The English 16th-century enclosure movement was a social movement with a wide range of participants, including peasants and manor lords. The land enclosure movement, dominated by wealthy peasants, eliminated common property rights in the land and strengthened the "right of possession". Under their leadership, the lords also embarked on the path of land property rights reform.
The rise of the enclosure movement has long been seen as a result of external events, i.e. the growth of the woolen trade that exacerbated the demand for wool, and people made more profits by raising sheep in enclosures.
In fact, as the individual power of the peasants in England grew, they demanded the breaking of the constraints of the open land system and the establishment of a new kind of land property rights, which was the root cause of the rise of the enclosure movement.
The growth of individual peasant power
As early as the 16th century, before the enclosure movement, the English peasants had experienced a relatively general and full development, the peasants were free, their living conditions were relatively wealthy, and some of them had accumulated considerable movable and immovable property and became wealthy peasants with a certain social status.
The growth of the individual power of the English peasant was the basis for the enclosure movement in the 16th century. The growth of the individual power of the peasant in medieval England was mainly inseparable from the protection of the legal system with individual rights as the core and the development of the commodity economy.
Individual rights are at the heart of the Western European legal system. Individual rights in pre-capitalist societies were primitive collective rights or hierarchical rights, including the rights of village communities, citizens, and merchants in the Middle Ages in Western Europe, as well as the rights of vassals relative to lords and the rights of princes relative to royal power.
The history of Western Europe is full of traces of this primitive individual right and its practice, and even in the most brutal conditions of serfdom, there may have been means of solidarity and resistance in the lower and middle strata of society.
It was precisely because of the development of primitive individual rights that Western European law with it at its core was gradually formed. Western European law, with individual rights as the core, gave tenant farmers the right to resist according to law, restricted excessive and arbitrary plundering of tenant farmers by large and small lords, and ensured the continuous and stable effective accumulation of peasant economy, which was mainly reflected in the limitation of the amount of peasant servitude:
The weekly hours of servitude are strictly limited when the rent is served, and the amount of money is strictly limited when the rent is paid.
Subject to customary law, rent on many estates has been stable for a long time. Tony studied the changes in rents in England's 27 estates from the late 13th century to the 16th and 17th centuries and found that "a tenant farmer's rent tended to remain constant for 200 or 250 years."
With the increase in the rate of land output, the proportion of land rent in the value of land production has been reduced from one-third of the land rent under labor to one-fifth, one-sixth or even one-eighteenth, and most of the products that remain in the hands of the peasants and continue to increase are sent to the market and become funds for expanding reproduction. ”
Rent became an insignificant part, and the peasants were able to accumulate personal wealth. In addition, Western European laws limited the taxation of royal power and feudal governments in order to curb unproductive consumption by the upper echelons of the ruling class.
This was mainly reflected in the "supremacy of the law" and the "limited royal power", the king had to live on the income from his own domain, and it was difficult for the king to make profits from the land and peasants outside the royal domain. Only in the event of war or certain special circumstances can the king collect taxes from his subjects, and the levy needs to be approved by Parliament.
It can be seen from this that the laws of Western Europe guaranteed the accumulation of personal wealth of the peasantry. The development of the commodity economy is also a necessary prerequisite for the growth of the individual strength of the peasants. At the height of the estate economy, there had been a significant increase in the productivity of agricultural labour in England, with the rate of agricultural products entering the market rising and the savings rate of farmers rising.
Improvements in fertilization and weeding techniques, the advent of heavy ploughs and three-ploughs, modern harnesses, and the widespread use of waterwheels and harnesses all came together to form a general system for the use of agriculture. By 1300, England was a thriving agricultural region.
In the 13th and 14th centuries, the average English peasant household produced about 115 bushels or 2,280 kilograms of grain per year, or more than 2 tons of grain per household. Hilton commented on the level of commodity production that the English peasants had been able to achieve in the 13th and 14th centuries: "Production for the sake of selling was already well developed there, and pure commodity exchange was in vogue. ”
The development of the commodity economy led the lords to change the labor rent into a money rent in order to obtain more money income. The conversion of labor rent into monetary rent means that the most basic feudal relationship of personal dependence has been transformed into a simple monetary payment relationship. With the conversion of the labor rent, the serfs no longer worked on the land under the lord's direct domain.
Many feudal lords also hired hired hired workers to directly manage the land in place of former serf labor, but the decline in the rural population after the Black Death led to an increase in labor prices, which made the lords very limited in their profits.
In this case, the lord leased out the direct domain, and renting out the lord's direct domain became an important part of the manor's economy. The leasing of direct domains made the lord a pure rent-collector, and the lord economy no longer existed in the estates, and the market-oriented, hired peasant economy arose.
Under the conditions of the legal guarantee and the development of the commodity economy in Western Europe, the individual power of the peasants in medieval England increased generally, and a considerable part of the peasants were able to accumulate funds, buy land, and become a wealthy yeoman peasant class.
Around the second half of the 14th century, a wealthy peasant class emerged, known as Chaucer's "Franklin". Franklin, described in Farmer Pierce and The Canterbury Tales, was a free man of respectable status and wealth, below knights and squires.
"There are often four or five families of farmers in each village who cultivate 60 to 100 acres or more of land and raise hundreds of livestock", and they are called "wealthy farmers". In the early 15th century, Franklin was replaced by Yeorman. The original meaning of the word "yoman" was to be a servant or attendant, and to refer to a person who performed honorary service.
Since the 15th century, the meaning of the word "yoman" has changed. Bacon defined Yoman as "between the squire and the cottage farmer", mainly to describe the wealthy peasant who was below the squire. Hoskins describes Yoman as follows: "Yoman in Leicestershire owns one or two or three farms with one or two hundred acres of land.
Yoman was active in three or four parishes, and they raised ten times as many livestock as the average farmer. Edward Kirk defined Joman as "a free-holders earning 40 shillings a year", and he considered a free-holders earning 40 shillings a year to have a certain status in the state, with the right to vote and to serve as a juror.
From this, it can be seen that Yoman was a wealthy peasant with a certain economic and social status. In the 16th century, there were major socio-economic changes in England, and land was greatly commoditized and had market value. The increase in urban population means that more people need to be fed, there is a wider market for agricultural products, and there is an increased demand for land.
In this age when every inch of land is at a premium, there is no one more greedy for land than Yerman. Joman continued to expand his land by buying and renting land, gradually accumulating wealth.
Some of Yoman were able to buy land from declining gentlemen, such as Joman John Furkney of Walton Manor, Sussexshire, for £500 from Viscount Montagu, and Yoman John Ackhurst of Sussex, for £100 in 1588.
In 1589, John Richard of Deauville Manor, Kent, bought the 124 acres of land leased to him by John Adeley, a gentleman. Some yoman bought the land of the monastery. After breaking with the Holy See and seizing the supreme leadership of the Church of England, Henry VIII began to dissolve monasteries and confiscate ecclesiastical property.
From 1536, the monastery was dissolved and the estates were taken into royal ownership. Between 1542 and 1547, under the financial pressure of the war, two-thirds of the monastery estates were sold by the crown.
Some of the church land was sold to Joorman, for example, in 1566 Joman Barnard Leston, Devon, bought Albertsham Manor, which had belonged to Hertland Abbey, for £400, the Joorman William Bienrith land in Worcestershire, which originally belonged to Bird Tersley Abbey, and some Yorman families in Lincolnshire made their fortune by buying monastery land.
In addition to buying land, Yoman also expanded his land by leasing the lord's direct domain. Yeoman was the main tenant of the lord's direct domain, for example, between 1501 and 1532 one half of the land tenants in Canterbury were Yoman, one-third were squires, and the rest were ordinary peasants.
For example, between 1570 and 1649 there were 67 estates in Sussex that were leased to direct estates, with 30 yomans, 18 gentlemen, 12 merchants and 3 farmers among the tenants.
Joman's lease of the direct domain deprived the lord's supra-economic domination of the foundation, and a new form of production organization pioneered by Yoman that was market-oriented, hired and hired laborers developed rapidly. Joman gradually rose to prominence through careful management of the land.