The Reform was a compromise between the liberals and landowners, which could only have “vile” results, Chernyshevsky warned. Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire, describes a similar process in France following the Great Revolution.
“The roots that small-holding property struck in French soil deprived feudalism of all nourishment. The landmarks of this property formed the natural fortification of the bourgeoisie against any surprise attack by its old overlords. But in the course of the nineteenth century the urban usurer replaced the feudal one, the mortgage replaced the feudal obligation, bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property. The peasant’s small holding is now only the pretext that allows the capitalist to draw profits, interest, and rent from the soil, while leaving it to the agriculturist himself to see to it how he can extract his wages. The mortgage debt burdening the soil of France imposes on the French peasantry an amount of interest equal to the annual interest on the entire British national debt. Small-holding property, in this enslavement by capital toward which its development pushes it unavoidably, has transformed the mass of the French nation into troglodytes. Sixteen million peasants (including women and children) dwell in caves, a large number of which have but one opening, others only two and the most favoured only three. Windows are to a house what the five senses are to the head. The bourgeois order, which at the beginning of the century set the state to stand guard over the newly emerged small holdings and fertilised them with laurels, has become a vampire that sucks the blood from their hearts and brains and casts them into the alchemist’s caldron of capital. The Code Napoléon is now nothing but the codex of distraints, of forced sales and compulsory auctions. To the four million (including children, etc.) officially recognized paupers, vagabonds, criminals, and prostitutes in France must be added another five million who hover on the margin of existence and either have their haunts in the countryside itself or, with their rags and their children, continually desert the countryside for the towns and the towns for the countryside. Therefore the interests of the peasants are no longer, as under Napoleon, in accord with, but are now in opposition to bourgeois interests, to capital. Hence they find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task it is to overthrow the bourgeois order.”
(The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 7)
In Britain, a similar effect was achieved by the Enclosure Acts, which required peasants not only to provide legal papers showing ownership of land, but also required them to spend large amounts to “enclose” their small plots.
As early as 1724, Daniel Defoe had noted that, on estates near London, families of local gentry were being displaced by families enriched in business; and Cobbett, who admired Squire Coke of Holkham, felt very differently about the people from London whom he termed “the Squires of Change Alley”. Parliament passed a series of so called Enclosure Acts. A few such Acts had been obtained under Queen Anne and George I, and over two hundred during George II’s reign, but even at the accession of George III in 1760, the open field system still existed in half the counties of England mostly in the Eastern counties bounded by the East Riding in Yorkshire, Norfolk, and Wiltshire. During George III’s reign some 3,200 Enclosure Acts were obtained including in 1801 a General Enclosure Act, which simplified the procedure.
On the face of it these Acts seemed fair. Land in a village was supposed to be the subject of Enclosure only if the owners of four-fifths of the area of property to be enclosed were in favour. But there was an in built problem here for the small peasant. The landed aristocracy were the biggest owners of landed property and, depending upon how the boundaries of the land to be enclosed were drawn, their individual land ownership could of itself ensure that the figure of four-fifths was achieved. In addition the increase in the number of capitalist farmers previously mentioned, meant that these new elements whose capitalistic methods of farming were only possible on large enclosed fields were bound to vote for Enclosure, and they themselves had larger areas of land ownership than the average peasant because it had been bought from the former squirearchy whose economic fortunes had been in decline. As many of the landlords were themselves suffering financially it was in their interest to have the land enclosed, in order to rent it out to capitalist farmers who would pay more rent. Secondly, in order to have a vote, it was necessary to prove that you were, in fact, a land owner. Most of the small peasant farms had passed down through generations of the peasant’s family, and no written documentation existed to prove such ownership. This was not just a problem at this stage, but at a later stage when, after Enclosure and the replacement of the old strip of land, a new enclosed field was to be allotted. If you could not prove ownership, you got no new allocation. Moreover, in many cases even where peasants did produce title deeds to their land, they were simply torn up, so that no proof existed, and the landlord then appropriated the land.
Even if these hurdles were overcome, the small peasant farmer was at a massive disadvantage. The compact piece of land he received after Enclosure had to compensate him not just for his arable strip, but also for his former use of the common land, which was now appropriated by the landlord. Not only did he lose the use of this land (which he like the other villagers had previously owned collectively) on which to graze his cattle, etc., but he also lost his source of fuel. Once an Enclosure Act had been passed, the Government sent in Commissioners to undertake the process. Of course, who were these Commissioners, ordinary peasants? Not on your life. There were normally three of them, and they were peers, gentlemen, clergymen, or farmers. And of course their fees and travelling expenses (which, with repeated trips back to London, were considerable given the cost of transport at the time) had to be paid, and this cost fell far more heavily in proportion on the pockets of the peasant than it did on the large landowner. Nor did the cost end there. The hedges or fences were also inordinately expensive for the peasant, as was the cost of the award, which had to be paid by each person who benefited.
Even Arthur Young, who had for years advocated enclosure, was forced to acknowledge the “knavery of commissioners and attorneys” acting under the Enclosure Acts, and stated that “by nineteen out of twenty Enclosure Acts the poor are injured, and most grossly.” Oliver Goldsmith in his poem, The Deserted Village, lamented,
A bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.
Those that managed to hang on soon found that their other means of livelihood was soon removed. Factory-produced goods soon replaced hand spinning and other crafts. In addition, new Game Laws were introduced that were extremely harsh. Where once the common land was a free source of food, in the form of game, these new laws meant that the penalty, for example, of being found, on open land, with nets for rabbiting, was seven years transportation. But, the greatest crime was the actual theft of the peasants’ land, which the Enclosure Acts themselves constituted.
Some small freeholders, who had been the most independent type of yeoman because being owners of their land they need obey no squire, kept their farms as long as prices were high, but at the end of the French Wars at the beginning of the 19th century many of these too had to sell up and move to the towns as agricultural prices fell.
A similar process occurred in France, Belgium, and western Germany during the 17th and 18th centuries.
No comments:
Post a Comment