> > Second, the old comparison of France and England: England where > > peasants lost rights to land early and had no early incentive to > > restrict fertility, and thus saw a rapidly-growing rural population > > that was pushed out of the countryside into the cities where it > > became the reserve army for the textile factories of the industrial > > revolution. Manchester 1844. > >Recent comparative research on the peasantries of England and France >questions this old view: 1) through the medieval period there were >regions in England where a peasantry free of any feudal obligation >prevailed and where higher yields per seed were achieved. And it was >these prosperous small farmers who later became the tenants of >large estates, and who consolidated their farms through a process >known as 'engrossing'. 2) copyholders, not just freeholders, had a lot >more security of tenure against enclosing landlords than previously argued, >with Parliament many times intervening in their favor against landowners. >3) the agricultural revolution of the 16th-17th centuries - associated >with increases in total grain output and yields - was in many ways >initiated and led by this well-to-do (yeomen) peasantry. Yes. But the not well-to-do peasantry? The rate of population increase--and of rural poverty increase in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century England is astonishing. >4) >meanwhile, in France, to quote Croot and Parker "the real crime of >the French Monarchy was *not* that it bolstered peasant ownership but >that (together with the church, seigneurs and landowners) it >depressed it so brutally. The consequence was that the countryside lost its most dynamic force - a class of truly independent peasants" I'm not so sure about that. I once found David Landes downing Sauterne and asked him why he thought weaving rough cotton cloth was a higher technological achievement than French winemaking. He didn't answer... Brad DeLong
