P.K. O'Brien, then, thinks that the overall message of the existing
literature is that English lords enjoyed greater extra-economic
powers than their couterparts in France. While he acknowledges
recent studies which indicate that royal courts did succeed in
protecting the customary rights of peasants, he thinks there's
ample evidence also indicating that, during the "long sixteenth
century", landlords evicted pesants from the land, and transformed
arable land to pasture. "Enclosure, as well as the contingent shifts
to larger farms, to pastoral agriculture, and to less secure forms of
tenure may have been checked but not reversed."
This brings us to what is perhaps the most undecided question in
this whole issue: were landlords the initiators of enclosures? No
sooner has O'Brien said the above, he tells us that "something like
45% of all farmland had already been removed from the fields,
much of it before and during the first wave of enclosure between
1450 and 1525." Here O'Brien is drawing on Wordie's widely
accepted finding that in 1500 England was already about 45%
enclosed. Note: by 1500, 45% of the land was enclosed, "much"
of which was already enclosed *before* and during the "first wave of
enclosure" between 1450 and 1525.
Two questions: Who "enclosed" the land that was already
"enclosed" before the *first* wave of enclosure? Who led this first
wave of enclosure? O'Brien's suggestion is that this fist wave was
led by landlords "during the long 16th century", "long" because this
century started in the late (mid?) 1400s, and thus incorporates the
"first wave". Problem is that Wordie (1983) has calculated that only
an additional 2% of the land was enclosed during the 16th century
proper, between 1500 and 1600. He writes: "...England was at
most 45% enclosed in 1500, and again at most 47% enclosed in
1600."
In fact, according to Wordie's findings (which, I should insist, are
considered highly reliable by the experts in the field) it was the
17th century that saw the highest number of enclosures, as an
additional 24% of the land was enclosed between 1700 to 1799.
O'Brien, in his own way, acknowledges this when he writes that "in
the early 17th century [small scale peasant farmers] had occupied
nearly one third of the cultivated area. By 1800 peasant families
managed only 8% of all farmland. Meanwhile, capitalist farms of
100 acres and above, reprrsenting only 14% of all farms in the
1600s but 52% two centuries later, had multiplied and controlled
two-thirds of the cultivated acreage in the early 19th."
Now, if we are concerned with "the Origin" of capitalist relations in
the English countryside, our focus should be on that "first wave of
enclosures" between 1450 and 1525, and see if we can determine
exactly what percentage of the land was enclosed then, for we
know that, by 1500, 45% was already enclosed, so we want to
know what percentage of that 45% was enclosed between 1450
and 1500. Next, we want to know who enclosed that land. And
next, who enclosed the remaining % before 1450.
