As penners relax in front of their TVs anxiously waiting for the
election results on the two undifferentiated candidates, I thought I
take the opportunity to state that it was really the freeholders and
the well-to-do copyholders who promoted the changes in tenures,
property rights and class relations which, beginning in the 15th
century, amounted to the creation of agrarian capitalism in
England. But this does not mean they were responsible for "the
origin of capitalism." These changes are best understood as an
important phase in a long-term process.
Not sure why Tawney has been criticized for his supposed undue
emphasis on the role of landlords, for he is very clear that well-to-
do copyholders had started the enclosure movement in the 14th-
15th centuries, even if he does say that, in the end, these
copyholders lost with the enclosures by lords that came later in the
16th. "Enclosing by lords and large farmers was not so much a
movement running counter to existing tendencies, as a
continuation on a large scale and with different results of
developments which in parts of England were already at work". He,
moreover, teaches us that the tenants to whom lords leased their
lands were drawn from this group of prosperous copyholders who
could afford to rent additional land.
And while he says that he's not concerned with "freeholders", he
tells us enough for us to learn that, in medieval England, there were
freeholders whose land was outside the customary regulations, and
who, "by acting as farmers for the lord of the manor and leasing the
demesne or part of it" extended their holdings, and that "they had
nothing to fear from the agrarian changes [of the 16th] which
disturbed the copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good
deal to gain..."
The idea that capitalism was imposed on these well-to-do
copyholders and freeholders by landlords who had unique
"economic powers" is extremely misleading, since it is obvious
that these peasants had economic power, exemplified in a variety
of ways: 1) with freeholders who had land which was, by definition,
already enclosed, not under customary regulations, 2) with
prosperous peasants who had been voluntarily leasing the lord's
demesne long before the 16th, 3) with peasants who, long before
the enclosing by lords of the commons, had been "hedging and
ditching their own little holdings and nibling away fragments of the
waste to be cultivated in severalty".
And if someone insists that lords used their "stronger" (O'Brien), or
"remaining" (Brenner) extra-economic powers to impose economic
leaseholds, they need to answer against whom. Not the
prosperous farmers, since they were the ones who had initiated
such a movement, and who, in fact, gladly rented more land.
Besides, we know that: 1) the 16th century saw hardly any
enclosures, 2) those who really promoted innovations in the 17th
and 18th were the leaseholders themselves. If anything remains of
the Brenner thesis, it is that landlords joined the wave of agrarian
commercialization long initiated and led by the more prosperous
farmers, an argument already contained in B. Moore (1966).
