The dominant market anarchist view of property

takes for granted individual, fee-simple ownership

through individual appropriation as the only natural
form of property. But as Karl Hess argued,
libertarian property can take on a wide variety of
legitimate forms. Communal ownership of land is a
legitimate and plausible model for property rights in
a stateless society based on free association.
Historically, the village commune and open field
system were, almost universally, the dominant
property model in societies which, so far in human
history, came closest to approximating the libertarian
ideal of statelessness and voluntary association: the
neolithic village societies between the agricultural
revolution and the rise of the state.
for their own benefit, to tending pri=e stoc" in enclosures for someone
else's. !hey were not in the least attracted by the prospect set forth by
one of the *eporters, seeing the commons 'to wave with lu(uriant crops
of grainbe covered with innumerable floc"s and herds, or clothed with
stately timber', since not grain, herds nor timber would be theirs.
1D1
@ritics of the %inefficiency& of the commons ignore the value of
independence and self#sufficiency, the possession of sources of subsistence
that could not be ta"en away at someone else's whim.
When critics of commons weighed the value of common right they
did so in their own terms, the terms of the mar"et. !hey tal"ed about
wage labour and the efficient use of resources. 7ut commoners lived off
the shared use of land. !o some e(tent they lived outside the mar"et.
!hey lived in part on the invisible earnings of gra=ing and gathering.
Huch of this was inconceivable to critics, either because they did not loo"
or because they did not want to see. -n their eyes commoners were la=y,
insubordinate and poor. 7ut when historians come to assess these
assessments we have to understand that none of these conditions, e(cept
poverty, is a measure of the inade1uacy of a standard of living. Even
poverty, in the case of commoners, may have been in the eye of the
beholder. commoners did not thin" themselves poor.
1D?
1)1 Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ 1'6+
1), $eeson, Commoners, 33+ *1C*,+
England is not a free people, till the poor that
have no land have a free allowance to dig and
labour the commons.
Gerrard Winstanley
164
insubordinate s1uatters, living in riotous s1ualor in their tumbledown
hovels on the common, would prosper morally and economically if they
were compelled to do regular wor" for an employer.
16F
!o borrow a line from @ool 0and )u"e, %- wish you'd stop being so good
to me, cap'n.&
!here's also more than a little implicit collectivism in the complaint, in
C.H. /eeson's words, that %9c:ommoners stood in the way of national
economic growth.&
16
-t reminds me of a comment by some
neoconservative tal"ing head on ;o( /ews at the outset of the -ra1 War in
?GGA, who boasted of $merican cowboy capitalism's superiority to a
European model that provided shorter wor"wee"s and si(#wee" vacations.
%Haybe $mericans,& he said, %prefer to wor" longer hours and ta"e less
vacation, so we can afford all those aircraft carriers.& -ndeed. no true
patriot will mind that 77 has reduced 5er, ahem, %increased&6 the
chocoration to ?G grams a wee", if it means another ;loating ;ortress off
the Halabar ;ront.
Hissing from all the discussion of %increased efficiency& is any
consideration of 1ui bono. @oase's argument that it doesn't matter who
owns a resource, because it will wind up in the hands of the most efficient
user, has always struc" me as nonsensical. -t matters a great deal to the
person who was robbed. 3uch arguments remind me a great deal of
arguments for eminent domain, by which land will be put to its %most
productive use.& 7ut sinceas the $ustrians never tire of asserting
elsewhereutility is sub,ective, what is %efficient& is very much in the eyes
of a potential user of the land.
!ell the fenmen, ;uller said, 'of the great benefit to the public, because
where a pi"e or duc" fed formerly, now a bulloc" or sheep is fatted< they
will be ready to return that if they be ta"en in ta"ing that bulloc" or
sheep, the rich owner indicteth them for felons< whereas that pi"e or duc"
were their own goods, only for their pains of catching them'.
1DG

W. E. !ate, in similar vein, describes the s"epticism of commoners in
the face of the propertied classes' visions of prosperity.
!hey much preferred rearing poor specimens of cattle on the commons
1'B Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ ,7+
1'( $eeson, Commoners, 3+ 7,+
1)> .ill, /e0ormation to Industrial /evolution, 3+ 1,1+
replaced the three#field system, in fact %we see in *ussia many village
communities ta"ing the initiative of introducing the rotation of crops.& -f
e(periments with crop#rotation prove successful, the peasants %find no
difficulty whatever in re#dividing their fields....&
166
!he peasant communes, on their own initiative, introduced crop
rotation and dug drainage wor"s in hundreds of villages in the provinces
around Hoscow, and built thousands of dams for ponds and dug many
hundreds of deep wells in the dry steppe country.
16D
*ecall, in regard to all the e(amples above of progressive action by
peasant communes, >ropot"in's observation that they were most li"ely to
ta"e place in areas where peasants were least crushed by e(ploitation. $nd
then consider the fact that all these heroic efforts at self#improvement come
from a time when the peasantry still lived under heavy ta(ation to
indemnify their former owners for the lands given the peasants at the time
of the liberation of the serfs. 7ear in mind that these people lived a
generation or less after most of the peasant ma,ority of *ussia had been
illiterate serfs in a state of near#slavery. /ow imagine what things they
might have accomplished had they lived free of that yo"e in previous
centuries, and held their land free from the e(action of tribute by the state
and the landed aristocracy.
3een in this light, all the arguments that %the peasants were better off &
or %it was necessary for progress& seem as shameful as the old arguments for
the White Han's 7urden. - suspect those who dismiss traditional peasant
property rights as an atavistic barrier to progress are close "in to the
conse1uentialists who argue that technological progress would have been
impossible had not the peasants been evicted from the land and driven into
the factories li"e beasts, or that the state must promote progress and
increase the ta( base by sei=ing inefficiently used property and giving it to
favored business enterprises.
W. E. !ate's description of the %benefits& envisioned for the poor by
Enclosure advocates is very much on the mar".
!he deserving poor would find small plots in severalty, or small pasture
closes, more useful than scattered scraps in the open fields, and vague
gra=ing rights. @ertainly they would be no worse off without the largely
illusory advantages of the common, and the very real temptations to
idleness which its presence entailed. !he undeserving poor, especially the
1'' -ro3ot&in, Mutual id, 33+ ,6)C,6B+
1') Ibid., 33+ ,6BC,6(+
Introduction
!he dominant mar"et anarchist view of property ta"es for granted
individual, fee#simple ownership through individual appropriation as the
only natural form of property. $lthough common or collective ownership is
grudgingly accepted as a legitimateif inefficientform of %voluntary
socialism,& it's ta"en for granted that such forms of ownership can only
come about through some sort of special contract between pree(isting
owners of fee#simple individual property. )and can only be appropriated,
runs the usually tacit assumption, by individuals.
*ight#wing libertarian and +b,ectivist forums are full of statements that
%there's no such thing as collective property,& %all property rights are
individual,& and the li"e. $yn *and argued that it was impossible for
European settlers to steal the land of $merican -ndians, because the latter
had no valid property rights.
/ow, - don't care to discuss the alleged complaints $merican -ndians
have against this country. - believe, with good reason, the most
unsympathetic 0ollywood portrayal of -ndians and what they did to the
white man. !hey had no right to a country merely because they were
born here and then acted li"e savages. !he white man did not con1uer
this country. $nd you're a racist if you ob,ect, because it means you
believe that certain men are entitled to something because of their race.
2ou believe that if someone is born in a magnificent country and doesn't
"now what to do with it, he still has a property right to it. 0e does not.
3ince the -ndians did not have the concept of property or property rights
they didn't have a settled society, they had predominantly nomadic
tribal 4cultures&they didn't have rights to the land, and there was no
reason for anyone to grant them rights that they had not conceived of
and were not using. -t's wrong to attac" a country that respects 5or even
tries to respect6 individual rights. -f you do, you're an aggressor and are
morally wrong. 7ut if a 4country4 does not protect rightsif a group of
tribesmen are the slaves of their tribal chiefwhy should you respect the
4rights4 that they don't have or respect8 ...92:ou can't claim one should
respect the 4rights4 of -ndians, when they had no concept of rights and
no respect for rights. 7ut let's suppose they were all beautifully innocent
savageswhich they certainly were not. What were they fighting for, in
opposing the white man on this continent8 ;or their wish to continue a
primitive e(istence< for their 4right4 to "eep part of the earth untouched
to "eep everybody out so they could live li"e animals or cavemen. $ny
European who brought with him an element of civili=ation had the right
to ta"e over this continent, and it's great that some of them did. !he
racist -ndians todaythose who condemn $mericado not respect
individual rights.4
1
7ut as >arl 0ess argued in )ibertarian ;orum, libertarian property can
ta"e on a wide variety of legitimate forms.
)ibertarianism is a people's movement and a liberation movement. -t
see"s the sort of open, non#coercive society in which the people, the
living, free, distinct people, may voluntarily associate, dis#associate, and,
as they see fit, participate in the decisions affecting their lives. !his means
a truly free mar"et in everything from ideas to idiosyncracies. -t means
people free collectively to organi=e the resources of their immediate
community or individualistically to organi=e them< it means the freedom
to have a community#based and supported ,udiciary where wanted, none
where not, or private arbitration services where that is seen as most
desirable. !he same with police. !he same with schools, hospitals,
factories, farms, laboratories, par"s, and pensions. )iberty means the right
to shape your own institutions. -t opposes the right of those institutions
to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.
?
@ommunal ownership of land is a legitimate and plausible model for
property rights in a stateless society based on free association.
1 Ayn Rand, in question and answer session following Address To The Graduating
Class Of The United States Military Acadey at !est "oint,# $ew %or&, March ',
1()*+
, -arl .ess, /0etter 1ro !ashington2 !here Are The S3ecifics4/ The Libertarian
Forum, 5une 16, 1('(, 3+ ,
entirely feasible within the bounds of the open#field system< it re1uired only
the reorgani=ation of the arable mar" to add a fourth field. Even before the
act of Iarliament in 1DDA which made it legal for villagers to do so
apparently on the assumption that unauthori=ed reorgani=ations had been
legally suspectsvillages had previously voted to create fourth fields for
root crops.
164
!he same later held true in the open fields of the *ussian mir, after the
emancipation of the serfs. >ropot"in, in the eighth chapter of Hutual $id,
cited numerous e(amples of villagers e(perimenting with new techni1ues on
their common lands. Hany of the e(amples referred to the efficient and
progressive management of commons where they persisted in Germany, and
even more so in 3wit=erland where they thrived in much greater vigor. 7ut
even in *ussia, where most historians view the alleged bac"wardness of the
mir through 3tolypin's lens.
!he facts which we have before us show, on the contrary, that wherever
the *ussian peasants, owing to a concurrence of favourable circumstances,
are less miserable than they are on the average, and wherever they find
men of "nowledge and initiative among their neighbours, the village
community becomes the very means for introducing various
improvements in agriculture and village life altogether.
16B
-mproved steel plows spread rapidly in southern *ussia, %and in many
cases the village communities were instrumental in spreading their use.&
$ plough was bought by the community, e(perimented with upon on
9sic: a portion of the communal land, and the necessary improvements
were indicated to the ma"ers, whom the communes often aided in
starting the manufacture of cheap ploughs as a village industry.
!he main impetus for the adoption of over fifteen hundred improved
plows over a five#year period in the Hoscow district came from %those
communes which rented lands as a body for the special purpose of
improved culture.& -n 3amara, 3aratov, and >herson provinces the
adoption of threshing machines came about mainly %due to the peasant
associations, which can afford to buy a costly engine, while the individual
peasant cannot.&
$nd contrary to the received wisdom from agricultural historians that
%the village community was doomed to disappear& when crop rotation
1'* Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ B>+
1'6 -ro3ot&in, Mutual id, 3+ ,66+
transmission of diseases li"e leptospirosis through contaminated
watercourses or rodents.
1BD
Eiseases associated with wet commons and poor
drainage were managed as well by commoners as by enclosers< %post#
enclosure improvements in drainage came fifty years after most enclosures
were complete.&
1BF
;inally, the irrelevance of Enclosure to disease is suggested by the
disconnect between the chronology of Enclosure and that of %diminution of
animal disease.& Iandemics continued to decimate floc"s well into the
nineteenth century. ;or e(ample, sheep rotthe most prominent item in
the enclosers' indictment of the commons"illed one to two million sheep
in the winter of 1FAG#1FA1.
1B
$nother bit of uncritically received wisdom is %the 'impossibility' of
improving animals on common pastures by selective breeding.& 7ut in fact
village ,uries closely controlled breeding. 7ulls were not allowed to run free,
and rams and bulls were only allowed on the common %at stated times.&
16G

)ords of manors and large farmers were re1uired by custom to put superior
bulls out to stud, pasturing them periodically with commoners' herds.
161
$s for the re1uirement of letting a large portion of land lie fallow,
@hambers and Hingay themselves concede that %open field farmers...
showed enterprise& in such matters as using legumes and turnips to restore
the fertility of soilsuggesting that %the ancient structure was not so
bac"ward nor so incapable of improvement as was once supposed.&
16?
Where peasants were not economically crushed by rents and ta(es, and
where some of their members had leisure to improve their minds, open# or
common#field villages were fre1uently 1uite progressive in introducing new
agricultural methods. $ccording to /eeson, in the Hidlands especially,
common#field villages in England in the period running up to Enclosure
were open to innovationsfor e(ample redividing the common fields for
crop rotation and introducing clover as a fodder crop on fallow land
%impressive developments& entailing a %fle(ibility in agricultural practice
which led to all#around increases in fertility and production long before
parliamentary enclosure.&
16A
$ccording to W.E. !ate, the introduction of turnips as a field crop was
16) Ibid., 3+ 1,B+
16B Ibid., 3+ 1,(+
16( Ibid., 3+ 17>+
1'> Ibid., 33+ 17>C171+
1'1 Ibid., 3+ 171+
1', Cha:ers and Mingay, The gricultural /evolution, 33+ 61C6,+
1'7 $eeson, Commoners, 3+ B+
*oderic" )ong, in particular, has argued for what he calls %public
property&as opposed to state property. %- have no interest in defending
public property in the sense of property belonging to the organi=ed public
5i.e., the state6. -n fact, - do not thin" government property is public
property at all< it is really the private property of an agency calling itself the
government.&
A
@ommon property, he says, can come about through
collective homesteading.
@onsider a village near a la"e. -t is common for the villagers to wal"
down to the la"e to go fishing. -n the early days of the community it's
hard to get to the la"e because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the
way. 7ut over time, the way is cleared and a path forms not through
any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the
individuals wal"ing that way day after day.
!he cleared path is the product of labor not any individual's labor,
but all of them together. -f one villager decided to ta"e advantage of the
now#created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be
violating the collective property right that the villagers together have
earned.
4
3ince collectives, li"e individuals, can mi( their labor with unowned
resources to ma"e those resources more useful to their purposes,
collectives, too can claim property rights by homestead.
B
0istorically, the overwhelming weight of evidence suggests that the first
appropriation of land for agriculture was almost universally by peasant
villages wor"ing as a social unit.

7 Roderic& T+ 0ong, 8n 9efense of "u:lic S3ace,# Formulations ;1ree $ation
1oundation<, S3ring 1(('+ !e:site offline, accessed =ia 8nternet Archi=e 5uly ', ,>11
?htt32@@we:+archi=e+org@we:@,>>(>6>7>(176(@htt32@@li:ertariannation+org@a@
f77l,+htlA+
* Ibid.
6 0ong, A "lea for "u:lic "ro3erty,# Formulations ;1ree $ation 1oundation<, S3ring
1((B+ !e:site offline, accessed =ia 8nternet Archi=e 5uly '+ ,>11
?htt32@@we:+archi=e+org@we:@,>>(>*1',>*7>B@htt32@@li:ertariannation+org@a@f67l1+htlA
+
I
Rise and Persistence
of the Village Commune
!he village commune was, almost universally, the dominant property
model in societies which, so far in human history, came closest to
appro(imating the libertarian ideal of statelessness and voluntary
association. $t the highest point of human development before the rise of
the state, the stateless villages and small mar"et towns that e(isted in peace
without paying tribute to imperial con1uerors, the common ownership of
land by the peasant commune was almost universal.
6

@ommunal ownership of land was the norm in the stateless village
societies of the neolithic period, from the $gricultural *evolution until the
rise of the first states. !he internal pattern of the village commune,
wherever it was found, typically appro(imated the hypothetical case study
of traditional tenure practices described by Cames 3cott.
)et us imagine a community in which families have usufruct rights to
parcels of cropland during the main growing season. +nly certain crops,
however, may be planted, and every seven years the usufruct land is
distributed among resident families according to each family's si=e and its
number of able#bodied adults. $fter the harvest of the main#season crop,
all cropland reverts to common land where any family may glean, gra=e
their fowl and livestoc", and even plant 1uic"ly maturing, dry#season
crops. *ights to gra=e fowl and livestoc" on pasture#land held in
common by the village is e(tended to all local families, but the number of
' Ca=eats on terinology fro "+M+ 0awrence =ia 3ri=ate eail+
centuries earlier. 7esides starvation and malnourishment, pro#Enclosure
writers have asserted that %common pasture led to promiscuous breeding
and the spread of disease.& -n particular, %unregulated mi(ing of animals in
large common pastures caused contagion and made control difficult.&
!hese writers assume with little ground that %little intelligent attempt was
made to control animal diseases in common pasture.&
1B4
-n fact, though, village ,uries %used by#laws and fines to prevent the
spread of disease.& Cust as much as enclosers, they believed that contagion
from pro(imity was the source of infection. Gra=ing diseased livestoc" li"e
mangy horses or sheep with the scab carried high fines. %Iaid herdsmen
and women almost constantly supervised common cattle and sheep,& which
made it e(tremely difficult to gra=e a diseased animal without detection.
!he intense economic interest of commoners in preserving the health of
their livestoc", and the ease of detection facilitated by %the very public
assembly, movement and supervision of common floc"s and herds,& were
powerful safeguards against infection. -t was still possible to gra=e diseased
animals for a short time in %partially supervised pastures where horses or
cows could be tethered,& but they were only in contact with only small
numbers of other animals.
1BB

What's more, contemporary and modern advocates of Enclosure
indicted the livestoc" management practices of commoners completely out
of any conte(t. !he most important comparisonto livestoc"
management practices after Enclosurewas almost never made. %Ierhaps
the most important point to ma"e is that the limited understanding of how
many diseases spread made prevention difficult both before and after
enclosure.& !he enclosers, as much as the commoners, mista"enly believed
that all disease was caused by contagion and were unaware of other vectors
li"e clothingfor transmitting disease.
@learly most of these sources of infection were not affected by separation
into herds after enclosure< and the long incubation period of the disease
5AG#6G days, and up to si( months in some cases6 made it very difficult to
prevent the introduction of diseased animals into uncontaminated herds
either before or after enslosure.
1B6
!he fences of enclosed farms, li"ewise, could not prevent the
16* Ibid., 3+ 1,*+
166 Ibid., 33+ 1,*C1,6+
16' Ibid., 33+ 1,'C1,B+
misgovernment and presented a deliberately one#sided picture out of self#
interest< and modern writers li"e Hingay swallowed it because it was e(actly
what they wanted to hear.
;or e(ample, C.H. /eeson presents evidence that cottagers didn't %gra=e
the commons bare&. %9t:hey were unli"ely to overstoc" their rights, they
might not even stoc" them fully.&
14F
3he also presents numerous e(amples
of effective commons management from manorial records. ;ar from
overrunning the commons or gra=ing them bare, in most places commoners
regulated the commoning of livestoc" by strictly stinting their commons
restricting the amount of stoc" which each commoner might gra=e. /eeson
refers to many cases in which village ,uries introduced stints and carefully
enforced them. Even in villages where commons were unstinted, common
rights were not unlimited. !he stoc"ing, rather, was limited by %the
common rights immemorially attached to land or cottage or residency. the
original, unabated level of stoc"ing.&
14

+n the other hand, the rich land#grabbing interestse.g. %9f :armers
who could afford to buy up cottages in order to engross their rights&were
typically owners of large floc"s and herds who %might overstoc", certainly
they would stoc" the full stint.& %!he threat to common pasture came less
from the clearly defined rights of cottagers than from the larger floc"s and
herds of richer men.&
1BG
Where village institutions were unable to enforce
strict regulations, or stints were too generous, it fre1uently resulted from the
political influence of a few large farmers who overran the commons with
their own livestoc" and left no room for the ma,ority of small owners.
1B1

$nd once Enclosure proceedings had begun, large farmers and lords of
manors often deliberately overstoc"ed the commons in order to drive down
the value of the cottagers' common rights, and thereby reduce the amount
of their compensation.
1B?
$lthough pro#Enclosure writers too" such
overstoc"ing as evidence of mismanagement of the commons, in fact it was
a side#effect of Enclosure itself.
1BA
$ssertions by Enclosure advocates and apologists in regard to the spread
of disease were similarly slipshod. -n this as in other things, @hambers and
Hingay uncritically repeated interest#driven accusations by writers two
1*B $eeson, Commoners, 3+ B'+
1*( Ibid., 33+ 117C11)+
16> Ibid., 3+ B'+
161 Ibid., 3+ 166+
16, Ibid., 33+ B)CBB, 16'+
167 Ibid., 3+ 16'+
animals that can be gra=ed is restricted according to family si=e, especially
in dry years when forage is scarce.... Everyone has the right to gather
firewood for normal family needs, and the village blac"smith and ba"er
are given larger allotments. /o commercial sale from village woodlands is
permitted.
!rees that have been planted and any fruit they may bear are the
property of the family who planted them, no matter where they are now
growing.... )and is set aside for use or leasing out by widows with
children and dependents of conscripted males....
$fter a crop failure leading to a food shortage, many of these
arrangements are read,usted. 7etter#off villagers are e(pected to assume
some responsibility for poorer relativesby sharing their land, by hiring
them, or by simply feeding them. 3hould the shortage persist, a council
composed of heads of families may inventory food supplies and begin
daily rationing.
D
!he village commune model traced its origins, in the oldest areas of
civili=ation, bac" to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, when
humans first began to raise crops in permanent village settlements. 7efore
that time, the dominant social grouping was the semi#nomadic hunter#
gather group. $s hunter#gatherers e(perimented with saving a portion of
the grain they'd gathered, they became increasingly tied to permanent
settlements.
-n the areas where communal tenure reemerged in Ear" $ge Europe,
after the collapse of *oman power, the village commune had its origin in
the settlement of barbarian tribes. 5Even in Europe, the village commune
was actually the reemergence of a social unit which had previously been
partly suppressed, first by the *oman *epublic in -taly and later by the
Empire in its areas of con1uest6.
-n both cases, the hunter#gather group or the clan was a mobile or semi#
mobile social unit based on common "inship relations. 3o the village
commune commonly had its origins in a group of settlers who saw
themselves as members of the same clan and sharing a common ancestry,
who bro"e the land for a new agricultural settlement by their common
efforts. -t was not, as the modern town, a group of atomi=ed individuals
who simply happened to live in the same geographic area and had to
negotiate the organi=ation of basic public services and utilities in some
) 5aes Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed ;$ew .a=en and 0ondon2 %ale Uni=ersity "ress, 1((B<, 33+ 77C
7*+
manner or other. -t was an organic social unit of people who saw
themselves, in some sense, as related. -t was a settlement by %a union
between families considered as of common descent and owning a certain
territory in common.& -n fact, in the transition from the clan to the village
community, the nucleus of a newly founded village commune was
fre1uently a single ,oint household or e(tended family compound, sharing
its hearth and livestoc" in common.
F

Even after the founding clan split apart into separate patriarchal family
households and recogni=ed the private accumulation and hereditary
transmission of wealth,
wealth was conceived e(clusively in the shape of movable property,
including cattle, implements, arms, and the dwelling#house.... $s to
private property in land, the village community did not, and could not,
recogni=e anything of the "ind, and, as a rule, it does not recogni=e it
now.... !he clearing of the woods and the brea"ing of the prairies being
mostly done by the communities or, at least, by the ,oint wor" of several
familiesalways with the consent of the communitythe cleared plots
were held by each family for a term of four, twelve, or twenty years, after
which term they were treated as parts of the arable land held in
common.

$nd even where a league of separate families together settled a new

village, they soon developed a mythology of a common ancestor as a basis
for social solidarity.
1G
$s we shall see below, the atomi=ed groups of landless
peasants which 3tolypin deported to set up new village colonies in 3iberia
spontaneously organi=ed the new villages around the mir's principle of
common ownership 5despite 3tolypin's vision of individual family
farmsteads held in fee simple6. !he village commune was, therefore, an
e(ample of the "ind of collective homesteading described above by *oderic"
)ong.
-n some variations of the village commune, e.g. in -ndia and in many of
the Germanic tribes, 0enry 3umner Haine argued, there was a theoretical
right for an individual to sever his ali1uot share of the common land from
the rest and own it individually. 7ut this was almost never done, Haine
said, because it was highly impractical.
B "yotr -ro3ot&in, Mutual id: Factor in !volution ;$ew %or&2 9ou:leday, "age D
Co3any, 1(>(<, 33+ 1,>C1,1, 1,7, 1,7 fn1+
( Ibid., 33+ 1,*C1,6+
1> Ibid., 33+ 1,6C1,'+
The &uestion of Efficiency
in the Enclosures
$pologists for the Enclosures in England argue that they were necessary
for the introduction of efficient new agricultural techni1ues li"e improved
crop rotation, the use of clover to improve wasteland, and the wintering of
livestoc".
146
@hambers and Hingay enumerated a long bill of indictments against
the open fields and common pastures in !he $gricultural *evolution. !he
particulars included
the dispersal and fragmentation of the holdings and the time wasted in
,ourneying with implements from one part of the field to another< the
unimproved nature of the soil, and the waste of the land in bal"s
5although these served as additional pieces of pasture as well as paths
between lands and headlands for turning the plough6< the rigid rotation
of two crops and a fallow< the impossibility of improving the livestoc",
and the ris"s of wildfire spread of disease among beasts herded together
on the commons and fields....
Ierhaps the most stri"ing wea"ness of the system... was the annual
fallowing of a proportion, generally from a 1uarter to a third, of the
arable land. !his was necessary in order to restore fertility after two or
three years of cropping....
14D
$ccording to subse1uent critics of @hambers and Hingay, pro#
Enclosure writers of the eighteenth century greatly e(aggerated the e(tent of
1*' .ill, Centur" o0 /evolution, 3+ 16>+
1*) Cha:ers and Mingay, gricultural /evolution, 33+ *BC*(+
intensification of agriculture demanded more labour.& 7ut in any case,
regardless of how many people lived in the countryside, the real 1uestion is
how they lived. *ather than living with the security and independence that
came with guaranteed customary access to land, they were permanently
relegated to the precarious status of wage laborers dependent on their
employer's good will and liable to be discharged without notice on his
merest whim.
14?
-n addition, regardless of how many people were suffered to live off the
land as laborers, the 1uestion remains of how much wor" was re1uired for a
given unit of consumption after Enclosure compared to before. $s
agricultural wages fell after 1D6B and rents were driven up by Enclosure, a
much larger share of the agricultural laborer's total produce was sold in the
towns rather than consumed by him and his family.
14A
Hingay might as
well have boasted that horses were better off based on their comparative
numbers in wild herds versus in domestication as draft animalsor the
comparatively larger numbers of chic"ens pac"ed hip to hip in industrial
chic"enhouses than of the wild fowl from which they descended. Wild
sheep may have been fewer in number than their domesticated cousins in
pasture< but they no doubt "ept more of their own wool and mutton. $s
for the increased productivity, increased output of labor doesn't matter
much to the person doing the wor", if the increase is appropriated by
someone else.
-n the 0ammonds' view, the Iarliamentary Enclosures of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries were %the second and greater of two waves,&
e(ceeding the !udor era enclosures of open fields for pasturage in scale.
144

$nd Eobb claimed that the total percentage of land enclosed under the
!udors %never touched 1G per cent. even in the four counties most
affected.&
14B

1*, .ill, /e0ormation to Industrial /evolution, 3+ ,,7+
1*7 Ibid+, 33+ ,,7C,,*+
1** 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 3+ 7*+
1*6 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism, 3+ ,,)+
;or one thing, the severance of one's patrimony in the common land
from the commune was viewed as a"in to divorcing oneself from an
organi=ed community and setting up the nucleus of a new community
alongside 5or within6 it, and re1uired some rather involved ceremonial for
its legal conclusion. $nd the individual peasant's subse1uent relations with
the community, conse1uently, would ta"e on the comple(ity and delicacy of
relations between two organi=ed societies.
11
3o many functions of the
agricultural year, li"e plowing and harvest, were organi=ed in part or in
whole collectively, that the transaction costs entailed in organi=ing
cooperative efforts between seceded individuals and the rest of the
commune would have been well#nigh prohibitive.
When the great ma,ority of a society considers common ownership as
the normal way of doing things, and the normal method of organi=ing
social functions presupposes that bac"ground state of affairs, even when
there is no legal impediment whatsoever to an individual severing her share
of property from the common there are li"ely to be very powerful path
dependencies that ma"e it costly and impractical to do so. $ given social
system, even if participation in its institutions is formally completely
voluntary and there are no coercive barriers to e(it, tends to function li"e
ground cover plants that create an interloc"ing ecosystem and crowd out
alternatives, or a forest of one species of trees that e(clude other species by
overshadowing.
1?
>ropot"in summari=ed, in sweeping language, the universality of the
village commune as a building bloc" of society.
-t is now "nown, and scarcely contested, that the village community
was not a specific feature of the 3lavonians, nor even the ancient !eutons.
-t prevailed in England during both the 3a(on and /orman times, and
partially survived till the last century< it was at the bottom of the social
organi=ation of old 3cotland, old -reland, and old Wales. -n ;rance, the
communal possession and the communal allotment of arable land by the
village fol"mote persisted from the first centuries of our era till the times
of !urgot, who found the fol"motes %too noisy& and therefore abolished
them. -t survived *oman rule in -taly, and revived after the fall of the
*oman Empire. -t was the rule with the 3candinavians, the 3lavonians,
11 .enry Suner Maine, ncient Law ;0ondon2 5+M+ 9ent D Sons 0td, 1('> ;1B'1<<,
33+ 16(C1'>+
1, 1or this analogy 8 a inde:ted to "+M+ 0awrence, an Australian 3olyath of alost
su3ernatural erudition who has :een a frequent eail corres3ondent and coenter
under y :log 3osts and online coluns o=er the years+
the ;inns 5in the pittaya, as also, probably, the "ihla#"unta6, the @oures,
and the )ives. !he village community in -ndiapast and present, $ryan
and non#$ryanis well "nown through the epoch#ma"ing wor"s of 3ir
0enry Haine< and Elphinstone has described it among the $fghans. We
also find it in the Hongolian oulous, the >abyle thaddart, the Cavanese
dessa, the Halayan "ota or tofa, and under a variety of names in
$byssinia, the 3oudan, in the interior of $frica, with natives of both
$mericas, with all the small and large tribes of the Iacific archipelagos.
-n short, we do not "now one single human race or one single nation
which has not had its period of village communities.... -t is anterior to
serfdom, and even servile submission was powerless to brea" it. -t was a
universal phase of evolution, a natural outcome of the clan organi=ation,
with all those stems, at least, which have played, or play still, some part in
history.
1A
We see a version of this communal ownership in the Cubilee system of
-srael, as it was later ideali=ed in the Hosaic )aw by the priestly and
deuteronomic redactors of )eviticus and Eeuteronomy, and had actually
e(isted to a greater or lesser degree in the period of the Cudges. !he
ultimate ownership of land lay with the tribe, clan and familyto whom it
reverted in the Cubilee year 5every forty#ninth or fiftieth yearthere's some
scholarly dispute6. 3ales of land were actually long#term leases, with the
price discounted depending on how many years it was until Cubilee.
$mong the customary by#laws regulating individual and family possessions
was the allowance of gleaning. -t's li"ely that the 7iblical accounts of a
revelation from Hount 3inai performed a function similar to that of the
totemic ancestor as a legitimi=ation of communal ownership, legitimi=ing a
7ron=e $ge society that predated the !orah. $t the time of the Cudges, even
the so#called C and E documents li"ely e(isted as nothing but epic poetry
preserved in oral form, with the tribes of -srael e(isting as an amphictyonic
league centered on 7ethel or 3hiloh.
!he prophet -saiah wrote in reference to land %privati=ation& 5i.e.
enclosure6 in violation of the law of Cubilee by the landed oligarchy, in this
passage from the 7ible. %Woe unto them who ,oin house to house, who lay
field to field, till there is no place, that they may be placed alone in the
midst of the earthJ& 5-saiah B.F6 $n English encloser, )ord )eicester, later
said in 1uite similar language. %-t is a melancholy thing to stand alone in
one's country. - loo" around, and not a house is to be seen but mine. - am
17 -ro3ot&in, Mutual id, 33+ 1,1C1,,+
customary regime, of gleaning the common fields after harvest.
1AD

Iro#enclosure writers, whether contemporaries or historians li"e
@lapham, @hambers and Hingay, fre1uently state in so many words that
customary claims were not by legal right, and therefore should not have
been compensated. @lapham argued that customary rights of common li"e
turning geese onto pasture or onto the harvested fields were not actually
rights at all, but merely on %sufferance.&
1AF

@ustomary rights of common were seldom preserved in official
manorial records li"e rolls and field orders. $nd in Enclosure proceedings,
the burden of proof was on peasants to provide documentation for their
claims.
1A
Given the history of land ownership in the countryside, and the glaring
fact that a peasantry had been reduced over a millennium to tenant status
by feudali=ation and land engrossment, the burden of proof should have
been on the other side. $s )udwig von Hises wrote.
/owhere and at no time has the large scale ownership of land come
into being through the wor"ings of economic forces in the mar"et. -t is
the result of military and political effort. ;ounded by violence, it has been
upheld by violence and that alone. $s soon as the latifundia are drawn
into the sphere of mar"et transactions they begin to crumble, until at last
they disappear completely.
14G
What customs were recogni=ed in the eighteenth century were the
remnant of claims that once had been of right. $nd as /eeson remar"ed in
regard to the right of gathering wood from private woods. %-t would ta"e
many years, if it happened at all, before this idea of right, no matter what its
origin, was worn down into a privilege, and before commoners would
accept that privileges could be ta"en away.&
141
*egarding Hingay's contention that the countryside was not
depopulated by Enclosure, 0ill responded. %2es, but so what8& +ne reason
the population did not fall in many villages after Enclosure is that
%population was increasing anyway. E(tension of the cultivated area and
17) Ibid., 3+ 1>)+
17B 5+ .+ Cla3ha, n !conomic Histor" o0 Modern 3ritain: The !arl" /ailwa" ge
(,.+%(,4+ ;Ca:ridge, 1(,'H ,
nd
ed+, 1(7>H re3r+ 1(6><, 33+ 116C11)+
17( $eeson, Commoners, 33+ )BC)(+
1*> 0udwig =on Mises, Socialism: n !conomic and Sociological nal"sis ;0ondon,
1(61<, 3+ 7)6+
1*1 $eeson, Commoners, 3+ 1'7+
fertili=ers necessary to profit by enclosure, the fact that rents, in the
Hidlands at least, doubled in conse1uence of enclosureall these might
assist him in ma"ing his free decision. 7ut coercionoh dear noJ
/othing so un#7ritish as that. !here was a ,ob waiting for him, either as
agricultural labourer in his village or in a factory somewhere, if he could
find out where to go and if he and his family could trudge there. '+nly
the really small owners,' say Irofessor @hambers and Er Hingay
reassuringly, would be forced to sell out.
1A4
-n Iarliament itself, Enclosure bills re1uired evidence of a three#fourths
ma,ority of proprietors in favor in order to proceed. 7ut the possible units
for tallying this figureacreage, common rights, cottages with rights of
common, total rac" rental value of land with common rightvaried widely,
and with them the possible measures of support. !he committee sometimes
chose between these measures based on which would show the highest
degree of support.
1AB
3econd, even ta"ing at face value the claim that the commons were
divided between the property owners of the manor on a pro rata basis, the
pree(isting distribution of propertyas we've already seen from accounts of
the enclosure of @hurch and monastic lands and of arable fields under the
!udorsdoesn't bear much loo"ing into. -n effect the lord of the manor,
the heir of predecessors who encroached on perhaps a ma,ority of common
lands over previous centuries, finally offers to divide up the remaining
common land according to the distribution of property resulting from those
centuries of theft. !he process was much li"e that of the modern urban
%improvement district,& which is formed with the approval of owners of the
ma,ority of property owners in the proposed district, and subse1uently
levies ta(es on advocates and opponents ali"e. !he old saw about the wolf
and the sheep voting on what to have for dinner comes to mind here.
$nd third, as we saw above, customary rights of commonprobably
including a ma,ority of small claimswere seldom compensated. !he
division of the common land among proprietors left out the cottagers and
s1uatters who had no formal property right in the common recogni=ed by
the royal courts, but who had rights of access under village customrights
of access which had meant the margin for independent survival.
1A6
$nd it
left out the benefit, which had previously accrued to the poor under the
17* .ill, /e0ormation to Industrial /evolution, 3+ ,,7+
176 Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ 1>>+
17' 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 3+ 6,+
the giant of Giant @astle, and have eaten up all my neighbours.&
14
0enry 3umner Haine, writing in the nineteenth century, pointed to the
village communes of -ndia as the most faithful surviving version of what
had once been an institution common to all the branches of the -ndo#
European family.
!he Killage @ommunity of -ndia is at once an organised patriarchal
society and an assemblage of co#proprietors. !he personal relations to
each other of the men who compose it are indistinguishably confounded
with their proprietary rights, and to the attempts of English functionaries
to separate the two may be assigned some of the most formidable
miscarriages of $nglo#-ndian administration. !he Killage @ommunity is
"nown to be of immense anti1uity. -n whatever direction research has
been pushed into -ndian history, general or local, it has always found the
@ommunity in e(istence at the farthest point of its progress.... @on1uests
and revolutions seem to have swept over it without disturbing or
displacing it, and the most beneficent systems of government in -ndia
have always been those which have recognised it as the basis of
administration.
1B
)i"e >ropot"in, Haine saw the village commune's ,oint ownership of
land as rooted in its origin from a group of families sharing common
descent. %9!:he simplest form of an -ndian Killage @ommunity,& he wrote,
is ,ust such %a body of "indred holding a domain in common...&
16

$lthough this process of formation of a Killage @ommunity from an
e(tended body of "indred comprising several related families %may be
regarded as typical,& there were many e(ceptions. Even in villages founded
by %a single assemblage of blood#relations,& nevertheless %men of alien
e(traction have always, from time to time, been engrafted on it& and
%admitted to the brotherhood.& $nd there were also villages which %appear
to have sprung not from one but from two or more families< and there are
some whose composition is "nown to be entirely artificial...&
1D
Even so, all
such villages have created a myth of %an original parentage,& even when the
%assumption of common origin... 9is: sometimes notoriously at variance
with fact....& !he village operated on the fiction of common origin, being
1* !+ E+ Tate, The !nclosure Movement ;$ew %or&2 !al&er and Co3any, 1(')<, 3+
(>+
16 .enry Suner Maine, ncient Law, 3+ 167+
1' Ibid., 3+ 16*+
1) Ibid., 33+ 16*C166+
either an %assemblage of blood relations& or %a body of co#proprietors
formed on the model of an association of "insmen.&
1F
$s Haine's reference to the administration of -ndia suggests, the village
commune continued in widespread e(istence even after the rise of the state,
amounting internally to a stateless society with a parasitic layer of "ings,
priests, bureaucrats and feudal landlords superimposed on it. !he village
commune was %under the dominion of comparatively powerful "ings& who
e(acted tribute and conscripted soldiers from it, %bud did not otherwise
meddle with the cultivating societies.&
1
!he state's relationship to the
governed was through the village as a unit, rather than the e(ercise of
regulatory authority over relations between individuals.
-n *ussia, Haine saw the enactment of serfdom under the tsars as an
imposition upon a pree(isting social system. namely, %the ancient
organisation of the village.&
?G
Where the village commune persisted, the state had little or no direct
dealings with individuals. -t dealt with the peasantry only collectively,
through the commune.
!he premodern and early modern state... dealt more with
communities than with individuals when it came to ta(es. 3ome
apparently individual ta(es, such as the notorious *ussian %soul ta(,&
which was collected from all sub,ects, were actually paid directly by the
communities or indirectly through the nobles whose sub,ects they were.
;ailure to deliver the re1uired sum usually led to collective punishment.
!he only agents of ta(ation who regularly reached to the level of the
household and its cultivated fields were the local nobility and clergy in
the course of collecting feudal dues and the religious tithe. ;or its part,
the state had neither the administrative tools nor the information to
penetrate to this level.
-n such cases the commune functioned internally much as it had before
the rise of the state, allotting land and mediating disputes among the
families, with the additional functions of handling relations with the state
collectively when a member of the commune was charged with violating
one of the state's laws and assessing each family's share of ta(es imposed on
the village by the state.
1B Ibid., 33+ 166C16'+
1( Henr" Sumner Maine# $illage%Communities in the !ast and &est+ Third Edition
;$ew %or&2 .enry .olt and Co3any, 1B(><, 33+ 16(C1'>+
,> Maine, ncient Law, 3+ 16)+
2eah, the English gentry were good to help out that way. Iart of that
%unbought grace of life& 7ur"e tal"ed about, - guess.
!he ma,ority of small holders with rights in the common were
disadvantaged in another way. @onsider how, as described by the
0ammonds, the procedure would have seemed to a small peasant.
)et us imagine the cottager, unable to read or write, en,oying certain
customary rights of common without any idea of their origin or history
or legal basis. "nowing only that as long as he can remember he has "ept
a cow, driven geese across the waste, pulled his fuel out of the
neighbouring brushwood, and cut turf from the common, and that his
father did all these things before him. !he cottager learns that before a
certain day he has to present to his landlord's bailiff, or to the parson, or
to one of the magistrates into whose hands perhaps he has fallen before
now over a little matter of a hare or a partridge, or to some solicitor from
the country town, a clear and correct statement of his rights and his claim
to a share in the award. )et us remember at the same time all that we
"now from ;ielding and 3mollett of the reputation of lawyers for cruelty
to the poor. -s a cottager to be trusted to face the ordeal, or to be in time
with his statement, or to have that statement in proper legal form8 !he
commissioners can re,ect his claim on the ground of any technical
irregularity.... -t is significant that in the case of 3edgmoor, out of 4G6A
claims sent in, only 1DA were allowed.
1AA
@hristopher 0ill, in language much li"e the 0ammonds', moc"ed
similar claims by Hingay that no coercion was involved in Enclosure.
!here was no coercion, we are assured. !rue, when the big
landowner or landowners to whom four#fifths of the land in a village
belonged wanted to enclose, the wishes of the ma,ority of small men who
occupied the remaining twenty per cent. could be disregarded. !rue,
Iarliament too" no interest in the details of an enclosure bill, referring
them to be wor"ed out by its promoters, who distributed the land as they
thought best. 7ut the poorest cottager was always free to oppose a
Iarliamentary enclosure bill. $ll he had to do was to learn to read, hire
an e(pensive lawyer, spend a few wee"s in )ondon and be prepared to
face the wrath of the powerful men in his village. -f he left his home
after enclosure, this was entirely voluntary. though the loss of his rights
to gra=e cattle on the common, to pic" up fuel there, the cost of fencing
his own little allotment if he got one, his lac" of capital to buy the
177 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 33+ '7C'*+
landlords to come to his rescue.&
1?
!he membership of the 7oard of @ommissioners that carried out an
Enclosure was appointed by the big landowners who initially promoted the
Enclosure, before the petition was ever publicly submitted for signatures.
3o the lord of the manor and other big owners were disproportionately
represented on the 7oard, and the small owners poorly or not at all< and
aside from the mandatory assignment of defined portions of the common to
the lord of the manor and the owner of the tithes, the commissioners were
otherwise given %a free hand, their powers... virtually absolute& in regard to
arbitrary assignments of land to the small owners.
1AG

$nd interestinglyinteresting, anyway, to those who ma"e a hobby of
seeing ,ust how low the depths of human nature can sin"it was common
for the same names to appear on the list of commissioners in a long series of
Enclosure petitions. $lthough in theory a commissioner represented no
particular interest, in fact he did.
...it often says, however, what amounts to much the same thingthat if
he 'dies, becomes incapacitated or refuses to act' he shall be replaced by a
nominee of 5a6 the lord of the manor, 5b6 the appropriator andPor other
tithe owner5s6, etc., or 5c6 the remaining proprietors. 3o clearly he has
been chosen to represent a particular point of view. !hus in +(fordshire,
!homas 0opcraft appears in five different commissions, always as
representing manorial interests< the *ev. Cohn 0orseman is shown nine
times, always acting on behalf of rector, appropriator or vicar. Cohn
@hamberl5a6in sat on si(teen commissions, 1DF#1FGA, and on twelve of
them represented 'other proprietors'. $n enclosure commissioner
combined the delicate functions of advocate and ,udge.
1A1
@hambers and Hingay, interestingly, made mentionalbeit in a much
more panglossian toneof the same substantive fact.
!he conduct of an enclosure was such a comple( matter that in
practice it became a professional occupation for the country gentlemen,
land agents and large farmers who were e(perienced in it, and we find the
same commissioners acting at a variety of different places.
1A?
1,( 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 3+ *6+
17> Ibid., 33+ 6BC'>+
171 !+ E+ Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ 1>(+
17, Cha:ers and Mingay, The gricultural /evolution 3+ B'+
!he central political conflict in the *oman *epublic, as recounted in
)ivy, was the patricians' attempt to appropriate and enclose%privati=e&
common lands to which all members of the community had legal rights of
access.
!he open#field system of England, which was gradually eroded by
enclosures of arable land 5mainly for sheep pasturage6 from the late Hiddle
$ges on, was another version of the same early !eutonic communal
property systemthe $rable Har" and @ommon Har"whose survivals
von Haurer noted in Germany.
-t was a later evolution of the system !acitus had observed among the
Germanic tribes. !he system !acitus remar"ed on was used by the !eutons
when they were semi#nomadic and had access to e(tensive land inputs. -t
was an open#field system with interstripping of family plots, but with only a
single field. When the soil was e(hausted, the community moved on and
bro"e fresh ground. !histhe system li"ely first used at the time of the
agricultural revolutioncould only wor" with low population densities,
obviously. !he first adaptation as the tribes settled down and the amount
of vacant land declined was a primitive two#field system, with half the
arable land remaining fallow each year. 7y the time the low German
descendants of !acitus' sub,ects were observed in England, they had
progressed to the full#blown three# or four#field system.
?1

!he $rable Har", and its English open#field counterpart, was a three#
field system with interstripping of family plots in each field and a periodic
redivision of plots between families. !he @ommon Har" consisted of
common waste, woodlot, and pasture, of which each family was entitled to
some defined share of use.
??
0ere's how William Harshall described the
open field system in 1FG4.
-n this place it is sufficient to premise that a very few centuries ago,
nearly the whole of the lands of England lay in an open, and more or less
in a commonable state.... 9!:he following statement may serve to convey
a general idea of the whole of what may be termed @ommon#field
!ownships, throughout England.
Lnder this ingenious mode of organi=ation, each parish or township
was considered as one common farm< though the tenantry were
numerous.
*ound the village, in which the tenants resides, lay a few small
,1 Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 33+ *>C*1+
,, Maine, $illage%Communities, 33+ )BCB)+
inclosures, or grass yards< for rearing calves, and as baiting and nursery
grounds for other farm stoc". !his was the common farmstead, or
homestall....
*ound the homestall, lay a suit of arable fields< including the deepest
and soundest of the lower grounds, situated out of water's way< for raising
corn and pulse< as well as to produce fodder and litter for cattle and
horses in the winter season.
$nd, in the lowest situation..., shooting up among the arable lands,
lay an e(tent of meadow grounds..., to afford a supply of hay, for cows
and wor"ing stoc", in the winter and spring months.
+n the outs"irts of the arable lands, where the soil is adapted to the
pasturage of cattle, or... less adapted to cultivation..., one or more stinted
pastures, or hams, were laid out for mil"ing cows, wor"ing cattle, or
other stoc" which re1uired superior pasturage in summer.
While the blea"est, worst#soiled, and most distant lands of the
township, were left in their native wild state< for timber and fuel< and for
a common pasture....
!he appropriated lands of each township were laid out with e1ual
good sense and propriety. !hat each occupier might have his
proportionate share of lands of different 1ualities, and lying in different
situations, the arable lands, more particularly, were divided into
numerous parcels....
$nd that the whole might be sub,ected to the same plan of
management, and be conducted as one farm, the arable lands were
moreover divided into compartments, or %fields,& of nearly e1ual si=e, and
generally three in number, to receive, in constant rotation, the triennial
succession of fallow, wheat 5or rye6 and spring crops 5as barley, oats, beans
and peas6....
?A
!he open#field system, according to C. ). and 7arbara 0ammond, was
%more ancient than the manorial order.... !he manorial element... is
superimposed on the communal.... the medieval village is a free village
gradually feudalised.& $s late as 16FB, an estimated FBM of the surviving
arable land that had not been converted to pasturage was organi=ed on the
open#field model.
?4
!he *ussian mir or obshchina was essentially a variant of the same
primeval open#field system that prevailed in Western Europe, but with a
,7 !illia Marshall, !lementar" and 'ractical Treatise on Landed 'ropert", quoted in
Maine, $illage%Communities, 33+ (>C(7+
,* 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, The $illage Labourer: ()*+%(,-. ;0ondon2
0ongans, Green, and Co+, 1(17<, 33+ ,'C,)+
recommend the creation of complete wage dependence. !hey said that
the discipline was valuable. !hey argued that the sanction of real or
threatened unemployment would benefit farmers presently dependent on
the whims of partly self#sufficient commoners. ;or them... the
,ustification for ending common right was the creation of an agricultural
proletariat.
1?D
$ central theme running through all Enclosure advocacy in the
eighteenth century was that %commoners were la=y.& $nd their very
obsession with this %problem& is itself an indication of the economic
significance of the commons.
!hey used la=iness as a term of moral disapproval. 7ut what they meant
was that commoners were not always available for farmers to employ. We
might as" why were they unavailable8.... -n fact... every commoner was
la=y, whether wages were high or not. !his suggests that they refused to
wor" because they could live without wages, or regular wages. !heir
la=iness becomes an indicator of their independence of the wage. $nd
the degree of frustration critics felt when they saw this la=iness may be a
guide to how well commoners could do without it.
1?F
!hose today who minimi=e the significance of Enclosure as the margin
of difference between independence and wage#slavery do so in direct
contradiction to the conscious and stated motives of Enclosure advocates
which we 1uoted at length in the section on English history in the main
body of this paperin the eighteenth century.
$pologists for Enclosure sometimes emphasi=e the alleged due process
entailed in it. 7ut in fact the formal procedure of Enclosurebehind all
the rhetoricamounted to a railroad ,ob. !he 0ammonds described the
formal process of Enclosure as it was ,ustified in legal theory, but argued
that in fact it was a na"ed power grab. !he lord of the manor typically
wor"ed out the plan of Enclosure and drafted the petition to Iarliament,
presenting it as a fait accompli to the peasantry only after everything was
neatly stitched up. -f anyone bal"ed at the terms of Enclosure, they were
li"ely to be warned by the landlord1uite unofficiallythat the Enclosure
was inevitable, and %that those who obstructed it would suffer, as those who
assisted it would gain, in the final award.& -f they persisted in obstinacy, the
only recourse was to appeal to %a dim and distant Iarliament of great
1,) Ibid., 3+ ,B+
1,B Ibid., 33+ 7(C*>+
$ lot of the trouble with twentieth century pro#Enclosure arguments
li"e those of @hambers and Hingay is that, in many regards, they ta"e
eighteenth#century accounts by pro#Enclosure writers at face value, when in
fact the latter were wereas C.H. /eeson pointed out%ma"ing a case, not
conducting an en1uiry.&
1?4
7ut although modern revisionists li"e @hambers agree with the
enclosers on the s1ualor and misgovernment of the commons, what's really
interesting is the areas in which the pro#Enclosure writers of the eighteenth
century agreed with their contemporary adversaries, rather than with their
sympathi=ers today. $ccording to /eeson, pro# and anti#Enclosure writers
of the eighteenth century
;irst... believed commoners to be numerous and well#dispersed in
space and time through the country and the century< second, they
thought common right gave commoners an income and a status or
independence they found valuable< third, they agreed that the e(tinction
of common right at enclosure mar"ed the decline of small farms and a
transition for commoners from some degree of independence to complete
dependence on a wage. $ll eighteenth#century commentators saw a
relationship between the survival and decline of common right and the
nature of social relations in England.
1?B
....-t becomes clear that beneath the argument between these writers
lay a fundamental agreement. +pponents agreed on the nature of
English rural society before enclosure, and they agreed on enclosure's
effect. it turned commoners into labourers. !heir disagreement was
about the worth of each class< neither side doubted that the
transformation occurred, and had profound conse1uences.
1?6
-ndeed, as we saw earlier, many of the strongest advocates for Enclosure
were deliberately and avowedly motivated not so much by a desire to
improve the efficiency of cultivation and animal husbandry, as by a desire to
improve the efficiency of e(tracting labor from the rural population.
$dvocates for enclosure were e(plicitly motivated, in part, by the prediction
of %complete wage dependence.&
...many pamphleteers and most reporters to the 7oard of $griculture did
1,* $eeson, Commoners, 3+ )+
1,6 Ibid., 3+ (+
1,' Ibid., 3+ 1B
state far more despotic than the Western European feudal structure
superimposed on it.
Har('s view of the uni1ueness of the %$siatic mode of production,& and
of the bac"wardness that resulted from the absence of private ownership of
land and the predominance of collective village ownership with the state as
landlord, probably reflected the limited awareness of the time as to the
e(tent to which the open#field system has persisted in the Hiddle $ges.
!he chief difference between the %$siatic mode& and the open#field system
of Western Europe was that in the former case a despotic central state was
superimposed as a parasitic layer atop the communal peasant society,
whereas in the latter case it was a pattern of feudal organi=ation that overlay
the peasant commune.
Har('s $siatic mode in -ndia was essentially a variant of the open#field
system, butas with the *ussian mirwith a despotic imperial state rather
than a feudal system superimposed on it. $s described by Haine.
-f very general language were employed, the description of the
!eutonic or 3candinavian village#communities might actually serve as a
description of the same institution in -ndia. !here is the arable mar",
divided into separate lots but cultivated according to minute customary
rules binding on all. Wherever the climate admits of the finer grass
crops, there are the reserved meadows, lying generally on the verge of the
arable mar". !here is the waste or common land, out of which the arable
mar" has been cut, en,oyed as pasture by all the community pro indiviso.
!here is the village, consisting of habitations each ruled by a despotic
pater#familias. $nd there is constantly a council of government to
determine disputes as to custom.
?B
!he %despotic pater#familias&apparently a common -ndo#European
institution, and also noted among the archaic )atinsis obviously
something to which libertarians will have moral ob,ections. 7ut a more
democratic system of governance within the family or household would in
no way affect communal tenure.

,6 Maine, $illage%Communities, 33+ 1>)C1>B
II
Destruction of the Peasant
Commune by the State
-t was only with the rise of the modern state, toward the end of the
Hiddle $ges, that governments began to ta"e an interest in regulating the
lives of individuals. !he modern centrali=ed state was confronted with the
problem of opacity, and became preoccupied with, in Cames 3cott's
language, an %attempt to ma"e society legible, to arrange the population in
ways that simplified the classic state functions of ta(ation, conscription, and
prevention of rebellion.&
?6
$lthough the state has always had such concerns
to a greater or lesser e(tent, it was only the modern stateat least since
*oman timesthat actually sought to touch individuals in their daily lives.
)egibility is a condition of manipulation. $ny substantial state
intervention in societyto vaccinate a population, produce goods,
mobili=e labor, ta( people and their property, conduct literacy campaigns,
conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards, catch criminals, start
universal schoolingre1uires the invention of units that are visible....
Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organi=ed in a
manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted,
aggregated, and monitored. !he degree of "nowledge re1uired would
have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention. -n
other words, one might say that the greater the manipulation envisaged,
the greater the legibility re1uired to effect it.
-t was precisely this phenomenon, which had reached full tide by the
,' Scott, Seeing Like a State, 3+ ,*+
%employment& from the labored classes as possible, regardless of whether the
laborers themselves wanted it.
$gainst arguments by Enclosure apologists that the population of the
countryside increased after Enclosure, Hc/ally responded.
+ne important recent study has shown that, during the main period
of parliamentary enclosure, population rose in both enclosed and
unenclosed villages, and that the rate of growth was no faster in the
former. Enclosure cannot therefore be said to have had a uni1uely
stimulative effect on population growth. !he same study also
demonstrates that there was a Spositive associationQ between enclosure and
migration out of villages. ;inally, a definite correlation has been
established between the e(tent of enclosure and reliance on poor rates....
!he heart of the modern liberal account has thus been refuted< indeed,
the older socialist picture now seems remar"ably accurateparliamentary
enclosure resulted in outmigration and a higher level of pauperi=ation.
1??
Hc/ally also argues that Hingay neglected the e(tent to which
Enclosure was a tipping point for small, marginal tenant farmers, rendering
them non#viable and pushing them into wage labor.
$s Hingay has noted in another conte(t, Sthe very small farmers
occupiers of perhaps ?B acres and lesscould hardly survive without
some additional form of income< the land itself, unless used for
speciali=ed production or amply supplemented by common, would hardly
yield sufficient to pay the rent and "eep the family.Q... 0e goes on to
point out that only in rare circumstances could such small occupiers
engage in speciali=ed farming for the mar"et. 2et the other means of
supportfarming Samply supplemented by common'is precisely that
which was being destroyed by parliamentary enclosure, to the tune of si(
million acres via enclosure $ct 5about one#1uarter of the cultivated area of
England6 and another F million acres by SagreementQ.... !he impact of
enclosure on small tenants, whose lands were inade1uate to procure
subsistence, can only have been dramatic, forcing them into growing
reliance on wage#labouras proponents of enclosure said it should.
1?A
1,, 9a=id Mc$ally, gainst the Market: 'olitical !conom"# Market Socialism and
the Mar5ist Criti6ue ;Jerso, 1((7<, 33+ 17C1*+ Citing $+1+R+ Crafts, KEnclosure and
0a:or Su33ly Re=isitedL, EG3lorations in Econoic .istory 16, 1()B, 33+ 1)'C),1B>+
-+9+M+ Snell, Annals of the 0a:ouring "oor2 Social Change and Agrarian England
1''>C1((>, Ca:ridge2 Ca:ridge Uni=ersity "ress, 1(B6, 33+ 1()C,>'+
1,7 Ibid+, 3+ 1*+
sure "nowledge of their value. 7ut there is more to it than versatility and
the interest it ensures.... 7ourne thought that a commoner's sense of
well#being came from a sense of ownership or possession, a sense of
belonging, and an overwhelming localness. !his was not the ownership
of a few acres 5though that is surely important too6 but the possession of
a landscape.
11

$nyone today who wor"s at wage labor, who e(periences cloc"ing in as
cutting off a piece of her life and flushing it down the toilet, as entering
someone else's place and being a poor relation in someone else's house, of
leaving her own ,udgment and values at the door and becoming a tool in
someone else's hand, a means to someone else's ends rather than an end in
her own right, "nows e(actly what 7ourne meant. !he untold millions of
people who punch a time#card with a sic" feeling in the pits of their
stomachs at the prospect of %0ow much shit am - going to have to eat
today to "eep my ,ob8& "now what a sense of belonging and ownership are
mainly from their lac".
/eeson's description reminded me of a comment about the 0ighland
crofters, by science fiction author >en Hacleod.
$ lot of these highlanders are 0einlein's omnicompetent manthey
can turn their hand to anything. !hey're also rather li"e Har('s doodle
about the post#class society where you could hunt in the morning, fish in
the afternoon and be a critic after dinner without ever being hunter,
fisherman or critic. !hat is literally what these guys are li"e....
...!he highlanders are often people who own a croft, wor" for wages
during the day and go poaching in the evening, and who read a lot. !hey
are people who've never really been hammered into industrial society and
therefore have a fle(ibility.
1?G
3o when @hambers and Hingay refer to the loss of commons being
%compensated... by an increase in the volume and regularity of employment
after enclosure,& they sort of miss the point.
1?1
!he commons were of value
to their possessors precisely because they were trying to get shut of %volume
and regularity of employment.& -t was the propertied classes, as we saw
above, who promoted Enclosures as a way of e(tracting as much
11( Ibid., 33+ 1))C1)(+
1,> 9uncan 0awie, &en acleod inter=iew,# IoneCsf+co, ,>>1 ?htt32@@www+IoneC
sf+co@&enacleod+htlA+
1,1 Cha:ers and Mingay, The gricultural /evolution, 3+ (B+
middle of the nineteenth century, that Iroudhon had in mind when he
declared, %!o be ruled is to be "ept an eye on, inspected, spied on,
regulated, indoctrinated, sermoni=ed, listed and chec"ed off, estimated,
appraised, censured, ordered about.... !o be ruled is at every operation,
transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced,
admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.&
;rom another perspective, what Iroudhon was deploring was in fact
the great achievement of modern statecraft. 0ow hard#won and tenuous
this achievement was is worth emphasi=ing. Host states, to spea"
broadly, are %younger& than the societies that they purport to administer.
3tates therefore confront patterns of settlement, social relations, and
production, not to mention a natural environment, that have evolved
largely independent of state plans. !he result is typically a diversity,
comple(ity, and unrepeatability of social forms that are relatively opa1ue
to the state, often purposefully so....
-f the state's goals are minimal, it may not need to "now much about
the society.... -f, however, the state is ambitiousif it wants to e(tract as
much grain and manpower as it can, short of provo"ing a famine or a
rebellion, if it wants to create a literate, s"illed, and healthy population, if
it wants everyone to spea" the same language or worship the same god
then it will have to become both far more "nowledgeable and far more
intrusive.
?D
!he imperative of rendering the opa1ue legible results, in the specific
case of property rules in land, in hostility toward communal forms of
property regulated as a purely internal matter by a village according to local
custom.
...open commons landholding... is less legible and ta(able than closed
commons landholding, which in turn is less legible than private
freeholding, which is less legible than state ownership.... -t is no
coincidence that the more legible or appropriable form can more readily
be converted into a source of renteither as private property or as the
monopoly rent of the state.
?F
;ee#simple %privati=ation,& and more recently 3oviet#style
%collectivi=ation& 5i.e. de facto state ownership6, are both methods by which
the state has destroyed the village commune and overcome the problem
from the state's perspectiveof opacity within it. -n both cases the village
,) Ibid., 33+ 1B7C1B*+
,B Ibid., 33+ ,1(C,,>+
commune, while 1uite legible hori=ontally from the perspective of its
inhabitants, was opa1ue to the state.
!he fee#simple model of private property, wherever it has e(isted, has
almost always been a creature of the state.
-n the case of common property farmland, the imposition of freehold
property was clarifying not so much for the local inhabitantsthe
customary structure of rights had always been clear enough to themas
it was for the ta( official and the land speculator. !he cadastral map
added documentary intelligence to state power and thus provided the
basis for the synoptic view of the state and a supralocal mar"et in land.
?
;reehold title and standard land measurement were to central
ta(ation and the real#estate mar"et what central ban" currency was to the
mar"etplace.
AG
*eplacing a society in which most ordinary people have access to the
land on a customary basis, with a society in which most of those same
people must rent or purchase land in order to cultivate it, has the virtue
from the perspective of the state and the ruling economic classof forcing
the peasantry into the cash economy.
@ommoditi=ation in general, by denominating all goods and services
according to a common currency, ma"es for what !illy has called the
%visibility 9of : a commercial economy.& 0e writes, %-n an economy
where only a small share of goods and services are bought and sold, a
number of conditions prevail. collectors of revenue are unable to observe
or evaluate resources with any accuracy, 9and: many people have claims
on any particular resource 5@oercion, @apital, and European 3tates, pp.
F, FB6.
A1
-n addition, forcing peasants and laborers into the cash economy means
they must have a source of cash income to participate in it, which means an
e(pansion of the wage labor mar"et.
3cott's functional e(planation of individual fee simple ownership
sounds remar"ably li"e ;oucault's description of the %individualism&
entailed in %panopticism.&
,( Ibid., 3+ 7(+
7> Ibid., 3+ *B+
71 Ibid., 33+ 7')C7'B no+ (*+
the hidden wealth of commonersthey were the oldest part of an
ancient economy. !hey gave commoners the fuel, food and materials
that "ept them out of the mar"et for labour and out of the mar"et for
consumption too. $nd the more productive the common the more
independent the commoners.
!he habit of living off commons made the habit of regular
employment less necessary. ;or commoners it was customary to ma"e a
living first out of the materials on hand< after all, the common came first,
wage labour was a relatively recent arrival. !his is not to deny the
e(istence of wage labour< earning wages was necessary, but until they
became the lion's share of income they were supplementary not central to
a commoning economy. )oo"ing for regular, constant employment was
unnecessary were commons were rich reserves. -t is no accident that the
loudest complaints about the unavailability of commoners for wor" come
from the 0ampshire downs and the East $nglian fens. !ime there was
customarily spent on other things as well as wor" for wages. Gra=ing a
cow or a don"ey, getting in a store of fuel, finding repair wood and
thatch, or gathering winter browse for a cow or pigs and food for the
larder were other older "inds of employment. !his time was never
available to employers, it was never purchasable....
+ne conse1uence was that commoners who were able to live on a
little were unli"ely to develop e(pensive wants. $s long as they had what
they thought of as enough they had no need to spend time getting more.
;rom this freedom came time to spend doing things other than wor", as
well as the ability to refuse wor". !his is the evidence for the accusation
by critics of commons that commoners were la=y, that they spent too
much timme at the mar"et or going horseracing.... @learly sporting,
indolence, la=iness, ta"ing time off, en,oying life, lac" of ambition 5all the
words are loaded with values of one "ind or another6 9the fact that most
wor"ing and middle class people today share those values is evidence of
Hethodism's success in reshaping consciousness in the late 1F
th
and early
1
th
century>. @.: had their origins in other things as well as a life
outside the mar"et economy. -n particular, celebration and recreation
had economic functions as well as social. !hey established connection
and obligation.... 7ut the effect of having relatively few needs was
liberating of time as well as paid labour. 0aving relatively few needs that
the mar"et could satisfy meant that commoners could wor" less.... -n
other words. commoners had a life as well as a living.
George 7ourne, who wrote most compellingly about thrift, also
argued that the life commoners got was particularly satisfying. +n one
level, satisfaction came from the varied nature of the wor". @ommoners
had a variety of tas"s, many calling for s"ill and invention, and they had a
four or five wee"s' wages for an agricultural laborer.
114
/ot only was
gleaning unharvested grain a significant source of subsistence for the
poorest 5at least enough to provide flour till @hristmas6
11B
, but the right to
glean wool caught on thorn bushes and the old winter fleece that dropped
off in summer was a significant source of fiber for spinning. $
contemporary observer estimated around one half of wool from common#
field floc"s was gathered in this way, rather than by shearing.
116
3uch rights also gave the landless %the means of e(change with other
commoners and so made them part of the networ" of e(change from which
mutuality grew. Even for the landless, rights such as gleaning and access to
the common waste provided some margin of subsistence and help "nit the
village together as a social and economic unit.
11D
!he social and economic unit thus "nit together included a significant
social safety net, of the sort >ropot"in described in Hutual $id. $ccording
to /eeson, seasonal shared labor li"e gathering rushes, harvesting and
gleaning, peating, berrying, etc., and the small e(change economy in which
even landless commoners participated%blac"berries, dandelion wine, ,am,
or labour in carrying home wood or reeds&both created connections
between families and %bonds of obligation.& Ioor families after Enclosure,
with no access to the common waste, were unable to obtain the material for
participating in this gifting economy from their meager wages, and so could
no longer build the ties of mutual obligation and good will with other
families which had previously served as a safety net.
11F
+ne might read all this material in light of recent studies which
compare the social health of communities in which farmland is widely
distributed among a large number of family farms, versus that of
communities where the land is concentrated in the hands of a few giant
agribusiness operations.
-n short, as /eeson describes it, the commons were the difference
between a community of free and independent people and a collection of
dependent wage laborers.
)iving off the produce of commons encouraged frugality, economy,
thrift. Iroductive commons had always been the insurance, the reserves,
11* Ibid., 3+ 1'6+
116 Ibid., 3+ 717+
11' Ibid., 33+ 1'BC1'(+
11) Ibid., 3+ 16B+
11B Ibid., 33+ 1B>C1B,+
!he fiscal or administrative goal toward which all modern states
aspire is to measure, codify, and simplify land tenure in much the same
way as scientific forestry reconceived the forest. $ccommodating the
lu(uriant variety of customary land tenure was simply inconceivable. !he
historic solution, at least for the liberal state, has typically been the heroic
simplification of individual freehold tenure. )and is owned by a legal
individual who possesses wide powers of use, inheritance, or sale and
whose ownership is represented by a uniform deed of title enforced
through the ,udicial and police institutions of the state.... -n an agrarian
setting, the administrative landscape is blan"eted with a uniform grid of
homogeneous land, each parcel of which has a legal person as owner and
hence ta(payer. 0ow much easier it then becomes to assess such property
and its owner on the basis of its acreage, its soil class, the crops it
normally bears, and its assumed yield than to untangle the thic"et of
common property and mi(ed forms of tenure.
A?
The Enclosures in England
;airly early in Hedieval times, there had been a modest amount of land
ownership in severalty. )ords of manors, who had originally interstripped
their domains with the rest of the holdings in the open fields, had early on
consolidated them into closes. $s the village e(panded the area under
cultivation into the waste, newly bro"en ground was usually incorporated
into e(isting open fields. 7ut some families developed waste land
independently and enclosed it as private holdings. /evertheless, a decided
ma,ority of land was held communally in the open fields.
AA
!here were early complaints by tenants in the thirteenth century of
lords enclosing parts of common lands without consent, and reducing
villagers' rights of pasture. !he 3tatute of Herton in 1?AB recogni=ed the
paramount authority of the lord of the manor over the waste, and
authori=ed lords to enclose the commons at their own descretion, so long as
they left a %sufficiency& of land to meet the commoning needs of the free
tenants 5although the burden of proof fell on the lords6.
A4
!he first large#scale assault on the village commune was the !udor
sei=ure of monastic landsentailing around a fifth of the arable land in
Englandfollowed by the distribution of it to royal favorites among the
7, Ibid., 3+ 7'+
77 Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ 6(+
7* Ibid., 3+ '>+
nobility. !he subse1uent !udor era was also characteri=ed by large#scale
enclosure of open fields for sheep pasturage for the lucrative te(tile mar"ets.
!he estates sei=ed with the suppression of the monasteries, and those
sei=ed of which the @hurch was feudal proprietor, %were to a large e(tent
given away to rapacious feudal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to
speculating farmers and citi=ens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary
sub#tenants and threw their holdings into one.&
AB
!he "ing's men to whom the monastic lands were distributed engaged
in wholesale %9r:ac"#renting, evictions, and... conversions of arable to
pasture. !he new landlords were less than sympathetic to complaints from
their tenants.
%Eo ye not "now,& said the grantee of one of the 3usse( manors of the
monastery of 3ion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the
sei=ure of their commons, %that the >ing's grace hath put down all the
houses of mon"s, friars and nuns8 !herefore is the time come that we
gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor "naves as ye be.&
A6
!he dissolution of the monasteries dispossessed some BG,GGG tenants,
and the ensuing enclosures for pasturage through the early seventeenth
century involved around half a million acres 5almost a thousand s1uare
miles6 and AG#4G,GGG tenants. Haurice Eobb argues that this might have
represented over ten percent of %all middling and small landholders and 1G
and ?G per cent. of those employed at wages...< in which case the labour
reserves thereby created would have been of comparable dimensions to that
which e(isted in all but the worst months of the economic crisis of the
1AGs.&
AD
!enants not sub,ect to enclosure under the !udors were instead
victimi=ed by rac"#renting and arbitrary fines, which fre1uently resulted in
their being driven off the land%land,& in Har('s words, to which the
peasantry %had the same feudal rights as the lord himself &when unable
to pay them.
AF
76 -arl MarG and 1riedrich Engels, Capital =ol+ 8, =ol+ 76 of MarG and Engels
Collected &orks ;$ew %or&2 8nternational "u:lishers, 1(('<, 3+ )11+
7' R+ .+ Tawney, /eligion and the /ise o0 Capitalism ;$ew %or&2 .arcourt, Frace and
Co3any, 8nc+, 1(,'<, 3+ 1,>+
7) Maurice 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism ;$ew %or&2 8nternational
"u:lishers, 1(*)<, 33+ ,,*C,,6, ,,*C,,6n+
7B 8anuel !allerstein, The Modern &orld S"stem# 'art I ;$ew %or&2 Acadeic
"ress, 1()*<, 3+ ,61nH MarG quote is fro Capital =ol+ 8, 3+ )>(+
despite the concentration of land ownership.
1G
3o in many villages that were supposedly devoid of a peasantry in
@hambers' and Hingay's terms, there was in fact still a si=able %landless&
rural population with rights to the land.
@hambers and Hingay minimi=ed the economic significance of the
supposedly minimal common rights of cottagers and s1uatters. 7ut even
small holdings, which were held by a large portion of the rural population,
were a source of considerable independence. +ccupancy of an acre or even
,ust a few furlong strips in an open field, coupled with a "itchen garden and
common right to gra=e a few sheep, according to /eeson, could be a %great
advantage.& With only one to three acres, a family could raise sufficient
potatoes, or wheat, barley and rye%bread corn&to subsist %in years of
dearth.& !he landless normally had customary right to pasture pigs on the
common, as well. Iigs on the forests and waste and geese in the fen
pastures were fre1uently sold to farmers who fattened them for the table
hence the decline in roast goose and goose down after Enclosure. $nd a
cottage on the border of the waste rendered a laborer %independent of the
farmers and many of the country gentlemen.&
11G
!he value of the common 9according to critics: was no more than wood
for the fire. Evidently critics did not "now that a waste might provide
much more than fuel. 3auntering after a gra=ing cow, snaring rabbits and
birds, fishing, loo"ing for wood, watercress, nuts or spring flowers,
gathering tea=les, rushes, mushrooms or berries, and cutting peat and
turves were all part of a commoning economy and a commoning way of
life invisible to outsiders.
111
!a"ing it a step further, even for those without common#right cottages,
land rights, or pasture rights of any "ind, the right to e(tract fuel, food and
materials from common waste provided %variety of useful products.&
11?

@ommon waste was a source of ha=elnuts, mushrooms, truffles, herbs, salad
greens, crabapples, and small game li"e fowl and rabbits.
11A
!he right to cut
wood in forests, wastes and private woods enabled families in some areas to
cut a year's worth of fuel in a wee"fuel which, after Enclosure, would cost
1>( Ibid., 3+ )6+
11> Ibid., 33+ 76, '6C'), 71,+
111 Ibid., 3+ *>+
11, Ibid., 3+ 16B+
117 Ibid., 33+ 1'(C1)>+
at enclosure< more widely en,oyed customary right was sometimes
ignored.
@ustomary rights based on residence alone, rather than ownership of
cottages with common rights attached, went unrecogni=ed by Enclosure
commissioners.
1G4
@hambers and Hingay conceded as much in principle,
although arguing in other passages that Enclosure commissions sometimes
recogni=ed customary right.
!he legal owners of common rights were always compensated by the
commissioners with an allotment of land. 5!he occupiers of common
right cottages, it should be noticed, who who en,oyed common rights by
virtue of their tenancy of the cottage, received no compensation because
they were not, of course, the owners of the rights. !his was a perfectly
proper distinction between owner and tenant, and involved no fraud or
disregard for cottagers on the part of the commissioners.6
1GB
$lso unrecogni=ed were common rights claims for cottage commons
which were unstoc"ed at the time of Enclosure, even when the holder of
common rights periodically used them depending on his fluctuating
economic circumstances.
1G6
!he e(tent of common rights is also undercounted by historians because
cottage rights of common were divisible, and sometimes a number of
cottagers might split a single cottage right of common, with some
individual households holding half or a 1uarter suit#house cottage rights.
1GD
-n total, around half of the population on the eve of Iarliamentary
Enclosure were commoners with %rights of pasture attached to land they
wor"ed or to cottages they occupied.& -n addition, there were landless
commoners who supplemented income from wage labor or self#
employment as artisans with a small right of pasturage, widows with
children to support, and s1uatters on the waste.
1GF
$rguably such
customary common rights were economically more significant to landless
and land#poor peasants than to those with formal title to land in the open
fields. $nd in some parishes common rights were attached to occupancy
rather than ownership of a cottage, with a large number of commoners
1>* $eeson, Commoners, 3+ ))+
1>6 Cha:ers and Mingay, The gricultural /evolution, 3+ ()+
1>' $eeson, Commoners, 3+ )B+
1>) Ibid., 3+ '7+
1>B Ibid., 3+ '*+
/evertheless the land that remained under peasant control, though
much diminished in e(tent, persisted under the open#field system. $nd
many of the %vagabonds& dispossessed by the !udor e(propriations found a
safety net in the common lands, migrating into %such open#field villages as
would allow them to s1uat precariously on the edge of common or waste.&
A
!he pace of enclosure slowed considerably under Cames - and @harles -.
!he 3tuarts, up until the @ivil War, sporadically attemptedwith only
mi(ed success at bestto counter the depopulation and impoverishment of
the countryside. !he availability of access to the common lands in open#
field villages, and the proliferation of unauthori=ed cottagers s1uatting on
the common, was a thorn in the side to landlords who could not obtain
sufficient wage labor at low enough wages so long as alternative means of
subsistence e(isted. +ne seventeenth century pamphleteer complained of
%upstart intruders& and %loyterers,& inhabitants of unlawful cottages erected
contrary to law& wherever %the fields lie open and are used in common....&
!he result was that such people %will not usually be got to wor" unless they
may have such e(cessive wages as they themselves desire.&
4G
With the deposition of @harles - and the triumph of the Iresbyterian
party in Iarliament, the gentry faced considerably less in the way of
obstacles to its rapacity.
!he so#called land reform of 1646 5which was confirmed by the
@onvention Iarliament in 166G6 abolished feudal tenures. -t abolished the
@ourt of Wards, and with it the death duties, and %9gave: landowners,
whose rights in their estates had hitherto been limited, an absolute power to
do what they would with their own, including the right to settle the
inheritance of all their lands by will.& -t converted all military tenures into
freehold.
41

...9;:eudal tenures were abolished upwards only, not downwards....
@opyholders obtained no absolute property rights in their holdings,
remaining in ab,ect dependence on their landlords, liable to arbitrary
death duties which could be used as a means of evicting the recalcitrant.
!he effect was completed by an act of 16DD which ensured that the
property of small freeholders should be no less insecure than that of
copyholders, unless supported by written legal title.
4?

7( 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism, 3+ ,,'+
*> 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism, 3+ ,,'+
*1 Christo3her .ill, The Centur" o0 /evolution: (*+-%()(2 ;$ew %or&2 !+ !+ $orton
D Co+, 8nc+, 1('1<, 3+ 1*B+
*, Christo3her .ill, /e0ormation to Industrial /evolution: Social and !conomic
Iarliament re,ected two bills which would limit the entry fees for
tenants in copyhold, and rein in enclosures, on the grounds that they would
%destroy property.&
4A
)andlords gained absolute ownership of their estates
against previous obligations to the monarchy and aristocracy, but the
peasantry secured no corresponding guarantee in the royal courts of their
own customary property rights against the landlord. !his essentially
eliminated all legal barriers to rac"#renting, eviction and enclosure.
44
Har(
described the %act of usurpation& which the landed proprietors %vindicated
for themselves the rights of modern private property in estates to which
they had only a feudal title....&
4B
*oyalist land e(propriated during the -nterregnum was typically
purchased by men on the ma"e, %an(ious to secure 1uic" returns. !hose of
their tenants who could not produce written evidence of their titles were
liable to eviction.&
46
!enants of these new landlords complained that they
%wrest from the poor !enants all former -mmunities and ;reedoms they
formerly en,oyed....&
4D
/one of this passed without opposition, of course. $lthough
@hesterton called the @ivil War the %*ebellion of the *ich,& it was in fact
contested terrain. $lthough republican, egalitarian and libertarian rhetoric
may have been used by the Iarliamentary side to whitewash what were
actually rather venal purposes, the rhetoric filtered downward and was ta"en
up seriously by the laboring classes. Euring the @ivil War, popular
resistance in the countryside often chec"ed the enclosure of commons and
waste. 3ome of the )eveller writers sought an alliance with the countryside
and called for the tearing down of enclosures. -n 164 William Everard 5%a
cashiered army officer 'who termeth himself a prophett'&
4F
6, Gerrard
Winstanley and their followers bro"e down enclosures and attempted to
cultivate the waste land communallyfor which they earned the name
%Eiggers.& 7ut the left wing of the republican forces never secured a broad
alliance with the peasantry, or managed to instigate a full#scale uprising in
the countryside, and the restoration of central authority put an end to what
Histor" o0 3ritain (4-+%(),+ ;0ondon2 !eidenfeld D $icholson, 1(')<, 33+ 116C11'+
*7 .ill, Centur" o0 /evolution, 3+ 1*(+
** Christo3her .ill, /e0ormation to Industrial /evolution: Social and !conomic
Histor" o0 3ritain (4-+%(),+ ;0ondon2 !eidenfeld D $icholson, 1(')<, 33+ 116C11'+
*6 MarG and Engels, Capital =ol+ 1, 3+ )17+
*' .ill, The Centur" o0 /evolution, 3+ 1*)+
*) 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism, 3+ 1),+
*B Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ 1*B+
tric"ed or forced into it.... 9-:t is how nearly all social#democratic
historians, until the weight of the evidence began to overwhelm them,
tried to portray matters....
Whether the process of enclosure satisfies libertarian standards of
,ustice is not the issue before us here, although much in,ustice is probably
concealed beneath many modern scholarsQ assurances that the process
5which, although it sought substantial consensus, stopped short of
unanimity6 made agriculture more efficientR. !he 1uestion, rather, is
whether the process was responsible for systematic dispossession, the
depopulation of the countryside, or rural poverty. -t caused none of these
outcomes.
-n Woods' version of things, the older left#wing history was
%propaganda,& in contrast to %modern research.&
1G?
Woods' overwhelming
%weight of the evidence,& otherwise "nown as %the past BG years of
scholarship,& turns out to refer almost entirely to the wor" of Hingay. ;or
Woods, apparently, historiography stopped with the groundbrea"ing
scholarship of Hingay. 0e displays no awareness whatsoever that the
%revisionism& of Hingay has since become the new orthodo(y, or that
subse1uent critics li"e C.H. /eeson have administered the e1uivalent of a
curb#stomping to Hingay's reading of the history of Enclosure.
@hambers and Hingay, in !he $gricultural *evolution, argued that
only a minority of the rural population held commoning rights, that they
were only marginally important to the rural population, that they were of
little benefit to most, that the stoc" fed on commons was poorly feed and
disease#ridden, and that the English landed peasantry had already
disappeared by 1DBG.
1GA
Kery little of this stands up to close e(amination. ;or e(ample the
e(tent of common rights was seriously undercounted in official records,
according to C.H. /eeson, because they did not include rights under the
custom of the manor.
!he number of common#right cottages counted by enclosure
commissioners or lords of manors at enclosure gives us an estimate of the
number of common#right cottagers, but it is almost certainly an
underestimate. ;or only narrowly defined legal right was ac"nowledged
1>, To !oods, "ro3aganda, Meet Modern Research,# Tom &oods, 5uly 1B, ,>11
?htt32@@www+towoods+co@:log@antiCca3italistC3ro3agandaCeetCodernCresearch@A+
1>7 5+9+ Cha:ers and G+E+ Mingay, The gricultural /evolution ()4+%(,,+ ;$ew
%or&2 Schoc&en Foo&s, 1(''<
The Debates on Enclosure
3tarting in the 16Gs, there was a reactioncentered on !he
$gricultural *evolution and other wor" by C.E. @hambers and G.E.
Hingayagainst the dominant radical criti1ue of Enclosure inherited from
Har('s account of primitive accumulation in volume one of @apital and
leftist writers li"e C.). and 7arbara 0ammond or E.I. !hompson. 3ince
then, it's been standard practice for anyone on the *ight grasping for a
defense of the %property rights& of the landed classes to fall bac" on
@hambers as having %disproved& the radical historians.
-t's 1uite similar to claims that Ceavons, Henger, 7ohm#7awer", Hises,
or some other thin"er5s6 from the marginalist#sub,ectivist tradition
%disproved& *icardian classical political economyclaims typically coming
from people whose understanding of both the classical political economists
and the marginalists is entirely second#hand, and who have little or no
understanding of the actual points at issue between them.
$ good recent e(ample is !homas Woods of the )udwig von Hises
-nstitute, who dismissed as %socialist& any arguments that the -ndustrial
*evolution and wage system were shaped in any way, and particularly made
more e(ploitative than they otherwise would have been, by the Enclosures.
!his was a central socialist theme. the people must not be viewed as
having chosen to abandon the land for the factory, having made a
rational assessment of what was best for them. !hey must have been
resistance there was and gave the landlords a free hand. -f anything, the
Eiggers' travelling missionaries in the countryside hardened local
landowners against any proposal that smac"ed even of modest land
reform.
4

Euring the Glorious *evolution in 16FF#16F, the great landlords too"
advantage of the power vacuum left by Cames --'s departure to sei=e @rown
lands on a large scale, either by acting 1uasi#legally through the state by
giving them away or selling them at sweetheart prices, or %even anne(ed to
private estates by direct sei=ure.&
BG
!he Whig Iarliament under William and Hary also passed Game )aws
in order to further restrict independent subsistence by the laboring classes.
0unting, for the rural population, had traditionally been a supplementary
source of food. !he enclosure of common forests and abrogation of access
rights put an end to this. $s the 16? law stated in its preamble, it was
intended to remedy the %great mischief & by which %inferior tradesmen,
apprentices, and other dissolute persons neglect their trades and
employments& in favor of hunting and fishing.
B1
!he enclosure of open fields under the !udors 5and on a smaller scale
under the 3tuarts6 had ta"en place largely %by means of individual acts of
violence against which which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years,
fought in vain....& With the Iarliamentary Enclosures of the eighteenth
century, in contrast, %the law itself becomes now an instrument of the theft
of the people's land....& -n practical terms, Iarliamentary $cts of Enclosure
amounted to a %parliamentary coup d'etat,& through %decrees by which the
landlords grant themselves the people's land as private property....&
B?
%;rom
the beginning of the eighteenth century the reins are thrown to the
enclosure movement, and the policy of enclosure is emancipated from all
these chec"s and afterthoughts.&
BA
Cust as with 3tolypin's and 3talin's policies toward the mir, and the
destruction of the -ndian village communes by the 7ritish Iermanent
3ettlement, in 7ritain %9t:he agricultural community... was ta"en to pieces
in the eighteenth century and reconstructed in the manner in which a
*( Ibid., 3+ 1*(+
6> MarG and Engels, Capital =ol+ 1, 3+ )1*+
61 Michael "erelan, Classical 'olitical !conom": 'rimitive ccumulation and the
Social 1ivision o0 Labour ;Totowa, $+5+2 Rowan D AllanheldH 0ondon2 1+ "inter,
1(B*, c 1(B7<, 33+ *BC*(+
6, MarG and Engels, Capital =ol+ 8, 3+ )16+
67 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 3+ 76+
dictator reconstructs a free government....&
B4
!he goal, as in the other cases, was legibility%the simplifying appetites
of the landlords&
BB
not only for purposes of central ta(ation, but perhaps
more importantly for the ease of the landed classes in e(tracting a surplus
from rural labor.
!he landlords saw themselves as the bac"bone of the 7ritish way of life,
and the imposition of more effective control on village society as a general
benefit to the peace and order of society. Given their assumption that
%order would be resolved into its original chaos, if they ceased to control the
lives and destinies of their neighbours,& they concluded %that this old
peasant community, with its troublesome rights, was a public
encumbrance.&
B6
!he customary rights of the peasantry hindered the
landlord's power to unilaterally introduce new farming techni1ues.
BD
!he
goal of the %governing class,& in language that might ,ust as easily have
described 3talin's motives in collectivi=ation, was %e(tinguishing the old
village life and all the relationships and interests attached to it, with
unsparing and unhesitating hand.&
BF
7ut the e(traction of a larger surplus from the agricultural labor force
was also very much a consciousand e(plicitly avowedpart of their
motivation. !he landed classes bore a powerful animus against the
common lands because they rendered the rural population less dependent
on wage labor, so that rural laborers were uninterested in accepting as much
wor" from the landlords as the latter saw fit to offer.
$ pamphleteer in 1DA argued that %the only way to ma"e the lower
orders temperate and industrious... was 'to lay them under the necessity of
labouring all the time they can spare from rest and sleep, in order to procure
the common necessities of life'.&
B
$ 1DDG tract called %Essay on !rade and @ommerce& warned that %9t:he
labouring people should never thin" themselves independent of their
superiors.... !he cure will not be perfect, till our manufacturing poor are
contented to labour si( days for the same sum which they now earn in four
days.&
6G
$rbuthnot, in 1DDA, denounced commons as %a plea for their idleness<
6* Ibid., 3+ 76+
66 Ibid., 3+ *>+
6' Ibid., 3+ 76+
6) Ibid., 33+ 7'C7)+
6B Ibid., 3+ ()+
6( .ill, /e0ormation to Industrial /evolution, 3+ ,,6+
'> MarG and Engels, Capital =ol+ 8, 3+ ,71+
%""endi'

Conclusion
>ropot"in, in Hutual $id, moc"ed those who defended the process of
enclosure and private appropriation of the communes as %a natural death...
in virtue of economical laws.& -t was, he wrote, %as grim a ,o"e as to spea"
of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield.&
!he fact was simply this. !he village communities had lived for over a
thousand years< and where and when the peasants were not ruined by
wars and e(actions they steadily improved their methods of culture. 7ut
as the value of land was increasing, in conse1uence of the growth of
industries, and the nobility had ac1uired, under the 3tate organi=ation, a
power which it never had had under the feudal system, it too" possession
of the best parts of the communal lands, and did its best to destroy the
communal institutions.
1G1
-f there is any one lesson to be gained from all this, it is a warning
against the common tendency for libertarians to conflate the private#state
dichotomy with the individualPcommon dichotomy.
1>1 -ro3ot&in, Mutual id, 3+ ,7'+
for, some few e(cepted, if you offer them wor", they will tell you, that they
must go to loo" up their sheep, cut fur=es, get their cow out of the pound,
or perhaps, say they must ta"e their horse to be shod, that he may carry
them to a horse#race or cric"et match.&
61
Cohn 7illingsley, in his 1DB *eport on 3omerset to the 7oard of
$griculture, wrote of the pernicious effect of the common on a peasant's
character.
-n sauntering after his cattle, he ac1uires a habit of indolence. Nuarter,
half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly lost. Eay labour
becomes disgusting< the aversion increases by indulgence< and at length
the sale of a half#fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding
intemperance to idleness.
6?
7ishton, in his 1D4 *eport on 3hropshire, was among the most honest
in stating the goals of Enclosure. %!he use of common land by labourers
operates upon the mind as a sort of independence.& !he result of their
enclosure would be that %the labourers will wor" every day in the year, their
children will be put out to labour early, ... and that subordination of the
lower ran"s of society which in the present times is so much wanted, would
be thereby considerably secured.&
6A
Cohn @lar" of 0erefordshire wrote in 1FGD that farmers in his county
were %often at a loss for labourers. the inclosure of the wastes would
increase the number of hands for labour, by removing the means of
subsisting in idleness.&
64
!he 1FGD Gloucestershire 3urvey warned that %the greatest of evils to
agriculture would be to place the labourer in a state of independence,& and
another writer of that time wrote that %;armers... re1uire constant labourers
men who have no other means of support than their daily labour....&
6B
+f course such motives were fre1uently e(pressed in the form of
concern for the laborers' own welfare, lest being able to feed oneself too
easily lead to irreparable spiritual damage from idleness and dissolution.
!he words of @ool 0and )u"e come to mind. %2ou shouldn't be so good
to me, @ap'n.&
!he 0ammonds estimated the total land enclosed between a si(th and a
'1 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 3+ 7)+
', Ibid., 3+ 7)+
'7 Ibid., 3+ 7B+
'* $eeson, Commoners, 3+ ,B+
'6 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism, 3+ ,,,+
fifth of the remaining unenclosed arable land 5i.e. that not already enclosed
before 1DGG6.
66
$ccording to the higher estimate of E.C. 0obsbawm and
George *ude, %something li"e one 1uarter of the cultivated acreage from
open field, common land, meadow or waste& were transformed into private
fields between 1DBG and 1FBG.
6D
$nd Haurice Eobb's figure was a 1uarter
to a half of the land in the fourteen counties most affected by Enclosure.
6F

W.E. !ate estimates the total land enclosed in the eighteenth and nineteenth
century at seven million acres, or an area over a hundred miles s1uarethe
e1uivalent of eight English counties.
6
$bout two#thirds of the four
thousand Irivate $cts of Enclosure involved %open fields belonging to
cottagers,& and the other third involved common woodland and heath.&
DG
France: War on the Commons by onarchy! Re"ublic and Em"ire
$s in England, the plunder of the common lands in ;rance began in
early modern times. 7y the late 1F
th
century, on the eve of the *evolution,
%the nobles and the clergy had already ta"en possession of immense tracts of
landone#half of the cultivated area, according to certain estimates
mostly to let it go out of culture.&
D1
+ne of the last acts of the monarchy,
confirmed two years later by the @onstituent $ssembly, was to replace the
village fol"motes with elected councils of a mayor and three to si( syndics
%chosen from among the wealthier peasants.&
D?
-n 1D? the @onvention, in
the face of peasant insurrection in the countryside, returned the enclosed
lands to the communes, but
ordered at the same time that they should be divided in e1ual parts
among the wealthier peasants onlya measure which provo"ed new
insurrections and was abrogated ne(t year, in 1DA, when the order came
to divide the communal lands among all commoners, rich and poor ali"e,
%active& and %inactive.&
'' 5+ 0+ and Far:ara .aond, $illage Labourer, 3+ *,+
') E+ 5+ .o:s:aw and George Rude, Captain Swing ;$ew %or&2 !+ !+ $orton D
Co3any 8nc+, 1('B<, 3+ ,)+
'B 9o::, Studies in the 1evelopment o0 Capitalism, 3+ ,,)+
'( Tate, The !nclosure Movement, 3+ BB+
)> 9e=elo3ent as Enclosure2 The Esta:lishent of the Glo:al Econoy,# The
!cologist ;5uly@August 1((,<, 3+ 177+
)1 -ro3ot&in, Mutual id, 33+ ,7>C,71+
), Ibid., 3+ ,7>+
corporations,& welcoming outsiders only as tenants 5thus creating the same
problem of a two#tier wor"force that has plagued modern cooperatives and
"ibbut=im when they've hired non#members as wage laborers6. +f course
all this resulted in a conflict of interest, in which it served the interests of
the dominant families in the village to be slow and grudging in allowing the
e(pansion of arable land into the waste.
!he one advantage of the form ta"en by @ornwallis's 3ettlement in
7engal, Hain argued, was that it overcame the problem of developing the
waste land. !he 7ritish, by erecting the Oemindars into a class of fee#simple
landlords, freed them from all customary limitations on %their power over
subordinate holders& as well as putting the wastes under their dominion at
their full disposal. !he Oemindars brought these wastes, freed from the
villages' customary controls over access, into cultivation by the colony
villages of landless peasants they settled there. -n countries with large
amounts of uncultivated waste and insufficient cultivation to feed the
population, Haine argued, fee simple ownership by a landlord was a way to
overcome traditional restrictions on waste reclamation and e(pand the area
under cultivation.
1GG
-t seems to me, however, that the root of this problem was not the want
of a dictatorial power to overcome customary restrictions and bring the
waste under cultivation. -t lay in the village commune's illegitimate and
unlibertarian power to control access to uncultivated waste. !he arable
lands of the village, its pastures and meadows, its woodlots from which its
members are in the habit of gathering timber and firewood, were all
collectively homesteaded by admi(ture of the village's labor with the soil
as described by *oderic" )ong above. 7ut land can only be homesteaded
collectively by actual development in commonnot simply by ma"ing
claims to unused land. 0aving not homesteaded the uncultivated waste,
the village has no right to restrict either landless outsiders, or its own
comparatively subordinate members, from coloni=ing a new village on the
waste land.
1>> Maine, $illage%Communities, 33+ 1'7C1'', 1)BC1)(+
III
The &uestion of Efficiency
$ good many of the criticisms raised of the alleged inefficiency of the
open field system and common pasturage turn out, on e(amination, to be
spurious. !hese include most of the ob,ections raised by @hambers and
Hingay, and commonly cited by apologists for the Enclosureswhich we
will e(amine in the appendi(. 7ut one of the more credible problems,
raised by 0enry 3umner Haine, was that of reclamation of waste land when
e(pansion of the cultivated area was an urgent necessity. $nd from the
failure to e(pand cultivation into the waste areas there followed a related set
of social distortions within the village.
$lthough village communes %in one stage& had been democratically
governed, they tended over time to become %oligarchies&as Haine had
observed in particular of the -ndian villages at the time of 3ettlement. !he
relative democracy of the village commune resulted from a comparatively
higher %capacity for absorption of strangers& in earlier times, %when men
were of more value than land.& !he villages then, owing to %the e(treme
value of new labour,& were more willing to welcome and amalgamate with
outsiders, admitting them to the privileges of the village brotherhood with
e1ual rights of access to the land. 7ut as increased population ran up against
the e(isting e(tent of cultivation, land became more valuable than people,
and the result was social stratification based on the more prestigious
families' control of access to land and the increasing deference re1uired to
secure access rights. $t the same time, the villages tended to become %close
!his policy, typical of measures by %liberal& states to impose fee#simple
ownership on peasant communes, was honored mainly in the breach by the
peasantry. -n most cases the villagers "ept undivided whatever land they
manged to reta"e possession of.
!he common lands, subse1uently, were repeatedly confiscated
declared to be state domainsand used as collateral for state war loans, and
then returned to the communes, from 1D4 through 1F1A. 7ut each time
the total acreage returned to the peasantry was further diminished in
1uantity, with the portion of land restored of disproportionately poor
1uality.
DA
$ similar process continued after the Wars, with three laws passed from
1FAD to the reign of /apoleon --- %to induce the village communities to
divide their estates.& Each time the laws were repealed in the face of
opposition in the countryside, but 5as during the /apoleonic Wars6
%something was snapped up each time.& /apoleon ---, finally, %under the
prete(t of encouraging perfected methods of agriculture, granted large
estates out of the communal lands to some of his favorites.&
D4
The Permanent Settlement in India
$ccording to Cames 3cott, the permanent settlement in -ndia
created a new class who, because they paid the ta(es on the land, became
full owners with rights of inheritance and sale where none had e(isted
earlier. $t the same time, literally millions of cultivators, tenants, and
laborers lost their customary rights of access to the land and its products.
DB
$s 0enry Haine described it, the pernicious effects of the 3ettlement
resulted from the needin 3cott's terminologyto render the native
property landscape legible to the ta(ing authorities.
)et us suppose a province anne(ed for the first time to the 7ritish
-ndian Empire. !he first civil act of the new government is always to
effect a settlement of the land revenue< that is, to determine the amount
)7 Ibid., 33+ ,71C,7,+
)* Ibid., 33+ ,7,C,77, ,7,n+
)6 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 3+ *B+
of that relatively large share of the produce of the soil, or its value, which
is demanded by the sovereign in all +riental 3tates, and out of which all
the main e(penses of government are defrayed. $mong the many
1uestions upon which a decision must be had, the one of the most
practical importance is, 'Who shall be settled with8'with whom shall
the settlement be made8 What persons, what bodies, what groups, shall
be held responsible to the 7ritish Government for its land revenue8
What practically has to be determined is the unit of society for agrarian
purposes< and you find that, in determining it, you determine everything,
and give its character finally to the entire political and social constitution
of the province. 2ou are at once compelled to confer on the selected class
powers co#e(tensive with its duties to the sovereign. /ot that the
assumption is ever made that new proprietary powers are conferred on it,
but what are supposed to be its rights in relation to all other classes are
defined.... - will not as" you to remember the technical names of the
various classes of persons 'settled with' in different parts of -ndia
Oemindars, !alu"dars, )umberdars...but - dwell on the fact that the
various interests in the soil which these names symbolise are seen to grow
at the e(pense of all the others. Eo you, on entering on the settlement of
a new province, find that a peasant proprietary has been displaced by an
oligarchy of vigorous usurpers, and do you thin" it e(pedient to ta"e the
government dues from the once oppressed yeomen8 !he result is the
immediate decline... of the class above them.... 3uch was the land
settlement of +udh, which was shattered to pieces by the 3epoy mutiny
of 1FBD.... Eo you, reversing this policy, arrange that the superior holder
shall be answerable to Government8 2ou shall find that you have created
a landed aristocracy which has no parallel in wealth or power e(cept the
proprietors of English soil. +f this nature is the more modern settlement
of the province of +udh, only recently consummated< and such will
ultimately be the position of the !alu"dars, or 7arons, among whom its
soil has been divided.
D6
/either course was really ade1uate, according to Haine. ;or most of
-ndia, the records of the time suggested %that no ownership of -ndian land
was discoverable, e(cept that of the village#communities, sub,ect to the
dominion of the 3tate.&
DD
!he most famous 3ettlement was that of )ord @ornwallis in )ower
7engal, which Haine described as %an attempt to create a landed#
proprietary li"e that of this country 9Great 7ritain:,& by %conferring estates
)' Maine, $illage%Communities, 33+ 1*(C161+
)) Ibid., 3+ 16*+
the population, became the new owners of two#thirds of the land....
+nce secured, the commons appropriated by the colonial administration
were typically leased out to commercial concerns for plantations, mining
and logging, or sold to white settlers.

(( 9e=elo3ent as Enclosure2 The Esta:lishent of the Glo:al Econoy,# The
!cologist ;5uly@August 1((,<, 3+ 17*+
autonomous public life had been eliminated. !he tavern, rural fairs and
mar"ets, the church, and the local mill disappeared< in their places stood
the "ol"ho= office, the public meeting room, and the school.
D
...-n place of a peasant economy whose harvests, income, and profits
were well#nigh indecipherable, it had created units that were ideal for
simple and direct appropriation. -n place of a variety of social units with
their own uni1ue histories and practices, it had created homologous units
of accounting that could all be fitted into a national administrative grid.
F
-f anything, collectivi=ation can be compared to Enclosure insofar as a
landed peasantry wor"ing its own allotments and appropriating a significant
share of its full product was transformed into a rural proletariat wor"ing the
land under the supervision of a hired overseer representing an absentee
owner.
#ritish $and Policy in %frica
7ritish land policy in East $frica centered on %dispossessing indigenous
communities of the greater part of their traditional territories&. claiming
uncultivated or common lands, forests, and gra=ing lands as property of the
colonial administration, and abrogating traditional rights of assessnot to
mention head ta(es to compel subsistence cultivators to enter the money
economy.
!hroughout the colonies, it became standard practice to declare all
%uncultivated& land to be the property of the colonial administration. $t
a stro"e, local communities were denied legal title to lands they had
traditionally set aside as fallow and to the forests, gra=ing lands and
streams they relied upon for hunting, gathering, fishing and herding.
Where, as was fre1uently the case, the colonial authorities found that
the lands they sought to e(ploit were already %cultivated&, the problem
was remedied by restricting the indigenous population to tracts of low
1uality land deemed unsuitable for European settlement. -n >enya, such
%reserves& were %structured to allow the Europeans, who accounted for
less than one per cent of the population, to have full access to the
agriculturally rich uplands that constituted ?G per cent of the country. -n
3outhern *hodesia, white colonists, who constituted ,ust five per cent of
() Ibid., 33+ ,17C,1*+
(B Ibid., 3+ ,1)+
in fee simple on the natural aristocracy of certain parts of -ndia....&
DF
-n
reaction against the pernicious effects of this, the English administration
e(perimented with the opposite approach in an area of southern -ndia
centering on Hadras. %to recogni=e nothing between itself and the
immediate cultivators of the soil< and from them 9to ta"e: directly its share
of the produce. !he effect of this was to create a peasant proprietary.&
$lthough the effects on productivity were far more favorable than those
from @ornwallis's 3ettlement, it was a radical departure from the customary
system.
D
7ut as Haine suggested above, the primary tendency of the English
settlement policy over time was toward the creation of a landed aristocracy
from those on whom the payment of ta(es was settled%by registering all
the owners of superior rights as landowners, their conception of ownership
being ta"en from their own country....&
FG
!heir motive was simply to find
the class in each province which mostly appro(imated %ownership& in
English terms. %the class to be 'settled with' was the class best entitled to be
regarded as having rights of property in the soil.& 7ut the English
commonly made this ,udgment on the implicit assumptions of English fee
simple ownership, and without regard to the specific "inds of %ownership&
the class in 1uestion had under native customary law. !he practical effect
was to ta"e a class whose rights of ownership were significantly restricted by
custom, and to transform it into a class of landlords with an uncontrolled
right of dominion, or fee simple ownership, in the landwith an at#will
tenantry sub,ect to unlimited evictions and rac"#rent in a country where
such things had previously been almost un"nown.
F1

-n the case of )ord @ornwallis in 7engala province where the village
system had already %fallen to pieces of itself & and there was nothing that
could be regarded as a real landlord classinstead of following what Haine
considered the obvious course of creating a %peasant proprietary& @ornwallis
%turned it into a country of great estates and was compelled to ta"e his
landlords from the ta(#gatherers of his worthless predecessors.&
F?
!here were other forces besides the 3ettlement wor"ing to undermine
the property rules of the village commune. Haine gives the e(ample, in
7engalthe province in his own time in which the invasion of English law
)B Ibid., 3+ 1>6+
)( Ibid., 33+ 1>6C1>'+
B> Ibid., 3+ 16)+
B1 Ibid., 33+ 16,C167, 1B6C1B'+
B, Ibid., 3+ 16*+
and the wea"ening of native customs of common ownership were most
advancedof English testamentary law undermining the collective
property of families. $ growing number of native plutocrats, li"e Haine's
e(ample of %a 7rahmin of high lineage,& were using the testamentary power
under English law to circumvent -ndian custom and determine the line of
succession and disinherit some in favor of othersa practice entirely
repugnant to native custom, by which individual rights to the collective
property of a family are beyond the power even of a family patriarch to
alter. ;ree testamentary succession, to the pre,udice of traditional common
property rights of the family and village, e(ercised great destructive power
over native property rules.
FA
The Destruction of the ir in Russia
-n *ussia the mir was sub,ected to a one#two punch, first under
3tolypin and then under 3talin.
3tolypin's so#called %reforms& were aimed at rendering the peasantry
more legible and ta(able, as well as ma"ing it possible to permanently
alienate individual holdings by sale or as debt collateral, by imposing fee
simple private ownership on themwith the additional benefit, from his
perspective, of turning the rural population into conservative property
owners.
!he dream of state officials and agrarian reformers, at least since
emancipation, was to transform the open#field system into a series of
consolidated, independent farmsteads on what they too" to be the
western European model. !hey were driven by the desire to brea" the
hold of the community over the individual household and to move from
collective ta(ation of the whole community to a ta( on individual
landholders....
...-t was abundantly clear that the pre,udicial attitude toward
interstripping was based as much on the autonomy of the *ussian village,
its illegibility to outsiders, and prevailing dogma about scientific
agriculture as it was on hard evidence.
F4
3tolypin's attempted revolution from above met with incomplete
success. -n most villages a ma,ority of peasants ignored the new property
B7 Ibid., 33+ *>C*,+
B* Scott, Seeing Like a State, 33+ *1C*7+
simple goals in mind. !hey created, in place of what they had inherited,
a new landscape of large, hierarchical, state#managed farms whose
cropping patterns and procurement 1uotas were centrally mandated and
whose population was, by law, immobile. !he system thus devised served
for nearly si(ty years as a mechanism for procurement and control at a
massive cost in stagnation, waste, demorali=ation, and ecological failure.
4
!he 3oviet state collectivi=ation program amounted to a reimposition of
serfdom. ;rom the peasant perspective, during the previous @ivil War, %the
fledgling 7olshevi" state, arriving as it often did in the form of military
plunder, must have been e(perienced... as a recon1uest of the countryside
by the stateas a brand of coloni=ation that threatened their newly won
autonomy.&
B
7ut after the brief lull of the /ew Economic Iolicy, the
peasants e(perienced recon1uest and plunder in earnest. !he peasants
commonly compared the new collective farm regime to serfdom, with the
obligation to wor" the "ol"ho='s fields at nominal wages under the orders of
a state manager as a revived form of barschina 5feudal labor dues6. )i"e
their enserfed great#grandparents, the peasants were re1uired to perform
annual draft labor repairing roads. >ol"ho= officials, li"e the old landlords,
used peasant labor for their own private purposes, and had the powerin
fact if not in law%to insult, beat, or deport& peasants for disobedience.
!he internal passport system effectively made it illegal, as under serfdom,
for the peasant to flee the countryside.
6
/aturally, the peasants saw their
wor" for the "ol"ho=li"e their labor obligations to the old landlordas
something to be done as perfunctorily as possible so they could get bac" to
wor"ing their own "itchen gardens.
-n sum, 3cott writes, %collectivi=ation was at least as notable for what it
destroyed as for what it built.&
!he initial intent of collectivi=ation was not ,ust to crush the resistance of
well#to#do peasants and grab their land< it was also to dismantle the social
unit through which that resistance was e(pressed. the mir. !he peasant
commune had typically been the vehicle for organi=ing land sei=ures
during the revolution, for orchestrating land use and gra=ing, for
managing local affairs generally, and for opposing procurements.
!he "ol"ho= was not... ,ust window dressing hiding a traditional
commune. $lmost everything had changed. $ll the focal points for an
(* Ibid., 3+ ,>7+
(6 Ibid., 3+ ,>'+
(' Ibid., 3+ ,17+
socialist accumulation& directly to the primitive accumulation Har(
described as a prere1uisite for the industrial revolution. $s large a surplus as
possible was to be e(tracted from the countryside in order to support
industriali=ation in the cities.
!he main goal of state collectivi=ation was to ma"e the terra incognita
of customary village property rules legible from above and enable the state
to e(act a ma(imum rate of tribute. $s envisioned, it was a classic e(ample
of a state attempt to impose legibility. it involved consolidating the rural
economy into gigantic, centrally controlled units with clear chains of
command, proletariani=ing the peasantry, and imposing !aylorist wor"
rules on the production process. $mong other things, this included a large#
scale rural division of labor with each "ol"ho= speciali=ing in some
monoculture crop and the individual village ceasing to be a diversified
economic unit. !he collective farms were envisioned as enormous assembly
lines, automatically churning out state orders li"e one of 0enry ;ord's auto
factories. !he collective farms' lines of command cut across village
boundaries, with either enormous "ol"ho=es that incorporated numerous
villages, or smaller ones whose boundaries were drawn without regard to
e(isting villages.
?
Lnli"e the village soviets, which had 1uic"ly been
coopted by the mir, the new %huge collectives& bypassed the traditional
village social structures and were governed by %a board consisting of cadres
and specialist,& with the separate sections of the "hol"o= under the control
of its own state#appointed manager.
A
$nd if collectivi=ation was a miserable failure in terms of total output
and efficiency of production, it was for the most part a success at achieving
its stated goalseven at the cost of mass starvation in the countrysideof
increasing the efficiency of e(traction and obtaining sufficient food to
support 3talin's urban industriali=ation program
!he great achievement, if one can call it that, of the 3oviet state in
the agricultural sector was to ta"e a social and economic terrain singularly
unfavorable to appropriation and control and to create institutional
forms and production units far better adapted to monitoring, managing,
appropriating, and controlling from above.... @onfronting a tumultuous,
footloose and %headless& 5acephalous6 rural society which was hard to
control and which had few political assets, the 7olshevi"s, li"e the
scientific foresters, set about redesigning their environment with a few
(, Ibid., 33+ ,11C,1,+
(7 Ibid, 3+ ,1*+
lines laid out from 3t. Ietersburg and continued to practice interstripping
and allot their land within the mir.
FB
$nd even in the new villages,
composed of the %surplus rural population& which 3tolypin settled in
3iberia, the colonists fre1uently disregarded 3tolypin's plan for new model
villages with independent family farmsteads in freehold and instead settled
the land as a group, with common property.
F6
$fter the *evolution, the peasantry initiated a unilateral land reform
that included fully restoring the mir as it had e(isted before the 3tolypin
program.
-n fact, after the collapse of the offensive into $ustria during the war and
the subse1uent mass desertions, much of the land of the gentry and
church, as well as %crown land,& had been absorbed by the peasantry.
*ich peasants cultivating independent farmsteads 5the %separators& of the
3tolypin reforms6 were typically forced bac" into the village allotments,
and rural society was in effect radically compressed. !he very rich had
been dispossessed, and many of the very poor became smallholders for the
first time in their lives. $ccording to one set of figures, the number of
landless rural laborers in *ussia dropped by half, and the average peasant
holding increased by ?G percent 5in the L"raine, by 1GG percent6. $ total
of ?4F million acres was confiscated, almost always by local initiative,
from large and small landlords and added to peasant holdings, which now
averaged about DG acres per household.
FD
$lthough many libertarians will no doubt regard the sei=ure of the
separators' land as theft, it should be considered at the very least a contested
issue. -f the mir's collective property in the land, dating time out of mind,
is regarded as a legitimate property right, then it follows that 3tolypin's
imposed division and alienation of parts of the mir's property through fee#
simple ownership was theft from the mir, and that reincorporating the
separators' farmsteads was a simple act of restoration.
!he newly reinvigorated village communes which the 3oviet state
confronted were almost entirely opa1ue to it, and their output far less
appropriable.
;rom the perspective of a ta( official or a military procurement unit,
the situation was nearly unfathomable. !he land#tenure status in each
B6 Ibid., 3+ **+
B' Ibid., 3+ 7'' n+ )B+
B) Ibid., 3+ ,>6+
village had changed dramatically. Irior landholding records, if they
e(isted at all, were entirely unreliable as a guide to current land claims.
Each village was uni1ue in many respects, and, even if it could in
principle have been %mapped,& the population's mobility and military
turmoil of the period all but guaranteed that the map would have been
made obsolete in si( months or sooner. !he combination, then, of
smallholdings, communal tenure, and constant change, both spatial and
temporal, operated as an impenetrable barrier to any finely attuned ta(
system.
!wo additional conse1uences of the revolution in the countryside
compounded the difficulties of state officials. 7efore 11D, large peasant
farms and landlord enterprises had produced nearly three#fourths of the
grain mar"eted for domestic use and e(port. -t was this sector of the
rural economy that had fed the cities. /ow it was gone. !he bul" of the
remaining cultivators were consuming a much larger share of their own
yield. !hey would not surrender this grain without a fight. !he new,
more egalitarian distribution of land meant that e(tracting anything li"e
the c=arist %ta"e& in grain would bring the 7olshevi"s in conflict with the
subsistence needs of small and middle peasants.
!he second and perhaps decisive conse1uence of the revolution was
that it had greatly enhanced the determination and capacity of the
peasant communities to resist the state. Every revolution creates a
temporary power vacuum when the power of the ancien regime has been
destroyed but the revolutionary regime has not yet asserted itself
throughout the territory. -nasmuch as the 7olshevi"s were largely urban
and found themselves fighting an e(tended civil war, the power vacuum
in much of the countryside was unusually pronounced. -t was the first
time... that the villages, although in straitened circumstances, were free to
organi=e their own affairs. $s we have seen, the villagers typically forced
out or burned out the gentry, sei=ed the land 5including rights to
common land and forests6, and forced the separators bac" into the
communes. !he villages tended to behave as autonomous republics, well
disposed to the *eds as long as they confirmed the local %revolution,& but
strongly resistant to forced levies of grain, livestoc", or men from any
1uarter.
FF
!he problem of opacity was intensified by the destruction of even the
limited "nowledge of the local terrain possessed by the tsarist networ" of
local officials and gentry, who had managed ta( collection before the
*evolution. !he village soviets, which were supposed to carry out this
BB Ibid., 33+ ,>6C,>'+
function, were typically made up of people whose first loyalty was to the
village rather than the 3oviet state.
F
$s it had done to the tsarist state
before the 3tolypin program, the village commune deliberately set out to
obfuscate the internal economic conditions of the village and render it
opa1ue to the 3oviet state. Even before the *evolution, the peasant
communes had been able to underreport the amount of arable land by
about 1B percent. $fter the *evolution, they concealed the e(tent of land
sei=ed from the gentry and landlords.
!he amount and distribution of land, of course, was 1uite legible
hori=ontally, to the peasants within the village commune. %Killage
committees did... "eep records for allocating allotment land, organi=ing
communal plow teams, fi(ing gra=ing schedules, and so on, but none of
these records was made available... to officials....&
G
Lnder the reinvigorated
communes after the *evolution, the village mir supervised something li"e
the interstripping and periodic redivisions which had prevailed under the
full#blown open field system.
3talin's industrial program, with its need for increased delivery of food
from the countryside, ran up against the reduced appropriability of
agricultural ouput as a serious obstacle. !he state's official procurement
prices for grain were one#fifth the mar"et price, which meant the peasants
were hardly eager to part with it on such terms. !he state resorted to forced
sei=ure, along the lines of military re1uisitions during the @ivil War, but its
sei=ures were generally as ineffective as during the war for the same reason.
the village communes were pretty effective at concealing how much grain
there actually was. -t was primarily the desire to overcome this peasant
withholding of grain that motivated 3talin's program for forced, total
collectivi=ation.
-t was in the conte(t of this war over grain, and not as a carefully planned
policy initiative, that the decision to force %total& 5sploshnaia6
collectivi=ation in 1?. 3cholars who agree on little else are in accord on
this point. the overriding purpose of collectivi=ation was to ensure the
sei=ure of grain.
1
-n the debates leading up to forced collectivi=ation, its advocates 5e.g.
2evgeny Ireobra=hens"y6 e(plicitly promoted it as a form of %primitive
B( Ibid., 3+ ,>)+
(> Ibid., 3+ ,>)
(1 Ibid., 3+ ,1>+