Tudor Preachers and Resistance to Enclosure
As the rising gentry of Tudor England ramped up enclosure and engrossment, and raised rents, they drove peasants off of the commons, rode roughshod over customary rights, and dispossessed thousands. Riots and uprisings sprung up throughout the kingdom and the newly reformed Church of England were not deaf to the pleas of the people. Preaching often targeted the avarice of landowners, including at the state-directed pulpit of pulpits, Paul’s Cross.
These sermons, however, failed to apply breaks to the process of transformation underway. Nor could they.
Avarice was an insufficient diagnosis. It dwells too much on the individual agents, who very well may not be exceptionally avaricious, only ordinarily so from a different position within a system of production that had already changed more than the prelates and princes realized and would continue to do so for material reasons they could not perceive.
The early disarming of the English nobles meant they were deprived of extra-economic means of squeezing surplus from farmers and peasants. So they were compelled to manage their lands to sustain the reproduction of their way of life. They increasingly turned to fixed-term leases, rather than hereditary leases, overturning customary rights wherever possible, thus forcing farmers into competitive bidding to renew their leases. The imperative of improvement (deriving more profit from the land) emerged as a result.
Once the imperative of improvement had entered in, landowners began to see expropriation and exploitation as necessary, motivated by a sense of prudence, duty, thrift, good stewardship, simply to maintain one’s station, much less get ahead. At that point avarice isn’t necessary to drive enclosure, engrossment, and dispossession, only a desire to maintain the conditions in which one’s family live — improvement was needed to keep in place, much less get ahead.
When the improving landowner sees the peasant, continuing to live by custom for subsistence, or driven from the commons, preferring the life of a vagabond to submitting to wage labor, not at all responding to the imperative of improving, moral labels are attached to their customary ways, like imprudent slothful, wasteful, ignorant, uncivilized, and even monstrous. This moral filter makes the improving landowner and merchant see to improving them, expropriation becomes paternal care. Preaching against individual avarice hardly touches the heart that sees all of this as moral imperative.
The new socio-politico-economic was not driven by extraordinary avarice — though avarice of course played its part — nor a desire to create a new kind of commonwealth, but adjustment to new circumstances in an attempt to maintain, to reproduce their status and way of life. Improvement demanded enclosure. Increasing market dependence for landowners, farmers, and peasants for access to the means of production followed naturally. A new literature of improvement blossomed. These many adjustments aimed at maintenance resulted in a tectonic shift.
Preachers wagged their fingers at the gentry while new concepts property, rights, and law emerged in tandem with the changing model and relations of production, away from use, custom, and commoning toward exchange-value, positive law, and exclusive property rights, though not without much protest from below. Such protests did garner sympathy from church and crown, but not sufficient material solidarity to alter the course of rapidly moving stream. The state’s efforts to limit enclosure were inadequate, a stark constraint to the ferocity with which it put down peasant uprisings, and such efforts ceased after the Glorious Revolution; indeed, parliament legislated enclosure on the century that followed.