Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre

AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTUREAND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT IN PRE-INDUSTRIALEUROPE*

GENERALINTERPRETATIONS OFTHE PROCESSES OF LONG-TERM ECONOMIC changein late medievaland earlymodern Europe have continuedto be constructedalmost exclusively in terms of what might looselybe called "objective" economic forces, in particular demographic fluctuationsand the growth of trade and markets. A variety of modelshave been constructedcentring on theseforces. But whatever the exact characterof the model, and whether the pressurefor changeis seen to arisefrom urbanizationand the growthof tradeor an autonomousdemographic development, a marketsupply-demand mechanismis usuallyassumed to providethe elementarytheoretical underpinnings. So, the response of the agrarian economy to economicpressures, whatever their source,is more or less takenfor granted,viewed as occurringmore or less automatically,in a direction economicallydetermined by "the laws of supplyand demand". In the constructionof these economicmodels the questionof class structuretends to be treatedin a varietyof ways. Typically,there is the statementthat one is abstracting(for the moment)from the social or class structurefor certainanalytical purposes.l The fact remains that in the actualprocess of explanation,that is in the "application" of the model to specific economic historical developments,class structuretends, almostinevitably, to creep backin. Sometimes,it is inserted,in an ad hocway, to comprehenda historicaltrend which the model cannot cover. More often, however, consciously or unconsciously,class structureis simplyintegrated within the model itself, and seen as essentiallyshaped by, or changeablein terms of, the objective economicforces aroundwhich the model has been constructedin the first place. In the most consistentformulations the very fact of class structureis implicitly or explicitly denied. Long-termeconomic development is understoodin termsof changing * This paper was originally presented at the Annual Convention of the AmericanHistorical Association, December I974. An earlierversion was given at the Social Science Seminar of the Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, New Jersey,April I974. I wish to thankProfessor Franklin Mendeis, Professor T. K. Rabb, Professor Eleanor Searle and Professor Lawrence Stone, for the substantial time and effort they gave in commenting on and criticizing this paper. I owe a special debt to Mr. Joel Singer for the great amount of help he gave me, including both information and analysis, in trying to understand German developments. 1 See for example below, p. 34. M. M. Postan, "Moyen Age", IXe Congres Internationaldes SciencesHistoriques, Rapports, i (Paris, I950), pp. 225 ff. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 3I institutionalizedrelaiionships of "equalexehange') between eontraet- ing individualstrading different,relatively searce "faetors"under changingmarket eonditions.2 It is the purpose of this paper to argue that such attempts at economic model-buildingare necessarilydoomed from the start preciselybecause, nzost crudely stated, it is the structureof class relations,of classpower, which will determirlethe mannerand degree to which particulardemographie and eommercialehanges will affect long-runtrends in the distributionof ineomeand economic growth and not vice versa. Classstructure, as I wish here to use the term, has two analyticallydistinct, but historicallyunified aspects.3 First, the relationsof the direct producersto one another,to their tools and to the land in the immediateprocess of production what has been calledthe "labourprocess" or the "socialforces of production". Seeondly,the inherentlyconflictive relations of property- always guaranteeddirectly or indirectly,in the last analysis,by force-by which an unpaid-forpart of the productis extractedfrom the direct produeersby a class of non-produeers whieh might be calledthe "propertyrelationship" or the "surplus extractionrelationship". It is aroundthe propertyor surplusextraction relationship that one definesthe fundamentalclasses in a society the class(es)of direct producerson the one hand and the surplus-extracting,or ruling, class(es)on the other.4 It wouldbe my argumentthen that different class structures, specifically "property relations" or "surplus extractionrelations", once established,tend to impose ratherstrict limits and possibilities,indeed rather specifie long-term patterns, on a society's economie development. At the same time, I would contend,class structurestend to be highlyresilient in relationto the impact of economicforces; as a rule, they are not shaped by, or alterablein termsof, changesin demographicor commercialtrends. It follows thereforethat long-term eeonomie ehanges, and most cruciallyeeonomie growth, eannot be analysedadequately in termsof the emergeneeof any partieularconstellation of "relativelyscarce

2 For a recent attempt to apply this sort of approachto the interpretationof socio-economic change in the medieval and early modern period, see Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World (Cambridge, I973). 3 The following definitions derive, of course, from the work of Karl Marx, especially: "Preface" to A Contributionto the Critique of Political Economy (New York, I 970 edn.); "The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent" and "Distribution Relations and Production Relations", in Capital, 3 vols. (New York, I967 edn.), iii, chaps. xlvii and li; and "Introduction" to Grundrisse (London, I973 edn.). 4 This is not necessarily to imply that classes exist or have existed in all societies. Classes, in my view, may be said to exist only where there is a "surplus extraction"or propertyrelationship in the specific sense implied here, that is in the last analysis non-consensual and guaranteed either directly or indirectly by force. 32 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 factors" unless the class relationshipshave first been specified; indeed, the opposite outcomes may accompanythe impact of apparentlysimilar economic conditions. In sum, fully to com- prehendlong-term economic development, growth and/or retrogres- sion in the late medievaland early modernperiod, it is criticalto analyse the relativelyautonomous processes by which particular class structures,especially property or surplus-extractionrelations, are establishedand in particularthe class conflictsto whichthey do (or do not)give rise. Forit is in the outcomeof suchcl

THE DEMOGRAPHICMODEL The emergingdominance of the so-calleddemographic factor in the economic historiographyof Europe even through the age of industrializationwas recognizedas earlyas I958 by H. J. Habakkuk in his well-knownarticle "The EconomicHistory of ModernBritain". As Habakkukwrote: For those who care for the overmasteringpattern, the elements are evidently there for a heroically simplified version of English history before the nineteenth century in which the long-term movements in prices, in income distribution,in investment, in real wages, and in migrationare dominatedby changes in the growth of population. Rising population: rising prices, rising agriculturalprofits, low real incomes for the mass of the population unfavourableterms of trade for industry - with variationsdepending upon changes in social institutions, this might stand for a description of the thirteenth century, the sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, and the period I750-I8I5. Falling or stationary population with depressed agriculturalprofits but high mass incomes might be said to be characteristic of the interveningperiods. 5 6 H. J. Habakkuk,"The Economic History of Modern Britain''s 1. Econ. Hist., XViii ( I958), p. 487. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 33 Well before Habakkuk'sarticle, M. M. Postan had presentedthe basic contoursof what has become the standardinterpretation of long-termsocio-economic change in the medievalperiod; and his demographicapproach has now been filled out and codifiedin his chapter on "Medieval AgrarianSociety in Its Prime: England" in the CambridgeEconomic History of Europe.6 Roughlythe same line of argumenthas, moreover,now been carried through the sixteenthand seventeenthcenturies by P. J. Bowdenin the Agrarian Historyof Englandand Wales.7 Nor has this approachbeen confined to Englisheconomic history, where it is now more or less standard. It has been rigorouslyapplied in whatis perhapsthe most influential workon Frenchsocio-economic history of the pre-industrialperiod, E. Le Roy Ladurie'sclassic monograph Les paysans de Languedoc.8 With such eminentexponents, it is hardlysurprising that whatmight be termedsecular malthusianism has attainedsomething of the level of orthodoxy. Its cyclical dynamic has replaced the unilineal "rise of the market"as the key to long-termeconomic and social changein pre-industrialsociety. Nor can there be any questionbut that the malthusianmodel, in its own terms, has a certain compellinglogic. If one takes as assumptions first an economy'sinability to make improvementsin agriculturalproductivity, and secondly a naturaltendency for population to increaseon a limitedsupply of land, a theoryof incomedis- tributionseems naturallyto follow. With diminishingreturns in agriculturedue to decliningfertility of the soil and the occupationof increasinglymarginal land, we can logicallyexpect demand to outrun supply: thus terms of trade runningagainst industry in favour of agriculture,falling wages, rising food prices, and, perhaps most cruciallyin a society composedlargely of landlordsand peasants, risingrents. Moreover,the modelhas a built-inmechanism of self- correctionwhich determines automatically its own changeof direction and a long-term dynamic. Thus the ever greatersubdivision or overcrowdingof holdings and the exhaustionof resourcesmeans "over-populaiion"which leads to malthusianchecks, especially famine/ starvation;this results in demographicdecline or collapseand the opposite trends in income distributionfrom the first phase. As Habakkukpointed out, this two-phasemodel has now been applied to the entire period betweenroughly I050 and I800. Indeed, the very essenceof "traditionaleconomy" has seemedto be capturedin

6 M. M. Postan, "Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England", The CambridgeEconomic History of Europe, i, 2nd edn., ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge, I966). 7 P. J. Bowden, "AgriculturalPrices, Farm Profits, and Rents", in H. P. R. Finberg (ed.), TheAgrarian History of Englandand Wales,iv, Joan Thirsk (ed.), I500-I640 (Cambridge,I967). 8 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysansde Languedoc,2 vols. (Paris, I966). fashionableterm, the 'long termmovements of social income'11

NUMBER70 PASTANDPRESENT 34 movement). As Le motionbiseculaire (two-phase thiscenturies-long came too late": ironically, Laduriesuccinctly states, "Malthus economy Roy not for the emergentindustrial Malthus'smodel was correct societyfrom which for the stagnantbackward hewas analysing, but the patternseemed so Indeed,for Le Roy Ladurie thishadarisen. biologyor physiology. The as to inviteanalogies from seen, "inescapable" hundredyears should be of rural Languedocover six history respirationof a socialstructure".9 hesays, as "the immense Grozvth IncomeDzstribution and Economic (a)Demography, the smallnumber of variables of its specialpremises and Yet, Interms seems almost foolproof. entails,secular malthusianism of actual it its relevanceto the explanation whatmust be questionedis and constants, Do the model's assumptions historicalchange. or actuallyobscure the crucial very dynamic,illuminate indeedits the varyingpatterns of long-term andprocesses underlying Europe?In his conditions medievaland earlymodern economicchange in late model for which set out his demographic classicarticle of I950 Postan made sure to Europeaneconomic development, "the medieval only with what he termed that he was concerned base" specify society. He definedthe "economic economicbase" of medieval and the general as: technique of production be and land settlement, economic facts which can population activity: in short, all those and social trendsof economic upon the working of legal discussed without concentrating to class.10 upon the relations of class institutionsand and necessaryto deal that what made it "possible Postanargued and in abstractionfrom class group of subjectstogether", the dis- withthis all recentlybeen drawninto was that "they have use the more relations, of economicactivity, or to cussionof generaltrends posed preciselywhen which must immediatelybe Butthe question termmovements of socialincome" to interpret"long economic oneis attempting income distributionand is, long-termtrends of them from -that at all admissibleto abstract growth is whetherit is Canthe problemsof of socialand legalinstitutions". be very "theworkings so-called "economicbase" the developmentof Postan's of classto class"? consideredapart from the "relations try meaningfully in incomedistribution, I shall respectto long-termtrends intractable With modelruns into particularly to arguethat the malthusian andcontested character in relationto the alwaysambiguous On the problems modernlandholding arrangements. of medievaland early of the land between very distributionof ownership one hand, the in question throughoutthe and peasantwas continually and fised landlord moveto establishheritability period. Couldthe peasantry esp. pp. 652-4. esp. p. 8; also "Conclusion", "Introduction", 11 9 Ibid., p. 225. Ibid. 10Postan, "Moyen Age", AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 35 rents, that is essentiallyfreehold rights on the land? If so, the very significanceof rent would be transformed,and the viabilityof the landlordclass put in jeopardy. On the other hand, in situaiions wherethe landlordhad establishedownership of the land, a further question might be raised: could the landlordgain extra-economie powerover the personof his tenant,control marriage, and in particular land transfersand peasantmobility? If so, the possibilitywould emerge of imposing "extra-economic"or arbitrarypayments upon the peasantry- payments beyond custom or beyond what the relative scarcityof factors might dictate. Any explanationof the progressof incomedistribution in the late medievaland earlymodern periodmust thereforebe able to interpretnot merelythe changing distributionof the immediateproduct of the land, but the prior questionsof the distributionof propertybetween lord and peasant and of the directapplicability of forcein the rentrelationship. Some economichistorians have attemptedto deal with this problemby denying or ignoring its existence, in pariicularby describingthe economy in terms of contractualrelationships among individual holders of scarce resources,such as military skill and weaponry, land, agriculturallabour power and so on.l2 Othershave attempted

12 See for example, D. C. North and R. P. Thomas, who arguethat "serfdom in Western Europe was essentially a contractual arrangementwhere labor services were exchangedfor the public good of protection and justice": "The Rise and Fall of the Manorial System: A Theoretical Model", i1. Econ. Hist XXXi (I97I), p. 778. North and Thomas can make this argumentbecause they assume: (a) that the serf was essentially "protected from arbitrarycharges" and (b) that because there was an absence of "a central coercive authority" the serfs were essentially free, especially to move, and that as a result there was a "rudimentary labor market". In my view, these assumptions are consistent with one another but inconsistent with the realities of serfdom precisely because serfdom was in its essence non-contractual. There was no "mutualagreement" between lord and serf accordingto North and Thomas a defining feature of contract. On the contrary,it is precisely the interrelated characteristicsof arbitraryexactions by the lords from the peasantsand control by landlords over peasant mobility that gave the medieval serf-economy its special traits: surplus extractionthrough the direct applicationof force rather than equal exchange via contract, as North and Thomas would have it. The sort of problems entailed in the approachof North and Thomas are evident in their account of the origins of serfdom. Thus: "Individuals with superior military skills and equipment were urgently needed to protect the peasants who were unskilled in warfare and otherwise helpless. Here was the classic example of a public good, since it was impossible to protect one peasantfamily without also protectingtheir neighbours. In such cases coercionzvas necessary to overcome each peasant'sincentive to let his neighbourpay the costs, and the militarypower of the lordprovided the neededforce." Rise of the WesternWorld pp. 29-30 (my italics). This explanationnot only begs the fundamentalquestion of class: How do we explain, in the first place, the distributionof the land, of the instruments of force, and of military skill within the society. It also undermines their own argument for the essentially contractual characterof serfdom, for it is here explicitly admitted that the serf is coerced. To go on to say that "the lord's power to exploit his serfs ... was not unlimited but constrained (in the extreme case) by the serf's ability to steal away" (p. 30) does not eliminatethe fundamentaldifficulty: that is attemptingto treat serfdom as contractual,while admitting its essentially coercive character. 36 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 to meetthe problemby assimilatingit to theirbasie eeonomie models: by insisiing, direetly or indireetly, that in the long run, the distributionof propertyand the suecessfulapplieability of foree in the rent relationshipwill be subjeetto essentiallythe samesorts of supply-demandpressures as the distributionof the productitself, and will move in roughlythe same direction. I shall try to show empirieallythat this is not the case and argueinstead that these are fundamentallyquestions of elass relationsand elass power, deter- minedrelatively autonomously from economieforees. The demographieinterpreters of late medievaland earlymodern eeonomiesrun into even more serious problemsin attemptingto explain general trends of total produetion,eeonomie growth or stagnation,than they do with regardto the distributionof ineome. Certainly,their assumptionof deeliningproduetivity in agrieulture is a reasonableone for most,though not all, pre-industrialEuropean eeonomies. Indeed, these eeonomiehistorians have been able to speeifyelearly some of the teehniealand eeonomieroots of long-term fallingyields through their researehes into the problemsof maintaining soil fertilityin the faee of a shortageof animalsand fertilizer, especially under eonditions of baekwardagrieultural organization andteehnique and low levelsof investment.13 Nevertheless,speeify- ing in this mannerthe eonditionseondueive to long-termstagnation is not really explainingthis phenomenon,for no real aeeount is providedof whysueh eonditions persisted. Thus, to explaineeonomie "rigidity"as does Le Roy Ladurie as the " 'fruit' of teehnical stagnation,of laek of capital,of abseneeof the spirit of enterprise and of innovation"is, in fact, to beg the question.14 It is analogous to attemptingto explaineeonomie growth merely as a result of the introductionof new organizationsof production,new techniques, and new levels of investment. These factors do not, of course, explaineconomie development, they merelydescribe what economic developmentis. The continuingstagnation of mostof the traditional Europeaneconomies in the late medievaland earlymodern period cannotbe fully explainedwithout aecounting for the real economic growth experiencedby the few of these economieswhich actually developed. More generally, economic backwardnesscannot be

13 Postan, "Medieval AgrarianSociety in its Prime: England", pp. 548-70 M. M. Postan, "Village Livestockin the Thirteenth Century", Econ.Hist. Reu. 2nd ser., xv (I962); J. Z. Titow, EnglishRural Society I200-I350 (London, I969). 14 Le Roy Ladurie, Op. Cit., p. 634. Le Roy Ladurieseems at times to want to view economic development as essentially the direct result of apparently autonomous processes of technical innovation. Thus, he says, "it was the technological weakness of the society ... it was its lack of ability to raise productivity, its incapacity lastingly and definitively to raise production which created the barrierwhich, at the end of the period, stopped its quasi- two-phase (quasi-biseculaire)growth of population and of small peasant proprietorship"(p. 639); see also below, note 37. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 37 fully eomprehendedwithout an adequate theory of eeonomie development. In deseribingthe speeifietwo-stage agrarian-eeonomie cyele set in motion in a number of medieval and early modern European eeonomies by deelining agrieulturalproduetivity, the malthusiantheorists have indeed isolatedone importantpattern of long-termeconomie development and stability. But this dramatie two-phasemovement is not universaleven for traditionalsoeieties;15 and besides, it still needs an interpretation. I shall arguethat the malthusiancycle of long-termstagnation, as well as otherforms of economicbackwardness, can only be fully understoodas the product of establishedstructures of class relations (particularly"surplus- extractionrelations"), just as economic developmentcan only be fully understoodas the outcome of the emergenceof newclass relations more favourableto new organizationsof production, technical innovations,and increasinglevels of productiveinvestment. These new class relationswere themselvesthe resultof previous,relatively autonomousprocesses of class conflict. (b) TheDemographic Model in ComparativePerspective I hope the force of these objectionswill appearmore eompelling as they are specifiedin partieularhistorieal cases. My eonerete methodof eritiqueis exceedinglysimple and obvious:it is to observe the prevaleneeof similar demographietrends throughoutEurope over the six- or seven-hundred-yearperiod between the twelfthand the eighteentheenturies and to show the very differentouteomes in terms of agrarianstructure, in particularthe patternsof distribution of income and eeonomic development, with which they were associated. In this way I maybegin to exposethe problemsinherent in the eomplementaryand eonnected demographie-deterministic modelsof Postan(for the twelfthto fifteentheentllries) and Le Roy Lad-urie(for the sixteenthto eighteentheenturies). Demographiegrowth, according to Postan,eharacterizes the twelfth and thirteentheenturies. It leads to the oceupationof marginal landsand the inereasinginfertility of the soil: in short,a risingdemand for a relativelyinflexible supply of food and land; thus, risingfood priees and rising rents. However, as Postan is of eourse aware, we aredealing in this periodwith a verypeeuliar form of rent. There is verylittle in the way of directlease and eontraet. We haveinstead a theoreticallyfixed, but actuallyfluctuating, structure of customary rights and obligationsthat definelandholding arrangements. These specify in the first place the regular(ostensibly fixed) paymentsto be madeby the peasantto the lord in orderto retainhis land. But they often lay down, in addition, a further set of conditions of

15 Cf. Clifford Geertz, AgriculturalInvolution (Berkeley, Calif., I963). 38 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 landholding:the lord's right to impose additionalextraordinary levies (tallagesand fines); the peasant'sright to use, transfer,and inherit the land; and finally,the very dispositionof the peasant's own person,in particularhis freedomof mobility. Now it is Postan's argumentthat these latter conditions which together defined the peasant'scustomary status his freedomor unfreedom in so far as they are relevantto long-termeconomic trends, can be more or less directlyassimilated to his supply/demanddemographic model. Thus the centralpoint for Postanis that due to developingpressure of population,the thirteenthcentury is a periodin which the landlords' positionimproves vis-a-vis the peasantsnot onlyin those few areaswhere what might be termedmodern leaseholding has emerged, but also in the so-called customarysector. Thus competitionfor land induces the peasantryto accept a seriousdegradation of their personalltenurialstatus in orderto hold on to their land and this, in turn, exacerbatesthe generallydeteriorating economic situation to which they are being subjectedsimply by forces of supply and demand. So, in orderto retaintheir land, the peasantsmust submit, in particular,to (I) increasingarbitrary taxes (fines,tallages), levied above and beyond the traditionalrent; and (2) increasinglabour- serviceson the lord'sdemesne. These increasedpayments are part and parcelof the generallyincreasing ability of the lord to control the peasantsand determinetheir condition. In other words, for Postan,the extra-economicrelationships between lord and peasant specifically,those paymentswhich are associatedwith increasing peasantunfreedom can be understoodin termsof the sameform of "relativescarcity of factors"argument that wouldapply to purely marketcontractual arrangements, and indeed conducedto the same effectin termsof incomedistribution between lord and peasant. As Postan says, for example,at one point: "The fluctuationof labour servicerequires no otherexplanation than that whichis providedby the ordinaryinterplay of supplyand demand demandfor villein servicesand supplyof serf labour".16 The fourteenthand fifteenth centuries witnessed a decline in populationas a result of falling productivity,famine arld plague. Ultimately,demographic catastrophe led to a drasticreversal of the man/landratio. Postanthus argues,consistently enough, that this demographicchange brought about preciselythe oppositesituation to that which had obtainedin the thirteenthcentury. Scarcityof peasantsmeant a declinenot only in the level of rent, but equallyin the lord's ability to restrictpeasant mcbility, and peasantfreedom in general. With competitionamong lords to obtainscarce peasant 16M. M. Postan, "The Chronologyof Labour Services", Trans.Roy. Hist. Soc., 4th ser., xx (I937), p. I7I. For the previousparagraph, Postan, "Medieval AgrarianSociety in its Prime: England", pp. 552-3, 607-9. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 39 tenants,one gets accordingto the laws of supply and demand,not only decliningrents in general,and labour-servicesin particular,but giving up by the lords of their rights to control the peasantry. Demographiccatastrophe determines the fall of serfdom.l7 Le RoyLadurie takes up the cyclefrom the point where Postarl leaves it, that is at the end of the fifteenthcentury. Serfdomis now no longerextant in eitherEngland or most of France. We haveinstead a societyof free peasantsin both Englandand France,some holding their land on a roughlycontractual basis from the landlords,others having achieved a status of somethinglike freeholders. (I shall returnto this a little later.) At any rate,as has been noted, we get a repetitionof the two-phasemovement Postan charted for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and then the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries:that is first an upward push in populationduring the "long sixteenthcentury" leading to rising rents, falling wages and the disintegration of peasant holdings. Drastically declining productivitythen leads to demographiccatastrophes during the seventtenth century, a turning of the trend, and the opposite configurationin terms of thc distributionof incomeand of land.18 The obviousdifficulty with this whole massivestructure is that it simply breaksdown in the face of comparativeanalysis. Different outcomesproceeded from similar demographictrends at different times and in different areas of Europe. Thus we may ask if demographicchange can be legitimatelytreated as a "cause",let alone the key variable. So it is tree that in the thirteenthcentury increasein populationwas accompanied by increasingrents and, more generally,increasing seigneurial controls over the peasantry,not only in Englandbut in partsof France(especially in the northand east of the Paris region: Vermandois,Laonnais, Burgundy).l9 Yet, it is also the case that in other partsof France(Normandy, Picardy) no counter-tendencydeveloped in this era to the long-termtrend which had resultedin the previousdisuppearance of serfdom.20 Moreover, in still other French regions (especiallythe area around Paris) a

17 Ibid., pp. 608-I0. "In the end economic forces asserted themselves, and the lords and the employersfound that the most effectiveway of retaininglabour was to pay higher wages, just as the most effective way of retaining tenants was to lower rents and release servile obligations"(ibid., p. 609). 18 Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc,passim. 19M. Petot3 "L'evolution du servage dans la France coutumiere du XIC au XIVe siecle", Recueilsde la Societe3rean Bodin, ii (I937), pp. I55-64; Ch.-E. Perrin, "Le servage en France et en Allemagne", Xe CongresIrzternational des Sciences Historiques,Rapports, iii (Rorule, I955), pp. 227-8- Guy Fourquin Les campagnesde la regionparisienne a la findu moyenage (Paris, I970), pp. I75-9; Robert Fossier, Histoiresociale de l'Occidentnzedie7>al (Paris, I970), pp. I6I-3. 20 Robert Fossier, La terre et les hoenmesen Picardiejusqu'a la fin du XIIIe siecle, 2 vols. (Paris, I968), ii; pp. 555-60. See also the references cited in note I9 above. 4o PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 70 processof deterioraiionin peasantstatus was at justthis time abruptly terminatedand an opposite movementset in motion which had decisivelyestablished peasant freedom (as well as nearlyfull peasant property)by the end of the thirteenthcentury. 21 These contrasting developmentsobviously had a powerfuleffect on trends of income distribution. As Postanhimself points out, landlordswere able to extractfar greaterrents from serfs (villeins) than from free tenants and were able to increasethese significantlyin the course of the thirteenthcentury.22 Postancontends, however, that: The reason why landlordswere now not only desirous to increasethe weight of labour dues but also "got away with it" are not difficult to guess. With the growing scarcity of land and with the lengthening queues of men waiting for it, the economic powers of the landowner over his tenants were more difficult to resist.23 Clearly,a growthof populationleading to rising demandfor land would tend to increasea lord's power to extractrent, in whatelrer form, from the peasantry-but only if the lord had successfully establishedhis rightto chargemore than a fixedrent. However,the point is that by and large in the medievalperiod the only tenants subjectto the exerciseof this sortof "economic"power on the partof the lord that is to the impositionof additionallabour services, as well as additionalarbitrary payments of other kinds above the customaryrent, in particularentry fines and tallages were unfree and held by villein tenure. The very status of free tenant in the thirteenthcentury (which incidentally included a significantsection of the population)generally carried with it preciselyfreedom from heavy (or increasing)labour-service on the lord's demesne, and freedom from tallages, entry fines and other similar payments.24 So, the determinationof the impact of the pressureof population on the land whowas to gainand who to losefrom a growingdemand for land and rising land prices and rent-was subjectto the prior determinationof the qualitativecharacter of landlord-peasantclass relations. Thus during the thirteenthcentury in the Paris region the trend towardincreasing tallaging of the peasantryby landlords was directlyaborted by a counter-trendtoward peasant enfranchise- ment. The point, here as in England,was that, once free, peasants

21 Fourquin, Op. Cit., pp. I60-72, I89-90. 22 Postan, "Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: England", pp. 552-3 603, 607-8, 6II. In particularp. 603: "... the money charges incumbent upon customary,i.e., villein, holdings were heavy by all comparison. . . even with those of substantialpeasant freeholders". 23 Ibid., p. 608 (my italics). 24 See above, notes I6, 22, 23. R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdomis Medieval England (London, I969) pp. I8-I9, 24, 29-3I. For graphic illustrations of the ability of estabiished free peasants to resist the most determined (and desperate)efforts of rent-gouging landlords even during the thirteenth-centuryincrease in population, see Eleanor Searle, Lordshipand Community:Battle Abbeyand its Banlieu)I066-I538 (Toronto, I974), pp. I63-6. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 4I paid only a fixed eustomaryrent; they eould not be foreed to pay additional,arbitrary rents. It is notable,moreover, that this trend towardrestrieting rent and establishingfree tenurein the Parisregion took plaeein the most heavilypopulated region in all of Franee.25 The demographiedeeline experieneedthroughout Europe whieh began at various points during the fourteenth eentury poses analogousproblems. In the long run the paralleltrends of deelining rents and the rise of peasantfreedom did dominatethis period in England,eertainly by the fifteentheentury. But in eontrast,the latefourteenth and fifteentheenturies also witnesseda sharpeningof landlordeontrols over the peasantryin Catalonia;and this was also the ease, apparently,in parts of France (Bordelais,the Centre).26 It is true that in these areasand in most of WesternEurope serfdom was dead by the early sixteentheentury. On the other hand, in EasternEurope, in partieularPomerania, Brandenburg, East Prussia and Poland,deeline in populationfrom.the late fourteenthcentury was aeeompaniedby an ultimately sueeessful movement toward imposingextra-eeonomie eontrols, that is serfdom,over what had been, until then, one of Europe'sfreest peasantries.27 By I500 the same Europe-widetrends had gone a long way towardestablishing one of the great divides in Europeanhistory, the emergeneeof an almost totally free peasant population in Western Europe, the debasementof the peasantryto unfreedomin EasternEurope. But the period from I500 to I750 markedanother great divide whieh puts in question onee more the explanatoryvalue of the malthusianmodel. This time whatis left unexplainedis not merely the question of ineome distributionbut the vhole problem of dramatieallyeontrasting trends of eeonomiedevelopment: continuing long-run stagnationaecompanying increase of populationin some areas,the speetaeularemergenee of an entirelynew pattern of relatively self-sustaininggrowth aceompanying increase of populationin other areas. Thus, as Le Roy Laduriewould lead us to expect,in muchof France during the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, increasing populationdid lead to fragmentationof holdings,rising rents and decliningproductivity. And at differentpoints in time in different

25 Fourquin, Op. cit., esp. pp. I70 ff. 26 Pierre Vilar, La Catalognedans l'Espagnemoderne, 3 vols. (Paris, I962), i, pp. 466 ff.; Jaime Vicens Vives, Historia de las Remensasen el Siglo XV (Barcelona, I945), pp. 23-4 ff.; Robert Boutruche, La crise d'une societe. Seigneurset paysans du Bordelaispendant la Guerrede Cent Ans (Paris, I947; Paris, I963 edn.), pp. 32I ff.; Isabelle Guerin, La vie rarale en Sologneaux XIVe et XVe s-iecles(Paris, I960), pp. 202-I5 ff. 27 F. L. Carstens, The Originsof Prussia (London, I954)3 pp. 80-4, IOI-I6- M. Malowist, "Le commerce de la Baltique et le probleme des luttes sociales en Pologne aux XVe et XVIe siecles", La Pologneau Xe CongresInternational des SciencesHistoriques a Rome (Warsaw, I955), pp. I3I-6, I45-6; J. Blum, "The Rise of Serfdom in Eastern Europe", Amer. Hist. Rev., lxii (I957), pp. 820-2. 42 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 regionswe do get the classiccrises of subsistence,demographic disaster and ultimatelya "turningof the trend".28 Nevertheless,ironically, parallelgrowth of populationin Englandin this same period has been used to explain precisely opposite developments. Thus, accordingto Bowden: Under the stimulus of growing population, rising agriculturalprices, and mounting land values, the demand for land became more intense and its use moreefficient. The area under cultivation was extended. Large estates were built up at the expenseof small holdiws.29 So, in France,as populationincreased, there was extremefragmenta- tion of holdings and decliningproductivity. But in England,by colltrast,the dominanttendency was to build up largerand larger units; to consolidateholdings and to farmthem out to a largetenant farmerwho in turn cultivatedthem with the aid of wage labour. Accompanyingthis changein the organizationof productionwere majorincreases in agriculturalproductivity, with trulyepoch making results. By the end of the seventeenthcentury English population had returnedto its high, latethirteenth-century levels, but therewas nothinglike the demographicpattern of seventeenth-centuryFrance, no phase B followinginescapably from phase A. Instead,we have the finaldisruption of the malthusianpattern and the introductionof a strikinglynovel form of continuedeconomic development.30

II THE COMMERCIALIZATIONMODEL Before I presentthe alternativewhich I think follows from the foregoingcomparative analysis, it should be noted that both of the two most prominentexponents of the population-centredapproaches to economicchange irl pre-industrialsociety, Postan and Le Roy Ladurie, originally constructedtheir models in opposition to a prevailinghistoriographical orthodoxy which assignedto the growth of tradeand the marketa role somewhatanalogous to that whichthey were ultimatelyto assignto population. Thus Postanand Le Roy Laduriemade powerfulattacks on the simple unilinealconceptions which had held that the force of the marketdetermines: first, the 28 See for example, Pierre Goubert, "Le milieu demographique", in L'ancienregime, i (Paris, I969)- also, Pierre Goubert, Beauvaiset le Beauvaisis de I600 a z730 (Paris, I960); Jean Meuvret, Etudesd'histoire economique (Paris I97I); Ernest Labrousse, et al., Histoire economiqueet sociale de la France, ii, I660- I789 (Paris, I 9705. 29 AgrarianHistory of Englandasld Wales,iv, I500-I640, p. 593 (my italics). 3?On English agrarianchange, its causes and consequences,see for example R. H. Tawney, The AgrarianProblen in the SixteenthCentury (London, IgI2 New York, I967 edn.); Eric Kerridge, The AgriculturalRevolution (London, I967); Eris Kerridge, Agrarian Probleensof the Sixteenth Centuryand After (London, I969), esp. ch. 6 W. G. Hoskins, "The LeicestershireFarmer in the Seventeenth Century", AgriculturalHistory, xxv (I95I)* Agrarian History of Englandand Wales, iv, I500-I640. See also below, pp. 62-8. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIGDEVELOPMENT 43 declineof serfdom,which was often simply identifiedas the change from labour-to money-rentsand ipso facto the emergenceof a free contractualtenantry; and secondly,the rise of capitalistagriculture, classically large-scale tenant farming on the basis of capital improvementand wage labour. (a) Tradeand Serfdom Postanwas, in particular,concerned to show that in the medieval periodthe forceof the market,far from automaticallybringing about the dissolution of serEdom,might actually ceincide with its intensification. He demonstrated,for example,that in some areas most accessibleto the London marketthe trend towardincreased labour-serviceand the seigneurialreaction of the thirteenthcentury was most intense. Perhapsan even clearerillustration of Postan's point is providedin the areasunder the influenceof the Parismarket duringthe same period. Thus, as one proceededalong tlle Seine througha seriesof differentregions all of whichproduced for Parisian consumption,one passedthrough regions of peasantfreedom, peasarlt semi-freedomand peasant serfdom. Most spectacular,as Postan pointedout, was the case of EasternEurope, where duringthe late medievaland earlymodern period the powerfulimpact of the world marketfor grain gave a majorimpetus to the tighterlingof peasant bondageat the same time as it was stimulatingthe developmentof capitalismin the West.31 Still, Postannever really specified the fatalflaw of the trade-centred approachto Europeandevelopment; this, in my view, is its tendency to ignorethe factthat serfdom denoted not merely,nor even primarily, labour- as opposed to money-dues,but, fundamentally,powerful landlordrights to arbitraryexactions and a greateror lesserdegree of peasantunfreedom. Thus serfdominvolved the larldlord'sability to controlhis tenant'sperson, in particularhis movements,so as to be able to determinethe levelof the rent in excessof "custom"or what mightbe dictatedby the simpleplay of forcesof supplyand demarld. For this reasonthe declineof serfdomcould not be achieved,as is sometimes implied, through simple commutation,the "equal exchange"of money-rentfor labour-rentwhich might be transactedirl the interestof greaterefficiency for both parties. 3 2 NShatwould remain after commutationwas still the lord's power over the peasant. Indeed,it is notablethat commotation could be unilaterallydictated-

31 Postan, "The Chronologyof Labour Services", esp. pp. I92-3; Fourquin, Campagnesde la regionparisienze, pp. I69-70 and I70, n. 7I- See also M. M. Postan, "The Rise of the Money Economy", Econ. Hist. Rev., xiv (I944). 32 For a recent re-statementof this view, see North and Thomas, Rise of the WesternWorld5 pp. 39-40. It is of course a corollaryof their view of serfdom as an essentially contractual,rather than coercive and exploitativerelationship. (See above, note I2.) PAST AND 44 PRESENT NUMBER70 and reversed at the lord's will. Thus, as out, Postan points commutationwas an extremelywidespread development in twelfth-centuryEngland; but this trenddid not signifythe tion of emancipa- the peasants,for in the thirteenthcentury, they were againmade once subjectto the landlords'demands for services. Indeed, even where the lord did not decide to take peasant labour-services,the was still requiredto pay moneyfees to "buyoff" his dues and labour- moreoverremained subject to those arbitraryexactioIls (tallages,entry fines and so on) whichwere bound up as a with his status "bondsman'>.33What therefore had to be eliminatedto bring aboutthe end of serfdomwas the type of "unequal was exchange"which manifested in the direct, forceful, extra-economiccontrols exertedby the lord over the peasant. Since the essenceof wasthe lord's serfdom abilityto bringextra-market pressure to bearupon the peasantsin determiningthe level of rent, in particularby peasant preventing mobility and thus a "free marketin tenants', it is surprisingthat hardly fluctuationsin trade,indeed of marketfactors of any type,were not in themselvesenough to determinethe serfdom. dissolutionof Serfdom was a relationshipof power which could reversed,as it be were, only in its own terms,through a changein the balanceof class forces. Obviouslythere might be periodswhen the land, enormousdemand for and thus for tenancies,deriving in particularfrom the pressureof rising population,would allow the lords to take a very relaxed attitudetoward peasant mobility (voluntarilyeasing their restrictionson villeintenants' movements) since they couldalways get ments,quite replace- often indeed on better terms. The latter part of the thirteenthcentury, as noted, was probablyjust this sort of Butevidence period. fromsuch a periodcannot be legitimatelyused to argue forthe end, or the essentialirrelevance, of peasant Serfdomcan be unfreedom.34 said to end only when the lords'right and abilityto controlthe peasantry,should they desire to do so, has Itis been terminated. significantthat even throughoutthe thirteenthcentury wishingto leave peasants the manorwere required to obtainlicences to depart andhad to returneach year for the one or two views of Inthis period, frankpledge. as Raftis says, "the manorialcourt was usuallyonly concernedto keep the villeinunder the lord'sjurisdiction, not himback on to have the lord's demesne". Whatis telling, however,is the suddenchange in the conditionssurrounding villein followed mobilitywhich immediatelyupon the BlackDeath and the suddenshortage 33 Postan, "Medieval Agrarian Society in itS Prime: England", pp. 604-S, 6II. For an analysis of the reasons why isassumed to commutationis misunderstoodif it mean a relaxationof serfdom, see esp. R. H. Hilton's Serfdom,pp. 29-3I, as well Declineof as his "Freedom and Villeinage in England", Past andPresent, no. 3I (July I965), p. II. 34 As does, for examplen Titow, EnglishRural Society I200-I350, pp. 59-60. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 45 (as opposedto plethora)of tenants. For this periodthere is ample evidencefor the distrainingof villeins to become tenantsand take overobligations; for muchheavier fines for licenceto leavethe lord's manor;for a remarkableincrease in the numberof pledgesrequired for thosepermitted to leavethe manor;for a sharperattitude concerning fugitivesfrom the domain;and for limitationson the numberof yearsthe villeinwas allowed to be awayfrom the manor.35 Certainly, from the lord'spoint of view, serfdomwas still the orderof the day, and they had every intentionof enforcingit. Whetheror not they wouldbe ableto wasa questionthat was answered only in the conflicts of the followingperiod.

(b) Commercializationand AgriculturalCapitalism In a manneranalogous to Postan's,Le Roy Laduriecarried forward the critique of the trade-centredapproach to Europeaneconomic developmentby showingthat even followingthe downfallof serfdom a tendencytoward capitalism (large, consolidatedholdings farmed on the basis of capitalimprovement with wage labour)could not necessarilybe assumed,even underthe impactof the market. Thus Le Roy Ladurie'sstudy of ruralLanguedoc was designedin partto qualifythe earlierconceptions of historianslike Raveau,Bloch and othersthat the earlymodern period, under the stimulusof the market, witnesseda steadytendency toward the developmentof largeholdings, cultivatedoften by farmersof bourgeoisorigin with a strongorienta- tion towardimprovement and efficientproduction for the market. In contrast,as we have seen, Le Roy Ladurie showed that the emergenceof "capitalistrent" (based on increasesin the productivity of the land due to capitalinvestment) as opposedto the simple squeezingof the peasant(on the basis of rising demandfor land stimulated by increased demographicpressure) was far from inevitable;that fragmentationof holdingswas as likelyas consolidation. Still the fact remainsthat, like Postan,Le Roy Laduriedoes not get to the root of the difficultiesof the trade-centredapproach to agrarianchange in this periodfor he does not attemptto specifywhy, in fact, duringthe sixteenthand seventeenthcenturies, a new cycle of fragmentationand declining productivitywas set off in some places, while consolidationand improvementtook place in others. He does imply that morcellement(fragmentation) and rassemblement (consolidation) were in some sense competitive trends, and shows that the "mercilesslypursued dismemberment"of holdings "renderedderisory the efforts of the consolidatorsof the land". The result, he says, was that the economic history of rural

35 J. Ambrose Raftis, TenureandS Mobility: Studiesin the SocialHistory of the Medieval English Village (Toronto, I964), pp. I 39-44. 46 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 Languedoeended up as "pure peasant history ... far from the 'originsof eapitalism'a. 3 6 But Le Roy Ladurienever really poses the question(not only for ruralLanguedoe but for all of WesternEurope) of whythe vietoryof one trend rather than another oceurred.37Nor does he seareh for an answer,as I am inclinedto do, in the emergeneeof a strueture of ownershipof land whieh provided the peasantryin most of Franee(in eontrastto Englandand elsewhere)with relativelypowerful propertyrights over eomparativelylarge areas of the land. This presenteda powerfulbarrier to thosewho wishedto coneentrateland. For whateverthe marketsituation or the prieeof land, the peasantry would not in generaleasily relinquishtheir holdings,the bases of their existeneeand that of theirheirs. It was thus, I will argue,the predominaneeof petty proprietorshipin Franeein the earlymodern period which ensured long-term agrieultural baekwardness.38 This was not only becauseof the teehniealbarriers to improvement built into the struetureof small holdings, espeeially within the eommonfields. It was,as I shalltry to demonstrate,beeause peasant proprietorshipin Franeeeame to be historieallybound up with the developmentof an overallproperty or surplus-extraetionstructure whichtended to diseourageagrieultural investment and development; in partieular,the heavy taxation by the monarchicalstate; the "squeezing"of peasanttenants (leaseholders) by the landlords;and, finally,the subdivisionof holdingsby the peasantsthemselves.39

36 Le Roy Ladurie,Paysans de Languedoc,passim, the quotationsare at p. 8. 37 Le Roy Ladurie, Paysans de Languedoc, pp. 8 ff. To explain the failure of agrarian capitalism in France, Le Roy Ladurie falls back in the last analysis, upon the prevalence of backwardmentalities. Thus (ibid., pp. 640-I): "technological stagnation (immobilisme)was enveloped in supportedby, a whole series of . . . culturalblockages". For Le Roy Ladurie, it was the "invisible spiritualfrontiers" which were "the most constrainingof all" on the economy (p. II). And consistently enough, he appearsto find the germs of true economic growth in the "new mentalities" (mentalitesnouvelles) of the epoch of the Enlightenment (p. 652). 38 For the difficulties(not of course the impossibility,especially under certain conditions and over a relatively long term) of consolidatinglarge holdings in the face of widespread and entrenched peasant proprietorship, see Louis Merle, La metairie et l'evolution agraire de la Gatine poitevine de la fin du moyenage a la revolution(Paris, I958), pp. 70-2; Andre Plaisse, La Baronniedu Neubourge(Paris, I96I), pp. 583-5; also Le Roy Ladurie,Paysans de Languedoc, p. 327. Roger Dion enunciated the following general rule concerning the powerfullimiting impact of the French peasantcommunity on the development of largefarms: "The regionsof largefarms are definednegatively: they are those which largely escaped the grip of the village communities". Quoted in J. Meuvret "L'agricultureen Europe aus XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles", in his Etudes d'histoire economique(Paris, I97I), p. I77. Of course, as Meuvret points out (agreeingwith Dion) large farms tended to develop in France only to a very small extent, and even then generallyon the worst lands precisely because they were prevented from doing so by the widespreadstrength of the "strongly-rootedpeasant collectivities"(ibid.). 39For the full arguments, see below, pp. 72 ff. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 47 III CLASS CONFLICT AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT In sum, despite the destructiveforce of their attacksupon the unilineal trade-centredtheories of economic change, it may be doubtedthat eitherPostan or Le Roy Laduriehas carriedhis critique quite far enough. For, rather than searching for underlying differenceswhich might account for contrasiinglines of development in differentplaces under similarconstellations of economicforces, bothPostan and Le Roy Laduriehave chosen to constructnew models largelyby subsiitutinga diSerentobjective variable, population, for the old, discreditedone, commerce. Because, in my view, they havefailed to placethe developmentof classstructure and its effects at the centreof their analyses,their own cyclicalmalthusian models encounter,as we have seen, preciselythe samesorts of difiicultiesin the face of comparativehistory that they themselvescriticized in the trade-centredunilineal approaches. In particulartheir methods prevent them from posing what in my view are perhapsthe two fundamentalproblems for the analysisof long-termeconotnic development in late medievaland earlymodern Europe, or more generally, the "transitionfrom feudalism to capitalism":(I) the declineversus the persistenceof serfdomand its effects; (2) the etnergenceand predominanceof secure small peasant property versus the rise of landlord-largetenant farmerrelations on the land. In historical terms this means, at the very least: (I) a comparative analysis of the intensificationof serfdom in Eastern Europe in relationto its process of decline in the West; (2) a comparative analysisof the riseof agrariancapitalism and the growthof agricultural productivityin England in relation to their failure in France. Simplystated, it will be our contentionthat the breakthroughfrom "traditionaleconomy" to relativelyself-sustaining economic development was predicatedupon the emergenceof a specificset of class relationsin the countryside,that is capitalistclass relations. This outcomedepended, in turn,upon the previoussuccess of a two-sided processof class developmentand class conflict:on the one hand the destructionof serfdom;on the other hand, the short-circuitingof the emergingpredominance of smallpeasant property.40

(a) The Decline of Serfdom One can begin by agreeingwith Postanthat therewas a long-term tendencyto demographiccrisis inherentin the medievaleconomy. But this tendencyto crisiswas not a naturalfact, explicablesolely by

40 This view obviously derivesfrom Marx's argumentson the barriersto and the class structural bases for the development of capitalism, especially as presented in "The So-called Primitive Accumulation of Capital", Capital i, pt. VIII, and Pre-CapitalistEconomic Formations, ed. E. J. Hobsbawm(New York, I965), pp. 97-I20. 48 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 refereneeto availablehuman and naturalresourees in relaiionto an ostensiblygiven level of teehnique. It was, rather,built into the interrelatedstrueture of peasantorganization of produetionon the one hand, and, on the otherhand, the institutionalizedrelationships of serfdomby whiehthe lordwas ableto extraeta feudalrent. Thus the inability of the serf-basedagrarian eeonomy to innovate in agrieultureeven underextreme market ineentives to do so is under- standablein view of the interrelatedfaets, first, of heavy surplus- extraetionby the lord fromthe peasantand, seeondly,the barriersto mobilityof men and land whieh were themselvespart and parcelof the unfreesurplus-extraction relationship. Thus the lord's surplusextraetion (rent) tended to confiscatenot merelythe peasant'sineome above subsistence (and potentiallyeven beyond) but at the same time to threatenthe funds neeessaryto refurbishthe peasant'sholding and to preventthe long-termdeeline of its produetivity. Postanhas estimatedthat on averagesomething like 50 per eent of the unfreepeasant's total produet was extraetedby the lord.4l This was entirelyunproduetive "profit", for hardlyany of it was "ploughedbaek" into produetion;most was squanderedin militaryexpenditure and eonspieuouseonsumption.42 At the sametime, given his unfreepeasants, the lord'smost obvious mode of inereasingoutput from his lands was not througheapital investmentand the introduetionof new teehniques,but through "squeezing"the peasants,through raising either money-rentsor labour-ser^riees.In partieularthe availabilityof unfreerent-paying tenantsmilitated against the tendeneyto expel or buy out peasants in order to eonstruet a eonsolidated demesne and introduce improvementson this basis. Revenues eould be raised through inereasingrents via tallages,entry fines and otherlevies, so therewas little need to engagein the difficultand eostly proeessesof building up largeholdings and investing,of removingeustomary peasants and bringingin newteehniques. Thus the argumentsometimes advaneed that the medievallandlords' agrieultural investments were adequate to the requirementsof their estatesbegs the question,for it takesas given the landlords'elass-position and the agrarianstrueture bound up with it.4 3 ol Postan, "Medieval AgrarianSociety in its Prime: England" pp. 603-4. 42 M. M. Postan, "Investment in Medieval Agriculture",.Xi. Econ. Hist. XXVii (I967). R. H. Hilton, "Rent and CapitalFormation in Feudal Society" Second InternationalConference of EconomicHistory I962 (Paris, I965), esp. pp. 4I-53. Hilton estimates that no more than 5 per cent of total income was ploughed back into productive investment by the landlords of the thirteenth century (p. 53). This paperis reprintedin R. H. Hilton, TheEnglish Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, I975). 43 Titow, English Rural Society, pp. 49-50. If I properly understand his argument, Dr. Titow is asserting that the failure to improve was by and large the result of the lackof technicalknowledge, the unavailabilityof new techniques Thus, he says, "the technical limitations of medieval husbandryseem to have imposed their own ceiling on what could be spent on an estate". AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 49 There were, in fact, known and availableagricultural improvements including the ultimately revolutionary "convertible husbandry" which could have brought significant improvements in demesne output.44 Indeed, as Professor Searle has recently demonstrated, fully-fledged convertible husbandry was systematically adopted on Battle Abbey's manor of Marley from the early fourteenth century. It is most significant that this manor consisted entirely of a single consolidated demesne (with no customary tenancies) and was farmed entirely with wage labour, marking a total break from feudal organization of production and class relations. It is notable, moreover, that the manor of Marley had been constructed by buying out free tenants. Because these tenants were freeholders, Battle Abbey had not been able to increase its rents, although it had tried to do so. Indeed, Battle Abbey had waged an extended struggle to force its tenants into unfree status, precisely in order to open them up to the imposition of additional levies. However, in the end this had been unsuccessful and, as a result, the only alternative for raising the revenue from these lands was to buy up the peasants' holdings. The Abbey could then farm these itself as a consolidated demesne and this, in fact, is the solution it hit upon.45 Of course, the methods used on the manor of Marley by Battle Abbey were almost totally ignored by English landlords. They generally did not have to improve to raise labour-productivity, efficiency and output - in order to increase income. This was because they had an alternative, "exploitative" mode available to them: the use of their position of power over the peasants to increase their share of the product. At the same time, because of lack of funds-due to landlords' extraction of rent and the extreme maldistribution of both land and capital, especially livestock - the peasantry was by and large unable to use the land they held in a free and rational manner. They could not, so to speak, put back what they took out of it. Thus the surplus-extraction relations of serfdom tended to lead to the exhaustion of peasant production per se; in particular the inability to invest in animals for ploughing and as a source of manure led to deteriorationof the soil, which in turn led to the extension of cultivation to land formerlyreserved for the support of animals. This meant the cultivation of worse soils and at the same time fewer animals and thus in the end a vicious cycle of the destruction of the peasants'

44 See for example, the use of convertiblehusbandry in Flandersin the early fourteenth century: B. H. Slicher Van Bath, The AgrarianHistory of Western Europe,A.D. 500-I850 (London, I963; repr. London, I966), pp. I78-9. 46 Searle, Lordshipand Community,pp. I47, I74-5, I83-94, 267-329. so PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 means of support. The crisis of productivityled to demographic crisis,pushing the populationover the edge of subsistence.46 On the other hand, the lord'sproperty relationships to that small group of peasantswho had enough land to producea marketable surplusand thus the potentialto accumulate that is to concentrate land, assemblea labourforce and introduceimprovement was also a barrierto the developmentof productivity.47First, of course, feudal rent itself limited the funds availablefor accumulation. Secondly, restrictions on peasant mobility not only prevented peasant movementto areas of greater potential opportunity,but tended to limit the developmentof a free market in labour.48 Finally,feudal restrictions on the mobilityof land tendedto prevent its concentration. Unfreepeasants were not allowedto conveytheir land to other peasantswithout the lord's permission. Yet it was often in the lord's interest to prevent large accumulatingtenants from receiving more land, because they might find it harder to collectthe rent fromsuch tenants,especially if they had free status.49 Given these propertyor surplus-extractionrelationships, productivity crisis leading to demographiccrisis was more or less to be expected, sooner or later.50 The question, however,which must be askedconcerns the economicand socialresults of the demographic catastrophe,in particularthat of the later fourteenthand fifteenth centuries. Postan showed one logic: that the peasantsapparently used their economicposition, their scarcity,to win their freedom. As B. H. SlicherVan Bath arguesfor WesternEurope in general,

46 lton, "Rent and Capital Formation", pp. 53-5; Postan, "1Medieval AgrarianSociety in its Prime: England", pp. 548-70. The net product of at least one third of all the land, including a disproportionateshare of the best land, was directly in the hands of the tiny landlordclass (that is in demesne): E. A. Kosminsky, "Services and Money Rents in the Thirteenth Century", Econ.Hist. Rev., v (I934-5); Postan, op. cit., pp. 60I-2. See also above, note 4I . 47 See Hilton, Decline of Serfdom,pp. 30-I and passim. 48 Admittedly,in the thirteenthcentury, given the extreme"overpopulation", the availabilityof wage labourwas not a problem. On the supply of wage labour in the thirteenthcentury, see E. A. Kosminsky, Studiesin the Sgrarian History of Englandin the ThirteenthCentury (Oxford, I956), ch. vi. 49 See especiallyRaftis, Tenureand Mobility, pp. 66-8, for evidence concerning lords' actions to prevent customary tenants from concentratingtoo much land or to prevent customary tenants from conveying land to freemen. Professor Searle suggests that a key motivation for Battle Abbey's continuing attempts from the mid-thirteenth century to depress its tenants from free tO unfree status was to be better able to control the peasant land marketin order to assure rents. Lordshipand Comxnunity,pp. I85 ff. See also M. M. Postan, "The Charters of the Villeins", in Carte Nativor7lm,ed. Nt. M. Postan and C. N. L. Brooke (Northampton Rec. Soc. Public., xx, I960), pp. XXXi-XXXii and ff. 60 Especiallyrelevant here is Postan's remarkthat the peasants'feudal rents "had to be treated as prior charges. They could not be reduced to suit the harvests or the tenant's personalcircumstances . . . in fact, the tenant's need of food and fodder had to be coveredby what was left after the obligatorycharges had been met": "Medieval AgrarianSociety in its Prime: England", p. 604. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT SI "the lord of the manorwas foreedto offergood eonditionsor see all his villeins vanish".51 Yet, euriously, quite another logie has sometimesbeen invokedto explainthe intensifieationof serfdomin EasternEurope: the erisis in seigneurialrevenues whieh followed upon the deelinein populationand the disappearaneeof tenantsled the lords to asserttheir eontrolover the peasantsand bind them to theirlands in orderto proteettheir ineomes and their very existenee. 5 2 Obviously, both "logies" are unassailablefrom different elass viewpoints. It wasthe logieof the peasantto tryto use his apparently improvedbargaining position to get this freedom. It was the logie of the landlordto proteet his position by redueingthe peasants' freedorn. The result simply eannot be explained in terms of demographie-eeonomiesupply and demand. It obviously eame down to a questionof power,indeed of foree, and in faet therewas intense Europe-wide lord-peasanteonfliet throughout the later fourteenth,fifteenth and early sixteenth eenturies, almost every- whereover the samegeneral issues: first, of eourse,serEdom; seeondly, whetherlords or peasantswere to gain ultimateeontrol over landed property,in partieularthe vastareas left vaeantafter the demographie eollapse. In Englandafter I349 and the BlackDeath there was a seigneurial reaetion:attempts to eontrolpeasant mobility by foreingpeasants to payimpossiblefees for permission to move;legislation to eontrolwages; an aetualinerease in rentsin some plaees. But by I400 it was elear that the landlords'offensive had failed; revolt and flight, whieh eontinuedthroughout the fifteentheentury, led to the end of serfdom.53 In Catalonia,a partieularlyrevealing ease, one also finds inereasedlegislation by the Corts the representativebody of the landlords,the elergy and the urban patrieiate-to limit peasant movementand deereasepersonal freedom. By the early fifteenth centurythis legislationhad proeeeded a gooddistanee, with apparently signifieantsuecess. But, correlatively,it provokedin response a high level of peasantorganization and, in particular,the assembling of mass peasant armies. Well past the mid-fifteentheentury it appearedquite possiblethat the seigneurialreaction would sueceed. Onlya seriesof violentand bloodyconfrontations ultimately assured peasant vietory. Armed warfareended finally in I486 with the Sentenceof Guadalupeby whieh the peasantrywas grantedin full

51 Slicher Van Bath, AgrarianHistory of WesternEurope, p. I45. 62 Carstens, Originsof Prussia, pp. I03 ff.- Malowist, "La commerce de la Baltiqueet la problemedes luttes socialesen Pologne aux XVe et XVIe siecles" pp. I3I-46; Guy Fourquin, Seigneurieet fetodaliteau moyenage (Paris, I970), pp. 2I5-I6. 63 Por the seigneurialreaction and its failure, see Hilton, Declineof Serfdom pp. 36-59. For a close case study, see Raftis, Tenureand Mobility, esp. pp. I43-4 and ff- 52 PAST AND PRESENT NUlWlBER70 its personalfreedom, full right in perpetuityto its property(while remainingobligated to the payment of certain fixed dues) and, perhapsequally important, full rightto those vacantholdings (masos ronecs)which they had annexedin the period followingthe demo- graphiecatastrophes.54 Finally, in Europeeast of the Elbe we have the familiarstory of the lords entirelyoverwhelming the peasantry, graduallydecreasing through legislation peasant personal freedom, and ultimatelyeonfiscating an importantpart of peasantland and attachingit to their demesnes. In short, the questionof serfdom in Europe could not be reduced to a question of economics:its long-termrise in the East correspondedfirst to a fall in population and stagnationin tradeand then to a rise in populationand rise in trade (I400-I600). In the West serfdomdeclined during a period first of rising populationand growingeommerce, then of declining populationand reducedtrade (I200-ISOO). In sum, the contradietionsbetween the developmentof peasant produetionand the relationsof surplus-extraetionwhieh definedthe class relations of serfdom tended to lead to a erisis of peasant accumulation,of peasant productivityand ultimately of peasant subsistence. This crisis was accompaniedby an intensificationof the class conflict inherent in the existing structure, but with differentoutcomes in differentplaces the breakdownof the old structureor its re-strengthening dependingon the balance of forees betweenthe eontendingclasses. Thus in the end the serf- basedor feudalclass structureopened up certainlimited patterns of development,gave rise to certainpredictable erises and, espeeially, tended to the outbreakof certainimmarlent class conflicts. The element of "indeterminacy"emerges in relation to the different characterand results of these conflictsin differentregions. This is not to say that such outcomeswere somehowarbitrary, but rather that they tended to be bound up with certainhistorically specific patternsof the developmentof the contendingagrarian classes and their relative strength in the different Europeansocieties: their relative levels of internal solidarity,their self-consciousnessand organization,and their generalpolitical resources especiallytheir relationshipsto the non-agriculturalclasses (in particular,potential urbanclass allies)and to the state (in particular,whether or not the state developedas a sCclass-like>competitor of the lords for the peasants'surplus). Obviouslyit is not possiblein this compassadequately to account for the differentialstrengths of lords sis-a-ris peasants and the differentpatterns of classconflict between them acrossEurope in the late medievalperiod. It is necessary,however, at least to pose this 64 VicensVives, Historia de las Remensas,pp. 23 ff.; Vilar, La Catalogne, 1, pp. 466-7I) fo6-9. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 53 problemin orderto eonfrontthe fundamentalquestion of the sueeess or failureof the "seigneurialreaetion" whieh was nearlyuniversal throughoutmedieval Europe, and thus, espeeially,the questionof the differentialouteomes of the latermedieval agrarian crises and elass eonfrontationsin Easternand WesternEurope, resulting in totally divergentpaths of subsequentsocial and eeonomie development. It shouldat least be clearthat we cannotfind an explanationin the directimpaet of foreesof supplyand demand,whether commercial or demographiein origin, no matterhow powerful. Serfdombegan its rise in the East (and its definitivedownfall in the West) in the period of late medievaldemographic decline; it was eonsolidated during the trans-Europeanincrease in populationof the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies; and it was furthersharpened at the time of the demographicdisasters of the laterseventeenth century. Nor will the pressureof tradeprovide a more convincinganswer although, ironically,the rise of large-scaleexport commercehas sometimesbeen invokedto explainthe rise of serfdomin the East55 (as it has, analogously,the rise of capitalismin the Blest). It is not, of course, my point to deny the relevanceof economiceonditions, especiallythe growthof trade,to the developmentof classrelations and the strengthof contendingclasses. No doubt, in this instance,the income from grain producedby serf-basedagriculture and sold by exportfrom the Balticto the West enhancedthe class powerof the Easternlords, helping them to sustain their seigneurialoffensive. But the controlof grainproduction (and thus the graintrade) secured throughtheir successful enserfment of the peasantrywas by no means assllredby the merefact of the emergenceof the grainmarkets themselves. In the rich, grain-producingareas of north-westGermany, the peasantswere largely suecessfulin gaining commandof grain output in preciselythe period of developingenserfment in north- cast Germany and they appearto have done so aftera prolonged period of anti-landlordresistanee. In fact, the peasants'ability in this region to eontrolthe eommereein agrieulturaleommodities (a shareof the Baltieexport trade, as well as the inlandroutes) appears to have been a factorin helpingthem to consolidatetheir powerand propertyagainst the landlords.56 Indeed, on a moregeneral plane, the preeociousgrowth of commercein the medievalBlest has often been taken to explainin large measurethe relativestrength of the

55 For a recent version of this position, see Immanuel Wallerstein, Tho Modern World System: CapitalistAgriculture and the Origins of the European WorldEconomy in the SixteenthCentury (New York, I974), pp. 90-6. 66 FriedrichLutge, Deutschesozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte(Berlin, I966) pp. 232-5. See the interesting material on the emergence in the regions of Dithmarschenand Fehmarn of a highly-commercializedfree peasantrywith large holdings deeply involved in the Baltic export trade in the late medieval- early modern period presented in Christian Reuter, Ostseehandelund Land- zvirtschaftimsechzehnten und siebzeknten3fahrhundert(Berlin, I9I2), pp. I8-29. PAST AND PRESENT 54 NUMBER70 peasantryin WesternEurope and thus the declineof serfdom. The growthof the market,it is argued,made possiblethe a significant emergenceof layer of large peasants who, through the sales of agriculturalsurpluses, were able to accumulatelarge holdings on this basis, and, to amasspower and to play a pivotalrole in organizing peasantresistance.57 So the argumentfor the of disintegratingimpact tradeon landlordpower appearsprima facie to as be as convincing the counter-casefor its enhancingeffects. We are brought therefore back to our point of departure:the need to interpret significance the of changingeconomic and demographicforces in terms of historically evolved structuresof class relationsand, especially, differingbalances of class power. Perhapsthe most widely acceptedexplanation of the between divergence Eastand West Europeandevelopment, in particularthe of serfdom rise in Eastern Europe, has been found in the weaker developmentof the towns in this regionwhich madethe more entirearea vulnerableto seigneurialreaction.58 Becausethe towns were smallerand less developedthey could be more easily by the overwhelmed nobility,thus shuttingoff a key outlet for peasantflight and deprivingthe peasantsof significantallies. However, lineof this classical reasoningremains diEcult to acceptfully becausethe actual mechanismsthrough which the towns had their reputedly effectson dissolving landlordcontrol over the peasantryin WesternEurope havestill to be preciselyspecified. The viabilityof the townsas a potentialalternative for the massof unfreepeasantry must be calledinto questionsimply in gross termsof their demographicweight. Couldthe relativelytiny urbancentres- whichcould have surpassedIO per cent of the total onlya populationin few Europeanregions haveexerted suicieIlt attractive onthe rural power masses to accountfor the collapseof serfdomalmost everywherein Western Europe by Isoo?59 The real opportunities economic offered by the towns to rural migrants are also questionable.Few runawayserfs could havehad the capitalor toenter the skill ranks of urban craftsmenor shopkeepers,let alone merchants.At the sametime the essenceof urban luxury economy,based on productionfor a limitedmarket, was economicrestriction, in 57 See for example, R. H. Hilton, "Peasant Movements in I38I"n in Essays in England Before EconomicHistory, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson, ii (London I962), pp. 8s-go; E. A. Kosminsky, "The Evolutionof Feudal fromthe Eleventh to the Rent in England Fifteenth Century", Past and Present,no. 7 (April I955)) pp- 24-7 58 See Carsten, Originsof Prussia,esp. pp. II5-I6, I35; Blum, "The Rise of Serfdomin Eastern Europe", pp. 833-5. 69 For an indication of the very small relative size of the latermedieval England, urban populationir) see R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The WestMid- landsat the End of the ThirteenthCentury (London I 67-8. and New York, I966), pp. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 55 particularcontrol of the labourmarket. Certainly,few of the established citizens of the medievaltowns, typicallyorganized in closed corporations,could have welcomedrural immigrants. Admittedly, the urban"freemen" often constitutedonly a minorityof the urban population;but they were often in a positionto place real limits on opportunitiesin the towns.fi? It is in fact a historicalcommonplace that the strengthof the guilds was a significantfactor in forcing potentialindustrial capital into the countrysideto find "freelabour". It is indeed far from obvious that the medievaltowns housed the "natural"allies of the unfree peasantry. For many reasons the urban patriciatewould tend to align themselvesrith the nobility againstthe peasantry. Both of these classeshad a commoninterest in maintainingsocial order and the defence of propertyand in protecting their mutually beneficial relationshipsof commercial exchange(raw materials for luxuryproducts). Moreover,the urban patricianswere often thezlselveslandowners and, as such, opponents of the peasantsin the same nexus of rural class relationsas the nobility.6l It is true that, in corltrast,the urbanartisans tended to be anti-aristocratic.But this would not necessarilylead them to supportthe strugglesof the peasants;for, again,freeing the peasantry posed a threatto urbancontrols over the labourmarket and invited increasedcompetition. In truth, the historicalrecord of urbansupport for the aspirations to freedomof the medievalEuropean peasantry is not impressive. Tlnelarge towns of Brandenburg,Pomeranis and Prussia,which were the scene of chronicsocial conflict throughout the latermiddle ages, offeredno apparentobjection to the nobility'sdemands that they legislateagainst fleeing serfs.6) Nor did the townsmenof Koenigs- burg come to the aid of the peasantrevolt of EastPrussia in I525 the one reallylarge-scale rural rising of this periodin north-eastern Europe. The town's patriciate positively opposed the reZolt. Meanwhilethe remainderof the citizenry despite their own engagementat this time in fierce strugglesagainst the patriciate failed to come forth with the materialaid which was requestedby the rebellious peasants threatened by encroachingenserfment.63 Correlatively,in the large-scalerevolt of the later medieva1period in which urban-ruralties were perhapsmost pronounced that of maritimeFlanders between I323 and I328 the peasantelement

60 For a survey of urban organizationin the medieval period, see The Cam- bridgeEconomic History of Europe,iii, ed. M. M. Postan, E. E. Rich and Edward Miller (Cambridge, I963), esp. chaps. iv, v. 61 See for example, Vilar, La Catalogne,i, pp. 490-3. 62 Carsten, op. cit., p. III (see also pp. 83-8). 63 F. L. Carsten, "Der Bauernkriegin Ostpreussen I525", Int. Res. Social Hist., iii (I938), pp. 400-I, 405-7; G. Franz, Der DeutscheBauernkrieg (Munich I943), p. 287; A. Seraphim,"Soziale Bewegungen in Altpreussen im Jahre I525" in AltpreussischeMonatsschrift, lviii (I92I), esp. pp. 74, 82-3, 87, 92. PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 was already fully free (or had never been enserfed), so there was never a question here of urban opposition to a rural social order of unfreedom.64 Finally, in perhaps the most significant of the late medieval revolts against serfdom-that of the Catalan remensas from the later fourteenth century there were no significantlink-ups with the urban classes this despite the fact that in Catalonia extended rural rebellion was paralleled by serious outbreaks of urban class conflict. The Catalan peasant revolt was probably the best organized and despite the lack of support from the urban classes the most successful in all of Europe: it brought about the downfall of serfdom in Catalonia.65 In sum, the towns rarely aided peasant resistance to serfdom, nor was the success of such resistance apparently dependent upon such aid. If the significanceof differing levels of urban development has been overstated in some explanations of the divergent socio-economic paths taken by Eastern and Western Europe from the later middle ages, the importance of the previous evolutions of rural society itself in these contrasting regions has been perhaps correspondingly neglected. The development of peasant solidarity and strength in Western Europe especially as this was manifested in the peasants' organization at the level of the village appears to have been far greater in Western than in Eastern Europe; and this superior instituiionalization of the peasants' class power in the West may have been central to its superior ability to resist seigneurial reaction. The divergent evolutions of peasant class organizaiion is clearest in what is probably the pivotal comparative case-east versus west Elbian Germany; and the divergent developments in these two regions provide important clues to the disparate development patterns of the far broader spheres of which they were a part. Thus, through much of western Germany by the later middle ages the peasantry had succeeded, through protracted struggle on a piece- meal village-by-village basis, in constituting for itself an impressive network of village institutions for economic regulation and political self-government. These provided a powerful line of defence against the incursions of landlords. In the first instance, peasantorganization and peasant resistance to the lords appear to have been closely bound up with the very development of the quasi-communal character of peasant economy. Most fundamental was the need to regulate co-operatively the village commons and to struggle against the lords to establish and to protect commons rights common lands (for

B4 R. H. Hilton, BondMen Made Free (London, I973), pp. II4-I5, I25-7* H. Pirenne, Le soulevementde la Flandremaritime de I323-I328 (Brussels, I900), pp. i-V and passim. 66 Vilar, La Catalogne,i, esp. pp. 449, 492-3, 497-9, So8-g (in general, pp. 448-52I). AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 57 grazing and so on) and the common-field organizationof agricultural rotation (in which the post-harvest stubble played an important role in the support of animals). Sooner or later, however, issues of a more general economic and political character tended to be raised. The peasants organized themselves in order to fix rents and to ensure rights of inheritance. Perhaps most significantly, in many places they fought successfully to replace the old landlord-installed village mayor (Schultheiss)by their own elected village magistrates. In some villages they even won the right to choose the village priest. All these gains the peasants forced the lords to recognize in countless village charters (Weistumer) through which the specific conquests of the peasantry were formally institutionalized.66 The contrasting evolution in eastern Germany is most striking. Here peasant economic co-operation and, in particular, the self- government of peasant villages appear to have developed only to a relatively small extent. As a result the east German peasants appear to have been much less prepared to resist seigneurial attacks and the onset of seigneurial controls leading to serfdom than were their counterpartsin the west. Probably most telling in this respect was the relative failure to develop independent political institutions in the village, and this is perhaps most clearlyindicated by the apparent inability of the eastern peasantryto displace the locatoror Schultheiss, the village officer who originally organized the settlement as the representativeof the lord and who retained his directing political role in the village (either as the lord's representative or as hereditary office-holder) throughout the medieval period. It is remarkable, moreover, that the numerous Weistumerwhich clearly marked the step-by-step establishment of village rights against the lord in the west are very rarely found in late medieval eastern Germany.67 The relative absence of viliage solidarity in the east, despite the formally similar character of village settlement (the so-called "Germanic" type), appears to have been bound up with the entire evolution of the region as a colonial society its relatively "late" formation, the "rational" and "artificial"character of its settlement, and especially the leadershipof the landlordsin the colonizing process. Thus, in the first place, the communal aspects of the village economy appear to have been comparatively underdeveloped. In general there were no common lands. Moreover, the common-field agriculture itself appears to have been less highly evolved; and this seems to have been bound up with the original organization of the fields at the time of settlement-in particular, the tendency of the

66 Gunther Fras, Geschichtedes deutschenBauernstaudes von fruhen Mittelat- ter bis zum I9. 3rahrhundert(Stuttgart, I970), pp. 48-66. 67 Ibid., pp. 50, 53, 58, 62. See the correlativefailure of the peasantry of eastern Germany to win the right to appoint village priests (pp. 62-35. 58 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 colonists to lay out holdings withiIl the fields in rather large, relativelyconsolidated strips (often stretchingdireetly behind the peasants'houses) in contrastto the tiny, scatteredparcels characteristic of the "natural"and "chaotic"development in the west. There seems, then, to have been more of a tendency to individualistic farming; less developed organizationof collaborativeagricultural practieesat the level of the villageor betweenvillages (for example inter-commoning);and little traditionof the "strugglefor commons rights" against the lords which was so characteristicof western development.68 At the same time, the planned, landlord-ledorganization of settlementin the easttended to placemajor barriers in the wayof the emergenceof peasantpower and peasantself-government.69 East Germanvillages were generallysmaller and less dense than their westerncounterparts; they tended, moreover,to have but a single lord. As a resultthey wereless diEcult for the lordsto controlthan were the villages of the west, where the thick populationand, in particular,the tendeneyof the villagesto be dividedbetween two or morelordships, gave the peasantsmore room to manoeuvre,making gemeinbildungthat mueh easier.70 As one historianof the Germanpeasantry has stated, "uJithout the strong developmentof eommunallife in (west) Germany,the peasantwars (of I525) are unthinkable". From this point of view, it is notable that the one east Germanregion which experienced peasantrevolt in I525 that is East Prussia was markedby unusuallystrong peasantcommunities, as well as an (apparently) weak ruling nobility. Thus, on the one hand, the East Prussian peasantrevolt originated and remainedcentred in Samland,arl area characterizednot only by extraordinarilyhigh densityof population, comparableto WesternEurope, but also by the persistenceof well- entrenchedand relativelypowerful forms of peasantoiganization. The Samlandwas one of the few east Elbian areasto escape the processof colonizationand thus the impositionof the "Germanic"

68 Hermann Aubin, "Medieval Agrarian Society in its Prime: The Lands East of the Elbe and German ColonizationEastwards", in CambridgeEconomic History of Europe,i (I966V, pp. 464-5, 468-9. 89 Note the comment of a recent student of the late medieval east German village community (Gemeinde)in accountingfor its weakness:"The village lord was there first, then came the village members. In the areaof older settlement the Gemeinde,whose beginnings are mostly lost in the dark, distant past, was primary". H. Patze, "Die deutsche Bauerliche Gemeinde im Ordenstaat Preussen", in Die iqnfnngeder Landgemeindeund iAr Wesen, ed. T. Mayer, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, I964), i, p. rsI. For a suggestive case study of a locality where landlord-led colonization left the peasantry in a position of weakness open to expropriation,see Searle, Lordshipand Community,pt. I, ch. 3, esp. pp. 63-8. 70 Aubin, op. cit., p. 469; Franz, Geschichredes deutschenBauernstandes, pp. 49, 53, 56-7. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 59 agrarianand politieal forms of settlement. In consequenceits originalPrussian peasant eommunities were left largelyundisturbed and were allowed to retain their own apparentlyaneient and distinetive socio-politiealstructures. 71 ()n the other hand, the East Prussiannobility was perhapsthe least well-establishedof any in the entire region. The eolonizationof the area had been, of eourse,largely earried out under the ''bureallcratic''administration of the Teutonie Order. At the time of the peasantrevolt of I525, the new "junker"ruling aristoeracywas only just completingits takeoverfrom the disintegratingstate of the Teutonie Order.72 Of course,the peasantwars in both west and east Germanywere largelya failure,as weremost of the reallylarge-scale peasant revolts of the latermedieval period in Europe. Whatwas successful,however, not only in western Germany, but tllroughout most of Western Europe, was the less spectaeularbut ultimately more signifieantproeess of stubbornresistanee, village by village,through which the peasantrydeveloped its solidarityand villageinstitutions. It was on this basisthat the peasantsof WesternEurope were able to limit eonsiderablythe elaims of the aristoeraeyarld, ultimately,to dissolve serfdomand forestallseigneurial reaction.73 Laekingthe strengththe \Vesternpeasantry had developedin eonstruetingthe

71 The quotation is to be found ibid., p. 63. On the development of the Samland region, the special socials political, and demographiccharacteristics of its Prussian peasant communities, see R. Weirlskaus,"Kleinverbande und Kleinraumebei den Preussen des Samlandes"in Die =4nfa7ngeder Landgemeinde und iAr Weserl,i, pp. 202-32 and ff. See Weinskaus's comment (p. 232): "In north-west Samland, the centre of resistanceagainst the Order, the native dominant classes had disappeared. Precisely because of this, the old associa- tions appear to have been maintainedfor an especially lona time". See also Hans Helmut Wachter, OstpreussischeDosnanenvorwerke im I6. ustd I7. Tahrh2xndert(Wurzburg, I958), p. 7. Note also the apparentinterrelationship of unusually dense population and distinctively powerful village communities with successful peasant revolt on the lands of the bishopric of Ermland (East Prussia) in I440. Carsten,Origins O2f Prussia,pp. 60-I, I04-5. Patze, Op. Cit., pp. I64-5. 72 On the decline of the Teutonic Orderand the rise of the Prussiannobility especiallyin relationshipto the revolt of I525, see Carsten,"Der Bauernkriegin Ostpreussenrs25") pp. 398-9; Seraphim,"Soziale Bewegungenin Altpreussen im Jahre I525", pp. 2-3. Note also Seraphim'sinteresting suggestion that the Orderfrequently attempted to defend the peasantry,and its customaryposition, against the growing incursions of an emergent nobility which was of course simultaneouslyundermining the Order itself (pp. 9-II). Cf. Carsten, Origins of Prussia, part II ("The Rise of the Junkers"), esp. p. III and ff. See also below, pp. 68-70. 73 For a m.eticulousreconstruction of those processes in one French region see Fossier's chapteron "Les conquetes paysannes",in La terreet les hommes en Picardie, ii, pp. 708-30. See Fossier's comment (ibid, p. 708): "The progressive elevation of the living standard of the peasants and the progress achievedin the sphere of their social condition are rightly consideredas fundamental phenomenaof medieval history .... In the face of an aristocraticworld on the defensive, that of the peasants' was strengthened,was emancipatedlittle by little". o PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 70 instrumentsof village co-operatioIland resistance,the peasantryof colonized EasternEurope was less preparedto hold out; and in consequence the) succumbed to seigneurial reaction and the impositionof serfdom. The outcomesof the breakdownsand conflictsof the late medieval periodhad momentousconsequences for subsequentEuropean social change. For the patternof economicdevelopment imposed by the now-intensifiedclass structureof serfdomin the Eastaunder the impact of the world market,was very different from that which prevailedin the free conditionsof the West. Specifically,the newly- emergentstructure of class relationsin the East had as its outcome the "developmentof underdevelopment',the preclusionof increased productivityin general)and of industrializationin particular. First of all, the availabilityof forced labourerswhose servicescould be incessantlyintensified by the lord discouragedthe introductionof agriculturalimprovements. Secondly,the lord'sincreasing surplus extractionfrom the peasantrycontinually limited the emergenceof a home marketfor industrialgoods. Thirdly)the fact of direct and powerfulcontrols over peasant mobility meant the constrictionof the industriallabour force, eventuating in the suffocationof industryand the decline of the towns. Finally,the landlords,as a ruling class which dominatedtheir states, pursueda policy of what has been called "anti-mercantilism";they attemptedto usurp the merchants' functionas middlemenand encouragedindustrial imports from the West, in this way underminingmuch of what was left of urbanand iIldustrialorganization. 7 't Thus)the possibilityof b

r ' which was the result of the dismal productivityand the vastly unequal distributionof income in agriculture,rooted in the last analysisin the class structureof serfdom.

74 Some of the most important recent analyses of the rise o? serfdom in Eastern Europe, its causes and consequences may be found in the works of Marian Malowist. A number of these writings are collected in his Croissance et regressionen EuropeXIVe-XVIIe siecles(Paris, I972). See also, Malowist "La commercede la Baltique et le probleme des luttes sociales en Pologne aux XVe et XVIe siecles". See, in addition,Carsten, Origins of Prussaa* A. Maczak, "Export of Grain and the Problem of I)istribution of National Income in the Years I550-I650", Acta Poloniae Historica, xviii (I9689; J. Topolski, "La regressioneconomique en Pologne du XVIe au XVIIIe siecle", ibid., vii (I962); L. Zytkowicz, "An Investigation of AgriculturalProduction in Masovia in the First Half of the I7th Century", ibid, xviii (I968)* AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 6I (b) The Emergenceand Checkof AgrarianCapitalism Finally, however, it needs to be remembered that even in the West the collapse of serfdom did not lead in any automaticway to capitalism or successful economic development. From the late fifteenth century there was Europe-wide pressure of population, development of the market and rise in grain prices. In Englarld we find the landlords consolidating holdings and leasing them out to large capitalist tenants who would in turn farm them on the basis of wage labour and agricultural improvement. But in France we find comparatively little consolidation. Even the land controlled directly by the landlords, that is the demesnes farmed out on terminable contractual leases, was generally let in small parcels and cultivated by small peasant tenants. At the same time, of course, fragmentation dominated the sector of peasant proprietorship. These different class structures determined substantially different results in terms of changes in agricultural productivity and, indeed, wholly disparate overall patterns of economic development and I shall return to these shortly. But it is necessary first to account for the class structures themselves; and once again I would argue that these can only be understood as the legacy of the previous epoch of historical development, in particular the different processes of class conflicts which brought about and issued from the dissolution of serfdom in each country. In England, as throughout most of Western Europe, the peasantry was able by the mid-fifteenth century, through flight and resistance, to break definitively feudal controls over its mobility and to win full freedom. Indeed, peasant tenants at this time were striving hard for full and essentially freehold control over their customary tenements, and were not far from achieving it. The elimination of unfreedom meant the end of labour-servicesand of arbitrarytallages. Moreover, rent per se (redditus)was fixed by custom, and subject to declining long-term value in the face of inflation. There were in the long run, however, two major strategies available to the landlord to prevent the loss of the land to peasant freehold. In the first place, the demographic collapse of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries left vacant many former customary peasant holdings. It appears often to have been possible for the landlord simply to appropriate these and add them to his demesne.75 In this way a great deal of land was simply removed from the "customary sector" and added to the "leasehold sector", thus thwarting in

76 Raftis, Tenureand Mobility, pp. I97-8; Hilton, Decline of Serfdom,pp. 44 ff.; R. H. Hilton, "A Study in the Pre-History of English Enclosurein the Fifteenth Century", in Studi in onoredi ArmandoSapori, 2 vols. (Milan, I957) i, repr. in Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages M. W. Beresford,C'A Review of Historical Research(to I968)", MauriceW. Beresford and John G. Hurst (eds.), DesertedMedieval Villages(London, I97I). NUMBER70 PASTANDPRESENT 62 freehold, and substantially a possible evoluiion toward peasant advance area of land for essentially reducingthe potential this does not appear Significantly,as we shall see, proprietorship. to the landlordsin France an alternativeeasily available tohave been period. similarconditions in the same loophole under often remainedone crucial Inthe second place, there claims of regardto the freehold-tending opento the landlordwith and clung to who still remairledon his lands thecustomary tenants to chargefines at will He could insist on the right theirholdings. is in salesor on inheritance. landwas conveyed, that land- wheneverpeasant appearto haveprovided the the end entryfines often peasant Indeed,in to dispose of customary with the Iever they needed competitive lords finescould be substitutedfor tenants,for in the long run commercialrents. 7 6 was not, at the start claimto the rightto raisefines Thelandlords' nor did it go uncontested. open and shut question, and however,an there were widespread the fifteenth century fines. And Throughout refusalsby peasantsto pay apparentlyquite successful centurywhen an continuedinto the sixteenth thissort of resistance ostensibly,have induced the land ratio should, 7 7 increasinglabour: andto pay a higherrent. to accepta deterioratingcondition their peasant took to open revoltto enforce Ultimately,in fact, the peasants sixteenthcentury known, the first half of the claims.As is well risingswhich threatened a period of majoragrarian of wasin England theme of the most serious social order. And a major and Ket's theentire the northin the mid-Is30s the revoltin in particular these-especially securityof peasanttenure, Rebellionin I549 was the arbitraryfines.78 thequestion of Lawrence Stone, The Crisis Problem,pp. 287-3I0. significanceof 76 Tawney, Agrarian I965), pp. 306-I0. The AristocracyI558-I64I (Oxford, the lord could gain economic ofthe as a mechanismby which questions theuse of fines "at will" It appearsto hinge on two remainscontroversial. to variable fines; controlof the land of "copyhold" land subject (I) the amount where the tenant's copy- inparticular: to chargetruly arbitraryfines amount of (2)the right of the lord For some estimates of the otherwiseheld by inheritance. pp. 297-300; Kerridge, holdwas fines, see Tawney, op. cit., Kerridge landsubject to variable Centuryand After, pp. 35-46. Problemsof the Sixteenth ensured "reasonablefines", Agrarian by inheritancegenerally tenant's right hasargued that copyhold that would not defeat the fines had to be set at a level of "reasonableness" thatis that date from which this doctrine the king's of inheritance. Still, the and enforcedby heritablecopyholds was recognized sort earlierthan uis-a-vis fines on produceno case of this Kerridgeappears to pp. 296, 296 n. 3, 307; courtsis unclear. See also, Tawney, Op. Cit., I586: Op. Cit., pp. 38-9. Stone, loc. Cit. of Incomes in Fifteenth-Centry Christopher Dyer, "A Redistribution Raftis, Tenureand Mobility, 77 and Present,no. 39 (April I968); "Landlords and England?",Past century, see B J. Harris, On the early sixteenth The BuckinghamEstates" pp. I98-9. in the Later Middle Ages: Tenants in England pp. I46-50. Present, no. 43 (May I969), Ket's Rebellion(I::list. Past and Problem,p. 307; S. T. Bindoff, 78 Tawney, Agrarian repr. London, I968), pp. 7-9. Assoc. pamphlet, London, I949; AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 63 If sueeessful, the peasant revolts of the sixteenth eentury, as one historianhas put it, might have "clipped the wings of rural capitalism".79But they did not sueeeed. Indeed, by the end of the seventeenth century English landlords corstrolledan over- whelmingproportion of the cultivableland-perhaps 70-5 per cent80 -and capitalistelass relationswere developingas nowhereelse, with momentousconsequenees for eeonomiedevelopment. Thus, in my view, it was the emergeneeof the elassicallandlord-eapitalist tenant-wagelabour structure which made possible the transformation of agriculturalproduetion in England,8land this, in turn, was the key to England'suniquely sueeessful overall eeonomie development. With the peasants'failure to establishessentially freehold eontrol over the land, the landlordswere able to engross,eonsolidate and enelose,to createlarge farms and to lease them to eapitalisttenants who could afford to make eapitalistinvestments. This was the indispensablepreeondition for signifieantagrarian advance, since agrieulturaldevelopment was predieatedupon signifieantinputs of eapital,involving the introduetionof new teehnologiesand a larger seale of operation. Sueh higher levels of agrieulturalinvestment weremade feasible through the developmentof a varietyof different leaseholdirlgarrangements, whieh embodied a novelform of landlord-

79 Ibid., p. 9. 80 G. E. Mingay, EnglishLanded Society in the EighteenthCentury (London I963), p. 25, gives a figure of 80-5 per cent for the proportionof land held by the landlord classes (that is "the great landlords" and the "gentry") in I790 (an additional, uncertainproportion was held by "freeholdersof a better sort", a category which presumablyincluded a significantnumber of capitalist owner- cultivators). He goes on to say that "the figuresfor the proportionof the land owned probablydid not change very significantlyover the hundredyears before I790, but there was certainly a shift in favour of the great landlords at the expense of the other two groups (that is the gentry and freeholders)". F. M. L. Thompson has estimated that freeholders (large and small) owned about one third of the land at the end of the seventeenth century: "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England Since the Sixteenth Century" Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xix (I966), p. 5I3. 81 This is not to say that preciselythese arrangementswere necessaryfor real agricultural breakthroughleading to economic development in this period- it is to say that some form of larger-scalecapitalist farming was required. Thus the only real alternativeto the "classical English" landlord-largetenant-wage labour form of capitalist agricultureseems to have been an equally capitalist system based on large-scaleowner-cultivators also generallyusing wage labour. The latterwas the structurewhich in fact emergedin Cataloniaat the end of the fifteenthcentury out of the previousperiod of agrarianstruggle in which the large peasants had been able to win not only essentially freehold rights over their lands, but in addition, the proprietorshipof large areas of land (masosronecs) which had been left vacant by demographic disaster in the later fourteenth century. Thus the characteristicunit of agriculturalownership and production in sixteenth-centuryCatalonia, the Masia, was typicallya very largebut compact farm. And this structuredid in fact provide the basis for significantand continuing agricultural advance throughout the early modern period. Vilar Catalogne,i, pp. 575-8, 584, 586, 588. See also above, pp. SI-2, and below, note 88. 64 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 tenant relationship. By virtue of these arrangementsthe capitalist tenants entered into essential partnership with landlords. They were assured that they could take a reasonable share of the increased revenue resulting from their capital investments and not have them confiscated by the landlords' rent increases.82 They were therefore set free to bring in those key technological innovations, most especially convertible husbandry systems and the "floating of the water meadows", as well as to make sizable investments in farm faciliiies, which were generallyfar less practicableon small unenclosed farms operated by peasants.83 This is not to say, of course, that peasant production was incapable of improvement. The point is that it could not provide the agrarian basis for economic development. Thus small scale farming could be especially effective with certain industrial crops (for example flax) as well as in viticulture, dairying and horticulture. But this sort of agriculture generally brought about increased yields through the intensificaton of labour rather than through the greater efficiency of a given unit of labour input. It did not, therefore, produce "development", except in a restricted, indeed misleading use of the term. Of course the very spread of this type of husbandry in "non-basic" agricultural commodities was, as in industry, predicated upon the growth (elsewhere) of basic food (grain) production. And improve-

82 Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, p. 46; E. L. Jones, "Agriculture and Economic Growth in England, I660-I750: Agricultural Change", TI. Econ. Hzst., xxv (I965). 83 On the strong advantages of large "capital" farms with respect to agricultural improvement, investment and general efficiency, see Kerridge, AgrarianProblems, pp. I2I-6, and G. E. Mingay, "The Size of Farms in the Eighteenth Century", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xiv (Ig62). It should be noted that some of the most important recent works dwell on the advantages of English agrarianclass relationsfor agriculturaldevelopment, but in the end tend to play down their significance. Thus in his "Editor's Introduction"to Agricultureand EconomicGrowth in EnglandI650-I8I5 (London, I967), E. L. Jones argues that the key to English agriculturaldevelopment was the introduction of new techiiques rather than changing institutional arrangements apparentlydismissing the idea that these were indissolubly linked. He states at one point (pp. I2-I3): "Novel systems of husbandrythus accountmuch more for the new 'responsiveness'of agriculturalsupply than do improvements in agrarianorganization". Nevertheless,Jones himself at other points emphasizes the crucial advantagesof large-scalecapitalist farming for agriculturaladvance and, moreover, provides the key intra- and internationalcomparisons which would tend to demonstratethe saliency of this connectionand, correlatively,to show up the barriersto improvementbuilt into peasant-dominatedagricultural systems. Thus, he says (p. I7), "the pattern of the countryside and the agrarianorganization which evolved in England made productionmore flexible and far more responsiveto the marketthan a peasantsystem could have been". He also gives the following case in point (p. 43): "In parts of the Midlands where the land had belonged to a few proprietorsand enclosure had come early, the 'new' crops had been sown and farmersspecialized in fatstock breed- ing. More usually, the 'peasant' farming of the Midland clays defied any change, except the pungent expedient of parliamentaryenclosure". AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 65 ments in the productivityof grain were, in fact, best achievedon largeconsolidated farms with majorcapital inputs.84 Even the emergenceof large-scaleunits of farmingdoes not, in itself, guaranteeagricultural improvement. As we shallsee, in those (relativelyrestricted) areas where big farmsemerged in France,they did not generallybring majorincreases in agriculturalproductivity. What proved, therefore,most significantfor English agricultural developmentwas the particularlyproductive use of the agricultural surpluspromoted by the specialcharacter of its ruralclass relations; in particular,the displacementof the traditionallyantagonistic relationshipin which landlord "squeezing" underminedtenant initiative,by an emergentlandlord-tenant symbiosis which brought mutualco-operation in investmentand improvement.85 That agriculturalimprovement was alreadyhaving a significant effecton Englisheconomic development by the end of the seventeenth centurycan be seen in a numberof ways; most immediatelyin the strikingpattern of relativelystable prices and (at least)maintenance of populationof the latterpart of the century;and in the long run in the interrelatedphenomena of continuingindustrial development and growthin the homemarket. Thus althoughEnglish population in this period reachedthe very high levels of the early fourteenth century(which at thattime hadmeant demographic crisis) there were not the same sort of violent fluctuationsin prices nor the crises of subsistencewhich grippedFrance and much of the continentin this period.86 Nor was there the markeddemographic decline which cameto dominatemost of Europeat this time, the famousmalthusian phase B.87 In short, Englandremained largely exempt from the "generaleconomic crisis of the seventeenthcentury" which sooner

84 B. H. Slicher Van Bath, "The Rise of Intensive Husbandry in the Low Countries", esp. pp. I35-7, I48-9, I53. As Slicher Van Bath concludes of the Flemish region of intensive husbandry(p. I53), "it iS not a picture of wealth but of scarcely controlled poverty". 85 See Jones, "Agricultureand Economic Growth in England, I660-I750". On large-scalefarming in early modern France, see below, note I I I . 86 For the avoidance of crises of subsistence in late seventeenth-century England, see A. B. Appleby, "Disease or Famine: A Study of Mortality in Cumberlandand Westmorland, I580-I640", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxxi (I973), esp. pp. 403, 430-I. For a comparisonof fluctuationsin prices between France and England in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century stressing England's avoidanceof the "violent fluctuations"which characterized much of France, see J. Meuvret3"Les oscillations des prix des cereales aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles en Angleterre et dans les pays du bassin parisien", lGtudesut'hzstoire economzque, pp. II3-24. 87 G. S. L. Tucker, "English Pre-Industrial Population Trends", Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xvi (I963), pp. 205-I8. This is not to deny the possibility that there was some slowing down in the rate of growth of population, even perhaps a temporary halt, in the late seventeenth andlor early eighteenth century. 66 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 70 or later struckmost of the continent.88This crisis, much like the previous"general economie crisis of the fourteenthcentury", was in the last analysisa crisis of agrarianproductivity, resulting as had its predecessorfrom the maintenanceof relationshipsof property or surplus-extractionwhich preventedany advancein productivity. By contrast,it was the transformationof the agrarianclass structure which had taken place over the period since the later fourteenth centurythat allowedEnglatld to increasesubstantially its agricultural productivityand thus to avoida repetitionof the previouscrisis. It seems,moreover, that agriculturalimprovement was at the root of those developmentalprocesses which, accordingto E. L. Jones, had allowedsome 40 per cent of the English populationto rnove out of agriculturalemployment by the end of the seventeenth century,mllch of this into industrialpursuits.89 Obviously,English industrialgrowth, predominantly in cloth, was in the first instance based on exports)spurred by overseasdemand. Yet such export- based spurtswere comrnonin Europethroughout the middle ages and the earlymodern period; but previouslynone had everbeen able to sustainitself. The inelasticityof agriculturaloutput, it seems,had alwaysset strict limits on the developmentof industrialproduction. Risingfood prices,if not a totalfailure of food supply,resulting from decliningagricultural productivity might directlystymie industry by limitingthe proportionof the populationwhich could devote itself to non-agriculturalpursuits. Otherwisethey would underminethe marketsfor industrialgoods eitherby forcingup wages(the cost of subsistence)and thus industrialprices or by cuttinginto the propor- tion of the population'sincome which was availablefor non-food purchases. These mechanismsmeant, in particular,that the general agricultural-demographiccrisis of the seventeenthcentury would also mean,for most of Europe,a long-tcrmcrisis of indwstry. This has been shown most clearly for severlteenth-centuryFrance by Goubert,who directlylinks the long-termdecline of the extensisTe textileindustry of Beauvaisin this periodto underlyingproblems in the productionof food.90 But a similarcase could seemingly be made for the declineof Italianindustry in the early seventeent-hcentury. Here drasticallyrising food pricesseem, as much as any otherfactor, to have been responsiblefor the enhanced(subsistence) wage costs which ostensiblypriced Italian goods out of their Europeanand

88 It is notable that Catalonia,one of the few areas to achieve agrariantrarls- formation with a concomitantincrease in agriculturalproductivity in this era, was also one of the fevn areas to escape the "general economic crisis of the seventeenth century", and, like England, to avoid demographic catastrophe while achievingcontinued economic development. Vilar, Catalogne,i, part III, esp. pp. 586, 588. See also above, note 8I. 89 Jones, "Editor's Introduction", Agricultureand EconomicGeotvlh, p. 2. 90Goubert3 Beauvais et les Beausaisis, pp. 585-7. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 67 especiallytheir easternMediterranean markets. Correlatively,the backward,largely peasant agriculture appears to have largelycut off the possibility of developinga significanthome market in Italy itself.9 Finally,although Dutch industryappears to have escaped the "seventeenth-centurycrisis" with relativelyminor damage,its failure to sustain continued developmentthrough the eighteenth centuryappears to have been boundup to an importantextent with an overwhelmingdependence on overseasgrain imports, which rose precipitatelyin price after I750.92 Thus whatdistinguished the Englishindustrial development of the early modern period was its continuous character,its ability to sustain itself and to provide its own self-perpetuatingdynamic. Here, once again,the key was to be found in the capitaliststructure of agriculture. Agriculturalimprovement not only madeit possible for an ever greaterproportion of the populationto leave the land to enterindustry; equally important, it provided,directly and indirectly, the growinghome marketwhich was an essentialingredient in Eng- land's continuedindustrial growth through the entire periodof the "generaleconomic crisis of the seventeenthcentury" in Europe.93 Thus, duringthe sixteenthand seventeenthcenturies, the prosperous class of tenantand yeomanfarmers, as well as landlords,appears to have offeredsignificant outlets for English industrialgoods.94 At the same time, and in the long run, especiallyfrom the later seven- 91On high wages as a basic cause of the decline of export-centredItalian industry from the early seventeenth century, see C. Cipolla, "The Economic Decline of Italy," in Brian Pullan (ed.), Crisis and Changein the Venetian Ecoslomy(London, I968), pp. I39-42. On problems of food supply and high food prices leadingto higher wages (subsistence),see B. Pullan, "Introduction" and "NVageEarners and the Venetian Economy";ibid., pp. I2-I4, I46-74. On the structuralroots of problems of food supply and the home market in the small-tenant, rent-squeezing organization of the Venetian mainland, see S. J. 'oolf, "Venice and the Terrafirma:Problems of the Change from Commercial to Landed Activities", ibid. esp. pp. I79-87. For the general problem of food supply in Italy and the Diediterranean,which intensified sharply in the latter part of the sixteenth century, see C. T. Smith, An Historical Geographyof WesternEurope Before I800 (New York, I967), pp. 4I6-I8. 9 This is suggested by E. L. Jones, "Editor's Introduction", Agriculture and EconomicGro7tJth, p. 2 I . 9 3 For continuedEnglish industrialgrowth into the later seventeenthcentury and the importantrole of the home marketin this process, see L. A. Clarkson The Pre-Ind2xstrialEconomy in EnglandISOO-I750 (London, I97I), ch. 4, esp. pp. II4-I5. See also, "The Origins of the IndustrialRevolution" (Conference Report), Past and Present, no. I7 (April I960), pp. 7I ff. Charles Wilson, F,ngland'sApprenticeship I603-I763 (London, I965), ch. 9, esp. pp. I85 and ff. F. J. Fisher, "The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Dark Ages of English Economic History", Economica,new ser., xxiv (I957). 94 W. G. Hoskins, "The LeicestershireFarmer in the Sixteenth Century" in his Essaysin LeicestershireHistory (Leicester, I950). F. J. Fisher, "London as an Engine of Economic Growth", in J. Bromley and E. H. Kossman (eds.), Britain and the Nethe1lands (London, I960); Fisher, "The Sisteenth and SeventeenthCenturies". 68 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 teenth and early eighteenthcenturies, continuing improvements in agriculturalproductivity combined with low food prices to give an extra marginof spendingpower to significantelements throughout the middle and perhapseven the lower class so as to expand the home marketand fuel the steadygrowth of industryinto the period of the industrialrevolution.95 English economic development thus depended upon a nearly unique symbiotic relationshipbetween agricultureand industry. It was indeed, in the last analysis,an agriculturalrevolution, based on the emergenceof capitalistclass relationsin the countrysidewhich made it possiblefor Englandto becomethe first nationto experienceindustrialization. The contrastingfailure in France of agrariantransformation seems to have followed directly from the continuingstrength of peasant landholdinginto the early modern period, while it was disintegratingin England. Referencehas alreadybeen madeto the relativesuccess with whichpeasant communities throughout Western Europewere able to resist landlordpower in the medievalperiod. In particular,the long-termprocess by whichvillage after village in variousFrench regions was able to win certainimportant economic and politicalrights to use the commons,to fix rents and secure hereditability,and to replacethe old village mayorswith its own elected representatives has been traced with special care by historians,who have remarkedupon its historicalsignificance.96 Whatstill requiresexplanation, however, is the abilityof the French peasantsnot only to establishcertain freedoms and propertyrights znis-a-vis the landlordsin the first place, but to retainthem over an extraordinarilylong historicalepoch - in particular,through the periodin whichtheir Englishcounterparts ceased to be ableto do so. Any answermust be very tentative. But in the light of English developments,what appearsto lie behindthe strikingpersistence of peasantproprietorship in Franceis its close interconnectionwith the particularform of evolutionof the Frenchmonarchical state. Thus in France,unlike England,the centralizedstate appearsto have developed(at leastin largepart) as a "class-like"phenomenon, that is as an independentextractor of the surplus,in particularon the

95 For this argument, see Jones, "Editor's Introduction", Agricultureand Economic Growth; Jones, "Agriculture and Economic Growth in England I660-I750; AgriculturalChange"; E. L. Jones, "The AgriculturalOrigins of Industry", Past and Present, no. 40 (July I968)- A. H. John, "Agricultural Productivity and Economic Growth in England, I700-I750", 71. Econ. Hist. XXV (I965); A. H. John, "Aspects of English Economic Growth in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century", Economica,new ser. xxviii (I96I)- D. E. C. Eversley, "The Home Marketand Economic Growth l?nEngland, I750-I780" in E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay (eds.), Land, Labourand Populationin the IndustrialRevolution (London, I967). 96 See esp. Fossier, La terre et les hommesen Picardie, ii, pp. 708-30. Also above, note 73. See, in addition, Fourquin, Campagnesde la regionparisienne, part I, ch. iii, esp. p. I90. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 69 basis of its arbitrarypower to tax the land. To the extent that the peasantswere able to uniteagainst the landlords,to win theirfreedom from serfdomand to gain the essentialsof freeholdproperty-and they did so, as noted, to a signifieantdegree - they tendedto open themselves to potential exploitationas a financial base for the monarehy. For if the peasants'loeally-based organization whieh was the essentialsouree, and effeetivelimit, of their power might at times be adequateto withstandthe claimsof the local landlord,it was far less viableagainst the pretensionsof the centralizingstate, at least in the long run. Correlatively,the state could develop,as it ultimatelydid, as a competitorwith the lords, largelyto the extent to which it could establishrights to extractthe surplusof peasant production. It thereforehad an interestin limitingthe landlords' rentsso as to enablethe peasantsto pay morein taxes- and thus in interveningagainst the landlordsto end peasantunfreedom and to establishand securepeasant property. Probablythe archetypalcase of the stateactually desTeloping in this manneras an independentclass-like surplus-extractor in relationto the emergenceof an entrenchedlandholding peasantry can be found in the rise of the "mini-absolutisms"of the west Germanprinces in the early modern period. In these states the princes pursued a conscious policy of protecting a peasant proprietorshipwhich, emerging from the medieval period, was already relatively well ensconced. In particular,the princessought to defendthe security and extent of peasantlandholding, with the aim of providingtheir own independenttax base (Bauernschutspolitik). Thus peasantdues were fixed in law; peasanthereditability was retainedor restored; and in some cases land which had formerlybeen in peasanthands but had then been lost to the nobilitywas returnedto the peasants. At the sametime the princesdid whatthey couldto reconstitutethe scatteredparcels of peasantland into unifiedtenements and, on the other hand, acted to preventthe peasantsfrom sub-dividint,their holdings. In the end the princessucceeded in turningthe peasant holdinginto a unifiedfiseal unit for taxation.97 But, correlatively, by the seventee1lthcentury the west Germanpeasantry appears to havebeen able to gain eontrolof up to go per eent of the land.98 The stages in the correspondingprocess by whieh the Freneh peasantrywas able to consolidateits own powerful (if far less 97 F. Lutge, Geschichteder deutschenAgrarterfassung (Stuttgart, I963), pp. I00-2, I34-54. For the foregoing discussion of west German developments I am deeply indebted to Mr. Joel Singer. 98 Eberhard NVeis, "Ergebnisse eines Vergleichs de grundherrschaftlichen StrukturenDeutschlands und Frankreichesvom I3. bis zum Ausgang des I8. Jahrhunderts", Vierteljahrschriftfur Sozial- und Wirtschaftvgeschichte,lvii (I970), pp. II4, esp. p. I3. As a result, the German nobility appearsto have been forced into an extraordinarydegree of dependence upon the princes, becoming the administrativearistocracy par excellence. 7o PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 70 extensive)grip on the land in relationshipto monarchicaldevelop- ment are far from clear. One turning point does seem to have occurred,at least in the Parisregion, during the middlepart of the thirteenthcentury in what emerged as decisive conflicts between peasantsand landlordsover the landlords'attempts to extend the seigneurialtaille (tallage). It was aroundthe questionof the taille, as we have noted, that the questionof peasantunfreedom in this region came to be decided. The lords aimed to consolidatetheir right to tax their customarypeasants at will. Their successwould haveestablished the peasants'unfree status, exposing them to further arbitraryseigneurial levies. However, the peasants of the Paris region resisted with force and in great number. What seems to have turned the tide in their favour was the interventionof the monarchicalstate againstthe landlords. Whenthe crownagreed to considerthe case, it recognizedby implicationthe peasants'free legal status,paving the way for fixed rents and effectiveproprietor- ship.99 Perhapseven more decisive in the long run were certain actionstaken by the state duringthe fifteenthcentury. In this era the monarchyseems to have generallyconfirmed the integrityof the cens (peasanthereditary tenure). It thus remainedlegally difficult for the landlordsto appropriateto their own demesnesthe large number of holdings subject to this tenure abandoned as a consequenceof war and demographicdecline. The resultwas the preservationof the areaof land underpeasant proprietorship. It is notablethat it was at just this time that the monarchywas taking decisive steps formallyto organizethe peasantcommunity around village assemblieswith elected syndics, in order to administerand collect the dramaticallyincreasing royal taxes.l?0 Certainly,by the earlymodern period the consolidationof peasant propertyin relationshipto the developmentof the Frenchstate had createda very differentsort of classstructure in the Frenchcountry- side from that which had emergedin England. And there is no better index of these contrastingstructures than the dramatically differentsorts of peasantrevolts which markedthe earlymodern era in bothcountries. In England,of course,peasant revolt was directed against the landlords, in a vain last-ditch struggle to defend disintegratingpeasant proprietorshipagainst advancingcapitalist encroachment. In France the target of peasant revolt was, typically,the crushingtaxation of the absolutiststate, which ironically

99 Marc Bloch, "Blanche de Castille et les serfs du Chapitre de Paris", Melanges Historiques,2 vols. (Paris, I963), i, pp. 462-go; Fourquin, Op. Cit., part I, ch. iii. 100Ibid., pp. I80, 377, 382, 430-2 and ff., 5I4-I5; J. F. Lemarignier,La Francemedieale: institutionset societe(Paris, I970), p. 3I8; Marc Bloch, French Rural History (London, I966), pp. I28-9. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 7I had been instrumentalin securingand protectingpeasant proprietorship (andthus impedingcapitalist development).l?l Thus in Francestrong peasantproperty and the absolutiststate developed in mutual dependenceupon one another. The state increasedits owrl power by virtue of its abilityto get betweenthe landlordsand the peasants,to ensurepeasant freedom, hereditability and fixed rents, and thus to use peasantproduction, uia non-parlia- mentarytaxation, as the directsource of revenuefor royal strength and autonomy. As Marc Bloch pointed out, in the seventeenth century the highpointof absolutistdevelopment in France a keyfunction of the intendants,the directadministrative representatives of the monarchyin the provinces,was "to pretectrural communities, ripe materialfor taxation,from intemperateexploitation by their landlords".102CorrelatisTely, the landlordswaged a fiercedefensive strugglethroughout the periodto protect"their" peaJants from the encroachmentsof a royalfiscal machine which soughtsystematically to extend its scope withinthe countryside.1''& In England, by contrast,monarchical centralization developed, especiallyfrom the laterfifteenth century, in relationshipto and with ultimate dependence uporl the landlord classes, as was most dramaticallyevidenced in the contemporarleousgrowth of parlia- mentaryinstitutions (while they decayedin France). The English peasantry,as we have seen, throughflight and resistancewere able to win their freedomfrom serfdomby the fifteenthcentury. Their relativefailure, however, to establishfreehold rights over much of the land (as had their French counterpartsat a far earlier date) deprivedthe monarchyof a potentialISnarlcial base in the peasantry for developingits independenceof the landlords. Thus monarchical centralizationcould not take an absolutistand peasant-basedform. By the sametoken, the monarchy'sreliance upon the landlordsin its drivc towardcentralization in the later fifteenthand earlysixteenth centuriesprevented its playinga decisiverole in aidingthe peasants lul For the English revolts, see above, p. 62. On peasant revolts in France see the summary article by J. H. M. Salmon, "Venality of Office and Popular Sedition in Seventeenth-CenturyFrance", Past and Present,no. 37 (July I 967). Although there is sharp debate on many aspects of these revolts, virtually all parties to the argument,including the leading protagonistsBoris Porchnevand Roland Mousnier, agree that the opposition to state taxation was central. See Boris Prochnev, Les soulevementspopulaires en France de I623 a I648 (Moscow, I 948; Paris, I 963 edn.); Roland Mousnier, CCRecherchessur les soulevements populairesen France avant la Fronde", Revue d'histoiremoderne et contemporaizze,v (I968), pp. 8I-I I3 . 02 Bloch, FrenchRural History, p. I34. 103 For a revealingaccount of the struggle between the French monarchyand the French nobility to protect the peasantryin orderto exploit it for themselves focusing especially on the attempts to extend royal land-taxationand noble resistance to these attempts in the name of their peasants, see P. Deyon, "A propos des rapportsentre la noblesse francaiseet la monarchieabsolue pendant la premieremoitie du XVIIe siecle", RevueHistorique, CCXXXi (I964), pp. 34I-56. 72 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER70 in their abortivestruggle for freehold,which occurredin precisely this period. Importantsections of the Englishnobility and gentry were willing to supportthe monarchy'scentralizing political battle against the disruptive activities of the magnate-warlordsin the interestof achievingorder and stable conditions for economicdevelopment. But it was preciselythese samelandlord elements who were most concernedto underminepeasant property in the interestsof enclosureand consolidation... and agriculturalcapitalism.l04 It cannotbe saidthat the Frenchlandlords did not wish to consolidateholdings. But the pointis that in orderto do so theycould not, as in England,merely raise rents or finesto impossiblelevels and thus evict the small tenant at the expirationof his lease or copyhold. Throughmost of France,state-supported law assuredhereditability and fixed fines (lods et qJentes)for customarytenures. Thus the landlordmight have to buy up countlesssmall peasantholdings in order to amass a consolidatedunit. And this was rarely easy to accomplish. On the one hand, the peasant had every positive incentiveto hold onto his holding, for it formed the basis for his existence, and that of his family and heirs. On the other hand, purely economic forces seem to have worked to underminethe peasants'property only in the very long term. Thus the point is that the peasantproprietor was under relativelylittIe pressureto operatehis plot as profitablyor eEcientlyas his potentialcompetitors in orderto survive,for therewas no directmeans for suchcompetitors to "defeat"him. In other words, the peasantdid not have to be competitive,because he did not reallyhave to be able to "hold his place"in the worldof the market,either the marketfor tenantsor the marketfor goods. Unlike a tenant,the peasantproprietor did not have to providea level of rent equalto what the landlordmight get from any other tenant-or else be evicted at the expirationof his

104 For the process of centralizationunder the Tudors, especially the inter- relationship between the crown and those sections of the landed class (noble and non-noble) who supported centralizationagainst the magnate-warlords see L. Stone, "Power", in Crisisof the Aristocracy,ch. v., as well as the series of works by M. E. James: 24 TudorMagnate and the TudorState (Borthwick Papers, no. 30, York, I966); Changeand Continuityin the TudorNorth (ibid. no. 27, York, I965); "The First Earl of Cumberland and the Decline of Northern Feudalism", Northern History, i (I966)- "The Concept of Order and the NorthernRising of I569", Past andPresent, no. 60 (August I973). The researchesof these authors are beginningto provide detailedcase studies which demonstrate the important overlap between those landlord elements, both noble and non-noble, who supported royal centralizationin the interests of social peace and public orderand those who wished to pursuehighly commercial and progressivepolicies with regard to their land-consolidation, enclosure, agriculturalimprovement. On this point I have benefited from reading an unpublishedessay by EleanorSearle, "The Jack Cade Rebellion: Social Unrest in England I450-I460". On the developmentof parliamentin this period, the fundamental works are the many books and essays by G. R. Elton and J. E. Neale. AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPMENT 73 lease. Unlikethe independentartisan, he did not have to be able to produeeeheaply enough to sell his goods profitablyat the market priee or else go out of business. All that was necessaryfor survivalfor the peasantproprietor (assuming of coursethat he was a food produeer)was sufficientoutput to providefor his family's subsisteneeand to payhis taxes(and generally fixed customary rents); and this eouldoften be supplementedthrough wage labour. Of eourse,merely maintaining subsistenee was rarelyeasy for the peasantry,especially the largenumbers with relatively small holdings. Demographicgrowth and the subdivisionof holdings diminished the size of the peasant's productive base, either relatively or absolutely. Mear}while,the growthof taxation,especially consequent upon wars, meant that greaterproduction was necessarymerely to survive(thus, ironically, the statewhich in the firstinstance provided the primarysupport for peasantproprietorship was indirectly perhaps also the majorsource of its disintegration). Finally, rising prices over the perioddecreased the valueof the supplementarywage often requiredto make the peasant'sholding viable. Throughoutthe earlymodern period many peasantswere indeed forced deeply into debt and were ultimatelyobliged to sell their holdings.105It was no aeeident,moreover, that the greatestnumber of easualtiesappear to have occurredin times of war (espeeiallythe Wars of Religion and the Fronde)and of dearth(particularly the "subsistencecrises" of the later seventeenthcentury) and to have been concentrated in the zones imnnlediatelyaffected by militaryaction (for examplethc Parisregion and Burgundy).106Yet even such long-termpressures and short-termcatastrophes seer-s to have workedtheir undermining effects on peasantproprietorship relatively sporadically and slowly over the whole of France. The corltinuingstrength of the French peasantcommunity and French peasantproprietorship even at the end of the seventeenthcentury was cvident in the factthat some 45-50 per cent of the cultivatedland was still in peasantpossession, often scatteredthroughout the open fields.l07 In England,by contrast, the owner-occupiersat this time held no more than 25-30 per cent of the land lo8

105 See P. Goubert, ;'The French Peasantry of the Seventeenth Century: A Regional Example", Past and Present,no. I0 (November I956), p. 75. 106 For case studies of the destruction of peasant proprietorship,see esp. Jean Jacquart,La crise ruraleen Ile-de-FranceI550-I670 (Paris, I974), passin; Marc Venard, Bourgeoiset paysans au XVIIe siecle: Recherchesur le role des bourgeoisparisiens dans la vie agricoleau sud de Paris au XVIIe siecle (Paris, I957); P. de Saint Jacob,"lMutations economiques et socialesdans les campagnes bourguignonnesa la fin du XVIe siecle", Studes Rurales,i (I 96 I), pp. 34-49 . 107 p. Goubert, "Le paysan et la terre: seigneurie, tenure, exploitation", in E. Labrousse et al. (eds.), Histoire economiqueet socialede la France,ii (Paris, I970), pp. I35-9. "It is commonly admittedthat the peasants of France were able to 'possess' . . . a mere half of the French soil . . ." (p. I35). 108 See above, note 80. 70 PASTAND PRESENT NUMBER 74 that Given the Frenchproperty structure) it is hardlysurprising the sixteenthand therising population,markets and grainprices of centuriesdid not lead in Francetc agriculturalimprove- seventeenth cycle of under- mentnbut ulerelyto a renewalof the old malthusian Given the strengthof peasantproperty, supported development. takeadvantage bythe exploitativestate, the landlordcould not usually pricesfor land and agriculturalproducts by inlproving ofincreasing the very andby increasingoutput, because this usually entailed consolidation. The landlordstherefore took the only difficulttask of share generallyopen to them: to try to obtainan ever greater course their demesne ofa constantor even decliningtotal product. On generallyof small separatedplots, they imposed land,composed the leases on draconianterms) designed to squeeze short-term their level of peasanttenants by raising their rents and lowering by takingadvantage of the growingdemand for holdings subsistence of course, arisingfrom demographicpressure. This procedure, possibilityof agriculturalimprovement by the tenantsn reducedthe left over they wouldrarely have sufficientfunds for inrestment since in England afterpaying the rerlt.109 The differencefrom the situation landlordswould obtain increasesin rent by co-operating -where andthereby theirtenants in capitalimprovements on largefarms with a largerskare of increasingtotal output)rather than by simplytaking or decliningoutput at the expense of the tenantstlo- a constant in the sector couldnot have been more stark.1ll At the sametime, account of this procedure of "squeesing" the leaseholding l?9For a good metairieer l'evolationagraire tenantsand its economic effects, see Merle, La dela Gatinepoitevine. "Rent anciently formed a 110See Adam Smith's analogous observations: of agriculturethan now .... In the progress largerproportion of the produce diminishes rent, though it increasesin proportionto the extent, ofimprovement, Wealthof Nations) ed. Edwin in proportionto the produce of the Iand". The Cannan(New York, I937), p. 3I8. where this respect that in those relativelyrestricted areas 1ll It is striking in the landlords generally consolidated holdings were created in France, large to their large tenants, with the result applied the same "squeezing" policy were the relativelysmall number of large farms few improvements that even on 3z6-30, and) in particular, pp. adopted. See Jacquart, op. cit.:, pp. 289-9I, Why VenardnBourgeois et paysans, esp. pp. I I7-I8. 747-8, 756-7. Also, for the "English system' the landlordsadopted this approach,rather than opting uncertain. But the reason may once agairl of landlord-tenantco-operation, is was still overall structureof landholdingin France which be bound up with an the generallystagnant dominatedby peasantproprietorship-and with heavily tended to entail. Most especially, economy which this landholding structure great pool England, French agriculturehad at its disposal a in comparisonwith for employment-that of agriculturallabour without alternativeopportunities and this naturallyencouraged labour-intensive is at relativelyvery low wages techniques. of cultivation,the neglect of capital-usirlgand labour-saving methods capital improvement of his land) the With no apparent incentive to promote in areas reErainfrom "squeezing" his tenant. Thus even lord had no reasoll to portions of the surface large consolidatedfarms dominatedconsiderable where a sea of petty proprietorswho needed area,they Stlll tended to be surroundedby wage labourers in order to make ends meet. (See to hire themselves out as (cont. on p. 75) AGRARIANCLASS STRUCTURE AND ECONOMICDEVELOPA1ENT 75 of free peasantproprietors, to repeat,the holdingswere dividedand subdivided. This too naturallyreduced the generallevel of peasant income,the surplusavailable for potentialinvestment in agriculture, and the slim hope of agriculturalinnovation. Meanwhile,of course, the state,which had helpedto maintainthe peasantson the land,rlow helpedto reducetheir enjoymentof it by confiscatingmuch of what was left of the peasants'product through ever higher taxes. In sum, it is not difficultto comprehendthe dismal patternof economicdevelopment imposed by this class structurein France. Not only was there a long-termfailure of agriculturalproductivity, bllt a correspondinginability to developthe home market. Thus, ironically,the most completefreedom and propertyrights for the rural populationmeant poverty and a self-perpetuatingcycle of backwardness. In England,it was preciselythe absence of such rights that facilitated the onset of real ecollomic development. Urziversityof California,Los Angeles RobertBrenner

(270te 1Il cont.) Jacquart,Op. Cit.) pp. 332-48, esp. 341, 348; Venard, Op. Cit.) pp. 27-g.) It was not merely that strong peasant rights in the land tended to be bound up with subdivision of holdings (partibleinheritance) and the rapid concentration of the peasant population on tiny holdings. Probablymore significant,due to the lack of economic development elsewhere in the economy (industry, the towns), which was itself the result of the establishedpeasant-dominated agrarian structure,this ruralsemi-peasantry'semi-proletariat, unlike the English agricultural labourers,had virtually nowhere to go (increasing pressure on the land meant downwardpressure on wages). Their natural tendency to remain on their mini-holdings was thus greatly intensified by the economic necessity do so. Thus peasant agriculture set up yet another vicious cycle of back- wardnessthwartiIlg agricultural capitalism even where its outwardforms (large consolidatedholdings farmed by big tel1antsusing wage labour) were present.