A Liberal
Dose
June 15,
2023
Troy D.
Smith
“Dispossessing
the Poor, Part 2- Building Fences”
[note- this is part of a series. Previous installments are linked below]
Last week we talked about feudalism and the commons in
Europe, and how things started to change in the 16th century.
Discovery of the New World had opened up global trading, which made money much
more important than it had previously been. Oh, there had always been trade,
and money had been around for millennia. But money was not what conferred power
in the Middle Ages, it was the control of land. Many nobles were “land rich and
cash poor” and it didn’t matter much. For simple farmers, you might come across
some money now and then, and use it, but mostly you worked the land and were
self-sufficient. You grew what you needed, supplemented by hunting and fishing
in the commons (which were owned by everybody) and by trading items here and
there with neighbors. The whole society didn’t RUN on money.
Two things happened to change that after the Plague. First,
English wool was in high demand in Europe. Lords who were not receiving much
real income from the land in their tenure decided that raising more sheep on
that land WOULD bring income, and in the form of money which was becoming
easier to use (“money travels”- you can use it in other places and it will not
go bad while it is getting there.) Therefore, in the mid-1500s, English nobles
started practicing “enclosure” -which is just what it sounds like. Fences and
walls. Usually in the form of stone walls, these enclosures were built on the
commons. Much woodland was leveled to make room for sheep pasturage. Fencing
off these areas meant they no longer belonged to everyone- they belonged solely
to the noble. Peasants were cut off from them. We established last week that peasants
could not survive simply on what they could farm for their noble liege (as much
of it was taken from them). Now, if they followed their previous practices,
they would be arrested or hung as poachers. As a result, many of them moved
away from the village farms and into cities, hoping to find jobs, which most
did not. By the late 1500s cities -especially London -were teeming with poor,
unemployed, landless people. Those who remained on farms had a very difficult
time of it, and certainly had lost any vestige of leverage they may once have
had.
Here’s the second thing. Over time, European elites,
philosophers, and merchants began to associate a free flow of money as evidence
a society had left savagery and entered modern civilization. By the 1700s, this
was associated with urban living and the factory system. Labor must be
specialized, Adam Smith argued, not broad. If there are 18 steps to making a
pin, with a different worker trained specifically for each step, many more pins
enter the market and more money is made -for the owner of the pin factory and
for the workers. More money is thus injected into the system, benefitting
everyone. Well, almost everyone. It is not good, Smith argued, for one person
to have a BUNCH of skills… like a farmer has to have. Because they are
self-sufficient, not making much money yet still getting by -they are not
contributing to “society” in the form of the economy. Yet we need farmers… but
do we, really? Other thinkers of the time stressed that we need FARMS, but not
farmers… if those farms can be corporatized and workers hired, that’s much
better. In short, people who were not maximizing their land and making it a
commodity, and who were only producing enough for themselves, were a burden on
society even if they took nothing from that society. Poor = bad. Intentionally
poor, due to not trying to get rich and being content with getting by… that, in
the eyes of the upper crust, was downright wicked.
These attitudes about simple farmers and poor workers were
about to travel across the ocean.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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