In the 15th century most English people were free peasant owners. Serfdom had practically gone by the end of the 14th, and even the farm labourers had cottages, four or more acres, and the common land for their cattle, wood and turf. A lord's power then rested on how many subjects he had, which meant on how many peasants held land. That world allowed what Chancellor Fortescue praised as the wealth of the people, but it shut out capitalist wealth. The break came in the last third of the 15th century. Bands of feudal retainers were dissolved and thrown on the labour market, and the great lords made a far larger proletariat by driving peasants off the land and seizing the commons. The rise of Flemish wool manufacture raised the price of wool in England and gave the push. The new nobility, for which money was the power of all powers, had a cry: turn arable land into sheep-walks. Harrison saw seventeen, eighteen or twenty houses shrunk in a single manor. Henry VII in 1489 forbade pulling down any farmhouse with twenty acres, and a law of 1533 limited flocks to 2,000 sheep where some owners had 24,000. For 150 years the complaints and the laws were alike fruitless.
Marx says the laws failed because capitalism needed the opposite of what they protected: a degraded, almost servile mass of people. The same fight went on over the labourer's four acres. Roger Crocker was condemned in 1627 for building a cottage without them, and a royal commission in 1638 tried to enforce the old laws. In the end, Dr. Hunter reports, landlords and farmers worked hand in hand against the rule, because a few acres to the cottage would make labourers too independent. The Reformation then gave the expropriation a new and frightful push. Church lands, which covered a great part of England, were given to royal favourites or sold cheaply to speculating farmers who drove out the hereditary sub-tenants. The monasteries' inmates were thrown into the proletariat, and Queen Elizabeth cried that the poor lay everywhere. In the 43rd year of her reign the nation had to admit pauperism with a poor-rate. After the Restoration the landlords got rid of their duties to the State, covered the loss with taxes on the common people, and claimed the land as modern private property. The glorious Revolution then brought in William of Orange and a new set of landlords who gave away, sold or simply annexed Crown estates, the base of the oligarchy's princely domains. By about 1750 the yeomanry had gone.
In the 18th century the law itself became the tool. Acts for the enclosure of commons were decrees by which landlords granted themselves the people's land. Marx quotes the complaints. In Hertfordshire 24 farms were melted into three. In Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, where 1,500 acres were once ploughed, some lordships did not plough 50. A hundred houses in an open-field village dwindled to eight or ten. Four or five graziers could swallow a lordship that had supported twenty or thirty farmers. Dr. Price saw that little farmers would become labourers who must buy everything at market, so that there would be more labour because there would be more compulsion. A defender of enclosure agreed that this was an advantage. Between 1765 and 1780, Eden admits, agricultural wages fell below the minimum and were topped up from the poor-rate. Eden's own comfort was that the right proportion of pasture to arable had at last been reached. Marx asks whether the people got a farthing for the 3,511,770 acres of common land that were taken between 1801 and 1831.
