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STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM by MAURICE DOBB
STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
BY MAURICE DOBEB, M.A.
LECTURER IN ECONOMICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
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INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
Copyright, 1947, by INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS Co., INC.
Revised Edition © Copyricnt 1963 By Maurice Dogs Second printing, 1968 Third printing, 1970
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-13744
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Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
PREFACE : : : . : : . F Z 7 vii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION . : . : : : : ix 1. Capitalism , : . - . . 5 5 j I ut. The Decline of Feudalism and the Growth of Towns . : 33 ut. The Beginnings of the Bourgeoisie , ; : , : 83 1v. The Rise of Industrial Capital . : , - . » 123 v. Capital Accumulation and Mercantilism . . 2 wn? S099 vi. Growth of the Proletariat . : : . ‘i . 221 vu. The Industrial Revolution and the Nineteenth Century : 255 vi. The Period between the Two Wars and its Sequel. : . 320 Postscript: After the Second World War i : : . - 387
INDEX . j 5 ; F : , : 3 ‘ 394
PREFACE
A work of this kind, which is concerned with generalizing about historical development on the basis of material already collected and arranged by other hands, runs a grave danger of falling between two stools, and of displeasing both the economist, who often has little time for history, and the historian, who may dismiss it as insufficiently grounded in the first-hand knowledge that comes from actual field-work. To the economist the author may appear as an irrelevant wanderer from his proper territory, and to the historian as an intruding amateur. Of this danger and of his own imperfect equipment for the task the author has, at least, not been unaware. He has, nevertheless, been encouraged to persevere by the obstinate belief that economic analysis only makes sense and can only bear fruit if it is joined to a study of historical development, and that the economist concerned with present-day problems has certain questions of his own to put to historical data. He has been fortified by the conviction that a study of Capitalism, in its origins and growth, so much neglected by economists (other than those of a Marxist persuasion), is an essential foundation for any realistic system of economics.
There are those who deny that history can do more for the economist than verify whether particular assumptions (e.g. the assumption of perfect competition) are in some simple sense true of particular periods, and that all else is facile and dangerous extrapolation of past trends into the future. Such persons seem to ignore, firstly the fact that any economic forecast must rest on certain assumptions about tendencies to change (or their absence) the probability of which cannot be estimated at all without reference to the past ; secondly, that the relevance of the questions which a particular theory tries to answer—whether a given structure of assumptions and definitions affords an abstract model which is sufficiently representative of actuality to be serviceable—can only be judged in the light of knowledge about the form of development and the sequence of events in the past. In other words, it is not a matter simply of verifying particular assumptions, but of examining the relationships within a com-
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Vili PREFACE
plex set of assumptions and between this set as a whole and changing actuality. It is a matter of discovering from a study of its growth how a total situation is really constructed : which elements in that situation are more susceptible to change, and which are most influential in producing change in others. It is a matter of putting questions to economic development in order to discover what are the correct questions to ask both of the past and of the present and what are the crucial relationships on which to focus attention.
At any rate, this collection of historical studies has not been hastily undertaken, and the author has not lacked the guidance and instruction of friends who are themselves expert in various parts of the field. Having had its germ in some jejune chapters of twenty years ago about the origins of capitalist enterprise, the work has grown discontinuously over the intervening period. This disordered growth, with its periodic botching and recon- struction, may have caused the final form at many points to be shapeless and diffuse. But the child once born proved too intractable to be remoulded entirely, and had either to die in obscurity or to brave the public eye with all the ungainly traits of its upbringing.
For instruction in many aspects of the history of the late Middle Ages the author owes a considerable debt to Professor Postan, Dr. Beryl Smalley and Mr. Edward Miller, and for guidance concerning the Tudor and the Stuart age to Mr. Christopher Hill and Mr. Rodney Hilton, and concerning the industrial revolution to Mr. H. L. Beales. Mr. R. B. Braith- waite afforded guidance on a special point touching philo- sophy ; and Miss Dona Torr richly supplied suggestions and searching criticism from her store of historical knowledge, especially of the nineteenth century and of the literature of Marxism. But for the signs that remain in these pages of ignorance unconquered these guides can in no way be held responsible.
It should perhaps be added that no pretence is made that these studies do more than answer certain specific questions. Certain aspects only of economic development have been selected ; although the selection has been made in the belief that these aspects have paramount significance. Comparative data from other countries have been introduced in so far, but only in so far, as the comparison appeared to illuminate these particular enquiries. The author is under no illusion that he
PREFACE ix
has written a history of Capitalism ; and a reader will perhaps be more tolerant of them if he remembers that these studies do not pretend to afford more than a first sketch for certain portions of a complete historical picture. M. H. D. CAMBRIDGE, November 1945.
NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
A brief postscript on the post-war scene has been added to bridge the decade and a half since the book was first published. Otherwise, no attempt has been made to revise or rewrite, and the text of the original has been left unchanged.
M. H. D. CAMBRIDGE October 1962
CHAPTER ONE CAPITALISM
I
It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the term Capitalism, which in recent years has enjoyed so wide a currency alike in popular talk and in historical writing, should have been used so variously, and that there should have been no common measure of agreement in its use. What is more remarkable is that in economic theory, as this has been expounded by the traditional schools, the term should have appeared so rarely, if at all.1| There is even a school of thought, numbering its adherents both among economists and historians, which has refused to recognize that Capitalism as a title for a determinate economic system can be given an exact meaning. In the case of economists this is largely because the central concepts of their theory, as customarily stated, are modelled in a plane of abstraction that is innocent of those historically relative factors in terms of which Capitalism can alone be defined. In the case of historians who adopt this nihilistic standpoint, their attitude seems to spring from an emphasis upon the variety and complexity of historical events, so great as to reject any of those general categories which form the texture of most theories of historical interpretation and to deny any validity to frontier- lines between historical epochs. No period of history, it is said, is ever made of whole cloth ; and since all periods are complex admixtures of elements, it is a misleading simplification to label any section of the historical process with the title of a single element. A system like Capitalism may be spoken of abstractly as describing an aspect which in varying measure has charac- terized numerous periods of history. But as such it is an abstract economic notion, not an historical one ; and to trace back the
1 Sombart, in his article on the subject in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, says: “* This term is not found in Gide, Cauwes, Marshall, Seligman or Cassel, to mention only the best-known texts. In other treatises such as those of Schendier, Adolf Wagner, Richard Ehrenburg and Philipovich, there is some discussion of capitalism, but the concept is subsequently rejected.” Neither Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy nor the Dictionnaire de Economie Politique includes the term Capitalism.
2 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
+
origins of any such “‘ system” is generally a vain pursuit that can have no end. One may suspect that this attitude is reinforced by a more topical consideration. If Capitalism does not exist as an historical entity, critics of the present economic order who call for a change of system are tilting at windmills ; and Marx in particular, who was originally responsible for the talk about a capitalist system, was following a will o’ the wisp. Some have been quite outspoken about this, and, like a reviewer of Professor Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, have denounced the term as being no more than a political catchword.
To-day, after half a century of intensive research in economic history, this attitude is rarely regarded by economic historians as tenable, even if they may still hold the origin of the term to be suspect. True, we find the leading historian of Mercantilism dismissing the notion of “ modern capitalism ”’ as ‘‘ that unwhole- some Irish stew’. But the prevailing view of those who have studied the economic development of modern times is summed up by Professor Tawney in a well-known passage. ‘‘ After more than half a century of work on the subject by scholars of half a dozen different nationalities and of every variety of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists, or to suggest that if it does exist, it is unique among human institutions in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eternity, or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids that history to be disinterred, is to run wilfully in blinkers. ... An author... is unlikely to make much of the history of Europe during the last three centuries if, in addition to eschewing the word, he ignores the fact.” * But if to-day Capitalism has received authoritative recognition as an historical category, this affords no assurance that those who claim to study this system are talking about the same thing. Some might think that a variety of usage gave little ground for comment and could dono great harm. But the differ- ence of verbal usage is not only associated with a different emphasis in the search for what is relevant among the multitude of historical incidents and with a different principle of selection in composing the chronicle of events, but is apt to lead to a different mode of interpretation and a different causal-genetic
1 Professor E. Heckscher in Economic History Review, vol. VII, p. 45. He adds that it can only have “a distinct meaning ” if it is “‘ connected with what is called in economic science capital *—in which sense, i.e. of the existence of capital, different
stages of history have differed only in degree. 2 Preface to 1937 Edition of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.
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CAPITALISM 3
story. If it is the pattern which historical events force upon us, and not our own predilections, that is decisive in our use of the term Capitalism, there must then be one definition that accords with the actual shape which historical development possesses, and others which, by contrast with it, are wrong. Even a believer in historical relativism must, surely, believe that there is one picture that is right from the standpoint of any given homogeneous set of historical observations. Moreover, it not infrequently happens that those who write about Capitalism are unaware, apparently, of any problem of meaning ; failing to make clear the sense in which they intend the word to be taken, and even themselves showing no great consistency in its employment.
One should, perhaps, at once make it clear that the word “capitalistic”? which has become fashionable among some economists, especially those who lean towards the Austrian School, has little in common with Capitalism as a category of historical interpretation. ‘“‘ Capitalistic’”? has been used by economists in a purely technical sense to refer to the use of so-called “ roundabout ” or time-using methods of production, and has been largely associated with a particular view of the nature of capital. It has no reference to the way in which the instruments of production are owned, and refers only to their economic origin and the extent of their use. Since production beyond the most primitive has always been in some degree “ capitalistic ” in this technical sense, the term has little value for purposes of historical differentiation, and its inventors have not attempted to employ it in this way. Their use of it, indeed, is by implication a denial of any specific meaning to Capitalism as a special historical system.
Scarcely more helpful is another conception which we find implicit in the context in which the term is frequently used, and which has the weakness of confining Capitalism to such a narrow span of years as to draw a boundary between social phenomena that bear the strongest marks of family resemblance. According to this, Capitalism is identified with a system of unfettered individual enterprise: a system where economic and _ social relations are ruled by contract, where men are free agents in seeking their livelihood, and legal compulsions and restrictions are absent.1. Thereby Capitalism is made virtually synonymous
1 One may quote as a not very serious example, perhaps, of this the following : ““True capitalism means an economy of free and fair competition for profit and continuous work opportunity for all”? (J. H. R. Cromwell and H. E. Czerwonky,
4 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
with a régime of laissez-faire and in some usages of the term with a régime of free competition. Dicey did not employ the term Capitalism ; but he treated as crucial the contrast between what he called the period of Individualism, in a sense corres- ponding to the notion that we are discussing, and the period of Collectivism, dating the opening of the latter from the 1870’s.1 Although a preoccupation with this kind of distinction between Individualism and Etatisme may, perhaps, be said to belong to the past rather than to the present, and among economic historians has seldom, if ever, been made a basis for defining Capitalism, its imprint on thought still lingers ; and much of the talk that one meets to-day seems by implication to identify Capitalism with a system of “free enterprise”? and to contrast it with any encroachment of State control at the expense of lavssez-fatre. The deficiency of so confined a meaning is evident enough. Few countries other than Britain and U.S.A. in the nineteenth century conformed at all closely to a régime of “ pure indi- vidualism ”’ of the classic Manchester type; and even Britain and U.S.A. were soon to pass out of it into an age of corporate enterprise and monopoly or quasi-monopoly, when latssez-faire as a policy has been in decline. If Capitalism is to be so straitly limited in time as this, how are we to characterize the system which preceded it and the system which followed after, both of which resembled it closely in a number of leading respects ?
As having exercised a major influence on historical research and historical interpretation three separate meanings assigned to the notion of Capitalism stand out prominently in relief. While in some respects they overlap, each of them is associated with a distinctive view of the nature of historical development ; each involves the drawing of rather different time-frontiers to the system ; and each results in a different causal story of the origin of Capitalism and the growth of the modern world.
Firstly, and most widely familiar perhaps, is the meaning that has been popularized by the writings of Werner Sombart. In Defence of Capitalism, 5). This definition is so exacting in the virtues it records as to make one doubt whether “ true Capitalism ” can have ever existed. More weighty examples are found among writers who sometimes refuse the term Capitalism to a Fascist economy and contrast Capitalism with “ Totalitarianism”. Cf. also the Handwoérterbuch der Staatswissenschaften (1923): “‘ Der Kapitalismus hat die privat- wirtschaftliche oder individualistische Wirtschaftsordnung zur Voraussetzung und
ist ohne diese gar nicht denkbar.” 1 Law and Opinion in England, passim.
CAPITALISM 5
Sombart has sought the essence of Capitalism, not in any one aspect of its economic anatomy or its physiology, but in the totality of those aspects as represented in the geist or spirit that has inspired the life of a whole epoch. This spirit is a synthesis of the spirit of enterprise or adventure with “ the bourgeois spirit ”” of calculation and rationality. Believing that “‘ at different times different economic attitudes have always reigned, and that it is this spirit which has created the suitable form for itself and thereby an economic organisation ”’,! he sought the origin of Capitalism in the development of states of mind and human behaviour conducive to the existence of those economic forms and relationships which are characteristic of the modern world. ** At some time in the distant past the capitalist spirit must have been in existence—in embryo if you like—before any capitalist undertaking could become a reality.”? The pre-capitalist man was ‘a natural man” who conceived of economic activity as simply catering for his natural wants; and in pre-capitalist times ‘‘ at the centre of all effort and all care stood living man : he is the measure of all things—mensura omnium rerum homo”.2 By contrast, the capitalist, ‘ root(ing) up the natural man” with his “ primitive and original outlook”? and “ turn(ing) topsy- turvy all the values of life’, sees the amassing of capital as the dominant motive of economic activity, and in an attitude of sober rationality and by the methods of precise quantitative calculation subordinates everything in life to this end.4 More simply Max Weber defined Capitalism as “‘ present wherever the industrial provision for the needs of a human group is carried out by the method of enterprise’, and “a rational capitalistic establishment” as ‘one with capital accounting”; and he used the spirit of Capitalism “ to describe that attitude which seeks profit rationally and systematically ”.
Secondly, there is a meaning, more often found implicit in the treatment of historical material than explicitly formulated,
1 Der Moderne Kapitalismus (1928 Ed.), I, 25. This he described as “ the funda- mental idea (Grundgedanke)” of his work.
2 Quintessence of Capitalism, 343-4.
3 Der Moderne Kapitalismus, vol. I, 31.
* Quintessence, 13-21, 239.
5 General Economic History, 2753; The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 64. Weber’s view is closely associated with Sombart’s ; but at the same time it has certain differences. Mr. Talcott Parsons has emphasized that there is a dis- tinction between Weber’s “ capitalism in general”’, which “‘is a purely economic category ” (unlike Sombart’s) and refers to any rationally conducted exchange for profit (which comes close to the second meaning we are about to mention), and his historical notion of ‘“‘ modern Capitalism” which is the same as Sombart’s. (Journal of Political Economy, vol. 37, p- 34-)
6 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
which virtually identifies Capitalism with the organization of production for a distant market.1 Whereas the régime of the early craft gild, where the craftsman sold his products retail in the town market, would presumably be excluded by this defini- tion, Capitalism could be regarded as being present as soon as the acts of production and of retail sale came to be separated in space and time by the intervention of a wholesale merchant who advanced money for the purchase of wares with the object of subsequent sale at a profit. To a large extent this notion is a lineal descendant of the scheme of development employed by the German Historical School, with its primary distinction between the “‘ natural economy ” of the medieval world and the “ money economy ” that succeeded it, and its emphasis on the area of the market as defining the stages in the growth of the modern economic world. In the words of Biicher, the essential criterion is ‘‘ the relation which exists between the production and con- sumption of goods ; or to be more exact, the length of the route which the goods traverse in passing from producer to consumer ”’.* This is not uncommonly found in close conjunction with a definition of Capitalism as a system of economic activity that is dominated by a certain type of motive, the profit-motive ; the existence in any period of a substantial number of persons who rely on the investment of money with the object of deriving an income, whether this investment be in trade or in usury or in production, being taken as evidence of the existence of an element of Capitalism. Thus we find Capitalism described by Professor Earl Hamilton, the historian of the sixteenth century price-revolution, as “ the system in which wealth other than land is used for the definite purpose of securing an income ”’ ; * while Pirenne seems to apply the term to any “ acquisitive” use of money, and declares that “‘ medieval sources place the existence of capitalism in the twelfth century beyond a doubt ”’.4 When this notion is married to that of Capitalism as a commercial system—as production for the market—we have the kind of definition that we find used by Professor Nussbaum: “a system of exchange economy” in which the “ orienting principle of economic activity is unrestricted profit ” (to which, however, he
1 Cf. Marx’s reference to Mommsen, the historian of ancient Rome, as one who “* discover(s) a capitalist mode of production in every monetary economy ” (Capital, vol. IIT, 914).
1 Industrial Evolution, 89. Cf. ao Schmoller, Principes d’Economie Politique, passim.
2 In Economica, Nov. 1929, 3
* Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe, 163; cf. also Pirenne in American Historical Review, 1914, 494 seq.
CAPITALISM 7
adds as an additional charatteristic that such a system is marked by a differentiation of the population into “‘ owners and property- less workers ”’.1) The tendency of those who give this emphasis to the term is to seek the origins of Capitalism in the first encroach- ments of specifically commercial dealings upon the narrow economic horizons and the supposedly ‘‘ natural economy ”’ of the medieval world, and to mark the main stages in the growth of Capitalism according to stages in the widening of the market or to the changing forms of investment and business enterprise with which this widening was associated. In many respects this notion has affinity with Sombart’s, and overlaps with the latter; but the focus of its attention remains substantially different.
Thirdly, we have the meaning originally given by Marx, who sought the essence of Capitalism neither in a spirit of enter- prise nor in the use of money to finance a series of exchange transactions with the object of gain, but in a particular mode of production. By mode of production he did not refer merely to the state of technique—to what he termed the state of the produc- tive forces—but to the way in which the means of production were owned and to the social relations between men which resulted from their connections with the process of production. Thus Capitalism was not simply a system of production for the market—a system of commodity-production as Marx termed it— but a system under which labour-power had “‘ itself become a commodity ” and was bought and sold on the market like any other object of exchange. Its historical prerequisite was the concentration of ownership of the means of production in the hands of a class, consisting of only a minor section of society, and the consequential emergence of a propertyless class for whom the sale of their labour-power was their only source of livelihood. Productive activity was furnished, accordingly, by the latter, not by virtue of legal compulsion, but on the basis of a wage- contract. It is clear that such a definition excludes the system of independent handicraft production where the craftsman owned his own petty implements of production and undertook the sale of his own wares. Here there was no divorce between ownership and work; and except where he relied to any extent on the employment of journeymen, it was the purchase and sale of inanimate wares and not of human labour-power that was his
1 History of Economic Institutions of Europe, 61. Elsewhere in this work, however, the author appears as a fairly close adherent of Sombart’s view.
8 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
primary concern. What differentiates the use of this definition from others is that the existence of trade and of money-lending and the presence of a specialized class of merchants or financiers, even though they be men of substance, does not suffice to consti- tute a capitalist society. Men of capital, however acquisitive, are not enough: their capital must be used to yoke labour to the creation of surplus-value in production.
It is not our purpose here to debate the merits of rival defini- tions: merely to make clear that in the studies which follow the last of these three senses is the one in which Capitalism will be used, and to underline some of the implications of using the term in this way. The justification of any definition must ultimately rest on its successful employment in illuminating the actual process of historical development : on the extent to which it gives a shape to our picture of the process corresponding to the contours which the historical landscape proves to have. As our ground for rejecting the other two of this trio of familiar meanings the following all-too-cursory observations must suffice.
Both Sombart’s conception of the capitalist spirit and a conception of Capitalism as primarily a commercial system share the defect, in common with conceptions which focus attention on the fact of acquisitive investment of money, that they are insufficiently restrictive to confine the term to any one epoch of history, and that they seem to lead inexorably to the conclusion that nearly all periods of history have been capitalist, at least in some degree. As our knowledge of earlier economic societies has increased, the tendency on the part of those who give such meanings to the term has been to extend the boundaries of Capitalism further back in time. It is now realized that money dealings and production for a market were much more common in medieval times than used to be supposed. As Brentano remarked, the Fourth Crusade already disclosed “‘ a very orgy of Capitalism ” in this sense of the word.!. And as our knowledge of the economic conditions of the ancient world extends, evidence accumulates to show that, on such definitions, the presence of Capitalism cannot be denied even in classical Greece and Rome. The acquisitive use of money is not exclusively modern. The purchase of slaves in antiquity was presumably an “‘ acquisitive ”
1 Sombart frankly admitted that this was so. He rather unconvincingly tried to meet the objection by asserting that commerce in medieval times was not commerce in any mature sense, but was inspired by the spirit of handicraft and not by a capitalist spirit.
CAPITALISM 9
employment of money as much as is the hire of wage-earners to-day. The classical world had its usurers, and lucri rabies was not a sin unknown to the medieval world. If both are to be regarded as capitalist societies, one has to conclude that any search for the origins of the system within the confines of the last eight centuries is useless, and that Capitalism must have been present intermittently throughout most of recorded history. What we clearly need, however, is a definition to describe the distinctive economic institutions of the modern world of recent centuries ; and what cannot do this is useless for the purpose that most people intend.
The further difficulty attaches to the idealist conception of Sombart and Weber and their school, that if Capitalism as an economic form is the creation of the capitalist spirit, the genesis of the latter must first of all be accounted for before the origin of Capitalism can be explained. If this capitalist spirit is itself an historical product, what caused its appearance on the historical stage? To this riddle no very satisfactory answer has been propounded to-date, other than the accidental coincidence in time of various states of mind, which conveniently fused in a marriage of enterprise and rationality to form the élan vital of a capitalist age. The search for a cause has led to the unsatisfactory and inconclusive debate as to whether it be true that Protestantism begat the capitalist spirit (as Weber and Troeltsch have claimed) ; and there seems to be scarcely more reason to regard Capitalism as the child of the Reformation than to hold, with Sombart, that it was largely the creation of the Jews.1_ Nor is this difficulty of tracing back the cause causantes one which also attaches, mutatis mutandis, as is sometimes supposed, to an explanation of capitalist origins that runs in purely economic terms. While it is true that behind any economic change one has to look for some human action, the action which initiates the crucial change may be inspired by an intention which is quite alien to the final outcome, and hence be a simple product of the preceding situation ; whereas, if the emergence of a new economic system
1 To the claim of Weber and Troeltsch that the Protestant ethic encouraged the spirit of calculation Mr. H. M. Robertson (in Aspects of the Rise of Economic Indi- vidualism) has replied, with some effect, that there was little to choose between Protestant and Catholic writers in their attitudes to such matters as commercial calculation and free trade ; and Brentano and others since his day (e.g. Pirenne) have shown that it is possible to find plenty of calculating acquisitiveness before the Reformation. Cf. P.C. Gordon Walker on “‘ Capitalism and the Reformation” in Econ. Hist. Review, Nov. 1937; also A. E. Sayous in Revue d’Histoire Economique et Sociale, 1930, 427-44.
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10 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
is to be explained in terms of an idea, this idea must embody ‘in embryo ” the essence of the future system in advance ; and the emergence full-grown of the idea of that system, before and in the absence of the system itself, has to be explained.
On the other hand, it is clear that, as our knowledge has been enriched by the extension of research into modern economic history in the last few decades, the definition of Capitalism in actual use in historiography has moved increasingly towards that which was first adopted and developed by Marx. Emphasis has increasingly come to be placed on the emergence of a new type of class differentiation between capitalist and proletarian rather than on profit as a motive of economic activity ; and attention has increasingly been focused upon the appearance of a relationship between producer and capitalist, analogous to the employment relation between master and wage-earner in the fully matured industrial system of the nineteenth century. On the whole it seems more likely that this is because the material which research has disclosed has forced this emphasis upon the attention of historians in their search for the essential differentia of the modern age, than because they have been predisposed towards it by the writings of Marx. Thus, Mr. Lipson, in claiming that the essentials of Capitalism were present some centuries before the industrial revolution, states that ‘“‘ the fundamental feature of capitalism is the wage-system under which the worker has no right of ownership in the wares which he manufactures: he sells not the fruits of his labour but the labour itself—a distinction of vital economic significance” 1 Even Cunningham came close to this standpoint when he said that “the distinguishing feature of capitalist organisation of industry is the possession of the materials by the employer, who engages the workman and pays his wages; he subsequently makes a profit by the sale of the goods” ; adding that “ the | intrusion of capital may not make much apparent change in the conditions under which the work is done, but it makes a tre- mendous change in the personal relations of the workman to his fellowmen when he is reduced to a position of dependence”’. :
1 Economic History, 3rd Ed., vol. UH, xxvi. Mr. Lipson adds to this, however, that | “if the goods do not belong to him because the material is provided by another person, then he is a wage-earner whether the instruments of production belong to him or not”. If, however, “ the true test is whether the worker has any property in the goods which he makes ”, and ownership of the means of production is dis- regarded, will not the definition be extensible also to what is customarily called a
socialist system? In another place, curiously enough, Mr. Lipson speaks of ‘‘ the medieval village’ as “‘ organized on a capitalist basis’? ([bid., 372).
a
CAPITALISM II
He did not, however, confine the term Capitalism to a particular organization of industry, but gave it a wider, and commercial, definition as “a phase when the possession of capital and the habit of pushing trade have become dominant in all the institu- tions of society ’’.1
II
In our preoccupation with the definition of an economic system, we must not let it be implied that the frontiers between systems are to be drawn across a page of history as a sharp dividing line. As those who distrust all such talk of epochs have correctly insisted, systems are never in reality to be found in their pure form, and in any period of history elements charac- teristic both of preceding and of succeeding periods are to be found, sometimes mingled in extraordinary complexity. Import- ant elements of each new society, although not necessarily the complete embryo of it, are contained within the womb of the old ; and relics of an old society survive for long into the new. What is implied in a conception of Capitalism such as we have adopted is that, save for comparatively brief intervals of transition, each historical period is moulded under the preponderating influence of a single, more or less homogeneous, economic form, and is to be characterized according to the nature of this pre- dominant type of socio-economic relationship. Hence in any given period to speak in terms of a homogeneous system and to ignore the complexities of the situation is more illuminating, at least as a first approximation, than the contrary would be. Our chief interest will not lie in the first appearance of some new economic form. Nor will the mere appearance of it justify a description of the succeeding period by a new name. Of much greater significance will be the stage when the new form has grown to proportions which enable it to place its imprint upon the whole of society and to exert a major influence in moulding the trend of development. Again, it is true that the process of historical change is for the most part gradual and continuous. In the sense that there is no event which cannot
} be connected with some immediately antecedent event in a rational chain it can be described as continuous throughout. But what seems necessarily to be implied in any conception of development as divided into periods or epochs, each characterized
1 The Progress of Capitalism in England, 24, 73.
12 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
by its distinctive economic system, is that there are crucial points in economic development at which the tempo is abnormally accelerated, and at which continuity is broken, in the sense of a sharp change of direction in the current of events.
These points of abrupt change in the direction of the historical flow correspond to the social revolutions which mark the transition from an old system to a new one. The view that development is characterized by periodic revolutions stands, therefore, in contrast to those views of economic development, moulded exclusively in terms of continuous quantitative variation, which see change as a simple function of some increasing factor, whether it be population or productivity or markets or division of labour or the stock of capital. A leading defect of the latter is their tendency to ignore, or at any rate to belittle, those crucial new properties which at certain stages may emerge and radically transform the outcome—whether it be the adventurous ambition of the capitalist entrepreneur in a period of expanding profit- making opportunities, or the new attitude to work in a collectivist and egalitarian society—and the bias they are apt to give the mind towards interpreting new situations in categories of thought which were product of past situations and towards super-historical ‘** universal truths’, fashioned out of what are deemed to be immutable traits of human nature or certain invariable sorts of economic or social “necessity”. This tendency theories of development that are cast in terms of the unique “spirit of an epoch ” have, at least, the merit of avoiding. When we cease to speak in metaphor, however, it is not easy immediately to define the type of events to which the phrase social revolution is usually intended to refer. While a social revolution seems to contain the notion of discontinuity, in the sense in which we have referred to an abrupt change of direction, this loses its simple meaning when we cease to express it in terms of spatial analogies. While, again, such a revolution evidently includes the notion of a quickened tempo of change, its meaning is not confined thereto. Those who conceive of change in terms of simple quantitative growth may admit that the rate of growth is not constant but subject to fluctuations, passing at times through phases of acceler- ated increase, as with population increase in the later eighteenth century, without introducing into their picture any notion of revolutionary transitions in which a qualitative change of system occurs.
If it be right to maintain that the conception of socio-economic
CAPITALISM 13
systems, marking distinct stages in historical development, is not merely a matter of convenience but an obligation—not a matter of suitable chapter-headings but something that concerns the essential construction of the story if the story is to be true—then this must be because there is a quality in historical situations which both makes for homogeneity of pattern at any given time and renders periods of transition, when there is an even balance of discrete elements, inherently unstable. It must be because society is so constituted that conflict and interaction of its leading elements, rather than the simple growth of some single element, form the principal agency of movement and change, at least so far as major transformations are concerned. If such be the case, once development has reached a certain level and the various elements which constitute that society are poised in a certain way, events are likely to move with unusual rapidity, not merely in the sense of quantitative growth, but in the sense of a change of balance of the constituent elements, resulting in the appearance of novel compositions and more or less abrupt changes in the texture of society. To use a topical analogy: it is as though at certain levels of development something like a chain-reaction is set in motion.
Clearly the feature of economic society which produces this result, and is accordingly fundamental to our conception of Capitalism as a distinctive economic order, characteristic of a distinctive period of history, is that history has been to-date the history of class societies : namely, of societies divided into classes, in which either one class, or else a coalition of classes with some common interest, constitutes the dominant class, and stands in partial or complete antagonism to another class or classes.} The fact that this is so tends to impose on any given historical period a certain qualitative uniformity ; since the class that is socially and politically dominant at the time will naturally use its power to preserve and to extend that particular mode of production—that particular form of relationship between classes, —on which its income depends. If change within that society should reach a point where the continued hegemony of this
1(Cf. the remarks of Pirenne which show an approach to this conception of discontinuous development due to the successive rise of different classes: “I believe that for each period into which our economic history [of Capitalism] may be divided there is a distinct and separate class of capitalists.” Since the capitalist group of one epoch “does not spring from the capitalist group of the preceding epoch”, it follows that “ at every change in economic organization we find a breach of
continuity ”, and history is not an inclined plane but a staircase (“‘ Stages in the Social History of Capitalism” in American Historical Review, 1914, 494-5)-
14 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
dominant class is seriously called in question, and the old stable balance of forces shows signs of being disturbed, development will have reached a critical stage, where either the change that has been proceeding hitherto must somehow be halted, or if it should continue the dominant class can be dominant no longer and the new and growing one must take its place. Once this shift in the balance of power has occurred, the interest of the class which now occupies the strategic positions will clearly lie in accelerating the transition, in breaking up the strongholds of its rival and predecessor and in extending its own. The old mode of production will not necessarily be eliminated entirely ; but it will quickly be reduced in scale until it is no longer a serious competitor to the new.! For a period the new mode of production, associated with new productive forces and novel economic potentialities, is likely to expand far beyond the limits within which the old system was destined to move ; until in turn the particular class relations and the political forms in which the new ruling class asserts its power come into conflict with some further development of the productive forces, and the struggle between the two is fought to a climax once again. In the nine- teenth century, largely under the influence of Hegel, the history of civilization was generally believed to consist of a succession of epochs marked by the dominance of successive national cultures. According to our present emphasis, it has rather consisted of a succession of class systems, each having its own peculiar mode of extracting an income for its ruling class. In the economic history of Europe, at least, one thing stands out and is worthy of particular remark. This is the surprising degree of similarity of the main stages through which economic development has passed. The timing of these stages has, of course, been very diverse, and the detail of the story, and the particular forms and phases within each main stage, have been notably dissimilar. But such unity as Europe can be said to possess seems most likely to have been due to the fundamental similarity of shape which the economic development of its various parts has exhibited over the past ten centuries.
The common interest which constitutes a certain social grouping a class, in the sense of which we have been speaking,
11t is not necessary to assume that this is done as part of a conscious long-term plan ; although, in so far as the dominant class pursues a definite political policy, this will be so. But it assumes at least that members of a class take common action
over particular questions (e.g. access to land or markets or labour), and that greater strength enables them to oust their rivals.
CAPITALISM 15
does not derive from a quantitative similarity of income, as is sometimes supposed: a class does not necessarily consist of people on the same income level, nor are people at, or near, a given income level necessarily united by identity of aims. Nor is it sufficient to say simply that a class consists of those who derive their income from a common source; although it is source rather than size of income that is here important. In this context one must be referring to something quite funda- mental concerning the roots which a social group has in a particu- lar society : namely to the relationship in which the group as a whole stands to the process of production and hence to other sections of society. In other words, the relationship from which in one case a common interest in preserving and extending a particular economic system and in the other case an antagonism of interest on this issue can alone derive must be a relationship with a particular mode of extracting and distributing the fruits of surplus labour, over and above the labour which goes to supply the consumption of the actual producer. Since this surplus labour constitutes its life-blood, any ruling class will of necessity treat its particular relationship to the labour-process as crucial to its own survival; and any rising class that aspires to live without labour is bound to regard its own future career, prosperity and influence as dependent on the acquisition of some claim upon the surplus labour of others. ‘‘A surplus of the product of labour over and above the costs of maintenance of the labour,” said Friedrich Engels, ‘‘ and the formation and enlargement, by means of this surplus, of a social production and reserve fund, was and is the basis of all social, political and intellectual progress. In history up to the present, this fund has been the possession of a privileged class, on which also devolved, along with this possession, political supremacy and _ intellectual leadership.” ?
The form in which surplus labour has been appropriated has differed at different stages of society ; and these varieties of form have been associated with the use of various methods and instruments of production and with different levels of productivity. Marx spoke of Capitalism itself as being, ‘‘ like any other definite mode of production, conditioned upon a certain stage of social productivity and upon the historically developed form of the productive forces. This historical prerequisite is itself the historical result and product of a preceding process, from which
1 Anti-Duhring, 221.
16 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
the new mode of production takes its departure as from its given foundation. The conditions of production corresponding to this specific, historically determined, mode of production have a specific, historical passing character.” ? At a stage of social development when the productivity of labour is very low, any substantial and regular income for a leisured class, living on production but not contributing thereto, will be inconceivable unless it is grounded in the rigorous compulsion of producers ; and in this sense, as Engels remarked, the division into classes at a primitive stage of economic development “ has a certain historical justification”.? In a predominantly agricultural society the crucial relationships will be connected with the holding of land ; and since the division of labour and exchange are likely to be little developed, surplus labour will tend to be performed directly as a personal obligation or to take the form of the delivery of a certain quota of his produce by the cultivator as tribute in natural form to an overlord. The growth of industry, which implies the invention of new and varied instru- ments of production, will beget new classes and by creating new economic problems will require new forms of appropriating sur- plus labour for the benefit of the owners of the new instruments of production. Mediaeval society was characterized by the com- pulsory performance of surplus labour by producers : producers who were in possession of their own primitive instruments of cultivation and were attached to the land. Modern society, by contrast, is characterized, as we have seen, by a relationship between worker and capitalist which takes a purely contractual form, and which is indistinguishable in appearance from any of the other manifold free-market transactions of an exchange society. The transformation from the medieval form of exploitation of surplus labour to the modern was no simple process that can be depicted as some genealogical table of direct descent. Yet among the eddies of this movement it is possible for the eye to discern certain lines of direction of the flow. These include, not only changes in technique and the appearance of new instruments of production, which greatly enhanced the productivity of labour, but a growing division of labour and consequently the develop- ment of exchange, and also a growing separation of the producer from the land and from the means of production and his appear-
1 Capital, vol. III, 1023-4. Marx adds that “‘ the conditions of distribution are essentially identical with these conditions of production, being their reverse side ’’. 2 Op. cit., 316.
CAPITALISM 17
ance as a proletarian. Of these guiding tendencies in the history of the past five centuries a special significance attaches to the latter ; not only because it has been traditionally glossed over and decently veiled behind formulas about the passage from status to contract, but because into the centre of the historical stage it has brought a form of compulsion to labour for another that is purely economic and “ objective” ;_ thus laying a basis for that peculiar and mystifying form whereby a leisured class can exploit the surplus labour of others which is the essence of the modern system that we call Capitalism.
Ill
The development of Capitalism falls into a number of stages, characterized by different levels of maturity and each of them recognizable by fairly distinctive traits. But when we seek to trace these stages and to select one of them as marking the opening stage of Capitalism, there is an immediate consideration about which it is of some importance that there should be no confusion. If we are speaking of Capitalism as a specific mode of production, then it follows that we cannot date the dawn of this system from the first signs of the appearance of large-scale trading and of a merchant class, and we cannot speak of a special period of “Merchant Capitalism’, as many have done. We must look for the opening of the capitalist period only when changes in the mode of production occur, in the sense of a direct subordination of the producer to a capitalist.1 This is not just a point of terminology, but of substance ; since it means that, if we are right, the appearance of a purely trading class will have of itself no revolutionary significance ; that its rise will exert a much less fundamental influence on the economic pattern of society than will the appearance of a class of capitalists whose fortunes are intimately linked with industry ; and that, while a ruling class, whether of slave-owners or feudal lords, may take to trading or enter into a close alliance with traders, a merchant class, whose activities are essentially those of an intermediary between producer and consumer, is unlikely to strive to become a dominant class in quite that radical and exclusive sense of which we were speaking a moment ago. Since its fortunes will tend
1 Some seem, however, to have used the term ‘“‘ Merchant Capitalism ” to apply, not to the mere existence of large capitals and specialized merchants in the sphere of trade, but to the early period of Capitalism when production was subordinated to the “‘ merchant manufacturer” under the putting-out system. The strictures in the text do not, of course, refer to this usage of the term.
18 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
to be bound up with the existing mode of production, it is more likely to be under an inducement to preserve that mode of production than to transform it. It is likely to struggle to “muscle in” upon an existing form of appropriating surplus labour ; but it is unlikely to try to change this form.
When we look at the history of Capitalism, conceived in this way, it becomes clear that we must date its opening phase in England, not in the twelfth century as does Pirenne (who is thinking primarily of the Netherlands) nor even in the fourteenth century with its urban trade and gild handicrafts as others have done, but in the latter half of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth century when capital began to penetrate production on a considerable scale, either in the form of a fairly matured relationship between capitalist and hired wage-earners or in the less developed form of the subordination of domestic handi- craftsmen, working in their own homes, to a capitalist on th> so-called ‘‘ putting-out system”. It is true that already prior to this fairly numerous examples are to be found of a transitional situation where the craftsman had lost much of his independence, through debt or in face of the monopoly of wholesale traders, and already stood in relations of some dependence on a merchant, who was a man of capital. It is also true that in the fourteenth century or even earlier there was a good deal of what one may call (to use modern terminology) kulak types of enterprise—the well-to-do peasant in the village or the local trader or worker- owner in town handicrafts, employing hired labour. But these seem to have been too small in scale and insufficiently matured to be regarded as much more than adolescent Capitalism, and scarcely justify one in dating Capitalism as a new mode of production, sufficiently clear-cut and extensive to constitute any serious challenge to an older one, as early as this. At any rate, one can say with considerable assurance that a capitalist mode of production, and a special class of capitalists specifically associated with it, did not attain to any decisive significance as an influence on social and economic development until the closing decades of the Tudor era.
In the career of Capitalism since this date it is evident that there are two decisive moments. One of them resides in the seventeenth century : in the political and social transformations of that decisive period, including the struggle within the chartered corporations, which the researches of Unwin have brought to light, and the Parliamentary struggle against monopoly, reaching
CAPITALISM 19
its apex in the Cromwellian revolution, the results of which were very far from being submerged, despite a certain measure of compromise and reaction at the Restoration. The second consists of the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth and earlier half of the nineteenth century, which was primarily of economic significance ; it had a less dramatic, but far from unimportant, reflection in the political sphere. So decisive was it for the whole future of capitalist economy, so radical a trans- formation of the structure and organization of industry did it represent, as to have caused some to regard it as the birth pangs of modern Capitalism, and hence as the most decisive moment in economic and social development since the Middle Ages. Maturer knowledge and judgement to-day clearly indicate, how- ever, that what the industrial revolution represented was a transition from an early and still immature stage of Capitalism, where the pre-capitalist petty mode of production had been penetrated by the influence of capital, subordinated to capital, robbed of its independence as an economic form but not yet completely transformed, to a stage where Capitalism, on the basis of technical change, had achieved its own specific produc- tion process resting on the collective large-scale production unit of the factory, thereby effecting a final divorce of the producer from his remaining hold on the means of production and establishing a simple and direct relationship between capitalist and wage-earners.
But if we date the origin of the capitalist mode of production in this way, a crucial difficulty seems immediately to confront us. To be consistent, must we not recognize not merely two but three decisive moments in the transition from the medieval mode of production to the capitalist: the third and earliest of these marking the disintegration of Feudalism? And if we admit that there was such an earlier decisive period of transition, how are we to speak of the economic system in the intervening period between then and the later sixteenth century : a period which, according to our dating, seems to have been neither feudal nor yet capitalist so far as its mode of production was concerned ? It is certainly true that the fourteenth century witnessed a crisis of the old feudal order, following closely on the heels of the rise of corporate towns to a large measure of local autonomy, political and economic, as well as to a greatly enhanced influence in national affairs. In this crisis the feudal mode of production, based on serfdom, was seriously shaken and reached an advanced
20 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
stage of disintegration, the effects of which were seen in the malaise of landlord economy in the following century. But unless one is to identify the end of Feudalism with the process of commutation—a subject about which more will be said later— one cannot yet speak of the end of the mediaeval system, still less of the dethronement of the medieval ruling class. It is also true, and of outstanding importance for any proper understanding of this transition, that the disintegration of the feudal mode of production had already reached an advanced stage before the capitalist mode of production developed, and that this disinte- gration did not proceed in any close association with the growth of the new mode of production within the womb of the old. The two hundred-odd years which separated Edward III and Elizabeth were certainly transitional in character. A merchant bourgeoisie had grown to wealth and to influence. Having won a measure of privilege, it stood in a position of co-partner rather than antagonist to the nobility, and in Tudor times partly merged with it. Its appearance exercised little direct effect upon the mode of production, and its profits were derived from taking advantage of price-differences in space and time, due to the prevailing immobility of producers and their meagre resources—price-differences which it sought to maintain and even widen by its privileges of monopoly.’ In the urban handi- crafts and in the rise of well-to-do and middling-well-to-do free- hold farmers one sees a mode of production which had won its independence from Feudalism : petty production of the worker- owner, artisan or peasant type, which was not yet capitalist, although containing within itself the embryo of capitalist relations and even showing signs of coming into subjection to capital from outside. But this type of economy remained a subordinate element in society ; and one has to remember that the majority of small tenants, although they paid a money rent (which was, however, more often a customary payment than an “economic rent’), were still largely tied in various ways and subordinated to manorial authority ; and while the estates were
2 Cf. Marx’s penetrating comment that “ Merchant Capital is the historical form of capital long before capital has subjected production to its control. . . . Capital develops on the basis of a mode of production independent and outside it, (and) the independent development of merchant capital stands therefore in inverse ratio to the general development of society” (Capital, vol. III, 384). Also Pirenne : “‘ In an age when local famines were continual one had only to buy a small quantity of grain cheaply in regions where it was abundant to realize fabulous profit, which could then be increased by the same methods. Thus speculation .. . largely contributed to the foundation of the first commercial fortunes ” (Economic and Social
History of Medieval Europe, 48).
eee ae eee ee
CAPITALISM aI
for the most part farmed by hired labour, this labour was still subject to a good deal of de facto compulsion and to a large extent came from persons who still treated wages as a supplementary, rather than the sole, form of livelihood. The labourer could be forced to accept work at legal rates, and he was restricted in moving from his village without the sanction of the local Jord. Indeed, the legislation of the fourteenth century robbed the poorer freemen of what had previously distinguished them from the villani adscripti glebe: freedom to move at will. Social relations in the countryside between producers and their lords and masters retained much of their medieval character, and much of the tegument at least of the feudal order remained. Discussion as to whether certain changes, such as those of the late eighteenth century, deserve to be given the title of a revolu- tion has frequently concentrated, not only upon the tempo of change, but upon its simultaneity in different branches of industry, as though this were a crucial issue. To avoid misapprehension, it should perhaps be stated forthwith that the history of Capitalism, and the stages in its development, do not necessarily have the same dating for different parts of the country or for different industries ; and in a certain sense one would be right in talking, not of a single history of Capitalism, and of the general shape which this has, but of a collection of histories of Capitalism, all of them having a general similarity of shape, but each of them separately dated as regards its main stages. In other words, different regions of England (and to some extent even different towns) had in, say, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries their different economic histories, in the same way as the economic development of different nations of Europe in the nineteenth century is rightly treated as largely separate stories. This seems more likely to be true the further one’s gaze travels back across the centuries, and least true of the present age. In this respect the appearance of Capitalism itself is a powerful co-ordinating influence. When we view the country as a whole, some crucial transition may give the appearance of being so long-drawn-out a process as to make the title of an economic revolution a mis- nomer. Yet in any one semi-autonomous sector the rhythm of movement may be much more sharply outlined. What is significant is the speed with which in any given sector a chain of consequential changes follows the occurrence of some crucial event—speed compared with the rate of change in these factors
in more normal times—and not necessarily the simultaneity of B
si sis
22 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
this crucial event and its chain of consequences in different sectors. In this connection, indeed, we meet an important distinction between major transitions from one form of class hegemony to another, of which we have spoken, and those minor transitions which mark stages within the life-span of a given economic system (to which Professor Pirenne was apparently referring when he spoke of the development of Capitalism as having the shape of “a staircase”). Where a new class, linked with a new mode of production, makes itself the dominant class, and ousts the representatives of the old economic and social order who previously held sway, the influence of this political revolution must necessarily be felt over the whole area of what- ever is the political unit within which power has been transferred, and the immediate consequences must in this case be approxi- mately simultaneous throughout this area. It is this change of policy, and hence of the direction in which its influence is exerted, at a national level that gives to such moments as the English revolution of the seventeenth century or 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia their special significance.
The development of Capitalism through the main phases into which its history falls has been associated essentially with technical change affecting the character of production ; and for this reason the capitalists associated with each new phase have tended to be, initially at least, a different stratum of capitalists from those who had sunk their capital in the older type of pro- duction. This was markedly the case in the industrial revolution. The pioneers of the new technical forms were for the most part new men, devoid of privilege or social standing, who carried on a struggle against the privileges of older established interests in the name of economic liberalism. In order to expand, these new men had often to rely for capital on partnership with capitalists of longer standing ; sometimes merchant manufac- turers who had previously financed domestic industry set up factories ; and gradually capital was transferred from the old into the new, so that antagonism between the older capitalist strata and the nouveaux riches of the new industry never went very deep. In turn, the change in the structure of industry affected the social relations within the capitalist mode of production : it radically influenced the division of labour, thinned the ranks of the small sub-contracting worker-owner type of artisan inter- mediate between capitalist and wage-earner, and transformed the relation of the worker to the productive process itself.
CAPITALISM 23
But it would be a mistake to suppose that these social relations were the passive reflection of technical processes and to ignore the extent to which changes in them exercised a reciprocal influence, at times a decisive influence, upon the shape of develop- ment. They are, indeed, the shell within which technical growth itself proceeds. If the conception of Capitalism and its develop- ment that we have here adopted be a valid one, it would seem to follow that any change in the circumstances affecting the sale of that crucial commodity labour-power, whether this concerns the relative abundance and scarcity of labour or the degree to which workers are organized and act in concert or can exert political influence, must vitally affect the prosperity of the system, and hence the impetus of its movement, the social and economic policies of the rulers of industry and even the nature of industrial organization and the march of technique. In the extreme case it will be decisive in affecting the stability of the system. In the chapters which follow, the influence exerted by changing states of the labour market will, rightly or wrongly, be a recurring theme. It may well be that this influence extends to spheres which fall outside the scope of this present study, with effects that are less evident than those of which we shall presently speak. For example, two writers have recently suggested a connection between the changing state of the labour market and the attitude of the State towards the punishment of crime ; this attitude being apparently less harsh and more prone to humane considerations at times of labour-scarcity when convict labour was in demand than at times when the labour reserve was large and proletarian life was consequently cheap.! Concerning the influence of this factor upon economic policy we will venture to make one general statement, if only as an hypothesis for more expert enquiry. There seems to be at least prima facie evidence for connecting periods when the policy of the State in a class society moves in the direction of economic regulation with periods of actual or apprehended labour-scarcity, and periods when State policy is inspired by a spirit of economic liberalism with an opposite situation. The reasons which prompt the State at any time towards intervention in production may be various and complex ; as are also the possible forms and objects of intervention. A situation conducive to one type of interven- tion may not be conducive to another. But when State inter- vention has occurred in the past as a considered and settled
1G. Riische and Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure.
24 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
policy adapted to the normal circumstances of peace-time, the two objects which mainly seem to have actuated it are the enforcement of a monopoly in favour of some group of capitalists or the tightening of the bonds of labour discipline}; and one might expect that the efforts of the State in a capitalist society to control wages and to restrict the freedom of movement of the labourer would be greater when the labour reserve was depleted than when it was swollen. Support is lent to the supposition that a ruling motif of Etatisme in a class society lies in control of the labour market by the fact that State intervention tended to grow in countries of Western Europe in the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, which was a period of almost universal labour scarcity (for example, in France the proclamation of John the Good designed to control the craft organizations in Paris and in England statutory control of wages) and again in the seventeenth century, which was in France, for example, the age of Sully, Laffemas and Colbert ; whereas the nineteenth century, a period of an abundant labour reserve and rapid increase of population, witnessed the greatest triumphs of laissez-faire? The hypothesis has, at least, a good deal to recommend it, that freedom flourishes
2 One is speaking here primarily of regulations and controls governing price or output or entry to a trade or change of employment, of the type common under the Mercantilist system and again in recent times, and not of legislation such as Factory Acts or social insurance which do not so directly affect the relations of exchange or of production and generally have a different motivation and significance.
2 Cf. E. Heckscher (Mercantilism, vol. 1), who suggests that the rise of wages after the Black Death “ provided a powerful motive for the first interference on the part of the State ” (p. 138), which “‘ was nearly always exerted on the side of the masters” (p. 148). Towards the end of the fifteenth century, however, there was a modification of official policy in France, and a partial reversion to a régime of gild self-government. For the seventeenth century cf. P. Boissonnade, Le Socialisme d@’Etat : V’ Industrie et les Classes Industrielles en France, 1455-1661, who refers to the rigid discipline to which apprentices and workers were submitted in the seventeenth century, “‘ similar to that of the barracks or the convent ”, and to the State policy towards the gilds which favoured the patronat against the worker, and in face of general complaints of labour shortage prohibited workers’ associations and assemblies and punished those who changed their employment (pp. 295-305). Despite illegal syndicats and workers’ revolts and insurrections in several towns in various years between 1622 and 1660, this seems to have been a period of worsening conditions among the workers, who “live in a state bordering on nakedness ”’ in conditions of “‘ frightful misery ” (pp. 307-8) : a state of affairs which continued under Colbert (Boissonnade, Colbert, 1661-83; H. Hauser, Les Debits du Capitalisme, 36-9, 102-6, 161 seq.). Cf. also Weber’s reference to the undeveloped character of a proletariat on the continent of Europe as the reason for the “‘ deliberate cultivation by the state” of industry in France and Germany (General Econ. History, 164). It is true that in the present century we have again an age of compulsory arbitration, of both minimum and maximum wages, and of the Corporate State, combined with a swollen unemployment total between the two wars. But this modern situation is a peculiar one in this respect, that it is dominated by the rise of powerful organizations of the wage-earning class. There is an evident connection, however, between the growth of armament expenditure in the 1930's, depleting the labour reserve, and the growth of coercion by the State over labour.
CAPITALISM 25
most under Capitalism when, by reason of a superabundant proletariat, the mode of production is secure, whereas legal compulsion stands at a premium as soon as jobs compete for men and the mode of production grows less profitable as a source of income on capital and less stable.
By contrast with the picture of a fluctuating policy of the State towards industry, as we actually find it, Capitalism has sometimes been represented as constantly striving towards economic freedom, since only in the absence of regulation and control can it find favourable conditions for expansion. Capitalism, to this view, is the historical enemy of legal restraint and monopoly, and monopoly is the product of illegitimate intrusion of the State into the economic domain, in pursuit of power instead of plenty or of social stability at the cost of commercial prosperity. But this bears little resemblance to the true picture ; and in what follows the réle of monopoly at various stages of Capitalism, at one time aiding the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the progress of capital accumulation, at another time arresting technical develop- ment, will be frequently emphasized. While in its coming-of- age Capitalism made war upon the monopolistic privileges of craft gilds and trading corporations which barred its way, subse- quently it showed itself to be not at all averse to the acceptance of economic privileges and State regulation of trade in its own interests, as the later history of Mercantilism bears witness. In the nineteenth century, again, especially in England, the new factory industry raised the banner of unfettered access to markets and to labour supplies, and claimed the right to compete on equal terms with older established rivals, in order to give head- room to its remarkably enhanced productive powers. But, except in the specially favourable circumstances of England as pioneer of the new technique, this enthusiasm for freedom of trade was seldom unqualified ; and by the end of the century competition was once again to yield place to monopoly, and free trade to retire before the dawn of what has been termed an era of neo-Mercantilism. One might even say that it is only in exceptional periods, when markets and _ profit-opportunities are expanding in an unusual degree, that the chronic fear of increase of products and of productive capacity which this system seems to nurture is held in check, and its native tendency towards restrictive policies, born of this fear, is in abeyance.
Two final comments of a general nature seem to be relevant as introduction to the more detailed studies which follow. The
26 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
emphasis of our approach to the interpretation of Capitalism is that changes in the character of production, and in the social relations that hinge upon it, have generally exerted a more profound and potent influence upon society than have changes in trade relations fer se. But this must not be held to imply that trade and markets have not in their turn had an important reciprocal influence on production and are not to be assigned a leading réle at various points in the story. Not only was trade the soil from which a bourgeoisie first grew ; not only did its impact on the medieval village have a potent influence, if only an indirect one by promoting a differentiation among the peasantry into well-to-do peasants and poor, thereby fostering the growth of a rural semi-proletariat from among the latter ; not only have markets shaped the moulds into which industry settled, as well as themselves being contingent on the growth of production ; but one can say that it is periods of rapidly expand- ing markets as well as of expanding labour supply which are the periods par excellence of industrial expansion, of progress both in productive technique and in forms of organization ; whereas it is apparently when markets are straitened that concern for a safe routine and the consolidation of an established position tends to oust the spirit of adventure and a stiffening of the joints of capitalist industry sets in. Compared with previous systems, there can be no doubt that modern Capitalism has been pro- gressive in a high degree : according to the well-known tribute paid to it by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, “ the bourgeoisie has played an extremely revolutionary réle upon the stage of history . . . (it) was the first to show us what human activity is capable of achieving . . . (it) cannot exist without incessantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and, consequently, the relations of production’. But this progressive influence of Capitalism was less because, by some enduring quality of its nature, the system thrives on continuous innovation, than because its period of maturity was associated with an unusual buoyancy of markets as well as with an abnormal rate of increase of its labour supply. That this should have been the case in the nineteenth century, and in America for the first three decades of the twentieth, does not justify us in supposing that this favour- able constellation will indefinitely continue ; and we shall see that evidence is not lacking to suggest that this may be already a thing of the past. Such long-term influence, however, as the changing configuration of markets has exerted upon economic
CAPITALISM 27
development seems to have been primarily via its effect on production, as one of the latter’s conditioning factors ; and, apart from this, the sphere of trade does not seem to have been the seat of any powerful waves of influence which have directly spread thence in wide circles over the surface of society.!
If the shape of economic development is as we have described it, a specific corollary seems to follow for economic analysis : a corollary, moreover, of crucial importance. This is that, for understanding the larger movements of the economic system at any given period, the qualities peculiar to the system are more important than the qualities it may have in common with other systems ; and that one is unlikely to make much of its long- term tendencies of development if one derives one’s concepts simply from relations of exchange, drawing a line between these and that special type of institutional factor which composes what Marx termed the mode of production of the epoch. Economic theory, at least since Jevons and the Austrians, has increasingly been cast in terms of properties that are common to any type of exchange society ; and the central economic laws have been formulated at this level of abstraction.? Institutional, or his-
1 This is not intended to be a statement about the order of “ importance ” of different factors in promoting change. It is a statement simply about the modus operandi of causal sequences and about the different operational réle of different factors in a process of development. The distinction referred to seems to be akin to that made by J. S. Mill between an event which is the immediate cause of some change and an event (or events), which exerts an influence, not by directly producing the change, but by predisposing certain elements in a situation in the relevant direction, ““ a case of causation in which the effect is to invest an object with a certain property ” or “ the preparation of an object for producing an effect’ (System of Logic, gth Ed., vol. I, 388-90).
2 Some seem to have claimed for the propositions of economic theory a universal and necessary character akin to that of so-called ‘‘ synthetic a@ priori propositions ”’. Professor Hayek, following a line of thought opened up by Weber, has declared that the objects which form the subject-matter of the social sciences are ‘‘ not physical facts ”’, but are wholes “‘ constituted ” out of “ familiar categories of our own minds ”’, ‘* Theories of the social sciences do not consist of ‘ laws’ in the sense of empirical rules about the behaviour of objects definable in physical terms” : all they provide is “‘ a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts”, and ‘‘ can never be verified or falsified by reference to facts”. ‘‘ All that we can and must verify is the presence of our assumptions in the particular case. ... The theory itself... can only be tested for consistency ” (‘‘ The Facts of the Social Sciences” in Ethics, Oct. 1943, pp. II, 13).
This tos startling claim derives from the view that the ‘‘ wholes ” with which social theories deal are concerned with relations which are not definable in terms of common physical properties but only in éeleological terms of attitudes which we recognize as similar by analogy with the character of our own minds. Hence from knowledge of our own minds we can derive a priori all the general notions which form the subject-matter of social theory. So far as economics is concerned, this view seems to depend on the selection of the market as the sole province of economics, and of the problem of “‘ adapting scarce means to given ends” as the aspect of the
28 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
torico-relative, material, while it has not been excluded entirely, has only been introduced into the second storey of the building, being treated in the main as changes in ‘“‘data”’ which may influence the value of the relevant variables, but do not alter the main equations themselves by which the governing relationships are defined. Hence a line of demarcation is drawn between an autonomous sphere of exchange-relations, possessed of properties and ruled by necessities that are, in the main, independent of any change of “system ’’—a sphere which is the province of economists—and the sphere of property institutions and class relations which is the territory where sociologists and historians of institutions, with their talk of ‘‘ systems ”’, can riot to their hearts’ content. But if the major factor in the economic and social, if not the political, development of the past four to five centuries has been something called Capitalism, and Capitalism is as we have described it, such a dichotomy is untenable.1. An autonomous sphere of exchange-relationships, whose concepts ignore the qualitative difference in the connection of various classes with production and hence with one another, in order to
market upon which economic study is focused (“ ends” being defined subjectively in terms of human desires).
This view is admittedly not applicable to phenomena capable of statistical measurement (e.g. vital statistics) ; nor presumably to institutions such as forced labour, individual ownership of property, the distinction between men with property and men without : all these seem quite capable of classification in terms of their physical properties, without reference to mental attitudes. Moreover, it is not at all clear why the assumption is made that such things as money or capital are not definable in terms of the actual uses to which we find that they are put, instead of “in terms of the opinions people hold about them”. [If money is defined as some- thing which does not give direct enjoyment but is regarded only as a means by which things yielding enjoyment can be acquired, then this definition must be in terms of people’s mental judgements ; but not if money is defined substantially as something that is customarily used as a means of acquiring things which people eat or wear or use as fuel or adorn their houses with, without itself being used in any of these ways. The fact that we may not always be able to decide whether to classify as ornaments or as money certain objects worn round the necks of South Sea islanders without intuition as to their mental processes does not seem sufficient to invalidate the latter type of definition for most purposes.] It is not a question as to whether in certain circumstances we may not be able to learn more by deducing other people’s motives from our own than by simply generalizing about their behaviour : it 1s a question as to whether the subject-matter of economic theory and historical interpretation is confined to what we can learn from the former.
1 J. S. Mill made the considerable concession of maintaining that the laws of distribution were relative to particular institutions ; but maintained that the laws of production were not. But this view (called by Marx “ an idea begotten by the incipient, but still handicapped, critique of bourgeois economy ” : Capital, vol. HI, 1030), draws a dichotomy within the corpus of economics itself which seems to be even more difficult to maintain. For example, in Mill’s doctrine the rate of profit, which figured in the determination of value, depended on those conditions which determined distribution ; and in this sense the theory of value rested on a theory of distribution. Modern economics, however, has left no room for this kind of dicho- tomy, since it has formally integrated distribution (i.e. the pricing of factors of production) into the structure of general price-equilibrium.
CAPITALISM 29
concentrate on their similarity as quantitative factors in an abstract pricing-problem, clearly cannot tell us much about the economic development of modern society. Moreover, the alleged autonomy of this sphere is itself brought into question.
To regard exchange-relationships as an autonomous territory for a special science of economics seems to mean that a fairly complete causal story of essential processes can be constructed without going outside its boundaries. There are those who hold that, while a study of exchange relations by themselves must admittedly be incomplete, unless it proceeds to take account of the influence upon them of particular institutions such as the class structure of society, the laws revealed by the former are nevertheless fundamental and express necessities which rule any type of economic system. In what sense the modern theory of price-equilibrium can be held to express “ necessities” for any type of society, and how much remains of such “ necessities ”’ when they have had to be supplemented to any large extent by historically-relative institutional data, is not altogether clear. But, expressed in formal terms, a possible meaning to be given to this claim is that the influence of the institutional factors upon exchange-relationships is not such as to change any of the governing equations or to rob any of the independent variables which have figured in these equations of their assumed independence. If this condition holds, changes in institutional factors can reason- ably be treated simply as changes in “‘ data”’, which affect the values to be assigned to these variables without affecting any- thing else. If, however, this convenient assumption does not hold—if the influence of the particular institutional data is more radical than this—then the necessities which these laws express will change their character with any fundamental change of system ; and the very statement of them in a form that is simultaneously realistic and determinate will be impossible unless the institutional situation is taken into account.
The claim that economic principles can be formulated with- out regard to particular institutional conditions may seem to many to be open to such an obvious objection as to make it surprising that such a claim could have been seriously advanced. Is it not obvious that the manner in which prices are determined,
1A particular meaning that those who subscribe to this view have themselves given to it is the alleged necessity for the adoption of certain price- and market- mechanisms by a socialist economy, which has figured in the discussion about the
problem of economic calculation in a socialist economy, around which there has grown quite a considerable literature.
30 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
and exchange is regulated, under conditions of competition must be different from the manner in which they are determined under conditions of monopoly ; or, again, that the pattern of prices at any particular time (and hence movements of prices over time) must be different when each seller is ignorant of the intended actions of other sellers from what it would be where this ignorance was partly or wholly absent (as would be the case under conditions of economic planning)? If this be so, the statement that a change of circumstance does not affect the equations themselves by which economic “ necessities”? are defined cannot be true so far as the determination of prices is concerned. Presumably the statement can only be seriously intended to apply to postulates at some higher level of generality : to principles of which the particular theories of particular situations can be treated as special cases.1 The only postulates that can possibly be of this kind are ones concerning the relation- ship of prices to demand : postulates which state that a given structure of prices will have a determinate effect on demand, and which have been held to yield the corollary that, in any given state of supply of productive resources, only one set of prices (and an allocation of productive resources corresponding to it) will result in an “ optimum satisfaction ” of demand—a corollary which requires also for its validity certain assumptions about the nature of consumers’ preference or about utility. But these statements do not suffice to afford a determinate account of how relationships of exchange are in fact determined.
An analogy which, because it is familiar, may perhaps commend itself to economists, can be cited from recent dis- cussions about the Quantity Theory of Money. This theory, expressing an invariant relationship between changes in the quantity of money and changes in prices, used to be stated in a form in which it was regarded as having general validity for any type of situation. This was largely by virtue of an implicit assumption that certain other crucial variables were independent of the quantity of money, or that, if they were connected with
1 The difference between the determination of price under competition and under imperfect competition has been formally stated in this way: namely, that output will be determined by the condition of equality of marginal cost and marginal revenue ; perfect competition being treated as a special case where marginal and average revenue are equal (since the demand is infinitely elastic), and hence marginal cost is equal to price, instead of less than price. But when one is dealing with the industry as a whole, this crucial condition (the elasticity of demand for the individual firm) has to be introduced when competition is imperfect as a separate condition (separate, that is, from the demand for the whole industry) ; as has also such a condition as the presence of restrictions on entry of firms into the industry.
CAPITALISM 31
the latter, this connection was limited to a certain form.! It is now realized that this assumption does not hold true of all types of situation : in particular, of 4 situation characterized by excess- capacity of man-power and machinery. In so far, therefore, as the theory claims to tell a causal story, its alleged generality breaks down, since there are situations in which the relationship it asserts between money and prices is not true ; whereas, if it modifies its status to that of a mere “ equation of identity ’’, the causal story ? of the actual relationship between money and prices remains to be told, and told in terms of particular situations. When this fuller causal story has been completely told, it may be that some new general principle emerges, in terms of which in a purely formal sense particular situations can again be expressed as special cases (e.g. a state of full employment as one where supply of output has a zero, instead of some positive, elasticity). The point is that such general principles can only properly emerge as a result of prior classification and analysis of the concrete peculiarities of particular situations, and not as a result of isolating a few common features of those situations by a method of superficial analogy. The comparative study of social institutions affords a strong presumption, to say the least, that the modern theory of price-equilibrium may have considerable analogy with the Quantity Theory of Money in this respect. In Friedrich Engels’ words, Political Economy as an “ historical science ” ‘‘ must first investigate the special laws of each separate stage in the evolution of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange considered as a whole”’.3
This is not a theme that can here be fittingly pursued. But it is also not one that in the present context could be entirely ignored. While no one could seriously deny that there are features which different types of economic society have in common, and that such analogies are deserving of study and have their share of importance when placed in proper setting,
1 For example, that in so far as velocity of circulation changed as a consequence of price-changes (or of the expectation of such changes) this was likely to be in a direction that would reinforce, and not counteract, the influence of changes in quantity of money on prices. Output was held to be unaffected by changes in demand by virtue of an implicit assumption of full employment, i.e. inelastic supply of output as a whole.
2 Causal story is used here in the sense of a theory adequate to enable one to make some prediction about actual events: in this case about the probable effect of a given change in the quantity of money.
3 Anti-Diihring, 167-8.
32 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALiSM
it seems abundantly clear that the leading questions concerning economic development, such as those with which the following studies are concerned, cannot be answered at all unless one goes outside the bounds of that limited traditional type of economic analysis in which realism is so ruthlessly sacrificed to generality, and unless the existing frontier between what it is fashionable to label as “‘ economic factors” and as “ social factors’ is abolished. Moreover, it is not only that this limited type of economic enquiry is powerless to provide answers to certain questions. By confining its examination of society to the level of the market, this type of enquiry also contributes to that mystifica- tion about the essential nature of capitalist society of which the history of economics, with its abstinence-theories and its word- play about “ productivity ”, is so prolific of examples. At the level of the market all things available to be exchanged, including the labour-power of proletarians, appear as similar entities, since abstraction has been made of almost every other quality except that of being an object of exchange. Hence at this level of analysis everything is seen as an exchange of equivalents; to the exchange-process the owner of titles to property contributes as much as the labourer ; and the essence of Capitalism as a particular form of the appropriation of surplus labour by a class possessing economic power and privilege is thus by sleight of hand concealed. To shift the focus of economic enquiry from a study of exchange societies in general to a study of the physiology and growth of a specifically capitalist economy—a study which must necessarily be associated with a comparative study of different forms of economy—is a change of emphasis which seems, in this country at least, to be long overdue.
CHAPTER TWO
THE DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS
I
This country has not been immune to discussion about the meaning of Feudalism, and usages of the term have been various and conflicting. As Dr. Helen Cam has remarked, the constitu- tional historian has tended to find the essence of Feudalism in the fact that “landholding is the source of political power ” ; to the lawyer its essence has been that “ status is determined by tenure ” and to the economic historian “ the cultivation of land
by the exercise of rights over persons”. But in general the matter has here excited little controversy. Definition has not been linked with rival social philosophies as has elsewhere been
the case, most notably in nineteenth-century Russia. The very existence of such a system has not been called in question ; and design for the future has not been made to depend on any imprint which this system may have left upon the present. In Russia, by contrast, the discussion has exercised opinion more powerfully than elsewhere, and the question whether Feudalism in the Western sense had ever existed formed a principal issue in the famous debate between Westerners and Slavophils in the first half and middle of the nineteenth century. At first emphasis was laid on the relationship in which the vassal stood to his prince or sovereign and on the form of landholding, yielding what was in the main a juridical definition : a definition certainly according with the etymology of the word, since as Maine observed the term Feudalism “ has the defect of calling attention to one set only of its characteristic incidents”. A matured example of this is the definition which the late Professor P. Struve recently contributed to the Cambridge Economic History of Europe: “‘ a contractual but indissoluble bond between service and land grant, between personal obligation and real right”. From this definition it followed that, although Feudalism had existed in Russia, its beginning was only to be dated from around 1350 with the
1 History, vol. XXV (1940-1), p. 216. 33
34 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
termination of allodial landholding and the rise of service-tenures, and that it presumably terminated in the seventeenth century, when the pomiestie became assimilated to the voichina (i.e. became hereditary) and there was a reversion to the allodial principle. With the growing influence of Marxism on Russian studies of agrarian history, a second type of definition came into prominence, giving pride of place to economic rather than to juridical relations. Professor M. N. Pokrovsky, for instance, who for many years was the doyen of Marxist historians, seems to have regarded Feudalism inter alia as a system of self-sufficient “‘ natural economy ”’, by contrast with a moneyed “exchange economy’’—as “ an economy that has consumption as its object”’.? This notion that Feudalism rested on natural economy as its economic base is one which, implicitly at least, seems to be shared by a number of economic historians in the West, and might be said to have more affinity with the conceptions of writers of the German Historical School, like Schmoller, than with those of Marx. There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that markets and money played a more prominent part in the Middle Ages than used to be supposed. But this notion, at any rate, shares with the purely juridical one the great inconvenience (to say the least) of making the term not even approximately coterminous with the institution of serfdom. In Pokrovsky’s case, for example, this definition leads him to speak of the sixteenth century in Russia as a period of decline of Feudalism (entitling the relevant chapter in his Brief History ‘‘ The Dissolution of Feudalism in Muscovy ”’), for the reason that commerce was reviving at this time and production for a market on the increase. Yet the sixteenth century was the very period when enserfment of previously free or semi-free peasants was taking place extensively and feudal burdens (in the common economic usage of the word) on the peasantry were being greatly augmented. Some English economic historians have apparently tried to evade this dilemma, firstly, by a virtual identification of serfdom with the performance of labour-services, or obligatory work directly performed upon the lord’s estate, and, secondly, by attempting
1 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I, 427, 432.
2 Brief History of Russia, vol. 1, 289. This definition inter alia earned him strong criticism from other Soviet historians in the early ’g0’s. Pokrovsky’s critics alleged that he tried simultaneously to ride both this conception and a purely political and juridical one ; and that influenced in particular by a much-discussed work of Pavlov- Silvanskiin 1907 (which championed the idea that Feudalism in the Western sense
had existed in Russia), he never completely broke away from the latter conception (cf. S. Bakhrushin in Protiv Historicheski Conseptsii M. N. Pokrovskovo, 117-18).
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 35
to show that such labour-services usually disappeared and were commuted into a contractual relationship in terms of money in the degree that trade and production for exchange in a wide market developed at the close of the Middle Ages. But this does not seem to provide at all a satisfactory way of escape, as what follows in this chapter will attempt to show.
The English mind is wont to dismiss arguments about defini- tion as mere disputation about words : an instinct which is prob- ably a healthy one seeing that so much argument of this kind has been little more than an exercise for pedants. But questions of definition cannot be entirely dismissed from our reckoning, however keen we may be on letting facts speak for themselves. We have already said that in attaching a definite meaning, whether explicitly or implicitly, to a term like Feudalism or Capitalism, one is ipso facto adopting a principle of classification to be applied in one’s selection and assembly of historical events. One is deciding how one will break up the continuum of the historical process, the raw material that history presents to his- toriography—what events and what sequences are to be thrown into relief. Since classification must necessarily precede and form the groundwork for analysis, it follows that, as soon as one passes from description to analysis, the definitions one has adopted must have a crucial influence on the result.
To avoid undue proxility, it must suffice, without further parade of argument, to postulate the definition of Feudalism which in the sequel it is proposed to adopt. The emphasis of this definition will lie, not in the juridical relation between vassal and sovereign, nor in the relation between production and the destination of the product, but in the relation between the direct producer (whether he be artisan in some workshop or peasant cultivator on the land) and his immediate superior or overlord and in the social-economic content of the obligation which connects them. Conformably with the notion of Capital- ism discussed in the previous chapter, this definition will charac- terize Feudalism primarily as a “ mode of production” ; and © this will form the essence of our definition. As such it will be virtually identical with what we generally mean by serfdom : an obligation laid on the producer by force and independently of his own volition to fulfil certain economic demands of an overlord, whether these demands take the form of services to be performed or of dues to be paid in money or in kind—of work or of what Dr. Neilson has termed “‘ gifts to the lord’s
36 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
larder ’”’.1 This coercive force may be that of military strength, possessed by the feudal superior, or of custom backed by some kind of juridical procedure, or the force of law. This system of production contrasts, on the one hand, with slavery in that (as Marx has expressed it) “‘ the direct producer is here in possession of his means of production, of the material labour conditions required for the realization of his labour and the production of his means of subsistence. He carries on his agriculture and the rural house industries connected with it as an independent producer ”’, whereas “‘ the slave works with conditions of labour belonging to another’. At the same time, serfdom implies that “the property relation must assert itself as a direct relation between rulers and servants, so that the direct producer is not free”? : ‘‘a lack of freedom which may be modified from serf- dom with forced labour to the point of a mere tributary relation ””.? It contrasts with Capitalism in that under the latter the labourer, in the first place (as under slavery), is no longer an independent producer but is divorced from his means of production and from the possibility of providing his own sub- sistence, but in the second place (unlike slavery), his relation- ship to the owner of the means of production who employs him is a purely contractual one (an act of sale or hire terminable at short notice) : in the face of the law he is free both to choose his master and to change masters; and he is not under any obligation, other than that imposed by a contract of service, to contribute work or payment to a master. This system of social relations to which we refer as Feudal Serfdom has been associated in history, for a number of reasons, with a low level of technique, in which the instruments of production are simple and generally inexpensive, and the act of production is largely individual in
1N. Neilson, Customary Rents (in Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History), 15. Cf. Vinogradoff, Villeinage in England, 405: ‘“ The labour-service relation, although very marked and prevalent in most cases {in the feudal period], is by no means the only one that should be taken into account.”
2 Capital, vol. III, 918. Marx goes on to say that “ under such conditions the surplus labour for the nominal owner of the land cannot be filched from them [the serfs] by any economic measures but must be forced from them by other measures, whatever may be the form assumed by them’; to which he adds the following remarks : ‘ The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relations of rulers and ruled... . It is always the direct relation of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden foundation of the entire social construction, and . . . of the corresponding form of the state.” Yet ‘‘ this does not prevent the same economic basis from showing infinite variations and gradations in its appearance’, due to “‘ numerous outside circumstances, natural environment, race peculiarities, outside historical influences, and so forth, all of which must be ascertained by careful analysis ’’.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 37
character ; the division of labour (and hence the co-ordination of individuals in production as a socially-integrated process) being at a very primitive level of development. Historically it has also been associated (and for a similar reason in the main) with conditions of production for the immediate needs of the household or village-community and not for a wider market ; although “‘ natural economy ” and serfdom are far from being coterminous, as we shall see. The summit of its development was characterized by demesne-farming : farming of the lord’s estate, often on a considerable scale, by compulsory labour- services. But the feudal mode of production was not confined to this classic form. Finally, this economic system has been associated, for part of its life-history at least and often in its origins, with forms of political decentralization, with the con- ditional holding of land by lords on some kind of service-tenure, and (more generally) with the possession by a lord of judicial or quasi-judicial functions in relation to the dependent popula- tion. But, again, this association is not invariable, and serfdom can be found in company both with fairly centralized State- forms and with hereditary landholding instead of service-tenures. To invert a description of Vinogradoff (who speaks of serfdom as “ a characteristic corollary of Feudalism ” !), we may say that the holding of land in fief is a common characteristic, but not an invariable characteristic, of Feudal Serfdom as an economic system in the sense in which we are using it.
II
The revival of commerce in Western Europe after a.p. 1100 and its disruptive effect on feudal society is a sufficiently familiar story. How the growth of trade carried in its wake the trader and the trading community, which nourished itself like an alien body within the pores of feudal society ; how with exchange came an increasing percolation of money into the self-sufficiency of manorial economy; how the presence of the merchant encouraged a growing inclination to barter surplus products and produce for the market—all this, with much richness of detail, has been told many times. The consequences for the texture of the old order were radical enough. Money revenue as well as services of bondmen grew to be a lordly ambition ; a market in loans developed and also a market in land. As one writer,
1 Article on Serfdom in Encyclopedia Britannica.
38 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
speaking of England, has said: “the great roads which join London to the seaboard are the arteries along which flows money, the most destructive solvent of seigniorial power ”’.t
That this process was of outstanding importance in these centuries can scarcely be doubted. That it was connected with the changes that were so marked at the end of the Middle Ages is evident enough. The tendency that developed to commute labour-services for a money-payment and either to lease out the seigniorial demesne for a money-rent or to continue its cultivation with hired labour obviously had the growth of the market and of money-dealings as their necessary condition. What is question- able, however, is whether the connection was as simple and direct as has often been depicted, and whether the widening of the market can be held to have been a sufficient condition for the decline of Feudalism—whether an explanation is possible in terms of this as the sole or even the decisive factor. It has been not uncommon for the solvent effect of exchange and of money to be assigned, not only an outstanding, but a unique influence in the transformation of society from feudal to capitalist. We are often presented with the picture of a more or less stable economy that was disintegrated by the impact of commerce acting as an external force and developing outside the system that it finally overwhelmed. We are given an interpretation of the transition from the old order to the new that finds the dominant causal sequences within the sphere of exchange between manorial economy and the outside world. ‘‘ Natural economy” and ‘exchange economy” are two economic orders that cannot mix, and the presence of the latter, we are told, is sufficient to cause the former to go into dissolution.
Serious doubt about the adequacy of such an interpretation arises as soon as the influence of trade on the structure of Feudal- ism in different parts of Europe, or even in different parts of England, is subjected to comparative study. For example, if the destructive effects of money-dealings on the old order, based on servile labour, were truly the decisive factor at work, one could naturally expect to find most evidence of commutation of services for a money-payment in England by (say) the fourteenth century in counties nearest to the London market—in closest
1W. H.R. Curtler, The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land, 41. Pirenne says that ‘‘ the decay of the seigneurial system advanced in proportion to the development of commerce ”’ (op. cit., 84). Professor Nabholz attributes the transition from feudal
dues to money rents to the fact that ‘‘ the lord must adjust himself to a money economy ” (Cambridge Economic History, vol. I, 503; also 554-5).
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 39
if
touch with those “ arteries along which flows money, the most destructive solvent of seigniorial power”. Actually, it was the south-east of England that showed the largest proportion of labour services at this date and the north and west of England the smallest.1. This of itself might be held to be insufficient as rebutting evidence, since the relative importance of labour services among feudal dues varied in different parts of the country with the type of cultivation and the size of the arable demesne ; and many money-payments were survivals of long standing and not products of recent commutation. But it is also true, when we study the trend over several centuries, that ‘in the more backward parts of the country, farthest from great markets, above all in the north-west, labour services were shed first, while the more progressive south-east retained them longest ’’.? Secondly, an explanation of the change in terms of market influences would lead one to expect to find a close correlation between the development of trade and the decline of serfdom in different areas of Europe. To some extent it is true that there is this correlation. But the exceptions are sufficiently remarkable. The outstanding case where the connection does not hold is the recrudescence of Feudalism in Eastern Europe at the end of the fifteenth century—that ‘second serfdom ” of which Friedrich Engels wrote? : a revival of the old system which was associated with the growth of production for the market. Alike in the Baltic States, in Poland and Bohemia expanding opportunities for grain export led, not to the abolition, but to the augmentation or revival of servile obligations on the peasantry, and to arable cultivation for the market on the large estates on a basis of serf labour.‘ Similarly in Hungary the growth of trade, the growth of large estate-farming and increased impositions on the peasants went hand in hand.§ Thirdly, there is no evidence that the start of commutation in England was connected with the growth of production for the market, even if the two were associated in the later stages of the decline
1 Cf. H. L. Gray in English Historical Review, Oct. 1934, 635-6. It is true that London had not yet the pre-eminence over other cities that it later had. But the two next cities in importance, Norwich and Bristol, were also in the southern half of England.
2M. Postan in Trans. Ryl. Hist. Society (NS.), vol. XX, 171.
® Marx—Engels Correspondence, 407-8.
“Cf. H. Sée, Modern Capitalism, 161; also cf. W. Stark, Ursprung und Aufstieg des landwirtschaftlichen Grossbetriebs in den Boéhmischen Ldndern ; Camb. Econ. Htstory, vol I, 405.
5 Camb. Econ. History, vol. I, 410.
40 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
of serfdom.! It is now recognized that there was a fairly con- siderable movement towards commutation as early as the twelfth century, which was succeeded in the thirteenth century by a reaction towards an increase of labour services and an inten- sification of pressure on the peasantry.? Yet the growth of trade and of urban markets was a feature of the thirteenth century, when feudal reaction was occurring, and not of the twelfth century when the drift towards commutation is found.
There seems, in fact, to be as much evidence that the growth of a money economy per se led to an intensification of serfdom as there is evidence that it was the cause of the feudal decline. If we wish to multiply examples we shall find the history of eastern Europe particularly rich in testimony of the former kind. The fact that the Greek colonies on the shores of the Black Sea in the second and third centuries a.p. were so largely trading colonies did not prevent them from being (in Rostovstev’s description of them) ‘ military communit(ies) of landowners and traders who ruled over a native population of serfs’. The fact that the early Russian cities like Kiev and Novgorod so largely thrived as centres of trade along the great Baltic-Lake Ladoga-Dnieper-Black Sea trade route did not prevent their ruling class from having slaves as objects of production as well as of trade and from developing a form of serfdom on their lands.¢ Four centuries later, it was precisely wealthy monas- teries like the Troitsa Sergeievsky near Moscow or that of St. Cyril on the White Sea, among the most enterprising and suc- cessful traders of the period, that were the earliest to impose labour services (instead of dues in money or kind) upon peasantry on their estates. Something similar was true of German monas- teries and of Church colonizing enterprises east of the Elbe, which reduced the indigenous Wendish peasantry to serfdom or even slavery upon their own once-free lands, and generally main- tained a more severe régime of bondage on Church lands than prevailed on lay estates. In Poland in the fifteenth century a transition from a system of tribute-payments in money and in
1 This association is scarcely true of the fifteenth century, however. This century witnessed a very rapid growth of hired labour in agriculture ; yet it was a century, for the most part, of declining rather than of expanding trade.
2 Cf. Kosminsky in Econ. Hist. Review, vol. V, No. 2, pp. 43-4, who speaks of an actual “ asservation of the free’; also his Angliskaia Derevnia v. 13° veke, 211-16, 219, of which the article is a summary; and Postan, loc. cit., 174-8, 185-7; N. Neilson, Economic Conditions on the Manors of Ramsey Abbey, 50 and passim.
3M. Rostovstev in American Historical Review, vol. XXVI, 222.
* See below, p. 67.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 41
kind (which had characterized the earlier period of colonization of new land) to an extensive system of labour-services coincided with the growth of corn export, following the Peace of Torun in 1466, which had given Poland an outlet to the sea!; and in the Polish-occupied Ukraine of the sixteenth century we find that ‘‘ serfdom made its initial appearance in western Ukraine where the demand for grain (for export) first appeared in the latter half of the sixteenth century ”’.?. The eighteenth century in Russia—the century of Peter the Great and of the enlightened Catherine, that “ golden age of the Russian nobility ’—was one in which Russian serfdom approximated more closely than it had ever done to slavery ; the serf being virtually the chattel of his lord who could sell his peasant apart from the land and could torture (even kill) him almost with impunity. Yet it was also the century that witnessed a higher development of commerce than in any previous century since the glories of Kiev and a not inconsiderable growth of manufacture.
To the question whether there is any reason to suppose that the growth of money economy of itself should encourage a feudal lord to cancel or relax the traditional obligations of his serfs and substitute a contractual relationship in their stead, the answer is, I think, bound to be that there is none. ‘That the lord would have no inducement at all to commute labour-services for a money-payment unless the use of money were developed to some extent is obvious enough ; and it is in this sense that a certain growth of the market was an essential condition of the change. But it does not follow from this that the spread of trade and of the use of money necessarily leads to the commutation of labour services (still less to the emancipation of the producer from all feudal obligations) and to the leasing of the lord’s estate or the farming of it on the basis of hired labour. Is there not equally good ground for expecting the growth of trade to occasion an intensification of serfdom in order to provide forced labour to cultivate the estate for purposes of the market? Is there not as good reason to regard what occurred in eastern Europe or in thirteenth-century England as the natural consequence of ex- panding commerce as what occurred in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century England or fourteenth- and fifteenth-century France
1J. Rutkowski, Histoire Economique de la Pologne avant les Partages, 31-6. The change seems to have come earlier, and to have been most complete, in the neigh- bourhood of navigable rivers such as the Vistula, and to have been tardier and least developed in remote regions where transport was difficult.
2M. Hrushevsky, A History of the Ukraine, 172~4.
42 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
and the Rhineland? If either of the two were to be regarded as the more probable outcome, it would seem to be the former, since at earlier periods of history the effect of commerce had been apparently to encourage a substitution of slavery, which permits a higher degree of organization and discipline, for the looser bonds of serfdom.! In past discussion of the decline of Feudalism the assumption that production of commodities for a market necessarily implies production on the basis of wage-labour seems too often to have slipped into the argument unawares.
What is clearly missing in the traditional interpretation is an analysis of the internal relationships of Feudalism as a mode of production and the part which these played in determining the system’s disintegration or survival. And while the actual outcome has to be treated as a result of a complex interaction between the external impact of the market and these internal relationships of the system, there is a sense in which it is the latter that can be said to have exercised the decisive influence. As Marx observed, the “ dissolving influence” that commerce will have upon the old order depends upon the character of this system, “its solidity and internal articulation” ; and, in par- ticular, “‘ what new mode of production will take the place of the old does not depend on commerce but on the character of the old mode of production itself ”’.?
As soon as we enquire how far forces internal to feudal economy were responsible for its decline, we turn in a direction to which less study has been devoted and where the evidence is neither very plentiful nor conclusive. But such evidence as we possess strongly indicates that it was the inefficiency of Feudalism as a system of production, coupled with the growing needs of the ruling class for revenue, that was primarily responsible for its decline ; since this need for additional revenue promoted an increase in the pressure on the producer to a point where this pressure became literally unendurable. The source from which the feudal ruling class derived its income, and the only source from which this income could be augmented, was the surplus labour-time of the servile class over and above what was necessary to provide for the latter’s own subsistence. With the low and stationary state of labour-productivity of the time, there was little margin to spare from which this surplus product
1 Marx comments on the fact that ‘‘ in the antique world the effect of commerce and the development of merchant capital always results in slave economy ” (Capital, vol. III, 390).
2 Ibid.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 43
could be increased ; and any attempt to increase it was bound to be at the expense of the time devoted by the producer to the cultivation of his own meagre holding and bound very soon either to tax the producer’s strength beyond human endurance or else to reduce his subsistence below the level of mere animal existence. That this was so did not, of course, prevent the pressure to obtain a larger surplus from being exerted ; but the eventual result for the system at large remained disastrous, since in the end it led to an exhaustion, or actual disappearance, of the labour-force by which the system was nourished. In the words of a French writer: “ To the knight or baron the peasant, serf or free, was only a source of revenue ; in time of peace they oppressed him at home as much as they could with imposts and corvées ; in time of war in foreign terri- tories they pillaged, murdered, burnt, trampled upon him... . The peasant was a creature to exploit at home, and to destroy abroad, and nothing more.” Even in the literature of the time, such as the chansons de geste, full of gentle chivalry, ‘“ there is not a word of pity for the peasants whose houses and crops are burned and who are massacred by hundreds or carried away with feet and wrists in bonds ”’.! The villein we find everywhere despised as an inferior creature :; regarded not at all as an end of policy but simply as an instrument—as a means to the enrichment of their lords. For the system that rested on these foundations history was to have its own peculiar reckoning.
Not only did the productivity of labour remain very low in the manorial economy, owing both to the methods in use and the lack of incentive to labour, but the yield of land remained so meagre as to lead some authorities to suggest an actual tendency for the system of cultivation to result in exhaustion of the soil. The primitive rotation, the lack of sufficient root crops and sown-grasses like lucerne, gave little chance to the soil to recover after it was cropped ; and while manuring was known and sometimes practised, the average peasant’s poverty pre- vented him from the adequate manuring of his own land which * soil cultivated under the mediaval cropping system required if it was not to lose its productive power ’”’.? Even the folding of his own sheep on his holding was not always possible owing to the jus faldae of the lord—his right of requiring the manorial sheep to be folded on his demesne. At any rate there was little
1A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of Philip Augustus, p. 384. 2H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor, 1150-1400, p. 78.
44 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
or no incentive to improvement. As an authority on medieval Europe has written, ‘‘ any improvement in the soil was but the pretext for some new exaction ”’, and the lord, being “‘ a mere parasite . . . discouraged initiative and dried up all energy at its source by taking from the villein an exorbitant part of the fruits of his work, so that labour was half sterile”’.1_ It is hardly surprising that masters should complain of villeins who “ will labour fervently before a man’s face but feebly and remissly behind his back”, or that it should have been said of bond- servants (the most exploited section of feudal society) that, “being bought and sold like beasts, and beat with rods, and scarcely suffered to rest or to take breath ”’, they should, ‘‘ when they be not held low with dread, wax stout and proud against the commandments of their sovereigns ’.2, How wretched was the plight of the mass of the producers and how close to the irreducible minimum they were is graphically shown by con- temporary accounts, like that of the man who “drove four heifers before him that had become feeble, so that men might count their every rib, so sorry looking they were” ; and “as he trod the soil his toes peered out of his worn shoes, his hose hung about his hocks on all sides’, while his wife beside him *“ went barefoot on the ice so that the blood flowed”. The common bailiffs’ doctrine was that “‘ the churl, like the willow, sprouts the better for being cropped ”—a doctrine that, even if true, must have operated within very narrow limits ; and a not unenvied title that bailiffs frequently earned was excoriator rusticorum. The Abbot of Burton hardly needed to remind his serfs that they possessed nihil praeter ventrem.3
At the same time the needs of the feudal ruling class for an
1 P, Boissonnade, Life and Work in Medieval Europe, pp. 140-1, also p. 145. Cf. the remarks of Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 1826 Ed., pp. 360-3. Denton refers to the fertility of English arable land at the end of the fifteenth century as exhausted (England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 153), and Lord Ernie has even suggested a decline of go or 40 per cent. in yield per acre between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Cf, also Harriet Bradley, Enclosures in England, p. 47 seq., where reference is made to “the overwhelming evidence of the poverty of the fourteenth-century peasant— poverty which can only be explained by the barrenness of their land” (56). For an opposite opinion cf. R. Leonard in Econ. Journal, March 1922; also on the wider question of soil exhaustion and history A. P. Usher in Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1923, p. 385. Fuller statistical data (e.g. of Sir Wm. Beveridge) does not support the view that there was an actual decline in yield over this period, but rather, as a recent writer has summarized it, “‘ gives the impression that the period was one characterized by agricultural stagnation, but not by retrogression, because the level of agricultural technique may at the beginning have been about as low as it could be” (M. K. Bennett in Econ. History, Feb. 1935, 22).
* Cit. G. G. Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, PP. 340, 341-2.
*H. S. Bennett, of. cit., pp. 164, 185-6, 305.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 45
increasing revenue demanded an intensified pressure and novel exactions on the producers. In the first place there was a tendency (which seems to have operated more forcibly on the Continent than in England) for the number of vassals to be multiplied, by a process known as sub-infeudation, in order to strengthen the military resources of the greater lords. This, combined with the natural growth of noble families and an increase in the number of retainers, swelled the size of the parasitic class that had to be supported from the surplus labour of the serf population.! Added to this were the effects of war and of brigandage, which could almost be said to be integral parts of the feudal order, and which swelled the expenses of feudal households and of the Crown at the same time as it spread waste and devastation over the land.2 While exaction and pillage diminished productive powers, the demands that the producer was required to meet were augmented. The series of Crusades involved a special drain on feudal revenues at this period ; and as the age of chivalry advanced, the extravagances of noble households advanced also, with their lavish feasts and costly displays, vying in emulation in their cult of magnificentia. At first the growth of trade, with the attraction of exotic wares that it made available and the possibilities it opened of producing a surplus for the market, reinforced the tendency to intensify feudal pressure on the peasantry ; and, as we have already noticed, the thirteenth century in England was marked by an increase of labour dues on the larger estates in England, and especially on monastic lands. A contemporary account com- plains that the lords are “‘ destroying the peasants by exactions and tallage”’ and “ exacting tallage from them by force and oppression’. Probably this was the root of that change of which Vinogradoff remarked, when he said that “ the will and influence of the lord is much more distinct and overbearing in the documents of the later thirteenth and of thefourteenth century than in the earlier records”’.4 At the same time it is possible that the smaller estates, which were apt to be badly supplied with unfree labour, may have had a tendency to encourage money- rents from tenants and to rely for cultivating the demesne, where
1 As regards the size of Church establishments in the later Middle Ages, cf. some remarks of Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, vol. I, 160-2.
2 Cf. the remarks of M. Bloch, La Société Féodale: les classes et le gouvernement des hommes, 16-24. Also see footnote to p. 49.
* Cit. H. S. Bennett, of. cit., pp. 198-9; also 105.
‘ Villeinage in England, p. 408.
46 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
this was practicable, on the hired labour of freemen.! In twelfth-century France we hear occasional voices like that of the Abbé de Cluny denouncing the oppressors of the peasantry, who, not content with the customary obligations, make novel and additional demands.?
The result of this increased pressure was not only to exhaust the goose that laid golden eggs for the castle, but to provoke, from sheer desperation, a movement of illegal emigration from the manors: a desertion en masse on the part of the producers, which was destined to drain the system of its essential life-blood
, and to provoke the series of crises in which feudal economy was
to find itself engulfed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This flight of villeins from the land often assumed catastrophic proportions both in England and elsewhere, and not only served to swell the population of the rising towns but especially on the Continent contributed to a prevalence of outlaw-bands and vagabondage and periodic jacqueries.2 In France “ when the lord remained inflexible, his land was deserted : it meant the exodus of the whole village, or even the whole canton ”’, and ‘“‘ desertions were numerous, continuous”. For example, in the twelfth century the inhabitants of the fle de Ré deserted en masse owing to their lord’s severity, and the lord was forced to introduce concessions in order to retain any labour at all. The lords in their turn resorted to agreements between themselves in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries for mutual assistance in the capture of fugitive serfs: agreements which provided for an exchange of captives or gave the right of pursuit in another’s territory. But so considerable did the problem of fugitives become, and so great the hunger for labour, that, despite treaties and mutual promises, an actual competition developed to entice and steal the serfs of a neighbouring domain—a competition which necessarily involved the making of certain concessions, and the existence of which imposed its own limits on the further
1 Kosminsky, loc. cit.
2 Cit. Levasseur, La Population Frangaise, vol. I, p. 147. Pirenne refers to a state of financial embarrassment among knights and monasteries in the mid-thirteenth century on the Continent. (Op. cit., p. 82.)
3 English legislation enacted severe penalties for such flight from feudal service : penalties which included imprisonment or branding on the forehead. There were even penalties against learning a handicraft on the part of those attached to a manor ; and it was prohibited for any man owning land of less than £20 annual value to apprentice his son to a trade (Denton, op. cit., p. 222). Cf. also Lipson: ‘‘ The manorial system was undermined not by commutation, but by the dispersion of the peasantry. . . . Desertion en masse from the manor accelerated the end of villeinage in England.” Econ. History of England, vol. 1 (Middle Ages), 1937 Ed., 92-4.
“A. Luchaire, of. cit., pp. 407-8. 5 Ibid., 407.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 47
increase of feudal exploitation. In some cases a lord, to repeople his land which had grown deserted by reason of his own oppres- sion, was forced into the sale of franchises, setting bounds to seigniorial exactions, in return for a rent or a cash payment ; and in certain provinces of France there developed in this way a number of rural communes, formed from an association of villages, which, like towns, possessed a mayor and a jurisdiction of their own.
To some extent the feudal lust for expanded revenue was met by an increase of population ; and the fact that there was some growth of population up to A.D. 1300 suggests that until this date there were certain areas where fresh supplies of cultivable land were available or else the pressure of feudal exactions had not yet reached its limit. Data concerning population in this age are scanty ; but there was apparently a considerable growth of population both in England and on the Continent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.2 This, it is true, would have served to provide more labour to support the system and to furnish additional feudal revenue. But except in areas where the in- crease in numbers was accompanied by an increase in cultivable land available to the peasants (which would in turn have required a sufficient increase in draught animals and instruments in the hands of the cultivators), the eventual result was bound to be an increase in the peasants’ burden owing to the increased pressure on the available land. True, considerable attempts were made to extend the area of cultivation in the course of the Middle Ages. There were some brave efforts at colonization and land-reclama- tion, to which certain religious orders such as the Cluniac and the Cistercian made an important contribution, as they did also towards the upkeep of roads and the encouragement of crafts ; in England there were encroachments on the waste, and clearings in the primeval forest were made; in Flanders there was reclamation of land from the sea in the twelfth century ; in Germany the marshes of the Elbe, Oder and Vistula were drained. But generally there was little incentive or means to improve the land ; and there is sufficient evidence of land-hunger by the end
1 Tbid., 404-6, 411-14; M. Bloch, La Société Féodale: La Formation des Liens de Dépendance, 422-3.
1 In England the population seems to have grown from about 2 million to 3} million between the Norman Conquest and the beginning of the fourteenth century. In France the increase was probably even greater. Levasseur suggests a rise from 7 million in the eleventh century to between 20 and 22 million in the fourteenth : a figure which was not exceeded in the sixteenth century or even until after the early eighteenth century (La Population Frangaise, vol. I, p. 169).
48 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
of the thirteenth century to suggest that the extension of the area of cultivable land lagged behind population-increase, and save in a few places was probably of too small a magnitude to offset the tendency to declining labour-productivity. Pressure on the soil was already showing itself in the Netherlands, in Saxony, the Rhineland, Bavaria and the Tyrol by 1200 and was a factor in the start of eastward migration ;} and it has been stated that after the later part of the fourteenth century “ the limits of land acquisition on forest soil in North-East Germany and the interior of Bohemia were already reached ”’.?
After 1300, however, the population over most of Western Europe, instead of increasing as it had done since A.D. 1000, seems to have begun a sharp decline.’ Whether this was con- nected with a declining productivity of labour on the peasants’ lands by reason of the population growth of previous centuries or was a direct result of increased feudal burdens on the peasantry is impossible to say with any approach to certainty. That there was some connection seems on the face of it very likely. At any rate, its immediate effect was to threaten feudal society with a shrinkage of revenue and to precipitate what may be called a crisis of feudal economy in the four- teenth century. Usually this decline, both in numbers and in feudal revenue, has been attributed exclusively to the devastation of wars and the plague. War and plague were clearly responsible for a great deal. But since the decline started some decades before the onset of the Black Death,‘ it evidently had economic roots. The destructive effect of the plague itself must have been fanned by the malnutrition of the population (mortality from the pestilence apparently being proportionately greater among the masses), and local famines have taken the toll
1 J. Westfall Thompson, Feudal Germany, 496 and 521: “In the twelfth century in some prosperous districts land seems to have attained twelve times the value it had in the ninth, and afterwards even down to the second half of the thirteenth century an increase of about 50 per cent. is to be observed.”
2 Nabholz in Camb. Econ. History, vol. I, 396.
3 Denton suggests that in England the population stopped increasing about the end of the reign of Edward II, and then fell sharply in the mid-fourteenth century, after which it tended to remain stationary at a level scarcely higher than the Domes- day figure until the accession of Henry VII (England in the Fifteenth Century, pp. 129-30). Of Europe generally in the fourteenth century Pirenne speaks as entering on a period of ‘‘ not perhaps a decline but a cessation of all advance” (loc. cit., P- 193).
‘ Lipson, for instance, speaks of wages as having been “ rising for a generation before the plague swept over England’, and adds: ‘“‘ hence the great pestilence only intensified but did not originate the economic crisis, for the altered equilibrium of the labour market had already begun to produce its effects”. (Econ. History of England, vol. 1, 1937 Ed., pp. 113-14.)
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 49
they did because of the absence of reserves. There is some evidence to suggest that agricultural decline in England set in soon after 1300,! and probably at about the same date in France. In fourteenth-century England depopulation of the countryside, and with it scarcity of labour, had gone so far even before the Black Death as to cause a serious fall of feudal income and a tendency, on the contrary to improving the demesne, to reduce its size by leases to peasant holders. It now seems clear that this leasing of the demesnes was an expression of economic crises rather than fruit of growing ambition to trade and to improve, to which it has been commonly attributed in the past. In the fifteenth century the evidence indicates that there was a reduc- tion in the total cultivated area, more land being withdrawn from the demesnes than was leased to tenants.?
In France labour scarcity seems even earlier to have been a factor hindering the extension of demesne cultivation. Not only had large land-grants been made by seigneurs to vassals and men-at-arms, but also land leased to small tenants in return for a share of the harvest (tenures 4 champart), We have mentioned the attempt to retain labour on the land as a source of revenue by partial emancipations of serfs from the thirteenth century onwards : a tendency that we find not only in France but also in the Rhineland and in Flanders, sometimes by individual manumission and sometimes by the sale of freedom to whole villages (in Burgundy, where the peasantry was especially poor, in return for the surrender of part of their land to the lord). In
1 Mr. R. A. L. Smith has given the years just before 1320 as the start of “ acute agricultural depression ” in Kent ; and from that time dates a policy of demanding once more the performance of labour-services previously commuted on the estates of Christ Church, Canterbury—“ the monks strove to exploit to the full their resources of compulsory labour’? (Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 125-7).
2M. Postan, in Econ. Hist. Review, May 1939. Professor Postan asks the question : how far was this decline in seigniorial revenues responsible for “‘ the political gangsterdom of the times’, which had the effect of further sapping the strength of the feudal nobility? This gangsterdom, though it probably increased in the fifteenth century, seems also to have characterized Feudalism in earlier centuries (as it did even more notoriously on the Continent, e.g. the “ robber barons ” of the Rhineland and elsewhere). Jusserand gives examples of highway robbery and rac- keteering by armed gangs in the fourteenth century : gangs which, under the system known as “ maintenance ”’, received support from the highest of the land, including persons at Court and members of the Royal Family, not excluding the Prince of Wales and the prelates of the Church and Edward III’s ‘‘ dearest consort, the queen ”’. “The great of the land and some lesser people too had their own men, sworn to their service and ready to do anything they were commanded, which consisted in the most monstrous deeds, such as securing property or other goods to which neither their masters nor any claimants, paying their master in order to be ‘ protected ’, had any title. They terrorized the rightful owners, the judges and the juries, ran- soming, beating and maiming any opponent.” (J. J. Jusserand, Eng. Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, 150-7.)
50 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
company with this marched a tendency to exchange corvées services on the seigniorial estate for payments in money or in kind. But these measures, forced as they were by revolt and flight more often than at the initiative of the lord, did not suffice to check the tendency to depopulation. “In all parts (of France) entire villages, sometimes for generations, were abandoned ”’, the forest in some areas invading former fields and vineyards ; and “ the two last centuries of the Middle Ages were in all Western and Central Europe a period of rural ‘ malaise’ and of depopula- tion”’.1 In Western and Central Germany an important influence was the eastern migration which had started in the twelfth century under the attraction of the colonizing movement, sponsored by warrior-lords and by the Church in the new lands beyond the Elbe: a colonization which gathered momentum after the “ crusade against the Wends ” (that ‘sinister mixture of bigotry and lust for land”, as Westfall Thompson calls it), resulting in the partial extermination of the subjugated tribes and a pressing need on the part of monasteries and Church for a labour supply to replace tribute-paying Slavs in the new terri- tories. In order to people these lands special concessions were made at first to attract colonists. The result was to spread the scarcity of labour not only to Saxony and Westphalia, but even as far as Holland and Flanders whence the migrants came.? The constant threat of losing the population from their lands, especially in the regions where growing towns and privileged bourgs acted as a powerful magnet, combined with the steady resistance of the peasantry to the performance of labour services, was a leading factor in Western Germany in the decline of demesne farming, and in the tendency of lords “‘ to reduce their demands for labour services in order to dissuade tenants from deserting their estates”, which operated fairly steadily after the twelfth century.®
III
The reaction of the nobility to this situation was not at all a uniform one; and it is on the difference in this reaction in
1M. Bloch, Les Caractéres Originaux de l'histoire rurale frangaise, 117-18 ; also 99-100, 104, 111-14; also cf. Camb. Econ. Hist., vol. I, 295-321, and Bloch, La Société Féodale : la formation des liens de dépendance, 422-5. By the sixteenth century the seigniorial attitude towards manumission of serfs had hardened, and willingness gave way to opposition to further concessions.
3 J. Westfall Thompson, Feudal Germany, 400-39, 485, 501-2, 610.
> F, L. Ganshof in Camb. Econ. History, vol. I, 295.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 51
different areas of Europe that a large part of the difference in the economic history of the ensuing centuries depends. In some cases, in order to attract or retain labour (as in parts of France, especially the south, after the Hundred Years’ War), the lords were forced into concessions which represented a mitigation of servile burdens and even on occasions a substitution of a con- tractual relationship, embodied in a money-payment, for an obligatory one. In yet other cases they responded with a tightening of feudal burdens, with firmer measures for the attachment of bondmen to an estate and for the recapture of fugitives, and a reimposition of servile obligations where these had previously been relaxed—the “‘ feudal reaction ” about which there has been much debate. In Eastern Europe the latter was most marked and most successful. Even in England there is evidence of an attempt to tighten the bonds of serfdom in the fourteenth century. To-day it is generally held that this response to the scarcity of labour which followed the Black Death was less widespread than used to be supposed and that it seldom had any large measure of success. That the attempt was made, however, especially on certain monastic estates, is fairly clear. Of the virtual renaissance of serfdom which occurred in some parts of the Continent we have already quoted examples: we find it in Denmark and in the Balkans, as well as later in the Baltic States and Russia, in Poland, Hungary and Bohemia. In Spain Moslems and Jews on the estates were reduced to serfdom and the peasant lot was so degraded as to be subsequently described as “‘ worse than that of a galley slave’. There was even some revival of the slave trade in the Mediterranean to supply land- owners with cultivators.?
Evidently political and social factors played a large part here in determining the course of events. The strength of peasant resistance, the political and military power of local lords, render-
1 Namely at Canterbury (where it started before 1330), Ely, Crowland, and on some estates of the Bishopric of Durham. It has to be remembered, moreover, that the Statute of Labourers of 1351 not only provided for the control of wages but also made service to a master compulsory for all poor persons whether bond or free and placed restrictions on their freedom of movement ; while decisions of the higher courts on its enforcement provided that a lord might re-capture a villein, despite a statutory contract between the latter and another employer. This suggests that “the machinery of the manorial courts had become inadequate for the task of recovering fugitive villeins, and that the lords needed some other means of securing labourers, and that therefore a remedy was provided for them by the agency of the central government” (B. H. Putnam, Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers, 222, also 200-6).
* Cf. Boissonnade, op. cit., 325-6. Also J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the Reformation, 54 seq.; J. K Ingram, History of Slavery and Serfdom, 113 seq.
52 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
ing it easy or difficult as the case might be to overcome peasant resistance and forcibly to prevent desertion of the manors, and the extent to which the royal power exerted its influence to strengthen seigniorial authority or on the contrary welcomed an opportunity of weakening the position of rival sections of the nobility—all this was of great importance in deciding whether concession or renewed coercion was to be the seigniorial answer to desertion and depopulation, and whether, if coercion was attempted, it was to prove successful. Some writers have advanced the view that in England the influence of the king’s courts and justices acted as a protection (doubtless no more than partial) for villein rights against arbitrary acts of oppression by their lords, at any rate if these acts were unhallowed by tradition,} and that in France the triumph of the absolute monarchy when it occurred served to limit the extent of the “‘ feudal reaction ’’.? By contrast the territories east of the Rhine (until one came to Poland and Muscovy) witnessed no comparable central power, jealous of the autonomy of lords and princes and competent to curb the unbridled exercise of their authority. In Eastern Europe and in Spain it would seem that both the military strength and the political authority of the local seigneurs remained relatively high. In France and in Flanders Feudalism had been seriously weakened by the Hundred Years’ War ; yet in certain parts of France the political authority of the seigneurs apparently remained for some time little impaired, and above all the Church, as a Closely-knit international organization, retained its strength. In England the baronage which had never been strong by contrast with the Crown (which by virtue of the Norman Con- quest had secured to itself an independent source of revenue in the extensive Crown estates) were further weakened by the Wars of the Roses: so much so that the noblemen summoned to attend the first Parliament of Henry VII numbered scarcely more than a half those who had been summoned at the beginning of the century.’
But while they may have been contributory, political factors of this kind can hardly be regarded as sufficient to account for the differences in the course of events in various parts of Europe.
1 This fact is denied, however, by Kosminsky (and before him by such authorities as Pollock and Maitland), who asserts that the English common law defended the right of lords to increase villein services without restriction and refused to hear villeins’ suits against their lords (Angliskaia Derevnia v. 13° veke, 206-9). Protection, when it was given in later times, probably came from the prerogative courts rather than from the courts of common law.
7M. Bloch, op. cit., 132, 139. ? Denton, op. cit., 257.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 53
Political centralization in Muscovy and the curbing of the power of the dboyars went hand-in-hand with an intensification of serfdom ; and while the rise of absolute monarchy in France may have put bounds to feudal reaction, it did not (at least as an early consequence) reverse it. All the indications suggest that in deciding the outcome economic factors must have exercised the outstanding influence. Yet regarding the precise character and importance of such factors we are not very plenti- fully supplied with reliable data. An influence to which one’s attention is immediately directed is the prevailing type of cultivation, For example, a predominance of pasture over arable would clearly affect the seigniorial desire for labour services, as well as itself being influenced by the scarcity or plentifulness of labour. The suitability of large areas in the west and north of England for sheep rearing, as well as the development of the wool trade, must evidently have predisposed lords in these areas towards money-payments rather than the labour-services which would be needed in much larger quantities as the basis for the cultivation of arable demesnes. In the case of Bohemia a factor to which Dr. Stark! has drawn attention was the need which the export trade in corn and the narrowness of the home market imposed for extensive cultivation on the cheapest possible basis. Had more intensive cultivation pre- vailed, quality of labour would have proved a more important consideration compared with its cheapness, and the preference of lords for compulsory serf labour on large latifundia might not have prevailed. That this can hardly of itself be accepted as a satisfactory explanation is suggested, however, when we consider that the choice of extensive methods of cultivation in such a case must itself have been determined by the scarcity and dearness of labour for hire (or, alternatively, the availability or non- availability of potential tenant-farmers to cultivate land for a money-rent) compared to the plentifulness of land; and that there were other cases, for example England and the Netherlands, where expanding corn export coexisted with an ultimate tendency that was away from labour-services.?
In some cases where labour-services fixed by custom were light there might be difficulty in raising them; and in such
1 Stark, op. cit.
2 In the thirteenth century it may have been true of England that the growth of corn export strengthened serfdom. Kosminsky points out that in that century production for export strengthened serfdom, most notably in the corn-exporting
regions, the Midlands and Thames Valley (ibid., 227-8). c
54 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
cases a change to money dues might be a way of increasing the serf’s obligations which was the more acceptable to him because it offered more personal freedom, and so presented to a lord the line of least resistance. It is, again, a well-known fact that compulsory labour was apt to be much less efficient than labour expended by the cultivators on their own holdings in their own time ; and even if the lord took much trouble to provide adequate supervision of the work the yield of these obligatory services often remained both uncertain and low. At times seemingly trifling matters, such as the price of provisions, may have influenced the decision (where some provisions were supplied to workers on the demesnes, even though no more than a loaf or a fish and some ale) ; and one meets the remark, “ the work is not worth the breakfast’, several times in the Winchester Pipe Rolls in the course of the fourteenth century.1. In such cases the substitu- tion of dues in kind or in money (paid from the more efficient labour of the serf on his own holding) for work on the estate might have proved a profitable bargain for the lord.
But while, no doubt, many factors such as these exercised again a contributory influence, it seems evident that the funda- mental consideration must have been the abundance or scarcity, the cheapness or dearness, of hired labour in determining whether or not the lord was willing or unwilling to commute labour- services for a money-payment, and whether this was a profitable or a profitless thing for him to do if he was forced into it.2 At any rate, this consideration must have ruled where the concern of feudal economy was to produce for a market and not simply to provision directly the seigniorial household. If the feudal lord dispensed with direct labour-services, the alternatives open to him were to lease out the demesne or to hire labour for its cultivation at a money-wage. Let us take the case where he chose the latter. What he was then doing was to convert an existing type of surplus (that of his serfs) from one form into another (from direct services to a payment in money or in kind) and to invest in the acquisition of a new type of surplus—that yielded by hired labour. For the employment of this additional labour, the retention of part of the land as demesne land was necessary, and the substitution of the new labour for the old serf labour in its cultivation. The latter now laboured for all their working time,
1A. E. Levett, Results of the Black Death in Oxford Studies in Social and Legal Hist., vol. V., 157.
2 Cf. the remarks of Kosminsky, Angliskaia Derevnia v. 13° veke, 52, 163 ; and of M. Postan in Trans. Ryl. Hist. Society, 1937, 192-3.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 55
instead of only for part of it, on their ‘‘ own ” land—the land to which they had been traditionally attached ; paying over to the lord the produce of this additional labour-time (or else the pro- ceeds of its sale in the local market). But the new type of demesne cultivation had this difference from the old. Any labour-time devoted to the demesne under the régime of labour- services was pure surplus for the lord (apart from a few incidental expenses such as the bread and ale supplied to the harvesters in the fields that we have mentioned). The producers’ subsistence was provided, not from the produce of this labour, but from the labour-time spent on their own holdings. It was the latter which provided, as it were, the lord’s ‘ outlay ’—the land allotted to his serfs for their own cultivation and such labour-time as he laid no claim upon for himself but left available for the provision of their own subsistence. Demesne cultivation, there- fore, by this method could be profitable even at a low level of labour-productivity. Low productivity reduced the amount of produce available to feed the producer and his family as well as the size of the lord’s produce (given the division of the serf’s working time between working for himself and obligatory labour for his master). As under the métayage system of produce-sharing, bad harvests made the share of peasant and landlord alike smaller, but could not make the latter share disappear altogether as long as there was a net product at all to be divided. Under the new type of demesne cultivation, however, the labour-power had first of all to be purchased with wages; and from the produce of this labour the equivalent of these wages had to be subtracted before what was surplus for the lord began. For this new type of cultivation to be of advantage—to add to the surplus available as feudal revenue under the traditional methods —it was not sufficient that hired labour should be more efficient than compulsory serf-labour. Productivity must have reached a certain minimum level. In short, one can say that the pre- conditions for a commutation of labour-services and the transition to demesne cultivation by hired labour were two-fold: the existence of a reserve of labour (either labour without land, or labour with insufficient land to maintain a livelihood, like the bulk of the English ‘“ cotters”’, and with labour-time to spare) and a level of productivity of this hired labour that was greater than its wages by a significant amount. This “ significant amount” which the surplus available from the new mode of production had to reach was a sort of minimum sensibile necessary
56 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
to attract estate-owners to its use. Sometimes, it is clear, this margin would have to be fairly large to overcome natural conservatism and to persuade estate-owners that cultivation by hired labour had substantial and enduring advantages. But in the case of estates which had always been deficiently supplied with serf-labour, the fact that hired labour could produce even a narrow margin of surplus above the equivalent of its own wages might suffice for its adoption, provided that the reserve of labour was readily available. One has, indeed, the paradox that, provided only that this crucial level of productivity (relative to the price of hired labour) had been reached, hired labour might even have been less efficient than bond-labour and its use still have proved an advantage.!
This condition that we have postulated for the operation of a tendency to commutation at the lord’s initiative could be fulfilled either by labour being exceptionally cheap or by labour being exceptionally productive relative to the primitive standards of the times. But in addition to being cheap or productive it had to be available at the given time and place in fair abundance. It follows that the transition to hired labour was more likely to occur in types of cultivation where the net product of labour was high, and that serf-labour was more likely to be retained where types of cultivation prevailed in which the productivity of labour was low, or over periods of economic history when productive methods had not advanced beyond a very low level (unless this was offset by the price of hired labour being equivalently low owing to the misery of the population). We are also confronted with this further paradox : the very misery of the peasantry, such as we have described, creating the danger of depopulation of manors, might incline the lords to be more amenable to conces- sions which lessened feudal burdens or to commute labour- services for a rent, both in an effort to avoid depopulation and because the misery which provoked mass migration tended to make labour for hire very cheap (as may have been a significant factor in France, for example, during and after the Hundred
1 The surplus available from hired labour did not need to be larger than that yielded by serf-labour (= the product of serf-labour when working for the lord), since, although we are assuming that hired labour is being substituted for serf-labour on the demesne, it is not being substituted for, but added to, serf-labour as a source of surplus. If we assume that the lord has commuted labour-services at the equivalent of what the surplus labour-time of serfs could produce when devoted to demesne cultivation, then the lord will gain from the change if the new hired labour produces any surplus at all above their wages, since he will now have this surplus as an addition to what he receives as commuted dues from his serfs.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 57
Years’ War and in Flanders in the thirteenth century).!_ Con- versely, where the plight of the cultivator was less desperate and land available to him was more plentiful, or alternatively where labour was exceptionally scarce because depopulation had already reached an advanced stage (as appears to have been a decisive factor in Eastern Europe after the Thirty Years’ War) seigniorial authority would have tended to insist on the retention of labour-services and to augment them by new exactions rather than to commute them. It is, surely, a very significant witness to the leading importance of this principle which we have cited that the century of scarce labour and of dear labour in England should have seen attempts to reimpose the old obligations, whereas this reaction should have weakened and given place to a renewed tendency to commutation in the middle of the fifteenth century, when the gaps in the population had been sufficiently filled for some fall in wages from their late-fourteenth century peak to have occurred.? It is, surely, also significant that it was east of the Elbe, where labour was most thinly spread compared to available land, that the ‘‘ second serfdom ” should have found its most secure foothold ; and that in Russia, for example, it was in the centuries when the expanding frontier of Cossack settlement to the south and south-east came into pro- minence, draining away fugitive peasant labour from central Muscovy with the lure of free land, that the movement towards the definitive bonding of the cultivator and his legal attachment to the soil should have developed.®
If we consider the other alternative available to the feudal lord—that of exchanging labour-services, not for cultivation of his estate by hired labour, but for leasing of the demesne to
1 There seems to be some evidence that the tendency to commutation and Manumission which occurred in Flanders from the second half of the twelfth century was accompanied by the appearance of a substantial class of peasants with holdings too small for a livelihood and even of a landless class (cf. L. Dechesne, Histoire Econo- mique et Sociale de la Belgique, 62-5).
® Cf. H. Nabholz in Camb, Econ. History, vol. I, 520. Wages, however, continued to remain substantially higher than at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and in 1500 may have been about double what they had been in 1300.
? For labour scarcity at the time cf. P. Liashchenko, Istorta Narodnovo Khoziaistva, S.S.S.R., vol. I, 157; A. Eck, Le Moyen Age Russe, 225, 257. There is no real con- tradiction between what is said here and the reference made above to the flight of peasants in thirteenth-century France and elsewhere prompting seigniorial concessions in the form of manumissions and commutation. Such a tendency in its early stages may result in concessions to restrain the exodus ; but when it has gone to the length of actual depopulation it is clearly more likely to result in compulsory measures to bring back the fugitives and to attach them to the soil. There is also a distinction between commutation forced on a lord against his will by threat of peasant revolt and commutation to which he accedes willingly, or even initiates.
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tenants—analogous considerations seem to apply. It is true that to the landlord’s choice of leasing the demesne, certain special considerations are relevant which have no parallel among the influences which decide his choice between cultivating the demesne with serf or with hired labour. For example, by leasing he might save a certain (perhaps a considerable) amount on overhead expenses of estate management—rent-collecting, in other words, might prove much cheaper than the maintenance of a staff of stewards and bailiffs. Perhaps more important might be the favourable or unfavourable state of the local market for the products of the estate: in particular the ratio of agricul- tural prices to prices of handicraft products and imported goods ; an unfavourable movement of which in the fourteenth century (due partly to the growing strength of the urban gilds) may have been a factor in predisposing estate-owners to leases of the demesne in that century.!' A contributory factor may sometimes have been the rise of a stratum of more well-to-do peasants, eager to add field to field as a means of improved farming and of social advancement, about which something will be said below. Such factors as these were, no doubt, decisive in determining which alternative to labour-services he adopted : leasing or hired labour. But, broadly speaking, to his choice between labour- services and leases and his choice between labour-services and hired labour, the same fundamental factors in the situation in both cases were evidently relevant. The scarcer was land relative to labour at any given time and place, the higher was likely to be the rentability of land, and hence the greater the inducement to adopt a policy of leases instead of estate-farming with labour-services ; while the converse was likely to be true where land was plentiful and human beings were scarce. When, however, we allude here to what we may perhaps term the land-labour ratio at a particular time and place, we must be careful not to conceive of this in too abstract a sense. What was
1 For this point I am indebted to Mr. E. Miller, of St. John’s College, Cam- bridge, who ascribes to changes in this “price scissors’? a leading réle in the events of the later Middle Ages. The precise effect of such price-changes might not always be uniform, however, since it would depend on how inelastic was the estate- owners demand for income, on the one hand, and on the possibilities of leasing the demesne on favourable terms, on the other hand. We have noted above that on the estates of Christ Church Priory, Canterbury, the decline of revenues from corn- sales from the third decade of the fourteenth century onward, which may have been connected with an unfavourable movement of market-prices, was accompanied by an intensification of labour-services and not the reverse. ‘‘ The account-rolls of all the manors show that in the years between 1340 and 1390 full labour-services were performed ” (Smith, of. cit., 127).
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relevant to the lord’s demand for labour (or alternatively for ienants) was, of course, the land in his possession (and in the case of his demand for labour, the amount of it he chose to cultivate) over and above the land which, by long tradition, was peasants’ land ; whereas it was not only the absence or plentifulness of man-power available to meet that seigniorial demand which was decisive, but also its exploitableness—its willingness to have burdens heaped upon it for a meagre return, or to be charged a heavy rent as the price of a meagre grant of land; and this tended to be in inverse ratio to the amount of peasant-land that was available, compared to the peasant population, and also to the amount of cattle, draught animals and instruments of tillage that the peasant possessed and to the quality of the soil and of village agricultural technique. Moreover, the extent of social differentiation among the peasantry themselves, creating a stratum of impoverished peasants with meagre holdings, might in this connection be even more important than the total area of peasant land available to the whole village ; and it may well be that any connection that there was between growth of the market and the transition to leases or to hired labour operated via the effect of trade on this process of differentiation among the peasantry themselves rather than via its direct influence on the economic policy of the lord, as has been customarily assumed.
Again, to avoid undue simplification, we have to bear in mind that the position with regard to the supply of serf-labour was often different on differently-sized estates : a consideration that explains much which at first appears contradictory as well as much in the conflicting policies among the different ranks of feudal nobility. It frequently happened that the smaller estates —the barones minori in England, the knights in Germany and the sixteenth-century small pomiestchiki in Russia—were much less well supplied with serf-labour compared to their needs than was the case with the larger estates, especially those of the Church. Moreover, when “ enticements ”’ or forcible kidnappings of serfs by one estate-owner from another occurred, it was the smaller estates that were most liable to suffer from the competition and the depredations of their richer and more powerful neighbours, and hence were most anxious to acquire protection from the law in order to fetter labour to the land and to restore fugitives to their original owners. For illustration one has only to look at the legislation of Boris Godunov in Russia, and in particular
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his decrees of 1597 and 1601 : of the Tsar who excited the enmity of the large boyars through his regard for the interests of the small landowner. But sometimes, as we have noted, this had an opposite effect. Ifthe amount of serf-labour that an estate could command fell below a certain crucial figure, its lord, if he found it worth while to cultivate the demesne at all, was of necessity forced to place reliance in the main on hired labour ; and the question of the amount of compulsory services he could command from each of his serfs was of relatively little concern to him, at any rate of much less concern to him than to his richer neighbour. If hired labour was not available, the alternative open to him was not to increase or extend labour-services (since these would have been inadequate in any case), but to abandon demesne cultivation and instead to find such tenants for the land as he could to pay him a rent for its use.!
Whether the economic plight particularly of these small estates in the difficult years of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England or the enterprise of ambitious villagers was the more responsible, a further series of events seems to have contributed in no small degree to the extension of leases and the growing use of hired labour. This was the growing economic differentiation among the peasantry themselves, which we have already mentioned, and the rise of a section of relatively well-to-do peasant-farmers in the village about this time. Ambitious and able to accumulate a small amount of capital, and encouraged by the growth of local trade and local markets, these farmers were probably capable of more efficient cultivation and anxious both to enlarge their holdings by leases of additional land and to make use of the hired services of their poorer neighbours. As solvent tenants for such leases from the lord of the manor, what they lacked in exploitableness which derives from poverty (on that score they could no doubt afford to be pretty shrewd bar- gainers), they may well have more than made up in eagerness to acquire additional land as a speculation on the enhanced profits of improved farming. The detailed record of their husbandry was not retained in “‘ bailiffs” accounts, as was that of demesne farming, and they remain accordingly a more obscure page of history. But it seems likely that they made up a sort of kulak class in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English village, whose story, when it is fully told, may have much
1 Cf. Eileen Power on ‘ Effects of the Black Death on Rural Organization in England ” in History, iii (NS.), 113.
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in common with their counterpart in the history of the Russian village in the nineteenth century. Such a development at such a time may well seem at first to stand in contradiction to the picture of village poverty and agrarian crises which was drawn above. A qualification of this picture it certainly is. But a contradiction it ceases to be if we examine the situation more closely. In fact, the inclusion of this element into our picture may succeed in explaining much that appears baffling in the contrary evidence about village economy at the time. It is clear that inequalities in type of soil and situation and in fortune would naturally give rise to differentiation among the peasantry themselves, even among the population of a particular manor : differentiation which in the course of a century would tend to increase and become considerable in ways that are nowadays sufficiently familiar, It may be that an appreciable number of those who rented (or even sometimes purchased) land at this period were persons in a special position like reeves or manorial officials.1 Marx made the comment that ‘some historians have expressed astonishment that it should be possible for forced labourers, or serfs, to acquire any independent property... under such circumstances, since the direct producer is not an owner, but only a possessor, and since all his surplus labour belongs legally to the landlord”; and pointed out that in feudal society tradition and custom play a very powerful réle and fix the sharing of the produce between serf and lord over long periods of time. The result may therefore be that the lord is precluded from claiming the fruits of any abnormal productivity of a serf’s own labour-time devoted to his own holding.? In thirteenth-century England Kosminsky claims to find “a distinct stratum of upper peasantry ”’, together with “a very significant section of poor peasantry ”’, this differentiation being observable both among villein holdings and “‘ free ” holdings, although more pronounced among the latter than among the former.’ Between then and the opening of the fifteenth century these differences
1 Cf. M. Postan in Econ. Hist. Review, vol. XII, 11-12. On the Kent manors of Christ Church Priory at the end of the fourteenth century leases of the demesne were sometimes taken by the serjeants of a manor—officials who were “ chiefly recruited from the growing class of prosperous peasants”. In general, “ there is much evidence to show that the firmarii were usually prosperous peasants and small land- owners” (Smith, op. cit., 193).
® Capital, vol. III, 923-4.
* Article on ‘‘ The English Peasantry in the Thirteenth Century ” in Srednia Veka, pub. by Institute of History, Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., p. 46; and op. ait.,
219-23. Kosminsky admits, however, that his evidence about this upper stratum is less adequate than he would like.
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must have increased quite considerably. In 1435 a serf on a manor of Castle Combe is said to have left £2,000 at death, and bond tenants are found farming several hundred acres.!. The fact that the mass of the village population on which the system relied for its labour was wretchedly poor was not to prevent an upper kulak layer, which had accumulated enough capital to afford improved methods and more land and some hired labour (perhaps only at certain seasons), from being moderately pros- perous. On the contrary, village poverty has always been the soil on which village usurer and petty employer can best feed. There is evidence that cotters sometimes served as labourers under the larger tenants and that some villagers even hired labour to assist them in performing harvest work for the lord ® ; and the growing number of those whose holdings or equipment were inadequate to support them, which was one aspect of economic differentiation, was evidently itself an important factor in the economic changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, affecting as it did so directly the immediate reserve of cheap labour for hire. Nor was the prosperity of these plebeian improving farmers inconsistent with a crisis of demesne farming. It may well be that the emergence of this layer of more prosperous peasants was connected with the tendency to consolidation of strips and to improved rotation that is to be observed towards the end of the fifteenth century, and that this favoured group of the rural population were considerable gainers from the fall in the value of money in Tudor times, which (in face of fixed or “ sticky ’? money-rents) served to transfer income to them from the landowning class, and thereby to assimilate lower gentry and upper peasantry in the manner that was so characteristic of Tudor England?
1 Curtler, op. cit.,
2 Cf. Custumals Oe Raat Abbey (Camden Socy. Pubns.) xviii, xxxix, 22-3. For an example in the fourteenth century of villeins who employ ploughmen and who bring an unsuccessful suit against their lord the abbot on the ground that he has taken away their servants, see B. H. Putnam, of. cit., 95:
* For detailed evidence of this rise of a well-to-do section of the peasantry, cf. Tawney, Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, esp. 72-97. The writer is also indebted to Mr. Rodnev Hilton, of Balliol. Oxford, for enlightenment on this point from unpublished work of his own. In Leicestershire in the sixteenth century a study of inventories shows that “even if we omit the Squirearchy (who were less wealthy than many a yeoman, in personal estate at least), we find that 4 per cent. of the rural population owned a quarter of the personal estate and 15} per cent. owned half of it”, there probably being “a greater measure of inequality in ownership of Jand ” (W. G. Hoskins, The Leicestershire Farmer in the Sixteenth Century, 7-8). In the second half of the century there were extensive purchases of land by yeomen, including whole manors, yeomen thereby rising to be squires (ibid.,
2Q).
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It must not, however, be assumed that the mere fact of a change from labour-services to money-payments or a transition to leases of the demesne represented a release of the cultivator from servile obligations and the substitution of a free contractual relationship between him and the owner of the soil. And the not uncommon view which virtually identifies a decline of labour- services with a dissolution of Feudal Serfdom is clearly false. The movement that had occurred at an early stage of Feudalism from a system of compulsory tribute, in kind or in money, to a system of demesne farming with labour-services, in an age when feudal need of revenue had grown relatively great and labour relatively scarce, was now reversed. But although tribute once more replaced services, it did not necessarily lose its compulsory character, so long as the producer was not free to move and his livelihood was virtually at the lord’s will. Nor can it always be assumed that commutation involved an actual lightening of feudal burdens. How far commutation constituted a substantial modification of feudal relationships varied widely with the circumstances of the case. In many cases it is true that the change from obligatory services to a money-payment represented some modification of the older burdens and a change of form which paved the way for more substantial alterations at a later date. Where the change occurred as a concession wrung by pressure of the cultivators themselves, this was most noticeably the case ; and the same was true of leasing of the demesne that was primarily due to the economic embarrassments of the estate-owner. But there were also plenty of instances where commutation involved not a mitigation but an augmenting of feudal burdens. Here it was merely an alternative to a direct imposition of additional services. Commutation was most likely to have this character where resort to it was primarily at the lord’s initiative; the attempt to increase feudal revenue presumably taking this form because of a relative abundance of labour. It may well be that the tendency towards commutation which we find in England as early as the twelfth century was of this kind. Much of the commutation occurring at this period was apparently at a price considerably in excess of the market-value of the services (so far as this can be computed). By no means all changes to money- payments were commutation in the proper sense of the term. Many of them took the form of opera vendita, not permanently, but from year to year at the lord’s discretion ; the latter retaining the right to revert to his claim for labour-services when it pleased
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him to do so.!_ Probably it was the pressure of population upon the available land of the village, rendering it harder for the villager to obtain his subsistence and hence making hired labour cheap and relatively plentiful—the spare-time labour of the poorer cottagers and of families for whom there was no land in the open fields—that furnished the inducement to this com- mutation.? Professor Kosminsky, who speaks of “ cotters economy ” at this time as representing “‘ a reserve reservoir of labouring hands for the estates”, also observes that ‘“‘‘ free- holding’ as a rule is feudal-dependent holding, paying feudal rent, often close in appearance to a villein holding, out of which it has recently come. Leaseholds, in whatever form they appear, very often are linked with the carrying out of obligations of villein type ’.? By contrast, the reverse tendency towards the restoration of labour-services a century later may have been due to a drain of labour into the rising towns as much as to the stimulus given by an expanding market to demesne farming ; just as it was the labour scarcity and the rising wages of the middle decades of the fourteenth century that once more hardened the reluctance of landlords to accept money-payments in lieu of labour-services, and caused them to charge an augmented money-price for the commutation where it occurred 4 (even though the threat of desertion of the manor, which after the Black Death assumed serious proportions, very soon and in most cases forced lords to make substantial concessions to their dependents).
1 Lipson, of. cit., 91-2; Levett, op. cit., 150. On the temporary nature of many money-payments and the right of the lord to revert to labour-services cf. Camb. Econ. History, vol. I, 511 5 also N. Neilson, Customary Rents (in Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History), 49. On the estates of Canterbury Priory, services which had previously been placed ad denarios were claimed again after about 1315. (Cf. R. A. L. Smith, op. cit., 125-6). ‘This may well have been connected with the slight rise of wages which seems to have followed the harvest failures (and labour shortage as a result of deaths) in 1315, 1916 and 1321. (Thorold Rogers in Economic Interpretation, 16-17.)
As a matter of fact, as Richard Jones pointed out, money rents, on the contrary to being a hallmark of independence for the cultivator, generally act in primitive communities to the latter’s disadvantage and the lord’s advantage, since they lay the difficulties and risks of marketing upon the peasant’s shoulders (Lectures and Tracts on Pol. Economy, Ed. Whewell, 434).
2 Kosminsky, op. cit., 114.
? Kosminsky, ‘“‘ Angliskoe Krestianstvo v. 13° veke” in Collected Papers, History, Moscow State Univ., 41, 1940, pp. 113-14. Kosminsky elsewhere points out that “ the villein paying money-rent remained a villein, and his holding was held at the will of the lord and according to manorial custom ’”’, (in Srednia Veka, Inst. of History, Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., 63) while stressing at the same time that “the boundaries (between villein and ‘ free’ holding), so clear in juridical theory, in practice were very far from clear, the latter sometimes being subject to such obligations as merchet and heriot.”” (Jbid., 44.)
6 Lipson, op. cit., 106.
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It may perhaps be the case that the amount of commutation taking place at the earlier period has been exaggerated, and that those who have stressed it have been led to do so, partly by a too-ready assumption that where money-rents were found these were products of commutation at some recent date, instead of being survivals throughout the feudal period (as Professor Kosminsky and Dr. Neilson both suggest),! and partly because, they have supposed that obligations to a lord that were valued in money in the records were necessarily paid to him always in a money form.? But whether it was large in extent or relatively small, this earlier transition from services to money- payments was no more than the beginnings of a tendency which was to operate with much greater force in the fifteenth century. By the end of the fifteenth century the feudal order had disintegrated and grown weaker in a number of ways. The peasant revolt of the previous century, it is true, had been suppressed, (though by trickery as much as by force of arms). But it had left its ghost to haunt the old order in the form of a standing threat of peasant flight from the manor into the woods or hills or to swell the growing number of day labourers and artisans of the towns. The ranks of the old nobility were thinned and divided ; and the smaller estates, lacking sufficient labour- services, had taken to leasing or to wage-labour as soon as the increase of population and in particular of the ranks of the poorer peasantry had made labour cheap again. Merchants were buying land ; estates were being mortgaged ; and a kulak class of improving peasant farmers were becoming serious competitors in local markets and as rural employers of labour. But the end was not yet; and neither the Battle of Bosworth nor the en- closures of the sixteenth century marked the final disintegration of the feudal mode of production. This was not to occur until the century of the English civil war. ‘‘ Personal serfdom ” (as Lipson puts it) “survived the decay of economic serfdom ” ; many bondmen continued under the Tudors ; in 1537 the House of Lords rejected a Bill for the manumission of villeins ; obligation to grind at the lord’s mill, payment of heriot, custom works and even “ harvest journeys ” survived in some parts of the country
1 Neilson, op. cit., 48; Kosminsky Angliskaia Derevnia v. 13 veka, 75-6, 176-80.
2 Ibid., 96. For evidence relating to East Anglia of widespread money-payments both by free and non-free tenants in the twelfth century, cf. D. C. Douglas in vol. EX of Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History. For money-rents still earlier, in Saxon England, which may well have survived into Norman England, cf. J. E. A. Jolliffe, Constitutional Hist. of Medieval England, 20-1, and Pre-Feudal England, passim.
66 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
at the end of the sixteenth century ; copyholders continued into the seventeenth century to hold their land “ by the custom of the manor” (i.e. subject to the jurisdiction of the manorial court) ; and it was not until 1646, under the Commonwealth, that feudal tenures were finally abolished.1. Moreover, through- out the seventeenth century, and even the eighteenth, the freedom of movement of the labourer in the countryside was in practice severely restricted by the fact that to leave the parish and go else- where virtually required the permission of his former master (under the system whereby he had to obtain a testimonial under the seal of the Constable, to make his departure lawful).? Concerning feudal obligations there are, therefore, two analytically distinct questions which are less often distinguished than clarity of thought demands. There is first the question of the nature of the obligation imposed on the serf, e.g. whether the surplus is exacted from him in the form of direct labour on the seigniorial demesnes or in the form of produce which he has grown on his own land (e.g., the old Saxon gafol), either directly as produce or in money as a part of the proceeds of that produce after it has been sold. Secondly there is the question of the degree of subordination in which the serf is placed relative to his lord and the consequential degree of exploitation to which he is subject. A change in the former is by no means always yoked with a change in the latter ; and the reasons for an alteration in the amount of feudal obligations and in their nature do not necessarily bear close affinity to one another. It happened that in the “ feudal reaction” the desire to fetter the peasant more firmly to the land, depriving him of freedom of movement, and to increase the obligations laid upon him coincided in most cases with a tendency to revert to the use of labour-services in the cultivation of the demesne ; while in England in the latter days of serfdom the tendency to commutation seems to have run parallel with a relaxation of feudal burdens. But this coincidence was not always found. In their historical roots the two types of change do, however, seem to have this much in common:
1 Lipson, of. cit., 111-12. Also A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall, 48-9.
? This passport or license system for labourers dated from a Statute of 1388, which enacted that ‘tno servant or labourer, be it man or woman, depart... to serve or dwell elsewhere unless he carry a letter patent containing the cause of his going and the time of his return, if he ought to return, under the King’s seal ’’. Cf. English Economic History : Select Documents, Ed. Bland, Brown and Tawney, 171-6, also 334-5, 352-3 ; also E. Trotter, Seventeenth-Century Life in the Country Parish, 138-9, where an example is also given of rent-paying tenants still being ‘ tyed ” to do certain services in the seventeenth century (in Yorkshire), ibid. 162.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 67
we have seen that scarcity of labour (compared to the land that the lord has available for cultivation and to the needs of the prevailing modes of cultivation) will generally place a premium on measures of compulsion to tie labour to the land and to enhance the obligations to which it is subject, while, if demesne farming is practised by the lord, this scarcity of labour will at the same time place a premium on farming that land by direct labour-services rather than with hired labour. Plentifulness and cheapness of labour will in each case tend to have a contrary effect. There is, therefore, this much reason, if other things are equal, to expect to find feudal reaction and a growth of labour-services associated together and a decline in labour-services associated with a loosening of feudal bonds.!
Although it is a far cry from Feudalism in England to Feudalism in Russia, with its different chronology and environ- mental conditions, the history of the latter affords so clear an illustration of the fact that transition from labour-dues to dues in money is not inconsistent with the preservation of the essential features of serfdom as to deserve our attention. In Russia, not only has the predominance at one time of dues in money or in kind (obrok) and at another of labour-services (barshchina) characterized different stages of serfdom, but their changing relative importance has shown no close correlation with the degree of freedom or servitude of the cultivator.
In the Kievan Rus of the eleventh and twelfth centuries there were persons in a serf position cultivating estates of princes and boyars ; some of these being slaves settled on the land (kholopi), others called zakupi who worked with a plough and harrow and sometimes even a horse provided by their masters—“‘ a recent peasant who had lost the possibility of carrying on his independent economy and was under the necessity of entering through bonds of indebtedness into dependence on a creditor-master, for whom he was obliged to work part of his time, leaving the rest for himself ’’.*
1 Discussion is sometimes conducted as though the crucial question were whether conditions (e.g. the existence of a market or the type of soil) favoured large demesnes cultivation in the first place. But clearly the needs either of a market or of the lord’s own household can equally well be met either by demesnes cultivation, (a) with compulsory labour, (6) with hired labour, or by dues in kind (or in money) from tenants. The decisive factor will be the relative profitability of one method of serving a given end as compared with others. Where the type of soil and hence of predominant type of cultivation may come in, is the extent to which it makes scarcity or plentifulness of labour of little or no account (e.g. the comparison between sheep- farming and arable).
2B. Grekov in Introduction to Khoziaistvo Krupnovo Feodala 17° veka, vol. 1 ; also Grekov, Ktenskaia Rus (4th Ed., 1944), 113 seq.
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In addition there were half-free peasants (smerdi), who possessed their own land and implements of tillage but came to stand in some kind of tributary relationship to an overlord, to whom they paid dues in kind.1’ In the period which succeeded the glory of Kiev and saw the settlement of the area between the Oka and the Volga which was later to become Muscovy, the prevailing relationship in these newly-settled territories seems to have been a tributary one. Squatters on the so-called ‘black lands” were gradually subjected to the overlordship of some prince and his vassals, and laid under the obligation of paying dues in kind to the latter (either fixed dues or some kind of produce-sharing). Princes and boyars, and especially monasteries, also had their estates which were worked by bonded kholofi. But the supply of these was scarce and soon became insufficient for the needs of the feudal household ; and one historian of medieval Russia has written that “the question of agricultural man-power dominates the history of the seigniorial domain in medieval Russia .. . and the struggle for man-power is one of the principal phenomena of social evolution in this epoch ”’.? Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries a tendency grows to exact labour-services from peasantry on the land of the large proprietors. On monastic estates we find such services as early as the fourteenth century ; 3 and in the reign of Ivan III we meet the statement of a German writer that as much as six days’ work a week was being demanded of their peasants by monastic estates. This can hardly have been at all general at this period ; and in the sixteenth century we still seem to find a considerable admixture of dues in kind, dues in money, and labour-services or barshchina. In the central districts not more than 10 per cent. of the peasant households performed work on the seigniorial estate ; although in the steppe region the pro- portion was considerably higher and in the Orel region more than 50 per cent. The remainder of the peasantry were subject to money-dues or to some kind of métayage system. But at the end of the sixteenth century there takes place a rapid growth of labour-services over money dues: an increase which was only halted by the crisis of seigniorial economy consequent on that
1 The process of bonding (zakabalenie) of the smerd seems to have begun in the tenth century, and by the eleventh century a substantial section of them approached in the servility of their status to the Kholops settled on the land, although some smerds may have themselves owned kholops. (Liashchenko, of. ctt., go—-2.)
*A. Eck, Le Moyen Age Russe, 225. * Ibid., 145.
“ Ibid., 225; Liashchenko, op. cit., 157-8.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 69
extensive depopulation of the years before and after the Times of Troubles, which was the joint result of war and famine and of the flight of peasants to the free frontier-lands of the south— depopulation of a magnitude to cause anything from a half to nine-tenths of the cultivated land in many areas to be abandoned, and a reversion from the three-field system to more primitive and extensive methods of cultivation. This labour shortage in central Muscovy in the first half of the seventeenth century led to a decline in demesne cultivation and in labour-services at the same time as it prompted stringent legal measures to bring back fugitive peasants and to bind the krestianin to his lord’s estate : what Kluchevsky called “the crowning work in the juridical construction of peasant serfdom ” on the part of the Muscovite State.2. In the eighteenth century, the century of Peter the Great and Catharine, of the architecture of the Rastrellis and of the opening of Russia’s ‘‘ window on the West ”’, we find both barshchina and obrok in force, with a tendency apparently (apart from peasants assigned to work in the new manufactories and mines) for the latter to make headway over the former, and for the burden of obrok to grow, especially between the ’60’s and *90’s (possibly as much as doubling on the average over the whole century). Even at this epoch dues in kind—in such varied things as eggs, poultry, meat and homespun—continued to be found alongside money-payments and direct service-obligations: a reflection, perhaps, of the undeveloped character of the local market in which the peasant could sell his produce and find the wherewithal to make a money-payment.
A striking fact of the ensuing century, the century of the Emancipation, was the growth in importance once again of labour-services over other dues. This chiefly applied to the steppe region and was evidently stimulated by the expansion of the market in corn and of corn export. By the time of the Emancipation about two-thirds of the serfs on private estates in the steppe regions were on barshchina and not obrok. Yet curiously enough it was not these southern landlords who were most opposed to the Emperor’s project of Emancipation,
1Cf. the often-quoted passage from the report of an Ambassador from Queen Elizabeth of England in the year 1588: ‘‘ Many villages and townes of half a mile and a mile long stande all unhabited : the people being fled all into other places, by reason of the extream usage and exactions done upon them. So that in the way towards Mosko, betwixt Vologda and Yaruslaveley there are in sight fiftie villages at the least, some halfe a mile long, that stand vacant and desolate without any
inhabitant.” (Giles Fletcher, Of the Russe Common Wealth, 61.) 1V. O. Kluchevsky, History of Russia, vol. 3, 191-
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but rather the reverse. The reason is not far to seek, and accords well with the type of explanation that we have advanced above. Peasant holdings in this part of the country were generally very small, too small in many cases to yield enough to keep a family alive. There was accordingly every prospect of a plentiful and cheap supply of wage-labour to cultivate the large estates if the traditional labour-service obligations were removed.!
IV
So far as the growth of the market exercised a disintegrating influence on the structure of Feudalism, and prepared the soil for the growth of forces which were to weaken and supplant it, the story of this influence can largely be identified with the rise of towns as corporate bodies, as these came to possess economic and political independence in varying degrees. The influence of their presence as trading centres, especially on the smaller estates of the knights, was a profound one. Their existence provided a basis for money dealings, and hence for money- payments from peasant to lord (which, however, were never entirely absent during the feudal period) ; and, if the pressure of feudal exploitation and the decline of agriculture helped to feed the towns with immigrants, the existence of the towns, as more or less free oases in an unfree society, itself acted as a magnet to the rural population, encouraging that exodus from the manors to escape the pressure of feudal exactions which played the powerful réle in the declining phase of the feudal system that we have tried to describe. In England the owners of the smaller estates, who were most susceptible to the urban influence, increasingly adopted the habit of borrowing from merchants, especially when times were dark and war or famine confronted them with ruin. Often they would apprentice sons to an urban craft or even marry a son to a merchant’s daughter—that “market for heiresses among the English aristocracy”, of which Professor Tawney speaks.2 When times were favourable and they accumulated a surplus, they wonld sometimes pur-
1G. T. Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Régime, 12-60; P. Liaghchenko,
op. cif., esp. gO seq., 119-25, 157-162; B. Grekov on “ Kiev Russia” and S.
Bakhrushin on “ Feudal Order” in Protiv Historicheski Konseptsii M. N. Pokrouskovo,
70-116, 117-39 ; A. Eck, op. cit., esp. 84-93, 225, 257-8, 273-95 ; V. O. Kluchevsky,
op. as esp. vol. 1, 185 seq., 343 seq., vol, 2, 217-241, vol. 3, 175-193, vol. 5, 60-75. 2 The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, 187.
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 71
chase membership of an urban gild and engage in trade. Many of them, under the incentive of the wool trade, in the sixteenth century enclosed land for pasture and at times became middlemen themselves. As an Italian writer remarked with surprise, “‘ even men of gentle blood attend to country business and sell their wool and cattle, not thinking it any disparagement to engage in rural industry ”’.}
But while these urban communities, to the extent that they were independent centres of trade and of contractual dealings, were in a sense alien bodies whose growth aided in the disinte- gration of the feudal order, it would be wrong to regard them as being, at this stage, microcosms of Capitalism. To do so would be to anticipate developments that belong to a later stage. Nor can one regard their existence as necessarily in all circum- stances a solvent of feudal relations. True, the trading element that these communities nourished were gathering between their hands the first germs of merchant and money-lending capital that was later to be employed on a larger scale. But other instruments of accumulation than a mere snowball-tendency had to intervene before this capital became as dominant and ubiquitous as it was to be in later centuries. In their early stage many, if not most, towns were themselves subordinated to feudal authority ; in this respect only differing in degree from free tenants of a manor, who, while spared the onerous services of a villein, still owed certain obligations to a lord. At least, in their early stage these communities were half servants of and half parasites upon the body of feudal economy. The mode of production which they enshrined in the urban handicrafts represented a form of simple commodity production, of a non-class, peasant type, where such tools as were used were in the ownership of the craftsmen : a form which differed from the crafts undertaken on a feudal estate only to the extent that the craftsman was making his wares for sale on a market and not making them as an obligation of service for a lord (and the latter might sometimes apply to village craftsmen as well). There was nothing in these early days (i.e. prior to the end of the fifteenth century) in England? about this mode
1Cit. J. R. Green, History of the English People, 18.
2 This statement is not true of certain parts of the Continent, such as the Nether- lands and some Italian towns, where merchant capital was much more developed and there were some signs of actual capitalist penetration into production as early as 1200.
Oné must remember that many towns of this period were scarcely larger than
72 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
of production that made it capitalistic : even though the crafts- man took apprentices and employed a journeyman or two to help him, this reliance on the labour of others was still on too small a scale to constitute in any sense the mainstay of the crafts- man’s income or to qualify his status as a self-employing worker. It needed some important historical developments, which will be the subject of later consideration, for a transition to be made from this free and small-scale handicraft to a specifically capitalist mode of production. It is true, however, that these communities in the course of time won their freedom, generally not without struggle, from seigniorial authority, and that in doing so they sapped the strength of feudal economy, since the economic control which they now exercised enabled them so to regulate their trading relations with the countryside as to transfer to themselves the profit on this trade, which would otherwise have accrued to the prince or lord or abbé of the place. And it is also true that contemporaneously with this growing freedom and prosperity of the towns there appeared the first signs of class differentiation within the urban community itself, and the appearance of an ex- clusively trading oligarchy within the major gilds and the town government.
The origin of these urban communities is far from clear, and has been the matter of some controversy. Evidence is scanty and conditions vary greatly from town to town and from one country to another. The suggestion has sometimes been made that medizval towns were survivals of older Roman cities, which having declined in the days of anarchy rose again to prominence when some measure of order brought a respite and a return of prosperity. One or two of the larger towns,! it is true, probably maintained some continuity of institutions throughout the period of barbarian devastations. It may have been the case that feudal garrisons and episcopal establishments continued in these old centres, and that later separate town life grew up around them ; or that the medieval urban congregations were drawn
what we should call large villages to-day. It was rare for a town to exceed 20,000 inhabitants ; and in the fourteenth century cities as large as 40,000-50,000 inhabit- ants were only found in Italy and Flanders. York only had some 11,000 and Bristol g,500. Even in the fifteenth century Hamburg only had some 22,000, Niirnberg 20,000—25,000, Ulm 20,000 and Augsburg 18,000. (Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalis- mus, I, 215-16.)
1 E.g. Cologne, Mayence, Strasbourg, Rheims, Paris. Cf. Cunningham, Western Cwilization, 58 ; also F. L. Ganshof in Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1938, 243.
——
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 73
to what.were almost deserted sites of earlier towns. But as a general explanation this theory of continuity seems manifestly inadequate. Most authorities nowadays appear to hold that the Dark Ages were sufficiently devastating in their effects on urban life to make any considerable continuity from the old towns to the new improbable.!_ We should remember that it is continuity, not of sites or buildings, or even of some elements of population, but of institutions and of modes of life that is important in the present context. It may be that there was continuity in this relevant sense in one or two of the more important Roman centres ; but one finds it hard to believe that this happened at all generally. Of England, Lipson tells us that “ to all appearances there was no continuity of development between the towns of Roman Britain and those of Saxon England. ... In general the towns were abandoned, and when not actually destroyed by fire they were left bare of inhabitants—a fate which for many years apparently befell even London and Canterbury.” ? In most cases we are dealing with new groupings of the population and new kinds of association, which sprang to life after the ninth century ; and even though these may have gathered round the site of a former Roman town, the fact that this congregation took place at the time it did requires an explanation.
Some, again, have argued that the towns of this period had a purely rural origin, having grown from the thickening of population in certain rural hundreds. There was continuity between village community and town community, and in particular between the earlier hundred court and the later town tribunal : a view which was sponsored by no less an authority than Stubbs. On the Continent the genesis of the town has been traced by an influential school of writers to the landgemeinde or rural township (for example, in the writings of Maurer and Below). Since the town grew up within the structure of feudal society, its inhabitants retained certain relationships of depend- ence to an overlord ; and qualification for citizenship remained essentially agricultural—the ownership of land within the boundaries ; trade only subsequently becoming a main occupa- tion of the inhabitants. The only dividing line which can be drawn, it is said, between earlier village and later town lies in the fortification of the place at a certain date with a wall, for the protection of its inhabitants, thereby converting it into an
1Cf. Ashley, Surveys, 179 and 195. 2 Econ. History, vol. I (Revised Ed.), 188,
74 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
oppidum.1 But even in cases where this explanation may be true, one is still left with the crucial question as to why a community that was agricultural in its origin should at some stage have adopted trade and handicraft as its economic basis. Least of all can a theory of continuity with the village explain this transition.
Thirdly, we have an explanation, which we owe chiefly to Pirenne, that towns originated in settlements of merchants’ caravans. Traders who at first were itinerant pedlars travelling between the various fairs or from one feudal household to another often in caravans for mutual protection—‘‘ a very poor mean set of people ” as Adam Smith termed them, “‘ like the hawkers and pedlars of the present time ’’*—in the course of time formed settlements, as lumbermen and trappers do to-day in North-West Canada. For settlement they might select the site of an old Roman town, by reason of its favourable situation at the junction of Roman roads, or they might choose the protecting walls of some feudal castrum, with its garrison, or be attracted both by the sanctuary and the custom of a monastery. Later, for more complete protection the trading settlement might build a wall, sometimes uniting the wall of this burg with the existing battle- ments of the castrum. This would give them a separate identity which they previously lacked and also a certain military advan- tage. Not infrequently such settlements, acquiring some size and influence, became the objects of special privileges and protection from the King, at the price of a money-payment or a loan, as was the case with German and Italian merchants in England ; and these royal privileges generally gave them freedom, in varying measure, from seigniorial authority and impositions. At some stage of these developments the loose association of caravan days probably assumed the more formal dignity of hansa and gild ; and this organization tended to claim not only immunity from feudal jurisdiction but also a measure of control over local trade, which inevitably brought it into sharp conflict with the local lord.?
1Cf. Ashley, “ Beginnings of Town Life”, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. X, 375-7, 392, 402 seq. Although it never achieved the status of a chartered borough, Clare in Suffolk affords an example of a village growing for a time into a considerable town with a market. Burford, again, was still a village on a lord's estate when its lord procured for it one of the earliest recorded charters (R. H. Gretton, The Burford Records, 5 seq.) It sometimes happened that “the title of borough was given to small pieces of land, cut off from the surrounding manor, and having a few privileged inhabitants”. (G. A. Thornton in Trans. Ryl. Hist. Society, 1928, 85.)
2 Wealth of Nations, 1826 Ed., 370.
* Ashley, loc. cit., 389-92; Pirenne, Belgian Democracy, 15 seq., and Medieval Cities, 117 seq. ; Carl Stephenson, Borough and Town, esp. 6 se
DECLINE OF FEUDALISM AND THE GROWTH OF TOWNS 75
Fourthly, we have the explanation which associates the rise of towns with the right of sauveté or sanctuary granted by feudal authority. Though this is not necessarily incompatible with the previous explanation, it has a different emphasis, pointing to a distinction which may have been of crucial importance. According to this view, towns were less spontaneous growths than creations of feudal initiative itself for its own purposes. Feudal establishments with garrisons needed traders and crafts- men to minister to their needs, and hence would be a natural magnet to such loose elements of the population as were not subordinated to an overlord. Churches and monasteries, possess- ing the right of sauveté, were a natural asylum for pilgrims and fugitives of all kinds in a lawless age, who would come to con- stitute a separate lay population, engaged in subsidiary occupa- tions for which the local establishment created a market. Sometimes, again, a lord would make an offer of special privileges to newcomers in order to institute a market for his own con- venience ; and sometimes the sauveté was made the subject of a secular grant, bestowing a certain amount of immunity from feudal jurisdiction. Akin to this is the so-called “ garrison theory” suggested by Maitland (and the parallel “ military ” theory of Keutgen in Germany) that towns were regarded as strongholds for purposes of emergency, to which inhabitants of surrounding places might retreat; and that originally various lords kept houses there and a skeleton staff of retainers. For example, towns like Chichester and Canterbury in England at the time of Domesday had each between 100 and 200 houses attached respectively to 44 and to 11 different manors.
With the limited knowledge in our possession, we shall probably have to be content for the present with an eclectic explanation of the rise of medieval towns : an explanation which allows a different weight to various influences in different cases. Certain English towns may have had a purely rural origin, although their urban development was no doubt attributable to their position on a ford or near the estuary of a river, which caused them to become centres of trade. Manchester grew out of a village and seems to have remained consistently agricul- tural and non-commercial in character for some time even after it had secured the status of a borough.?, Cambridge apparently arose, close to an older castle and camp, from a coalescence of villages (as did also Birmingham), but its position on a ford
1 Lipson, op. cit., 192. 2M. Bateson, Medieval England, 395.
76 STUDIES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM
was no doubt responsible for its later growth, as was the case also with Oxford ; while Glasgow is said to have originated in the religious gatherings about the shrine of St. Ninian, because these afforded great opportunities for trade.1 Norwich owed much of its position to Danish influence, to the settlement of Scandinavian traders there at an early date and to its position in the path of commercial intercourse with northern Europe.?* Pirenne’s explanation would seem also to fit the development of London (where it is said that German merchants had establish- ments in the reign of Ethelred) ; but the protection afforded by fortifications and religious establishments must also have played a part in attracting elements of the population that were un- attached to the soil or were fugitives. The same would largely apply to continental towns such as Paris (which in the ninth century was no more than a small island enclosed by Roman walls) and Geneva, to cities on the Rhine like Cologne, which quite early had a colony of alien merchants, and to other German or Flemish towns like Bremen, Magdeburg, Ghent and Bruges. But there were many important centres where the urban com- munity clearly originated in groups of traders and craftsmen who settled under the walls of a monastery or a castle, not only for the military protection that the latter gave or for its favourable situation on an existing trading route, but because certain privileges were offered to them in order that they should be available to cater for the needs of the feudal establishment. Thus, we find the abbey of St. Denis in France in the eleventh century attracting population around it by creating an area with the right of sauveté. ‘‘ Four wooden crosses were set up at the corners of a tract of land large enough to hold a burg ; and King Philip I granted to the tract so marked out complete freedom from external jurisdiction, from toll and from military service.” * In England towns like Durham, St. Albans, Abingdon, Bury St. Edmunds, Northampton, grew up round castles and monas- teries, and on the borders of Wales the Norman baronage gave special privileges to attract traders and artisans to form town communities, as a means of settling and strengthening the frontier. At Bury, the Domesday Survey tells us, a community of bakers, brewers, tailors, shoemakers and so forth ‘‘ daily wait
1 Cunningham, Growth (Early and Middle Ages), 95-6; Maitland, Township and Borough, 41 seq., 52; Lipson, op. cit., vol. I, 185-g ; Carl Stephenson, op. cit., 200-2; H. Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England,