Expropriation and the political origins of agrarian capitalism in England

Abstract

Waves of evictions of peasants and the generation of large leased, competitive, farms out of a previously communal, customary agriculture first took place in England in and from the fifteenth century. This occurred nowhere else on such a fundamental scale for centuries. In recent decades, standard, mainstream studies have played down the role of violence and political and class conflict in these changes and placed much greater emphasis on market-centered forms of causation. This chapter breaks that mold. It focuses on the evidence for the violent eviction of peasants from their homes and livelihoods, especially in the decades around 1500, and on the agents of that violence. The emphasis is therefore on the changing political context of the period, that is, on the changing balance in the structure of power in England which enabled these changes to take place.