Agricultural Policy in United Kingdom

Agricultural Community

Ingiving an account of agricultural communities it seems best to follow the plan adopted by Mr. Seebohm in his standard work on the English Village Community, and to proceed from known and undisputed facts, open to present observation, back through historical evidence which step by step decreases in authority and increases in difficulty of interpretation until we arrive at the tribal organisations, clans, and kindred settlements of prehistoric times ; that is to say, the comparative method may be first applied to existing communities, and to the traces and survivals of the past, and then an explanation may be attempted by the historical method.

Communities in which land is practically owned and cultivated in a collective manner, according to customary rules of great antiquity, and in which the rights and powers of any individual are strictly limited, still exist over large areas and among vast populations. In Central Asia the tribes of pastoral nomads are made up of groups, each under the authority of the head of a family, and nothing is the subject of separate ownership except clothes and weapons (La PLAY, Ouvriers Europiens). When a group becomes too large a division is made by the head in a manner suggestive of the division made between Abraham and Lot.

More interest, however, attaches to the communities which have a settled system of agriculture in a fixed area. The most important at present is the Russian MIR, which may be described as ” the aggregation of inhabitants of a village possessing in common the land attached to it.” Each male inhabitant of full age is entitled to an equal share of the land. The period of distribution at present varies in different districts, nine years being the average, and the limits from three to fifteen. The arrangements for the partition are decided by the peasants under the presidency of the stavosta (headman or mayor). All the arable land is divided into three concentric zones which extend round the village, and these zones arc again divided into three fields to admit of the three-field system of cultivation. These fields again are divided into long narrow strips, in length from one to four furlongs, and in breadth from one to two rods. The division of the parcels is arranged so that every man hat at least one parcel in each of the great. fields. The bundle of parcels is arranged before the lots are drawn.

As a rule there is not much difference in the fertility of the land, but in some cases the measuring rods are of different lengths according to the fertility. Formerly a certain amount of forest, pasture, and meadow was attached to each village, the inhabitants paying a kind of labour rent, but by the Act of Emancipation of 1861 this part of the land was made over to the lord. The cultivation is carried on in a strictly routine manner, the time of sowing, reaping, etc., being fixed by the village assembly, and there being no division between the parcels of land, and no separate approach. The dwelling-house, izba, with its enclosed garden ground, is, however, private property, although even in this case the owner cannot sell it to a stranger without the consent of the mir, which has always the right of pre-emption. Before the abolition of serfdom the lord of the manor (to give the nearest English equivalent) granted about half the arable land to the SERFS, and cultivated the remainder with their forced labour of about three days a week. On the emancipation a rent (redeemable—the money being in many eases advanced by government) was fixed, and a minimum amount of land assigned to each serf. Power was given to the mirs by a twothirds majority to abandon the system of collectivism in favour of individual ownership, but on the whole the mir has been rather strengthened, and is taken by the government as the basis of taxation.

From the economic standpoint the most striking objections to the mir, which also seem to render its long continuance under modern conditions doubtful, are (1) the natural growth of population under the system of equal division. Hitherto this increase has been slow, owing partly to the large mortality of the children, and partly to the women being much older than their husbands, and to the prevalence of immorality. But the infant mortality might readily be lessened, and the system of unequal marriages, which rests on the convenience of the head of the family in obtaining women-servants by the marriage of his boys, seems to be falling into disfavour. (2) The second objection lies in the constraint placed upon individual enterprise by the compulsory cultivation according to fixed methods, in the impossibility of highly extensive cultivation with the periodic divisions of the land, and the absence of enclosures, and in causes similar to those which in England in the 15th century secured the victory of several (enclosed, individual) over champion (non-enclosed, common) cultivation (compare E. de LAVELEYE, Primitive Property, ch. iii. ” Economic Results of the Russian Mir “).

Village and fields

In Scotland, in the crofting parishes, we find as a rule that the tenants have a certain amount of hill ground on which they have the right to pasture so many sheep or cattle, the number varying in different cases according to the holding. As soon as the crops are gathered the ground is thrown open in the same way. There are, however, no periodical divisions, and the village had no rights not derived from the feudal proprietor until the recent legislation giving effect to presumed custom established fixity of tenure at a “fair rent,” and made provisions for consolidating holdings.

In England there still survive a number of CoMMoNs and LAMMAS-LANDS in which certain members of a village have definite rights, and there are abundant traces of the old agricultural communities. In most of the countries of

Europe where private property has become the rule there are also survivals which point to the wide prevalence of customary cultivation in common. On the historical development and gradual decay of the village community, the reader should consult Mr. Seebohm’s remarkable work, which, on its broad outlines has been mainly followed in the rest of this article. Although nominally this work is confined to England, the search for a rational explanation led the writer to make a wide survey of many other countries at different times.

Before Mr. Seebohm’s work appeared many writers had called attention to the wide prevalence of common cultivation in England in recent times. A passage is quoted by Sir Henry Maine (Village Communities, p. 90) from Marshall’s Treatise on Landed Property (1804), in which the writer from personal observation of “provincial practice” attempts to construct a picture of the ancient agricultural state , of England. He notices the division of the arable land into three great unenclosed fields adapted for the regular triennial succession of fallow, wheat (or rye), and spring crops (oats, beans, peas, etc.) He describes also the division of these fields into strips and the mode in which the meadows and the waste were used. He gives also statistics on the extent to which in his day these open and common fields existed, which have been summarised by E. NASSE, The Common Field System for England in the Middle Ages. Mr. Seebohm points out (p. 14) that taking the whole of England with roughly speaking its 10,000 parishes, nearly 4000 Enclosure Acts were passed between 1760 and 1844, the object of these acts being expressly to get rid of the old common unenclosed fields. But in spite of the Enclosure Acts the old system has left many indelible traces on the surface of the land itself and the nature of the holdings in the size and shape of the fields (compare also Canon Taylor’s paper in Domesday Studies on ” Domesday Survivals “).

The open fields were nominally divided into long acre stripe a furlong (i.e. a furrow-long) in length and four rods in width. Originally these strips were separated by green balks of unploughed turf, and these balks can still be traced. A bundle of these long acre strips a furlong in width made a “shot” (AngloSaxon) “quarentena” (Latin) “furlong” (old English), and these furlongs were divided by broader balks generally overgrown with hushes. The roads by which access was obtained to the strips usually lay along the side of the furlong and at the end of the strips, and these roads, often at right angles to one another, still survive. There are further traces on the land itself of the old ” head-lands ” (Scotch headrig), the ” linches,” ” butts,” ” gored acres ” and pieces of ” no man’s land ” (Seebohm, p. 6). Canon Taylor in the paper cited above gives some very remarkable examples of the effects of the same method of ploughing in these open fields having been practised for many generations.

Land and fields

But not only on the surface of the land, but in the present distribution of the fields and ” closes ” constituting a farm, the effect of its common open fields may be traced. Taking any manor as a centre we find the farms of which it is composed not consisting only of solid blocks (as in the newly-settled land of the United States), but of a number of little fields scattered about in the most “admired disorder,” and at a considerable distance from one another. Of the present inconvenience and want of economy involved in the arrangement of farming land there can be no doubt from the modern agricultural standpoint, and if a tabula rasa could be made of the land such a wasteful method of distribution would never be adopted. The inference is plain that this irregular straggling scattered ownership and occupation of the land must be a survival from a past custom of which the inner meaning has been lost. The great merit of Mr. Seebohm’s work is that he provides a key for the explanation of this peculiarity, and whatever modifications may be found necessary with further research this explanation is certainly at any rate a most valuable working hypothesis. Evidence of the full existence of the open-field’ system is easily perceived as far back as the 16th, 15th, and 14th centuries. We have the literary remains of the great agricultural controversy, in the two former centuries, on ” champion ” and “several ” already alluded to, and for the 14th century we have the graphic touches of Piers Plowman in describing his ” fair felde ” full of all sorts of folk.

Then through a series of documents such as the Winslow Manor Rolls (reign of Edward the Hundred Rolls (Edward I.), the records of various abbeys, the Bolden Book (1183 A.D.), we are taken back to the great Domesday Survey (1086 A.D.) So far the result of the evidence is certainly to show that the further we go back the more clearly do we discover the wide prevalence of the open-field system and cultivation in common. Up to the time of Domesday at any rate, Mr. Seebohm may be admitted to have proved his case, and it will be convenient in this short summary at this point to abandon the retrogressive chronological method and to notice the principal features of the system at the time of the Conquest and the processes and causes of its decay.

At the completion of the Conquest there were certainly manors everywhere, some belonging to the king, others to great barons and prelates, and others to the mesne tenants of these greater lords (cp. Madox, Exchequer). Some lords held many manors and were represented by a steward or REEVE (villicus). The typical MANOR was a manorial lord’s estate with a village or township upon it under his jurisdiction and held in the peculiar system of serfdom known as villenagePassing now to the internal economic constitution of one of these manors and leaving the legal difficulties on one side, we observe that the arable land was divided into the lord’s demesne and the land in villenage. The whole of the arable land was in three great open fields, and the demesne land was interspersed with the villain’s land. For the present purpose the liberi homines may be omitted, and we may observe that there were three classes of tenants in villenage, namely villani (proper), cotariior bordarii (cottagers), and servi (slaves). The chief interest attaches to the villeins. The typical villein holding was a virgate or yardland, and a Virgate normally consists of thirty acres, namely ten of the long-acre stripe in each of the three great open fields. It has been calculated (Seebohm, p. 102) that about 5,000,000 acres were under the plough in the counties named in the survey, about half being held by the villeins.

The normal virgate was an indivisible bundle of strips of land passing with the homestead by regrant from the lord to a single successor. There were also rights to certain use of meadow and waste. The virgates with their homesteads were sometimes called for generations by the family name of the holder. The central idea of the system was to keep up the services of various kinds due to the lord of the manor, and the virgate was a typical family holding. The services consisted of so much WEEK WORK, generally three days, an uncertain quantity of boonwork (adprecem, precarious) at the will o f the lord, and certain payments, occasionally of money but more frequently in kind. There were also restrictions upon the personal freedom of the villeins, e.g. the lord’s licence must be obtained on the marriage of a daughter, or the sale of an ox, etc., and no one could leave the land without the lord’s assent.

The normal outfit of the VILLEIN was a pair of oxen, and the ploughing was usually done with a team of eight oxen. Thus even so far as the beasts were concerned the co-operation of at least four villeins was required. We find also that certain craftsmen held their virgates in virtue of their services to the village, and the principal wants of the community were satisfied by its own labour. Everywhere and in every. thing custom was in force limiting the nature and amount of the services and prescribing the times and methods of cultivation. The principal differences between the English village community at the Conquest and at the time of the Black Death (1349 A.D.) are to be found in the gradual break-up of these overpowering customs and the increasing scope given to individual enterprise and variety. The nature of the movement is shown by the increasing irregularity of the holdings and the departure from the normal type, by the progressive limitation of the services demanded and above all by the substitution of money payments for these services and payments in kind. This commutation in the mode of rendering tribute to the landowner was the most potent cause of economic progress in the mediaeval period. By the time of the BLACK DEATH the option at any rate of money payments had become usual. The landowner found his advantage in the greater efficiency of hired labour, and the villein had the power of benefiting himself by exceptional industry.

For a long time, however, the customary methods of cultivation prevailed, and, as pointed out above, the open fields remained down to the close of last century. The principal point to observe is that starting with the Conquest, economic and agricultural improvement has been closely connected with the disintegration of Village COMMUNITIES. The nature of this movement is, however, often overlooked, because a comparison is made at different times between different parts of the social scale, the modern farm labourer being compared to the villein with the virgate, to the apparent disadvantage of the former in spite of serfdom. But the true counterpart of the modern labourer was the mediaeval slave, and the villein corresponds to the modern small farmer or landowner.

System

When we go back beyond the Conquest we fmd strong evidence of the prevalence in the eastern districts of Britain of these village communities in serfdom under manorial lords, though the points of similarity are at first disguised by the difference of language. There seems, however, little doubt that, whatever may have happened at the time of the Saxon invasion and in the dark period which followed after the departure of the Romans, as soon as the Saxons were settled they developed (or adapted) the essential economic features of the manor (compare the Laws of Ine quoted by Mr. Seebohm, p. 142). It is at this point that the principal controversy arises. The older view generally associated with the name of Von Maurer was that the Saxons imported into this island the fully-developed MARK SYSTEM. The members of the mark were freemen, and in their assemblies decided on points of interest to the community. The arable land was divided, and the portions of meadow were allotted by popular vote. According to this view the village community in historical Saxon times had degenerated from this original type, the overlordship of a single individual having taken the place of the free assembly of equals.

Against this view, however, Mr. seebohm has made out a very strong case. His principal points are that the Saxons in their own homes do not appear to have cultivated laud on the THREE-FIELD SYSTEM ; that as soon as historical evidence is available we find the closest analogies between the agricultural systems in SaxonEngland and that in the Romano-Teutonic portion of southern Germany ; that there is no sufficient time allowed for the full development independently of the manorial from the mark system, and that there is no reason to suppose that the Saxons exterminated the inhabitants and treated the land as if it were virgin forest. The conclusion is that to a great extent the Saxons simply adopted the system which they found already established by the Romans during their four centuries of occupation. This opinion is supported by the close analogy between the conditions of tenure of the Romano-British colones and the later villani (Seebohm, p. 267). Thus the Roman villa is made to contribute some of the most important elements of the late English village. But now the question arises :—Whence were the elements of the Roman system in Britain derived ? Did the Romans themselves import their own agricultural customs and impose them upon the inhabitants, or did they adapt what they found to their own uses? It is known from other sources that the most usual course of the Romans in their policy of parcere subjectis was to amalgamate as far as possible foreign customs with their own. It is known also from historical evidence that before the Roman invasion in many parts of Britain there was a settled system of agriculture, notably in the southeast, and it would be in accordance with their usual practice for the Romans to take what they found as the basis of their own methods of cultivation and extracting revenue from the people. We are thus thrown still further

back, in order to discover the elements of this system which existed in Britain before the Roman invasion, and in the search we discover, following the lines of Mr. Seebohm’s investigation, that through the whole period from pre-Roman to modern times there were two parallel systems of rural economy the essential features of which were preserved in spite of the Roman, English, and Norman invasions— namely the village community in the east and the tribal community in the west of the island. Neither system was introduced into Britain during a historical period of more than 2000 years. The village community of the east was connected with a settled system of agriculture ; the equality and uniformity of the holdings were signs of serfdom, and this serfdom again had itself arisen from a lower stage of slavery. The mark with its equal freemen, so far as this part of Britain is concerned, is thus an untenable hypothesis. We have equality and community, it is true, but they are based not on freedom but on organised serfdom. On the other hand the Tribal SYSTEM which prevailed in the west of Britain (especially Scotland and Wales) and also in Ireland was connected with an earlier stage of economic development mainly of a pastoral kind.

The tribal community was bound together by the strong ties of bloodrelationship between free tribesmen. This free equality involved an equal division amongst the tribesmen according to various tribal rules, and this custom of sub-division has survived to our own day in the “RUNDALE” or “run-rig ” system of the west of Scotland and Ireland. In this brief summary many interesting points have been omitted and many certainly require further investigation. The origin of the size and shape of the long-acre stripe, the original object of the irregular scattering, and the way in which the system became solidified in such an inconvenient form for modern requirements, can only be alluded to. Perhaps the most remarkable general result is that co-operation which we are accustomed to regard as a purely modern product is very ancient, but whether this co-operation arose, unlike most other ancient institutions, purely from rational elements and from motives of economy and convenience, has not yet been the subject of sufficient investigation. Certainly hitherto the principal danger in reconstructing primitive societies has been to import too readily modern ideas and not to allow sufficiently for what we should now call irrational elements. [1]

Common Agricultural Policy in Europe

Resources

Notes

1. Robert Harry Inglis, Sir, Dictionary of Political Economy, Vol. 1, 1915

See Also

Further Reading

• Common Agricultural Policy in the Encyclopedia of Britain
• Common Agricultural Policy in the Osborn’s Concise Law Dictionary
• Common Agricultural Policy in the Halsbury’s Laws of England
• Common Agricultural Policy in the Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary of Words and Phrases
• Common Agricultural Policy in the Jowitt’s Dictionary of English Law
• Common Agricultural Policy in the New Oxford Companion to Law
• Common Agricultural Policy in the Words and Phrases Legally Defined
• Common Agricultural Policy in the Oxford Dictionary of Law