588 Agricultural Labour Early Last Century. [Oct., 



could only sell because he could not afford the expense of fencing. 

 Of course in hundreds of cases a small commoner could not 

 make out a case at all. He was uneducated and about his rights 

 he knew little, except that as long as he could remember he had 

 kept a cow, driven geese across the waste, pulled his fuel out of 

 the brush-wood and cut turf from the common, and that his 

 father had done all these things before him. It followed, there- 

 fore, that in nine cases out of ten on an enclosure the peasant 

 vanished, and the inhabitants of the village became wage earners 

 and nothing more. Thus, when the mediaeval village disappeared 

 in France, the various Frenchmen who were called peasants 

 became landowners, where in England they became wage earners. 



England and France thus present examples of the dissolution 

 of the old village society under the influence in the one case of aris- 

 tocratic and in the other case of revolutionary ideas. We might 

 find another contrast in the histories of Prussia and Bavaria. It 

 was thought until lately that Stein and Hardenberg did for the 

 peasant in Prussia what the French Eevolution did for the 

 peasant in France. Professor Ashley shows that this view was 

 mistaken. The Prussian peasant was enfranchised on much 

 harsher terms, for the peasants had to surrender from one-third 

 to a half of their holdings to compensate their lords for the loss 

 of their labour services. This operation was carried out at a 

 time when the landlord class was very powerful in Prussia. In 

 Bavaria, on the other hand, the abolition of serfdom and the 

 dissolution of the old system took place in the middle of the last 

 century, and as half the duchy had been in the hands of 

 ecclesiastical bodies down to the nineteenth century, there was 

 not a powerful landlord class, and the peasants were consequently 

 enfranchised on much easier terms. 



We may put it broadly then that England got rid of serfdom 

 earlier than the Continent, but that the general conditions on 

 which the mediaeval village was finally re-arranged were pre- 

 scribed by an all-powerful landlord class. This, as Professor 

 Ashley has pointed out, had very important consequences. It 

 is true of almost every society down to the eighteenth century 

 that there were reasons of state for preserving the peasantry 

 and reasons of class interest for dissolving it. Mr. Tawney's 

 brilliant book on " The Agi'arian Problem in the Sixteenth Cen- 

 tury " shows these motives in conflict in the struggles over the 

 enclosures of that age. The interests of peace, defence, order, 

 and revenue all demanded in the eyes of prominent statesmen 

 at that time (as they demanded in the eyes of a continental 

 ruler like Marie Therese or Frederick WiUiam the Third of 



