April 4, 19 1 8 
Land & Water 
19 
The English Peasant: By Jason 
A CENTURY ago one of the leading economists of 
the time prophesied that France would become 
"the great pauper warren of Europe" because 
she had turned her people into a race of peasant 
owners. His remark would have struck most of 
his generation as a commonplace, for the agrarian revolution 
which created the landless labourer seemed to the economist 
of the age not less happy and providential in its working 
than the industrial revolution that created Lancashire and 
the Black Country. Among the educated minds of the day 
it was only here and there that any misgivings arose about 
the future of the village society that was reformed so ruth- 
lessly in the age of the enclosures and the introduction of 
the large farm. To most of the enlightened it was as clear 
as daylight that France was taking a retrograde step in 
establishing, and that England was making a great social 
advance in disestablishing, her ancient peasantry. The _ 
peasant, i.e., the cultivator with rights over the soii, was as 
much of an anachronism as the hand-loom weaver. 
Of course, the contrast with France was emphasised by the 
war. Two nations were at war in a sense in which nations 
had rarely been at war in the past. For the war with France 
was not merely a struggle between Governments on the 
watch for opportunities of trade or political power, or moving 
restlessly for more elbow-room in the world. It was a 
struggle between two social systems. And just as the Europe 
which will emerge from the present conflict will not be the 
Europe we knew in that distant summer of 1914 — for too 
many hammer blows have fallen on its body and its mind — 
so the Europe from which Napoleon stepped on to his exile's 
ship was very different from the Europe that had listened to 
the echoes of the tumbling Bastille. And the changes that 
had come about in each country were the result of the dis- 
tribution of power, for the governing forces guided and 
controlled the changes that we are apt to speak of as 
economic and impersonal. 
Two Diverse Societies 
in the Middle Ages, England, as a rural society, differed 
little from the rest of Western Europe. There is a common 
background ; a common past. How different their face 
to-day ! Over the greater part of France the place of the 
serf cultivators of the Middle Ages has been taken by peasant 
proprietors, whereas in England the great bulk of the land 
belongs to large landowners who let it out to comparatively 
large tenant farmers who in their turn employ labourers for 
wages. Two diverse societies have developed from a common 
civilisation. Modern historians are coming to realise that 
the terms on which each society in Europe dissolved its old 
mediaeval village system are among the most important facts 
of its history, and that the old analysis of these changes was 
far too easy and simple. 
Why and under what conditions did the peasant survive, 
and why and under what conditions did he disappear ? 
Five years ago Professor Ashley gave an important address 
to the International Congress of Historical Studies in which 
he collected the results of modern research on this subject. 
Roughly speaking, we may say that there were everywhere 
reasons of State for keeping a peasantry and reasons of class 
interest for dissolving it. The reasons of State are clear 
enough. There is an old saying : "Pauvres paysans, pauvre 
royaume, pauvre royaume, pauvre rot." In the old statutes 
against depopulation stress was laid on the military import- 
ance of the peasant, and one of the charges brought against 
engrossing landlords was that "the defence of this land 
against our enemies outward is enfeebled and impaired." 
Peace, defence, order, and taxation all demanded, in the 
eyes of a provident English statesman of the sixteenth 
century or a Continental ruler like Maria Theresa or Frederick 
William III. of Prussia, that the peasantry should not be 
torn from the soil. On the other hand, the reasons of class 
interest are not less apparent, and in the eighteenth century 
the landlord who wanted to add to his property had the 
sanction of the economist not only in England, but in France, 
for it is important to remember that McCuUoch was not 
more hostile to peasant farming than Quesnai or Turgot, 
and that the French Physiocrats were actually the pioneers 
in preaching enclosure. 
Now, the great difference between England and France was 
the difference in the position of the aristocracy. In France 
before the Revolution the noble was a courtier, where in 
England he was a ruler. Consequently the actual Govern- 
ment of France was not in the hands of the class whose 
instincts of self-interest, reinforced by the teaching of the 
economists, prompted enclosure. The French noble amused 
himself at Versailles while the intendant administered the 
countryside. The seigneur who resided on his estate had 
become, in nine cases out of ten, a mere rent-receiver. When 
the Revolution came the French peasants were, in the main, 
customary tenants of one kind or another. The Revolution 
released them from the dues and services — vexatious and, 
in some cases, humiliating — under which they held their 
land. In this respect, the Revolution put the peasant on 
his feet. Further, a certain amount of the land that was 
confiscated, though not the greater part, of course, came 
into his hands. Meanwhile the Revolution set up a Central 
Government, which had every motive for protecting the 
property of the peasant, who was the natureil defender of 
the new order against the danger of the restoration of the 
ancient regime. 
In Prussia 
It used to be said that Stein and Hardenburg did for the 
peasants in Prussia what the French Revolution did for the 
peasant in France. This view is now discredited. The 
French Revolution enfranchised the peasant, by a stroke of 
the pen abolishing all feudal dues and obligations with the 
enthusiastic approval of the liberal nobles. Stein and 
Hardenburg enfranchised the Prussian peasant on much 
harsher terms, for the peasants had to surrender from a 
third to a half of their holdings to compensate their lords 
for the loss of their labour services. Secondly, enfranchise- 
ment in Prussia was limited to the larger holders ; the smaller 
men, customary tenants and cotters, lost their footing as 
completely as did the English labourer. Thus the legisla- 
tion of Stein and Hardenburg reflects the power of a landlord 
class, which was able, not indeed as in England, to do exactly 
what it pleased, but to control legislation in its own interest. 
In Bavaria, where the peasants were turned into proprietors 
in the middle of the last century, there was no powerful 
landlord class, because half the duchy had been in the hands 
of ecclesiastical bodies down to the nineteenth century. 
The peasants \yere consequently enfranchised on much 
easier terms. 
In England the serf disappears much earlier than on the 
Continent, but the general conditions on which the mediaeval 
village was finally rearranged were prescribed by an all- 
powerful landlord class. Now, the landlord class saw no 
conflict between the reasons of State and the reasons of 
class interest. In their minds public policy and private 
interest pointed the same way. Their power was absolute ; 
strengthened, first, by the confiscation of the monasteries ; 
secondly, by the Revolution of 1688 ; and, thirdly, by the 
freedom of English social life from the strict superstitions 
that made the French nobleman shrink from trade. The 
English aristocracy was immensely more powerful just 
because it was not a close aristocracy. And the English 
landowner was not a hypocrite when he asserted that the 
larger his estate, the more prosperous the nation. For the 
Revolution of 1688 had consummated the process by which 
the landlord class had become the Government, and he was 
a very active, zealous, and self-confident ruler. 
To thinkers like Burke it was an axiom that the govern- 
ment of the landlord class was the greatest blessing that 
could be bestowed on any people, and if Burke coyld have 
guided the French Revolution he would have set up the 
nobles as the successors to the rule of Versailles, and turned 
the peasants into English labourers. If Burke thought this 
an ideal system, the landlords were not to be blamed for 
putting their own services to the nation pretty high, and for 
thinking that the dispossession of the peasantry was not too 
great a price to take in return. Thus the broad difference 
between the course that agrarian history has taken here and 
in the rest of Western Europe may be summarised. England 
escaped from the abuses of mediaeval society long before the 
Continent, but the classes that established ParUamentary 
and Constitutional Government rewarded themselves by 
using their power to dispossess the peasantry. Medievalism 
survived on the Continent down to the nineteenth century in 
some of its worst forms of personal oppression, but wfien it 
disappeared the Revolution (outside Prussia) helped the 
peasant instead of destroying him. If the English nobleman 
had been a gay trifler Uke the French, he could never 
have acquired the power that enabled him to make the 
