• European food production became more and more commercial and capitalistic between 1559-

1715. • Farmers grew cash crops for urban markets on land they owned or rented. • They could
cultivate their estates with wage labourers, or take half the tenant’s crop in lieu of rent. • In Poland,
Bohemia Hungary, Prussia, landlords were less likely to bother with money wages or rent. They
generally required their serfs to farm their estates thrice a week without pay. The expanding
agricultural market thus turned some Western European peasants into wage labourers, some into
tenant farmers, and others into small free-farmers, while Eastern European peasants were driven
deeper into serfdom. Case of Wigston Magna’s Three-Field-System Many legacies from medieval
agriculture remained. Villagers still divided their arable land into 3 great fields to be planted with
different crops in successive years. The wasteful 3-field-system of crop rotation prevailed through
much of England, France and Germany. • Ploughing and harvesting techniques hadn’t improved
much since the 12th century. • The field per bushel of seed was wretchedly low. • The traditional
undiversified crops grown were mainly cereals and legumes with little in the way of meat, diary
produce, fruits and leafy vegetables. • The staples were bread and beer in the North, and bread and
wine in the South. Corn and potatoes were introduced from the New World, but were not yet
cultivated widely in Europe. • The consumers were very grateful for the spices, sugar, tea and coffee
imported from Asia and Americas.

In Spain, agricultural production declined during the 16-17th century while in England production
increased. In both Spain and England, large-scale wool-raisers were converting grain fields into
sheep runs. • 3% of the people held 97% of land. So it was easy for the landlord class to increase the
% of land to sheep pasturage. • The Mesta Members’ Sheep-Ranchers Association owned 3 million
Merino sheep in the early 16th century. • The Spanish government granted the Mesta special
privileges. In 1501, their migratory flocks were given exclusive possession of huge belts of
pastureland, which had been formerly used to raise grain for Castilian towns. • The countryside was
depopulated as dispossessed farmers moved to the towns. Wheat production fell drastically. Spain
was faced with a famine.

In England, the landlords evicted their tenants from half a million acres and enclosed much of this
land into great sheep pastures. But the English enclosure movement didn't assume large proportions
until the 18th century. • End 17th century, nearly half of the English rural population consisted of
small farmers who either owned their land, or half it, on long leases. • English farmers large and
small, worked their land more efficiently. Some enterprising farmers created rich farmlands in the
17th century, by draining the Fenland district in Cambridgeshire. • Others cut down large forest
tracts and learned how to till areas, which had hitherto been wastelands. • Not only did wool
production rise in the 17th century, but also grain and cattle production, which kept pace with the
expanding population. • By the end of the 17th century, English farmers started to export a good
deal of wheat.

The Dutch were the most enterprising agriculturalists. • They had to be, for they had very little
farmland on which they’d have to support a dense population. • Their low-lying fields were
periodically inundated by the North Sea. The soil was soggy and unfit for cultivation. • In the 16-17th
centuries, the Dutch reclaimed huge tracts and polders from the sea. They built dikes, and drainage
canals to keep the water out, and windmills to pump the land dry. • They farmed the new lands
intensively, planting orchards, truck gardens, grain fields, and pastures raising Turkish tulips. They
experimented with clover and turnips, which improved the soil yield and fattened the cattle. The
Dutch produced butter and cheese for export.

17th century agrarian enterprise took an innovative turn in the development of grape-growers in the
French county of Champagne, to have a method for making superlative sparkling wine. • French
wines were established as the best in Europe, but Champagne was not among the great wine
producing regions. Its chalky soil grew stunted vines with small quantities of sweet white and black
grapes. Its northerly climate delayed the harvest season and slowed the crucial fermentation of
grape juice to alcohol. • The standard method of making wine was to harvest the grapes in
September-October and press them into a mush, which then fermented. Before the fermented
liquid turned into vinegar, it was poured into great wooden casks. The liquid was then piped from
cask to cask in order to remove the sediment and filtered to achieve a clear colour, which was drunk
young, or kept in casks for centuries to mature. These technological innovations created an
increased demand in the market.

In sophisticated and urbanised parts of Europe, over 3/4th of the population were peasants. It was
remarkable how the progress of industrial capitalism, the expansion of trade and commerce, and the
widening of the organised money market affected them profoundly.

In the medieval ages, these economies were the same that had been moulded by manorialism,
which bound serfs to work the demesne, of their lord in exchange for protections and the hereditary
use of a portion of the estate. With the lapse of time, when serfdom declined, lords were willing to
free their peasants of the ties of personal dependence for a fee.

In the 14th century, pestilence and Black Death, and other epidemics cut the rural population to a
half. Wages rose. The peasantry became pauperized. In areas where crops like grain and wool could
be cultivated extensively, and on a large scale, and readily sold for cash in the international market,
landlords were tempted to evict their tenants and farm the whole estate themselves commercially
with the hired labour.

The expansion of trade between 1460-1560 heightened this temptation. Opportunities for
agricultural profit multiplied as communications improved, and a dense network of trade in
agricultural produce covered the Continent. Ever more rapidly land and its products were being
sucked into the vortex of an expanding exchange economy, and in this economy, was the
subsistence agriculture of the past medieval economy of no outlets, being transformed into an
extensive commercial economy of products for near and distant markets.

Where the market was exclusively local, agriculture remained of utmost necessity and unspecialised,
and landlords preferred to rent out the whole estates to tenant farmers because this was the easiest
way to assure themselves of a money income. Here the manorial lord became a rentier. Where
landlords could grow wool or grain for export, they preferred to assert their absolute ownership of
the estate and engage in capitalistic agriculture, the rational exploitation of a large holding to
produce a cash crop for commercial profit. Here the manorial lord became the capitalist farmer.
Enclosures in England and a ‘New Commercialized Agriculture’

Three major ways of achieving commercialization of towns were – • Changes in agrarian

organisation and land tenures, • Changes in the kind of product produced, and • Improvements and
innovations in agricultural methods.

Changes like this would take time, and one way of achieving this was to concentrate on stock
rearing. A new profession arose with graziers of large herds…

How? • A crucially important element was the sheep, and the increasing wool demand associated
with it. Sheep was easy to keep and feed on England’s extensive grasslands, requiring little labour
and yielding intensive returns. • Arable lands were turned into pasture strips. Changes in the farming
practices could only be carried out efficiently by altering the distribution of land among the people.
The traditional farming manner with open fields was no longer tenable. • But the chief corn-growing
Leicestershire, and Warwickshire down to Berkshire, Yorkshire Lincolnshire, East Anglia and part of
the Home Counties – fell within the area of the open field system. It was here that the movement for
enclosing mostly applied…

Enclosure was a general term usually a term of abuse which covered three distinct operations:
Firstly, there was the individual tenant of villein stock, who began to buy up strips adjoining his own,
put an hedge around the field, so created and farmed lands thus cut off from the open fields,
Secondly, there was the bigger man who somehow consolidated large stretches of open field by
evicting his tenants and put the lands to pasture, this depopulating enclosure was the veil weighed
against by the preachers and pamphleteers, Lastly, there was the enclosing of commons and wastes
of each of the medieval villages, the stretch usually under rough grass, where villagers pastured their
animals and geese. Machinations of manorial lords, who successfully intrigued and bullied to get
exclusive rights of the use of commons for sheep, were of all the forms of enclosure – the most
resented. Though grain production declined to a large extent due to the enclosing of lands for sheep
rearing and grazing, early 16th century agriculture did not return to its old open-field system of grain
production alone. Instead, there developed a symbiotic relationship between grain production &
cattle rearing. In the second half of the 16th century, some new commodities were being produced.
Among these were, cattle feed, sunflower seeds, different kinds of oilseeds. To provide for the ever-
increasing population of England, arable lands were expanded. In this way, peripheral areas were
turned into fertile arable lands, fit for cultivation, since grazing lands were also needed for sheep
rearing.

Aspects… • Methods of agriculture and production remained more or less the same. But a change
was on its way in the agrarian structure. • The enclosures brought in complexities in the rural life.
Among these were: an increase in the prices of grains, a decline of population in the villages, non-
productivity and a rise in food shortages. • In reality some other measures taken by landlords proved
to be even more disastrous to the rural economy: collecting lands or Engrossing, collecting lands to
make parks or Emparking, and establishing controls illegally on the Commons. Crisis… • Southeast
England and Central England had a mixed economy, i.e. both agriculture and animal husbandry.
Enclosures affected mostly all areas. • Commoners had a great use of the fields – for natural
compost, + small and middle farmers used these fields for their daily uses. So there developed a war
between landlords and peasants. • The customary tenants who used to enjoy a part of the manor,
received some benefits and privileges from the manorial courts, but the tenants-at-will could be
ousted and evicted easily. They would then either have to wait for governmental action or would
have to create chaos to get results. Most times, they would be turned into impoverished agricultural
labourers. • On one hand, production and export of wool was very important to England, and on the
other hand there was the growing demand for foodgrains for the steadily increasing population of
England.

Control… • 11 laws had been passed against the enclosures, and a few royal acts, and even 8 royal
commissions were made in search of illegal enclosures and enclosings. • 1 out of 22 guilty people
were punished, in 1520, enclosures were broken down if even after getting a royal permit the
processing of an enclosure were given a red signal at the chancellor’s office as illegal. This was
however a stance of the spread of royal supremacy and control over the landlords. • Gradually
policies became more and more stringent. In 1533, an act of sheep rearing and agrarian crisis was
passed, which said that a single person could not own more sheep than 2400. At the same time, not
more than 1 land plot could be engrossed. Punishment were readily doled out after 1536. •
Influential people behind the protest against the enclosures included Bishop Latimer, Robert
Crowley, John Hales, Thomas Smith, William Cecil and others… • A few commissions were made to
look into matters concerning enclosures, engrossing, emparking, converting fallow land and arable
lands into grazing grounds, etc. in 1548. These measures were the root cause of a price hike in grains
and a food shortage in grains. • Only in the south midlands, John Hales succeeded in carrying out
some reforms. For concerting grazing grounds back to cultivable fields in 1549, a special tax was
levied on sheep briefly. If sheep existed more than 150 per flock, each head would carry an extra
charge of 1 pence. • Thomas Smith in his A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England,
said that it was the responsibility of each farmer to plough his own field, till land regularly, reclaim
fallow barren land into cultivable plots, and convert grazing grounds back to arable fields for
cultivation.

A crisis rose in the woollen textile industries of England in the mid-16th century and enclosures
started becoming less lucrative because of a steep rise in prices of grain.

Effects… • The population spike had pressurised land into being enclosed and emparked. Joint or
combined grazing fields and fallow lands became the centre for a new demand. The dear of losing
land induced the landlords and peasants to enclose/encase/empark lands... • Again, on the other
hand, prices of commodities increased with the rise in the population. It became necessary to bring
in profits by better production and not only that, but also to ascertain rights on property. Other than
just this, demand didnot increased just of foodgrains and vegetable, but also wool. It was wool and
not foodgrains or meat, which increased the profits of the English merchants. Wool trade was the
start of capitalism in the English countryside.

The landlords had first come up for applying the enclosure system in England. The price revolution
had left them in a very dismal state endangering their very existence in the economy. Though prices
rose, the taxes collected from the lands remained the same. Thus their income fell in the times of
inflations. Profits from agricultural produce went mostly to the cultivators. As a result there were 2
options for them: - increase the revenue on land which wasn't practically possible since feudalism
had already declined and also due to peasant rights, - enclose, engross, empark land and lease them
out at higher prices. • Landlords carried out 70-75% of the enclosing process at Leicestershire in the
first half of the 16th century. But from mid-16th century on, the peasants took a forehand in this
matter of enclosing lands and animal husbandry, mainly sheep rearing and discovered the lucrative
business and higher profits. Thus in this way, the traditional open field system of cultivation,
changed, giving way to a more extensive commercial form of cultivation, and the agrarian scenario
of England forever changed from the 16th century.
Agrarian crises

Situation… 1. In the 14th century, pestilence and war reinforced the disrupting influences of the
money economy on the manorial structure of rural life… 2. The Black Death of 1348-49 cut the
population of Europe to a half… 3. The Hundred years War had consequences which were
disastrous- the countryside was ravished, peasantry was decimated and pauperised… 4. The scarcity
of labour hastened the abandonment of demesne farming, the commutation of labour service and
the replacement of traditional tenures by rent contracts... 5. Manumissions multiplied and serfdom
disappeared in most parts of western Europe… 6. Agriculture shared in the prosperity of this
century. Production rose, opportunities of profit increased as communications improved. 7. Land
and its products were being sucked into the vortex of an expanding exchange economy, and in this
economy, was the subsistence agriculture of the past medieval economy of no outlets, being
transformed into an extensive commercial economy of products for near and distant markets. 8.
Where the market was exclusively local, agriculture remained of utmost necessity and unspecialised,
and landlords preferred to rent out the whole estates to tenant farmers because this was the easiest
way to assure themselves of a money income. Here the manorial lord became a rentier. 9. And
where landlords could grow wool or grain for export, they preferred to assert their absolute
ownership of the estate and engage in capitalistic agriculture, the rational exploitation of a large
holding to produce a cash crop for commercial profit. Here the manorial lord became the capitalist
farmer and agriculture became wholly capitalistic.

Context… Peasants were freed from the land, and the land from the peasants… The transformation
of a capitalist farmer is seen in the agricultural histories of the English midlands and in Germany east
of the river Elbe… East East of Elbe, the economic basis of the landed estates, which were in the sole
control of the landlords, included 3 elements – a rising grain price, a growing demand for eastern
grain in western Europe, and cheap and easy transportation of this grain from growers to the
markets. Whereas sheep farming needed little manpower and enclosures thus led to the creation of
a small free agricultural proletariat. The raising of grain required labour, and revival of demesne
farming in Pomerania, Brandenburg and Prussia needed a growing subjection of the peasantry.
Aristocratic landlords grew rich, enlarged their demesne by buying out and evicting their peasants
and after the Reformation, clearing out parish and monastic lands. The peasants who had been freer
than those of western Europe, were reduced to serfdom, tied to the soil, burdened with new dues
and increased their labour services. The great dividing line of the Elbe solidified permanently in the
16th century.

West On the other hand in the West, most landlords got a money income after 1500 by renting.
Agriculture was carried out by peasant farmers working on small plots. Landlords and tenants shared
propriety rights. Old burdens of dependent status were attached to land, then persons. Peasants
were free men. The relative prosperity of the landlord and tenant was determined by the movement
of prices and rents. Some landlords raised rents at will – racking rents, thus diverting the bulk of the
tenant’s profits to themselves. French landlords introduced a short-term contractual lease called
métayage instead of paying an annual rent, peasants paid a fixed proportion of the annual crop
(half) this increased the landlord’s propriety rights while long term leases benefitted tenants’ mode
of production. However real rents lagged well behind more rapidly rising prices in the short run.
Finally in areas of France, west Germany, peasant tenure was heritable. The tenant could farm his
holding anyway he liked – sell it, divide it among his heirs. He could sell his surplus produce in the
market. Commuted payments were fixed in customary law. Real rents thus fell, and landlords were
caught in an inflationary vice, and it was the tenant who profited from the rising prices.
Consequences • The aggressive instability of the 16th century nobility suggests that many smaller
landlords were caught in the squeeze of rising prices and falling real rents. • The economic condition
of the peasantry was the mirror image of the economic condition of the landowning aristocracy.
Where landlords prospered in Spain and Portugal, in south Italy in Sicily, in parts of England and the
east of Elbe – peasants suffered. From Elbe to the English Channel, from the Apennines to the North
Sea, peasants were freer and more prosperous in the 16th c than they had been in the 13th c. Result
The 16th century was an age of permanent agrarian crisis. Where serfdom remained, it seemed a
purely arbitrary bondage in a world where the lack of personal freedom was no longer accompanied
by any economic advantage. Free tenants resented all obligations and tried to escape the dues and
services that landlords tried to enforce. Tension between landlords and peasants was endemic and it
occasionally erupted in violence. There were minor movements in England, scattered risings in
France. In Germany there were 11 major uprisings between the early 15th century and the Great
Peasant Revolt of 1525-56…

The prosperity and dynamism of the European economy in late 15th – 16th century were thus
inseparable from the sharpening tensions between the landlords and tenants, as well as between
employers and workers. The fundamental causes of tension were structural changes in production,
and the organisation of labour associated with the development of the capitalistic mode of
production in industry, and to a lesser extent in agriculture. The changes produced a widening gap
between capital and labour – rich and poor – and forced every group in the social hierarchy to adapt
or suffer economic penalties. The Price Revolution aggravated the crisis… These developments had
important political and cultural repercussions. They formed one strand in the intricate patterns of
the emergence both of the sovereign territorial state, and equally powerful though less obviously of
a lay culture, based on a revived enthusiasm for the classical ages.

Price Revolution & the Dynamics of Prosperity in 16th c. Europe The people of Europe during the 16-
17th century became more money conscious than they had ever been before. Between 1521-1660,
the Spanish brought home from their Mexican and Peruvian mines 18,000 tons of bullion, enough to
treble the existing European silver supply, and to enlarge the European gold supply by 20 %, over
half of this precious metal, flooded in during the 40 years of peak production 1580-1620…

Circulation of Spanish Bullion • Spanish fleets carried silver ingots from the Caribbean to Seville. •
Very little remained permanently in Spanish hands. • Some was captured by English and Dutch
pirates. • Some was smuggled into West Europe by the Spanish colonies. • The Spanish king received
some bullion at Seville. • Most of the remaining bullion went to foreign merchants. • Spain’s
treasure circulated like fluid wealth in western Europe: some was hoarded, some was fashioned into
items of luxury, and a great deal of it was minted into coins – Spanish gold escudos and silver real,
French gold Louis and silver livres, Dutch gold ducats and silver florins, English gold guineas and
silver shillings.

Consequences Between the beginning of the 16th century & the beginning of the 17th century,
Europe experienced a long and startling inflationary spiral. Spain was hit first and hit hardest. For
them the price rise was a veritable price revolution.

What caused it? Other historians contend that the Spanish prices rose steeply before 1565, whereas
bullion imports reached their peak 1580- 1620. Population pressure in the 16th c., had a substantial
effect on the inflation rate. There was not only more money to spend on the given commodity, but
more demand for the commodity. The relaxation of population after 1590 helps explain why prices
stabilised in the mid 17th c. Earl J. Hamilton, was of the opinion that the inflation was directly
related to the flood of American bullion. He had calculated that Spain’s annual bullion imports and
price levels correlated very closely throughout the 16th century. As soon as the bullion imports
declined in the 17th century, prices stabilised.

In every state in Western Europe, the price of goods seemed to have doubled or trebled between
1500-1650. In England, the inflation was almost as severe as in Spain. The price rise wasn't uniform,
but general. • Wages for day labourers in Spain, England and other western states climbed more
slowly than consumer prices: in other words, real wages for farm labourers, and artisans, fell during
the late 16th century. • In the late 16th century, unskilled labourers in Spain, England, France, and
Germany must often have exhausted their entire wages in paying for minimum requirements of
bread and drink. Elderly people living on savings and those with fixed income (clergymen, teachers,
clerks) also suffered.

Effects • Among the most important effects of the price revolution were the strain it placed upon
the government budget. Traditionally taxation had been closely tied to agriculture. • Princes drew a
considerable percentage of their revenue from their own private lands, the rest came largely from
taxes on farms and crops. • As the inflationary spiral developed these agricultural taxes proved to be
hopelessly inelastic and inadequate. • The peasants who bore the brunt of customary tax levies were
hard hit by the price rise and their income rose more slowly than government expenses.

Borrowing & Bankruptcy

Whenever French tax yields proved inadequate, the government borrowed money at exorbitant
interest rates from great international baking houses at Italy, Germany, Flanders. The Valois kings
were notorious spendthrifts. 2. But even Elizabeth I of England, remarkable among 16th century
monarch for her frugality, was forced by the expenses on her war with Spain to sell royal lands
valued at 800000 pounds (equivalent to 3 years’ peace time revenues) and to contract large debts. 3.
Elizabeth’s great enemy Phillip II of Spain was in a better position than any other 16th century
monarch to tap the fluid capital effectively. Yet even Phillip got into terrible fiscal difficulty as he
undertook expensive wars. He borrowed wildly. Twice during the early years of his reign in 1557 and
again in 1575, Phillip was forced to declare bankruptcy suspending all payments to the Fuggers and
to his other creditors. When Phillip died 1598, his chief legacy was a debt in the of a 100 million
ducats. Another legacy was the ruin of the House of Fuggers, which went out of business shortly
after 1600. 4. Many of the German princes’ difficulties during the Thirty Years’ War were attributable
to the outmoded tax systems. Even a solvent prince like Maximilian of Bavaria quickly exhausted his
treasury in trying to finance his army and once the soldiers of fortune got control, no German price
had the means to stop them from wrecking the country.

Measures… First, there was a general 17th century rise in living standards of property holders and in
the accumulation in surplus wealth especially in the three chief Atlantic states. Second, there was a
wider circulation of specie and an increased reliance on credit both of which facilitated the use of
Europe’s wealth as working capital. Third, governments were devising better techniques for tapping
this wealth by taxing the consumer more and the producer less.

France Unlike the 16th century Valois and Habsburg kings, the 17th century Bourbon Kings of France,
attempted to increase tax revenues by promoting industry and commerce. But in other respects, the
17th century French fiscal systems, despite its ability to support Louis XIV ‘s army was rather old
fashioned, and its yield was low by English and Dutch standards. The Taille still brought in the
greatest returns. Some regions of France were heavily rated than others, but everywhere the
aristocrats and the bourgeoisie were in large parts exempted. Jean Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s great
finance minister tried to change the Taille from an income tax of the peasants into a real estate tax
of all property owners. He increased the aides, indirect liquor taxes that almost everyone had to pay.
But French taxes were still collected principally from the poor. Colbert was unable to shake the
French upper and middle class notion that tax payments were a badge of dishonour.

England The English government in the 1680s, tried abandoning land taxes altogether and drew 50%
of the royal revenues from customs duties on international and colonial trade. English overseas
commerce suffered somewhat under this tax burden, but the Stuart monarchs drew enough money
from customs levies to free them from dependent on the country gentlemen who sat in parliament.
Since the Dutch depended even more heavily than the English on foreign trade, they refrained from
imposing such heavy customs duties. Instead, they taxed domestic commerce, placing excise levies
(similar to the French aides), on a wide range of staple market goods. The excise was intended like
the English custom duties to siphon off surplus purchasing power without strangling business. It was
a burdensome but practicable tax.

Netherlands None of these states could survive on taxes alone. Public borrowing was essential for
covering the expenses of wars and other emergencies. Here again, the Dutch managed better than
the French. While Louis IV had to pay interest of 8% or more and consume much of his budget on
debt service, the Dutch were successfully floating government loans at 3-4%. Thousands of Dutch
citizens, including very humble people subscribed to these loans to their government in the belief
that they constituted a safe investment. Not so many years earlier, the Fuggers had been gambling
their money on Phillip II at extortionate rates in the hope of making a quick killing before their king
defaulted.

New beginnings… England and the Dutch republic were fiscally the more effective 17th century
states because they were the most commercialised. In the era of the price revolution, commercial
profits proved to be much more elastic than agricultural or industrial profits. The Dutch & the English
governments developed fruitful partnerships with the merchants of Amsterdam and London. The
state granted commercial privileges and protection to the mercantile community and in return
received excise and customs revenues and was able to secure public loans at tolerable rates of
interests. The vigorous Dutch and English traffic in foreign goods produced greater wealth than the
mines of America