Land
grants became frequent from the fifth century AD. According to this, the
brahmanas were granted villages free from taxes which were collected by the
king from the villages. In addition, the beneficiaries were given the right to
govern the people living in the donated villages. Government officials and
royal retainers were not permitted to enter the gifted villages. Up to the
fifth century, the ruler generally retained the right to punish the thieves,
but in later times, the beneficiaries were authorized to punish all criminal
offenders. Thus, the brahmanas not only collected taxes from the peasants and
artisans but also maintained law and order in the villages granted to them.
Villages were made over to the brahmanas in perpetuity. Thus, the power of the
king was heavily undermined from the end of the Gupta period onwards.
In
the Maurya period, taxes were assessed and collected by the agents of the king,
and law and order were maintained by them. In the initial stage, land grants
attest to the increasing power of the king. In Vedic times, the king was
considered the owner of cattle or gopati, but in Gupta times and later, he was
regarded as bhupati or owner of land. However, eventually land grants undermined
the authority of the king, and the pockets that were free from royal control
multiplied. Royal control was further eroded through the payment of government
officials by land grants. In the Maurya period, the officers of the state, from
the highest to the lowest, were generally paid in cash. The practice continued under
the Kushans, who issued a large number of copper and gold coins, and it
lingered on under the Guptas whose gold coins were evidently meant for payment
of the army and high functionaries. However, from the sixth century onwards,
the position seems to have changed.
The law-books of that century recommended that services should be
rewarded in land. Accordingly, from the reign of Harshavardhana, public
officials were paid in land revenues and one-fourth of the royal revenue was
earmarked for the endowment of great public servants. The governors, ministers,
magistrates, and officers were given portions of land for their personal
upkeep. All this created vested interests at the cost of royal authority. Thus,
by the seventh century, there is a distinct evolution of the landlordism and a
devolution of the central state authority.
Landlords and peasants in
Europe
The growing population
in the 16th century and the larger concentrations of urban dwellers required
abundant supplies of food. In the course of the century, wheat prices steadily
rose; the blades of late medieval price scissors once more converged.
Money again flowed into the countryside to pay for food, especially wheat. But
the social repercussions of the rising price of wheat varied in
the different European regions.
In eastern Germany (with the exception of electoral Saxony), Poland,
Bohemia, Hungary, Lithuania, and even eventually Russia, the crucial change was
the formation of a new type of great property, called traditionally in
the German literature the Gutsherrschaft Historians
distinguish two phases in its appearance. The nobility and gentry, even without
planning to do so, accumulated large tracts of abandoned land during the late
medieval population collapse. However, depopulation also meant that landlords
could not easily find the labour to work their extensive holdings. Population,
as previously mentioned, was growing again by 1500, and prices (especially the
price of cereals) steadily advanced. Inflation threatened the standard of living of the landlords; to counter its
effects, they needed to raise their incomes. They accordingly sought to win
larger harvests from their lands, but the lingering shortage of labourers was a
major obstacle. As competition for their labour remained high, peasants were
prone to move from one estate to another, in search of better terms. Moreover,
the landlords had little capital to hire salaried hands and, in the largely
rural east, there were few sources of capital. They had, however, one recourse.
They dominated the weak governments of the region, and even a comparatively
strong ruler, like the Russian tsar, wished to accommodate the demands of the
gentry. In 1497 the Polish gentry won the right to export their
grain without paying duty. Further legislation bound the peasants to the soil
and obligated them to work the lord’s demesne. The second serfdom gradually
spread over eastern Europe; it was established in Poland as early as 1520;
in Russia it was legally imposed in the Ulozhenie
(Law Code) of 1649. At least in Poland, the western market for cereals was a
principal factor in reviving serfdom, in bringing back a seemingly primitive
form of labour organization.
No second serfdom developed in western Europe, even though the stimulus
of high wheat prices was equally powerful. Harassed landlords, pressed to raise
their revenues, had more options than their eastern counterparts. They might
look to a profession or even a trade or, more commonly, seek at court an
appointment paying a salary or a pension. The western princes did not want
local magnates to dominate their communities, as this would erode their own authority.
They consequently defended the peasants against the encroachments of the
gentry. Finally, landlords in the west could readily find capital. They could use the money either to hire
workers or to improve their leased properties, in expectation of gaining higher
rents. The availability of capital in the west and its scarcity in the east
were probably the chief reasons why the agrarian institutions of eastern and
western Europe diverged so dramatically in the 16th century.
In the west, in areas of plow agriculture, the small property remained
the most common productive unit. However, the terms under which it was held and
worked differed widely from one European region to another. In the Middle Ages,
peasants were typically subject to a great variety of charges laid upon both
their persons and the land. They had to pay special marriage and inheritance
taxes; they were further required to provide tithes to the parish churches.
These charges were often small—sometimes only recognitive—and were fixed by
custom. They are often regarded as “feudal” as distinct from “capitalist” rents,
in that they were customary and not negotiated; the lord, moreover, provided
nothing—no help or capital improvements—in return for the payments.
The 16th century witnessed a conversion—widespread though never
complete—from systems of feudal to capitalist rents. The late medieval
population collapse increased the mobility of the peasant population; a peasant
who settled for one year and one day in a “free village” or town received
perpetual immunity from personal charges. Personal dues thus eroded rapidly;
dues weighing upon the land persisted longer but could not be raised. It was
therefore in the landlord’s interest to convert feudal tenures into leaseholds, and this required
capital.
In England upon the former manors, farmers (the original meaning of the
term was leaseholder or rent payer), who held land under long-term leases,
gradually replaced copyholders, or tenants subject only to feudal dues. These
farmers constituted the free English yeomanry, and
their appearance marks the demiseof the last vestiges
of medieval serfdom. In the Low Countries, urban investors bought up the
valuable lands near towns and converted them into leaseholds, which were leased
for high rents over long terms. The heavy infusions of urban capital into Low
Country agriculture helped make it technically the most advanced in Europe, a
model for improving landlords elsewhere. In central and southern France and in
central Italy, urban investment in the land was closely linked to a special
type of sharecropping lease, called the métayage in
France and the mezzadria in
Italy. The landlord (typically a wealthy townsman) purchased plots,
consolidated them into a farm, built a house upon it, and rented it. Often, he
also provided the implements needed to work the land, livestock, and
fertilizer. The tenant gave as rent half of the harvest. The spread of this
type of sharecropping in the vicinity of towns had begun in the late Middle
Ages and was carried vigorously forward in the 16th century. Nonetheless, the
older forms of feudal tenure, and even some personal charges, also
persisted, especially in Europe’s remote and poorer regions. The early modern
countryside presents an infinitely complex mixture of old and new ways of
holding and working the land.
Two further changes in the countryside are
worth noting. In adopting Protestantism, the
North German states, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, and England
confiscated and sold, in whole or in part, ecclesiastical properties. Sweden, for example, did so
in 1526–27, England in 1534–36. It is difficult to assess the exact economic
repercussions of these secularizations, but
the placing of numerous properties upon the land market almost surely
encouraged the infusion of capital into (and the spread of capitalist forms of
agrarian organization in) the countryside.
Second, the high price of wheat did not everywhere make cereal cultivation
the most remunerative use of the land. The price of wool continued to be
buoyant, and this, linked with the availability of cheap wheat from the east,
sustained the conversion of plowland into pastures that also had begun in the
late Middle Ages. In England this
movement is called “enclosure.” In
the typical medieval village, peasants held the cultivated soil in unfenced strips, and they also
enjoyed the right of grazing a set number of animals upon the village commons.
Enclosure meant both the consolidating of the strips into fenced fields and the
division of the commons among the individual villagers. As poorer villagers
often received plots too small to work, they often had little choice but to
sell their share to their richer neighbours and leave the village. In
16th-century England, enclosure almost always meant the conversion of plowland
and commons into fenced meadows or pastures. To many outspoken observers,
clergy and humanists in particular, enclosures were destroying villages,
uprooting the rural population, and multiplying beggars on the road and paupers
in the towns. Sheep were devouring the people—“Where there have been
many householders and inhabitants,” the English bishop Hugh Latimer lamented, “there is now but a shepherd
and his dog.” In light of recent research, these 16th-century enclosures were
far less extensive than such strictures imply. Nonetheless, enclosures are an
example of the power of capital to transform the rhythms of everyday life; at
the least, they were an omen of things to come.
