Landlords and peasants history
Introducation
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
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 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 (ownership of an estate). The estate was
divided into two principal parts: the landlord’s demesne,
from which he took all the harvest, and the farms of the peasants, who supplied
the labour needed to work the demesne. The peasants (and their children after
them) were legally serfs, bound to the
soil. These bipartite, serf-run estates superficially resemble the classic
manors of the early Middle Ages but differ from them in that the new estates
were producing primarily for commercial markets. The binding of the peasants of
eastern Europe to the soil and the imposition of heavy labour services constitute, in another traditional term, the “second serfdom.”
In the contemporary west (and
in the east before the 16th century), the characteristic form of great property
was the Grundherrschaft (“ownership of land”). This was an
aggregation of rent-paying properties. The lord might also be a cultivator, but
he worked his land through hired labourers. 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.
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.
In Spain, sheep and people also entered into destructive competition. Since the 13th
century, sheepherding had fallen under the control of a guild known as
the Mesta; the guild was in turn dominated by a few grandees. The Mesta practiced
transhumance (alternation of winter and spring pastures); the flocks themselves
moved seasonally along great trailways called cañadas. The
government, which collected a tax on exported wool, was anxious to raise output
and favoured the Mesta with many privileges. Cultivators along the cañadas were
forbidden to fence their fields, lest the barriers impede the migrating sheep.
Moreover, the government imposed ceiling prices on wheat in 1539. Damage from
the flocks and the low price of wheat eventually crippled cereal cultivation,
provoked widespread desertion of the countryside and overall population
decline, and was a significant factor in Spain’s 17th-century decline. High
cereal prices primarily benefited not the peasants but the landlords. The
landlords in turn spent their increased revenues on the amenities and luxuries
supplied by towns. In spite of high food costs, town economies fared well.
CONCLUSION
After going through
some of the
debates, I can
conclude that the
Early Medieval Indian
Feudalism was characterized
by a class
of landlords and
by a class
of subject peasantry,
both living in a predominantly
agrarian economy marked
by a decline
in trade and
urbanism and by
a drastic reduction
in metal currency.
Most of the
power structures within
the state did
not have to
pay taxes. Indian
kings made land
grants to get
taxes (surplus) collected.
In their turn
the grantees collected
rents from their
tenant peasants who
could be evicted
and even subjected
to forced labour.
In this context,
the concept of
class may be
reconsidered. The position
may be located
in the overall
system of production.
Class is best
seen in the
context of the
unequal distribution of
the surplus, which
was eventually given
a lasting basis
by the unequal
distribution of the
means of production
and strengthened by
ideological, ritualistic and
judicial factors. The
social structure is
identified by the
nature of the
class which dominates
it. Ecological factors
influence the development
of material culture
but do not
determine the form
and nature of
the social structure.
