Peasants

We were all talking about peasants. Sometimes an ordinary word can flip and start to seem extraordinary, or funny, and find a place in schoolboy slang. It might have been Geography that started us off on peasants; it might have been that History mentioned the Peasants Revolt, or we might have picked up on the peasant question from reading Russian novels.  One History master still thought – after all those years of teaching - that it was funny to tell every class that the peasants in 1381 were revolting.  We discovered that there was something called ‘peasants’ in other countries, and that there had once been peasants here, and that maybe they were revolting. Otherwise our education on this point was as defective as our sex education, where we were given the mysterious advice that a gentleman should never try to persuade a lady to go swimming if she didn’t want to, and not put pens in his top pocket.

No one explained what peasants are, or why there were apparently no peasants in the country that, in those days, we tended to call Great Britain. ‘Peasant’ entered the jargon among those boys with whom I mixed at school, sometimes used scornfully and sometimes in a puzzled but slightly amused way, as if the very idea of peasants was in itself comical. I ended up nicknamed ‘Pez,’ partly because my father was a farm worker while most of the boys, especially the boarders, had fathers who were in middle-class professions and scorned agriculture, and partly because I was so interested in the idea of peasants.

There were other words I didn’t understand. Masturbation, for example. If you looked it up in a dictionary you got that weird expression ‘self-abuse’, and if you looked up self-abuse you were sent straight back to masturbation. ‘Fellatio’ took you straight to a Latin dictionary, and you could only work out what ‘cunnilingus’ was if you read Ancient Greek. So I started using these interesting and mysterious kinds of words as insults to my elder brother, who as it happened could read some Ancient Greek, in the hope that his response might give me a clue to the meaning rather than a clip around the ear. I think I started calling people peasants in the same spirit, and they retaliated by nicknaming me ‘Pez’. I like to think that some of them called me Pez in a moderately affectionate way, tinged with respect because I, like the peasants of 1381, often revolted in ingenious ways against the ethos of the school.

The closest we got to an explanation was that ‘the enclosures’ had led to us not having peasants. This sounded fairly benign. What could be wrong about planting all the hedges which were now such a pleasant part of the British countryside? I was well in favour of hedges, from a birds nesting point of view, as I moved from being a nasty little egg-collector to being more of a bird watcher and a boy naturalist. It has taken me years to gradually come to understand what cataclysmic changes to the British countryside lie concealed beneath that harmless word ‘enclosure’. In many a Midland parish the ribs of the old village strip system can still be seen below the modern hedges and fences, but there is nothing to show that these physical changes devastated the lives of most of the ordinary people of the countryside.

When farming started in this country, around the time the Neolithic people round here put up Arthur’s Stone above the Golden Valley, they can have only farmed small patches of land. The entire population of Neolithic farmers in Britain was maybe a couple of hundred thousand. Much of the countryside would still have been uncultivated forests, heaths and marshes, where the Neolithic women and children could forage and the men could hunt, like hunter-gatherers everywhere. Inevitably each settlement would have had its fields surrounded by untamed countryside. A few thousand years later the English villagers – the peasants – were still farming the common fields in the centre of the village and using the land all around to forage, to graze their animals, to pick nuts and berries, to cut turf and dig sand and building stone, and the people continued to be hunter-gatherers as well as farmers until long after the landlords redefined hunting as poaching, and gathering as theft. The pre-enclosure landscape was essentially Neolithic. The Norman aristocracy were incomers, but the peasants’ roots in the landscape were ancient.

When the Normans arrived and started to lay claim to property rights, in an effort to justify having in effect stolen the entire country, land was ‘held’, not owned. It was held from the king in return for support, and the barons who held it doled out similar rights to their henchmen, until at the bottom of the chain the peasants held land and had rights to use land and to use the commons and the woods and wastes in return for performing certain services to the landlord, who in return protected them. It was a system where interdependency was acknowledged, and after the peasants had given service at harvest time the landlord was expected provide a great harvest feast that acknowledged this reciprocity.

Under this system the peasantry – pretty well all the ordinary people of the countryside – had access to the land and could grow their own food, produce their own textiles and drinks and build their houses from local materials. They were, in short, self-sufficient and relatively independent. I am not romanticising this. Life may have been hard, but when their self-sufficiency and independence were taken from them by the Enclosure Acts and they were no longer able to sustain themselves from the countryside where they lived, life became immeasurably more difficult.

The system whereby the village lands were worked in common and peasants also had rights on the commons and wastes was chipped away at by the rich, powerful and of course greedy, which is what caused the Peasants Revolt and many similar demonstrations of discontent. After the Peasants Revolt against the injustice of taking people’s livelihoods and land-use rights away, some of the protesters were hung, drawn and quartered, and the piecemeal enclosures continued. The more grasping peasants tended to acquire more property or land-use rights as time went on, and there was a certain amount of consolidation, but when enclosures really got going with the Parliamentary enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the scale of change was dramatic.

The rich and powerful, when Parliamentary Enclosures became universal, were able to use a Parliament composed of people like themselves to pass laws enabling them to turn the plough lands and commons of their parishes into enclosed fields, and to extinguish the peasants’ rights to use the village fields and commons. The peasants were in no position to influence Parliament, and if they protested, as they often did, or burned the enclosers’ fence-posts, the landlords would call in the army or a militia to suppress them. In one of the great injustices of British history, an entire class, most of the common people of the countryside, was deprived of ancient communal land-use rights and their many rights of commonage, and left without their means of support, essentially losing their livelihoods, culture and identity.  They lost ancient rights that certainly went back to the time of the Anglo-Saxons, and I suspect there may be a direct line to the way the Neolithic people used and thought about land.

Some of the peasants received small patches of land as compensation for the loss of their various rights, but often could not afford the expense of the compulsory fencing and usually had to sell these small patches, which were of little use to them anyway once the right to graze their animals on the commons had been extinguished and the moral economy of the village had been broken. The enclosures have often been justified as agricultural improvements, but they did not lead to greater food production. Like modern privatisations, touted as ‘efficient’, their chief efficiency lay in the efficient transfer of the value of shared community assets into the accounts of the rich and powerful, and away from the wider community.  Many of the enclosers knew that the effect of enclosures would be to make cheap labour available to them, and they welcomed the conversion of an independent peasantry into a powerless underclass forced to sell their labour to the farmers and the factory owners.

The enclosures have been variously interpreted according to the political views of those doing the interpretation. They clearly played a large part in the development of modern capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the British empire, which spread ideas about land ownership and capital to many parts of that empire. But whether you see them as an outrage or as progress, or indeed as both, some facts are not in dispute. No one can deny that the peasants were the people who worked the land and produced the food before the Enclosure Acts. They were virtually the entire population of the countryside apart from the aristocracy. No one can deny that after the enclosures there were no peasants. The ordinary people, deprived of land –use rights and commonage, became day labourers hoping the new class of farmers would offer them work.  Often the new farmers turned the arable into pasture, which needed less labour, and the peasants were compelled to move to the urban slums to look for  work in the new ‘manufactories’. An entire class of people, at the centre of the British countryside and rural society, had been dispossessed and converted into powerless day labourers in a way that may be unique outside Stalinist Russia. And yet it scarcely features in our version of our history.

What makes this relevant today is the effect it continues to have on the countryside and on our attitudes to land ownership and land management. In the late nineteenth century a Parliamentary commission was set up to inquire into the way game preserving caused conflicts between landowners and farmers. A result of the enclosures was that landowners had consolidated both their estates and their ability to enjoy and exploit land exclusively for their private benefit and enjoyment. Land ownership, often vague and ill-defined before the enclosures, constrained by the rights of the peasantry to share the use of the land, became more absolute. The new fashion for sporting estates, and often the riches brought back from the sugar plantations by a new class of wealthy landowners known as ‘West Indians’, contributed to the development of estates where the landowning classes lived in luxury and rented out the land in the form of oven-ready farms, complete with equipment and a captive labour force.

The Parliamentary Commission interviewed large numbers of farmers. These appear to have been a very mobile class of rural capitalist. They rented a farm on an estate complete with equipment and a population of labourers living in cottages on the farms and dependent on the farmers for any work that they could get. The farms, being on sporting estates where the owners were often fanatical about hunting, shooting, fishing and the preservation of game such as hares and pheasants, often suffered losses caused by the land being overstocked with hares and deer eating their crops. Their detailed responses to the questioning of the parliamentary commission reveal a countryside brutally stratified into gentry at play on their estates, mobile capitalist farmers simply out to make a profit from the land they rented, and a rural poor entirely dependent on either whatever work the farmers gave them, domestic service for the gentry, or the workhouse. This is a fractured society, where the community concerned for the wellbeing of the countryside that nurtured it has been replaced by disconnected social classes with no shared aims or interests. Court records from Herefordshire in the earlier part of the 19^th century, when the enclosures in the area were largely recently completed, reveal the rural poor constantly in conflict with these farmers and landowners. Deprived of the means of subsistence of the common fields and the rights to use the commons and woodlands, they often end up before the magistrates for stealing pitiful quantities of food, such as a few apples or some handfuls of beans, for stealing bits of wood from hedges to try to warm their houses, or for catching rabbits. Some of this was simply the result of poverty, but poaching in particular continued to be also a protest at the loss of the rights of the peasantry, it wes a direct attack on the oppressors as well as a source of food. These poachers, like true guerrillas, had the support of the country people. This is a rural society that has been broken, disrupted and pauperised. An earlier system where resources were shared has been replaced by one where all the rights are owned by the aristocracy, the land is worked for the benefit of a small class of mobile entrepreneurial farmers, and the people of the countryside have lost all their rights, their independence, their dignity and their self-respect and become resources to be exploited by those in control of the means of production. Their only alternative to powerless rural poverty was to move to the slums and work in factories.

The question this raises, for me at least, is how much has this changed? The country mansions have mostly gone, though the aristocracy still own vast acreages of land, and many of our natural resources, such as moorlands and woodland, are still managed for the sporting enjoyment of the rich, who still behave, when foxhunting, as if they own the place. The aristocracy sold off many of their farms at a time when it was not clear how valuable farmland would soon become, and as a result much of our farmland is now owned by farmers who have become very wealthy as the result of agricultural subsidies and rising land prices. For everyone else the enjoyment of their native land is largely visual. The dilapidated country cottages, once lived in by the dispossessed rural poor, are now inhabited in general by people who like to live in the country and have modernised and prettified their houses, but have no organic connection with the country through which they drive every day on their way to work in town. They may spend time buying food in the local ‘farm shop’ and like the notion of the countryside producing delicacies; they may feed the birds, and walk the dogs, but have no visceral connection to the land

I realise as I write this that since the days when my schoolfellows called me Pez, I have spent a lot of time trying to become as close to being a peasant as possible. To be like a peasant is to have that connection to the land, and to make one’s living by using the resources of the countryside sustainably. A peasant is his own boss; he doesn’t work by the clock but by the weather, and he plans his life by the day and by the season. Peasants used to rely on being able to share a land that was ‘a common treasury for all’. Now to be a peasant you have to be a beekeeper, living off the flowers of the land without owning it, or a cider maker, buying fruit from farmers who can’t be bothered to pick it themselves. You can be a fisherman – for some reason the seas are still a common resource that no aristocrat has found a way to steal. I knew a shepherd once who herded his sheep with those of farmers who couldn’t be bothered to do their own shepherding, and so was a sheep farmer who owned no land. To live in that peasant way is both hard and rewarding, requiring the wide range of skills and knowledge of the peasant as well as serious hard work. Most people in rural areas, like the dispossessed peasants, have no option but to continue to be the same wage slaves into which the peasants were converted, spending their lives in workplaces run autocratically and looking  on to a countryside outside their country gardens with which they have little connection and limited access.

This is the countryside which has enriched a few people often at the taxpayer’s expense, which is inaccessible to most of us except for a few grudging footpaths for which we have had to fight, over the management of which we have no say, and which now is one of the most nature depleted landscapes in the world.  We, like the proverbial frogs in the slowly heated pool, have somehow not noticed that the state of our countryside originates in a huge injustice, perpetuated by a landowning class who benefited from slavery and from bringing home the riches of the empire, and that continues to exploit the planet just as they did during the worst periods of the British Empire. The land could enrich us all, mentally, physically, ecologically and spiritually. It could be, in the words of the Diggers’ Song by Gerard Winstanley, a ‘common treasury for all’. Or it could continue to enrich those who are already rich at the expense, ultimately, of the planet itself.

There should be a better way to manage the countryside. There are still a few small farmers who produce fine foods and sell them locally. In my next-door village two brothers grow high-quality organic vegetables that they sell in the local shop at a fraction of the price of veg in supermarkets. They are clean and fresh and not wrapped in plastic, and everyone in their right minds in the district should be buying them instead of going to the supermarket. But we are all, like most of the farmers, part of the global market system dominated by monstrous corporations such as Cargill. One of the local farmers would not give me a price for a bag of corn for my chickens without ringing his broker to check on current wheat futures.

Half the land in the UK is owned by less than 1% of the population, by definition the rich and powerful. Many of us, slaving to buy a bit of land large enough to park our doormats, may also feel we should have a stake in the land, but radical change is not likely any time soon. Nevertheless, some significant change both to land ownership and to the right to access and enjoy land is possible, and it is often change in which you can participate.

Public Land: Large areas of the UK are owned by the National Trust, the National Trust for Scotland, the Wildlife Trusts, the Woodland Trust and other conservation organisations. The RSPB owns and manages large areas of Scotland where the Caledonian Forest is being restored. Charities such as Trees for Life are doing similar work. Such land, acquired by donations of property and cash, is steadily expanding, and is to all intents and purposes public land, rescued from the kind of exploitation, typical of farmland, that has left us one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. It is almost certainly safer for posterity than land owned by the state, and you can enjoy visiting and supporting such trusts and charities knowing that their land portfolios are safe and expanding. With the power of the internet, of crowdfunding and our subscriptions and ticket money we can collectively challenge the power of the landowners. We can also challenge the opaque right-wing think-tanks that infiltrate these organisations in order to emasculate them:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/08/rspb-ministers-wildlife-charity-power-britain

Right to Roam:  The right to roam is commonplace and entirely uncontroversial in Scandinavia, where you can walk wherever you want with the exception of areas of growing crops and the curtilages of houses.  You can pick fungi and berries and camp where you wish. In Scotland the Land Reform Act 2003 gave everyone the same kinds of rights that Scandinavia had been enjoying since time immemorial. Right to roam is not red revolution; it is long overdue if we are to gain the mental and physical and spiritual health benefits of access to the countryside, and actually now exists in part of the UK. Landowners in England tend to oppose right to roam or to suggest that they should get paid for allowing access. I suggest it is time we told them all to take a hike. Right to roam might make it easier for the public to spot wildlife crime by gamekeepers on shooting estates, and thus be a wedge to encourage more public say in the way our countryside is managed.

(see

https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/

for inspiration and some fine artwork by Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass)

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) : In England these are mainly used for visionary housing projects and associated open spaces, but in Scotland their use is far more widespread. The Community Land Reform Act (2003) was passed to try to rebalance the utterly unequal land ownership of Scotland. (0.025% of Scotland's population own 67% of its private rural land, a shaming symbol of national inequality. Put another way, fewer than 500 people own more than half of Scotland). Since then communities have had the right to register their interest in buying the land around their community, and can be supported to finance this with the help of the Scottish Land Fund. Langholm in the Scottish borders, which was enabled to buy a huge local area once used as grouse moors by the Duke of Buccleuch, is now creating a nature reserve and supporting various enterprises to revitalise the community and provide opportunities for young people to stay in the village. This week they reported a pair of Golden Eagles on Tarras Valley Nature Reserve, the former grouse moor. There are many similar projects throughout Scotland.

Country Code for Farmers: The Country Code was started by the Ramblers’ Association in the 1930s. They were keen to show that although they organised mass trespasses such as that on Kinderscout (1932) they were responsible walkers who would respect the countryside, shutting gates behind them and so forth. That was nearly a hundred years ago; during that time it has become clear that while ramblers are almost entirely gentle harmless people, the landowners and farmers have continued to industrialise their farming methods, clear hedges and ponds, and in general to wreck the countryside and reduce biodiversity in pursuit of personal gain. The threat to the countryside comes not from the ramblers but from the landowners. The visionary American ecologist Aldo Leopold lamented long ago that there was no land ethic, no social consensus that owning land was a sacred trust and not a simple money-making opportunity. We need a Country Code for Farmers.

The rich and powerful not only own most of the land, they seem intent on using it for their personal short term gain even if that means making the planet uninhabitable. Those non-violent climate protesters who are so vilified by the right wing press are essentially hoping hopelessly that eventually the meek will inherit the earth. We are now where being meek has got us, with an earth that will soon not be worth inheriting.