Tragedy of the Abolition of the Religious Commons in Reformation Europe
Discussion
Benjamin Suriano:
1.
"The process of forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century from the Reformation, and the consequent colossal spoliation of church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, the feudal proprietor of a great part of the soil of England. The dissolution of the monasteries, etc., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and townsmen, who drove out the old-established hereditary sub-tenants in great numbers, and threw their holdings together. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was quietly confiscated.”
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 881–882. 42
2.
"With no monastic institution by which to care for the poor, English Parliament in 1531 set up a meager system of collecting relief and decreed that only those officially determined to be infirm were authorized to beg and receive almsgiving from this national fund as well as from designated local parishes. Almsgiving was outlawed to anyone unauthorized and begging was punishable by whipping, and, later in 1536, decreed to be punishable by branding and even execution. This was followed by statutes of Settlement that fixed wages at a low rate, prohibited the unemployed from turning down any form of work as well as prohibited the poor from migrating from their place of birth in search of higher wages. As summed up by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, by 1601 the Laws of Settlement in combination with the Poor Laws effectively ensured that “laborers could not organize, they could not refuse work, they could not exploit labor shortages to demand higher wages, and they could not move to new localities to find better working conditions.”
Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 37.
This is to not even mention the dwindling diets of the masses in the 16th century as famines and food shortages amongst the peasantry, exacerbated by the enclosure of the commons and the rise of commercial farming, marked a further regression in developing their productive powers.
See Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800, trans. Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1974).
On the Game Laws in England as a means of denying subsistence to the laboring class and thereby aiding primitive accumulation of capital,
see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 38–58."