The Tudor revolution
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In fact, Chou feudalism makes sense. It was a time of petty kings. And remember we are talking not of a China anywhere near the size it became. South of the Yangtse did not feature.
There was definitely a Ch’in revolution of sorts – the building of an oppressive strongly centralised state – but it crumbled in twenty years. The book-burning, mass-murdering Ch’in emperor is a Bolshevik hero, but hated by everyone else, and rightly so.
More details below on the 1660 Act abolishing certain legal aspects of feudal property-holding that Wez mentioned. It seems to have more to do with the income of the king than with that of the land-holding nobility as it’s to do with what they pay him. I can’t see the nobility siding with the king just to preserve their feudal obligations to him.
Note that it was passed after the overthrow of the English Republic and the Restoration of the monarchy. So presumably the top nobles thought it was a good idea.
In any event, according to the discussion in the second link, this reform had already been enacted by the Long Parliament in 1646.
Classic : William Cobbett, The Protestant Reformation.
Feudal lingerings in law are nothing new (pun intended).
Thomas More,
Feudalism made sense in its time. Expand or be sub alternative to the other more powerful competitor. In order to exercise control in the lack of a central ruling over-king, feudal kingdoms competed for that over arching idea- uniting under a central controlling family and establishing a patrilinear system.
Each winner will burn the others books and culture- feudal capture. Ch’in is no different to Henry VII et al. Each winner will tell hagiographers what to write.
To bring it to a more today usage: let the corporate wars begin! The winner gets a headline.
That’s it- I lack sleep!
LB
‘ I don’t think that showing that some bourgeois sided with the absolutist state would disprove that the class struggle.’
‘I don’t think that the materialist conception of history says that every single member of a particular class has to support the objective interests of that class.’
Neither myself or C. Hill take that position. I just want some evidence that the income of those conservative landowners who supported Charles I did not come from feudal tenure as C. Hill maintains. Your point about the final abolition of feudal tenure taking place during the restoration may just indicate that Charles II recognized that his future depended on accommodating the economic needs of the bourgeoise.
“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 feudaltenures into leaseholds, and this required capital.”
https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/Landlords-and-peasants#ref310408
In all these discussions what appears to be missing are the people other than the monarchs and aristocrats and bourgeoisie.
Scotland has a tradition of common property rights. They include rights arising from commonties, grazing rights, peat-cutting rights, salmon rights, rights to use harbours and foreshore, mineral rights, sporting use rights, ownership rights, rights to usufruct, rights of access to resources and rights of passage over land and inland water. Commonty in Scots Law means; a piece of land in which two or more persons have a common right. A widespread example of such common property is living in a tenement. Those who own or rent a flat also hold other parts of the property, e.g. the stairs or close (and have its common responsibility – your turn to clean the stairs!) and access to the communal back-garden It does not mean state-owned or public-land but could be parish/burgh land.
It is estimated that half the land area of Scotland was still common land in 1500. They provided areas of free access. It was not a “free for all” but their use was covered by sets of rules that were well established and understood locally. No-one could make financial profit. The resources of the commonty were solely for personal uses, and individuals could not, for instance, cut timber for sale or rent grazing to someone else. By the mid 19th century, virtually all this common land had been divided into the private property of neighbouring land owners. Subsistence farming could not survive without access to the resources that the commons traditionally supplied and their loss was a major factor in forcing local people to abandon the way of life that had sustained generations before them and join the mass of people leaving the Scottish countryside.
“Ferm touns” or collective farm settlements, of Scotland’s subsistence agriculture, which survived in northern areas into the 19th century, were a traditional arrangement that typically could not have survived without the resources provided by a commonty which provided many of the resources needed by a community at no cost apart from the inhabitants’ own labour.
Crown Commons were land held directly by the Crown and are thought to have originated out of the once extensive Royal Hunting Forests. The lands that became Crown Commons were areas within those forests where traditional communal use, which had predated the establishment of the forests, continued after the system of forests broke down in the medieval period. While these Commons were most heavily used by people living nearby, anyone unconnected with the area could also use them. Crown Commons had certainly largely disappeared by the early 19th century. An Act in 1828 allowed for their division and the land was then shared out between the adjoining land owners.
A green is a small area of common land usually closely associated with a settlement, whether a town or village or single clachan. These greens provided an area where cows could be milked, markets and other events held, garments bleached and a host of other common and communal activities carried out. The greens associated with many fishing communities were used for the drying and repairing of nets, the salting and drying of fish and other related activities. One specific type of green were the overnight and river crossing stances associated with traditional routes and drove roads.
A loan was a common route through private property to and from an area of common land or some other ‘public’ place. The distinction between this and a right of way was that the loan was itself common land and not just a right of use. Their former existence of others is indicated by street and place names, like Loanhead.
A moss is a wet area where peats can be dug and historically many were used in common by local inhabitants. Common mosses were the same form of shared property. The common status of surviving common mosses has often gone unnoticed because they have been of relatively little use since the decline of peat cutting in the eastern and central Highlands.
Rigs were narrow strips of cultivated land, sometimes up to around 15 metres wide. Traditionally, adjacent rigs were used by different cultivators and the rigs periodically re-allocated between them. This system was known as runrig. Lands lying runrig were invariably associated with an area of rough ground or hill land that was also shared in common. These two types of land were the longstanding basis of farming in Scotland before the Improvements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Originally, many areas of runrig, together with their shared hill ground, were held by two or more proprietors. Each owned a number of rigs, which were interspersed with the rigs of the other owners and each owner had an undivided share of the ownership of the common hill. The common hill was thus a commonty and the runrig lands equivalent to a commonty on arable land.(Bishopbriggs was originally Bishoprigs)
Burghs were established in Scotland from the 12th century. The creation of Royal Burghs was to provide the Crown with a convenient counter-balance to a feudal aristocracy which threatened to assume supreme power in the State. It was necessary that the King’s burgesses should have absolute freedom from the jurisdiction of the neighbouring baron and should have an adequate patrimony. The Kings, therefore, granted wide privileges and vast territorial estates for the common good use of their chartered burghs. In 1617 the jurisdiction of the Magistrates of Rutherglen extended from Polmadie on the south side of the river Clyde to Carron; the entire parish of Ayr at one time belonged to the Burgh of Ayr; Aberdeen once possessed lands which extended many miles in circuit round Aberdeen, granted by the Kings of Scotland, for the use of the town. Edinburgh’s common land, the Burgh Muir had a total area of approximately 5 square miles. The last open area of common land remaining of the Burgh Muir is now Bruntsfield Links. The Border towns still retain the tradition of the annual Common Ridings, reasserting the boundaries of it.
The vast territories granted to Scotland’s Royal Burghs were designed to act as a bulwark against noble power. Labour politician Thomas Johnson wrote extensively about Burgh commons and its loss, being a sympathiser of “municipal socialism” and nationalisation. According to Johnston, such acreages, together with other common lands, extended in the latter part of the sixteenth century to fully one half of the entire area of Scotland.
But this valuable inheritance did not to last long:
“Until the Burgh Reform Act of 1833 the landowners and the commercial bourgeois class controlled all burghal administration of the common lands, and controlled it in such a way that vast areas of common lands were quietly appropriated, trust funds wholly disappeared, and to such a length did the plunder and the corruption develop, that some ancient burghs with valuable patrimonies went bankrupt, some disappeared altogether from the map of Scotland, some had their charters confiscated, and those which survived to the middle of the nineteenth century were left mere miserable starved caricatures of their former greatness, their Common Good funds gone, their lands fenced in private ownership, and their treasurers faced often with crushing debts. As late as 1800 there were great common properties extant; many burghs, towns and villages owned lands and mosses; Forres engaged in municipal timbergrowing; Fortrose owned claypits; Glasgow owned quarries and coalfields; Hamilton owned a coal pit; Irvine had mills, farms and a loom shop ….”
By the time the Royal Commission on Municipal Corporations in Scotland reported in 1835.
“Wick had lost in the law courts its limited right of commonty over the hill of Wick, and owned no property; Abernethy owned nothing, nor did Alloa. Bathgate was the proud possessor of the site of a fountain and a right of servitude over four and a half acres of moorland. Beith had no local government of any kind; Bo’ness owned nothing; Castle-Douglas owned only a shop; Coldstream was stripped bare, not even possessing ‘rights in its street dung’; Crieff had two fields; Dalkeith nothing; Dunkeld nothing; and Dunoon, nothing””Even the towns which did not hold their charters from the Crown, but from the neighbouring baron, possessed wide territories of commonity. The lands over, which property rights and privileges of use were held by the burgh were the burgh commons. The loss of the burgh commons stemmed in large part from an Act of the Scots Parliament in 1469. This Act had suppressed the popular election of Councils and led to the dominance of burghs by local land owners and wealthy merchants. The evidence in the reports shows how these land owners and merchants, with their relations and allies, had appropriated the burgh commons to themselves through generous land grants and cheap feus.
TM – you don’t seem to be very selective in your quotes. Many seem to originate from anonymous sources. You must realize that there has been a long ideological struggle between historians concerning the matters under debate here. The priority of most reactionary historians is to destroy or at least undermine the Marxist theory of class struggle generating historical change. Your ‘gradualist’ theory of history is one of their favourite tactics and so you must forgive me for being suspicious of its credibility. None of us here are historians i.e. we don’t have access to original sources or the training to interpret their meaning. We have to rely on historians for our information and, as I’ve said, many have an ideological agenda.
The priority of most reactionary historians is to destroy or at least undermine the Marxist theory of class struggle generating historical change. Your ‘gradualist’ theory of history is one of their favourite tactics and so you must forgive me for being suspicious of its credibility
I dont really get this argument at all. How does the “gradualist theory of history” contradict the “theory of class struggle”?
Surely the historic change from feudalism to capitalism was predicated on the gradual build up of capitalist relations of production within the interstices of a feudal society bringing it eventually into open conflict with the relations of production characteristic of the latter and the consequent intensification of class struggle leading to the overthrow of the latter?
There is no contradiction whatsoever between these two concepts. We can quibble about when exactly political power fell into the hands of the rising capitalist class but we can hardly deny the existence of this class prior to this revolutionary event
Similarly, the socialist revolution presupposes a very long and gradual growth of a class conscious socialist movement leading up the dispossession of the capitalists of their exclusive ownership and control of the means of wealth production. Unquestionably this gradualistic movement will have far reaching cumulative consequences that will progressively modify the very social environment in which socialists operate.
This would be the materialistic approach to understanding history – that the past prepares the ground for the future. The alternative would be to suggest that events happen completely out of blue by someone waving a magic wand somewhere .
I see nothing wrong with the basic argument TM is putting forward. The only issue at stake is when exactly did the state fall into the hands of the capitalist class or those intent upon furthering the interests of this class….
Chinese knights errant.
“According to Dr. James J. Y. Liu (1926–1986), a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at Stanford University, it was a person’s temperament and need for freedom, and not their social status, that caused them to roam the land and help those in need. Dr. Liu believes this is because a very large majority of these knights came from northern China, which borders the territory of “northern nomadic tribes, whose way of life stressed freedom of movement and military virtues”. Many knights seem to have come from Hebeiand Henan provinces. A large majority of the characters from the Water Margin , which is considered one of China’s best examples of knight-errant literature, come from these provinces.”
(Wikipedia)
Thanks Robbo.
I think he is concerned that there must be the political seizure of power as the end expression of these gradual economic changes.
This has to be true of the proletariat today, and it was true of the bourgeoisie in France. It is also true that elements of the bourgeoisie broke the stranglehold of Charles I. over their expansion. They had control of parliament (the government) already in 1642, and Charles, viewing them as the rebels, was viewed by them as the rebel threatening the English government. They claimed his personal ambitions were “French” and that he would overrun England with “papists.”
But political seizure of government by the capitalist class doesn’t always come by them actively doing the seizing. In Japan it was handed to them by the Meiji throne. In China and Russia it fell to a new bourgeoisie formed of Bolshevik and ex-Bolshevik leaders, and later, new entrepreneurs emerging from the termination of Bolshevik state-capitalism.
Here is Christopher Hill’s definition of “feudalism” from a preface he wrote in 1955 (while still a member of the “Communist” Party) to a republication of a contribution he had written in 1940 for a textbook for CP members:
“I use the word feudal in the Marxist sense, and not in the more restricted sense adopted by most academic historians to describe narrowly military and legal relations. By “feudalism” I mean a form of society in which agriculture is the basis of economy and in which political power is monopolised by a class of landowners. The mass of the population consists of dependent peasants subsisting on the produce of their family holdings. The landowners are maintained by the rent paid by the peasants, which might be in the form of food or labour, as in early days, or (by the sixteenth century) in money. In such a society there is room for small handicraft production, exchange of products, internal and overseas trade; but commerce and industry are subordinated to and plundered by the landowners and their State.”
This is a rather broad definition that would apply to all sorts of situations that have existed in recent times (and still exist) in some parts of the world. It might even be said to have been tailored-made to fit the situation in England at the beginning of the 1600s (as well as to conditions in which the some Moscow parties were operating ,as in Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia). It’s including a situation where the peasants are in effect tenants paying a money rent that’s the problem. I’d always assumed that feudalism was based on serf-labour and that serfs were tied to the land and exploited through being forced to work on the lord of the manor’s estate for nothing and also to have to hand over in kind a part of what they produced. A peasant paying a money rent would no longer be a serf; in fact, to get the money to pay the rent, they would have to be free to sell some of their produce to somebody somewhere.
Here is how he applied this to the situation in England in 1600 (it’s from the section on Land):
“The structure of society was still essentially feudal; so were its laws and its political institutions. There were still many legal restrictions on the full unhampered capitalist utilisation of landed property, on free trade in land. These restrictions were maintained in the interests of the Crown, the feudal landowning class, and to a lesser extent, of the peasantry, anxious to live in the old secure way paying the old fixed dues. (…) [T]here still persisted in many parts even of the south and east, and all over northern and western England, landowners who lacked either the ability, the capital, the psychology or the opportunity to exploit their estates in the new way. They were still attempting to maintain feudal pomp and ceremony, still running their estates in the traditional way. Their courts were thronged with blue-blooded hangers-on, poor relations and retainers, who performed no productive functions in society, but still believed that the world owed them a living – “Drones” was what the bourgeois pamphleteers called them, as they had called the monks before them (…) The focus of this society was the King’s Court. (…) Times were hard for these parasites and rentiers (…) Yet this class was still a social and political power; the State was organised to safeguard its interests. Its inability to reorganise its estates was keeping a large amount of capital uninvested. Much of the richest land in England was not utilised to the full technical capacities of the time. State power was being used to prevent the growth of a national market.”
This seems a rather strained attempt to show that pre-1640 England was rather like pre-1789 France. I don’t think it comes off. A commenter in the A Good Read of this early work of his says that “Later in his career, Hill qualifies his earlier notion that pre-Revolutionary England was ‘essentially feudal’” (presumably this was after he left the CP over Hungary). As well he might.
Having said this, I am a great fan of Hill and always buy any of his books when I see them in a charity shop. In fact during lockdown I finished reading his one on the English Bible. But I don’t think his early CP stuff is all that good.
I do not think that Marx informed himself from some newspapers. He made intensive research about the Asiatic Mode of Production and he researched the Africans, the Arabian, and the Chinese, and the best evidence are the Ethnological notebooks which show that he was working in that historical process. The Autonomy University of Mexico ( UNAM ) and the Department of Anthropology made the same research and they agreed with Karl Marx, and the concluded that similar production similar existed within the Mayas and the Incas. Franz Mehring who is one of Marx biographer said that Engels himself was surprised to see that Marx was working on so many things at one time, but he had not finished most of them, it was too much work for one man
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