I.3. Agriculture in the Feudal Era

This is not the place to inquire into the origins of peasant property relations. For our purposes it is enough to establish the state of peasant relations of property and cultivation that developed, after the storms of the migration of the peoples, in the countries occupied by the Germanic peoples, and that survived there, with few exceptions — of which the most important is England — far into the eighteenth century, and in places into our own time. It was a compromise between common property in the land, such as the peasants’ pasture farming required, and private property in the land, which corresponded to the needs of the peasants’ arable farming.

Just as every peasant family formed a household co-operative that was sufficient unto itself, so every village too formed a co-operative, economically self-contained and self-sufficient: the mark community.

We leave aside here the form of settlement in scattered single farmsteads instead of compact villages, a form that was long held to be the original one, but which, as is now established, was only an exceptional one, brought about by particular peculiarities of historical tradition as well as of the lie of the land. The normal and typical form is the village system, and it is with this alone that we have to do in what follows.

The starting-point of the peasant economy was the homestead, which had passed into separate ownership. To it belonged, besides the dwelling-house and the necessary farm buildings, a piece of land round the buildings, which was fenced in. This enclosure took in the garden with the most necessary kitchen plants, with vegetables, flax, fruit trees and so on. The village consisted of a larger or smaller number of such homesteads. Outside the village lay the divided mark, the arable. Where the three-field system prevailed, which was mostly the case, this was divided into three fields or Zelgen. Each field was in turn divided into various furlongs or Kampe, that is, areas of arable differing from one another in situation and quality of soil. In each furlong every homestead had a strip of its own. Outside the divided mark lay the undivided mark (the Allmende, the common mark), that is, forest and pasture.

The undivided mark was worked in common by the community. On the arable each family cultivated its own strips for itself. But not at will. Corn was grown on the arable to feed the people. But stock-raising, pasture farming, still dominated the whole of agricultural practice. And if arable farming had become the private affair of the individual families, pasture farming remained the common concern of the whole community. This shaping of the economy reacted on the relations of property. As arable the land was private property, as pasture common property. That is to say, every field, as soon as it had been harvested, fell to the grazing of cattle, and as pasture was subject to the right of disposal of the community, which had all the fields grazed in common. And like the stubble field, the fallow too was used as common pasture for all the cattle of the village. But that would have been impossible if every member of the village had cultivated his strips as he pleased. There therefore reigned the Flurzwang, the compulsory rotation: within each field all the owners of strips had to cultivate them in the same way. In each year one of the three arable fields lay fallow, the second was sown with winter corn, the third with summer corn. The cropping of each field changed every year. Besides the grazing on stubble and fallow, meadows, permanent pastures and forests supplied the fodder for the cattle, whose labour, manure, milk and meat were equally important to the peasant economy.

This system of agriculture came to prevail wherever Germanic peoples settled. It made no difference in this respect whether the peasants were in a position to keep their full freedom, whether they settled as rent-paying peasants on the territory of a lord, whether they gave up their independence to come under the protection of a powerful lord, or whether they were brought into dependence by force.

It was a system of cultivation of remarkable strength and power of resistance, conservative, preserving, in the best sense of the word. No less than on domestic handicraft, the prosperity and security of peasant existence rested on the constitution of the mark community. The three-field system with forest and pasture needed no supplies from outside. It itself produced the cattle and the manure that were necessary to cultivate the fields and to prevent the exhaustion of the soil. But the common use of pasture and arable also produced a firm cohesion among the villagers, which protected them effectively against excessive exploitation by outside powers.

But firmly knit as this economic system was, the development of urban industry, and with it of the money economy, dealt it too its death-blow, just as it did peasant handicraft.

We have seen how urban industry increased the peasant’s need for money, but also the need for money of the powers that sucked their vital strength wholly or in part out of the peasant — the feudal nobility and the rising modern state. We have also seen how the peasant was thereby compelled to produce food for sale, for which a market was opening in the growing towns. But this alone was enough to upset the balance of the mark, whose whole economic order was calculated on its being completely self-sufficient, receiving nothing or as good as nothing from outside, but also giving off nothing, or at least nothing of importance, to the outside.

Originally, accordingly, it was most strictly forbidden in almost all marks to take any of the produce of the mark out of it, or to dispose of it outside the mark, without the permission of the members of the mark — wood, hay, straw, manure, etc., for example. The crops grown in the mark, too, were as far as possible to be worked up and consumed in the mark itself. The same held for the animals raised in the village mark. Pigs fattened in the mark could not be sold outside the mark. It was likewise laid down that the field crops and the wines grown in the village mark were to be milled, baked and eaten, or pressed and drunk, in the mark itself; and from this banalities developed in many village marks. Under feudal exploitation the need to export nothing, to have everything consumed in the village itself, often took curious forms.

G. L. von Maurer tells us in his Geschichte der Dorfverfassung (I, p. 316) of a nobleman in Alsace who in 1540 laid on his peasants, as a labour service, the drinking up of his sour ban-wines, so that his casks might be free for that year’s wine, which had turned out well. “They had”, says an old chronicle quoted by Maurer, “to go to the wine three times every week, and paid the nobleman no more than for cheese and bread. Now when the peasants were drunk, they beat one another, and then the squire fined them for the offence, and so got more money for the wine than if he had sold it.” Our schnapps-squires ought to raise a monument to this worthy Christian-Germanic hero, who even in those distant times knew how to stand up so vigorously for alcoholism, profit and Christian discipline.

The restrictions imposed by the banalities became untenable, or useless chicanery, as soon as production for the market forced itself on the peasants as a necessity. But the constant export to the town of nutritive substances that were no longer returned to the soil was bound to exhaust the soil gradually and make it poorer.

The economic balance of the mark, however, was disturbed in quite another way as well. To the degree that the products of the soil became commodities and acquired a market value, the soil itself became a commodity that possessed a value. When agricultural commodity production took on a greater extent, at the beginning of modern times, land was no longer so abundant as it had been when the Germanic peoples settled down and put the three-field system of which we are treating here in the place of nomadic pasture farming, supplemented by extensive hunting and slight and most primitive tillage.

To every mode of production there corresponds a maximum population that a given tract of country can feed. Whether this maximum had been reached by the Germanic peoples at the time of the migrations, whether it was overpopulation that drove them to break into the Roman Empire and not rather its defencelessness, is open to dispute. What is certain is that the transition to a higher mode of agriculture, which they owed to their contact with Roman civilisation, enormously widened the margin of subsistence of the Germanic peoples in the period after the migrations. Their small numbers were far from enough for the needs of the new mode of production, and this itself was very favourable to the rearing of numerous offspring. As soon, therefore, as the storms of the migrations and their aftermath had died down and Europe had attained a certain degree of peace and security, the population began to increase rapidly. The growth of population easily found the necessary land in the extensive wildernesses. If the number of people in the village grew, either the arable of the village was enlarged by new clearings in the undivided mark, or part of the latter was set apart and made the territory of a new mark community, a daughter village that arose beside the mother village. On the other hand, the princes gave monasteries or noble retainers large tracts of land, scarcely or not at all cultivated, on which the lords set up mark communities of immigrant colonists for a small rent. The steady driving back of the Slavs opened up ever new territories to German colonisation.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century the Hussite wars in Bohemia and the overthrow of the power of the Teutonic Order in Poland put an end to the further advance of German colonisation to the east. At about the same time, however, the population of Central Europe, if it had not yet reached the maximum of which it was capable under the economic system of the day, had grown large enough for there to be no longer any shortage of people, of labour, and for land to cease to be so abundant that no one cared about it. Thus there arose the possibility, but also the urge, to monopolise the most important of all the means of production. The most stubborn and bitter struggles over it broke out between the peasants and the feudal nobility; they lasted into modern times, and have never really ceased altogether, but their decisive battles were fought in Germany as early as the sixteenth century. Almost everywhere they ended in favour of the feudal nobility, which submitted to the rising power of the state and in return won its help against the peasants.

The victorious nobility begins to produce commodities itself, in a way that represents a strange mixture of capitalism and feudalism. It begins to produce surplus-value in large-scale enterprises, but as a rule not by wage-labour but by feudal forced labour. Its forest policy, like its pasture and arable farming, curtails the peasants’ land and undermines the balance of the three-field system.

Forestry lent itself most easily to feudal-capitalist exploitation, to commodity production on a large scale in the countryside. As soon as the growth of the towns made wood a commodity in demand — and at that time it was not yet replaced by coal and iron, and so was relatively much more used as fuel and building material than nowadays — the lords sought to take possession of the forest, either by taking it from the mark community that owned it, or, where it had been their property from the first, by restricting as far as possible the rights of the members of the mark to take wood and litter and to graze their cattle.

Already in the Twelve Articles of the insurgent peasants of 1525 one article (the fifth) runs:

“Fifthly, we are aggrieved in the matter of wood-cutting, for our lords have appropriated all the woods (forests) to themselves alone, and when the poor man needs anything he must buy it at double the price. Our opinion is that whatever woods have not been purchased by those who hold them, whether spiritual or temporal, shall revert to the whole community, and it shall be free in reasonable measure to each member of the community to take from them what he needs for his house without payment; and also for building, if it should be needed, he shall be allowed to take it without payment, but with the knowledge of those whom the community chooses for the purpose, whereby the exploitation of the wood will be prevented.”

The exclusion of the peasants from the use of the forest was furthered by the development of hunting.

The weapons of the chase were originally also the weapons of war, the chase itself the preparatory school of war; hunting and war were most closely connected. So long as hunting was necessary to meet the needs of the common freeman, he was also a warrior. The retreat of hunting behind arable farming as a source of food furthered the division of labour between the “estate that feeds” and the “estate that fights”, which, it is true, had other causes as well. And conversely, the more war fell exclusively to the nobility, the more hunting became an exclusively noble sport.

When the nobility became superfluous, when the modern state took from it the functions it had exercised in the Middle Ages, war, jurisdiction and police, it became a court nobility, which crowded together at the court of the monarch to amuse itself and plunder the state, and which, when it did visit its estates, knew no other pleasure there than hunting.

The flourishing of hunting and that of the cultivation of the soil, however, exclude each other. A large stock of game can be kept only in great, extensive forests, and it forms a constant source of losses and damage to the peasant.

The more superfluous and arrogant the nobility became, the more, in the conflict between the interests of cultivation and of hunting, the latter won the day with it. A limit was set to the advance of cultivation, which threatened to reduce the stock of game; clearings in the forests were forbidden, poaching by the peasants was punished most severely, and they were even prevented from killing the game that laid waste their fields.

To this too the Twelve Articles of the peasants of 1525 already bear witness, the fourth of which says:

“Fourthly, it has been the custom hitherto that no poor man has had the power to catch game, fowl or fish in flowing water, which seems to us altogether unseemly and unbrotherly and not in accordance with the word of God. In some places, too, the authorities preserve the game to our defiance and our great harm, since we must suffer the unreasoning beasts to devour to no purpose what is ours, what God has caused to grow for the use of man, and we must hold our peace about it, which is against God and our neighbour.”

But in the following centuries it became much worse still. In France only the great Revolution put an end to these conditions. In Germany, however, a hundred years after the French Revolution Prussian Junkers could still dare to demand in the Reichstag that the peasant be obliged to feed their hares with his cabbage, without meeting serious resistance from the majority.

If, where a market for wood had formed, it was an obvious and fairly simple step to turn the forest into private property, worked on capitalist principles, though still under feudal forms, it was hardly less obvious and simple, where a large market for a product of pasture farming (above all wool) had formed and soil and climate allowed it, to go over to capitalist pasture farming, which, like forestry, requires neither an extensive wage-proletariat nor large investments of capital, and whose technique is of the simplest nature. Like capitalist forestry, the extensive form of capitalist pasture farming requires almost nothing but private property in extensive areas of pasture; and the lords did their honest best to create it where the conditions described above urged them on, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England and Spain, later in some districts of northern Germany that offered favourable conditions for sheep-farming. The mildest form was the monopolisation by the manorial lord of the sheep-walk right, the right to drive sheep on to the common pasture. In Germany the complaints about this begin only after the Peasant War. But in many cases the profitability of sheep-farming also drove the lords to turn the common pasture into private property, and sometimes even to take over peasant holdings and turn the arable into pasture.

Where a market for the products of arable farming formed, the feudal lords strove to produce these too in their own enterprises. This was certainly less simple than forestry and pasture farming. It required additional land to a lesser degree than these, but additional labour and a certain outlay of capital to a greater degree.

In the Middle Ages every lord as a rule had worked only a part of his land himself, either directly or through a bailiff. The rest of his territory he had given out to tenants, who had to render him partly deliveries in kind and partly labour services on his own farm, the demesne. We have seen how the rise of the urban market for food developed on the one side the possibility, and on the other the urge, to convert these services into money dues. But this tendency is crossed by another wherever the demesne too begins to produce for sale: wage-labour is still little developed, and the agriculture of the demesne depends on the forced labour of the tenant peasants. The greater the surplus of food the demesne is to supply, the more labour it needs, but also the more land. This produces on the one side the striving to extend the lord’s territory at the expense of the peasants’, either by curtailing the undivided mark, above all the pasture, or directly by driving out peasants, by “laying” them; and on the other side the striving to increase the labour services of the peasants — a striving that keeps the laying of peasants within certain limits, for the fewer peasants in the village, the fewer hands on the lord’s estate, but which is itself in turn spurred on most strongly by the laying of peasants, for the fewer workers on the lord’s estate, the greater the burden of work that must be loaded on each one.

Thus we see that the development of commodity production produced the most diverse tendencies in the countryside, all of which, however, worked to restrict more and more the peasant’s arable, and above all his pasture and forest, long before any real overpopulation had set in, that is, before the population had been reached that the prevailing system of agriculture could have fed.

Peasant existence was thereby shaken to its depths.

The profound transformation of the conditions of peasant existence already showed itself in the peasant’s food.

We may be allowed to make a small digression here, to discuss a subject that is only loosely connected with our main theme, but which seems to us fitted to throw some light on it none the less.

A school widespread today, which rests on Comte and Spencer, likes to transfer the laws of nature to society without more ado. The successes of natural science in our century were so brilliant that they only too easily misled the natural scientist into believing that he now had in his pocket the key to all riddles, even in fields that were quite remote from him. On the other hand, it was very convenient for many a sociologist simply to transfer the established laws of nature to his own field, instead of ascertaining the special laws of the latter by complicated research.

Among the axioms of this natural-scientific sociology is the close connection between climate and food.

“Even if we eat quantities of food equal in weight in cold and in warm regions,” says Liebig, “an infinite wisdom has so ordered things that these foods are extremely unequal in their content of carbon. The fruits that the southerner eats contain, in the fresh state, not more than 12 per cent of carbon, while the bacon and train-oil of the inhabitant of the polar regions contain 66 to 80 per cent of carbon.” (Chemische Briefe, p. 246.)

Buckle concluded from this that slavery was the “natural” condition of the Hindu people, to which it was “doomed by the irresistible laws of nature” (History of Civilisation, German translation by Ruge, I, p. 171). For the climate makes them vegetarians, but plants grow abundantly in the tropics; this makes the increase of population easier and overfills the “labour market”.

Now it does not occur to us to deny the generally recognised physiological proposition that in a colder climate man has a greater need of carbon, or of meat, than in a warm one.

But this difference is not so great as is usually supposed. Even within the Arctic Circle man seeks vegetable food.

“Besides fish and meat,” Nordenskiöld tells us, “the Chukchi consume an enormous quantity of greens and other foods from the vegetable kingdom … The writers who point to the Chukchi as a people that lives only on substances taken from the animal kingdom are therefore making a great mistake. The Chukchi seem to me, on the contrary, to be at certain times of the year more ‘vegetable-eaters’ than any other people known to me.” (The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, II, p. 108 ff.)

On the other hand, even in the tropics “the ordinary food” does not “consist almost entirely of fruit, rice and other plants”, as Buckle thinks (p. 54); exclusive vegetarianism is rather an exception. “That people in Africa have less need of meat is a fable,” says Buchner (Kamerun, p. 153; cf. also p. 116), and the facts confirm his observation. Throughout Africa meat is much sought after as food. The fare of the Bongo negroes must be especially appetising: Schweinfurth tells us that, dog and man excepted, they despise no animal food, not even rats, snakes, vultures, hyenas, scorpions, ants and caterpillars. Similarly we are told of the Indians of British Guiana, who live on the Equator: “Game and fish form their principal food, but they do not despise rats, monkeys, alligators, frogs, worms, caterpillars, ants, larvae and beetles either.” (Appun in Peschel, Völkerkunde, p. 163.)

Far from living only on fruit, many of the peoples living in the tropics have even taken human flesh into their diet. Indeed, it seems as if cannibalism were peculiar above all to the tropics.

Only at a very high level of civilisation does man acquire such mastery over nature that he can choose his food freely according to his needs. The lower he stands, the more he must make do with what he finds; the more, instead of adapting his food to himself, he must adapt himself to the food that is available to him. If the Eskimo lives mainly on meat and blubber, it is less because the climate prescribes these foods to him than because he finds no others. He could not live on fruit, for the simple reason that not enough of it grows in Greenland. That his exclusively meat diet was not chosen by him for physiological reasons is shown by the value he sets on the scanty vegetable food that is accessible to him. The southern Eskimos gather a few berries in summer; those living in the north know scarcely any vegetable food at all, except what they find in a half-digested state in the stomachs of reindeer, and this they regard as a great delicacy.

That, it is true, is an extreme case; by far the greater part of the earth’s surface bears a rich abundance of the most varied animal and vegetable foods; man is not everywhere as restricted in his choice of them as in the neighbourhood of the poles. But nowhere is he free to choose at will whatever food he likes. By far the greater part of his foodstuffs man finds only in limited quantity, not without effort and not at all times. Which sources of food are capable of affording him a sufficient and steady livelihood depends neither on their content of carbon nor on his need of it, but in the first place on the kind and level of his technical knowledge, his art of mastering nature — in a word, on his mode of production. Compared with its influence, that of climate, of the configuration of the land and of other physical conditions becomes positively insignificant. Take the various savage Indian tribes of America that stand at the same level of civilisation, and you will find that on the pampas as in the Rocky Mountains, on the Amazon as on the Missouri, they consume fish, game and vegetable food on the whole in roughly the same proportions, which are noticeably modified only by local conditions, say a greater abundance of fish in a river and the like, and not by climatic influences.

If the mode of production of a people changes, its food also changes, without any change of climate. If the lazzarone of Naples today is content with macaroni, anchovies and garlic, he does not owe this to the glorious climate under which he lives. Under the same climate the men of the Greek heroic age, as we know from the Iliad and the Odyssey, took pleasure in consuming great quantities not only of meat but also of “rich” fat, a diet that could satisfy an Eskimo too.

Nor have the Hindus always been vegetarians. Before they broke into the valley of the Ganges and settled there, they were nomadic herdsmen whose food consisted mainly of the milk and meat of their herds. Only when their mode of production had changed, when arable farming had driven back stock-raising, since the Ganges region offered favourable conditions for the former but not for extensive pasture farming, did the slaughter of an ox, the ploughman and giver of milk, gradually become a sinful waste.

A similar revolution in the peasant’s food took place in our own regions from the fifteenth century onwards. As late as the fourteenth century forest, pasture, water and poultry-yard supplied abundant meat. Meat was at that time the ordinary daily food of the common man throughout Germany. Two or three meat dishes a day for day-labourers were nothing unusual.

How widespread the consumption of meat was at that time is shown by a calculation of Klöden’s, according to which the consumption of meat in Frankfurt on the Oder in the year 1308 amounted to at least 250 pounds per head of the population, whereas today the consumption of meat in Berlin varies between 130 and 150 pounds per head. In Breslau in 1880–89 it was as little as 86 pounds.

In the sixteenth century the decision went against the peasants. Forest and water were closed to them; the game, instead of giving the peasant food, laid waste his food. The pasture is restricted; whatever cattle and poultry the peasant still raises, apart from his draught animals, he must sell in the town to raise the money he needs. The table of the German peasant now rapidly grows poor, and he himself becomes a vegetarian, like the Hindu.

As early as 1550 the Swabian Heinrich Müller lamented:

“Within the memory of my father, who was a peasant, people ate quite differently among the peasants from now. Then there was meat and food in plenty every day, and at fairs and other feasts the tables groaned under all they had to bear; then people swilled wine as if it were water, then they gorged themselves and took away with them what they would, for there was growth and plenty. That has changed now. It has become a very dear and bad time for many years, and the food of the best peasants is almost much worse than that of the day-labourers and farm servants used to be.”

But the decline in the production of livestock was bound soon to bring about a decline in the production of grain as well. For the fewer the cattle, the less the manure. In many places, too, the tilling of the fields suffered where the decrease in stock-raising led to a reduction in the number of draught animals. The increase in the feudal services of hand and team, which claimed the peasant’s labour for the lord’s farm at the very times when he most needed it on his own, worked in the same direction.

At the very time when the quantity of products that agriculture had to give up to the town was growing, and it became necessary to cover the resulting deficit by an increased supply of manure and a more intensive working of the soil, the supply of manure and the working of the soil were being reduced more and more. The consequence was the decline of the peasant economy, an increasing exhaustion of the soil, a growing infertility of the fields. These were scarcely enough to keep the peasant’s head above water in good years; a bad year or an enemy invasion, formerly a passing evil, was now enough to ruin him completely.

We have seen how in the sixteenth century the peasant became a vegetarian; in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in some districts, he ceased to eat his fill at all. Well known is the description of the French peasant that La Bruyère gave a hundred years before the great Revolution:

“There is a kind of shy animals, male and female, black, gaunt and sunburnt; they are found in the country and are chained to the soil, which they rummage and dig up with invincible persistence. They have something like an articulate voice, and when they stand up they show a human face. In fact they are men, who withdraw at night into dens, where they live on black bread, roots and water.”

In some villages the peasants lived only on grass and wild herbs. Massillon, Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, wrote to Fleury in 1740: “Our country people live in fearful misery. … Most of them go without even the barley and oat bread that is their only food for half the year.”

Conditions became positively appalling in bad years, and in view of the increasing infertility of the soil these became more and more frequent. From 1698 to 1715, as a consequence of the accumulating famines, the population of France fell from 19 to 16 millions.

The reign of Louis XV was more peaceful than that of Louis XIV, its burdens of war lighter; but the pressure of the feudal burdens remained. They became intolerable; many peasants voluntarily fled from the property that chained them to misery, and found it more advantageous to become wage-labourers, or even beggars or robbers. As early as 1750 Quesnay stated that a quarter of the land fit for the plough was uncultivated; immediately before the French Revolution Arthur Young declared that a third of the arable (more than 9 million hectares) lay waste! According to the agricultural society of Rennes, two-thirds of Brittany lay fallow.

It was not everywhere as bad as in France, where the power of the government ruled the peasant absolutely, but was at the same time entirely in the hands of a court nobility as arrogant as it was unscrupulous, greedy and short-sighted. Even so, in Germany too the condition of the peasants was wretched, and flight from their holdings very frequent.

Even in the regions where no Junker arrogance forcibly narrowed the margin of subsistence that the prevailing system of agriculture offered, even there this system became more and more an oppressive fetter in the course of the eighteenth century. In places the population had already grown so dense that it demanded a widening of the margin of subsistence by the transition to a higher system of cultivation. Such a system had in fact already developed in England, where, as a result of a peculiar shaping of circumstances, the foundations of feudal agriculture had been shattered in a series of revolutions from the Reformation of Henry VIII to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, and the way had been cleared for the development of a capitalist, intensive agriculture, which replaced pasture farming by stall-feeding and the growing of fodder crops, and grew root crops besides grain. It proved impossible, however, to introduce its results generally on the European continent without a revolution in the existing relations of property. The intermixture of the separate strips of arable and the compulsory rotation made any innovation in the traditional three-field system impossible. So far as individual farmers went over to growing newly introduced crops, the potato for example, they did so in their gardens, to which the compulsory rotation did not apply, or on larger estates that had been separated from the common fields.

Besides the need to extend the production of food, it was also the need to adapt production to the demand of the market that made the traditional mode of cultivation intolerable, at least for the larger farmers, who produced a considerable surplus for the market.

The medieval mode of production was admirably adapted to the needs of a co-operative of equals, who all had the same standard of living and produced for their own use. To it the community of the fields, with its fixed round of summer grain, winter grain and fallow, was well suited. Now there arose the market with its changing demands; now inequality developed among the villagers, some of whom produced on their land scarcely, or only just, as much as they themselves consumed, while others produced a surplus. The former, the smaller ones, went on producing for their own use and held fast to the community of the fields. For the others it became a fetter, for whatever the market might demand, they were not allowed to grow anything on their fields but what the community of the fields prescribed.

An antagonism of interests developed in the same way over the remnants of the common pasture. The small peasant needed it; he did not have the means to go over to a higher form of cultivation, and the division of the common pasture would have made it almost impossible for him to keep cattle. What he most needed was more manure. The division of the common pasture brought him a little more land, but reduced his supply of manure, since it forced him to cut down his stock of cattle. The big peasants, on the other hand, considered it a sinful waste to use as pasture land that they could exploit far more effectively with their means. And on their side stood the theorists, the representatives of the higher mode of cultivation developed in England.

To go over to this, it was necessary to overthrow the compromise between communism in land and private property that the medieval system of cultivation represented; it became necessary to establish full private property, to divide the common pasture, to abolish the community of the fields and the compulsory rotation, to do away with the intermixture of the scattered strips, to consolidate them, and so to make the landowner the full proprietor of his land, united in a single continuous area, on which he could now farm solely as competition and the market dictated.

But however necessary this revolution in rural relations of property became, economic development produced no class among the rural population that could have generated the impulse and the strength required for this revolution.

Agriculture today, however, is no formation that leads a separate existence of its own in society; its development is most intimately bound up with social development. The revolutionary initiative and strength that agriculture did not produce out of itself were brought to it from the towns. The economic development of the town had completely overturned economic conditions in the countryside and made a revolution in the relations of property necessary. The same development created in the town those revolutionary classes which, by their rising against the feudal power, carried the political and legal revolution out into the countryside, where they carried through the reorganisation of conditions that had become necessary, often amid the rejoicing of the mass of the peasant population, but sometimes in spite of its resistance.

It was first the urban bureaucracy of enlightened absolutism that attempted this reorganisation, not always happily, often in a mechanical, cut-and-dried fashion, mostly, for all its lofty tone, very irresolutely and pettily. Only when in 1789 the revolutionary classes of Paris rose, led politically by the bourgeoisie, and the storming of the Bastille called on the enslaved peasants to throw off their feudal burdens, did the revolution in rural relations of property take on a rapid and decisive pace, first in France itself and then, under its influence, among its neighbours.

In France the revolution was carried through illegally and by force, that is, at a single stroke and in such a way that the peasants not only got rid of their burdens but also received land as well, from the confiscated estates of the Church and the émigrés, in so far as the bourgeoisie did not seize it.

In Prussia the revolution was forced on the country by the defeat of Jena. There, as in Germany generally, it proceeded peacefully and legally, that is, the bureaucracy carried out the process, which had become inevitable, as sluggishly and hesitantly as possible, with as much expenditure of labour and money as possible, always anxiously concerned to obtain the consent of the Junkers, in whose favour the whole procedure in the end turned out, and which in 1848 was not yet complete. The peasants had to pay the Junkers dearly for the peaceful and legal road — with hard cash, with part of their land and with new taxes.

“We may put the sum paid by the peasants to the nobility and the treasury, for release from burdens unlawfully imposed, at not less than 300,000,000 thalers, perhaps a thousand million marks.

“A thousand million marks, merely to get back, free of burdens, the smallest part of the land stolen over four hundred years! The smallest part, for by far the greatest part was kept back by the nobility and the treasury in any case, in the form of entailed and other knights’ estates and of crown domains.” (F. Engels, in his introduction to Wilhelm Wolff’s excellent Schlesische Milliarde, which first appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1849, and as a separate reprint in Zurich in 1886.)

More recent research has only confirmed Wolff’s account.

The modernisation of agriculture in Russia after the Crimean War took place in a similar way. The peasants were relieved not only of serfdom but also of their best land.

But however wretchedly the revolution may in many cases have turned out where it proceeded peacefully and legally, its final result was everywhere the same: the abolition of the feudal burdens on the one side, of the remnants of primitive communism in land on the other, and the establishment of full private property in land. The way was open for capitalist agriculture.