The land-family bond in England

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by R.W. Hoyle

Books which provoke storms often fail to prompt research. In his iconoclastic book The Origins of English Individualism (1978), Alan Macfarlane described how in England land was vested in the individual and how he (or less often she) had an absolute right of sale, uncomplicated by any obligation to children or kin. By comparison with an archetype derived from studies of the Polish and Russian peasantries, in which the sale of land was infrequent if not unknown, the sentimental connection between kin and land in England was weak.(1) The English, unlike the Irish of the century after the Famine, did not care for "the rewards of immortality derived from having one's name and progeny established on the land".(2) It is not hard to see ways in which this characteristic pattern of behaviour may have had implications for the workings of rural communities. Land, and thus status, might be bought rather than inherited. The labour of children might not be relied upon if they could purchase or lease a holding without being obliged to wait for the devolution of the parental messuage. Conversely, children could never be certain of their inheritance when a single parent controlled the timing and direction of the devolution of property.

English Individualism was not simply a description of the legal framework within which individuals held their land. Macfarlane found that the right of sale was freely used. Having demonstrated a rapid turnover in the possession of tenements in Earls Colne, Essex, Macfarlane disproved his own speculation that "if we are to find a pre-industrial peasantry anywhere in the country it seems likely to be in the higher, supposedly more remote and backward, upland region" through an examination of the Westmorland parish of Kirkby Lonsdale, where he found that landholding exhibited a similar instability.(3) Moreover, the weak attachment to land was not the result of a transition from feudalism to capitalism in the later Middle Ages. On the contrary, it seemed that a form of rural anomy had prevailed in all periods since the Conquest.

English Individualism served as a corrective to the easy assumptions of earlier writers, but its thesis contains a number of persistent difficulties. There is, for instance, its static approach to demography. While this, to a small degree, may be justified in the light of the case it sets out to make, Macfarlane's failure to recognize that the activity of the land market was conditioned by demographic circumstances must be regretted. It is significant that evidence drawn from the period of the late medieval population collapse plays a prominent part in demonstrating the weakness of the land-family bond.(4)

Another problem is the lack of reference to circumstances outside England, even within the British Isles. The uniqueness of the English within Europe is stated rather than argued (unless we assume that Macfarlane believed that the nineteenth-century eastern European peasantry was in some way representative of the whole European experience). This failure to ask whether the experience described by Macfarlane was genuinely only an English experience allows him to make the association between the individualistic behaviour of the English and another feature unique to England, the English common law. But the association of the two was never proved, either by showing that characteristics of English society were lacking in continental Europe (even though Macfarlane postulated a Germanic origin for those characteristics) or in the British Celtic fringe, or that it was the common law, rather than some other factor, that determined the character of relations within the family. In contrast, the assumption which informs this paper is that the individual possession of property was less the consequence of a particular legal system than a feature of a commercialized, monetarized economy in which rural production was largely for consumption within an urban market. It is, for instance, the degree of exposure to the market and the character of the rent levied on the tenant which determines the survival of the kinship-based systems of landholding in Highland Scotland. The adoption in the eighteenth century of cash rents in place of food rents, which forced the tenants to seek a market for their produce, was a crucial moment in the dissolution of the clan as a system of landholding.(5)

Yet despite the controversy provoked by English Individualism, no major body of writing based on new research has appeared to either challenge or confirm Macfarlane's hypotheses. One recent exception (which offered the stimulus for this present paper) was an article in Past and Present by Govind Sreenivasan which drew on Macfarlane's own materials from Earls Colne to show that landholding there exhibited much more stability than Macfarlane allowed. Unfortunately, Sreenivasan's own conclusions are open to challenge on a number of grounds.(6)

The present paper is offered as a contribution to the debate over the individualistic character of English society. The first part asks whether the right of alienation described by Macfarlane was actually as free as he held and whether it really is incompatible with a close relationship between family and land. The second section covers ground made familiar by Sreenivasan, whose methods and conclusions are critically assessed. In the third and final section, an attempt is made to reformulate the enquiry into the land-family bond. We shall raise questions about how we might most usefully measure the frequency of sale. We shall offer some tentative suggestions as to why the sale of tenements might have been necessary and query whether the freedom of sale in a commercialized society indicates anything of significance about the character of intra-familial relations. In doing this, our intention is to rescue from social history two issues which ought to be central to agricultural and economic history: the survival of the unit of agrarian production and the workings of the land market. The historiographical consequence of Macfarlane's intervention is that the perpetuation of the family farm has become dislocated from the cognate study of engrossment, the polarization of rural societies and agricultural profitability; in short, it has been wrenched from its economic context.