English Property Rights vs. French Peasant Farming & Productivity

University Degree Historical and Philosophical studies

English Property Rights vs. French Peasant Farming & Productivity

The view that England’s advantage in terms of agricultural productivity was related to its system of property rights and agrarian institutions is far from new. It was Arthur Young in the late 18th century that famously cited enclosure as the major factor in the differing levels of agricultural productivity the two countries. To Young big was beautiful and the agglomerated and enclosed farms of England were far superior to the “infinitesimally small” peasant farms of France. Young furthered his arguments by suggesting that partage, the opposite of English primogeniture, augmented the creation of inefficiently small farms. On the standard of living of the peasants who inhabited these farms, he remarked: “In general they are poor and miserable, much arising from the minute division of their little farms among all children”. On the subject of agrarian institutions Young was equally scathing. He described the open field system as “The Goths and Vandals of the open system” as well as referring to French agricultural practices as barbarous. The classic, pre-revisionist response to this question is an unequivocal yes. However a revisionist school has countered the tradition of Young and others. A reassessment of old data and the formulation of new data have led to opposing answers to this question. In this essay I will outline and discuss the classic as well as the revisionist arguments.

Allen terms the classic viewpoint on property rights and agrarian institutions as Agricultural Fundamentalism. Agricultural fundamentalism explains how and why England’s agriculture developed more quickly than France’s. This theory emphasizes how agrarian institutions and property rights were crucial to the development of English agriculture and the so-called retardation of French agriculture. Enclosure, a concept that contains institutional and teneurial facets, is central to this classic argument. The enclosures of open-fields created capitalist farming and extended markets. Agglomerated farms allowed the accumulation of capital, which in turn led to the rapid diffusion of more intensive mixed husbandry techniques. With greater capital accumulation a greater intensity of animals could be farmed, thus raising output from animal products, and raising arable yields through the nitrogen-fixing properties of manure. Young argued that larger, enclosed farms were necessary for this intensification of livestock rearing. Marxists and Tories alike agreed that enclosure raised agricultural productivity and output, although only the Marxists argued that it led to a fall in rural employment. The enclosure movement in England, especially the post 1750 Parliamentary Enclosure movement allowed now redundant rural labour to move into urban areas to power the industrial revolution. The agricultural revolution was a prerequisite for the industrial revolution.

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Traditionally it has been argued that France’s failure to match England’s agricultural productivity, or its failure to reform its agricultural system, necessitated its much slower industrial development. The agrarian revolution was delayed which in turn restricted industrial growth. France’s failure to enclose its open fields was seen by Young as the reason for France’s failure to improve agriculture productivity. There can be no doubt whatsoever that France was slow to enclose. By the end of 19th century 40% of French agricultural land was still in peasant hands, whereas a mere 11% was in the hands of the English rural poor. France’s failure to enclose has been linked to a wide variety of factors. The strength and experience of the peasantry in maintaining their access rights from the seigneurs went back decades, and historians have suggested that ancien regime monarchs protected such rights in order to protect their tax base. The French revolution, which occurred during the height of the third enclosure movement in England served to strengthen the peasants’ position. Partage and other inheritance measures meant small farms persisted, whilst judicial and tax reforms eased the peasantry’s economic burden. The accompanying inflation of the period served to eradicate peasant debt which augmented the peasant’s ability to buy land. The French peasantry, as O’Brien describes, were wiling to trade the short run gains from enclosure for the stability and wealth of landowning. In contrast rural workers in England continued to lose land. The power of the French peasantry and their penchant for landownership is directly contrasted with the seemingly helpless and landless position of the rural population in England. In England the enclosure movement, which originated with tenant evictions in 16th century, had all but removed peasant rights to common land by 1815. The English peasantry now worked for larger, more efficient capitalist farms owned by a few great landowners. This concentration of landownership is traced back to the aristocratic domains generated by the Norman Conquest of 1066. The strong British monarchy and ability of the governing classes to ride roughshod over the rural masses allowed the open-field system to be enclosed, agricultural productivity to rise and labour to be released into the growing urban manufacturing sectors. The differing political and legal heritages of the two countries facilitated differing levels of enclosure at differing times, which in turn raised England’s agricultural productivity ahead of France and allowed agrarian and industrial revolutions to proceed apace.

This classic argument has been revised in the last forty years. There have been a variety of challenges to the basic thesis, but for this essay two main criticism stand out. Firstly, the causal function of the system of property ownership and agrarian institutions has been reviewed and secondly the extent of the productivity gap has been called into question. Allen and others have questioned the role of enclosure in increasing agricultural productivity and thus revising the seemingly sacred rhetoric of Young and the early secondary historians. Allen’s study of the South Midlands placed emphasis on yields as opposed to real rents as a measure of agricultural productivity. Rents are poor indicators of agricultural productive, as Clark argues, as they are distorted in their raw format by land inflation and tithe levels. Turner, Becket and Afton highlighted very low real rents rises accruing from enclosure, and Clark estimated that a 40% rise was the very highest possible increase. Thus Overton’s argument that parliamentary enclosure directly caused some kind of agrarian revolution is contradicted by rent level data. Allen is even more skeptical of the productivity effects of enclosure. He negates the rent problem by analyzing yield data in the south Midlands. He sees the period of 1750 to 1800, the apex of the parliamentary enclosure movement, as a period of stagnation in productivity growth. He does admit that enclosure had some positive productivity effects at differing levels of agricultural intensity, but crucially he sees these small gains in the context of a longer period of productivity growth. Allen argues for a rising productivity trend since the middle ages and makes to sure emphasize the role of open-farmers in increasing yields per acre. Allen sees a yeoman revolution, which enabled large productivity growth on owner-occupied farms followed by a landlord revolution. Was it the system of tenure that allowed the yeomanry to develop on owner occupied farms that allowed productivity to rise? The yeomanry powered productivity growth on open fields whilst enclosure by the landlords merely redistributed income in their favour as rents rose to reflect their true market value. In this way he sees Young as an apologist for the aristocracy. Young’s proclamations of efficiency, new intensive husbandry and higher levels of capital are in Allen’s eyes an attempt to conceal a self-interested process of income redistribution. Clark adds weight to Allen’s argument by questioning why enclosure did not occur earlier. Clark dismisses real rent gains estimated at well over 100% by contemporary sources and labels 18th century reformers as “wild-eyed”. The efficiency gain of enclosure was only 2.8% between 1720 and 1840 and barely profitable before this period. Enclosure happened at this time because the relative costs of the investment needed for enclosure fell. Clark states that common fields persisted in northern Europe because they were not inefficient! If enclosure was so profitable and productive why did it not happen earlier?

If we question the role of property rights and agrarian institutions as the main reason behind the differences in productivity we must seek alternatives for the supposed productivity gap. Newell argues that the diffusion of mixed husbandry was at least partly responsible for the agricultural revolution. He sees the adoption of these new forms of husbandry as crucial to the raising of yields. His argument would therefore support a positive answer to the question by suggesting that the earlier diffusion of mixed husbandry in England was responsible for its earlier agricultural productivity growth. However, Grantham continues where Newell left off by suggesting that the relatively slow diffusion of intensive animal husbandry in France was in a large measure due to factor endowments. Grantham sees the lands around Paris utilizing the modern husbandry more readily because of the loamy nature of the soil. The costs of converting to this new husbandry were high and a farm’s productivity often fell upon initial conversion. Therefore diffusion would be quickest in areas were yields would recoup investments in the shortest possible time. Grantham saw soil and climate as the main determinants for the diffusion of new intensive husbandry techniques, and as O’Brien shows England had a distinct advantage over France in both quality of land and climate. Relative prices were also important. The introduction of railways and the surge in urban meat consumption between 1840 and 1860 raised meat prices and urban demand to a level that encouraged intensive husbandry diffusion. O’Brien agrees to some extent with Grantham. The differing natural endowments of England and France meant that new agricultural methods diffused at different rates. The higher number of farm animals per head in England, a reflection of a historical trend as well as capital formation trend, allowed easier diffusion in England. Similarly relative advantages in relief, soil type and climate also heightened diffusion in England.

The work of Patrick O’Brien sheds new light on the productivity gap between the two countries. O’Brien compares the yields of the most productive land in both countries and sees little difference in productivity. He extrapolates further and remarks that the highest yielding land in France differs very little in terms of tenure type from the rest of France. O’Brien attributes 58 to 71% of the difference in relative productivity to the superior land endowment of British farmers. This larger land endowment is in many ways due to natural factors, but also the increased attachment to the land felt by the French peasantry. The French peasantry are then in some way responsible for the labour productivity gap by over-populating rural areas. O’Brien suggests that this lower labour productivity is partly caused by the French peasantry’s lack of mobility. However, he informs us that the French peasantry were far from the boorish, ill-informed farmers that contemporary writers portray. O’Brien states that agricultural productivity in farming was roughly similar to that of England’s and that the only real difference was in arable productivity. Yet, O’Brien attributes only 40% of the productivity variation to physical yields and crop mix. The allocation of land between pasture and arable was the key to the slower development of French agriculture. Even if yields on the arable had approached British levels productivity would have been significantly lower. It is hard not to see O’Brien’s work as reaffirming the importance of natural endowments in the relative agricultural development of the two agricultures. However, he is also sure to affirm the significance of the deficiency of capital in French agricultural that resulted from small-scale farm size. O’Briens’ important work suggests that small scale farm size, or the strength of the peasantry, was important in restricting capital accumulation and thus the adoption of new productive techniques, but he also stresses the importance of non-tenurial and non-institutional factors.

The earlier adoption of intensive mixed husbandry aided the growth of agricultural productivity in England over France. Yes, enclosure certainly aided this process, but the majority of the groundwork was accomplished by the English yeomanry in the open-fields before the classic late 18th century period of enclosures. If we must talk about the significant causal functions of systems of property ownership we should do so in periods well before the classic 1750 waves of enclosure. The persistence of France’s system of peasant farming was certainly aided by systems of property ownership highlighted earlier in this paper, but this form of agriculture is perhaps less inefficient than historians first thought, especially as the gains from more enclosed layouts have been down graded. Newer works correctly highlight the importance of natural endowments and ratios of land to labour. Indeed historians are beginning to question whether a large productivity gap existed at all. It would be presumptive to assume that French agricultural productivity was on a par with England’s, but it would be short sighted, unfair and narrow to suggest that the differences were entirely down to systems of property ownership. Yes, the speed of diffusion of new techniques of husbandry was important, but it would be incorrect to blame the peasantry for the France’s slower adoption of intensive animal husbandry. It is too easy to overly praise the visible effects of enclosure and too unfair to underplay the diligence and innovation of both the English yeomanry and the French peasant.