That government can be scarcely deemed to be free where the rights of property are left solely dependent upon the will of a legislative body without any restraint.
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Samizdata quote of the day – Property rightsJune 18th, 2026 |
 15 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Property rightsLeave a Reply |
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Agreed – and this is not some new idea.
For example, as far back as 877 AD King Charles the Bald of France accepted that he did NOT have the legal power to take land from one family and give it to another family. That his will (“legislation”) was NOT the law – that natural law, natural justice, existed and applied even to the ruler or rulers.
As for “public use” – old Scots Law (correctly) held that there was no right to take land by force even to build a road, if someone would not sell – build round the property, do not steal it.
And in England, as recently as the 19th century, private land owners blocked the taking of land to build the mainline railway through Stamford (which remains only on an east-west – not a north-south line to this day) – instead the north-south mainline went through Peterborough – which wanted it.
If the law is just “the will of the state” (Thomas Hobbes and others) then there is no reason to respect the law – indeed if law is just “the will of the state” then there is a moral reason to oppose it, to actively resist it.
To declare that natural law, natural justice, does not exist also makes the oaths of British monarchs (going back at least to Henry the First in 1100) that they would not violate the law, meaningless – meaningless if the ruler (or rulers) will is “the law”. Remember Parliament (the High Court of the Monarch in Parliament) did not exist for centuries – and its role (when it was created) was to FIND law NOT to “make” law. This is forgotten today.
As for the Biblical view of this matter, the matter of unlimited government power – with the ruler (or rulers) will being “the law”, see the First Book of Samuel, Chapter Eight – a grim warning.
Agreed, Paul.
I presume this means that you are ferociously against the Enclosure Acts, and would, if possible, reverse them as much as is possible, and put such land back into the commons?
neonsnake – as I have told you before (at least I think I have told you before), the Enclosure Acts were mainly about land use, not taking land ownership away from individuals. No person in England had land they owned taken from them. Even in Russia the idea that a village communally OWNED much of the land was an invention of Alexander II in the 1860s – and it was his biggest blunder (no other country when ending serfdom had declared that “village communities” owned much of the land in-common – only Russia did this), Stolypin had to reverse it in the early 1900s by allowing individual peasants to opt-out of the “Mir” (a word used on Royal estates long before Alexander II – but the Mir on the Royal estates had not been the owner of the land – the Czar was). True the “Mirs” only covered part of Russia – but they caused much harm and Alexander II should not have done what he did. Either keep the land under the ownership of the nobles (as Prussia did) or give it to individual peasants (as France did) do not try and make “the village” the owner of much of the land.
In ENGLAND some land was held for certain special common uses – but that tended (tended) to remain in common use (under charitable trusts – for example some grazing land near what is now the University of York – although the grazing land is many centuries old and the university only dates from the 1960s). It was changing the use of arable land that the Enclosure Acts were mainly (mainly) about.
The Enclosure Acts also varied in importance – in one county they influenced the majority of farm land, I know that country because I live in it – Northamptonshire (in no other country was the majority of land use influenced in this way – although some counties came close), in other countries, such as Kent (where Dr Gabb lives) the percentage of land use influenced by the Enclosure Acts was zero.
To answer your question directly – other means could have been found to end strip farming and the three field system (which kept down production and meant that a rising population would stave to death) the Enclosure Acts were not the only way to do the job.
But it is not about ownership – the “village” did NOT own much of this land, that is not how English land law worked, even before the Enclosure Acts. Not even in the Middle Ages – see M.M. Posten “Medieval Economy and Society” and Alan McFarlane “The Origins of English Individualism” – the idea that the “village community owned the land” (which I suspect you believe) was just not the case – and if they did not own the land (which they did not), the ownership of it can not have been taken away from them – because they never had this ownership.
If you really want to cite an example of the taking of land away from owners – it is the Norman Conquest that you should be looking at.
Within a few years after 1066 there were only a handful of Anglo Saxon tenants-in-chief (land holders left – due to the legal fiction that King William now owned all the land – and due to the claims of treason (real or imagined) by previous land holders.
The Normans themselves felt uneasy about all this – hence the practice of marrying into Anglo Saxon families, even Henry the First did this – marrying a direct descendant of Alfred the Great (which is why Charles III is a descendant of Alfred the Great).
The, unspoken – but obvious, message was clear – “we may have stolen the land – but we have married the daughters of the previous owners, so our children will be the rightful owners”.
Like yourself neonsnake – I think that was a rather self serving argument.
So it is the Norman Conquest, not the Enclosure movement, that should be your target.
Sir Walter Scott in “Ivanhoe” had a point – some people considered the Normans robbers for at least one generation, and this point was brought up for centuries. Yes for centuries some people used the line “the Norman Yoke” – even though no family was “pure” Norman any more.
And then there is the reverse point – Anglo-Saxon (i.e. English) merchants, or even wealthy peasants (hello Paxton family – but many others as well) buying up land, or marrying into Norman families (who had lost their money) – and then changing their name to sound Norman (when they were not).
The wheel turns.
In Scotland (under the old law) it was simpler – whoever bought the estate had the title of nobility as well, in England titles of nobility came from the King (which meant that Mr Smith, or whatever other Englishman, had to do some fancy footwork to get the title of nobility as well as the land) – in Scotland it was much simpler, if you owned the land (even if you had bought it five minutes ago) you were the lord – till old Scots law fell.
That is why Dr Johnson’s friend Mr Boswell was called a lord in Scotland – even though his family had never been given any title of nobility by a King, they had bought an estate – so, as far as the old customs were concerned, they were the lord – laird. Even though the law had officially changed. And the noble, the person who had bought the land, was expected to lead the local folk into battle – if summered by the King, or if there was a private dispute with people of a different area.
In Kettering (here in England) the Sawyer family claimed to be Lords of the Manor (at least they acted as if they were) – but they were not (the Watsons in Rockingham were) buying land in Kettering did not make you lord of anything – but the Sawyers did not want to be told that. A rather hot tempered family – their raid on Wellingborough during the Civil War of the 1640s (searching for Catholics – who only existed in their imagination) showed that, it started badly when one of the Sawyers got killed (stoned to death by local women), but then they got a lot of Roundhead soldiers in from Northampton and sacked Wellingborough (I suspect the folk there have never forgiven us in Kettering for that). The Sawyers also had a habit of beating up tax collectors (the female as well as male members of the household taking part in the beatings) – and then apologizing afterwards and paying big fines.
They lost their money in the South Sea Bubble and then they were forgotten – the family seems to have died out in London where they fled to (cities are the slaughterers of humanity in history – families that live in cities tend to die out). All rather sad.
Come to think of it – there is a strip system of farming still going in a small (very small) part of Leicestershire – with the annual meeting to assign strips of land, and all the rest of it.
Quite bonkers – but, as it is very small scale, it does no harm.
It was also exported to Massachusetts – but it did not last long there.
And I forgot about the mass stealing of land by Henry VIII – church land, land owned by the body corporate (corporation) that is the church, and specific subdivisions (also bodies corporate) of it – such as monasteries.
Henry and his Chief Minister Cromwell at first wanted to keep the land in state ownership – but the Scottish war meant it had to be sold. To finance Henry’s wild spending.
What could have been done was to repeal all the 16th century Acts of Parliament that made it difficult for land owners to enclose land (i.e. change land use – not land ownership) without following special procedures.
Had that been done, the 18th century Acts of Parliament (the “Enclosure Acts” that neonsnake refers to) would not have been necessary – Parliament was dealing with a problem that a previous Parliament (previous Parliaments) had created.
As for the ideology behind the 16th century Acts – it was associated with “Protector” Somerset and his adviser John Hales – who, for example, believed that inflation was caused by “greed” rather than by debasement of the coinage to help pay for the Scottish war (in short John Hales was bonkers – he was also admired by the early 20th century writer J.M. Keynes)
One difference between the two centuries was the use the land was to be put to – in the 16th century arable land was being converted into pasture for sheep, in the 18th century (in England) the land was to remain arable – but was going over to a different form of land use (in some areas) enclosed fields – rather than large fields with a strip system.
Again this was the wheel turning – as before the Anglo-Saxons the field system had been one of enclosed fields (going back at least to the Bronze Age) and it remained so in some areas – such as Kent.
The big “Open Fields” with their strip system were more a feature of the East Midlands – counties such as Northamptonshire. But, again, this was not a matter of land ownership – “village communities” did not own this arable land.
No, you haven’t “told” me. You’ve proffered an opinion, which is not the same thing. You’ve gish-galloped, instead (as you did here). I rather suspect that you’re unaware of the history of Enclosure, and how it was used to take away peoples’ ability to live freely, to consciously and deliberately remove their ability to look after themselves, and indeed to remove their liberty. Or, maybe you are aware, and approve. Neither would surprise me.
It is a matter of historical record that the Enclosures were enacted, at least in part, to subdue and remove freedom and independence, and to force people into wage labour.
It’s amusing to me that you bring up the Mirs, of all things – I can only assume that you don’t know precisely why they struggled to continue to exist, post Alexander II, or you are choosing to ignore the reason – it was because of the unfeasibly onerous payment terms imposed upon the former peasantry after their so-called “emancipation”, and not because of any inherent “inefficiency” in the Mir system. All of this is a matter of verifiable record. They were pretty much capable, mostly, to seeing to their own needs, even under harsh conditions, but were certainly not able to do so when they had to pay back the former landowners (who did not own that land by any feasibly defensible moral right). It wasn’t the “commons-based” land ownership that ruined them, it was the privatisation, in as-much-as they suddenly now needed to pay for access to their customarily-held lands.
neonsnake – you can not steal land from someone who does not own it, that is not an “opinion” that is a fact.
Please try and understand that the “village communities” may have owned a lot of land in Russia, after the terrible mistake of Alexander II (ending serfdom was NOT a mistake – but putting lots of land under the Mirs was a mistake, a terrible mistake), but they never did in England.
They did not own much land here. You are confusing land use (which they had) with land ownership – which (mostly) they did not have.
That is why tenants paid rent – because they not own the land.
Your communes are a fantasy inside your own mind – they do not belong in the real world.
neonsnake – would you, at least, accept that the Mir land ownership system, created by Alexander II, in Russia was a disaster? Although much of Russia was, thankfully, not under this system of land ownership.
It was a disaster – and allowing farmers to opt out of it was the least Stolypin could have done in the 1900s. Not even Mr Putin wants to bring it back.
And if it was a disaster in Russia, which it was, why would creating such a system in England not be a disaster?
Of course. However…
1) The Mir land ownership system was not created by Alexander II. It had been in place for centuries (I’m not able to pinpoint an exact date, but at least since the 16th Century, and one has to assume that it was in place before then, although I cannot be 100% certain.
2) There’s overlapping reasons why the Mir system failed post-1861, but an extremely material one is that the villages/Mirs/whatever were required to pay reparations back to the previous landowners. Those payments were so high (because Alexander II allowed the landowners to draft the legislation), that the Mirs were no longer able to sustain themselves, when they had been able to do previously. They were “legally” free, but by no means “practically” free. Ending serfdom, as you say, was NOT a mistake – 100% agree, no argument here – but the terms on which it was ended made failure inevitable.
3) Were they inefficient? Potentially yes (although this is up for debate, given what we know now about the long-term effects of mono-cropping etc). But where does that lead us, in terms of freedom and liberty? Should someone (or a group of someones) be free to be inefficient? I say yes, they should, if the alternative is a mandate from the state. They should be free to recognise for themselves that their method of (in this case) farming is inefficient, and should be modernised. An argument based around “Well, I understand that we took away their liberty and freedom, but they got better crop growth” is a utilitarian argument – I poked you on this a few weeks back, because you’ve always been vocal about your disdain for utilitarianism – a disdain which I 100% share, by the way.
In terms of the UK, I’ve little to no interest in mapping out whether Kent or Northamptonshire were more or less affected by the Enclosures. It has no relevance to my overall point; I don’t care where it happened or where it didn’t.
You’re talking about “legalities” and I’m talking about “moralities” – yes, I know full well that legally, feudal tenants didn’t own the land. But they had customary rights to the commons – rights that had been built up over centuries by literal common custom (albeit not put down on “paper”) – to graze their cattle, for their pigs to run in the woods, to gather firewood, to fish, and so on and so forth. Those customary rights – and yes, obviously those rights were granted by feudal lords, but they were widespread and generally accepted – were wiped out by the Enclosures Acts. And that “legality”, the “laws” upon which Enclosure stood, which defined who owned land and the laws governing it…were pushed through by a parliament of landowners and lawyers. It’s not hard to work out that they would have skewed it in their favour.
Those “customary” rights granted people the ability to live free. They were by no means perfect, obviously enough, but at least they gave people the right – however nominal – to subsist on something approaching their own terms. Contrary to popular belief, peoples’ lives were not generally “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, as Hobbes put it (I’m confident that you agree with me on this), and recent anthropological studies confirms this.
But the Enclosures criminalised freedom and liberty – both the right and the practical ability to live free of a master.
And, of course, this was – at least in part – deliberate.
From the time:
“In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion increases by indulgence; and at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.” (John Billingsley)
“The use of common land by labourers operates upon the mind as a sort of independence.” (John Bishton)
On the effects of Enclosure: “The labourers will work every day in the year, their children will be put out to labour early, and that subordination of the lower ranks of society which in the present times is so much wanted, would be thereby considerably secured. ” (John Bishton again, emphasis mine)
“Often at a loss for labourers: the inclosure of the wastes would increase the number of hands for labour, by removing the means of subsisting in idleness” (John Clark)
“The greatest of evils to agriculture would be to place the labourer in a state of independence” (1807 Gloucestershire Survey)
The Enclosures were – at least in part – a deliberate war on liberty and freedom to survive on ones’ own terms.
I know full well that you believe that this is case today, with how corporations are set up with respect to sucking at the teat of government (which, again, I 100% agree with – zero argument on that from me); but I very much struggle to understand why you don’t believe it was the case in prior centuries.
(It feels to me sometimes like maybe you think that saying “yeah, that was crap, actually” about anything Britain did in the past is tantamount to admitting guilt; it isn’t. You weren’t involved, and hold no guilt for it)
neonsnake – you start with a incorrect statement, namely that the Mirs had owned the land for centuries.
That is nonsense. The Mirs did not even exist (on a large scale) outside the Royal Estates (before Alexander II spread them) – and they did not own the land even on the Royal Estates, not before Alexander II. The Czar owned the land on the Royal Estates – till Alexander changed that.
His experiment of Mir land ownership was a disaster – the least Stolypin could do in the early 1900s was allow farmers to opt out of it. It is not that you do not know that communal land ownership is a disaster – you know it is a disaster, and that is why you support it.
You have even claimed, in the past, that village communities owned the arable land before the “Enclosure Acts” in ENGLAND – thus confusing (deliberately confusing) land use (land use in some areas) with land ownership.
I am tired of your incorrect statements, you are an enemy of liberty and an enemy of civilization, what you want (what you desire) is for vast numbers of people to suffer – to die of starvation. And I have quite enough of people like yourself – on the BBC, the Guardian, and so on. You have even expressed support (or semi support) for Mr Mamdani in New York – and have expressed support for theories you know to be utterly false, such as the Labour Theory of Value and Ricardo’s theory of land. You support such doctrines BECAUSE you know them to be false – hence, also, your deliberately incorrect statements about money.
You are a troll – you are not here to take part in honest discussion, you are here to annoy and provoke. That is your only purpose in being here.
My life is quite bad enough without having to hear from people like you in my spare time.
A King of Castile (I forget which one) passed an edict saying that tenants could not be evicted if they paid “customary rent” (part of the absurd “just price” doctrine – with government deciding what prices should be – for wages and rents are also prices) – this was part of the “Spanish Practices” that were mocked in Britain for centuries.
These “Spanish Practices” (a web of regulations) held back Spanish economic development for centuries, and held back many Latin American nations as well – even Theodore Roosevelt (a Progressive) mocked “Spanish land law”.
However, the tenants, even in Spain, were not called the “owners” of the land – and to claim that the tenants “owned” the land in England is nonsense, it shows (if sincere – although it is not sincere) that the person making the claim does not know what the word “tenant” means.
The “Anti Enclosure” Acts of the Tudor period were a violation of English land law and contract law generally – the “Enclosure Acts” of the 1700s should not have been needed to correct the “Anti Enclosure” Acts of “Protector” Somerset and company – because the Anti Enclosure Acts should never have been passed in the first place.
As for defending communal land ownership in Russia (the experiment pushed by Alexander II and others) – that is defending an utter disaster, it is a perverse (deliberately perverse) position.
Paul, I literally said in my post that “I know full well that legally, feudal tenants didn’t own the land.” Don’t accuse me of not knowing what the word “tenant” means when I’ve said it one post up.
And the Mir system of land-ownership absolutely has existed for centuries. I cannot conceive why you’d call that false, when a simple internet search shows that they’ve existed since way before the times of Alexander II.
You can bang on about how they failed after 1861 as much as you like, but if you ignore the main, material, reason why they failed (ie. the onerous repayment terms owed to the former landholders), after it’s been pointed out to you, then you’re knowingly spewing falsehoods.
As to whether I’m here to provoke?
Yeah, sure.
I’m here to provoke people into a slightly different way of thinking, that is more in line with genuine libertarianism. I’ll take the accusation of “provoke” as a point of pride. If you’re annoyed, well; there’s a reason for that, and it’s because you don’t actually believe in liberty and freedom for all.
It’s very difficult, because “property laws”, a few hundred years ago, were very different. The idea of an individual having absolute control over a tract of land would have been unthinkable, and yet people wish to project backwards modern laws, and pretend (yes, pretend) that those held at the time.
What was real, what actually happened, was people had customary rights to land, or “use and usufructuary” rights, that had been built up over centuries of common usage. This was not the same as the current usage of “property law” what with it being a few hundred years ago, and the world was different, and anyone who is pretending it’s the same, is absolutely incorrect, and should be utterly ignored, because they literally have no idea what they’re talking about.
This isn’t a defence of feudalism, of course; rather it’s a more honest explanation of how it worked. They needed to be ended. The people who defend the “Enclosures” as a way of ending it will, I suspect, end up in Hell, if such a thing exists.
I repeat my previous statements.
There is no need to type out the same things over and over again.
People who support communal land ownership, on a large scale, know what it leads to – and they want this horror to happen.
The Mirs (village councils) did not own the bulk of land in Russia before Alexander II (Mirs had been largely about the Royal estates – and there it was the Czar who owned the land) – indeed they paid (over time) some compensation for the land they were given (in part of Russia – certainly not all of the Empire) in a communal land ownership experiment – an experiment which failed, failed horribly.
As for “village communities” owning the bulk of arable land in ENGLAND – in reality tenants paid rent, that is why they were called tenants. And they paid rent as individuals – not as village communities.
In Israel these communal land ownership experiments were given massive help (both by the Labour government that used govern Israel – and by foreigners, who went to live on these communal land things – why people such as “Boris” Johnson went and did that, I do not know) – but they largely failed even there. Contrary to what people seem to believe in Britain – Israeli farming is not dominated by communal land ownership.