1 - Church Leaseholders on Durham Cathedral's Estate, 1540–1640: The Rise of a Rural Elite?

Summary

The decline of the peasantry and the associated emergence of the yeomanry as a social group in England has long provoked questions about the role of economic and cultural factors, as for instance over whether their relative market orientation represented oppressive seigniorial exactions or a unique peasant mentality. Eric Wolf's distinction that a ‘peasant runs a household, not a business concern’, succinctly represents this debate, suggesting not only a quantitative difference between commercial farmers and peasantries but also a qualitative one. Perhaps the most radical cultural definition of peasants in this period was applied by Alan Macfarlane, who drew upon anthropological studies of late nineteenth-century Polish and Russian peasantries to establish the characteristics of a peasant society in which there were no institutional property rights because land was vested in the family group. There could, therefore, be neither sale nor inheritance of goods, for no individual ‘owned’ them, and so he concluded that English society displayed a remarkable degree of individualism which precluded the existence of a peasantry. However, Jane Whittle has criticised this as being an ‘unusually constrictive definition of peasant society and economy, stressing an almost total lack of market relations in peasant societies’, whilst Henry French and Richard Hoyle have similarly criticised it for there ‘seemed to be no good reason why one historically specific form of peasantry should be the standard against which all others should be judged’. These three historians have in turn provided alternative definitions of peasant societies, with Whittle concluding that peasants are ‘small-scale agricultural producers who are in possession of land which is farmed primarily with family labour and with the main aim of providing the family directly with a means of subsistence’.

French and Hoyle, in their work on Earls Colne (Essex), have, furthermore, emphasised that there was a transformation in the mentalities of early modern farmers that was a key process in the decline of the English peasantry. They bear quoting at length:

We suggest that it was not only economic factors which forced small farmers out of farming, and drove the consolidation of their holdings, but that the change from a peasant to a non-peasant mindset was a crucial element in the dissolution of the peasantry as a social group.