LAND TENURE

Liana Vardi

Types of property and patterns of landownership might, on the surface, seem to belong less to social history than to economic history, describing the distribution over time and space of small and large farms, or to legal history as a branch of contract law. Land tenure, however, is woven into the very fabric of society, reflecting concepts of property, hierarchy, and individual rights. Describing changes in land tenure thus involves describing changes in the society at large. This makes understanding land tenure both interesting and challenging.

Land tenure in preindustrial Europe has long been the focus of historiographical debate. Painstaking research into landholding has been driven by more than antiquarian curiosity. The resulting information has figured prominently in scholarly debates about distribution of land and about peasants' need for and attachment to the land. Those who equate country life with rural idiocy might not view the peasants' dispossession of their land with as much distress as those who imbue rural life with rustic virtues. If owning land is linked with independence and dignity, then dispossession will seem a cruel blow. The study of land tenure has thus been able to evoke strong feelings: a desire to do justice to the dispossessed; a drive to understand the process of modernization, associated (until recently) with large-scale farming and treating small properties as hindrances to progress; and a wish to go beyond generalizations to recover the full complexities of the past with its variations, exceptions, negotiations, and multiple agencies. Until the 1970s, historians tended to equate country life with land, meaning that gradations in landownership were taken to represent gradations in wealth, disregarding the import of secondary or alternate sources of income. Thus, forms of property and tenure were profoundly intertwined for much of European history. In fact, in its simplest and most reductive form, the history of land tenure in much of Europe might be taken as the emergence and eventual victory of private property over previous forms of tenure.

As the defining feature of rural life, land tenure holds much less sway than it used to. Historians used to fasten on the constraints that antiquated land tenure imposed. They attached importance to both legal and cultural constraints. First, the excessive "surplus extraction" by lord, church, and state left the peasant with the bare minimum. Second, the terms of tenure were so rigid that they allowed peasants and farmers little room to innovate, and should they manage to get around those, they would be trapped by the demands of communal farming and grazing. Third, peasant value systems were geared toward family survival rather than economic profit. To that end, peasants were always struggling to get more land or to hold on to their small properties, rather than concentrating on making these commercially viable.

Late-twentieth-century scholarship focused more on how peasants, be they freeholders, or long-term or short-term tenants, took advantage of economic opportunities, negotiating loopholes or disdaining constraints altogether. The collection, The Peasantries of Europe (1998), edited by Tom Scott, is a case in point. Its authors view the organization and accessibility of markets as far more important than legal categories and treat peasants as responding to market forces, by choice or of necessity. Rare is the author who still clings to the notion of a downtrodden peasantry crushed by feudal oppression or to a "romantic" view of the past with its moral economy of mutual aid and communal institutions. In the same way, gone is the notion that peasants were backward and routine-bound, living in self-sufficient worlds (even if they paid state taxes) or "part-societies" (a term favored by rural anthropologists in the wake of Robert Redfield and updated by Eric Wolf ).

LAND TENURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE SEIGNEURIE

Any discussion of land tenure involves by implication a discussion of feudalism and seigneurialism (manorialism for British historians, Herrschaft for German ones), for they imparted to land tenure much of its complexity, including a superfluity of attributes that centuries of practice and resistance whittled down and finally abolished. The history of land tenure in Europe must therefore begin in the Middle Ages, when these systems originated.

Land has always been important, of course. Until the mid-nineteenth century, because of its low yields, agriculture was the major occupation of Europeans and 80 percent of the population, and in some cases more, were engaged in the cultivation of the fruits of the soil, edible and nonedible. To own land, therefore, meant the ability to feed, house, and clothe oneself and one's family. It also meant creating the surpluses that allowed other social groups to survive without working the land, be they nobles, churchmen, or city dwellers. Except in extreme circumstances, agriculture was always capable of producing such surpluses so that the possession and marketing of this produce was a profitable proposition. Ownership and control over land therefore provided the most obvious form of wealth and prestige, and this is why it was not left to the people who worked it.

In the Middle Ages all the land in any given country belonged in theory to the Crown, although actual ownership had devolved, via land grants, to the nobility in return for military services, to the church in recognition of its spiritual services, and to commoners by dint of immemorial possession that no one chose to contest and that the Crown, at some point, agreed to recognize. Such full-fledged peasant owners were always a minority. Noble recipients of land granted domains to other nobles, in turn, so that the countryside became a patchwork of properties of different sizes, whose possessors were arranged hierarchically and linked by a chain of allegiance. Land thus expressed one's place in society. It symbolized, first and foremost, military might as lords were required to support their superiors in battle, and, likewise, to protect the people who worked their land against aggression. This was the primordial contract struck between lord and commoner. Just as the priest was meant to pray for his salvation, so the knight was meant to offer him protection, in return for which the peasant granted both a share of his produce. For some historians, this contractual relationship was real and all benefited from the arrangement. Others argue that the relationship was exploitative and rested not so much on mutuality as on an unequal distribution of power.

In addition to military power, land signified access to economic resources, and ownership brought with it administrative, judicial, and policing powers. When a lord obtained a tract of land (a seigneurie), sometimes in one large chunk, sometimes in several, he also obtained rights of justice over it. The peasants who were settled and working the land, or whom he brought to the land, were under his jurisdiction and subject to his law. Even if the lord could not act totally arbitrarily and was bound, to some extent, by customary or civil law, he had the right to judge, fine, and condemn his peasants as if they were his subjects. Where the state remained sufficiently organized and strong, the peasants could take their cases before this higher authority. But the devolution of power from the Crown to the lords in the Middle Ages reduced that capacity, until that time when the state began to reconsolidate and reclaim these rights. The high point of the seigneurial system in any given country was when most peasants fell under its dominion.

Before the Middle Ages some peasants had owned land outright, but, except for a few pockets where such independent owners survived for centuries (this land being known as alodial), most peasant owners eventually came under the control of a lord, and had to pay him a fee in recognition of his superior ownership of their properties. In one way or another, then, most peasants were tenants and owned tenancies. The full-fledged owner or seigneurial lord was not necessarily a nobleman. The Crown, the church, and wealthy burghers also owned seigneuries.

Besides the judicial and military powers it conferred, a seigneurie was viewed as an income-producing unit, subject at all times to fluctuations in prices, and the vagaries of supply and demand. Although landowners did not subscribe to some medieval version of the Financial Times, they were acutely aware of where profits lay and eager to make the most of them. Thus, depending on the region, they might view it as more sensible to lease as much of their land as possible, or on the contrary to hold on to it or "buy" it back from the peasants (whether peasants were coerced into selling or driven to sell by poverty and debt remains open to debate). A landowner might hire laborers or, even better, retain a steady supply of workers by granting them some land and demanding, in return, that they work his land three, four, and even in extreme cases six days a week. Feudalism granted the lord the power to enforce such decisions, which is why feudal economics cannot be separated from power.

Western European lords, as a rule, did not till their domains themselves. Their estates were divided into two distinct parts: the demesne, that part of the land that remained under their direct control, and tenures allocated to peasants. When the lord divvied up his domains or settled peasants on new land he insured himself a ready supply of workers who either worked part-time on his fields, or paid him a rent with which he hired servants. In Germany this system was called Grundherrschaft to distinguish it from Gutsherrschaft (most common in eastern Europe), where most of the estate remained under the lord's direct control.

Late medieval tenures were either long-term or perpetual leaseholds (emphyteutic), where the peasants received one or several plots, a garden, orchard, perhaps vineyard, or any combination or fraction of these to treat as their own and pass on to their heirs or even sell in return for a number of fixed dues, services, and fees that they owed the lord. The peasants were the de facto owners, having the use value of the land, but the lord remained the final proprietor and peasants continued to owe him dues and/or services in recognition of that fact.

Under the most oppressive conditions of tenure, serfdom, peasants were bound to the estate and forced to work the lord's domain in return for their allotments. Their servile status could be based on personal bondage—known as Leibeigenschaft in German, mainmorte in French, Remença in Spain, and neifty in England—or it could be a condition attached to the land, meaning to the peculiar demands of tenure on a seigneurial estate: the type of relationship that the English called villenage. In western Europe as of the later Middle Ages, personal bondage had been superseded by land based bondage and greater personal freedom. Labor services were commuted to cash, hold on tenures became more secure, and some of the more humiliating seigneurial rights were dispensed with. Peasants recovered their mobility, their ability to bequeath or to marry outside the seigneurie without the consent of their lord. Most important, most tenures became hereditary. Whenever possible, the lord converted previous constraints into payments. Thus, seigneurial relations were transformed into primarily economic transactions. Personal serfdom, on the other hand, was introduced into eastern Europe at the time when it was disappearing in the West, a process known as the second serfdom.

TENANT FARMING AND SHARECROPPING IN THE PREMODERN ERA

Most peasants and serfs, that is free and unfree rustics, possessed tenancies. The terms and nature of tenancy varied. They ranged from quasi ownership to full-fledged economically based rentals. Along with emphyteutic leaseholds, which were either perpetual or lasted up to ninety-nine years, there existed tenures of one to three lives (that of the husband, the wife, and their son, who could upon their death renegotiate for himself three further lives), medium-length tenures of eighteen to twenty-four years, and short-term rentals of one, three, six, or nine years; multiples of three were the most common for they reflected the three-field rotation cycle. Shorter leases were, much like modern rentals, gauged economically on the basis of market prices—in England this was called rack rent—rather than having the fixed fees of hereditary rights of tenure. The tenant-farmer typically paid a high entry fee (or fine) and an annual rent based on the anticipated returns from the land during the length of the lease. From the late Middle Ages onward this became the most common way of leasing the demesne, that part of his domain that the lord did not parcel out as tenures, especially in continental Europe (except east of the Elbe). From the demesne the practice eventually spread to other tenures as lords tried to increase their profits by reducing the number of emphyteutic tenures and making peasants pay returns proportional to their produce. This might happen, for example, when bad economic conditions coupled with high state taxation drove peasants into debt and forced them to relinquish their holdings. The lord might then buy the plots and rent them back under new terms. The progression in the types of tenancies, that is, the changing demands and needs of lords, can be reconstituted through surviving leases, grants, litigation, and sometimes legislation.

Rentals came in two basic forms: the fixed rents described above, which were adjusted with each new contract, and sharecropping agreements, where the landowner and renter supposedly shared the produce equally, hence the terms métayage in French and mezzadria in Italian from the words meaning "half." Although this terminology was most common, sharecropping agreements might only involve the payment of one-fifth or one-third of the produce, fitting better the Spanish usage of the term aparcería, or partnership. But in Spain also sharecropping ranged from one-third to equal shares in the produce. Sharecropping prevailed in some parts of Europe but not in others. It was, for example, unknown in England and much of northern Europe, but common in Italy, France, Spain, and parts of the Rhineland throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

Sharecropping contracts have generally been taken as a sign of poverty: the tenant, being unable to furnish any capital, relied on the owner to provide the seeds, animals, and running capital to work the farm, in return for which he offered his labor and tools and handed over half his produce. Sometimes, the landlord agreed to pay state taxes. In parts of north and central Italy, where sharecropping emerged in the twelfth century as a substitute for serfdom, small landholders with a few parcels took on sharecropping contracts, which augmented what they grew on their own plots (this combination of ownership and rental seems most typical of Piedmont). These farms of about ten to thirty hectares produced a little of everything: cereals, fruits, vegetables, and wine. As S. R. Epstein explains, this arrangement suited landlords, whose main concern was to reduce labor costs. Unlike specialized cash crops, the mixed production kept the workforce busy all year round, but was also less profitable in the long run. In Lombardy and in the south, where farms were much bigger, from 50 to 130 hectares, tenant-farmers (masseri) either hired laborers or sublet the less fertile parts of their land. By the eighteenth century tenant-farming had become more common in north and south Italy than sharecropping, which however survived in central Italy until the nineteenth century. Another arrangement that became widespread was the grouping of farms under common management (fattoria) worked either by tenant-farmers or day laborers. Sharecropping was slow to disappear from areas where it had existed for centuries. For example in 1862 there were still 400,000 tenant-farmers and 200,000 sharecroppers in France.

In the later Middle Ages, peasants did not lease for brief periods but had hereditary rights to tenancies, which were recognized by customary law (or the custom of the manor, hence in England peasants were known as customary tenants). As territorial states began to consolidate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, rulers upheld this customary law. In the case of England, unfree peasants came to be called copyholders because they were given a copy of the documents attesting their right to their tenure. The revival of Roman law, favored by centralizing rulers, was at first detrimental to peasants because Roman law defined much more bluntly the difference between free and servile status, and serfs were forbidden recourse to public courts and were left at the mercy of their masters.

Yet, because it was not in the long-term interest of most rulers to relinquish control over vast numbers of their subjects, territorial lords sided with peasants against seigneurial lords. Where once a "contract" had bound lord and peasant, with the first protecting the second in adversity in return for labor and rent, now the state inserted itself as the protector of the peasants against the demands of the lords. The Germans had a name for it: Bauernschutzpolitik, peasant protection policies. Peasants could once again appeal to public courts, and were liberated from the most onerous of seigneurial exactions. Instead they became liable to the public fisc. In France, as of 1439, the king forbade seigneurs from levying taxes and replaced them with his own. To put it bluntly, in this "trade" one bloodsucker replaced another. Seigneurial payments had not all been extinguished and continued to be a drain on peasant incomes. The demands of the state, however, represented the most onerous fiscal burden from then on.

SEIGNEURIAL DUES

Hereditary tenures owed periodic, usually annual, payments in cash or kind. The amounts were fixed at the time of the agreement. By the twelfth century inflation had reduced cash payments to insignificance, even if they were supplemented by a capon or some eggs. Where an additional rent was paid in kind (in France this was called a champart or terrage) it could be onerous: as much as 8 percent of the peasant's crop in France (likewise in Spain) levied right after the harvest. In the Middle Ages, lords derived as much as 90 percent of their income from various seigneurial payments. This amount diminished substantially over the next centuries, as lords came to depend primarily on rents and on income from royal and princely courts. By the late eighteenth century, seigneurial payments commonly represented 15 to 30 percent of revenues, although in some Germanic lands they might still amount to 50 percent, as they had in 1500. Payments varied from place to place because tenures were created at different times under different circumstances. No one can do justice to the multiplicity and variety of fees that might be asked of European tenants. Jerome Blum reports that a seigneurie in northwest Germany listed 138 different obligations. Such a variety defies generalization, and few scholars attempt it. Faced with a baffling array of incommensurable data, they are more likely to focus on dynamics within a specific region.

Lords not only charged a quitrent, or fixed fee, they were also entitled to collect a series of incidental fees, called casualties. Some related directly to their "eminent" possession of the land and were levied when a tenant sold his tenure (these went by different names: lods et ventes in French, laudemium in Latin, Lehnsgeld in German) or when he bequeathed it (in English, heriot). This fee might be trivial or rise to one-quarter of the value of the holding. Other payments had once signified the peasants' servile status: their lack of mobility, their inability to marry out of the seigneurie without the lord's consent (the fee known as marchet or formariage), or their obligation to support the lord's expenditures in war, contribute to his ransom, or help pay for his daughter's wedding. Lords could reclaim the land if a peasant died intestate, and had the right to forestall a sale (retrait seigneurial). In Catalonia, lords went so far as fining servile peasants whose wives committed adultery (cugucia). Paul Freedman has reminded us how deeply peasants resented such degrading payments, how hard they fought for their abolition, and how much they spent on manumissions, that is, the release from bondage. The bundle of offensive payments known as mals usos (bad customs) were rescinded in Catalonia in 1486 after a successful peasant rebellion.

By the eleventh century lords throughout Europe charged fees for the use of various services they monopolized: flour mills; bread ovens; wine and olive presses; local markets; passage on roads, bridges, and rivers; weights and measures; and forests or fishponds; and they fined anyone found poaching or bypassing their facilities. Casualties and banalités (seigneurial monopolies) were a way for lords to get additional moneys from their tenants, especially those tenants who had secure holdings with fixed rents, which brought lords little revenue. These payments could be changed or increased at will, although they tended to be governed by the custom of the manor/seigneurie. Labor services, which had been the hallmark of serfdom, were generally commuted into rent. Where they survived into the early modern period, they amounted to two or three days' labor a year, although sometimes as many as fourteen. Service days fell at harvest time, and peasants highly resented this interference with their own farming. But for the most part, payments that pertained to servile status were either abolished outright or withered into insignificance as part of the liberties western European peasants gained in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That made payments directly linked to land and various banal monopolies all the more important to lords. These survived for centuries in most of continental Europe, to disappear only in the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century.

Despite the clear coercive power of lords, the balance of power between them and their tenants was also governed by economic forces and demographic factors. The support of the state played an important role, and peasant resistance should not be underestimated. Rural communities fought excessive seigneurial exactions with lawsuits and uprisings. Moroever, seigneuries did not always coincide with villages, but could be spread over several, or cover only a part of any given village, depending on how and when they had been constituted. Thus, most peasants lived in villages with multiple owners and lords. As time went on, peasants could also appeal to a reconstituted central state. Everywhere, there were multiple, competing authorities, and peasants learned quickly how to play one against the other.

Although there is no uniformity, scholars estimate that by the eighteenth century peasants paid half of their net profits to the state in taxes, to the church as tithes, and to the seigneurs in rents and dues. In Germany, 60 percent of peasant payments went to the state (representing 25 percent of average output), 30 percent to the lords, and 10 percent to the church. In the mid-eighteenth century the French physiocrat François Quesnay believed a similar distribution to be true of France. Taxes, dues, and tithes might take from one-third to one-half of peasant produce in France and Spain, but only one-third in Switzerland and Austria. These figures sometimes include rent and sometimes not. State taxation increased everywhere, rising to intolerable amounts in wartime, and hitting peasants especially hard since they bore the brunt of the burden. Rents also fluctuated depending on economic circumstances. They rose during the eighteenth century, cutting into tenant-farmer profits. The difficulty in assessing the weight of such exactions is not merely that demands might fluctuate from year to year, but that no one can say for certain how much peasants produced. Payments were either tendered in coin or kind, meaning primarily wheat, the most valuable of cereals. Average yields in Europe before the agricultural revolution have been estimated to lie anywhere between 2:1 and 10:1, although 4:1 seems the most likely. Peasant expenditures have been calculated on that uncertain basis. Given the uncertainty about peasant incomes, estimates reinforce both bleak and sanguine views of the peasant estate.

SERFDOM AND THE STATE

Historians assess the factors that were most significant in altering agrarian relations in the fourteenth century differently. Some (Annales school historians in particular) have emphasized demographic factors. Others (particularly marxists) have argued that the crisis was political and signified a long-term transformation of the feudal economy and its mode of surplus extraction into its absolutist version. These arguments were particularly ferocious in the 1970s, culminating in what is known as the Brenner debate, after Robert Brenner's attack on neo-Malthusian interpretations. Research on peasant resistance in the 1980s and 1990s has bolstered the Brenner side of the debate by fastening on local power relations. While few contest the significance of the demographic crises of the fourteenth century, they disagree about the peasants' ability to profit from them, which, not surprisingly, varied from place to place.

The late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries witnessed population explosion, land hunger, and rising prices with concomitant declining wages, followed by a series of catastrophes—crop failures, wars, and epidemics, of which the worst was the Black Death of 1348. These disasters drastically reduced population, lowered demand for food, collapsed agricultural prices, and raised wages. While lords had been eager to take advantage of favorable economic conditions to regain control of the fields, peasants after the plague were able to improve their lot significantly. Lords who had acquired vacated farms were looking to rent them. Depopulation put peasants in a position of strength, and many won freedom from serfdom, reduced rents, and secure tenures from lords eager to attract them. This was not the universal response, however.

Lords, conscious of their power, tried at first to compel peasants to remain on their land by reinstituting a harsh serfdom that severely restricted their mobility. They failed in this because peasants fled to more welcoming terrain or openly rebelled. Lords were successful in England and Catalonia, where serfdom was reintroduced with the support of temporarily weakened states. By the late fifteenth century, however, serfdom had been officially abolished in Catalonia and had disappeared from England. Italy also underwent a form of refeudalization between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, which consisted primarily in the landowners' recognition of the overlordship of territorial states rather than in the enserfment of the peasants.

In eastern Europe, which is a case apart, serfdom was successfully introduced in the sixteenth and seventeenth century by lords who controlled large estates and wanted them worked by compulsory labor services. In Germany east of the Elbe, Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, the Danubian Principalities, and Russia, serfdom became the norm at a time when it disappeared almost completely from western Europe. In those regions, lords' control over a servile population was ratified by state legislation and survived until abolished in the nineteenth century.

The reinstitution of serfdom in England and Catalonia in the fourteenth century, and later in eastern Europe, was achieved with the collaboration of recreated territorial states, whose rulers needed the support of their nobilities, and whose royal decrees upheld seigneurial law. State formation had two major consequences: the introduction of civil law that competed with customary law, and taxation that vied with the lord's exactions.

COMMUNAL ASPECTS OF LAND TENURE

One factor that made tenure so complex was that no owner or renter in pre-modern times had the exclusive usufruct of his property. All land had a communal dimension, and most villages also owned land communally. These should not be conflated.

Villages consisted of arable fields and pastures and areas that were considered too sterile to till—wastes, swamps, roadways, and fields that had been abandoned and never reclaimed. Often, the barren lands were turned into communal meadows; in some places they belonged to the seigneur, in others to the village community by dint of immemorial possession or documentary evidence. In northern France where the adage "nulle terre sans seigneur" (no land without a lord) obtained, the land was presumed to belong to the lord unless the community could prove otherwise. In the south the opposite was true, for there it was the seigneur who needed to show proof: "nul seigneur sans titre" (no lord without a title). This distinction became especially important in the eighteenth century, when both seigneurs and villagers claimed to own such communal land or "commons." This land was used primarily for grazing cattle and, while extremely important to all peasants, was crucial for smallholders who had no other way to pasture their animals. A vast literature examines that question for England during the period of enclosures, when the commons vanished. Communal properties were important in Spain, Italy, Alpine regions, and elsewhere where pasturing was a major activity. The privatization of the commons in early modern Europe (usually by state decree), to feed a growing population, went hand in hand with an expansion of the arable at the expense of pasture.

Besides this unclaimed/communal land, all land became at some point communal, notably in regions of open-field farming. The village arable was divided into large sections—two in the case of biennial rotation and three in triennial—that were planted at the same time with the same crop or left fallow. These fields, either when fallow and overgrown with weeds or after the harvest, would be turned into grazing grounds, primarily for sheep. Given the lack of fodder, grazing on the stubble made the possession of animals possible. Also, manure was the principal form of fertilizer before the advent of chemicals, making pasturing a necessary part of farming. All land was declared "open" to pasturing after the harvest, including artificial meadows where the community shared in the second crop. The lord, whose estate might be separate from or mingled within the peasant fields, was also entitled to graze his flocks on the stubble.

It was long presumed that lords were opposed to communal forms of farming and wished them replaced with enclosed private properties; but by the eighteenth century it was they, more often than not, who profited most from communal lands. Villagers benefited from the quid pro quos such as the right to scavenge for berries or wood in seigneurial and communal forests. As long as one was a village resident with some land, whether owned or rented, one was entitled to send one's animals on the communal grazing grounds, be they fallow or waste (the number of animals that could be pastured was sometimes prorated), and to share other use rights. For this reason, "closed" villages in Germany and Austria carefully controlled residence and membership in the village community.

Such seasonal devolution of fields into the common domain, such rights of pasture (which, if they spread beyond the village boundaries, were known as intercommoning), and the entire series of use rights came under severe attack in the eighteenth century, and they were replaced—sometimes easily, sometimes after a hard struggle—with enclosed farms and individual property rights. French Revolutionaries who decreed individual property rights and abolished feudal tenures as of the summer of 1789 could not agree about the fate of communal properties, and allowed Old Regime practices to stand. In Spain and Italy, restrictions on property rights eroded in the early modern period as communities sold their commons, usually to settle communal debts. Liberal reformers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made privatization a byword for liberty and progress.

In England, where philosophers had linked independence with individual property since the late seventeenth century, agricultural development was equated with big compact farms liberated from communal servitudes, where each farmer could grow what he wanted, when he wanted, without interference. Land was removed from common cultivation and enclosed as of the sixteenth century, though the pace quickened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. English scholars continue to argue the benefits and drawbacks of enclosures, assessing its effects on productivity and on a small peasantry deprived of communal grazing grounds. Elsewhere in Europe, the survival of communal practices into the modern period was taken, until recently, as a sign of economic backwardness.

FRAGMENTATION OF LANDHOLDINGS

A farm of twenty to twenty-five hectares had since the Middle Ages been taken as the basic unit of taxation, going by the Latin name of mansus, or "hide" in English, Hufe in German, mas in Spanish, and manse in French (but also charrue as the unit of land that could be cultivated with one plow). Smaller properties were assessed as proportions of the basic unit. Whether owned or leased, this was the amount considered necessary for self-sufficiency, for living off farming alone.

Yet, as of the twelfth century fragmentation became the norm, and the majority of peasants lived on far less, putting their survival at risk in times of dearth. The drop in population in the fourteenth century allowed the reconstitution of larger farmsteads but the process of fragmentation began as soon as population rose once more. That is why some seigneurs and territorial rulers insisted on impartible inheritance, which maintained viable farms and thus more secure bases for taxation and dues. In England, as in Catalonia, nobiliary models of primogeniture, favoring the eldest son, spread early to the peasantry (in Spanish, hereu). In the rest of Spain, however, all heirs shared in the inheritance. In the Hohenlohe region of Germany, the counts in 1562 and again in 1655 forbade peasants to divide their holdings. Regimes of impartible inheritance governed four-fifths of Germany, much of Austria, and a few regions of France. There, the child who inherited the farm had to compensate siblings with cash. In areas of partible inheritance, such as Castile, most of France, southern Germany, and Italy, patrimonies were split among all surviving children, although, there too, one heir could opt to buy out his siblings by common agreement. Peasant choices depended on family strategies for survival.The more one delves into what peasants actually did with their properties, the more complicated things look. One should keep in mind that the amount that peasants owned was not necessarily the amount they farmed. Early modern European peasants owned about one-third of the land directly, either as freeholders with full property rights or as seigneurial tenants with de facto ownership. But they tilled the remainder by leasing it from noble, ecclesiastical, and absentee urban landlords. The most successful, as we shall see, were the tenant-farmers of vast estates. But below them were plowmen (laboureurs in French, labradores in Spanish, and what Germans usually mean by Bauer) with some land of their own, and the farming implements (plows, horses, or oxen) to take on additional rentals. In most places in Europe, the best land had been granted to the privileged, so that rentals were generally more fertile and thus more profitable than peasant plots. Even peasants with only a few acres might rent a plot or two from other villagers—those too old to till it themselves or those who had moved away while keeping property in the village—or from the parish church. This land was not usually of high quality, but it provided a supplement. A mix of property and leasehold was therefore quite common.

Nonetheless, there was evident growing fragmentation and in the early modern period land tenure became more and more polarized between big holdings on the one hand and small or even tiny tenancies on the other. Demographic upsurge accounts for increased fragmentation at a time when it was no longer possible to extend the arable by cultivating the wastes or by clearing and colonizing new land. Several mitigating factors might explain why peasants would be willing to subdivide tiny plots: access to the commons, the availability of rental property, supplementary work on large estates, the option of planting vines (which necessitated little land for a decent return), and cottage industry. Although the result could be pauperization and eventually "proletarianization" as peasants made do with only a house and selling their labor, it is wrong to think of peasants as lemmings, accepting misery as their lot.

Everywhere, near-landless peasants became a majority. Spain in 1792 reported 16.5 percent peasant owners, 30.5 percent renters, and 53 percent day laborers. In early modern Italy, farms in the central regions covered 10 to 30 hectares, whereas in Lombardy they ranged from 50 to 130 hectares and were surrounded by subdivided smallholdings, as were the latifundia in the south and in Sicily. In England, near-landless squatters and cottagers made up 20 to 90 percent of the rural population, depending on the region; overall they amounted to 20 to 30 percent in the sixteenth century, but close to 50 percent in the seventeenth century. The same was true of France where three-quarters of peasants tilled less than 5 acres (2.2 hectares). Fragmentation occurred even in areas of compact farms. In Austria in 1600, big, middling, and small peasantries represented respectively 9, 61, and 31 percent of the rural population. By 1700 the proportion was 18, 29, and 53 percent. In Saxony full holdings fell from 50 percent of tenures in 1550, to 25 percent in 1750, and 14 percent in 1843.

While tiny peasant holdings multiplied, large farms increased in size. In France, especially around Paris, tenant-farms grew from an average of 50 hectares (or two charrues) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to 80 hectares in the seventeenth century. The disruptions of the Fronde, the demands of the fisc, and the long drop in prices in the late seventeenth century caused havoc among middling peasants. Their abandoned holdings were integrated within existing farms, so that the average farm covered 135 hectares by the second half of the seventeenth century, and 210 hectares in the eighteenth century. Farms were much bigger in England than in France. In the eighteenth century, a large English estate was reckoned at 10,000 acres, or 4,000 hectares—ten times the size of the biggest French equivalent. In France, Jean-Michel Chevet reports, farms of 50 to 100 hectares grew at the detriment of farms in the 10 to 50 hectare range or smaller. The ranks of middling peasants thinned everywhere, although they fared better in Germany than elsewhere. There, rich farmers grew richer and poor ones poorer, but some middling peasants managed to hold onto their family farms, often with the help of landlords who extended them credit in difficult times.

Farms increased in size as lords consolidated their domains in order to profit from price rises (or, as happened in England, Spain, and parts of Germany, to convert their estates from arable to pasture when food prices dropped, and then back again to cereals when market conditions changed). In Italy, France, and England, the richest peasants were not substantial landowners in their own right. Rather they farmed the new, enlarged demesnes for the lords and owned only a few plots of their own. Such tenant-farmers prospered, especially where they managed to stay in place for generations. They intermarried, controlled village councils and vestries when they could, collected dues for the seigneurs and tithes for the church, acted as moneylenders to other peasants, and marketed grain on distant markets or dealt with urban grain merchants. Nicknamed coqs de village in France, they were a tight-knit oligarchy and for eighteenth-century agronomists they figured as the acme of rural society and hopes for future developments.

Historical revisionism has not downplayed the importance of rich tenant-farmers. Rather, scholars have examined more closely the "losers" in this trend toward bigger and bigger farms: the middle and small peasantry. In doing so, they have altered our picture of agrarian change. Thus, Robert C. Allen has argued that the agricultural revolution in England owed much to the middling groups of landowners (the yeomen) with 60 to 100 acres (25 to 40 hectares). They prospered in the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth century, introducing new crops, doubling their productivity, and laying the ground, so to speak, for the eighteenth-century large-scale improvements on big estates. Yet, by the eighteenth century large farms had the clear advantage over middling and small peasantry, although many more survived into the mid-nineteenth century than had been supposed.

Not too long ago, farm size was taken as the indicator of economic health: the bigger, the more efficient. The European ideal had once been the small, intensive, and highly productive family farm of medieval and early modern Flanders. By the eighteenth century this model had been superseded by the extensive farming (preferably of a specialized sort) using hired laborers—full-time servants, seasonal migrants, or local small peasants—which prevailed in Britain. This version governed analyses of economic growth from the eighteenth century onward. England was the model, France and other European countries poor replicas. Few people contest that the agricultural revolution began in England (though they disagree as to when) but they balk at the implicit value judgements. Local studies have shown that English progress was slower and more sporadic than once thought. Studies have also demonstrated that open-field farming could be as productive as enclosed properties. Concomitantly, research has revealed far more complicated and often advanced patterns on the Continent. The common understanding is that there was no right or wrong way to "modernity," but rather a multiplicity of paths. Regions once considered backward (Spain, for example), appear to have been as responsive to economic stimuli as "capitalist" England. If historians now uncover blockages in the way of economic growth, it is more in state taxation and the organization of markets than in seigneurial exactions, customary constraints, or forms of land tenure.

CONCLUSION

Land tenure, the historian Jerome Blum argued, can be divided into "good" and "bad." Good tenures made the least financial demands on peasants and their hold on them was most secure; bad tenures were accompanied by high demands for labor or rents and were revocable at will. Michael Bush has challenged that view, claiming that the best tenancies were in fact those that owed labor services, since peasants could spare the extra hands, profit from the security of tenure, be spared the fluctuations in prices, and avoid the dispossession of disinherited siblings that most western Europeans suffered. It is perhaps safest to say that peasants both lost and profited from agrarian regimes. The advent of private property in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, which abolished feudal eminent possession and made peasants the true proprietors of their holdings, freed peasants from irksome and sometimes onerous payments. At the same time, the concentration of land in a few hands—which progressed at different rates in different regions—meant that small and middling peasants were unable to compete in the long run, and had to abandon for good the small-scale part-time farming that had ordered peasant lives for centuries.

The mechanization of agriculture at the end of the nineteenth century, the important capital outlay that it required, and the vast properties that made it worthwhile transformed the European countryside yet again. Peasants, unable to compete, sold out, though in some parts of Europe not until after World War II. In Eastern Europe collectivized farms were imposed by Communist regimes, and briefly attempted by left-wing governments in the West, for example in Spain in the 1930s. Yet, it was the resilience of small-scale mixed farming that saved some Third World countries from total destitution in an era when foreign experts and the World Bank imposed on them the model of large-scale cash cropping. Such realizations are bound to complicate further our approach to and understanding of land tenure in the West.

See alsoThe Annales Paradigm; Marxism and Radical History (volume 1); and other articles in this section.

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