|
|
От
|
Chestnut
|
|
|
К
|
Любитель
|
|
|
Дата
|
19.04.2006 02:22:20
|
|
|
Рубрики
|
Прочее;
|
|
Re: У Вас...
>Вас наверное не затруднит привести оттуда статью об огораживаниях, например?
>Тогда каждый сможет сделать выводы о пристрастности либо беспристрастности Британники.
enclosure also spelled Inclosure,
the division or consolidation of communal fields, meadows, pastures, and other arable lands in western Europe into the carefully delineated and individually owned and managed farm plots of modern times. Before enclosure, much farmland existed in the form of numerous, dispersed strips under the control of individual cultivators only during the growing season and until harvesting was completed for a given year. Thereafter, and until the next growing season, the land was at the disposal of the community for grazing by the village livestock and for other purposes. To enclose land was to put a hedge or fence around a portion of this open land and thus prevent the exercise of common grazing and other rights over it.
In England the movement for enclosure began in the 12th century and proceeded rapidly in the period 1450–1640, when the purpose was mainly to increase the amount of full-time pasturage available to manorial lords. Much enclosure also occurred in the period from 1750 to 1860, when it was done for the sake of agricultural efficiency. By the end of the 19th century the process of the enclosure of common lands in England was virtually complete.
In the rest of Europe enclosure made little progress until the 19th century. Agreements to enclose were not unknown in Germany in the 16th century, but it was not until the second half of the 18th century that the government began to issue decrees encouraging enclosure. Even then, little advance was made in western Germany until after 1850. The same policy of encouragement by decree was followed in France and Denmark from the second half of the 18th century, in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs (1861), and in Czechoslovakia and Poland after World War I. Common rights over arable land—which constitute the most formidable obstacle to modern farming—have now for the most part been extinguished, but some European land is still cultivated in the scattered strips characteristic of common fields, and common rights continue over large areas of pasture and woodland.
И из статьи по истории Англии
By 1485 the kingdom had begun to recover from the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death and the agricultural depression of the late 14th century. As the 15th century came to a close, the rate of population growth began to increase and continued to rise throughout the following century. The population, which in 1400 may have dropped as low as 2,500,000, had by 1600 grown to about 4,000,000. More people meant more mouths to feed, more backs to cover, and more vanity to satisfy. In response, yeoman farmers, gentleman sheep growers, urban cloth manufacturers, and merchant adventurers produced a social and economic revolution. With extraordinary speed the export of raw wool gave way to the export of woolen cloth manufactured at home, and the wool clothier or entrepreneur was soon buying fleece from sheep raisers, transporting the wool to cottagers for spinning and weaving, paying the farmer's wife and children by the piece, and collecting the finished article for shipment to Bristol, London, and eventually Europe. By the time Henry VII seized the throne, the Merchant Adventurers, an association of London cloth exporters, were controlling the London–Antwerp market. By 1496 they were a chartered organization with a legal monopoly of the woolen cloth trade, and largely as a consequence of their political and international importance, Henry successfully negotiated the Intercursus Magnus, a highly favourable commercial treaty between England and the Low Countries.
As landlords increased the size of their flocks to the point that ruminants outnumbered human beings 3 to 1, and as clothiers grew rich on the wool trade, inflation injected new life into the economy. England was caught up in a vast European spiral of rising prices, declining real wages, and cheap money. Between 1500 and 1540, prices in England doubled, and they doubled again in the next generation. In 1450 the cost of wheat was what it had been in 1300; by 1550 it had tripled. Contemporaries blamed inflation on human greed and only slowly began to perceive that rising prices were the result of inflationary pressures brought on by the increase in population, international war, and the flood of gold and silver arriving from the New World.
Inflation and the wool trade together created an economic and social upheaval. Land plenty, labour shortage, low rents, and high wages, which had prevailed throughout the early 15th century as a consequence of economic depression and reduced population, were replaced by land shortage, labour surplus, high rents, and declining wages. The landlord, who a century before could find neither tenants nor labourers for his land and had left his fields fallow, could now convert his meadows into sheep runs. His rents and profits soared; his need for labour declined, for one shepherd and his dog could do the work of half a dozen men who had previously tilled the same field. Slowly the medieval system of land tenure and communal farming broke down. The common land of the manor was divided up and fenced in, and the peasant farmer who held his tenure either by copy (a document recorded in the manor court) or by unwritten custom was evicted.
The total extent of enclosure and eviction is difficult to assess, but between 1455 and 1607 in 34 counties 516,573 acres (208,954 hectares), or 2.76 percent of the total, were enclosed, and some 50,000 persons were forced off the land. Statistics, however, are deceptive regarding both the emotional impact and the extent of change. The most disturbing aspect of the land revolution was not the emergence of a vagrant and unemployable labour force for whom society felt no social responsibility but an unprecedented increase in what men feared most—change. Farming techniques were transformed, the gap between rich and poor increased, the timeless quality of village life was upset, and on all levels of society old families were being replaced by new.
The beneficiaries of change, as always, were the most grasping, the most ruthless, and the best educated segments of the population: the landed country gentlemen and their socially inferior cousins, the merchants and lawyers. By 1500 the essential economic basis for the landed country gentleman's future political and social ascendancy was being formed: the 15th-century knight of the shire was changing from a desperate and irresponsible land proprietor, ready to support the baronial feuding of the Wars of the Roses, into a respectable landowner desiring strong, practical government and the rule of law. The gentry did not care whether Henry VII's royal pedigree could bear close inspection; their own lineage was not above suspicion, and they were willing to serve the prince “in parliament, in council, in commission and other offices of the commonwealth.”
In hoc signo vinces