Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

flocks, and thus the contrast between rich and poor makes its appearance. Customary rules regarding the inheritance of wealth are recognized. But this early wealth does not produce commerce to any considerable extent, simply because there is little division of labor either between localities or within the tribe.

III. THE AGRICULTURAL STAGE

In this stage there is an enormous increase in man's power over nature. The production of wealth is increased especially by the use of animal power in cultivating the soil. One result is to increase population. Land which under the more primitive methods of production would give a scanty support to a small tribe for a part of the year will now maintain a whole community with a fixed abode. It is necessary for human development that men should live in definite places and have homes and a country. This results in new relations between men, new duties, new arts, and new possibilities. The beginning of the institution of private ownership in land falls within this stage, although it is difficult to trace the actual steps in the process.

A most important characteristic of this period is slavery. Slavery begins long before improved agriculture, but it now attains its full magnitude as an institution. There have been many discussions as to whether slavery is right or wrong. It is both. There is a time in human development when slavery represents a step in human progress. The slavery of the early period we are now considering was inevitable, and is not to be judged by modern standards. We now know that free labor is better than slave labor, especially in the later stages of industrial development; but, inasmuch as primitive man is induced with difficulty to work at all, slave labor is a great improvement on free idleness.

Commercial intercourse is still comparatively slight in this stage. Fixed residence develops village communities, and these are economically self-sufficient. They produce the things that they consume, and as a rule have not surplus products to dispose of to others. Hence money does not at this time perform important functions in the life of every day. The economic condition of Europe dur

D

ing the middle ages before the growth of cities illustrates the agricultural stage.

The Manorial Economy in England. England was almost wholly agricultural for three centuries following the Norman Conquest. In the thirteenth century the population for the most part lived in villages or manors, each controlled by a lord to whom the rest of the inhabitants were bound by customary rules to render certain assistance in the cultivation of the lord's land. The villagers were of various classes, according to the amount of land which they held and according to the services which they were required to perform. The land of each tenant was not a compact area, but was composed of strips scattered in the three great fields into which the arable land was divided for purposes of crop rotation.

Some handicraftsmen were also found upon the estate, but they do not occupy an important place in the economy of the village. For the most part, they were probably slaves or household servants. Slaves in England constituted at the time of the Conquest about nine per cent of the population, but "in some of the eastern and midland shires do not appear at all, or fall to a percentage of four or five," while they rise to as much as twenty-four per cent in other parts of the country. "We cannot but explain this by the supposition that in the later stages of the English conquest a greater number of the British cultivators were spared, so that in these districts slaves came to form a considerable part of the rural population. Absolute slavery, how

ever, disappeared in less than a century after the Conquest, and the servi became customary holders of small plots, like the cotters elsewhere, but on more onerous conditions."

While these manors were largely self-sufficient in their economic life, there was, to be sure, some trade. England exported raw products to the continent and received back some of the finer forms of manufacture. But the ordinary needs of the very frugal life which the tenants had to live were supplied by products of the village itself. During the centuries following the Norman Conquest important changes took place in the manorial system: (1) a rapid growth in the number of free tenants; (2) the commutation of customary services into fixed payments in money or kind; and (3) the appearance of a class of agricultural laborers

1 See Ashley, English Economic History, Vol. I, pp. 17-18.

dependent on the wages which they received. In contrasting the manorial economy with the village of the present day, Professor W. J. Ashley has pointed out the following differences: (1) Now farmers live in separate homesteads among the fields they rent, but then all the cultivators lived side by side in the village street. (2) Now each farmer follows his own judgment as to his agricultural operations, but in this early period he took his share in the common method of cultivation, which was regulated by custom enforced by the manor courts. (3) To-day, if the landlord himself engages in farming, his management is independent of that of his tenants, but under the manorial system he depended almost exclusively upon the labor of his tenants, who contributed plows, oxen, and men. Finally, (4) aside from the great gulf between lord and tenants, there was then no such social separation between the cultivators as there is to-day between large and small farmers. The manorial economy of England was a type, though somewhat more systematically developed, of conditions on the continent of Europe.

IV. THE HANDICRAFT STAGE

This stage begins with the development of towns as centers of trade and handicraft in the latter part of the middle ages, and extends to the introduction of power manufacture in the latter part of the eighteenth century. During such a long period many changes took place in the economic life of the people of Europe, but so far as the expansion and satisfaction of wants is concerned, the power over nature, the whole period is in marked contrast with the modern era of machine production.

[ocr errors]

Gilds. The growth of trade in the town brought with it the merchant gild, the purpose of which was to regulate the conduct of trade and to keep a monopoly of it for the merchants of the town. Merchant gilds appeared in all the larger towns of England in the twelfth century. But a new class was developing in the towns, the craftsmen who were engaged in the making of things for sale. As this handicraft grew in importance, the merchant gild was superseded by the craft gild, which in England attained its fullest development in the first half of the fourteenth

century. Each craft had its gild, which specified in detail how the business should be carried on, how many should be admitted to it, and how the trade should be learned. This growth in specialization meant also a growth in trade, but in this early part of the handicraft period, commerce was much restricted as compared with that of the present day. The towns made exchanges mostly with the country surrounding them, there being as yet no national or world market of any importance. Plainly such a general system of exchange cannot be carried on by barter, and in this period money became increasingly important.

The agricultural stage had in the greater part of Europe culminated in the feudal system. The nobility maintained order and attended to the fighting while the serfs tilled the soil. The manufacturing cities became the rivals of the feudal lords, who felt their power threatened, and hence they bitterly opposed the cities. The cities were free, and the serfs who fled to them were accepted and made freemen.

The Domestic System. With the beginning of the modern period the town system gave way to a larger economy. The towns lost the control of trade. The gild system was succeeded by the domestic system, which prevailed in England from the middle of the fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries. As in the gild system, industry was carried on by hand in a small way, but the functions of merchant and workman were now separated. The gild master sold the goods which he produced in his shop directly to the customers who were to use the goods, but under the domestic system the workman came to be less independent. He received the raw material from a middleman, to whom he also delivered the finished product. Much of this work was done outside of the towns, the artisans thus being enabled to devote part of their time to agriculture. Defoe, in his tour through Great Britain (1724-1726), describes the methods employed as follows:

The land". 'was divided into small inclosures from two acres to six or seven each, seldom more; every three or four pieces of land had an house belonging hardly an house standing out of a speaking distance from We could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every

to them, another.

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

...

tenter a piece of cloth or kersie or shaloon. . . At every considerable house was a manufactury. . . . Every clothier keeps one horse, at least, to carry his manufactures to the market, and every one generally keeps a cow or two or more for his family. By this means the small pieces of inclosed land about each house are occupied, for they scarce sow corn enough to feed their poultry. . . . The houses are full of lusty fellows, some at the dye-vat, some at the looms, others dressing the cloths; the women or children carding or spinning, being all employed, from the youngest to the oldest."

The domestic system should be distinguished from the manorial economy of the agricultural period, for the production under the domestic system was not for home consumption simply, but for the market.

Agricultural Changes. During the handicraft period there were also important changes in the agricultural life of England. The most prominent of these is the process of inclosing the common fields for the purpose of pasturage during the Tudor period. Later, the farmers practiced what was known as "convertible husbandry"; that is, the pasture was plowed up every few years for raising crops. This, again, has been superseded by the modern system of crop rotation.

---

The Mercantile System. The decay of town authority did not imply that industry and commerce were left to the free play of competition. The supervision of the central government took the place of that of the towns. The national system of regulation has been called the Mercantile System, which prevailed in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and most of the eighteenth centuries. Its essential idea is the guidance of economic affairs in such a way as to increase the commercial and military power of the nation as a whole. The navigation laws which the student has met with in his study of American history were a part of this system. An attempt was made to create a "favorable" balance of trade and to maintain a good supply of the precious metals. Agriculture was fostered with the aim of promoting the growth of population. The mercantile system has often been described as consisting chiefly of trade restrictions, but it is the contention of Professor Schmoller that in its essence the system meant "the replacing of a local and territorial economic policy by that

« AnteriorContinuar »