The essays in this edition address, for four periods and regions, the kinds of processes that could, in certain circumstances, have led to expropriation, that is the appropriation of land by wealthier parties and the enforced landlessness of former peasant landholders; however, in each instance presented here, the authors describe processes that did not in fact result in the forced and complete removal of peasant proprietors from their land. Instead, as three of the following articles show, namely those by Furio, Nadan and Schofield, a reduction in property rights could be as important an indicator of the expropriation of property rights as the more classical view of enforced landlessness and proletarianization. Furthermore, the sorts of conditions that might have led to expropriation or a reduction in property rights in certain contexts, did not necessarily result in any reduction in the pre-existing rights of peasant tenants, as is shown by Arnoux in his contribution to this edition. In all instances, the articles published here illustrate that those who might have chosen to expropriate, notably landlords, wealthier peasants, merchants and creditors, were not necessarily interested in appropriating peasant land. Rather, a regular receipt of rents was, most obviously, often as and more important in such contexts; as such, and again as will be explored in the following articles, these designs on peasant land typically led to a diminution of the property rights of the tenant but not their wholesale eviction from the land. This was not universally the case; in other parts of medieval Europe, to which reference will be made below, creditors sought out and expropriated the lands of their debtors. However, this was neither a universal process nor one that was dependent upon unique sets of prevailing conditions; instead, the persistence of, or introduction of, new institutional and economic structures and practices (such as seigneurial expectations, communal or familial convention, governmental legislation, the relative fluidity of capital, and the exercise of local norms of dealing) may all have combined, jointly or severally, to affect the degree to which land was retained by a diminished tenantry or wholly appropriated. The following articles illustrate the applicability of these contentions both for the middle ages, with studies of England and Wales, Normandy and Valencia, as well as modern Palestine.

The idea that peasant landholders might be expropriated from their land by those with greater political and coercive power is a familiar one and is certainly and evidently applicable in different regions, both in Europe and beyond. While expropriation is not a term confined to Marxist dialectic it has, since Marx wrote Capital and discussed the expropriation of the agricultural population from the land, been closely associated with the English later middle ages and the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism.Footnote ² The essential components for expropriation were the diminution of a pre-existing mode of production, namely feudalism, and an effective abandonment of a peasant tenantry to a new mode of production, capitalism, founded on new economic principles, including greater specialisation and market production. Classically, this process of expropriation is associated, in England, with a major redistribution and redeployment of land in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when lords abandoned their commitment to serfdom and released longstanding constraints on landholding and the freedom of their tenants to buy and sell. The reduction in and eventual removal of the kinds of seigneurial controls contingent upon feudalism – including resistance by lords to the morcellisation or accumulation of landholding by a servile tenantry – propelled land onto the market. Subsequent processes of accumulation of landholding created a polarised rural society, divided between larger peasant and yeoman landholders and a larger cohort of landless and increasingly proletarianised former peasants/tenants. While this process started earliest and is best known for England and the Low Countries, it also occurred in other European countries, including those in Mediterranean Europe. In Italy, for instance, former peasant land was concentrated in poderi (large farms), owned by citizens and worked by mezzadri (sharecroppers)Footnote ³ while in other countries, such as France, a peasant hold on property lasted longer, and dispossession came much later.Footnote ⁴

Expropriation could take many forms, one of which was the seizure of peasant land through indebtedness, given as a guarantee of loans received or sold in order to repay the creditor. It seems that in some countries, such as Italy, peasant expropriation was part of a territorial conquest strategy behind credit operations.Footnote ⁵ But in others this was not necessarily the case and the creditor sold the expropriated land as soon as he could: what the creditor sought in such instances were rents (interests), not land. What, however, interests us as an object of study in this collection of essays is the impact predatory action had upon property rights, especially in contexts where the actions of wealthier and more powerful parties, such as merchants and creditors, did not result in the expropriation of land but in some form of adjusted property right. In this respect, we can consider, most obviously, the role of plots or holdings as securities for loans or as the principal debtor's asset put up for sale. The importance and extent of rural credit in the Middle Ages, as well as the generalization of peasant indebtedness have long been known.Footnote ⁶ We know with reasonable confidence the forms and modalities of this rural credit, in the short (mutuum, loan) and long term (rents, annuities), interest rates, guarantees and even debt litigation.Footnote ⁷ However, the consequences of insolvency and non-payment, and in particular the seizure of the debtor's assets, have been less studied. In fact, the confiscation and legal sale of the debtor's goods in order to pay the creditor and settle the debt gave rise to a wide circulation of effects and properties in two circuits: a very dynamic second-hand market, only recently attracting the attention of historians and important for historical awareness of material culture and consumption patterns, and an equally very active peasant land market, both of plots and holdings, which has been a significant research focus for historians for a number of years.Footnote ⁸ The way in which the land was seized and sold judicially, the role of brokers and judicial agents, the sale prices in relation to market prices, buyers, and so on are all potentially relevant in this respect. Awareness of such mechanisms or a forced redistribution of property rights encourages a wider view of expropriation and also permits an assessment of the form and nature of exchange in particular periods and places. It also serves to remind us that the wealthier parties, such as merchants or urban creditors, in interactions with peasant landholders did not always seek to take or directly manage peasant land; instead, peasant land was capable of satisfying the expectations of these parties in other ways, such as the acquisition of rents.

In an important comment, Robert Brenner has argued that the conditions in which expropriation take place, and that ‘larger peasants…beat out, on the market, smaller and less effective producers’, are necessarily conditioned by a transition to capitalism. Brenner contends that expropriation of this kind could only take place once there had been a transition to capitalism. Before there is capitalism, according to Brenner, there can be no process of proletarianization for the reason that, under feudalism, much of the economy is protected by institutions and a non-market foundation to the economy which rejects processes that will defeat the essential function of that pre-capitalist economy, namely for peasants to hold on to land as ‘the foundation for their economic reproduction’.Footnote ⁹ Brenner describes a ‘safety first’ approach on the part of peasants which suggests that morcellisation or parcellisation was more likely to occur than was accumulation or agglomeration under feudalism; the lack of sufficient marketing structures discouraged distance from landholding and the means of production or, as he also presents it, the peasant's means of subsistence.Footnote ¹⁰ To follow Brenner, then, as well as those such as E.A. Kosminsky who preceded him, is to accept that expropriation will not occur under feudalism but will occur with some rapidity ‘in the presence of the market’.Footnote ¹¹ As the articles presented here make clear, however, conditions that speak to a market presence and elements of a nascent capitalism do not necessarily prompt a process of expropriation; instead, even allowing for the inequalities of the market and the relative disadvantage of peasant tenants in their dealings with wealthier merchants, creditors and landholders, the studies gathered here show how poorer peasants, the debtors and the under-capitalised parties in such arrangements, managed to, or were given licence to, hold on to their land. In such instances, the continuity of peasant tenure in the face of rapacious external forces was not necessarily or at all the consequence of pre-existing institutional factors, such as seigneurial or communal convention of a kind associable with pre-capitalist modes of dealing; instead, the persistence of peasant tenure of land could reflect in often large part the choices made by those non-peasants who preferred not to direct their capital at the direct acquisition and possession of peasant land. In fact, in the examples presented here we encounter both the modern influence of external capital and its interplay with prevailing seigneurial, familial and communal conventions that may have made the direct appropriation of peasant land unwelcome and a disincentive to such investment. Instead, merchants, creditors and wealthier landholders identified other mechanisms by which they could exploit peasant land without the need to expropriate, notably the payment of rents or the establishment of share-cropping arrangements.

In this edition, Mathieu Arnoux's discussion of the sale of rents, for one, takes the discussion of expropriation in a different direction from its traditional historiographical foundations. Arnoux expresses surprise that earlier discussion of transition rendered money and markets largely ‘neutral’ and suggests that it is only with a developing understanding of the role of credit and indebtedness in effecting change in the medieval economy that our conception of transition has been nuanced and informed. For Arnoux, a previous discussion of transition, informed by Marxism or Malthusianism, has given way to a model of change founded upon commercial activity and its development; in this new model, the development of property rights and market growth paved the way from feudalism to capitalism. Interestingly, Arnoux returns to Rodney Hilton's earlier discussion on the limited evidence for sharecropping in medieval England and notes that, as Hilton discussed, important parts of the non-seigneurial market, in goods, labour, and land, are not especially visible in our sources.Footnote ¹² As such, by extension, our attention is typically focused on lord-tenant economic relations and, further to this, our understanding of transition and of expropriation is also defined accordingly. Arnoux's discussion, in his paper, of annuities, rentes constituées, is intended to show, through a particular emphasis on rents paid in grain in medieval Normandy, the potential complexity and significance of distinctive forms of exchange and their importance, not always so evident, in facilitating investment and the accumulation of capital in the medieval countryside. As Arnoux's discussion makes clear, a system of exchange based upon annuities was pervasive and persistent; while the extent of annuities is difficult to ascertain, their importance, including rents in grain, to the function of the economy of the Normandy region in the middle ages and beyond is without doubt. In this respect, the emergence of rentes constituées appears, to Arnoux, to constitute an early indication of commercial development, though not one that led to significant processes of expropriation in terms of land. In Normandy, according to Arnoux, the family-land bond amongst peasant tenants remained strong well into the eighteenth century and the likelihood that credit relationships might generate a fluid market in land in earlier periods was therefore limited; rather, it was the exchange of moveable goods, especially grain exchanged through rent markets, that permitted economic growth but also prompted no significant disruption to landholding. Here, then, we find a form of commercial and capital-mobilising activity that appears not to be a pre-condition for a process of tenurial expropriation, though this does not preclude the possibility that processes of polarization of wealth and accumulation might still occur, though chiefly through a market in rents rather than in tenures. As such, and to return to an earlier observation, Arnoux's article also illustrates the interplay between market factors and the investment of capital by entrepreneurs within the context of prevailing socio-economic conditions, notably a conservative communal and familial culture that limited the free circulation and appropriation of land.

This distance between classic expropriation and various kinds of discrete and, to certain degree, less evident forms of expropriation is also central to Antoni Furio's discussion of property rights and their different degrees of fragility in medieval Valencia. As Furio points out, while the expropriation of the peasantry through the exploitation of their weakness was central to any explanation of transition from feudalism to capitalism, the nature of that process was far from consistent. In Iberia, just as in areas of France, such as Normandy, a dynamic land market did not necessarily result in the dispossession of the peasantry; instead, as in Arnoux's discussion of Normandy, possession of land was retained by the peasantry throughout the medieval and early modern periods. For Furio, economic development and innovation were not necessarily dependent, as in the classical Marxist expropriation, on the appropriation of land by landed elites and urban entrepreneurs. While in medieval Italy the wealthy inhabitants of the cities facilitated a flow of urban capital into the neighbouring countryside which resulted in the taking over of holdings, there is less evidence of the same developments in landholding across the Balearic Sea in Valencia. Notarial records show a significant increase in private debt in the kingdom of Valencia between the early fourteenth and the later fifteenth centuries. Furio, in examining the nature of this debt, concludes that debt was generated for investment for consumption and often tended to be relatively informal (in the form of instalments or deferred payments) rather than through the extension of more formal credit instruments. Most debts were also for short terms, typically less than half a year; such debts were often not settled but forced recovery was typically made against moveable assets and not against land. In this respect then, as Furio notes, any strategy on the part of creditors appears to have been aimed more at the acquisition of goods or rents rather than land itself. In this respect Furio identifies a significant difference from the model of expropriation identified above and chiefly founded on a study of England and in comparison to France. In medieval Valencia, lay and ecclesiastical lords, as well as merchants and townsmen, did not pursue peasant land but instead sought control of moveables and, above all, rents.

Phillipp Schofield's discussion of a peasant land market and the redistribution of land in medieval England and marcher Wales in the decades either side of 1300 illustrates the difficulties in associating exchange with a process of expropriation of the kind closely identified with processes which took place two centuries later. Historians of medieval England have long recognised the expansion of commerce in the thirteenth century, with the growth of markets and marketing institutions as well as the development of credit mechanisms and the legal apparatus intended to support creditors. However, in England the market was, to use Mark Bailey's memorable phrase, ‘imperfectly developed’ in the early fourteenth century and the aggressive acquisitiveness associated with rampant capitalism and with a process of expropriation had yet to supplant an often tacit commitment to a feudal culture founded upon the needs and expectations of consumption rather than the drive to greater production.Footnote ¹³ While, undoubtedly, in high medieval England, in the century and a half before the Black Death, the market created opportunities for individuals, generated winners and losers and encouraged landlords to move from traditional management of their estates, the prevailing imperatives tended to persist. So, while we find evidence of accumulation amongst the peasantry, it was often limited and transient; credit agreements amongst the peasantry were seldom secured by land; and the kinds of redistribution of property rights associated with trespass and illegal pasturing tend to reveal disputes between peasants of broadly equal standing rather than the forced expropriation of the weak by the strong. This, however, is not to say that English and Welsh peasants in the decades either side of 1300 were not subjected to loss of capital and land through economic inequalities as, clearly, they were. The capacity of external creditors, for instance, to extract capital from local communities and to shift the economic balance within such communities to the evident disadvantage of at least some villagers offers an instance of market forces and business dealings which left some peasant tenants exposed to the vagaries of the market. It is also possible, though difficult to illustrate definitively, that at least some apparently straightforward transfers of land may hide a more involved and commercialised context; at Dyffryn Clwyd, the surrender and subsequent readmittance of tenants, often some years after the initial surrender, as well as the claims of the supplanted interim tenant for rents due, may hint at hidden agreements, and the extension of clandestine loans. Even so, and allowing for the possibility that at least some of the exchanges recorded in manorial courts included disguised credit agreements, we find relatively little evidence for accumulation by creditor-engrossers in this pre-plague period. As we have seen already from this introduction, this stands in some contrast to the situation described for Valencia and Normandy; while we would not expect to find the accumulation of customary rents in the hands of anyone but the manorial lord whose rents they were, the piecemeal acquisition of associated property rights, including the seizure of moveables, should not be entirely dismissed. It is, though, probable that in the particular context of medieval England and marcher Wales in the early fourteenth century – and in this discussion the evidential base draws particularly on material from the lordship of Dyffryn Clwyd in the north-east Welsh marches – the mutability and transferability of property rights, other than an outright transfer of the land itself (which as is discussed was restricted), was limited by prevailing institutions and conventions and as yet resisted the growing pressure of the market and its agents.

Testing the validity of a general model formulated from peasant studies in ‘the West’ can benefit from a comparison with case studies from other areas. Amos Nadan's paper on Palestine in the 1800s–1940s, offers a further, and much more recent, reminder that the full facts about property rights are not always evident in the historical record, and can be both mediated and diminished by other means. In accordance with Brenner's contention, for-profit (capitalist) private owners increasingly gained power in nineteenth-century Palestine; they were interested in acquiring cultivated lands and were engaged in the expropriation of peasants. But the mechanisms were different from those described by Brenner. It was not the case that larger peasants beat out smaller peasants, but rather that land ownership was transferred into the hands of non-peasant, richer individuals. Nor did proletarianization with wage labour become the dominant mode of employment. Instead, the expropriated peasant worked in sharecropping for the new landowner. An exogenous change in the Land Code of 1858 gave permission to some non-peasants, especially richer merchants, to buy land, which significantly facilitated this expropriation. In early-to-mid-nineteenth century Palestine, peasants enjoyed informal but real rights in the land that they held. The Land Code of 1858 transformed property rights from informal tenure of land to formal tenure; the effect of this was however often not to secure peasant rights in their land but instead to encourage tenure by wealthier ‘non-cultivators’. In this respect, institutional developments in tenure, including a strengthening of formal rights and the registration of land, served as a form of expropriation as landholding, now more attractive and alienable, promoted a market in rents. In the decades that followed, peasant indebtedness precipitated a further process by which peasant landholders were eased out of their more formal property rights, and it is estimated that by 1930, approximately three quarters of the peasants in Palestine cultivated lands that they did not own. Here we do not see a completed process of expropriation, since the peasantry remained effectively in situ, though their rights were diminished. Importantly, however, the formal and legal foundations for some form of expropriation were already in place and the peasantry's hold on its land was rendered precarious. Significant also in Nadan's paper, and a theme that is general in the articles in this collection, is the evidence of hidden and often contested property rights. As already noted, Nadan begins by discussing the informal property rights which Palestinians enjoyed over their land before the mid-nineteenth century legal reforms; these were supported by custom and traditional arrangements within villages; these, as Nadan notes, often have to be inferred from our sources rather than directly observed. An awareness of the existence of such informal, and often largely invisible, rights reminds us that the extension or diminution of rights might occur without land necessarily changing hands; in this respect, we should be aware of reallocations of rights over land as much as of land itself.

The studies presented here reveal then, to different degree, the likelihood that apparently simple exchanges disguise subtleties and complexities which our surviving sources cannot reveal. Brenner's contention, cited above, that expropriation cannot occur before the conditions of market exchange which facilitate such a process already exist, is based on a particular view of the evident emergence of capitalism. One problem, which the current investigations set out, is that at least some of the sources used here do not permit a detailed understanding of the negotiations and further detail of the contracts which are typically only seen in one facet, such as the exchange of land. A noteworthy feature of the discussions of peasant land in medieval Normandy and in modern Palestine is the way in which landholding persisted amongst certain groups, such as peasant landholders, even while their property rights were reallocated to others, such as townspeople or creditors, through the purchase of more formal tenures or through the sale of rents. In such instances it is of course reasonable to propose that expropriation had yet to take place: while the condition of the peasantry may have shifted, typically to the disadvantage of peasants, they remained on the land and working the land; there was no evident process of proletarianization. However, the reallocation of property rights had, as in numerous instances identified in these studies, been occasioned by commercial activity and the exchange of capital in ways that speak to a degree of nascent capitalism operating within prevailing economic systems. In this respect at least, we witness the emergence of proto-capitalist institutions and modes of exchange that were not held back by pre-existing structures, such as lordship or communal or familial ties to land, but had yet to leap the barrier into a capitalist economy capable of embracing processes such as expropriation and widespread proletarianization.Footnote ¹⁴