The English land-system, as we know it to-day, really began with the Restoration, when the very memory of Winstanley and his doctrines was swept away, when the men of the Model Army found themselves powerless, while “the great and wise men” of the nation “set up Monarchy again,” humbly prostrating themselves at the feet of a licentious, cynical debauchee, and the Landocracy, new and old, found themselves in the saddle with far greater political power than they had ever before enjoyed.  They soon found means of fastening their yoke more firmly than ever on the necks of the people, and of making short work of any claims of an independent yeomanry to any right to the soil of their native country apart from their good-will and pleasure.  After some effort, they passed a Statute under which the estates of such of the free-holders as had no documentary evidence by which to support their titles, were confiscated and turned into tenancies at will.  By means of Enclosure Acts they still further plundered and impoverished the peasantry, by appropriating to themselves millions of acres of land over which these still had some right, some enjoyment.  By means of the Law of Parochial Settlement, as Thorold Rogers repeatedly points out,[110:2] they “consummated the degradation of the labourer”; and made him, as it has left him, what the same impartial authority well terms “the most portentous phenomenon in agriculture, a serf without land.”  By means of their Financial Policy they rid themselves of the duties which originally accompanied the privilege of land-holding, viz. to provide the necessary public revenues for all defence purposes, and converted themselves from Land Holders into Land Owners, by shifting the burden of taxation to the food, industry, and handicraft of those they had despoiled and disinherited.  And, finally, for the first time in the history of England, they passed a Corn Law artificially to increase their rents, at the cost and to the detriment, often to the starvation, of the masses of the people.  From the effect of these laws the people of Great Britain have not yet been able entirely to recover themselves, though since 1824 they have made heroic steps to do so.  With this portion of the history, we had almost written of the martyrdom, of the English people we are not here directly concerned.  Manifestly it would have been very different had the Long Parliament listened to Winstanley’s appeal, or had his self-sacrificing efforts been crowned with the success they so well deserved.

FOOTNOTES: 

[100:1] Thomasson’s Tracts.  British Museum, Press Mark, E. 560 (1).  Reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. ii. p. 485.