More Macfarlane

He catches a hallucination

In The Origins of English Individualism (1978), Alan Macfarlane writes,

The central feature of ‘peasantry’ is the absence of absolute ownership of land, vested in a single individual. The property-holding unit is a ‘corporation’ which never dies. Into this an individual is born or adopted, and to it he gives his labour. In such a situation women have no individual and exclusive property rights and individuals cannot sell off their share of the family property. It would be unthinkable for a man to sell of land if he had sons, except in dire necessity and by common consent. There is unlikely to be a highly-developed land market. …the inhabitants of Earls Colne lived in a different world. …by the later sixteenth century ownership was highly individualized. Land was held by women in their own right…Land was bought and sold without consideration for any wider group than husband and wife. It was, in fact, treated as a commodity which belonged to individuals and not to the household. p. 80

Later, he writes,

We may now turn to… the unit of production and consumption. In the model peasant society, this unit is again the household. This household is characteristically composed of more than the ‘nuclear’ or ‘elementary’ family of parents and children, but with a minimal group of those who are co-owners…. an ‘extended household, and usually a phase in the life-cycle when more than one married couple live together in the same house p. 135

Macfarlane claims that in early medieval England one finds hired labor widespread and money in common use. In a peasant society, household workers would have been kinsmen and there would have been little or no need for monetary transactions.

Macfarlane uses public records to show that England in the 16th century was not a peasant society, because property was owned by individuals. He goes on to assert that England’s departure from peasantry took place in earlier centuries, although the written record becomes sparser.

Macfarlane is arguing against the entrenched views of most historical sociologists, including Marx and Weber. The conventional wisdom is that English culture was transformed from a peasant society by the Reformation and/or capitalism. Macfarlane insists that England was individualist long before.

A peasant society was one in which a woman had no status unless she had married. Regarding one historian who claimed that medieval England was this sort of patriarchy, Macfarlane writes,

G.G. Coulton invokes the strong authority of Maitland to support his view that the ‘old maid’ was ‘as unusual a phenomenon in the Middle Ages as in modern upper-class French society, quoting Maitland’s words as follows:

“It is hardly too much to say that the early Medieval Law never seems to have contemplated the existence of an unmarried woman of full age. …Her position is never the subject of statute law, as is that of widows; hence, it seems probable that among the higher classes, the independent ‘femme sole’ was, outside the convent, a negligible quantity.”

Macfarlane catches Coulton hallucinating!

But when we turn to the page Coulton cites as the origin of the quotation from Maitland we are in for a shock. Not only is the whole quotation missing from this page and nowhere to be found in the rest of Maitland’s History of English Law, but the page to which we are referred contains a passage which is totally contrary…

“After the Norman Conquest the woman of full age who has no husband is in England a fully competent person for all the purposes of private law…”

In fact, Maitland’s whole passage on the legal position of unmarried women lies very badly indeed with the predictions of the peasant model. p. 132

Macfarlane argues that in peasant societies people rarely leave the village. This means that family inter-marriage is necessarily high. He says that in this regard medieval England differs from continental Europe. But this puts him in conflict with Joseph Henrich and colleagues, who would see all of Europe as under the influence of Christianity’s proscription against cousin marriage.

Macfarlane concludes,

within the recorded period covered by our documents, it is not possible to find a time when an Englishman did not stand alone. …it is no longer possible to ‘explain’ the origins of English individualism in terms of either Protestantism, population change, the development of a market economy at the end of the middle ages…Individualism, however defined, predates sixteenth-century changes and can be said to shape them all. p. 196