"Macfarlane argues that in peasant societies people rarely leave the village. This means that family inter-marriage is necessarily high."
He should be careful here. It also used to be thought that hunter-gatherers, living in small scale societies, "necessarily" had high rates of inter-marriage. But it turns out if you run the numbers that this not only isn't necessary, it isn't true. See: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199071 "Most individuals in [hunter-gatherer] residential groups are genetically unrelated." This was found through field work with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups.
I thought I heard somewhere one time, that there was an unexpected consequence of travel becoming easier, when people engaged in more interbreeding because roads or trains or something enabled them to court one another within families more easily. I know this doesn’t make sense. I’m happy for somebody else to have a recollection of this that’s better.
Like, Darwin doesn’t marry his first cousin (?) because they were thrown together in the same village, but because they were able more easily to seek one another over 30 miles from home, and isolate themselves socially from other, less closely related marital possibilities.
I read Macfarlane (1978) a few months ago, finding it an interesting enough read. More importantly, it's yet more evidence that most everything we've been told by the "consensus" (social) sciences is not true. As Dr Kling often says, it's about who we choose to trust. I'm well down the road to trusting no-one. I better move to Missouri, the "show me" state.
Richard Pipes makes a big deal about this difference in property ownership in his book *Property and Freedom*. He partially attributes the emergence of liberal institutions in England to its unusually long tradition of private property ownership, which he dates to Anglo-Saxon England (i.e., the early Middles Ages). In contrast, Russia had significant communal land ownership until the Russian Revolution (and beyond, during the New Economic Policy). Pipes saw this weak culture of individualized property as one factor making Russia more receptive to Bolshevik takeover.
The best explanation of why England has such unique private property ownership so early I have found comes from this anonymous Twitter/X thread: https://x.com/crimkadid/status/1615111379928719369?s=46. You have to read through the whole thread to get to the point. The basic idea is individualism results from the fragmentation of families, and the fragmentation of families resulted from sea-based migrations. The migrations of the Anglo-Saxons into England fragmented their families and sowed the seeds of individualism early. Interestingly, you also see parallels with Iceland. The legal system in Iceland became much more individualized than the old legal system/norms in Norway. This line of reasoning also may explain some/many of the unique features of the USA. (To be clear, sea-based migration would work in tandem/complement the Henrich thesis/Hajnal Line research.)
After researching this idea of the importance of sea migrations as breaking down kin-groups, ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking found two sources that argue for this idea: (1) sociologist Richard F. Tomasson's work (e.g., *Iceland as The First New Nation,* Scandinavian Political Studies 10 (1975); there is a follow-up book as well) and (2) Toynbee's *A Study of History*.
The Romans brought all that to their entire empire, not just England, and for longer periods, not just 43-410. If Roman influence was that decisive, why was England the only place it took hold, when the Roman Empire occupied Iberia, Gaul, Greece, Egypt, northern Africa, and elsewhere for longer periods?
Roman private law survived mainly in elite or ecclesiastical contexts. But in England, something unusual happened: England’s kinship structures collapsed instead of re-solidifying.
Anthropologists note that Anglo-Saxon England shows:
- very weak clans
- very low corporate kin property
- early shift to individual liability (wergild tied to individuals, not groups)
- early land charters to individuals
This is unlike the Continent, where Germanic tribes maintained strong clans for centuries, and Roman law remained mostly elite-only.
2. England lacked surviving Roman aristocracies and entrenched kin elites
In Gaul or Spain, Romanized aristocracies persisted and fused with Germanic elites, creating stable, lineage-based landed estates.
But in Britain:
- Roman Britain collapsed dramatically
- urban Roman structures vanished
- the Romano-British elite seems to have been wiped out or absorbed
- incoming Anglo-Saxons built a new social order on a comparatively “clean slate”
This allowed Anglo-Saxon legal culture—already unusually individualist for Germanic norms—to take root without being absorbed back into a clan system.
3. Early medieval English Christianity aggressively enforced bans on cousin marriage
Here we get to Joseph Henrich & colleagues. The Western Church prohibited cousin marriage everywhere—but it penetrated some regions far deeper and earlier than others.
The evidence suggests:
In England, enforcement was unusually strong and early (before the 9th century). On the Continent, practice remained much more flexible; many regions quietly ignored the rules until the High Middle Ages. In southern Italy and Spain, cousin marriage persisted for over a millennium.
This means England experienced earlier breakdown of kin networks, facilitating:
- neolocal marriage
- nuclear households
- individual land transmission
All essential for Macfarlane’s model.
4. Anglo-Saxon land law was unique among Germanic societies
Most Germanic peoples kept strong family control over land.
In England, however:
- charters gave individualized, alienable ownership
- land could be willed to anyone, not just kin
- widows and unmarried women held land independently
- the king became the ultimate source of property rights, not the clan
Nothing comparable existed in Germany or Scandinavia (except Iceland, another extremely individualistic frontier society).
Thus Roman law didn’t take hold everywhere—Anglo-Saxon law created something closer to Roman private property than most of the post-Roman world managed.
5. England’s geography (an island) prevented reabsorption into Continental kinship systems
Because Britain was separated from the Germanic heartlands:
- transplanted kin structures decayed faster
- new immigrants did not reinforce old extended families
- small migrating groups formed new, weakly-structured villages
Well ... thanks, but it doesn't really explain why England was so different.
The Romans left in a hurry, but that doesn't explain why the locals reverted so fast. If they reverted to the individualism they had pre-Romans, where did that 400 year old individualism come from? Why didn't the Gauls, Iberians, etc have individualism x00 years before? How did English individualism survive 400 years of Roman rule? If Roman rule strengthened English individualism, where did English individualism come from?
> England’s kinship structures collapsed instead of re-solidifying.
> This is unlike the Continent, where Germanic tribes maintained strong clans for centuries, and Roman law remained mostly elite-only.
This only says England was different. It doesn't say why England was different.
> England lacked surviving Roman aristocracies and entrenched kin elites
> In Gaul or Spain, Romanized aristocracies persisted and fused with Germanic elites, creating stable, lineage-based landed estates.
It always comes back to geography. It’s an island; its terrain, climate, and location differ.
This causes a different history. Different history includes different people migrating; different knowledge, different technology, different weapons, different enemies, different wars, different governance, different norms and laws.
Same with California. It’s an island. It has a different geography. This causes a different history. Different people migrating, with different knowledge, with different technology at a different time with a different starting places. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the Castro, Skunk Works, Pixar, Stanford, are there because of its different history, due to different geography.
Geography is the answer to all your questions that start with “Why is England different?”
The causes are so numerous we can’t know all of them.
I've had some time to think about this, and read CW's earlier pingthread link about Bertha Phillpotts' book. The thesis that sea migration broke kinship connections seems vaguely plausible, but I wonder if there might be an alternate explanation: that they left a densely populated area with no uncultivated land, so were forced to live together as extended families. But when they migrated to England, and especially when the English later migrated to North America, uncultivated and unclaimed land was theirs for taking. That would have broken up extended families more effectively than migration by ships which could presumably carry an extended family in one voyage. Of course the migration did break connections with those who stayed behind, but if kinship was that important, I'd think they would be reluctant to leave as just a small nuclear family.
The sea crossing thing is interesting because of the break in kinship ties, but also because now you have a natural barrier of defense against the roving bandits and there would be a higher level of cooperation and competency needed to conquer you. Selecting for higher human capital of the next conquerors. A good comparative history with Japan and other islands would probably be illuminating in ferreting out differences as well.
ChatGPT is a bit of an untrustworthy sycophant but tells me Henrich and Macfarlane are primarily concerned with the Medieval period roughly from 500 to 1500. Apparently neither one talks about density and forestry levels, which are somewhat different outside their time period. So, you get migration into England and there is cleared land all ready for cultivation. There are some claims in the history of the Ancient period and in the Medieval period that outside of Roman occupation you have both lower density in England and lower forestry levels. ChatGPT claims forests are communally managed resources for both timber needs and game hunting. So, after the water crossing there is now less reforming of groups to communally manage resources.
At the tail end of the Medieval period this lack of forestry contributes another thing that pushes in the same direction Macfarlane and Henrich are looking at but do not talk about. Lower class adoption of coal centuries before the peasantry on the continent. And there is literature out there about coal, but it has an important part that hasn't, according to ChatGPT, been synthesized with all this other literature on these macro socioeconomic narratives and appears primarily among nutrition and domestic household historians. Coal for cooking and heating leads to higher and better nutrition both in the actual nutrients and calories gotten from food and in heating of homes in winter. So, you have boiling and potting of foods that give 10 to 30 percent better preservation of calories and nutrients and this already shows up by 1500 in England. Cheaper more efficient heating and cooking and better extraction of calories and nutrition. ChatGPT presents this as all more efficient and all pushing towards more individualism and less reliance on extended community.
I see England as being attractive to people that possess seafaring technology and value independence and agency.
“We’re in our ship; we can go where we want, and who is going to stop us?”
“Rather than put up with their dumb rules, let’s take our ship over there and start over. Yes, there’s free land over there. There are plenty of fish here. All we have to do is defend this place from other people in ships.”
So the island of Great Britain filtered for people that had seafaring technology, independence, and knowledge of this new way of living.
This new way of living probably came about because they were seafaring people, fishermen, merchant marine specialists, amphibious raiders. They established their home bases on the shores of England and eventually moved inland with their institutions.
With Romanization one of the big issues is that some mercantile and military elites were really properly Romanized, some centers of Roman military manufacturing had a lot of Romanitas, but then you have a whole lot of England out there in the sticks which was not terribly impacted by Roman influence.
The Goths, Vandals, Huns, etc. rampaged mostly on the continent. When the continental tribes converted to Christianity it was more gradual. Then with Iberia the Muslims took most of it by the early 8th century, so even though not pagan that mostly destroyed the remnants of Roman culture there.
I think the reason why is because it is hard to project power over sea. Steppe warriors like the Huns were not big into sea power. Just as Napoleon and Hitler could not ultimately cross the channel, non-maritime barbarians also had a lot of trouble doing it.
Another hypothesis for why England became more individualistic in the early Medieval period - England adopted Cluniac reforms earlier and more completely than the Continent. Church reforms from Cluny in the 10th to 11th century were intended to create a universal legal and moral order focused on individual moral culpability. When Normans conquered in 1066, they replaced the entire episcopate with reform-minded clergy. By contrast, everywhere else had powerful local nobility resisting reforms. The moral force of these reforms pointed to individualism, and the (relatively) centralized state after the Norman conquest (rather than piecemeal small kingdoms) enabled a greater degree of trade, further strengthening individualism. These reforms gave England a head start in individualism.
I know what anarcho-syndicalism is, but I didn't see what your point was. So I googled "anarcho-syndicalism Dennis et al" and got references to Dennis et al v. United States, a 1951 Supreme Court case holding the Smith Act constitutional, and this from Monty Python:
I'm no expert, but I always thought that the sale of English land was severely limited by primogeniture and entail. I guess some of that view may come from reading too much Jane Austen. I also thought that most arable land was pretty much publicly shared ("the commons") until the enclosure movements began in 1500 or thereabouts. After that, the dissolution of the monasteries opened up a lot of new land with which Henry paid off lots of his debts to the nobility. Is all of this just dead wrong?
Finally, I think that the 1688 conquest of England by the Dutch in 1688 (Brits like to keep this Gloriously hush hush) had a far bigger impact on English culture and law than is generally recognized. John Locke had been in exile until then. Does anyone know some good work on this subject?
None of this is real clear to me, I think I’m not firing on all cylinders, cause I didn’t find this very easy to follow
However, this is especially puzzling: “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.”
Another issue is that the corporate family is a Roman institution that came to the English via the Romans. The English couldn't have invented it because the Romans did. Corporate inheritance is straightforwardly Roman. I agree with your other issues related to attacking the Annales school and then citing Monsieur Annales.
"Macfarlane argues that in peasant societies people rarely leave the village. This means that family inter-marriage is necessarily high."
He should be careful here. It also used to be thought that hunter-gatherers, living in small scale societies, "necessarily" had high rates of inter-marriage. But it turns out if you run the numbers that this not only isn't necessary, it isn't true. See: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1199071 "Most individuals in [hunter-gatherer] residential groups are genetically unrelated." This was found through field work with the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups.
More recent genetic studies have confirmed this for prehistory. See: https://www.mpg.de/17505368/0914-evan-prehistoric-humans-rarely-mated-with-their-cousins-150495-x
I thought I heard somewhere one time, that there was an unexpected consequence of travel becoming easier, when people engaged in more interbreeding because roads or trains or something enabled them to court one another within families more easily. I know this doesn’t make sense. I’m happy for somebody else to have a recollection of this that’s better.
Like, Darwin doesn’t marry his first cousin (?) because they were thrown together in the same village, but because they were able more easily to seek one another over 30 miles from home, and isolate themselves socially from other, less closely related marital possibilities.
I read Macfarlane (1978) a few months ago, finding it an interesting enough read. More importantly, it's yet more evidence that most everything we've been told by the "consensus" (social) sciences is not true. As Dr Kling often says, it's about who we choose to trust. I'm well down the road to trusting no-one. I better move to Missouri, the "show me" state.
Arnold grew up in St. Louis, which is in Missouri :)
Richard Pipes makes a big deal about this difference in property ownership in his book *Property and Freedom*. He partially attributes the emergence of liberal institutions in England to its unusually long tradition of private property ownership, which he dates to Anglo-Saxon England (i.e., the early Middles Ages). In contrast, Russia had significant communal land ownership until the Russian Revolution (and beyond, during the New Economic Policy). Pipes saw this weak culture of individualized property as one factor making Russia more receptive to Bolshevik takeover.
The best explanation of why England has such unique private property ownership so early I have found comes from this anonymous Twitter/X thread: https://x.com/crimkadid/status/1615111379928719369?s=46. You have to read through the whole thread to get to the point. The basic idea is individualism results from the fragmentation of families, and the fragmentation of families resulted from sea-based migrations. The migrations of the Anglo-Saxons into England fragmented their families and sowed the seeds of individualism early. Interestingly, you also see parallels with Iceland. The legal system in Iceland became much more individualized than the old legal system/norms in Norway. This line of reasoning also may explain some/many of the unique features of the USA. (To be clear, sea-based migration would work in tandem/complement the Henrich thesis/Hajnal Line research.)
For those without twitter: https://pingthread.com/thread/1615111379928719369
After researching this idea of the importance of sea migrations as breaking down kin-groups, ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking found two sources that argue for this idea: (1) sociologist Richard F. Tomasson's work (e.g., *Iceland as The First New Nation,* Scandinavian Political Studies 10 (1975); there is a follow-up book as well) and (2) Toynbee's *A Study of History*.
Who settled England prior to the Norman Conquest? Why did individualism appear so early there?
Roman Britain — 43 CE to 410 CE
Romans introduced:
- Roman private property law (i.e., dominium—full individual ownership)
- Monetized economy
- Wage labor
- Urban centers, roads, markets
- Roman law, even when imperfectly adopted by local populations, emphasized individual property rights, contracts, and commercial transactions.
England did not fully “become Roman”—but the cultural and legal residue of Roman administration was non-trivial in some regions.
Anglo-Saxon settlement — 5th to early 7th centuries
After Romans withdrew, Anglo-Saxon migration brought:
- Germanic kin groups (Angles, Saxons, Jutes)
- Village-based farming communities
- Early forms of individual landholding appear surprisingly early in the documentary record:
- Charters granting land explicitly to named individuals or families (bookland)
- A legal culture emphasizing wergild (compensation assigned to individuals), not kin groups
- A social structure that, compared to continental Germanic areas, already seems less dominated by large corporate clans
This is important: English kinship in the Anglo-Saxon period is conspicuously weak compared with other Germanic societies.
Scandinavian (Viking) influence — 8th to 11th centuries
In the Danelaw (eastern England):
- Scandinavian customary law was introduced
- Vikings tended to be mobile, merchant-oriented, individual-warrior societies
Scandinavian legal traditions also emphasized personal property, contracts, and individual liability
The Romans brought all that to their entire empire, not just England, and for longer periods, not just 43-410. If Roman influence was that decisive, why was England the only place it took hold, when the Roman Empire occupied Iberia, Gaul, Greece, Egypt, northern Africa, and elsewhere for longer periods?
Why Roman influence didn’t produce English-style individualism everywhere
1. Most of the Romanized world re-tribalized after Rome fell. England did not.
Across Gaul, Iberia, the Balkans, and North Africa:
- kin groups reasserted themselves
- extended families re-emerged as the core social units
- corporate property (village, clan, lineage) re-established itself
Roman private law survived mainly in elite or ecclesiastical contexts. But in England, something unusual happened: England’s kinship structures collapsed instead of re-solidifying.
Anthropologists note that Anglo-Saxon England shows:
- very weak clans
- very low corporate kin property
- early shift to individual liability (wergild tied to individuals, not groups)
- early land charters to individuals
This is unlike the Continent, where Germanic tribes maintained strong clans for centuries, and Roman law remained mostly elite-only.
2. England lacked surviving Roman aristocracies and entrenched kin elites
In Gaul or Spain, Romanized aristocracies persisted and fused with Germanic elites, creating stable, lineage-based landed estates.
But in Britain:
- Roman Britain collapsed dramatically
- urban Roman structures vanished
- the Romano-British elite seems to have been wiped out or absorbed
- incoming Anglo-Saxons built a new social order on a comparatively “clean slate”
This allowed Anglo-Saxon legal culture—already unusually individualist for Germanic norms—to take root without being absorbed back into a clan system.
3. Early medieval English Christianity aggressively enforced bans on cousin marriage
Here we get to Joseph Henrich & colleagues. The Western Church prohibited cousin marriage everywhere—but it penetrated some regions far deeper and earlier than others.
The evidence suggests:
In England, enforcement was unusually strong and early (before the 9th century). On the Continent, practice remained much more flexible; many regions quietly ignored the rules until the High Middle Ages. In southern Italy and Spain, cousin marriage persisted for over a millennium.
This means England experienced earlier breakdown of kin networks, facilitating:
- neolocal marriage
- nuclear households
- individual land transmission
All essential for Macfarlane’s model.
4. Anglo-Saxon land law was unique among Germanic societies
Most Germanic peoples kept strong family control over land.
In England, however:
- charters gave individualized, alienable ownership
- land could be willed to anyone, not just kin
- widows and unmarried women held land independently
- the king became the ultimate source of property rights, not the clan
Nothing comparable existed in Germany or Scandinavia (except Iceland, another extremely individualistic frontier society).
Thus Roman law didn’t take hold everywhere—Anglo-Saxon law created something closer to Roman private property than most of the post-Roman world managed.
5. England’s geography (an island) prevented reabsorption into Continental kinship systems
Because Britain was separated from the Germanic heartlands:
- transplanted kin structures decayed faster
- new immigrants did not reinforce old extended families
- small migrating groups formed new, weakly-structured villages
- repeated invasions (Angles/Saxons → Vikings → Normans) continually disrupted stable clan structures
Contrast this with the Continent, where dense continental networks preserved kinship robustness.
6. The Viking and Norman invasions reinforced English individualism rather than reversing it
Vikings:
- strongly mobile
- merchant-oriented
- focused on personal wealth
- fostered contract culture
Normans:
- introduced feudal law but also strengthened heritable, alienable, individualized land tenure
- preserved written charters and individual legal standing
While on the Continent, feudalism often strengthened lineage estates, in England it became surprisingly contractual and individual.
Well ... thanks, but it doesn't really explain why England was so different.
The Romans left in a hurry, but that doesn't explain why the locals reverted so fast. If they reverted to the individualism they had pre-Romans, where did that 400 year old individualism come from? Why didn't the Gauls, Iberians, etc have individualism x00 years before? How did English individualism survive 400 years of Roman rule? If Roman rule strengthened English individualism, where did English individualism come from?
> England’s kinship structures collapsed instead of re-solidifying.
> This is unlike the Continent, where Germanic tribes maintained strong clans for centuries, and Roman law remained mostly elite-only.
This only says England was different. It doesn't say why England was different.
> England lacked surviving Roman aristocracies and entrenched kin elites
> In Gaul or Spain, Romanized aristocracies persisted and fused with Germanic elites, creating stable, lineage-based landed estates.
Again, it doesn't say why the difference.
It always comes back to geography. It’s an island; its terrain, climate, and location differ.
This causes a different history. Different history includes different people migrating; different knowledge, different technology, different weapons, different enemies, different wars, different governance, different norms and laws.
Same with California. It’s an island. It has a different geography. This causes a different history. Different people migrating, with different knowledge, with different technology at a different time with a different starting places. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the Castro, Skunk Works, Pixar, Stanford, are there because of its different history, due to different geography.
Geography is the answer to all your questions that start with “Why is England different?”
The causes are so numerous we can’t know all of them.
I've had some time to think about this, and read CW's earlier pingthread link about Bertha Phillpotts' book. The thesis that sea migration broke kinship connections seems vaguely plausible, but I wonder if there might be an alternate explanation: that they left a densely populated area with no uncultivated land, so were forced to live together as extended families. But when they migrated to England, and especially when the English later migrated to North America, uncultivated and unclaimed land was theirs for taking. That would have broken up extended families more effectively than migration by ships which could presumably carry an extended family in one voyage. Of course the migration did break connections with those who stayed behind, but if kinship was that important, I'd think they would be reluctant to leave as just a small nuclear family.
The sea crossing thing is interesting because of the break in kinship ties, but also because now you have a natural barrier of defense against the roving bandits and there would be a higher level of cooperation and competency needed to conquer you. Selecting for higher human capital of the next conquerors. A good comparative history with Japan and other islands would probably be illuminating in ferreting out differences as well.
ChatGPT is a bit of an untrustworthy sycophant but tells me Henrich and Macfarlane are primarily concerned with the Medieval period roughly from 500 to 1500. Apparently neither one talks about density and forestry levels, which are somewhat different outside their time period. So, you get migration into England and there is cleared land all ready for cultivation. There are some claims in the history of the Ancient period and in the Medieval period that outside of Roman occupation you have both lower density in England and lower forestry levels. ChatGPT claims forests are communally managed resources for both timber needs and game hunting. So, after the water crossing there is now less reforming of groups to communally manage resources.
At the tail end of the Medieval period this lack of forestry contributes another thing that pushes in the same direction Macfarlane and Henrich are looking at but do not talk about. Lower class adoption of coal centuries before the peasantry on the continent. And there is literature out there about coal, but it has an important part that hasn't, according to ChatGPT, been synthesized with all this other literature on these macro socioeconomic narratives and appears primarily among nutrition and domestic household historians. Coal for cooking and heating leads to higher and better nutrition both in the actual nutrients and calories gotten from food and in heating of homes in winter. So, you have boiling and potting of foods that give 10 to 30 percent better preservation of calories and nutrients and this already shows up by 1500 in England. Cheaper more efficient heating and cooking and better extraction of calories and nutrition. ChatGPT presents this as all more efficient and all pushing towards more individualism and less reliance on extended community.
I see England as being attractive to people that possess seafaring technology and value independence and agency.
“We’re in our ship; we can go where we want, and who is going to stop us?”
“Rather than put up with their dumb rules, let’s take our ship over there and start over. Yes, there’s free land over there. There are plenty of fish here. All we have to do is defend this place from other people in ships.”
So the island of Great Britain filtered for people that had seafaring technology, independence, and knowledge of this new way of living.
This new way of living probably came about because they were seafaring people, fishermen, merchant marine specialists, amphibious raiders. They established their home bases on the shores of England and eventually moved inland with their institutions.
With Romanization one of the big issues is that some mercantile and military elites were really properly Romanized, some centers of Roman military manufacturing had a lot of Romanitas, but then you have a whole lot of England out there in the sticks which was not terribly impacted by Roman influence.
Could be a very good thing. Right?
Why? Did Gaul and Iberia have fewer places out there in the sticks which were not impacted by the Romans?
I believe that the standard explanation is that there was more war and more pagans, so less transmission of Roman law and culture.
Again, why? Why was there more war and more pagans?
Scott's sea migration thesis is the most plausible I've heard, and his patience with me is something I should try to learn from.
The Goths, Vandals, Huns, etc. rampaged mostly on the continent. When the continental tribes converted to Christianity it was more gradual. Then with Iberia the Muslims took most of it by the early 8th century, so even though not pagan that mostly destroyed the remnants of Roman culture there.
I think the reason why is because it is hard to project power over sea. Steppe warriors like the Huns were not big into sea power. Just as Napoleon and Hitler could not ultimately cross the channel, non-maritime barbarians also had a lot of trouble doing it.
Another hypothesis for why England became more individualistic in the early Medieval period - England adopted Cluniac reforms earlier and more completely than the Continent. Church reforms from Cluny in the 10th to 11th century were intended to create a universal legal and moral order focused on individual moral culpability. When Normans conquered in 1066, they replaced the entire episcopate with reform-minded clergy. By contrast, everywhere else had powerful local nobility resisting reforms. The moral force of these reforms pointed to individualism, and the (relatively) centralized state after the Norman conquest (rather than piecemeal small kingdoms) enabled a greater degree of trade, further strengthening individualism. These reforms gave England a head start in individualism.
So, medieval England wasn't an anarcho-syndicalist commune that has no king and operates as a collective as claimed by Dennis etal.?
Huh?
If you know, you know- if you don't know, you Google it.
Small correction:
There was no et al doing any claiming…
I know what anarcho-syndicalism is, but I didn't see what your point was. So I googled "anarcho-syndicalism Dennis et al" and got references to Dennis et al v. United States, a 1951 Supreme Court case holding the Smith Act constitutional, and this from Monty Python:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EMZ1u__LUc
I still don't see what your point is.
The Monty Python Holy Grail reference is his entire point.
Much thanks for the link.
Well, feed me garlic and call me Stinky.
It’s really surprising a Kling reader-frequent commenter doesn’t know Monty Pythons, taking in turn to act as sort of an executive…
I'm no expert, but I always thought that the sale of English land was severely limited by primogeniture and entail. I guess some of that view may come from reading too much Jane Austen. I also thought that most arable land was pretty much publicly shared ("the commons") until the enclosure movements began in 1500 or thereabouts. After that, the dissolution of the monasteries opened up a lot of new land with which Henry paid off lots of his debts to the nobility. Is all of this just dead wrong?
Finally, I think that the 1688 conquest of England by the Dutch in 1688 (Brits like to keep this Gloriously hush hush) had a far bigger impact on English culture and law than is generally recognized. John Locke had been in exile until then. Does anyone know some good work on this subject?
None of this is real clear to me, I think I’m not firing on all cylinders, cause I didn’t find this very easy to follow
However, this is especially puzzling: “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.”
Rural France was not a peasant society?
Oh nevermind. Just realized I read inter as intra.
Another issue is that the corporate family is a Roman institution that came to the English via the Romans. The English couldn't have invented it because the Romans did. Corporate inheritance is straightforwardly Roman. I agree with your other issues related to attacking the Annales school and then citing Monsieur Annales.