English Towns and the Transition c.1450–1550

There are few historical issues of more relevance to a critical understanding of the economic and political workings of today's societies, and their future, than 'the transition from feudalism to capitalism'. In association with its contemporary resonance, the 'transition debate' has invigorated historical theory and practice by generating a sense of structural unity to long periods of time. The debate has recognized the potential of the whole range of people's experiences and actions to determine change. State politics and everyday life are brought together and both have a claim to historical significance. In this spirit I intend in this essay to develop some new lines of inquiry on the transition in England by focusing on the interrelationships between the small town, the capitalist clothier and early enclosure.

Hilton, towns and the transition

When entering a discussion on the transition debate, Rodney Hilton always considered it necessary to spell out what he thought he was talking about and so will I. Working within a historical materialist perspective I understand feudalism and capitalism to refer to distinct societies with their own specific patterns or logic of development. There is a close relationship between the economic, political, and cultural life in each society and its predominant 'mode of production' of material goods and wealth, the latter being ultimately determinant but not mechanistically so. Each mode of production is characterized by particular social relations engaged in the process of production, and these are relations of property and social class. The feudal mode of production in the European middle ages is characterized by, on the one hand, peasants that possessed, independently of the market, their means of subsistence in the form of plots of land, and on the other, a class of lords and its state apparatus that maintained itself by the politically and legally enforced appropriation of the surplus food (in money or in kind) produced by the peasants on their plots. Although the means of surplus appropriation or feudal levy varied markedly in different regions and over time, it included labour and customary dues indicative of serfdom or villeinage, seigneurial monopolies, money and commuted labour rents and taxation.

In the developed capitalist mode of production, the peasantry no longer exist, or are certainly no longer predominant, having been separated from their means of subsistence and made dependent on the market, either as capital-owning entrepreneurs or wage-workers in both town and countryside. In this mode the direct political relationship has also disappeared and wage-workers, capital-owning entrepreneurs and commercial landlords relate to each other as legally free individuals in the market place, and they are compelled to do so in order to survive. Despite the change from a direct political relationship in the transfer of the surplus to one of economic compulsion on the market, political coercion inevitably supports the dominant class of appropriators in ensuring the market provides an adequate supply of cheap labour.

In England where capitalist relations of production successfully emerged from the late fifteenth century, increasing labour productivity in agriculture, increases in the proportion of the non-agrarian urban and industrial sector, and modern economic growth were generated in the long run, because the new capitalist entrepreneurs were subject to competition in the market place in order to survive, and were therefore compelled to maximize profits through specialization, accumulation, innovation, and the systematic reinvestment of profits in order to respond to changing demand. The landlords also depended on the market because their rents varied with the success of their capitalist tenant farmers. This competition between capitalist tenant farmers led, along with the urban and industrial sector, to the growth of the proportion of wage-workers and proletarianization, as, in economic and political terms, the weak were divorced from the land by the strong. Proletarianization was, therefore, increasingly the result, not the precondition of a developing capitalist system.¹ The question is what led to the emergence of capitalism in the first place?

Given the role of lords and peasants as the principal feudal classes, Rodney Hilton believed that the fundamental threat to feudalism was located in the countryside; in England capitalism emerged...