The revolution in property: institutionalising modern Property

As late as the sixteenth century, a large proportion of English farming was still being undertaken by farmers working within a complex system of open fields and common rights. Two centuries later, notwithstanding widespread enclosure, much land was still commonly held and in many parts of the country it was still often the case that no one landowner enjoyed exclusive rights to use particular tracts of land. Rather, many different people possessed rights, recognised in custom and law, to use land for certain purposes. In the context of such ‘variable and divided property’, landed property was inevitably seen and experienced, at least in part, as a social relation between people concerning a resource. Embedded in the customary practices of a complex and hierarchical social whole, the use rights held by the labouring classes over land were fiercely defended and critical to livelihoods, enabling full or partial self- sufficiency and reducing dependence on wage- labour and market- purchased goods. These use rights were detailed in The Commentaries, where Blackstone described, often in painstaking detail, property rights in land that were not only fragmented and divided, but still to a considerable extent bound up in intricate and visible social relations between people occupying different places in a hierarchically organised and inter- connected social whole. The situation was very similar elsewhere. In pre- revolutionary France, for example, ‘real estate, such as land and buildings, was rarely owned independently and completely by a single person. Instead, any given piece of real estate had multiple, partial owners who stood in legally enforced relations of superiority and dependence toward one another’.

As this suggests, during this period the connections between different classes were often openly recognised, as was the connection between the wealth of the rich and the labour of the poor. Labour was seen as the source of the nation's wealth and as the foundation upon which all riches depended. The agricultural commentator Timothy Nourse observed that ‘were it not for … poor labourers, the Rich themselves would soon become poor’. In similar vein, a mid eighteenth- century MP candidly stated that it was from the labour of the ‘common people’ that the wealthy ‘derive[d] their riches and splendour’.