The Commons

The wage is so nearly universal now that a working life without one is hard to picture; to be without a wage is to be in trouble, and we reach at once for the word unemployed. But unemployment is a young idea. For most of the human past, and for most people in it, a livelihood did not run through an employer at all. A family lived from the land — a strip in the open field, a beast on the common pasture, pigs turned into the lord’s wood, fuel cut from the turf, the right to glean what the harvest left behind.¹1On the open-field system and the rights of common — pasture, estovers (wood), turbary (turf), gleaning — by which households drew a subsistence from land they did not individually own: J. M. Neeson, Commoners (1993); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1991). These were not charity and not wages; they were rights — customary, often unwritten, but real, attaching to the place and the person — and on them a household could subsist without ever selling its labour to anyone.

Such a life was neither easy nor equal. It was hedged by its own customs and its own lords; it could be bitterly poor, and it bound a person to a place. But it had one feature the wage does not: it required no buyer. A commoner who hired himself out did so to add to his living, not to have one at all; if no one hired him this week, he did not starve, because the land was still there and his right to it still held. The wage sat at the edge of his life, not at its centre. To move it to the centre — to make the wage the single thing standing between a person and hunger — something first had to happen to the land.

What happened to the land was enclosure. Over centuries, and then in a great rush, the open fields and commons of England were fenced, hedged, and parcelled into private property, and the rights of common that had hung upon them were extinguished. The first wave, in the Tudor century, was driven by wool: it paid to turn arable strips and shared pasture into private sheep-runs, and so, as Thomas More wrote in 1516, the once-meek sheep had grown so great a devourer that it would ‘eat up and swallow down the very men themselves’ — the husbandmen thrust out, whole villages pulled down, to make room for flocks.²2Thomas More, Utopia (1516), Bk. I, on enclosure for sheep. The later, larger wave was statutory: between 1604 and 1914 Parliament passed over 5,200 Inclosure Acts, enclosing roughly 6.8 million acres — better than a fifth of England.

The second wave was slower, vaster, and entirely lawful. Between the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, Parliament passed more than five thousand Inclosure Acts, enclosing some six and three-quarter million acres — better than a fifth of England — each act a stroke of the pen that converted common land into private title and dissolved the rights by which the poor had lived upon it. There is a real case for enclosure: consolidated private fields could be worked far more efficiently than scattered strips, and the harvests that fed a fast-growing nation came in part from it. But for the commoner the improvement was also an eviction. Stripped of the land and the rights that had been his living, he had left to sell only one thing — his labour — and from that day he had to find a buyer for it, or go under.

The commons did not require a buyer. The wage does.

Enclosure pushed people off the land; the law then saw to it that they could not simply roam free of work. The dispossessed who took to the roads — seeking harvest work, or alms, or anywhere to be — were met not with relief but with the whip. A long line of Tudor statutes against ‘vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ made being poor and masterless a punishable condition: the able-bodied man without a master could be whipped, branded, set in the stocks. The most savage of them, an Act of 1547, decreed that a stubborn vagabond might be made a slave for two years and driven to work by beating or chaining — a law so brutal it proved unenforceable and was repealed within three years, but whose intent was unmistakable.³3The Tudor ‘bloody legislation against the expropriated’ (Marx’s phrase, Capital I, ch. 28): the vagrancy statutes of 1494–1597, of which the Vagabonds Act 1547 (1 Edw. 6 c. 3), prescribing two years’ bondage for the able-bodied vagrant, was the harshest; it was repealed in 1550. To be without work was not a misfortune to be cushioned; it was a fault to be corrected.

The point of the whip was not cruelty for its own sake but instruction: there was to be no living outside the labour market, no honourable idleness for the poor, no third thing between a master and a punishment. What enclosure had made physically necessary — that a man must sell his labour — the vagrancy laws made legally compulsory. Between them they did not so much offer the wage as ensure there was nothing else.

There was one celebrated attempt to keep a door open, and its fate has shadowed the argument ever since. In 1795, with bread prices soaring, the magistrates of Berkshire, meeting at Speenhamland, resolved to top up the wages of the poor out of the parish rates on a sliding scale tied to the price of the loaf and the size of the family, so that no labourer’s income — whatever his master paid him — would fall below what bread cost to live.⁴4The Speenhamland scale (1795) keyed relief to the price of the gallon loaf and the number of children. Condemned by the Royal Commission of 1834 (and later by Polanyi) for depressing wages and pauperising labour, its ill effects were judged greatly exaggerated by later historians (Mark Blaug, 1963; George Boyer). It was abolished by the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. It was, in effect, a guaranteed minimum income — a wage subsidy two centuries before the phrase — and it spread across much of southern England.

What it did is still disputed, and the dispute is the whole modern quarrel in miniature. To its critics — the reformers of 1834, and a century later Karl Polanyi — it was a disaster: by making up the difference, it freed employers to pay beneath subsistence and heaped the rest onto the rates, so that wages sank, the labourer was pauperised, and his independence drained away. To later historians — Mark Blaug, George Boyer — the charge was overdrawn: the system mostly kept people from starving, steadied a countryside in crisis, and fitted the broken, seasonal rhythm of farm work. But the official verdict of the day was damning, and in reaction it produced the New Poor Law of 1834, which swept the subsidy away, raised the workhouse, and laid down the iron rule of ‘less eligibility’ — that relief must be made so much worse than the meanest paid work that no one would ever choose it. The open door was not merely closed; it was walled up and made a place of dread, precisely so that the wage, however poor, would always look the better bargain.

It took another century to say plainly what had happened, and it was Karl Polanyi who said it best. Land and labour, he argued in 1944, are not really commodities at all: a commodity is something produced in order to be sold, and labour is only another name for human beings, as land is only another name for nature. Neither was made for the market; both were driven into it. To run a whole society as one great self-regulating market, these ‘fictitious commodities’ had to be treated as though they were real ones — human life priced and sold by the hour like so much cloth — and a market that did that to people, left to itself, would grind them to pieces. And so, Polanyi held, society always struck back: the very century that freed the labour market also filled with factory acts and unions and poor relief — a ‘double movement,’ the market’s advance met by society’s defence.⁵5Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944), on land, labour, and money as ‘fictitious commodities’ and on the ‘double movement.’ The origin story is Karl Marx’s ‘so-called primitive accumulation,’ Capital I, part VIII.

Marx had told the origin story earlier, and harder. The wage-labouring class, he insisted, was not born of thrift — a few industrious souls saving while the rest squandered, as the comfortable legend ran. It was made, by force, through what he called primitive accumulation: the prising of the people from the land, enclosure and eviction and the bloody statutes, until there existed a great mass of men who were, in his phrase, free in a double sense — free to sell their labour as they pleased, and free of any property by which they might otherwise have lived. The liberty of the wage worker and his dispossession, he saw, were a single event told twice.

He was free to sell his labour, and free of anything else to live on. The two freedoms were the same.

Set the commons and the wage side by side, and the bargain is plain. The commons gave security without freedom: the commoner could not easily be starved, for the land was there — but neither could he easily leave, bound as he was to his place, his lord, the slow grip of custom. The wage gives the opposite: freedom without security. The wage worker may go anywhere, leave anyone, sell his labour to the highest bidder — a real and precious liberty the serf never knew — but he must find a buyer, week upon week, or fall, for there is no longer any land beneath him to break the fall. We did not simply lose the commons, nor simply gain the wage. We traded a floor for a door.

Nearly everything built since has been an effort to have both at once — to keep the freedom of the wage while restoring, by other means, the security of the commons. Poor relief, factory acts, social insurance, unemployment pay, the minimum wage: each is, in its way, an attempt to slide a floor back under the worker without binding him again to a master or a place. The boldest version of the idea is also among the earliest. In 1797, watching these same enclosures, Thomas Paine argued that because the earth had once been ‘the common property of the human race,’ everyone dispossessed by private property was owed compensation — not as charity but as a right — and proposed a national fund to pay every person a sum on coming of age and a pension ever after: a floor of money to stand in for the floor of land.⁶6Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797): the earth as ‘the common property of the human race,’ and a national fund — raised from a ground-rent on inherited land — to pay each person a lump sum at twenty-one and a pension from fifty, ‘as a right, and not as a charity.’ An ancestor of the basic-income idea. Two centuries on the same proposal returns under a new name, the universal basic income, and draws the same two replies it always has: that a floor a person can live on without working is the truest freedom a modern society can offer — and that it is merely Speenhamland again, a subsidy that lets wages fall and calls it kindness. Plate i asked whether the wage was just; plate ii, what it sells; plate iii, the trust it is staked upon. This plate asks the question beneath the others — whether it must be taken at all — and finds the answer was settled long ago, by the closing of every other door. The measure of a society may be how freely it can let that door open again.