BOTH books listed above provide important information about the rise of the concept of private property in England:
Tawney trace the origins of the modern concept of property in Chapter III of the book referenced above. Relevant excerpts from the chapter are cited below. Tawney describes, but does not focus on the historical context. --
Historically, the battle is between the King and the Aristocrats, the public fend for themselves. The King opposed efforts of the Aristocracy to expropriate the Commons Land belonging to the public -- he did not want them to grow too powerful. Battles between Kings often took place, and the side which lost had lands expropriated and re-assigned from Rebels to parties favoring victorious kings. THEREFORE it was important for the aristocracy to have secure rights to land, independent of the King. This was exactly the objective of the theory proposed by Locke for property rights.
After Cromwell's rebellion, monarchy was restored by the help of the aristocracy. However, they extracted a heavy price from the King Stuart in return for their help. They were allowed to privatize the common lands -- they took over schools and Church lands and commons land belonging to public and turned it into their own private property. Polanyi in The Great Transformation has given a graphic description of the process: The material below is from around page 35:
Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich is against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves. Though this happened only in patches, the black spots threatened to melt into a uniform catastrophe.1 The King and his Council, the Chancellors, and the Bishops were defending the welfare of the community and, indeed, the human and natural substance of society against this scourge. With hardly any intermittence, for a century and a half—from the 1490's, at the latest, to the 1640's—they struggled against depopulation. Lord Protector Somerset lost his life at the hands of the counterrevolution which wiped the enclosure laws from the statute book and established the dictatorship of the grazier lords, after Kett's Rebellion was defeated with several thousand peasants slaughtered in the process. Somerset was accused, and not without truth, of having given encouragement to the rebellious peasants by his staunch denunciation of enclosures.
It was almost a hundred years later when a second trial of strength came between the same opponents, but by that time the enclosers were much more frequently wealthy country gentlemen and merchants rather than lords and nobles. High politics, lay and ecclesiastical, were now involved in the Crown's deliberate use of its prerogative to prevent enclosures and in its no less deliberate use of the enclosure issue to strengthen its position against the gentry in a constitutional struggle, which brought death to Strafford and Laud at the hands of Parliament. But their policy was not only industrially but politically reactionary ; furthermore, enclosures were now much more often than before intended for tillage, and not for pasture. Presently the tide of the Civil War engulfed Tudor and early Stuart public policy forever.
Nineteenth century historians were unanimous in condemning Tudor and early Stuart policy as demagogic, if not as outright reactionary. Their sympathies lay, naturally, with Parliament and that body
[35]
had been on the side of the enclosers. H. de B. Gibbins, though an ardent friend of the common people, wrote: "Such protective enactments were, however, as protective enactments generally be, utterly vain."
1 Tawney, R, H„ The Agrarian Problem in the i6th Century, 1912
EXCERPTS from TAWNEY: Religion & the Rise of Capitalism
CHAPTER III: The Church of England
In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. Church retreated to strong traditional formulations, rather than insightful accommodation that was needed. As a result, it became irrelevant.
I: The Land Question: (Enclosures and Private Property)
During Cromwell’s Rebellion and the Restoration, Catholic Estates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of £15,000.000 to £20,000,000 changed hands. Tremendous amount of social change, and also rise to power of a corrupt, financially motivated class.
The ideals of the Reformation were high for Church, Society, State. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring into life a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel. Of course, there was an element of propaganda here, but there were genuine hopes/aspirations. However, the concrete reality turned out so differently.
As the ideals were corrupted by practice, so also a new creed came into being, to defend the new practices: . That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbors, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.
The traditional theory of limited rights to property was re-asserted by the Divines: The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the crops which the village needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbors's beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by methods of agriculture which injure his neighbors and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased fines; for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain.