Historians and Peasants, Studies of Medieval English Society in a Russian Context

Historians and Peasants: Studies of Medieval English Society in a Russian Context Peter Gatrell Past and Present, No. 96. (Aug., 1982), pp. 22-50. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-2746%28198208%290%3A96%3C22%3AHAPSOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H Past and Present is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. http://www.jstor.org Mon Aug 6 20:54:50 2007 HISTORIANS AND PEASANTS: STUDIES OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH SOCIETY IN A RUSSIAN CONTEXT* IT HAS NOT GONE UNNOTICED THAT RUSSIAN WORK ON PEASANT SOCIETY has been prolific and has profoundly influenced rural studies else- where. Two aspects of this influence deserve consideration. Firstly, during the half century between 1880 and I 9 3 0 a wealth of new data was accumulated about the Russian peasantry,.giving rise to differing interpretations of social structure, social mobility and peasant econ- omic b e h a ~ i o u r . ~These debates have provided a substantial body of theory upon which social scientists in other countries have subse- quently been able to draw. This is most clearly true of Lenin's famous book on The Development of Capitalism in Russia, though an alter- native vision of peasant society associated with A. V. Chayanov has enjoyed increasing currency in the last fifteen years.3 Secondly, in the final quarter of the nineteenth century Tsarist intellectuals turned their attention to the historical study of western European society. The fruits of their labour, which was stimulated in part by a search I should like to thank members of the History Department at the University of Manchester for their comments on an earlier version of this article, and the third-year students who contributed to the course from which it derives. The detailed comments and advice of Dr. Michael Bush, Dr. Ian Kershaw and Mr. Steve Rigby have been particularly helpfu!, but they are not responsible for any shortcomings the article may have. D . Thorner, "Peasant Economy as a Category in Economic History", in T . Shanin (ed.), Peasants and Peasant Soclettes (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 208-9; A. Macfar- lane, The Ongtns of English Individualtsm: The Family, Property and Soclal Transition (Oxford, 1978), pp. 17-18, and ch. I , passim; N . Charlesworth, "The Russian Strati- fication Debate and India", Mod. Asian Studies, xiii (1979), pp. 61-95; P. Worsley, "Village Economies", in R. Samuel (ed.), People's History and Soclallst Theop (Lon- do:, 1981),pp. 80-5. - For general background, see T . Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry tn a Developing Soctety (Oxford, 1972), pt. 2; S. G. Solomon, The Soviet Agrarian Debate: A Controversy in Social Science, 1923-1929 (Boulder, Colo., 1977); T . M. Cox, Rural Socioloaj in the Soviet Union (London, 1979). ch. 2. Chayanov's major theoretical work only became accessible to English-speaking readers following the translation that appeared as A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. D. Thorner et al. (Homewood, Ill., 1966). Translations of this work had appeared in German and Japanese in the 1920s. One might also note that some of Chayanov's writings were available in English at the time. See, for instance, A. V. Chayanov, "Agricultural Economics in Russia", J1. Farm Economics, x (1928), p p 543-9; A. V. Chayanov, "The Socio-Economic Nature of Peasant Farm Economy", in P. A. Sorokin et al. (eds.), A Systemattc Source Book in Rural Sociology, 3 vols. (Minneapolis, 1931), ii. A good idea of Chayanov's importance can be obtained from past issues of the Journal of Peasant Studies and Peasant Studies (previously Peasant Studtes Newsletter). For a guide to the accumulating theoretical literature, see E. P. Durrenberger and N. Tannenbaum, "A Reassessment of Chayanov and his Critics", Peasant Studies, viii (1979), pp. 48-63. RUSSIAN STUDIES OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH SOCIETY 23 for clues as to the possibility in Russia of a transition from feudalism to capitalism along "western" lines, have similarly provided an im- portant literature for non-Russian historians to c ~ n s u l t . ~ The most obvious instance of the impact of Russian scholarship in both respects is the investigation of medieval English peasant ~oc i e t y . ~The work of historians such as Paul Vinogradoff and E. A. Kosminsky occupies a central place in the hi~toriography.~ Russian research in problems of medieval English society reflected issues that emerged from a specifically Russian background. Their work cannot be located solely in the context of a developing British and continental historiography, any more than it could be considered in vacuo. As Vinogradoff himself said, "Questions that are entirely surrendered to antiquarian research in the West of Europe are still topics of con- temporary interest with us".' Alexander Savine, one of Vinogradoff's best-known pupils, posed some of the key questions thus: What have been the causes and results of the rural revolution in the West? How far has it been of a universal character, and how far can it be avoided or modified in a society living in different circumstances? What has been the balance of good and evil during and after the ~ h a n g e ? ~ How this interrogation of the English medieval material has been handled is the subject of part of this article. It is not intended to suggest that the study of English rural society has been determined by Russian historical scholarship, the precise contribution of which may be left for medievalists to judge. The continuing relevance of the Russian social science tradition to contemporary scholars of medieval England is demonstrated by refer- ences in the work of such historians as Postan, Hilton, Dyer and Razi. These ought not to be dismissed as casual asides. Russian social "Richard Cobb informs us, for instance, of the influence on the young Georges Lefebvre of two books in particular: N. Kareiew, Les paysans et la question paysanne en France duns le dernier quart du XVZII' siecle (Paris, 1899); J . Loutchisky, L'etat des classes agricoles en France a la vetlle de la Revolution (Paris, 191 I ) ; R. C. Cobb, "Georges Lefebvre", Past and Present, no. 18 (Nov. 1960), pp. 52-67. 5 This verdict might be challenged soon on the grounds that Indian social scientists are turning to Russian rural sociology in the course of interpreting social change,on the subcontinent. See Utsa Patnaik, "Neo-Populism and Marxism: The Chayanovian View of the Agrarian Question and Its Fundamental Fallacy", 31. Peasant Studtes, vi (19791, PP. 375-420, Some recognition of this point may be found in E. A . Kosminsky, "Russian Work on English Economic History", Econ. Hist. Rev. , 1st ser., i (1928), pp. 208-33; F . Polyansky, "0russkikh burzhuaznykh istorikakh angliiskoi derevni" [Concerning Russian Bourgeois Historians of the English Countryside], Voprosy istorit (1949), no. 3, p p 93-107. For the importance of Kosminsky himself, see the introduction by Rodney Hilton to E. A. Kosminsky, Studies in the Agrarian History of England in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1956),pp. xv-xxii. P. G. Vinogradoff, Villatnage In England: Essays In English iMedteval History (Ox- ford, 1892), p. v. 8 A. Savine, "English Customary Tenure in the Tudor Period", Quart. 31. Econ., xix (~goq) , pp. 33-86. M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Sociew (Harmondsworth, 1975), c h 8, passim; R. H . Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), 24 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 96 science has provided hypotheses about stratification and class for- mation to test against available evidence. In some instances historical work has been informed by a sense of the direct and immediate rel- evance of Russian developments, often on the assumption (to mis- quote Marx) that the less developed country shows to the more de- veloped an image of the latter's past. Again, there is no chauvinistic suggestion that this alone has influenced the course of the historiogra- phy. Readers of Past and Present are well aware of the variety of methodologies operated implicitly or explicitly in the analysis of agrarian societies. l0 Here the intention is to explore the circumstances under which an influential body of ideas has been shaped and the ways in which they have been applied. As we shall see, their appli- cation has sometimes been quite crude. The latent interest of Russian intellectuals in peasant society re- ceived a boost in the 184os, with the publication of August von Haxt- hausen's Studies in the Internal Conditions . . . of Russia." Haxthau- sen, a Prussian nobleman, advanced the thesis that the Russian peasant commune (mir) represented a specifically Russian form of social organization that would allow her to avoid the trauma of pro- letarianization by encouraging the peasantry to retain a claim on com- munal land which was periodically redistributed among peasant fam- ilies. Those who accepted this argument might contemplate one of two options: either the mir operated in such a way as to stabilize existing social relations, as Haxthausen believed, or it would allow the peasantry to find their way from feudalism to socialism without having to experience capitalist industrialization. This was the view taken by Alexander Herzen. The imminent emancipation of the Rus- sian peasantry in the second half of the 1850s gave a considerable edge to these arguments. Among both conservative and radical think- ers there were those who assumed that peasant society operated on broad principles of equality and harmony, but this assumption was not universally accepted. So it was that on the eve of 1861 the claims (n.9 ronf. pp. 5-8; C. Dyer, Lords and Peasants tn a Changlng Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680-1540 (Past and Present Pubns., Cambridge, 1980), esp. ch. 14; 2. Razi, Life, Matriage and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society and Demog- raphy in Halesowen, 1270-1400 (Past and Present Pubns., Cambridge, 1980), pp. 88- 9. 10 R. Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-In- dustrial Europe", Past and Present, no. 70 (Feb. 1976), pp. 30-75; Z. Razi, "The Toronto School's Reconstitution of Medieval Peasant Society: A Critical View", Past and Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979), pp. 141-57. "August von Haxthausen, Studten iiber die inneren Zustande, das Volksleben, und insbesondere die landlichen Einrichtungen Russlands, 3 vols. (Hanover and Berlin, 1847-52). There is an abridged version in English: Studies on the Interior of Russia, ed. S. F. Starr (Chicago, 1972). For the context of Haxthausen's work, see N. M. Dru- zhinin, "A. Haxthausen i russkie revolyutsionnye dernokraty" [A. Haxthausen and Russian Revolutionary Democrats], Istoriya S . S . S .R . (1967), no. 3 , pp. 69-80; S. F . Starr, "August von Haxthausen and Russia", Slavonzc and E . European Rev . , xlvi (19681, PP. 462-78. RUSSIAN STUDIES OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH SOCIETY 25 that Russia was unique in her communal institutions, that she could avoid western European economic and social upheavals and, finally, that peasant society was fundamentally egalitarian were hotly debated among the intelligentsia. l2 These issues assumed even more importance with the emancipation of serf peasants in 1861. Feudalism had been abolished, but existing peasant institutions were left intact and actually consolidated.13 Al- though, as Isaiah Berlin points out, the Slavophil notion of Russia's uniqueness ceased to arouse passions in the 1870s and 1880s in the way it had done a generation earlier, this was not to say that echoes of the claim did not provoke fruitful historical enquiry into the origin and function of the community in the Russian and European past.'" As will be seen, this led Russian scholars to enter discussions taking place in England, Germany and elsewhere about the evolution of village communities. But from the point of view of contemporary debate in Russia more attention centred upon the internal organiz- ation of peasant society and social relations. Some elaboration of this debate is called for. According to those Russian intellectuals who have come to be called populists, the traditional commune was a viable, healthy and egali- tarian institution. This belief derived from the observation that a prime purpose of the mir was to ensure an equal distribution of com- munal land according to the number of mouths each household had to feed. Periodic reallocation of land according to this criterion made it impossible for any one household in the mir to acquire land at the expense of another household of similar size. In addition, because the commune encouraged family labour to remain on the land and pre- vented the progressive concentration of peasant land, it was a bulwark against capitalism. l 5 l 2 For an elaboration of the condensed argument in this paragraph, see F. Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth- Century Russia (London, 1960), chs. I , 3; E. Lampert, Studies in Rebellion (London, 1957), pp. 242-3, 246-7; J. Blum, Lord and Peasant In Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1971), pp. 508-9; Alexander Gerschenkron, "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization: Russia, 1861-1g17", in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vi pt. 2, ed. H . J. Habakkuk and M. M. Postan, p. 750; P. F . Laptin, Obshchina v russkol lstonografit poslednei tretel XIX-nachala X X veka [The Commune in Russian Historiography in the Last Third of the Nineteenth Century and the Be- ginning of the Twentieth] (Kiev, 1971), pp. 126-7. l 3 For details, see G. T . Robinson, Rural Russia under the Old Regime (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 68-71; Gerschenkron, "Agrarian Policies and Industrialization", pp. 745- 56. lJIsaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (London, 1978), p. 213. ' j The clearest and most intelligent discussion of the operation of the Russian mir is contained in G. Pavlovsky, Agricultural Russia on the Eve of the Revolutton (London, 1930), p p 81-4. See, in addition, Robinson, Rural Russta under the Old Regime, ch. 7; Blum, Lord and Peasant tn Russia, ch. 24, passtm. The argument about the character of the commune is set out in A. Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Soclal Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Oxford, 1969). On the attitude of populists towards capitalist industrialization, see A. Gerschenkron, Economic Backzuardness in ronr. on p. 26 8 26 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 96 Populist thought was not, however, a rigorously formulated set of principles and never amounted to more than the sum of the writings of individuals who adopted, or did not reject, the label.I6 So the picture is inevitably more complex than the above characterization suggests. Several populist writers in the 1870s, for instance, began to detect a strong impulse of economic individualism among Russian peasants who, hitherto, had been regarded as instinctively egalitarian. Closer investigation revealed, in the words of the exiled landowner A. N. Engelhardt, that "the ideals of the kulak reign among the peasantry; every peasant is proud to be the pike who gobbles up the carp. Every peasant will, if circumstances permit, . . . exploit every other". l 7 Since economic differences disclosed themselves to observ- ers, it followed that the notion of a uniform and homogeneous peasant society had to be modified. To some, such as N. N. Zlatovratsky, the possibility remained that peasants might form a "free communal union" by pooling factors of production along co-operative lines.18 And L. Tikhomirov, writing in 1885, argued that while inequalities in peasant landholding had developed after 1861, the traditional re- distribution of communal land had started up again after an interval of some twenty years. l 9 In these ways, populist writers tried to come to terms with new observations of reality. The argument that peasant society was fundamentally egalitarian had not entirely vanished, while it was by no means certain that peasant society would polarize into capitalist farmers and landless proletarian^.^^ Internal differences of status and power in the peasant community had been placed on the agenda for discussion. So, too, had the need to consider the mir in relation to the evolution and function of the village community elsewhere. If, increasingly, intellectuals came to accept the argument of N. G. Chernyshevsky that the commune was not unique to Russia, did it follow that Russia would proceed along the lines of western European capitalist de~eloprnent?~' On this point, Russian socialists sought the advice of Karl Marx. In a famous 8 n. 15 coni.: Historical Perspecttve (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), ch. 7; A . P. Mendel, Dilemmas of Progress tn Tsarist Russia: LegaliMarxtsm and LegaIPopulism (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). I h Isaiah Berlin, "Russian Populism", in his Russtan Thinkers, pp. 210-37. l 7 Quoted in R. Wortman, The Crisis ofRussian Popultsm (Cambridge, 1967), p. 58. Ibid., ch. 4 . l9 L . Tikhomirov, Russia, Political and Social (London, 1888; repr. Westport, Conn., 1978), pp. 124-9. His point was that peasants had delayed redistribution of land in the expectation that a new census would fix tax obligations for each commune and define the burden to be borne by each household. Since more than twenty years had elapsed since the previous census, members of each mtr renewed land reallocation to redress inequalities that had emerged. His observation was subsequently confirmed by a non-populist economist: A. A. Chuprov, "The Break-Up of the Village Com- munity in Russia", Economic Jl . , xxii (1912), p. 177. 'O Wortman, Crisis of Russtan Populism, passim. Laptin, Obshchina v russkoi tstoriografit, pp. 128 ff. RUSSIAN STUDIES OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH SOCIETY 27 reply to an enquiry by Vera Zasulich in I 881 (which was not published until 1924), Marx indicated that the mir could survive and flourish, providing an alternative road to socialism: "the commune is a point of support for the socialist regeneration of Russia". However, "in order that it may function as such it would be necessary to remove the harmful influences to which it is exposed . . . and guarantee to it normal conditions of free d e~e l op r n en t " . ~~ In a more lengthy draft letter Marx acknowledged the importance of the context in which the commune was located; there was no inherent and absolute tendency for the community to disintegrate. In Russia, the mir was oppressed by the state's fiscal