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Land was no longer a thing the peasants could grow stuff on, land became an investment, land became an asset class for the wealthy. Once it became an asset class they started Partitioning and Enclosure, which meant people weren't allowed to grow stuff on it, so subsistence farming was no longer a viable lifestyle.
*Psst* Hi, Historian here. You know back in the Middle Ages? Land was still divided between the classes and going onto your King/Lord's land would get you killed. Also, the lands used for farming were rented out to peasants pretty much in the same system from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. Communal land was used for forging nuts and grazing animals, it didn't really have many benfits.
Life super sucked in the Middle Ages.
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@ MargaretMoony: Exactly. What's even weirder is that for the majority of people not in the Nobility who didn't die in the plague, the Late Middle Ages was a much better time to live then the High Middle Ages. The people who suffered the MOST were in fact the elites. This guy's history is completely ass-backwards.
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@MargaretMoony: Shooting deer in the King's forests got you hanged. No matter if he was out of the country and your village was starving, don't be going on his land to get something to eat.
Robin Hood stories didn't get to be popular b/c the peasants were so happy with their setup.
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@AgnosticTheocrat: "This guy's history is completely ass-backwards."
That's what happens when a person tries to make reality fit his philosophy rather than make his philosophy conform to reality. Unfortunately history (especially the history of philosophy) is almost completely filled with examples of the former rather than the latter.
It is a shame to see, on a site dedicated to thinking about the future, that the same error is still being promulgated. But, of course, as the saying goes, if you don't learn from history, you will be doomed to repeat it.
This article certainly does THAT in spades.
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@AgnosticTheocrat: True, it may make me sound like a shameless capitalist but this is when trade began to really start to benfit the masses (amoung other things).
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