<論説>囲込運動を回る英国農民事情 : 十六世紀ヨーマソリーの問題

Abstract

従来我国の研究史に即する限り、主として地域的・時代的類型論として、或いは経営形態論として提出され、また主に計量的にのみ問題にされ勝ちであつた囲込運動を、領主経済の側からではなく、農民問題として、とくにかの中世的土地保有形式の解体という巨大な歴史過程の中に位置づけようとしたのが本稿である。従つてこの際、囲込運動は既に所与のモチーフとして考えられた。が、この運動によるかかる土地保有形式の解体の不可避性=必然性はわけても農民土地保有態様の不安定性にあつたと考えざるを得ず、この点よりとくに慣習土地保有態様の特異な性絡について主としてページをさいた。しかも慣習土地保有農こそは当時農民の大部、ことにかのヨーマンリーの主体を形成したものであり、併せてここに副題の意味を含ませることにした。

This essay is an attempt to provide a more fundamental treatment than has been found hitherto of the Enclosure Movement in our academic circle. It is an attempt to restate the essence of the movement not in the mere typological difference, periodical, geographical and administrative, that has been discussed even among us to some degree, but in that dynamic process of the disintegration of the feudal tenure. Accordingly the question of the statistical estimate of the areas enclosed and of the number of the tenants displaced is not here so concerned with. The most important is, after all, to get the general view of the economic forces at work and of the structure of the leagal relationships upon which they operated. While the agricultural revolution of the sixteenth cetury was in process, legal considerations were largely the determining factor. The legal status of the tenants was not the artificial discrimination of the lawyers, but was often all that lay between prosperity and destitution. In this connection the decisive cause of the decay of the feudal society is to be found not in the realm of economics but in the legal insecurity of the peasantry, especially of the customary tenants who constituted the greatest part of the rural population and that substantial English yeomanry.