The world-shaking forced evictions of English peasants during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are treated by most historians as largely a 'Tudor myth'. For them, the peasantry disappeared much later through fair means thanks to industrialisation and trade. Centred on close scrutiny of the royal commission of 1517 – 'England's Second Domesday' – this book overturns these accounts. It demonstrates, unequivocally, that capitalism carved fundamental and irreversible breaches into the English countryside between 1400 and 1620. It began, grew and thrived on widespread illegal clearances of rural people and their culture by the English ruling class, long before the British industrial revolution.
Spencer Dimmock, Ph.D. (1999), University of Kent at Canterbury, is an independent historian. He has published many studies on England and Wales, including The Origin of Capitalism in England, 1400–1600 (Brill, 2014).
Preface Abbreviations
1 Introduction
1 The Political Context of England’s Second Domesday
2 The Source
2 Before the Second Domesday
1 John Russell and John Rous
2 Forced Expropriation and the Decline of Serfdom
3 Accumulation and the Remodelling of Manorial Estates before 1488
3 England’s Second Domesday: 1488–1517
1 The Southern Midlands
2 The Rest of England
4 After the Second Domesday
1 Introduction
2 Yorkshire and the North of England
3 The Enclosure Commissions and the Risings of 1548–49
4 The ‘Midland Rising’ of 1607
5 Conclusion
Appendix: A Translation of England's Second Domesday of 1517–18 and Related Enclosure Commissions
1 Introduction
2 The Returns of the Commissions for the Southern Midlands
3 The Returns of the Commissions for the Rest of England
Bibliography Index
All students and specialists in social sciences, humanities, archaeology (including ecology, geography). The book is also accessible for the general reader and would be of interest to both academic and public libraries.