Historians J.L. and Barbara Hammond in The Village Labourer 1760–1832 (1911) describe the workers who were driven into factories by the Enclosure Acts:
The enclosures created a new organization of classes. The peasant with rights and a status, with a share in the fortunes and government of his village, standing in rags, but standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer with no corporate rights to defend, no corporate power to invoke, no property to cherish, no ambition to pursue, bent beneath the fear of his masters, and the weight of a future without hope. No class in the world has so beaten and crouching a history.
As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains, “England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a
system of poor relief supplements to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve. The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages.
English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization: Two Instances of an Anti-Peasant Mode of Development
The Village Labourer: 1760-1832 : A Study in the Government of England Before the Reform Bill
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