Mastodawn

> The only solution, Young insisted, was to deprive the rural laboring class of their property and let poverty goad them to greater industry. What else but hardship would make them work? In turned out that deprivation did the poor a favor. “Every one but an ideot [sic] knows that…the lower classes must be poor, or they will never be industrious.”
https://www.bellfarmnc.com/p/arthur-youngs-rural-idylls

#ArthurYoung #EnclosureEnslaves #Peasants
Meme Source: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GEg7ozjzD/

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bsmall2 Jun 4

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> Young was quite clear that small and middling farmers shouldn’t bother with convertible husbandry; it was best left to the big ones: “how in the name of common sense were such improvements to be wrought by little or even moderate farmers! Can such inclose wastes at a vast expense–cover them with an hundred loads an acre of marle–or six or eight hundred bushels of lime–keep sufficient flocks of sheep for folding[…] No. It is to GREAT FARMERS you owe these. Without GREAT FARMS you never would have seen these improvements.”
#TheUnsettling

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bsmall2 Jun 4

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> The very earliest enclosures in Norfolk took place in the 12th century and then again in the 15th century. About a hundred years later, Kett’s Rebellion (1549), in which approximately 16,000 smallholders and laborers tore down hedges and fences put up by the rich in a massive spate of enclosure, began about forty miles south of Holkham–just outside Norwich.
#Enclosure #KettsRebellion #Norfolk

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bsmall2

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> ... a way of seeing both obfuscations of labor as bound up in the same process of economic and ecological myth-making: rural people yield their labor to the lord’s grasp as willingly as the pike in the stream or the plum in the tree, and they are not the worse for it. Indeed, for Young, no less than for Jonson, exploitation is good for them: how else would people or places learn to be productive if not for the firm hand of their lordly masters?
#BenJonson #EcologicalMyths #ObfuscationLabor