European yeomanries: a non-immiseration model of agrarian social history, 1350-1800

The neo-classical and political economy literatures view the European peasantry's post-medieval history as one of economic dispossession and legal disability. Here I propose a model of early modern European village history concentrating on the maintenance and reproduction of the self-sufficient family farm. Its proprietors figure as householders only marginally dependent on wage labour and capable of developing their holdings into small-scale engines of market production. European villagers were everywhere subject to seigneurial lordship or landlordism. They were universally subject to rents and taxes, and occupied their farms under widely differing tenures, with varying property rights. Some may think the English word 'yeoman' to be non-exportable. Here it signifies not only the politically enfranchised freeman agriculturist but family farmers across Europe (whatever their legal disabilities) living, in good times, in rustic sufficiency, engaged in market production and surplus accumulation in one or another form. The present article offers, in an exploratory spirit, an ideal-typical model.