Agrarian law

“ The State shall apply the principles of agrarian reform or stewardship, whenever applicable in accordance with law, in the disposition or utilization of other natural resources, including lands of the public domain under lease or concession suitable to agriculture, subject to prior rights, homestead rights of small settlers, and the rights of indigenous communities to their ancestral lands. The State may resettle landless farmers and farmworkers in its own agricultural estates which shall be distributed to them in the manner provided by law. ”

“ Nothing is more remarkable in their contrariety, than that fictitious property is founded in the principle of agrarian laws, which it reprobates. The simple objection to these is, that they take away a portion of one man's property, and give it to another. ”

“ Agrarian reform shall be carried out with a guarantee of land ownership for small and medium-sized farmers as an instrument or result of their work and safeguarding the interests of emigrants and those who have no other means of subsistence. 2. The law shall determine the criteria for setting maximum limits for private agricultural holding units. ”

“ No complaint is intended, or ought to be alleged against them, unless they adopt the crime by opposing justice. The fault is in the system, and it has stolen imperceptibly upon the world, aided afterwards by the Agrarian law of the sword. But the fault can be made to reform itself by successive generations, without diminishing or deranging the property of any of the present possessors, and yet the operation of the fund can commence, and be in full activity, the first year of its establishment, or soon after, as I shall shew. ”

“ Of mere destructive violence there is, indeed, in all the social disturbances of the period, singularly little. There was a good deal in the routine of rural life, with its common administration of land and dependence on a collectively binding custom, to teach habits of discipline and co-operation. It must be remembered that those who took the initiative in breaking the law were not the peasants who pulled down enclosures, but the landlords who made them in defiance of repeated statutes forbidding them. ”

“ And if we ask why the obligation of maintaining the destitute should have received national recognition first in the sixteenth century, we can only answer by pointing to that trend away from the stationary conditions of agriculture to the fluctuating conditions of trade, and in particular to that displacement of the rural population, which we have already seen was one result of enclosure. The national Poor Law is not a mediæval anachronism. It is the outcome of conditions which seem to the men of the sixteenth century new and appalling. ”

“ The way in which the economic movement towards enclosure and pasture-farming is crossed, and its consequences heightened, by the law of land tenure, is proved by the comparative immunity of the freeholders from the worst forms of agrarian oppression, by the fact that, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the purely economic conditions of much of England were by no means unfavourable to small scale farming, and by the anxiety of landlords to induce tenants who had estates of inheritance to surrender them for leases. ”

“ A badly constituted grandeur in which are combined all the material elements and into which no moral element enters.
Communism and agrarian law think that they solve the second problem. They are mistaken. ”

“ It seems certain that in every case the possessor occupied precario, and that only in the bargain between the censor and the middleman was there room for contract. Thus the state was justified in the claim to resume public land which it made in many of the Agrarian laws.
The earliest agrarian measures of which we have any record are the distributions of land conquered in war to poor citizens, which later authorities attribute to Numa and Servius Tullius. ”

“ We have to consider not only what would be the state of agricultural labourers if the Corn Law were abolished, but also to consider their state if not abolished. The population is increasing at the rate of more than a thousand souls per day. What is to become of them? The land cannot find occupation for them. They must be employed in manufactures. ”

“ The first agrarian statutes were of a characteristically restrictive nature, and no constructive policy was attempted by the government until after a century of futile attempts to deal with the separate evils of engrossing, enclosure, conversion to pasture, destruction of houses and rural depopulation. The first remedy these evils suggested was limitation of the amount of land which one man should be allowed to hold. ”

“ Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. ”

“ The law is that if a field is not tilled for three successive years the government has the right to confiscate it and sell it to others. Because of the absence of modern machinery and many obstacles in the way, an average farmer can cultivate but ten or twelve acres of land. After hard labor and constant watch over the field from the tenderest growth to the harvest, the fariner is not allowed to use any part of the products until the tither has measured the crop and taken his part. ”

“ The writer of a letter in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1798, signed "Agricola," says that it has been the custom in open fields of leaving one-third or one-fourth every year as of common right for all persons, "as well those of smaller property, and that not in land, as those of superior property and that in land, to turn their cattle, horses and sheep to feed, in proportion to their several legal holdings, whether land or cottage." "Agricola" does not believe in "the unlimited right of common—it is too absurd to be defended." ”

“ Such being the case, and known to be so by the government, it is enough to surprise one that they should parcel out their lands in this way, because, even under the Code Rural, the person holding it is no longer a labourer, but a proprietor, and is not therefore amenable to it. Had the government proceeded differently, and let the estates to farm as they were originally laid out, so many petty proprietors would not have existed, but would have remained amenable to the law for enforcing cultivation. ”

“ But article 2743 (2714) is limited to a destruction of the crop only. There is no doubt that by the civil law, as by the common law, crops, so long as they are standing and ungathered, are part of the land to which they are attached. ”

“ The law for the better observance of the culture of the soil, until the Code Rural, of which I shall speak hereafter, made its appearance, was extremely deficient, and merely compelled all cultivators to remain on their respective settlements, and to attend to the duties required on them, except on Saturday and Sunday, and such holidays as were particularly enumerated; but there was no penalty for disobedience sufficient to deter a man from being guilty of it. ”

“ And so it has happened that those lands which the shepherds who founded the city taught their children to cultivate are now, by their later descendants, converted again from corn fields back to pastures, thus in their greed of gain violating even the law, since they fail to distinguish the difference between agriculture and grazing. ”

“ The State is to do no more than restore the old usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised manorial customary enforced by a strong central Government throughout the length of the land, free use of common lands, reduced rents of meadow and marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free fisheries, and the abolition of the lingering disability of personal villeinage. The most striking thing about these demands is their conservatism. Almost exactly a hundred years later agrarian reform will be demanded as part of a new heaven and a new earth. ”

“ That the present corn-law tends to check improvements in agriculture, produces uncertainty in all farming speculations, and holds out to the owners and occupiers of land prospects of special advantage which it fails to secure. That this house will take the said laws into consideration, with a view to such cautious and deliberate arrangements as may be most beneficial to all classes of her majesty’s subjects. That the freedom of industry would be promoted by a careful revision of the law of parochial settlement which now prevails in England and Wales. ”

“ Rules governing leasing or other forms of exploiting land belonging to third parties are provided for in the law in such a way as to safeguard the stability and the legitimate interests of the farmer. (2) Censive and colonial systems are prohibited and conditions created for farmers whereby the limited liability system in farming may be effectively abolished. ”

“ To carry out an integral agrarian reform, which responds to the natural right of private property, taking into account efficiency in the utilization of resources and the utility of giving land to those who work it ”

“ Though farmers are no longer yeomen, but peasants. Having no interest in the soil which composes their country, they are virtually expatriated, and the middle class, which ought to constitute the real physical and moral strength of the land, ceases to exist as a rural estate, and is found only among the professional, the mercantile, and the industrial population of the cities.—See, on the difficulty of regulating irrigation by law, Negri, Idea su una Legge in materia di Acqua, 1864 ”

“ It is to the effect that our laws relating to public lands should be so framed and administered as to ultimately secure freeholds to the greatest number of citizens, and to this end all laws facilitating speculation in public lands authorizing or permitting entry or purchase in large bodies ought to be repealed, and all public lands adapted to agriculture, subject to bounty grants, and those in aid of education ought to be reserved for the benefit of actual and bona fide settlers, and disposed of only under the provisions of the homestead law. ”

“ To advocate a system of agriculture which shall abolish the possession of land by a class who are owners and not cultivators of the soil, and thus extinguish the charge for the loan of it to farmers, is perfectly legitimate. ”

“ Cecill from Sir Anthony Auchar, quoted by Russell, Ket’s Rebellion, in Norfolk, p. 202.
[619] Miss Leonard (Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series vol. xix.) quotes Coke, Institutes, Book III., p. 105 (1644 ed.) , and S. P. D. Chas. I., clxxxvii., No. 95: “The decay of tillage and houses of husbandry are the undoubted causes and grounds of depopulation, and a crime against the Common Laws of this Realm, and every continuance thereof is a new crime.” But the words “against the Common Laws" are hardly to be interpreted strictly. ”

“ But some of them, at any rate, like rights of common pasture, seem to be bound up with the very existence of the village as an agricultural community, and all of them are dictated by the interests of the peasants in protecting themselves against encroachments, as clearly as are those of the first type by the desire of lords to make the manor a source of profit to themselves. ”

“ To appropriate common pastures without compensation may ruin a whole village; it is to seize a piece of free capital without which cows and horses cannot be fed, and thus it is virtually to confiscate the beasts, which are the peasant’s tools. When that is done he must either re-assert his rights, or throw up his arable holding, or hire pasture for a money rent; sometimes—a bitter thought—he must hire grass-land from the very man who has robbed him. ”

“ That agrarian code which is at perpetual war with the laws of God and man, is more especially the offspring of this state of society, the primary object being to secure the possession of the plots of land, which, in the absence of wages, are the sole means of subsistence. ”

“ This conclusion is clearly not supported by the premises. If the source of popular discontent be agrarian, then the right course is to amend the land laws while improving the administrative system, and enforcing justice between man and man. ”

“ The original form of agrarian arrangement is due to the settlement of a group of free men, which surrenders to its individual members the use of arable land, meadows, pasture and wood, but retains the ownership and the power to control and modify the rights of using the common land. There can be no doubt that the legal theory, which sees in the modern rights of commoners mere encroachments upon29 the lord, carries feudal notions back into too early a period. ”

“ One hundred and sixty acres of fairly rich and well-watered soil, or a much smaller amount of irrigated land, may keep a family in plenty, whereas no one could get a living from one hundred and sixty acres of dry pasture land capable of supporting at the outside only one head of cattle to every ten acres. In the past great tracts of the public domain have been fenced in by persons having no title thereto, in direct defiance of the law forbidding the maintenance or construction of any such unlawful inclosure of public land. ”

“ Land turned to pasture simply to restore it to a condition in which it would be fit for tillage escaped the condemnation passed on other kinds of “conversion,” and one can imagine that nice arguments must have arisen as to a farmer’s motives. Again, suppose a man converted to pasture land which should have remained under the plough, and then leased it to some one else, who retained it as pasture, was the lessee guilty of an offence? ”

“ It was of the essence of the open field system of tillage, and of the joint use of common meadows and pastures, that unauthorised encroachments by a single tenant should be an inconvenience to his neighbours. If made on the arable, they might interfere with the customary rotation of crops, and would certainly diminish the area of land available for the village cattle on the fallows and after harvest. If made on the common waste, they threw the village economy into confusion by upsetting the arrangements under which each holding could place so many beasts to be grazed there. ”