Development 13

… for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots! not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded (…) They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.

Thomas Morus (1516): Utopia.

Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English lawyer and politician who was executed for high treason. In 1935 he was made a saint.

From the end of the 15th century, many small holder tenant farmers, who practised subsistence farming (self-sufficiency), were driven off the land by large landowners. According to Silvia Federici (2014: 68), this land privatisation in Europe began at the same time as colonial expansion into the Americas, with which it was connected. In England, large landowners needed land for their sheep in order to be able to supply the textile manufacturers in Flanders / Belgium with more wool (the price of which had risen sharply). The consequences were rural exodus and impoverishment.

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

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