Alternatives to expropriation: rent, credit and peasant landholding in medieval Europe and modern Palestine

The essays in this edition address, for four periods and regions, the kinds of processes that could, in certain circumstances, have led to expropriation, that is the appropriation of land by wealthier parties and the enforced landlessness of former peasant landholders; however, in each instance presented here, the authors describe processes that did not in fact result in the forced and complete removal of peasant proprietors from their land. Instead, as three of the following articles show, namely those by Furio, Nadan and Schofield, a reduction in property rights could be as important an indicator of the expropriation of property rights as the more classical view of enforced landlessness and proletarianization. Furthermore, the sorts of conditions that might have led to expropriation or a reduction in property rights in certain contexts, did not necessarily result in any reduction in the pre-existing rights of peasant tenants, as is shown by Arnoux in his contribution to this edition. In all instances, the articles published here illustrate that those who might have chosen to expropriate, notably landlords, wealthier peasants, merchants and creditors, were not necessarily interested in appropriating peasant land. Rather, a regular receipt of rents was, most obviously, often as and more important in such contexts; as such, and again as will be explored in the following articles, these designs on peasant land typically led to a diminution of the property rights of the tenant but not their wholesale eviction from the land. This was not universally the case; in other parts of medieval Europe, to which reference will be made below, creditors sought out and expropriated the lands of their debtors. However, this was neither a universal process nor one that was dependent upon unique sets of prevailing conditions; instead, the persistence of, or introduction of, new institutional and economic structures and practices (such as seigneurial expectations, communal or familial convention, governmental legislation, the