Why Didn't People Just Refuse to Use Money?

The Question I Left You With

I told you the King invents coin and tax together. He mints the coins, gives them to his soldiers, and then demands them back from everyone else as tax — and in that single move he has forced an entire population to need his coin and created the market where his soldiers spend it. That part, I stand by.

But I ran ahead of myself. Because if you actually sit with that story for a minute, it doesn’t explain very much. A tax, paid once a year, in a fixed number of coins, is a small thing. You could work a short stretch, earn what you owed, pay it, and spend the rest of the year exactly as your grandparents had — grazing your animals on the common, gathering your fuel from the common wood, fishing the shared stream, trading favors with your neighbors the way I described with the elevator button. The king’s tax explains why coin has some value. It does not explain why, today, you cannot get through a single day of your life without it.

So something else must have happened. Some other, much bigger set of events between “pay the king once a year” and “you will starve, this week, without money.” I want to walk through what that was, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It is not one event. It is not one law. It is hundreds of specific, documented, legal acts, spread across roughly three centuries, each one closing a door that used to be open.

What People Actually Had

Before I show you how it was taken away, I want to be precise about what “it” was. Because I don’t want you picturing something vague and romantic — “the commons” as a kind of pastoral daydream. It was a specific bundle of legal rights, attached to specific land, enforced in specific courts.

If you lived in an English village before enclosure, you likely had a right called estovers — the right to take wood from the common land for fuel and repairs. It was split into named categories: housebote for repairing your dwelling, hedgebote for repairing your fences, firebote for fuel. You had pannage — the right to let your pigs loose in the common woodland every autumn to fatten on fallen acorns and beechmast. You had turbary — the right to cut your own peat for fuel. You had piscary — the right to fish the shared river or pond. And you had grazing rights on the common pasture itself, which your village regulated through a system called stinting: a cap, set and adjusted by the manorial court, on exactly how many cows, sheep, or geese each household could put out, so no one overgrazed the shared land.

None of this was informal or sentimental. These rights were documented, litigated, and in 1217 explicitly re-affirmed by royal charter — the Charter of the Forest, issued alongside Magna Carta, which protected free men’s access to pannage, estovers, agistment, and turbary in the royal forests after earlier kings had been steadily restricting them. It stayed in force, in some form, longer than almost any other English statute.

Gleaning, and the Day It Legally Ended

The one I find most striking is gleaning — the right of the poorest people in a village, usually women, to walk through a field after the harvest was carried away and gather whatever grain the reapers had missed, before the animals were let onto the stubble. Historian Peter King, who studied this specifically, found it was not a trivial custom — it was a real, calculable part of a laboring family’s income for the year. (King, “Customary Rights and Women’s Earnings,” Economic History Review, 1991)

And gleaning has something almost no other piece of this story has: an exact date it stopped being a right. In 1788, a Suffolk landowner named James Steel sued a woman named Mary Houghton for trespass, after she gleaned in his field. The case went to the Court of Common Pleas. The court ruled that no person has, at common law, any right to glean. Not a custom to be respected — a privilege, granted or withheld entirely at the landowner’s discretion. (Steel v Houghton, 1 H Bl 51, 126 ER 32, 1788) One case. One ruling. One of the oldest surviving rights of the rural poor in England, ended by a single judgment, on the say-so of a court made up of men who owned land, not men who gleaned it.

I am telling you about gleaning first because it is the clearest, smallest example of the pattern this whole story runs on. Something existed. It had a name, a use, a real value to the people who depended on it. And then a specific, documented, legal act ended it — not by taking anything from you at gunpoint in the street, but by a court quietly declaring it had never really been yours to begin with.

Enter the Merchants

Now I need to bring in a second character, because the king was not the only one who figured out how to make people need money. While English villages ran on stinting and estovers and gleaning, something different was being built in the trading cities of Italy — Florence, Venice, Genoa. And what was built there is, in a very direct way, the ancestor of the bank that approves your mortgage today.

An ordinary merchant sells wool in one city and buys silk in another. That is trade. What the Italian merchant-bankers built was something else: a way to move the promise of money between cities without moving any actual coin. A merchant in Bruges who owed money to a merchant in Barcelona didn’t need to ship gold across the sea. He wrote a bill of exchange — a letter instructing his bank’s agent in Barcelona to pay the Barcelona merchant, in Barcelona’s own currency, on a fixed future date. There is a documented example of exactly this, from the Florentine Orlandini-Benizi company: in January 1400, a bill for 600 écus was drawn in Bruges on an agent in Barcelona, accepted, and paid out a month later by a simple transfer between bank accounts — no coin ever crossed the sea at all. (de Roover, as summarized in Munro, “The Medieval Bill of Exchange,” University of Toronto)

This mattered enormously, because it meant a small number of banking families — the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and later the Medici — could hold and move sums of money far larger than any single kingdom’s physical stock of gold and silver. And kings noticed. When Edward III of England needed money to fight France in the 1340s, he didn’t dig a new silver mine. He borrowed from the Bardi and Peruzzi banks. When he later defaulted, a contemporary Florentine chronicler claimed it wiped out both companies to the tune of 900,000 and 600,000 gold florins. (Villani, contemporary chronicle, 14th century) I want to be honest with you about this one, because it is exactly the kind of thing this series keeps warning you about: a dramatic number, repeated for six hundred years, that turns out to be shakier than it looks. A modern historian who went back through the Peruzzi’s own surviving account books found nothing close to that scale of lending to Edward III, and argues the real losses were closer to a tenth of that, with the companies’ collapse driven by several other problems at once, not one royal default. (Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies, 1994) Whichever number is closer to true, the shape of the event is not in dispute: a king borrowed at a scale beyond his own capacity to repay, from bankers whose only product was other people’s need for money. That is the beginning of the merchant class becoming a power the king himself depends on — which is a thread I’ll come back to.

Money That Demands More Money Back

Here is the part I actually want you to sit with, because it is the real invention, and it is still, today, the thing that makes your loan cost more than you borrowed.

The Catholic Church, for most of the medieval period, banned charging interest on a loan outright. It was called usury, and it was a sin. So how did banking families get rich lending money, in a Europe where lending money for profit was supposed to be forbidden?

They used the fact that a bill of exchange involved two different currencies in two different cities. Suppose a Florentine bank in Venice buys a bill payable in Bruges, at one exchange rate. Two months later, instead of collecting the money in cash, the Bruges branch immediately uses it to buy a return bill payable back in Venice — at a slightly different exchange rate. There was no single moment where anyone “charged interest.” There were just two currency exchanges, months apart, at two slightly different rates. But the gap between those rates was the profit. It was a loan, wearing the costume of a foreign-exchange transaction. Historians have gone back through real surviving transactions and calculated what this actually worked out to in annual terms: commonly somewhere in the range of 9 to 16 percent a year — a real, calculable interest rate, collected by a route that let everyone involved say, with a straight face, that no loan had taken place. (Bell, Brooks & Moore, “Cambium non est mutuum,” Economic History Review, 2017)

Some bankers pushed this further still, into something called dry exchange — a bill drawn on a foreign city with no real trade happening at all, sometimes on an agent who barely existed, purely to manufacture the appearance of a currency transaction around what was, underneath, a plain loan to a local borrower who needed cash now. The Church eventually caught up: in 1571, Pope Pius V issued a bull specifically condemning “dry and fictitious exchange” as disguised usury, while still allowing genuine, trade-linked currency exchange to continue. (In Eam, Pope Pius V, 1571) Notice what that ruling actually concedes: the Church wasn’t objecting to money making more money. It was only objecting to doing it too obviously.

This is what I mean when I say money that demands more money back. A coin, on its own, just sits there — it is not a promise, it does not grow. What the merchant bankers built was a way to turn a sum of money into a claim on a larger future sum, dressed up in enough technical machinery that it could dodge a direct ban on doing exactly that. Once that trick exists, whoever controls it has a permanent, compounding claim on everyone who ever has to borrow — which, as you’ll see, is a widening circle of people, because their other options are being closed off at the same time.

The Same Trick, Played on Entire Continents

Once a king or a state needs money at a scale beyond what its own land can produce, the logic of coin-and-tax starts getting applied further and further away from home — to entire colonized populations, and eventually to whole continents.

I’ve written elsewhere about the clearest, most explicit case of this: British colonial administrators arriving in East and Southern Africa in the 1890s, finding people who had land, food, and community, and who had no need whatsoever for British currency. So the British imposed a hut tax — an annual levy, payable only in British coin, on every dwelling. The only way to get that coin was to work for a British employer. Frederick Lugard, the architect of British rule in Nigeria, wrote about this purpose in his own words — the tax existed to manufacture a workforce, not to raise revenue. When the British imposed it in Sierra Leone in 1898, the Temne and Mende peoples rose up under Bai Bureh in what became known as the Hut Tax War. They understood exactly what was being taken from them. They lost.

The same coin-and-tax logic ran, at an even larger scale, through Spain’s conquest of the Americas. The Spanish crown fought almost constant wars in Europe, and financed them not from its own treasury but from Genoese merchant-bankers — the Spinola, Doria, Grimaldi, and Centurione families — under contracts called asientos. One documented example: a 1595 loan of 340,000 ducats from the Genoese banker Tomás Fiesco, at 12 percent interest. (Álvarez-Nogal & Chamley, “Debt policy under constraints,” Economic History Review, 2014) These loans were routinely secured against silver that had not even arrived yet — the next fleet due from the Americas. And the silver on those fleets came overwhelmingly from one place: Potosí, in what is now Bolivia, which at its peak around 1600 may have produced as much as 60 percent of all the silver mined on earth. (aggregated estimates, Potosí in the Global Silver Age, Brill, 2023 — treat as approximate)

That silver was pulled out of the ground by a forced-labor draft called the mita, formalized by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in the 1570s: villages across a huge stretch of the Andes were required to send roughly one in seven of their adult men to work the mines, typically for a year at a stretch. (Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain, 1984) I want to be careful here too — some popular accounts state a specific, very low survival rate for mita laborers, and I could not find that figure traced back to a serious peer-reviewed source, so I’m not going to repeat it as fact. What is well documented is that the parallel mercury mine at Huancavelica, which supplied the mercury used to refine Potosí’s silver, was known to colonial officials themselves by a nickname: “the mine of death.”

Follow the chain all the way through: a war in Flanders needed money the Spanish crown didn’t have → Genoese bankers supplied it at interest → the loan was secured against silver not yet mined → the silver was mined by Andean villagers forced into the mita → the mercury used to refine it came from a mine colonial administrators themselves called a slaughterhouse. Nobody in that chain, from the drafted miner in the Andes to the taxpayer in an English hut, chose to enter the money system. Money reached them because someone above them needed it and had the power to make that need theirs.

Who Was Actually in the Room

So let’s come back to England, and to the actual mechanism that finally closed the door on people living outside the money system entirely: the Enclosure Acts.

Here is the part that is almost never said out loud, even though it is not a matter of opinion — it is written directly into the law. In 1711, Parliament passed the Property Qualification Act, which required anyone sitting as an MP to own a substantial landed estate. The stated purpose, in the words used at the time, was to exclude “courtiers, military men, and merchants” from Parliament, so that — again, in their own words — “the land interest would be the prevailing consideration in all their consultations.” (Property Qualification Act, 1711) Parliament legally engineered itself, on purpose, to be a body of landowners. As late as 1818, close to 70 percent of MPs either owned a landed estate or came from a family that did. Add to that the “rotten boroughs” and “pocket boroughs” — more than 140 of 658 Commons seats, right up until the Reform Act of 1832, were tiny or empty constituencies effectively owned outright by a single aristocratic patron.

Now here is how an actual Enclosure Act got passed. A group of local landowners petitioned Parliament to enclose their parish’s common land. The threshold for that petition to proceed was, in practice, assent from owners holding somewhere around three-quarters of the land by value — not a vote of the people who lived there, a vote weighted by how much land you already owned. Public notice was a notice pinned to the parish church door for three Sundays. The petition then went to a Parliamentary committee — made up of the same class of men who owned the land in question, or land just like it — which approved the bill, appointed commissioners (usually chosen by the petitioning landowners themselves) to survey the parish and allocate the newly enclosed plots. (UK Parliament, “Enclosing the land,” parliament.uk)

So walk through what actually happened: landowners petitioned a Parliament composed of landowners, elected in many cases by other landowners, to approve the taking of land that people without formal title had used for generations, using a process whose committees and commissioners were staffed by landowners. The historian E.P. Thompson put it more bluntly than I will: he called enclosure “a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers.” (Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963) I want to flag something in fairness to Thompson, though, because this series keeps insisting on applying the same rigor to every replacement idea as to the myth it’s replacing: Thompson himself resisted the flatter version of this argument — that law is simply, always, nothing but a weapon of the ruling class. His own point, made elsewhere, was that law only functions as effective ideology because it maintains a real appearance of fairness. It is not a cartoon. It is something more durable and harder to see through than a cartoon.

The Commons, Enclosed

By Parliament’s own historical account, between 1604 and 1914 it passed over 5,200 separate enclosure Acts, converting roughly 6.8 million acres — about a fifth of the total land area of England — from common or open land into private property. (UK Parliament, “Enclosing the land”) Other historians, measuring differently — England and Wales together, or counting the informal enclosures that predated the Parliamentary process — arrive at figures as high as 8 million acres, and one influential study argues England was already something like three-quarters enclosed by 1760, well before most of the famous Parliamentary Acts were even passed. (Wordie, “The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500–1914,” Economic History Review, 1983) The exact number is genuinely debated among historians. That it was a lot of land, taken through a specific, repeatable legal mechanism, over roughly three centuries, is not.

A single village makes this concrete in a way a national number can’t. In Wollaston, Northamptonshire, the open fields and commons were enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1788. The number of separate landowners in the village fell from 108 to just 18. (local historical record — treat as needing independent confirmation) A hundred and eight households, most of them probably smallholders with common rights attached to their land, became eighteen. The other ninety did not vanish. They became something else: people with no land, and therefore, for the first time, no way to eat except by selling their labor.

When People Fought Back

People understood exactly what enclosure was doing to them, and they resisted it, repeatedly, for centuries — not passively, but in organized, sometimes armed, always documented ways.

In 1549, in Norfolk, a yeoman farmer named Robert Kett watched a crowd tear down the enclosure fences on his own land near Wymondham — and instead of calling for their arrest, he agreed with them and led them. Some 16,000 people camped outside Norwich at Mousehold Heath, drew up a list of 29 grievances, and administered their own rough government from beneath an oak tree they called the Oak of Reformation. The rebellion was crushed that August at the Battle of Dussindale. Kett was hanged for treason that December. (Kett’s Rebellion, 1549) I want to be honest about a detail here too, because Kett’s Rebellion is often flattened into “the enclosure riot” when the surviving document — the actual 29 demands, still held by the British Library — shows only one clause that mentions enclosure directly, and even that is narrow. Most of the demands are about corrupt local officials and the power of the gentry generally. The rebellion is best read as part of a wider revolt against gentry power, of which enclosure was one piece, not the whole story.

A century later, in April 1649, a small group led by Gerrard Winstanley — calling themselves the True Levellers, though history remembers them as the Diggers — began digging and planting vegetables on common land at St George’s Hill in Surrey, declaring the earth “a common treasury of relief for all, both beasts and men.” About fifty people joined them. Local landowners had their shelters burned and crops destroyed within about a year. (St George’s Hill Diggers, 1649–1650)

And in Northamptonshire in 1765, at West Haddon, villagers advertised a football match in the local newspaper — a cover story to legally assemble a crowd — and used the gathering to tear down and burn the fences from a fresh, 2,000-acre enclosure, causing around £1,500 in damage. (West Haddon enclosure riot, 1765; discussed in Neeson, Commoners, 1993) The enclosure went ahead anyway. It almost always did. Parliament did not need to win the argument. It only needed to win the vote, and it had already arranged, by its own property qualification, who got to hold one.

Standing Still Became a Crime

Enclosure took away the land. But taking the land alone doesn’t force anyone into wage labor, not by itself — a person without land could, in principle, still travel, beg, squat, or scrape by on whatever remained of the old customary economy. So a second kind of law closed that option too: it became a crime to be unemployed.

Under an act of Henry VIII from 1531 (renewed and hardened in 1535), a person convicted a second time of “vagabondage” could be whipped and have part of an ear sliced off; a third conviction meant execution as, in the law’s own words, “a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal.” (cited in Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, ch. 28, drawing on the statutes directly) The Vagabonds Act of 1547, passed under the boy-king Edward VI, was harsher still: any able-bodied person found not working could be denounced by anyone, branded with a hot iron, and made the legal slave of whoever reported them, for up to two years — fed on bread, water, and scraps, and worked “by beating, chaining, or otherwise.” A second escape meant slavery for life and a second branding. A third meant execution as a felon.

I want to flag something honestly here, because it matters for how you read this: that specific slavery clause turned out to be so unworkable and so widely resisted in practice that Parliament repealed it within about two years. But notice what that repeal did and didn’t do. It removed one especially brutal enforcement mechanism. It did not remove the underlying principle, which reappeared in milder but still punitive form in later vagrancy statutes for the rest of the early modern period: a person who cannot show they are working for a wage, or that they have independent means, has no legal right to simply exist where they are standing.

Put the two laws side by side and the mechanism becomes impossible to miss. Enclosure removed your ability to survive on the commons. Vagrancy law removed your ability to survive without the commons in any way other than wage labor. Between them, they didn’t leave a gap. They left one door.

The Last Door

There is one more piece of this, and it is the one I find hardest to write about plainly, because it involves real people burned alive, and because the exact numbers are genuinely contested — I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Historians estimate somewhere between roughly 40,000 and over 100,000 people were executed for witchcraft across Europe, concentrated between about 1450 and 1750, and the overwhelming majority — commonly cited around 75 to 80 percent — were women. (range synthesized from Levack, Barstow, Hutton, and Sharpe; historians disagree by roughly a factor of two on the total) The historian Silvia Federici makes an argument in Caliban and the Witch that I think belongs directly in this story: that the witch hunts were happening in the same decades, in the same regions, as the enclosure of the commons — and that they were doing to women’s independent knowledge and autonomy what enclosure was doing to shared land. (Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, 2004) Federici cites a regional study by the historian Alan Macfarlane, who mapped witch accusations across Essex and found they clustered in the same areas where land was being enclosed and disputed. (Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, 1970)

Who, specifically, was targeted? A separate but complementary body of research — Witches, Midwives, and Nurses by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English — traces how the women most often accused were midwives and herbal healers: women who held real, practical, independent knowledge of the body, of birth, and — this is the part that connects directly to who controls dependency — of contraception. As formal medicine professionalized and required university training that women were legally barred from receiving, that professionalization itself became a mechanism of exclusion, regardless of who actually had the more useful knowledge. When male barber-surgeons introduced obstetrical forceps into childbirth in seventeenth-century England, forceps were legally classed as a surgical instrument — and women, barred from surgical practice by law, were excluded from using them by that classification alone, not by any question of skill. (Ehrenreich & English, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses, 1973)

Put this next to enclosure and vagrancy law and you can see the same shape a third time. Enclosure closed off the land you didn’t need to buy access to. Vagrancy law closed off survival without a wage. And the destruction of independent women healers and midwives closed off the last major form of care — birth, medicine, the knowledge of how to end an unwanted pregnancy — that had never run through money or a licensed, paid professional at all. After this, even the most intimate parts of staying alive had a fee attached, and a gatekeeper who controlled who was allowed to charge it.

Nobody Chose This

So let’s go back to the question I opened with. Why didn’t people just earn the king’s small annual tax and otherwise carry on as before?

Because “as before” was, over the following three centuries, dismantled one specific, documented, legal act at a time. The commons you grazed your cow on: enclosed, by a Parliament of the very people who wanted it enclosed. The grain you gleaned after harvest: ruled, by a single court case, to never have been a right at all. The choice to simply not take a wage, and live some other way instead: made a whipping offense, then a branding and enslavement offense, then a lesser but still punishing offense, for as long as vagrancy law existed. And the women who held the knowledge to keep a community healthy and fed without any of that: accused, tried, and in tens of thousands of documented cases, killed.

I don’t think “capitalism” is a very useful word for what I just described to you, because it doesn’t point at anything you could go find in an archive. What you can find in an archive is a 1711 Act restricting Parliament to landowners. A 1547 Act making unemployment punishable by branding and slavery. Over 5,200 separate, named, dated Acts enclosing named parishes. A single 1788 court ruling ending the right to glean. These are not the backdrop to the story. They are the story. Nobody was ever offered a real choice between the old way of living and the wage. The old way was made illegal, one law at a time, until the wage was the only door left standing.

And once that is true — once you can see, specifically, that the market for your labor was not something you or your ancestors ever walked into voluntarily, but something built by closing every other exit — a much bigger question opens up. Because someone still had to build the actual money you’d be paid in. The king who started this whole story by minting coin and demanding it back as tax does not, today, mint the money you use. Somewhere between his coin and your salary, he lost that power, and somebody else took it. Who, and how, is next.

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