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. 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.

And “taken away” has a specific name and a specific physical shape: enclosure. A fence went up, or a hedge got planted, around land that used to be open to everyone who held a right to it. Once that fence was up, one person owned everything inside it. Every right anyone else had held there simply stopped existing. That is the whole mechanism. Almost everything in this piece is some version of that fence going up.

If you lived in an English village before that happened, 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, but 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

Before I show you what the merchants built, let’s go back to something from the first part of this story, because it matters more than it seemed to at the time: credit, the oldest system, the “I owe you one.” It worked because the two people involved knew each other. There was a relationship. If I never returned your favor, I didn’t just owe you something. I lost you. That’s what made it self-enforcing, without anyone needing to write anything down or measure anything in numbers.

Notice what that system cannot do. It cannot feed a king’s army. A soldier posted three hundred kilometers from where he grew up, in a village whose people have never met him and owe him nothing, cannot survive on “I owe you one.” There is no relationship there to enforce the debt. That’s the actual reason coin exists at all: not because barter was inefficient, but because credit doesn’t scale to strangers, and an empire is mostly strangers.

But coin creates a new, very physical problem the moment trade grows past your own village: a merchant carrying a bag of silver from one city to the next is carrying something every bandit on the road can see the point of stealing. So a solution appeared, and it appeared first and most fully in the trading world of the Abbasid Caliphate, centered on Baghdad, from around the ninth century onward. Merchants and bankers there (the money-changers were called sarraf, and the caliph’s own treasury bankers jahabidha) used written instruments called sakk and suftaja, a kind of letter of credit that let a merchant deposit coin in one city and collect the equivalent in another, without ever carrying metal on the road between them. (Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 2011; Udovitch, Bankers Without Banks, 1979) A real, working credit economy, centuries before anything like it existed in Christian Europe, that let money move without moving.

I want you to notice one more thing about the suftaja specifically, because it’s the detail that makes the next part of this story land. Islamic law banned riba, interest, just as strictly as the Christian Church banned usury. So the suftaja had a built-in rule: whatever you deposited had to be paid back in the same currency, not converted into another one. That rule existed specifically so nobody could hide a profit inside a currency-exchange spread. In other words: this note was honest. It represented real coin that genuinely existed somewhere, waiting to be collected. It was a receipt, nothing more.

The Trick That Created Money From Nothing

Now I want to take you to London, six hundred years later, because this is the moment that note stopped being honest. I think it is the single most important moment in this entire story, because it is the first time anyone, anywhere, created money that had nothing real behind it at all.

In 1640, Charles I did something that broke a specific kind of trust: he seized roughly £200,000 in gold that London merchants had deposited at the Royal Mint, in the Tower of London, for safekeeping: money he wanted for his own spending. He eventually gave most of it back, under pressure, but the damage was done: merchants had just learned that the King’s own mint was not a safe place to store their coin. (1640 seizure of merchants’ bullion, Tower of London Mint) Over the following two decades, through the chaos of the Civil War and into the 1660s, merchants shifted to storing their gold instead with private goldsmiths, men whose actual trade was working metal, not banking. By the 1670s there were something like forty-four of these goldsmith-bankers operating in London, with names like Edward Backwell, Robert Vyner, and Francis Child now well documented in surviving ledgers. (Quinn, “Goldsmith-Banking,” Explorations in Economic History, 1997)

Here is exactly what a goldsmith did. A merchant handed over a bag of gold coin. The goldsmith wrote out a receipt certifying how much he’d received and promising to pay it back on demand. That receipt is the same idea as the suftaja: an honest note, representing real coin sitting in a vault.

But a goldsmith holding hundreds of these deposits could see something a single merchant never could: on any given day, only a small fraction of depositors actually showed up to withdraw their gold. Most of the receipts just kept circulating, hand to hand, as a convenient substitute for carrying coin. Nobody ever presented them all at once. And once you can see that, a very specific temptation opens up. What if you issued more receipts than you actually had gold to back?

Their own surviving ledgers confirm it: goldsmiths routinely held only a fraction of what their outstanding notes claimed, cash reserves as low as 10 percent of the notes in circulation, depending on the banker. (Cantillon’s observation, discussed in Quinn, 1997) Money that had never been mined, dug up, or earned came into existence because a goldsmith wrote a number on a piece of paper.

Notice exactly what changed. The goldsmith’s note has a number on it: “worth £10,” not “John owes Sarah one.” It isn’t personal. Anyone can hold it, spend it, steal it. It still says, in words, “I promise to pay the bearer.” But it behaves like a coin, not a promise between two people who know each other. And it is worse than a coin, because a coin at least requires real metal to exist. This required nothing but confidence.

That’s one half of how everyone ended up dependent on money: money itself became a thing a private few could simply create. The other half happened on English soil, in plain daylight, written into the law.

Who Was Actually in the Room

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.

Local landowners petitioned Parliament to enclose their parish’s common land. Assent was counted by land value, not by people, so a handful of large landowners could out-vote everyone else. The petition went to a Parliamentary committee of the same class of men who owned land just like it, which approved the bill and appointed commissioners, usually chosen by the petitioning landowners themselves, to survey the parish and hand out the newly enclosed plots. (UK Parliament, “Enclosing the land,” parliament.uk) Land that people without formal title had used for generations, taken by a vote of the people who wanted it taken. The historian E.P. Thompson called it “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)

Between 1604 and 1914, that process produced over 5,200 separate enclosure Acts, converting roughly 6.8 million acres, about a fifth of England’s total land, from common land into private property. (UK Parliament, “Enclosing the land”) In Wollaston, Northamptonshire, one Act in 1788 dropped the number of separate landowners in the village from 108 to 18. The other ninety didn’t vanish, but something in how they lived changed completely. Before, if you spent the day tending your own strip or grazing your own cow, what came of it went straight into your own house. Now there was no strip, no cow, no wood to gather from. The only thing left to offer anyone was your own body’s effort, hour by hour. Whoever bought those hours owned what your hands made, not you. That specific relationship, your own effort bought and sold by the hour, barely existed at this scale before the fences went up. It has a name: wage labor. Not a new way of getting paid for what you’d always done. The one thing left to sell, once everything else had been fenced off.

People fought this every generation, for three centuries: Robert Kett leading 16,000 people against enclosure at Norwich in 1549; Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers planting vegetables on common land at St George’s Hill in 1649; villagers at West Haddon burning a fresh 2,000-acre enclosure’s fences in 1765, under cover of a football match they’d advertised in the local paper. (Kett’s Rebellion, 1549; St George’s Hill Diggers, 1649–1650; West Haddon riot, 1765, discussed in Neeson, Commoners, 1993) Almost every enclosure went ahead anyway. Parliament never needed 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.

That specific slavery clause was so unworkable it got repealed within about two years. But notice what the 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.

Tens of thousands of people were executed for witchcraft across Europe, concentrated between about 1450 and 1750, and the overwhelming majority were women. (Levack, Barstow, Hutton, Sharpe) 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. 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.

This has a name outside England too. Karl Polanyi, writing about exactly this kind of engineered dependency, put the English case next to a colonial one: “The colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labor. In either case the effect is similar to that of Tudor enclosures with their wake of vagrant hordes.” (Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ch. 14, 1944) Notice exactly what he’s saying: not that these were the same tool, but that they were built by people who wanted the identical thing. I’ve written separately about the hut tax Britain imposed on colonial Africa in the 1890s: a cash levy that reached people regardless of what land they had, forcing self-sufficient communities into wage labor by a completely different legal route, in living memory, not ancient history. A fence in one place. A tax bill payable only in the ruler’s currency in another. Two different machines, built at different times, by different people, for the same purpose: a population with nothing left to sell but its own labor.

And 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, notice that this is only half of what I’ve told you. The other half happened in London, in these same centuries: a handful of goldsmiths discovering they could create money that had never existed. Two separate developments, in two separate rooms, that had not yet found each other. 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 the people who took it are about to meet the people who own the fences. Who, and how, is next.

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