Landlord surplus extraction stripped peasants’ means to manure, exhausting soils

Evidence

But population growth, dealt with at the village level by increased cooperation, when combined with landlord taxation, led ultimately to the breakdown of the medieval agrarian economy and ecosystem. The landlords’ practice of extracting from unfree peasants (those not subject to fixed rents) any income above subsistence meant that these peasants were unable to give back to the land what they took. They had insufficient reserves to reinvest in animals for plowing and manuring the soil. In many regions, soils became quickly exhausted and badly eroded. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 267

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Supports the polyad’s law/institutions and land thread: legal categories (unfree vs fixed-rent peasant) determine whether a community can return to the land what it takes.
• XREF: connects to: Southern Italian rentier ownership extracts surplus from a malnourished peasantry — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1053; Taxation-driven manure scarcity trapped French peasants in soil exhaustion cycles — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 275; Landowning strata profit directly from keeping peasants impoverished and degraded

Broader Connections

• Taxation-driven manure scarcity trapped French peasants in soil exhaustion cycles #corroborates (0.88) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 275
• Southern Italian rentier ownership extracts surplus from a malnourished peasantry #exemplifies (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1053
• Landowning strata profit directly from keeping peasants impoverished and degraded #corroborates (0.80)