1955, p. 59). When Burghley died, his son Cecil took over. Cecil began administering the court as an instrument for raising revenues, squeezing out the intermediaries. Although the annual revenues of the court rose by almost 50 percent in the 1590s, by the early 1600s the court had lost its political support in parliament and was headed for extinction. Used as an instrument of a natural state coalition, the court was politically viable. Used simply as a mechanism for extracting revenue, it had no place in seventeenth-century England, and was abolished. Thomas (1977) finds an exact parallel to Burghley’s use of the Court of Wards and Liveries in the policy of leasing crown lands to favored servants on extremely favorable “reversionary” leases.29 Land was always used this way by the crown.30

Land gradually lost its role as a balancing item in the dominant coalition. Ownership of land was not completely secure from political manipulation until 1660. Estates would be confiscated and sequestered during the seventeenth-century civil war (Habakkuk, 1965). Nevertheless, most of those estates would be restored to their owners. By the end of the seventeenth century, landownership and the organizations associated with land had been moved outside the immediate control and manipulation of the state. On the dimension of land, England exhibited the institutions and organizations of a mature natural state.

3.6 The Typology of Natural States

This chapter is not an economic history of England between 1066 and 1660. Land was an important element of both the political and economic system of England over the entire period, and because of its importance in law, politics, and society, the history of land law, land allocation, land use, and the institutions regarding all three is easily accessible. However, there were dramatic and important changes in many areas of English society over these years. The commercial and monetized economy steadily developed, and the close connections grew between state finances and commercial exchange. The development of new forms of business organizations, particularly the business corporation, again with close associations with the crown and

29“ . . . the Crown gained a large amount of political support from its tenants. The purpose of this short article is to show that the Crown sometimes managed its lands not for the revenue or for the tenants, but as a source for casual supplements to the incomes of its servants. This was done by granting them leases in reversion on favourable terms” (Thomas, 1977, p. 67).

30“They [the Crown Lands] were much more than a source of rental income, but formed an important part of the Crown’s armoury of patronage and rewards” (Hoyle, 1992, p. 1).

aristocracy, is a subject we return to in Chapter 6. Increasing productivity and new forms of organization and scale in agriculture were introduced (Allen, 1992; Clark, 2005, 2007b). The use of new public/private forms of organization in overseas colonies began (Tilly, 1992), including several types of corporate forms. The development of financial markets and financial market institutions came about (Dickson, 1967). Creation of a state church and then increasing religious tolerance, with lapses, began developing. These were all critically important developments, none of which we wish to slight.

Instead, we apply the natural state framework to medieval and early modern English history to show how an important asset was handled to secure and stabilize the dominant coalition and trace the evolution of the state from fragile to basic to mature through the land law. We began when William the Conqueror displaced the existing power structure and created a new fragile natural state. William managed a dominant coalition whose principal asset was land. As the fortunes of various elites rose and fell, he and his successors actively used land redistribution (especially on the death of landowners) to maintain the coalition.

Over the next few centuries, a basic natural state emerged, more stable than the fragile natural state. The basic natural state produced a series of differentiated organizations closely associated with the state in the form of the manor: a stable, rent-creating social structure that harmonized relations among local religious, military, economic, and political elites. As with the fragile natural state, the members of the basic natural state’s dominant coalition experienced rising and falling fortunes, leading to power struggles and civil wars, including the Wars of the Roses but also international wars, such as the Hundred Years’ Wars.

As a natural state, England was stable but not static. The society changed with circumstances. As the fortunes of the elite rose and fell, the coalition adjusted, sometimes imperfectly, and sometimes violently, including civil wars. Over time, the formal government evolved into a more complex form, in part because elites sought to take advantage of greater economic opportunities. Although England changed, it remained a natural state through the entire period.

By the end of the sixteenth century, ownership rights in land were relatively secure and impersonal. Similar changes had occurred on other dimensions of elite rights. As Maitland (1963[1908]) details, between the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries the legal system moved from a system based on trial by combat and ordeal to one based on evidence and legal process. In the late sixteenth century and through the seventeenth century, England moved from a basic natural state to a mature natural state. The