The Destruction of the European Commons

Before capitalism, European peasants lived on what was simply called the commons — shared forest and field that communities used to grow food, tend animals, gather firewood, and celebrate together. Their lives were organized around the seasonal round: Maypoles, bonfires on Celtic feast days, dances and festivals that honored local sacred sites going back further than memory.

These were not primitive people awaiting progress. They had successfully ended serfdom and won significant autonomy for themselves through centuries of class struggle. They were, in the language of Starhawk and others, indigenous — rooted in specific place, specific practice, specific relationship with land.

Then came enclosure.

Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch documents how the rise of capitalism required the violent destruction of this commons culture. Land that had been held communally was seized and converted to private property. The peasants who had sustained themselves from it were forced off and into the emerging factory system. Their culture of seasonal festival, collective celebration, and communal land use was pathologized and suppressed.

The Witch Hunts as a Tool of Enclosure

The witch hunts were not an eruption of medieval superstition. They were a targeted tool of this cultural revolution.

The women most likely to be accused were exactly those who carried the old culture: herbalists and traditional healers, widows and the unmarried, outspoken community leaders. Hundreds of thousands — possibly millions — of women were tortured and killed in Europe between 1550 and 1650, precisely the century of the height of the enclosures in England.

Simultaneously, mass propaganda campaigns taught peasants to fear one another. The tactics worked: the commons were destroyed, the community was atomized, and a disconnected, compliant workforce was created just in time for the factories that needed them.

What Men Lost

Men did not escape this. The commons was where men gathered, decided together, held council, maintained relationship with the land that fed them. Enclosure didn’t just take the land — it took the social structure that made coherent masculine identity possible. The man who had been a peasant with his own relationship to place, community, and seasonal practice became a laborer whose value was purely his output.

This is an often-overlooked root of masculine disconnection: the structural destruction of the conditions under which men had a meaningful relationship with community and place.

The Wendigo Economy — Capitalism as Insatiable Hunger is the machine that consumed the commons. Ancestral Recovery — Roots Deeper Than Whiteness is the work of remembering what was there before.

See also: Kinship-Mind and the Emu Deception, The Honorable Harvest — An Ethics of Reciprocity, Seventh Generation Thinking — Stewardship Across Time