What that new society might have grown to look like we will never know, for it was brutally crushed. Nobles, the Church and the merchant bourgeoisie united in an organised attempt to end peasant autonomy and drive wages back down. They did so not by re-enserfing peasants – that had proved to be impossible. Rather, they forced them off their land in a violent, continent-wide campaign of evictions. As for the commons – those collectively managed pastures, forests and rivers that sustained rural communities – they were fenced off and privatised for elite use. They became, in a word, property.
