yes, it was the English manorial lords turning the commons into "sheep-walks" circa the 1500s. Thomas More coined the phrase that "the sheep have eaten men." Then the lords sold the wool in Italy. This had the side consequence of booting peasants off farming lands, thus starting the 500-year proletarianization process where they ended up in cities as factory workers. (Although many peasants chose to abandon farming too). In the cities, they were brutally disciplined on how to embody the twelve-hour-a-day laborer, so a bunch of legislation sprang up punishing loafers. In addition to the "So-Called Primitive Accumulation" chapter in Capital vol. I, Ernst Mandel has written good stuff on this; David Harvey has shown how the field enclosures of 1500s England never stopped under capitalism, as they continue on in spirit as "accumulation by dispossession."
yes, it was the English manorial lords turning the commons into "sheep-walks" circa the 1500s. Thomas More coined the phrase that "the sheep have eaten men." Then the lords sold the wool in Italy. This had the side consequence of booting peasants off farming lands, thus starting the 500-year proletarianization process where they ended up in cities as factory workers. (Although many peasants chose to abandon farming too). In the cities, they were brutally disciplined on how to embody the twelve-hour-a-day laborer, so a bunch of legislation sprang up punishing loafers. In addition to the "So-Called Primitive Accumulation" chapter in Capital vol. I, Ernst Mandel has written good stuff on this; David Harvey has shown how the field enclosures of 1500s England never stopped under capitalism, as they continue on in spirit as "accumulation by dispossession."
For a long time the English would kill you if you were twice found unable to prove you had a job. A death sentence for unemployment.