In fact, the events that transformed the small peasants into wage labourers,
 and their means of subsistence and of labour into material elements of capital,
 created, at the same time, a home-market for the latter. Formerly, the
 peasant family produced the means of subsistence and the raw materials,
 which they themselves, for the most part, consumed. These raw materials
 and means of subsistence have now become commodities; the large farmer
 sells them, he finds his market in manufactures. Yarn, linen, coarse woollen
 stuffs — things whose raw materials had been within the reach of every
 peasant family, had been spun and woven by it for its own use — were now
 transformed into articles of manufacture, to which the country districts
 at once served for markets. The many scattered customers, whom stray artisans
 until now had found in the numerous small producers working on their own
 account, concentrate themselves now into one great market provided for
 by industrial capital. [5] Thus, hand in hand with the
 expropriation of the self-supporting peasants, with their separation from
 their means of production, goes the destruction of rural domestic industry,
 the process of separation between manufacture and agriculture. And only
 the destruction of rural domestic industry can give the internal market
 of a country that extension and consistence which the capitalist mode of
 production requires. Still the manufacturing period, properly so called,
 does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely.
 It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers but
 partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts
 of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate
 basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain
 points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs them for the
 preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore,
 a new class of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of
 the soil as an accessary calling, find their chief occupation in industrial
 labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or
 through the medium of merchants. This is one, though not the chief, cause
 of a phenomenon which, at first, puzzles the student of English history.[6]
 From the last third of the 15th century he finds continually complaints,
 only interrupted at certain intervals, about the encroachment of capitalist
 farming in the country districts, and the progressive destruction of the
 peasantry. On the other hand, he always finds this peasantry turning up
 again, although in diminished number, and always under worse conditions.
 The chief reason is: England is at one time chiefly a cultivator of corn,
 at another chiefly a breeder of cattle, in alternate periods, and with these 
 the extent of peasant cultivation fluctuates. Modern Industry alone, and 
 finally, supplies, in machinery, the lasting basis of capitalistic
 agriculture, expropriates radically the enormous majority of the agricultural
 population, and completes the separation between agriculture and rural
 domestic industry, whose roots — spinning and weaving — it tears up.
 [7] It therefore also, for the first time, conquers for
 industrial capital the entire home market. [8]