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m -> 'ᶆ',
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BURT FRANKLIN RESEARCH & SOURCE WORKS SERIES # 13
THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM IN THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY
THE
AGRARIAN PROBLEM
IN THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
BY
R.H. TAWNEY
"_And if the whole people be landlords, or hold the Lands so
divided among them, that no one Man, or number of Men,
within the Compass of the Few or Aristocracy, overbalance
them, the Empire (without the interposition of force) is a
Commonwealth._"--HARRINGTON, _Oceana_.
_WITH 6 MAPS_
BURT FRANKLIN RESEARCH & SOURCE WORKS SERIES # 13
[Illustration]
BURT FRANKLIN
New York 25, N.Y.
_Published by_
BURT FRANKLIN
514 West 113th Street
New York 25, N.Y.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN
LONDON--1912
_Printed in U.S.A. by_
SENTRY PRESS, INC.
New York 19, N.Y.
TO
WILLIAM TEMPLE and ALBERT MANSBRIDGE
PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY
OF THE
WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to trace one strand in the economic life of
England from the close of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the
Civil War. As originally planned, it included an account of the
relations of the State to trade and manufacturing industry, the growth
of which is the most pregnant economic phenomenon of the period. But I
soon found that the material was too abundant to be treated
satisfactorily in a single work, and I have therefore confined myself
in the following pages to a study of agrarian conditions, whose
transformation created so much distress, and aroused such searchings
of heart among contemporaries. The subject is one upon which much
light has been thrown by the researches of eminent scholars, notably
Mr. Leadam, Professor Gay, Dr. Savine, and Professor Ashley, and its
mediæval background has been firmly drawn in the great works of
Maitland, Seebohm, and Professor Vinogradoff. The reader will see that
I have availed myself freely of the results of their investigations.
But I have tried, as far as the time at my disposal allowed, to base
my picture on original authorities, both printed and manuscript.
The supreme interest of economic history lies, it seems to me, in the
clue which it offers to the development of those dimly conceived
presuppositions as to social expediency which influence the actions
not only of statesmen, but of humble individuals and classes, and
influence, perhaps, most decisively those who are least conscious of
any theoretical bias. On the economic ideas of the sixteenth century
in their relation to agrarian conditions I have touched shortly in
Part III. of the book, and I hope to treat the whole subject more
fully on some future occasion. If in the present work I have given, as
I am conscious that I have, undue space to the detailed illustration
of particular changes, I must plead that one cannot have the dessert
without the dinner, and that a firm foundation of fact, even though as
tedious to read as to arrange, is a necessary preliminary to the
higher and more philosophical task of analysing economic conceptions.
The reader who desires to start with a bird's-eye view of the subject
is advised to turn first to the concluding chapter of Part III.
One word may be allowed in extenuation of the statistical tables,
which will be found scattered at intervals through the following
pages. In dealing with modern economic conditions it is increasingly
recognised that analysis, to be effective, must be quantitative, and
one of the disadvantages under which the student of all periods before
the eighteenth century labours is that for large departments of life,
such as population, foreign trade, and the occupations of the people,
anything approaching satisfactory quantitative description is out of
the question. The difficulty in the treatment of agrarian history is
different. Certain classes of manorial documents offer material which
can easily be reduced to a statistical shape. Indeed one difficulty is
its very abundance. The first feeling of a person who sees a
manuscript collection such as that at Holkham must be "If fifty maids
with fifty mops--," and a sad consciousness that the mop which he
wields is a very feeble one. But historical statistics should be
regarded with more than ordinary scepticism, inasmuch as they cannot
easily be checked by comparison with other sources of information, and
it may reasonably be asked whether it is possible to obtain figures
that are sufficiently reliable to be used with any confidence. Often,
no doubt, it is not possible. The strong point of surveyors was not
always arithmetic. The forms in which their information has been cast
are sometimes too various to permit of it being used for the purpose
of a summary or a comparison. Even when figures are both accurate and
comparable the student who works over considerable masses of material
will be fortunate if he does not introduce some errors of his own. The
tables printed below are marred by all these defects, and I have
included them only after considerable hesitation. I have tried to
prevent the reader from being misled by pointing out in an appendix
what I consider to be their principal faults and ambiguities. But no
doubt there are others which have escaped my notice.
It remains for me to express my gratitude to those whose kind
assistance has made this work somewhat less imperfect than it would
otherwise have been. I have to thank the Warden and Fellows of All
Souls College, the Senior Bursar of Merton College, the Clerk of the
Peace for the County of Warwick, and the Earl of Leicester for
permission to examine the manuscripts in their possession. The maps
illustrating enclosure are taken from the beautiful maps of the All
Souls estates; my thanks are due to the College for allowing me to use
them, and to Mr. W. Tomlinson, of the Oxford Tutorial Class at
Longton, for helping me to prepare them for reproduction.
Circumstances preventing me from working in the Record Office, I was
so fortunate as to secure the co-operation of Miss Niemeyer and Miss
L. Drucker, who have transcribed for me a large number of surveys and
rentals. How much I owe to their help will be apparent to any one who
consults my footnotes and references. Among those who have aided me
with advice and information I must mention Professor Vinogradoff,
Professor Unwin, and Professor Powicke, the late Miss Toulmin Smith,
Mr. Kenneth Leys, Mr. F.W. Kolthammer, Lieut.-Colonel Fishwick, Dr.
G.H. Fowler, and the Hon. Gerard Collier. Especially great are my
obligations to Mr. R.V. Lennard and Mr. H. Clay, who have read through
the whole of the following pages in manuscript or in proof, and who
have helped me with numberless criticisms and improvements.
In conclusion I owe two debts which are beyond acknowledgment. The
first is to my wife, who has collaborated with me throughout, and
without whose constant assistance this book could not have been
completed. The second is to the members of the Tutorial Classes
conducted by Oxford University, with whom for the last four years it
has been my privilege to be a fellow-worker. The friendly smitings of
weavers, potters, miners, and engineers, have taught me much about
problems of political and economic science which cannot easily be
learned from books.
R.H.T.
MANCHESTER, _April 1912_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I.--THE SMALL LANDHOLDER
CHAP.
I. THE RURAL POPULATION--
(_a_) THE CLASSES OF LANDHOLDERS 19
(_b_) THE FREEHOLDERS 27
(_c_) THE CUSTOMARY TENANTS 40
II. THE PEASANTRY--
(_a_) THE VARIETY OF CONDITIONS 55
(_b_) THE CONSOLIDATION OF PEASANT HOLDINGS 57
(_c_) THE GROWTH OF THE LAND MARKET AMONG THE
PEASANTS 72
III. THE PEASANTRY (_continued_)--
(_d_) THE ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT OF THE SMALL
CULTIVATOR 98
IV. THE PEASANTRY (_continued_)--
(_e_) SIGNS OF CHANGE 136
(_f_) THE GROWTH OF COMPETITIVE RENTS ON NEW
ALLOTMENTS 139
(_g_) THE PROGRESS OF ENCLOSURE AMONT THE
PEASANTRY 147
PART II.--THE TRANSITION TO CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE
I. THE NEW RURAL ECONOMY--
(_a_) MOTIVES AND CAUSES 177
(_b_) THE GROWTH OF THE LARGE LEASEHOLD FARM 200
(_c_) ENCLOSURE AND CONVERSION BY THE MANORIAL
AUTHORITIES 213
II. THE PEASANTRY--
(_a_) THE REMOVING OF LANDMARKS 231
(_b_) THE STRUGGLE FOR THE COMMONS 237
(_c_) THE ENGROSSING OF HOLDINGS AND
DISPLACEMENT OF TENANTS 253
(_d_) THE AGRARIAN CHANGES AND THE POOR LAW 266
III. THE QUESTION OF TENANT RIGHT--
(_a_) THE TENANTS AT WILL AND THE LEASEHOLDERS 281
(_b_) THE COPYHOLDERS 287
(_c_) THE UNDERMINING OF CUSTOMARY TENURES 301
PART III.--THE OUTCOME OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION
I. THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM AND THE STATE--
(_a_) THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL
IMPORTANCE OF THE PEASANTRY 313
(_b_) LEGISLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 351
(_c_) SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF STATE INTERVENTION 377
II. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 401
APPENDIX I 410
APPENDIX II 422
INDEX 437
LIST OF MAPS
I. PART OF THE MANOR OF SALFORD, IN
BEDFORDSHIRE (1590) _To face page_ 163
II. PART OF THE MANOR OF EDGEWARE, IN
MIDDLESEX (1597) " " 172
III. PART OF THE MANOR OF MAIDS MORTON,
IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE (1590) " " 221
IV. PART OF THE MANOR OF CRENDON IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
(about 1590) " " 221
V. PART OF THE MANOR OF WEEDON WESTON,
IN NORTHAMPTONSHIRE (1590) " " 222
VI. PART OF THE MANOR OF WHADBOROUGH IN
LEICESTERSHIRE (1620) " " 223
THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM IN
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
INTRODUCTION
Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth
century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an
agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any
one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an
importance at once economic, legal, and political. The economist can
watch the reaction of growing markets on the methods of subsistence
farming, the development of competitive rents, the building up of the
great estate, and the appearance, or at any rate the extension, of the
tripartite division into landlord, capitalist farmer, and landless
agricultural labourer, the peculiar feature of English rural society
which has been given so much eulogy in the eighteenth century and so
much criticism in our own. From a legal point of view the great feature
of the period is the struggle between copyhold and leasehold, and the
ground gained by the latter. Before the century begins, leases for
years, though common enough on the demesne lands and on land taken from
the waste, are the exception so far as concerns the land of the
customary tenants. When the century closes, leasehold has won many
obstinately resisted triumphs; much land that was formerly held by copy
of court roll is held by lease; and copyhold tenure itself, through the
weakening of manorial custom, has partially changed its character. The
copyholders, though still a very numerous and important class, are
already one against which the course of events has visibly begun to
turn, and economic rent, long intercepted and shared, through the fixity
of customary tenure, between tenant and landlord under the more elastic
adjustments of leasehold and competitive fines, begins to drain itself
into the pockets of the latter. Politically, one can see different views
of the basis of wealth in conflict, that which measures it by the number
of tenants "able to do service" contending with that which tests it by
the maximum pecuniary returns to be got from an estate, and which treats
the number of tenants as quite a subordinate consideration. The former
is the ideal of philosophical conservatives, is supported, for military
and social reasons, by the Government, and survives long in the North;
the latter is that of the new landed proprietors, and wins in the South.
And its victory results in much more than a mere displacement of
tenants. It means ultimately a change in the whole attitude towards
landholding, in the doctrine of the place which it should occupy in the
State, and in the standards by which the prosperity of agriculture is
measured, drawing a line between modern English conceptions and those of
the sixteenth century as distinct as that which exists between those of
the Irish peasantry and Irish landlords, or between the standpoint of a
French peasant and that of the agent of a great English estate. The
decline of important classes alters the balance of rural society, though
the Crown for a long time tries to maintain it, and the way is prepared
both for the economic and political omnipotence which the great landed
aristocracy will exercise over England as soon as the power of the Crown
is broken, and for the triumph of the modern English conception of
landownership, a conception so repugnant both to our ancestors and to
the younger English communities,[1] as in the main a luxury of the
richer classes. If it had not been for the undermining of the small
farmer's position in the sixteenth century, would the proposal[2] to
enfranchise copyholders have been thrown out in 1654, and would the
enclosures[3] of the eighteenth century have been carried out with such
obstinate indifference to the vested interests of the weaker rural
classes? Would England have been unique among European countries in the
concentration of its landed property, and in the divorce of its
peasantry from the soil?
[1] See the land legislation of the Australasian Colonies.
[2] The Instrument of Government (December 1653) established a
franchise qualification of rent or personal estate to the value
of £200. This certainly would have enfranchised a large number
of copyholders and leaseholders, some of whom were much better
off than the small freeholders. For an estate of £299, 15s. 4d.
left at death by a tenant "Husbandman" see _Nottingham Borough
Records_ under the year 1599 (vol. iv. pp. 249-252). It was made
up as follows: "Money in purse and his clothes, £15; value of
beasts, £74; corn sowne in fields, £35; value of furniture in
hall, £2, 13s.; in parlour, £5, 14s., and other miscellaneous
possessions." For wills of husbandmen and yeomen see _Surtees
Society_, vol. lxxix., pp. 181-182, 263-264, 294, 310. For the
restoration of the franchise to the freeholders, see Gardiner,
_The Commonwealth_, iii. 78.
[3] Hammond, _The Village Labourer_, 1760-1832. One may add--if
English statesmen had studied the history of customary tenures
in England, would they have deferred until 1870 legislation
protecting tenant right in Ireland? See Lord Morley's
description of the Irish cultivator "as a kind of copyholder or
customary freeholder" (_Life of Gladstone_, vol. ii. p. 281).
From a wider point of view the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century
may be regarded as a long step in the commercialising of English life.
The growth of the textile industries is closely connected with the
development of pasture farming, and it was the export of woollen cloth,
that "prodigy of trade," which first brought England conspicuously into
world-commerce, and was the motive for more than one of those early
expeditions to discover new markets, out of which grew plantations,
colonies, and empire. Dr. Cunningham[4] has shown that the system of
fostering the corn trade, which was embodied in the Corn Bounty Act of
1689, and which was a principle of English policy long after the reason
for it had disappeared, was adopted in a milder form in the reign of
Elizabeth with the object of checking the decline in the rural
population. Again, new agricultural methods were a powerful factor in
the struggle between custom and competition, which colours so much of
the economic life of the period, and, owing to this fact, they produced
reactions which spread far beyond their immediate effect on the classes
most closely concerned with them. The displacement of a considerable
number of families from the soil accelerated, if it did not initiate,
the transition from the mediæval wage problem, which consisted in the
scarcity of labour, to the modern wage problem, which consists in its
abundance. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
municipal[5] authorities were engaged in a prolonged struggle to
enforce their exclusive economic privileges against the rural immigrant
who had lost his customary means of livelihood and who overcrowded town
dwellings and violated professional byelaws; while the Government
prevented him from moving without a licence, and when he moved,
straitened[6] his path between the Statute of Inmates on the one hand
and the House of Correction on the other. Observers were agreed that the
increase in pauperism[7] had one capital cause in the vagrancy produced
by the new agrarian régime; and the English Poor Law system, or the
peculiar part of it providing for relief of the able-bodied, which
England was the first of European countries to adopt, came into
existence partly as a form of social insurance against the effect of the
rack rents and evictions, which England was the first of European
countries to experience. Whatever uncertainty attaches to the causes and
effects of the agrarian problem, there can be no doubt that those who
were in the best position to judge thought it highly important. If it is
not a watershed separating periods, it is at least a high range from
which both events and ideas descend with added velocity and
definiteness. To the economic historian the ideas are as important as
the events. For though conceptions of social expediency are largely the
product of economic conditions, they acquire a momentum which persists
long after the circumstances which gave them birth have disappeared, and
act as over-ruling forces to which, in the interval between one great
change and another, events themselves tend to conform.
[4] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern
Times_, Part i. pp. 85-88, 101-107, 540-543.
[5] See _e.g. Records of the Borough of Reading_, vol ii. pp.
36, 94, 156; vol. iii., 131, and those of Leicester, Norwich,
Nottingham, and Southampton, _passim_; also below, pp. 275-277.
[6] "Mr. Secretary Cecil said, ... If we debar tillage, we give
scope to the Depopulator, and then, if the poor being thrust out
of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them
with the Statute of Inmates; if they wander abroad, they are
within the danger of the Statute of the Poor to be whipt"
(D'Ewes' _Journal of the House of Commons_, 1601, pp. 674-675).
[7] See below, pp. 273-275.
A consideration of these great movements naturally begins with those
contemporary writers who described them. Though the books and pamphlets
of the age contain much that is of interest in the development of
economic theory, their writers rarely attempted to separate economic
from other issues, and economic speculation usually took the form of
discussions upon particular points of public policy, or of a casuistry
prescribing rules for personal conduct in difficult cases. Such a
difficult case, such a problem of public policy, was offered by the
growth of competitive methods of agriculture. The moral objections felt
to the new conditions caused them to be a favourite subject with writers
of sermons and pamphlets, and made the sins of the encloser, like those
of the usurer, one of the standbys of the sixteenth century preacher.
There is, therefore, a considerable volume of writings dealing with the
question from the point of view of the teacher of morality. At the same
time the political significance of the movement, and the fact that the
classes concerned were important enough to elicit attempts at protection
on the part of the Government, called forth a crop of suggestions and
comments like those of More, Starkey,[8] Forest,[9] the author of the
Commonwealth[10] of England, and, at a later date, Powell[11] and
Moore.[12] Further, the new agricultural methods were explained by
persons interested in the economics of agriculture, such as
Fitzherbert,[13] Tusser,[14] Clarkson,[15] who surveyed the manors of
the Earl of Northumberland in 1567, Humberstone[16] who did the same for
those of the Earl of Devonshire, and Norden.[17] The accounts of
surveyors, a dull but indispensable tribe, are reliable, as they are
usually statements of facts which have occurred within their own
experience, or at any rate, generalised descriptions of such facts. The
same may be said of the evidence of John Hales, who was employed by the
Government in investigating the question, and who had to explain it in
such a way as to convince opponents, and to get legislation on this
subject through a bitterly hostile Parliament. The description given by
writers like Latimer,[18] Crowley,[19] and Becon[20] are valuable as
showing the way in which the movement was regarded by contemporaries;
but they are mainly somewhat vague denunciations launched in an age when
the pulpit was the best political platform, and their very positiveness
warns one that they are one-sided and must be received with caution.
Still, they mark out a field for inquiry, and one may begin by setting
out the main characteristics of the agrarian changes as pictured in
their writings.
[8] E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of King Henry the
Eighth_, Part II.: "A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas
Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford, by Thomas Starkey,
Chaplain to the King," edited by J.M. Cowper (date of
composition about 1538).
[9] E. E. T. S., as above, Part I. (Appendix). _The Pleasant
Poesye of Princelie Practise_, by Sir William Forest (date of
composition 1548).
[10] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, edited by
Elizabeth Lamond (date of composition 1549; the author was
almost certainly John Hales).
[11] Powell, _Depopulation Arraigned_, 1636.
[12] _The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the Poor,
wherein Enclosure such as doth unpeople Towns and Common Fields
is Arraigned, Convicted, and Condemned by the Word of God_, by
John Moore, Minister of Knaptoft, in Leicestershire, 1653.
[13] Fitzherbert, _Boke of Husbandry_, 1534. _Surveyinge_, 1539.
[14] Tusser, _Five Hundred Points of Husbandry._
[15] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350 and passim.
[16] Surveys _temp._ Philip and Mary of various estates
belonging to the Earl Devon (_Topographer and Genealogist_, i.
p. 43).
[17] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_ (1607).
[18] Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime Bishop of Worcester
(Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Co.).
[19] Crowley, Select Works (E. E. T. S., 1872).
[20] Becon, _Jewel of Joy_. Extract quoted in England in the
reign of King Henry the Eighth (Part I., p. lxxvi.).
The movement originates, they agree, through the covetousness[21] of
lords of manors and large farmers, who have acquired capital in the
shape of flocks of sheep, and who, by insisting on putting the land to
the use most profitable to themselves, break through the customary
methods of cultivation. The outward sign of this is enclosing, the
cutting adrift of a piece of land from the common course of cultivation
in use, by placing a hedge or paling round it, and utilising it
according to the discretion of the individual encloser, usually with the
object of pasturing sheep. This is accompanied by land speculation and
rack-renting, which is intensified by the land-hunger which causes
successful capitalists,[22] who have made money in trade, to buy up
land as a profitable investment for their savings, and by the sale of
corporate property which took place on the dissolution[23] of the
monasteries and the confiscation of part of the gild estates. The
consequence is, first, that there is a scarcity of agricultural produce
and a rise[24] in prices, which is partly (it is supposed) attributable
to the operations of the great graziers who control the supplies of
wool, grain, and dairy produce, and secondly and more important that the
small cultivator suffers in three ways. Agricultural employment is
lessened. Small holdings are thrown[25] together and are managed by
large capitalists, with the result that he is driven off the land,
either by direct eviction, or by a rise in rents and fines, or by mere
intimidation. At the same time the commonable[26] area, consisting of
the common waste, meadow, and pasture of the manor is diminished, with
the result that the tenants who are not evicted suffer through loss of
the facilities which they had previously had for grazing beasts without
payment. There is, in consequence, a drift into the towns and a general
lowering in the standard of rural life, due to the decay of the class
which formerly sent recruits to the learned professions, which was an
important counterpoise to the power of the great landed proprietors, and
which was the backbone of the military forces of the country.[27]
[21] "For looke in what partes of the realm doth growe the
fynest and therefore dearest woll, there noblemen and gentlemen,
yea, and certeyn abbotes, holy men no doubt, not contenting them
selfes with the yearely revenues and profytes, that were wont to
grow to their forefathers and predecessours of their landes, nor
being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothinge
profitting, yea much noyinge, the weal publique, leave no
grounde for tillage, thei inclose al into pasture; thei throw
doune houses; they plucke downe townes, and leave nothing
standynge, but only the churche to be made a shepehouse" (More's
_Utopia_, Book I., p. 32, Pitt Press Series).
[22] "The Grazier, the Farmer, the Merchants become landed men,
and call themselves gentlemen, though they be churls; yea, the
farmer will have ten farms, some twenty, and will be a
Pedlar-merchant" (_King Edward's Remains: A Discourse about the
Reformation of many Abuses_). "Look at the merchants of London,
and ye shall see, when by their honest vocation God hath endowed
them with great riches, then can they not be content, but their
riches must be abrode in the country, to bie fermes out the
handes of worshipful gentlemen, honest yeomen, and poor
laborynge husbands" (_Lever's Sermons_, Arber's Reprints, p.
29).
[23] "Do not these ryche worldlynges defraude the pore man of
his bread, ... and suffer townes so to decay that the pore hath
not what to eat, nor yet where to dwell? What other are they,
then, but very manslears? They abhorre the names of Monkes,
Friars, Chanons, Nounes, etc., but their goods they gredely
gripe. And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out
their fermes at a reasonable pryce, noryshed scholes, brought up
youths in good letters, they doe none of all these thinges"
(Becon, _Works_, 1564, vol. ii. fols. xvi., xvii.).
[24] "A proclamation set fourthe by the King's Majestie with the
assent and consent of his dear uncle Edward, Duke of Somerset
... and the said cattell also by all lyklyhode of truth should
be more cheape beynge in many men's handes as they be nowe in
fewe, who may holde them deare and tarye the avantage of the
market" (Brit. Mus. _Lansdown_, 238, p. 205). See also E. E. T.
S.: "Certayne causes gathered together, wherein is showed the
decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (date
1550-1553), and _The Commonweal of this Realm of England,
passim_, especially pp. xlv.-lxvii. It is worth noting that
Hales, who was quite conversant with the effect on general
prices of an increase in the supply of money, thought that the
rise which took place in his day was in some measure due to
monopolists. He describes his third Bill as ensuring that "ther
wolde have byn within fyve yeares after the execution therof
suche plentie of vitteyll and so good cheape as never was in
England" (_Commonweal_, p. lxiii.).
[25] Proclamation as before: "Of late by thynclosinge of landes
and erable grounds, many have byn drevyn to extreme povertie,
insomuche that wheareas in tyme past, tenne, twentie, yea in
some places C. or CC. Chrysten people hathe byn inhabytynge ...
nowe ther is nothynge kept but sheepe and bullocks. All that
lande, whiche heretofore was tilled and occupied by so many men,
is nowe gotten by insaciable gredyness of mynde into one or two
men's handes, and scarcely dwelled upon with one poore
shepherd."
[26] "There be a manie a M cottagers in England, which, havinge
no land to live of theire owne but their handie labours, and
some refreshinge upon the said commons, yf they were sodenly
thrust out from that commoditie might make a great tumult and
discorde in the commonwealth" (_Commonweal of England_, pp.
49-50).
[27] See below, pp. 341-344.
The picture drawn by the literary authorities suggests questions, some
of which have been satisfactorily cleared up and some of which are still
obscure. Dissertations as to method are usually more controversial than
profitable, and we do not propose at this point to give any detailed
account of the order in which these problems have been taken up by
previous scholars, to pass any judgment upon the different kinds of
evidence which they have used, or to offer any estimate of the value of
their conclusions. If we are at all successful in our presentation of
the subject, the reader will discover for himself the nature of the
evidence upon which we have relied, and where we differ from and agree
with the treatment of other writers. All we can attempt here is to give
a short statement of some of the principal issues which demand
attention, a statement which does not pretend to be exhaustive, but
which may serve to indicate the more salient features of the ground over
which we shall travel.
As to the counties mainly affected by the agrarian changes there is now
substantial agreement. The work of Mr. Leadam[28] and Professor Gay[29]
seems to have put the geographical distribution of the movement towards
enclosure, or at least of those enclosures which produced hardships,
upon a fairly firm basis. We can say with some confidence that it mainly
affected the Midlands and eastern counties, from Berkshire and
Oxfordshire in the south to Lincoln and Norfolk in the north-east, and
that it was least important in the south-western counties of Cornwall
and Devon, and in the south-eastern counties of Kent and Essex, much of
which had been enclosed before the sixteenth century began, and in the
northern counties of Lancashire, Westmoreland, Cumberland,
Northumberland, and Durham, though, by the end of the sixteenth century,
parts of the two latter counties, at any rate, were considerably
affected by it. Again, the same authors have offered a statistical
estimate of the extent of the movement which, while it is manifestly
defective, and while it can only be used with great caution to support
arguments as to the practical effect of enclosures, does offer some
guide to the imagination, and is, at least, a valuable check on the
conjectures made by contemporaries without any statistics at all and on
a basis merely of their personal impressions. Finally, the difficult
question of the security of copyhold tenants as against the landlords
who desired to evict them seems to have been put in the right
perspective by the evidence which Dr. Savine[30] has adduced to prove
that, in the case of copyholds of inheritance, a plaintiff who could
show a clear title could get legal redress.
[28] Leadam, _Domesday of Enclosures_.
[29] _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xiv. and vol. xvii.;
_Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii. See also Gonner,
_Common Land and Inclosure_, pp. 132-152.
[30] _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xix. See below, pp.
287-297.
On the other hand, certain points must still be pronounced highly
obscure. The first is a simple one. The agrarian changes are usually
summed up under the name of "Enclosure." But what exactly did enclosing
mean? Contemporary writers represent it as almost always being carried
out by lords and large farmers against the interests of the smaller
tenantry. But there is abundant proof that the tenants themselves
enclosed; and as they can hardly be supposed to have been forward in
initiating changes which damaged their own prospects, ought we not to
begin by drawing a distinction between the piecemeal enclosures made by
the peasantry, often after agreement between neighbours, from which they
hoped to gain, and the great enclosures made by lords of manors from
which the peasants obviously lost? Further, different authorities assign
different degrees of importance to different aspects of the movement.
Mr. Johnson[31] holds, for example, that the enclosure of the common
waste, as distinct from the enclosure of the arable fields, was
relatively unimportant. Such a view, however, is not easily reconciled
with the constant complaints which relate clearly to the enclosing of
common wastes and pastures and with the state of things depicted in the
surveys.[32] Again, the writings of the period speak as though the
movement were mainly one from arable to pasture farming. But this was
questioned as long ago as the first thorough study of the question--that
of Nasse[33]--and the doubts which he threw on their view of the problem
are supported by Mr. Leadam by means of the statistics which he has
drawn from the returns of the Commission of 1517, though his conclusions
are in their turn disputed by Professor Gay. In fact no one who examines
the picture given by the Commissions and by surveys and field maps can
help feeling that the word "enclosing," used by contemporaries as though
it bore its explanation on its face, covered many different kinds of
action and has a somewhat delusive appearance of simplicity.
[31] Johnson, _The Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, p. 40.
[32] See below, pp. 218-221 and 237-253.
[33] Nasse, _The Land Community of the Middle Ages_ (translated
for the Cobden Club by Colonel Ouvry, 1871), pp. 81-91: "With
regard to the proper agricultural character of these movements
they are represented commonly as having been caused by an
exclusively pure pasture husbandry, which expelled the tillage
husbandman. Different circumstances, however, and witnesses show
us closely that this, for the most part, was not the case." The
discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay is contained in
the _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xiv. See also
Miss Davenport, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xi., and
below, pp. 223-228.
Moreover, who gained and who suffered by the enclosures, and to what
extent? If the movement deserves to be called an agrarian revolution, it
was certainly one which left a great many holders of small landed
property intact, and perhaps even improved their position. Otherwise we
can hardly account for the optimistic description of them, or of some of
them, which is given in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries by writers like Harrison,[34] Norden,[35] and Fuller,[36] or
for the part which this class played in the Civil War. Nor can we say
with confidence how the statistical evidence derived by Mr. Leadam and
Professor Gay from the reports of Royal Commissions should be
interpreted. The comparative smallness of the percentage of land which
the Commissioners returned as enclosed has led to the view[37] that the
importance of the whole movement was grossly exaggerated by the writers
of the period, who created a storm in a tea-cup over changes which
really affected only an inconsiderable proportion of the whole country.
If this is so, it is not easy to explain either the continuous attention
which was paid to the question by the Government, or the revolts of the
peasantry, or the strong views of reasonable and fair-minded men with
first-hand knowledge, such as John Hales.
[34] _Elizabethan England_, edited by Lothrop Withington, with
introduction by F.J. Furnivall, p. 119.
[35] J. Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_.
[36] Thomas Fuller, _Holy and Profane State_.
[37] Gay, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii., p. 587:
"Hysterical and rhetorical complaint ... condemned by its very
exaggeration."
There is obscurity not only as to the details, but as to the outlines of
the movement. Different views have been expressed as to its origin,
duration, and points of maximum intensity. Professor Ashley[38] puts the
period of most rapid change from about 1470 to 1530. But these dates
cannot be taken as in any way fixed. The greatest popular outcry[39]
against enclosing occurred about the middle of the sixteenth century, in
the years 1548 to 1550. As Miss Leonard[40] has shown, there was much
enclosing in the seventeenth century, and about 1650[41] there was a
crop of pamphlets against it similar in tone to the protests which
occurred almost exactly a century before. It is especially difficult to
determine how far back the movement should be carried. The first
statute[42] against it, that of 1489, is an obvious landmark. But has it
not been too readily accepted as an earlier limit? Hales[43] said that
most of the "destruction of towns" had taken place before the beginning
of the reign of Henry VII. The allusion to enclosing in the
Chancellor's[44] speech to Parliament in 1483 shows that the movement
must have already obtained considerable dimensions. Rous[45] had
petitioned Parliament on the subject of depopulation in 1459, and in his
History, which was published sometime between that date and 1486, he
returned to the charge with a detailed account of the destruction of
villages in his own county of Warwickshire. More convincing than either,
the records of Manorial Courts[46] prove that the consolidation of
holdings and collisions between the interests of commoners and
sheep-farmers were quite common early in the fifteenth century. One may
perhaps pause to remark that the question of the antecedent conditions,
out of which the rapid agricultural changes of the sixteenth century
arose, is a very important one, and the more important the more
far-reaching those changes are thought to have been. It is surely
incredible that the conversion of land to pasture, the growth of large
pasture estates, and the eviction of customary tenants, should have
occurred to the extent described, unless considerable minor changes
preceded them, and without some premonitory rumblings to suggest the
coming storm. In economic affairs new lines of organisation usually
start on a small scale before they attain dimensions sufficiently
striking to attract attention; and one would expect to be able to trace
the leading motives of the agrarian changes of the Tudor period far back
in the fifteenth century and even earlier, and that they would throw
light on the nature of the subsequent movements. There is, further, some
difference of opinion as to the causes which forced the agrarian problem
to the front. Some contemporary authorities attribute it mainly to the
growth of the woollen industry,[47] and in this they have been followed
by most subsequent writers. On the other hand, the direct evidence
supplied by price statistics seems to be not altogether reliable,[48]
and in any case the woollen industry had been steadily growing for a
hundred years before the complaints as to enclosure become general. This
has led Dr. Hasbach[49] to argue that the change in agricultural methods
was due less to the high price of wool than to the low price of grain,
which was artificially reduced by the restrictions imposed on export
under the Tudors, and which he holds to have produced such a fall in
rent as to result in the adoption of pasture-farming. Other writers have
emphasised the revolutionary effect of the general depreciation in the
value of money[50] and the consequent growth of commercialism in the
relations between landlord and tenant.
[38] Ashley, _Economic History_, vol. i. Part II., p. 286:
"There were two periods of rapid change ... namely from c. 1470
to c. 1530, and again from about 1760 to 1830. After about 1530
the movement somewhat slackened."
[39] See below, Part III., chap. i.
[40] _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xix. See also Gonner,
_Common Land and Inclosure_, pp. 153-186. Professor Gonner is no
doubt right in saying that "the view which regards inclosure ...
as taking place mainly at two epochs, in the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries respectively ... gives an almost entirely
false presentation of what occurred."
[41] Moore. _The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the
Poor_, 1653, and _A Scripture Word against Enclosure_, 1656.
Moore's pamphlets provoked rejoinders, viz., _A Vindication of a
Regulated Enclosure_, by Joseph Lee, 1656, _Considerations
concerning Common Fields and Enclosures_ (1654, Pseudonismus),
and _A Vindication, of the Considerations concerning Common
Fields and Enclosures, or a Rejoynder unto that Reply which Mr.
Moore hath pretended to make unto those Considerations_ (1656,
Pseudonismus).
[42] 4 Henry VII. c. 19.
[43] "For the chief destruccion of Townes and decaye of houses
was before the begynnynge of the reign of King Henry the
Seventh" (The defence of John Hales, quoted p. lxiii. of Miss
Lamond's edition of _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_).
[44] Camden Society, 1854, lii.
[45] J. Rossus, _Historia Regum Angliæ_ (T. Hearne).
[46] See below, pp. 161-162.
[47] See _e.g._ More's _Utopia_ quoted above, and Pauli, _Drei
volkswirthschaftliche Denkscriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII.
von England_. It is suggested that if the council will only fix
the price which stappellers and clothmakers are to pay for raw
wool, "it shall cause the pasturers of sheep to open their
enclosures and suffer the more earth to be wrought by works of
husbandry."
[48] See the discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay on
the wool prices of Thorold Roger in _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._,
New Series, vol. xiv. The best account of the price movements of
the sixteenth century is contained in _Studien zur Geschichte
der Englischen Lohnarbeiter_, Band I., by Gustaf F. Steffen.
[49] Hasbach, _A History of the English Agricultural Labourer_,
pp. 31-33.
[50] See below, pp. 197-200 and 304-310.
Finally, one may ask what was the effect of legislation against
pasture-farming and evictions, and of the frequent administrative
interference by which the Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries tried to check them. On a first view, at any rate, the whole
history of the policy pursued in this matter, with one short interval
from the autumn of 1549 to 1553, constitutes surely one of the most
remarkable attempts to control changing economic conditions by
Government action which has ever been made. Whether successful or
unsuccessful, it throws much light on the ideas of the period with
regard to the place in the State which should be occupied by the
landholding classes, on the relative advantages from a political
standpoint of large and small farming, and on the administrative
machinery of Government. The opinion generally[51] adopted seems to be
that the Acts forbidding conversion were entirely ineffective, and that
the Government, if sincere, was outmanœuvred by the Local
Authorities, whose duty it was to administer the laws, and whose
interest lay in preventing their administration. Much evidence may be
cited in support of this view. On the other hand, we have clear proof of
the Council interfering on some occasions with apparent success; and
further, it seems necessary to discriminate between the policies of
different periods. One cannot argue, for example, that because the
statutes protecting the poorer classes were not carried out by the
rapacious oligarchy of adventurers which governed England from the fall
of Somerset to 1553, therefore they were never used effectively in the
reigns of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, or of the first two Stuarts. Nor
would one be right in assuming the existence in the sixteenth century of
the identity of interest and policy between the great landlords and the
Government which characterised the period from 1688 to 1832. One's
conclusion on the whole question must depend less on direct evidence as
to the success of the particular measures, which, in the nature of
things, is not easily obtainable, than on the opinion which one forms of
the degree of importance which the statesmen of the period assigned to
the class of small cultivators, and of the ability of the Central
Government to get its policy executed.
[51] e.g. by Hasbach, _op. cit._ p. 37. Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist.
Soc._, vol. xviii. Contrast Miss Leonard, Trans. _Royal Hist.
Soc._, vol. xix. On the subject of the policy of the State
towards the agrarian problem, see below, Part III., chap. i.
Such are some of the questions which are suggested by even a cursory
survey of the agrarian problem. There are others which are less
susceptible of summary statement, but which involve issues that are of
some importance for the interpretation of economic history. Granted that
it was inevitable that the subsistence husbandry of the mediæval village
should give way to capitalist agriculture, in what light are we to
regard the changes by which that great transformation was brought about?
Ought we to think of the open field system as altogether incompatible
with any improvement in agricultural technique, as the miracle of
squalid perversity which it has appeared to some writers both of our own
and of earlier ages, and as requiring the bitter discipline of pasture
farming and evictions to shake it out of its deep rut of custom, and to
make room for more progressive methods? Or are we to view it as
permitting a good deal of mobility, and as already slowly developing a
less rigid and cumbrous organisation when it was partially overwhelmed
by rapid, and for the mass of the peasantry disastrous, changes? What
place ought the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century to be given
in that transition from mediæval to modern conditions of agriculture
which, starting in England, has spread eastwards through almost every
European country, and which is beginning to-day even in India. How far
does it compare and contrast with the enclosures of the period
succeeding the fall of the Stuarts, and with the analogous developments
which have taken place on the continent, and how far does it present
special features peculiar to itself? What were the relations between it
and other aspects of national life? Have the economic changes which took
place in the world of agriculture any reflex in the social and political
changes occurring in the century which divides the Reformation from the
Civil War? How far did the redistribution of property which they
effected contribute to the decline in the condition of the poorer
classes which, according to most writers, took place in the sixteenth
century, and to the creation of the commercial aristocracy whose
influence becomes so pronounced after the Restoration? What was the
result of these material developments in the realm of legal and economic
ideas? Ought we to minimise the communalism of the mediæval village? Or
should we think of the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century as
really a new and decided movement in the direction of economic
individualism, a long step towards the growth of modern ideas of land
ownership and of the right of the individual to follow unfettered his
own discretion in matters of economic enterprise, which gather weight at
the end of the seventeenth, and come to their own at the end of the
eighteenth, century?
We cannot pretend to answer these questions. We leave them as riddles
for the reader, with the words which a sixteenth century economist
prettily prefaces to his analysis of the chief economic problems of his
age:--"And albeit ye might well saye that there be men of greater witte
then I; yet fools (as the proverb is) speake some times to the purpose,
and as many headdes, so many wittes ... and though eche of theise by
them selves doe not make perfitte the thing, yet when every man bringeth
in his guifte, a meane witted man maye of the whole (the best of everie
mans devise beinge gathered together) make as it were a pleasant garland
and perfitte."[52]
[52] Preface to _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (ed.
Lamond).
In the following pages we shall deal with our subject in the following
order: Chapter I. of Part I. will describe the chief classes of tenants
as they are set out in rentals and surveys, and in particular the
freeholders and customary tenants who formed the bulk of the
landholders. Chapters II., III. and IV. will discuss in some detail the
economic positions of the customary tenants both before and during the
sixteenth century, the reasons for supposing that there had been a
considerable growth in the prosperity of many of them before our period
begins, and the gradual modification in the customary conditions of
rural life, as illustrated both by the growth of competitive payments on
those parts of the manor which were least controlled by custom, and by
the attempts made by the peasantry themselves to overcome by enclosure
the difficulties attaching to the methods of open field cultivation.
Chapter I. of Part II. will examine the reason which led to more rapid
changes in agricultural methods in the sixteenth century, and the growth
of the large leasehold farms upon which these changes can be most easily
traced. Chapters II. and III. will discuss the reaction of these changes
upon the peasantry and the question of the nature and security of their
tenure. Chapter I. of Part III. will explain their political and social
importance and the policy of the State towards them. In Chapter II. we
shall endeavour to offer a summary of our main conclusions.
PART I
THE SMALL LANDHOLDER
"What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the comyns
of England in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all
prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so strong in the
felde as the comyns of England?"--_State Papers, Henry VIII._,
vol. ii. p. 10.
"My thynketh that as the wise husbandman makethe and maynteyneth
his nursery of yonge trees to plante in the steede of the olde,
when he seeth them begynne to fail, because he will be sure at
all tymes of fruyte: so shulde politique governours (as the
kynges maiestie and his councell mynde) provide for thencrease
and mayntenance of people, so that at no tyme they maye lacke to
serve his highnes and the commenwelthe."--_The defence of John
Hales agenst certeyn sclaundres and false reaportes made of
hym._
CHAPTER I
THE RURAL POPULATION
(a) _The Classes of Landholders_
If an Englishman of ordinary intelligence had been asked in the reign of
Henry VIII. to explain the foundations of national prosperity, he would
probably have answered that the whole wealth[53] of the country arises
out of the labours of the common people, and that, of all who labour, it
is by the work of those engaged in tillage that the State most certainly
stands. True, it cannot dispense with handicraftsmen and merchants, for
ours is an age of new buildings, new manufactures, new markets. The
traders of Europe are already beginning to look west and east after the
explorers; there are signs of an oceanic commerce arising out of the
coastwise traffic of the Middle Ages; and Governments are increasingly
exercised with keeping foreign ports open and English ports closed. But
whether any particular artisan or trader is a profitable member of the
commonwealth is an open question. Too many of the manufactures which men
buy are luxurious[54] trifles brought from abroad and paid for with good
English cloth or wool or corn or tin, if not with gold itself--articles
whose use sumptuary legislation would do well to repress. As for
merchants,[55] if like honest men they give their minds to navigation,
well and good. But theirs is an occupation in which there is much room
for "unlawful subtlety and sleight," for eking out the legitimate
profits earned by the labour of transport, with underhand gains filched
from the necessitous by buying cheap and selling dear, for speculations
perilously near the sin of the usurers who traffic in time itself.
Outside the circle of a few statesmen and financiers, the men of the
sixteenth century have not mastered the secret by which modern societies
feed and clothe (with partial success) dense millions who have never
seen wheat or wool, though London and Bristol and Southampton are
beginning to grope towards it. Looking at the cornfields which are
visible from the centre of even the largest cities, they see that a
small harvest means poverty and a good harvest prosperity, and that a
decrease of a few hundred acres in the area sown may make all the
difference between scarcity and abundance. A shortage in grain, which
would cause a modern State to throw open its ports and to revise its
railway tariff, sets a sixteenth century town[56] breaking up its
pastures and extending the area under tillage. No man is so clearly a
"productive labourer" as the husbandman, because no man so unmistakably
adds to the most obvious and indispensable forms of wealth; and though,
in the system of classes which makes up the State, there are some whose
function is more honourable, there is none whose function is more
necessary. In most ages there is some body of men to whom their
countrymen look with pride as representing in a special degree the
strength and virtues of the nation. In the sixteenth century that class
consisted of the substantial yeoman. Men speak of them with the same
swaggering affection as is given by later generations to the sea-dogs.
The genius of England is a rural divinity and does not yet rule the
waves; but the English yeomen have "in time past made all France
afraid."[57] They absorb most of the attention of writers, both on the
technique and on the social relations of agriculture. They are the
feet[58] upon which the body politic stands--the hands which, by
ministering to its wants, leave the brain free to act and plan. Let us
begin by trying to see how the landholding classes were composed.
[53] Pauli, _Drei volkswirthschaftliche Denkschriften aus der
Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England_: How to reform the Realme in
setting them to work, and to restore tillage. "The whole welth
of the body of the realm riseth out of labours and workes of the
common people."
[54] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond), p. 63:
"And I marvell no man taketh heade unto it, what nombre first of
trifles cometh hether from beyonde the seas, that we might
either clene spare, or els make them within oure owne Realme,
for the which we paie inestimable treasure every yeare, or els
exchange substanciall wares and necessaries for them." E. E. T.
S., _England in the Reign of King Henry VIII._, Part II., p. 84:
"Craftys men and makers of tryfullys are too many." Harrison in
_Elizebethan England_ (Withington), p. 15: "O how many trades
and handicrafts are now in England whereof the Commonwealth hath
no need!" &c.
[55] _e.g._ the prayer for merchants in Edward VI.'s _Book of
Private Prayer_: "So occupy their merchandise without fraud,
guile, or deceit."
[56] _Coventry Leet Book_, Part III., pp. 679-680.
[57] See Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. I. c. 23: "These
are they which in the old world got that honour to Englande ...
because they be so manie in number, so obedient at the Lorde's
call, so strong of bodie, so hard to endure paine, so courageous
to adventure ... these were the good archers in times past, and
the stable troops of footmen that affaide all France that would
rather die all, than once abandon the knight or gentleman their
captaine," and Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington),
pp. 11-13.
[58] E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of King Henry VIII._,
Starkey's Dialogue, Part II., p. 49: "To the handes are
resemblyd both craftysmen and warryarys.... To the fete the
plowmen and tyllarys of the ground, beycause they, by theyr
labour, susteyne and support the rest of the body."
The manorial documents supply us with much information about the
landholders, and though we cannot say what proportion[59] they formed of
the population, we ought to be able to say with some certainty the
relative numbers of different classes among them. In the surveys and
rentals of the period persons holding land may usually be divided
roughly according to the nature of their tenure into three
groups--freeholders, customary tenants, and leaseholders. This
classification[60] of course is an elastic and tentative one, which
raises almost as many questions as it settles. The customary tenure of
one part of the country differs very much from the customary tenure of
another part. Customary tenants include copyholders and the vast
majority of tenants at will, who are holding customary land, and who are
often entered under the latter heading merely because the surveyor did
not trouble to set out their full description. But tenancy at will is
sometimes used to describe the condition, not only of the holder of
customary land, but also of men who are mere squatters on the waste or
on the demesne, and who are not protected in their holdings by any
manorial custom. Again, it is not always easy to draw a line between
copyhold and leasehold. On a manor where the custom is least favourable
to the tenants' interests the former shades into the latter. There is
not much difference, for example, between a lease for thirty-three years
and a copyhold for life. Again, the classification is one of tenures not
of tenants. In parts of England, it is true, it does divide individual
tenants with almost complete exhaustiveness and precision. In most
districts, for example, the free tenant usually holds freehold land and
nothing else, the customary tenant customary land and no other. But in
East Anglia there is no such simplicity of arrangement, no such
permanence of tenurial compartments. Many free tenants hold land which
is said to be bond or villein or customary land; many customary tenants
hold free land; many of both have added to their holdings by leasing
parts of the demesne or of the waste, and though in this respect the
Eastern counties are exceptional, it is in them often impossible to say
in what class any individual should be placed.
[59] In this essay we are concerned only with the landholders,
not with the wage workers. The relative number of persons
holding land and of agricultural labourers without land is an
important question on which it is not easy to get light. The
surveys and rentals, a species of private census invaluable in
giving information about the holders of property, tell us only
the number of householders, and as the labourers employed in
agriculture (like many of those employed in manufacturing
industry) usually lived on the premises of their masters, they
do not enable us to calculate the number of those living
entirely by their labour. Still, since they include all tenants,
whether holders of a cottage only or holders of land in
addition, they enable us to say what proportion of heads of
families held land, and what proportion had none, or none except
a garden. This is of some importance. A tenant holding even as
much as fifty acres can hardly have employed more than two or
three agricultural labourers, and most tenants held less than
this; so that in those places where the cottagers form a small
proportion of the whole population we may conclude that a large
proportion of the villagers were landholders (for the figures on
this point see the tables given below).
Unfortunately, we do not possess for the sixteenth century even
such a loose estimate as was made by Gregory King at the end of
the seventeenth. In 1688 he calculated that there were 16,560
families of nobles and gentlemen, 60,000 families of yeomen,
150,000 of farmers--presumably on lease--400,000 cottagers and
poor, 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, obviously a
very rough calculation, the most remarkable feature of which is
the large number of yeomen. Poll Tax returns might give us the
kind of information we require, since they included, or were
meant to include, the whole population above a certain age,
irrespective of whether they held land or not, and sometimes
divided them roughly into classes. Thus on sixteen manors in the
Norfolk Hundred of Thingoe the return to the Poll Tax of 1381
showed a population of 870 male and female inhabitants over
fifteen years of age, of whom 9 were set down as knights, 53 as
farmers, 102 as artificers, 344 as "labourers" (laboratores),
362 as "servants" (servientes). If, as is not improbable, the
first four classes held land (the labourers being serfs working
on the demesne), and the last consisted of farm and household
employees who did not, this would put the landholding classes on
these manors at a little more than half the total population
over the age of fifteen. But this return was probably falsified
to escape the tax; see Powell, _The East Anglian Rising_, App.
I., and Oman, _The Great Revolt of 1381_. The figures published
by Dr. Savine (_Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_,
vol. i., pp. 223-226) of the monastic population show that on
the eve of the dissolution there were residing in 22 houses in
Leicester, Warwick, and Sussex, 255 "hinds" and 76 "women
servants," presumably employed on the demesne farm, which gives
an average to each farm of about 11 hinds and about 3 women
servants. In the Kentish Nunnery of St. Sexburge, Sheppey, the
demesne farm employed a carter, a carpenter, two cowherds, a
thatcher, a horse keeper, a malter, three shepherds. Best,
describing his farming arrangements in Yorkshire in 1641
(_Surtees Society_, vol. xxxiii.), states: "Wee kept constantly
five plowes goinge, and milked fowerteene kine, wherefore wee
had always fower men, two boyes to go with the oxeploughe, and
two good lusty mayde-servants." These were in each case only the
permanent staff, and their comparatively small numbers suggest
that much work must have been done by men who worked on their
own land and only occasionally helped on the demesne, _i.e._
that the proportion of landholders to non-landholders was high.
This conclusion agrees with the evidence of the surveys, which
show that, especially in the East of England, many of both the
free and the customary tenants' holdings were so small that they
could hardly have made a living out of them without working as
wage-labourers as well, and also with other indications as to
the classes in rural society; _e.g._ out of 3780 persons
mentioned in Worcestershire recognizances, 1591-1643, as either
"labourers," "husbandmen," or "yeomen," 667 are entered as
labourers, 1303 as husbandmen, 1810 as yeomen, the latter
designation always, and the second usually, implying a holder of
land (J.W. Willis Bund, _Kalendar of the Sessions Rolls_,
1591-1643, Part II.) On the other hand, conditions varied
enormously from place to place. Where there was a considerable
body of small landowners the number of hired labourers tended to
be small, the work of cultivation being done by the holder and
his family; _e.g._ we read of a manor in the seventeenth century
where thirteen freeholders farmed 580 acres with the aid of only
ten men-servants and shepherds before enclosure, and six or
seven afterwards (Joseph Lee, _A Vindication of a Regulated
Enclosure_).
Some of the surveys supply us with extreme cases of the opposite
kind, where the whole manor consists of two or three holdings or
of even one great estate, and where almost the whole of the
population must have been working for wages; these illustrate
Harrison's complaint that in many places "The land of the parish
is gotten up into a few men's hands; yea, sometimes, into the
tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled
betimes to be hired servants unto the others, or else to beg
their bread in misery from door to door" (Withington's edition
of _Elizabethan England_, p. 21). A protest made to the Council
from Norfolk in 1631 against its policy of trying to keep down
prices by insisting that all corn should be sold in the open
market points out that in "the woodland and pasture part" of the
country there are "a great many handicraftsmen which live by
dressinge and combinge of wool, carding, spinning and weaving,
etc., and the Townes there commonly very great consisting of
such like people and other artificers with many poor, and none
of them all ordinarilye having any corn but from the market." As
to the "champion part" of the county, the document divides the
rural population into three classes: "1. Tilth masters that have
corn of their own growing and sell it to others. 2. Labourers
that buy it at an under-price of them unto whom they worke. 3.
Poore people that are relieved by good orders in every towne"
(_Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological
Society_, 1907). But the case of Norfolk was exceptional, owing
to its position as the chief seat of the textile industries.
On the whole I am inclined to think that though the process of
commutation which went on from 1350 onwards can hardly be
explained except on the supposition that there was a
considerable population of persons who held little land and were
ready to eke out a living by working for wages, yet in the
sixteenth century even the wage-working heads of families
usually held a certain amount of land (even if only a garden) as
well. This agrees with what we are told by contemporaries of the
scarcity of wage-earners (see below, pp. 99-102). One may add,
that in view of this, the fixing of maximum wages bears a
somewhat different colour from that often given it. It was only
practicable, one is inclined to say, because so few persons
depended entirely on wages for a living. The social problem in
the sixteenth century was not a problem of wages, but of rents
and fines, prices and usury, matters which concern the
small-holder or the small master craftsman as much as the
wage-earner. The "working classes" were largely small property
holders and small traders.
[60] The summary statement given above is liable to be
misleading. The reader will find a fuller discussion of the
questions arising in connection with it below in Part II., chap.
iii.
Nevertheless, in spite of many marginal cases, we may perhaps find in
the surveyors' classification a map of the broader features of the
country through which we are to travel. Property holders, profit makers,
and wage-earners are to-day inextricably confused, but to the economist
who writes on our social problems 200 years hence it will not be
altogether useless to know that his predecessors did in practice draw
rough distinctions between these classes, and formed estimates of the
numbers of each. Much of the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century
turns on the question of the legal interest in their holdings enjoyed by
different classes of tenants, and though we cannot hope to escape the
pitfalls which await compilers of even the humblest census, a
preliminary survey of their distribution in a few counties may not be
altogether without value. The following figures are taken from the
surveys and rentals of 118 manors.[61] The majority were made in the
reign of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth. There are included,
however, three from the latter half of the fifteenth century and three
from the years between 1630 and 1650. Under the heading of customary
tenants are grouped copyholders and tenants at will, as well as those
who are called customary tenants in the rentals and surveys.
[61] They include also tenants on the lands belonging to
Cockersand Abbey, lying in many different parts of Lancashire,
in 1503. For the sources from which this table is constructed
and its defects, see Appendix II.
Scanty as they are, these figures show that there is the very greatest
variety in the distribution of different classes of tenants in different
parts of the country, and remind us that we must be careful how we
generalise from the conditions of one district to those of another. When
all localities are handled together, customary tenants form nearly
two-thirds of the whole landholding population, freeholders about
one-fifth, leaseholders between one-eighth and one-ninth. But in parts
of the Midlands and in parts of the West the leaseholders are much more
numerous than they are elsewhere; in Leicestershire they form over
one-fifth, and are almost as numerous as the freeholders, while if we
isolate the five Somersetshire and Devonshire manors which above are
combined with those of Wiltshire, we find that in them the leaseholders
exceed the freeholders by nearly two to one. Again, in Northumberland
the preponderance of customary tenants (where they form 91 per cent. of
the landholding population) over the two other classes is much more
marked than it is in Wiltshire, and in Wiltshire it is greater than it
is in the three Midland counties and in East Anglia. That customary
tenants should overwhelmingly preponderate in Northumberland is
intelligible enough. If the single great manor of Rochdale be removed,
they preponderate almost as much in Lancashire. In those two wild
counties mediæval conditions survive long after they have begun
elsewhere to disappear. There has been no growth of trade to bring
mobile leasehold tenures in its train, or to accumulate the wealth which
the peasants need to enfranchise their servile tenancies. But why should
they be so much more numerous in the southern counties than they are in
the twenty-two Midland villages, where one would suppose the conditions
to be much the same? Here, as often hereafter, we raise a question only
to leave it unanswered.
TABLE I
--------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
| Total. | Free- |Customary|Lease- |Uncertain.|
| |holders.| Tenants.|holders.| |
--------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
Northumberland, | 474 | 26 | 436 | 12 | |
six manors | | | | | |
| | | | | |
Lancashire, | | | | | |
seven manors, and lands | | | | | |
belonging to Cockersand | | | | | |
Abbey | 1280 | 217 | 451 | 334[62]| 278 |
+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
Total | 1754 | 243 | 887 | 346 | 278 |
| |(13.8%) | (50.5%) |(19.04%)| (15%) |
| | | | | |
Staffordshire, | 356 | 44 | 272 | 23 | 17 |
six manors | | | | | |
| | | | | |
Leicestershire, | 618 | 134 | 311 | 124 | 49 |
nine manors | | | | | |
| | | | | |
Northamptonshire, | 531 | 100 | 355 | 66 | 10 |
seven manors | | | | | |
+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
Total | 1505 | 278 | 938 | 213 | 76 |
| |(18.1%) | (62.3%) |(14.2%) | (5%) |
| | | | | |
Norfolk, |1011[63]| 316 | 596 | 53 | 50 |
twenty-five manors | | | | | |
| | | | | |
Suffolk, | 353 | 176 | 146 | 25 | 6 |
fourteen manors | | | | | |
+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
Total |1364[63]| 492 | 742 | 78 | 56 |
| | (36%) | (54.3%) | (5.7%) | (4.1%) |
| | | | | |
Wiltshire, Somerset, | | | | | |
and Devonshire, | | | | | |
thirty-two manors | 1102 | 149 | 817 | 136 | |
| | | | | |
Hampshire, | 259 | 8 | 251 | | |
two manors | | | | | |
| | | | | |
Ten other manors | | | | | |
in the south of | | | | | |
of England | 219 | 43 | 158 | 12 | 6 |
+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
Total | 1580 | 200 | 1226 | 148 | 6 |
| |(12.6%) | (77.2%) | (9.3%) | (0.3%) |
+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
Grand total |6203[63]| 1213 | 3793 | 785 | 416 |
| |(19.5%) | (61.1%) |(12.6%) | (6.7%) |
--------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+
[62] The Lancashire figures are unduly weighted by those of the
single large manor of Rochdale, where, in 1626, there were 612
tenants. If this manor be omitted, there remain only 19
leaseholders on the other Lancashire manors. Like
Northumberland, Lancashire seems to be (as one would expect) a
county of customary tenants.
[63] There is an error of 4 in the Norfolk figures which I have
been unable to trace and correct.
Yet there is one point emerging from these figures of which the
explanation can hardly be in doubt. It will be noticed that in Norfolk
and Suffolk combined the proportion of freeholders is about double what
it is in the country as a whole. In the former county they form more
than one-third of all the landholders, and in the latter they are almost
equal to the other two classes together. The number of peasant
proprietors in Suffolk is indeed quite exceptional, and is one of the
most remarkable facts revealed by the surveys, drawing an unmistakable
line between the land tenure of the east and that of the south-west and
the northern border. In Wiltshire and Northumberland it is not uncommon
to find villages where no freeholders at all are recorded. In Norfolk
and Lancashire it is the exception for them to be in a majority. But on
half the Suffolk manors summarised above they are the largest class
represented, and on some they stand to the other landholders in a
proportion of two, three, and even four to one. Is it fanciful, one may
ask, to turn from the sixteenth century to the dim beginnings of things,
to that first and greatest survey in which the land of England was
described so that not an ox or an acre escaped valuation, and in which,
before freehold tenure had been hammered into any precise legal shape,
Suffolk and Norfolk abounded more than all other counties in _liberi
homines_ and _sochemanni_? Though a longer time separates these
documents from Domesday[64] than separates them from us, perhaps it is
not altogether fanciful. Rural life, except for one great catastrophe,
has been very permanent. Unlike rural life to-day, it has been most
permanent in its lower ranges. How ever often manors may have changed
hands, there has been little to break the connection with the soil of
peasants whose title is good, no change at all comparable to the buying
out of small freeholders which took place in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It may well be that the main outlines of the
social system which the Domesday commissioners found already laid in the
east of England crop out again after the lapse of between four and five
hundred years. It may well be that Suffolk is a county of small
freeholders in the days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, because it was a
county of free men and socmen in the days of William I.
[64] In Domesday Book 35 per cent. of all the tenants in Suffolk
are _liberi homines_, 32 per cent. of all those in Norfolk are
either _liberi homines_ or _sochemanni_. See Vinogradoff, _The
Growth of the Manor_, note 24 to chap. iii. Book III. (p. 376);
Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, p. 23; Seebohm, _The
English Village Community_, map opposite p. 85. Domesday also
gives a large number of _liberi homines_ and _sochemanni_ in
Leicestershire. In the table given above the Leicestershire
manors come after Suffolk and Norfolk as having the third
largest proportion of freeholders, viz., 21.6 per cent. The
return of freeholders supplied to the Government in 1561
(Lansdowne MSS. V., 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) appear to be
considerably understated, probably because only the more
substantial men were thought worth mentioning. They are as
follows: Beds 282, Berks 166, Essex 880, Notts 189, Oxon. 198,
Herts 363, York 787, Lincoln 444. The large number in Essex is
noteworthy.
(b) _The Freeholders_
In spite of the constant complaints of the sixteenth century writers
that one effect of the agrarian changes was the decay of the yeomanry,
we shall not in the following pages be much concerned with the
freeholders. In our period the word "yeomen" was ceasing to be given the
narrow semi-technical sense which it possessed in Acts of Parliament and
legal documents, and was beginning to acquire the wide significance
which it possesses at the present day. To the lawyer the yeoman meant a
freeholder,[65] "a man who may dispend of his own free lande in yerely
revenue to the summe of 40s. sterling," and if the word yeoman was used
in its strict legal sense, the decay of the yeomanry ought to have meant
a decline in the numbers of freeholders, such as occurred on a very
large scale two and a half centuries later. But in this matter it seems
that popular usage was more elastic than legal definition, and, except
when the significance to be given it is defined by the context, the word
itself is not an accurate guide to the legal position of those to whom
it is applied. Writers on constitutional questions were careful to
observe the stricter usage, because the 40s. freeholder occupied a
position in the State, both as a voter and in serving on juries, from
which persons who, though much wealthier, were not freeholders, were
excluded. But the word yeoman was used, in speaking of agricultural
conditions, to describe any well-to-do farmer beneath the rank of
gentleman, even though he was not a freeholder. Thus Bacon[66] writes
quite vaguely of "the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between
gentlemen and cottagers or peasants." Those who insisted that the
military power of England depended on the yeomanry can hardly have meant
to exclude well-to-do copyholders;[67] not only copyholders but even
villeins[68] by blood were sometimes described as yeomen; and, in fact,
even writers who, like Sir Thomas Smith,[69] use the word most clearly
in its strict legal sense on one page, allow themselves to slip into
using it in its wider and more popular sense on the next, when the
social importance of the class and not its legal status is uppermost in
their minds.
[65] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib I., c. 23.
[66] _History of King Henry VII._ (Lumley), pp. 70-72. He makes
his meaning quite clear by saying "tenancies for years, lives,
and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned
into demesnes."
[67] _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xvii. (Savine, "Bondmen
under the Tudors").
[68] _Ibid._
[69] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum, loc. cit._
Nor is there much evidence that the freeholders suffered generally from
the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. It is true that there are
some complaints from freeholders as to the loss of rights of pasture
through the encroachments of large farmers upon the commonable area,
some cases of litigation between them and enclosing landlords. But,
since their payments were fixed, there was no way of getting rid of them
except by buying them out, and though this method, which was so
important a cause of the decline of the small freeholder in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was occasionally employed to
round off a great estate, it seems to have played a comparatively
unimportant part in our period. There is no sign of any large diminution
in their numbers, such as would have been expected if the movement had
affected them in the same way as it did the customary tenants.
Indeed, if the accounts of contemporary writers may be trusted, it would
appear that their position was actually improved in the course of the
century. Though even among quite small men one occasionally finds a
tenant by knight[70] service, the vast majority of freeholders held in
free socage, owing fealty and suit of court, and paying a money rent,
sometimes combined with the old recognitions[71] of dependent tenure,
such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of
cummin. But while on some manors some outward form of feudalism, such as
homage and fealty, were still maintained, the decay of feudal relations
in the middle order of society had combined with economic causes to
better their condition, and the time was already not far distant when
those who held by the more honourable tenure of knight service would
insist on its being assimilated to the humbler and less onerous tenure
of the socager. The agricultural services of the socage tenants had long
disappeared. There are many instances of work on the demesne being done
in the sixteenth century by copyholders; but there is in our records
only one manor where it was exacted from the freeholders, and other
obligations were tending to go the way of the vanished predial labour.
Suits of court might be owing, and set down as owing in the surveys, but
one may doubt very much whether they were often enforced. Owing to the
fall in the value of money the fixed rent of the socager often yielded
only a small income to the lord of the manor, and in a good many cases
these payments had disappeared altogether before the end of the century,
or were so unimportant as to be hardly worth the trouble of collecting.
Surveyors for this reason were often little interested in them, and,
while recording the acreage held by the customary tenants and
leaseholders with scrupulous accuracy, did not always trouble to set out
in detail the holdings of a class which was financially so
insignificant, with the result that sometimes the freeholders shook
themselves loose from all payments and services altogether. Nor, had the
surveyors been as careful as the heads of the profession would have had
them be, would they always have been successful in dealing with this
very independent class. They may protest that "next[72] under the king"
the freeholders "may be said to be the lord's," but freehold lands have
a way of getting mislaid[73] to the despair of manorial officials, as
copyhold lands do to-day. When escheats occur, the holding cannot be
found; when rents are overdue, distraint is impossible, because the
bailiff does not know on whom to distrain. The suggestion that, as long
as rents are paid and services discharged, the lord has any interest in
the property of his freehold tenants, rouses instant resentment, and it
would seem that by our period, at any rate in the south of England, the
connection of the freeholders with the manor was a matter rather of form
and sentiment than of substance. In fact freehold has almost assumed its
modern shape.
[70] MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham. Billingford and
Bintry MSS. No. 9 (Manor of Foxley, 1568).
[71] _e.g. ibid._, Sparham MSS. No. 5, a freeholder pays "a
pounde of cumming seede and a gillyflower" (_c._ 1590). R.O.
Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Portf. 6, No. 15: "nyne
golden threads of vi.d." (1568). R.O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182,
fol. 1: a tenant "holds freely a cottage paying a red rose."
[72] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, Book I., pp. 4-5, to
which the farmer answers: "Fie upon you. Will you bring us to be
slaves? Neither lawe, nor reason, nor least of all religion, can
allowe what you affirme."
[73] _Op. cit._, Book III. Here is a bitter cry from the bailiff
of a manor (Merton Documents, No. 4381). "Good sir let me
entreat you yf the Colledge determyne to make survey this spring
of the lands at Kibworth and Barkly to send Mr. Kay or me word a
month or 3 weeks before your coming that we may have Beare and
other necessaries, and I desire you to gather up all evidences
that may be needful for the Lordshipp, for all testimony will be
little enough, the Colledge land is so mingled with Mr. Pochin's
freehold and others in our towne. There ys an awarde for
keepinge in of the old wol (?) close in our fields for (from ?)
Mr. Pochin's occupation, very needfulle for the ynhabitannts yf
that awarde can be founde at the colledge where yt was loste."
(For the remainder of this letter see Appendix I.) The Crown
suffered especially, see Norden, _Speculum Britanniae_, Part I.,
pp. xl.-xliii. of introduction (Camden Society): "In many of his
Majesty's manors, free holders, their rents, services, tenures
and landes ... become strange and unknown ... and when escheates
happen the lande that should redound to his Majesty cannot be
found." In the common entry in manorial surveys under the
heading of freeholders of "certain lands" we should probably
take the word "certain" to mean "uncertain."
In assuming its modern shape it has made this particular strand in rural
life harder to unravel. By escaping from the supervision of the manorial
authorities the freeholders escape at the same time from the economic
historian, and since the facts of their position go so often
unrecorded, we can speak of it with much less confidence than we can
about that of the leaseholders and customary tenants. Out of over one
hundred manors which we have examined, there are only twenty-two where
it is possible to ascertain with any accuracy the acreage held by the
freeholders, and, even on these, one too often meets cases in which the
extent of the holding is either unknown to the surveyor, or in which he
does not think it worth while to record it. Our results, such as they
are, are set out in the table on pages 32 and 33.[74]
[74] For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II.
Combining the information supplied by these figures with that obtained
from other sources, we can form a rough idea of the agrarian conditions
under which the freeholders live. They are, in the first place, a most
heterogeneous class, including on the one hand men of considerable
wealth and position, and on the other mere cottagers. If we could trust
the statistics given above we should have to say that the latter
enormously outnumbered the former. But our impression is that, though,
no doubt, a large number of freeholders were extremely small men, the
preponderance of the latter was not nearly so marked as is suggested by
the table. For one thing, it is difficult to reconcile it with the
accounts given us of the substantial yeomen by the writers of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For another thing, it is in dealing
with the larger freeholders that the inclination of surveyors to omit
any estimate of the extent of the land is strongest, because it is
naturally in their case that an estimate is most difficult to form.
Probably, therefore, if we could obtain for the freehold tenancies
figures even as full as we can for those of the customary tenants, we
should find that the proportion holding between twenty and forty acres
was considerably larger than these partial statistics would suggest.
In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to
the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture,
such as is often supplied for other classes of tenants, we may say with
some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agricultural
economy differed from that of the neighbouring copyholders,[75] and that
the backbone of their living, except when the plots were so small as
merely to supply them with garden produce, was therefore in almost every
case tillage. If in any way they departed from the practice of their
neighbours who were not freeholders, they did so probably only in being
somewhat more alert and enterprising, somewhat more ready to use their
security to break with custom and to introduce innovations. It is clear
that many of them were very far from being tied down to the stagnant
routine which some writers would have us believe is inseparable from all
small scale farming. Often, indeed, they had enough initiative to
realise the advantages of improved methods of cultivation, and on
several manors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
freeholders agreed with each other to survey their lands and separate
them, so that they could be cultivated in severalty.[76] In many cases,
again, they extended their holdings, which were sometimes large and
sometimes mere patches of a few acres, by acting as farmers for the lord
of the manor and leasing[77] the demesne or part of it. Above all they
had nothing to fear from the agrarian changes which disturbed the
copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good deal to gain; for the
rise in prices increased their incomes; while, unlike many copyholders
and the tenant farmers, they could not be forced to pay more for their
lands.
TABLE II
---------------------------------------------------------------+
15 and under 20 Acres. |
10 and under 15 Acres. | . |
5 and under 10 Acres. | . | . |
2-1/2 and under 5 Acres. | . | . | . |
Under 2-1/2 Acres. | . | . | . | . |
Houses or Cottages only. | . | . | . | . | . |
Total Number of Tenants. | . | . | . | . | . | . |
----------------------------+ | | | | | | +
Norfolk, six manors | 139| 25| 33| 12| 17| 9 | 10 |
----------------------------| | | | | | | +
Suffolk, four manors | 85| 27| 18| 10| 11| 2 | |
----------------------------| | | | | | | +
Staffordshire, three manors | 24| 7| 4| 2| 3| 1 | |
----------------------------| | | | | | | +
Lancashire, three manors | 9| | 1| 3| 1| 1 | 1 |
----------------------------| | | | | | | +
Northants, four manors | 116| 10| 11| 4| 13| 9 | 5 |
----------------------------| | | | | | | +
Wiltshire, one manor | 6| | | | 2 | | |
----------------------------| | | | | | | +
Leicestershire, one manor | 11| 1| 2| 2| 1| | 1 |
----------------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
Total, twenty-two manors| 390| 70| 69| 33| 48| 22 | 17 |
----------------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+
TABLE II (CONT'D)
---------------------------------------------------------------+
Uncertain.|
120 and over.| .|
115 and under Acres.|.| .|
110 and under Acres.|.|.| .|
105 and under Acres.|.|.|.| .|
100 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.| .|
95 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
90 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
85 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
80 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
75 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
70 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
65 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
60 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
55 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
50 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
45 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
40 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
35 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
30 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
25 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
20 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .|
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Norfolk |2| |2|1|2| | | | | | | | | | |1|2| | | | |23|
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Suffolk |1|1|3| | | |2|1| | | | |1| | | | | | | | | 8|
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Staffordshire |1|2| |1|1| | | | | | | | | | | |2| | | | | |
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Lancashire | | | | | | |1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1|
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Northants |1|1|4|2|3|2| | |3| | | | | | | | | | | |3|45|
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Wiltshire | | | | |1| |1| |1| | | | | | | | | | | |1| |
--------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +
Leicestershire |1| | | | |1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2|
--------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+
Total |6|4|9|4|7|3|4|1|4| | | |1| | |1|4| | | |4|79|
--------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+
[75] See below, pp. 105?-115.
[76] See _e.g. Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. p. 327,
below, pp. 157-?158, and _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery,
temp. Eliz._ B, b. 1, 58, Ll. 10, 62.
[77] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. I., c. 23: "These be
for the most part fermors unto gentlemen." _Elizabethan England_
(Withington), p. 120. "Yeomen" frequently occur in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries as lessees of the Merton Manors.
The apparent immunity of the freeholders in the face of movements which
overwhelmed other groups of tenants suggests indeed that economic
causes alone, which all classes, whatever the legal nature of their
tenure, would have experienced equally, are not sufficient to explain
the sufferings of the latter. The situation in our period is not like
that which arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when
widening markets throw all the advantages of increasing returns on the
side of the large wheat farmer, and the yeomanry sell their holdings to
try their fortunes in the rapidly growing towns. The struggle is not so
much between the large scale and small scale production of corn as
between corn growing and grazing. The small corn grower, provided he has
security of tenure, can still make a very good living.[78] From the
point of view of the economist all the smaller men, whether freeholders,
leaseholders, or customary tenants, are in much the same position. The
decisive factor, which causes the fortunes of the former class to wax,
and those of the two latter to wane, is to be found in the realm not of
economics but of law. Leaseholders and many copyholders suffer, because
they can be rack-rented and evicted. The freeholders stand firm, because
their legal position is unassailable. Here, as so often elsewhere, not
only in the investigation of the past but in the analysis of the
present, the trail followed by the economist leads across a country
whose boundaries and contours and lines of least resistance have been
fashioned by the labour of lawyers. It is his wisdom to recognise that
economic forces operate in a framework created by legal institutions,
that to neglect those institutions in examining the causes of economic
development or the distribution of wealth is as though a geographer
should discuss the river system of a country without reference to its
mountain ranges, and that, if lawyers have wrought in ignorance of
economics, he must nevertheless consult their own art in order to
unravel the effect of their operations.
[78] See below, pp. 105?-115.
From the larger standpoint of social and political organisation the
freeholders constituted an element in society the very nature of which
we can hardly understand, because our modern life offers no analogy to
it. We tend to draw our social lines not between small properties and
great, but between those who have property and those who have not, and
to think of the men who stand between the very rich and the very poor,
the men of whom our ancestors boasted as the "Commons of England," as
men who do not own but are employed by owners. Independence and the
virtues which go with independence, energy, a sober, self-respecting
forethought, public spirit, are apt to become identified in our minds
with the possession of wealth, because so few except the comparatively
wealthy have the means of climbing beyond the reach of the stream of
impersonal economic pressure which whirls the mass of mankind this way
and that with the violence of an irresponsible Titan.
The sixteenth century was poor with a poverty which no industrial
community can understand, the poverty of the colonist and the peasant.
It lived in terror of floods and bad harvests and disease, of plague,
pestilence, and famine. If one may judge by its churchyards, it had an
infantile mortality which might make even Lancashire blush under its
soot. Yet (and we do not forget the black page of the early Poor Law) it
was possible for men who by our standards would be called poor to
exercise that control over the conditions of their lives which is of the
essence of freedom, and which in most modern communities is too
expensive a privilege to be enjoyed by more than comparatively few. Such
men were the freeholders. They formed a class which had security and
independence without having affluence, which spanned the gulf between
the wealthy and the humble with a chain of estates ranging from the few
acres of the peasant proprietor to the many manors of the noble, which
was not too poor to be below public duties nor too rich to be above
them, which could feel that "it is a quietness to a man's mind to dwell
upon his owne and to know his heire certaine."[79] Look for a moment at
the jolly picture drawn by Fuller,[80] who wrote at the very end of the
period with which we are dealing:--
"The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore whom the next age may see
refined, and is the most capable of genteel impressions when the Prince
shall stamp.... France and Italy are like a die which has no points
between cinque and ace, nobility and peasantry.... Indeed, Germany hath
her boors like our yeomen; but by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility
to some few ancient families their yeomen are excluded from ever rising
higher to clarify their blood. In England the temple of honour is closed
to none who have passed through the temple of virtue.
"He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his
buttons and silver in his pocket. He is the surest landmark whence
foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs, the gentry more
floating after foreign fashions.
"In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and poor people. Some
hold, when hospitality died, she gave her last groan among the yeomen of
Kent. And still at our yeoman's table you shall have as many joints as
dishes; no meat disguised with strange sauce; no straggling joint of a
sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass, but solid, substantial food.
"He hath a great stroke in the making of a knight of the Shire. Good
reason, for he makes a whole line in the subsidy book, where, whatsoever
he is rated, he payeth without regret, not caring how much his purse be
let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of the state.
"In his own country he is a main man on juries; where, if the Judge open
his eyes on a matter of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in
matters of fact.... Otherwise (though not mutinous in a jury) he cares
not whom he displeaseth, so he pleaseth his own conscience.
"In a time of famine he is the Joseph of the country and keeps the poor
from starving ... and to his poor neighbour abateth somewhat of the high
price of the market. The neighbour gentry court him for his
acquaintance, which either he modestly waveth, or thankfully accepteth,
but in no way greedily desireth.
"In war, though he serveth on foot, he is ever mounted on a high spirit,
as being a slave to none, and subject only to his own Prince. Innocence
and independence make a brave spirit, whereas otherwise one must ask his
leave to be valiant on whom one depends. Therefore if a state run up all
to noblemen and gentlemen, so that the husbandmen be only mere
labourers or cottagers (which one calls but 'housed beggars'), it may
have good cavalry, but never good bands of foot.... Wherefore to make
good infantry it requireth men bred not in a servile or indigent
fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner."
[79] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_.
[80] Fuller, _Holy and Profane State_. The concluding paragraph
is obviously copied from Bacon's _History of King Henry VII._
The ancestors of the yeomanry had suffered much in the anarchy of the
fifteenth century, when the violent ejection of freeholders seems to
have become almost as common[81] as it had been in the evil days before
the reforms of Henry II. But the Tudor monarchy had put an end to that
nightmare of lawlessness, and in any society governed by law this body
of small property-owners was bound to be a powerful element, even though
they had no occasion for making any concerted use of their power, as
during the greater part of our period they had not. One must not, of
course, exaggerate their importance, or forget that, though a special
dignity was attached by opinion to all freeholders, they included in
reality men of various economic positions. Many of them must have been
quite poor. In the eastern counties, where they are most numerous, they
frequently own not more than three or four acres apiece, and can hardly,
one would suppose, have supported themselves without working for wages
in addition to tilling their holdings. Nevertheless the part which they
played in the routine of rural life was an indispensable one, and the
very diversity of the elements which they included made them a link
between different ends of the social scale. It was from the more
substantial among them that the government was most anxious to recruit
the military forces. The obligation of serving the State as voters and
upon juries fell upon the 40s. freeholders. The security of their tenure
caused them to be the natural leaders of the peasantry in resisting
pressure from above. No efforts of Elizabeth's Government could induce
the yeomanry of the North[82] Riding to abandon the old religion; and
when tenants and lords fall out over common rights and enclosures, it is
often the freeholders--though on occasion they enclose themselves--who
speak[83] for the less independent classes and take the initiative in
instituting legal proceedings. The upward movement which went on among
this class in many parts of England meant a change in the distribution
of material wealth which necessarily involved a corresponding change in
the balance of social forces and in the control of political power. To
Harrington,[84] who sought in the seventeenth century to find in
economic causes an explanation of the revolution through which the
country had passed, it seemed that the seeds of the civil war had been
sown by the Tudor kings themselves in the care which they showed for the
small proprietor. In destroying feudalism to establish the monarchy,
they had raised a power which was more dangerous to the monarchy than
feudalism itself. They had snapped the bond between landlord and tenant
by the Statute of Retainers. They had given the tenant security by
forbidding depopulation. Most important of all, by encouraging
alienation they had caused an enormous transference of property from the
upper to the middle and lower middle classes. "The lands in possession
of the Nobility and Clergy of England till Henry VII. cannot be
estimated to have over-balanced those held by the People less than four
to one. Whereas, in our days, the Clergy being destroyed, the Lands in
possession of the People over-balance those held by the Nobility at
least nine in ten." But property is political power individualised and
made visible. The destruction of the monarchy was only the political
expression of an economic change which had begun in the reign of Henry
VII. "He suffered the balance to fall into the power of the people....
But the balance being in the People, the Commonwealth (though they do
not see it) is already in the nature of them." We need not accept
Harrington's view in its entirety in order to appreciate the
significance of the change which he describes. Certainly the yeomanry
were growing in political power, and were strong in that spirit of
self-respect and pride in their order, which, when, as too often, it is
confined to a single class, means social oppression, but which, when
widely diffused throughout society, is the mother of public spirit and
political virtue. The long discipline of tiresome public duties which
they had borne throughout the Middle Ages had formed them into a body
which was alive to political issues and conscious of political
influence, and which, when participation in public affairs became not
only a duty but a right, would use their power to press urgent petitions
from one county after another upon the King and upon the Parliament, or
by riding up from Buckinghamshire to protect Hampden at Westminster in
1642, or by fighting behind Cromwell in Cambridgeshire, or by fighting
for the King in the West. Compared with the bulk of the population, they
were a privileged class and stood by their own; it was they who restored
the franchise to the 40s. freeholders in 1654 and refused to extend it
to the copyholders. But the tenure of much of the land of England by men
with whom, however poor, no landlord or employer could interfere, set a
limit to the power of wealth, and made rural society at once more alert
and more stubborn, a field where great ideas could grow and great causes
find adherents. Political and religious idealism flourish bravely in a
stony soil. What makes them droop is not poverty, but the withering
shadow cast by complete economic dependence.
[81] Paston Letters, I. 12, II. 248. Plummer's edition of
Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, Intro., p. 21.
[82] Atkinson's _Quarter Sessions of the North Riding of
Yorkshire_, lists of recusants.
[83] _e.g. Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii. (quoted
below, pp. 251-253), and Selden Society, _Select Cases in
the Court of Star Chamber_, vol. ii., _Inhabitants of Thingden_
v. _Mulsho_; also Holkham MSS., Burnham Documents, Bdle. 5, No.
94 (quoted below, p. 245 _n_.).
[84] Harrington's works, 1700 edition, p. 69 (_Oceana_), pp.
388-?389 (_The Art of Law-giving_). See also Firth, _The House
of Lords during the Civil War_, pp. 28-?32.
From such degrading subservience the freeholders, "slaves to none," were
secure. As it was, they often left substantial fortunes to their
children, and by the middle of the sixteenth century were already
following the examples of their social superiors in entailing[85] their
lands. One can quite understand therefore that there is nothing
inconsistent between the glowing accounts of their prosperity at the end
of the century given by Harrison and his lamentation over the decline
of the rural population, or between the well-attested sufferings of the
small cultivator in the sixteenth century and his equally well-attested
importance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth. The explanation is
that the freeholders, though most important politically, did not form
the larger proportion of those substantial yeomen whose decay was
lamented. The day of their ruin was to come. But for the next two
centuries they were safe enough, and, if anything, gained on the class
immediately above them, whose lands they bought or leased, into whose
families they married, and with whose children their own competed in the
learned professions, laying, as the historian of Suffolk[86] said, "such
strong, sure and deep foundations that from thence in time are derived
many noble and worthy families." Nothing in the life of the period
caused more pride than the prosperity of this solid body of small
property-owners, and the contrast which it offered to the downtrodden
peasantry of the Continent. No loss has been sustained by the modern
world greater than their disappearance.
[85] It is stated by good authorities that between 12 Ed. IV.,
when the collusive action known as a common recovery used to
evade the Statute _de donis conditionalibus_ was confirmed by a
judicial decision (Taltarum's case), and the introduction into
settlements of "Trustees to preserve contingent remainders" by
Sir Orlando Bridgeman and Sir Geoffrey Palmer under the
Commonwealth, the tieing up of lands in one family was
impossible (_e.g._ Johnson, _The Disappearance of the Small
Landowner_, pp. 11-?13). But in 1538 Starkey's Dialogue speaks
strongly of the practice of entailing lands. "This faute sprange
of a certayn arrogancy, whereby, wyth the entaylyng of landys,
every Jake would be a gentylman, and every gentylman a knight or
a lord" (E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of Henry VIII._,
Part II. pp. 112?-113, and pp. 195?-196.)
[86] Reyce, _Breviary of Suffolk_, p. 58, quoted _Victoria
County History, Suffolk_.
(c) _The Customary Tenants_
Important, however, as the freeholders were from a social and political
standpoint, they were in most parts of England far inferior in point of
numbers to those described as "customary tenants." It is with the latter
class that we are mainly concerned, and leaving the leaseholders on one
side for examination later,[87] we may summarise shortly certain
features in their position. The number of customary tenants varied from
one manor to another, according to the extent to which in different
districts farmers holding by lease had been substituted for them, and on
some by the middle of the sixteenth century there were none at all. But
there are many indications that, down to the end of that century at any
rate, and probably much longer, they formed over the great part of
England the bulk of the landholding population. Of the revenues of 74
manors held by monastic[88] houses in 1535, £116 came from free, and
£1310 from customary, tenants. On 81 of the 118 manors analysed above
they are the most numerous class. When all the different districts are
grouped together, they amount to about 61 per cent. of all landholders,
and even this figure does not give an adequate idea of their numerical
importance. As we have seen, Norfolk and Suffolk are quite peculiar in
the multitude of freeholders they embrace, while the large number of
leaseholders on one extensive Lancashire manor unduly weights the
figures for that county. On the Midland manors 62 per cent., in
Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Somerset 77 per cent., in Northumberland 91
per cent. of all those holding land are customary tenants. No doubt the
area of land held under lease was growing in the course of the
sixteenth, and still more in the course of the seventeenth, century, and
its growth is an extremely important movement, of which something will
be said later. But it seems true to say that, down to the end of the
sixteenth century, both in numbers and payments, though not in prestige
and influence, the customary tenants, as distinct from the freeholders
and leaseholders, were by far the most important class in the
agricultural life of the country.
[87] See below, pp. 200?-213 and 283?-287.
[88] _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, vol. i.
Savine, _English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution_, pp.
156?-159.
Among the customary tenants, however, there are certain important
subdivisions. There are in the first place, differences of legal status.
Though villeinage by blood had been disappearing rapidly for several
generations, partly through manumission on payment of a fine to the
lord, partly through the absorption of migrating villeins into the
growing industries of the towns, a certain number of villeins by blood
lingered on into the sixteenth century. Dr. Savine[89] has estimated
that there were at least as many as 500 villein families in 1485, and as
many as 250 in the reign of Elizabeth; and the fact that they occur
occasionally on our Norfolk[90] manors, and rather more often on those
in Wiltshire[91] and Somersetshire, suggests that his list could be
considerably extended on further investigation. Even in 1561 a borough
surrenders an apprentice on the ground that he is a runaway villein.[92]
Even in 1568 it is worth while in leasing[93] a manor to a farmer for
the lord to reserve to himself the villeins upon it, together with other
forms of property like quarries and advowsons.
[89] _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xvii.
[90] R.O. _Misc. Bks. Land Rev._, vol. 220, fol. 220, Brisingham
(Norfolk) 1589: "Alice Bartram, the widow of W. Bartram, the
lord's villain by blood, took by surrender of said William for
term of life on 4 Feby., remainder to Roger Bartram, lord's
villain by blood." Holkham MSS., Titleshall Documents, Terrier
of Godwick, 1508: "Also five roods of the Prior in the hands of
Thomas Frend, native."
[91] Among the 742 customary tenants on the manors belonging to
the Earl of Pembroke surveyed in 1568 there appears to be 7
_nativi domini, i.e._ villeins by blood, viz., 1 at Washerne
(Wilts), 2 at Stooke Trister and Cucklington (Somerset), 4 at
Chedeseye (Somerset), of whom one has been manumitted.
[92] _Selected Records of Norwich_ (Tingey), vol. vi. p. 180:
"Robert Ryngwoode brought in a certain indenture wherein Lewis
Lowth was [bound] to hym to serve as a prentys for seven years.
And Mr. John Holdiche cam before the Mayor and other Justices
and declared that the said Lewis is a bondman to my lord of
Norfolk's Grace, and further that he was brought up in husbandry
untyl he was xx year old. Whereupon he was discharged of his
service."
Note the way in which Statute law is used to compel the
agricultural labour which the vanishing jurisdiction of lord
over serf is ceasing to be able to enforce.
[93] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_, Manor of Chilmerke: "Johannes Reve tenet per
indenturam totum illud capitale messuagium excepta et omnino
reservata omnia wardas, maritagia fines ... nativos," &c.
One cannot, therefore, take the almost sanctimonious abhorrence of
bondage expressed by the writers of the period quite at its face value.
On the other hand, though villeinage by blood was still worth recording,
since it offered an impecunious lord an opportunity for arbitrary
taxation, and still sufficiently irksome for the rebels under Ket[94]
(influenced perhaps by some dim memory of the German peasants'
programme) to set its abolition among their demands, its practical
importance was slight, and it was quite compatible with a good deal of
prosperity on the part of those who were legally bondmen. How completely
out of date it was by the middle of the sixteenth century is best shown
by some of the cases in which attempts were made to enforce it. When the
Earl of Bath[95] seizes £400 from a family on the ground that the
members are his villeins, and is pursued by them for nine years from
one court to another, or when a lord[96] of a manor is compelled by a
royal commission appointed for the purpose of investigating the matter,
to repay the value of the beast taken from a man who is proved by the
court rolls to be his villein, and the latter, having received it back,
declines to stop proceedings unless he be paid heavy compensation in
addition, one must see rather a proof of the practical disappearance of
villeinage than of its survival. Its occasional enforcement is clearly
regarded as something outrageous; it is a freak of arbitrary despotism,
which has hardly more historical significance than the seizure of the
Derby winner as a copyhold heriot would have at the present day. Public
opinion, even the opinion of those engaged in estate management,
condemns such attempts unreservedly, and when they come to the ears of
the authorities they strain the law on the side of the bondmen.
[94] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 49: "We pray that
all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his
precious blood shedding." The German peasants in the articles
drawn up at Memmingen in 1525 demanded the abolition of serfdom
"since Christ hath purchased and redeemed us all with his
precious blood." The Christian appeal is a common one; see
below.
[95] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_,
John Burde and another v. The Earl of Bath. The quarrel dragged
on from 1535 to 1544, when the plaintiff's goods were restored.
(In 1551, however, when all bad landlords were raising their
heads, his house and cattle were again seized.)
[96] _Ibid._, Netheway _v._ George, 1534. For other cases see
Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber_.
Carter _v._ Abbot of Malmesbury (vol. i., 1500), and Selby _v._
Middlemore (vol. ii., 1516-1522). Mr. Leadam's remarks (int.
cxxix.) show that a man who was legally a villein might be
economically very prosperous: "Thomas Carter ... was charged 40
marks for his enfranchisement. He kept a man-servant. He rode on
horseback. He gave a feast to celebrate his freedom. He was even
on friendly terms with the gentlemen of the Abbot's household."
See also Savine, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xvii. Lord
Stafford actually tried to seize the Mayor of Bristol and his
brother as bondmen!
This change from servile to free labour, begun some two centuries
before, and virtually completed in the reign of Elizabeth, is a high
landmark in the development both of economic and political society. It
is a long step towards modern industrialism on the one hand and the
modern all-inclusive state on the other. By sapping the organisation of
society on the basis of tenure, and thus making room for the more
elastic relationships of the wage-contract, it prepared the way for new
methods of production and for the growth of new centres of economic
power. The refusal of the courts to allow that the lord of a manor had,
_qua_ lord, a theoretical right to dispose of the persons and chattels
of his unfree tenants, meant the final triumph of the common law in
regions with which for four centuries after the Norman Conquest it had
not dared to interfere. Henceforward, while the German peasant is driven
afield to gather snails and wild strawberries for his lord, is plundered
and harried and tortured without hope of redress, his English brother
is a member of a society in which there is, nominally at least, one law
for all men. His liberty may be more in shadow than in substance, yet
the shadow is itself an earnest of greater things. To us who know the
misery of many of the poorer classes in the sixteenth century the boast
that "if any slaves or bondmen come here from other realms, so soon as
they set foot on land they became so free of condition as their
masters," may read like a bitter mockery. But it is something that the
boast should be made, and when England is confronted with the greatest
moral issue of the modern world, that boast will stand her in good
stead.[97] She owes some acknowledgment to the nameless serfs who fled
from farm and homestead, till villeinage, in spite of the law, bled
gradually to death.
[97] Hargreave's speech in Somersett's case (1771-1772, Howell,
_State Trials_, xx.) is based largely on precedents drawn from
villeinage: "Though villeinage itself is obsolete ... those
rules, by which the claim of it was regulated, are not yet
buried in oblivion.... By a strange progress of human affairs
the memory of slavery expired now furnishes one of the chief
obstacles to slavery attempted to be revived.... The law of
England, then, excludes every slavery not commencing in England,
every slavery, though commencing there, not being ancient and
immemorial. Villeinage is the only slavery which can possibly
answer to such a description, and that has long expired by the
death or emancipation of all those who were once the objects of
it. Consequently there is now no slavery which can be lawful in
England."
Having said so much we must hasten to guard ourselves, by adding that
the final disappearance of serfdom in this country neither involved any
radical conversion of opinion, nor prevented the classes who depended
solely on their labour from being, on occasion, cruelly oppressed. It
would be a mistake to see in the attitude of the governing classes
towards villeinage a symptom of humanitarian feeling for the rights of a
helpless class, such as prompted the emancipation movement of the last
century. How little humanitarianism influenced economic policy in
relation to those who were too powerless to be dangerous, is shown by
the sanguinary statutes relating to the destitute, and in particular by
the extraordinary legalisation of slavery in the Act[98] of 1547, by
which a confirmed vagrant might, when captured, be made a bondman for
life. Nor must we think of the disappearance of legalised serfdom as
effecting a great improvement in the lot of the ordinary wage-worker.
Those who benefited by it were not so much the workers for wages, as the
landholding peasants. The wage-labourer, who was tied to his parish by
the Statute of Artificers almost as completely as the serf had been by
the custom of the manor, can hardly have seen much difference between
the restrictions on his movement imposed by the Justices of the Peace
and those laid on him by the manorial authorities, except indeed that
the latter, being limited to the area of a single village, had been more
easy to evade.
[98] 1 Ed. VI., c. 3. Possibly, however, the penalty of bondage
was regarded as a step towards greater leniency, as the
punishment of "incorrigible rogues" had hitherto been death.
Even if we confine our attention to the landholding peasants, to whom
the advantage (for they were quick to seize it) was certainly real
enough, we may doubt whether they did not lose almost as much by the
intrusion into agriculture of competitive commercial forces as they
gained by the final disappearance of a claim which had always been held
in check by the custom of the manor, and which, since the ravages of the
Great Plague, had been steadily circumscribed by commutation. The truth
is that the sharp antithesis drawn by modern commercial societies
between serfs and the free labourers on whose slowly straightening backs
our civilisation is uneasily poised, and emphasised as though it marked
a line between hopeless oppression and unqualified liberty, requires to
be supplemented by categories derived from a wider and more tragic range
of experience than was open to our forefathers. There are more ways of
living "at the will of a lord" than were known to Glanvill and Bracton,
and the utility of the contrast in the sphere of legal analysis does not
save it from being but a thin abstraction of the countless forms of
tyranny which spring from the world-old power of one human being to use
another as his tool. That dependence on the uncontrolled caprice of a
master whom one hates to obey and dare not abandon, which, by whatever
draperies it may be veiled, is still the bitter core of serfdom,[99] is
compatible with the most diverse legal arrangements; with wage labour
as with forced services, with tenure by a competitive money rent as well
as with tenure by personal obligations, with freedom of contract as well
as with inherited status, with protection by the national courts as well
as with its absence.
[99] More's remarks on the lot of the wage-workers of his day
have a refreshing note of reality. The Utopians are "not to be
wearied from earlie in the morning to late in the evenninge with
continuall worke, like labouringe and toylinge beastes. For this
is worse then the miserable and wretched condition of bondemen.
Whiche nevertheless is almooste everywhere the lyfe of workemen
and artificers, saving in Utopia" (More, _Utopia_, Pitt Press
Edition, pp. 79?-80).
When we turn over the pages in which the writers of the sixteenth
century declare that bondage is contrary to "the Christian religion
which maketh us all in Christ breathren, and in respect of God and
Christ _conservos_,"[100] and congratulate themselves on its
disappearance, we must not doubt their sincerity, but we may envy their
inexperience. We must remember that a condemnation of villeinage was
quite compatible with a policy of great severity towards the
wage-labourer, and was in fact not unconnected with it, since the latter
had almost everywhere stepped into places and functions formally held by
the bondman. Villeinage disappeared in England earlier than on the
continent of Europe, not for the ethical reasons given by Fitzherbert
and Smith and Norden, but because the growth of a commercial
organisation of agriculture had made its maintenance both useless and
impossible. The intellectual conversion did little more than follow on
the economic change to make a virtue of necessity. The personal
rightlessness of the villein and the hateful incidents of villeinage,
such as chevage, merchet, and leyrwite, had had their utility in the
fact that they kept him at the disposal of the manorial authorities as
an instrument of agriculture. With the substitution of hired labour for
the cultivation of the demesne by the services of bond tenants, their
maintenance lost its attractiveness. No employer wants to retain a
permanent staff, if there are "hands" whom he can take on and put off at
pleasure. Villeinage ceases but the Poor Laws begin.
[100] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. III., ch. 8. See also
Fitzherbert, _Surveying_ (1539): "How be it, in some places the
bondmen continue as yet, the which me seemeth is the greatest
inconvenience that now is suffered by the law." Norden, _The
Surveyor's Dialogue_ (1608): "Which kinde of service and
slavery, thanks be to God, is in most places of this Realme
quite abolished and worne out of memory.... Truly I think it is
a Christian parte so to do [_i.e._ manumit bondsmen], for seeing
we be nowe all as the children of one father, the servants of
one God, and the subjects of one king, it is very uncharitable
to retain our brethren in bondage, sith, when we were all bond,
Christ did make us free."
Much more important than this difference of legal status are
differences in the tenure by which customary tenants hold their lands.
Under the name of customary tenants are grouped together all holders of
lands which pass by surrender and admission in the court of the manor,
and which are subject to the custom of the manor as evidenced by the
records of the court. But not all these lands are held by exactly the
same title. Some are held by copy of court roll according to the custom
of the manor, on the terms set out on a copy of the entry of admission.
Others are held without a documentary title, and are often said to be
occupied at the will of the lord, or at the pleasure of the lord, or by
grant or permission of the lord or of the court, their essential feature
being that the tenant does not possess any instrument recording the
transaction, but has, if necessary, to appeal to the records of the
court or even to its mere memory.
One must hasten to add, however, that these classes are not mutually
exclusive. A copyholder is a tenant at will, though qualified by the
addition of the words "by copy of court roll according to the custom of
the manor." It not seldom happens that in rentals and surveys he is
simply described as a tenant at will, and that the fact that he has a
copy is not recorded. A tenant at will is usually (though not always) a
customary tenant, and, when he is, he can appeal to the custom with as
good a right as a copyholder, though of course the fact that his title
is not in his own keeping may prejudice him if the manorial authorities
want to get rid of him. "All[101] copyhold land," it was said, "is
commonly customary, but all customary land is not copyhold," and one may
accept the statement with the reservation that "commonly" must not be
taken to mean "always," for it is quite usual in parts of England for
land which by no stretch of imagination can be called customary land,
for example, part of the lord's demesne, to be let by copy of court
roll. The fact that "tenant at will" was sometimes used as a compendious
phrase for "copyholder," and that both are sometimes described simply as
"customary tenants" without further definitions, makes it impossible to
offer any accurate estimate of the relative number of those holding by
copy and those holding at will. It may, however, be of interest to give
an analysis of the entries as they appear in a group of manorial
documents. It is as follows[102]:--
TABLE III
+------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+
| |Total| "Copy- |"Customary|"Tenants |
| | |holders."| Tenants."| at Will."|
+------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+
| | | | | |
|Northumberland | 436 | 362 | 45 | 29 |
|Lancashire | 451 | 295 | 156 | ... |
|Staffordshire | 272 | 170 | ... | 102 |
|Leicestershire | 311 | 157 | ... | 154 |
|Northamptonshire | 355 | 253 | 931 | 91 |
|Norfolk | 596 | 536 | 45 | 15 |
|Suffolk | 146 | 53 | 82 | 11 |
|Wilts and Somerset | 817 | 786 | ... | 31 |
|Hampshire | 251 | 251 | ... | ... |
|Ten other manors in the south | | | | |
| of England | 158 | 87 | 45 | 26 |
+------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+
| Total |3793 | 2950 | 466 | 377 |
+------------------------------+-----+---------+----------+----------+
[101] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_. He continues: "For in
some places of this Realme Tennants have no copies at all of
their lands or tenements, or anything to show for that they
hold, but there is an entry made in the Court Books, and that is
their evidence."
[102] See Appendix II.
These figures, one must repeat, are merely a summary of the entries in
surveys and rentals. Probably they underestimate the number of
copyholders, as we know that copyholders were sometimes entered as
tenants at will or as customary tenants for the sake of brevity, while
it is not probable that tenants at will who had not got copies were
often written down as copyholders. One may suspect that this, rather
than any difference of custom, is the explanation of the relatively
small number of those who are returned as copyholders in Lancashire,
Staffordshire, Leicestershire, and Suffolk. Still, these figures do show
the enormous preponderance of copyholders among the customary tenants,
and show it all the more certainly if the number of copyholders is to be
taken, as is probable, as the minimum. And this agrees with what we know
from the incidental references of the writers of the time. Of 1000
tenants on the great ecclesiastical manor of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire
"the most part" were said by Archbishop[103] Sandys in 1582 to be
copyholders. Harrison[104] in 1587 spoke of copyholders as those "by
whom the greatest part of the realm doth stand and is maintained." At
the beginning of the seventeenth century Coke[105] could say that the
third part of England consisted of copyhold. Copyholders, it is true,
are far from being all of one type; for the essence of their tenure is
that it depends on the custom of the manor which varies from place to
place, and when we come to consider how far they have security against
eviction these differences are of crucial importance. Still, in spite of
the varieties of copyhold tenure, it is useful to know that to the bulk
of the population in the sixteenth century landholding meant holding by
copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor. No account of
the agrarian changes can stand for a moment which does not give full
weight to the fact that, in most parts of England, the copyholders
greatly outnumber all other classes of tenants.
[103] Archbishop Sandys to Queen Elizabeth, Saturday 24 November
to 4 December, 1582 (quoted by E. Arber, _The Story of the
Pilgrim Fathers_, pp. 61-?64).
[104] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), p. 120.
[105] Quoted by Nasse, _The Land Community of the Middle Ages_
(Ouvry's trans.). I have not been able to trace the reference.
The numerical predominance of the customary tenants and among those of
the copyholders, together with the disastrous effects upon them which
are ascribed by most of our authorities to the agrarian changes of the
sixteenth century, makes a somewhat detailed examination of their
position essential. In particular it is important to try to bridge the
gap between the agricultural system of the sixteenth and that of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, out of which it emerged, and of
which it continued to bear unmistakable traces. The problem is really a
twofold one, partly legal and partly economic. First, what was the legal
nature of copyhold tenure, and how did it arise out of mediæval
villeinage? Secondly, there is the question, which for us is more
important, of the type of agriculture which prevailed among the mass of
the people. The economist wants to know whether the customary tenants
were large cultivators or small, whether they included considerable
capitalists and mere cottagers or whether their holdings were of a
fairly uniform pattern, whether they farmed mainly for subsistence or
for the market, whether they lived entirely by tillage or were pasture
farmers as well, whether they were tied down by custom or showed any
signs of being influenced by the agricultural innovations of our period.
Of these two questions the first has been investigated much more
thoroughly than the second. We shall return to it later in considering
how far the copyholder had security of tenure, and enjoyed legal
protection against the lord who wished to evict him. But we may say at
once that we accept in substance the argument of those who hold that
most copyholders are the descendants of villeins holding villein land,
that copyhold tenure is, in fact, villein tenure to which the courts
from the end of the fourteenth century have gradually extended their
protection, and that the puzzling differences between the position of
one group of copyholders and another are due to differences in manorial
custom which were followed and upheld by the courts. This not only is
the traditional view, in the sense of being that which is implied in the
insistence of contemporaries that copyhold originated in base tenure,
and that copyholders were tenants "whom the favourable hand of time hath
much enfranchised,"[106] but also seems to be that which best fits the
situation of the copyholder as we find it in the sixteenth century.
[106] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_.
This line of development is suggested, though it is not proved, by the
mere preponderance of copyholders. In looking for the antecedents of so
numerous and widely spread a class we can only find them in the tenure
of the mass of the people in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
that is in villein tenure. Further, we do not find in villein tenure any
such fundamental distinction between customary tenure which was
protected and base tenure which was not, as has been sometimes
postulated as an explanation of the qualified legal security possessed
by copyholders 200 years later. On the contrary, the tenure of the
villeins is marked by the same variety of customary conditions as
appears in that of the copyholders, with the difference that, when once
copyhold has taken root, these customs are enforced by the courts. The
same conclusion is borne out by the survival of ancient formulæ among
the terms by which the conditions of the copyholders are recorded in
the surveys. It is quite common for copyholders in the sixteenth century
to be described as occupying "bond"[107] or "native" land; sometimes one
finds a whole list of them set down under the rubric "holding[108]
native lands by copy of court roll." The last thing, of course, which
occurred to the writer of these entries was any legal theory as to the
origin of copyhold tenure. All he was concerned to do was to describe
the holdings in the way which was most precise and left least room for
possible disputes. Clearly, he must have had it in his mind that lands
which in his day were let by copy of court roll were lands which were
known generally in the village as bond lands, and which in earlier
documents were described as being occupied in villeinage.
[107] _E.g._, R.O. Rentals and Surveys Gen. Ser., Portf. 27, No.
32, Dunstall (Suffolk): "Bond land held by copy of court roll,
13s. 4d. Of holders of 3 bond pightells, 5s. 4d." MSS. of Earl
of Leicester at Holkham, Tittleshall Books, No. 62, Langham Hall
(Norfolk): "Redditus assissæ native tenentium. ... John Rose per
copiam, 4d." R.O. Rentals and Surveys Gen. Ser. Portf. 14, No.
70, Barton (Staffs.): "T. Collinson 1 messuage 1/4 virgate land
de bond ... by copy 2 Hen. viii."
[108] MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Billingford and
Bintry MSS., No. 9, Foxley: "Native tenentium per copiam rotuli
curiæ."
One may approach the question in another way, by looking at the
circumstances of those exceptional manors on which the tenants at will
are more numerous than the copyholders, and which are instructive just
because they represent a variation from the general type. A case in
point is the Manor of Knyghton in Wiltshire. On the majority of the
manors held in that county by the Earl of Pembroke the copyholders are
far the most numerous class, and on some they are the only class, among
the customary tenants. At Knyghton,[109] however, there are no
copyholders; all the customary tenants hold at the will of the lord, and
when one examines the position and methods of agriculture more closely,
one finds that they display several signs of being in other respects
more antiquated and conservative than is the case in other parts of the
same country; for example, all the holdings are either virgates of
twenty-four acres or some fraction and multiple of a virgate, which is
not at all common on other Wiltshire manors, and implies an unusual
approximation to the conditions of the peasantry two centuries before.
Is it unreasonable to conclude that this is a case of arrested
development, and that Knyghton is a manor on which the tenants at will
have never turned into copyholders, because for one reason or another it
has lain outside the main stream of agricultural development?
[109] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_.
The connection with copyhold tenure of some of the characteristic
obligations and disabilities of villeinage points in the same direction.
In spite of the general commutation of services into money payments,
which Mr. Page's statistics show to have taken place before the middle
of the fifteenth century, one still finds the attenuated records of
labour rents surviving for many generations after the direct management
of the demesne by manorial officials has been abandoned, and passing
with the rest of the farm equipment to the farmer who takes it on lease.
In Norfolk and Suffolk they seem indeed to have disappeared almost
altogether, which is what one would expect in view of the fact that
those counties were the Lancashire and West Riding of the period, and no
doubt, even when labour services were still exacted, the farmer relied
mainly upon hired labour. But it would be a mistake to regard the
tenants' works as everywhere so trifling as to be of no economic
importance. Often, it is true, they are inconsiderable. At South
Newton,[110] for example, though the uncertainty which had been one of
the marks of villeinage still survived among the copyholders in the
shape of the duty of "gift carriage," the transport of such timber as
was wanted to the lord's house at Wilton, the purely agricultural
services were unimportant, and the tenants of every yardland had only to
mow the farmer's meadow and to carry his hay. At Cuxham,[111] in
Oxfordshire, on the other hand, the authorities were still getting
twenty-eight boonworks in autumn from the copyholders at the end of the
fifteenth century. On a Northumbrian[112] manor belonging to Tynemouth
Priory down to the dissolution of the monasteries "every tenant did lead
to the castle in the prior's time one load of hay, mow three several
dayworks of hay, rake one daywork and sheare three severall dayworks in
the corn in harvest every year." At Washerne,[113] in Wiltshire, the
copyhold tenants' labours were in 1568 still quite an important affair:
each holder of one virgate of twenty acres "shall plough three half
acres for the lord's winter seed and shall harrow them, and also the
aforesaid tenants shall wash and shear the lord's sheep ... and further
each of them shall mow one acre of meadow ... and gather hay thence and
prepare it.... Each of the said tenants shall reap one acre of wheat and
he must bind the crop and carry it. Also each of them shall reap one
acre of barley." On a Lancashire[114] manor in 1628 every plough hand is
obliged to do two days' work in the year with a team on the demesne, and
two days with a labourer. Such elaborate obligations as appears at
Washerne are, it is true, the exception. But they show that in the
middle of the sixteenth century there were still backwaters where the
remnants of agricultural services were a not inconsiderable burden; and
if their comparative lightness marks the progress from villeinage to a
wage system, their survival as clearly shows that villeinage was the pit
from which copyhold tenure was digged.
[110] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_.
[111] Merton Documents, 5902.
[112] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii., p. 220 (one
may add that in parts of Northumberland the labourers are still
called "bondagers"; Mr. Clay tells me that in the Calder valley
farmers still use "daywork" as a unit for measuring fields). See
also _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz._, D. d.
2, 44, for a suit by a farmer to recover services due from
tenants.
[113] Pembroke Surveys.
[114] _Chetham Society Miscellanies_, vol. iii.
More striking still, perhaps, is the persistence of disabilities of
another kind. The old marks of personal bondage, chevage, merchet,
leyrwite, liability to tallage, and the rest have almost disappeared.
But traces of them are still found clinging to the copyhold tenants.
Copyholders pay a fixed sum to be free of tallages.[115] They pay salt
silver instead of the salt with which they had once been obliged to toil
to the lord's manor-house; they are forced to act as the lord's reeve,
and collect his rents, heriots, and strays. In one curious instance one
finds something very like a tallage[116] being taken at the beginning
of the seventeenth century, though of course that is not what it is
called. The tenants are simply collected and told that they must help
the lord to pay for an estate which he has bought, by giving him three
years' rent apiece, that, if they do, no more gifts will be demanded
during his lifetime, and that, if they do not, he will refuse to renew
holdings as they fall in. Even merchet, the most hateful of all the
incidents of villeinage, is something more than a mere memory. As late
as 1620 the tenants of Holt[117] in Denbighshire thought it worth while
to point out to the crown surveyor that "they are freed from payment of
any sum of money upon the marriage of their daughters," and even in 1654
Leyrwite and childwite were still being paid by the heiresses of
copyhold tenants on some of the Warwickshire[118] manors.
[115] Pembroke Surveys, Estoverton and Phipheld: "Tenentes de
Estoverton reddunt annuatim pro pannagio et tallagio ... ivs."
For salt silver, _ibid._, South Newton. For liability to serve
as Reeve, _ibid._, Paynton.
[116] _Chetham Society Miscellanies_, vol. iii.: "I would wish
you to call the tenants first all together and to signify unto
them that my father and I have gone through with Mr. Ireland for
Warrington, and the summe we are to give is above £7000; and
this was done making no doubt that towards it every one of them
being tenants would by their assistance enable us to finish
it.... If they faile in this, they may provoke us to sharp
courses, especially mee, who have had a purpose to take the
third part of every living as it falls."
[117] Wrexham Free Library, _Ancient Local Records_, vol. ii.
MS. transcript by A.N. Palmer, "Survey of the Town and Liberty
of Holt."
[118] Savine, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xix.
It will not, therefore, be surprising to find that the humble origin of
copyhold tenure has left marks upon it in other ways as well, and, in
particular, that though the copyholder is not without legal protection
when the lord tries to get rid of him, that protection is often of a
somewhat shadowy and ineffective kind. His title is a customary one, and
mighty as custom still is, it has for centuries been growing gradually
weaker. Its weakening is at once an advantage and a disadvantage to the
peasantry. It relieves them of odious obligations and leaves them
greater room to push their fortunes. It lowers a protecting barrier and
exposes them to the dissolving forces of competition.
CHAPTER II
THE PEASANTRY
(a) _The Variety of Conditions_
When one turns from what legal historians have said on the origin and
development of copyhold tenure to consider the economic position of this
class of tenants, one finds oneself in a region of much greater
uncertainty. The legal historian may speak of the copyholders as
constituting, in spite of minor differences, a fairly well-defined
class. The economic historian cannot. He finds, on the contrary, the
widest difference between the economic conditions of tenants holding
their land by copy of court roll, not only, as would be expected, in
different parts of the country, but on the same manor. In the thirteenth
century to say that a man is a villein tells us something at least about
his economic position, at any rate when the general features of the
manor on which he is a villein are known. He will probably have a
standard holding of a virgate or half-virgate; he will have rights in
the common meadow land and in the common waste; he will do work on the
lord's demesne. In the sixteenth century tenure is no clue to economic
status, and to say that a man is a copyhold tenant tells us nothing at
all about the extent of his holding or the sort of husbandry which he
pursues. The vast majority of copyhold tenants are peasants, men who
make a toilsome living from their land with the help of their families
and a few hired servants. But in England by our period the line between
class and class has ceased to coincide with differences of title; if
copyhold tenure is born of a humble stock, yet it has risen so much in
the world that the upper classes are not ashamed to hold out a hand to
welcome it; and among copyholders are found the names not only of many
small freeholders, but also of gentlemen and knights.[119]
[119] _Crondal Records_, edited by Baigent, Part I., p. 159; the
Crondal customary of 1567. Among the copyholders appears a
knight and four gentlemen.
Among the peasants who form the bulk of the population there is, again,
the greatest diversity. Sometimes the copyholders are simply emancipated
villeins, who have commuted most of their services, and who hold by copy
instead of at the will of the lord, but whose economic condition has
hardly changed at all. Thus in Northumberland[120] the holdings of the
copyholders on several manors reflect very accurately the distribution
of land between the bondage tenants in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries; the holdings have grown slightly in size, but they have
apparently a more or less continuous individual existence from the
earliest times. In parts of Wiltshire,[121] on the other hand, though
not in all parts, there is no possibility of establishing any connection
between the virgate and semi-virgate of the fourteenth century villeins
and the acreage held by the copyholders two hundred and fifty years
later; both in size and number the holdings are markedly different. In
Norfolk and Suffolk ancient class divisions have often been obliterated
altogether, and bond and free lands are interlaced in the holdings of
the customary tenants in quite inextricable confusion.
[120] _Northumberland County History, e.g._ Surveys of High
Buston (vol. v. p. 208); Acklington (vol. v. p. 372); Birling
(vol. v. p. 201), and figures of eight townships in
Tynemouthshire, vol. viii. p. 230.
[121] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of the Lands of William, First
Earl of Pembroke_.
Again, there is the greatest variety in the methods of agriculture.[122]
Everywhere among the copyhold tenancies arable land predominates to an
extent which is in marked contrast to the frequent preponderance of
pasture land on many of the demesne farms. But to some tillage seems to
be their sole livelihood, while others are very considerable
sheep-farmers. Some are cultivators on quite a big scale, well outside
the Board of Agriculture's interpretation of a "small-holder" to-day,
with 80, 90, 100, or even 200 acres of land. Often they are better off
economically than many freeholders, and when Harrison and Sir Thomas
Smith classify[123] copyholders in general with "day labourers and poor
husbandmen," they must surely have been either speaking loosely, or else
thinking not of their economic but of their legal position. But others
hold only 5, 10, 15, or 20 acres, so that arithmetical averages of the
size of their holdings are very little guide to the real distribution of
land. Yet it would not be true to say that such inequality is universal,
for in the same county one finds some manors on which the holdings seem
all to be cut to a regular standard pattern, and others where the
variety of size is almost infinite, while in the North striking
divergences of area seem to be as much the exception as they are the
rule in the South and the East. On some manors, again, the copyhold
tenants have enclosed land and hold much in severalty; on others nearly
all of it lies in the open fields. Some have extensive rights of common,
while on other manors such rights are non-existent, or are too
insignificant to be recorded by surveyors.
[122] See below, pp. 105-115.
[123] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. I., c. 24. Harrison,
_Elizabethan England_ (edited by Withington), p. 13.
In fact the impression given by the surveys is that of a condition of
things which is very far from being stationary, but in which, on the
contrary, much shifting of property and many changes in the methods of
cultivation have been going on, and in which the legal position of the
peasants is no guide at all to their economic characteristics. The task
of finding a manor to serve as a pattern and standard for the rest,
which is hard enough in the thirteenth century, is a sheer impossibility
in the sixteenth, and the student works with a deep sense of the danger
of sacrificing fidelity to simplicity of statement.
(b) _The Consolidation of Peasant Holdings_
But difficult as it is to reduce to any order the very diverse economic
conditions of the customary tenants at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the task, at any rate in outline, has got to be faced. And this
involves a short account of movements which take us some way back into
the Middle Ages. No one can understand the contrast between the
conditions of the Irish peasantry in 1850 and their condition to-day
without knowing something of the agencies which have been at work in the
interval, of the Fair Rent Courts, the Congested Districts Board, and
the Land Purchase Acts; no one can appreciate the changes which are
taking place in rural France without having taken at any rate a glance
at the position of the peasantry before the Revolution, and at the Code
Napoleon. Certainly the substantial alteration which overtook agrarian
relationships in many parts of England between 1500 and 1640 is
unintelligible if it is regarded as a wave suddenly appearing in a calm
sea, a revolution by means of which commercial relationships of
sometimes an almost modern elasticity developed quite rapidly in village
communities of an almost mediæval immobility. To understand the agrarian
problem of the sixteenth century we must know the sort of framework on
which the new forces worked, and the sort of tendencies of which they
were the continuation.
Moreover, the history with which we are concerned is primarily the
history of the peasants as landholders, and only secondarily the history
of their personal condition. Generalisations about the disappearance of
villeinage and the substitution of hired labour for the working out of
rents in labour services do not help us much here. Speaking broadly, it
is no doubt true that, in spite of the survival of many vestiges of the
old order, wage-labourers are as normally the means of cultivating the
demesne at the end of the fifteenth century as servile tenants are at
the end of the thirteenth. But significant as this change is for the
history of the wage-earning classes, it does not by itself seem to throw
much light on the characteristic features of the sixteenth century
problem, the substitution of large tenancies for small, the displacement
of small holders, and the undermining of the customary routine of the
open field village. Certainly the two movements are connected; equally
certainly that connection is not a direct or obvious one. The change in
the personal condition of the peasantry is not by itself the key to
changes in the use and distribution of property. Why should it be? In
Prussia the abolition[124] of villein services in 1807 was carried out
by a decree which had as its object not a diminution, but an increase,
in the number of small tenants; and it is not self-evident that an
alteration in the method of cultivating the lord's demesne must have
produced changes in the disposition of the customary holdings in
fifteenth and sixteenth century England.
[124] Edict of October 9, 1807, Clauses 10, 11, 12. See Cobden
Club, _Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries_: Morier's
Essay on Germany.
The very variety in the economic conditions of the peasantry which makes
generalisation so difficult is, however, itself a significant feature,
because it is in marked contrast with the comparative uniformity which
existed among great masses of them in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. It suggests that even in agriculture custom has to some
extent been broken down by commercial enterprise, and that commercial
enterprise has had the natural result of accentuating inequality in the
possession of property. It warns a student of the agrarian changes of
the sixteenth century that he has not only to explain the way in which
the small cultivator lost ground then before the large estate, but also
how it was that his economic position differed in many cases so much
from that of the villein of two hundred years before, and that it may
very well be that the answer to the latter question will throw light
upon the former.
Let us put ourselves in the position of a jury catechising some "aged
man" about the year 1500, catechising him not about boundaries, or
rights of common, or manorial customs, but about the general changes in
the distribution of property in his village. If surveys and court rolls
may be trusted, there is one thing that he could hardly fail to tell us,
and that is that for as long as he can remember there has been a great
deal of buying and selling of land by the customary tenants, a great
many changes in occupancy, and on the whole a tendency for those changes
to result in the concentration of several holdings in fewer and larger
tenancies. "Virgates which in grandfather's time," he would say, "used
to belong to A., B., C., and D. now belong to A. alone. Men who used to
occupy one holding each, now occupy two or three; when they cannot buy
they lease, and some have bought so much that they sublet part of their
holdings to others. Indeed there is not much sense in talking about
virgates or half-virgates at all. Once each of them had a separate
holder; once Durrant's shottes belonged to Durrant, Gunter's mead to
Gunter, Parry's croft to Parry, Hawkins' meade to Hawkins, Woolmer's
lande to Woolmer, Blake's tenement to Blake. To-day, though the old
names remain, they are no guide to the families holding the land.
Frankling has bought Durrant's and Gunter's and Blake's, Vites has
bought Parry's, while Pynnole's and Pope's and Hawkins' and the rest of
Blake's holdings have all passed into the hands of Blackwell."[125]
[125] The instance is taken from a map of the manor of Edgeware
now in the All Souls muniment room. The map was made in 1597.
But many earlier examples can be found of land being known by
the name of one of its early holders, long after it had passed
into the possession of some one else.
One thing at any rate is clear. If frequent changes of occupancy point
to a free land-market, then such a free land-market has existed for a
long time among the customary tenants; and if a keen demand for land
among the peasantry is a proof that small men are thriving, and see
their way to thriving still more by adding to their properties, then
there is a good deal of this healthy land hunger in English villages
before the age of the Tudors. We read to-day of how the French peasant
will pinch himself and his family to add a few acres to his little
estate, and we take it as an indication that small cultivation has a
firm root in France, and that rural life is on the whole enterprising
and prosperous. Certainly such a state of things is in marked contrast
with the stagnation prevailing in the lower ranges of village society in
countries where great estates pass almost intact from generation to
generation between the tall palings of family settlements, with the
small man, who would get land if he could, staring helplessly through
the bars. Now, at any rate in the fifteenth century, England belonged
very markedly to the first type, not to the second; to the type where
there is much buying and selling of land in small plots by small
cultivators, not to the type where land is locked up and rarely comes
into the market, rarely at any rate into a market where it can be bought
by the small peasantry. This mobility of land is of much significance
when we come to consider the breaking down of customary rules before the
forces of competition, and the formation of great estates out of the
holdings of the customary tenants. Let us consider it in more detail,
first from the point of view of the changes in the economic basis of
rural life which it produces, and secondly from the point of view of the
process by which those changes were brought about. We will for the
present leave on one side the demesne farm and the land held on lease,
and look only at the customary land which forms the backbone of the
copyholders' estates.
The first source of information to which we turn consists of the surveys
and rentals, in which the holdings of the tenants are set out in detail.
To those accustomed to the picture of village life contained in the
records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the surveys of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries present certain features which at once
arrest attention. For one thing, there is a much greater inequality
between the holdings of different customary tenants on the same manors
than is usually found among the holdings of virgators and semi-virgators
two centuries before. For another thing, some of their holdings are very
much larger than anything we find belonging to the same class of tenants
at an earlier date; occasionally, indeed, they can only be described as
enormous, running into 150 or 200 acres of land; often they amount to 80
or 90. In the third place, the number of customary tenants is, on the
whole, much smaller than it was 200 years before, and that even on
manors where there has been an increase in the area cultivated by them.
The latter fact is significant, and we shall return to it later. But
before doing so, let us ask the meaning of the growing inequality in the
holdings of the customary tenants and of the great increase in the size
of some among them.
Great as is the variety of conditions visible on a thirteenth century
manor, it is on the whole true to say that this variety usually conforms
to a rough rule or principle. One can find on the same manor families
whose holdings differ very largely in size, from the 25 to 40 acres
occupied by the holder of a virgate, the 12 to 16 acres of a
semi-virgator, to the 2 or 3 acres or less occupied by a cottar. But
normally each individual holds much the same amount of land as other
individuals of the same class; one holder of a virgate has about as much
as another holder of a virgate, one holder of half a virgate about as
much as his fellow, one cottager about as much as another cottager.
There are in fact different grades, but for each grade there is what may
be called a standard area of land, a unit of agrarian organisation, and
though that standard area varies a good deal in different parts of the
country it is usually fairly easy to discover what it is on any one
manor. Outwardly, at any rate, village life is organised, and the
distribution of property is settled in the main by the authority of
custom, rather than by commercial forces acting directly upon the
tenants.
Now after the middle of the fifteenth century it is common to find quite
a different condition of things from this. There are, it is true, manors
where holdings preserve their primitive equality down to the very end of
the sixteenth century, especially manors in backward parts of the
country, where the influence of commerce has been little felt;
especially also manors where the demesne farm, instead of being leased,
has been retained in the hands of the lord. But in the South of England
these are the exception. The rule is that with regard to the area held
by the customary tenants there is no rule at all. On the same manor
copyholders may be cultivating anything from a quarter of a virgate to
two, three, four, or even more virgates; if their holdings are expressed
in acres they may be holding anything from 1 acre to 100 or 150.
Economically, indeed, customary tenants are often not a class at all, if
the essence of a class is common characteristics and a similarity of
economic status, though in the face of certain dangers they will act as
one. On many manors the nature of their tenure is the only common link
between them, and the nature of their tenure is compatible with the
greatest economic variety.
This variety is most noticeable when we examine a large number of manors
one by one, since, when the figures of many different manors are added
together, their distinctive features are liable to be concealed in the
aggregate. Still, to get some idea of the scale on which the peasants
carried on their agriculture, it is perhaps worth examining the
following table[126] of the holdings of 1600 odd customary[127] tenants
on fifty-two manors.
[126] For the sources from which this table is constructed, and
its defects, see Appendix II.
[127] On three small manors I have included some tenants who may
possibly be freeholders or leaseholders.
This table enables us, in the first place, to make a comparison between
the economic positions of groups of tenants in different parts of
England. It will be seen that the "predominant rate"--what we may call
the predominant acreage--varies considerably. In Wiltshire it is between
20 and 25 acres, and, including the next two columns, 36 per cent. of
all the tenants hold something between 20 and 35 acres. In
Northumberland the predominant acreage is between 30 and 35, and nearly
one half the tenants, 41 per cent., hold between 30 and 40 acres.
Elsewhere the most common holding is a good deal smaller. In Lancashire
(if we omit the cottagers, nearly all of whom come from one manor) the
predominant acreage is between 10 and 15 acres, though a great many
persons hold between 5 to 10 acres. In Staffordshire the largest group
of tenants is that holding under 2-1/2 acres, and more than one-half of
them hold less than 10 acres. In Norfolk and Suffolk the same state of
things obtains, but in a more pronounced form. Little emphasis need be
laid on the large number of cottagers there, nearly all of whom are
found on a single semi-urban manor, that of Aylsham. But it is clear
that the mass of the peasantry in those counties are very small holders
indeed. When the cottagers are left on one side, 22 per cent., about
one-fifth, of the landholders have under 2-1/2 acres; 54 per cent., more
than one-half, have under 10 acres. It is fortunate for them that
Norfolk and Suffolk are the home of the woollen industry.
In the second place, let us notice a fact which is more relevant to our
immediate purpose. That fact is the great variety in the scale of
landholding obtaining between different tenants in the same part of the
country. In this matter, again, some counties present a marked contrast
to others. In Northumberland the uniformity in the size of the holdings
of the tenants is much more marked than the variety. About two-thirds
of them appear in the four columns representing holdings from 30 to 50
acres. Only six hold more than 50, and though on one manor there are ten
tenants holding less than 2-1/2 acres, there are, apart from these,
comparatively few holding under 25 acres. On all the manors which have
been examined in this county there is, in fact, a regular standard
holding in the sixteenth century, which varies from 30 to 45 acres on
different manors, but which on the same manor varies hardly at all. But
Northumbrian agriculture is always several generations behind that of
the South and East, and when we turn to Wiltshire, or to East Anglia, or
to the nine manors given at the bottom of the table, we find a condition
of things in which there is much greater irregularity. The line extends
farther at both ends than it does in Northumberland. There are more
individuals and fewer clusters. The grouping of holdings round certain
standard patterns is much less marked. If we look at all the manors
together, we find that the four most populous columns contain almost
exactly one-half (49.1 per cent.) of the whole population, exclusive of
cottagers without land. In Northumberland the corresponding columns
contain two-thirds, in East Anglia, Lancashire, and Staffordshire rather
less, on the nine manors in the South and Midlands about one-half, in
Wiltshire a little over one-third. Again there are more large holders
and more very small holders in the South and East, than there are in
Lancashire and on the Northumbrian border. In Lancashire and
Northumberland 4.4 per cent. of the tenants, exclusive of cottagers,
have holdings of more than 50 acres. In Suffolk and Norfolk the
corresponding figure is 8.5 per cent., in Wiltshire 16.9 per cent., on
the nine other manors 14 per cent.
TABLE IV
--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
30 and under 35 Acres. |
25 and under 30 Acres. | . |
20 and under 25 Acres. | . | . |
15 and under 20 Acres. | . | . | . |
10 and under 15 Acres. | . | . | . | . |
5 and under 10 Acres. | . | . | . | . | . |
2-1/2 and under 5 Acres. | . | . | . | . | . | . |
Under 2-1/2 Acres. | . | . | . | . | . | . | . |
Cottages or Houses with or without . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . |
Gardens . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . |
Total Number of Tenants. | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . |
|--------------------------------| . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Ten manors in Northumberland | 96| | 10| 1| 2| 1| 3| 1| 12| 27|
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Four manors in Lancashire | 168| 38| 14| 19| 29| 35| 7| 4| 7| 7|
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Three manors in Staffordshire | 103| 8| 21| 16| 14| 6| 10| 11| 3| 1|
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Two manors in Northamptonshire | 255| 30| 53| 24| 22| 22| 13| 22| 5| 10|
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Three manors in Leicestershire | 129| 13| 17| 6| 6| 8 | 3| 3| 5| 1|
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Five manors in Suffolk and | | | | | | | | | | |
| eight manors in Norfolk | 391| 52| 77| 40| 69| 28| 26| 19| 14| 5 |
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Seven manors in Wiltshire and | | | | | | | | | | |
| one manor in Somersetshire | 156| 3| 5| 7| 12| 8| 7| 27| 16| 14|
| | | | | | | | | | | |
| Nine other manors in the South | | | | | | | | | | |
| of England | 366| 23| 58| 27| 52| 29| 31| 16| 22| 12|
+--------------------------------+----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| Total |1664|167|255|140|206|137|100|103| 84| 77|
+--------------------------------+----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
TABLE IV _(cont'd)_
--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Uncertain.|
120 and over.| .|
115 and under 120 Acres.| .| .|
110 and under 115 Acres.| .| .| .|
105 and under 110 Acres.| .| .| .| .|
100 and under 105 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .|
95 and under 100 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .|
90 and under 95 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
85 and under 90 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
80 and under 85 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
75 and under 80 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
70 and under 75 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
65 and under 70 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
60 and under 65 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
55 and under 60 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
50 and under 55 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
45 and under 50 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
40 and under 45 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
35 and under .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
40 Acres .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
+----------------| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .|
|Northumberland |13|10|10| | | 1| 1| 2| 1| | 1| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|Lancashire | 2| | | | 2| | | 1| | | | | | | | | | 1| 2|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|Staffordshire | 2| 2| 2| 2| | 1| 1| | | | | | | | | | | 1| 2|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|Northamptonshire| 3| 7| 2| 5| 2| 7| 2| 2| 2| 2| | | | | 2| | | 4|14|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|Leicestershire |10| 7| 8| 7| 7| 6| 2| 4| 1| 2| 1| 1| 2| | | | 1| 1| 7|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|Suffolk/Norfolk | 9| 4| 2| 4| 7| 3| 3| 1| 1| 1| 1| | 1| | 2| 1| | 4|17|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|Wiltshire/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
| Somersetshire |10|12| 5| 7| 2| 4| 3| 4| 1| 2| 1| | 2| | | | | | 4|
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
|South of England|11|10|13| 3| 6| 7| 6| 3| 5| 4| 4| 1| 2| 4| | 1| 1| 7| 9|
+----------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
| |60|52|42|28|26|29|18|17|11|11| 8| 2| 7| 4| 4| 2| 1|18|55|
+----------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
In the non-commercial, non-industrial North there is something like
economic equality, something like the fixed equipment of each group of
tenants with a standard area of land which is one of the first things to
strike us in a mediæval survey, and, as we shall see later, manorial
authorities for a long time insist on that rough equality being
maintained, because any weakening of it would disorganise the
old-fashioned economy which characterises the northern border. In the
industrial East and South this uniformity existed once, but it exists
now no longer. Wiltshire is humming with looms; Norfolk and Suffolk are
linked to the Continent by a thousand commercial ties, and will starve
if the clothiers lose their market. The mighty forces of capital and
competitive industry and foreign trade are beginning to heave in their
sleep--forces that will one day fuse and sunder, exalt and put down,
enrich and impoverish, unpeople populous counties and pour Elizabethan
England into a smoking caldron between the Irish Sea and the Pennines;
forces that at present are so weak that a Clerk of the Market can lead
them and a Justice of the Peace put a hook in their jaws. It is natural
that mediæval conditions of agriculture should survive longest in the
North. It is natural that they should survive least where trade and
industry are most developed, and where men are being linked by other
bonds than those of land tenure. But we must not comment until we have
examined the text more closely. We would only draw attention to the
contrast between the South and the North, to the contrast also between
the great diversity in the size of the peasants' holdings in the
sixteenth century, and the much greater uniformity two or three hundred
years before.
This contrast gives a clue to certain features of village life which are
distinctive of our period, and at the risk of wearying the reader one
may illustrate it from the circumstances of particular manors. At
Cuxham,[128] in 1483, there are, in addition to tiny holdings of a few
acres or of fractions of acres, holdings of one-quarter of a virgate,
of half a virgate, of one virgate, of four virgates. At Ibstone[129] in
the same year there are two tenants at will holding one virgate each,
one tenant holding five tofts and three crofts, while the rest hold
little except cottages and gardens. At Warton[130] in Lancashire, there
are in the reign of Henry VIII., in addition to various holdings
expressed in terms of acres, four holdings of half a bovate, two of
three-quarters of a bovate, seven of one bovate, two of one and a
quarter bovates, four of one and a half bovates, four of two bovates,
one of two and a quarter bovates, one of three bovates. At Barton[131]
in Staffordshire, in 1556, the typical holding is one virgate of 24
acres. But though this forms the nucleus of the copyholders' properties
a good many of them have acquired so much extra land, and a good many
apparently have parted with so much of the land which they once held,
that though 24 acres is still the predominant holding, the majority of
the tenants hold something more or something less than this. At
Byshopeston,[132] in 1567, there are men holding half a virgate, two
virgates, three virgates, four virgates, six virgates. At Knyghton[133]
there are holders of anything from a half to two and a half virgates.
[128] Merton Documents, Rentale de Cuxham (Nos. 5902 and 5905).
[129] Merton Documents, Rentale de Ibston (No. 5902).
[130] R.O. Rental and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 19, No. 7, f.
79-87.
[131] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 70.
[132] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_.
[133] _Ibid._
Looking at this grouping of holdings, one is tempted at first sight to
say that the virgate has ceased to be a unit of open field tillage, and
has become merely a common form, an idea which is laid up in the minds
of surveyors, and which is produced automatically, even when it
corresponds to nothing in the fluid world of agriculture. This, however,
would be an error. On the contrary, the conservatism[134] of rural
arrangements is such that yardlands, bovates, virgates, and oxgangs,
continue to do duty in circumstances which seem quite incongruous, and
to be used, not only in theory, but in practice, to apportion rights
over arable, meadow, and pasture, long after holdings have been
redistributed in such a way as altogether to destroy the former equality
of shares. On the Leicestershire manors of Barkby[135] and Kibworth[136]
holdings were set down in terms of yardlands in 1636, though the
condition of things in which a yardland or half yardland formed one
tenant's holding had long since given way to one in which the smaller
holders occupied a few acres and the wealthier 2-1/2, 3, and 3-1/2
yardlands. Still, though the continuance of these measures even into the
eighteenth century should be noted, there is no reason why we should use
them, and the modern reader will perhaps get a better idea of the
growing heterogeneity in the economic conditions of the customary
tenants if the distribution of their property is expressed in terms of
acres.
[134] The inconvenience of reckoning in yardlands is noticed by
a writer in the seventeenth century: "The tax of land is after
the yardland; a name very deceitful by the disproportion and
inequality thereof, the quantity of some one yardland being as
much as one and a halfe or two in the same field, and yet there
is an equality of taxes" (Joseph Lee, _A Vindication of a
Regulated Enclosure_, 1656).
[135] Merton Documents, MS. book labelled Kibworth and Barkby,
1636.
[136] _Ibid._
Our first example comes from Malden[137] in Surrey. It shows on a small
scale the tendency towards concentration of property in larger parcels.
In 1452 there were on that manor one holder of 24 acres, three holders
of 16 acres, two holders of 15 acres, and families holding 10, 8, 6, 5,
2 acres respectively. That 16 acres had been the normal holding is
fairly obvious; it is obvious also that though this normal holding is
still traceable, it is on the way to being obliterated. Later specimens
of a similar kind come from Ashfield[138] in Suffolk and Ormesby[139] in
Norfolk. In 1513 there were on the former manor tenants holding 7, 10,
15, 21, 22, 36, 37, 45, 107, 121 acres, and all intermediate sizes. On
the latter, in 1516, the holdings were much smaller, but they were still
more various in area, ranging from 2 to 31 acres. One or two of the
Wiltshire and Somersetshire manors surveyed for the Earl of Pembroke in
1567 offer examples of the reverse state of things in which the tenants'
holdings were all cut out to a standard pattern. At Washerne,[140] for
example, a manor where the demesnes were not leased but retained "in
the hand of the lord," nearly all the copyholders had exactly 20 acres
each. But this is an exception which proves the rule. At Estoverton[141]
there were some tenants holding 69, 48, 38 acres of arable, and others
with 12, 10, 9, 3, and 2 acres. At Donnington[142] there were holders of
63 and 52 acres in the fields and holders with only 8 or 9 acres. At
South Brent[143] the divergence between large and small customary
tenants is more striking still. One occupies about 90 acres, several
others over 50, while the vast majority hold less than 30 acres in
holdings which are hardly ever of the same size. At Crondal[144] we find
in 1567 exactly the same inequality in the area cultivated by different
tenants, exactly the same combination of very large with very small
holdings. Taking one tithing only of that manor--that of Swanthrop--we
are met by tenants holding 112, 104, 66, 58, 47, 44, 30, 27, 25, and 3
acres. Finally, let us take two extreme instances. They are drawn from
the closing years of the sixteenth century; but their inclusion may be
justified by the fact that they reveal in a pronounced form the
tendencies which we have seen at work elsewhere a century and a half
before, and that they offer a peculiarly clear example of larger
customary holdings formed out of the aggregation of several smaller
ones, since the names of the previous tenants are stated by the
surveyor. On the two Middlesex manors of Edgeware[145] and
Kingsbury[146] all relics of the state of things which had presumably
existed there, as on other manors, two or three centuries before, the
state of things in which there were groups of men holding virgates or
half virgates, has disappeared so entirely as to leave no traces behind.
On the former the thirty-eight copyholders occupy holdings of almost any
size between 1 rood and 130 acres; out of the 722 acres of copyhold land
as much as 254, a little over one-third, are in the hands of two large
tenants. On the latter there is, _mutatis mutandis_, the same story; out
of the twenty-seven copyholders thirteen hold less than 15 acres, eight
hold more than 30, and of those eight two hold more than 100 acres
apiece.
[137] Merton Documents, Rental of Malden.
[138] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 85.
[139] _Ibid._, Portf. 22, No. 18.
[140] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_.
[141] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_.
[142] _Ibid._
[143] _Ibid._
[144] _Crondal Record_, Part I. (Baigent), pp. 210-221.
Customary of 1567.
[145] All Souls Documents, Map and Description of the Manor of
Edgeware (1597).
[146] _Ibid._, Map and Description of the Manor of Kingsbury
(1597).
These examples are drawn from 12 different counties.[147] Let us see
more exactly what they suggest. They suggest that, quite apart[148] from
any movement on the part of lords of manors to throw the holdings of the
customary tenants into large farms and to evict their holders, quite
apart from any external shock such as was given to the organisation of
village life by the change from tillage to pasture on the part of lords
and their farmers, there has been going on an internal change in the
relation of the customary tenants to each other. So far we have been
concerned only with the result of that change, not with the process by
which it is brought about. The result, as evidenced by the surveys, is
the consolidation of several holdings, or parts of holdings, into fewer
and larger tenancies, the appearance of a class of well-to-do peasants
by whom such larger tenancies are held, and a widening of the gap
between the most prosperous and least prosperous. Customary tenants hold
3 or 4 virgates, 80 or 90 or 100 acres, and their holdings are composed
of holdings and parts of holdings which formerly belonged to several
different tenants. Customary tenants even become the landlords of other
customary tenants. At Yateleigh[149] one copyholder has as many as
twenty sub-tenants, and it is not at all uncommon for the surveyors of
the sixteenth century to record the names both of owners and occupiers
in estate and field maps. There can hardly be a clearer proof of the
re-arrangement of property which has been going on among them than the
fact that some of them hold more land than they can cultivate themselves
and sub-let it to smaller men, who become their sub-tenants.
[147] Similar examples could be adduced from Northamptonshire
and Leicestershire, were it worth while, _e.g._ at Duston in
Northants in 1561 there were tenants holding 2 virgates, 1-3/4
virgates, 1-1/2 virgates, 1/2 virgate, 1/4 virgate (R.O. Rentals
and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 23). At Desford in Leicestershire,
_temp._ Hen. VIII., one finds the same division and aggregation
of virgates (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancs., Bdle. 6,
No. 7).
[148] See below, pp. 72-75.
[149] _Crondal Records, loc. cit._
May one not say, in fact, that by the beginning of the sixteenth century
the rough equality which had once existed between the holdings of
different groups of customary tenants is fast disappearing, and that by
the middle of that century it has, in some parts of the country,
disappeared altogether? The village community is often no longer made up
of compact groups of holders with more or less equal holdings, more or
less equal rents and services, more or less similar economic positions.
Even as early as the time when the great agrarian changes which
contemporaries summed up under the name of "enclosing" begin to produce
legislation on the part of governments and riots among the peasantry,
its appearance of a systematic adjustment of property and obligation is
already far on the way to disappearance. Its members still hold shares
in the open fields, and are still bound by a common routine of
cultivation, save in so far as that routine has been undermined in the
ways to be described below. But it is easy to be deceived by the
external shell of organisation into thinking of village life at the end
of the fifteenth century as being much more homogeneous than it really
was. After all there are shareholders and shareholders. There is very
little similarity in economic interest or social position between the
artisan who buys a £5 share in a Bolton spinning-mill and a capitalist
who invests £5000 in the same concern. There was hardly more, one may
suspect, between the copyholder who cultivated a few acres and the
copyholder who held 100 or 200 acres and sublet part of his holding to a
poorer neighbour, though the lands of both were intermixed, though both
held of the same manor, though both were nominally bound by the same
custom. This comparison says more than we mean; for, with few
exceptions, the inequality in the holdings of the peasantry revealed by
the manorial documents is not so great that it cannot be spanned by
enterprise and good fortune. Looking back from a world in which the mass
of mankind have no legal interest in the land which they cultivate or
the tools which they use, what strikes the modern reader most in the
sixteenth century is not the concentration of property, but its wide
distribution. Nevertheless, even in these petty rearrangements of
holdings there is a meaning. They are the beginning of greater things.
To appreciate their importance we must obliterate from our minds our
knowledge of later developments, and regard them as the innovation which
they are. We must remember that they are the economic foundation of a
prosperous rural middle class.
(c) _The Growth of a Land Market among the Peasants_
If the surveys were our sole source of information it would not be easy
to say how this regrouping of holdings has been brought about. Even the
surveys, however, do not leave us quite in the dark. They suggest that
it has taken place very largely through the play of commercial forces
within the ranks of the customary tenants themselves, through the eager
purchasing of land which we noticed as one feature of rural life at the
close of the Middle Ages, and through the growth of a cash nexus between
individuals side by side with the rule of custom. This is a factor in
the break up of the mediæval condition of landholding upon which
sufficient emphasis has perhaps not always been laid. The pre-occupation
of the writers of the sixteenth century with the special problem of
their own day, when the existence of a class of well-to-do copyholders
was taken as something needing no explanation, and their decay before
the growth of the great leasehold estate occupied the attention of all
interested in agricultural problems, caused the significance of the
development of these thriving peasants to be forgotten in the agitation
and regrets which accompanied their depression, and naturally
concentrated interest on the changes introduced by lords and great
farmers, through which that depression was mainly caused. In every age
prosperity is taken as a matter of course, and, in defiance of all
experience, mankind reserves its surprise for distress.
But the special phenomenon of the growth of large customary tenancies
which we have been considering can hardly be explained except as a
result of enterprise among the tenants themselves. The piling up of
customary holdings in the hands of one individual is quite a different
thing from the adding of customary holdings to the demesne which the
lord retained or leased to a farmer. It means a transference of
property, but a transference not from a customary tenant to the lord or
the lord's farmer, but from one customary tenant to another. It suggests
that before the "enclosing movement" of the sixteenth century brought
its crop of evictions, economic forces had long been at work to break up
the village community into large holders and small. When in 1452 John
Blackman, copyhold tenant of Maiden,[150] holds Keyser's, Key's, and
Skinner's tenements, it can only mean that Keyser, Key, and Skinner have
parted with their tenements to John Blackman. The lord may have put
pressure upon them to sell, but the customary land is not diminished, it
is simply rearranged; the result is not an addition to the manorial
demesne, but the appearance of a copyhold tenant with a great deal more
land than his neighbours. The cases in which the existence of more than
one survey of the same manor enables us to contrast the condition of the
customary tenants at different dates make it quite clear that this
aggregation of holdings was a well-marked movement which went on quite
apart from any encroachment by manorial authorities on the customary
land. Some time between 1340 and 1454 two virgates at Castle Combe,[151]
which at the earlier date were in separate hands, have been formed into
one holding. And naturally, the later we come, the more marked the
change which we find. At Aspley Guise[152] in 1275 the forty customary
tenants each held almost exactly half a virgate. In 1542 one finds among
the tenants at will and copyholders three occupants of the original half
virgate, one tenant with 30 acres, two tenants with 60 acres each, three
tenants with 75 acres each. These large holdings have plainly been
formed by the aggregation of half virgates in fewer hands and into
parcels of two, three, four, and five half virgates apiece. This case is
a very clear one, because nearly all the holdings are multiples of the
original standard, even the rent being calculated from this basis.
[150] Merton Documents, Rental of Maiden, 1496.
[151] _History of Castle Combe_ (Scrope).
[152] For information as to Aspley Guise I am indebted to the
kindness of Dr. H.G. Fowler of Aspley Guise, who has allowed me
to see the material which he has collected for a history of the
manor.
Elsewhere the aggregation of small customary holdings into large is
equally marked, but it has not been carried out with such a nice regard
to the maintenance of the original units. In the tithing of South[153]
Newton, part of the Manor of South Newton in Wiltshire, there were in
1315 seven holders of a virgate, each of whom occupied 23 acres,
seventeen holders of half a virgate with 12 acres each, and eight
cottagers. When the manor was surveyed in 1567 the customary tenants,
though fewer in number, cultivated a good deal more land than they had
two and a half centuries before, so that there is no question of their
holdings having been merged in the demesne. But the land was very
differently distributed between them. Of the ten copyholders then
remaining only one held the original virgate. Of the rest there were
holders of 59, 65, 80, and 96 acres, of 7, 13, and 15 acres, and of
various acreages between these wide limits. The symmetry of the earlier
arrangement has entirely vanished. Instead of a cluster of small
cultivators organised in three well-defined layers, we have a chain
stretching from a mere cottager up to a petty capitalist. A very similar
change has taken place on the Manor of Crondal.[154] If one compares,
for example, the arrangement of holdings on the tithing of Swanthrop in
1287 and 1567, one finds that the rough symmetry which existed at the
former date has altogether disappeared by the latter. In 1287 there were
eight persons holding virgates, seven holding half virgates, two holding
quarter-virgates, and four whose holdings are not expressed in virgates.
By 1567 all this has been altered. There are tenants holding 100, 66,
58, 47 acres; there are three with less than 10 acres, and there are
five with holdings of various sizes between these limits, but in no case
reducible to any common measure. How could such a transformation come
about, unless, as was suggested above, there was much buying and selling
of land, much rudimentary commercialism inside and behind the decent
cloak of routine which seems to be spread over our villages? Is not this
explanation forced upon us when we examine the holdings of the larger
peasants and find them made up of pieces bought from one and leased
from another, pieces taken from the waste or from the lord's demesne or
from the common pasture? And if it is correct, does it not point, on the
one hand, to a good deal of enterprise among the small holders, and
since enterprise can hardly exist without a certain level of prosperity,
to a good deal of prosperity; and, on the other hand, to movements which
in time are likely to dethrone custom altogether and put competition in
its place?
[153] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_ (Straton).
[154] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 111-116, and 210-222.
To these questions we shall return later. But happily we are not
restricted to inferential argument for our knowledge of these internal
changes in the economy of village life before the sixteenth century. We
have the court rolls of manors, and the court rolls are full, from a
very early date, of transactions which show how the state of things
which has been described was being brought about. In examining the
evidence which they offer of the shifting of property among the
peasantry we shall have to go some way back, and we shall do well to
begin with a distinction and a warning--a distinction between the legal
framework of rural life and its economic tendencies, and a warning that
we shall have to deal with a somewhat tiresome mass of detail, which the
general reader can avoid by turning to the summary at the end of this
chapter.
In the picture of the mediæval manor which is usually offered us the
features which receive most emphasis are its systematic apportionment of
works and services, its regulation by binding customary rules, its
immobility and imperviousness to competitive and commercial influences;
in short, its character as an organisation in which even the details are
settled by custom. In the "typical manor," as it appears in some
accounts, the main lines are drawn with almost photographic sharpness.
There are the free holders on the free land, the bond tenants each with
his virgate or half virgate of bond land, and the officers and servants
of the lord, a system the parts of which are knit together by the lord's
need of extracting labour services to cultivate his demesne. Now that
the internal economy of a thirteenth century manor displays to a very
remarkable degree the authority of custom in all its arrangements is
not, of course, denied; and it is specially proper to emphasise it when
we are contrasting it with modern agriculture, or when we are regarding
it from the standpoint of law. But this is only one aspect of it, and if
we assume that the economic relationships between the different members
of it always followed the same grouping and ran on the same lines as the
legal ones, we are likely to ascribe to them a simplicity and a hard and
fast character which, we may be quite sure, they never possessed in real
life, and to miss those very innovations which throw most light on
economic development.
True of such development early rentals and surveys show little trace.
But let us remember the purpose for which they were prepared. The
manorial officials were concerned with getting in an income, not with
supplying information about the methods of agriculture or the
cross-relations between one tenant and another, except in so far as they
affected the manorial revenue. The source of the income was the holding,
not the holder; or, rather, it did not matter to them who the landholder
was, whether he was one individual or another, or whether he was a
partnership of half-a-dozen individuals, provided that the land, however
held, yielded the customary services and payments. The nearest analogy
would be an apportioned tax which a Government divides between different
localities, each locality having to raise a certain sum, but making its
own arrangements as to what individuals shall pay. It is the virgate
which pays rents, which mows the lord's meadow, reaps the lord's fields,
carries the lord's messages, pays a stoup of honey and a churchshot of
white corn; and as long as the meadow is mowed and the message carried,
the question what individual holds the virgate is quite a subsidiary one
for the bailiff, and one which the tenants can arrange among themselves
much as they please. Each half virgate at Cuxham[155] has got to do two
boonworks or pay 4d. But the manorial economy is not at all disturbed by
the fact of one tenant holding not half a virgate, but a virgate and a
half; for he has to do, or pay some one else to do, six boonworks and
pay 2s. if he does not. A half-hide at Bramshot[156] has to make
half-a-dozen different payments in money and kind; but there is another
to prevent John, Stephen, Roger, and William clubbing together to work
it and arranging the payments among themselves as they please.
[155] Merton Documents, No. 5902, Rental of Cuxham, 1483:
"Johannes ... pro uno messuagio et una virgata terræ et dimidia
xxiiis. et 6 precaria in autumno vel 2s.... Thomas Lee, Rector
ecclesiæ ibidem pro uno tofto ... et una virgata terræ 18s. et 4
precaria in autumno vel 16d."
[156] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 96, Rental of 1287:
"Johannes filius Fabri, Stephanus Draghebreck, Rogerus de
Hallie, et Willelmus le Hart ... tenent j dimidiam hidatam
terræ. Reddendo inde per annum 5s. ad festum S. Mich. et xixd.
de Pondpany et ad festum Beati Martini viii gallinas de
chersetto, et ii gallinas contra Natale, et x ova contra Pascha,
et facient in omnibus omnia sicut Willelmus de Haillie." P. 125:
"William, son of Gonnilda, and Galfrid Levesone, John, son of
Matilda, and Emma, a widow, hold one virgate of land containing
27-1/2 acres on paying and doing as the said Robert of
Estfelde." There are many similar entries.
Clearly in these circumstances a rigid classification of holdings by the
manorial authorities is quite compatible with a great deal of diversity
in the arrangements made with each other by the holders, and we are
likely to miss a good many innovations if we look at the manor only
through the eyes of officials and as a revenue-producing concern.[157]
We must no more expect to get from them an exhaustive account of the
exact individuals at any one time using the land, or of the scale on
which farming is carried on by the peasants, than we expect the
shareholders' list of a limited company to tell us who has the spending
of the dividends. The shares stand in A.'s name, but the interest may go
to A.'s married daughter. The holding stands in the name of Thomas in
the books of the manor, but it may be that part or all of it is worked
by Walter. To put the case in another way, to the lord and his steward a
manor is primarily a business, a business on which various obligations
can be imposed and from which various profits can be extracted. But it
is also a village community consisting of peasants whose economic
relations are by no means exhausted in the interest which the lord takes
in them as part of its stock, and who have economic dealings which are
important when we begin to inquire into changes in the distribution of
peasant property. The number of the holdings and the amount of payments
and services may remain quite unaltered, and yet at the same time if one
individual begins to acquire several shares his property will grow at
the expense of other persons. Precisely because it is new, the
appearance of such small capitalists is not readily traceable in the
stereotyped forms used by the manorial officials. Precisely because it
is new, it is of the greatest economic significance. It shows what may
be called, by contrast with later developments, the old agrarian régime,
producing the new type of well-to-do peasant who is one of the
protagonists in the class struggles of the sixteenth century.
[157] Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, pp. 250-251: "The
general arrangement admitted a certain subdivision under the
cover of an artificial unity, which found its expression in the
settlement of the services and of the relations with the lord."
And this upward movement is no mere matter of conjecture. That behind
the stiff legal framework of the manorial organisation there was a
tendency for property to pass into the hands of the more prosperous
tenants, and that there was a sort of primitive commercialism even at a
time when commercial ideas had little influence over the methods of
agriculture, becomes evident if we examine the elements out of which the
small properties of the fourteenth century are composed. The gradual
formation of a class of wealthy peasants took place in three ways,
through the buying up by well-to-do men of parts of their neighbours'
properties, through the colonising by villages of the unoccupied land
surrounding them, and through the addition to the customary holdings of
plots which had at one time been in the occupation of the lord, but
which, for one reason or another, he found it more profitable to sell or
lease to his tenants. Even before the end of the thirteenth century it
is by no means unusual to find land changing holders pretty rapidly both
by transfer and by lease. The customary land passes in the manorial
court; the outgoing tenant surrenders it, and the incoming tenant is
formally admitted by the steward. When a peasant leaves the manor or
dies without heirs, the other tenants offer a sort of small land-market,
and bid for his land or part of it to add to their own. Hence holdings
or fractions of holdings change hands with some frequency at the court
customary, the well-to-do, who can afford to take more land, offering
the lord an increased rent to obtain a share in a holding the possession
of which has for some reason lapsed. In the court rolls of the
Lincolnshire manor of Ingoldmells,[158] for example, there are many such
transfers, six sales occurring in successive courts held in 1315 and
1316. At Crondal,[159] in 1282, a tenant has for some reason given up
his holding; the rest of the community dart on it like minnows on a
piece of bread; and it is at once split up among as many as ten other
tenants, who find sureties for the continuance of the normal services.
At Hadleigh,[160] in 1305, a tenant sells part of his land to be built
upon. At Castle[161] Combe, in 1367, a villein enters by licence of the
lord on two virgates of land and a separate pasture.
[158] _Ingoldmells Court Rolls_ (Massingberd), October 1315 to
June 1316.
[159] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 152-153. Court Roll of
1282. "Hugh Sweyn gives to the lord 15d. that he may be able to
hold 2-1/2 acres of arable land of the tenement formerly Richard
Wisdom's, paying therefor yearly 15d. of rent: sureties for the
services being Gilbert Swein and Roger Carter." Nine other
tenants take fractions of Richard Wisdom's holding in the same
way.
[160] _Victoria County History of Suffolk_, "Social and Economic
History" (Unwin). Professor Unwin has some suggestive remarks on
similar developments in other parts of the county.
[161] _History of Castle Combe_ (Scrope), p. 162: "Johannes
Pleyslede, nativus domini, cepit de domino unum messuagium et
duas virgatas terrae tenendas in bondagio, secundum
consuetudinem manerii ... Reddit etiam annuatim sex denarios pro
quadam pastura vocata le Hatche, et pro via ad eandem."
Such examples of what may be called petty land speculation could be
multiplied almost indefinitely, and point to a good deal of mobility in
rural society even in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. At
the same time one can see signs of relationships of a more complicated
character tending to establish themselves between the tenants, and
breaking up the symmetry of the manorial arrangements. There is a marked
tendency for holdings not to remain intact but to be split up among
different holders. Sometimes this takes place in the ordinary course of
transference from father to son. The virgate held by the former is
divided, for example, into two cotlands, each of which is held by one
child,[162] or the heir to a holding divides it with his mother.[163]
More frequently one is left to infer the actual process of division
from the way in which the Rentals describe holdings as being occupied by
groups or partnerships[164] of tenants, who share the land between them,
each being responsible for a part of the rents and services owing from
the virgate. Such an arrangement does not imply that there is any
partnership in actual cultivation, any partnership in the modern sense
of the word. It means, on the contrary, that the different parts of the
holding are divided among several different cultivators, and that its
apparent unity is quite artificial, simply a fiscal expression to enable
the authorities to see that it renders its share of payments and
services.
[162] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 129, Rental of Dupehale
(Dippenhall) 1287: "Edmunde de Bosco and William de Bosco hold 2
cotlands which were formed out of one virgate of land which Adam
de Bosco formerly held."
[163] _Ibid._, p. 153: "Margery Palmer comes and surrenders into
the hands of the lord a virgate of land with a house in Crondal,
and Galfrid her son comes and gives to the lord 6s. 8d. to have
seizin thereof, upon this condition, that the said Margery have
the third part, and two pieces more, of the aforesaid tenement,
for the term of her life."
[164] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 117, Rental of Yateleigh,
1287: "John de la Perke and Thomas Squel hold one virgate of
land containing 22 acres, on payment therefor of 2s. 10d. on the
Feast of St. Michael and 7-1/2 for Pondpany, and one stoup of
honey, and 75 eggs, and shall perform all services like Thomas
Kach.... Walter le White and Osbert de la Knelle hold one
virgate of land containing 29-1/2 acres.... Roys de Pothulle and
John le White hold one virgate of land containing 29 acres."
Again there is much leasing and sub-letting of land by the more
prosperous of the customary tenants. Like labourers who hold allotments
to-day, they often find it convenient to hire extra land and at the same
time to let out parts of their own holdings, which may be inconveniently
situated, or hard to work, or for some other reason not worth retaining.
Thus in Lancashire the Clitheroe[165] court rolls show many fines being
paid in the early fourteenth century for permission to "tavern," that is
simply to lease, land. In 1351 there are several tenants on the manor of
Sutton[166] in Hampshire who have leased cotlands from the larger
customary tenants. At Crokeham on the neighbouring manor of Crondal[167]
we hear as early as 1287 of one tenant paying 12d. for his holding
"through the rents of" another customary tenant, who stands as an
intermediate landlord between him and the manorial authorities. On this
manor, indeed, sub-letting of land proceeded very far, and had created
by the middle of the sixteenth century exactly the result which one
would have expected, the existence, namely, of a considerable number of
subtenants holding land from the copyholders and known by the name of
Hallmote[168] tenants. Nor is mere subtenancy the most elaborate of the
arrangements which arise among these Lilliputian capitalists. The
peasants deal in land, and naturally they employ land agents to act as
brokers for their bargains. When "Robert Bagges surrenders one bovate of
villein land into the hands of the lord for the use of Symon Clerk, and
the same Symon forthwith surrenders the aforesaid bovate to the lord for
the use of William Flaxman, and William Flaxman pays 12d. to enter
thereupon,"[169] may we not say that we have the whole machinery of land
speculation, seller, middleman, and client, complete?
[165] _Court Rolls of the Lordships, Wapentakes, and Demesne
Manors of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster_ (edited by W. Farrer).
Halmote of Colne, 1323: "Thomas le Harper for taverning 3 acres
of land, 6d. Roger ... for the same of 2 acres of land, 4d.,"
and _passim_.
[166] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 140: "John Thomas holds a
messuage and a 'ferdell' of land, excepting one cotland and a
perch.... Thomas le Freyn holds of the above a cotland and a
perch."
[167] _Ibid._, p. 134: "William de Suche gives to the lord 12d.
yearly, to be allowed to hold 6 acres through the rents of Hugh
of Wyggeworthale."
[168] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 159-383. Customary of
1567. The name does not necessarily imply subtenancy in any way,
the Hallmoot being simply the court of the manor. At Yateleigh
one copyholder, Richard Allen, held about 263 acres, of which
about 126 were held from him by 21 subtenants (pp. 258-265 and
378-379).
[169] Footnote in _The Rebellion of Wat Tyler_, by Petruschevsky
(Russian), p. 210: "Ricardus Flaxman qui de domino tenuit in
bondagio unum messuagium et II. bovatas terræ et xvi acras terræ
de Forland quæ quondam fuerunt Johannis Colyn ad terminum xx.
annorum ex dimissione prædicti Johannis per licenciam curiæ,
venit hic et reddidit in manus domini prædictas duas bovatas
terræ et acras di' terræ et prati ad opus Willelmi Dolynes
deduct' prædicto messuagio." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls,
Bdle. 32, No. 307, and _ibid._, p. 211: "Robertus Bagges redd'
in manus domini l bovatam terræ in bondagio ad opus Symonis
Clerk Tenend 'sibi et suis, etc. Et idem Symon instanter redd'
in manus domini prædictam bovatam terræ ad opus Willelmi Flaxman
sibi et heredibus suis secundum consuetudinem manerii, et dat ad
ingressum xiid." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 33, No.
324: "Instanter" is remarkable.
So far we are on safe ground. But it is not easy to describe the sort of
conditions in which this petty commercialism, this emergence of peasants
richer and more prosperous than their fellows, takes place. Clearly it
implies the existence of small stores of capital, of some surplus over
the consumption of the current year, which its fortunate possessors can
use as a starting-point for further acquisitions; nor ought this to
surprise us, for the usurer who traffics in his neighbours' misfortunes
by lending money or corn at exorbitant rates, is by no means an
unfamiliar bugbear in the mediæval village. Clearly, again, we must not
look for some single _primum mobile_ to explain how such small capitals
could be brought into existence. With all its apparent homogeneity the
manorial population had, from the beginning of things, included people
some of whom were in so much better a position than others for building
up considerable properties as to make it no matter for astonishment
that, as time went on, they should improve their advantage and attract
more than their share of any increase in wealth which might take place.
The appearance in the fourteenth century of a rural middle class is,
indeed, much less remarkable than the extreme slowness of its
development in the more backward parts of the country. For one thing,
even the strictest equalisation of shares could not prevent the holder
of exceptionally fertile land from being better off than his less
fortunate fellow. Since services and rents were based on the
requirements of the demesne, with a view to their rough apportionment
among all the peasants, and were not adjusted, like modern competitive
rents, so as to sweep away the surplus arising on superior sites, the
occupants of the latter could build up, under the ægis of custom, the
nucleus of a very considerable property.[170] For another thing, the
mere fact that the village was subordinated to a lord, who exploited it
by means of officers and servants, supplied village society with an
upper layer of people who had larger opportunities than the mass of the
peasantry for improving their position. Stewards, bailiffs, and greaves
were frequently rewarded for their services with grants of land for
which only a nominal rent was asked, and of course the most obvious way
of using their advantage was further to increase it by adding to their
properties. In a somewhat similar position to these were the peasants
who were let off easily because their labour was not needed for the
lord's estate. It is quite a mistake to think of the mediæval villager
as a man pinned down to subsistence level by the economic pressure which
grinds, as in a mortar, the poorest classes in modern society. Of course
individuals were cruelly oppressed, and when the harvest failed whole
communities, as in India to-day, must sometimes have been blotted out at
a blow. But the whole story of the extraordinary upward movement which
took place among the peasantry in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries is unintelligible, unless we admit that the legal
rightlessness of the villein was, in fact, quite compatible with a good
deal of economic prosperity. His liability to the manorial authorities,
though in law unqualified, was in reality a liability limited, on the
one hand, by the rule of custom, and, on the other, by the fact that he
worked, not for an ever hungry world-market, but for a by no means
insatiable local demand. Since services were adjusted to holdings, not
to holders, a family of five or six persons usually did not send more
than one or two to work on the lord's estate, and the remainder had
opportunities for economic advancement, which necessarily became greater
as the growth of population made the weight of the lord's requirements
less exacting.[171] Moreover, the rudimentary specialisation of
industrial employments, which can plainly be seen going on in the
villages of the fourteenth century, brought into existence the man who
was half peasant, half artisan or tradesman, and who could employ the
money which he made in trade to carry on his husbandry on a larger scale
than his neighbours. Such, for example, were the smiths, carpenters,
turners, shoemakers, tailors, butchers, walkers, websters, and shearmen,
who appear so constantly in Poll Tax returns.[172] When a weaver is
able, though a villein, to leave 3000 marks to his heirs,[173] the
village capitalist has plainly come upon the scenes. Nor must we forget
that, however self-contained some manors may have been, there were
others whose proximity to a chartered town or to a seaport acted as a
magnet to draw rural conditions out of the rut of custom. Among the
serfs who bought permission to emigrate, there were some who, having
made money as town craftsmen, strayed back to their "villein nest," and
acquired considerable properties with their hardly amassed wealth, like
the Italian or Austrian peasant of to-day, who, after years spent in the
sunless tenements and restaurants of New York, returns at last to be the
envy of Calabrian and Tyrolese villages. From several sides at once,
therefore, from those who socially rank above the mass of the
population, from the peasant who combines trade and husbandry, from the
enterprising serf who sets out to make his fortune at a distance, forces
are at work to build up the considerable holdings that are the basis of
the well-to-do peasantry of the future.
[170] See below, pp. 115-121.
[171] See _E.H.R._, vol. xv. pp. 774-813; Vinogradoff's review
of Page's _The End of Villeinage in England_.
[172] Powell, _The Revolt in East Anglia_, Appendix I.; and
Putnam, _The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers_, pp.
80-81.
[173] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_.
p. 233.
But while these causes were always operating on individuals, the most
potent influence in forming a class of prosperous peasants was, no
doubt, the spread of commerce and its reaction on agriculture. Its
effect is shown by the fact that it is just in those parts of the
country where trade is most highly developed, and where, therefore, the
use of money and the growth of wealth encourage speculation of all
kinds, that the commercialising of landed relationships, and the
appearance of a middle class, arises earliest and spreads furthest. The
change is specially noticeable in the Eastern counties, which, from an
early date, are the home of industry. Examples of the extreme variety
and irregularity in the holdings of the customary tenants on the manors
of Suffolk in the sixteenth century, which we have already contrasted
with the arrangements in the backward parts of the country such as
Northumberland, begin to make their appearance at a very early date in
that county of fisheries and manufactures. At Hadleigh,[174] where the
woollen industry has set money in circulation, the processes both of
splitting up the customary holdings, and of letting two or three of them
to a single tenant, is conspicuous at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, and has completely altered the distribution of property which
existed a century before. At the little fishing village of
Gorleston[175] at the end of the thirteenth century each of the former
tenancies was divided up among several tenants, sometimes three or four,
sometimes eight or ten, and once as many as twenty. At Hawstead, in the
same county, the free tenants have let off part of their holdings and
added to them by leasing additional land in its place. In short,
whenever trade becomes a serious factor in rural life, one finds a very
general tendency for new arrangements of land to grow up side by side
with the customary holdings, which are the backbone of the manor,
because it is from them that the lord extracts his services for the
cultivation of the desmesne. As long as the necessity for labour
services continues, the number of holdings does not undergo any
appreciable alteration, but the number of holdings ceases to be a guide
to the number of holders.
[174] _Victoria County History of Suffolk_, Unwin's article on
Social and Economic History.
[175] _Ibid._
It is clear that the organisation of the manor is compatible with a good
deal of shifting of property among the customary tenants, and that an
alteration in its arrangements begins at a comparatively early date,
without any external shock and through the desire of such tenants as can
afford it to buy and lease land from other tenants who are less well
off. If such a tendency were at all general, it would explain the
gradual aggregation of larger holdings into fewer hands, and the
appearance of considerable inequality in economic status among members
of the village community whose legal position was the same. Sometimes,
indeed, the authorities of the manor think that the process is going on
too fast, that tenants have forgotten that, though they deal in land as
though it were their own, it is really the lord's, and that they must
not jeopardise the rents and services which he expects from it by
alienating it without his permission. Sometimes a day of reckoning
comes, when "tenants having more than one customary tenement" are "to
show cause why they should not be excluded from the other tenements but
one, unless license be granted them."[176] But in view of the multitude
of transactions which come before us, we can hardly doubt that licence
was nearly always granted if the purchaser or lessee was thought by the
steward to be substantial enough to make the land do its duty,[177] and
that tenants who wanted to buy and sell, lease and let, had very little
opposition to expect from the lord or his steward.
[176] _Merton Documents_, "A table of the Matters, Orders, and
Customs Conteyned in Severall Courts of the Manor, 1563": "Daye
given to all ye tenants of ye manor to remove and expell their
undertenants by Michaelmas that shall be in ye yeare 1563, upon
paine of every delinquent forfeiting 20s." "Daye given to the
aforesaid tenants having above one customary tenement to be here
at ye next court to shew," etc., as above. See the Customary of
High Furness quoted below, p. 101; also Hone, _The Manor and
Manorial Records_, pp. 177-178, Court Rolls of Payton, Oxon.:
"And the aforesaid Laurence Pemerton, in his life time,
substituted Walter Milleward as his subtenant ... contrary to
the custom of the Manor without license; therefore let him have
a talk thereon with the King's officer before the next court."
[177] This is the meaning of entries of two names as "sureties"
when land changes hands. See _Crondal Records_, Court Rolls of
1281 and 1282, _passim_.
After all the picture is one which we ought not to have any difficulty
in understanding, if once we get rid of the idea, born of our melancholy
modern experience, that the buying of land in small parcels is for the
small man the road to ruin, a luxury in which none but the well-to-do
can afford to indulge. We have all heard much of the iniquities of the
English system of land transfer, and have contrasted its cumbersomeness,
its expense, its uncertainty, with the facilities for buying small plots
offered by methods like those of France, where sales and mortgages are
entered in a public registry, which any one has the right to inspect.
But we need not look to the Continent or the British Dominions to see a
market for real property working freely and smoothly. In our period by
far the most general form of tenure was one customary tenure or another,
and whatever the disadvantages of customary tenure may have been--and
they were many--they had one great compensating advantage. Customary
holdings could be transferred easily, cheaply, and with certainty, by
surrender and admission in the court of the manor. Since there was no
doubt that the freehold was in the lord, there was no expensive
investigation of titles to eat up the prospective profits of the
purchaser, and the Court Rolls offered a record, one is tempted to say a
register, of the nature of the interest which a tenant had had in any
holding from time immemorial. Of course the adjustment of the respective
claims of lords and tenants raised very knotty problems, and these will
be examined later. But, as long as they were in abeyance, the fact that
peasant holdings could be transferred so readily contributed to the
breaking up in the regularity of manorial arrangements, to the passage
of land from one family to another, and to the formation of larger
properties out of small.[178]
[178] Since writing the above I have seen that the same view of
the advantages of copyhold (the descendant of villein) tenure is
taken by Dr. Hasbach, who quotes an eighteenth century writer to
the effect that copyhold as compared with freehold land had the
advantage of "the greater certainty of its title and the
cheapness of its conveyance" (Hasbach, _A History of the English
Agricultural Labourer_, pp. 72-73).
Such petty transactions among the peasantry were not, however, the only
way in which substantial peasant properties came into existence. In
addition to the transference of land from one tenant to another there
were other causes working to produce much the same results. The first
was the continuous taking in of plots of waste land by tenants who got
permission from the manorial authorities to make encroachments upon it.
The second was the abandonment of the system of cultivating the demesne
by the labour rents of the tenants. Long before the enclosing of the
common waste by lords of manors and farmers had become a very serious
grievance--that it was a grievance at an early date is proved by the
Statute of Merton[179]--one finds arrangements being made for bringing
unused land under cultivation. Sometimes this movement goes on on a very
large scale indeed; the Abbey of St. Albans gets a licence from the King
in 1347 to "improve its wastes aforesaid and to grant and let them for
their true value to whomsoever of their tenants comes to take
them;"[180] and about the same time 500 acres of waste in the forest of
High Peak[181] are let by the Crown to three tenants, much to the
disgust of the neighbouring commoners. Usually the encroachments on the
waste take place piecemeal. The process by which piece after piece was
clipped off it and added to the tenants' holdings is shown very clearly
in Rentals and Court Rolls. Occasionally it goes on without sanction; a
tenant surreptitiously draws into his holding an extra piece of land for
which he pays nothing, and is only found out when he has occupied it for
some time. But this is rare, for such encroachments are a source of
profit to the lord, both in the payment made for the original permission
to make them and in the rent coming from them, and the steward is
therefore careful that they should be made through the court and entered
in detail on the rolls of the manor. Thus at Ashton-under-Lyne,[182] in
1422, both freeholders and customary tenants had made large intakes of
wood and waste and were paying for some of them as much as 13s. 4d. and
10s. The Halmote Court of Colne[183] in 1324 shows many tenants paying a
few pence for acres and half acres of waste. At Yateleigh,[184] in 1287,
almost every one of the fifty-three customary tenants held, in addition
to his land in the open fields, land taken from the waste amounting in
the aggregate to 37 acres, while some possessed no land at all except
that which they had thus reclaimed. In the tithing of Aldershot,[185] on
the same manor, one tenant held 52 acres in encroachments. At
Crokeham[186] another held 63-1/2 acres in addition to the standard half
virgate of customary land; another, at Southwood,[187] 16 acres.
[179] 1235, c. 4. One may remark, however, that the power which
a single freeholder had had before 1235 to prevent the breaking
up or enclosure of common pastures, even when he had more than
was sufficient for his own beasts, was a genuine hardship for
the lord, for other freeholders, and for the customary tenants;
see the remarks in Pollock and Maitland (_History of English
Law_, vol. i. p. 612).
[180] _Gesta Abbatum Monasterii St. Albani_, vol. iii. pp.
120?-121, quoted by Petruschevsky, _op. cit._, pp. 179?-180.
[181] _Victoria County History_, Derbyshire, vol. ii. p. 170.
[182] Glover, _History of Ashton_, p. 355. "Richard the Hunte
... for an intake 3d. ... Thomas of the Leghes for the one half
of the intake in Palden Wood 13s. 4d. The same Thomas of the
Leghes for an intake besyde Alt Hey 10s."
[183] _Court Rolls of the Lordships, etc., of Thomas, Earl of
Lancaster_ (Farrer). Halmote of Ightenhill, 1324, January 18:
"John de Briddeswail for entry to half an acre of waste in
Habrincham, 6d., for the same yearly, 2d." Same court, May 7,
1324.: "Richard le Skinner for entry to 4 acres of waste in
Sommerfordrod, 6d., for the same yearly, 6d.," and _passim_. In
the north of England there seems to have been very much
colonising of the waste, perhaps because original settlements
were small. See Turner, _History of Brighouse, Rastrick, and
Hipperholme_, pp. 66?-67, and _Trans. Rochdale Literary and
Philosophical Society_, vol. vii., Rochdale Manor Inquisition.
[184] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 116?-120, _e.g._ "Robert,
son of Peter de la Pierke, holds one acre of encroachment land
on paying 4d."
[185] _Ibid._, pp. 123-?127.
[186] _Ibid._, pp. 131?-134. "Richard Wysdon holds half a
virgate of land containing 16 acres.... The same holds 63-1/2
acres, which were in his ancient occupation, and were found to
be over and above his said virgate, and (included) in many
encroachments."
[187] _Ibid._, pp. 122-?123: "William of Southwoode holds 16
acres of encroachments and other detached pieces."
The process of nibbling away the waste was, in fact, very general, and
was a natural and inevitable one. The lord gained by leasing part of it
to be broken up and cultivated, while, so long as sufficient land was
left for grazing, the tenants gained by getting land which they could
add to their holdings, and on which the growing population could settle.
It must be remembered that the area under cultivation was everywhere an
island in an ocean of unreclaimed barrenness which cried out for
colonists.[188] In the Middle Ages land was abundant and men were
scarce; the land wanted the people much more than the people wanted the
land. Moreover, with the simple methods of cultivation prevailing, the
number of persons which a villein's holding could maintain was strictly
limited, and the tendency to "diminishing returns," with the consequent
difficulty of maintaining a growing population on the same area, must
have come into play very soon and very sharply. Surveyors[189]
appreciated this, and pointed out on some manors that unless the
tenants' holdings were enlarged they could not make a decent living and,
what was more important to the authorities, could not perform the
customary services. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that at a
comparatively early date the manorial population began to overflow the
boundaries of the customary land and to occupy the waste, with the
result that the area under cultivation grew, in some cases,
enormously.[190] We can hardly be mistaken in supposing that this was
the chief cause of the remarkable difference in the amount of land which
strikes one when one compares some of the surveys of later and earlier
dates. In any case the result was to increase the opportunities
possessed by the more prosperous tenants, who could afford to rent
additional land, of adding to their holdings, and thus to produce a
growing inequality in the distribution of property among them.
[188] Thorold Rogers _(Agriculture and Prices_, vol. i. p. 34:
"Not much less land was regularly under the plough than at
present") thinks otherwise. But (i.) modern agriculture has many
ways of using land besides keeping it "under the plough"; (ii.)
we know that in the eighteenth century large tracts now
cultivated were barren heaths, and it is difficult to believe
that these had been cultivated in the Middle Ages.
[189] See below, p. 189. The instances there quoted are later
than the period with which we are now dealing, but as they
mostly come from Northumberland, a very conservative county,
they are perhaps to the point.
[190] _e.g._ at South Newton in Wiltshire (see p. 74), tithing
of Swanthrop in Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings
was in 1287 about 360 acres, and in 1567 about 607 acres, and
tithing of Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was
in 1287 about 181, and in 1567 about 284. But these figures are
not altogether satisfactory; and sometimes one finds a
reduction, _e.g._ at Dippenhall (from about 287 acres at the
earlier date to about 275 at the later date). The plague
relieved the pressure of population, and thus removed one
incentive for breaking up the waste; on the other hand, it left
the survivors much better off, and thus more able to increase
the scale of their husbandry. But until we know much more about
the growth of population we shall not make much of general
comparisons of this kind.
If the instances which have been given above are at all typical of the
state of things on many manors, the economic rigidity of rural life in
the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries must have been a good
deal less than is often suggested. The legal forms are stiff and
unchanging, but the life behind them is fluid, and produces all sorts of
new combinations and arrangements which make legal forms a better index
of what was a hundred years before than of what at any moment is. In
particular one finds considerable movement going on before the Great
Plague. The more fully manorial records are explored, the more difficult
does it seem to generalise about the effects of that great catastrophe.
One cannot say that it was the beginning of the commutation of labour
services into rents, for on some manors they were partially commuted
before it, and on some they were not entirely commuted till nearly two
centuries later. One cannot say that the leasing of the demesne was due
to the Plague; for where the labour supply was small, parts of it were
leased already,[191] and after the Plague the authorities of different
manors met the crisis in different ways, sometimes beginning by letting
the demesne only to return later to the older system. It may be
suggested, however, that its influence has been somewhat exaggerated by
those authorities who would have us regard it as the watershed of
economic history. No doubt the Great Plague was the single most
important event in the economic history of the fourteenth century, just
as the Irish famine of 1846 was the single most important event in the
economic history of Ireland in the nineteenth century. But neither the
Irish famine nor the Plague had the effect of sweeping economic
development on to wholly new lines. What they both did was enormously to
accelerate tendencies already at work. The customary tenants were buying
and leasing land from each other before the Plague, and before the
Plague some lords were leasing out their demesnes, but on a small scale.
After the Plague the death of many holders and the poverty of many
survivors caused land to come into the market on a vastly greater scale
and at a cheaper rate, with the result that the aggregation of holdings,
the beginnings of which have been described as above, proceeded with
vastly increased rapidity. That this was the case immediately after the
Plague is shown by the familiar entries[192] as to the transference of
holdings which have lost their cultivators in the Court Rolls. The
movement seems to have continued, however, long after the immediate
effects of the Plague had passed away, and to have resulted on some
manors in the fifteenth century in something which might almost be
called free trade in land. One finds a readiness to buy and sell
customary holdings which belies the idea of the manor as a rigid
organisation in which little room was left for changing contractual
arrangements, and one finds also the natural result of the rising
commercialisation of land tenure in the grouping of several holdings
under one tenant, in the appearance of the practice of some tenants
sub-letting lands to others, and in general in the passing of property
from the economically weak to the economically strong, which naturally
does not go on rapidly till there is a market in which they both can
meet.
[191] _e.g._ at Hadleigh in 1305 (_Victoria County History_,
Suffolk, Unwin's article); at Crondal in 1287 (_Crondal
Records_, p. 110); at Ormsby in 1324 (Massingberd, _History of
Ormsby_).
[192] _e.g._ Scrope, _Castle Combe_, p. 164. Court Rolls of
1357: "Johannis filius Johannis Payn venit et finem fecit cum
domino per 12d. pro ingressu habendo in illo messuagio et
virgata terræ quæ Johannis le Parkare quondam tenuit.... Et
dictum tenementum concessum est ei ad tam parvam finem eo quod
dictum tenementum est ruinosum et decassum; et existebat in manu
domini a tempore pestilentiæ pro defectu emptorum." Massingberd,
Ingoldmells Court Rolls for years 1349?-1352. Gasquet, _The
Great Pestilence_. Page, _The End of Villeinage in England_.
At the same time by the beginning of the fifteenth century another force
of great importance was beginning to operate. The increase in the size
of the customary tenants' holdings, and the growth of a class occupying
much more land than the ordinary villein tenancy, was brought about not
only by encroachment on the waste and the aggregation of holdings, but
also by the transference to the tenants of that part of the manorial
land which has been the lord's demesne. The process by which the demesne
ceased to be cultivated by villein labour, and became frequently an area
subject to the more elastic arrangements of leasehold tenure, has been
often described, and we shall have to return to it later in speaking of
the development of the large capitalist farm. Here it is sufficient to
point out that, the abandonment of the primitive system, by which the
tenants worked out their rents in labour on the demesne, had two
consequences which are of great significance in the development of the
villein into the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries.
In the first place, it meant that one great force making for equality
between the holdings of different tenants was removed. The system which
gave each customary tenant on a manor what may be called a standard
holding was surely an artificial one, in the sense that it bears the
mark of deliberate arrangement, and is not one which would tend to be
established by the play of economic forces. As we have seen, economic
forces did begin to impair it at an early date. Its persistence is more
remarkable than its disappearance, and why had it persisted? Partly, no
doubt, because the idea that each full household should be equipped with
a standard holding was part of the original organisation of the village
community, upon which the feudal superstructure had been imposed, and
which it used as a machine for grinding out its revenue. Partly also
through the needs of that superstructure itself. As the tenants were the
instruments by which the demesne was cultivated, and as the demesne
could not be cultivated unless the tenants were adequately equipped with
the means of livelihood, the rough equality which existed between their
holdings, though arising from the communal arrangement of village life,
and not deliberately imposed from above, had, nevertheless, been, in
fact, a quite necessary condition for the working of the lord's private
estate. A settled relation between holdings and services was a
convenience to the manorial authorities, and in this sense the work done
on the demesne was a force tending to keep the tenants' holdings fixed,
as it were, on a scale which did not easily allow of much
variation.[193] When the demesne ceased to be cultivated by labour
services, what had been from the point of view of the manorial officers,
though not from that of the villagers, the chief practical reason for
maintaining equality between the different holdings disappeared, and the
inequality which economic forces were tending to produce developed more
rapidly.
[193] The view that the equality of holdings was the creation
not of the communal needs of the peasantry but of deliberate
arrangement by the authorities, seems to be untenable in face of
the evidence of early records showing that freeholders as well
as the servile peasantry held roughly equal shares (see
Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, Essay II., chap. iv. and
chap. vi). On the other hand, the apportionment of services to
holdings tended to stereotype the existing arrangement. A late
example which displays both elements, that of authoritative
pressure and that of communal organisation, is supplied by the
Customary of High Furness (R.O. Duchy of Lancs. Special
Commissions, No. 398): "As heretofore dividing and portioning of
tenements hath caused great decay, chiefly of the service due to
her Highness for horses, and of her woods, and has been the
cause of making a great number of poor people in the lordship,
it is now ordered that no one shall divide his Tenement or
Tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be
of the ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d." See
below, p. 101.
In the second place, when labour rents were commuted into money, the
demesne was often added to the tenants' holdings, with the result of
still further destroying their symmetry, by the opportunity which was
given to men with money to buy up parcels of land. This movement went on
so unobtrusively that its significance is liable to be overlooked. In
reality, however, it was a change of very great importance, scarcely
less important than the decay of villein services and disabilities which
was the other side, the personal as contrasted with the agrarian side,
of the same break up of the old system of cultivation. One must remember
that the lord's demesne formed a very large part of a great many manors,
often no doubt the most fertile and desirable part. One may recall again
that there are other European countries in which the sharp distinction
between the demesne and the holdings of the peasants was maintained in
full mediæval vigour almost to our own day. In Prussia,[194] for
example, a Royal Decree, the Decree of 1807, was needed to break it
down, and to allow the land held by lords of manors to be bought by the
small cultivator. What the partial obliteration of this line meant in
fourteenth and fifteenth century England was that a great deal of land,
land on which the peasantry, one would suppose, had often turned
covetous eyes, was thrown into the market for families who could afford
it to buy and lease, that for a century or so after the Plague great
estates were being broken up into small, instead of small being
consolidated into great, that for a century or so the land market turned
in favour of the small man as much as it afterwards turned against
him.[195]
[194] Edict of October 9, 1807, Clause 1.
[195] Compare a document, _temp._ Hen. VIII., quoted by Gonner,
_Common Land and Enclosure_, p. 155 n., which states that
whereas landlords at one time could not find tenants, now the
case is altered and tenants want landlords.
Of course the leasing of the demesne was not universal; nor, when it
was leased, was it always divided up among the tenants. Often it was
transferred _en bloc_ to a single farmer, and became the nucleus of the
large leasehold farm whose management we shall examine later. Sometimes
it was first divided up and later consolidated again, with results
disastrous to the interests which had grown up upon it. But the
existence in the sixteenth century[196] of many small demesne tenancies
is a proof that a common way of treating it was to divide it up among
the peasants; and if we cast our eyes back over the records of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we can find many examples to show how
such a state of things was brought about. Sometimes small plots of the
demesne are leased for terms of years. At Tykeford, in 1325,[197] the
surveyor found that 48 acres of demesne which were then in the hands of
the lords used to be leased to the tenants. The bailiff's accounts of
the manor of Amble[198] in Northumberland show that in 1328 "the
forlands" were let out to the bondage tenants, and in 1337 four of the
latter got leases of from 2 to 4 acres of demesne at Acklington.[199] In
1436 at Ambresbury[200] 2 carucates were leased to various tenants for a
term of years, as well as 8 acres of meadow and 400 acres of pasture;
and at Winterborne[201] 2 carucates, 6 acres of meadow, and 300 acres of
pasture were leased in the same year. But in the fifteenth century the
leasing of the demesne was constant, and there is no need to multiply
examples which can be found in almost every survey of the period. Where
the land was not leased it was quite usual for it to be held by copy.
This was a common practice in the fifteenth century in the south-west of
England. The surveyor[202] who, in 1568, gave an account of six manors
in the Western counties, found that in all of them the Barton or demesne
had been split up among the customary tenants for very many years and
was held by them as copyholders. The same thing happened on the manors
of the Earl of Northumberland, where the tenants' holdings were
increased by pieces taken from the lord's demesne and divided equally
among them. It happened at South[203] Newton in Wiltshire, where in 1567
a good deal of the Barton land was held by the tenants, who were
copyholders, on the same terms as the rest of their customary holdings;
at Stovard,[204] and Childhampton,[205] and Estoverton,[206] where the
customary tenants held "Bordland." Very probably those pieces of the
demesne which on some manors were held by copy of Court Roll, had
originally been let on lease in the way described above. The difficulty
of distinguishing them was very great, since normally they would lie in
the open fields scattered among the strips which formed the customary
holdings, in such a way that the movement of a balk obliterated the
difference. It is not surprising, therefore, that in spite of the
efforts of the lord's officials, they should constantly have lost their
identity. The remarkable thing is that they retained it so often, and
that surveyors were able to pin down a couple of acres among 30 or 40
others as not being, like the rest, customary land, but as having at one
time, perhaps several generations before, been parts of the lord's
demesne which it is "good to revyve and keep in memory that it should
not hereafter decay, but that at all tymes it may be devyded from the
customarye."[207]
[196] For the use of the demesne in the sixteenth century see
below, pp. 200?-213.
[197] Dugdale,_Monasticon_, vol. v., Survey of Tykeford.
[198] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v., Amble: "4s. 8d.
de forlands dimissis diversis tenentibus." "4 acres leased by
the Prior for 8 years to Roger at 8d. per acre."
[199] _Ibid._, vol. v., Acklington.
[200] Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of Ambresbury.
[201] _Ibid._
[202] Humberstone, _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i. p. 43.
See below, pp. 208?-209.
[203] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_ (Straton).
[204] _Ibid._
[205] _Ibid._
[206] _Ibid._
[207] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i., Survey of the
Manor of Whitforde in the County of Devon.
With these words, so suggestive of the blurring of lines which in
previous ages were sharply drawn, we may pause to consider where we
stand. Our argument has aimed at showing the large changes which have
taken place in the position of the peasantry as landholders before the
agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century begins. We have not been
able to give any quantitative measurements of the developments. But we
have seen enough to understand the direction in which economic forces
are setting. The substitution of hired labour for villein services, and
the formation of a middle class of considerable landholders out of the
occupiers of virgates and semi-virgates who formed the bulk of the
population on most mediæval manors, are changes which have taken place
quietly and which have nothing sensational about them. But the growth of
relationships based on a cash nexus between individuals, which they both
imply, has effected a very real alteration in rural conditions, an
alteration which is in a small way like that occurring to-day when the
discovery that a quiet village possesses mineral wealth or is a
convenient holiday resort puts money into circulation there, causes
farming lands to be cut up into plots which are bought by the savings of
speculative tradesmen, and adds a new tangle of commercial relationships
to the slowly moving economy of village life. Speculation in land on a
small scale begins among the more prosperous villeins at an early date,
as the inevitable result of an increase in prosperity and of the land
hunger of a growing population. It is immensely accelerated through the
impetus which the plague, by emptying holdings of their occupants, gives
to the formation of something like a land market, and the result is that
the holdings of the more fortunate grow and the holdings of the less
fortunate diminish. As a consequence, there is in many fifteenth century
villages the greatest variety in the economic conditions of the
peasantry. Except where commercial forces have been held in check by the
remoteness of the township from centres of trade, or where the needs of
the manorial authorities oblige them to resist any subdivision of
holdings for fear it should lead to the loss of services, the
comparative uniformity characteristic of their holdings in the
thirteenth century has disappeared, and the equality in poverty of the
modern agricultural labourer has not yet taken its place. Though the old
Adam of economic enterprise seems to be banished by the insistence of
stewards and bailiffs that holdings which are responsible for certain
works shall be treated as an indivisible unity, he sneaks back, even in
the mediæval manor, in the shape of agreements among the peasantry,
agreements which break that unity up by way of exchange, of sale, of
leasing, and sub-letting. By the end of the fifteenth century the
different elements in rural society are spread, as it were, along a more
extended scale, and there is a much wider gap between those who are
most, and those who are least, successful.
Taken together these changes mean, on the whole, an upward movement, an
increase in the opportunities possessed by the peasantry of advancing
themselves by purchasing and leasing land, more mobility, more
enterprise, greater scope for the man who has saved money and wishes to
invest it. They mean that custom and authority have less influence and
that class distinctions based upon tenure are weakened. But the upward
curve may turn and descend; for they imply also a tendency towards the
dissolution of fixed customary arrangements and of the protection which
they offer against revolutionary changes, a tendency which in the
future, when great landowners and capitalists turn their attentions to
discovering the most profitable methods of farming, may damage the very
men who have gained by it in the past. In the next two chapters we shall
glance at the first point, and pause at greater length upon the second:
first, the economic condition of the mass of the peasantry before the
great agrarian movements of the sixteenth century begin; secondly, the
signs of coming change which may react to their disadvantage. We shall
try to maintain the standpoint of an observer in the early years of the
sixteenth century. But economic periods overlap, and Northumberland is
still in the Middle Ages when Middlesex is in the eighteenth century. So
we shall not hesitate to use evidence drawn from sources that are in
point of time far apart.