THE PEASANTRY (_continued_)
(d) _The Economic Environment of the Small Cultivator_
It was the argument of the previous chapter that the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries saw the emergence from the mass of manorial tenants
of a class of wealthy peasants who bought and leased their neighbours'
lands, added to their property parcels taken from the waste and demesne,
and by these means built up estates far exceeding in size the normal
villein holding. The change from labour services to money rents left the
peasantry with time for the management of larger holdings, and the
spread of a money economy increased their means of acquiring them. Cheap
land and easy transfer favour the movement of property from one man to
another. In the manorial courts transfer was easy, and, especially after
the Great Plague, land was cheap. It is not necessary to take sides in
the much debated question of the economic conditions of the fifteenth
century, in order to hold that, on the whole, such changes made the
greater part of it a period of increasing prosperity among the small
cultivators. To support this view one could quote Fortescue's[208] proud
description of the well-being of the common people. One could point out
that in the dark days in the middle of the sixteenth century the
peasants themselves looked back to the social conditions of the reign of
Henry VII.[209] as a kind of golden age, and clamoured for their
restoration. One could cite a good many examples pointing to an upward
movement. Large estates are left at death by men who are legally
villeins. Villeins, especially in the eastern counties, buy up freehold
land and found considerable properties. A bond tenant in Lincolnshire
marries into a knight's family. Bond tenants are found leasing the
manorial demesne in one block and farming estates of several hundred
acres. Nor must we forget that the peasants of the sixteenth century are
often very substantial people, and that even when the taint of personal
villeinage is still upon them.
[208] Fortescue on the Governance of England (Plummer), chapter
xii.: "But oure commons be riche, and therefore thai give to
thair kynge, at somme times quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte
tymes other grate subsidies."
[209] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 48 foll.; see
passage quoted below, pp. 335?-337. For the sentences
immediately following, see Scrope, _History of the Manor and
Barony of Castle Combe_, p. 233: "A serf ... is said to have
left at his death in 1435 chattels estimated at 3000 marks or
£2000." Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, int. xxix.;
Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 53.
But isolated instances of this kind, suggestive though they are, are not
likely to carry conviction unless they agree with what we know of the
general economic situation. Economists who live after the days of Samuel
Smiles will hesitate before they base optimistic conclusions as to the
conditions of any class on cases of good fortune among individual
members of it. We should be false to the spirit of our period if we did
not recognise that the economic ideal of most men, an ideal often
implied though not often formulated, was less the opening of avenues to
enterprise than the maintenance of groups and communities at their
customary level of prosperity. We shall have hereafter to speak of the
changes which overtook the English social system in the course of the
sixteenth century, in so far as they were connected with changes in the
methods of agriculture and of land tenure. Before we do so we may pause
for a moment to look at the village of the later Middle Ages as a social
and economic unit.
The foundation of its whole life is the possession by the majority of
households of holdings of land. Land is so widely distributed that the
household, all of whose members are entirely dependent for their living
upon work for wages, is the exception. Though this cannot be
statistically proved, it is rendered almost certain by several
converging lines of evidence. Turn first to the table on pp. 64 and 65,
which sets out the acreage of the customary tenants' holdings. It will
be seen that, when all the counties represented are grouped together,
the tenants who have only cottages form less than one-tenth of the total
number. In East Anglia and in Lancashire the proportion, it is true, is
considerably higher; but these counties are exceptions to the general
rule, and the cottagers usually have gardens, which, if they do not
amount to the minimum of four acres laid down by the Act of 1589, are
nevertheless not infrequently of one or two acres in extent. If we may
trust these figures, the typical family has a small holding of from two
and a half to fifteen acres. Our second line of evidence quite falls in
with this conclusion. It is clear from the tone of legislation that the
class of workers who depend solely on a contract of service is in
sixteenth century England not very large. Elizabethan[210] legislation
provides expressly for the needs of farmers by empowering Justices of
the Peace to apprentice unoccupied youths to husbandry, and to set the
unemployed to work in the fields. Even in the middle of the
seventeenth[211] century, when a strong movement has been at work for
one hundred and fifty years in the opposite direction, there are
complaints from pamphleteers that men who should work as wage-labourers
cling to the soil, and in the naughtiness of their hearts prefer
independence as squatters to employment by a master. Such comments throw
a flash of light on the way in which the peasants regard the
alternatives of wage labour and landholding. Sometimes they themselves
give us a glimpse into their mind on the matter. They tell us how they
face that most fundamental of economic problems, the Achilles' heel of
modern civilisation, the problem of so arranging their little societies
that as many persons as possible may enter life with some material
equipment for self-maintenance in addition to their personal strength
and skill. Here is an extract from a customary of the Lancashire manor
of High Furness[212] drawn up in the reign of Elizabeth:--
"As heretofore deviding and porcioning 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 devide his tenement or
tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be of
ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d., and that before every
such division there shall be several houses and ousettes for every part
of such tenement."
This seems a hard rule. Will it not result in the creation of a body of
propertyless labourers employed by a small village aristocracy? That
danger is appreciated, and is dealt with in the clauses which follow:--
"If any customary tenant die seized of a customary tenement, having no
son but a daughter, or daughters, then the eldest daughter being
preferred in marriage shall have the tenement as his next heir, and she
shall pay to her younger sister, if she have but one sister, 20 years
ancient rent, as is answered to her Majesty; and if she have more than
one sister she shall pay 40 years ancient rent to be equally divided
among them....
"For the avoiding of great trouble in the agreement with younger
brothers, it is now ordered that the eldest son shall pay to his
brothers in the form following:--If there is but one brother, 12 years
ancient rent; if there are two brothers, 16 years ancient rent to be
equally divided.
"If there be three or more, 20 years ancient rent to be equally divided.
"Whereas great inconvenience has grown by certain persons that at the
marriage of son or daughter have promised their tenement to the same son
or daughter and their heirs, according to the custom of the manor, and
afterwards put the tenement away to another person; it is ordered that
whatever tenements a tenant shall promise to the son or daughter being
his sole heir apparent at the time of his or her marriage, the same
ought to come to them according to the same covenant, which ought to be
showed at the next court."
[210] Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. c. 4.
[211] See below, pp. 277?-279, and _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 784,
pp. 322?-323. Presentment by the grand jury, Worcestershire,
1661, April 23: "We desire that servants' wages may be rated
according to the statute, for we find the unreasonableness of
servants' wages a great grievance, so that the servants are
grown so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the
servant except it be because the servant wears better clothes
than his master. We desire that the statute for setting poor
men's children to apprenticeship be more duly observed, for we
find the usual course is that if any are apprenticed it is to
some paltry trade, and when they have served their
apprenticeship they are not able to live by their trades,
whereby not being bred to labour they are not fit for husbandry.
We therefore desire that such children may be set to husbandry
for the benefit of tillage and the good of the Commonwealth."
See also Britannia Languens (1680) for remarks on the scarcity
of labour even at the end of the seventeenth century.
[212] R.O. Duchy of Lancaster, Special Commissions, No. 398.
The motive of the first rule is a mixed one. Its object is partly to
obviate the risk that the Crown, which is lord, of the manor, may lose
its services if holdings are too much subdivided, partly to prevent the
appearance of a class which has too little land for a living. The motive
of the other rules is to ensure that the custom of primogeniture, which
obtains among the customary tenants on this manor, shall not result in
the creation of a propertyless proletariat. Holdings are not to be
divided. But the payment to other members of the family of a sum ranging
from about one-half to more than the whole of their capital value is
made a charge upon them, and with that money they can purchase land
elsewhere, or take, like the French peasant girl, a considerable _dot_
to their husbands. Sue,[213] the daughter of Old Carter, the rich
yeoman, whose security for the marriage-portion "shall be present
payment, because Bonds and Bills are but Tarriers to catch fools, and
keep lazy knaves busy," was a match for whom gentlemen's sons were
willing enough to compete.
[213] See Dekker's _The Witch of Edmonton_. I have ventured to
assume that in this play "yeoman" is used in its wide
non-technical sense.
These groups of from ten to a hundred households which constitute the
ordinary village of southern and middle England, form small democracies
of property holders, who are of course under the authority of a lord,
but whose subjection does not prevent them from exercising considerable
control over the management of their own economic affairs, nor impose
any effective bar on those individuals who have the means and capacity
to advance themselves. We can watch them arranging[214] the course of
agriculture, deciding when the pastures at Wolsyke and Willoughbybroke
are to be "broken," imposing fines on those who encroach on the several
pasture land, throwing open the Pesefield on Holy Thursday to the
village horses, shutting them out of Street headlands for fear of the
"stroyinge of Korn," making charitable provision for gleaners who cannot
work, punishing those who ought to work but in their depravity would
rather glean. We can observe how the wide distribution of land gives an
opportunity to a humble family to better itself by judicious husbandry
and well-calculated purchases. True, the peasant's land is no longer
held in approximately equal shares as generally as it had been in the
thirteenth century. The growth of a money economy, the withdrawal of the
levelling pressure of villeinage, the growth of population, has in the
more progressive parts of the country left a gap into which
individualising commercial forces wind themselves in the way which has
already been described. But these changes are important mainly as
precursors of more extensive innovations. As yet they have done little
more than make tiny breaches in the wall of custom. They have enabled
individuals to rise from the general level into positions of comparative
affluence. They have not proceeded so far as to enable the successful to
exercise a decisive direction over the economic affairs of their
fellows. Though Northumberland is exceptional in the way in which down
to the very end of the sixteenth century it preserves its system of
standardised holdings, it is none the less true that all the petty land
speculation, whose operations we have traced above, has not the effect
of producing any very large changes in the distribution of property. If,
when compared with its condition two hundred years before, the village
of our period shows remarkable irregularity, it offers precisely an
opposite aspect to the observer who compares it as it is then with its
condition two hundred years later. The gaps which have appeared between
the holdings mark the disintegrating influence of economic enterprise;
but they are gaps which enterprise can span, and the graduation of
holdings from the two or three acres of the humblest to the fifty or
sixty acres of the most prosperous, together with the abundance of
unoccupied land, supplies a kind of staircase along which in the country
the younger son can travel from the position of a labourer to that of a
small holder, as he does in the towns from apprentice to
master-craftsman. From this point of view the characteristic
_morcellement_ of holdings, so bitterly denounced by economists who,
like Arthur Young, approached the problem from the point of view of the
large farmer, was a positive advantage. It meant that land could be
bought and sold, as it were, retail. It meant that the labourer could
begin with one strip of land of half an acre, and add other strips to it
as he worked his way up. It meant that even the humblest peasant usually
had some live-stock of his own; for even the smallest customary holding
usually carried with it rights of common. Such conditions are, of
course, no safeguard against poverty. No doubt there were plenty of
people like Widow Quin, whose "leaky thatch is growing more pasture for
her buck goat than her square of fields."[215] But they are a safeguard
against destitution, and indeed against any complete loss of
independence.
[214] See _e.g. Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567, pp. 106-?107, and
below, pp. 159-?162.
[215] Synge, _The Playboy of the Western World_.
Let us turn to a part of England where something like the open field
system survives to this day, and ask the inhabitants what they think of
it. In the so-called Isle of Axholme there are still common fields with
intermixed strips. Here is the evidence[216] which a body of labourers
there sent into a Select Committee of Parliament in 1899: "We, the
undersigned, being agricultural labourers at Epworth, are in occupation
of allotments or small holdings, varying from two roods to three acres,
and willingly testify to the great benefit we find from our holdings.
Where we have sufficient quantity of land to grow two roods each of
wheat, barley, and potatoes, we have bread, beans, and potatoes for a
great part of the year, enabling us to face a long winter without the
dread of hunger or pauperism staring us in the face." One of the tests
by which the economic prosperity of a community may be measured is its
success in preventing the appearance of a residual population, which
cannot fit itself into the moving mechanism of industry without
ceaseless friction and maladjustments. In most villages before extensive
evictions begin that mechanism moves very slowly; property is widely
diffused, and the residuum must have been small. That there was often
distress through bad harvests and pestilence is certain. But was there
much of the economic helplessness, more terrible than physical distress
itself, which is the normal lot of most of the propertyless wage-earners
of the modern world? We hesitate to say. Hesitation on such a point may
perhaps be counted to our peasants for righteousness.[217]
[216] Quoted by Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure
of Common Fields_, pp. 58?-59. He remarks "a labourer ... begins
with one 'land,' then takes a second, a third, and so on," and
quotes Mr. Haggard's statement that the "Isle of Axholme ... is
one of the few places ... in England ... truly prosperous in an
agricultural sense."
[217] Customs like those of High Furness, together with the
complaints as to the scarcity of agricultural labour, make one
reflect on a fundamental question of economics, viz., the
average age of marriage and its relation to the distribution of
property and organisation of industry. It is well known that the
age of marriage is influenced by (among other things) the age at
which maximum earning power begins, _e.g._ to-day it is lower
for the unskilled labourer than for the artisan, for the former
reaches his prime earlier than the latter; lower for the artisan
than for the professional man, because the latter takes longer
than the former in getting together a practice or rising from a
low initial salary. The difference is not primarily due to
differences of thrift or foresight as between different classes,
but to the fact that the deferring of marriage, which is prudent
in (say) a lawyer, who does not reach his full earning power
till thirty-five or later, is imprudent in (say) an engineer who
has all the experience he needs at twenty-six or twenty-seven,
and still more imprudent in the labourer, who reaches his full
earning power at twenty-one or twenty-two, and in whom it falls
off rapidly after he has passed the prime of life. When a large
number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth
century probably a majority) were small landholders or small
masters, did the fact that they had to wait for the death of a
parent to succeed to their holding, or (in towns) for the
permission of a guild to set up shop (_i.e._ to reach their
maximum earning powers) tend to defer the age of marriage? If
the possibility of this being the case is conceded, ought we to
connect the slow growth of population between 1377 and 1500 (on
which all historians seem to be agreed) with the wide
distribution of property, and ought we to think of the
considerable increase in the landless proletariate which took
place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as tending in
the opposite direction? In the absence of statistics we cannot
answer these questions. But I am inclined to argue that they are
at any rate worth investigation. (i) Contemporary opinion shows
that in the eyes of sixteenth century writers the problem of
population was a problem of underpopulation. The prevalent fear
is "lack of men" for military purposes. Starkey's Dialogue
speaks of it as "a consumption of the body politic," and
suggests as remedies to allow priests to marry, to forbid
gentlemen to employ more serving men than they are able to "set
forward" to matrimony (on the ground that "men whych in service
spend theyr lyfe never fynd means to marry"), to endow with a
house and a portion of waste land at a nominal rent persons who
marry, to exempt from taxation all persons who have five
children and less than a hundred marks in goods, to tax
bachelors 1s. in the pound, and give the proceeds to "them which
have more children than they be wel abul to nurysch, and partely
to the dote of poor damosellys and vyrgins" (Part II. p. 8).
Hales (p. lv. of Miss Lamond's introduction to _Commonweal of
England_) speaks of depopulation in a similar strain, as also
does Harrison forty years later. There are some complaints as to
excess of population in 1620 (see below, pp. 278?-279), but
these do not become general till the very end of the seventeenth
century (see Defoe, _Giving alms no charity_). (ii) The position
of a son who acquires a holding when his parent dies is
analogous to that of an apprentice who cannot set up as a master
till given permission by the proper authorities. It is quite
plain that in the eyes of the ordinary man in the sixteenth
century one of the advantages of a system of compulsory
apprenticeship was that it prevented youths marrying at a very
early age. _E.g._ an Act (2 & 3 Philip and Mary) forbids the
admitting of any one to the freedom of the city of London before
the age of twenty-four, and enacts that apprentices are not to
be taken so young that they will come out of their time before
they are twenty-four. The reason alleged for this rule is the
distress in the city of which "one of the chief occasions is by
reason of the overhasty marriages and over soon setting up of
householdes by the young folke of the city ... be they never so
young and unskilful." A petition of weavers states (_Hist. MSS.
Com._, C.D. 784, p. 114): "Whereas by the former good laws of
their trade no one could exercise the same until he had served
an apprenticeship for seven years and attained the age of
twenty-four, now in these disordered times many apprentices
having forsaken parents and masters ... refuse to serve out
their time, but before they are eighteen or twenty years old
betake themselves to marriage." One may contrast the
extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage of the people of
Lancashire brought about by the early factory system, with its
armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the
wages earned immediately on reaching maturity (Gaskell,
_Artisans and Machinery_, 1836, and _The Manufacturing
Population of Great Britain_, 1833), and compare the results
usually ascribed to the wide distribution of landed property in
France. See also the remarks of Slater on the effect of the
eighteenth century enclosing (_The English Peasantry and the
Enclosure of the Common Fields_, p. 256), and Hasbach, _History
of the English Agricultural Labourer_, pp. 120 n. 138-?139, 178.
Young ascribed "a great multiplication of births" to the fact
that "the labourer has no advancement to hope" (_Suffolk_, 1797,
p. 260); Duncombe, "The practice of consolidating farms ...
tends to licentiousness of manners" (_Herefordshire_, p. 33). A
witness before the Select Committee on Emigration, 1827, stated,
"The labourers no longer live in farm houses as they used to do,
where they were better fed and had more comforts than they now
get in a cottage, in consequence there was not the same
inducement to early marriage" (_qu._ 3882). In the absence of
direct statistical evidence all we can say is (i) that when
persons look forward to entering on property or setting up as
small masters their point of maximum earning power is later than
it is when they can earn the standard rate of the trade at
twenty-two or twenty-three; therefore (ii) that the average age
of marriage is likely to be higher in a society composed largely
of small property owners than in one composed largely of a
propertyless proletariate.
In the second place, let us examine the use which the peasants make of
their holdings. Modern writers tell us that among the conditions
necessary to the prosperity of a class of small holders the most
important are a wise choice of the kind of farming to be pursued, a
sound organisation of credit, cheap marketing, and rural bye-employments
to back agriculture. Modern writers who are not English would probably
add a tariff on imported agricultural produce. In our period the type of
cultivation pursued by the large farmer was undergoing rapid changes.
That of the peasantry was hardly a matter of choice. It was dictated by
the necessity, under which most villages still lay, of being largely
self-supporting in the matter of corn supplies, a necessity recognised
and crystallised in the customary routine of village husbandry. The
preponderance of arable farming among the peasantry is illustrated by
the table[218] on page 107, which should be contrasted with that given
on pages 225?-226.
The figures in this table do not pretend to complete accuracy. But they
indicate the distribution of land between different uses with sufficient
correctness to show the sort of agriculture followed by the small holder
of our period. They prove unmistakably that his standby was the grain
crops grown on the open fields.[219] Students of rural conditions will
be quick to recognise the contrast which the picture offers to the
economy of the modern small holder. In our own day the breaking up of
large farms into smaller tenancies has proceeded furthest in those parts
of the country which are most suitable for pasture. The occupier of a
holding of less than 70 or 80 acres usually relies mainly on stock
farming in one form or another, and on the growing of vegetables and
fruit. Corn-growing he leaves to much larger men, and, when he does grow
grain, he does so mainly to provide fodder and straw for his beasts. In
the sixteenth century almost exactly the opposite was the case. In so
far as the large farmer with 200 or 300 acres can be said to have had a
specialty, it was not corn-growing but sheep and cattle grazing. The
small man relied mainly, though not entirely, upon tillage, and though,
even in his case, pasture farming assumed increased importance as the
century went on, grazing was chiefly a supplement to arable farming. To
this statement there are of course certain exceptions. Though villages
where the customary tenants hold more pasture than arable are rare, they
are not unknown, and occasionally one finds one where large numbers of
tenants of the most diverse economic conditions, with pasture holdings
ranging from 6 to 100 acres, have no arable at all. Sometimes such an
arrangement is to be accounted for by the fact that a part of the
demesne lands of the manor, which happens not to be suitable for
tillage, has been divided up among the population of younger sons and
labourers who have no holdings in the open fields. In the neighbourhood
of considerable towns, again, there was a market[220] for vegetables and
dairy produce which gave an impetus to this side of agriculture, and the
home counties poured butter and cheese, fowls, eggs, and fruit into
London, as France and the Channel Islands do at the present day. Still,
to speak broadly, the small holder of the sixteenth century, unlike the
small holder of the twentieth, was before all things interested in
arable farming, and interested in rights of pasture chiefly as a
necessary adjunct to it.
TABLE V
+-----------+---------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+
|Manors | | | | |
|(excluding | | | | |
|houses, | | | | |
|orchards, | total area. | arable. | meadow. | pasture. |
|garths, | | | | |
|_&c._). | | | | |
+-----------+---------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+
| | ac. ro. po. | ac. ro. po. |ac. ro. po. |ac. ro. po. |
|four in | | | | |
|northumber-| | | | |
|land and | | | | |
|one in | | | | |
|lancashire |1730 3 13-1/4|1533 2 32-3/4| 98 1 6-1/8| 98 3 14 |
| | | | | |
|seven in | | | | |
|wiltshire | | | | |
|and one | | | | |
|in dorset |3963 2 0 |3636 3 0 |124 3 0 |202 (in close |
| | | | | plus |
| | | | | consid- |
| | | | | erable |
| | | | | rights of |
| | | | | pasture |
| | | | | not |
| | | | | expressed |
| | | | | in acres).|
|four in | | | | |
|midlands | | | | |
|(bedford, | | | | |
|leicester, | | | | |
|northants, | | | |ac. ro. po. |
|stafford) |2092 3 2 |1670 2 17 | 167 3 32 |254 0 33 |
+-----------+---------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+
[218] See Appendix II.
[219] It must be remembered, however, that there was pasture on
the one field which every year lay fallow, and that the amount
of this does not appear in the figures given below.
[220] Camden Society, Norden, Speculum Britanniæ, Part I.,
Intro.: "And these commonly are so furnished with kyne that
their wives twice or thrice a week conveyeth to London mylke and
butter, cheese, apples, pears, frutmentye, hens and chickens,
baken, and other country drugs ... and this yieldeth them a
large comfort and relief."
Corn-growing in England has been for the last hundred years a branch of
farming so completely surrendered to the large capitalist, that it is
not easy to realise a state of things in which the typical corn-grower
was a man with less than 60 acres, and a man who could make a good
living from a holding of that size. To understand the economics of his
position we must think away the conditions which have in the last
century made it intolerable. Or rather we must think away all except
one. That one was the perennial problem of agricultural credit. In this
matter, certainly, the poorer among the peasantry suffered as their
successors all over the world suffer to-day. They were apt to be in the
grip of the moneylender. Cheap land, as the modern colonist knows, is of
little avail to the man who has not the capital needed to stock it, and
to carry over the interval between harvest and harvest, when his
receipts fall off but his expenses continue. In the endless arguments
which took place on the ethics of moneylending at a later date, it was a
common complaint that village financiers drove a hard bargain with the
peasants whom misfortune compelled to resort to them. In a backward
village the only man with capital to lend might be the local
corn-dealer, brewer, or maltster, the large farmer who held the lord's
demesne, or the lord of the manor himself and his agent. Like an
American farmer in the grip of an "elevator," the peasant who wanted
money for his crops had often to sell them to a dealer[221] who gave a
ridiculously low price for them, and then made an enormous profit by
holding them till the price of corn rose, or by sending them to a market
where there was a scarcity. Lords[222] of manors, it was said, helped
their tenants out of temporary difficulties by advancing them small
sums, and then used their advantage to screw extra labour on the demesne
out of them. Manor courts[223] in the Middle Ages had fined villagers
for usury, but one may suspect that these were capitalists too potent
for them to control, and one does not wonder at the headshakings of the
prudent Fitzherbert over the man whose method of farming compels him to
be a borrower. The form which charity and co-operative effort took
points in the same direction. Hospitals[224] and monasteries advance
money to buy seed. Well-to-do men aid their relatives by stocking their
farms for them. Gilds[225] make loans of cattle and sheep, and the last
legacy of a philanthropic parson to his parishioners is money with which
to buy a cow for the poor. How far the charitable and corporate
organisation of loans succeeded in keeping the small cultivator out of
the clutches of the usurer, and how far the dissolution of the
monasteries and the confiscation of part of the Gild lands deteriorated
their condition by placing them more at his mercy, are questions which
deserve consideration but which we have not sufficient evidence to
answer.[226] In forming any estimate, however, of rural conditions, the
hand to mouth economy of the poorer peasants, and their consequent
helplessness in the face of any unexpected catastrophe, such as an
unusually bad harvest, a cattle plague, and (in the fifteenth century)
the destruction of crops by civil disturbances, must not be forgotten.
In that age less capital was needed to stock a holding than in our own,
but it was scraped together with even greater difficulty. On the very
eve of the dissolution of the monasteries there were some remote manors
where "Money was so scantie that coigned leather went bargaining between
man and man,"[227] and where corn rents were substituted for money
because the tenants had no money in which rent could be paid.
[221] See _The Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurers_, 1594:
"It is a common practice in this country, if a poore man come to
borrow money of a maltster, he will not lend any, but tells him,
if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of
fore-hand buyers; the man being driven by distresse sells his
corn far under foote, that when it comes to be delivered he
loses halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value. I have heard
many of these fore-hand sellers say that they had rather allow
after 20 pounds in the hundred for money, than to sell their
fore-hand bargaines of corn. These are most extreme usurers."
[222] _A Discourse upon Usurie_, by Thomas Wilson, 1584: "A lord
doth lend his tenants money, with this condition that they shall
plough his land, whether doth he commit usurie or no? I do
answer that if he does not pay them for their labour, but will
take the benefit of their labour for the use of his money, he is
an usurer."
[223] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 2319, p. 27: "Juetta ... is a
usuress, and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation."
[224] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 7881, p. 129, St. Saviour's
Hospital gives "20d to a poor man to buy seed for his land."
[225] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk, "Social and Economic
History": "The gild let out in one year 8 cows and 4 neats at
19d. each." For the parson's cow, see _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd.
784, p. 46.
[226] On the subject of the monasteries see Gasquet, _Henry
VIII. and the English Monasteries_, chap. xxii., and _passim_.
[227] For reference see below, p. 198, n. 2.
On the other hand, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth
century began, and in those parts of the country which were least
affected by them, the economic environment was in other respects
favourable to the class of which we have been speaking. As far as
corn-growing is concerned, _petite culture_ flourishes most readily when
the methods of production are primitive and trade little developed. It
is not necessary to point out that, in the sphere of production, the
conditions which have given its present tremendous advantage to
large-scale corn-growing are the fruit of the last century, and that in
our period there were neither machinery nor expensive manures to require
the outlay of large capital, and to make arable farming almost a branch
of factory industry. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the
growth of prosperity among the peasants had been accompanied by an
improvement in the technique of cultivation. Not to mention the part
which they took in enclosures, of which we shall speak later, there
were, at any rate by the beginning of the seventeenth century, certain
exceptional parts of the country where it was said[228] that in good
years from thirty-two to eighty bushels of grain were raised to an
acre, instead of the ten which Walter of Henley had thought a fair
return in the thirteenth. We may believe this or not as we like;
probably we should discount it by at least one-half. But even the
average peasant, who could not possibly make his land perform these
prodigies, was buttressed by the natural protection of unpassable roads,
which tended to make every village, even almost every landholding
family, more or less self-sufficing in the matter of food supplies. A
highly organised corn trade is as unfavourable to the existence of small
corn-growers as a wide market is to the small master-craftsman, because
it sets a premium upon the qualities needed for business
management--qualities often quite different from those needed for
effective farming--and thus (in the absence of co-operation) plays into
the hands of the capitalist, who buys and sells in bulk and can pick his
market. To the mass of the peasantry in our period the commercial side
of agriculture offered no problem, because for the mass of the peasantry
it did not exist. The wealthier among them, it is true, did grow corn
for the market, and sent their supplies far afield through the hands of
middlemen, much further sometimes, if we may believe contemporaries,
than Customs Officials should have allowed. In certain parts of England
rudimentary industrial specialisation had made a regular corn trade a
necessity. In Norfolk,[229] for example, where manufactures and
agriculture had drawn apart to an extent unknown elsewhere, a rough
local division of labour was concentrating the woollen industry in that
part of the country most suitable for grazing, and was bringing together
a huge population of wage-earners, who depended for their food supplies
on the grain produced by the "tilth masters" in "the champion part of
the country," and whose needs baffled the traditional policy of trying
to prevent corners by checking the transport of corn. But down to the
very end of the eighteenth century, and still more under the Tudors,
there was a large body of small landholders who pursued their way
undisturbed by market fluctuations because they grew wheat almost
entirely for subsistence. To a foreign observer[230] English agriculture
in the reign of Henry VII. seemed "not to be practised beyond what is
required for the consumption of the people." Between the two extremes of
capitalist farmer and hired labourer, the poles between which the needle
of the Government's policy as to prices uneasily oscillates, there
stands the man whose family consumes the product of his land, and who
rarely puts his small supplies on the market, because, if he tries to do
so, "he loseth[231] the labours of himself, his horse and carte, and
husbandry at home," and "is in hazard to pay deare for a place to
chamber it till the next market day." Such a man, if entirely occupied
in tillage, did little more than supply the wants of his own household;
if a sheep farmer as well, he worked up the wool in his own home in the
manner enjoined on thrifty housewives by Fitzherbert. From the point of
view of national welfare his security was purchased by the distress in
which the difficulty of moving corn supplies involved the wage-earner.
The constant local famines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
should remind us that the more self-sufficing a country's agricultural
economy, the narrower the margin there is likely to be between the
landless classes and starvation. But with them for the present we are
not concerned, and if we confine our attention to the landholding
peasantry we can see that to them the backwardness of trade was a
positive advantage. The risk of spoiling good farming by ineffective
marketing was not one which faced the small holders of our period.
[228] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_. He is speaking of parts
of Somersetshire. "Now I say if this sweet country of Tandeane
and the western part of Somersetshire be not degenerated,
surely, as their land is fruitful by nature, so doe they their
best by art and industrie ... they take extraordinary pains in
soyling, plowing, and dressing their land.... After the plough
there goeth some 3 or 4 with mattocks to break the clods ...
they have sometimes and in some places foure, five, six, eight,
yea tenne quarters in an ordinary acre." For Walter of Henley's
figures see Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 437-438.
Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth century estimated the
average yield "in a year of moderate plenty" at a little more
than 11 bushels (Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_,
vol. v. pp. 92 and 783). I quote Norden not as giving what was
general, but to show what it was thought could be done.
[229] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological
Society_, 1907.
[230] Camden Society, 1857, _An Italian Narration of England_.
[231] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological
Society_, 1907.
Moreover, in estimating the causes which in the fifteenth century
favoured a growth in their prosperity, we should not overlook that it
was a period in which commercial policy encouraged the corn-grower. In
the series of compromises which were struck between the interests of the
farmer and those of the consumer the scale during the greater part of
it was tilted in the direction of the former, and when success had
caused his holding to grow to a size which made trade in grain
inevitable, he dealt in a market which the Government tried to turn in
his favour. That section of the industry which supplied the market
obviously gained by freedom of export and by import duties upon foreign
wheat, though the fact that England was largely a corn exporting country
made the latter less important than the former. From 1437 to 1491 free
export of wheat was permitted, subject to the obligation to obtain an
export licence when prices in the home market rose above a certain
point. In 1463 the same policy was carried furthur, and an Act was
passed restricting its importation. Such a commercial[232] policy was no
doubt adopted mainly in the interests of the great landed proprietors.
But that the prosperity of the small cultivators was to some extent
bound up with the Government's encouragement of corn-growing can hardly
be doubted. Competent observers in the sixteenth century gave its
abandonment by the Tudors as one cause of the subsequent decline in the
condition of the peasantry, and a return to it as one remedy for their
distress.
[232] See below, p. 197.
If the peasantry were favoured in the fifteenth century by a state of
things in which the small corn-grower's position was still unshaken, did
they not also gain by the beginnings of industrial expansion and by the
pasture farming that accompanied it? That a man who was mainly dependent
upon tillage might also be a grazier upon a considerable scale, is shown
by the following table of the animals kept by the customary tenants on
six[233] manors in the south of England.
I. II. III. IV.
Manors. Customary Tenants. Sheep kept by Customary Other Beasts
Tenants. (minimum).
6 112 7440 793
[233] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_; _cf._ R.O. _Land Rev. Misc. Bks._, 182, fol. 1,
Rental of the late Priory of Launde (Leicestershire, 1539),
where there are tenants paying for common pasture for about 430
sheep.
One must not, of course, forget that a certain number of beasts were
indispensable to arable farming. Perhaps one-third or one-half the
cattle in column IV. should be written off as simply part of the
corn-grower's necessary equipment. The sixteenth century small holder,
who keeps plough beasts, is no more a grazier on that account than his
twentieth century successor, who uses his grain for fodder, is a
corn-grower. But, when this has been remembered, we may perhaps allow
these figures to remind us that in the agriculture even of the small man
there was room for considerable diversity, and that in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries it was probably much more diversified than it had
been two centuries before. So much is said in the writings of our period
of the harm done by the great grazier, that we perhaps do not always
sufficiently realise that the customary tenants both then and long
before were often themselves graziers on a considerable scale. They
raise stock, and are interested in the woollen trade as well as in the
corn-growing. Ultimately, when time enough had elapsed for the
profitableness of sheep farming to supply lords of manors with a motive
for clearing away interests which interfered with the formation of sheep
runs, the movement for laying down land to pasture did result in
evictions and rack-renting. But, looking at the fifteenth century as a
whole, may we not say with some confidence that the growth of the
woollen industry must have brought increasing prosperity to many
villages? Though it is not till almost the last decade that complaints
of enclosing become sufficiently clamorous to attract the attention of
the Government, the spread of woollen manufacturers into rural districts
was going quietly on throughout the whole century, and benefited the
peasants both by the lucrative bye-employment which they offered to both
sexes, and by the alternative to arable farming which the demand for
wool supplied in the shape of sheep-grazing. The large number of sheep
kept by the customary tenants of many manors in the south of England,
and the increase in the complaints as to the over-stocking of commons
contained in the Court Rolls of the fifteenth century, show that they
were not slow to seize the opportunity, and that the great pasture
farms, which aroused the indignation of More and Latimer, had their
precedent in the small flocks of thirty or forty sheep which had long
been run by the peasantry upon the common wastes or pastures. It would
seem that, as so often happens, the new departure was first made on a
small scale by small men, and chat it was not until some time had
elapsed that its wholesale adoption by large capitalists plunged them in
distress. The movement towards pasture-farming as a special branch of
agriculture is one that proceeds gradually for a hundred years, before
the demand for wool becomes sufficient to produce the body of capitalist
graziers whose interests come into sharp collision with those of the
peasantry.
But after all, the profits arising from favourable economic
circumstances may be of very little advantage to the mass of
cultivators. They may simply be handed on to the landlord in the shape
of increased rents. At a time when, both in Ireland and Scotland, rents
are being fixed by public tribunals, we are not likely to forget that
the profitableness of agriculture has no necessary connection with the
prosperity of tenants. Trade may be increasing, and the return from the
land may be growing, and yet those things may profit the farmers and
peasants very little, unless they have some security that they will not
see them drained away in increased payments for their land. It is
important, therefore, to consider how far rents were competitive and how
far they were customary, how far the tenants held the surplus due to
economic progress, and how far it passed to the landlord.
Some light is thrown on the general situation by the following
table[234]:--
TABLE VI
+---------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| Manor. | Rents. |
+--------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| | |
| | 1295-1308 1568 |
|1. South Newton | £13 19 3-1/2 £14 4 8 |
| | |
| | 1347 1421 1485 1628 |
|2. Ingoldmells | £61 9 4 £71 10 3 £72 6 8 £73 17 2 |
| | |
| | 1287 1567 |
|3. Crondal | £53 7 0 £103 2 8-3/4 |
| | |
|4. Sutton Warbling- | |
| ton | 1351 1567 |
| | £5 17 4-3/4 £8 10 4 |
| | |
| | 1295 1542 |
|5. Aspley Guise | £7 8 4 £10 5 10 |
| | |
| | 1248 1567 1585 |
|6. Birling | £9 2 6-1/2 £14 9 4 £14 9 4 |
| | |
| | 1352 1478 1567 1580 |
|7. Acklington | £18 13 2 £19 13 11 £19 13 5 £20 0 5 |
| | |
| | 1483 1505 |
|8. Cuxham | £9 9 3 £8 9 3 |
| | |
| | 1483 1600 |
|9. Ibstone | £4 8 10 £3 15 0-1/2 |
| | |
| | 1498 1567 1585 1702 |
|10. High Buston | £3 12 0 £3 12 0 £3 12 0 £12 0 0 |
| | |
| | 1539 1608 |
|11. Amble | £22 14 6 £16 0 5 |
| | |
| | "The reign of King Henry VII." 1529 |
|12. Malden | £4 9 10 £4 6 7 |
| | |
| | 1527 1588 1607 |
|13. Kibworth | £23 6 7 £26 15 1 £19 14 5 |
| | |
| | 1304-5 1348-9 1373-4 1461 |
|14. Standon | £21 17 3 £23 8 0 £23 2 2-1/2 £33 3 3-1/2|
| | |
| | 1317-8 1445-6 Henry VIII. |
|15. Feering | £29 10 9-1/2 £32 14 10 £16 2 6-1/2 |
| | |
| | 38-39 Henry VI. |
| | 1321 Henry VI. (1460) |
|16. Appledrum | £7 0 11 £10 11 6 £13 14 10-1/2 |
| | |
| | 1357 1501 |
|17. Minchinhampton | £41 14 4 £41 19 9 |
| (works) | £4 18 0 |
| | |
| | 1280 1441 1547 |
|18. Langley Marish | £20 16 5-1/2 £24 0 0 £45 3 5-3/4 |
| | |
| | Henry VI. 1521 James I. |
|19. Lewisham | £8 11 7 £23 1 6-1/2 £90 3 3 |
| | |
|20. Cuddington. For | Edward III.(?) 15th century(?) James I. |
| terms of Easter | £6 4 2-3/4 |
| and Michaelmas | |
| (for whole year) | £12 8 5-1/2(?) £15 16 7 £9 19 8-3/4 |
| | |
|21. Isleworth | 1314-15 1386-7 1484-5 |
| (Michaelmas) | £21 16 10 £23 3 10-1/4 £18 18 0 |
| | |
|22. Wootton (free | |
| and customary | 1207 1607 |
| tenants) | £9 11 2 £13 19 0-1/2 |
| | |
| | 1271-2 1547 |
|23. Speen | £6 13 9-3/4 £17 4 2 |
| | |
| | 1303-4 1314-15 1478-9 |
|24. Schitlington | £29 13 0-1/2 £30 4 10 £58 11 9 (exclusive of|
| | ferm of land|
| | and ferm of |
| | manor). |
| | |
|25. Cranfield (rent | |
| of vill including | 1383-4 1474-5 1519-20 |
| ferm of lands) | £68 15 2 £63 19 10-1/4 £72 2 1-3/4 |
| | |
| | 1325-6 1482-3 |
|26. Holywell | £12 18 2 £22 7 8 |
| | |
| | 1536 1803 |
|27. Farleigh | £4 9 9 £4 15 5 |
+--------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
[234] For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II.
It will be seen that, in spite of some considerable increases, many
rents were comparatively stationary during long periods of time.
Moreover, in all probability, they were more stationary than is
suggested by the statistics given above. For at the earlier dates there
were works the value of which usually does not appear among the money
rents. As time went on, more land was brought under cultivation and the
demesne was leased; and though an attempt has been made to exclude the
latter factor, it is not always possible to do so with certainty. The
later figures, therefore, are, if anything, a more exhaustive account of
the tenants' burdens than the earlier, and the small difference which
exists between them on several manors is for this reason all the more
remarkable.
These figures, it will be said, if they prove anything, prove too much.
Do we not know that one of the grievances of the peasantry in the
sixteenth century was the rack-renting of their holdings? Have we not
the evidence of Fitzherbert, Latimer, and Hales to prove it? To these
questions one must answer that it is certainly true that lords of manors
did make a strenuous effort to get from their tenants increased payments
for their holdings, and that the success which in many cases they
achieved was one great cause of the decline in the condition of the
peasantry. The matter, however, is not so simple as it appears. In
respect of their liability to be competitively rented, some parts of the
lands of a manor stood on a different footing from others; and again,
fixed rents of customary lands were quite compatible with movable fines.
An attempt will be made in subsequent chapters[235] to illustrate both
the rack-renting of those parts of a manor where the rent was least
controlled by custom, and the upward movement of the fines charged on
the admission of tenants to their holdings. These figures of stationary
or almost stationary rents must not, therefore, be taken as giving a
full account of the relations between the customary tenants and the
manorial authorities, as though there was no other way in which the
latter could compensate themselves. Subject to this qualification,
however, they do indicate that, at any rate on the customary holdings
which formed the kernel of the manor, there is for a very long period
little rack-renting. They suggest that the tenants' payments have a
fixity which would make Arthur Young tear his hair. They fall in line
with the statements of authorities like Fitzherbert and Norden as to the
difficulty experienced by the manorial officials in forcing up rents of
assize, that "are as in the beginning, neither risen nor fallen, but doe
continue always one and the same." And this fixity of rents is a factor
in the prosperity of the peasantry which can hardly be over-estimated.
When not neutralised by exorbitant fines, it means that any surplus
arising on the customary tenements as the result of growing trade, or of
the fall in the value of money, or of improved methods of agriculture,
anything in fact which is in the nature of economic rent, is retained by
the tenants. Secured by the custom of the manor, as by a dyke, against
the competitive pressure which under modern conditions transfers so much
of the fruits of progress into the hands of the owners of land and
capital, they enjoy an unearned increment which grows with every growth
in economic prosperity, and have an interest in their holdings almost
similar to that of a landlord who is burdened only with a fixed
rent-charge like the English land tax. One of the best established
generalisations of economics, ground into the English people by thirty
years of misery, is that the effect of agrarian protection is to make a
present to landlords. But agrarian protection itself wears a different
complexion when the rise in rents which it produces is not transferred
to a small and wealthy class of absentee owners, but retained by
thousands of men who are themselves cultivating the soil.
[235] See below, pp. 139-147 and 304-310.
Lest such a picture should seem to be drawn too much in the spirit of
the economic theorist, let us make its meaning more precise by pointing
out that the retention of the unearned increment by copyhold tenants was
a fact of which the manorial authorities were perfectly well aware, and
the results of which they were sometimes at pains to estimate
arithmetically by setting side by side with the actual rent paid the
rent which the holdings would fetch if put up to competition. Four
examples may be given. At Amble,[236] in 1608, the surveyor gives the
rent of the customary tenants as £16, 0s. 5d., and "the annual value
beyond rent" as £93, 4s. 4d. On the great manor of Hexham[237] in the
same year the rents of the 314 copyhold tenants amounted to £126, 4s.
8-1/4d.; the "value above the oulde Rentes" was £624, 4s. 1d. In the
various townships of the manor of Rochdale[238] part of the land was
rack-rented. But a great deal of it was held at payments which left the
tenant a substantial margin between the rent which he paid to the king
and the letting value of the land, a margin which varied from 2d. an
acre in parts of Wardleworth, to 6d. an acre in parts of Wardle, 8d. an
acre in Walsden, and 10d. an acre in Castleton. On the manor of
Barkby[239] in Leicestershire the difference was still more striking.
The rents paid by free and customary tenants together amounted in 1636
to £11, 8s. 7-1/2d.; the value of their holdings was put by the
surveyor at £215, 1s. 6d. And, of course, the fact that these rentals
come from the very end of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the
seventeenth, centuries, makes the evidence which they offer of the
inability of manorial authorities to insist on copyhold rents keeping
pace with the rising value of land, when they had every motive to
enforce such correspondence if they could, all the more significant. For
a century they have been screwing up rents wherever they can, and here
are tenants, who, as far as rents go, put 6d. in their own pockets for
every 1d. they give to the landlord. Let us repeat that these figures,
striking as they are, would, if taken by themselves, give a misleading
impression of the position of the copyhold tenants. Even when the lord
of a manor cannot break the barrier opposed by manorial custom to a rise
in rents, he may be able to dip his fingers in the surplus by raising
the fines charged on admission; he may be all the more exacting in
screwing the last penny out of those holdings where the rent is not
fixed by custom. But though we must not forget the other side of the
shield, though the very fixity of rents on many manors should make us
scrutinise other conditions very carefully, we must not forget either
that a tenant whose rent is unaltered for 200 or 250 years, a tenant
who, after a period of sweeping agrarian changes in which a bitter cry
has gone up against the exactions of landlords, is paying a fifth, or a
sixth, or even an eighteenth of what could be got for his holding in the
open market, is a tenant whom most modern English farmers would envy.
Whatever his other disadvantages he has at any rate one condition of
prosperity. He will not be eaten up by rack-renting. No wonder that such
a man can accumulate capital and buy up land to add to his holding. No
wonder that he can sublet parts of it at a profit. No wonder that in the
day of agrarian oppression the wealthier peasantry stands stubbornly
against it, that they can carry cases from one court to another, and
that there are manors where they boast that "20[240] of them would
spend 20 score pounds" in fighting an unpopular landlord. On the whole,
the individual cases of enterprise and prosperity among the customary
tenants of the fifteenth century do fit into the view that the economic
environment was favourable to the peasantry. They may be regarded as
symptoms, not exceptions.
[236] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ii.
[237] _Ibid._, vol. iii. pp. 86?-94. On this manor at the time
of the survey, though the distinction between the old rent and
the "cleare yearly value above the old rent" was noted, the
latter seems to have been tapped by a rise in rents ("cleere
improved rent above the ould rent").
[238] _Rochdale Manor Inquisition_, 1610, by H. Fishwick
(_Trans. of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society_, vol.
vii.).
[239] Merton Documents, MSS. Book labelled "Kibworth and Barkby,
1636." For another illustration of fixed copyhold rents, see
Maitland, _English Hist. Review_, vol. ix.: The History of a
Cambridgeshire Manor.
[240] Quoted, Leadam, "The Security of Copyholders in the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" (_English Historical Review_,
vol. viii. pp. 684-?696). The case in question was that of the
inhabitants of Thingden _v._ John Mulsho.
Here, perhaps, we should stop. What manner of men these were in that
personal life of which economics is but the squalid scaffolding; what
stars threw for them their beams on that tremendous whirlpool of
religion and politics into which Europe was plunging, we cannot say. Of
the hopes and fears and aspirations of the men who tilled the fields
which still give us in due season their kindly fruit, we know hardly
more than of the Roman plebs, far less than of the democracy of Athens.
Yet these men too had their visions. Their silence is the taciturnity of
men, not the speechlessness of dumb beasts.
That the peasantry as a class were no politicians was a natural
consequence of the position which they had occupied throughout the
Middle Ages. On a small number among them, in the Eastern counties a
large number, the State had for centuries showered duties and
obligations with a lavish hand, and the freeholders, though they must
often have cursed the tediousness of suit of court, and jury service,
and Parliamentary elections, turned that tiresome discipline to good
account in the days when the Stuarts had contrived to make politics to
thousands of heavy-handed obstinate people throughout England a matter
not only of money but of conscience. The non-participation of the bulk
of the peasantry in the same large interests was not due to poverty, for
often the copyholders were wealthier than the freeholders who listened
to Pym and Hampden on that first great election campaign in 1640, and
left their farms to fight for King or Parliament. Nor was it due to
timidity or lack of spirit, for, as we shall see later, they frequently
asserted themselves in the course of the sixteenth century in their own
characteristic way of agrarian strikes.[241] It was rather that the
centre of their interests and their social horizon were different. The
freeholders from an early date had been brought into contact with the
chief institutions of the organised political state. Since the twelfth
century they had been protected in their holdings by the courts, and had
learned through that cunning procedure which was the fruit of Henry
II.'s[242] sleepless nights, that though often one cannot do much with
the law, one can do even less without it. Since the thirteenth century
they, along with their social superiors, had returned members to
Parliament, and had acquired that facility in grumbling at taxation
which is the beginning, though not, as is so commonly supposed, the end,
of political wisdom. Thus they became a body in whose eyes the Law,
Parliament, the State, loomed up, though for ages dimly enough, as a big
something which it is well to have on your side, something which
requires, like the new fangled arquebuses, to be carefully handled,
something which, if neglected, may give you a surprising shock, but if
treated with proper respect may teach manners even to your landlord. Of
course your first duty is to him. You ride and fight for him readily
enough as your fathers did. But still, you do it because you have said
you will, not because he has said you shall, and though London lawyers
are a pack of knaves, it is good to know that the law will, if
necessary, make him see the difference.
[241] See below, pp. 329-331.
[242] Bracton, f. 164 b.: "Succuritur ei per recognitionem
Assisæ novæ dissesinæ multis vigiliis excogitatam et inventam"
(quoted Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, vol. i.
p. 125 n.).
But the freeholders have been for centuries a privileged class, and
those of the peasants who are copyholders, a far more numerous body, are
in a very different position. Your fathers were villeins, who hung on
the words of the upstart manorial officials, who "had no right to know
at night what they should do on the morrow,"[243] who never had the
bitter satisfaction of grumbling that they got no return for the wages
paid to the knights of the shire, who had no redress from the King's
Courts if threatened with eviction. Of course you are not in the same
position now. Your blood has been purged of the servile taint for
generations. The lawyers have been competing for your business, and so
the Court of Chancery has invented a new procedure to protect you in
your holding. "When thieves fall out...." Still, it is better to run no
risk of offending your superiors, for the law is a chancy thing, and
your title (you keep the copy under lock and key and refuse to show it
to the new surveyor lest he should twist it into meaning what it
doesn't) is none too clear.[244] Deep down in your mind, beneath the
prosperity of to-day, there are dim memories of old, unhappy, far-off
things, and your shoulders slouch at their recollection. _Weh dir dass
du ein Enkel bist!_ The bailiff has invented a pedigree as long as your
arm to prove that your great-grandfather was a villein, and had no
business to have bought his freedom for the preposterous reason that the
money with which he bought it was the lord's all along. The toadying
beast is even trying to curry favour by saying that your copyhold is for
life only, and that your fine is uncertain. True, there are plenty of
ancient inhabitants who will swear in the manor court that your family
has lived in the village before the present lord was ever heard of. But
it is easy to bully and cajole them into silence. Were not Walter and
Hugh turned adrift, "weeping bitterly," because money had to be found to
pay the young lord's debts? As a copyholder, then, you are much less
conscious of the State than if you are a freeholder, because in the
matter which interests you most, the security of your holding, you have
for centuries had no dealings with the State at all. Your idea of
Government is a vague reverence for a King who sits far away in
Westminster with a crown on his head and his judges about him, and who
governs his kingdom as a good lord--not like yours--governs his manor.
For the rest you are a non-political animal, who take little interest in
affairs of State, because in the past the State has taken so little
interest in you. When your fathers made London tremble in the great days
of 1381 (you can see from your hay-stack the hill where they were
hanged, hanged "like dogs"[245]) what they demanded was fair rents and
freedom from villein services. When you went out with Ket in 1549 you
asked the same, and, untaught by their experience, you begged that the
King would see that you had the fair play which his Justices of the
Peace, who are your landlords, will never allow you.[246] When King and
Parliament come to blows, you curse both impartially, remain neutral as
long as you can, and only turn out when they begin driving the village
beasts. Your sentiments are pithily expressed in the motto which a local
wit has devised for the village banner: "If you take our cattle, we will
give you battle."[247]
[243] Bracton, Lib. iv. cap. 28, f. 208.
[244] _Northumberland County History_, vol. iii., Pt. V., pp.
86-?104, Survey of Hexham (1608): "Their fines they pretend to
be certain, viz. one year's rent at everye change of tenant, but
not herritable. They have there, for certaine, very ancient
evidences and Court Rolls, but they woulde not show them unto
us, nor any of their coppies." See also Appendix I. No. IV.
[245] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Part VII., pp. 49?-50 (1596): Some
information concerning those intending the rebellion in
Oxford.... "And Steer said that there was once a rising at
Enscombe Hill by the commons, and they were persuaded to go down
and were after hanged like dogs. 'But,' said he, 'we will never
yield, but will go through with it!'"
[246] See below, pp. 334?-337.
[247] Warburton's _Rupert_, iii., 118 (quoted Gooch, _English
Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_, p. 112).
If, however, the peasantry are on the whole uninterested in the larger
problems of government to which the world has agreed to confine the word
politics, this is not because they are incapable of self-help, or
destitute of any conception of public expediency. It is because the
framework of their lives has for ages been different from that of the
freeholders, because the centre round which their social interests
revolve is even more localised than it is to the freeholders, because
what matters to them most is not the law of the land but the custom of
the manor. We shall have hereafter[248] to discuss the vexed question of
the legal position occupied by the copyholders in the sixteenth century.
But we may pause for a moment to point out here the decisive part which
custom had played, and still played in our period, in moulding the lives
of the mass of the peasantry, because unless this is firmly grasped we
cannot understand their mental horizon. It is the custom of the manor
which gives them their social environment and their conception of public
order. The commonest name for all those who hold neither freely nor by
lease is "customary tenants," men whose title is rooted in custom. When
the courts begin to interfere to protect copyholders, they introduce
that sweeping innovation under the guise of enforcing customary
conditions. They do not say "copyholders can be evicted." Nor do they
say "copyholders cannot be evicted." They say, "Tell us what the custom
of your manor is, and if it is one which does not seem to a plain man
too unreasonable, we will enforce it." When tenants and landlords fall
out, it is always to custom that the tenants appeal. When the peasants
ask the Government for assistance, they do so by demanding the
observance of their "old customs."
[248] See below, pp. 287?-310.
Let us look at the custom of the manor more closely. The phrase has, of
course, misleading suggestions for modern ears. We tend to think of
custom as something indefinite and inconclusive; something which is not,
like the law (we speak of what should be), the embodiment of reason;
something which fetters progress and is the opposite of freedom;
something which is mere habit, and very likely a "bad habit" at that.
All this is true in a sense. It is the way in which in the sixteenth
century an enterprising landlord looks at the custom which ties his
hands. But it is not the way in which it is regarded by the peasants.
The custom of the manor does not mean to them a mere feeble acquiescence
in existing conditions, mere inertia. It is not a negative, but a
positive thing. It is no more inconsistent with progress to observe the
custom, than it is inconsistent with progress to keep out of gaol by
observing the law. For the custom is simply the law of the village. Like
the main rules of the common law, it comes down from a dim age that is
beyond the memory of man. Like law it is enforced by a court, the court
of the manor. Like law it can be altered (and in some respects and on
some manors often is altered to meet the new conditions of our period)
by the proper authority, which again is the court of the manor. Of
course it is not law in the fullest sense. From one standpoint it is the
antithesis of law, the law of the King's Courts, which, till the end of
the fourteenth century, has taken no cognizance of the customary
tenures, though since that time the Court of Chancery, by intervening to
enforce the custom of the manor in respect of copyholds, has been
breaking down the opposition. Still, for the mass of the peasantry, even
in the sixteenth century, custom is a bigger, more important, thing than
the law of the national courts. It is with custom that the first
decision will lie.
Again, the custom of the manor is not at all a vague or indefinite
thing. That it reposed partly on the Court Rolls, partly on the memory
of ancient inhabitants, we can see from the frequent appeals which are
made to both of them. But it certainly is no mere nebulous tradition. On
the contrary, it is often most rigorous in its precision. It lays down
boundaries and numbers stocks and stones. It adjusts and readjusts
agricultural arrangements. It enters into the details of social life
with a bold hand. Let us reflect, to take an example, on the customs of
High Furness, parts of which have been quoted above. Here we have a
whole village agreeing about matters which do not at first sight seem,
like the use of pastures or the fixing of boundaries, of a specially
public character. The term on which a man's property is to be
distributed among his descendants, this, if anything, one might expect
to be left to his own discretion, once the succession of an heir to
maintain the rents and services due from the holding had been provided
for. The rules quoted above go much further than this. They settle
exactly what proportion of a man's property is to go to his different
children, male and female, from the eldest down to the youngest. Imagine
a Parish Council to-day distributing the wealth of deceased parishioners
with the object of seeing that the whole of the younger generation shall
obtain some kind of start in life, and you will have an analogy to what
is done by the prudent men of High Furness.
Or take another example, where the points handled are of a somewhat
different kind. Here are the customs of the manor of Bushey,[249] as set
out in 1563 by twenty customary tenants in response to an inquiry by the
lord:--
"In primis to the fyrste article we saye that no copyholder at the tyme
of his death dying seased of twoo copyholdes hathe paid any more than
one quycke heriott by the tyme of any remembrance, or before, to our
knowledge.
"Item to the seconde we saye that the lorde oughtte to have the second
beste for hys herryott and the heyer the beste.
"Item to the thyrde we saye that the copyholder that doth surrender his
copyholde ought not to paye any herryott upon the surrender of his
copyholde except yt be in extreme of deathe.
"Item to the fourth we saye that lords of the mannor have never demanded
nor any copyholder payde any more for their ffyne than one yere's rente
of the lande.
"Item to the fyfth we saye that the widdowe upon the deathe of her
husbande shall have the thyrde parte of the rente of the lande, but not
the thyrde part of the lande except yt be surrendered to her by her
husbande.
"Item to the syxth we saye that the copyholder may sell hys underwoode
and stocke upp by the roote the same wytheout lycense of the lorde.
"Item to the seventh we saye that the copyholder may fell tymber for
reparacion or otherwyse to sell the same to hys use and profyt; so hathe
yt byn used by our tymes and by all tyme beyond the memory of man.
"Item to the eytthe we saye that the copyholder may make a grante of hys
copyholde for three yeres wythoute the lord's lycense, and the lorde to
take nothing for the same.
"Item to the nineth we saye that the tenants maye take surrender bothe
within the manor and without the manor.
"Item to the tenth we saye that we cannot answer for that we knowe not
every man's lande.
"Item to the eleventh we saye that every copyholde is not heryottable.
"Item to the xiith we knowe not where the Courte Rolles, Rentals, or
customaryes of the manor are remayning or in whose custodye.
"Item to the xiiith we saye that we knowe not of any deutyes or rentys
withdrawn from the lordshippe.
"Item to the xiiiith we saye that we never knewe nor hearde any heryott
payde for freeholde at the dethe of the freholder.
"Item to the fyfteneth we say that the freholder hathe never payde
relief at alienacion, but at deathe only.
"Item to the xvith we saye that a copyholder dying his heir being wythin
the age of xiiii yeres the custody of the body and lande oughte to be
comytted by the lorde to the nexte of the kyn to whom the inheritance
may not dyscende."
[249] I take them from the MSS. Court Rolls of the Manor of Bushey,
kindly lent me by the late Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith.
In themselves these customs are not in any way remarkable, except
perhaps for the uniform favour which they show to the interests of the
tenants. They might be paralleled from those of scores of other manors.
What is worth noticing is the precision of the rules laid down. The
relations between the lord and the tenants are settled with the
definiteness of a sort of great collective bargain.
It would be going beyond the scope of this essay to enter upon the large
question, on which so much learning has been expended, of the respective
parts played in manorial origins by the communal organisation of
villagers for the purpose of self-government in their agrarian affairs,
and by the authoritative pressure of superior authorities for the
purpose of using the village as the basis of a financial and political
system. But one may point out that facts such as have been quoted above
in illustration of the rule of custom cannot easily be fitted into any
theory which regards the economic arrangements of the manor as the
result simply of a system imposed from above, and which treats the
customary rights of the peasants as the outcome of concessions made by
lords from time to time in their own interests, the revocation of which
involved no larger difficulties than necessarily surround the alteration
of practices sanctioned by long use. However much the organisation of
village life may have been stereotyped by the pressure directed upon it
by the desire of the manorial authorities to extract rents and services
on an unvarying plan, one cannot trace it altogether to its
subordination to such external forces, because the custom of the manor
acts as a restriction which impedes the free action of lords themselves
and their agents, even when they are most anxious to break through its
meshes. This is seen more clearly perhaps in the sixteenth century than
in earlier periods, for the very reason that the sharp collision of
interests between lords and tenants makes it more possible to
distinguish those parts of manorial custom which represent the economic
interests of the tenants, from those which represent the power of the
manorial authorities imposed upon them. Under the latter heading would
fall the rules as to heriots and reliefs, rules forbidding waste, rules
requiring tenants to pay "for the rushes which they gather on the lord's
common,"[250] or to perform the surviving remnants of labour services,
while a rule such as that of High Furness, forbidding the division of
holdings to such an extent as to prevent the discharge of services or
the obtaining of an adequate living by the occupier, may be regarded as
a compromise in which the interests of both lord and tenant receive
consideration. Under the former may be placed the custom which fixes
rents, and, on some fortunate manors like Bushey, fixes fines to be paid
on admission, sanctions the sub-letting of copyholds and the felling of
timber, and allots rights of pasture to each arable holding. Not all of
these, of course, stand upon the same footing of importance. The right
to cut wood is much less essential than the right to graze cattle. But
some of them, at any rate, like rights of common pasture, seem to be
bound up with the very existence of the village as an agricultural
community, and all of them are dictated by the interests of the peasants
in protecting themselves against encroachments, as clearly as are those
of the first type by the desire of lords to make the manor a source of
profit to themselves. It is scarcely possible to account for the
obstacles put by manorial customs in the way of changes which would
benefit the lord and be detrimental to the tenant, except on the
supposition that they are rooted in something more indestructible than
the mere concession of privileges which long use has solidified and
hardened; something which can only be found in the fact that they are an
essential part of the life of the village, to which the lord himself, as
a condition of extracting revenue from it, is almost bound to conform.
[250] Aldeburgh, _temp._ Henry VIII., R.O. _Misc. Bks. Treas. of
Receipts_, vol. clxiii. See Appendix I., No. II.
This brings us to our original point, the way in which the whole social
environment of all the tenants, except the freeholders, who do not need
the protection of custom, and the leaseholders,[251] who cannot get it,
is dependent upon the custom of the manor. Fraught with modern
associations as it is, the phrase "collective[252] bargain" is perhaps
the nearest we can get to expressing what the custom of the manor means
to the peasants themselves. Of course it is much more than this. The
custom has the sanction of immemorial antiquity. The phrase "time out of
mind" is no mere piece of idle rhetoric. The stable self-perpetuating
conditions of economic life create a sort of communal memory, in which
centuries are focussed. There were villages where, in the reign of
Elizabeth, the effects of the Great Plague[253] were still dimly
remembered. But regarding the matter from the point of view of the
practical working of village life, we shall not be far wrong if we think
of the peasants as a body of men who are more or less organised, and of
the custom as a system of common rules which regulates the relations
between them and the lord. And it is evident that the custom of the
manor, at any rate in our period, is a safeguard of the tenants'
interests rather than of those of the manorial authorities. It is not
only that the changes which followed the Great Plague have set the
peasants free from the most irksome customary restrictions, but,
further, that, in the sixteenth century, it is the lord who wants to
make innovations and the tenants who resist them, and that it is
therefore the latter who stand to gain most by clinging to custom. The
custom sets up a standard by which encroachments can be opposed, by
which the village as a whole can put a solid barrier in the way of
change, by which blacklegging (in the shape of one man taking a holding
over the head of another) can be prevented. Competitive forces have, it
is true, been gradually undermining custom, and by the sixteenth century
an increasing number of tenants have the terms on which they take their
holdings settled by the higgling of the market without reference to any
authoritative rule. Nevertheless, as far as the copyholders, who are the
kernel of the manor, are concerned, competition is held in check by the
fact that, on certain fundamental matters, there is a common
understanding between the peasants, which is recognised by the lord
himself. The manorial authorities cannot bargain with the tenants one by
one. They have to deal with the villagers as men who are "organised,"
who are members of a society, who know what they have to expect in the
way of heriots and rents and fines, and who will be supported by village
opinion in resisting innovations. On occasion the peasants will strike.
On occasion they will force their landlord to arbitration.[254] One
might almost say that the customary tenants are trade unionists to a
man. Again, who shall determine what the custom is? The court rolls will
throw light on certain points, and occasionally we find lords appealing
to them successfully in order to upset the tenants' claims. But on many
matters there is no guide but tradition; the exponents of tradition are
the ancient inhabitants; the lord has to ask them to expound it, as he
does the tenants of Bushey. Can we doubt that this was a powerful check
on autocratic action on his part? Lords come and go. But the custom of
the manor endures, and probably loses nothing in the telling.
[251] Some copyholders, who held land which was not "customary
land" but part of the demesne or the waste, were not protected
by custom either: for a discussion of this point see below, pp.
293?-294.
[252] See below for an example from Crondal, p. 295.
[253] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of "The Presentment and
Verdict of the Jury for the Manor of Hewlington," 1620 (Wrexham
Free Library, _Ancient Local Records_, vol. ii.): "Which decay
(as by the ancient records appeareth) did growe by reason of the
great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in
the reign of Edward III., and also of the rebellion of Owen
Glendower and trouble that thereupon ensued."
[254] _Victoria County History of Gloucestershire_, Social and
Economic History, p. 146. For agrarian strikes see below, pp.
329?-331.
If, then, we ask what the custom means to the peasantry, we must think
not of the "forbidding, stale, and meagre ways," which is what the word
custom too often suggests in the twentieth century, but of the phrase
"ancient customs and liberties," which is so common in the charters of
Boroughs. The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the
rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind
of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom which most
concerns the mass of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but
the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from
which they draw their political ideas. They cannot conceive the state
except as a very great manor. Their idea of good government is the
enforcement of an idealised customary.[255]
[255] See below, pp. 338?-340.
Having said this we can say little more. There is no standard by which
we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village
life of the sixteenth century--and England is all villages--would still
be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of
examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of
impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own
day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller's sketches of
modern England, yet, like a traveller's sketches, possessing a certain
value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion
selects for emphasis.
One is encouraged in one's belief in the comparative prosperity of a
large number of the peasantry in the earlier sixteenth century by the
comments which the writers of the periods pass upon it, even after a
decline has already begun. The picture we get is of an open-handed,
turbulent, large-eating and deep-drinking people, much given to
hospitality and to merriment both coarse and refined; according to
modern standards very ignorant, yet capable of swift enthusiasm,
litigious, great sticklers for their rights, quick to use force in
defence of them, proud of their independence, and free from the grosser
forms of poverty which crush the spirit. The latter feature strikes
everybody. Foreign visitors[256] notice with amazement the outward signs
of wealth among the humbler classes. English writers, though their tone
becomes sadder and sadder as the century proceeds, are never tired of
boasting of it. Even in the eighties of the sixteenth century, when many
of the peasants are much worse off than they had been a hundred years
before, Harrison, though he paints in dark colours the ruinous effects
of the agrarian changes, describes their hearty life with good-humoured
gusto. "Both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficiently liberal
and very friendly at their tables, and when they meet they are so merry
without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and
sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them....
Their food consisteth principally of beef and such meat as the butcher
selleth. That is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork. In feasting also the
latter sort, I mean the husbandmen, do exceed after their manner,
especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such odd meetings,
where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one
bringing such a dish, or so many with him, as his wife and he consult
upon, but always with this consideration that the lesser friend shall
have the better provision." The peasants themselves have a good conceit
of their position, and all unmindful of the whirligig of time and its
revenges, contrast it with that of their class in France, where women
labour like beasts in the fields, where men go in wooden shoes or no
shoes at all, where the people drink water instead of ale, eat rye bread
and little meat, and have not even the heart, like honest Englishmen, to
rob the rich who oppress them, and that in the most fertile realm in all
the world;[257] "Caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldome as they
dyd to the Romaynes, and gevynge tribute for theyr meat, drinke, brede,
and salte, which for theyr wayke personayges and tymorous hartes I may
compare to the pigmies who waged battayle against the Cranes, so that I
dare let slip a hundred good yeomen of England against five hundred of
such ribaldry."[258] Apart from the utterances of these good Jingoes,
stray glimpses show us a people which not only is materially prosperous,
but is also bold in action, and can produce men of high moral ardour. In
the twentieth century the rural population is a bye-word for its
docility. Its ancestors in the sixteenth were notorious for their
restiveness. Hales, who knew and loved them, makes one of the characters
in his dialogue[259] suggest that men at arms should be used to put down
the disturbances made by them and by the unemployed weavers, only to
answer, through the lips of another, that to call in the military will
be the best way to make them riot all the more:--"Marie, I think that
waye wold be rather occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be
quenched, for the stomakes of Englishmen would never beare that, to
suffer such injuries and reproaches as I knowe suche (_i.e._ the men at
arms) use to do to the subjects of France."
[256] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), p. 114,
quoting one of "the Spaniards in Queen Mary's days." "These
English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare
commonly so well as the king."
[257] Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, chaps. iii. and
xiii. The Scots, he thinks, are only one degree less
faint-hearted than the French. "Thai ben often tymes hanged for
larceny, and stelynge off good in the absence off the owner
theroff. But ther hartes serve them not to take a manys gode,
while he is present, and woll defende it."
[258] Coke, _Debate of Heralds_. See also the quotation,
Froude's _Henry VIII._, vol. i. chap, i., from a State Paper of
1515: "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 stronge in the
felde, as the comyns of England?"
[259] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond), p. 94.
These humble people have their idealisms. They produce martyrs for the
new religion and for the old, Lollards who suffer persecution for
upholding the Wycliffite tradition in the quiet villages of
Buckinghamshire, Catholics who follow Aske in that wonderful movement of
northern England, the last of the crusades, in 1536, or fall in
Devonshire thirteen years later before the artillery of Herbert. Nor are
they altogether cut off from the springs of learning. For at the
beginning of the sixteenth century the upper classes have not yet begun
to covet education for themselves sufficiently to withhold it from the
poor. Bequests[260] show that the sons of well-to-do peasants may have
been among those godly yeomanry whom Latimer[261] described as once, in
happier social conditions than those amid which he preached,
frequenting the older universities, and the records of some sixteenth
century grammar-schools tell a similar story. Among the first twenty-two
names on the register of Repton[262] there are five gentlemen, four
husbandmen, nine yeomen, two websters or weavers, a carpenter, and a
tanner.
[260] _Victoria County History_, Berkshire, ii., 208. In 1558 a
yeoman leaves his son a portion of land worth £10 a year "for
his keepinge and learninge in Oxford for five years nexte." On
the same page there is a case of a man described as a "yeoman"
who is tenant by copy of Court Roll.
[261] Latimer's _Sermons_. The first sermon preached before King
Edward, March 8, 1549 (Everyman Series, p. 86): "We have good
statutes made for the commonwealth, as touching commoners and
enclosures; many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the
matter there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing
I will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from the
devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to pass that
the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to school (as indeed
universities do wondrously decay already); I say ye pluck
salvation from the people and utterly destroy the realm. For by
yeomen's sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained
chiefly." See also _A Supplication of the Poor Commons_ (E. E.
T. S.): "This thing causeth that suche possessioners as
heretofore were able and used to maintain their own children ...
to lernynge and suche other qualities as are necessary to be had
in this Your Highness Royalme, are now of necessitie compelled
to set theyr own children to labour, and al is lytle enough to
pay the lorde's rent, and to take the house anew at the end of
the yere." The children of yeomen had no doubt been educated
mainly for the Church, and some attained high position (_Surtees
Society_, vol. lxxix. pp. 263-?264, for the son of a yeoman
becoming a Bishop, and vol. li. No. 53, the son of a yeoman
becoming subdeacon of York, vol. lxxix. pp. 176?-177, for a
yeoman's son sent to school for fifteen years). But in the
fifteenth century this was not always so, v. Leach, _Educational
Charters_, p. 41, for a school founded in Yorkshire, a county
which "produced many youths endowed with light and sharpness of
ability, who do not all want to attain the dignity and elevation
of the priesthood, that these may be better fitted for the
mechanical arts and other concerns of this world." A case of
hostility to the education of the poorer classes based on the
idea that education should be reserved for "gentlemen" is given
_ibid._ p. 470, where the notorious Lord Rich and other
gentlemen argue "as for husbandsmen's children, they were more
meet ... for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the
place of the learned sort. So that they wished none else to be
put to school, but only gentlemen's children." Cranmer retorted,
"Poor men's children ... are commonly more apt to apply their
study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated ... the
poor man's son by painstaking will be learned, when the
gentleman's son will not take the pains to get it, ... wherefore
if the gentleman's son be apt to learning let him be admitted;
if not apt, let the poor man's child being apt enter in his
room."
[262] _Repton School Register_, 1564-?1910. One of the
husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average
school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and
seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five
and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the attitude of
most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why
shouldn't Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably
off.
But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these
documents begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner
things to think of than the schooling of their children.