THE PEASANTRY (_continued_)
(e) _Signs of Change_
So far attention has been concentrated upon those phenomena which
suggest that, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century
begin, there has been a period--one may date it roughly from 1381 to
1489--of increasing prosperity for the small cultivator. We have
emphasised the evidence of this upward movement which is given by the
growth among the peasantry of a freer and more elastic economy. We have
watched them shake off many of the restrictions imposed by villeinage
and build up considerable properties. We have seen how the custom of the
manor still acts as a dyke to defend them against encroachments, and to
concentrate in their hands a large part of the fruits of economic
progress. In the century from the Peasants' Revolt to the first Statute
against Depopulation, in spite of the political anarchy which disfigures
it, there is, as it seems to us an interval between one oppressive
régime and another, between the leaden weight of villeinage and the
stress and strain of the gathering power of competition. In that happy
balance between the forces of custom and the forces of economic
enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men cannot
evade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it has not
grown to such lengths as to undermine the security which the small man
finds in the established relationships and immemorial routine of
communal agriculture.
There is, however, we need hardly say, another side to the picture, and
to that other side we must now turn. We must examine again from another
point of view some of the ground over which we have already travelled,
and we must modify the opinions which we have formed by bringing a fresh
range of facts into perspective. The piecemeal changes which have been
going on in the internal organisation of so many manors look forward as
well as back, and are of significance as throwing light on the larger
innovations of the later period. For one thing, they mean the appearance
among the customary tenantry of persons who are in a small way
capitalists, and who supply a link between the great farmer of the
sixteenth century and the agricultural organisation of earlier periods.
The emergence out of the mediæval peasantry of prosperous cultivators,
occupying two or three times as much land as their grandfathers, is a
proof that holdings of a considerable size can be managed successfully,
and the farmers of the demesne are often drawn from among them. For
another thing, the inequality which has appeared among the holdings of
different tenants implies the growth of a state of things in which
innovations in the customary methods of agriculture are much more likely
to be made than they were when all the tenants were organised in fairly
well-defined classes. The smaller among them are still practising
subsistence farming when the larger are producing on a considerable
scale for the market, are acquiring capital, are extending their
holdings, are even becoming landlords themselves. There arises therefore
a divergence of agricultural methods and economic interests between
them, which is quite compatible with the fact that both large and small
tenants stand in the same legal relationship to the lord of whom they
hold. The enterprise which the former show in their dealings with land
and in encroaching on the routine of manorial cultivation cannot fail to
have a powerful influence in preparing the way for the individualistic
movement which sweeps over agriculture in the sixteenth century, and
from which the peasants, as a class, suffer so severely. The freedom
with which parcels of land change hands must inevitably weaken the
connection between the family and the holding, and result in leaving the
least successful without any land at all. The difficulty of maintaining
a peasant proprietary without restricting the alienation of land is one
which is familiar to modern Governments, and there is clear
evidence[263] that, even before the evictions of the sixteenth century
began to attract attention, a decline in the number of customary tenants
was brought about on a good many manors by the mere process of the
well-to-do buying up the poorer men's holdings.
[263] I am inclined to think that an investigation of the
manorial records of the fifteenth century would show a
considerable decrease in the number of customary tenants, not as
a result of evictions, but simply as a consequence of one man
buying out another and forming one larger holding out of two or
more smaller ones. The evidence for this is as follows: (1) When
several holdings pass to one man there must be a diminution
unless more land is brought under cultivation. Such an
agglomeration of holdings has been shown to be very frequent.
(2) A comparison of fifteenth and sixteenth century surveys with
those of an earlier date shows a marked diminution in the number
of customary tenants (a) before complaints as to enclosure
become loud, and on manors where there is no trace of enclosing
by lords or large farmers; (b) on manors where more land is
cultivated by the customary tenants than at an earlier date.
Thus at Haversham there were 52 tenants of all kinds in 1305, 35
in 1458, 14 in 1497 (_Victoria County History_, Gloucestershire,
vol. ii. pp. 61?-62). On six Northumbrian manors, where there is
no sign of evictions on a large scale, there were 82 customary
tenants in 1294, and 37 in 1567, and where intermediate surveys
enable one to narrow the limiting points, one finds that there
has been a considerable diminution before the end of the
fifteenth century. On the four tithings, of South Newton,
Childhampton, Stovord, and Little Wishford, which made up the
manor of South Newton, customary tenants numbered at the
beginning of the fourteenth century 32, 7, 13, 13, and in 1567
10, 3, 7, 1, the average holding having grown from 10-1/2 to
about 43 acres (Roxburghe Club, _Pembroke Surveys_). At Sutton
Warblington there were in 1351, 28 customary tenants, and in
1568 there were 7, while the average acreage of each tenant's
holding had increased enormously (_Crondal Records_, Baigent).
At Dippenhall and Swanthrop, two tithings of the manor of
Crondal, the customary tenants numbered 40 in 1287, 24 in 1568,
while the average size of their holdings had risen from between
18 and 19 to just under 35 acres. At Aldershot the number of
customary tenants during the same period fell from 48 to 37
(_ibid._). Such figures are of course full of pitfalls. In the
North border warfare reduced the population, and the effects of
the Great Plague have to be considered. The great growth in the
size of holdings does, however, suggest that a diminution in the
number of customary tenants may have occurred without any
encroachments being made by lords on the customary land, and
merely through one tenant buying up the land of another.
Such movements prepare the way for greater changes: petty capitalism is
naturally followed by capitalism on a larger scale. It is surely at
first sight somewhat surprising that the noticeable upward movement in
the condition of the rural population, which coincides with the
disappearance of villeinage and the growth of copyhold tenure, should
have been followed by the marked depression which all observers agree to
have occurred in the following century. Why should a class which has
displayed such remarkable signs of vigour and enterprise find such
difficulty in holding its own? An answer to this question cannot be
given till after a consideration of the new causes at work in the
sixteenth century. But may it not be that their position had to some
extent been undermined by the very changes which at first improved it,
and that the enterprise of the larger customary tenants, while it added
to their prosperity as long as they led the way in it, tended to weaken
the customary relations and the customary methods of agriculture which
had protected the small man, and to leave him at the mercy of
competitive forces which he could not control? Such an undulating line
of development, in which the small producer gains temporarily from the
expansion of markets and improved technical methods which ultimately rob
him of his independence, can be paralleled from the later history both
of agriculture[264] and of manufacturing industry. It seems to us to
offer a thread which connects the capitalist farmer of the sixteenth
century with the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth. When there is
much buying and selling of land among the peasantry, much colonising of
new plots taken from the waste and the demesne, we should expect to see
the influence of competition beginning to override that of custom; we
should expect to see the paring away of communal restrictions to make
room for individual arrangements of a more elastic nature. In the
remainder of this chapter we shall approach this problem by considering
two movements--the growth at an early date of competitive rents on those
parts of manors where custom was weakest, and the enclosing of land by
customary tenants themselves. The former offers a precedent for the
rack-rents and excessive fines of which so much is heard in the
sixteenth century, the latter at once an analogy and a contrast with the
enclosures carried out by lords of manors and capitalist farmers, which
we shall discuss in Part II.
[264] Thus the yeomen seem to have increased in prosperity at
the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century
(though at the same time large classes of agrarian workers were
suffering terribly), because the rise in prices made
corn-growing a gold-mine. The collapse came probably after 1815
(see Johnson, _The Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, chap.
vii.).
(f) _The Growth of Competitive Rents on New Allotments_
The development of competitive rents is a subject which must always
possess a peculiar fascination for the historical economist, inasmuch
as the distribution of wealth depends to no small degree upon the manner
in which the surplus gains wrung from nature are shared between
different classes. The wealth which, under a régime of great estates and
leasehold tenure, accrues to a tiny body of landlords, is, in a
community of small freeholders, retained by the cultivating tenant, and,
when the tenure of land is such that custom sets a barrier to a rise in
rents, is divided between owner and occupier in a way which prevents the
former from absorbing the whole advantage of superior sites, or the
latter from being reduced to working for bare wages of management. The
causes which determine the allocation of rents must always be of crucial
importance for an understanding of economic conditions, and any change
which augments them, diminishes them, or varies the degree to which
different classes participate in them, is likely in time to produce a
substantial alteration both in the economic configuration of society and
in the possession of social privileges and political power. In modern
times, it is true, the enormous area from which food-stuffs are drawn,
and the relatively small space upon which manufacturing industry can be
concentrated, has made the differential payments accruing to the
landowner from varieties of soil and situation almost trifling compared
with the surpluses drawn from finance and manufacturing industry by the
infra-marginal capitalist and entrepreneur. Such "quasi-rents" are,
however, a comparatively modern phenomenon. In our period the basis of
wealth was land, and a crucial question is that of the manner in which
incomes drawn from land were determined. We have seen that in the
sixteenth century custom still ruled the payments made by most of the
copyhold tenants. But at that time there were many complaints of
rack-renting, and though we must leave till later an inquiry into their
justification, it will help us if we take a glance at the new forces,
which, even in the Middle Ages, were beginning to operate on the margin
of cultivation.
The gradual extension of cultivation over the waste lands surrounding
the village fields, and the not infrequent addition of parts of the
lord's demesne to the tenants' holdings, was obviously the occasion, as
it took place, of a number of new agreements between the payer and
receiver of rents, which might or might not repeat the conditions of
existing contracts. When new land was broken up for tillage an attempt
seems in some cases to have been made by the manorial authorities to
assimilate its treatment, as far as payment was concerned, to that of
the existing customary holdings. The basis of the rent paid was a
comparison between the areas of the encroachments and the ordinary
holding of a customary tenant; the payment was so many ploughlands'[265]
worth, and sometimes the corresponding services were extracted from
them. On the other hand, the mere fact that the land was new land, which
did not come into the original scheme of manorial finance and
organisation, tended to make it the point from which new relationships
could spring. For one thing, it was the natural starting-point for the
process of substituting money rents for labour. When the customary
holdings offered a sufficient supply of labour for the cultivation of
the demesne, the manorial authorities naturally preferred to take the
payments for additional land in the shape of money rather than in
services of which they already had sufficient. Services are sometimes
exacted for the new encroachments, but they are the exception; and the
assimilation of the payments for these new holdings to those made for
the customary holdings was either not seriously attempted or was
unsuccessful. One can quite understand that, even if the lord wanted
labour services from those parts of the waste which were broken up and
added to the cultivated area, he might not be able to get the
improvements made on the old terms. Quite apart, therefore, from the
process of commutation, the growth of money rents developed as a natural
accompaniment of the growth of population.
[265] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 132?-133, Rental of 1287:
"The same Hugh holds certain encroachments on payment of 3
ploughlands' worth, 3 hens, and 3d. at the said term." "Emma of
Wyggeworthhall ... holds certain encroachments on payment
therefor 11s. 6d. and one ploughland's worth." These documents
throw much light on the whole process of the extension of
cultivation over the waste.
The second point is more important. It is that the rents paid for the
new holdings taken from the waste differed from such money payments as
were made for the customary holdings, in that they were not to the same
extent dominated by custom, but were to a much greater extent influenced
by competition. This contrast is the tiny seed of great changes, and may
be illustrated by an example drawn from the south of England at a
comparatively early date. At Yateleigh,[266] one of the tithings of the
manor of Crondal, the absorption of the waste by the customary tenants
went on with great rapidity even in the thirteenth century, and in the
rental drawn up by the steward in 1287 we find the rents and services
paid for the customary holdings and the rents paid for the encroachments
set down side by side. The latter fall into a definite scheme which can
be picked out at a glance. With a very few exceptions the rent charged
for an acre of land taken from the waste is always 4d., and this is the
basis for all other payments for the varying portions of waste occupied
by the tenants. A two acre piece pays 8d. For a piece of 9-1/2 acres the
payment is still about 4-1/4d. per acre, the awkward sum of 3s. 4-1/2d.
The rents and services of the customary holdings, however, cannot be
reduced to any such simple and uniform plan of adjusting rent to
acreage. In the first place all of them, whatever their size, are liable
to an initial charge of 9-1/2d., called "Pondpany." In the second place
there is only the roughest correspondence between the amount of land
held by a tenant and the payment which he makes. A holding of 22 acres
pays 2s. 10d., but so does a holding of 32 acres, while one of 29 acres
pays 2s. 2d. Holdings of 12-1/2, of 16, and of 18-1/2 acres all make
exactly the same payment of 2s. In short, though it would not be quite
true to say that the payment made bears no relation to the size of the
holding, the relation which it bears is not at all definite and precise.
It is a general relation applying rather to groups of holdings roughly
marked off from others by broad differences in extent, not to individual
holdings. There is no standard price per acre at all, such as appears in
a modern land market, and such as exists for the land taken from the
waste.
[266] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 116?-120.
What is the reason of this remarkable contrast between the rents of
pieces of land lying quite near to each other and held by the same
tenants, which causes the payment for one set of holdings, the
encroachments, to be adjusted uniformly to the area held, and the other,
the customary holdings, to be rented apparently without any economic
plan at all? The answer is that the payments for the encroachments and
the payments for the customary holdings, if they are both to be called
rents, are rents of very different kinds. The payments made for the
customary holdings are not based directly on the economic value of the
land, but on the value of commuted services, and all the holdings,
though of unequal size, are liable to much the same services. All make a
general payment of 9-1/2d., because that sum is the value of some
payment in kind or service which they had made before the money payment
took its place. Holdings of 32 acres and 22 acres, just as holdings of
12-1/2 and 18-1/2 acres, make the same payments, because the labour
rents had been only very roughly adjusted to the size of the holdings,
and these payments are commuted labour rents, not rents fixed by putting
up an acre for leasing and taking what can be got for it. It is of
course quite true that services and the size of holdings were connected,
and that therefore the money rents which took the place of services and
the size of holdings were connected also. But the connection is rough,
arrived at by apportioning between holdings the labour services needed
to cultivate the demesne, without distinguishing precisely differences
of a few acres in the size of different holdings, and the subsequent
money rents are not adjusted to the acreage because they express the
roughness of the original apportionment.
Now clearly these considerations did not apply to the rents paid for the
encroachments which were taken from the waste. The greater part of them
had never been liable to labour services at all. Each acre stood by
itself, as it were, as simply a piece of cultivatable land of a certain
area, not part of a complex on which certain obligations had been
imposed. Each, therefore, gets a market value, based on what will be
given for it, much sooner than does the land making up the customary
holdings, which are not exposed to the levelling influence of the market
because they are bound together by their place in the social
organisation of the manor. Hence it is on this land, the land leased
piecemeal from the waste by tenants who were prosperous enough to afford
the extra outlay, that one gets the appearance of something like true
competitive rents, because it is here that commercial influences have
freest play and are least checked by their subordination to custom. In
the same way, when the tenants at Brightwalton[267] do the full quota of
work demanded, the rent of their customary holdings is abated
accordingly. But not so the rent of the new land which was once part of
the waste: in fixing its rent the lord is not checked by any collective
sense on the part of the village community; he has a free hand and will
make the best bargain he can.
[267] Camden Society, 1857. Rental and Custumal of the Manor of
Brightwalton. Under the heading virgators it is said, "If they
do the full day's work set out above each of them ought to have
his rent reduced 12d." Under the heading of villeins holding
assarted land it is said, "Be it known that no customary tenant
shall have any reduction of rent of the lands which he holds by
way of assart or in the common of Greeneholt for any office or
work to be done for the lord."
Thus, at a very early date, a fringe of leasehold land forms itself
round the manor in addition to the ordinary customary holdings. Because
it is on the margin of cultivation the initial rent is low, and because
the land is leased the rent can be raised. Exactly the same thing
applies to the leasing of the demesne, and sometimes even to the land
which one tenant hires from another, because here also the element of
competition enters to adjust rents in accordance with supply and demand
and with little regard to the influence of custom. When the greater part
of the demesne is still cultivated by the labour of villeins, and only
small plots are leased to the tenants by way of experiment, the bailiff
balances one method against the other, and recommends the resumption of
the land which "would pay better in the hands of the lord."[268] On some
manors, it is true, demesne land seems to have been merged inextricably
in the customary holdings, and to have been held later, like them, by
copy of court roll.[269] But the manorial authorities were anxious to
keep it separate precisely because it was recognised that if kept
separate it could be let at a competitive rent. Thus the charter which
was granted to the little borough of Holt[270] in Denbighshire, in 1413,
provided that the tenants should pay for "every burgage 12d., for every
curtilage 12d., for every acre of land belonging to their free burgages
12d., and for every acre of land which was wont to be of the lord's
demesne two shillings." And though, during the confusion of the
following century, much of the rent appears not to have been collected,
the Crown, of whom the burgesses hold, does not forget that a high rent
was due from the demesne, and one hundred and fifty years later requires
them to bring up their payments for it to the level fixed in 1413. At
Castle Combe, in the middle of the fifteenth century, one finds the
steward of the manor watching the land market with a view to getting the
best price that he can for the demesne, and speculating whether "any man
will ferme the parkis and the conyes at any better price above X marks
than yt ys now."[271] The same tendency towards competitive rents can be
seen equally well in the case of the land leased by one tenant from the
holdings of others, which for one reason or another have been
surrendered to the lord. Thus at Mildenhall,[272] in 1381, a villein
pays for his land nearly 1s. 6d. an acre, a very high rent, which is at
once explained when it is seen that his holding consists of pieces of
land held on a ten years' lease from the holdings of five or more other
tenants. Elsewhere one can almost see the bidding up of rents going on.
For what else can happen when the demesne lands of a manor are leased
to four tenants who, in turn, make their profit by leasing them again to
the other tenants,[273] or when a villein pays £6 to enter on two acres
of arable land,[274] or when land is worth 3s. 6d. an acre after the
rents and services have been discharged from it to the lord,[275] so
that the holder who cares to sublet can reap a substantial profit on the
difference?
[268] Camden Society, _Inquisition of the Manors of Glastonbury
Abbey_, Brentmarsh, 1189. A tenant holds "1 acre de terra
arabili in dominico, utilius esset quod esset in manu domini."
[269] _e.g._, on the Devonshire, Somerset, and Cornwall manors
surveyed by Humberstone _temp._ Phil, and Mary (_Topographer and
Genealogist_, vol. i.).
[270] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of the Survey of the Manor
of Holt, 1620 (Wrexham Free Library, _Ancient Local Records_,
vol. ii.).
[271] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_,
p. 258 (1440?-1550).
[272] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk. I quote the writer's
remarks in full. "The bailiff's accounts for the manor begin in
that very year [1381], and the one striking feature in them is
the system of leases which appears to have gradually displaced
other kinds of tenure since the time of the pestilence. A few
are for forty years, but most are for ten or six years.... The
land so leased is not mainly demesne land. It belongs largely to
villein tenements that have fallen into the lord's hands, and
the process of consolidation described had already taken place
at Mildenhall. The land held by John Kelsynd on a ten years'
lease includes, for example, '3 acres of Frere's, Hayward's and
Willway's tenement in Bradinhawfield, 1 acre of Holmes' tenement
in Suttonfield, 5 acres of Zabulo's tenement in one piece at
Lambwash,' and the rent of the whole 22 acres is 31s. 1d., or
nearly 1s. 5d. an acre, an extremely high rent for land not
stated to be meadow or pasture."
[273] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_,
p. 203.
[274] Massingberd, _Ingoldmells Court Rolls_, Introduction, p.
xxx.
[275] _Ibid._
The truth is that, at any rate by the middle of the fifteenth century,
the rents of different parts of a manor are being settled on quite
different principles. They are not all customary rents, as they tended
to be at an earlier date, nor are they all competitive rents, as they
tend to be to-day. The latter are growing because of the improved
economic position of the tenants, which enables them to hire or purchase
land over and above their customary holdings, and their growth has been
greatly accelerated by the enormously increased opportunities for land
speculation which were offered when the Great Plague brought thousands
of acres into the land market. It is in the demand put forward by the
men of Essex in 1381,[276] "that no acre of land, which is held in
villeinage or serfdom, may be had at a higher rent than 4d.," rather
than in the reference to the already decaying labour services, that
there is a warning of troubles to come. But long after that, as we have
already seen, a great deal of land is still held by rents which are
customary and little influenced as yet by the play of competition. We
have, in fact, what is almost an illustration of modern theories of
rent, with this difference, that though the condition of competitive
rents being charged appears as the margin of cultivation is lowered,
custom at first prevents the owners of land from taking advantage of
their position and asking the full competitive rents from the holders of
the superior sites, so that part of the surplus is for a long time
enjoyed by the tenants. Such a state of things is clearly a precarious
one. When the tenements of Hugh and Thomas are being rack-rented there
will obviously be a strong temptation to cause Walter's to follow suit,
and if the custom is a barrier to a rise in rents, but not to a rise in
fines, to make heavy fines do on the latter what high rents do on the
former. If it had been given to our peasants to happen on some monstrous
mediæval Ricardo, would they not have wondered how long such an
intermingling of payments fixed by custom and payments fixed by
competition was likely to continue, and have foreseen, what actually
occurred in the sixteenth century, an attempt, though not always a
successful attempt, to force up the payments for customary holdings to
something like the maximum which the condition of agriculture would
allow? They would have said:--"This fellow fears not God, neither
regards he man. He is a usurer, a great taker of advantages, an
oppressor of his neighbour. We will beat him, and put him in our stocks,
and maim his cattle. Nevertheless in the bottom of his foul mind there
is some glimmering of sense, and we will give heed to his warning. The
devil brings it, but it may be that God sent it. The Court shall recite
our good customs once more, and our young men shall look to their bows.
Weapon bodeth peace."[277]
[276] Stubbs, _Constl. Hist._, vol. ii. p. 479, n. 5.
[277] The word "usury" denoted in the Middle Ages and in the
sixteenth century not merely exorbitant interest on a loan, but
any oppressive bargain, including the raising of prices, the
beating down of wages, and the rack-renting of land (see _e.g. A
Discourse on Usurie_, by Thomas Wilson, 1584). The phrase "a
great taker of advantages" comes from a complaint by the people
of Hereford against an unpopular divine who lent money at
interest and rack-rented land (_S. P. D. Eliz._, cclxxxvi. Nos.
19 and 20), and the phrase "weapon bodeth peace" from an account
of an agrarian dispute in Lancashire--it is the sort of grim
joke that stubborn and humorous people would appreciate--in _L.
and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xiii., Pt. II., p. 535. "On Sunday
night Wheateley sent his daughter to bid him to come to Parson's
Close to mow Mr. Tempest's meadow there. Had heard that whoever
should mow the meadow should be beaten off the ground, and sent
to ask if he should bring a weapon. Wheateley sent word again
'howe weapon boded peace, therefore bring his weapon with him.'
Brought his bow and shafts."
(g) _The Progress of Enclosure among the Peasantry_
While competitive conditions are creeping forward on those parts of the
village lands which have been most recently taken in, even more
momentous changes are occurring on the customary holdings themselves. By
the end of the fifteenth century we are walking through fields that are
being cut up with the hedges which give the dullest English landscape
the trim beauty of a garden. For a century and a half, while in the
great world the new state rises on the ruins of the Middle Ages, while
Tudors give way to Stuarts, and Stuarts browbeat and are browbeaten by
ever more impatient Parliaments, in courts customary and sometimes in
noisier assemblies not without arms, we shall be discussing whether
those hedges are to stand or fall. The great enclosing movement has
begun.
Like most great economic changes it has begun quietly and for a long
time men are doubtful whether it is a great change at all, and, if it is
mischievous, in what exactly the mischief consists. Nor indeed does the
mass of the population, who feel the new conditions most, ever become
quite clear on this point. Events are too various and move too swiftly
for them. They see that great men enclose with little regard to the
interests of their poorer neighbours. They curse them for their
enclosures,[278] and believe with the faith of an age which has
re-discovered the Bible, that they, like greedy Ahab, the father of
enclosers, will be cursed. When the encloser should call on God to
witness his deed the devil's name starts to his lips. His cattle are
struck by lightning, and his children do not live to reap the fruits of
his iniquity. But the peasants enclose themselves, and though they feel
the difference between one sort of enclosing and another, they are
simple men who cannot make the matter plain to lawyers and
commissioners, and when things reach a certain point they will fight it
out.
[278] For the popular attitude towards enclosures see below, pp.
313?-340, and Leland (quoted Hone, _The Manor and Manorial
Records_, p. 117): "The Duke of Buckingham made a fair park by
the Castle of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, and took very much
fair land in, very fruitful of corn, now fair lands for
coursing. The inhabitants cursed the Duke for those lands so
enclosed." I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage
(_Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii): "To the Right Honble.
House of Parliament now assembled, the Humble Petition of the
Mayor and Free Tenants of the Borough of Wootton Basset in the
Countie of Wilts, Humble sheweth to this Honourable House" [that
their common has been seized and enclosed by the lord of the
manor, who] "did divers times attempt to gaine the possession
thereof by putting in of divers sorts of cattle, in so much that
at length, when his servants did put in cowes by force into the
said common, many times and present upon the putting of them in,
the Lord in his mercy did send thunder and lightning from
heaven, which did make the cattle of the said Francis Englefield
[the lord of the Manor] to run so violent out of the said
ground, that at one time one of the beasts was killed therewith;
and it was so often that people that were not there in presence
to see it, when it thundered would say, Sir Francis Englefield's
men were putting in their cattle into the land, and so it was,
and as soon as those cattle were gone forth, it would presently
be very calm and fair, and the cattle of the towne would never
stir, but follow their feeding as at other times, and never
offer to move out of the way." For the allusion to invoking the
devil, see Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c. It was said
that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three
generations (Erdeswick, _Survey of Stafford_, ed. Harwood, p.
55). The same was said of enclosers (Moore, _op. cit._).
In every age there are words which are sufficiently definite to become a
battle-cry, and yet which contain so many shades of meaning and are
susceptible of such varying interpretations, that those who seem to
differ most profoundly really differ because they are using the same
word to express quite different ideas. Such a word was enclosing. For
many years it was a burning question--with statesmen, with preachers,
with the mass of the peasantry. But those who tell us exactly what it
meant are few, and they tell us hardly more than is sufficient to show
that it meant several different things in different connections. The
picture of enclosure which carried Ket's followers against the walls of
Norwich was that immortalised two centuries later in Goldsmith's
"Deserted Village"; a vision of village cornfields turned into dreary
expanses of pasture, where sheep grazed amid ruined homesteads and
cattle were stalled in the mouldering churches.[279] When the scientific
agriculturists of the age eulogised enclosures, they thought of a more
orderly and productive cultivation arising in place of the intolerable
"mingle mangle" of the open fields. The Levellers, who in the
seventeenth century carried on the agitation against enclosure, had no
objection to such as took place "only or chiefly for the benefit of the
poor."[280] The panegyrists of enclosing like Fitzherbert and Norden
denounced[281] lords who made enclosure an occasion to rack-rent and
depopulate. The Justices of Nottinghamshire[282] complain to the
Government that enclosure drives people into the already overburdened
towns, but they are careful to explain that enclosures of less than five
acres in size improve agriculture without depopulating the country. The
Government itself under Elizabeth sets its face against the enclosures
which produce evictions, but nevertheless expressly sanctions the
exchanging of strips, which is desired chiefly in order that small
enclosures may be made.[283] In this phase of the eternal quarrel
between the plain man and the technical expert both the technical expert
and the plain man were right, and needed only a definition to unite
against the avarice and oppression which snatched a golden harvest from
their confusion. It is the tragedy of a world where man must walk by
sight that the discovery of the reconciling formula is always left to
future generations, in which passion has cooled into curiosity, and the
agonies of peoples have become the exercise of the schools. The devil
who builds bridges does not span such chasms till much that is precious
to mankind has vanished down them for ever.
[279] See the ballad of Nowadays (1520):
"Envy waxeth wonders strong,
The Riche doth the poore wrong,
God of his mercy sufferith long
The Devil his workes to worke.
The Townes go downe, the land decayes;
Of cornefeldes playne layes,
Gret men makithe now a dayes
A shepecote in the Church.
The places that we Right holy call
Ordeyned ffor Christyan buriall
Off them to make an ox-stall
These men be wonders wyse;
Commons to close and kepe,
Poor folk for bred to cry and wepe;
Towns pulled down to pastur shepe,
This ys the newe gyse."
[280] "The Leveller's Petition" (Bodleian Pamphlets, 1648, c.
15, 3, Linc.).
[281] Fitzherbert, _Surveying_: "I advertise and exhort in God's
behalf all manner of persons, that ... the lords do not heighten
the rents of their tenants or cause them to pay more rent or a
greater fine. A greater bribery and extortion a man cannot do
than upon his own tenants, for they dare not say him naye, nor
yet complain." Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, Book III.:
"Lords should not depopulate by usurping enclosures, a thing
hateful to God and offensive to man."
[282] _Victoria County History, Nottinghamshire_, vol. ii. p.
282.
[283] 39 Eliz. c. i.
One such distinction, however, we must draw at once. Enclosure is
usually thought of in connection with the encroachments made by lords of
manors or their farmers upon the land over which the manorial population
had common rights or which lay in the open arable fields. And this is on
the whole correct. This is what the word would have suggested to nine
men out of ten in our period: this aspect of the movement was the most
rapid in its development and the most far-reaching in its effects. But
there was another side to it which was at once earlier in point of time
and productive of quite dissimilar results. There is abundant evidence
to show that the open field system of agriculture, with its intermingled
strips and its collective, as opposed to individual, rules of
cultivation, was undergoing a gradual dissolution from within even
before the larger innovations of great capitalists gave it a shock from
without. At the very time when the peasantry agitated most bitterly they
were often hedging and ditching their own little holdings and nibbling
away fragments of the waste to be cultivated in severalty. It is, of
course, true that the effect of enclosure by the lord of a manor or
large farmer was usually very different from that of enclosure by the
customary tenants. The latter was a slow process of attrition, which
went on quietly from one generation to another, often no doubt after
discussions in the manorial court. The former was frequently an
invasion. But though their social effects were dissimilar, from a
technical point of view they were both part of the process through which
cultivation at the discretion of the individual was substituted for
cultivation in accordance with common customary rules. Enclosing by
lords and large farmers was not so much a movement running counter to
existing tendencies, as a continuation on a larger scale and with
different results of developments which in parts of England were already
at work. Great changes are best interpreted in the light of small, and
it will therefore be worth our while to look shortly at the sort of
enclosing which was being carried out by the peasantry themselves.
First, one may review briefly what is told us by those who wrote on the
technique of agriculture. Fitzherbert[284] and Hales in the sixteenth
century, Norden and Lee in the seventeenth, make it quite plain that,
apart from enclosures carried out by lords of manors, a movement is
going on among the tenants which is also known by the name of enclosure.
It has as its object the formation of compact fields out of the
scattered strips, and the substitution of closes surrounded by hedges
for rights of grazing over the common pasture, meadow, and waste. It
has as its effects a great increase in the output of wheat,
opportunities for better grazing and stock-breeding, and a consequent
rise in the value of land; the improvement being partly due to
psychological[285] reasons, to the fact that a man who has a free hand
will put more labour into the land than one who is fettered by customary
rules, partly to technical causes such as the better draining and
cleaning of land which the enclosure of arable ground makes possible,
the greater security offered against damage done by straying cattle, the
improvement in the quality of pasture when it is no longer liable to be
eaten bare by the beasts of a whole township. The method by which such a
change takes place is re-allotment. The construction of
hedges--enclosing--is simply the machinery by which the new lines of
demarcation between one man's land and another's are drawn and kept
firmly in their place; and though the word _enclosure_ gives a vivid
picture of the alteration which is produced in the appearance of the
country, _re-allotment_ or _redivision_ of land describes much better
the process by which it is brought about. The ideal form of it is
described by Fitzherbert.[286] All the landlords in a village must come
to an agreement that their tenants should exchange their holdings with
each other. An exact statement of the area of land in tillage and
pasture held by each tenant must then be made. When this has been done,
every man is "to change with his neighbour, and to leye them (_i.e._ the
acres, which were formerly scattered) together, and to make him one
several close in every field, to leye them together in one field and to
make one several close for them all; and also another several close for
his portion of his common pasture, and also his portion of his meadow in
a several close by itself, and all kept in several both winter and
summer. And every cottager to have his portion assigned to him according
to his rent." Such enclosure does not, it is contended, interfere
unfairly with any one's vested interests. It makes a spatial
rearrangement of property, but it does not alter its economic
distribution. It does not result in evictions or depopulation. It simply
converts rights exercised jointly over a larger area into rights
exercised individually over a smaller one. The map is dissolved into
scattered pieces, but it is put together again; and when it is put
together all the pieces are still there. The tenants part with shares in
the common fields, meadows, and pastures, to get smaller fields,
meadows, and pastures to themselves. The latter are more valuable than
the former. What is lost in extension is gained in intension.
[284] Fitzherbert, _Book of Husbandry_. Norden, _op. cit._: "One
acre enclosed is worth one and halfe in common." _Commonweal of
this Realm of England_, p. 56. Lee, _A Vindication of a
Regulated Enclosure_.
[285] _Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 49: "That which
is possessed of many in common is neglected of all."
[286] Fitzherbert, _Surveying_, chap. xl.
But this account is an ideal one, a description of the most excellent
way, not necessarily a description of what is being actually done. For
that we must turn to the surveys. In the picture of agriculture which is
given by the surveyors one can see the open field system of cultivation
at almost every stage of completeness and disintegration at different
places. On many manors there is hardly any sign of the scattered strips,
which make up the individual tenant's holding, coalescing into
compactness, hardly any sign of encroachments upon either the common
pasture or the meadow or the waste. Elsewhere one finds that though the
bulk of the land still lies in the open fields, and though the greater
part of the meadow and pasture is undivided, a considerable proportion
has been enclosed by the tenants and is held in severalty. Elsewhere one
finds the common meadow split up and the arable enclosed, the arable
enclosed and the waste unenclosed, or all of them enclosed more or less
completely. It would be of great interest and importance to determine
the relative preponderance of enclosure by the tenants in different
parts of the country, and to see how far the districts where this type
of enclosure by consent had been commonest were identical with those
where the reports of the Royal Commissions of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries show that depopulating enclosures made least way.
Very probably it would be found that the latter movement went on least
rapidly where the former had proceeded furthest, and that where the
tenants themselves had from an early date substituted enclosed for open
field husbandry, as apparently they had in Kent, Essex, Cornwall, and
parts of Devonshire[287] they had least to fear from that kind of
enclosure which was accompanied by encroachments on the part of manorial
authorities, and which seems to have produced most dislocation in the
Midlands and Eastern counties. But this is a suggestion which our
material is too scanty either to confirm or disprove. Enclosure by
consent did not cause popular disorder; and therefore we cannot say,
taking the country as a whole, how far enclosure on the part of the bulk
of the smaller tenants had proceeded. We can only give cases which show
that on some manors it had advanced very far, and which bear out the
evidence of the writers on agriculture as to there being a well-defined
movement away from open field husbandry on the part of the peasants
themselves, without attempting to determine its extent or its
geographical distribution.
[287] _Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 49. _Victoria
County History_, Essex. I am inclined to say "almost certainly"
rather than "very probably" (see below, pp. 167 and 262?-263).
Look, first, for example, at the picture given by the Commission of
1517. Thanks to Mr. Leadam,[288] we are able to say what the average
acreage of the enclosures in each county represented was, what
proportion of the enclosures was due to lords of manors, lay or
ecclesiastical, and what proportion was due to the tenants. Now it is
generally, though not universally, true that the enclosures reported to
this Commission fall into two main types. The first consists of
considerable enclosures carried out mainly by lords of manors. The
second consists of smaller enclosures carried out mainly by other
classes. Thus the five districts where the average size of the
enclosures made is largest are Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire,
Yorkshire North Riding, Yorkshire West Riding, Yorkshire East Riding,
where it is 129, 96, 84, 77, 62 acres respectively, and in these the
proportion of the enclosures which is due to the lords of manors is high
also--72 per cent., 52 per cent., 79 per cent., 92 per cent., 64 per
cent. Contrast with the position in these counties that obtaining in
Berkshire, in Salop, and in London and its suburbs. In Berkshire the
average size of an enclosure is 32 acres, in Salop 18, in London 10, and
in these districts the lords play a much smaller part in enclosing.
They are responsible for 42 per cent. of the acreage enclosed in
Berkshire, 12 per cent. of that enclosed in Salop, 3 per cent. of that
enclosed in the vicinity of London. Does not this suggest that in parts
of the country--we cannot yet say what parts--there is much small
enclosing by small men?
[288] _Trans. R. H. S._, New Series, vol. vi., and _The Domesday
of Enclosures_.
Turn next to the story told by the surveys. Though Wiltshire is on the
whole a country of recent enclosure, there was a certain amount of
several farming on the part of the customary tenants on the Wiltshire
manors in the middle of the sixteenth century. Out of 4128-1/4 acres
held by them on eight manors the surveys show that 202-1/4 acres lie in
closes.[289] This is a very small proportion, only 5 per cent., and
suggests that on most of them the holdings lay in the open fields, and
that, as a general rule, the common utilisation of meadows and pastures
still obtained. On one, however, as much as 132 acres out of 1103, or
just under 12 per cent. were enclosed, and at best these are minimum
figures which do not accurately represent how far the movement had gone;
for, though a surveyor would not describe unenclosed land as enclosed,
he might very well class enclosed land with other land of the same
description, for example as meadow or pasture, and omit to state that it
was occupied in severalty. On some Staffordshire[290] manors again there
are similar tentative beginnings of enclosure, and a similar
impossibility of determining its actual extent. Then, too, there are
manors where the greater part of the land still lies in the open fields,
but where enclosure has proceeded a little further. At Salford,[291] in
Bedfordshire, eight of the tenants have enclosed about 51 acres, which
they hold separate from, and in addition to, their holdings in the open
fields, in amounts varying from 2 to 17 acres. At Weeden Weston,[292]
in Northamptonshire, the three largest tenants (apart from the farmer of
the demesne) hold "in several ground enclosed" 28 acres. In addition to
this, part of the manor called "the mere land," the exact nature of
which is obscure, has been broken off and split up among all the
fourteen tenants, some holding only 2 or 3 acres, others holding 15 or
20 acres. Finally, as examples of manors where enclosure by the
customary tenants was carried furthest, we may take those of
Edgeware[293] and Kingsbury in Middlesex. From the admirable maps of
these two manors, which were made in 1597, no one could even guess that
the open field method of cultivation had ever existed there. The land of
each of the numerous tenants lies in fields, often quite small fields,
which are separated from each other by hedges. Instead of the "spider's
web" of the older method we have the irregular chessboard of modern
agriculture.
[289] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of the Manors of William, First
Earl of Pembroke_. The manors are South Newton, Washerne,
Donnington, Knyghton Estoverton and Phiphelde, Wynterbourne
Basset, Byschopeston, and South Brent and Huish (the last in
Somersetshire.) The manor where most is enclosed by the
customary tenants is Donnington.
[290] _e.g._, R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14,
No. 70, Barton (3 & 4 Ph. and Mary): "J. Whiting ... 1 close of
7 acres by copy ... J. Whiting ... 1/2 virgate ... 1 intake of 2
acres by copy."
[291] All Souls' Maps (survey on back of map of Salford).
[292] _Ibid._, Weedon Weston.
[293] _Ibid._, Edgeware and Kingbury. All these four instances
come from the last decade of the sixteenth century.
These instances tell us nothing of the origin, extent, or distribution
of the movement which they represent. They are useful merely as offering
concrete specimens of enclosure on the parts of free and customary
tenants, which confirm what is told us by the surveyors. There was
certainly a well-defined trend away from the methods of common field
agriculture taking place in the course of the sixteenth century and
before it on the part of the peasantry. We can, however, go further than
this; and premising that in the infinite variety of rural conditions in
different parts of the country any classification must be somewhat
arbitrary, we can distinguish two main elements in the movement.
In the first place there is among the tenants on some manors something
like a deliberate movement towards the substitution of "several" for
open field husbandry. This was a change which occurred almost
spontaneously when the economic interests of the majority of tenants
were pushing in the same direction, and can be seen affecting both
pasture, meadow, and arable holdings. The Commission[294] of 1517 found
that in certain places land had been enclosed neither by individual
landlords, nor by individual tenants, but by "the village," and the
manorial documents give us a clue to what such entries mean. In the
surveys of the sixteenth century we not infrequently find that meadows
and pastures which were originally occupied in common have been split up
among the tenants, so that each has the exclusive occupation of a few
acres, the share which each tenant takes being proportioned more or less
exactly to his holding of arable in a manner which precludes the idea
that the change can have taken place by piecemeal individual
encroachments, or in any way except by an intentional redistribution of
land, in which the interests of all the tenants received
consideration.[295] Such a division of meadow and pasture is paralleled
by cases in which the re-allotment of arable holdings is carried out
both by freeholders and by copyholders almost exactly in the manner
prescribed by Fitzherbert. Thus at Ewerne,[296] in Dorsetshire, the
customary tenants got permission from the lord to make enclosure on the
open fields; appointed persons to "extend and tread them out," and then
united the dispersed strips into compact holdings, so that "the more
part of the manor was enclosed, and every tenant and farmer occupied his
land several to himself." At Mudford, in Somersetshire, the tenants were
found by the surveyor in 1568 to be contemplating the same step. A
similar course was taken in the early seventeenth century on several
Northumbrian manors, of which Cowpen[297] may be taken as a typical
example.
[294] _e.g._ Whitecote (Salop) 40 acres, and at Wyndeferthing
(Norf.) 25 acres are enclosed by the _villata_ (see Leadam,
_Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. vi.).
[295] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_. At Washerne
nineteen out of twenty-one customary tenants held separate
pieces of meadow and pasture, the largest 7-1/2 and the smallest
3-1/2 acres, but usually almost equal. At Donnyngton, twelve out
of thirty-two customary tenants had pieces of land "extractum de
communia." R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Bdle.
3, No. 29, Agarsley (Staffs., 1611).; here the pasture appears
to have been divided up among the copyholders, but there are
considerable inequalities in their shares.
[296] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.
[297] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. In this case
enclosure was carried out by the freeholders. But the procedure
is similar to that at Ewerne. The allusion to "justice and
right" shows what the reason for the intermixing of strips had
been.
The procedure followed by the freeholders of that township was to get
their land surveyed by an expert, to divide it into two great portions,
and to agree that each man should have an allotment in one or other of
the two divisions proportionate to the holding which he had occupied in
the open fields, due regard being had to the quality as well as the
acreage of each holding, "so that some have not all the best ground and
others all the worst, but that each man have justice and right." Such
instances may prove to be exceptional in the sixteenth century; it is
our impression that they were, and that the attempts which the peasantry
made to overcome the difficulties associated with the open field system
of cultivation more often took the form of individual exchanging of
strips, than of a formal agreement to abandon one method of cultivation
and to adopt another. But, even though exceptional, they are of some
interest as offering complete examples of changes which have been going
on more generally on a smaller scale and in a less systematic manner.
They afford a striking contrast to the enclosing by the manorial
authorities which we shall examine in a future chapter, and offer an
analogy to the enclosures which were carried out in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. They resemble the latter in being a deliberate
attempt to make a clean sweep of the old system of open field
agriculture. They differ from them in being the outcome of voluntary
agreement among the tenants, not of legislation.[298]
[298] We know why lords wanted to enclose much better than we
know why tenants wanted to enclose. Here is a petition from a
freeholder (_Northumberland County History_, vol. v. undated):
"To the Right Honourable Earl of Northumberland, William Bednell
... gent., humbly prayeth: That where the said village of Over
Buston is held in common ... it would please your good lordship
to consent that partition may be made of the same, and that also
there may be convenient exchange of the arable lands lyinge in
the common fields there to be rateable reduced into severall by
the same partition for the reasons under-written.
"First, for that the common and pasture of the said village
lying open, unfenced upon the common and fields of Wordon and
Bilton, wherein are many tenants and great number of cattle, the
profits of the same are continually by them surcharged, and your
lordship's tenants prevented.
"By reason hereof divers quarrels and variances have happened,
and daily like to ensue between the tenants of both towns, by
chasing, rechasing, and impounding of their cattle damage
fezant, which cannot be kept out but by perpetual staffherding,
to the great charge of your honour's poor tenants.
"Your lordship's tenants being four in number, unprovided to
keep able horses by reason of the want of convenient pastures
and meadow, may be enabled by this particion for that purpose.
"Inclosure would greatly strengthen the said village, and your
lordship's tenants, against the incursions of Scotts and foren
ryders, which otherwyse, lying open, cannot be defended by the
number there, who are forced to watch generally together every
night, to their great charge and endurable toil.
"This breeding betterment to the soil and ease to your
lordship's tenants will augment your honour's revenue there,
avoid forren commoners, prevent contentions, enable your
lordship's tenants to do your honour their requisite service,
and bind your orator to pray that your lordship live long in
happy state."
Much more general, however, than enclosure by agreement of the whole
township, is the enclosure which takes place through the initiative of
individual tenants, who, without any common agreement as to a policy of
enclosure being reached by the village community as a whole, make
sporadic encroachments on the common pasture or waste, and consolidate
their arable holdings by exchanging strips with their neighbours. Our
best information on the first point is obtained from the manorial court
rolls. The court was the guardian of the customary methods of
cultivation. How far it could maintain them against a lord or his farmer
who wished to break them down, and how far it was merely his mouthpiece,
is a difficult question, which we need not at present discuss. Certainly
it did occasionally uphold the common rule of the township even against
the lord; certainly the mere fact that when that rule is uncertain the
lord refers the matter to the court in the form of a series of questions
which it is to answer, gave the tenants the opportunity of building up a
kind of case law which can hardly have failed to act as a brake upon
arbitrary action by the manorial authorities. But however impotent it
may often have been when confronted by an enclosing lord of the manor,
its rules set very effective limits to the discretion exercised by
tenants in their agricultural arrangements, and it checked enclosing by
individuals for several reasons. It was of the essence of the open field
system of tillage, and of the joint use of common meadows and pastures,
that unauthorised encroachments by a single tenant should be an
inconvenience to his neighbours. If made on the arable, they might
interfere with the customary rotation of crops, and would certainly
diminish the area of land available for the village cattle on the
fallows and after harvest. If made on the common waste, they threw the
village economy into confusion by upsetting the arrangements under
which each holding could place so many beasts to be grazed there. "It
is both law and reason," wrote a surveyor grieved by such aggression on
the part of a large tenant, "that every tenant of like land and like
rent have like portion in all things upon the common pasture."[299] The
court, as the upholder of manorial custom, was occupied with discovering
and checking breaches of it. On manors where there was not sufficient
grazing land to allow of each tenant pasturing as many beasts as he
pleased, it fixed "the stint" which each was allowed to turn out on the
common. It decided whether rights of pasture were confined to old
tenements or whether they could be extended to cottages recently
erected. It made rules as to what fields should be sown with what crops.
It would fine a man "for refusing to consult his neighbours touching the
common affairs of the township."[300]
[299] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v. The Surveyor of
Buston (1569).
[300] _Ibid._
Such action does not, of course, necessarily imply any highly developed
communal organisation of village life. When four householders to-day
bring an action against a fifth who has interfered with "ancient
lights," they act simply as individuals who are temporarily united in
defence of a common interest, and when a court customary fines a man for
over-stocking the common pasture, it is possible to argue that there is
no more in its action than the temporary alliance of individuals to
suppress a nuisance. Yet such a view of the matter is incomplete. The
common interest is there in both cases; but in the case of the village
community it is a permanent, not merely a passing, ground for
co-operation; and if we must take to heart the warnings given by some
legal historians not to see communism where there is only joint action,
we must also insist that common action, which is in effect communal
action, is quite possible without those who act either possessing, or
feeling the need of possessing, any definite status.[301] It is perhaps
not too presumptuous to suggest that the very precision with which the
lawyer applies his keen analysis of juristic conceptions to remove the
misconceptions of the lay mind, is sometimes an obstacle to the
understanding of forms of organisation created by the daily routine of
men quite unversed in the law. An employers' association or a trade
union to-day in an industry which is not highly organised is, during
two-thirds of its life, a mere collection of individuals. But in an
emergency it can show very effectively that it is the organ of a common
will. It is surely rather hard to deny the peasantry some measure of
corporate management of common interests because they cannot answer
questions as to the legal nature of a corporation, because they do not
express their communal arrangements by the use of terms of art which
they would not have understood. The economist, at any rate, will look at
practice rather than theory. He will be inclined to doubt whether the
villagers were any clearer as to the basis of their associated action
than the mass of trade unionists were between 1875 and 1906. But he will
see that, like trade unionists, they do in fact habitually act together
and act effectively for the regulation of their common interests. No
doubt such action was often mere adherence to a customary rule. But it
is possible again to draw the antithesis between custom and organisation
too sharply. After all custom does not work by itself. Especially in
times of change, like the sixteenth century, it only works in so far as
men make it work. On some manors it is frequently changed by the court,
and clearly, when it is changed, we have not automatism but deliberate
action.
[301] For references to the discussion on this point, see below,
p. 244.
But the power of a rule is not recognised till it is broken, and it is
just these collisions between the plan of cultivation upheld by the
court and the interests of individual tenants, which show how prevalent
are the small enclosures made by the latter. They begin very early and
are increasingly frequent throughout the fifteenth century. Let us make
the picture more precise by giving one or two instances. In 1405 some
customary tenants at Forncett[302] are fined 2s. 2d. because "they have
made enclosures of their lands within the manor against the custom of
the manor, on account of which action the tenants of the manor are not
able to have their common there." In 1418 the court at Castle[303] Combe
presents that three tenants "have sown the common fields and kept them
several without the licence of the lord, when they ought to be common,
to the common damage." At Ingoldmells,[304] in 1437, the court impounds
the sheep of some tenants who have "entered upon the fields of Burgh and
occupied the common there, where they have no common." At Coventry[305]
from the middle of the fifteenth century, and at Southampton[306]
throughout almost the whole of the century and a half following,
continuous war was waged by the Court Leet against those who "oppressed
the common" by over-stocking it with more than their authorised quota of
beasts. Yet, in spite of elaborate and ever-changing regulations which
were made as to the number which any person might place upon it, in
spite of bye-laws requiring them to be delivered personally or through a
servant into the charge of the town herdsman, ruling off aged animals
which were past work, and imposing heavy fines on offenders, the
constant references in the documents of the sixteenth century to pieces
of land which are held by customary tenants in severalty show that this
sporadic individualising of part of the manorial area had to a great
extent broken down the customary routine of cultivation, even on manors
where no extensive enclosures were carried out by the manorial
authorities.
[302] Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 80.
[303] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_,
p. 236.
[304] Massingberd, _Ingoldmells Court Rolls_, p. 276.
[305] M.D. Harris, _Coventry Leet Book_, vol. ii., pp. 445, 456,
510, and elsewhere.
[306] Hearnshaw, _Court Leet Records of Southampton, passim,
e.g._ 1551: "Thomas Betts and Thomas Fuller continue to oppress
the common with sheep, therefore they are fined 8s. each" (p.
21).
So far we have spoken of the encroachments by tenants on the common
pasture. The growth of several occupation could occur there with less
disturbance than on the arable holdings, because, if the pasture was a
large one, the clipping off of a corner might leave the other tenants
with more than was sufficient for their cattle. But enclosure made by
one tenant on the open arable fields created a disturbance which was
immediate and obvious. Indeed, if his holding lay in scattered strips,
separated from each other by the strips of his neighbours, how could he
enclose at all? He would at once come into collision with their demand
that his holding should lie open for grazing purposes after harvest.
Moreover, even from his own point of view, enclosure could hardly
pay, for he would have to put hedges round each of 30 or 40 or 50 acre
and half acre plots. One would expect, therefore, that individual
tenants would be slow to undertake the hedging and ditching of their
arable holdings; and this expectation is on the whole confirmed by the
impression which one gets from the surveys and from the accounts of
contemporaries.[307] On the tenants' arable land enclosure has not
proceeded by the middle of the sixteenth century as far as on their
pasture and meadow. Yet, even in this matter, the tendency is perhaps to
exaggerate the stability of agricultural conditions. Even on the arable
fields themselves individual tenants set themselves to overcome the
obstacles in the way of enclosure, and they do so in the only way they
can, by attempting first of all to consolidate their strips into larger
holdings. This tendency is revealed most clearly by the open field maps.
The picture of mediæval agriculture, to which Mr. Seebohm has accustomed
us, is one in which holdings were made up of strips which lay scattered
over the open fields at a considerable distance from each other. In the
sixteenth century this condition of things survived in its entirety on
many manors and partially on most. But, side by side with it, there is
going on a process by which the strips coalesce into larger bundles, so
that one tenant's pieces of land, instead of being far apart, very often
lie next to each other, forming blocks of several acres. Those who make
maps show the change by putting brackets round the contiguous
strips.[308] Written surveys, instead of describing parts of holdings
with the words "lying between the land of A and the land of B," call
attention to the new condition of things, which is still sufficiently
unusual to deserve remark, with the words "lying together."[309]
Sometimes in the maps one finds twelve or twenty strips bracketed as
belonging to one man; sometimes the surveys state that 16 or 20 acres
lie together. But even 10 acres is a big field, quite big enough to
repay the cost of hedging and ditching. When sufficient strips have
become contiguous to form a close of this size one great obstacle to
enclosure has been removed. Unity of cultivation has been added to unity
of ownership. The difficulty that enclosure will probably, though not
necessarily, mean the exclusion of the other tenants' beasts after
harvest still remains. But an individual tenant will no longer find
enclosure impossible if he can persuade his neighbours to acquiesce in
it. In fact he does sometimes persuade them, and in the midst of fields
which are still open one finds here and there blocks which have been
enclosed.
[307] _e.g._ _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 56:
"And weare it not that oure grounde lieth in the common fieldes,
intermingled one with another, I thincke also oure fieldes had
been inclosed, of a common agreement of all the townshippe,
longe ere this time."
[308] See opposite, the map of part of Salford.
[309] Merton Documents, No. 5209, Rental of Ibstone (about
1600): "Item, Thomas Skott holdeth ix acres as it is estymed
lieinge together in Tillage." "John ... holdeth 16 acres of
Lande lieinge together in Redfield."
[Illustration: I. PART OF THE MANOR OF SALFORD, IN BEDFORDSHIRE (1590.)]
[Illustration: II. PART OF THE MANOR OF EDGEWARE, IN MIDDLESEX (1597.)]
[Illustration: III. MAP OF PART OF THE MANOR OF MAIDS MORTON IN
BUCKSHIRE (1580.)]
[Illustration: IV. MAP OF PART OF THE MANOR OF CRENDON IN
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE (ABOUT 1590.) ]
[Illustration: V. MAP OF PART OF THE MANOR OF WEEDON WESTON IN
NORTHAMPTONSHIRE (1590.)]
[Illustration: VI. MAP OF THE MANOR OF WHADBOROUGH IN LEICESTERSHIRE
(1620.)]
Nor can we doubt that this process of forming strips into blocks took
place through deliberate action on the part of tenants, though we need
not assume that the probability of its leading to enclosure was always
foreseen. The amalgamation of the scattered parts of a single holding
had sufficient advantages to commend it without any further change, and
enclosure may often have been an afterthought. How could this
amalgamation come about? It would naturally take place by a process of
exchange[310] between tenants. As we have seen, the tenants were from an
early date buying and selling, leasing and sub-letting, parts of their
holdings. What could be more reasonable than that in doing so they
should have regard to the situation of the plots which they acquired,
and so arrange their bargains as gradually to substitute a few larger
blocks for many scattered strips? This hypothesis (for it is only a
hypothesis) receives a certain amount of confirmation from a curious
fact to which attention was called for the first time by Professor
Unwin.[311] It occasionally happens that we find the very tenants who
sell and let part of their holdings are buying and leasing parts of
other holdings from their neighbours. Thus, at Gorleston,[312] in
Suffolk, a customary tenant sublets about half his holding of 12 acres
to as many as eight other persons, and at the same time acquires plots
of land from another eight holdings himself. At Crondal[313] Richard
Wysdon adds enormously to his half-virgate by encroachments, and at the
same time sublets 2-1/2 acres to Hugh Sweyn. Henry Simmond enters on
land belonging to the same Richard Wysdon, and in turn transfers 8 acres
of his holding to Matilda Huthe. What is relevant to the question in
these transactions is not the mere sub-letting and selling of land.
That, as we have seen, was common enough. The noticeable thing is that
the same tenant who surrenders part of his holding acquires part of the
holdings of other people. After the transactions are completed he holds
about as much land as before, only it is differently arranged. May it
not be that the desire that it should be differently arranged was one of
the motives of the double transaction, and that in this way he sought to
substitute for his dispersed strips a compacter and more manageable
holding? Is he not like a shareholder who sells out Canadian Pacifics
and invests in Consols, in order to have his property more directly
under his own eye? At any rate such an explanation would account for the
undoubted fact that in the sixteenth century holdings are much more
compact than they are in the thirteenth century. But whether it is
correct or not the growth towards compactness is a fact, and a fact
which makes possible the enclosure of holdings in the open fields.
[310] Exchanges are not uncommon, _e.g._ Roxburghe Club,
_Pembroke Surveys_, Manor of South Brent and Huish: "Note that
the same Thomas with leave of the Court has exchanged the said
acre lying near Appleworth with John Moore, customary tenant of
the lord, for one acre lyinge in Holmefield." Mr. Kolthammer has
called my attention to a case (Ashford Court Rolls, 1605), in
which a tenant gives up a number of half acre strips lying
between the lands of another, and receives in exchange some
strips of the latter which lie between his own.
[311] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk, Social and Economic
History.
[312] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk, Social and Economic
History.
[313] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 134, 149, 152, 154-155.
It is plain from these and similar instances that there was a
well-defined movement from the fourteenth century onwards which made for
the gradual modification or dissolution of the open field system of
cultivation, and that it originated not on the side of the lord or the
great farmer, but on the side of the peasants themselves, who tried to
overcome the inconvenience of that system by a spontaneous process of
re-allotment, sometimes, but not always, in conjunction with actual
enclosure. On one manor it proceeded by the piecemeal encroachments of
individuals, on another by the deliberate division of the common meadow
or pasture, on a third by the voluntary exchanging by tenants of their
strips so as to build up compact holdings, on a fourth by the
redistribution of the arable land. It was a spontaneous movement in the
sense of being initiated by the tenants and not merely forced upon them.
The economic, as distinct from the legal, arrangements of the village
community were much less rigid than some of the books about it would
suggest. The open field system of cultivation was, in fact, already in
slow motion in several parts of England, when the impact of the large
grazier struck it, enormously accelerated the speed of the movement, and
diverted it on to lines which were new and disastrous to the bulk of the
rural population.
This aspect of the enclosures, though not overlooked by contemporaries,
has perhaps hardly received the emphasis which it deserves from modern
writers. For one thing, a recollection of it explains certain apparent
contradictions, the difference in the views expressed by different
writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the social
effect of enclosures, the disagreement between Mr. Leadam and Professor
Gay as to whether enclosing was or was not usually followed by
conversion to pasture, the strange statement of Hales[314] that "the
chief destruccion of Townes and decaye of houses was before the
beginning of the reigne of Kynge Henry the Seventh." The latter remark
can hardly have been true of the great and sudden evictions which caused
rioting and depopulation, and evoked the long series of statutes which
begin in 1489. It may well have been a curt summary of the impression
produced by a century of gradual consolidation and piecemeal enclosures
carried out by the smaller cultivators. It would seem, again, to be the
case that while landlords usually enclosed with the object of putting
sheep where men had been, the tenants of customary holdings enclosed
simply for the sake of better arable farming, or for the more convenient
employment of meadow and pasture land. That is why Hales could make
himself detested by landlords as the chairman of the only effective
committee of Somerset's ill-starred Enclosure Commission, and at the
same time say that certain kinds of enclosure are "very beneficiall to
the commonweal." That is why Fuller and Moore a century later could damn
enclosure in one sentence and qualify their verdict in the next. That is
why Moore's numerous critics could repudiate his aspersions with some
acrimony, and nevertheless admit that "when townes are in the hands of
one or few men ... enclosure doth produce depopulation."[315]
[314] "The defence of John Hales agenst certyn sclaundres and
false reaportes made of hym" (Appendix to Miss Lamond's
introduction to _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p.
liii.). Two things make the effect of the fifteenth century
enclosures obscure. First, the pamphlets on popular grievances
which begin in the sixteenth century were hardly possible before
the general use of the printing press. Second, in the sixteenth
century people appealed to the Tudor government for protection
because it was strong enough to give it. In the fifteenth
century there was no Government to preserve order, let alone
protect the poorer classes. Even if there were, therefore,
extensive enclosures producing depopulation, we might very well
hear little of them. But, while confessing ignorance, I think
Hales' statement compatible with the view expressed above and on
page 138, note 1, that the fifteenth century was a time when the
consolidation of holdings was going forward slowly through the
small speculations of the peasants.
[315] _A Vindication of the Considerations concerning Common
Fields and Enclosures_ (Pseudonismus).
For another thing, the prevalence of small enclosures suggests that the
view of those who represent the agriculture of the period as needing a
violent shock to rouse it from a state of intolerable inefficiency can
only be accepted with considerable qualification. We know that by the
middle of the sixteenth century in certain counties, notably Kent,
Essex, and Devonshire, the common field system of cultivation was
already the exception and not the rule. We know, too, that though in
parts of these counties its absence may have been due to differences in
the original forms of settlement and clearance, it had elsewhere
disappeared within historical times. We may conjecture that the reason
why it decayed sooner in Kent and Essex than elsewhere was the fact that
the neighbourhood of those counties to London and the sea, and to the
commercial routes from the Continent, caused the influence of commerce
and of a money economy to be felt there sooner than in the Midlands,
with the natural result of accelerating economic and agrarian changes,
and that in the examples quoted above we have the same process of
individualisation in the method of agriculture going on quietly
elsewhere in a way which would sooner or later have brought about a
similar result to that which had already occurred in those two
progressive districts. At any rate these rearrangements suggest a good
deal of adaptability among the tenants who carried them out, and not the
condition of organised torpor which some writers profess to find in the
unenclosed village. That communal cultivation was incompatible with
swift change may be granted. Of that fact its survival into almost our
own day is a sufficient proof. That it prevented improvements altogether
must be denied; and though no doubt to large farmers and impatient
surveyors the petty operations of the smaller tenants seemed intolerably
dilatory and wasteful, the student who looks at them in an age which has
some experience of economic revolutions may well doubt whether rapid
technical progress cannot be bought too dear, and regret that the
gradual movement towards more rational methods of farming on the part of
the small man was so soon overtaken by one over which the small man
could exercise no effective control. Now, as then, land agents shake
grave heads at the wastefulness of sacrificing the well-ordered dignity
of a great estate to the encouragement of undercapitalised, untidy,
higgledy-piggledy small holdings, and prove by arithmetic that the
labourer has more comforts for less work. Now, as then, in those
countries where the peasant tradition has not died altogether away, the
unreasonable creature prefers starving on land which is his own, though
it be but a tiny patch where he sweats from dawn to dark.
If it be objected to the view which we have taken of the slow spread of
enclosure among the peasantry that they were notoriously opposed to
enclosing, we must answer by repeating that there was nothing
inconsistent in approving one kind and detesting another. After all
there is no curse attached to landmarks, but only to the man who removes
his neighbour's. Even in an open field village no one had a
conscientious objection to fences in general; it all depended on where
the fences were put. The object of enclosure was to shut in, or to shut
out, or to do both. The villagers were not unwilling that an agreement
should be reached whereby each man should shut his own beasts in a close
of pasture, and shut out the beasts of other people from his arable
after harvest. On the contrary, it was sometimes a grievance[316] that
enclosure was not allowed. What they objected to was that one man should
exclude others without compensation from rights of pasture or from their
arable holdings. Moreover, provided that enclosure took place by
consent, the advantages of it were overwhelming. When the superior[317]
value of enclosed over unenclosed land was so marked that the former was
sometimes assessed to subsidies at a higher rate than the latter, a man
who, like many of our tenants, had money to spend on timber, would
naturally wish to enclose. The growth of pasture farming by large
graziers turned the minds of the smaller tenants in the direction of
enclosing for themselves, because this, paradoxical though it may seem
when the outcry against enclosure is remembered, was the most obvious
way in which they could protect themselves. The explanation is that the
system of open field cultivation and of common pasturage made it
peculiarly easy for one large shareholder to ruin the rest by letting
his cattle stray at large over the common, and even by encroachments on
his neighbour's strips. Its underlying principle had been the
apportionment of rights on a basis which was settled by the custom of
the manor, as opposed to the acquisition by individuals for themselves
of such rights as they could obtain by economic power, or by the
accumulation of capital. This was the meaning of the strict allotment of
grazing privileges by the establishment of a stint which each tenant, or
rather each tenement, was not to exceed. The limitation to the capital
which a man could acquire in the shape of stock--cattle and sheep--was
practicable as long as that capital was small. When it became large, as
in the sixteenth century it did, it was too powerful to be dammed up by
the rules as to cultivation enforced in the manorial court, and the
outward sign of this was the failure of the latter to prevent the
"overcharging" both of the common waste, and of the common pasture
formed by the field after harvest, with the beasts of the large grazier.
Hence in some places the enclosing of pasture or arable was used by the
tenants as a way of protecting themselves: at Mudford the tenants, at
Newham and Tughall the surveyor in the interests of the tenants, at
Southampton the Leet jury, were anxious[318] for enclosing, in order
that the weak barriers which the custom of the manor offered to the
farmers' or to neighbouring villagers' depredations might be
supplemented by a strong quickset hedge. What damaged the smaller
tenants, and produced the popular revolts against enclosure, was not
merely enclosing, but enclosing accompanied either by eviction and
conversion to pasture, or by the monopolising of common rights. When
some of the tenants became large capitalists, what the rest lost by
surrendering common rights might be more than compensated by the
security which they thus obtained of grazing their own beasts
undisturbed on a smaller area.
[316] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i., Survey of
Whitford: "I woulde wish that the same [the common] were divided
among the tenants yielding some small rente ... the poore men
with dyligence and labour woulde soon convert yt to amendement,
and alter the nature thereof, but the ritche men will not
consent to that, for yt is as good to them as theire several
grounde or pasture. The poore are not able to store yt with
cattle, nor to use the commodytie as they might do if welth
woulde serve them. But the rytche do consume their own parts and
their neighbouris also: and that is the cause they will not
consent to the enclosure and partition thereof."
[317] There is interesting documentary proof of the statements
of surveyors. Warwickshire MSS. Quarter Sessions Records,
Michaelmas, 1636: "Fforasmuche as this Courte is informed that
Overhinton (?) in this countie consists of 30 yardlands, of
which 22 are enclosed and 8 yardlands thereof residue in the
possession of Thomas [surname illegible] do lie in the common
fields, and whereas the same 8 yardlands lyinge in the comon
fields have been heretofore rated equally and proportionablie in
all levies with thother yardlands, the said 22 yard of inclosed
land being worth xx [pounds], for every yardland and the seid
other 8 yardlands being worth but after the rate of x the
yardland, it is ordered that the said 8 yardlands shall from
henceforth pay in all levies but after the rate of x pounds for
every yardland and the said 22 yardlands after the rate of xx
pounds for every yardland, unless the owners of the said 22
yardlands shall att the next sessions uppon convenient notice
hereof to them given shewe cause to the contrarie." The Justices
do not understand the taxation of unimproved land.
[318] See _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i., for Mudford;
for Newham and Tughall, _Northumberland County History_, vol.
i.; for Southampton, Hearnshaw, _Court Leet Records of
Southampton_.
At the same time, though voluntary enclosing by the peasants was partly
a symptom of the overshadowing of small property by large, it was much
more than this, and was due partly to a change in their methods of
agriculture, and partly, perhaps, to a genuine progress in the technique
of cultivation. This is indicated by the enthusiasm of the expert
opinion of the period for "several" holdings, and by the qualified
praise of discriminating critics like Hales.[319] As we have seen
above, there were parts of England--for example, "the sweet country of
Tandeane," described by Norden--where cultivation was quite intensive in
character, and intensive cultivation naturally gave an impetus to the
individualising of arable holdings. Again, the advantage to the cattle
breeder of "several closes and pastures to put his cattle in, the which
would be well quicksetted, hedged, and ditched,"[320] was a commonplace.
It has been already pointed out that on many manors of Southern and
Eastern England the customary tenants were sheep farmers on a
considerable scale. The adjustment of common rights must always have
involved some difficulty: the fixing of so many head of beasts to each
tenement was obviously a rough and ready arrangement based on the idea
that the holding in the arable fields was the backbone of a man's
substance, and that therefore it might properly be taken as a standard
by which his rights of pasture and common could fairly be measured. The
problems which arose could be imagined, even if they were not described
for us at some length: "Where fields lie open and the land is used in
common, he that is rich and fully stocked (up to the limit allowed)
eateth with his cattle not his own part only, but also his neighbour's
who is poor and out of stock. Besides that, it is an ordinary practice
with unconscionable people to keep above their just proportion ... those
who have consciences large enough to do it will lengthen their ropes, or
stake them down so that their horses may reach into other men's
lots."[321] As long as the great bulk of the customary tenants relied
for a livelihood mainly on the subsistence farming of the arable land,
these practical difficulties were probably not felt very keenly, because
the comparatively few beasts which were kept could pick up a living
without overcrowding each other. But when the raising of stock became
almost as important as the cultivation of arable, the demand for more
pasture and for better pasture grew enormously, and in the face of the
competition for it the strict maintenance of the customary stint became
more difficult. On manors where 150 or 200 sheep were kept by almost
every tenant the motive either to enclose surreptitiously and in
defiance of the custom of the manor, or to divide and enclose meadow and
pasture by agreement, must have been extremely strong. Ought we not to
ask why the open field system survived so long, rather than why it
partially disappeared in the sixteenth century?
[319] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 49: "I meane
not all inclosures, nor yet all commons, but only of such
inclosures as turneth commonly arable lands into pastures; and
violent inclosures, without recompence of them that have right
to comen therein; for if land weare severallie inclosed, to the
intent to continue husbandrie thereon, and everie man, that had
Right to Common, had for his portion a pece of the same to
himselfe enclosed, I thincke no harme but rather good should
come thereof, yf everie man did agre theirto."
[320] Fitzherbert, _Book of Husbandry_.
[321] Pseudonismus, 1654, _Considerations concerning Common
Fields and Enclosures_.
We may now summarise the argument of this part of our work. The manor,
as we see it from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, is not
the rigid, motionless organisation which it is sometimes represented as
being. Though it is governed by custom, custom leaves room for the
growth of commercial relationships on the extending fringe of new land
over which the village spreads; for the withdrawal by the villagers of
part of their holdings from the common scheme of open field husbandry,
the division of meadows and pastures, the exchanging of strips, the
formation of closes like those represented in the map on the opposite
page, which a man can use as he pleases and over which the customary
routine of agriculture has no authority. This side of the enclosing
movement, more properly described as redivision and reallotment than as
enclosure, develops earliest in those parts of the country which, owing
to their geographical position, are particularly exposed to the
dissolving forces of trade and of a money economy. But with the
improvement in the condition of the peasantry and the growth of pasture
farming it spreads far afield, and by the middle of the sixteenth
century, quite apart from the large changes introduced by lords of
manors and capitalist farmers, it has effected a considerable alteration
in the methods of agriculture even of the more stationary inland
counties. Such piecemeal alterations are a gradual process; they are not
regarded unfavourably by the peasantry; and a balance between their
tentative individualism and the rule of communal custom is preserved by
the action of the manorial court. They are to be carefully
distinguished from the sweeping innovations of the sixteenth century,
which alone deserve the name of an Agrarian Revolution. But they are
closely connected with that revolution. For by making a breach in the
walls of custom they bring us to the edge of two great problems, the
growth of competitive rents, and the formation of large pasture farms
out of the holdings of evicted tenants.
We have spoken at length of the prosperity of the peasants, because it
is necessary to appreciate it in order to sympathise with the point of
view from which they and their contemporaries regarded the agrarian
problem. But evil days are coming upon the rural middle classes. Indeed
they have already come. There is by this time much anger against
depopulating landlords, much talk of the good customs of Henry VII.,
much murmuring lest men be brought to that slavery the Frenchman be in.
We must leave the light and follow them into the shadow.
PART II
THE TRANSITION TO CAPITALIST AGRICULTURE
"The earth is thine, O Lord, and all that is contained therein;
notwithstanding thou hast given the possession thereof to the
children of men, to pass over the time of their short
pilgrimage in this vale of misery. We heartily pray thee to
send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the
grounds, pastures, and dwelling places of the earth; that they,
remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and
stretch out the rents of their houses and lands; nor yet take
unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous
worldlings; but so let them out to other, that the inhabitants
thereof may be able to pay their rents, and also honestly to
live, to nourish their families, and to relieve the poor: give
them grace also to consider that they are but strangers and
pilgrims in this world, having here no dwelling place, but
seeking one to come; that they, remembering the short
continuance of their life, may be content with that is
sufficient, and not join house to house and field to field, to
the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in
letting out their tenements, lands, and pastures, that after
this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling
places; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen."--_A Prayer for
landlords, from a Book of Private Prayer, authorised and set
forth by order of King Edward VI._
"Nowe if I should demand of the gredie cormoraunts what they
thinke should be the cause of sedition, they would saie:--'The
paisent knaves be too welthy, provender pricketh them. They
knowe not themselves; they knowe no obedience; they regard no
lawes; they would have no gentlemen; they would have al men
like themselves; they would have all things commune. They would
not have us master of that which is our owne. They will appoint
us what rent we shall take for our grounds.... They will caste
down our parkes, and lay our pastures open.... They will compel
the King to graunt theyr requests.... We wyll tech them to know
theyr betters. And because they would have all in common, we
will leave them nothing,'"--E. E. T. S., Crowley, _The Way to
Wealth_.
CHAPTER I
THE NEW RURAL ECONOMY
(a) _Motives and Causes_
A common view of social development regards it as the outcome of
irresistible causes working towards results which can be neither
hastened nor averted, and treats the fact that events have followed a
certain course as in itself an indication that no other course was
possible. Whatever is has always been implicit in the past; the
established fact rules by the divine right of being the only possible
dynasty, and no scope is left for pretenders to contest or acts of
settlement to alter its legitimate title. It is not surprising that such
a theory should be peculiarly popular in interpreting economic history.
On their frontiers even the most different forms of social organisation
shade into one another. Each generation naturally sees in a strong light
those regions of the past which reproduce the features with which it is
familiar, and overlooks the existence of wide Hinterlands whose general
features are quite different. Since important classes, like important
individuals, find it difficult to believe in the truthfulness of any
picture where they do not occupy the greater part of the canvas, they
insensibly encourage a conventional interpretation of history, which
lends an air of respectable antiquity to the legal and economic
arrangements which favour them and which they favour, by treating such
arrangements as an essential characteristic of civilisation itself. In
reality, however, it is only by dragging into prominence the forces
which have triumphed, and thrusting into the background those which they
have swallowed up, that an appearance of inevitableness is given to
existing institutions, which satisfies the desire to see them as links
in an orderly chain of unavoidable sequences. Useful as the conception
of a continuous development is, it can easily be carried too far. It is
carried too far when it causes us to forget that a small alteration in
the lie of the land might have caused the stream to take quite a
different channel, and that the smoothly flowing waters of the plain are
the outcome of a series of crises in the higher regions, where the spur
of a mountain or a cleft in the rocks might easily have diverted their
course into other directions. If we must talk of social evolution, we
ought to remember that it takes place through the action of human
beings, that such action is constantly violent, or merely short-sighted,
or deliberately selfish, and that a form of social organisation which
appears to us now to be inevitable, once hung in the balance as one of
several competing possibilities.
Certainly the possibility that economic changes should have followed a
quite different line from that which they actually have can hardly fail
to strike the student of agrarian history. The facts, as we read them,
do not lend unqualified support to the idea that the growth, at the
expense of the little landholders, of great estates cultivated by hired
labour was the inevitable result of irresistible forces, or that the new
agricultural régime was a necessity on account of the sluggishness of
the old. To an observer of agrarian conditions living about the year
1500, who looked back over the conditions of the last century, all the
possibilities must have seemed to point in the direction of a continuous
improvement in the condition of the peasantry. It is evident that the
growth of prosperity among the small cultivators was leading from the
beginning of the fifteenth century to the gradual consolidation of
holdings, to keen competition for the use of land, and to increasing
individualism in the methods of agriculture. Though the movement caused
a diminution in the number of landholders, the diminution was very
gradual. It was not the result of a sudden revolution affecting large
numbers of tenants simultaneously; and even those who regarded enclosing
with hostility were favourable to the process of gradual redistribution,
which did not violate vested interests or cause any sensational
disturbance. The appearance of the country would have changed, and the
methods of cultivation would have improved. But there would have been no
great cause at work to displace the peasantry from the soil, with the
rapidity which entailed hardship, until a much later period than we are
now considering. Obviously, however, it was not these slow internal
changes in the manorial organisation which impressed observers. On the
contrary, though they are noticed by the writer who took a scientific
interest in agricultural questions, they are hardly mentioned by the
majority of commentators on the life of the period, who were interested
not in the technique of agriculture but in the social results of
changing methods. What aroused their alarm and produced rioting and
legislation was, as every one knows, a movement the distinctive feature
of which was that it was initiated by lords of manors and great farmers,
"the Graziers, the rich buchars, the men of law, the merchants, the
gentlemen, the Knights, the Lords,"[322] in short by the wealthiest and
most powerful classes, and that it was carried out frequently against
the will of the tenants, and in such a way as to prejudice their
interests.
[322] Crowley, _The Way to Wealth_ (E. E. T. S.).
As the small capitalist prepared the way for the great, the two
movements were connected, and the simultaneous development of both of
them explains the rather puzzling mixture of approval and criticism
which is to be found in the comments of observers upon enclosing. But
their economic and social results were very different. No doubt the
incipient movement in the direction of reorganising national life on the
basis of industry involved a breach with the customary methods of
agriculture, which must in any case have caused a certain degree of
dislocation. The development of the textile manufactures, which for two
centuries were the chief source of English wealth, could not have taken
place without the production of cheap supplies of raw material, and the
growth of the towns was dependent on the saving of labour from
agriculture. But in such changes the element of time--the speed at which
the transition takes place--is all important, because upon it depends
the feasibility of social readjustments to meet the new situation. The
slow breaking up of the open field system, though it changed the
methods of cultivation, might quite conceivably have effected only such
a gradual diminution in the number of the small farmers, as to make the
absorption into industry of those displaced comparatively easy. In so
far as the changes of the sixteenth century were a social revolution,
and not merely a gradual development, this revolution was the result not
only of technical advances, but of the concentration of landed property
and the development of new relationships between landlord and tenant. It
is to the second of the two movements that we must now turn.
The new agrarian arrangements which we shall have to consider are called
by the name of enclosure, and we will discuss later what exactly
enclosure means in this connection. But there are enclosures and
enclosures, and we shall do well to begin by drawing some distinctions.
In the first place, then, the enclosing movement that will occupy us in
this chapter has very little resemblance to the enclosure which we have
considered in the last. It is carried out by great men, not by small. It
proceeds wholesale, not piecemeal. It does not consist in many little
cultivators rearranging their holdings by purchase, or sale, or
agreement, but in one great proprietor or his agent consolidating small
holdings into great estates. The new arrangements are imposed rapidly
and with a high hand from without. They do not arise gradually from
within through the spontaneous development of the peasants' needs and
resources.
Again, the new movement bears very little resemblance to the
rearrangements introduced by lords of manors, which, from an early date,
have gone by the name of enclosing. Such rearrangements have not been
few. People have talked about enclosing long before they have begun to
lament enclosures. Not to mention the encroachments on the waste
evidenced by the Statute of Merton, one finds the word "enclosure" used
in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to describe a variety of
agreements made between lords whose lands were contiguous, or between
lords and their free tenants, by which, instead of the parties concerned
using a given area in common as their pasture, each surrenders his right
of access to part of it, and obtains in return the right to use another
part in severalty. The Abbot of Malmesbury[323] and the men of
Niwentone come to an arrangement with Walter of Asselegge and the men of
that village, whereby the monastery agrees to follow the customary
routine in cultivating the land lying between Niwentone and Asselegge,
and not to common on the marsh at Cheggeberge, getting in return
exclusive rights of pasture over another marsh, and over the east field
of Niwentone. The Abbot and Monastery of St. Peter's[324] of Gloucester
make an agreement with Lord Thomas Berkeley whereby the former are "to
have and hold in severalty and enclose and approve at their will"
certain lands lying in Southfield "so that the said Thomas and his free
tenants may not ... claim or demand common, but be excluded from it for
ever," and in return covenant that the latter may "enclose and approve
their lands in all parts of the summit of the Pike of Coveleigh."
Similar arrangements are made between the Abbot of Glastonbury[325] and
a neighbouring landowner, between the Abbot of Cerne[326] and Robert of
Bloxworth, and between the City of Coventry[327] and the master and
brethren of the Trinity Gild of that town.
[323] _Registrum Malmesburiense_, vol. ii. pp. 220-?221: "Quod
... dictus abbas de Malmesburia non debet de cetero colere
terram de Niwentone ... nisi antiquitus consueverat coli. Et
quod dictus Walterus de Asselegge habebit mariscum suum de
Cheggeberge quietum a communia hominum de Niwentone. Dicti vero
abbas et conventus Malmesburia habebunt mariscum suum iacentem
ex Orientali parte stratæ publicæ quæ vocatur Fos quietum et
exceptum a communia hominum de Asselegge. Habebunt etiam ...
campum Australem in Niwentone quietum et exceptum a communia
hominum de Asselegge. Omnes vero aliæ terræ ad dictas villas
pertinentes ... erunt in pastura communi."
[324] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriæ_, i.
147-?149.
[325] Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of South Domerham.
[326] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord
Middleton), pp. 61?-62. This agreement was made in 1231.
[327] _Coventry Leet Book_ (edited by Mary Dormer Harris).
Whether it is a chance that such agreements seem to occur with special
frequency in the records of religious houses we cannot say. It is
possible that the perpetual character of a corporation made exclusive
enjoyment at once more desirable and more feasible; a great abbey, like
St. Peter's of Gloucester, could pursue a continuous and far-sighted
policy, and wait more than a generation to see the results of its
experiments. Nor is it possible to understand the motives for such
arrangements without information as to local conditions which is not
easily obtainable. Sometimes the object was simply to protect land used
for agriculture against the depredations caused by the game of a hunting
landlord. Sometimes it would seem to have been to allow of a variation
in the methods of agriculture, for example the sowing of a piece of land
which could not be sown as long as several persons had right of pasture
over it. Occasionally it was simply to realise an obvious convenience
dictated by the lie of the land, each party gaining more by the
exclusive use of pasture lying near to him, than he would lose by
surrendering rights of common over that part which lay at a distance.
Two points, however, are worth noticing. The first is the use of the
word "enclosure." Arrangements which go by the name "enclosure" are made
at a very early date by the manorial authorities, and the latter would
have been very much surprised to be told that they were inaugurating an
agrarian revolution. The second is the character of these enclosures.
They are in every way different from those which produced discontent in
the sixteenth century. Though they affected the routine of cultivation
they did not imply any abandonment of arable farming. Since they were
carried out mainly by an exchange of rights they did not prejudice the
tenants. Further, the disputes of which they were sometimes the result
were not disputes between the lord of a manor and his tenantry, but
between the lord and tenants of one manor and the lord and tenants of
another, the ground of the disagreement being the difficulty of
adjusting rights of common over the debatable land which must often have
lain between two manors, and the division of interests being, as it
were, a vertical, not a horizontal, division. In fact, these early
examples of enclosure throw light on the later movement only by way of
contrast. What we meet in our period is not isolated innovations of this
character, but a general movement spreading across England from
Berkshire in the South to Norfolk and Lincoln in the North-East, and
affecting especially the corn-growing counties of the Midlands, a
movement which meant a great extension of pasture-farming, a violent
collision of interests between the manorial authorities and the
peasantry, and a considerable displacement of population. Clearly some
new and powerful causes must have been at work to account for it.
In the third place, the movement which goes by the name of enclosing in
the sixteenth century has little similarity with the changes which
proceeded under the same name from about 1700 to 1850, and which went on
most swiftly in the reign of George III. It differs from them in method.
In the eighteenth century Parliament is supreme. It is simply a
committee of landlords and their hangers-on, and it makes Private Bill
legislation a very easy method of getting enclosure carried out. In our
period the Government, for reasons to be discussed later, sets its face
against most kinds of enclosing, and such enclosures as are made are
made in defiance of the law. It differs from them in motive. We must not
prejudge the question whether the enclosures of our period were made
mainly for pasture or for arable. But leaving this question on one side,
we can point to certain broad contrasts. The ostensible motive of the
eighteenth century enclosures is to improve the productive capacity of
the land by spending capital upon it. This is the reason alleged when
Private Bills are being promoted, and this is the aspect of the movement
which causes it to be eulogised by the agricultural experts. Of course
landlords were not philanthropists. As Mr. and Mrs. Hammond[328] have
demonstrated, there were often very sordid motives behind their
resounding platitudes on the advantage of throwing commons and small
holdings into large compact estates, and, even when these were not too
conspicuous, the interests of the smaller landholders were sometimes
treated with the most outrageous injustice. Still the general nature of
the movement was clearly in the direction of bringing under better
cultivation land which had hitherto not been used to its full economic
capacity. The price of foodstuffs after 1750 rose enormously, and the
rise in prices offered a golden harvest to any one who would prepare
land for producing larger supplies. The landlords of the eighteenth
century did not merely enclose. They improved as well. Part of their
increased rent rolls was interest on capital which they had invested for
the purpose. Now in the sixteenth century there is very little trace of
any movement of this kind. What improving is done, is done by the
peasants themselves. There is no sign of the great proprietors making
large capital outlays in order to render their estates more productive,
except in the way of the trifling expenditure entailed by fencing,
hedging, and ditching. They are by no means pioneers of agricultural
progress. Enclosing is profitable to them not because it enables them to
convert barren heaths into smiling corn-fields in the manner described
by Arthur Young, but because it enables them to use the land as they
please, to let it down to pasture when the price of wool is high, to
employ few labourers on it instead of many, and, possibly, to add to
their own estates part of their neighbours' holdings. They do not bring
under cultivation land which would otherwise lie waste. On the contrary,
very often they turn into a waste land which would otherwise be under
cultivation. Whether the picture which represents the eighteenth century
enclosures as the effort of an energetic and public-spirited class to
overcome old-fashioned prejudices by applying the resources of science
to agriculture is veracious or not, we need not now inquire. As far as
the century and a half from 1485 is concerned it is altogether out of
place.
[328] In their book, _The Village Labourer from_ 1760 to 1832.
The changes which we are about to describe have at once a social and an
economic reference. The former is the aspect which receives most
attention from contemporaries. They lament the decay of the peasantry,
the embittered relations between classes, the distress and discontent
caused by the new agrarian régime. They are usually not much concerned
with the economics of the situation. Economic issues are not yet
separated from questions of personal and public morality. To find subtle
reasons why it is unavoidable that a large number of persons should be
impoverished seems to them very like condoning a crime. Some excuses
only aggravate the offence, and if men are cursed with a neighbour who
insists on fulfilling economic laws by raising prices or taking usury,
they are less likely to discuss his conclusions than first to present
him for breaking the statutes and then to break his head for his bad
principles. So they judge the dominant movement by its fruits, and its
fruits seem very evil. But to us the economic problem is the primary
one. The occurrence of rapid changes in the structure of an old and
stable society implies either some radical revolution in the basis of
economic life, or some great change in men's conception of social
expediency, or, what is most likely, an economic and a spiritual change
occurring together. To understand its effect we must understand the sort
of economic environment from which it springs.
In the first place, then, the age of the Tudors is a commercial age, and
it becomes more commercial as the century goes on. No doubt it is only
of certain classes and in certain relations of life that such a
statement is true. The permanence of economic arrangements, which makes
Froude declare that at the end of the fifteenth century the model of the
upper classes was still the chivalry of the Arthurian legends, is seen
still more strikingly among the artisans and peasants, and it is only
very slowly and painfully that they are drawn into the net woven by the
growth of capitalist trade. But it is with the classes who respond to
the new movement that the power of the future, though not its graces,
lies, and it is through the widening of the influence of commerce and
commercial transactions that the economic developments most typical of
our period take place. The age is a commercial one in the sense that
much attention is given by Governments from the reign of Henry VII.
onwards to fostering the conditions which promote trade and industry.
This is not the place to discuss the meaning of Mercantilism or the
truth of Bacon's[329] epigram that Henry VII. "bowed the ancient policy
of this State from consideration of plenty to consideration of power."
Though in the reign of Henry VIII. the State is almost a religion, one
can easily exaggerate the influence of its interference even in that
much governed age. Nevertheless no one who looks at the Statutes, or the
Acts of the Privy Council, or the Domestic State Papers for the reigns
of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, can fail to realise that much
of the time of Governments is occupied with devising measures which are
intended to hasten industrial and commercial development. There is a
settled habit of mind with regard to these matters which is quite
conscious of its ends, though its means may often be ill-chosen. Every
one is agreed that the encouragement of trade is the duty of the
Prince.[330] There is a real popular demand for the intervention of the
authorities, and they respond to it readily enough.
[329] Bacon, _History of King Henry VII._
[330] See _e.g._ Starkey's _England in the Reign of King Henry
VIII._, p. 173 (E. E. T. S.): "Ye, and though our cloth, at the
fyrst begynnyng, wold not be so gud peradventure, as hyt ys made
in other partys, yet, in processe of tyme, I cannot see why, but
that our men, by dylygence, myght attayne therto ryght wel;
specially yf the Prince wold study thereto, in whose powar hyt
lyeth chefely such thyngys to helpe." Also _The Commonweal of
this Realm of England_ (Lamond), and Pauli, _Drei
Denkschriften_, &c.
The age is a commercial one in the more fundamental sense that large
economic changes are initiated by classes and individuals. Foreign trade
grows enormously in the early years of Henry VIII., though certain
branches of it suffer a temporary set back at the end of the reign.[331]
The use of money, of which during the first quarter of the century there
was a shortage, begins in the middle of it to spread throughout all
classes. The industry which for the next three centuries is to be the
chief manufacture of England becomes firmly established. Under the
influence of widening markets, trade separates from trade.[332] Within
single industries there is an increasing subdivision of labour; many
links intervene between the group supplying the raw material and the
group which hands the finished article to the consumer; a special class
of capitalist entrepreneurs[333] appears to hold the various stages of
production together, to organise supplies, and to find markets. Side by
side with the development of manufacturing industry goes a development
in the organisation of finance. In the woollen industry men buy and sell
on credit. In tin-mining[334] and coal-mining[335] they sink shafts with
borrowed capital. The first joint-stock[336] companies are established
in the middle of the century with capitals of from £5000 to £20,000.
There is a regular money market in London, there are bill brokers,
arbitrage dealings between it and the Continent, adventurers who take
advantage of the increasing fluidity of capital to speculate on the
difference in the rates at which it can be borrowed in the Low Countries
and in England. By the end of the century London has partially ousted
Antwerp as the financial capital of Europe.[337]
[331] Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende der
Mittelalters_, Band II., "Zoll und Handelstatistik," pp. 1?-156.
[332] Unwin, _Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries_.
[333] See _e.g._ the account of the East Anglian woollen
industry in the _Victoria County History_, Suffolk (Unwin's
article on "Social and Economic History").
[334] G.R. Lewis, _The Stanneries_, pp. 214?-215, and quotations
from Lansdowne MSS. 76, fol. 34, given there.
[335] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord
Middleton).
[336] W.R. Scott, _Joint-Stock Companies to 1720_, vol. ii.
[337] For a description of "The Exchange and What It is," see T.
Wilson, _Discourse upon Usurie_ (1584): his remark, "The second
kind of bill ... may be called sicke and dry exchange, and is
practised where one doth borrowe money abroad ... not meaning to
make any real payment abroad, but compoundeth with the exchange
to have it returned again," illustrates what is said above. See
also Camden Society, _Dialogue or Confabulation of Two
Travellers_ (1580): "The said Hans had provided £10,000 for the
Prince of Condy upon five in the 100 at interest, and if I would
have the like he would help me unto it. Then I ... pondered what
benefit it would be to me to let it out again at ten in the
hundred to some nobleman in England." Down to about 1560 at any
rate the English Government was constantly in the hands of
foreign capitalists. See Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, and
Burgon's _Life of Gresham_.
In the second place, the social arrangements of England are such as to
make it certain that this increasing activity will react almost
immediately on agriculture and on agrarian relationships. There have
been countries where a sharp line has been drawn between trade and
agriculture, where the landowner could not engage in trade without
degrading himself, where the tradesman could not buy up the noble's
land.[338] But this has never been the case in England. In that
precocious island the Lombards had hardly settled in Lombard Street,
when Mr. Pole's daughters discovered that the fine shades flourished
their finest in country air, and there was a market for heiresses among
the English aristocracy long before Columbus had revealed to Europe the
Eldorado of the New World. From a very early date the successful
merchant has bought dignity and social consideration by investing his
savings in an estate. The impecunious gentleman has restored the falling
fortunes of his house by commercial speculations, of which marriage into
a merchant family, if not the least speculative, is not the least
profitable. At the beginning of the sixteenth century both movements
were going on simultaneously with a rapidity which was before unknown,
and which must be explained as the consequence of the great growth of
all forms of commercial activity. The rise of great incomes drawn from
trade had brought into existence a new order of business men whose
enterprise was not confined to the seaport and privileged town, but
flowed over into the purchase of landed estates, even before the
secularisation of monastic endowments made land speculation the mania of
a whole generation. Great nobles plunged into commerce, were granted
special trading privileges, and intermarried with the rising
middle-class families who were often better off than themselves. In all
ages wealth allies itself with wealth, and power with power. As soon as
the appearance of rich merchant families creates a fresh and powerful
interest in society, the old social system and the new[339] coalesce,
and each learns from the other--the merchant how to make a display as a
landed proprietor and a Justice of the Peace, the old-fashioned landlord
how to cut down expenses and squeeze the utmost farthing out of his
property in the best City manner. Even if the political and economic
environment had remained unchanged, the mere formation of commercial
capital and of a moneyed class could hardly have failed to work a slow
revolution in agrarian relationships.
[338] _e.g._ Prussia before 1807.
[339] For examples see A. Abram, _Social England in the
Fifteenth Century_, especially Part II., chap, ii., "The Rise of
the Middle Class," and Plummer's _Fortescue_, p. 17. In the
_Cely Papers_ (Camden Society), p. 153, a correspondent of
George Cely writes, "yowre sallys made withyn lesse than thys
yere amountes above £2000 sterling."