But the environment did not remain uncha_The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

economic affairs as in religion, the new order came, not gradually, but

swiftly and with violence, sapping ancient loyalties, confronting with

insoluble problems simple men who desired only to plough the land like

their fathers, holding out to the privileged orders that prospect of

suddenly increasing their wealth which is the most awful temptation from

which any class can pray--if it will pray--to be delivered. On the side

of politics a powerful motive for a change in the relations between

landlords and tenants was supplied by the Tudor peace. In the turbulent

days of the fifteenth century land had still a military and social

significance apart from its economic value; lords had ridden out at the

head of their retainers to convince a bad neighbour with bows and bills;

and a numerous tenantry had been more important than a high pecuniary

return from the soil.[340] The Tudor discipline, with its stern

prohibition of livery and maintenance, its administrative jurisdictions

and tireless bureaucracy, had put down private warfare with a heavy

hand, and, by drawing the teeth of feudalism, had made the command of

money more important than the command of men. It is easy to underrate

the significance of this change, yet it is in a sense more fundamental

than any other; for it marks the transition from the mediæval conception

of land as the basis of political functions and obligations to the

modern view of it as an income-yielding investment. Landholding tends,

in short, to become commercialised. The meaning of this movement is best

understood if one compares with the South and Midlands those parts of

England where to the very end of the sixteenth century the older

conditions survived. The surveys of many Northumbrian[341] manors reveal

throughout this period of rapid agrarian changes the continuance of a

very primitive condition of things. The holdings of the customary

tenants are often almost rigidly equal; there is hardly any change in

their numbers; son succeeds father, and grandson succeeds son, with only

the very slightest disturbance. The manorial officials, who in the South

were cursed as the agents of evictions and rack-renting, were in the

North much concerned with keeping tenants on the soil. At Acklington the

tenants, writes Clarkson, "must be helped and rather cherished for

service sake." At High Buston the holdings of the tenantry have been

increased in order that "they should the better live and do their

dutiful service to their Lord and master," and a freeholder is rebuked

for action which results in curtailing the commonable area on the ground

that "the tenants be but poor men and be not well horsed, as they are

bound by their copies." At Tughall[342] the surveyor complains bitterly

in 1567 that in time past, apparently a long time past, twenty-three

tenants had been reduced to eight by "such as nothing regard his

lordship's service, nor the commonwealth." To what are we to ascribe

this permanence of tenure among the peasants, this exceptional

solicitude for the maintenance of a numerous tenantry on the part of

surveyors? Partly, no doubt, to the fact that Northumberland lay apart

from the main stream of commercial life, and was as yet little affected

by the growth of the woollen industry. Mainly, however, it was the

result of the military importance of a numerous tenantry on the

Northumbrian border. In that wild corner which is neither England nor

Scotland, English and Scots, Scroopes and bold Buccleughs, gnash their

teeth at each other across the wan water of the Eden. In the long

northern evenings about Lammastide moormen win their hay with axes in

their belts and bows piled in the corner of the field, and customary

tenants are bound by their copies to provide horse and armour, and to

ride to the musters in person or by proxy. No wonder that while

elsewhere landlords pore over their accounts of wool or timber, in

Northumberland they should measure their wealth by the men whom they can

bring out when the summons goes, and insist on feudal obligations with a

rigour unknown in the South. When any night Scotch[343] raiders may come

storming over the marches, any night the red cock may crow up to the

very walls of merry Carlisle, a holding means not only a piece of land

that grows wheat and feeds sheep, but a horseman in harness; and the

dropping out of a holding, or its merging in that of some one else,

results in the weakening of the force on which the peace of the border

depends. As a consequence, there is nothing like free trade in land

between the tenants, such as developed in the South under the forms of

surrender and admission, and there is little incentive for the lord or

his officials to get rid of them. Such an exceptional state of things

comes to an end in Northumberland with the union of the two Crowns under

James I., and its termination is the signal for an attempt to break down

customary tenures on the part both of the Crown[344] and of private

landowners.[345] But it survives a century longer on the border than it

does elsewhere, and while it lasts it offers a standard by which may be

measured the extent and significance of the change which is overtaking

agrarian relationships in other parts of England, where commerce is more

developed, and where, since a tenant can no longer serve his lord by

fighting, a sheep may easily be more valuable than a man. With the

development of a strong central Government the military strength of the

great landlords was broken, though it blazed up in the Pilgrimage of

Grace and in the rebellion of 1569, and as a consequence they turned

their attention to getting the maximum economic return from the soil, or

to adding to their social dignity by parks, instead of maintaining a

large body of tenants upon it.[346]

[340] See the Paston Letters, _passim_; and also the account

given in _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord

Middleton), 142?-145, of the marvellous doings of Sir Gylles

Strangways in Dorsetshire as late as 1539; pp. 115?-117 contain

a similar case of private warfare from the year 1477.

[341] _Northumberland County History_, _e.g._ Amble (vol. v.),

Acklington (_ibid._), High Buston (_ibid._), Birling (_ibid._);

vol. viii. p. 230, figures as to eight manors in Tynmouthshire.

At Birling out of ten names which appear in the surveys of 1567,

eight reappear in 1616; at Acklington, out of eighteen names,

nine reappear; at High Buston, out of four names, four reappear

in 1616 and two in 1702. But in parts of the county there were

rapid changes at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the

seventeenth centuries; see below, pp. 257-258 and 260.

[342] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350: "In the

ancient tyme the fermor of the demaines had the charge of the

tenants of the said lordship as bailiff, with the fee of £3, 0s.

5d. by year. Then was the town of Tughall planted with xi

husbandmen well horsed and in good order, viii cottagers, iiii

cotterells, one common smith for the relief and better aid of

the said tenants and bailiff, being in number 23 householders,

besides the demains, which are nowe by suche as nothing regard

his lordship's service nor the commonwealthe brought to 8

farmers only, to the great decay of his lordship's service and

discommodity of the said commonwealth."

[343] See _e.g._ the ballad of "Kinmont Willie," turning on an

incident which occurred in 1596.

[344] _Cal. S. P. D. James I._, vol. cxxxii., July 27, 1622.

Letter to the Bishop of Durham to confer with the judges of

Assize for the Northern Counties touching tenant-right or

customary estate of inheritance claimed in those parts, ordering

them to abide strictly by the King's Proclamation against

tenant-right, or the holding of lands by border service, to

countenance no claim founded thereupon, and to acquaint the

tenants of his Majesty's pleasure therein, giving them no hope

to the contrary. Apparently the instructions were not carried

out, as in 1642 the Long Parliament was discussing the subject

of the border tenures (Rushworth _Collections_, Pt. III., vol.

ii. p. 86).

[345] See below, pp. 257?-258.

[346] The effect of the Tudor policy on the land system is

excellently described by Harrington in _Oceana_, and also in

_The Art of Law-giving_: "Henry VII. being conscious of the

infirmity of his title, yet finding with what strength and

vigour he was brought in by the Nobility, conceived jealousy of

the like power in case of a decay or change of affections.

_Nondum orbis adoraverat Roman._ The lords yet led country

lives; their houses were open to retainers, men experienced in

military affairs and capable of commanding; their hospitality

was the delight of their tenants who by their tenure or

dependence were obliged to follow their lords in arms. So that,

this being the Militia of the nation, a few noblemen

discontented could at any time levy a great army, the effect

whereof both in the Barons Wars and those of York and Lancaster

had been well known to divers kings. This state of things was

that which enabled Henry VII. to make his advantage of

troublesome times and the frequent unruliness of retainers;

while, under pretence of curbing riots, he obtained the passing

of such laws as did cut off these retainers, whereby the

nobility wholly lost their officers. Then, whereas the

dependence of the people on their lords was of a strict ty or

nature, he found means to loosen this also by laws which he

obtained upon a fair pretence, even that of Population. But the

nobility, who by the former law had lost their officers, by this

lost their soldiery. Yet remained to them their estates, till

the same Prince introducing the Statutes for alienations, these

also became loose; and the lords, less taken (for the reasons

shown) with their country lives, where their trains were

clipped, by degrees became more resident at court, where greater

pomp and expense by the Statute of Alienations began to plume

them of their Estates" (Harrington, _Works_, 1700 edition, pp.

388-?389).

The change meant an advance in civilisation among the upper classes, and

a tightening of economic pressure upon the peasantry. The feudal

seigneur had at his worst been a lawless tyrant, and at his best a

despotic parent. But he had governed his estate as the sovereign, often

the resident sovereign, of a petty kingdom, whose interests were

roughly identical with his own; and though his depredations were a

terror to his neighbours, his own tenants had little to fear from them,

for his tenants were the force on which his very existence depended. In

the new political conditions his occupation was gone, and his place was

taken by two types of landed proprietor who were at once more peaceable

and less popular. On the one hand, there emerges the landlord who is a

laborious and acute man of business, and who sets about exploiting the

material resources of his estate with the instincts of a shopkeeper and

the methods of a land-agent. Of this kind are the Willoughbys[347] in

the Midlands and the Delavales[348] in Northumberland. Often they are

sheep-farmers. When their land is rich in minerals they sink coal-pits

and mine for iron ore. The predecessors of the captains of industry of

two and a half centuries later, they employ labour on a large scale,

they open up trade across country by river, they higgle over port dues,

they experiment with new inventions, they clear away without mercy any

customary rights which conflict with their own. On the other hand, there

are the gentry who buzz about the Court, regard London as the centre of

the universe, and have periodically to be ordered home to look after the

affairs of their country-sides by a peremptory mandate from the

Government. When this type becomes prominent, in the reign of Elizabeth,

it most commonly spends its time in the interminable pursuit of

profitable sinecures, and in endeavouring to induce the City to believe

that thrice-mortgaged estates are a gilt-edged security. At its worst it

produces Sir Petronel Flash,[349] a figure as typical of the sixteenth

century as Squire Western is of the eighteenth. At its best it

patronises the arts, sets sail for a new world of drama and romance,

sighs over Vergil's Eclogues, and goes pricking, almost too graceful a

chivalry, through the fairy kingdoms of Spenser. But the men of

business, and the men of fashion, and the patrons of literature, are

alike in being the symptoms of a new economic and political system, a

system which has shorn landownership of the territorial sovereignty

which had gone with it, broken down the personal relations of landlord

and tenant, and, by turning agriculture into a business, has made it at

once more profitable and less strenuous for the former, more exacting

and less stable for the latter, than it had been when a lordlord was not

only a drawer of rents but a local sovereign, a tenant not only a source

of income but a dependent who was bound by a tie which was almost

sacramental. "It was never a merry world since gentlemen came up";

"never so many gentlemen and so little gentleness"; "the commons long

since did rise in Spain and kill the gentlemen, and since have lived

merrily there"; such are some of the blessings the new landlords would

hear from men who grumble to their mates between the spells of shearing

sheep and mowing hay. Those who have watched the uncouth, rough-handed

master of a backward industry, who has wrought among his workmen as a

friend or a tyrant, blossom, under the fertilising influence of

expanding markets, into the sedate suburban capitalist who sets up a

country house in the second generation and sends his sons to Oxford in

the third, and who scientifically speeds up his distant operatives

through the mediation of an army of managers and assistant-managers and

foremen, will not need to be reminded that economic changes which bring

civilisation to one class may often be fraught with ruin to another. The

brilliant age which begins with Elizabeth gleams against a background of

social squalor and misery. The descendant of the illiterate,

bloody-minded baron who is muzzled by Henry VII. becomes a courteous

gentleman who rhapsodises in verse at the Court of Gloriana. But all

that the peasants know is that his land-agents[350] are harsher. An

Earl of Pembroke has been given immortality by Shakespeare. But the

first of his name had founded the family on estates which had belonged

to the Abbey of Wilton,[351] and by his exactions had provoked the

Wiltshire peasants into rebellion. The Raleigh family--it was a

Raleigh's chance gibe at the old religion which set the West in a blaze

in 1549--had endowed itself with a manor torn from the see of

Wells,[352] as the Grenvilles had done with the lands of Buckland Abbey.

The gentle Sidney's _Arcadia_ is one of the glories of the age, and it

was composed, if we may trust tradition, in the park at the Herberts'

country-seat at Washerne,[353] which they had made by enclosing a whole

village and evicting the tenants. The dramatists who reflect the high

popular estimation of the freeholder[354] see nothing in the grievances

of Mouldy and Bullcalf except the disposition of an ignorant populace to

cry for the moon. Shakespeare's Cade, with his programme[355] of seven

half-penny loaves for a penny, and the three-hooped pot that shall have

ten hoops, is so far proposing only what an energetic mayor is quite

prepared to carry out before breakfast. His crowning absurdity, which

makes the stalls hiss and the pit cheer, is the promise that "all the

realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to

grass." A few months after these words were printed Cade came to life in

earnest. In the autumn of 1596 some Oxfordshire[356] artisans and

peasants organised a revolt against "the gentlemen who took the

commons," and from that year onwards to 1601 Parliament and the Council

had their hands full of the question of enclosures. Men feel the

contrast, even when it is only just beginning, and with natural

inconsistency sigh for the old order even while they are glorifying the

new. "Princes and Lords," wrote Henry VIII.'s chaplain[357] about 1538,

"seldom look to the good order and wealth of their subjects, only they

look to the receiving of their rents and revenues of their lands with

great study of enhancing thereof, to the further maintaining of their

pompous state; so that if their subjects do their duty therein justly,

paying their rents at time affixed, for the rest they care not (as is

commonly said) 'whether they sink or swim'"!

[347] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord

Middleton), especially the entries relating to the development

of the coal trade.

[348] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii., p. 238, vol.

ix. (under Cowpen). Robert Delavale apparently began life as an

agent to the Earl of Northumberland, but he owned considerable

property himself; in 1605 the whole of the lands of Cowpen were

in his hands. He was an energetic encloser; see below, p. 260.

[349] See Marston's _Eastward Ho!_

[350] See the following extract (Lodge, _Illustrations of

English History_, iii., 41). William Hammond to the Earl of

Shrewsbury on the subject of raising money on the latter's

estates from Palavicini, a moneylender: "Though his froward

fortune hath made him unable to stand you almost in any steadde,

hee hathe dealt with Mr. Maynard to aide him in the provision of

this £3000 against the second of next month. He finds him very

backwarde to disburse any money upon bond or any other security

but lands; neither will he deal with lands in any way of

mortgage for years or any long time, but only 2 or 3 months....

Yf, therefore, it stands with your honour's good liking to make

a conveyance of Kingston to Sir Horatio ... after the rate of

£7000 ... and withal to passe it in this absolute sort that iff

the money then laid out by them for your Honour's use bee not

repaid on May day next, that they fully enjoy and possess the

lands as their owne.... Hee saith besides that his surveyors

have certified him £500 will bee the most the lands will ever

yeald yerely rent, without racking and oppressions, which are no

course for suche meane men as they be to take."

[351] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manor of William, First Earl

of Pembroke_, Straton's introduction.

[352] _History of the Parish of Wiveliscombe_, by Hancock. For

Walter Raleigh and the revolt of 1549, see the dramatic account

given by Holinshed. The incident is described in Froude's

_Edward VI._ For the Grenvilles and Buckland Abbey see _Trans.

Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. vi. It ultimately came to Francis Drake.

[353] Straton's introduction to _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.

[354] _e.g._ Heywood's _A Woman Killed with Kindness_, Act iii.

sc. 1.

[355] _Henry VI._, Part II., Act iv. scene 2. I am indebted for

the reference to Professor Unwin. Part II. was first printed in

1595.

[356] _Hist. MSS. Com._, MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part

III., pp. 49?-50: "The attorney-general to Mr. Robert Cecil.

Some information concerning those that intended the rebellion in

Oxfordshire. Bartholemew Stere, carpenter ... was the first

person of this insurrection. His outward pretence was to

overthrow enclosures, and to help the poor commonalty, that were

like to perish for want of corn, but intended to kill the

gentlemen of that county and take the spoil, affirming that the

commons long since in Spain did rise and kill the gentlemen in

Spain and sithen have lived merrily there. After that he meant

to have gone to London and joined with the prentices ... and it

was but a month's work to overrun England."

[357] E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of Henry VIII._, p. 85.

While the centralised government of the Tudors gave a new bias to the

interests of landlords by stripping them of part of their political

power, economic changes were hurrying the more enterprising among them

into novel methods of estate management. In the situation which

developed in the first fifty years of the sixteenth century they were

exposed to pressure from two sides at once. They stood to gain much if

they adapted their farming to meet the new commercial conditions. They

stood to lose much if they were so conservative as to adhere to the old

methods. The explanation of the agrarian revolution most generally given

by contemporary observers was that enclosing was due to the increased

profitableness of pasture farming, consequent upon the development of

the textile industries; and though a recent writer[358] has endeavoured

to show that most of the land enclosed was used for tillage, and that

therefore this explanation cannot hold good, there does not seem any

valid reason for disputing it. The testimony of observers is very

strong; they might be mistaken as to the extent of the movement towards

pasture, but hardly as to its tendency; and with scarcely an exception

they point to the growth of the woollen trade as the chief motive for

enclosing.

[358] See the discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay

in _Trans. Royal Hist. Society_, vol. xiv., new series.

Moreover, their evidence is confirmed by the proofs which we possess of

the expansion of the woollen industry at the end of the fifteenth

century. It is true that the figures collected by Thorold Rogers do not

enable any satisfactory correlation to be made between the rise in wool

prices and the progress of pasture farming. But they are statistically

much too unreliable to upset the direct evidence of eyewitnesses, being

based on various measures which are somewhat arbitrarily reduced to a

supposed common standard, relating to many different qualities of wool,

and being weighted in particular years by a preponderance of prices from

particular counties which are sometimes clearly not typical at all. The

figures of Schanz[359] as to the export trade in wool and woollen

cloths, are a sufficient proof of the growth in the output of wool, and

therefore in the growth of sheep-farming. They show that while the

export of unmanufactured wool fell off in the sixteenth century, that of

grey cloth grew enormously. In 1354 the export had been 4774-1/2 pieces,

from 1509 to 1523 it averaged 84,789 pieces a year, from 1524 to 1533,

91,394 pieces, from 1534 to 1539, 102,647 pieces, and from 1540 to 1547,

122,354 pieces, while in 1554 the total manufacture was estimated at

160,000 pieces of cloth and 250,000 pieces of hosiery. This expansion of

the manufactured cloth industry was only the culmination of a growth

which had been going on gradually for a hundred years. In 1464 the

Flemish manufacturers[360] were complaining that their market had been

invaded by English clothiers. Merchants like the Celys shipped enormous

consignments of wool from the Cotswolds to the Continent.[361] The large

number of sheep kept in England at the end of the fifteenth century was

the amazement of foreigners;[362] and English buyers groaned over the

high prices to which wool was driven by the competition of continental

buyers.[363] The revolution in the technique of agriculture when sucked

into the vortex of expanding commerce is, in fact, simply an early,

and, owing to the immobility of sixteenth century conditions, a

peculiarly striking example of that reaction of widening markets on the

methods of production, which is one of the best established of economic

generalisations.

[359] Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des

Mittelalters_, Band II., p. 18.

[360] Abram, _Social England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 33.

[361] _Ibid._, pp. 40-41.

[362] Camden Society (1847), _Italian Relation of England_.

[363] Camden Society (third series, vol. i.), _Cely Papers_. In

1480 the elder Cely writes: "I have not bought this year a loke

of woll, for the woll of Cottyswolde is bought by the

Lombardys;" and in the following year, "Ye avyse me for to buye

woll in Cottyswolde, bot it is at grate prise, 3s. 4d. a tod,

and gret ryding for woll in Cottyswolde as was any yere this vii

yere."

At the same time, the revolution was probably hastened by a change in

commercial policy, which, while encouraging the export trade in woollen

cloth, was after 1485 less favourable to the corn-grower. During the

greater part of the fifteenth[364] century the Government was forced by

the agrarian interests to allow freedom of export for grain except when

prices reached a certain height, after which point an export licence was

required. But the victory of Henry VII. produced a policy which was less

influenced by the traditional object of helping the corn-growing

landlords, and more favourable to commerce and the middle classes on

which the new monarchy rested. In 1491[365] the export of grain, except

with a special licence, was forbidden altogether, and in 1512 the

prohibition was repeated by Henry VIII. Though the administration of

such a policy must have been difficult, and its exact effect must be a

matter of conjecture, the view taken by some contemporaries,[366] that

it was a subordinate cause which stimulated the abandonment of old

agricultural methods and caused a good deal of land to go out of

cultivation, is at any rate intrinsically probable.

[364] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,

Early and Middle Ages, pp. 447-448. The statute sanctioning

export without licence when the price was below 6s. 8d. was 15

Hen. VI., c. 2, which was made perpetual by 23 Hen. VI., c. 5. 3

Ed. IV., c. 2, forbade the importation of foreign corn except

when the price reached 6s. 8d.

[365] _Ibid._, Modern Times, Part I., p. 85.

[366] _e.g. The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, pp.

54-60.

If the expansion of the woollen industry offered a fortune to those who

adopted the new methods of estate management, the depreciation in the

value of money threatened with ruin those who did not. The agrarian

changes of the sixteenth century cannot be traced primarily to the

revolution in general prices which all European countries experienced,

because they had already proceeded some way before the full extent of

the movement in prices became apparent. Throughout the fifteenth century

the value of money, as far as can be judged from such statistics as we

possess, was fairly stable, and, if anything, somewhat appreciated.

During the first half of Henry VIII.'s reign there were complaints[367]

of the scarcity of the metallic currency. On the very eve of the

dissolution of the monasteries we find a religious house in

Northumberland reversing the movement which had been going on for two

centuries in most parts of the country, and actually commuting money

rents into payments in kind,[368] on the ground that the tenants could

not command the necessary coin. Such facts should warn us that England

was far from being a single economic community, and that the effects of

the cheap money penetrated into the more backward regions only very

slowly indeed. Nevertheless, in the more advanced parts of the country,

the tide turned soon after the beginning of the new century, though it

was not till the fourth decade of it that it became a mill-race in which

all old economic standards were submerged. The general course of the

movement, so far as it affected commodities in general use, is set forth

below. The figures are re-arranged from those supplied by Steffen,[369]

whose work is mainly based on that of Thorold Rogers.

[367] See the whole question discussed in Schanz, _Englische

Handelspolitik_, Band II., pp. 481-540.

[368] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii. p. 232. In

1595 a dispute as to corn rents arose between the Earl of

Northumberland and the Tynemouthshire tenants, the Earl

insisting on payment by the Newcastle measure, the tenants

demanding to pay by the Winchester measure, on the ground that

they are so poor that "they are not able with horse, furniture,

and geare to serve as their ancestors have done, as it appeared

upon the late muster." Evidence given by an ancient yeoman

before the Commission appointed to hear the case showed that the

tenants had formerly paid in money, and that the change from

money to corn had been introduced in the time of the last Prior

for the sake of the tenants, not for the sake of the Priory.

[369] Steffen, _Studien zur Geschichte der Englischen

Lohnarbeiter_, Band I., pp. 254-255 and 365-366.

TABLE VII

+---------+----------+----------+----------+---------+

+---------+----------+----------+----------+---------+

| | | | | |

| | s. d. | s. d. | s. d. | s. d. |

|1401-1450| 5 9-1/4| 3 2-3/4| 7 9 | 4 3 |

|1451-1500| 5 6-1/4| 3 4-3/4| 6 6-3/4| 3 8 |

|1501-1540| 6 10-1/4| 5 1-3/4| 9 4-3/4| 4 5 |

|1541-1582| 13 10-1/2| . . . | 20 10-3/4| 10 5 |

| | | | | |

+---------+----------+----------+----------+---------+

+---------+----------+----------+----------+------+------+

+---------+----------+----------+----------+------+------+

| | | | | | |

| | s. d. | s. d. | s. d. | d. | d. |

| | | | | | |

|1401-1450| 16 5-1/2| 2 1 | 7 6-3/4| 2 | 5 |

|1451-1500| 15 7-1/2| 1 10-1/4| 8 3-1/4| 2-1/4| 5-1/4|

|1501-1540| 22 9 | 2 10-1/4| 10 0 | 3 | 9 |

|1541-1582| 70 0-1/4| 6 4 | . . . | 4-3/4| . . .|

| | | | | | |

+---------+----------+----------+----------+------+------+

Though it would not be right, of course, to force these figures too

far, as one cannot be sure that they are in all cases typical, the

indication which they offer of a remarkable rise in prices beginning

soon after 1500 is in all probability substantially correct. The result

of this movement in dragging down the standard of comfort of the people

has often been noticed, and need not be emphasised here. But it is

important to observe that it had a very marked effect upon the

traditional methods of agriculture, because it supplied landowners with

a new incentive to squeeze the utmost possible income out of their

estates. Since they were buying everything dearer, they were under a

strong inducement to turn land to the most profitable use, and to revise

all existing contracts which prevented an advance in tenants' payments.

In the not unnatural confusion which surrounded the question of the

cause of the general rise in prices, this aspect of the agrarian

troubles failed very generally to be appreciated by contemporary

writers, who were inclined to argue that the higher prices were due to

the increased rents, instead of seeing that the increased rents were

themselves the consequence of the increased prices. But it was

emphasised in the middle of the century by the author of the

_Commonwealth of England_,[370] and at the end of it by Gerrard de

Malynes,[371] who puts the case with great power and perspicacity,

though he perhaps may be thought to exaggerate the importance of the

debasement of the currency. "Every man knoweth," he wrote in 1601, "that

by reason of the base money coined in the end of the most victorious

reign of King Henry VIII. all the forrain commodities were sold dearer,

which made afterwards the commodities of the realm to rise at the

farmers' and tenants' hands, and therefore gentlemen did raise the rents

of their lands and take farms themselves and made inclosures of

grounds, and the price of everything being dearer was made dearer though

plenty of money and bullion coming daily from the West Indies.... If we

require gentlemen to abate their rents, give over farms, and break up

enclosures, it may be they would do so if they might have all their

provisions at the price heretofore." Yet such a statement gives but a

faint indication of the revolutionary effect upon agrarian relationships

of the depreciation in the value of money. The modern reader, before

whose eyes all economic standards are fluctuating from day to day, can

hardly grasp the anarchy which it tended to produce in a world where

values, especially land values, were objective realities which had stood

unaltered for centuries together. The landlord sees his income slipping

from him, though his estate pays as much as before. The tenant finds his

landlord pressing for higher rents and fines, though the yield of the

land has not increased. Yet neither desires anything but to remain as

they were, and both are ignorant of the force which sweeps them out of

the ancient ways. For, in the wholesome manner of the age, they ascribe

all economic evils to personal misdemeanours, the unreasonableness of

merchants, the covetousness of gentlemen, the extortions of husbandmen,

and the real cause is an impersonal one, which carries them forward

against their will, like men "thrusting one another in a throng, one

driving on another."[372] It is easy to understand that it must have

been difficult to maintain customary payments and traditional methods of

agriculture against the screw which the rise in prices turned on the

landowning classes. Agricultural experiments were in the air, and with

experts explaining how to double the value of an estate by enclosure

without prejudicing the tenants, it is not surprising that landowners,

who saw their real incomes dwindling with the fall in the value of

money, should have adopted the principle of their advice and neglected

the qualifications.

[370] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond),

especially p. 81: "Knight: What sorte is that which youe said

had greater loss thereby then those men had profitte? Doctor: It

is all noblemen, and gentlemen, and all other that live by a

fixed rent, or stipend, or doe not maner the grounde, or do

occupie no byinge or sellinge.... He that maie spend £300 a

yeare by such revennewes and fees, may kepe no better porte then

his father, or anie before him, that could spend but £200. And

so ye maie perceave, it is a great abatement of a man's

countenance to take awaie the third part of his livinge. And

therefore gentlemen doe so much studie the Increase of theire

landes, enhauncing of their rentes, and so take farmes and

pastures into theire owne hands."

[371] _A Treatise of the Canker of England's Commonwealth_

(1601).

[372] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond), p.

100.

(b) _The Growth of the Large Leasehold Farm_

The changed situation created by these causes had the effect of

producing a new policy on the part of landlords, which took different

forms according to the circumstances of different localities, but which

in the counties most deeply affected resulted in an increase in

pasture-farming and in an upward movement in the payments made by

tenants. The new régime seems to have affected first, as was natural,

that part of their estates which was most entirely under their own

control, and the disposal of which was least involved in other

interests, namely, the manorial demesne. It is not altogether easy to

construct a picture of the policy pursued by a typical enclosing

landlord from the accounts of contemporaries, who were more interested

in results than in the steps by which they were reached. According to

some of them, lords in the sixteenth century were resuming into their

own hands those parts of the demesne which had been let out, in order to

supply their establishments with produce without having to rely on the

markets when prices were rapidly rising. On some manors again, when the

demesne was "in the hand of the lord," considerations which were not

purely economic came into play; for example, one finds part of it being

turned into a park, which was at once profitable as a means of grazing

sheep, and prized for those motives of social amenity and ostentation

which have done so much to make the English countryside the admiration

of travellers, and so much to ruin the English peasantry. It was not

seldom that the confiscated estates of monastic houses were converted

into a pleasaunce or a deer-park by their new proprietors.

On the other hand, the manorial documents suggest that landlords were

usually rather parties to changes in the methods of cultivation than

themselves the agents who carried them out, because, at any rate in the

case of the larger landowners, the demesnes were usually leased. The

actual process of experiment and innovation took place on most manors

through the instrumentality of the lessee.[373] The large farmer, who on

many manors is found managing the demesne, is much the most striking

character in the rural development of the sixteenth century. His

fortunes wax while those of the peasantry wane. Gradually he thrusts

them, first copyholders and then yeomen, into the background, and

becomes in time the parent of a mighty line, which later ages,

forgetting poor Piers Plowman, whose place he has usurped, will look on

as the representative of all that is solid and unchanging in the English

social order. In our period he plays in the economics of agriculture the

part which was played in industry by the capitalist clothier, and his

position as the pivot of agrarian change is so important that it will

repay close attention.

[373] This may seem inconsistent with the fact that in the

statistics published by Mr. Leadam from the Inquisition of 1517

most enclosures in most counties are entered as made by lords of

manors. I do not think, however, that this is necessarily so.

When it is stated that a lord of a manor has enclosed and

converted to pasture, it may very well be meant that his agent

did so with his consent. _I.e._ the distinction would appear to

be not between the lord and the lord's farmer, but between the

manorial authorities (lord and farmer) and the rest of the

landholders. The phrase used in the Berkshire returns, "converti

permisit," indicates what I take to have been the most general,

though not, of course, the invariable, course of events.

In the first place, then, it is clear that the foundation of the large

farm was the practice of leasing the demesne for a term of years, which

was the normal way of disposing of it in the sixteenth century. In the

reign of Elizabeth the distinction between the demesne and the customary

tenancies still survived, and surveyors were at some pains to separate

them in order to prevent the demesne being merged in the customary

holdings. But the original meaning of the distinction had been almost

obliterated; the demesne was no longer the centre of the manorial

economy, as it had been when its produce maintained the lord's

household, and the labour of the customary tenants, in spite of the

survival of many services, no longer supplied the chief means of

cultivating it. On the whole, it would be true to say that on

ninety-nine manors out of a hundred the demesne was leased by the middle

of the sixteenth century, and on the majority of them probably at a much

earlier date. There are, of course, some exceptions. Certain manors the

lord makes his headquarters, and there the home farm is retained in his

hands, because it is required to supply his establishment. On other

manors the demesne or part of it can no longer be distinguished from the

holdings of the customary tenants, and is held by them by copy of Court

Roll in the same way as the "customary land." In certain parts of

England, again, the leasing of the demesne has not proceeded far,

because the demesne has always been relatively unimportant. On several

Northumberland manors, for example, the surveyor[374] could in 1567 find

no demesne at all, either because it had all been divided up among the

tenants, or because it had never existed. Nevertheless, in spite of

these exceptions, a lease for a term of years to a farmer or farmers is

the ordinary method of disposing of the demesne in the sixteenth

century. This is proved in a very satisfactory way by the investigations

of Professor Savine[375] into the disposition of the lands of monastic

houses in 1534. After an exhaustive inquiry relating to several hundred

manors he found that the cases in which the demesne was not leased were

an insignificant proportion of the whole. An examination of smaller

groups of manors tells the same story. Out of thirty-six[376] manors in

Wiltshire, Somersetshire, and Devonshire surveyed for the Earl of

Pembroke in 1568, it is possible to determine the use made of the

demesne on thirty-two, and on twenty-nine of them it was leased. Of

twenty-nine other manors examined at random at different periods in the

sixteenth and early seventeenth century every one was in the same

condition. There is no reason to distrust these instances on the ground

that they may represent a development occurring too late in the century

to be relevant to movements found in existence at the beginning of it,

because in several cases where the history of a manor can be traced

backwards, it is clear, as has been shown above, that the leasing of the

demesne was quite common at least from the middle of the fifteenth

century, and in parts of the country much earlier.

[374] _e.g._ at Acklington (_Northumberland County History_,

vol. v.), of which Clarkson the surveyor writes: "Neither is

there any demaine lands or demaine meadows, but all is occupied

together in husbandry"; at Birling (_ibid._): "There is no

demaine land or meadow, with all their husbandlands and meadows

appertaining to the same"; apparently also at High Buston.

Compare Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, p. 316: "Villages

without a manorial demesne ... are found ... where the power of

the lord was more a political than an economical one" (Norfolk

and Suffolk, Lincoln, Northumberland, Westmoreland, &c.). For a

manor where the demesne is kept in the hand of the lord in 1568

for the reason given above, see Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of

Pembroke Manors_, Manor of Washerne.

[375] _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, pp. 153-154.

[376] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl

of Pembroke_.

From the allusions made by contemporaries to the large farmer as one of

the mainsprings of the changes of the period, one is disposed to look

first at the demesne for the beginning of capitalist agriculture.

Whether, however, the method of cultivating the demesne differed much

from the cultivation of the customary holdings depended to a

considerable extent upon the terms on which it was leased, and, in

particular, upon whether it passed into the control of a single

considerable tenant. It would be a mistake to think that the economic

relationships which were established when the demesne ceased to be

cultivated by villein labour were all of one type, or in particular that

the demesne invariably passed into the hands of one holder. Mention has

already been made of the practice of adding the demesne lands, or part

of them, to the customary land held by copy of Court Roll, a practice

which obviously resulted in maintaining in the hands of small

cultivators land which might have gone to build up large properties.

Even when the demesne is leased it is not always leased to a single

large farmer. In reality the surveys of the sixteenth century reveal two

well-defined types of leasehold property subsisting on the lord's

demesne, sometimes on neighbouring manors. The first type has as its

distinctive feature that the lessees are a number, sometimes a very

large number, of small farmers, who have been given allotments on the

demesne and who hold them for various periods of years, sometimes for

life only, sometimes for eighty, sometimes for ninety-two or

ninety-nine, years. Many examples of this type of small leaseholder come

from the west of England. Thus at Ablode,[377] in Somersetshire, before

the demesne was leased out by St. Peter's to a large farmer in 1515, it

had already been leased to seventeen of the customary tenants. At

Paynton,[378] in 1568, the Barton land was held in small plots by

fifty-one leaseholders, at South Brent[379] by eighteen. But examples of

this arrangement are found all over England. At Higham Ferrers,[380] in

Northamptonshire, the demesne has been divided among nine tenants; at

Stondelf,[381] in Staffordshire, among thirty-one. At Shape[382] in

Suffolk and Northendale[383] in Norfolk the demesnes are added to the

holdings of the customary tenants. At Forncett,[384] in Norfolk, parts

of the demesne are in the same way leased out in small parcels in the

fifteenth century for gradually lengthening periods of years, though by

the beginning of our period they seem to have been held by copy in the

same way as the customary land. Elsewhere we get what appear to be

variations of the same system, in the form of sub-letting or of

joint-cultivation. At Castle Combe,[385] for example, the demesne lands

were leased in 1454 to four tenants, "with the intention that they

themselves should let to farm to all the tenants of the lord some

portion of those lands." On other manors groups of tenants seem to make

themselves jointly responsible for the rent required. It was not an

unknown[386] thing even at quite an early date for a whole village to

come forward and make a kind of collective bargain with the lord as to

the terms upon which they would take over the demesne lands, and when

the leasing of the demesne became the regular practice townships

sometimes stepped into the shoes of the bailiffs, and averted the entry

of the large farmer by leasing the lands themselves, and making their

own arrangements as to the way in which they should be utilised. One may

suspect, indeed, that such action took place in a good many cases when

the land was leased to many small tenants, as at Paynton and South

Brent, even though the intervention of the township is not expressly

stated. Sometimes, however, the communal character of the bargain is

quite beyond doubt. For example, at Cucklington,[387] on the manor of

Stooke Trister in Somersetshire, twelve tenants leased together at a

rent of £8 for forty years a sheep house with 250 acres of land. At

Chedsey,[388] in the same county, the whole of the demesne, which lay

mainly in small parcels of one or two acres, was held in 1568 on a

twenty-one years' lease by the tenants of the manor. At Caston,[389] in

Norfolk, we find an entry of rent which is paid by "the inhabitants of

the town of Scratby for certain lands occupied for their benefit." The

phrase "town lands," which appears not infrequently[390] in the surveys

and estate maps of the sixteenth century may perhaps be taken as

indicating the same conclusion. In what way exactly we ought to

interpret these arrangements--whether we should regard them as nothing

more than a summary expression of the fact that all the tenants have

severally rights over part of the estate, or whether we should conceive

of them as implying some higher degree of corporate action than this,

and as the outcome of a bargain struck with the lord by the village as a

village, is an interesting and difficult question,[391] to which we

shall recur later in speaking of rights of common. But we may mention

two points which suggest that there is in them a certain element of

practical communism to which legal historians sometimes do less than

justice. The first is that we occasionally find certain tenants acting

on behalf[392] of, one might almost say, representing, others. The

second is that in some cases the demesne lands are divided among them in

exactly equal[393] shares, so that, though every one has more land than

before, the relative sizes of their holdings are unaltered. The last

fact is a very striking one. It means, in the first place, that the new

land has been allotted on some common principle and by some formal

agreement. Clearly, if each tenant had bought as much land as he

pleased, we should have had not equality but inequality. It points, in

the second place, to the enduring strength of the ideas and interests

underlying the system of agricultural shareholding which is

characteristic of the mediæval village. We can understand a very

primitive system of agriculture designed to secure each household the

standard equipment needed to support it. But one would naturally suppose

that at the end of the Middle Ages, when new land which had hitherto

belonged to the lord was offered to the villagers, each would buy up as

much as he could without regard to the interests of his neighbours. It

is probable that in most cases, as in those quoted in Chapter III., this

is what happened. But in some instances it is not. The old economic

ideas which had governed the disposition of the ancient customary

holdings are applied to the new land which the cessation of demesne

cultivation by the lord throws into the market, and the villagers

re-allot it on the old plan. Even in its decay the mediæval land system

shows its vitality by meeting new situations with the ancient methods.

[377] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriæ_, vol.

iii. App., pp. 291-295.

[378] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl

of Pembroke_.

[379] _Ibid._

[380] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 34.

[381] R.O. _Land Rev. Misc. Bks._, vol. clxxxv., ff. 70-74.

[382] R.O. _Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts_, vol. clxiii., ff.

187.

[383] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Roll 478, No. 3.

[384] Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_.

[385] Scrope, _History of Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, p.

208.

[386] Vinogradoff, _The Growth of the Manor_, note to chap. ii.,

Book III., p. 370, and his quotations from Maitland: "The

villains of Bright Waltham ... constituted a community which

held land, which was capable of receiving a grant of land, which

could contract with the lord, which could make exchange with the

lord."

[387] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl

of Pembroke_.

[388] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl

of Pembroke_.

[389] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 12, No. 52, p.

10 d.

[390] See the map of part of Salford, p. 163, and compare R.O.

Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 27, No. 32 (Lavenham in

Suffolk): "Of Township of Tuddenham Free land foldcourse, 6s.

9d." _Ibid._, Portf. 13, No 21 (Colly Weston in Northants): "The

inhabitants for bushy ground paying two years 11s. Item, in

every third year they pay nothing." At Wymondham (R.O. _Aug.

Off. Misc. Bks._, vol. ccclx., f. 91) one finds under the

heading "Towne lands" 38 acres held by copy by the "feoffees of

the Vill of Wymondham" (37 Eliz.) in Trust for the school.

[391] See references quoted below, pp. 244-253.

[392] _e.g._ Scrope, _History of Manor and Barony of Castle

Combe_, p. 203. Extent of Manor, 1454: "Et notandum quod

prædictae terræ dominicates cum pratis et pasturis supra

specificatis dimittebantur ad firmam Ricardo Hallewey, Edwardo

Yonge, Johanni Costyn, Willelmo Gaudeby, et Edwardo Noorth, ea

intentione quod ipsi dimitterent ad firmam omnibus tenentibus

domini aliquas portiones dictorum terrarum secundum magis et

minus pro earum cultura, et reddunt pro firma inter se cxiiis.

viiid."

[393] R.O. _Land Revenue Misc. Bks._, vol. ccxxi., fol. 1.

Survey of Manor of Brigstock (Northants) 4, James I. Here the

demesne is held by twenty-two tenants, each having 8 acres, 3

roods, and 1 acre of meadow. Mickleholme meadow (also demesne

land) is held by five tenants, each having 1 acre. One finds on

some Northumberland manors a growth in the size of customary

holdings combined with the preservation of almost exact equality

between them, which surely must be taken as proving that the

increase in the area held grew, not by sporadic encroachments on

the part of individuals, but by definite allotment on some

communal plan. Thus at Birling there were in 1248 ten "bondi,"

each holding 30 acres or one husbandland; in 1498 nine holding

30 acres or one husbandland, and four holding one husbandland of

30 acres between them; in 1567 ten customary tenants, each

holding 33 acres; in 1616 the average holding has risen from 33

to 42-1/2 acres, but there is still substantial equality, the

largest holding amounting to 44 acres, 3 roods, 3-1/2 poles, and

the smallest to 40 acres, 0 roods, 33 poles (I omit the facts as

to the cottagers). In spite of two considerable additions to the

land of the village, there is little change in the relative

proportions of the tenancies. At Acklington there were in 1352

thirty-five bondage holdings of 16 acres each, of which nine

were vacant (presumably on account of the plague). In 1368 these

nine vacant holdings were let to the other tenants for herbage.

In 1498 there were eighteen tenants, of whom seventeen held two

husbandlands apiece (_i.e._ 32 acres) and one, one husbandland

(_i.e._ 16 acres). _Northumberland County History_, vol. v.

These small tenants were described as "farming the demesne," and their

existence may perhaps mark a sort of half-way house in the evolution of

the manorial demesne into the large leasehold farm. One may suspect

that that development was not at all likely to take place rapidly in the

circumstances of the fifteenth century. According to the generally

accepted view the practice of leasing part of the demesne, though

occurring at a very early date on manors where the labour supply was too

small for it to be cultivated by the villeins, received a great impetus

from the scarcity of labour which was produced by the Great Plague, and

went on side by side with the gradual commutation of labour services

into money rents. Of course one must not dogmatise about changes which

took centuries to accomplish, and which developed at very different

degrees of speed in different parts of the country. But the accounts of

particular manors supplied us by surveyors bear out the view that the

development of a class of small leaseholders took place as the result of

the abandonment of the old system of cultivating the demesne by means of

the works of the tenants organised under the supervision of the manorial

officials. "The lorde departed his habitation and caused his officers to

grant out parte of his landes to his tenants at will." "The medowes

lying in Hinton were the lordes' severall meadowes, which nowe are

divided among the tenants." "When the lorde departed his habitation, and

granted out the demesnes, the part was delivered and letten to the use

of the tenants." "One Sir John Taverney, Knight, dyd inhabit within the

said mannor, and kept great hospitalitie, and occupied the demesnes in

his own possession, which are large and greate, and now of late years

granted out by copye for terms of lyves among the tenants." Such

information, collected by a curious investigator[394] in the middle of

the sixteenth century from the lips of aged peasants in the west of

England, takes us back to a time when the leasing of the demesne was a

comparative novelty. Is it surprising that the landlord who leased for

the first time should prefer to do so on this small scale, should choose

to grant plots of land piecemeal for short terms of years rather than to

form a single farm? The practice was at first an experiment, an alarming

departure from accepted methods undertaken only through dire necessity.

A great catastrophe like the plague might make it profitable, but time

would naturally elapse before it was done systematically and on a large

scale. At the same time a class of farmers with sufficient capital to

manage several hundred acres of land could not come into existence at

once. The ordinary villein tenants, who were the first lessees on many

manors, could hardly jump immediately from farming twenty or thirty

acres to farming a whole estate, though those of them who as bailiffs

had previously been responsible for managing the demesne, and who seem

sometimes to have managed it as farmers for the lord, rather than as

hired servants, were certainly in a better position to do so.

[394] Humberstone, _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.

(surveys _temp._ Phil. and Mary of various manors belonging to

the Earl of Devon).

It would seem indeed that the question whether, when the sixteenth

century began, the demesne lands of a manor were leased to many small

tenants or to one or two large farmers, was decided largely by local and

personal conditions, and may fairly be described as a matter of chance.

When they lay in many scattered strips unified culture was impossible

till they had been consolidated, and therefore there was no particular

reason for leasing them to one tenant rather than to many; whereas, when

they were from the start in two or three great blocks, it was obviously

very improbable that they would be sub-divided. In those parts of the

country where sheep-farming was less profitable than elsewhere one

motive for introducing a single large farm was absent, while where the

demesne had already been leased in small plots the manorial authorities

might dislike to make an abrupt change affecting many households

disadvantageously. The general movement would appear, however, to have

been in the direction of longer leases and larger tenancies. Thus Miss

Davenport has shown that at Forncett the leasing of the demesne

began[395] in small parcels and for short periods from the end of the

fourteenth century, and gradually took place on a larger scale and for

longer periods as the practice became more familiar. The earlier leases

of the Oxfordshire manor of Cuxham[396] alternate between six and seven

years in length, and it is not till 1472 that the College owning it

appears to have granted a lease of as much as twenty years. Sometimes

one can see the system of leasing small parcels to many little farmers,

and that of leasing the whole demesne to one large farmer, coming into

competition with each other. A case in point comes from Ablode[397] in

Somersetshire. In 1515 the Abbot and Convent of St. Peter's, Gloucester,

leased the whole manor of Ablode to a farmer for eighty years. But at

the time when the lease was made the demesne lands and demesne meadows

were already occupied by the customary tenants. Accordingly the covenant

with the farmer provides that as soon as the other tenants' agreements

terminate, he shall have the reversion of their lands to use as he

pleases. Here the two types of demesne cultivation are seen merging into

one another, with the result that the large farm is consolidated out of

the small tenancies which preceded it.

[395] Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 57. When first

leased in 1373 the demesne was leased as a whole, but this plan

was abandoned. Early in the fifteenth century it was leased in

small plots, at first for six or seven years, and then for

twelve, twenty, or forty years. Finally parts of the demesne

were granted to be held at fee farm.

[396] Merton Documents, Nos. 3100 (lease of 1361 for seven

years), 3002 (lease of 1420 for seven years); 2856 (lease of

1424 for one year); 1874 (lease of 1472 for twenty years).

[397] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriæ_, vol.

iii. App., pp. 291-295. The words are "Sed bene licebit præfatis

... substituere tenentes ad eorum bene placitum in omnibus illis

terris dominicalibus supradictis modo in manibus tenentium

ibidem existentibus, cum reversio prædicta inde acciderit."

At the beginning of our period these small demesne tenancies had already

disappeared from many manors, if they had ever existed on them, and the

normal method of using the demesne was to lease it to a single[398]

large farmer, or at any rate to not more than three or four. In spite of

the instances given above, in which the home farm and its lands were

split up among numerous small tenants, most of the evidence suggests

that the leasing of the demesne to a single farmer was as regular a way

of disposing of it in the sixteenth century as its cultivation by

manorial officials with the labour of villeins had been in the

thirteenth. The very slow development of the large farm in certain

parts of the country was due rather to the insignificance or absence of

the demesne on some northern manors than to the prevalence of any

alternative methods of utilising it. The terms on which the farmer took

over the land varied naturally in detail, but these differences are

unimportant. In a few cases he holds it by copy. Normally he is a

leaseholder, sometimes for life, more usually for a period of years

ranging from twenty-one to eighty. Again the lessee's interest may be

more or less inclusive. Sometimes only the demesne, including any

customary works upon it of the tenants which may survive, is leased.

Sometimes the lease includes the live-stock of the manor, which, or the

equivalent of which, the farmer must replace at the end of his term.

Sometimes the profits of the court are leased as well, though more

usually they are reserved, together with any income from fines, to the

lord. Sometimes there is an arrangement of great interest and importance

by which the whole body of manorial rights, including the income from

the courts, confiscation of straying beasts, and the rents of the

customary tenants, are leased to the farmer, who thus becomes the

immediate landlord of the other tenants.[399] The greater part of the

farmer's rent is by the middle of the sixteenth century paid in money.

But certain payments in kind[400] survive, and supply a link between the

vanishing subsistence cultivation, and the growing commercial economy.

Where money was scarce, tenants were sometimes allowed to pay in kind as

a concession to their interests, and some landlords still found it

convenient to receive part of their rent in grain, fowls, pigeons, fish,

or a fat bull, a practice which on college estates lasted down to the

very end of the seventeenth century. But the value of such payments was

carefully calculated in terms of money, and they were the exception.

[398] Thus in 1535, on nineteen out of twenty-two manors owned

by Battle Abbey, the demesne was farmed by a single tenant, on

one by two, on one by three, while on one it was retained in the

hands of the monks (_Oxford Studies in Social and Legal

History_, vol. i.; _English Monasteries on the Eve of the

Dissolution_, by A. Savine). On twenty-five manors out of

thirty-two held by the Earl of Pembroke in 1568, the same

unified management obtained (Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of

Pembroke Manors_). Savine's remarks are to the point: "The lord

of the manor seldom divided up the demesne into separate plots

of land to be let to local tenants. Usually the demesne and its

buildings, sometimes even together with the live and dead stock,

passed into the hands of one farmer" (_ibid._).

[399] As at Knyghton in Wilts in 1568 (Roxburghe Club, _Pembroke

Surveys_), where the holdings and rents of the customary tenants

appear in the farmer's lease, _e.g._ "Walter Savage ad

voluntatem tenet ut parcellam dicti manerii l close etc. ... et

reddit 56s. ad manus dicti firmarii."

[400] Here is an example from a lease of 1562. The farmer pays

"yearly to the lord for the aforesaid farm--

10 quarters of corn, per bushel, 12d. £4

20 quarters of barley, per bushel, 8d. 106s. 8d.

10 quarters of oats, per bushel, 3d. 26s. 8d.

20 capons, per caput, 4d. 6s. 8d.

20 pigeons, per caput, 4d. 6s. 8d.

12 great fish called trouts, per caput, 3d. 3s."

(Survey of South Newton, _ibid._).

The growth of large farms had proceeded so far by the middle of the

sixteenth century that in parts of the country the area held by the

farmer was about equal to that held by all the other tenants. On some

manors it was less; on others it was a great deal more. The average area

of the large farmer's land in Wiltshire seems to have been about 352

acres, and it is not unusual to find manors where there are only two or

three customary tenants, while on some there were none at all. Wiltshire

no doubt must not be taken as typical of all other counties, as the

acreage of the leasehold farms held by men who had capital to spend

could so easily be increased by drawing in great tracts from the rolling

stretches of Chalk Down. But elsewhere, though the acreage held by the

farmer of the demesne is less, 170 or 150 acres, and though one or two

of the larger copyholders control a great deal of land themselves, he is

still, compared with the bulk of the customary tenants, a Triton among

minnows. Arithmetical averages are, however, unsatisfactory, and a

better idea of the scale on which the large farmer carried on business

may be obtained from the following table:--

TABLE VIII

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

| 850-900 Acres.|

| 800-849 Acres.|.|

| 750-799 Acres.|.|.|

| 700-749 Acres.|.|.|.|

| 650-699 Acres.|.|.|.|.|

| 600-649 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 550-599 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 500-549 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 450-499 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 400-449 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 350-399 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 300-349 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 250-299 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 200-249 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 150-199 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 100-149 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| 50-99 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| Under 50 Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

+-----------------------------------|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|

| manors in Norfolk | |2|2|3|1| |3|1| |2|3| | | |1| | | |

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

| three manors in Wiltshire |4|2|4|4|3|4|3| |2|1|1| | | | | |1|2|

| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

| manors in several counties |2|3|3|1|3|2|1| | |3| | | | | | | | |

| +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

| on fifty-two manors |6|7|9|8|7|6|7|1|2|6|4| | | |1| |1|2|

+-----------------------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

It will be seen that if all the farms are grouped together, rather more

than one half, thirty-seven out of sixty-seven, have an area exceeding

200 acres, and that the area of rather more than a quarter exceeds 350

acres. The figures must be read with the caution that they in some cases

certainly underestimate the real extent of the land used by the farmer,

as rights of common often cannot be expressed in terms of acres.

When we turn from the agricultural arrangements described in previous

chapters to examine these large farms, we enter a new world, a world

where economic power is being slowly organised for the exploitation of

the soil, and where the methods of cultivation and the standards of

success are quite different from those obtaining on the small holdings

of the peasantry. The advantage to the lord of the system of large

farms, compared either with the retention of the demesne in his own

hands, or with the leasing of it in allotments to small tenants, was

obvious enough for its extension to be no matter for surprise. The

utilisation of the produce of the demesne by the lord's household was

unnecessary when markets were sufficiently reliable to offer a regular

supply, and inconvenient when the landlord was an absentee. The division

of the estate among small tenants meant the creation or maintenance of

interests opposed to agricultural changes, and made it impracticable to

vary the methods of agriculture to meet varying demands, except by the

rather cumbrous process of a common agreement ratified in the manorial

court. The leasing of the demesne to a large farmer got rid of those

disadvantages. The lord was secured a regular money income, which was

considerably higher per acre than that got from the customary tenants;

and since the land was under the management of a single individual, who

was sometimes equipped with a good deal of capital, it was much easier

to try experiments and to initiate changes. When not only the demesne,

but the whole body of manorial rights, was included in the lease, the

property became of that most desirable kind, in which ownership is

attenuated to a pecuniary lien on the product of industry, without

administrative responsibility for its management.

Opportunities for new methods of cultivation were afforded by the

leasing of the demesne to a single farmer, which would lead us to look

at his holding as the place where agrarian changes were most likely to

begin, and to start from that in order to trace the effect of these

large properties on the small properties of the customary tenants. On

the one hand, any wide development of leasehold tenure involves a

certain mobility in rural society and a disposition to break with

routine. There must be a market for land, which again implies that some

class has accumulated sufficient capital to invest and has got beyond

mere subsistence farming. It naturally arises either when new[401] land

is brought into cultivation, or when the development of trade makes

farming for the market profitable, or when changes are being introduced

into the methods of agriculture, or when the value of land is uncertain

(for example, when it is thought that it may contain minerals),[402]

because in all these cases leasehold, being a terminable interest,

enables the owner of land to adjust his rent to the tenant's returns. On

the other hand, the landowner does not get the full advantage of the

elasticity in rent and management that leasehold tenure makes possible,

unless the tenant is a man of some substance, who can spend capital in

cultivating land on a large scale, in stocking a farm with sheep and

cattle, in carrying crops until the best market is found, and in making

experiments in new directions.

[401] See pp. 139-?147.

[402] See _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix., account of

Cowpen, and _Victoria County History_, Lancashire, article on

Social and Economic History. For the same reasons mills and

fisheries were naturally the first parts of a mediæval manor to

be leased for terms of years.

One can easily understand the reasons which favoured the large farm, if

one reflects on the change in economic environment, the outlines of

which have been already described. The most important economic cause

determining the unit of landholding is the nature of the crop to be

raised and the methods used in producing it; and the nature of the crop

depends mainly on the conditions of the market. Now in the sixteenth

century the market conditions were such as to leave room for a large

number of small corn-growers, because trade was so backward that a great

number of households farmed simply for subsistence. On the other hand,

even in the case of corn-growing, the size of the most profitable unit

of agriculture was increasing with the development of an internal corn

trade--a development which is proved by the strenuous attempts which the

Government made to regulate it through the Justices of the Peace; while

in the case of sheep and cattle grazing on the large scale practised by

the graziers of the period, there was obviously no question but that an

extensive ranch, which could be stocked with several thousand beasts,

was the type of holding which would pay best. That a class of capitalist

farmers of this kind was coming into existence in the sixteenth century

is indicated both by the complaints of contemporaries that small men

find farms taken over their heads by great graziers, who have made money

in trade; by the fact that the stock and land lease, a form of metayage

under which the working capital was supplied by the landowner, had given

way on many manors to the modern type of lease under which it is

provided by the lessee;[403] and by the way in which one farmer would

become the lessee of two[404] or more manors, a clear indication of the

existence of wealthy men who had money to invest in agriculture. It was

the substitution of such a class for the small leaseholders among whom

the demesne had often been divided, and their appearance for the first

time on manors where the demesne had been kept in the hands of the lord

until it was leased to one large farmer, which gave a rapid and almost

catastrophic speed to the tendency to enclosure which, as we have seen,

was already going on quietly among the small tenants, because it meant

the control of a growing proportion of the land by persons who had

capital to spend, and who, since they held their farms by lease, not by

copy, were under the pressure of competitive rents to adopt the methods

of agriculture which were financially most profitable. This in itself

was a new phenomenon, at least on the large scale on which it appeared

in the sixteenth century. In modern agriculture one is accustomed to

seeing the area sown with any crop varying according to movements in the

market price of the produce, so that on the margin of cultivation land

is constantly changing its use in response to changes in the world's

markets. But such adaptability implies a very high degree of

organisation, and when farming was carried on mainly by small producers

for their own households, the reaction of changing commercial conditions

on the supply was much slower, and cultivation was to a much greater

extent a matter of routine. It was the development of the large

capitalist farmer which supplied the link binding agriculture to the

market and causing changes in prices to be reflected in changes in the

use to which land was put.

[403] Owing to the advantages which the small holding has for

dairy purposes (personal attention to cattle, &c.), it is still

the custom in parts of the country, _e.g._ Devonshire, for the

large farmers to sublet small dairy farms out of their holdings,

and to supply the lessee with all the stock, including the cows

and the cottage. See Levy, _Large and Small Holdings_, chap. ix.

[404] Several examples of this are to be found in the _Pembroke

Surveys_. Contemporaries called it "the engrossing of farms."

The tendency which we should expect to find represented most

conspicuously upon the demesne farms is of course that enclosing of land

and laying of it down to pasture, which is lamented by contemporaries.

The word "enclosing," under which contemporaries summed up the agrarian

changes of the period, has become the recognised name for the process by

which the village community was broken up, but it is perhaps not a very

happy one. Quite apart from the difficulties which it raises when we

come to compare the enclosures of the eighteenth century, which were

made under Act of Parliament, with those of the sixteenth century, which

were made in defiance of legislation, it is at once too broad and too

narrow to be an adequate description even of the innovations of the

earlier period, too broad if it implies that all enclosures entailed the

hardships which were produced by some, too narrow if it implies that the

only hardships caused were due to enclosure. It selects one feature of

the movement towards capitalist agriculture for special emphasis, and

suggests that the hedging and ditching of land always produced similar

results. That, however, was by no means the case. Enclosure might take

place, as has been shown above, without producing the social

disturbances usually associated with it, provided that it was carried

out by the tenants themselves, and with the consent of those affected.

The concentration of holdings and the displacement of tenants might take

place without enclosure. On a desert island there is no need of palings

to keep out trespassers; and a manor which was entirely in the hands of

one great farmer was a manor where the maintenance of enclosures was

almost unnecessary. At the same time the word does describe one of the

external features which usually accompanied the agrarian changes. The

general note of the movement was the emancipation from the rules of

communal cultivation of part or all of the land used for purposes of

tillage or pasture. The surface of a manor was covered with a kind of

elaborate network of rules apportioning, on a common customary plan, the

rights and duties of every one who had an interest in it. A man must let

his land lie open after harvest; he must not keep more than a certain

number of each kind of beasts on the common; he must plough when his

neighbours plough, and sow when his neighbours sow. The effect of the

growing influence of the capitalist farmer was to clear away these

organised restrictions from parts of the manor altogether, and violently

to shake the whole system. Enclosing was normally the external symptom

of the change, for the practical reason that the simplest way of cutting

a piece of land adrift from the common course of cultivation, or from

the rules laid down for the use of the commonable area, was to put a

hedge round it, partly to keep one's own beasts in, partly to keep other

people's beasts out. The essential feature of the change was that land

which was formerly subject to a rule prescribing the methods of

cultivation became land which was used at the individual's discretion.

The agent through whom enclosing was carried out was usually the large

farmer. When the farmer leased only the demesne lands, and the demesne

lands lay in large compact blocks, not in scattered strips, he could

naturally practise the new economy of enclosure upon them without

colliding with any other interest, except in the cases where they were

divided into several tenancies; while if steps were taken to get rid of

the interests which the customary tenants had either in the open fields,

in the meadows, or in the common, the land lost by them was normally

added to the area which the farmer leased, and enclosed by him. In the

surveys of the period one finds manors in every stage of the transition

from open field cultivation to enclosure, and though such individual

instances tell us nothing of the extent of the movement, they offer a

vivid picture of what enclosing meant, and give the impression that

enclosure had usually proceeded further on those manors where the farmer

held the largest proportion of the land. The slowness of the movement

towards enclosure on the holdings of the customary tenants has already

been described. As a contrast to it one may look at the following table,

which sets out the condition of things on some demesne farms:--

TABLE IX

+-----------+------------+-------------+-----------+

| | | | 5 |

| Demesne | of | 5 per Cent. | to 24 |

+-----------+------------+-------------+-----------+

| 47 | 12 | 9 | 7 |

+-----------+------------+-------------+-----------+

| 25 | 50 | 75 | |

| to 49 | to 74 | to 99 | per Cent. |

+-----------+------------+-------------+-----------+

| 7 | ... | 4 | 8 |

+-----------+------------+-------------+-----------+

These figures are not offered as any evidence of the absolute area

enclosed in the counties represented. They may, however, perhaps be

taken as an indication that the demesne farm was usually that part of

the manor on which enclosure was carried out most thoroughly. Thirty-one

of the manors included in the table are in Wiltshire and Norfolk, and

where the conditions of things on the tenants' holdings can be compared

with that obtaining on the demesne, it is almost always the case that

the new economy has spread furthest on the latter. Neither in Wiltshire

nor in Norfolk had enclosure by the peasants themselves proceeded very

far in the latter half of the sixteenth century.

The conditions, however, on different manors varied so enormously that

much weight cannot be laid on these figures, and it is both more

important and more practicable to examine particular examples of the

ways in which the large enclosed estate was built up. In the first

place, then, one may say with some confidence that those parts of a

manor which lent themselves most readily to enclosing were the waste,

the common pasture, and the common meadow, while the enclosing of the

farmer's holdings of arable land took place more gradually, less

thoroughly, and with greater difficulty. Thus selecting from the manors

tabulated above those in which the quality of the land enclosed is

distinguished, and omitting those where it is merely stated to lie "in

closes," one finds that partial or complete enclosure of the arable has

been made on nine, of the meadow on eleven, and of the pasture on

twenty, manors. The explanation of this is to be found by recollecting

the characteristics of the organisation into which the farmer stepped.

The arable land which formed the lord's demesne was often scattered,

like the tenant's, in comparatively small plots over the three fields;

unity of ownership did not by any means necessarily imply unified

culture, and before these could be enclosed they had to be consolidated

into fewer and larger blocks. Moreover, if the object of enclosure was

conversion to pasture, it must be remembered that the enclosure of the

arable implied a very great revolution in the manorial economy. A farm

which was well equipped for tillage had barns, granges, agricultural

implements, which would stand idle if the arable land was enclosed for

pasture, and it was therefore natural that, as long as other land was

available in sufficient quantities for sheep-farming, such land should

be enclosed for the purpose, before the ordinary course of cultivation

on the arable land was abandoned. The common meadows and the common

wastes did not offer these obstacles to enclosure. Since the

individualising tendencies of personal cultivation did not operate upon

these parts of the village land, the method of securing equal enjoyment

of them had not been, as in the case of arable, to give each household a

holding consisting of separate strips scattered over good and bad land

alike, but to give each holder of an arable share access to the whole of

the pasture land. They were, therefore, usually not divided and

scattered to anything like the same extent, and it was thus much easier

for the rights of different parties over them to be disentangled, and

for the land to be cut up and enclosed "in severalty." Hence, where the

tenants are most numerous, and where there are fewest signs of change,

the effect of the large farmer is often seen in the withdrawal of part

of the common waste from communal use. If the growth of sheep farming

made the small tenants anxious, as in many cases it did, to acquire

separate pastures for their flocks, it can readily be understood that

the large farmer, who had more to lose and more to gain, was likely to

pursue the same policy unless checked by organised opposition. Normally

the change seems to have taken place by converting the right to pasture

a certain number of beasts in common with other tenants into the right

to the exclusive use of a certain number of acres. Instead of the whole

commonable area lying open to a number of animals "stinted" in a certain

proportion among the commoners, the stint is abandoned, and the basis of

allocation is found not in a fixed number of animals, but in a fixed

area of land, which forms the separate common of the individual farmer,

and which is naturally enclosed. Many examples of this division of

commonable land are found in the surveys, especially in connection with

the common waste of the manor, which enable us to trace the change from

collective to individual administration. Thus, to give a few instances,

at Winterbourne Basset[405] the farmer has all the meadow land except

one half-acre, and a separate close of 140 acres on the downs, where he

can graze nearly three times as many sheep as all the customary tenants.

At Knyghton[406] he has enclosed with a hedge part of the sheep's

common, no sheep at all being kept by the customary tenants. At

Massingham,[407] in Norfolk, where much of the demesne arable lies "in

the fields," there is an enclosed pasture containing 123-1/2 acres; and

on another farm of 203 acres, which has apparently been formed out of

the demesne, one finds 28 acres of arable "in the fields" and 65 acres

of "pasture enclosed," the remaining 80 acres lying "in the sheep

courses." The best picture of what the change meant is given by the two

maps[408] printed opposite. In No. III. the meadow, save for a small

piece used exclusively by All Souls, is common, each tenant presumably

being allowed to place so many beasts upon it. In No. IV. the meadow has

been divided up among the tenants, and instead of pasturing a limited

number of beasts on the whole of it, each can pasture as many beasts as

he pleases on part of it. It is not necessary to point out the

significance of this change from the point of view of the social

organisation of rural life. It means that communal administration of

part of the land has been abandoned and its place taken by use at the

discretion of the individual tenant.

[405] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl

of Pembroke_. The farmer has four closes of meadow amounting to

9 acres, one meadow of 2-1/2 acres, one meadow of 7 acres, one

meadow of 8-1/2 acres. In addition to that and the hilly

pasture, there is in his possession "unus campus noviter

inclusus, qui aliquando seminatur, aliquando iacet ad pasturam,"

and which "olim sustentare potuit 900 oves et catalla non

extenta."

[406] _Ibid._, "De terra montanea unde pars includitur cum sepe

iuxta Crowcheston continens per estimationem 100 acres, et

custodire potest supra prædictam 900 oves." Sometimes it is

expressly stated that the farmer alone is to have a certain

pasture, _e.g._ at Chalke (_ibid_): "Et etiam dictus firmarius

habet ibidem unum montem vocatum a Doune et bene cognitum est

quia circumcinctum est per sepem et bundas, et custodire potest

600 multones quia nullus habet communiam in eo nisi firmarius

solus, et continet per estimacionem 200 acres."

[407] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 24, No. 4, f.

46 (_temp._ Hen. VIII.). "The fold course will carry 1800 sheep

at £8 a hundred."

[408] In All Souls' Muniment Room.

But while the pasture ground and meadow offered special facilities for

enclosure, there is abundant evidence that the farmer's arable land was

also in many cases enclosed. On some manors the whole of the arable

demesne lay together, and in that case there was no obstacle in the way

of enclosing it. More usually it lay in three pieces, one block in each

of the three great fields, and here again, when there was sufficient

motive for enclosure, enclosure was easily practicable. The only

arrangement which offered a really difficult problem was that in which

it was divided into acre and a half strips scattered about the manor at

a distance from each other. One finds cases in which such strips

numbered several hundred, but the impression given by surveys is that,

at any rate by the middle of the sixteenth century, such extreme

subdivision was exceptional, and that the consolidation of holdings by

means of exchange and purchase, which we have seen at work from an early

date on the holdings of the customary tenants, had often proceeded so

far on the demesne as to have rounded off the farmer's property into

comparatively few large holdings. As an illustration of the first steps

towards unification and enclosure we may take the manor of Sparham,[409]

in Norfolk, which was surveyed about 1590. Here the 189 acres which

compose the demesne, and which are leased to a farmer, are still much

scattered. They lie in seventy different pieces, most of which are quite

small, acres, half-acres, and roods. But even here there has been a

considerable amount of consolidation, and it has been followed by the

beginnings of enclosure. The 37-1/2 acres of pasture lie in five pieces

of 11, 9, 7, 5, 5-1/2 acres, all of which have been enclosed. The arable

is still intermixed with the strips of the other tenants in the open

fields. But on the arable itself consolidation and enclosure are

creeping forward. There are four strips lying together which comprise

6-3/4 acres. There is one enclosure, consisting of arable, wood, and

meadow, and containing 17 acres. The neighbouring manor of

Fulmordeston[410] offers an example of a state of things in which the

same tendency has worked itself out to completion. The 742 acres leased

by the farmer of the demesne are entirely enclosed. There are two woods

comprising 50 acres. There is an enclosure of 250 acres, 35 perches,

consisting of "Corne severall and Broome severall." There is a "great

close" of 130 acres, 1 rood, "longe close" of 57 acres, 3 roods, "Brick

kyll close" of 40 acres, 1 rood, "Brakehill close" of 24 acres, 1 rood,

a field of 106 acres called Hestell, and another of 83 acres, 2 roods.

But these different stages are best illustrated by maps[411] Nos. I.,

III., IV., V., and VI.

On No. III. it will be seen that there is a good deal of subdivision. On

Nos. IV. and V. the tenants whose strips separated parts of the demesne

from each other, have in many cases dropped out, so that the process of

aggregation is facilitated: on No. I. the concentration of the demesne

into a single large block is complete; though it is still unenclosed, it

offers no obstacle to enclosure: on No. VI. consolidation has

been followed by enclosure, conversion to pasture and depopulation.

Between the state of things on map No. III. and that on map No. VI.

there is the greatest possible difference. Yet there is no reason to

doubt that Whadborough had once been an open field village with tenants

who were mainly engaged in tillage. Map Nos. IV., V., and I. are, as it

were, the intervening chapters which join the preface to the conclusion.

Occasionally one can see the process of consolidation, which was the

necessary preliminary of enclosure, actually taking place. At

Harriesham,[412] in Kent, the parson held 3 acres of glebe land in two

pieces, one of them lying in the middle of a field belonging to another

tenant, who ploughed up its boundaries and added it to his own land.

Accordingly, to prevent uncertainty in the future, the owner of the

field and the parson executed a deed by which the latter surrendered his

claim to the detached pieces of land, and in return got three acres laid

out in a single plot. In view of the large blocks which are often held

by the farmer of the demesne, one cannot doubt that such consolidation

by way of exchange must have been a common arrangement.

[409] MSS. of the Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Sparham

Documents, Bdle. No. 5.

[410] _Ibid._, Fulmordestone Documents, No. 59. Description of

manor at bottom of map (1614).

[411] In All Souls' Muniment Room.

[412] Maps in All Souls' Muniment Room: "The description of the

parsonage of Harriesham in the countie of Kent, with the glebe

lands thereunto belonging." Note on back of map: "Memorandum

that whereas there are and always have been 4 parcelles of land

in Mr. Steed his fielde called Harriesham field belonging unto

the parsonage of Harriesham, conteyninge by estimation three

acres, whereof the one did lye along by the landes of Sir Edward

Wootton, called the Cowe doune, the other ... abutteth on the

said Cowe doune toward the east, the other boundes thereof not

being certainly known by reason that they were plowed up by one

Robert Brinkley, tenant of the whole field, and were laid out by

Robert Brinkley as in the Platte doth appeare under the Redd

colour; It is now covenanted by the said Mr. Steede and Mr.

George Hovenden, incumbent there, by deed bearing date the 20th

of July in the 17th year of the Queen's Majestie's reign, that

nowe all that the said three acres shall from henceforth be

possessed by the parson and his successors for ever in manner

and form as it is nowe laid out in the platte in the yellow

colour after the maner of a square" [here follow the

boundaries].

It remains to ask how far the type of economy pursued by the large

farmer differed from that of the smaller tenants, and in particular

whether there are signs of his specialising upon the grazing of sheep.

The most complete picture of the agricultural changes of the early

sixteenth century, not on the demesne farms alone, but on the holdings

of all classes of tenants as well, is given in the well-known

returns[413] made by the Commissioners who were appointed by Wolsey in

1517 to investigate enclosures, and these are supplemented by the

figures published by Miss Davenport[414] as to the relative proportions

or arable and pasture land on certain Staffordshire estates. The

interpretation of both of these sets of statistics is ambiguous. Mr.

Leadam uses them to show that much enclosing took place for arable, and

that therefore the statutes and writers of the period exaggerated the

movement towards pasture farming. Professor Gay thinks his conclusions

untenable, and that a proper interpretation of the Commissioners'

returns corroborates the view of contemporary writers that pasture was

substituted for tillage on a large scale. Two points emerge pretty

clearly from the controversy. The first is that there was a good deal of

redistribution of land with the object of better tillage, of the kind

which has been described above, and that probably the fact that the word

"enclosure" was used to describe this, as well as the conversion of

arable to pasture, was responsible for some confusion. The second is

that the predominant tendency was towards sheep-farming. To suppose that

contemporaries were mistaken as to the general nature of the movement is

to accuse them of an imbecility which is really incredible. Governments

do not go out of their way to offend powerful classes out of mere

lightheartedness, nor do large bodies of men revolt because they have

mistaken a ploughed field for a sheep pasture. Even if we accept Mr.

Leadam's statistical analysis of the report of the Commission of 1517,

his figures still reveal a great deal of conversion to pasture; and it

is clear that many cases on which his totals rest are open to more than

one interpretation.

[413] Leadam, _Domesday of Enclosures_. For a discussion as to

whether they suggest that enclosing took place for arable or

pasture, see _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xiv.

[414] _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xi.

If the general correctness of the view of the sixteenth century

observers that there was a wide movement towards sheep-farming is

accepted, it ought to be represented more fully on the demesne farms

than elsewhere, because changes could be applied to them with much less

friction than to the lands in which the interests of other tenants were

involved. With a view to showing to what extent this is the case two

sets of figures are given below; the first is a table taken from Dr.

Savine's[415] work on _The English Monasteries on the Eve of the

Reformation_, and relates to the demesne lands of forty-one monasteries

which were surveyed for the Crown on the occasion of their surrender;

some were apparently in the hands of the monastery and some apparently

were leased. The second gives the approximate use to which land was put

by the farmers of the demesnes on forty-nine manors in the sixteenth and

early seventeenth centuries. They are subdivided in three groups, (_a_)

manors in Norfolk and Suffolk, (_b_) manors in Wiltshire and Dorsetshire

(one), and (_c_) manors in other southern and eastern counties, but

including one in Staffordshire and one in Lancashire. For purposes of

comparison the table given in Part I. Chapter III., illustrating the use

made of the customary holdings, is repeated here:--

TABLE X

+-------------------------------+----------+----------+----------+

+-------------------------------+----------+----------+----------+

| 16780 | 6235-3/4 | 8691-1/2 | 1852-3/4 |

| | (37.1%) | (51.7%) | (11.0%) |

+-------------------------------+----------+----------+----------+

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

| 16866 | 8302 | 6172 | 1528 | 624 | 240 |

| |(49.2%)| (36.5%)| (9%) |(3.6%) | (1.3%) |

+-------------------+--------+-------+-------+-------+---------------+

| |

| COMPOSED OF (_a_) THIRTY-TWO FARMS ON |

| TWENTY-THREE MANORS IN WILTS AND ONE MANOR IN DORSET |

| |

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

| 8812 | 4390 | 2928 | 754 | 500 | 240 |

| |(49.8%)|(33.2%) | (8.3%)| (5.6%)| (2.7%) |

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

| |

| (_b_) SIXTEEN FARMS ON THIRTEEN MANORS IN |

| NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK |

| |

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

| 4361 | 2393 | 1707 | 261 | ... | ... |

| | (52%) | (39%) | (5.9%)| | |

+-------------------+--------+-------+-------+-------+---------------+

| |

| (_c_) SEVENTEEN FARMS ON THIRTEEN OTHER MANORS |

| MAINLY IN SOUTH AND MIDLANDS |

| |

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

| 3691 | 1519 | 1536 | 512 | 124 | ... |

| |(41.1%)|(41.1%) |(13.8%)| (3.3%)| |

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

III

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

| 7786 | 6841 | 555 | 390 | ... | ... |

| |(87.7%)| (7.1%) | (5.1%)| | |

+-------------------+-------+--------+-------+-------+---------------+

[415] _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, vol. i. pp.

171-173.

The figures in this table do not pretend to complete accuracy, but their

classification of the distribution of land between different uses is not

far wrong. Of the customary tenants' land about 87 per cent. is arable,

and 12 per cent. meadow and pasture. Of the farmers' land about 49 per

cent. is arable, 36 per cent. pasture, 9 per cent. meadow. The

proportion of pasture to arable is somewhat higher in the southern and

midland counties than it is in East Anglia; but the cases examined are

too few to allow of any conclusion being drawn from this fact. Without

pushing the figures in either table further than they will go, one may

suggest that they seem to imply, in the first place, that the large

farmer was by no means always a grazier, and that the writers of the

period who spoke as though all large-scale farming meant the conversion

of arable to pasture were guilty of some exaggeration. In a good many

cases the methods of cultivation pursued by the farmer of the demesne

differed from those of the customary tenants only in the fact that his

holding was larger; as a matter of fact the customary tenants on some

manors deserve the name of grazier better than the farmer of the demesne

upon others.

But they suggest, in the second place, that these cases were

exceptional, and that, on the whole, arable farming played a much more

important part on the holdings of the customary tenants than it did on

those of the farmers. The former subsisted mainly on the tillage of the

land in the open fields. The latter, though they had often much arable,

sometimes had none, or next to none at all, and relied to a far greater

extent on the opportunities for stock-breeding offered by pasture and

meadow land. These figures, however, include some derived from manors

where tillage was virtually the only sort of farming carried on, and

they do not give any idea of the arrangements prevailing on an estate

where pasture-farming had been pushed far. Taking from the fifty manors

dealt with above, the twelve which are most typical of the new régime,

one gets a very different picture--

TABLE XI

+------------+---------+---------+----------+---------+-----------+

+------------+---------+---------+----------+---------+-----------+

| 4474 | 922 | 403 | 3065 | 71 | 13 |

| | (20.6%) | (8.9%) | (68.3%) | (1.5%) | |

+------------+---------+---------+----------+---------+-----------+

Here arable forms only 23 per cent. of the whole area, while pasture and

meadow together form over 77 per cent. This swing of the pendulum from

arable husbandry to pasture-farming will not surprise us, if we remember

that at the time of the Domesday Survey, and, indeed, throughout the

Middle Ages, the area of land under the plough had been, when considered

in relation to the population, extraordinarily large. The economic

justification of ploughing land which no modern farmer would touch had

lain in the fact that the impossibility of moving food supplies had made

it necessary for each village to be virtually self-supporting, and had

thus prevented the specialisation of districts in different types of

agriculture. When the development of trade under the Tudors had combined

with the keen demand for wool to introduce a geographical division of

labour, the change was naturally all the more violent, because there

was, so to speak, so much lee-way to be made up, because so much land

was in tillage which had no special suitability for the production of

grain. Even so, between 1815 and 1846, the rich water meadows of

Oxfordshire were being ploughed up for corn. Even so, after 1879, the

collapse of corn-growing was all the more disastrous, because it had

been so long delayed.

One would expect the growth of large farms side by side with the

customary holdings, especially when the methods of agriculture employed

were so different, to result in a powerful reaction of the new interests

upon the old, and perhaps in a collision between them, even when no

deliberate attempt was made to alter the position of the tenants. And

this is what we are told in fact occurred. The customary tenants'

holdings and the demesne both formed part of one area, subject to

certain rights and privileges defined by the custom of the manor. Both,

for example, would lie open to the village cattle after harvest; both

were subject to the customary rotation of crops, and necessarily so when

the demesne was not separate but mixed with the customary holdings in

the open field; both had rights of common on the pasture or waste of the

manor. Moreover, the whole organisation of the economic side of manorial

life was based on the assumption that tillage was the most important

element in it. For example, the apportionment of rights over the waste,

the "stint" of animals to be grazed, assumed that no one partner would

require to graze more than a certain number, and broke down if he gave

himself up to cattle-breeding or sheep-farming, and multiplied his

beasts by five or ten. It would be natural, therefore, to look for a

straining and shifting of those rights as a probable consequence of the

existence side by side of two such different agricultural stages, and of

such different types of property. Formerly the respective interests of

the lord and the customary tenants had been harmonised by the fact that

the labour of the latter supplied the chief means of cultivating the

demesne, and that the demesne could hardly be a profitable concern if

the number of tenants or their standard of living declined very largely,

any more than a gold-mine can pay without gold-miners. But when the

demesne was largely used for pasture this consideration of course did

not apply, and in any case by the sixteenth century, although the

services of the tenants were still part of the means by which the

farmers found labour, they were probably an unimportant one. As is shown

by the smallness of the holdings on many manors, which were quite

insufficient by themselves to support a family, and by the evidence of

contemporaries, the farmer had a growing, though still small, labour

market into which to dip, and the rough agreement which had existed

between the interests of the manorial estate and those of the tenants

was therefore no longer existent. Thus a collision of interests, a

weakening of communal restrictions before the enterprise of the

capitalist farmer, the strengthening of some kinds of property and the

weakening of others, and the growth of new sorts of social relations in

the villages, were consequences to be expected from the increasing

predominance of the large farm, and especially of the large pasture

farm.

To sum up the arguments of the chapter. At the beginning of the

sixteenth century forces both political--the restriction of the

territorial sovereignty of the landlords--and economic--the growth in

the demand for wool--were working to produce a change in the methods of

agriculture; and at any rate by the middle of the century another

powerful motive was added by the fall in the value of money. The result

was that there was a movement in the direction of converting arable land

to pasture, and of enclosure, which affected all classes of landholders,

but which was carried furthest by the large farmers who leased the

demesne lands of manors, who could afford to make experiments, and who

were under a strong incentive to turn the land to its most profitable

use.

CHAPTER II

THE REACTION OF THE AGRARIAN CHANGES ON THE PEASANTRY

(a) _The Removing of Landmarks_

The history of the agrarian problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries--indeed its history ever since--is largely the story of the

small cultivator's struggle to protect his interests against the changes

caused by the growth of the great estate. In that struggle there is much

that is detailed, tiresome, and obscure. The student hears very little

about general principles, very much of technicalities about the nature

of common appendant and common appurtenant, of stinted and unstinted

pastures, of gressums and fines, of copyholds for years, for lives, or

of inheritance, of land which is old enclosure that ought to stand, or

new enclosure that ought to fall. But at the centre of this maze of dry

and infinitely diverse details there is a real regrouping of social

forces going on, and a rearrangement, at once rapid and profound, of

economic and political ideas. We must no more picture the changes of our

period as mere matters of the technique of agriculture, than we must

think of the industrial revolution of two centuries later in terms of

spinning-jennies and steam-power. On the contrary, these very details

are the channel along which rural life is beginning to slip from one

form of economic organisation to another, the seed-plot in which new

conceptions of social expediency are being brought to maturity. In

numberless English villages between 1500 and 1600 large issues are being

decided which will profoundly modify the course of social development.

Is the communal administration of meadow and wastes to survive (as it

has survived in France and Belgium) or is it to disappear? Is England

to be a country of large cultivators working with many hired labourers,

or of small cultivators working with few? Is leasehold or copyhold to be

the predominant form of land tenure? When the final transition to modern

agriculture takes place, will England face the change with a population

the bulk of which has been rooted in the soil since the Middle Ages, or

will the middle classes in rural society have been already so far

undermined that opinion turns spontaneously to the great landlord as the

sole representative of agricultural progress? Of course the answer to

these questions was not given by 1600 or even by 1700; we must not

forget Arthur Young and the far more extensive enclosures of the

eighteenth century. But in our period development certainly took a

distinct bias away from one set of arrangements and in the direction of

another. The best standpoint from which to examine its course is found

by watching the reaction upon the tenants of the agricultural changes

which we have tried to summarise in the preceding sections.

The economic effect of the policy pursued by the large farmer depended

upon what proportion of the land he controlled, and in particular upon

the part of the manor upon which enclosure was made. He might enclose

only the land actually belonging to the demesne farm when he took it

over; or he might enclose parts of the waste or meadow over which other

tenants had rights of pasture; or he might enclose the holdings in the

open arable fields belonging to other tenants, for this purpose

evicting, or inducing the lord to evict, them. When only the demesne

lands were enclosed the other interests were sometimes little disturbed,

unless indeed the demesne had already been parcelled out among some of

the smaller tenants, a contingency to be considered later. But, even

when that was not the case, the conversion of the demesne to pasture and

its enclosure had two consequences which were not unimportant. On the

one hand, the wage-earning population of cottagers and younger sons, who

had found employment as hired labourers when the demesne was used for

tillage, were thrown out of work, and with the limited demand for labour

offered by a sixteenth century village, were obliged, one would

suppose, to join the armies of tramps who figure so largely in the pages

of the writers of the period. As the bailiffs accounts of some manors

show, the demesne farm had sometimes employed a quite considerable staff

of workmen of different kinds, and though no clear instance of a

reduction of the number of employees, consequent on the transition to

pasture farming, has come to light, one can occasionally compare the

demand for labour under the old régime and under the new in a way which

does something to substantiate the lamentations of contemporaries.[416]

It is this which gives point to their complaints as to the decay of

"hospitality." Hospitality in the sixteenth century does not merely mean

a general attitude of open-handed friendliness. When the Government

intervenes to enjoin hospitality, we are not to think that, even in that

age of grandmotherly legislation, it is going out of its way to insist

that every man shall provide his neighbour with a glass of beer and a

bed for the night. Hospitality has a quite precise meaning and a quite

definite social importance. It is, in the most literal sense,

housekeeping, and the household does not merely imply what we mean by

"the family," a group of persons connected by blood but pursuing often

quite separate occupations, and, except in the small number of cases

where property owned by the head of the family supplies a financial

basis for unity, possessing quite separate economic interests. It is, on

the contrary, a miniature co-operative society, housed under one roof,

dependent upon one industry, and including not only man and wife and

children, but servants and labourers, ploughmen and threshers, cowherds

and milkmaids, who live together, work together, and play together, just

as one can see them doing in parts of Norway and Switzerland at the

present day. When the economic foundations of this small organism are

swept away by a change in the method of farming, the effect is not

merely to ruin a family, it is to break up a business. It is analogous

not to the unemployment of an individual householder, but to the

bankruptcy of a firm.

[416] The Shepe Book of Tittleshall Manor (Holkham MSS.,

Tittleshall Books, No. 19), shows flocks of 500 to 1000 sheep

being managed by a single shepherd, 1543?-1549.

On the other hand, even when they lost nothing else, the rest of the

landholding population was deprived of some of the rights of grazing

which they had exercised on the enclosed arable after harvest. If the

demesne formed a large proportion of the whole area of the village, or

if there was little other pasture, their loss, as the frequent

complaints of interference with "shack"[417] prove, might be a very

considerable one; for it meant that there might be no means of feeding

some proportion of the village beasts. Moreover, the mere presence of a

large capitalist who controlled a great part of the land, and converted

it to pasture or retained it as arable according to the price of wool

and wheat, prejudiced them in various indirect ways. The farmer of the

demesne seems at an early date to have had a bad name for hard dealings.

He was often a stranger, and therefore indifferent to the influence of

local customs and personal relationships. Where the manoral officials

had offered direct employment, he was a middleman with a high rent to

pay, and, like most middlemen, a channel for pressure without

responsibility. As the largest shareholder in the small agricultural

community, he could disturb its arrangements by altering his course of

cultivation, and, since he was the representative of the lord, he could

not easily be checked. Sometimes, indeed, a clause was inserted in his

lease expressly providing that he should not disturb the neighbouring

peasants.[418] But there are many cases in which there is no mention of

formal enclosing, and in which, nevertheless, it is complained that the

farmer persistently molests and harries the customary tenants. It was

the essence of the open field system of agriculture--at once its

strength and its weakness--that its maintenance reposed upon a common

custom and tradition, not upon documentary records capable of precise

construction. Its boundaries were often rather a question of the degree

of conviction with which ancient inhabitants could be induced to affirm

them, than visible to the mere eye of sense, and their indefiniteness

made the way of the transgressor extremely easy. Even the lord of the

manor sometimes found the large farmer too much for his vigilance. "John

Langford and his ancesters," the College of All Souls petitioned in

Chancery in 1637, "have for many yeares by vertue of several demises

farmed and rented of your oratours their said messuage and lands, and

used and occupied the same with their own lands, and during the time of

such occupation have pulled up, destroyed and removed, the metes, mere

londs, and boundaries of your oratours their said lands, and confounded

the same so that the same cannot be set forth.... Mr. Langford's lands

and grounds lying next adjoining unto the said oratours their

grounds,... the said John Langford hath extended his said cottages,

orchards, gardens, and curtilages thereunto belonging, to your oratours

their said grounds, and hath made hedges, ditches, fences and mounds

wherein and whereby he hath enclosed your oratours their said grounds

unto his own cottages and land, ... and intendeth so ... to keep from

your orators all the said land so encroached and enclosed."[419] When a

farmer would thus calmly expropriate the lord of the manor, it is not

surprising to find constant small disputes between him and the other

tenants, on the ground of his entering upon their holdings, or

"surcharging the fieldes by waye of intercommon and destroying the corn

of greane by drifte of cattle over the common of fieldes and suche

other."[420] Often, no doubt, the sporadic encroachments which provoked

quarrels with the other tenants appeared to the great grazier a natural

exercise of his obvious rights. Who should say where one man's land

began and another's ended? But it can hardly be doubted that such

irregularities were sometimes a deliberate attempt to worry the weaker

members of the village community into throwing up their lands, by making

profitable cultivation impossible. "If any man do sow any ground," ran

the direction given by a lord to the shepherd who looked after the

demesne farm on a Suffolk manor, "and the stifts of the field are

broken, and may not duly be taken and fed as heretofore they have been

used, then the said Tillot to feed off the said corn and drive his sheep

on that part of the ploughed land, and to forbid any particular man to

sow his ground or any part thereof whereby the sheep-walks may be

hindered."[421] Such an order points to the difficulty of adjusting the

different methods of cultivation pursued by the smaller tenants and on

the demesne. Though the complaints of the former were often indefinite

enough, it is probable that the very difficulty of defining what a large

capitalist might or might not do was in itself a substantial grievance.

The truth is that it was not easy for the great pasture farm, with its

flocks of sheep, to subsist side by side with the smaller arable

holdings of the other tenants, without a good deal of friction arising,

even in those cases in which no deliberate attempt was made to evict the

latter or to deprive them of their rights of common. The traditional

organisation of agriculture was based on the assumption that much the

same methods of utilising the land would be followed by all the tenants.

When that assumption broke down with the growth of large-scale

sheep-farming, there was naturally a collision of interests between the

great men who made innovations and the small men who adhered to the

customary rule.

[417] _e.g._ Holkham MSS., Fulmordeston, Bdle. 6: "To the Right

Honourable Sir Edward Cooke, Knight, Attorney General unto the

King's Ma{tie}. Humblie sheweth unto your lordship yo{r} poore

and dayley orators ... yo{r} worshippes tenants of the Manor of

Fulmordeston cum Croxton in the Duchie of Lancaster, and the

moste parte of the tenants of the same manor that whereas your

said orators in the Hillary Terme last commenced suite in the

Duchie Courte against Thomas Odbert and Roger Salisbury, gent.,

who have enclosed their grounds contrary to the custom of the

manor, wherby your wor. loseth your shack due out of the

grounds, common lane or way for passengers is stopped up, and

your worshipps' poore orators lose their accustomed shack in

those grounds, and the said Roger Salisbury taketh also the

whole benefit of theire common from them, keepinge there his

sheepe in grazinge, and debarring them of their libertie there

which for comon right belongeth unto them." For the rest of this

document see Appendix I., and compare the following defence to a

charge of breaking open an enclosure: "The owners of the said

tenements, from time whereof there is no memory to the contrary,

have had a common of pasture for themselves and their tenants in

one close commonly called 'the new leasue,' in the lordship of

Weston in the manner following; that is to say, when the field

where the said 'leasue' doth lie, called Radnor field, lieth

fallow, then through the whole year; and when the said field is

sown with corn, then from the reaping and carrying away of the

corn until the same be sown again ... and the said Thomas Dodd

further said that he did break open the said close ... being

fenced in such time as he ought to have common in the same, to

the end that his cattle might take their pasture therein"

(_William Salt Collection_, New Series, vol. ix., Chancery

Proceedings, Bdle. 8, No. 9).

[418] For complaints of tenants against the exactions, of

farmers as early as 1413, see _Victoria County History_, Essex,

vol. ii. p. 318. For a stipulation in the farmer's covenant, see

the following: "Item a covenant conteyned in this lease that the

said Thomas shall permit and suffer the customary Tenants

peaceably to have and enjoy their estates, rights, grants,

interests, and premises, without any lette, interruption, or

contradiction of the said Thomas" (Roxburghe Club, _Pembroke

Surveys_, Knyghton); and _Northumberland County History_, vol.

v. p. 208, Buston: "The tenants of this town at the beginning of

summer have their oxen allway grazed in Shilbottel wood, or else

they were not able to maintain their tenements. It is therefore

requisite that his lordship or his heire should have respect

unto the want of pasture, that in any lease made by his lordship

or his heire to any person of the pasture, the said Shilbottel

wood, there might be a proviso in the said lease that the said

tenants should have their oxen ground there, as they have been

accustomed." Instances of the harrying of the peasants by the

large farmers are to be found, _ibid._, vol. i. p. 350

(Tughall), and p. 274 (Newham).

[419] All Souls' Archives, vol. i. p. 203, No. 356.

[420] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i., Survey of Mudford

and Hinton. In this case the aggressor was not the farmer of the

demesne, but a freeholder owning a third of the manor. To escape

his depredations the tenants proposed "to enclose their common

fieldes and to assign to Master Lyte and his tenants his third

parte in every field by itself, and to extinguish his right of

common in the rest."

[421] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk, "Social and Economic

History."

(b) _The Struggle for the Commons_

But the environment did not remain unchanged; and as a consequence, in