fear. He may wake to find the path along which he drives his beasts to
pasture blocked by a hedge. When he goes to renew his lease or buy the
reversion of his copy, he may be told that his holding is to be merged
in a pasture farm. The great estate is not always built up by the mere
consolidation of pieces of land which are already united in ownership,
though spatially they may be separate. If it were there would be few
statutes and few riots; for the law looks with a favourable eye on such
attempts at improved cultivation, and the peasants have long been doing
on a small scale what the capitalist farmer does on a large. The great
estate is formed in another and less innocent way, by throwing together
holdings whose possession is separate, though spatially they may be
contiguous. It is the result of addition, not simply of organisation; of
addition in which the cyphers are the holdings of numerous small
tenants. In such a process the opposition between the interests of the
peasantry and those of the manorial authorities is brought to a head. If
one man is to run a hedge round a pasture, the pasture must first be
stripped of the rights of common which enmesh it. If sheep are to be fed
on the sites of ruined cottages, their occupants must first be evicted.
It is over the absorption of commons and the eviction of tenants that
agrarian warfare--the expression is not too modern or too strong--is
waged in the sixteenth century. Let us look at both these movements more
closely.
The obscurity to one age of the everyday economic arrangements of
another is excellently illustrated by the difficulty of appreciating the
part which common rights played in English husbandry before the
nineteenth century. It is not so long since it became a memory. There
are villages where the old men still remember--how could they forget
it?--the year when the commons finally "went in." Yet there is hardly a
feature in the plain man's view of the nature of a common which
corresponds to the reality as it was used by our ancestors, and as it is
used to-day by communities whose land system has followed a different
course of development from our own. He thinks of a common as land which,
like a municipal park, "belongs to the public," land which any one may
use and any one abuse. In the innocence of his heart he will even move
his local authority to put in a claim for its possession, and is very
much surprised when its solicitors tell him that he is fighting for the
rights of two or three mouldy tenements. Again, he thinks of a common as
a place of fresh air and recreation, not of business; as land for which,
at the moment, no serious economic use can be found; unprofitable
scraps, whose ineligibility has secured them a precarious immunity from
park-loving squires and speculative builders. In connection with
agriculture he thinks of it not at all--is not waste land the opposite
of land which is under cultivation? In one respect he is right. Our
existing commons are remnants--remnants which have survived the deluge
of eighteenth century Private Acts, mainly because they consist of land
too poor to pay counsel's fees. In all other respects he is wrong. In
the earlier period the word common implied common exclusiveness quite as
much as common enjoyment. The value of a common to the commoners
consisted precisely in the guarantee given them by custom that no one
might use it except holders of tenements which time out of mind had a
right thereto, and that no man might use it to a greater extent than the
custom of the manor allowed. And the modern man is especially wrong in
regarding commons as though they fell below the margin of economic
employment. Commons and common rights, so far from being merely a luxury
or a convenience, were really an integral and indispensable part of the
system of agriculture, a linch pin, the removal of which brought the
whole structure of village society tumbling down.
No one who reads the petitions and the legal proceedings of our period
can doubt that this was what the small cultivator felt. No one who
consults the surveyors can doubt that he was right. Yet, at first sight,
the importance attached to commons is certainly surprising. Is not the
outcry disproportionate to the grievance? To riot and rebel when you
lose grazing rights--is not this, it may be asked, rather like shooting
your landlord because he will not let you keep poultry? The answer is
perhaps a twofold one. The peasants' economy in the sixteenth century
was one in which, in many parts of England, the pastoral side of
agriculture played a very important rôle, and for which, therefore,
abundance of pasture land was very essential. As any one who has lived
in a Swiss châlet knows, a family which has sufficient cattle and goats
on a good mountain can, during half the year, be almost self-sufficing.
It has milk, butter, cheese, eggs, and meat. The only thing it really
misses is bread, and that it has the means of purchasing, even if it
does not, like the sensible people of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and
probably of most parts of England before the industrial revolution, bake
its own supplies at home or in a common public oven. Our sixteenth
century peasants do not keep goats, but they keep a great many horses
and cows, on some manors an average of 6 or 8 per holding; they keep a
great many sheep, sometimes 150 or 200 each; they meet depressions in
the corn trade by falling back on other sides of agriculture, and
sending to market miscellaneous produce which, in a time of rising
prices, sells well. But to do this successfully they must have plenty of
grazing land. A Swiss commune measures its wealth very largely by the
quality of its pasture, and will take pains to buy a good one, even
though it be a long distance from the village.[422] Can we doubt that
the same was true of many parts of England, and that Hales' husbandmen
who "could never be able to make up my lordes rent weare it not for a
little brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese, and hens,"[423] was typical,
not, it is true, of the more substantial men, but of many of the less
well-to-do?
[422] For an amusing example see Conway, _The Alps from End to
End_, pp. 190-192.
[423] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 57.
But there was another and more fundamental reason for the importance
attached to rights of common, and for the disastrous re-action upon the
tenantry involved in their curtailment. It was that the possession of
pasture was not only a source of subsidiary income but also quite
indispensable to the maintenance of the arable holding, which was
everywhere the backbone of the tenants' livelihood. Ask a modern small
holder, and he will tell you that what he wants is a certain proportion
of grass-land to arable, in order that he may feed his horses without
having to resort to the hire of extra land, to the purchase of
foodstuffs, or to turning them out to pick up a living where they can by
the side of the road.[424] In the normal village community this was
secured by the apportionment of rights of pasture to each arable
holding, the tenants grazing their cattle on the common in the summer,
and only feeding them on their separate closes when the approach of
winter made shelter a necessity.[425] It is, therefore, a mistake to
think of the engrossing of commons by large farmers as affecting the
peasant only in so far as he was a shepherd or a grazier. On the
contrary, it struck a blow at an indispensable adjunct of his arable
holding, an adjunct without which the ploughland itself was
unprofitable; for to work the ploughland one must have the wherewithal
to feed the plough beasts. It is this close interdependence of common
rights with tillage which explains both the manner of their organisation
and the distress caused by encroachments upon them. Rights of common of
the most general type go with the tenement, not with the tenant, because
what is considered is the maintenance of a fully equipped arable
holding in the open fields, and for this end it is not necessary to
allow common rights to the population of younger sons, servants, or
others who do not hold one of these primary units of tillage. The
commoners are often "stinted," restricted[426] that is in the number of
beasts which they may put upon the pasture, because rights of grazing
have to be distributed among all the arable holdings, such holdings
being unworkable without them. Rights of common are often apportioned
among the tenants "according to the magnitude of their holdings," for,
of course, a large holding will need more plough beasts, and therefore
more pasture, than a small one. Their boundaries are accurately recorded
from this tree to that stone and such and such a hill, because otherwise
an invasion of foreigners with their cattle from a neighbouring village
may eat them up like locusts. To divide them up among the tenants may do
no harm provided the division is an equitable one, for each man will
still have his equipment of pasture, though in the form of a limited
area instead of in the form of a limited quota of beasts. To appropriate
common pastures without compensation may ruin a whole village; it is to
seize a piece of free capital without which cows and horses cannot be
fed, and thus it is virtually to confiscate the beasts, which are the
peasant's tools. When that is done he must either re-assert his rights,
or throw up his arable holding, or hire pasture for a money rent;
sometimes--a bitter thought--he must hire grass-land from the very man
who has robbed him.[427]
[424] Ten acres of "turf" to forty acres of arable was the
estimate of his requirements made to me by an Oxfordshire small
holder.
[425] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.: "The tenants of
Landress have common in a certayne ground called King's Moore
for all kinde of cattle, and every one of them may keep in the
said moore as much of all kind of cattle in somer as their
severall or ingrounde will beare in the wynter, whyche is a
great relief to the poore tenants, for as they confesse they
keep all their cattle there in the somer, and reserve their
ingroundes untouched for the winter."
[426] _e.g._ _Southampton Court Leet Records_ (Hearnshaw), pp.
4-5, 1550: "Item we present that no burgers or comyners at one
time comyn above the number of two beasts upon payne of every
such defaulte 2s.; provided that iff any of them have two kyne
or wenlings, he shall have no horse, and yf he have but one cow
he may have one horse."
[427] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.--Rolleston
(Stafford): "The said manor is ... well inhabited with divers
honest men, whose trade of lyvinge is onlie by husbandry ... and
have no large pastures or severall closes ... but have been
alwaie accustomed to have their cattle and sometyme their
ploughe beasts pastured in the Queen's Majestie's Park of
Rolleston, for xxd., the stage ... without which aide and help
they were neither able to maintain hospitallitie nor tyllage;
and nowe of late yeares the fermor of the herbage hath advanced
the stage to 6s. 8d., and yet the Quene's Majesties rent nothing
increased."
One must not, of course, unduly simplify the picture. Different villages
are very differently endowed with grazing land. On some there is a
common waste, and a common pasture in addition of superior quality, so
that the waste can be left to animals which will thrive on rough land.
On others there is not even a common waste, and the tenants have to do
the best they can on the stubble which lies open after harvest. Nor do
they all manage the apportionment of grazing rights in the same way. As
we have seen, there has been a movement towards the formation of
separate closes; and even when all the pasture is administered in
common, it may either be that each villager looks after his own animals,
or that the township, intent on seeing that the common is not
overstocked, appoints a common shepherd and a common cowherd, who drives
them all afield together "under the opening eyelids of the morn." Under
all such diversities, however, which can often be paralleled from the
practice of continental communes to-day, there is the fundamental fact
of the necessity of rights of pasture to successful tillage.
Fitzherbert's remark that "an husband cannot well thrive by his corne
without he have other cattle, nor by his cattle without corne,"[428] is
reiterated in different forms by other surveyors. When they tell us that
a common adjoining a town is a "great relief to the poor tenants," and
recommend that a special clause be inserted in a farmer's lease binding
him not to appropriate the pasture without which the tenants "were not
able to maintain their tenements," they are speaking of matters which
they understand far better than we possibly can, and must be believed.
[428] Fitzherbert, _Book of Husbandry_.
The monopolising of commons by manorial authorities who wished to form a
large sheep-run can be traced through several stages, of which actual
enclosure is only one, and the climax rather than the beginning. It
usually begins with the overstocking of the common pasture by the owner
of great flocks and herds, and the consequent edging out of the small
man, though, of course, when the area is a large one, and when, as in
Wiltshire, there are great downs which are suitable for sheep, it may be
a long time before the latter feels the pinch severely. But the mere
overriding by a capitalist of the customary allotment of pasture rights
is usually only the first step. As long as matters are left in this
transition stage there is endless friction and disturbance, because each
party tries to oust the other, the great man swamping the pasture with
his beasts, and the peasants defiantly insisting that the recognised
stint shall be observed--a guerilla warfare in which the farmer's
servants are matched against the township's cowherd and the common
pound. Enclosing follows as a way of regularising the new arrangements,
by substituting a tangible and prickly boundary for an ideal limit.
Sometimes enclosure is demanded by the peasants and resented by the
well-to-do, who think that in the general squabble they will come off
best. More often it is carried out with a high hand by the farmer and
the lord, who, once they take seriously to cattle-breeding or
sheep-farming, have naturally no desire to have a limit set to their
investment in stock. Occasionally compensation[429] is given to the
dispossessed commoners in the shape of an abatement in their rents, or
of a fresh pasture in another quarter. In most of our documents,
however, there is little trace of any deliberate re-adjustment of
rights. We are simply told that "he holds the whole of the hilly
pasture," or that he has "a heath enclosed with a hedge," or that
grounds have been "enclosed contrary to the custom of the manor." We can
trace the effect in the small number of beasts which other tenants keep,
but we are left to conjecture how this state of things was reached. Our
impression is that in most cases the enclosing of commons was carried
out in the simplest and most arbitrary way, by the lord or the farmer
erecting a hedge round such part of the common pasture as he cared to
appropriate, and leaving the tenants to make good their demand that it
should be removed, if they could.
[429] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v., Birling:
"Allowed part of 25s. 4d. for focage of Orchard Medow and
Mylneside Bank, because they are now enclosed within the lord's
new Park, and this allowance shall be made yearly until the
tenants of Byrling have and peacefully enjoy another parcel of
pasture to the same value 11s. 8d." (Bailiff's Accounts, 1474).
R.O. _Misc. Books Land Rev._, vol. ccxx., f. 236: "Divers
parcels of land and pasture of the manor of Farfield, now common
of 140 acres, now occupied by the tenants there as commons and
given them in exchange in satisfaction of their old common
imparked in the new Park, £6, 13s. 8d."
Could they make it good? The question of the degree to which different
classes of tenants could obtain legal redress for disturbance will be
discussed later. But we cannot leave this part of our subject without
considering shortly the standpoints towards disputes arising out of the
loss of rights of common, which were adopted by the peasantry and by
legal opinion. One may point out, in the first place, that their
standpoints were by no means the same. The contrast which we have
already ventured to draw between the considerable elements of practical
communism in the working arrangements of the village community and the
strict and (so we believe) correct interpretation of the law of the
King's Courts, which treats its members simply as holders of individual
rights which they on occasion exercise jointly, comes out very
strikingly in the different attitudes adopted towards rights of pasture.
If we must be careful not to see communism where there are really only
individual rights, we must also be careful not to see only individual
rights where there is in fact a considerable amount of communism.
However much it may be necessary to emphasise the "rough and rude
individualism"[430] latent in these arrangements, we must admit that for
the peasants themselves, who make and depend upon them, they contain
features which are not easily explained without the use of words which
the lawyers are reluctant to allow us--words implying some degree of
practical communism. We must remember that the custom of the manor is
itself a kind of law, and that though the lawyers who sit in the King's
Courts may cast their rules into a feudal mould, which attenuates rights
of common to mere concessions made by the lord to individual tenants,
yet the law of the village, the custom of the manor, to which the first
appeal is made, does treat them as containing a distinctly communal
element. In practice the whole body of customary tenants are found
managing their commons on a co-operative plan. They regulate their use
and re-adjust the regulations, sometimes at almost every meeting of the
court. As a community, they hire additional pasture and administer town
lands. As a community, they make arrangements for enclosure and even
sell part of their common--the common in which only individuals have
proprietary rights--to persons who undertake to invest capital in
improving it.[431] When all regulations fail and the enemy attempts to
evade their vigilance by a strategic appearance of benevolence, a town
sometimes returns to the charge with words glowing with what can only be
called the pride of common property, though the title to that property
may be of a very shadowy kind. "Whereas of late days," proclaimed the
Court Leet of Southampton in 1579, "there hathe ben a peice of our
common and heathe ditched and hedged and enclosed in and planted with
willows under the name of a shadow for our cattle, which have hitherto
many yeares past prospered verie well as the common was
before;--wherefore (therefore) we desire that it may be pulled down
again and levelled as before, for we doubt that in short time yt will be
taken from our common to some particular man's use, which were
lamentable and pitiable and not sufferable. For as our ancestors of
their great care and travail have provided that and like other many
benefits for their successors, so we thinke it our dutie in conscience
to keepe, uphold and maintaine the same as we found yt for our
posteritie to come, without diminishing any part or parcel from yt, but
rather to augment more to yt yf may be." We need not ask in what sense
the Southampton men had inherited the salt marsh from their ancestors,
or whether a lawyer would not have made short work of their claim to
leave it to posterity. It is enough to realise that they feel it to
belong to their town in a quite effective and intimate manner, that they
stint it, turn off intruders, guard it for their descendants, defend it,
if need be, with bows and arrows and pikes, and the other agricultural
implements of that forceful age. We know that people commit many crimes
in the name of posterity. But they do not usually think of bequeathing
to their grandchildren rights which have never had any existence for
themselves. We shall hardly understand all that was meant for a village
by the loss of its common pastures unless we allow for that feeling of
practical proprietorship, unless we confess that a society of
landholders becomes on occasions something very like a landholding
society.
[430] Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, vol. i. p.
606. For the questions concerning common rights see _ibid._, pp.
594-624, and Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 340-356;
Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, Essay II. chap, ii., and
_The Growth of the Manor_, Book II. chap. iv. I have followed
Vinogradoff's rather than Maitland's view.
[431] For buying and selling of pasture see below, and for
enclosure pp. 168-170. The following seems a clear case of more
or less corporate action. Holkham MSS., Burnham, Bdle. 5, No.
94: "Copy of an indenture between [here follows a list of names]
of the same town and county, yeomen, as well on the behalf of
themselves as of the rest of the comoners and freeholders of the
said town of the one part, and Robert Bacon of [illegible] in
the County of Norfolk, and Thomas Coke of Grays Inn in the
County of Middlesex of the other part, that whereas heretofore
Sir Philip [illegible] being lord and owner of the marshes
hereafter mentioned ... did by his indenture of bargain and sale
bearing date ... 1588, grant bargain and sell unto [list of
names as above] all those marsh grounds lying and being in
Burnham, to have and to hold the said premises to the parties
last before mentioned and their heires to the use of them and
their heires for ever, to the intent and purpose notwithstanding
that the said parties last before mentioned there, being
inhabitants in certain ancient messuages in the said Towne, and
all other inhabitants of the said Towne there and afterwards for
the tyme being in any of the ancient messuages and cottages in
the said towne, for so long time as they shall be there
inhabitinge and noe longer, according to the quantity of their
tenures within the said Towne might depasture and feede the land
as by the said deeds referring thereunto being had may more
fully appeare; [it recites that the land] may by wallinge and
embankinge the same be improved to more than a [illegible]
value, and made fitt for arrable, meadowe, and pasture grounde,
whereby tillage may be increased and his Majestie's subjects
receive more employment thereby, and danger of drawing
[drowning?] of their stock for their feedinge prevented [recites
that Robert Bacon and Thomas Coke have undertaken to drain the
land in return for receiving three parts of it and that the
persons above mentioned] being the major parte of the parties
interested in the said salte Marshes, and being enabled by the
lawes and Statutes of this realm to contract and bargaine with
any person or persons for the draining thereof" [now convey 3
parts of the marshes to the above-mentioned Robert Bacon and
Thomas Coke], June 8, 1637. The motive of this agreement was to
get the low-lying meadows on the sea-coast drained. Drainage
schemes were much in the air about this time, and any one who
has seen the country near Holkham and Burnham will know how
badly protection from the sea was needed. Two points are worth
noticing: (i.) the tenants have no objection to surrendering
part of their common if they get a _quid pro quo_; (ii.) they
act as a single body. They buy land and they sell land and they
can leave it to their heirs. Certain persons in the township act
on their behalf, much as directors might act for a body of
shareholders. Is it possible to speak of such arrangements
simply in terms of individual rights? Are we not driven to think
of the township as almost a landholding corporation?
But, in the second place, such communal aspirations are a matter of
feeling and custom, not of national law. It is hardly necessary to point
out that these words do not put an aspect of the case which could be
pleaded in court in a dispute as to common of pasture. At the touch of
the law, as has often been pointed out, the communal element, of which
Southampton makes so much, seems to crumble away. If, to the eye of the
peasants, a manor was a more or less self-conscious community with
considerable powers of controlling the administration of its pastures,
it was, to the eye of the common lawyer, a collection of individuals
bound together by their relation to the manorial authorities, but in
other respects able to enforce rights of common only in so far as those
rights could be shown to be enjoyed by one of the four[432] titles which
the law recognised. It is quite true that in practice the use of common
pastures extended to persons who could not plead one of those titles,
and that the economic working of the village often cannot be brought
inside the four corners of a legal formula. But when a right of pasture
is challenged by the lord of the manor, the tenant must show that his
right falls within them or lose his case. Of those four titles residence
in a manor was not one. The occupier who is the unit of English Local
Government to-day had, as such, no standing, because he was not, _qua_
occupier, a holder of one of the arable shares with which, primarily,
rights of pasture went. Again, a great number of cottagers and day
labourers, who were not holders of arable, but who in practice used the
commons for pigs, geese, poultry, and cows, were likely to be legally in
the same unprotected condition; so that it is obvious that, when
enclosing took place, there might be a considerable number of persons,
perhaps an actual majority of the villagers, who could not even raise
the question whether they could obtain redress or not, and that much
distress could be caused without any infringement of the law. Of those
who could bring their enjoyment of rights of pasture under one of the
categories which the law recognised, the freeholders were, of course, in
the strongest position. They could plead rights of common appendant to
their tenements; probably they could often plead common appurtenant, and
common in gross, common by a special personal grant, as well, and they
could enforce their rights both by self-help, in the way of throwing
down recent enclosures, and by the ordinary remedies of the Assize of
Novel Disseisin or an action of trespass.
[432] Common appendant, common appurtenant, common in gross, and
common par cause de vicinage. This classification is not found
in Bracton, and appears to date from the late Middle Ages, see
Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, Essay II., chap, ii., and
the following case: _Coke's Reports_, Part IV., p. 60. Hill, 4
Jac. I. in Communi Banco: "Robert Smith brought an action of
Trespass against Stephen Gatewood, gent., quare clausum fregit
... cum quibusdam averiis.... Defendant pleaded a certain
custom, 'quod inhabitantes infra eandem villam de Stixwood
prædictam infra aliquod antiquum messuagium ibidem ratione
commorantiæ et residentiæ suæ in eadem habuerunt et usi fuerunt
et consueverunt habere com. Pastur ... pro omnibus et omnimodis
bobus et equis et aliis grossis animalibus.' Unanimously
resolved that the custom is against law. 1. That there are but
four manners of common, common appendant, appurtenant, in gross,
and by reason of vicinage, and this common _ratione commorantiæ_
is none of them. 2. What estate shall he have, who is
inhabitant, in the common, when it appears he hath no estate or
interest in the house (but a mere habitation and dwelling) in
respect of which he ought to have his common? For none can have
interest in a common in respect of a house in which he hath no
interest."
Moreover, the Statute of Merton, which expressly allowed a lord to
enclose commonable land on condition that he left sufficient for the
free tenants, did not mean that a lord could arbitrarily cut down rights
of common to what he was pleased to think sufficient. If it had, there
would have been little enclosing of commons in the sixteenth century,
for by that time there would have been little common left to enclose.
The question "what is sufficient?" had to be answered by a jury, a jury
representing expert knowledge as to local customs and the agrarian
usages of the township. The jury could only answer it by taking account
of the size of the tenements and of the land available for commoning. In
fact, it found itself at once considering the custom of the manor, which
stinted rights of pasture according to the economic needs and resources
of different villages. Of the position of the customary tenants it is,
for reasons which will be given below, less easy to speak. Regarded from
the standpoint of the economic organisation of the manor, their rights
of pasture should have got protection as much as those of the
freeholders, for as holders of ancient tenements they required pasture
to enable them to carry on their tillage; and since they were, in most
parts of the country, by far the most numerous class, the aggregate of
their commonable area was much larger than was that of the free tenants.
According to the canon of interpretation supplied by Coke,[433] the
Statute of Merton would appear, at any rate in the latter part of the
sixteenth century, to have been construed as protecting them; and
Fitzherbert,[434] though he introduces an additional complication by
trying--trying, it seems, quite arbitrarily--to prove that rights of
pasture over the waste and rights of pasture on land which was not
technically part of the waste, ought to be treated differently, places
all tenants on an equal footing in respect of their claim to be left
"sufficient common."
[433] Coke, Complete Copyholder, Sect. 53: "When an Act of
Parliament altereth the service, tenure, or interest of the
land, or other thing in prejudice of the lord or of the Customs
of the Manor, or in prejudice of the tenant, then the generall
words of such an Act of Parliament extend not to the copyhold;
but when an Act is generally made for the good of the
commonwealth, and no prejudice may accrue by reason of the
alteration of any interest, service, tenure, or Custom, of the
Manor, there usually copyhold lands are within the generall
purview of such Acts."
[434] Fitzherbert, _Book of Surveying_: "And as for that manner
of common, me seemeth the Lord may improve himself of their
waste grounds, leaving their own tenants sufficient common,
having no regard to the tenants of the other lordship. But as
far as all errable lands, meadows, leises, and pastures, the
lordes may improve themselves by course of the common law, for
the statute speaketh nothing but of waste grounds."
The treatment by the law of common rights, in the case both of
freeholders and of the customary tenants, seems to fit roughly into this
scheme, though the actual facts are somewhat more complex than it would
suggest. The cases show that the freeholders had a legal remedy if
enclosure deprived them of rights of pasture, and that this remedy was
used. A freeholder could say "these be the pastures ... which should be
my common ... after the tenure of my freehold;"[435] if he proved the
fact he got protection, and on manors where the freeholders were
numerous and the lord wanted to make very large enclosures, he had to
buy them out. It is true also that the freeholders[436] joined with the
farmer on some manors in enclosing commonable land, to the detriment of
the customary tenants, who apparently sometimes had to acquiesce in it.
They show again that a customary tenant could obtain protection for his
rights of common pasture both, at any rate in the sixteenth century,
from the Common Law Courts, and also, at an earlier date, from the Court
of Chancery, provided that he could show that such rights were attached
to his holding by the custom of the manor, a very important
qualification, to which we must return.[437] On the other hand, it is
certainly true that both freeholders and customary tenants suffered in
our period from a curtailment of common rights, in spite of the
qualified protection enjoyed by the latter and the complete protection
enjoyed by the former. We cannot, in fact, be content with a mere
summary of the legal position, for the law is not always strong enough
or elastic enough to cope with shifting economic forces. Or, rather, its
arm is short, and it can only grapple with those conflicts which are
sufficiently violent to force their way to Westminster.
[435] _e.g._ _Coventry Leet Book_, vol. ii. p. 510.
[436] _Genealoger and Archæologist_, vol. i., Manor of West
Coker (Somerset): "The demesnes remayneth in one entier ferm,
and is dymysed to one Sir John Seymour, knight, who being
confederate with the freeholders of the manor, maketh such
inclosers for his owne lucre, and suffreth the freeholders to do
the same, nevertheless surcharge the common with their cattle,
that in process of tyme yt wilbe the destruccion of the
custumarye tenants."
[437] For a discussion of the legal position of the copyholders
see below, pp. 287-310.
Some light may be thrown on the kind of trouble of which our period was
full by two accounts which have come down to us of disputes concerning
rights of common pasture. At Coventry[438] there were in the fifteenth
century prolonged quarrels between the City and the Prior and Convent of
the Cathedral Church of St. Mary. In 1485 the Prior was accused by the
city authorities of wrongfully overcharging the common with sheep and
cattle, to the damage of the city. He replied by admitting the legal
rights of the other commoners, but by claiming that whereas they could
only pasture a limited number of beasts, "by the lawe of this lande the
lord of the waste soyle may surcharge and pasture there what nombre hym
lykes," and that therefore in overstocking the common he was only
exercising his rights. To this the city answered by a rather hesitating
appeal to custom, according to which the commoners never had been
stinted to a fixed number of beasts, and by pointing out that, if the
Prior was allowed to put as many beasts on the common as he pleased, he
was virtually confiscating the property of the other commoners. This
case brings out very clearly one weakness in the position even of the
free tenants. It was that, while they were protected by law against
attempts actually to deprive them of rights of common, the protection
might be held to be contingent on the lord or his farmer proceeding so
far as not to leave them sufficient, and was not available if the
encroachments only went so far as to diminish their common pasture.
There was a minimum which they could not lose: but above this minimum
their rights of pasture were elastic and compressible, and when, as in
this case, the pasture was so large as to make any numerical limit to
the number of beasts which they might graze unnecessary, the commoners
might be deprived of some part of their customary pasture without any
infringement of the law.[439]
[438] _Coventry Leet Book_, vol. ii. pp. 445-446 and _passim_.
[439] If the common was so large that it had been unnecessary to
"stint" it, why did the city object to the lord putting
additional beasts on? I take the situation to be that the
Prior--probably tempted by the profitableness of sheep-farming
in the latter part of the fifteenth century--diminished the
pasture which the city could use, by putting on many more beasts
than ever before, which, in the absence of a recognised "stint,"
he was able to do without violating any custom, as he would have
done if there had been a customary limit, as on many manors.
Another aspect of the problem is illustrated by a story of a
similar struggle at Wootton Basset,[440] a small borough in
Wiltshire. Early in the seventeenth century the mayor and
freemen of Wootton Basset petition Parliament to "enact
something for us, that we may enjoy our right again." What they
want is a restoration of certain rights of common which a
powerful neighbour has taken from them. Their story--they seem
to rehearse it with tears in their eyes--is a perfect Odyssey of
misfortunes. According to them, the manor of Wootton Basset had
passed in 1555 into the hands of Sir Francis Englefield, who
enclosed a park containing 2000 acres, in which the free tenants
had hitherto had rights of pasture, and had them without stint,
owing to its great size. This wicked man showed them, however, a
sort of contemptuous compassion. He left them 100 acres, with
which they had to be content, and the rights over which they
carefully apportioned, "to the Mayor for the time being two
cowes feeding, and to the constable one cowe feeding, and to
every inhabitant of the said Borough, each and every of them,
one cowe feeding and no more, as well the poore as the riche."
These rights of common were in practice vested in all the
tenements in the town (not only, it would appear, the free
tenements), and property was bought and sold subject to them.
The occasion of the petition was that the grand nephew of the
original grantee, having apparently got, by some means which the
petitioners could not explain, the title deed of the common into
his hands, set out to ruin those whom his ancestor had only
robbed. He began lawsuits against the free tenants, excluded
them from the 100 acres of common which remained to them, and
put his own cattle on it. The suits, according to our story,
were purposely deferred, and dragged on so long that one of the
free tenants was actually made bankrupt by legal charges and the
rest were impoverished, the common being used meantime by the
plaintiff, Sir Francis Englefield.
[440] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii. These are the
people whom Heaven protected in the way described on p. 148
note. Observe what this little community endured. (i.) Sir
Francis Englefield, senior, seizes 1900 out of 2000 acres of
their common. (ii.) Sir Francis Englefield, junior, seizes "the
charter of our town ... and the deed of the said common." (iii.)
He tries to seize the remaining 100 acres, and ruins them by
lawsuits "for the space of seven or eight years at the least,
and never suffers any one to come to triall in all that space
... that the said Free tenants were not able to wage law any
longer, for one John Rous ... was thereby enforced to sell all
his land (to the value of £500) with following the suits in law,
and many were thereby impoverished." (iv.) He turns them out of
their shops in the market-place, and introduces instead "a
stranger that liveth not in the town." (v.) He appoints his own
nominee as mayor, in defiance of the custom which requires him
to appoint one of two men submitted to him by the jury. (vi.) He
prevents his victims from signing this petition by threats of
eviction. ("They are fearful that they shall be put forth of
their bargaines, and then they shall not tell how to live,
otherwise they would have set to their hands.")
These examples of struggles over rights of common pasture are
instructive in several ways. In the first place, they suggest that the
freeholders were regarded as having a better title than the rest of the
community, and that they led the movement to resist encroachments for
that reason. It is the free tenants who petition Parliament for redress,
and the free tenants who are sued. If they lose their case it is not
worth while, it seems, for the customary tenants to take any action. In
the second place, they show that the classes who have the best legal
title to right of pasture are not at all commensurate with the classes
who will lose if they are taken away. Whatever the legal rights of the
other tenants may be they have as much practical benefit out of the
common, and as great an interest in protecting it against encroachments,
as the freeholders have. When the shearing away of part of it makes it
necessary to limit the number of beasts to be kept there, the limitation
is applied to free and customary tenements alike without distinction,
and both classes of tenements are bought and sold on the understanding
that they carry with them a right of common pasture. In the third place,
the case of Wootton Basset is one of many examples of the way in which
poverty, ignorance of the law, and the practical difficulties of getting
justice against a powerful landlord, prevent humble litigants from
enforcing their legal rights. Finally, it reinforces what has been said
above as to the economic importance of rights of pasture. The
arrangements which are made at Wootton Basset when the first assault
upon the commons takes place show clearly that grazing land is thought
of as a quite indispensable adjunct to every man's holding, and its loss
is so disastrous to the community that they are ready to be slowly bled
to death by lawyer's fees, rather than be beggared at a blow by
submitting tamely without a contest.
(c) _The Engrossing of Holdings and Displacement of Tenants._
We have dwelt at some length on the loss of rights of common, because
the misleading modern associations of the word seem sometimes to prevent
a proper appreciation of the very important place which they occupied in
the agricultural economy of our period. It must be confessed, however,
that, in dealing with them first, we have reversed the order in which
grievances due to enclosure were set out by the writers of the time.
Though there are many bitter complaints against the enclosure of
commons, it was, notwithstanding this, less the loss of rights of
pasture than the consolidation of small tenancies into great farms,
which aroused public excitement, at any rate, in the southern and
midland counties. In the Statutes the words enclosure and depopulation
are again and again combined as though they were almost synonymous; and
if a contemporary had been asked to explain the special evils most
characteristic of enclosing, he would certainly have given the first
place to the "engrossing of farms" and "depopulation," the throwing
together of peasant holdings and the eviction of their tenants. We must
now examine this side of the movement. Did the displacement of tenants
through the concentration of properties take place on the large scale
suggested by the passionate outbursts of contemporary writers, or were
their complaints as to empty villages and ruined churches mere
rhetorical exaggeration? Again, what was the legal position of the
classes of people who suffered? Were they entirely without the
protection of the law, or did they fail to obtain legal protection
principally in consequence of ignorance and intimidation?
It is easy to understand the strong motives for throwing together
peasant holdings, if we keep our eyes on the picture of agricultural
arrangements given in the maps. It will be seen that the different
blocks of demesne land are often separated from each other by two or
three strips belonging to the smaller tenantry, and that if such strips
were removed they could be fitted together into a wide and unbroken
expanse of territory. The manorial authorities have often, it is clear,
been for a long time consolidating the demesne by exchange and purchase,
so as to avoid the wastefulness of having land scattered in a hundred
separate pieces, and the only obstacle to its complete unification
consists of strips and patches which are held by tenants who are for one
reason or another unwilling to sell, small spits and islands which stand
out of the surrounding sea. Clearly there is an enormous temptation to
make the tide flow over them as well, to complete the circuit by merging
them in the demesne. Look, for example, at maps Nos. III., IV., and V.
Here it is evident that there has been a good deal of consolidation.
Both the tenants and the lord of the manor have been forming their
strips into compact blocks. To unity of ownership has been added
something like spatial unity. Still the process is by no means complete.
There are awkward little pieces of land which interrupt the smooth
surface of the great estate, pieces which one will have to walk round,
where, if the demesne is used as arable, the demesne plough must stop,
where, if it is used as pasture, a fence must be erected to shut out the
demesne sheep. Or walk down a typical field and mark how the land is
held. Here are the strips which one would pass, if one travelled from
end to end of two parallel furlongs at West Lexham[441] in Norfolk in
the year 1575. They are copied in order from the map--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
FURLONG A. | FURLONG B.
ac. ro. po. | ac. ro. po.
1. Will Yelverton, | 1. Rob. Clemente,
Freeholder. | Freeholder.
2. Demesne 2 1 31 | 2. Demesne 0 2 4
3. Demesne 0 1 7-1/2| 3. Demesne 1 0 3
4. Will Yelverton, | 4. Demesne 1 0 39
Freeholder. |
5. Demesne 0 2 7 | 5. Demesne 0 1 24
6. Demesne 1 3 0 | 6. Demesne 1 0 38
7. Demesne 0 1 11 | 7. Demesne 0 1 22
8. Demesne 0 2 10 | 8. Demesne 1 2 19
9. Demesne 0 2 28 | 9. Will Lee, Freeholder.
10. Glebe. | 10. Will Gell, Copieholder.
11. Demesne 1 2 12 | 11. Demesne 1 1 39
12. Demesne 3 0 0 | 12. Demesne 2 3 39-1/2
13. Glebe. | 13. Demesne 2 1 25
These furlongs, though the predominance of demesne land in them makes
them not quite typical, illustrate sufficiently the awkward way in which
the great farmer's stretch of land is interrupted by the little property
of a freeholder or copyholder. The strips of Will Yelverton, Robert
Clement, Will Lee, and Will Gell must have been a constant eyesore to
the manorial authorities. Buy them out or evict them, and then the two
furlongs will consist of nothing but demesne land and glebe. They will
be two fields of quite a modern pattern and quite ready for enclosure.
Leave these tenants where they are, and they are a permanent obstacle to
unified management, all the more annoying because they are so petty.
They may even insist on the farmer observing the same course of
cultivation as themselves, and on turning their beasts to common on his
land after harvest! Is it not inevitable that, as soon as the lord is
pushed by economic forces into making his estate yield the maximum money
return irrespective of a numerous tenantry or of the ancient methods of
tillage, he should try in any way he can to get rid of what to him are
troublesome excrescences, that he should begin questioning titles,
screwing up rents, turning copyhold to leasehold?
If our hypothesis is correct we ought to be able to find manors where
the strips formerly held by tenants have been merged in the demesne, so
as to form a continuous expanse, in the hands of the lord or his farmer,
out of what was formerly a collection of fragments of separate holdings.
To see it verified, let us turn to another manor in the same county,
that of Walsingham,[442] which was surveyed in the reign of Henry VIII.
Here is a statement of the land which is "in the hands of the lord" in
the west field--
IN THE WEST FELDE
1. In manus domine [sic] 1/2 acre of land of the tenement Marre.
2. " " 1-1/2 roods of the tenement Furell.
3. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Stanx.
4. " " 1 acre, 1 rood land of the tenement Gryne.
5. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Scot.
6. " " 3-1/2 roods land of the tenement Townsend.
7. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Byelaugh.
8. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Wheteloffe.
9. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Scutt.
10. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Coyefor.
11. " " 1 acre with the gravel pit.
12. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Nedwyn.
13. " " 1 acre land late of J. Cockerell.
14. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Gilbert.
15. " " 1 acre and 1 rood of the tenement Spotell.
16. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Spotell.
17. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Husbond.
18. " " 1 acre of the tenement Rodengh.
19. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Pymans.
20. " " 3 roods of the tenement Scutt.
21. " " 1 acre of decay of the tenement Spotell.
[441] Holkham MSS., Map of West Lexham.
[442] R.O. _Aug. Off. Misc. Bks._, vol. cccxcix., f. 201 ff.
Here one has a field divided into twenty-one strips. Of these strips
eighteen had at one time been in the occupation of separate individuals.
The picture is just what we are accustomed to in mediæval surveys. It is
illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the map of part of Salford,
on page 163. But some time before this survey of Walsingham was made a
great change had taken place. The separate fragments had been taken out
of the hands of the tenants and combined in the hands of the lord; the
field is ready for conversion to pasture and for enclosure. How
extremely profitable it might be to substitute a single large farm for a
number of small holdings is proved by Manorial Rentals. Taking five
manors in Wiltshire in the year 1568, one finds that the rents paid by
the farmer of the demesne work out at 1s. 6d., 7-3/4d., 1s. 5-3/4d., 1s.
1-3/4d., 1s. 5-1/2d. per acre; those paid by the customary tenants at
7-1/2d., 5d., 1s. 0-3/4d., 5-3/4d., 5-3/4d. per acre.[443]
[443] The manors are South Newton, Winterbourne Basset,
Knyghton, Donnington, and Estoverton and Phipheld (Roxburghe
Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_).
The difference is, in itself, enough to explain a decided movement
towards an increase in the size of the unit of agriculture. But of
course a powerful incentive to such procedure was supplied by the
growth of pasture farming. In the days when the cultivation of the
demesne depended on the labour of the tenants there was obviously bound
to be a certain proportion between the land belonging to the former and
the land held by the latter, a proportion which might be expressed by
saying "no tenants, no demesne cultivation; no demesne cultivation, no
income for the lord." But when tillage was replaced by pasture farming
this economic rule of three ceased to work. On the one hand, the limit
of size imposed on the demesne farm by considerations of management was
removed or at any rate enormously extended, for many thousand sheep
could be fed by two or three shepherds. On the other hand, the economic
motive for preventing a decline in the number of small landholders was
weakened, because there was little use for their labour on a pasture
farm; while there was a great deal of use for their land, if only it
could be cleared of existing rights and added to it. We have, in fact,
an ordinary case of the depreciation of particular[444] kinds of human
labour in comparison with capital, of the kind to which the modern world
has become accustomed in the case of machinery--become accustomed and
become callous.
[444] This, of course, is not inconsistent with a general
appreciation, _i.e._ a general rise in wages and fall in the
rate of interest.
We shall perhaps best give precision to our ideas of the sort of policy
which landlords were inclined to adopt, by taking a single concrete
instance, though of course conditions varied locally very much from
place to place. It comes from Hartley[445] in Northumberland, where
Robert Delavale was lord of the manor in the reign of Elizabeth. The
narrator is his cousin, Joshua Delavale--
"Since which time" (_i.e._ 16 Eliz.), he says, "the said Robert
Delavale purchased all the freeholder's lands and tenements,
displaced the said tenants, defaced their tenements, converted
their tillage to pasture, being 720 acres of arable ground or
thereabouts, and made one demaine, whereon there is but three
plows now kept by hinds and servants, besides the 720 acres. So
that where there was then in Hartley 15 serviceable men
furnished with sufficient horse and furniture, there is now not
any, nor hath been these 20 years last past or thereabouts."
Here we get a complete example of the various steps which are taken to
build up a great pasture farm. The freeholders are bought out; the other
tenants are (it is to be inferred) evicted summarily; their houses are
pulled down; their land is thrown into the demesne; the whole area is
let down to pasture and managed by hired labourers, while the
land-holding population is turned adrift. It is worth noticing that the
word "enclosing" is not used. All the drastic changes that are usually
ascribed to enclosure can on occasion take place without it. Indeed, the
more drastic they are the less need is there to complete them by the
erection of fences, for the smaller the population left to commit
encroachments.
[445] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. p. 124. For a
similar case of evictions by Delavale, showing how they were
carried out, _ibid._, pp. 201-?202: "There was in Seaton
Delavale township 12 tenements, whereon there dwelt 12 able men
sufficiently furnished with horse and furniture to serve his
Majestie ... who paid 46s. 8d. rent yearlie a piece or
thereabouts. All the said tenants and their successors saving 5
the said Robert Delavale eyther thrust out of their fermholds or
weried them by taking excessive fines, increasing of their rents
unto £3 a piece, and withdrawing part of their best land and
meadow from their tenements ... by taking their good land from
them and compelling them to winne moorishe and heathe ground,
and after their hedging heth ground to their great charge, and
paying a great fine, and bestowing great reparation on building
their tenements, he quite thrust them off in one yeare, refusing
either to repay the fine or to repay the charge bestowed in
diking or building.... The said seven fermholds displaced had to
every one of them 60 acres of arable land, viz. 20 in every
field at the least, as the tenants affirme, which amounteth to
480 acres of land yearlie or thereabouts, converted for the most
part from tillage to pasture, and united to the demaine of the
lordship of Seaton Delavale."
If such a process were general or even common, we should certainly have
the materials of a social revolution. But was it? The much discussed
question of the effect of the agrarian changes on the numbers of the
rural population is one which it is not possible to answer with any
approach to accuracy, owing to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient
number of continuous series of surveys and rentals. Those relating to
single years tell mainly results, when what we want to see is a process.
Nevertheless even single surveys are not altogether without value. They
show the distribution of land between different classes at a given
moment, and sometimes contain indications of the changes by which the
existing distribution was reached. In particular they show us the
relative areas of the demesne farm and of the land in the hands of all
other classes of tenants. And this has a certain interest. For since the
demesne farm on a manor where conditions approximated most closely to
those of the Middle Ages and had been least affected by more recent
changes, rarely contained more than half the whole manorial territory
and generally not so much, there is a _prima facie_ case for surmising
concentration of holdings and evictions when one finds two-thirds,
three-quarters, or even ninety per cent. of it in the hands of one large
farmer. It is, however, a very tedious task calculating the acreage held
by a number of different tenants, and this may perhaps excuse the small
number of instances which are given below. They are as follows:--
TABLE XII
+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+
| | (I.) | (II.) | |
| Manor. | Whole Area | Area held | Percentage |
| | Ascertainable. | by Farmers | of |
| | [446] | of Demesnes.| (II.) to (I.).|
+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+
|Donnyngton | 1523-1/2 | 418 | 27.8 |
|Salford | 856 | 295 | 34.4 |
|Estoverton and Phipheld| 1160 | 484-3/4 | 41.0 |
|Weedon Weston | 715 | 301 | 42.0 |
|South Newton | 1365 | 632 | 46.3 |
|Washerne | 1249 | 707 (in | 56.6 |
| | | hands of | |
| | | lord) | |
|Knyghton | 452 | 268 | 59.2 |
|Bishopeston | 1280 | 805 | 62.9 |
|Gamlingay Merton | 283-1/2 | 199-3/4 | 70.3 |
|Winterborne Basset | 708-1/2 | 532 | 75.1 |
|Billingford | 666 | 507 | 76.1 |
|Gamlingay Avenells[447]| 531-3/4 | 420-1/4 | 79.0 |
|Domerham[448] | 960-1/2 | 824-1/2 | 85.8 |
|Ewerne | 473 | 428 | 90.5 |
|Burdonsball | 190 | 190 | 100.0 |
|Whadborough | 469 | 469 | 100.0 |
+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+
[446] In several cases the freeholders' lands are not stated in
the survey, and are therefore not included in this table.
[447] A few acres described as "held without title" are omitted.
[448] I am not sure that there are not other lands in Domerham
not included in the survey or in the demesne. If this is so, the
proportion of the latter to the rest of the manorial land would
of course be reduced.
It will be seen that on eight of these sixteen manors more than
two-thirds of the whole area, and on seven more than three-quarters, is
in the hands of one individual, the farmer of the demesnes. These
figures are at any rate not inconsistent with a considerable
consolidation of tenancies and displacement of tenants, though we cannot
say that they prove it.
Occasionally the surveys take us behind this presumptive evidence and
enable us to trace the building up of large farms out of small holdings.
For example, at Ormesby,[449] in 1516, the lord of the manor held 219
acres "late in farm" of six tenants. At Domerham,[450] some time before
1568, enclosure of land in the open fields and conversion of arable to
pasture had been carried out by the largest of the three farmers. The
process had been accompanied by depopulation; for in 1568 his farm
included pieces of land which had formerly belonged to four smaller
tenants, and the two large farms which he held had formerly been in
separate hands. It is probable that at Winterbourne Basset[451] somewhat
the same movement had taken place. In 1436 two carucates of land were
held by an unspecified number of tenants; in 1568 three customary
tenants are still found there, but three-quarters of the manor is in the
hands of a single farmer who has recently enclosed a field of 40 acres.
Elsewhere one can fill in the picture in somewhat greater detail. At
Tughall,[452] in Northumberland, the surveyor tells us in 1567, the
demesne lands had been let to a farmer, who acted as the lord's bailiff
and collected the rents and services of the other tenants. He used his
position to partition the manor so as to get rid of the intermingled
holdings, and at the same time so harassed the smaller tenants that they
were reduced from twenty-three to eight. At Cowpen[453] a similar
concentration of land was going on at the end of the sixteenth century;
first five tenancies were thrown into one, and then the whole manor
passed into the hands of one large farmer. At Newham,[454] near Alnwick,
we are told that a hundred and forty men, women, and children were
evicted simultaneously. At Seaton[455] Delavale, the Robert Delavale who
had depopulated Hartly, turned adrift seven families out of twelve. The
map of a Leicestershire manor which is reproduced opposite page 223 is
more eloquent than many lamentations. In "the place where the town of
Whadboroughe once stood" there was by 1620 not a single tenant left. The
whole of it formed one great expanse of pasture.
[449] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 22, No. 18.
[450] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.
[451] _Ibid._, and Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of
Ambresbury.
[452] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350.
[453] _Ibid._, vol. ix., Cowpen.
[454] _Ibid._, vol. i. p. 275.
[455] _Ibid._, vol. ix. pp. 201-202.
But these isolated instances are obviously worthless as a basis for
generalisation. The most that can be said of them is that they prove
that the writers who spoke of whole towns being depopulated were not
romancing. Nor are the statistics offered by contemporaries of any
practical help towards determining the social effects of enclosure.
Those who state, like Moore[456] (writing in the seventeenth century),
that they have seen "in some townes fourteen, sixteen, and twenty
tenants discharged of plowing," or, like the Dean of Durham,[457] that
"500 ploughs have decayed in a few years" and "of 8000 acres lately in
tillage now not 8 score are tilled," may have seen what they say. But
these figures are suspiciously round, and the cases are obviously
extreme ones, not samples. The one[458] writer who makes an estimate for
the whole country, putting the number of persons of all ages displaced
between 1485 and 1550 at 300,000, is rash enough to explain how his
estimate was reached, and his explanation shows that it was not even a
plausible guess.
[456] Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c.
[457] Cal. S. P. D. Eliz., 1595-1597 (p. 347), quoted Gay,
_Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii.
[458] "Certayne Causes gathered together wherein is shewed the
decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (E. E.
T. S. date 1550-1553). "It is to understande ... that there is
in England townes and villages to the number of fifty thousand
and upward, and for every town and village ... there is one
plough decayed since the fyrst year of the reign of King Henry
VII.... The whiche 50,000 ploughs every plough was able to
maintain 6 persons, and nowe they have nothing, but goeth about
in England from dore to dore."
The returns collected for the Government seem at first to take us on to
surer ground. Investigations were made by Royal Commissioners[459] in
the years 1517-1519, 1548, 1566, 1607, 1632, 1635, and 1636. The returns
collected for twenty-three counties by the Commission of 1517, for four
counties by those of 1548-1566, and for six counties by that of 1607
have been printed. According to them, it would appear that between 1485
and 1517 about one-half per cent. of the total area of the counties
investigated was enclosed, and 6931 persons displaced, the corresponding
figures for the period 1578-1607 being 69,758 acres and 2232 evictions.
Both in the earlier, and in the later, period, the county which was
affected most severely was Northamptonshire, where 2.21 per cent. of the
county was returned as enclosed in the years 1485-1517, and in the years
1578-1607 4.30 per cent., the numbers displaced being respectively 1405
and 1444. If we like, we may adopt the conjectural estimates of
Professor Gay, and, assuming that the pace of the movement was the same
during the years for which we have not information as during those for
which we have, may say with him that from 1455 to 1607 the agrarian
changes affected about 2.76 of the whole area of twenty-four counties,
and displaced something between 30,000 and 50,000 persons.
[459] For a discussion of the value of these reports see Leadam,
_Domesday of Enclosures_, and _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New
Series, vol. vi.; Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series,
vol. xiv. and vol. xviii.; Gay, _Quarterly Journal of
Economics_, vol. xvii. (1902-1903). A useful summary of the
evidence, with a map illustrating the probable geographical
distribution of the movement, is given by Johnson, _The
Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, pp. 42-54 and Map I.
The statistics which have been worked up by Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay
from the inquiries of the Government are extremely valuable as showing
the geographical distribution of the enclosing movement. It is most
powerful in the Midland counties, which were in the sixteenth century
the chief granary of the country, and its influence is least in the
South-West and South-East. In Somersetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall,
Suffolk, Essex and Kent the small enclosures[460] described in Part I.
had probably often been carried out by the peasants themselves at an
early date, with the result that those districts were, compared with the
open field villages of the Midlands, little disturbed. Those parts of
the country, in fact, where the peasantry have been most progressive,
are relatively unaffected by the changes of our period. They have been
inoculated and they are almost immune. On the other hand, one is
inclined to say that the figures are not of much value for other
purposes. In the nature of things they cannot be reliable, and, if they
were reliable, they would not really answer the most important questions
which are asked about the social results of the changes to which they
refer. Let us remember the methods by which they were collected. They
are taken from returns which are in the form of answers delivered to
commissioners by juries of peasants, juries which we know from the most
active of the commissioners to have been occasionally packed by the
local proprietors, and often intimidated,[461] and to have been examined
by the commissioners under the eyes of their landlords. It is hardly
necessary to point out that no evidence of even approximate accuracy
would be derived from an inquiry conducted in such a fashion at the
present day. Is it probable that it was obtained any more satisfactorily
in the sixteenth century?
[460] It is a question how far there had ever been an open field
system in some of these counties, _e.g._ Cornwall and Kent.
There certainly were some open field villages of the ordinary
pattern in Kent (see Slater, _The English Peasantry and the
Enclosure of Common Fields_, p. 230). But Kent from an early
date develops on its own lines, and does not go through the same
stages of manorialism and commutation as other counties. Much of
it seems to start at the point which they reach only in the
sixteenth century. Cornwall again, though in the sixteenth
century there were commons where the villagers pastured their
cattle together (see accounts of Landress and Porpehan,
_Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.), was largely a county of
scattered homesteads and very early enclosure (for the
"nucleated village" and "scattered homesteads," see Maitland,
_Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 15-16), pointing to a different
system of settlement from that of the counties where the open
field system obtained. For enclosures in Devon and Somerset see
Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, Modern
Times, Part II., App. B: "A consideration of the cause in
question before the lords touchinge depopulation," and Carlyle's
_Cromwell_, Letter XXIV. "Lest we should engage our body of
horse too far into that enclosed country."
[461] For intimidation see the case of Wootton Basset, quoted
above, pp. 251-253, and below, pp. 302-304. Also Gay, _Trans.
Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii.; and Hales' defence
(appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to _The Commonweal of
this Realm of England_).
Nor, if accurate, could these statistics really be used as a means of
disproving the accounts given by contemporary writers of the dislocation
produced by enclosure. That those accounts were highly coloured, no one
familiar with the methods which the age brought to the discussion of
economic questions will doubt. Professor Gay does well to warn us
against credulity. It is certainly a salutary discipline to turn from
the burning words of Latimer or Crowley to these official calculations,
and then, by a glance at the chapters of Dr. Slater and Professor Gonner
on the enclosures of the eighteenth century, to realise that even in
those parts of England where the cry against depopulation had arisen
most bitterly two centuries before, there were still thousands of acres
to be enclosed by some hundreds of Enclosure Acts. But if we must
discount the protests of authors to whom all large economic changes seem
to smell of the pit, we must not forget either that their views are
formed by the conditions of their age, and that it is just in the
conditions productive of this state of mind that even a moderate change
is likely to work with the most disastrous effects. We who reckon in
millions and count a year lost which does not see some new outburst of
economic energy, must be very careful how we apply our statistics to
measure the movements of an age where economic life differs not only in
quantity but in quality, where most men have never seen more than a
hundred separate individuals in the course of their whole lives, where
most households live by tilling their great-grandfathers' fields with
their great-grandfathers' plough. We must not be too clever--our
ancestors would have said too wicked--for our subject. We must not
accept an estimate of the amount of depopulation as an explanation of
its effects; for the two things are not in _pari materia_. Certainly we
must not argue that, because the returns collected by Royal Commissions
show that in the counties affected most severely less than one-twentieth
of the total area was enclosed, therefore the complaints of observers
must be taken as a hysterical exaggeration of slow and unimportant
changes. For one thing, summary tables are no measure of the distress
caused by eviction, till we know how the tables are made up. The
drifting away of one tenant from each of fifty manors, and the eviction
of fifty tenants from one manor, yield precisely the same statistical
results when the total displacement from a given county is being
calculated. But the former would be scarcely noticeable; the latter
might ruin a village. For another thing, the total area of a county is a
mere spatial expression, which is important to no one except
geographers. What mattered to the peasantry, and what matters to us, is
not the proportion which the land enclosed bore to the whole area of the
county, but the proportion which it bore to the whole area available for
cultivation. This, which is of course not ascertainable, is clearly a
very different thing.[462] It is no consolation to a family which has
been evicted from a prosperous farm to be told that it can settle on a
moor or a marsh, on Blackstone Edge or Deeping Fen. To argue that
enclosing was of little consequence, because so small a proportion of
the total land area was enclosed, is almost precisely similar to arguing
that overcrowding is of little consequence, because the area of Great
Britain divided by the population gives a quotient of about one and a
half acres to every human being in the country. The evidence of a
general trend of opinion during a century and a half--opinion by no
means confined to the peasants, or to the peasants' champions like
Hales, or to idealists like Sir Thomas More, or to the preachers of
social righteousness like Latimer and Crowley, but shared by Wolsey and
Thomas Cromwell in the earlier part of the century, Robert Cecil and
Francis Bacon[463] at the end of it--to the effect that the agrarian
changes caused extensive depopulation, is really a firmer basis for
judging their effects than are statistics which, however carefully
worked up, are necessarily unreliable, and which, when reliable, are not
quite the statistics required. When that opinion is backed by
documentary proof that from one village thirty persons, from another
fifty, from another the whole population, were displaced, though of
course we cannot say that such displacement was general, we can say that
it was not unknown, and that if contemporaries were guilty of
exaggeration (as they probably were), their exaggeration took the form
not of inventing extreme cases, but of suggesting that such extreme
cases were the rule. On the whole, therefore, our conclusions as to the
quantitative measurement of depopulation caused in the sixteenth century
must still, in spite of the researches of Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay,
be a negative one. In the first place, we cannot say, even
approximately, what proportion of the total landholding population was
displaced. In the second place, such figures as we do possess are not of
a kind to outweigh the direct evidence of contemporary observers that
the movement was so extensive as in parts of England to cause serious
suffering and disturbance.
[462] Professor Pollard has good remarks on this point
(_Political History of England_, 1547-1603, p. 29).
[463] Wolsey was responsible for the Commission of 1517. For a
letter of Cromwell to Henry VIII. on the subject of enclosure,
and for the views of Cecil and Bacon, see below, pp. 273-274,
279, 343, 387.
(d) _The Agrarian Changes and the Poor Law_
The obscurity in which the statistics of depopulation are involved does
not prevent us from seeing that it played an important part in providing
an incentive to the organisation of relief on a national and secular
basis, which was the most enduring achievement of the social legislation
of sixteenth century statesmen. An influential theory of Poor Law
History regards the admission finally made in 1601 that the destitute
person has, not only a moral, but a legal, right to maintenance, as a
last fatal legacy handed to the modern state by the expiring social
order of the Middle Ages, a relic of villeinage which was given a
statutory basis at the very moment when a little more patience would
have shown that a national system of poor relief was not only
unnecessary, but positively harmful, in the new mobile society which the
expansion of commerce and industry was bringing into existence.
"Serfdom," says an eminent exponent of this view, "is itself a system of
Poor Law. The Poor Law is not therefore a new device invented in the
time of Elizabeth to meet a new disease. The very conception of a
society based on status involves the conception of a Poor Law far more
searching and rigid than the celebrated 43 Eng. cap. 2.... The
collective provision is appropriate to the then expiring condition of
status.... A wide diffusion of private property, not collective
property, is the obvious and natural method by which the unable-bodied
periods of life are to be met. With the disappearance of Feudalism we
might have expected that there would have disappeared the custom which
made the poor a charge upon the manor or parish of which they had
formerly been serfs. This, however, did not happen, and a history of
this survival of mediæval custom is the history of the English Poor
Law.... To sum the matter up:--In following the development of Poor Law
legislation, we watch society struggling to free itself from the fetters
of a primitive communism of poverty and subjection, a state of things
possessing many 'plausible advantages.' Legislation for the management
of the Poor often impeded, and only occasionally expedited, this
beneficent process.... It proceeded from ignorance of the true nature of
progress, and from a denial or neglect of the power of absorption
possessed by a free society."[464] It is obvious that in this passage
Mr. Mackay uses his interpretation of Poor Law origins to make a very
trenchant criticism upon the whole principle involved in the public
maintenance of the destitute. That principle was not introduced because
new conditions made its adoption indispensable. It survived from an
older order of things into a world in which the only serious causes of
destitution are personal and not economic, and in which therefore it is
quite inappropriate. To tolerate it is to drag for ever a clanking
chain, one end of which is fastened round the bleeding ankles of modern
society, and the other anchored in the hideous provisions of the Statute
of Labourers. Nor should we be wrong if we said that a similar theory,
though less lucidly expressed, has had a considerable influence upon
Poor Law practice. For the idea of a Poor Law as an anachronism which is
quite out of place in a developed economic society is implied more than
once in the celebrated report drafted by Senior and Chadwick in 1834,
and has passed from that brilliant piece of special pleading into the
minds of three generations of administrators. "A person," they state,
"who attributes pauperism to the inability to procure employment, will
doubt the efficiency of the cause which we propose to remove it,"
whereas "whenever inquiries have been made as to the previous condition
of the able-bodied individuals who live in such numbers on the town
parishes, it has been found that the pauperism of the greater number has
originated in indolence, improvidence, and vice, and might have been
avoided by ordinary care and industry. The majority of the Statutes
connected with the administration of public relief have created new
evils, and aggravated those which they were intended to prevent."[465]
[464] Mackay, _History of the English Poor Law_, 1834-1898, pp.
10-11, 16-17.
[465] _Poor Law Commission Report of 1834_, pp. 264-277, 281.
A discussion of Poor Law theory and history falls outside the limits of
this essay. But in forming an estimate of the effects of the agrarian
changes which have been described above, it is perhaps not out of place
to consider the minor question of the connection between them and the
system of Poor Relief which took its final shape in the reign of
Elizabeth. Since the distress which the relief institutions of an age
exist to meet stands to its general economic conditions in the relation
of reverse to obverse, of effect to cause, of disease to environment,
much light is thrown on the economic difficulties most characteristic of
any period by ascertaining the type of distress with which relieving
authorities are most generally confronted. Equally important, any
student of Poor Law History, who is not the partisan of a theory, finds
himself constantly driven to look for an explanation of Poor Law
developments in regions which, at first sight, appear to lie far outside
his immediate subject, but where, in reality, is grown the grim harvest
which it is the duty of Poor Law authorities, often acting in complete
ignorance of its origin, to reap. Much wild theorising and some tragic
practical blunders might have been avoided, had it been more generally
realised that, of all branches of administration, the treatment of
persons in distress is that which can least bear to be left to the
exclusive attention of Poor Law specialists, because it, most of all
matters, depends for its success on being carefully adapted to the
changing economic conditions, the organisation or disorganisation of
industry, the stability or instability of trade, the diffusion or
concentration of property, by which the nature and extent of the
distress requiring treatment are determined.
When one turns to the age in which the Poor Law took shape, the first
thing to strike one is that the need for it arises, according to the
views expressed by most writers of the period, from that very
development in commercial relationships, that very increase in economic
mobility, which Mr. Mackay seems to imply should have made it
unnecessary. The special feature of sixteenth century pauperism is
written large over all the documents of the period--in Statutes, in
Privy Council proceedings, in the records of Quarter Sessions. The new
and terrible problem is the increase in vagrancy. The sixteenth century
lives in terror of the tramp. He is denounced by moralists, analysed
into species by the curious or scientific, scourged and buffeted by all
men. The destitution of the aged and impotent, of fatherless children
and widows, is familiar enough. It has been with the world from time
immemorial. It has been for centuries the object of voluntary
charitable effort; and when the dissolution of the monasteries dries up
one great channel of provision, the Government intervenes with special
arrangements[466] to take their place a whole generation before it can
be brought to admit that there is any problem of the unemployed, other
than the problem of the sturdy rogue. The distinction between the
able-bodied unemployed and the impotent is one which is visible to the
eye of sense. The distinction between the man who is unemployed because
he cannot get work and the man who is unemployed because he does not
want work, requires a modicum of knowledge and reflection which even at
the present day is not always forthcoming. The former distinction,
therefore, is not supplemented by the latter until the beginning of the
last quarter of the century.[467] In one respect, that of the Law of
Settlement, the English Poor Law does show traces of a mediæval origin.
In all other respects, so far from being a survival from the Middle
Ages, it comes into existence just at the time when mediæval economic
conditions are disappearing. It is not accepted at once as a matter of
course that the destitute shall be publicly relieved, still less that
the able-bodied destitute deserve anything but punishment. Governments
make desperate efforts for about one hundred years to evade their new
obligations. They whip and brand and bore ears; they offer the vagrant
as a slave to the man who seizes him; they appeal to charity; they
introduce the parish clergy to put pressure on the uncharitable; they
direct the bishops to reason with those who stop their ears against the
parish clergy. When merely repressive measures and voluntary effort are
finally discredited, they levy a compulsory charge rather as a fine for
contumacy than as a rate, and slide reluctantly into obligatory
assessments[468] only when all else has failed. And if we ask why the
obligation of maintaining the destitute should have received national
recognition first in the sixteenth century, we can only answer by
pointing to that trend away from the stationary conditions of
agriculture to the fluctuating conditions of trade, and in particular to
that displacement of the rural population, which we have already seen
was one result of enclosure. The national Poor Law is not a mediæval
anachronism. It is the outcome of conditions which seem to the men of
the sixteenth century new and appalling. Of these conditions the most
important are the agrarian changes.
[466] 27 Hen. VIII., c. 25. Under this Act city and county
authorities are to relieve impotent beggars "by way of voluntary
and charitable alms." They are also for the first time given
power to apprentice vagrant children.
[467] 18 Eliz. c. 3 directed that a stock of wool, flax, hemp,
iron, or other stuff should be provided in cities, corporate
towns, and market towns. The important words which show the
change of opinion are, "To the intente also that ... Roges ...
may not have any just excuse in saying they cannot get any
service or work."
[468] 14 Eliz. c. 5.
Let us try for a moment to put ourselves in the position of a family
which has been evicted from its holding to make room for sheep. When the
last stick of furniture has been tumbled out by the bailiff, where, poor
houseless wretches, are they to turn? They cannot get work in their old
home, even if they can get lodgings, for the attraction of sheep-farming
is that the wage bill is so low. Will they emigrate from England like
the Scotch crofters? There are people who in the seventeenth century
will advise them to seek a haven with the godly folk who have crossed
the Atlantic, who will argue that England is overstocked, that "there is
such pressing and oppressing in town and country about farms, trades,
traffic, so as a man can hardly anywhere set up a trade but he shall
pull down two of his neighbours," and point out that "the country is
replenished with new farmers, and the almhouses are filled with old
labourers," that "the rent-taker lives on sweet morsels, but the
rent-payer eats a dry crust often with watery eyes."[469] But enclosures
have been going on for a century before the plantations exist to offer a
refuge, and in any case the probability of the country folk hearing of
them is very remote. Can a man migrate to seek work in another part of
the country? Not easily, for, apart from the enormous practical
difficulties, the law puts obstacles in his way, and the law is backed
up with enthusiasm by every parish and town in the country. There are
three possible attitudes which a State may adopt towards the questions
arising from the ebb and flow of population. It may argue, with the
optimists of 1834, that the mobility of labour is a good thing, a
symptom of alertness and energy, and that it will take place of itself
to the extent which is economically desirable, provided that no
impediments are placed in the way of those who desire to better
themselves by looking for work elsewhere. Or, while believing that it is
much to be desired that people should migrate freely from place to place
in search of employment, it may nevertheless reflect that the mere
absence of restrictions does not in fact stimulate such movement, and
therefore take upon itself its encouragement through the publication of
information and the registration of unemployed workers. Or,
subordinating economic to political considerations, it may hold that the
movement of a large number of unemployed persons up and down the country
is not an indication of a praiseworthy spirit of enterprise, but a
menace to public order which must be sternly repressed. We need hardly
say that this last view is the one characteristic of the sixteenth
century. The attitude towards the man on tramp in search of employment
is exactly the opposite of that which is held at the present day. He is
not less, but much more, culpable than he who remains in his own parish
and lives on his neighbours. He is assumed not to be seeking work but to
be avoiding it, and avoiding it in a restless and disorderly manner.
Hear what the worthy Harrison says when the State has already made the
provision for the unemployed a charge upon each parish:--"But if they
refuse to be supported by this benefit of the law, and will rather
endeavour by going to and fro to maintain their idle trades, then are
they adjudged to be parcel of the third sort (_i.e._ wilful vagrants),
and so, instead of courteous refreshing at home, are often corrected
with sharp execution and whip of justice abroad. Many there are which,
notwithstanding the rigour of the laws provided on that behalf, yield
rather with this liberty (as they call it) to be daily under the fear
and terror of the whip, than by abiding where they were born or bred, to
be provided for by the devotion of the parishes."[470] The village is
still thought of as the unit of employment. It is still regarded as
being equipped with the means of finding work for all its inhabitants,
as though there had been no movement towards pasture-farming to prick a
hole in its economic self-sufficiency. The presumption, therefore, is
against the man who leaves the parish where he is known to his
neighbours. He must prove that he is going to take up work for which he
is already engaged. He must get a licence from his last employer. As far
as the able-bodied are concerned the Poor Law is in origin a measure of
social police. Relief is thrown in as a makeweight, because by the end
of the sixteenth century our statesmen have discovered that when
economic pressure reaches a certain point they cannot control men
without it. The whip has no terrors for the man who must look for work
or starve. So every Sunday after church, while Parson's sermon is still
fresh in our minds, we board out our poor by rotation "among such
householders as will maintain them meat and work and such wages as they
shall deserve for the week following."[471] Heaven help us if the next
parish does not do the same!
[469] Robert Cushman, "Reasons and Considerations touching the
Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the parts of America"
(printed by E. Arber, _The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers_).
[470] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), chap. x.
[471] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp.
160-161: "Orders agreed to by the Justices of the Peace for
Cornwall at General Sessions for Bodmin the 5th and Truro the
8th of April, 39 Eliz."
And the Poor Law is a police measure for the necessity of which the
agrarian changes are largely responsible. In spite of all the obstacles
in the way of migration, in spite of whip and courteous refreshment, men
do in fact migrate, and not only men, but women and children. By the
latter part of the century, at any rate, statesmen have begun to
understand that pauperism and vagrancy stand to the depopulation caused
by enclosure in the relation of effect to cause. The revolution in the
official attitude to the problem caused by this belated illumination is
as great as that which has taken place in the last ten years with regard
to unemployment. Once the new standpoint has been seized, though
opinion, and the opinion not only of the ruling classes, but of
burgesses and villagers, still treats the vagrant with iron severity, it
never quite relapses into the comfortable doctrine, the grand discovery
of a commercial age, that distress is itself a proof of the demerits of
its victim, and that Heaven, like a Utilitarian philosopher, permits
the existence of destitution only that it may make "less eligible" the
lot of "improvidence and vice." It is saved from this last error not by
the lore of economists, but because it regards economic questions
through the eyes of a sturdy matter-of-fact morality. It is sufficiently
enlightened to recognise that even among vagrants there is a class which
is more sinned against than sinning, a class of whom it can be asked "at
whose hands shall the blood of these men be required?"[472] It is
sufficiently ingenuous to answer by pointing to "some covetous man" who,
"espying a further commodity in their commons, holds, and tenures, doth
find such means as thereby to wipe many out of their occupyings and turn
the same unto his private gains."[473] Occasionally the effect of
enclosures is brought home to the encloser in a practical way, by
compelling him not only to pay a fine to the Crown, but also to make a
contribution towards the relief of the poor whose numbers he has
increased.[474]
[472] Harrison, _loc. cit._
[473] _Ibid._
[474] Camden Society, 1886. Cases in Courts of Star Chamber and
High Commission, Michaelmas, 7 Caroli, Case of Archer. (The
allusion in the text is to a precedent cited in this case.)
To see the way in which the relation between the problems of pauperism
and of agrarian depopulation is regarded, turn to the debates in the
House of Commons. In the year 1597, when both questions are acute (the
preceding year had seen a recrudescence of agrarian rioting), a member
or minister, probably Robert Cecil, is preparing notes for a speech[475]
on the subject in Parliament. What are the points he emphasises? They
are the high price of corn caused by bad harvests and the manipulations
of middlemen, the enclosing of land and the conversion of arable to
pasture, which naturally intensifies the difficulty of securing adequate
food supplies, "the decaying and plucking down of houses, ... and not
only the plucking down of some few houses, but the depopulating of whole
towns ... and keeping of a shepherd only, whereby many subjects are
turned without habitation, and fill the country with rogues and idle
persons." When Parliament meets in October, the House is at once busy
with different aspects of the same question.[476] Bills are introduced
dealing with forestallers, regrators, and engrossers of corn, with
vagrancy and pauperism, and with enclosures, and a committee is
appointed to consider the latter question. In the debates which follow
there is the usual division of opinion between the champions of economic
reform and the advocates of more, and more ruthless, "deterrence,"
between those who wish to legislate as to causes and those who are
mainly occupied with symptoms. Bacon, master as ever of the science of
his subject, insists with invincible logic that pauperism is one part of
the general agrarian problem, and he is supported by Robert Cecil. On
the other hand, the experts as to pauperism--we can imagine the county
justices fresh from their whippings and relief committees and houses of
correction, fresh, too, from enclosure and depopulation--complain that
their special subject is being overlooked in a general and dangerous
discussion on the economic causes of distress, and that the committee
"has spent all their travel about the said enclosures and tillage, and
nothing about the said rogues and poor." That this should have been the
popular line to take needs no explanation. A Parliament which dares
discuss not only how to manipulate the lives of the poor, but the
fundamental causes of their misery, is a Parliament which the eye of man
had not yet, has not yet, beheld. Compared with other representative
assemblies, compared with itself at a later date, the Elizabethan House
of Commons, debating in an age when it could be said that government was
"nothing but a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne
commodities under the name and title of the Common Wealth," had the
grace to show some stirrings of compunction. If members who had grown
fat on the tragedy which they were discussing spoke of their victims as
members will speak, ministers at least were independent, and could
venture, like Cecil, to tell the House unpalatable truths. Of the two
Acts against enclosure, which were the result of this session's
deliberations, we shall speak later. What is worth noticing here is the
disposition, even in a Parliament composed of country gentlemen, to
emphasise the connection between the problems with which anti-enclosure
and anti-vagrancy legislation have to deal. It is summed up in the
eloquent peroration of a nameless member. "As this bill entered at first
with a short prayer, 'God speed the plough,' so I wish it may end with
such success as the plough shall speed the poor."[477]
[475] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., Nov.
1597. "Notes for the present Parliament."
[476] _D'Ewes' Journal_, pp. 551-555; see also Leonard, _The
Early History of English Poor Relief_, pp. 73-75.
[477] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp.
541-543.
What became of the families displaced from the soil between their final
eviction and that subsidence upon the stony breast of the Elizabethan
Poor Law, which, for some of them, was their ultimate fate? There is no
certain information to guide us. The tragedy of the tramp is his
isolation. Every man's hand is against him; and his history is
inevitably written by his enemies. Yet, beneath denunciations hurled
upon him by those who lived warm and slept soft, we can see two
movements going on, two waves in a vast and silent ebbing of population
from its accustomed seats. In the first place there is a steady
immigration into the towns on the part of those "who, being driven out
of their habitations, are forced into the great cities, where, being
very burdensome, men shut their doors against them, suffering them to
die in the streets and highways."[478] The municipal records of the
periods teem with complaints of the disorder, the overcrowding, the
violation of professional bye-laws, caused by rural immigration. The
displaced peasant is the Irishman of the sixteenth century, and, like
the Irishman, he makes his very misery a whip with which to scourge, not
alas! his oppressors, but men who often are not much less wretched than
himself. He turns whole quarters into slums, spreads disease through
congested town dwellings, and disorganises the labour market by crowding
out the native artisan. Gild members find themselves eaten up by
unlawful men who have never served an apprenticeship in the town, and
retort with regulations requiring the deposit of a prohibitive sum as an
entrance fee from all immigrants who want to set up shop, especially
from those wretches who are thought to have a large family of children,
at present snugly concealed in their last place of residence, but soon
to be surreptitiously introduced, a brood of hungry young cuckoos, if
once their parents get a footing in the town.[479] Borough authorities,
who see cottages "made down" into tenements in which pestilence spreads
with fearful rapidity, seek to stamp out the very possibility of
invasion by prohibiting the erection of new cottages or the subdivision
of old. To judge by their behaviour, the notorious Statute of 1662,
which codified the existing customs as to settlement, must have been one
of the most popular pieces of legislation ever passed by Parliament.
Town[480] after town in the course of the sixteenth century tries to
protect itself by a system of stringent inspection worthy of modern
Germany. Sometimes there is a regular expulsion of the aliens.
"Forasmuch as it is found by daily experience," declare the authorities
of Nottingham,[481] "that by the continual building and erecting of new
cottages and poor habitations, and by the transferring of barns and
suchlike buildings into cottages, and also by the great confluence of
many poor people from forrein parts out of this towne to inhabit here,
and lykewise by the usual and frequent taking in of inmates into many
poor habitations here, the poorer sort of people do much increase ... it
is ordered that no burgess or freeman on pain of £5 erect any cottage or
convert any building into a cottage in the town without license of the
Mayor, that no burgess or freeman, without a license, receive any one
from the country as a tenant, that every landlord be bound in the sum of
£10 to remove all foreign tenants who have entered in the last three
years before May 1st next." What most boroughs do for themselves is
finally, after many regulations have been made by the Common Council,
done for London by Parliamentary legislation. It is not a chance that
the end of Elizabeth's reign sees the first two Housing Acts, one[482]
in 1589, enacting that only one family may live in a house, the
other[483] applying to London alone, and forbidding the division of
houses into tenements, the receiving of lodgers, or the erection of new
houses for persons who are assessed in the subsidy book at less than £5
in goods or £3 in lands. The evicted peasants are beginning to take
their revenge. They have been taking it ever since.
[478] Lansd. MSS. 83, f. 68, quoted Gonner, _Common Land and
Enclosure_, p. 156 n.
[479] _e.g. Nottingham Records_, vol. iv. pp. 170-171, Nov. 4,
1577: "Any burgess that hath not been prentice to pay £10 and no
pardon. _Records of Leicester_, vol. iii. p. 351, Oct. 17, 1598:
"He is inhibited from dwelling in your corporation unless he
finds bonds for £200 that neither his wife nor children shall be
burdensome to the town." _Southampton Court Leet Records_, vol.
i., Part I.: "One William Dye, undertenant to John Netley, dothe
lyve idelly and hathe no trade.... He hathe 4 or 5 children in
places from whence he came whom he will bring shortly hither, yf
he may be suffered here to remayne, whom we desyer may be
examined and removed from hence according to the Statute."
[480] Some instances are given by Leonard, _Early History of
English Poor Relief_, pp. 107-109.
[481] _Nottingham Records_, vol. iv. pp. 304-307.
[482] 31 Eliz. c. 7.
[483] 35 Eliz. c. 6.
In the second place there is a general movement from the enclosed to the
open field villages. The families displaced by enclosure cannot easily
enter into industry, even if they wish to do so, for the avenue to most
trades is blocked both by the Corporations and by the statutory system
of a seven years' apprenticeship, which maintains professional standards
at the expense of an unprivileged residuum. What they do is to follow
the orthodox advice given to those who have lost their customary means
of livelihood. They proceed to colonise, and to colonise in such numbers
that they cannot easily be kept out. They settle as squatters on the
waste lands of those manors which have not been enclosed, and which,
before the waste is turned into a sheep-run, offer no obstacle to
immigration. That the possibility of using the manorial waste to
accommodate those who had no settled abode had occurred to statesmen as
one expedient for meeting the problem of the infirm and destitute, is
shown by the sanction expressly given in the Poor Law of 1597[484] to
the expenditure of parish funds on the erection of cottages on the waste
as residences for the impotent poor. In fact, however, the mobility of
labour was becoming such that it was impossible, even if it had been
desirable, to reserve those unutilised territories for the maintenance
of the impotent. In spite of bitter protests from the existing
inhabitants, refugees from other villages swarm down upon them in such
numbers that the Act requiring four acres of land to be attached to each
cottage cannot be observed, and the issuing of licences for the erection
of cottages on the waste for able-bodied men, who have come with their
families from a distance, becomes a regular part of the business of
Quarter Sessions.[485] Such a redistribution of the population solves
one problem only to create others. Stern economists in the seventeenth
century lament that the ease with which permission to build cottages on
the waste is obtained encourages the existence of an improvident and
idle class, which will neither work for wages nor make good use of the
land. "In all or most towns where the fields lie open and are used in
common, there is a new brood of upstart intruders as inmates, and the
inhabitants of unlawful cottages erected contrary unto law.... Loyterers
who will not usually be got to work unless they may have such excessive
wages as they themselves desire."[486] The opponents of enclosure answer
with some justice that, in effect, the open field villages are saddled
with the destitution caused by enclosing landlords, who first ruin their
tenants and then, like a modern Dock Company which relies on the Poor
Rate to save its wage-bill, leave them to be supported by those places
to which they are compelled to migrate.[487] The latter difficulty is
indeed a very serious one, which not only is the occasion of numberless
petitions[488] from villages who wish to be assisted by, or to avoid
assisting, their neighbours, but on occasion converts even the country
gentry into opponents of enclosure. "We further conceive," write the
Justices of Nottingham to the Council, "that if depopulation may be
reformed it will bring a great good to the whole Kingdom; for where
homes are pulled down the people are forced to seek new habitations in
other towns and countries, whereof those towns where they get a settling
are pestered so as they are hardly able to live one by another, and it
is likewise the cause of erecting new cottages upon the waste and other
places who are not able to relieve themselves ... which causes rogues
and vagabonds to increase."[489] In the elaborate book of Poor Law
orders published in 1631 the Government recognises the genuineness of
this grievance, and, to its direction that richer parishes should
contribute funds to the aid of the poor, adds a special rider pointing
out that such extra contributions would come with special
appropriateness from those places where there had been depopulation.
[484] 39 Eliz. c. 3.
[485] For petitions on this subject see _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd.
784, pp. 81-82 (Wiltshire). The Warwickshire Quarter Sessions
were much occupied with this, _e.g._ the following: "Trinity
Sessions 1625. Fforasmuch as this Court was this present day
informed ... by Sir Edward Marrowe, kt., and Thomas Ashley as
the lords of the manor of Woolvey in this county ... that the
said lords are content that William Wilcox of Woolvey in this
countie shall build and erect a cottage for hys habitation hys
wyfe and his small children uppon the waste within the said
lordshippe, it is therefore ordered that the same being with
consent of the lord as aforesaid that the same cottage shall be
and continue," and later "which cottage the Court doth licence"
(_Warwick Quarter Sessions MSS. Records_).
[486] "Considerations Concerning Common Fields and Enclosures,"
Pseudonismus, 1654.
[487] Moore, _The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the
Poor_: "And now alas, saith the poor cottier, there is no work
for me, I must go where I may get my living. And hence it comes
to pass that the open fielden towns have above double the number
of cottiers they had wont to have, so that they cannot live one
by another, and so put the fielden towns to vast expense, in
caring for these poor that these enclosures have made."
[488] _e.g. Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 784, p. 95 (Wiltshire), pp.
292 and 298 (Worcester).
[489] See Appendix I., No. VI. Miss Leonard (_Trans. Royal Hist.
Soc._, vol. xix.) prints this document as referring to Norfolk,
which appears to be an error.
We may now summarise our view of the social effects of the changes
introduced by lords of manors, and by the capitalist farmers who manage
their estates. When the demesne land is enclosed and converted to
pasture, there is an appreciable diminution in the demand for labour,
and consequently an increase in unemployment. When the common rights of
tenants are curtailed, they lose not only an important subsidiary source
of income, but often, at the same time, the means of cultivating their
arable holdings. When their holdings are merged in the great estate of
the capitalist farmer, they are turned adrift to seek their living in a
world where most trades and most towns are barred against them, where
they are punished if they do not find work, and punished if they look
for work without permission, where "if the poor being thrust out of
their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the
Statute of Inmates; if they wander abroad, they are in danger of the
Statute of the Poor to be whipped."[490] Thus, quite apart both from the
eternal source of poverty which consists in the recalcitrance of nature
to human effort, and from those causes of individual destitution which
in all ages and in all economic conditions lie in wait for the
exceptionally unfortunate or the exceptionally improvident, for the
sick, the aged, and the orphan, there is an increase in the number of
those for whom access to the land, their customary means of livelihood,
is unobtainable, and consequently a multiplication of the residuum for
whom the haunting insecurity of the propertyless modern labourer is, not
the exception, but the normal lot. It is this extension of destitution
among able-bodied men, who have the will, but not the means, to find
employment, which is the peculiar feature of sixteenth century
pauperism, and which leads in 1576 to the most characteristic expedient
of the Elizabethan Poor Law--the provision of materials upon which the
unemployed can be set to work. The recognition that the relief of the
destitute must be enforced as a public obligation was not the
consequence of the survival of mediæval ideas into an age where they
were out of place, but an attempt on the part of the powerful Tudor
state to prevent the social disorder caused by economic changes, which,
in spite of its efforts, it had not been strong enough to control.
[490] _D'Ewes' Journal._ Speech of Cecil, 1597.
CHAPTER III
THE QUESTION OF TENANT RIGHT
(a) _The Tenants at Will and the Leaseholders_
We have said above that we cannot measure the extent of the depopulation
caused by enclosure, even for those years with regard to which figures
are supplied us by Royal Commissions. But, after all, it is happily less
important to arrive at an exact statistical estimate of the acres
enclosed and of the number of tenants displaced, than it is to get a
general view of the economic forces at work and of the structure of
legal relationships upon which they operated. Given the economic reasons
for the consolidation of holdings which were dominant in the sixteenth
century, they could hardly have failed to result in evictions on a
considerable scale, unless the tenants themselves had sufficient legal
security to hold their own. If they had such security, the statistical
analysis of displacements given above will fall into line with the
general situation and be a valuable comment upon it. If they had not,
then the figures, while a useful guide to the imagination, may stand
when they confirm, but hardly when they contradict, the picture given by
contemporaries. The accounts of the latter, though still not freed from
the charge of exaggeration, will be supported by what we know of the
general disposition of economic and legal forces. They probably heighten
the colour and sharpen the outlines, but their indication of tendencies
will be correct.
In discussing the position of the small cultivator in the sixteenth
century it was pointed out above that similarity of legal status was
compatible with the greatest economic variety, and in considering their
ability to resist attempted eviction it is essential to remember the
converse truth, that tenants who were economically in a similar position
were often from the point of view of tenure very different. Just as
writers of the time lump together all classes of well-to-do small
landholders under the name of yeomen, though the majority of them were
not legally yeomen at all, so they constantly speak of evictions,
ruinous fines, and rack-rents, without discriminating between the
different classes of tenants whose different legal positions make them
liable to suffer in very different degrees. One must remember, again,
that in the sixteenth century a man might be called a copyholder because
he held a copyhold tenement, but at the same time he might have, and
very often had, additional land which he had leased from the demesne or
from the waste, and in which his legal interest was quite different; he
might be a freeholder and at the same time be the farmer who leased the
lord's demesne, or he might be freeholder, copyholder, and leaseholder
in one, and even hold at the will of the lord other land which he had
been allowed to occupy "by grant of the court," for example part of the
manorial waste. Hence not only were the positions of tenants at will,
lessees, and copyholders considered as classes, different from each
other, but there was also a difference in the legal interest which
individuals had in different parts of the lands which they cultivated.
Even if the law gave protection to copyholders, a point to be discussed
later, they might suffer from the consolidation into large farms of
those parts of their lands which they did not hold by copy, and the more
they had gained in preceding years by adding to their holdings of
customary land by leasing part of the demesne and of the waste, the
heavier would be their loss when these additions were taken from them,
while those whose holdings consisted entirely of such encroachments
would be altogether ruined. Again, on those few manors where tenure at
the will of the lord had not crystallised into copyhold, the tenant's
position was even weaker than that of the lessee, for there was nothing
but a custom unenforced by legal documents to prevent his eviction.
There was thus opportunity for a considerable displacement of population
without any need of raising the difficult question of the degree of
security enjoyed by copyhold tenure. When a manor was occupied only by
tenants at will without copies, or when its demesne lands were leased
for short terms to a number of lessees, or when its waste had been
gradually taken in either by new settlers or by the customary tenants,
land could be resumed by the lord without any conflict save, in the
first case, with a custom which two centuries before had been powerful
but now was weak, and in the second case with a terminable interest. It
is not necessary to adduce instances to prove the liability of the
tenant at will or lessee to eviction, because the nature of their
interest makes it obvious that they could not claim to have complete
legal security. Examples of the first kind are, indeed, not very common,
owing to the fact that by our period tenure at will of the lord had in
most places hardened into copyhold, and their comparative rarity may
suggest that tenants at will who had not become copyholders had been
displaced on most manors by the beginning of the century. The case of
two Wiltshire manors may serve to illustrate their position. At
Knyghton[491] the whole manor was in 1554 leased to a farmer, and with
the manor the rents and service of six customary tenants holding at
will. At Domerham,[492] in 1568, almost the whole of the land was in the
hands of three large farmers, but "it has been granted to Richard
Compton, Thomas Pryce, John Pryce, and Robert Kynge, to sow of the above
said land every year 120 acres." In the second case the precariousness
of the tenants' position is obvious; they are mere squatters, who are
there, as it were, on sufferance. In the first case it has been
recognised and mitigated, as far as the farmer is concerned, by a clause
in his agreement binding him to leave the tenants in peaceable enjoyment
as long as they pay their rents. But they have no security as against
the lord, and are liable to immediate eviction if it proves more
profitable to add their holdings to the large farm. When tenants
commence an action against a lord for wrongful disseisin, it is
sufficient for him to answer that they are "but his tenantry at
wyll."[493]
[491] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.
[492] _Ibid._
[493] Leadam, _English Hist. Rev._, vol. viii. pp. 684-696.
Much more numerous, however, than the tenants at will, were the small
leaseholders who held part of the waste or of the demesne lands. A
glance at the table given on page 25 will show that they form about 12
per cent. of the whole manorial population therein represented. But in
parts of the country their numbers are far greater. In 1568 they form 20
per cent. of the landholders on four manors in Somersetshire and one in
Devonshire.[494] In two villages in Northamptonshire[495] they form
nearly two-thirds. On the great manor of Rochdale there are in 1626 as
many as 315 leaseholders to 64 freeholders and 233 copyholders.
Leaseholders possessed, of course, legal security during the period of
their leases, and these were in some cases for as long as ninety-two
years. But they, too, had not an interest in the land of the kind which
would enable them to offer any permanent barrier to the policy of
consolidating holdings. This fact, indeed, was the motive for the care
which surveyors showed in discriminating between those parts of the
tenants' holdings which were customary land and those which were made up
of pieces taken from the demesne or from the waste, as well as for the
desire to convert copyhold tenure into leases for years, which was often
shown in the sixteenth century by the manorial officials. For an example
illustrating the eviction of numerous small tenants who had leased the
demesne we may recur to the case of Ablode[496] which has been mentioned
above. The lease of that manor to a farmer made by the monastery of St.
Peter's in 1516 expressly provided that he should be allowed to get rid
of the lessees, to whom the demesne lands had previously been let, as
soon as their leases should have expired. Two other examples show the
same class encountering exactly the same difficulty under somewhat
different circumstances. The first, which relates to the waste, not to
the demesne lands, comes from a survey of the lordship of Bromfield and
Gale which was made by the Parliamentary surveyors in 1649.[497] "The
inclosures before mentioned," they say, "and all the rest of them within
the lordship of Bromfield and Gale, fall to the lord of the soyle,
because enclosed without license. For although by their fee farm estate
they [_i.e._ the tenants] may challenge freedome of commoning, it is by
the covenant of the grant as formerly and antiently was accustomed, so
that they must take a new grant of all (except some old inclosures which
are included in their fee farms), which is the custom of the lordshippe.
_And if they should enclose all their common, yet the lord would have a
third part._" The second illustration is given by a petition which some
leasehold tenants of Whitby Strand[498] promoted in the Court of
Requests in the year 1553. When the monastery of Whitby was dissolved,
its property passed first to the Crown, which disposed of it to the Duke
of Northumberland, who in turn sold it to Sir John Yorke. The sufferings
of the tenants may be told in their own words: "Which saide Sir John, of
his extort power and might and by great and sore threatenings of the
said tennants ... hathe gotten from them all the leases ... and
unreasonably hathe raised rents ... and in consideration also that the
said Sir John York is a man of power and might, landes, goodes and
possessions; greatly frendid.... Your poor oratours ... are not able to
sue against him," and petition the Court for redress. The reality of
their grievance is shown sufficiently by the fact that whereas, when the
estate was in the hands of the monastery, the total rents of twenty-six
tenants amounted to £28, 19s. 8-1/2d., an average of about £1, 2s. 1d.
per tenant, by the date of these complaints the rents alone, apart from
fines, had been forced up to £64, 9s. 9d., averaging per tenant £2, 6s.
6d.
[494] _Ibid._, Paynton, Stooke Trister and Cucklington, Donyett,
Chedseye, South Brent and Huish. The leases at South Brent are
for ninety-two years.
[495] They are Duston in 1561 (R.O. Rentals and Surreys, Portf.
13, No. 23), and Paulspurie in 1541 (_ibid._, vol. ccccxix.,
fol. 3).
[496] See pp. 204 and 210.
[497] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of Survey of Lordship of
Bromfield and Gale in Wrexham Free Library.
[498] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_.
What is the conclusion to be drawn from these three examples? It is
surely the special precariousness in the conditions of the sixteenth
century of all those tenants whose livelihood lies mainly in land which
has been taken from the demesne or from the waste, which is, in fact, in
the words of Fitzherbert,[499] "a new thing that hath not gone by
custom," a thing which may "fortune to increase or decrease of rent." A
piece of demesne may have been let out on lease at a low rent in the
year following the great plague, or have been taken from the waste at an
even earlier date. It may have remained in the hands of one family for
a century without being resumed by the lord, and without any attempt
being made to increase the tenants' payments. It may have been cleared
and cleaned, hedged and ditched, by the sweat of generations. But, if
the manorial officials have done their duty, that land has been marked
as a "new thing," something for which no custom can be pleaded and which
no prescription can protect. When the lord wishes to alter the condition
of its tenure no vested interest can stand against him. He will throw it
into a large farm, or double the rent, and the tenants can say nothing;
for they are mere lessees, unprotected by the sanctity of manorial
custom, and to have his way he need only wait till their leases expire.
That this is no impossible supposition is shown by the records of the
manor of Hewlington.[500] In 1562 an inquiry was made into the rights of
the tenants there, who seem to have been lessees for the term of forty
years with a right of renewal to the heir. On investigation being made
by the officers of the Crown, to whom the manor belonged, it was found
that there was "a decay of the sum of one hundred and five pounds, six
shillings, yearly rent, which in ancient tymes had been answered for the
said landes"; which decay "as by the auncient records appeareth, did
growe by reason of the great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes
had been in the reign of Edward III. and also of the Rebellion of Owen
Glendower and trouble that therefrom ensued; ... by reason of which
mortalitie and rebellion the country was wasted, the Tenants and their
houses destroyed, insomuch that the then lords of the soyle were
constrayned by their stewards and officers to graunte the said landes at
a lesser rent than formerlie was paid for the same to such as could be
gotten to take it." Two hundred years after the great plague, its effect
in reducing the rents of a few tenants on the Welsh Border is
remembered: a commission calculates the sum due to the last penny, and
is then required and authorised "to revise the said decayed rent," a
fact which the jurors of the manor duly record in their presentment made
another sixty years later. No doubt the Crown has an unusually good
memory--_nullum tempus occurrit regi_. But what the Crown can do on
this grand scale the surveyors of smaller lords do on a smaller one. As
soon as the time has come when it is convenient to get rid of tenants,
nothing but the most unassailable title can stand against the proof that
such and such a plot of land was once part of the lord's demesne or of
the lord's waste. And this, one may suspect, was a great change, which
affected many families who thought themselves as safe as their
neighbours. For at least two centuries before enclosing became general
enough to cause alarm, the demesne and waste lands on one manor after
another had been nibbled away by small encroachments; for lords had been
glad to find an alternative to the cultivation of the former through
labour services, and the colonising of the latter, though sometimes a
source of complaint with commoners whose rights of pasture were
curtailed, was welcomed by the manorial authorities as a means of
improving lands which would otherwise be useless. Both together had been
in fact a sort of reservoir of land upon which any surplus population
could draw, and from which the more prosperous of the customary tenants
could lease additions to their holdings in the manner described above.
In our period the tendency is reversed. A lord is anxious to get rid of
the obstruction which the small farmer's lease offers to the
consolidation of holdings. He wishes to follow the advice of experts and
"reduce his demeans into one entier ferme."[501] Titles are questioned,
and the small lessee, whose interest is a terminable one and unprotected
by any manorial custom, is the first to suffer.
[499] Fitzherbert, _Book of Surveying_, p. 32.
[500] For reference, see p. 130, note 2.
[501] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i., survey of Mudford
and Hinton.
(b) _The Copyholders_[502]
But were the tenants at will and the leaseholders the only classes to be
evicted? No allusion has yet been made to the most difficult problem
which confronts the student of the sixteenth century agrarian
changes--the degree of protection enjoyed by the copyholders. If this
problem is the most difficult it is also one of the most important. As
far as can be calculated, the copyholders far exceeded in number upon
most manors all other classes of tenants together. Copyhold tenure was
the rule, and tenure at will and leasehold were generally the exception,
though the latter was an important exception. If all copyholders had
complete security, and were readily protected in their holdings by the
courts, there would be little sense in talking of an agrarian
revolution; for the changes, though they might still have caused much
individual suffering, could hardly have constituted anything like the
serious national danger which they were thought to be by many
contemporaries. Again, the copyholders were in a special sense the
kernel of a manor, the representatives of an ancient social system,
around which the newer relationships of leasehold were, so to speak,
comparatively modern accretions. It was with them and their business
that the manorial courts were concerned; a copyhold tenement could not
exist apart from a manor because surrender and admission in the manorial
court was essential to its recognition as copyhold; and the very name of
"customary tenants," by which copyholders were often described, suggests
the special antiquity and fixity of their position. Even in the
sixteenth century there were still manors where there were no tenants at
all except copyholders, and the mere shedding of the outer layers of
small leaseholders, who had sprung up around them, would have left the
organisation of such manors quite intact. It would have cut back recent
developments; it would not have shaken rural society very seriously.
One's view of the importance of the agrarian changes of the sixteenth
century will depend, therefore, to a great extent, upon the opinion
which is formed of the legal position of the copyholders.