[502] In the following section on copyho_The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

largely by Dr. Savine's article in the _Quarterly Journal of

Economics_, vol. xix.

The problem centres in the question to what extent a copyholder who was

threatened with eviction could obtain protection from the courts. It is

not at all easy to extract a definite answer on this point from the

writers of the period, whose views as to the degree of security enjoyed

by copyhold are often inconsistent with each other, and sometimes seem

to be inconsistent with themselves. The layman certainly thought that

copyhold tenants could be and were evicted, and this view seems to be

supported by Fitzherbert.[503] It is true that he draws a sharp

distinction between the customary land, the rent of which cannot be

altered, and the new intakes from the waste or the demesne, the rent of

which can be forced up at the lord's pleasure. But he expressly states

that copyhold tenants cannot get protection from the courts: "These

manners of tennants shall not plede nor be impleded of their tenements

by the king's writte"; and he implies elsewhere that the lord can

increase both rent and fines. Kitchin,[504] on the other hand, thinks

that the lord can never increase the amount of the admission fine; while

Coke,[505] in a well-known passage, emphasises the copyholder's security

as long as he makes no breach in the custom by failing in his services,

and points out that he can protect himself either by proceedings in

Chancery or by a writ of trespass.

[503] Fitzherbert, _Book of Surveying_, p. 28.

[504] Kitchin, _Court Leet_.

[505] Coke, _The Complete Copyholder_.

It is not surprising, in view of the variety of opinion as to the

copyholders' status which obtained in the sixteenth century, that there

should have been much disagreement about it among historians. It seems

possible, however, at any rate to narrow the limits of conjecture by

ruling certain theories out of account. In the first place one can

hardly now accept the view put forward by Mr. Leadam,[506] that, at any

rate after 1467, all copyholders had complete legal security, as

complete, it would appear, as freehold, though guaranteed by different

remedies. He holds that copyholders who occupied customary land, and who

were "tenants at will according to the custom of the manor," could get

redress either by petition in the Court of the lord with an appeal to

Chancery, or by an action of trespass in the Common Pleas, the classes

who suffered from eviction being "tenants at will at Common Law," who,

though sometimes described as inferior copyholders, were not really

copyholders at all, because they did not occupy the lands set apart as

customary lands. This view, according to which the lord could clear off

his estate all the newer copyhold tenancies on the demesne or waste, but

was debarred by the courts from touching the tenancies on the customary

land of the manor, receives a certain support from the great pains

shown by the manorial authorities in distinguishing between the two.

But, while it rightly emphasises the special features of the tenure of

customary land, it is difficult to reconcile what we actually know of

the position of copyholders with this theory as to the complete security

of copyhold tenure. To the objection that contemporaries who could

hardly have been mistaken certainly supposed that copyholders suffered,

Mr. Leadam would, no doubt, answer that they were thinking of the

"inferior copyholders" who held pieces of the demesne or waste. But this

answer has got to meet difficulties which are really overwhelming. On

the one hand, the historical confirmation which Mr. Leadam seeks, by

trying to trace the distinction postulated back into the remote regions

of tenure in villeinage, can no longer be accepted now that the

difference between villeinage "regardant" and villeinage "en gros," on

which he relies, has been proved to refer not to differences in the

tenure by which the serfs held their lands, but simply to different

methods of pleading, which have nothing to do with the question of the

tenant's security, but merely with the form in which cases were argued

in the courts.[507] On the other hand, it cannot be made to fit the

facts of the copyholders' position in the sixteenth century. The truth

is that copyholders were not safe even on the sacred customary land

itself. It is quite certain that a great many copyholds were not

copyholds of inheritance, but copyholds for life, which returned into

the hands of the lord with the death of every tenant. It is certain

also, as will be shown later, that fines for admission to customary

holdings were on some manors raised enormously during the sixteenth

century. How can one reconcile these facts with the view that the lord

could make no alteration in the treatment of the customary land which

would jeopardise the copyholders' interest?

[506] Leadam, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. vi.

[507] Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, pp. 48-56.

Nor is it easy to accept the sharply contrasted theory of Professor

Ashley.[508] Where Mr. Leadam sees absolute security of tenure

guaranteed by the courts, Professor Ashley sees absolute insecurity

mitigated by a once powerful but now decaying custom. In the past, when

the lord's land had been dependent on labour services for its

cultivation, the last thing he wanted to do was to get rid of the

tenants, and therefore custom had made it a rule of practice, though not

of law, that first villein, and then copyhold, tenements should pass in

the manorial court from father to son. But just when this custom was on

the way to become law through the action of the courts in extending

protection to copyholders, changed economic conditions made pasture

farming much more profitable than tillage, and so supplied landowners

with a strong motive for breaking it down. In the struggle which

followed custom and public opinion were on the side of the tenants, but

the law was on the side of the landlords, and copyholders were evicted

without being able to obtain any legal redress, not merely through

ignorance or intimidation, but because no legal protection was offered

them by the courts. There is perhaps only one serious objection to this

ingenious theory. But that is insuperable. It is that in certain

circumstances, at any rate, the courts did in fact offer protection to

copyholders who were threatened with eviction. In the fifteenth century

a considerable number of cases came before the Court of Chancery. In the

sixteenth century the same business, which in view of the number of

copyholders must have been a lucrative one, came before the Common Law

Courts. The case of the year 1482,[509] which is quoted by Professor

Ashley to show the hesitation which the judges felt as to whether a

copyholder had any legal remedy, is really one of a long series in which

the courts considered the claims of copyholders, and which Coke must

have had in mind when he said, "Now copyholders stand upon a sure

ground: now they weigh not their lord's displeasure, they shake not at

every sudden blast of wind, they eat, drink, sleep securely ... let the

lord frown, the copyholder cares not, knowing himself safe, and not

within any danger."[510] To overlook that series of cases is really to

misread a change of the first importance, a change which almost amounted

to a legal revolution. Suppose that at the present day the courts were

to begin to protect the "tenant right" of workmen who have given their

lives to a trade by ruling that any man dismissed after fifteen years

continuous service should either be reinstated or receive compensation?

The change would be greater--but would it be much greater?--than the

momentous departure that was made by the judges who for the first time

decided that a man impleaded for a villein tenement should have an

action in Chancery. For centuries such actions could not be brought, and

if brought would have been simply sent back to the court of the manor

with the endorsement "our lord the king does not interfere in matters of

villeinage."[511] Now the tide is reversed. From 1439 onwards a stream

of equitable jurisdiction flows out from the Chancery to secure the

title of the very class which has hitherto had no legal title at all.

Tenure in villeinage becomes copyhold. Clearly the discovery of these

cases by Dr. Savine[512] must alter the whole standpoint from which we

view the struggle between lords and copyholders in the sixteenth

century. If one must reject the view of Mr. Leadam that copyholders on

customary land had complete legal security, one must also, it would

seem, reject the view of Professor Ashley that the courts never

interfered in their favour. Somehow or another one must reconcile a good

deal of insecurity with a good deal of protection, the complaints of

contemporaries that copyholders suffered from enclosures with the

equally indisputable fact that they were fairly often protected by the

law.

[508] Ashley, _Economic History_, Part I., vol. ii. pp. 274-282.

[509] Coke upon Littleton, 60 b.

[510] Coke, _The Complete Copyholder_.

[511] Note-book of Bracton pl., 1237: "Dominus rex non vult se

de eis intromittere" (quoted Vinogradoff, _Villainage in

England_, p. 46, note 2).

[512] On this point see _English Hist. Review_, vol. viii. p.

296.

A way leading some distance through this apparent contradiction may,

perhaps, be found by recurring to that dependence upon manorial custom

which is the characteristic feature of copyhold. A copyholder is a

tenant by copy of Court Roll according to the custom of the manor, and

this custom is primarily what regulates his rights and obligations. The

custom must be an immemorial one; mere prescription is not custom; to be

binding it must have "been used time out of mind." Given such a custom,

it is this upon which the nature of the copyholder's tenure depends; and

it is noticeable that authorities who differ as to the practical outcome

of it, all agree that it is with custom that the first appeal lies. But

the custom of a manor is a particular and individual thing peculiar to

that manor, and determining the relations between lord and tenant there

and not elsewhere. In the words of a surveyor, "Their customs are not so

universall as if a man have experyence of the customs and services of

any mannor he shall thereby have perfect knowledge of all the rest, or

if he be experte of the customes of any one mannor in any one countie

that he shall nede no further enstruccions for all the residewe of the

mannors within that countie."[513] There are several different sets of

customs, and therefore several different sorts of copyhold. There are,

in fact, copyholders and copyholders, and there is no general law of

copyhold because its essence is to be local and peculiar. The first

question, therefore, which has got to be asked, when considering the

question of the legal security of copyholders, relates to the custom of

the manor on which they are found; for probably, if the parties go to

law, this is the first question which will be asked by the court. If it

is shown that in getting rid of a tenant the lord has broken the custom

of the manor, there is much likelihood in the sixteenth century that the

court will restore it. If this is not shown, there is little probability

that the court will go behind the custom in favour of the tenants, or

try to harmonise it with general principles of equity, except in so far

as it declines to take account of customs which are held to be

"unreasonable," a word too vague to be much protection to a tenant or

much hindrance to a lord. It is this tremendous importance of local

custom which causes it to be so minutely entered in manorial documents,

and which results both in the constant appeals which are made to it when

cases come before the courts, and in the careful recording of

contradictory opinions. Surveyors are at pains to emphasise the

difference between land which is customary land and land which is not,

because, while on the former the introduction of new conditions will be

followed by all sorts of friction and disturbance, on the latter the

tenants will have no case in opposing them. It is here that Mr. Leadam's

distinction between holders of customary land and holders of land taken

from the waste or the demesne becomes of real value. It is a particular

exemplification of a general rule, the rule that the appeal is always to

custom. The meaning of the distinction is not, as Mr. Leadam seems to

suggest, that copyholders on the former always had legal protection and

copyholders on the latter always had not. It is that the crucial

question is always, "What sort of custom are you under?" and that, while

on the customary holdings the custom _may_ be unfavourable to the

tenant's security, it is much more likely to be unfavourable on the

newer tenancies formed on land which, perhaps within the memory of

persons living, was indubitably the lord's own, not merely in the

general sense in which even the villein's land had been the lord's, but

in the practical sense that it was part of his demesne to use as he

pleased. In fact quite a common answer when copyholders bring an action

is the statement that the land in question is not ancient copyhold but

part of the demesne;[514] and when the Protector Somerset applied his

popular agrarian policy to his own estates he had to get Parliament to

pass a special Act to give the copyholders on his demesnes peculiar

security.[515]

[513] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i. The surveyor is

Humberstone.

[514] _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery in the Reign of Ed.

VI._, vol. i. p. cxxxvii.: "To the Right Honourable Sir Richard

Riche, Kt., Lord Riche and Lord Chancellor of England. In humble

wise sheweth and complaineth unto your lordeshippe your daley

orator Richard Cullyer of Wymondham ... yeoman, and John Cullyer

his son," that whereas they "were admitted tenants (of 20 acres)

to hold the same to them and their heirs ... and contynued

seased of the said 20 acres as of fee, as tenants at will, by

copy of Court Roll" now "Thomas Knyvett, Esq. ... of late

claimed 10 acres of the said 20 acres to be the demeanes of the

said manor." Knyvett (i.) answers, "The said lond ys and have

been tyme out of mynde parcell of the demeanes of the moytie of

the said manor of Cromwell." (ii.) Denies that "the premises

have been used to be dymytted or be dymittable by copie of Court

Roll for term of lyfe or lyves as in fee"; on the contrary "yt

may appear that the same have been letten by term of yeres."

[515] In 1548 an Act was passed "for the assurance to the

tenants of graunts and leases made for the Duke of Somerset's

demesne lands." It begins, "Whereas of truth noe custom or usage

can or maye by the lawes of this realm be annexed or knytt to

any meases, lands, tenements, or hereditaments letten by copye

of Court Roll ... albeyt those words 'secundum consuetudinem

manerii,' be rehearsed and expressed in the saide Court Rolle or

coppie had or made, except that the same meases, lands,

tenements, or other hereditaments, so letten be of olde

customarie or coppieholde land, and have byn used by all the

tyme whereof memory of man is not to the contrary to be letten

or demysed by copie of court roll."

The significance of custom is shown in other ways as well. In the

numerous petitions in Chancery addressed by copyholders their demand is

constantly for a recital or confirmation of manorial customs, and the

same line is taken in the fewer cases which come before the Courts of

Common Law. Tenants who claim an estate of inheritance and a fixed fine

on admission refuse in a body to show their copies to the surveyors,

presumably for fear that, if they do, some excuse may be made to upset

the custom.[516] Tenants will perjure themselves as to the nature of the

custom of their manor in order to be thought to have estates of

inheritance. In the days when copyholders (if they exist at all) are

still very few and villeins many, men who are really villeins of St.

Peter's of Exeter come forward and swear falsely that they hold in

socage, "intending all to say that they hold and ought to hold _de

stipite in stipitem_, Anglice stock after stock";[517] but the falsehood

is exposed, and they are punished with a fine of 30s. The copyhold

tenants on the Northumbrian manor of Amble claim in the sixteenth

century that manorial custom requires that the next of kin of the whole

blood shall succeed his father, and that the fines shall be limited to

two years' rent. But the surveyors repudiate their claim, remarking that

"we cannot find that they have any such estate of inheritance."[518]

Elsewhere the copyholders are more fortunate, and succeed in inducing

the manorial authorities themselves to make formal admission of the

custom, or in proving its existence to the satisfaction of the courts.

In 1567 the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral, and the one

hundred and fifty-eight copyhold tenants on their manor of Crondal,

enter into a solemn covenant and bargain--may we not call it a

"collective bargain"?--whereby it is agreed that fixed rents, fixed

fines, and copyholds of inheritance, "shall be from henceforth for ever

accepted, reputed, deamed, and taken to be vearye trewe, just, certaine,

and auncient customs, rights, dewtyes, and useages, between the Lorde

and the Customarye tenants ...; and shall from henceforth stand,

contynewe, remayne, and be of perfect force and strength to conclude and

bynde the said Deane and Chapiter, their successors and assignees of the

said mannour and hundred and everye parte thereof for ever."[519] The

tenants at Elswick[520] go to law with the lord of the manor on the

question of the nature of their estates, and, on the records of a custom

requiring the admission of a son on his father's death being produced,

the custom is confirmed by the court. Even the Government of Elizabeth,

favourable as it was to the small man, would not intervene without first

being informed of the nature of the custom. When a tenant appeals to

them for protection, they refer the matter to the local justices, with a

request to "certifie their opinions of the poor man's right."[521] No

doubt once the Courts begin to interfere with the internal business of a

manor they tend to break down some of the peculiarities of local custom,

and to set up a general pattern of copyhold tenure by ruling out certain

customs as "unreasonable." Copyholders for life may not cut down

timber,[522] though perhaps copyholders of inheritance may. Two and a

half years' rent is held by the reign of Charles I. to be an

unreasonable fine, one and a half years' to be reasonable, and the heir

shall not forfeit his copyhold if he tenders such a sum when he demands

admission.[523] But the definition of what is meant by "unreasonable"

has been going on from that day to this, and is perhaps not yet

completed. In our period it was only just beginning. At any rate we

shall not be far wrong if we say that, speaking broadly, the crucial

question is always whether the custom makes it easy for lords to get rid

of tenants or whether it makes it difficult. If an ancient custom gives

the lord a free hand, he has little trouble in getting his way. If it

restricts him, the courts are likely to enforce the restriction, and

though the lord still has, of course, the option of extra-legal action

by way of persuasion, cajolery, or intimidation, the tenants are likely

to be protected by the law.

[516] See pp. 122-123.

[517] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 3218, p. 74. Inquisition of

February 20, 1308.

[518] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v. p. 282.

[519] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), Part I. p. 177.

[520] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii.

[521] _Acts of the Privy Council_, vol. xiii. pp. 91?-92, 1581.

The justices are to decide "if they thinke it agreeable with

equite and justice that the poore man should be put in

possession of the said landes."

[522] Croke's _Reports_, vol. iii., Trin. 4 Caroli, Rot. dcciv.

case 7. Custom that copyholder for life may cut down trees

pronounced "a void and unreasonable custom and not allowable by

law. For it is the destruction of the inheritance and against

the nature of a copyholder for life. But peradventure there may

be such a custom for a copyholder of inheritance."

[523] _Ibid._, vol. iii., p. 198, case 8, Hill, 5 Car., Rot.

125: "The question was whether a lord of a mannor may assess two

years and a half value of copyhold land according to racked rent

for a fine upon surrender and admittance, and for non-payment

enter for forfeiture. And all the Court conceived that one year

and a half of rent improved is high enough; and the defendant

assessing two years and a half it is unreasonable, and therefore

the plaintiff might well refuse the payment thereof." _Ibid._,

vol. i. p. 779, case 13, takes the rule that unreasonable fines

need not be paid back to 1600 ("It was holden _per curiam_ that

if the lord demands an unreasonable fine of his coppyholder

where the fine is uncertain, if he denies it, it is not any

forfeiture of his copyhold"), but his judgment does not say how

many years' rent is a reasonable fine. The _Calendar of Chancery

Proceedings, temp._ Eliz., is full of petitions from tenants

asking the court to declare fines excessive. The rule that a

fine must not exceed two years' rent does not appear to have

been accepted as binding till 1781 (_Grant v. Ashe, Douglas

Reports_, 722?-723). But it is plain from the cases cited above

that by 1600 it was recognised that some fines were

unreasonable, and by 1630 that a reasonable fine should not

exceed one and a half years' rent. The fact that the Chancery

intervened to protect the equitable interests of copyholders

earlier than the Common Law Courts leads one to suspect that

there must be earlier cases than these of the Courts declaring

fines unreasonable. But I have not found them.

The dependence of copyhold upon manorial custom offers an explanation of

the fact that the changes of the sixteenth century displaced

copyholders, although the courts would intervene when a custom which

gave them security was proved to exist. The most important questions

with regard to the custom which determined the copyholders' position

were two: first, whether he had by it an estate of inheritance, or

merely an estate for years, for life, or for lives; second, whether his

payments were fixed or unalterable, or whether they could be increased

at the will of the lord. If it was not an estate of inheritance his

holding returned fairly frequently into the hands of the manorial

authorities, who could either renew it on the old terms, or lease it at

an increased rent, or amalgamate it with a large farm. In the second

case, where payments were variable, lords could force a tenant to throw

up his land by placing a prohibitive burden upon it. The only way of

ascertaining with accuracy the real position of copyholders in our

period would be to show the relative proportions in which these four

arrangements are found upon each of many hundred manors. And this we

cannot yet do. The figures published by Dr. Savine[524] suggest that

manors on which copyholders possessed an estate of inheritance, and

those where they did not, were about equal in number, while manors on

which the fines were uncertain predominated over those on which they

were fixed in a proportion of more than two to one. Since it would seem

that the ability of the lord to demand what fine he pleased could be

used as a means of excluding a successor even when the copy was not

merely for life or lives but from father to son, his investigations

suggest that the copyholders' tenure was more often insecure than not.

[524] _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xix.

To the examples which he has collected one may perhaps add certain

others, inadequate though they are in point of quantity. Taking

twenty-one[525] manors in the years 1568?-1573, of which three are in

Somersetshire, one in Devonshire, and seventeen in Wiltshire, one finds

that on only one out of the whole number was the copyholders' estate one

of inheritance. On one manor copies were granted for four lives or

less--it is expressly stated that they are not to be granted for

more--and on nineteen they are granted for three lives or less. On one

manor (that where the copyholders had estates of inheritance) the fine

was fixed by custom at a sum which is not stated, but which could not be

increased. On the remaining twenty the fine was a variable one, the

general formula being that land shall be given "for such fines as buyers

can fix by bargaining with the lord or his officers, both in possession

and in reversion," which means that they were to be fixed by the

higgling of the market. Turning next to two manors on the Welsh[526]

Border, which were in possession of the Crown, one is told that in the

reign of Elizabeth the royal officers granted the tenants leases for

years, renewable at the will of the tenant, and fixed the fine at two

years' rent, thus giving them what was virtually an estate of

inheritance. It is possible, however, that the Crown tenants received

more favourable treatment than did those on manors which were in

private hands. From Northumberland, again, there is a good deal of

evidence which it is difficult to summarise. Coke stated that "the

customary tenants upon the borders of Scotland ... are mere tenants at

will, and though they keep their customs inviolate, yet the lord might,

sans controll, evict them."[527] At the beginning of the seventeenth

century an order in Chancery ruled that none of the tenants of Lady

Cumberland,[528] who paid a fine on the death of lord and tenant, could

have an estate of inheritance; and we have clear evidence that the fines

paid by the copyhold tenants of the Earl of Northumberland[529]

increased very considerably in the course of the sixteenth century. On

the other hand such insecurity was not universal. A common rule on the

Northumbrian border seems to have given a copyhold for life, with a

tenant right of renewal to the heir, provided that a constant custom of

renewal could be proved.[530] On the Crown estates in the reign of

Elizabeth fines were fixed on conditions which varied from place to

place; sometimes they were at discretion, sometimes one year's rent,

sometimes two years' rent; and in 1609 the tenants of twelve

Tynemouthshire manors got the Courts to confirm a custom limiting their

fine to a definite sum, on six of them to £2 on the admission of a

descendant, and £4 on alienation, and on the remaining six to one year's

rent in the former case and two years' rent in the latter.[531] On

eleven out of thirteen manors in Norfolk[532] and Suffolk the fines are

uncertain; on one, Wighton, they are said to have been fixed at 4s. per

acre "by the space of 100 years at least"; on one, Aldeburgh, there is a

curious distinction between the fines paid for land "in the fields,"

which are at the will of the lord, and the fines paid for cottage

tenements, which are fixed at 2s. when the site is built upon and 1s.

when the site is not covered. Elsewhere when the fine is fixed the

ordinary payment seems to be usually two years' rent on descent, with

sometimes a small addition, sometimes a small deduction, when the

tenement is alienated during the tenant's life. Estates of inheritance

and fixed fines do not necessarily go together. The general situation on

the small number of manors for which information has been obtained is

set out below.[533] Table I relates to duration of tenancies, Table II

to the character of admission fines. In each table, line (_a_) gives Dr.

Savine's figures, line (_b_) our own, line (_c_) the total of both

together.

TABLE XIII

DURATION OF TENURE

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

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

|(_a_) 82| 25 | 17 | 40 | ... |

|(_b_) 60| 22 | 2 | 33 | 3 |

|(_c_) 142| 47 | 19 | 73 | 3 |

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

CHARACTER OF FINES

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

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

|(_a_) 86| 28 | 58 | ... |

|(_b_) 61| 25 | 35 | 1 |

|(_c_) 147| 53 | 93 | 1 |

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

[525] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_. The

twenty-one manors are as follows: Washerne, South Newton, North

Ugford, Brudecombe, Foughlestone, Chalke, Albedeston, Chilmerke

and Rugge, Staunton, Westoverton, Remesbury, Stockton,

Dichampton, Berwick St. John, Wyley, North Newton, Byshopeston

(all in Wilts), Donyett, Chedseye, South Brent (all in

Somerset), and Paynton in Devonshire. Estates of inheritance are

found at Byshopeston, and also fixed fines. At Paynton copies

are granted for 4 lives or less. The common formula for fines

runs: "Pro talibus finibus ut emptores et captores cum domino et

officiariis suis concordare vel barganizare possunt tam de terra

in possessione quam in reversione."

[526] MSS. Transcript in Wrexham Free Library by A.N. Palmer, of

"The Presentment and Verdict for the Manor of Hewlington," 1620

(in which the proceedings in the reign of Elizabeth are

recorded), and "The Surveys of the Town and Liberty of Holt,"

1620. At Hewlington it is stated that the Crown Commissioners

made an arrangement with the tenants "that if the said tenants

would relinquish these said pretended estates, revive the said

decayed rents, and pay two yeres Rent of the landes to the late

Queen for a fine, that then the said tenants and their heirs and

assignes should have leases granted them for fortie years, and

so from fortie years to fortie years in perpetuity." It is not

expressly stated that the same arrangement was made at Holt, but

it is to be inferred from the context that it was.

[527] Coke, _The Complete Copyholder_.

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

[529] See below, pp. 305?-306.

[530] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii. pp. 238?-239.

[531] _Ibid._ For conditions on the Crown estates under

Elizabeth see _S. P. D. Eliz._, vol. xii. pp. 69?-70: "Abstract

of the Commission to the lord Chancellor ... for letting the

queen's lands and tenements in Northumberland within 20 miles of

the border and in the seigniories of Middleham and Richmond,

Yorkshire and Barnard Castle, Bishopric of Durham," June 24,

1565.

[532] The manors are West Lexham (Holkham MSS., West Lexham, No.

87, Map), Sparham (_ibid._, Sparham Bdle., No. 5), East Dereham

(R.O. Parliamentary Surveys, Norfolk, No. 1), Wighton (R.O.

Special Commissions, Duchy of Lancs., No. 839), Stockton Socon

(R.O. Parliamentary Surveys, Norfolk, No. 14), Aldeburgh (R.O.

_Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts_, vol. clxiii.), Chatesham (R.O.

_ibid._, vol. clxiii.), Dodnash (R.O. _ibid._, vol. clxiii.),

Falkenham (R.O. _ibid._, vol. clxiii.), Stratford iuxta Higham

(R.O. Duchy of Lancaster, Rentals and Surveys, 9/13), St. Edmund

(R.O. Parliamentary Surveys, Suffolk, No. 14), Mettingham

(_Victoria County History_, Suffolk), Mark Soham (_ibid._).

[533] See Appendix II.

It will be seen that the degree of security enjoyed by copyholders

varies very greatly. When the copyhold is one of inheritance, it is

legally complete, unless the tenants incur forfeiture by breaking the

custom. An estate for life with right of renewal is virtually as good as

a copyhold of inheritance. Estates for life or lives are precarious.

Copyholds for years without right of renewal are scarcely

distinguishable from leases. On the whole, when these examples are added

to those of Dr. Savine, it would appear that copyholds for life or lives

were more usual than copyholds of inheritance, while fixed fines were

the exception and variable fines the general rule.

The importance of the predominance of copyholds for lives for the

question of the degree of security enjoyed by the tenant is shown by the

efforts which were made by lords of manors, where copyholders had

estates of inheritance, to persuade them to give up their copies and

take leases instead. It is evident that in this course they encountered

a good deal of opposition. On manors, however, where the copyholds

escheated to the lord at intervals of one, two, or three lives, he could

substitute leases for a regrant of the copies, or throw the holdings

into a large farm, or retain them in his own hands. Though such action

might be thought harsh, it could hardly be prevented by the tenants,

since the lord could always hold the threat of eviction over their

heads. One finds some manors where the striking and exceptional

preponderance of small leaseholders suggests unmistakably that such a

conversion of copyhold to leasehold has taken place,[534] or where the

motive of the alteration is shown by the great rise in rents which has

followed it. One finds others where the struggle between copyhold and

leasehold is going on and is still undecided. In that struggle the

chances are against the copyholders, even though their interest is

protected by the law, for the law is less powerful than ignorance and

fear. How can our peasants, men "very simple and ignorant of their

estates,"[535] enter into the respective merits of copies and leases

with the powers of the manor, armed with professional advice and all

those indefinite but invincible advantages in bargaining which are given

by legal knowledge, social influence, and a long tradition of authority?

It is so easy to get caught in some legal trap. In the reign of Charles

I., the two hundred Crown tenants of the manor of North Wheatley, who

have suffered much in the way of rack-renting from the officers of their

impecunious lord, engage a lawyer to negotiate the renewal of their

leases of the demesne lands. The grant is made to him, as their

attorney; but, to their dismay, they find that he declines to fulfil his

bargain. He has "afterward, contrary to the Trust committed to him,

increased and raised the rent thereof upon the tenants, to his owne

privat benefitt."[536] The tenants of Hewlington succeed, as we have

seen, in inducing the Crown to recognise their estates of inheritance by

granting that their forty years' leases shall be renewable at the will

of the tenants. Then unexpectedly a servant of the Earl of Leicester

purchases one of the townships. The tenants, in an agony of

apprehension, "perceiving that they were like to have their said landes

and tenements after the expiration of their said leases taken from them,

and that they had no remedy by the course of the common law to helpe

themselves, preferred their Bill to be relieved in Equitie." Chancery

comes to their rescue. It decides that the covenant made by the Crown to

the effect that their leases should be renewable at the option of the

holder is binding not only on the Crown, but on all to whom it might

sell the lands in question. But their troubles are not yet finished. It

is one thing to get a judgment, another for the judgment to be carried

out. The purchaser is servant to a great man and can afford to be

dilatory and recalcitrant. We leave these villagers still petitioning

"His Highness and His Honourable Council and Commissioners of Revenue

that when it shall seem good unto them the said tenants may be admitted

to have their leases accordingly."

[534] _E.g._ Ormesby in Norfolk, where in 1516 thirty-one

tenants holding "in farm" formed the whole landholding

population (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 22, No.

18). For a great rise in rents following a probable substitution

of leases for customary tenures, see the case of Lewisham in

Kent. On this manor in the reign of Henry VI. the rent of the

tenants (tenure unspecified) was £8, 11s. 7d., 9 plougshares,

and 6s. 2-1/2d. in the abbot's hand (R.O. Rentals and Surveys,

Gen. Ser., Roll 361). In 1621 it was £23, 1s. 6-1/2d. (R.O.

_Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipt_, vol. clxxiv., fol. 1?34). In the

reign of James I. we have full details. The rent of the free

tenants was £17, 12s. 10-1/2d.; that of the tenants at will 9d.;

that of tenants "per dimissionem" (_i.e._ lease-holders) £72,

9s. 8-1/2d. (R.O. _Misc. Bks. Aug. Off._, vol. ccccxiv., f.

33?34). It is unfortunate that we are not told how the bulk of

the tenants held at the two earlier dates. But is it

unreasonable to say that they were probably customary tenants,

and that the introduction of leases was followed by a great rise

in rents?

[535] Survey of Town and Liberty of Holt, MS. transcript in

Wrexham Free Library.

[536] _S. P. D._, ch. i. vol. cli., No. 38. (See Appendix I.,

No. iv.)

It is so easy to be intimidated by the fear of aggravating your

misfortunes. When an agent frightens some tenants by telling them the

unfavourable decision of the Court of Chancery as to the tenant right of

the copyholders on a neighbouring estate, do they answer, as they

should, that manorial customs vary, and that they will see what the

Courts say about their own? No, they make "Humble suit that your

lordship will be pleased to grant them leases for twenty-one years, and

they will pay, in lieu of their fine, double rent for every farm."[537]

Sometimes they live to repent their bargain. "I have persuaded one John

Wilson of Over-Buston," writes a manorial official to the Earl of

Northumberland, "to deliver me in his copy, and he is content to take a

lease at double rent."[538] A strange chance has left us a letter, in

which this very John Wilson, labouring horribly amid the intricacies of

grammar, expounds through one long, broken-backed sentence, what balm

such "contentment" brings. "To the Right Honourable the Earl of

Northumberland, the humble petition of John Wilson, his wife and 8 poor

children. Humbly complaining showeth ... your petitioner ... that

whereas your said petitioner and his predecessors being ancient tenants

to your honour, holding one tenement on ferme in Upper Bustone, by

virtue of copyhold tenure out of the memory of man, which copies both of

your said poor petitioners' great grandfather, his father's father, and

his own father are yet extant to be seen: and now of late your said

poor petitioner, being under age, helpless and none to do for him, and

forced (God knows) by some of your honour's officers to take a lease and

pay double and treble rent, in so much that your said poor petitioner,

his wife, and 8 poor children is utterly now beggared and overthrown,

unless your worthy good honour will be pleased to take a pitiful

communication thereof, or otherwise your saide poore petitioner, his

wife and poore children knows no other way but of force to give over

your honour's land, by reason of the deare renting thereof, and so be

constrained to go a-begging up and down the countrie."[539] Poor,

patient, stiff-fingered John Wilson, so certain that he has not been

treated fairly, so confident that his lordship cannot have meant him to

be wronged, so easily circumvented by his lordship's brisk officials! He

and his heavy kind are slow to move; but, once roused, they will not

easily be persuaded to go back. It was such as he that, at one time or

another in the sixteenth century, set half the English counties ablaze

with the grievances of the tillers of the soil.

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

[538] _Ibid._, vol. v. p. 211. The rent was raised from 18s. to

36s.

[539] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v. p. 210.

The significance of the predominance of variable fines is very evident

if one turns to examine the economic relations between lords and

copyhold tenants as they stood in the middle of the sixteenth century. A

manor on which there was a large number of customary tenants must have

often seemed from the point of the owner a rather disappointing form of

property, because the first fruits of economic progress tended to pass

into the hands of the tenants. The rents and services due from their

holdings were fixed by custom; meanwhile prices were rising with the

fall in the value of silver, and the result, as is pointed out by

Maitland, was that the economic rent or unearned increment of their

properties was intercepted by the copyholders, instead of being drained,

as under leasehold, into the pocket of the lord.

An explanation of what is meant can best be given by recurring to the

table of rents printed in Chapter III. of Part I. It will be recollected

that on the manors there represented the value of the rents got by the

lords from the customary tenants was often almost stationary. When the

enormous fall in the purchasing power of money is remembered, it is

clear that rentals must sometimes have very greatly depreciated, which

of course meant that the tenants retained the surplus due to economic

progress, a surplus measured by the difference between the "rents of

assize" and the full rack-rent for which the holding could be let if put

up to competition, and amounting sometimes to more than three-quarters

of the latter. At Wilburton, for example (to quote a fresh instance),

according to Maitland,[540] a virgate worth £7 or £8 only pays £1 in

rent. From the competitive rents of the open market the lord was

debarred by the custom of the manor. How could he tap the surplus? He

did so, it may be suggested, either by inducing the tenants to exchange

their copies for leases, or by raising the fines, when the fines were

not fixed by custom, so as to get in a lump sum what he could not get by

yearly instalments. In that case the tenant's surplus was on paper only;

he was exactly in the position of an investor in a stock of inflated

value, the high nominal interest of which has been capitalised in the

price paid for the shares. The probability that when fines were movable,

they were forced up in the sixteenth century so as to sweep away any

unearned increment accruing to the holders of customary land, is not

only suggested by the bitter denunciations launched against the practice

by contemporaries. It is also indicated by the manorial documents. May

not this be the explanation of what Maitland justly calls "the absurdly

high price" of £1261 paid in the reign of James I. by the purchasers of

Wilburton, a manor the yearly value of which was at the time only £33?

The suggestion is confirmed, as far as a few manors are concerned, by

the upward movement of fines revealed by the following table--

FINES PAID ON THREE MANORS IN NORTHUMBERLAND[541]

1567. 1585.

Acklington £57, 3s. 8d. or £3, 3s. 4d. £87, 10s. 0d. or £4, 17s. 2d.

per tenant. per tenant.

High Buston £11, 14s. 0d. or £2, 18s. 6d. £18, 0s. 0d. or £4, 10s. 0d.

per tenant. per tenant.

Birling £43, 7s. 6d. or £4, 6s. 9d. £72, 0s. 0d. or £7, 4s. 0d.

per tenant. per tenant.

FINES PER ACRE PAID ON SIX MANORS[542] IN WILTS AND ONE

IN SOMERSET

1520-39, average fine per acre for each of 42 tenants 1s. 3d.

1540-49, " " " 28 " 2s. 11d.

1550-59, " " " 36 " 5s. 6d.

1560-69, " " " 29 " 11s. 0d.

[540] Maitland, _English Historical Review_, vol, ix., "The

History of a Cambridgeshire Manor."

[541] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v.

[542] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_. The manors

are South Newton, Washerne, Donnington, Winterbourne Basset,

Estoverton and Phipheld, Byshopeston (all Wilts), and South

Brent and Huish (Somerset).

The figures show a steady upward movement during the third and fourth

decades of the century of a little over 100 per cent., a rather less

rapid rise between 1549 and 1559, and another rise of 100 per cent.

between 1559 and 1569. They are of course too small to be the basis of a

wide generalisation, but perhaps they may be held to offer some

documentary confirmation of a grievance which bulks large in the

literature of the period. The elasticity of fines at any rate corrects

the impression which would be formed of the tenants' position from

looking only at the comparatively stationary rents. The same tendency is

suggested by the details of individual copies. It was a not uncommon

practice for a tenant who was in possession and had an estate for life

to buy at a later date the right of his heir to succeed him. When this

was done we have an opportunity of comparing the fines paid at different

periods, and the complaints of contemporaries about unreasonable and

excessive fines become intelligible. This may be illustrated by a few

extreme instances taken from the manors of Estoverton and Donnington in

Wiltshire, and of South Brent in Somersetshire.

Fine for Copy. Fine for Reversion.

1. 6/8 (1537) £5 (1563)

2. 40/? " £13, 6s. 8d. (1566)

3. 54/4 " £23 (1561)

4. 60/? " £30 (1565)

5. 20/? " £10 (1561)

6. 20/? (1529) £40 (1563)

7. 33/4 (1542) £20 (1565)

8. 66/8 (1522) £20 (1563)

9. 13/4 (1516) £13, 6s. 8d. (1563)

10. 40/? (1513) £40 (1565)

11. 46/8 (1531) £20 (1563)

12. 6/8 (1545) £20 (1565)

13. 13/4 (1522) £5, 6s. 8d. (1558)

14. £9 (1532) £12 (1557)

Though these are extreme cases, a considerable rise is the rule and not

the exception. The advantage of the fixed rent is in fact neutralised

by the movable fine. Such figures give point to Crowley's outbursts,

"They take our houses over our heads; they buye our groundes out of

handes, they reyse our rents, they levy great, yea unreasonable

fines."[543] It is not surprising that the programme[544] of agrarian

reform put forward by the Yorkshire insurgents in 1536, and by the

rebels under Ket in 1549, should have contained a demand for copyhold

lands "to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable sum

of money." It is not surprising that the Court of Chancery[545] should

have been bombarded with petitions to declare or enforce customs

limiting the demands which a lord might make of an incoming tenant. It

is perhaps more surprising that, in those cases where the fine was by

custom uncertain, the rule that a reasonable fine was about two years'

rent should not have been enforced by judges at an earlier date and more

generally than it seems to have been. For in the sixteenth century,

though many old economic ideas are going by the board, public opinion

still clings to the conception that there is a standard of fairness in

economic dealings which exists independently of the impersonal movements

of the market, which honest men can discover, if they please, and which

it is a matter of conscience for public authorities to enforce. Even a

good Protestant who hates the Pope will admit that there is more than a

little in the Canon Law prohibition of usury,[546] and under usury, be

it noted, the plain man includes rack-rents, as well as interest on

capital and exorbitant prices. If to a modern economist the demand for

reasonable fines and rents savours of sentimentality and confusion, he

must logically condemn not only the peasants and their champions, but

the statesmen; not only Ket and Hales and More and Latimer, but almost

every member of every Elizabethan Privy Council. After all, all the

precedents are on the side of an attempt to enforce a standard which

shall be independent of the result which might be reached by higgling

between this landlord and that tenant. Prices are fixed, wages are

fixed, the rate of interest is fixed, though the money market is

becoming more and more elusive, more and more critical of old-fashioned

attempts at interference; the fines which freeholders must pay on

admission have been fixed for centuries. Now that copyhold has got the

protection of the Courts, it is not unnatural that tenants should ask

the State to do with regard to the bargain most affecting them what it

already does for bargains of nearly every other kind. It is not

unnatural that, even when the fine is not settled by custom at a

definite sum, they should demand nevertheless that the Courts should

sanction that establishment of a "common rule," which is the ideal of

the economically weak in all ages.

[543] E. E. T. S., Crowley, _The Way to Wealth_.

[544] See below, pp. 334-337.

[545] _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery in the Reign of

Edward VI._ Bills to establish a fine certain on admission and

alienation, to get protection against exorbitant fines, &c. are

common. For popular complaints see E. E. T. S., _A Supplication

of the Poore Commons_: "These extortioners have so improved

theyr lands that they make of a xls. fyne xl. pounds," &c. For

an actual instance see the following case. The tenants of

Austenfield claim "that of ancient time all the customary

tenants of the said manor of Austenfield were finable at fines

certain, until of late years the lords moved by covetousness, by

troubling and vexing their copyholders, drove many of them, for

the buying of their quietness, to be at fines uncertain"

(William Salt Collection, vol. ix. Chancery Proceedings. Bdle.

12, No. 70).

[546] Th. Wilson, _A Discourse upon Usurie_, 1584: "And

therefore I would not have men altogether to be enemies to the

Canon Lawe, and to condemn everything there written, because the

Pope was author of them.... Naie, I will saie plainlie that

there be some such lawes made by the Pope as be right godlie,

saie others what they list."

Yet we shall miss the full significance of the movement which we have

examined, if we take their demands without analysis, and do not look at

the other side of the picture. There was much to be said on the side of

the manorial authorities, harsh as they often were. The criticism which

Norden,[547] with a surveyor's experience, makes upon the outcry against

the upward movement of fines, by pointing out that the whole scale of

prices and payments has been shifted by the depreciation in the value of

money, is perfectly justified. For money had depreciated, depreciated

enormously; and landlords, who were faced with swiftly rising prices on

the one hand and fixed freehold and copyhold rents on the other, were in

a cleft stick from which it is not easy to blame them for extricating

themselves as best they could. The truth is that if we content ourselves

with the supposition of an access of exceptional unscrupulousness on the

part of lords of manors which was favoured by contemporaries, we shall

misread the situation. The real facts were much more complex, much more

serious, much more interesting. A large impersonal cause, the flooding

of Europe with American silver, upsets all traditional standards of

payment. The first brunt is borne by those whose incomes are fixed, or

relatively fixed, the owners of landed property, and the wage-earning

classes. But all over the country thousands of new bargains are being

struck as leases fall in and copies are renewed. Each fresh contract is

the opportunity for a readjustment of relationships, for shifting the

burden from the shoulders where it rested. The wage-earners do this to

some extent, but not successfully; wages do not keep pace with prices.

The landlords do it much more effectively. But there is no mechanical

means of measuring what change is necessary in order to place them and

their tenants in the same position relatively to each other as they were

before. Once customary fines are thrown overboard, there is, unless the

Government interferes, no other standard except the full fine which can

be got in the open market, and, when the custom of the manor allows it

to be demanded, it is demanded. Thus the readjustment, as it were,

overshoots itself, and the economic rent, unearned increment, surplus

value--it is difficult to avoid phrases which modern associations have

made trite--only part of which represents the rise in the price of land

caused by the fall in the value of money, tends, instead of being, as

hitherto, shared between landlord and copyholder, to be transferred _en

bloc_ to the former. It is rarely in modern society that classes are

sufficiently definite and self-contained, rarely that economic changes

are sufficiently catastrophic, for a great shifting of income from one

to the other to be detected. Here we can see it going on before our

eyes. We can note the result. But in this matter the twentieth century

is not in a position to be critical of the sixteenth.

[547] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, Book I.: "_Surveyor._

The tennant leaveth commonly one either in right of inheritance,

or by surrender, to succeed him, and he by custome of the manor

is to be accepted tenant, alwaies provided he must agree with

the lord, if the custome of the manor hold not the fine certain

as in few it doth.... _Farmer._ You much mistake it, for I will

show by ancient court rolls that the fine of that which is now

£20 was then but 13s. 4d., and yet will you say they are now as

they were then? _Surveyor._ Yea, and I thinke I erre little in

it. For if you consider the state of things then and now, you

shall find the proportion little differing; for so much are the

prices of things vendible ... now increased as may well be said

to exceed the prices then as much as £20 exceede the 13s. 4d."

We may now sum up this part of our subject. The extreme lucrativeness of

sheep-farming, and the depreciation in the value of money, offered an

incentive to landlords to make the most profitable use which they could

of their property by amalgamating small holdings into large leasehold

farms, which were used mainly, though not entirely, for pasture. To

carry out this new policy they had to get rid of the small tenants. When

the tenants held at will, or were lessees for a short term of years,

lords could do this without difficulty. When they were copyholders for

one life or more, they could do it more slowly; but still they could do

it in time. When they were copyholders with an estate of inheritance,

lords had only two alternatives--to induce them to accept leases, or to

raise the fines for admission. The latter course enabled them to offer

the tenants the alternative of surrendering their holdings or paying the

full competitive price which could be got for them. And thus it caused

an almost revolutionary deterioration in their position. Hitherto the

custom of the manor had been a dyke which protected them against the

downward pressure of competition, and behind which they built up their

prosperity. Now the unearned increment was transferred from tenant to

landlord by the simple process of capitalising it in the fine demanded

on entry. The interest of the customary tenant, therefore, virtually

depreciated to the level of that of a leaseholder. The interest of the

manorial lord appreciated to the full and effective ownership of all

surpluses arising between the grant of one copy and the grant of the

next. Thus the differences in the degree of security enjoyed by

copyholders are to be explained by differences in manorial customs. Whom

custom helps the law helps; who by custom are without protection, are

without protection from the law, except in so far as it gradually builds

up a doctrine as to what is reasonable. Long after villeinage has

disappeared, copyholders still bear traces of having sprung from a class

of whom the law was reluctant to take cognizance, traces of being

nurtured in a "villein nest."

PART III

THE OUTCOME OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION

"Lords spiritual and temporal, have it in your mind This

world as it waveth, and to your tenants be kind."

--_The Proclamation of the Commons_, Gairdner,

_Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._,

xii. I. 163.

"We must needs fight it out, or els be brought to the lyke

slavery that the Frenchmen are in.... Better yt were therefore

for us to dye like men, than after so great misery in youth to

dye more miserably in age."--E. E. T. S., Crowley, _The Way to

Wealth_.

_Doctor._ "On my faithe youe trouble youreselves ... youe that

be justices of everie countrie ... in sittinge upon commissions

almost wekely."

_Knight._ "Surely it is so, yet the Kinge must be served and

the commonwealth. For God and the Kinge hathe not sent us the

poore lyving we have, but to doe services therefore amonge our

neighbours abroad."--_The Commonweal of this Realm of England._

"We have good Statutes made for the Commonwealth, as touching

commoners and inclosers, many meetings and sessions; but in the

end of the matter there cometh nothing forth."--Latimer, _First

Sermon preached before King Edward VI._, March 8, 1549.

CHAPTER I

THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM AND THE STATE

(a) _The Political and Social Importance of the Peasantry_

The changes which have been described in the organisation of agriculture

created problems which were less absorbing than those arising out of the

religious reformation and the relation of England to continental powers.

When we turn over the elaborate economic legislation of the reign of

Elizabeth, with its attempts to promote industry, to define class

relationships, and to regulate with sublime optimism almost every

contract which one man can make with another, we are tempted at first to

see statesmen giving sleepless nights to the solution of economic

problems, and to think of a modern bureaucratic state using the

resources of scientific administration to pursue a deliberate and

clearly conceived economic policy. But this is both to exaggerate the

importance which economic questions occupied in the minds of the

governing aristocracies of the age, and to credit them with a foresight

which they did not possess. If they are to be called mercantilists, in

England, at any rate, they wear their mercantilism with a difference; as

a vague habit of mind, not as a reasoned system of economic doctrines.

Their administrative optimism is the optimism of innocence as much as of

omnipotence; the fruit of a self-confidence which, in the name of the

public interests, will prop a falling trade, or cut down a flourishing

one, with a bland naïveté unperturbed by the hesitations which perplex

even the most courageous of modern protectionists. Though in several

departments of life--in commercial policy, in the regulation of the wage

contract, in the relief of distress--the main lines drawn by Elizabethan

statesmen will stand for two centuries, much of their legislation is

very rough and ready; much of it again is undertaken after generations

of dilatory experiments; much of it is devoid of any originality, and is

a mere reproduction on a national scale of the practice of individual

localities, a reproduction which sometimes does less than justice to the

original. If it is popular, it is popular because it tells men to do

what most decent men have been doing for a long time already, and when

it tells them to do something else it is carried out only with great

difficulty. If it is permanent, it is permanent not because

Parliamentary draughtsmen possess any great skill or foresight, but

because, before the rise of modern industry, all social relationships

have a great amount of permanence. Though there was much interesting

speculation on economic matters, economic rationalism was as a practical

force almost negligible; and since the only instrument through which it

could have achieved influence was the monarchy, its lack of influence

was perhaps politically fortunate. Sixteenth century England was too

busy getting the State on to its feet to produce a Colbert. Lath and

plaster Colberts built their card castles on the Council table of James

and Charles, and all was in train for the sage paternal monarchy which

was the ideal of Bacon. But a wind blew from strange regions beyond

their ken, and they were scattered before they could do much either for

good or evil, leaving, as they fled, a cloud of dark suspicion round all

those who would be wiser in the art of Government than their neighbours,

from which, in the lapse of three centuries, the expert has hardly

emerged. In spite of mercantilism, economic questions never became in

England the pre-occupation of specialists. In spite of the genuine

indignation roused by the sufferings of the weaker classes in society,

questions affecting them were questions which statesmen did not handle

for their own sake, but only in so far as they forced themselves into

the circle of political interests by cutting across the order, or

military defence, or financial system, of the country. Apart from these

high matters of policy most members of the governing classes were

inclined to answer petitions on the subject of economic grievances as

Paget did to Somerset: Why can't you let it alone? "What a good year ...

is victuals so dear in England and nowhere else? If they and their

fathers before them have lived quietly these sixty years, pastures being

enclosed, the most part of these rufflers have least cause to

complain."[548]

[548] Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_. Sir William Paget to

the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549.

The subordinate place occupied by economic questions during our period

makes the attention which was given to the results of pasture-farming

all the more remarkable. Though to the statesmanship of the sixteenth

century the agrarian problem was one of the second order, it was, at any

rate till the accession of Elizabeth, the most serious of its own class,

and it was important enough to occupy Governments at intervals for over

a century and a half. The first Statute against depopulation was passed

in 1489;[549] an abortive Bill was introduced into the House of Commons

in 1656;[550] and between the two lies a series of seven Royal

Commissions, twelve Statutes, and a considerable number of Proclamations

dealing with one aspect or another of the enclosing movement, as well as

numerous decisions on particular cases by the Privy Council, the Court

of Star Chamber, and the Court of Requests. This reaction of the new

agrarian developments upon public policy is interesting in several ways.

It illustrates the growth of new classes and forms of social

organisation, the methods and defects of sixteenth century

administration, and the ideas of the period as to the proper functions

of the State in relation to an important set of questions, upon which

political opinion was in some ways nearer to our own than it was to that

of the age following the Civil War. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether

without importance from the point of view of general history. We need

not discuss how far the reaction of some recent historians against the

familiar judgments which contrast Tudor tyranny with the constitutional

revolutions of the seventeenth century as darkness with light, is likely

to be permanent. But it is perhaps safe to say that it is in the sphere

of social policy that their case is seen at its strongest. After all,

tyranny is often the name which one class gives to the protection of

another. To the small copyholder or tenant farmer the merciless

encroachments of his immediate landlord were a more dreaded danger than

the far-off impersonal autocracy of the Crown to which he appealed for

defence. The period in which he suffered most in the sixteenth century

was the interval between the death of the despotic Henry VIII. and the

accession of the despotic Elizabeth. Though the interference of the

Tudor, and--in a feebler fashion--of the Stuart, Governments to protect

the peasantry was neither disinterested nor always effective, its

complete cessation after 1642, and the long line of Enclosure Acts which

follow the revolution of 1688, suggest that, as far as their immediate

economic interests were concerned, the smaller landholders had more to

lose than to gain from a revolution which took power from the Crown to

give it to the squires. The writers[551] who after 1750 turned with a

sigh from the decaying villages which they saw around them, to glorify

the policy of the absolutist Governments of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, were received with the ridicule which awaits all

who set themselves against a strong current of interests and ideas. But

historically they were right. The revolution, which brought

constitutional liberty, brought no power to control the aristocracy who,

for a century and a half, alone knew how such liberty could be

used--that blind, selfish, indomitable, aristocracy of county families,

which made the British Empire and ruined a considerable proportion of

the English nation. From the galleries of their great mansions and the

walls of their old inns their calm, proud faces, set off with an

occasional drunkard, stare down on us with the unshakable assurance of

men who are untroubled by regrets or perplexities, men who have deserved

well of their order and their descendants, and await with confidence an

eternity where preserves will be closer, family settlements stricter,

dependents more respectful, cards more reliable, than in this imperfect

world they well can be. Let them have their due. They opened a door

which later even they could not close. They fostered a tree which even

they could not cut down. But neither let us forget that to the poorer

classes its fruits were thorns and briars, loss of their little

properties, loss of economic independence, the hot fit of the hateful

Speenhamland policy, the cold fit of the more hateful workhouse

system.[552] Those who would understand the social forces of modern

England must realise that long disillusionment. Even in the seventeenth

century there are whisperings of it. At the end of the Civil War there

were men who were dimly conscious that the freedom for which they had

fought involved economic, as well as political and ecclesiastical,

changes. "Wee the poor impoverisht commoners," wrote the leaders of a

little band of agrarian reformers to the Council of War in 1649, "claim

freedom in the common lands by vertue of this conquest over the King,

which is gotten by our joynt consent.... If this freedom be not granted,

wee that are the poor commoners are in a worse case than we were in the

King's day."[553] But from the reign of Henry VII. to the Civil War

official opinion was as generally in favour of protecting the peasantry

against the ruinous effects of agrarian innovations, as it was on the

side of leaving the landlords free to work their will in the two

centuries which succeeded. We must explain this state of mind, for it

certainly needs explanation; and this will necessitate our looking at

the movements of the peasants and at their place in the State. We must

estimate how far it was effective in practice; and to do this we must

say a few words about the administrative machinery of the Tudors and of

the first two Stuarts.

[549] 4 Henry VII., c. 19.

[550] Journal of House of Commons, December 19, 1656. See

Leonard, _Trans. Royal Hist. Society_, vol. xix.

[551] _e.g._ Price, _Observations on Reversionary Payments_,

1773. See Levy, _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 41.

[552] The general adoption of the "Test Workhouse" for the

able-bodied, which dates from the Poor Law Reform Act of 1884,

was the direct result of a one-sided reaction against the

disastrous Speenhamland policy.

[553] Camden Society, _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii. p. 217.

In almost all ages the first task of Governments is the preservation of

order. Though the economic ideas of the sixteenth century were very

different from those of the nineteenth, one of the reasons which made it

impossible for the statesmen of the period to leave the land question

altogether alone was the same as that which induced their successors to

deal with Irish land in 1870 and 1881. It was that agrarian discontent

created a permanent supply of inflammable material, which a spark might

turn into a conflagration. The years between 1500 and 1650 are the last

great age of the peasant uprisings which, in all countries of Western

Europe except France and Ireland, are incredible to-day as a romance of

giants, and hardly a generation in that stormy period elapsed without

one. Sometimes nothing more happened than a collision of justices and

gentry with angry mobs who were tearing down hedges and restoring common

to common again under mysterious figures who flit across the darkening

country-side with weapons in their hands and the eternal insurrection of

the New Testament on their lips--Jack o' the Style, Pyrce Plowman, and

that prophetic Captain Pouch, who "was sent of God to satisfie all

degrees whatsoever, and in this present work was directed by the Lord of

Heaven."[554] Sometimes the discontent swelled to a small civil war, as

it did in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, and in the eastern and

southern counties in 1549. The Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of

Grace were, it is true, mainly motived by discontent with the attack on

the abbeys. But the explanation of their objects given by those

insurgents who were cross-examined by the Government makes it difficult

to agree with Professor Gay that only an insignificant part was played

in these movements by agrarian discontent. The truth is that we ought to

distinguish between the objects of different sections. The rebels of

1536 were not a class, but almost the whole society of northern England,

which suddenly rolls forward with all its members, spirituality and

laity, peasants and peers, in fervent motion together. The weaker side

of these great conservative demonstrations was that, though all classes

were united against the régime typified by Cromwell, all classes were

not moved to the same degree by the same grievances. Even when the old

religion was the cause that took the gentry into the field, the humbler

rebels were brought out as much by hatred of agrarian as of religious

innovations. The men of Lincolnshire marched under a banner embroidered

with a ploughshare, and laggards were spurred forward with the cry "What

will ye do? Shall we go home and keep sheep?"[555] In Cumberland the

four Captains of Penrith--Faith, Poverty, Pity, and Charity--marched in

solemn procession with drawn swords round Burgh Church, and then, having

heard Mass, led their followers, with the blessing of the vicar, on a

crusade to put an end to gentlemen and to withhold rents and fines.[556]

In the North generally the arrival of Aske's messengers was a signal for

the wholesale plucking down of new enclosures; a programme of agrarian

reform was included in the demands put forward at Doncaster; and Aske

himself told the Government at his examination that the practice of

letting out farms over the heads of poor tenants was one of the causes

of the rising.[557] A well-informed officer of State like Sir William

Paget seems to have thought that even the rebellion which took place in

Devonshire and Somersetshire in 1549, the causes of which were mainly

ecclesiastical, was partly also agrarian.[558] In that year, indeed,

nearly the whole of the southern counties, beginning in May with

Hertfordshire, from Norfolk in the east to Hampshire in the south and

Worcester in the west, were driven into riot by disappointment with the

ineffective Royal Commission appointed in the preceding year. In 1550

there were disturbances in Kent, and the Government anticipated their

appearance in Essex. In 1552 the Buckinghamshire peasants rose on

account of high rents and high prices. In 1554 Wyatt's[559] adherents

demanded that all pasture lands which had forcibly been seized by

persons in power should be restored. In 1569 an armed band pulled down

enclosures near Chinley[560] in Derbyshire, threatened to kill the

encloser, and rescued by force those of their number who were arrested.

Twenty-six years later, at a time of unusually high prices, even the

peasantry of Oxfordshire,[561] that most imperturbable of English

counties, planned "to knock down the gentlemen and rich men who made

corn so dear, and who took the commons." In 1607 in the Midlands, where

in the preceding decade enclosure and depopulation had created a

situation as acute as that of half a century before, there was a riot

which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission.

[554] For Captain Pouch see Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New

Series, vol. xviii. For the other names Cooper, _Annals of

Cambridge_, vol. ii. p. 40.

[555] Gairdner, _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._, vol. xii.,

Part I., 70, 1537. Examination of R. Leedes: "The rebels ...

were half inclined to go home. But Ralph Green ... encouraged

them to go forward, saying, 'God's blood, sirs, what will ye now

do? Shall we go home and keep sheep? Nay, by God's body, yet had

I rather be hanged,'" and _ibid._: "The said Trotter says the

meaning of the plough borne in the banner was the encouraging of

the husbandman."

[556] _Ibid._, vol. xii., Part I., 687, 1537. Confession of

Barnarde Townleye, Clerk: "The beginners of the insurrection in

Cumberland were the 4 captains of Penrith; Faith, Poverty, Pity

and Charity, as the Vicar of Burgh proclaimed them at each

meeting.... Conjectures that the intent was to destroy the

gentlemen, that none should pay ingressums to his landlord, and

little or no rent or tithe"; also _ibid._, Examination of Sir

Robert Thompson, Vicar of Burgh: "On the Wednesday and Thursday

the 4 captains followed examinand in procession with their

swords drawn, and examinand said mass, which they called the

Captains' mass."

[557] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xii., Part I.,

687: "They of Kirkby Stephen plucked down the new intacks of

enclosures, and sent to other Parishes to do the like, which was

done at Burgh, 28th January." For the Doncaster programme see

below, p. 334. Aske said (_L. and P._, vol. xii., Part I., p.

901) that the new farmers of monastic estates "let and tavern

out the farms of the same houses to other farmers for lucre."

[558] These particulars are taken from Strype, _Ecclesiastical

Memorials_.

[559] Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii.,

which also gives an account of the Midland riot of 1607.

[560] MSS. in possession of Charles E. Bradshaw Bowles, Esq., of

Wirksworth, for a transcript of which I am indebted to Mr.

Kolthammer. See below, pp. 327?-329.

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

pp. 49?-50.

This was perhaps the last serious agrarian rising which England has

seen. But though henceforward the hatred of the new agrarian régime ran

for the most part underground, it had been burned too deep into the

minds of the people to be lightly forgotten, and more than once its

smouldering embers flickered up in occasional riots. In the first flush

of the army's victory over King and Parliament, when the shattering of

authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, not only the

political, but the economic, ideas of two centuries later burst for a

moment, as in an early spring, into wonderful and premature life. The

programme of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to

express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand

not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a

redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition

of the Veto of the House of Lords, but also "that you would have laid

open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed

only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor."[562] Theoretical

communism, repudiated by some of the Levellers, found its expression in

the agitation of the Diggers, those "true born sons and friends of

England" who, under Everard and Winstanley, set themselves, in the

spirit of an Owenite Community, to convert the waste land at Weybridge

into the New Jerusalem.[563] For to many earnest souls the day of the

Lord seems very near, and Israel must make ready against it, not with

anguish of spirit only, but with spade labour upon the barren earth. The

contrast between the prevalence of organised agrarian revolts in the

middle of the sixteenth century, dragging on in small sporadic

agitations for nearly one hundred years, with their comparative rarity

two hundred years later, when similar causes were at work to produce

them, marks the new grouping of social classes and economic forces which

was going on apace in our period. The intelligence of toiling England,

that for a century now has gone to build up a new civilisation in

factory and mine, in trade union and co-operative store, still lay in

the larger villages, its immemorial home. Discontent travelled across

the enclosing counties as it does to-day in a Welsh mining valley,

outcoursing oppression itself, like Elijah running before Ahab into

Jezreel. "If three or four good fellows would ride in the night with

every man a bell, and cry in every town that they pass, 'To Swaffham! To

Swaffham!' by the morning there would be ten thousand assembled at the

least; and then one bold fellow to stand forth and say, 'Sirs, now we be

here assembled, you know how little favour the gentlemen bear us poor

men.... Let us ... harness ourselves.'"[564] Good fellows and bold were

not wanting. "From that time forward no man could keep his servant at

plough; but every man that could bear a staff went forward."[565] Before

the appearance of almost universal leasehold tenure, standing armies,

and omnipotent aristocratic Parliaments, unrest among the rural

population might cause the Government a not inexpensive campaign, in

which the reluctant militia of yesterday were the enthusiastic rebels of

to-day, and there was not therefore much disparity between the

discipline and equipment of the forces engaged on either side. Both in

the mainly agrarian revolts in Norfolk, and in the mainly religious

revolts in Devonshire, the peasants fell, as they hoped they might, like

men, and it was the arquebuses of the foreign mercenaries which really

decided the struggle. Poor homeless hirelings, what could they know but

to clamour for their pay, and shoot better men than themselves?

[562] The Humble Petition of thousands well affected persons

inhabiting the city of London, Westminster, the Borough of

Southwark, Hamlets, and places adjacent. In Bodleian Pamphlets,

_The Leveller's Petition_, c. 15, 3 Linc. See also Gooch,

_English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_, pp.

139?-226.

[563] Camden Society, _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii. pp. 215?-217.

Winstanley's letter to Lord Fairfax and the Council of War

begins: "That whereas we have begun to dig upon the Commons for

livelihood, and have declared unto your excellency and the whole

world our reasons, which are four. First, from the righteous law

of creation that gives the earth freely to one as well as

another, without respect of persons"; also Gooch, _op. cit._ The

Owenite note may be more than a mere chance. Owen himself stated

("New View of Society"): "Any merit due for the discovery

calculated to effect more substantial and permanent benefit to

mankind than any ever yet contemplated by the human mind belongs

exclusively to John Bellers." Bellers published his _College of

Industry_ in 1696, and may easily have been acquainted with the

story of the Diggers' agitation.

[564] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 8.

[565] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xii., Part I.,

201, Examination of John Halom of Calkehill, yeoman.

To understand the nature of a body at rest it is sometimes advisable to

look at the same body when it is in motion. The agrarian disturbances of

our period possess certain features which are of interest even to those

who are concerned primarily not with social politics, but with economic

organisation. In the first place, they mark the transition from the

feudal revolts of the fifteenth century, based on the union of all

classes in a locality against the central government, to those in which

one class stands against another through the opposition of economic

interests. In the Lincolnshire rebellion and in the Pilgrimage of Grace

the old spirit predominated. In the North of England the new agrarian

régime had not proceeded far enough to sap entirely the ancient bonds

between landlord and tenant, and the plunder of the monastic estates had

not yet set a commercial aristocracy in the seat of the old-fashioned

Catholic landlords. The commons of Westmoreland, who declare that they

will trust no gentlemen with their councils, nevertheless feel

sufficient confidence in Lord Darcy to write to him for his advice as to

how far they will be justified in insisting on reduced admission fines,

and in pulling down "all the intakes yt be noysum for poor men."[566]

Had the Catholic gentry generally been willing to sacrifice the rents

got from pasture-farming, these movements might have found leaders who

would have made them more formidable. As it was, even when hatred of the

religious changes or of some particular piece of legislation, like the

unpopular Statute of Uses, enrolled the gentry with the peasants, as in

Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, the incompatibility of the allies

was obvious, and the presence of the wealthier classes inspired distrust

among the rank and file, who saw in them the authors of their economic

evils, and who, though genuinely concerned at the painful destruction of

the social institutions of the old religion, were fighting mainly for

the maintenance of "old customs and tenant right," fair rents and

security of tenure. In spite of the temporary union of all classes in

1536, the insurgents tended to break up into two camps corresponding

roughly with the division between landlord and tenant. In Lincolnshire,

though the commons were influenced by the gentry so far as to demand the

repeal of the Act of Uses, "not knowing," as a witness said, "what that

Act of Uses meant," they showed their distrust of the upper classes by

refusing to allow them to discuss their future policy apart from the

general body of insurgents, while the extremists clamoured that "they

ought to kill some of the justices; also that if they hanged for this,

they would not leave one gentleman alive in Lincolnshire."[567] At

Richmond all lords and gentlemen were to swear on the mass-book to

maintain the profit of Holy Church, to take nothing of their tenants but

the usual rents, to put down Cromwell and not to go to London, on pain

of death if they refused.[568] For courts have strange arts of

seduction, and though London (thank Heaven) is not England now, it was

still less England then. The rough rhymes that ran through the North

contain the warning of all popular movements against the treachery of

leaders, the sad eternal warning which buoys the sands where so many

high endeavours have gone to wreck. "All commons stick ye together, rise

with no great man till ye know his intent. Keep your harness in your

hands, and ye shall obtain all your purpose in all this North land....

Claim ye old customs and tenant right, to take your farms by a God's

penny, all gressums and heightenings to be laid down. Then may we serve

our sovereign Lord King Henry VIII., God save his noble Grace.

We shall serve our lands' lords in every righteous cause

With horse and harness as custom will demand.

Lords spiritual and temporal have it in your mind

This world as it waveth, and to your tenants be kind.

Adieu, gentle commons, thus make I an end:

Writer of this letter, pray Jesu be his speed;

He shall be your captain, when that ye have need."[569]

[566] _Ibid._, vol. xi., 1080.

[567] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xi., 975.

[568] _Ibid._, vol. xii., Part I., 163.

[569] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xii., Part I.,

163. The Proclamation of the Commons; see also _ibid._, 138, the

manifesto which says, "Ye shall have captains just and true, and

not be stayed by the gentry in no wise."

The temporary solidarity which had drawn all classes into the Pilgrimage

of Grace, though it flickered up for the last time in the feudal revolt

of the northern earls in 1569, was absent altogether from the widespread

agitation of 1549 to 1550. Except in Devonshire and Cornwall, the

disturbances of those years were purely agrarian, a movement of tenants

against landlords. The Eastern rebels were for leaving "as many

gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls";[570] the gentry responded

by rallying to the Government; and both in that country and in

Devonshire the military forces which put down the peasants were led by

the two most notoriously unpopular landlords in England, who had built

up their estates out of confiscated abbey lands, the Earl of Warwick and

Sir William Herbert. In the reign of Henry VII. the problem before

Governments had still been to prevent a great landlord from using his

authority over his tenants to make war on his neighbours or on the

State. Sixty years later it is to prevent tenants in several different

counties from combining against landlords. The landed classes recognise

the new spirit. They denounce the peasants as communists and agitators;

and when they get a free hand, as in the years from 1549 to 1553, they

insist on legislation which will make effective combination impossible.

[570] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, Introduction, p. 8.

The advice of John Walker of Griston.

In the second place, the way in which the agrarian agitations were

conducted is interesting as showing both the comparative prosperity and

independence of the English peasantry, even at a time when the fortunes

of many of them were declining, and the general conceptions of social

expediency held by what was regarded as the most representative part of

the English nation. It would be a mistake to think of the rebels who

joined these revolts as mere unorganised malcontents, with nothing to

lose. There is no resemblance at all, either in personnel or methods,

between the agrarian disturbances of our period and the riots of

starving agricultural labourers who burned ricks under Captain Swing in

the early nineteenth century. The peasants who formed the backbone of

the movements were often well-to-do men, who were fighting to keep their

land with the dreadful tenacity of small proprietors. They had arms and

were accustomed to their use. They had sufficient money to raise common

funds. They included among their number sanguine and pertinacious

litigants who, so far from being disposed to throw up their case at the

hint of the landlord's displeasure, were quite capable of making his

life one long lawsuit. The readiness of a class to make effective the

protection given it by the law in the face of the opposition of powerful

individuals, quenched, alas! too often by ignorance, and timidity, and

generations of dull oppression, is a very good test of its spirit and of

the practical freedom which it enjoys. In the sixteenth century, though

we certainly see many gross cases of intimidation, we also see tenants

appealing to the law courts and to the Government over the heads of

lords of manors. Such appeals are a proof of the helplessness of the

victims which has been commented on above. But they are also a proof of

the persistence and cohesion of some among them. For while in the

absence of oppression they would not have been necessary, in the absence

of a determination to resist oppression they could not have been made.

To enclose was in parts of the country to stir up a hornet's nest. There

was not much obsequiousness about the villagers of Thingden,[571] who

from 1494 to 1538 pursued their landlord through almost every Court in

the Kingdom. The leaders of the popular agitation were often the more

prosperous among the middle-classes. Sanders, the general in the

interminable struggle over the common lands of the city of Coventry

which began in 1460, was a member of the important craft of Dyers, and

had occupied the high civic office of Chamberlain.[572] At Louth[573]

the initiative among the commons was taken by a tailor and a weaver.

Ket[574] himself was a considerable landed proprietor as well as a

tanner.

[571] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Star

Chamber_, and Leadam, _E. H. R._, vol. viii. pp. 684?-696.

[572] _Coventry Leet Book_, edited by M.D. Harris, vol. ii. 510

and _passim_.

[573] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xii., Part I.,

380, The Examination of the Monk late of Louth Park: "Plummer

and one James, a tailor, were the most quick and chiefest rulers

of the company.... Melton, whom they named 'Captain Cobbles,'

was the most chief and busy man among these commoners.... John

Tailor, of Louth, webster, brought out of the house a great

brand of fire, and the commons carried the books into the

market-place."

[574] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 2319, p. 75, Copy of Letters Patent

(28 May, 4 Ed. VI.) granting to Thomas Audeley ... all that

manor called Gunvyles Manor in Norfolk, parcel of the

possessions of the said ... Robert Ket, in consideration "boni,

veri, fidelis, et magnanimi servitii in conflictu versus

innaturales subditos nostros proditores ac nobis rebelles in

Com. nostro Norf.... quorum ... quidam Bobertus Kett existit

capitanus et conductor."

The peasants' agitations took the form both of more or less organised

risings and of sporadic rioting, which aimed at ends varying from place

to place according to the grievances inspired by the varying conditions

of different districts. Everywhere there were the throwing down of

enclosures and the driving of sheep.[575] In Yorkshire the enclosures

which were pulled down seem to have been mainly intakes from the waste,

and in Norfolk and the Midlands enclosures of arable land which had been

converted to pasture. In Warwickshire the Earl of Warwick's park was

demolished, while in Wiltshire, where Sir William Herbert had acquired

the lands of Wilton Abbey, and enclosed a whole village in his new park

at Washerne, the peasants rose and tore down the palings.[576] In the

North generally the bitterest outcry seems to have arisen over the

excessive fines and "gressums" charged for the admission of

copyholders. In Cumberland[577] there was a general strike against the

payment of rents, and almost everywhere there were complaints of the

diminution in the area available for pasturing the beasts of commoners

through the enclosing by landlords of manorial wastes.

[575] Sheep-driving in the sixteenth century was like

cattle-driving in Ireland to-day; see Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry

VIII._, vol. xii., Part I., 201: "When they first went to York,

they drove one Coppyndale's sheep because he fled away, and sold

them again to his deputy for £10," and the behaviour of the

Norfolk rebels in 1549.

[576] Gairdner, _L. and P._, xi., II., 186, and _Rutland MSS._,

p. 36, quoted by Leadam: "There is a great number of the commons

up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir

William Herbert's Park that is about his new house ... they say

they will not have their common grounds to be enclosed and taken

from them."

[577] Gairdner, _L. and P._, xii., I., 362: "Your rents and

others cannot yet be collected."

Though it involves abandoning the order of events, let us illustrate by

a single example[578] the shape assumed by agrarian rioting, which has

not yet become a rebellion. In the summer of 1569, when Cecil and

Elizabeth were waiting anxiously for news from those northern counties

which "know no other prince but a Percy," there was much running and

riding, much sending for warrants and plentiful delay in their

execution, in the wild country between Chinley and Bakewell, whose

centre is the Peak, and whose principal gorge now carries the most

beautiful piece of railway line in England. The Derbyshire peasantry

seem to have been ill to deal with. A few years later some of those in

Glossopdale succeeded in setting the Earl of Shrewsbury at defiance,

and, when evicted from their farms, induced the Council to intervene to

insist on their reinstatement.[579] Just now those of them who lived in

the neighbourhood of Chinley were in a ferment over the enclosure of

some common land. The story is a curious one, and shows both the kind of

conditions under which agrarian discontent developed, and the way in

which it was associated in the mind of the Government with fears of

political disturbance. The Duchy of Lancaster, to whom the land near

Chinley belonged, had let a parcel of herbage called Mayston Field to

one Lawrence Wynter, his lease to begin as soon as that of the existing

tenant had expired. In that age of land speculation land changed hands

rapidly. On the same day as Wynter obtained the lease he sold it to a

certain Richard Celey. Celey transferred it to Godfrey Bradshaw, and

Godfrey Bradshaw got rid of it to his brother Anthony. The trouble began

when the land came into the hands of Godfrey Bradshaw. He started to

hedge and ditch it, which of course involved the exclusion of the other

inhabitants from the rights of pasture which they had hitherto enjoyed.

Accordingly the villagers, led by twelve of their number, of whom four

belonged to one family, removed the ditch, tore down the enclosure,

which consisted of "XLIII hundredth quicksetts willowes and willowe

stackes ... and did utterlye destroy and cutt the sayd stacks and quick

setts in pieces," proceeding at the same time, with the object of

protecting their own grazing land against encroachments, themselves to

divide up the land into smaller enclosures to be held by each man in

severalty. Godfrey Bradshaw then obtained warrants for the preservation

of the peace against the ringleaders, and at the same time induced the

lessor, who was Sir Ralph Sadler, the Chancellor of the Duchy, to

address a letter to them directing them not to interfere with any

houses, hedges, or ditches, which might in future be constructed round

the land. They received his communication, but massed in force with arms

on Chinley Hill, pulled down what still remained of Bradshaw's hedges,

and then proceeded to organise the nucleus of a very pretty agitation.

They gave part of the herbage, which was nominally in the occupation of

the unfortunate lessee, to one William Beard, on condition that, after

the manner of his betters in the good old days before the Tudors, he

should "maynteyn them geynst the Queenes Majestie," his support taking

the form of an agreement that he "should from tyme to tyme send them

Ydill ryotouse p'sons to assyste them in these yll doinges." They then

raised a fund, presumably by a levy on the inhabitants, called a meeting

in the forest of High Peak, and set off about the tenth of June to

Bakewell for a further conference, arranging in the meantime that some

one should burn Godfrey Bradshaw's house, and that while his enclosures,

if re-erected, should be pulled down, the other inhabitants should make

haste to divide up the disputed land into twenty-one separate parcels.

When the Bradshaws, having got their warrants, tried with the aid of the

village constable to execute them, their opponents ("the land was

grabbed from him, and he did what any decent man would do"[580])

threatened them with murder, and, on one of the party being actually

arrested, came very near to carrying their threat out. "The said p'tyes

... did ryotouslye assemble themselves together in great companies at

the town of Hayfield with unlawfull weapons, that is to saye, with

bowes, pytchefforkes, clobbes, staves, swords, and daggers drawen, and

ryotouslye dyd then and there assaulte and p'sue the sayd Godfrey and

Edward Bradshawe, and in ryotouse manner dyd reskewe and take from them

the body of the sayd Richard Shower, being attached; the Queenes

Officer, George Yeavely of Bawdon, then being p'sent commanding the

peace to be kepte." Having chased the enemy for some distance, they

camped on the contested territory, and kept a watchful eye and a firm

hand for any sign of the reappearance of the detested hedges. More

serious still in the eyes of the Government (and this, one suspects, was

their undoing), the leaders of this village revolution went so far as to

entangle themselves in high politics. At their examination they are

asked, "Whether dyd Reynold Kirke about May day last paste, and dyvers

tymes since and before, or any other tyme, confederate, consulte,

practise, or otherwise confer and talk with one Mr. Bircles of the

countye of Chester ... touching or concerning prophesis by noblemen, or

otherwise, and what books of prophesie have you or the said Bircles seen

or heard, and what is the effect thereof, and how often have you or he

perused, used, or conferred of the same, or about such purposes, and

with whom?" We do not know how they answered this question. It may be

that the anger of these Derbyshire peasants at their vanishing commons

was indeed a fraction to be set among weightier assets by schemers in

high places, and that the sinister Mr. Bircles had really talked with

them of matters more serious than the pulling down of hedges and the

baiting of enclosers, of things forbidden to the vulgar, of the

scattering of upstart officials, of the restoration of a Catholic

monarchy, of Mary, who in the previous year had made her irrevocable

plunge across the Border. It may be merely that all in authority had

that autumn an unusually bad attack of nerves. In 1569 the North was

full of prophets, both noble and other.

[578] I take this story from a transcript kindly supplied me by

Mr. Kolthammer of MSS. in the possession of Charles E. Bradshaw

Bowles of Wirksworth.

[579] Lodge, _Illustrations_, ii. p. 218.

[580] Synge, _The Playboy of the Western World_.

It was not always the case, however, that agrarian discontent ended in

casual rioting of this kind. Of mere destructive violence there is,

indeed, in all the social disturbances of the period, singularly little.

There was a good deal in the routine of rural life, with its common

administration of land and dependence on a collectively binding custom,

to teach habits of discipline and co-operation. It must be remembered

that those who took the initiative in breaking the law were not the

peasants who pulled down enclosures, but the landlords who made them in

defiance of repeated statutes forbidding them. On the whole the

organised character of the action taken is more conspicuous than the

individual excesses, and if one is to look for a modern analogy to the

mixture of deliberation and violence which it shows, it must be sought

in an Irish fair rent campaign rather than in the bread riots of a

despairing urban proletariat. When the agitation was confined to

individual manors it occasionally took the form of agrarian trade

unionism. Tenants collectively decline to serve as jurors in the court

of the manor till their demands are granted.[581] They raise a common

purse.[582] They refuse to pay more than a certain rent. When more than

one manor is implicated different localities display a rough cohesion.

Whole communities seem to have joined the movement in 1536 and 1540 with

a certain formality. In Lincolnshire and Yorkshire townships were

brought out on the ringing of the town bell with the cohesion of a

well-organised trade union; Beverley[583] sent messages to the

Lincolnshire rebels under its common seal; and the part which was played

by the village officers in the movements of the peasantry is proved by

the Proclamation[584] which the Council issued in 1549, when disorders

were at their height, forbidding constables, bailiffs, and head-boroughs

to call meetings except for the purposes required by the law.

Hales,[585] as he rode through the South and Midlands in 1548, was

struck by the patience with which people waited for the Government to

take action, and attributed the disturbances of the ensuing year to the

despair caused by the victory of the local landlords over the

Commission, and to the rejection by Parliament of the Bills which he had

introduced. Even Ket's campaign in Norfolk, which ended in a sanguinary

battle, during the greater part of it was carried on with an orderliness

from which the Government which suppressed it might profitably have

taken a lesson. Nothing could have been more unlike the popular idea of

a _jacquerie_. The peasants enjoyed the enormous joke of making the

gentry look foolish a great deal more than cutting their throats, as

during the four weeks in which they were "playing" they might have done

without any difficulty.

"Mr. Pratt, your sheep are very fat,

And we thank _you_ for that;

We have left you the skins to pay your wife's pins,

And you must thank _us_ for that."[586]

[581] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_

(Leadam). Customary tenants of Bradford _v._ Francis: "The said

stuard called ... the ... tenants of the manor to be sworn to

enquire as they ought to doo, the which to do ... the said

tenants ... obstinately and sturdily then and there refused, and

said that unless the said defendent ... wold grante them

forthwith and immediatelye that they should have and enjoy the

commodity of the said three matters ... that they, nor any of

them, wolde be sworn at that Court, but wolde depart."

[582] Leadam, _E. H. R._, pp. 684-696. The tenants at Thingden,

in their proceedings against Mulsho, "calle commen Councelles

... and make a commen purse among them, promising all of them to

take parte with other, saying that xx. of them would spend xx.

score pounds ayenet the said John Mulsho." The tenants of

Abbot's Ripton "procured one common purse to be ordeyned

together one common stock to thentent obstinately to defend

their perverse and ffrowned appetitez." As to Rents, see _L. and

P. Henry VIII._, xii., I., 154: "In many counties little or no

ferms will they pay" (Darcy to Shrewsbury).

[583] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xii., I., 392.

[584] Proclamation of July 22, 1549. Strype, _Ecclesiastical

Memorials_, who remarks that these village officers, "in the

places where these risings were, had been the very ringleaders

and procurers by their example and exhortation."

[585] _Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond), Appendix

to Introduction, lviii.: "In dyvers places wher we were, and

wher the people had just cause of Gryef, and have complayned a

great many yeares without remedy, there have they byn very

quiet, shewed themselves most humble and obedient subiectes

taryenge the Kynges Maiesties Reformation."

[586] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_, 1905, p. 2.

These lines, pinned on the carcasses of an enclosing landlord's flocks

and herds, are a fair specimen of their humour. Men may well be merry

together, when they have seen hovering over the fields of an English

county, though but in a fleeting glimpse, the New Jerusalem where the

humble are exalted and the mighty put down; and there is no

inconsistency between such mundane gaiety and the long pent up passion

which on the lips of a nameless labourer burst into the cry, "As sheepe

or lambs are a prey to the wolfe or lion, so are the poor men to the

rich men."[587] There was much lecturing (the matter is easily imagined)

at the Oak of Reformation, and not on one side only, for the peasants

were tolerant compared with their betters, and a future archbishop was

allowed to address the insurgents on the evils of their ways; much

laying down of hedges and enclosures; much slaughtering of that beast of

iniquity, the man-devouring sheep. There was none of the massacring of

unarmed men which both Henry VIII. and Elizabeth ordered without

compunction when they thought the times required it, very little of the

"making the public good a pretext for private revenge," against which

the insurgents were warned by Parker. Though for months after the final

tragedy the badges of the justly-hated Warwick "were not so fast set up

but that they were as fast pulled down" from the city walls, the rebels

even in the heat of their early triumphs claimed only to be executing

the Protector's Proclamations, and, while indignantly repudiating the

name of traitors, showed a complete readiness to negotiate peaceably

with the Government. The whole movement was less a rising against the

State than a practical illustration of the peasants' ideals, a mixture

of May-day demonstration and successful strike embodied in one gigantic

festival of rural good fellowship. Its bloody termination was, as far as

can be judged, the result of two errors of judgment, one, a pardonable

one, on the part of Ket, the other, unpardonable, on the part of a

nameless member of the other party.[588] When all was over, and each man

reflected after his kind on the great days of Mousehold Heath, what the

camp followers, who attach themselves to every popular movement,

remembered was that for about a month they had filled their bellies at

other people's expense. "'Twas a merry world when we were yonder,

eating of mutton." But there were some who, as they saw Ket swinging on

the gallows before the City gates, were seized with the tumult of pity

and hoarse indignation which serves Englishmen, who are not good at

revolutions, in place of the revolutionary spirit. "O Kette," one

countryman was heard to say to another, "God have mercy upon thy soul;

and I trust in God that the King's Majesty and his Councell shall be

enformed once between this and Midsummer evening, that of their own

gentleness thou shalt be taken down and buried, not hanged up for winter

store; and set a quietness in the realm, and that the ragged staff shall

be taken down of their own gentleness from the gentlemen's gates in this

City, and to have no more King's arms but one within the City, under

Christ."[589] The Council, in its gentleness, thought otherwise. Ket

still creaked in his chains, and in the meantime other gallows were

rising for other rebels in Somerset, and Devon, and Cornwall.

[587] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_, 1905, p. 22.

[588] Ket refused the pardon offered on July 31st on the ground

that the insurgents had committed no offence requiring to be

pardoned, and fighting followed. On August 23rd a pardon was

again offered. While it was being read by a herald, a boy

standing by insulted him "with words as unseemly as his gesture

was filthy" (Holinshed), and was shot by one of the herald's

retinue. Ket tried to pacify the anger of his followers at what

they took to be treachery, but without effect.

[589] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_, 1905, p. 20.

What were the aims which at intervals between 1530 and 1560 set half the

counties of England in a blaze? Let us look at the peasants' programme

more closely. It will help us to see the agrarian problem from the

inside. Reduced to its elements their complaint is a very simple one,

very ancient and yet very modern. It is that what, in effect, whatever

lawyers may say, has been their property, is being taken from them. To

be told that social disorders take place because an envious proletariat

aims at seizing the property of the rich would seem to them a very

strange perversion of the truth. They want only to have what they have

always had. They are conservatives, not radicals or levellers, and to

them it seems that all the trouble arises because the rich have been

stealing the property of the poor. Here is part of a colloquy[590]

between Jack of the North beyond the Style, Robin and Harry Clowte, Tom

of Trumpington, Peter Potter, Pyrce Plowman, and divers other worthies.

As will be seen from the verses, they are birds of night--

"JACK. Now for that Slaunder's sake,

Companye by night I take,

And, with all that I may make,

Cast hedge and ditch in the lake,

Fyxed with many a stake

Though it was never so faste

Yet asondre it is wraste.

* * * * *

HARRY CLOWTE. Gud conscience should them move

Ther neighbours quietly to love,

And thus not for to wrynche

The commons styl for to pinch,

To take into their hande

That be other mennes land.

JACK. Thus do I, Jack of the Style,

Now subscrybe upon a tyle.

This I do and will do with all my myght,

For sclaundering me yet do I but right,

For common to common again I restore

Wherever it hath been yet common before.

If agayne they enclose it never so faste

Agayne asondre it shall be wraste.

They may be ware by that is paste

To make it agayne is but waste."

[590] Printed by Cooper, _Annals of Cambridge_, vol. ii. p. 40.

To take into your hand what is other men's land, that is the grievance.

To restore common to common again, that is the obvious remedy, a remedy

which is not seriously opposed to the agrarian policy of most sixteenth

century statesmen. But the more far-seeing of the peasants realise what

their followers do not, that these troubles which are going on in so

many different parts of England cannot be dealt with by isolated bodies

of villagers, however good their cause may be. They require the

intervention of the Government. How the Government is to intervene they

lay down in two documents which are perhaps the only two popular

programmes of agrarian reform ever published in England since 1381. The

first, contained in two of the articles[591] drawn up at Doncaster in

1536, is short enough:--

"That the lands in Westmoreland, Cumberland, Kendall, Dent, Sedbergh,

Furness, and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kyrkbyshire, Notherdale,

may be by tenant right, and the lord to have, at every change, 2

years' rent for gressum, according to the grant now made by the lords to

the commons there. This to be done by Act of Parliament.

"The Statutes for Enclosures and Intacks to be put in execution, and all

enclosures and Intacks since the fourth year of Henry VII. to be pulled

down, except mountains, forests, and Parks" (a noticeable exception

which shows the composite character of the movement. In the South of

England the peasant did not spare parks).

[591] Gairdner, _L. and P. of Henry VIII._, xi. 1246.

The articles[592] signed by Ket, Aldryche, and Cod in 1549 are a much

more elaborate affair. Here are the most noteworthy of them:--

"We pray your grace that where it is enacted for enclosing, that it be

not hurtful to such as have enclosed saffren grounds, for they be

greatly chargeable to them, and that from henceforth no man shall

enclose any more.[593]

"We certify your grace that whereas the lords of the mannors hath been

charged with certe fre rent, the same lords hath sought means to charge

the freeholders to pay the same rent, contrary to right.

"We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall comon uppon the

commons.

"We pray that priests from henceforth shall purchase no lande neither

free nor bondy, and the lands that they have in possession may be letten

to temporal men, as they were in the first year of the reign of King

Henry VII.[594]

"We pray that reed ground and meadow ground may be at such price as they

were in the first year of King Henry VII.

* * * * *

"We pray that the payments of castleward rent, and blanch ferm and

office lands, which hath been accustomed to be gathered of the

tenements, whereas we suppose the lords ought to pay the same to their

bailiffs for their rents gathering, and not the tenants.[595]

"We pray that no man under the degree of a knight or esquire keep a dove

house, except it hath been of an old ancient custom.

"We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of

all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor to

take profits of the same.

"We pray that no feudatory within your shires shall be a councellor to

any man in his office making, whereby the King may be truly served, so

that a man being of good conscience may be yearly chosen to the same

office by the commons of the same shire.

* * * * *

"We pray that copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did

in the first year of King Henry VII., and that at the death of a tenant

or of [at] a sale the same lands to be charged with an easy fine, as a

capon or a reasonable [sum] of money for a remembrance.

* * * * *

"We pray that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free with

his precious bloodshedding.

"We pray that rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and

passage.

* * * * *

"We pray that the poor mariners or Fishermen may have the whole profits

of their fishings, as porpoises, grampuses, whales, or any great fish,

so it be not prejudicial to your Grace.

* * * * *

"We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase

land freely, or [and] to let them out again by copy of court roll to

their great advancement and to the undoing of your poor subjects.

* * * * *

"We pray that no man under the degree of ... shall keep any conies upon

any of their freehold or copyhold, unless he pale them in, so that it

shall not be to the common nuisance.

* * * * *

"We pray that your Grace give license and authority by your gracious

commission under your Great Seal to such commissioners as your poor

commons hath chosen, or to as many of them as your Majesty and your

Council shall appoint and think meet, for to redress and reform all such

good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings,

which hath been hidden by your justices of your peace, shreves,

escheators, and other your officers, from your poor commons, since the

first year of the reign of your noble grandfather, King Henry VII.

* * * * *

"We pray that no lord, knight, esquire, nor gentleman, do graze nor feed

any bullocks or sheep, if he may spend forty pounds a year by his lands,

but only for the provision of his house."

[592] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 48.

[593] Some doubt has been expressed as to the interpretation of

these words. They should probably be read in the light of what

was said above (Part I. chap. iv.) as to enclosures made by the

tenants themselves. The rebels point out that a considerable

number of people have spent capital on hedging and ditching

their lands for the better cultivation of saffron, and therefore

ask that, while other enclosures may be pulled down, a special

exception may be made in favour of this particular kind of

enclosure.

[594] Contrast the feeling in Protestant Norfolk with that of

Cornwall and Devon in 1549, and of the North in 1536.

[595] The grammar is bad, but the sense is clear enough. Lords

must stop shifting on to tenants burdens which lords ought to

bear.

The programme of the peasants is partly political. The Northerners

insist that Parliament and the Crown must interfere, and the Norfolk

leaders ask for a permanent commission to do the work which the county

justices, who are interested in enclosing, have wilfully neglected. But

it is mainly economic. The State is to do no more than restore the old

usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised manorial

customary enforced by a strong central Government throughout the length

of the land, free use of common lands, reduced rents of meadow and

marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free fisheries, and the abolition

of the lingering disability of personal villeinage. The most striking

thing about these demands is their conservatism. Almost exactly a

hundred years later agrarian reform will be demanded as part of a new

heaven and a new earth. Agrarian agitation will be carried on in terms

of theories as to the social contract, of theories as to the origin of

private property. Its leaders will be appealing to Anglo-Saxon history

to prove to the indifferent ears of a Government which has saved them

"from Charles, our Norman oppressor," that "England cannot be a free

commonwealth, unless the poore commoners have a use and benefit of the

land."[596] They will appeal also to a more awful sanction than that of

history. "At this very day," cries Winstanley,[597] "poor people are

forced to work for 4d. a day and corn is dear, and the tithing-priest

stops their mouths and tells them that 'inward satisfaction of mind' was

meant by the declaration 'the poor shall inherit the earth.' I tell you,

the scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled.... You jeer at

the name of Leveller. I tell you Jesus Christ is the head leveller."

Such communistic doctrines are always the ultimate fruit of the

breakdown of practical co-operation and brotherliness among men. To

human nature, as to other kinds of nature, a vacuum is abhorrent.

[596] Camden Society, _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii. p. 217. Letter

addressed by the Diggers, December 8, 1649: "To my lord generall

and his Councell of War." The allusion to the usurping Normans

occurs also (_ibid._, p. 215) in another letter in a statement

of the reasons of the agitation: "Secondly by vertue of yours

and our victory over the king, whereby the enslaved people of

England have recovered themselves from under the Norman

Conquest; though wee do not yet enjoy the benefit of our

victories, nor cannot soe long as the use of the Common land is

held from the younger brethren by the Lords of Mannours that yet

sit in the Norman chair and uphold that tyranny as if the kingly

power were in force still."

[597] Winstanley: "The curse and blessing that is in mankind,"

quoted Gooch, _English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth

Century_.

[502] In the following section on copyholders I have been guided