But as yet the soil has not been ploughed by a century of political and

religious controversy, and there is little sign of these high arguments

in the social disturbances of our period. The earliest levellers[598]

get their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset

hedges and park palings. What communism there is in the movement is not

that of the saints or the theorists, but the spontaneous doctrineless

communism of the open field village, where men set out their fields, and

plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the wet, with natural

fellowship. The middle-class terror of the appearance in England of the

political theories of the German Peasants' War, though it was forcibly

expressed by Sir William Paget[599] in remonstrating with Somerset's

policy in 1549, and though John Hales thought it worth while to

repudiate it, is not justified by any recorded utterances or programmes

which have come to us. There are, indeed, many verbal similarities

between the articles of Ket and those put out by the German peasants at

Memmingen in 1525, which suggest that some refugee from Germany had

carried them with him to the most Protestant county in England. Both,

for example, demand a reduction in rents, the abolition of villeinage,

and free fisheries. But the contrasts are much more striking, and are

due not only to the fact that the onerous villein services which

survived in Germany had become almost nominal in England, but to the

difference in the spirit of their conception, which leads one to appeal

to the New Testament and the other to the customs of the first years of

Henry VII. There is, in fact, the same broad difference between the

peasant movements in England and Germany as there is between the English

and German Reformation. In Germany the ecclesiastical changes spring

from a widespread popular discontent, and are swept forward on a wave of

radical enthusiasm, which carries the peasants (German Social Democrats

are metaphysicians to this day) into the revolutionary mysticism of

Münzer. In England changes in Church government are forced upon the

people by the State, and outside the South and East of England are

regarded with abhorrence. It is not until the later rise of Puritanism

that either religious or economic radicalism becomes a popular force. In

the middle of the sixteenth century the English peasants accepted the

established system of society with its hierarchy of authorities and

division of class functions, and they had a most pathetic confidence

in the Crown. What they wanted, in the first place, was fair

conditions of land tenure, the restoration of the customary

relationships which had protected them against the screw of commercial

competition. When they went further, they looked for an exercise of

Royal Power to reduce to order the petty tyranny of local magnates, and

to carry out the intentions of a Government which they were inclined to

think meant them well, "to redress and reform all such good laws,

statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings which hath been

bidden by your justices of your Peace ... from your poor commons." Such

movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant

spirit. They are the outcome of a society where the normal relations are

healthy, where men are attached to the established order, where they

possess the security and control over the management of their own lives

which is given by property, and, possessing this, possess the reality of

freedom even though they stand outside the political state. Happy the

nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.

[598] A reference to the Levellers occurs in connection with the

Midland Revolt of 1607, Lodge, _Illustrations_, iii. 320: "You

cannot but have hearde what courses have been taken in

Leicestershire and Warwickshire by the two Lord Lieutenants

there, and by the gentlemen ... and lastlie howe Sir Anth.

Mildmay and Sir Edward Montacute repaired to Newton ... where

one thousand of these fellowes who term themselves levellers

were busily digging, but weare furnished with many half-pikes,

pyked staves, long bills, and bowes and arrows and stones ...

there were slaine some 40 or 50 of them and a verie great number

hurt" (January 11, 1607, the Earl of Shrewsbury to Sir John

Manners, Sir Francis Leake, and Sir John Harper). The name

Diggers seems to have cropped up about the same time, v. _Wit

and Wisdom_, edited by Halliwell for New Shakespeare Society,

pp. 140-141, for a petition from "the Diggers of Warwickshire to

all other diggers," and signed "poore Delvers and Day Labourers

for ye good of ye commonwealth till death" (quoted by Gay,

_Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii.)

[599] See below, pp. 367-368.

The social disturbances caused by enclosure, with its accompaniments of

rack-renting and evictions, were one cause which compelled the

Governments of our period to give attention to the subject. Though no

direct concessions were made to them, their lessons were not altogether

wasted, because it is plain that they impressed on the minds of

statesmen the idea that to prevent disorder it was necessary for the

State to interfere in favour of tenants. Rural discontent, which might

have been insignificant in an age of greater political stability,

derived a factitious importance from the circumstances of the sixteenth

century, when it might be exploited by a rebellious minority, which, for

all that most men knew, might really be a majority of the nation, by

Yorkist Plotters under Henry VII., religious enthusiasts under Henry

VIII., restorers of a Catholic monarchy, supported by a Spanish invasion

or a Franco-Scottish alliance, under Elizabeth. Governments so uncertain

of their popularity as these had a strong reason for protecting the

class which would be the backbone of a revolt. One way in which they

could secure themselves against the discontent of the disaffected

nobility was to encourage the yeomanry, who might act as a counterpoise.

The way in which self-preservation and a popular agrarian policy went

hand in hand is illustrated by Burleigh's cynical advice to Elizabeth to

make a practice of supporting tenants in any quarrel which might arise

between them and Catholic landlords.[600]

[600] _Somers' Tracts_, vol. i., pp. 164-168: "For their

tenantries, this conceit I have thought upon ... that your

Majesty, in every shire, should give instruction to some that

are indeed trusty and religious gentlemen, that, whereas your

Majesty is given to understand that divers popish landlords do

hardly use some of your people and subjects, ... you do

constitute and appoint them to deal both with entreaty and

authority, that such tenants, paying as others do, be not thrust

out of their living, nor otherwise molested. This would greatly

bind the commons' hearts unto you, on whom indeed consisteth the

power and strength of your realm, and it will make them less, or

nothing at all, depend upon their landlords."

But there were other causes as well working in the same direction. No

one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed can

fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of agrarian

relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man, and was,

indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the

peasants themselves. Not, of course, that the authorities had any

intention of depressing landlords or raising peasants, but that the

whole established system of Government was based on a certain

organisation of social life, and that the Government tended to maintain

that organisation in maintaining itself and carrying on the work of the

State. For this attitude, which is in striking contrast with the policy

of the statesmen of the eighteenth century when faced with an analogous

problem, there were several practical reasons which we shall do well to

understand. In judging the motives of economic policy in past ages we

are even more apt to be misled by modern analogies than we are in

estimating its effects. We see that in our own day most of the

legislative protection accorded to those who are economically weak has

been produced by a combination of two causes, the political

enfranchisement of the wage-earning classes and the spread of

humanitarian sentiment. We know that in the sixteenth century the first

cause was absent and the second was feeble. The Macchiavellis of that

iron age were neither democrats nor philanthropists; and when they

avow a policy of protecting the weaker classes in society against

economic evils we are inclined to think with Professor Thorold Rogers

that they are merely hypocritical. But this analogy is a false light. To

be influenced by it is to confuse political power with its symbols, and

to forget that the economic importance of a class may be a more

effective claim to the interest of Governments than the ballot-box.

Under the Tudors there were strong practical reasons for protecting the

peasantry which are not felt to the same extent to-day. The modern State

has so specialised its organs that its maintenance is quite compatible

with the existence of the extremes of poverty, not only among the

exceptionally unfortunate, but among those whose position is not more

insecure than that of their neighbours. They may be able neither to

fight, nor to take part in public duties, nor to contribute much to the

Exchequer. But if their incompetence is a menace, it is a menace which

is not felt till after the lapse of generations, a menace the fulfilment

of which no single life is long enough to behold. For the State hires

specialists to fight, and specialists to keep order; indeed, the poorer

they are, the more cheaply it can obtain their services.[601] Its local

government is conducted mainly by specialised officials, and the

concentration of wealth makes possible a concentration of taxation. The

extension of political power has been accompanied by a subdivision of

political functions, which has diminished the importance of the

individual citizen, and turned him, as far as the routine of Government

is concerned, into a sleeping partner, whose consent is necessary, but

whose active co-operation is superfluous.

[601] For the manner in which the British army is recruited by

starvation, see Mr. Cyril Jackson's Report on Boy Labour to the

Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, Cd.

4632, pp. 166-168.

Now we need not point out that this would be as fair a description of

large classes of persons in the sixteenth century as it is now, and that

the day labourer and handicraftsman who "are to be ruled and not to

rule"[602] were, as a class, far more completely beneath the

consideration of statesmen than they are at the present day. But we

are concerned with the landholding population, not with the landless

wage-earner, and in the slightly differentiated state of our period both

economic and political conditions made a decline in the standard of life

among a class so important as the peasantry a danger which might cause

the most authoritarian of Governments to be confronted with very grave

practical difficulties. It might find itself unable to raise an

effective military force. The States of Continental Europe had

introduced standing armies. But England relied mainly on the shire

levies, and the shire levies were recruited from the small farmers. Just

as the lord of a manor in the North of England, whose tenants held by

border service with horse and harness, was anxious to prevent the

decline in their numbers which landlords elsewhere were welcoming, so

the Government regarded with quite genuine dismay an agrarian movement

which seemed to threaten its military resources by impoverishing the

finest fighting material in the country. Shadow, Feeble, and Wart may

"fill a pit as well as better"; but to make good infantry it requires

not "housed beggars," but "men bred in some free and plentiful manner."

One Depopulation Statute after another recites how "the defence of this

land against our enemies outward is enfeebled and impaired."[603] In the

settlement of the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace the Government

took care to instruct its officials to see that the Northumbrian

tenants, on whom the defence of the border depended, "should be put in

comfort, that no more shall be exacted with gyrsums and like charges,

instead of which they shall be ready with horse and harness when

required."[604] In 1601 Cecil[605] crushed a proposal to repeal the acts

then in force against depopulation by pointing out that the majority of

the militia levies were ploughmen. And in the instructions for the

choice of persons to be enrolled in the trained bands which were issued

by the Government of Charles I., particular care was taken to

emphasise that they were not to be selected at haphazard, but were to be

drawn from the families of the gentry, freeholders, and substantial

farmers.[606]

[602] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. I., chap. xxiv.

[603] 4 _Henry VII._, c. 19.

[604] Gairdner, _L. and P. Hen. VIII._, xii., I. p. 595.

[605] _D'Ewes' Journal_, p. 674: "Mr. Secretary Cecil said, '...

I think that whosoever doth not maintain the plough destroys

this kingdom.... I am sure when warrants go from the Council for

levying of men in the counties, and the certificates be returned

unto us again, we find the greatest part of them to be

ploughmen.'" See also on this point Appendix I., Nos. iv., v.,

vi., and viii.

[606] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_ (1909), p. 144.

This cogent reason for intervening to protect the peasantry was

supported by another which was not less convincing. The classes who

suffered most from enclosure were important from a fiscal, as well as a

military, point of view. In the simple economic life of that age the

connection between the output of wealth and the individual worker's

opportunities for production and standard of subsistence, if not more

important than to-day, was certainly more patent to observation. "The

hole welth of the body of the realm cometh out of the labours and works

of the common peple ... a riche welthy body of a realm maketh a riche

welthy king, and a poore feble body of a realm must needs make a poore

weak feble king."[607] In our period "_pauvre paysans pauvre royaume,

pauvre royaume pauvre roi_" was a statement not of any recondite theory,

but of an obvious economic fact, and one can hardly be mistaken in

supposing that part of the favour which sixteenth century Governments

were inclined to show the small farmer was due to the fact that the

methods of taxation in use made him important as a source of revenue. To

a State which relies largely for its supplies on a direct declaration of

income, it is indifferent whether the total assessable income is made up

of a few large or many small ones; indeed if the tax be a progressive

one, most will be got from the former. But look at the way in which

taxation is raised in the sixteenth century. The chief direct tax is the

subsidy. A typical subsidy, for example that of the first year of

Elizabeth,[608] is assessed partly on the capital value of property,

including farm and trade stock and household furniture, partly on the

yearly profits of land. When a village of small and fairly prosperous

cultivators is wiped out to make room for a large and sparsely populated

estate, will the Government get as large a revenue from direct taxation

as before? A modern reader may very well answer "Yes." The motive of

converting land to pasture is to increase the profits of agriculture. If

they are increased, does not this mean a corresponding increase in the

taxable wealth of the country? Now to inquire how far one can assume in

any age that the personal interests of landlords will lead to land being

put to its most productive use would take us far beyond the scope of

this essay, and it is unnecessary for our present purpose. For, as far

as our period is concerned, the answer is certainly wrong. Apart from

the subtler reactions of the agrarian changes upon social welfare, there

is then no such identity between the economic interests of the landlord

and the economic interests of the State. Speaking broadly, the former

consist in securing the largest net income, the latter in securing the

largest gross product. And these two things are by no means necessarily

found together. If a pasture farm managed by a shepherd and his dog is

substituted by an enclosing proprietor for several score of families

living by tillage, the rent roll of the estate can hardly fail to be

increased, for the value of wool is so high, and the cost of

sheep-farming so low, that the net income from which rent can be paid is

large. But subsidies are assessed on property, not only on income; and

on personal as well as real property. A rise in rents is quite

compatible with a falling off in the gross produce of the land, and the

conversion of an estate from arable to pasture, by displacing tenants,

means a diminution in the farm stock and household property which has

hitherto contributed towards the revenue.

[607] Pauli, _Drei volkswirthshaftliche Denkscriften_, How to

Reform the Realm in Setting Men to Work to restore Tillage: "The

kynge and his lordes have nede to mynyster right ordre of common

wele; or els they must needs destroy their own wealth by the

very ordenaince of God, for they are upholden and borne upon the

body. Yf they will be riche, they must first see all common

people have riches."

[608] 1 Eliz. cap. xxi. Prothero Statutes and Constitutional

Documents, 1558-1625. Two subsidies of 1s. 8d. and 1s. were

imposed on "every pound, as well in coin, ... as also plate,

stock of merchandises, all manner of corn and blades, household

stuff, and of all other goods moveable," and two subsidies of

2s. 8d. and 1s. 4d. on the "yearly profits" of land.

Lest such a view should seem unduly theoretical, let us hasten to add

that it is one which is endorsed by the authority of contemporaries.

When subsidies are being debated in the House of Commons members

complain that, while the wealthy are under-assessed, the small men pay

more than their share.[609] Political writers from Fortescue[610] to

Bacon[611] emphasise the fact that the ability of the country to bear

taxation depends on the maintenance of a high level of prosperity among

the yeomanry. The yeoman is a man who "makes a whole line in the subsidy

book."[612] "The weight thereof," says a pamphleteer in 1647, "falls

heavily ... especially upon the yeomanry."[613] The occasional glimpses

which we get of harassed collectors trying in vain to screw taxes out of

small farmers, whom a rise in rents or a bad season has plunged in

distress, show the truth of their accounts. In the reign of Edward VI.

subsidies cannot be collected on the northern border owing to the

oppression to which some of the tenants have been subjected.[614] From

Norfolk in 1628 comes a still more melancholy tale. "The ffarmors and

such as use Husbandrye and tilth," write the Commissioners of the

subsidy to the Government, "from whom in times past was accustomed to be

drawne the greatest part of ye money leviable by way of subsidye,

present unto us their pitiful estates, growen into decay through the

base price and noe vent in these later years for their corne ... that

some of them doo owe unto their landlordes two yeares rent, many of them

one years.... All which considered we much feare that the collectors

shall not gather in the monye soe speedily as they would or we

desire."[615] The truth is that so much of the wealth of the country had

been in the hands of the more prosperous among the small cultivators

that any decline in their position was likely to place the Governments

of our period in financial straits. They regard it with the

self-interested apprehension which modern statesmen feel lest capital

should be "driven abroad." Hence there was a strong fiscal motive for

protecting the rural classes. Rebels who pointed out that "A man can

have no more of a cat but the skin; that is the King can have no more of

us than we have, which in a manner he has already,"[616] or tenants who

urged the Crown to protect them on the ground that "they paie your

Majesty subsidies, fifteens, and loans,"[617] were using language which

the impecunious Government of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

could understand much better than appeals to humanitarian sentiment. The

military, financial, and political importance of the yeomanry was, in

fact, great enough to make them one of the classes with whom the defence

and order of the country were identified, and therefore sufficient to

make them an object of solicitude to statesmen who were concerned with

national interests.

[609] _D'Ewes' Journal_, p. 633. "Sir Walter Raleigh said ...

'Call you this par iugum when a poor man pays as much as a rich,

and peradventure his estate is no better than he is set at, or

little better; when our estates, that be thirty or forty pounds

in the queen's books, are not the hundredth part of our

wealth?'"

[610] Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, chap. xii.:

"The reaume off Ffraunce givith never ffrely off thair owne good

will any subsidie to thair prince, because the commons thereoff

be so pouere.... But owre commons be riche, and therefore thai

give to thair kynge as somme tymes quinsimes and dessimes, and

ofte tymes other grete subsidies."

[611] Bacon, _History of King Henry VII._ (Pitt Press Series),

pp. 70-71: "The more gentlemen, ever the lower book of

subsidies."

[612] Fuller, _The Holy and Profane State_.

[613] _The Standard of Equality in Subsidiary Taxes and

Payments_, London, 1647.

[614] _S. P. D. Ed. VI._, Addenda IV., p. 26: "Subsidies and

duties must be levied on that border for your service, and they

are loosed by oppression of your officers."

[615] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_, 1907, pp. 139-140.

[616] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xi. 1244. See the

remarks about Cromwell: "Item, the false flatterer says he will

make the king the richest prince in Christendom.... I think he

goes about to make him the poorest."

[617] See Appendix I., iv.

Economic policies are not to be explained in terms of economics alone.

When an old and strong society is challenged by a new phenomenon, its

response is torn from a living body of assumptions as to the right

conduct of human affairs, which feels that more than material interests

are menaced, and which braces itself anxiously against the shock. The

swift agrarian changes of the sixteenth century differ from the swifter

changes of the eighteenth, in that enlightened opinion is, on the whole,

against them, and that even the technical experts feel misgivings. If

the attitude of statesmen is to be explained by the practical reasons

which have already been given, the opposition of men like More, Latimer,

Crowley, Starkey, and Hales seemed to themselves a plain matter of

morals. In Germany Luther denounced the revolting peasants. In England

those who in ecclesiastical matters were poles apart united in a plea

for economic conservatism. Leading reformers preach and write against

enclosing; and terrified landlords complain that "none ever spake so

vilely as these so-called commonwealths."[618] Their understanding of

the technique of the agrarian changes is often deficient. Like the

Carlyles and Ruskins of a later age, they make Philistia merry with

their sad blunders over economic details. But it would be a mistake to

regard their views of the social effects of enclosing as abnormal or

sentimental. They are the last great literary expression of the appeal

to the average conscience which had been made by the old agrarian order,

the cry of a spirit which is departing, and which, in its agony, utters

words that are a shining light for all periods of change.

[618] Letter to Mr. Cecill from Sir Anthony Auchar, quoted by

Russell, _Ket's Rebellion, in Norfolk_, p. 202.

Several paths of argument lead to their position. There is the

traditional importance of tillage. It is a "foundation industry," an

industry from which four-fifths of the people directly or indirectly get

their living. English Governments have always shown it special favour.

Its maintenance is almost part of the common law[619] of the land. And

it is right that it should be so. For the partition which separates men

from starvation is thin, and if tillage fails how shall the people be

fed? The Government insists on a certain minimum area being under the

plough for exactly the same reason that the city of Coventry, when it is

in the grip of a bad harvest, decides to break up part of its common

pastures for wheat. All men are agreed that the price of food ought to

be fixed by authority, and one cannot control prices unless one can

control supplies. There is the argument from social functions. The State

is a community of classes. Between classes there must be inequality, for

each has a different function, fighting, or merchandise, or handicraft,

or husbandry. Unless there is inequality between classes no class can

perform its duties or (strange thought) enjoy its rights. But one class

must not encroach upon the livelihood of another. If we will not have

villein blood on the Council, neither will we let gentlemen take into

their hands the holdings of their tenants. For this means that one limb

of the body politic drains nourishment from another limb, and that men

drop into a superfluous residuum from which the State gets no profit.

And within a class there should be substantial equality. When one man

has the livelihoods of two must not another man go without any living at

all? There is the argument from economic morality. In every bargain

there is the possibility of oppression. The unscrupulous man makes the

most of this. He regards only his own profit. He is "a great taker of

advantages."[620] This is the sin of the usurer, the bodger, and the

tyrannous landlord, and of this bad trinity the last is the worst. To

oppress men by rack-renting land is particularly detestable. For though

in all contracts there is certainly (if only it can be found!) an

objective standard of value, yet a man may with reason be in doubt as to

what is fair price to charge for an article the value of which has not

been fixed by authority. But he can hardly be in doubt as to what is a

fair rent. The fair rent is the usual rent; equity is custom. There is

the argument from the very nature of the bond between tenant and

landlord. Tenure is no longer as sacred a thing as once it was, and,

even if it were, men who are legally the descendants of right-less

villeins could not easily appeal to its sanctity. But opinion feels that

there is something despicably sordid in using this particular relation

as a financial engine. Though surveyors' economics are as notorious as

lawyers' justice,[621] even one of that detested class can preface his

business-like account of western manors with words idealising the

conditions which have "knit such a knot of colaterall amytie between

the Lords and the tenants that the lord tendered his tenants as his

childe, and the tenants again loved the lord as naturally as the childe

his father."[622] The bond between landlord and tenant is perhaps,

indeed, the only economic relationship which has ever yet stirred the

affection of large masses of men. It has done so because it has been in

the past so much more than economic. The pitiful cry of that nameless

old man to whose care Shakespeare commits the blinded Gloucester, "O my

good lord, I have been your tenant, and your father's tenant, these

fourscore years," is the voice of an attachment which once was real. In

the sixteenth century the tie of tenure is still the symbol of greater

things, and the wrench which is given it by the partial commercialising

of agriculture seems to portend more ruinous innovations. Most men make

the State in the image of their own village, or city, or business. It is

perhaps not an unfair description of one side of the social philosophy

of our period to say that a manor is still a "little commonwealth,"[623]

the kingdom still the greatest of manors. If the lord holds from the

King, does not the tenant hold from his lord by as good a right? If the

tenant who encroaches on his neighbour's strips is checked by the

manorial court, should not the lord who depopulates half a village be

checked by the King in his High Court of Parliament? If gentlemen

oppress yeomen, how can they "live together as they be joined in one

body politic under the King?"[624]

[619] Miss Leonard (_Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series vol.

xix.) quotes Coke, _Institutes_, Book III., p. 105 (1644 ed.),

and _S. P. D. Chas. I._, clxxxvii., No. 95: "The decay of

tillage and houses of husbandry are the undoubted causes and

grounds of depopulation, and a crime against the Common Laws of

this Realm, and every continuance thereof is a new crime." But

the words "against the Common Laws" are hardly to be interpreted

strictly.

[620] _S. P. D. Eliz._, vol. cclxxxvi., Nos. 19 and 20: "He is a

great taker of advantages. He granted a lease to his brother,

who dying a year past, he sued his brother's wife to overthrow

the lease to the undoing of her and her children." For a strong

expression of these views see _Hist. MSS. Com._, MSS. of Marquis

of Salisbury, Part II., 1575, Nov. 20. Lord North to the Bishop

of Ely: "My lord, it wilbe no pleasure for you to have hir

Majestye and the Councell knowe howe wretchedly yowe live within

and without your house, howe extremely covetous, how great a

grazier, how marvellous a dayrye man, howe ritche a farmer, how

grete an owner. It will not lyke yowe that the world knowe of

your decayed houses, ... of the leases you pull violently from

many, of the copyeholdes that yowe lawlesslye enter into, of the

fre land that yowe wrongfully posese.... Yowe suffer no man to

live longer under yowe than yowe lyke him."

[621] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, p. 1: "Farmer, I have

heard much evill of the profession, and to tell you my conceit

plainly I think the same both evill and unprofitable ... and

oftentime you are the cause that men lose their land and

sometimes they are abridged of such liberties as they have long

used in mannors."

[622] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.

[623] Norden, _op. cit._: "And is not every mannor a little

commonwealth, whereof the tenants are the members, the land the

body, and the lord the head?"

[624] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xii., I., 98,

Instructions to the Duke of Norfolk.

It is true that it is just these ideas which in our period are on their

trial, and that if one were to seek the watershed where the mediæval

theory of land tenure, as something contingent on the fulfilment of

obligations, parts company from modern conceptions of ownership, as

conferring an unlimited right to unconditional disposal by the owner,

one would find it in the century and a half between 1500 and the final

abolition of feudal tenures in 1660. The combination of forces both

economic and political making for a change of attitude is

unmistakable; on the one hand the severance of the personal relationship

of tenure through the development of the great leasehold farm, the

breaking up of the customary routine of cultivation through the

increasing dependence of agriculture on the market, the general revision

of contracts brought about through the fall in the value of money; on

the other hand the enormous redistribution of landed property through

the confiscation of monastic and gild endowments, the consequent

creation of a new aristocracy ready to apply commercial ideas to land

tenure, the desire of proprietors to escape from the obnoxious feudal

incidents and of the Crown to find some more lucrative substitute for

them. But the decay of the older conceptions goes on very slowly. The

Government is on the whole on the conservative side; for naturally it

has to work on the material to hand, and the best hope of maintaining

order lies in the preservation of fixed customary relationships between

the different classes in society. Its instinct is therefore still to

treat the control and disposition of land as to a special degree a

question of public policy, in regard to which landlords are bound

"rather to consider what is agreeable ... to the use of the state and

for the good of the commonwealth, than to seeke the utmost profit which

a landlord for his particular advantage may take among his

tenants."[625]

[625] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. xxvii. p.

129. Letter from the Council to William Harman, Esq.

(b) _Legislation and Administration_

This was its instinct. But can we say more than this? Can we say that

the presumption in favour of protecting the small landholder was

translated into any definite policy, and that such a policy was carried

out in practice? The answer to these questions is by no means easily

given. There is the difficulty of making any generalisation which will

cover the century and a half during which, from time to time, the

agrarian problem claimed public attention. True, this difficulty is not

so serious as might at first sight appear, or as it would be in an age

of swiftly changing ideas. The political historian may treat the Tudors

as one period and the first two Stuarts as another. But the economist

finds much the same views on economic matters obtaining under Charles I.

as under Henry VIII., and much the same administrative system to carry

them out. There is in our period no marked change in responsible opinion

upon the enclosing movement. The Commission which deals with the subject

in 1607 shows the same attitude as the Commission of 1517. Enclosers are

fined in 1637 as they have been fined in the reign of James I. But the

opinion which counts is not always responsible opinion. During the six

years which intervene between the death of Henry VIII. and the accession

of Philip and Mary the Government is in the hands of the great

landlords,--landlords who have built up their fortunes out of the spoils

of the monasteries, and whom no authority is strong enough to check. By

a curious chance the first head of the Government is a man who is an

agrarian reformer by conviction. But, when he falls, his colleagues

throw over his policy, and turn savagely to the work of crushing out the

very possibility of organised protest among the peasantry. These years,

the so-called reign of Edward VI., will be an exception to whatever

conclusions may be reached as to the policy of the State under the

Tudors and the first two Stuarts. Again, there is the difficulty, the

great difficulty, of saying how far the interference of Governments is

successful even when they honestly desire it to have effect. The modern

assumption, which is sometimes all too sanguine, is that a Law is being

carried out unless it is proved that it is not. For the sixteenth

century there are those who would say that we must assume that a Law is

not being administered unless it is proved that it is, and, though

scepticism is sometimes pushed to absurd lengths, one certainly cannot

build much on the letter of Acts of Parliament. But how exacting are our

tests of effective administration to be? All will agree that in our

period the mere enacting of a Statute causes and cures very little,

unless special efforts are applied to making it work. But is a

peremptory order from the Council to the Justices of the Peace, or to

the Council of the North, to redress this or that grievance among

tenants, a proof that the grievance will be redressed? Or must we be

content with nothing less than a record of cases actually handled? If

we decline to believe in the efficacy of any economic legislation about

which we have not a full list of decisions, we shall have little left to

rely on. The famous Statute of Artificers will look shaky, and so will

the legislation with regard to prices and quality. Perhaps a reasonable

view would be to look askance at mere Acts of Parliament, but to accept

action, or orders to take action, on the part of the executive

authorities, as a proof that the law is being applied in practice.

Of the Statutes prohibiting the conversion of arable to pasture we need

not, then, say much. The long series of Acts[626] which were passed

between 1489 and 1597 show little originality. They were at bottom

simply a series of great manorial customaries framed to apply to the

whole country, or to all parts of the country which were not expressly

excepted from their operation, an attempt to maintain the _status quo_

obtaining at any time by laying down for the whole country a common rule

of cultivation of much the same kind as had been in the past maintained

by local customs. They did not prohibit enclosure as such, but they

proceeded on the assumption that a fixed proportion of the land, usually

the average of a certain number of years preceding the Act, ought to be

under the plough, and that the small cultivator's farm accommodation

should be maintained or renewed at the expense of the landlord. They

differed only in the methods used to achieve this end. The Statutes

before 1550 usually insisted merely on the reconversion of pasture land

to tillage,[627] the re-edification of decayed houses of husbandry,[628]

and the limitation to 2000 of the sheep to be kept by any one

farmer.[629] They relied on most unpromising machinery. Like the ancient

Statute of Mortmain, they tried to make the feudal contract the means

for enforcing the law, by empowering superior lords to take half the

profits of mesne lords and tenants who infringed it. The Statutes after

1550 were somewhat bolder in their experiments. The most important

departure was the provision, first introduced into the Statutes of

1552[630] and 1555,[631] for the creation of permanent bodies of

Commissioners to do the work which, when most landlords were anxious to

enclose, no landlord would undertake. Under the Statute of 1555,

subsequently declared "too mild and gentle," but on the face of it a

drastic measure, the Commissioners were empowered both to bind over

offenders to rebuild decayed houses, to plough up pasture land, and to

fix the judicial rents which had been demanded by the peasantry and

suggested by certain reformers. It was repealed (together with the

Statutes of 1536 and 1552) in 1563, the Act[632] of that year confirming

the earlier Acts passed in the reign of Henry VIII., and requiring all

land which had been under the plough for four successive years since

1529 to be kept in tillage, on pain of a fine of 10s. per acre for all

land converted to pasture contrary to the Act. In 1589[633] a Statute

was passed for the protection of cottagers, prohibiting the letting of

cottages to agricultural labourers with less than four acres of land

attached. In 1593[634] it was thought that sufficient land was in

tillage to make the maintenance of legislation on the subject

unnecessary, and the clause in the Act of 1563, which forbade conversion

to pasture, was repealed. But the result seems to have been a

recrudescence of the movement for converting arable land to pasture,

with the result that in 1597[635] two more Acts were passed, both of

which adopted the expedient of setting up a special authority, apart

from the ordinary machinery of local government, to enforce the Act, by

empowering the Lord Chancellor to nominate bodies of Commissioners. The

first enacted that all houses of husbandry decayed within seven years

preceding the Act, and half of those decayed within seven years before

that, were to be rebuilt and let, the former with not less than 40

acres, and the latter with not less than 20 acres, of land. It also took

the significant step of expressly sanctioning the consolidation of

intermixed holdings by way of exchange between lord and tenants, or

between one tenant and another. The second applied only to twenty-five

counties, where, presumably, enclosing had proceeded furthest or was

most disastrous in its effects. It enacted that all land converted from

tillage to pasture since 1558 should be reconverted within three years,

if it had been under the plough for twelve years immediately preceding

conversion, and that land which had been in tillage for twelve years

preceding the Act should remain in tillage, the penalty for disobedience

being a fine of 20s. per acre. These two Acts escaped the general repeal

of the laws against depopulation which took place in 1624, and remained

on the Statute Book till the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863.

[626] A useful list of these Acts, with a summary of their

provisions, is given by Slater, _The English Peasantry and the

Enclosure of Common Fields_, Appendix D.

[627] 4 Henry VII., c. 19. All occupiers of twenty acres and

more which have been in tillage during three years preceding the

Act to maintain tillage.

[628] 6 Henry VIII., c. 5, and 7 Henry VIII., c. 1. In parishes

"whereof the more part was or were used and occupied to tillage

and husbandry," any person who "shall decay a town, a hamlet, a

house of husbandry, or convert tillage into pasture," and has

not "within one yeere next after such wylfull decaye reedifyed

and made ageyn mete and convenyent for people to dwell and

inhabyte the same ... and therein to exercyse husbandry and

tillage," forfeits one half of his land to the lord of the

manor. Land converted to pasture must be tilled "after the maner

and usage of the countrey where the seyd land lyeth."

[629] 25 Henry VIII., c. 13.

[630] 5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 5.

[631] 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 2.

[632] 5 Elizabeth, c. 2.

[633] 31 Elizabeth, c. 7.

[634] 35 Elizabeth, c. 7.

[635] 39 Elizabeth, c. 1 and c. 2.

The Statutes are evidence of a state of opinion. To judge how far that

opinion wrote itself on the world of affairs we must look elsewhere. Nor

are they in themselves very interesting. The genius of sixteenth century

statesmanship lay in administration not in legislation. It dwelt not in

Parliament but in the Council, and in those administrative courts, the

Court of Star Chamber, the Court of Requests, the Council of the North,

the Council of Wales, which were the Privy Council's organs. In studying

economic questions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, one

is met at every turn by the apparatus of special administrative

jurisdictions, which was built up by the Tudors, and which fell to

pieces with the final rupture between the Crown and Parliament. On the

one hand, they supply the control and stimulus in matters of detailed

administration, without which all legislation designed to regulate

shifting economic relationships, or running counter to the prejudices of

a powerful class, is doomed to be ineffective. Are the Justices of the

Peace lax in carrying out the Statutes for the relief of the poor and

punishment of vagrants? The Council will remonstrate. Have they omitted

to assess wages and fix prices? The Council will let them know that

their neglect has been noted at headquarters and that it must be

corrected. Are capitalists in the clothing counties dismissing workmen

in times of trade depression? The Council will direct the justices to

read them a lesson on the duty of employers to their operatives and to

the State, and threaten them with a summons to Whitehall unless they

mend their ways. A stream of correspondence pours into London from the

Government's agents in the counties--returns as to the supplies of wheat

available for consumption, applications for permission to license the

export of food-stuffs, statistics as to prices, information as to

unemployment, information as to vagrancy based on a "day-count" of

vagabonds. The Council digests it, and sends out its mandates to

continue this and alter that, to raise wages or reduce prices, to

inspect granaries, punish middlemen, whip sturdy rogues, relieve the

poor. Bad means of communication, scanty and inaccurate intelligence,

incompetent local officials, prevent administration from running

smoothly; and as the Civil War approaches incompetence becomes

recalcitrance. Nevertheless the engine is a powerful one, and up to a

year or two before the meeting of the Long Parliament its throb is felt

throughout the country.

Such a system of centralised supervision, which can meet emergencies

with promptitude, and can adjust regulations to the varying needs of

different years and different localities, is a necessity in any society

where economic relationships are made the object of authoritative

control. Under the Tudors and first two Stuarts the Council does much

that is done to-day by several State departments--the Board of

Agriculture and Fisheries, the Board of Education, the Local Government

Board, the Home Office, as well as much that is left to Private Bill

legislation. But the Council is, of course, much more than an executive

organ. It is also a court of law. It does not only make rules, it

punishes people for breaking them. Sometimes it exercises jurisdiction

itself. More often, at any rate in the cases arising out of the economic

questions with which we are chiefly concerned, it issues an order, and

leaves the punishment of breaches of it to the Court of Star Chamber and

the Court of Requests. Into the controversy as to the constitutional

position of these courts we need not enter; we need only point out their

extreme importance as buttresses of the Government's control over

economic affairs. Both in personnel and procedure they were admirably

qualified to be the instruments of a thorough system of State

intervention in matters of industry and agriculture. Both of them were

committees of the Council, and in both the governmental predominated

over the judicial element, the two judges who attended the Court of Star

Chamber, and the Masters of Requests who sat in the Court of Requests,

being in the position rather of legal advisers or assessors than of

judicial authorities. In theory the former court dealt with criminal,

the latter with civil cases. But in an age when the majority of the

populace were armed, a dispute was extremely likely to terminate in a

riot, and in practice there were subjects on which complaints came

before either court indifferently. They dispensed with a jury. They took

account of equitable considerations which had no place in the common law

courts. They were guided by reasons of State, not by the letter of the

law, and would punish behaviour as contrary to public policy. For the

execution of their rulings they used not only the ordinary officers of

the law, the Justices of the Peace, but also special bodies of

Commissioners.

Whatever may have been the abuses of this system of administrative

jurisdictions, one can easily understand that it was well fitted to deal

with the agrarian problem. It is seen at its worst in ecclesiastical

matters. It is seen at its best in protecting the poorer classes against

economic tyranny; and we shall fail to understand the popularity of the

Tudor Governments unless we lay as much emphasis on the good side as on

the bad. The Court of Requests in particular is a popular court, a court

which punishes the rich, a court which brings, in the words of the

aristocratic chronicler, "many an honest man to trouble and vexacion," a

court to which the poor "compleyned without number."[636] The notorious

difficulty of getting a verdict from a jury of tenants who are liable

to eviction means that a landlord can break the law with impunity. Here

are courts before which the intimidator can be intimidated; courts which

will handle him "on that sort, that what courage soever he hath, his

heart will fall to the grounde."[637] The enormous importance of

manorial custom in determining the fate of all classes of peasants,

except the freeholders, makes it certain that grave injustice will be

done to vested interests by any court which confines itself to the

strict letter of the law. The Council will direct that "such order be

taken in the matter as in justyce and equitie shall appertayn."[638] The

mere fact that its ruling is not simply the verdict of a court but the

command of the Government, increases the probability that it will

receive due attention from those whose duty it is to enforce it. The

landlord who has enclosed may be the very man who hears the peasant's

complaint. The Council will interfere to insist on the local authorities

taking "a more indifferent course."[639]

[636] Hall's _Chronicle of Henry VIII._, p. 585 (Edition 1809),

quoted by Leadam, introduction to _Select Cases in the Court of

Requests_ (Selden Society).

[637] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. III., chap. iv.

[638] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. xiii. pp.

91-92.

[639] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. xxx. pp.

36-37. A letter to the Council in the Marches of Wales,

concerning the tenants of Aston in Montgomeryshire: "And if it

be true, as they do inform us by their petitions, that

examinations in a case concerning one of that Counsell should be

taken by a kinsman of his owne and a clerk underneathe him, wee

wyshe ... that you would have taken a more indifferent course,

especially in a matter of commons, which, concerning many

persons, doth easily give occasion of offence and scandal."

The activity of the Government in matters of land was not so incessant

as it was in the regulation of prices and the administration of the Poor

Laws; for its land policy was strongly opposed to the interests of the

country gentry who were its officials, and it had to proceed with

caution. If we except the first great Commission appointed by Wolsey in

1517, the periods in which it was especially energetic in dealing with

the land question were three, the years between 1536 and 1549, the years

from 1607 to 1618, the years from 1630 to 1636; and on each of these

three occasions there was some temporary cause to explain its peculiar

zeal--on the two first the revolts of the peasantry, and on the last the

rise in the price of grain, which suggested that an unduly small

proportion of the land was under tillage. Nevertheless it handles

individual cases with considerable frequency throughout the whole

period from 1517 to 1640. Usually it acts as a final court of appeal,

which intervenes only when other means of redress have broken down, and

it is sometimes at pains to explain to offended landlords that it does

not intend to debar them from asserting their rights at Common Law, if

they can. Its aim is to stop very gross cases of oppression, to prevent

the peasants being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation,

to induce landlords to take a larger view of their responsibilities, to

settle disputes by the use of common sense and moral pressure. It steps

in when the tenants are poor men who are being ruined by vexatious

lawsuits, or when enclosure is thought likely to produce disorder, or to

forbid a landlord to take action pending a decision by the courts. It

has to hear many cases touching copyholders and many touching commons;

for no one is quite certain as to the legal rights of copyholders, and

in the matter of commons there is a fearful gulf between law and equity.

Occasionally in the reign of Henry VIII., and even in that of Elizabeth,

it deals with cases of villeinage. But these, though more numerous than

might have been supposed, are nevertheless rare, for the principal

economic evils of the period consist not in the revival of old claims,

but in the new competitive conditions of agriculture. The treatment of

the latter is by no means a simple matter--even the strong Governments

of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth will not lightly thrust forceful fingers

into the mysterious custom-bound recesses of the manor--and when we have

said that on the whole the bias of the Tudor and early Stuart statesmen

is against revolutionary changes that damage the peasants, we can say

little more without citing individual cases of interference.

Let us look shortly at the more striking among them. The famous

Commission upon enclosure appointed by Wolsey in 1517 set a precedent to

be followed in several subsequent inquiries, and has left us an

invaluable body of information as to the nature and extent of the

enclosing movement. It was, however, by no means the first example of

the Government intervening in the agrarian problem, and the partial

reconversion of pasture to arable, which seems to have resulted from

its labours, still left an urgent need for a continuous supervision of

the relations between landlord and tenant by some tribunal sufficiently

independent to do justice to the weaker party. In 1494 the earliest

proceedings in the interminable case[640] of John Mulsho v. the

inhabitants of Thingden ended in the Court of Star Chamber (the same

court was dealing with the same matter in 1538) with a decree in favour

of the tenants. In 1510 the same body was dealing with a quarrel between

the Abbot and the copyholders of Peterborough,[641] and in 1516 with a

complaint from the inhabitants of Draycote[642] and Stoke Gifford that

the lord of the manor had evicted copyholders, stopped up rights of way,

and enclosed common land. The policy of Wolsey is sufficiently indicated

by the active campaign which he set on foot against depopulation, and

requires no further illustration. But it is interesting to observe that

his attitude towards the agrarian question was not a mere personal

idiosyncrasy, and that it was the same in all essential particulars as

that of his successor. Thomas Cromwell must bear the blame for part of

the agrarian distress which prevailed during the closing years of Henry

VIII. and the reign of Edward VI.; for that distress was enhanced by the

wild land speculation which followed the secularisation of the monastic

estates. In that age, however, such indirect social reactions of their

policy were matters quite beneath the consideration of statesmen, and

the fact that the Government was responsible for changes which operated

most disastrously on the established order of rural society did not

prevent administrative interference to impede agrarian innovations from

going on to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. Indeed the King,

influenced no doubt by the fear that agrarian agitation might add fuel

to religious discontent, seems himself to have taken some interest in

the matter. In 1534 one finds Cromwell writing to congratulate him on

the passage through the House of Commons of a Bill providing that no man

shall keep more than 2000 sheep, and that one-eighth of every farmer's

land shall always remain in tillage, "The most profitable and most

benefycyall thing that ever was done to this the commonwealthe of your

realm;"[643] and in the following year there is a letter[644] from

Cromwell to Rich directing him to apprise the Duke of Suffolk of the

King's displeasure at the decay of certain towns which the Duke had

promised to repair. The agrarian grievances expressed in the Pilgrimage

of Grace were admitted, and in the instructions issued to the officers

who were appointed to restore order in the disaffected counties special

directions[645] were included to throw open enclosures, and to reduce

the excessive fines charged to tenants on admission to their holdings.

In the years immediately following the same policy was pursued in other

parts of the country. In 1538 the Earl of Derby[646] writes to Cromwell

protesting against the pressure put upon him to reinstate seven tenants

whom he has turned out. In 1540 a landlord[647] in the Isle of Wight is

compelled to restore to their holdings some recently evicted tenants. In

1541 several cases come before the Council. It appoints a Commission to

investigate the case of a Northamptonshire[648] landlord who has

prevented the tenants of Brigstock from feeding their pigs, calves, and

sheep, by cutting up part of a common wood "into several pastures for

his own private use and benefit." It meets a complaint from the

borderers[649] of the Forest of Dartmoor that the owner of the lands of

the monastery of Buckfast is breaking the statute which required the

lands of dissolved abbeys to be farmed in the traditional way, by

excluding them from the common, with a decision upholding the tenants'

case and with the appointment of Commissioners to carry out the award.

It sets a certain choleric Sir Nicholas Poyntz,[650] who has dared to

procure the imprisonment of a tenant for proceeding against him before

the Council, to cool his temper in the Fleet, and when he comes out

compels him to grant his victim a new farm in exchange for one which he

has surrendered, to reduce his rent from 20s. to 6s., and to pay him

forty marks as compensation for his "damages and travailles." In

1543[651] the tenants of Abbots Ripton lay a complaint in the Court of

Requests against Sir John St. John on the ground that, in addition to

other acts of oppression, he has entered forcibly on their holdings. Sir

John replies that they are not copyholders, but merely tenants at will,

who are unprotected by any immemorial custom, and after an examination

of the manor rolls the court holds that he is right. But the legal

insecurity of the tenants does not prevent them from getting protection.

The court requires their landlord to grant them leases for years at

reasonable rents, and orders that the property which he has distrained

shall be restored.

[640] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Star

Chamber_, edited by Leadam, and Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp.

684-696.

[641] Leadam, _E. H. R._, vol. viii. pp. 684-696.

[642] _Ibid._

[643] Merriman, _Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell_, vol. i.

p. 273.

[644] _Ibid._, vol. i. p. 413.

[645] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xii., I., 98 and 595.

[646] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xiii., I., 334 (see

also 66, where an appeal is made January 11, 1536, to Cromwell

to protect some tenants in Denbighshire.)

[647] _Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council_, vol.

vii. p. 42: "The King's pleasure was signified to John Dawney,

Knight, that whereas he had turned certain persons in the Isle

of Wight out of their farms, whereof they pretended to have

leases, and had demised the same to others that minded not to

dwell upon the same, he should take order that the old tenants

might enjoy their leases until Michaelmas, come a twelve month,

and that in the mean season the King's Highness would see a

direction taken in the matter."

[648] _Ibid._, vol. vii. pp. 225-226. July 30 and August 1,

1541.

[649] _Ibid._, vol. vii. pp. 123-125. January 25, 1541.

[650] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. i. pp. 5 and

9.

[651] Leadam, _E. H. R._, vol. viii. pp. 684-696.

With the Protectorate of Somerset we enter upon a period of more violent

agitation and more drastic expedients. There was a large difference

between using the jurisdiction of the Council to redress individual

cases of hardship and a deliberate attempt to effect a general

settlement of the land question upon lines which would do substantial

justice to the peasants. The former course involved no perilous

assertion of principles, and could be pursued under the guise of a

purely conservative policy, merely by referring disputes between

landlords and tenants to the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests, which,

though in fact administrative and governmental bodies, were none the

less protected to some extent against criticism by wearing the

appearance of mere legal tribunals. The latter might, perhaps, have been

attempted with some faint hope of success, if statesmen had been much

more careful than they were to discriminate between the different

aspects of the problem with which they were confronted. To us, who look

back on the situation from a distance of three and a half centuries,

it seems that the one guiding thread, which might have led some way

through the welter of confusion, was offered by the sharp distinction

drawn by Hales between those enclosures which were made by the exchange

and consolidation of strips, with a view to better husbandry, and those

which had as their effect the conversion of arable land to pasture, the

monopolising of commons, and the eviction of tenants. The arguments in

favour of the first type of enclosure were too cogent for any policy

which condemned enclosing in general to have the smallest prospect of

success. The only possibility of averting the ruin to the peasantry

which accompanied depopulation lay in encouraging them generally to

follow the example of their brothers in Kent, Essex, Devonshire, and

Cornwall, who had for centuries been substituting a more progressive

husbandry for the "mingle mangle" of the open fields, without the

disastrous consequences entailed by the spread of capitalist agriculture

in other parts of the South and Midlands. But such a frank encouragement

of certain kinds of enclosure for the sake of repressing others implied

an appreciation of the economics of the problem to which comparatively

few persons in our period had attained, and was quite beyond the grasp

of Governments, which, at their worst, as under Warwick, were quite

indifferent to the sufferings of the poorer classes, and, at their best,

conceived public interests to be served best by a strict maintenance of

customary conditions. Somerset's policy of deliberately restoring

ancient relationships with a strong hand could hardly even be begun

without those who pursued it taking sides in a bitter economic

agitation, and essaying openly to reverse the whole agrarian movement

with which, in the course of the past half century, the wealth of the

middle and upper classes, at any rate south of the Trent, had become

inextricably identified. It involved in fact a return to the policy of

Wolsey, and a return to it under conditions which made Wolsey's policy

doubly hard to carry out, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the position of

Somerset as temporary head of a jealous aristocracy was far weaker than

that of the omnipotent Cardinal, and, on the other hand, the lapse of

twenty years had seen the growth of a generation to which enclosures

were a vested interest.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of the whole agrarian episode between

the death of Henry VIII. and the fall of Somerset as the mere freak of a

misguided doctrinaire. If we can see difficulties which he did not, if

we can smile at the thought of any Government at once so incompetent,

and but for Somerset himself, so entirely selfish, carrying out a great

conservative revolution in the teeth of the new wealth and power of the

country, we must also remember that he was not alone in thinking the

spoliation of the weaker rural classes not only, as it certainly was,

illegal, but also so patently unjust as to amount to a national crime,

and that in that age men overestimated the ability of a Government fiat

to modify economic habits almost as much as they underestimated it two

and a half centuries later. Somerset can hardly have been ignorant of

the tremendous risks involved in his policy. But he may well have

thought inaction not only baser than, but almost as dangerous as,

action. It was certain that, unless the Government interfered to protect

tenants, there would be a series of peasants' revolts. The best answer

to the charge of stirring up class hatred, which was made against

Somerset, as against all who call attention to its causes, was that

agrarian rioting had begun in Hertfordshire[652] before the Commission

on Enclosures was sent out, that in those counties where it took its

work seriously order was maintained till the end of 1548, and that grave

disturbances did not take place until the following year, when it became

evident that, both in Parliament and on the Council, the Protector's

policy had been beaten by the opposition of the great landowners. Nor is

there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Somerset himself (though he,

like every one else, had speculated in monastic estates), however much

there may be to regret that his policy did not come into stronger hands,

or fall upon times which were, from a political point of view, less

hopelessly impracticable. An attempt was made to set a good example on

the Crown Estates. In 1548, in response to complaints from the tenants

at Walton, Weybridge, Esher, and Shepperton, that the making of the

royal deer park at Hampton Court was ruining them through the loss of

common rights which it entailed, an order[653] was issued dechasing the

Park, and throwing open the enclosed lands to the commoners. In the

following year Somerset secured the passage through Parliament of a

Private Act[654] conferring a good title on those copyholders on his own

manors to whom demesne lands had been let, and who, as occupiers of

other than customary tenancies, could not claim the protection of

manorial custom. It is plain from the comparatively few complaints which

came in the sixteenth century from freeholders that, if such a course

had been generally pursued, the chief objection to the changes grouped

together under the name of enclosure would have been removed, because

the harsh disturbance of vested interests which they involved would have

been avoided. But that, of course, was quite outside the bounds of

political possibility.

[652] Appendix to Miss Lamond's edition of _The Commonweal of

this Realm of England_, Hale's defence, p. lviii.: "Whas ther

not, longe before this Commyssyon was sent forthe, an

insurrection in Hertfordshire for the comens at Northall and

Cheshunt?"

[653] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. ii. pp.

190-193, May 5, 1548: a complaint from "many poor men of the

Parishes of Walton, Weybridge, East Molson, West Molson,

Caverham, Esher, Byfiete, Temsditton ... in the name of the

whole parishes before rehearsed, that by reason of the making of

the late chase of Hampton Court, forsomyche as their commons,

pastures, and meadows be taken in, and that all the said

parishes are overlaid with the deer now increasing daily upon

them, very many households of the same parishes be let fall

down, the families decayed, and the king's liege people much

diminished, the country thereabout in manner made desolate."

[654] See p. 294.

The story of Somerset's attempt to deal with the land question is soon

told. In 1548 agrarian discontent was at its height. Some time in that

year there must have come to the hands of the Government the small tract

on the effect of sheep-farming in Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire,

Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, which was printed in 1551 under the name

of "Certayne causes of the Present Discontent."[655] In spring and

summer Latimer was thundering against the "Step-lords"[656] at Paul's

Cross. In autumn Crowley published his "Information and Petition

against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons."[657] Above all, the poor

commons had earlier in the year shown unmistakable signs of fending for

themselves. The result of Somerset's own sympathy with the prevalent

discontent was the formation of something like a party, under the name

of the "Commonwealth men," with Latimer as its prophet and Hales as its

man of action, which had a programme sufficiently definite to put heart

into the peasantry and to terrify the great landed proprietors. On June

1st a Royal Commission[658] was appointed to inquire into offences

committed against the Acts forbidding conversion of arable to pasture

and depopulation. The Commission divided itself into several committees

to deal with different parts of the country. Only one of them, however,

consisting of John Hales and five of his colleagues, got seriously to

work. It had a large area to cover--the counties of Oxfordshire,

Berkshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire,

and Northamptonshire--and one which was the centre of the agitation

against enclosure. It seems to have interrupted its labours during

autumn and winter, but it was busy in June, July, and August 1548, and

again in the summer of 1549, by which time, however, the anger of the

landed gentry against its proceedings, and of the peasants against the

inactivity of the Commission as a whole, had reached a point which made

it hardly possible for it to do more than collect information.

Considering the difficulties of its task, and the wide tract of country

to be covered, its behaviour appears to have been thorough and

business-like. The usual procedure was to empanel a jury of twelve in

each place visited, to whom Hales delivered an address explaining the

objects and methods of the inquiry, as set out in the instructions

issued by the Government to the Commissioners. These stated the

Commission to have been formed in particular "for the maintenance and

keeping up of houses of husbandry, for avoiding destruction and pulling

down of houses for enclosures and converting of arable land into

pasture, for limiting what number of sheep men should have and keep in

their possession at one time, against plurality and keeping together of

farms, and for maintenance of housekeeping, hospitality, and tillage on

the sites ... of such monasteries, priories, and religious houses as

were dissolved."[659] Offenders were then presented by the jury, and

though, on Hales' advice, a pardon was granted them for their past

illegalities, their enclosures seem to have been thrown down, arable

which had been turned into pasture to have been ploughed up, and farms

which had been united to have been separated.[660]

[655] Published by the E. E. T. S.

[656] The first sermon preached before King Edward the Sixth,

March 8, 1549: "You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you

step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possession

yearly too much. For that herebefore went for twenty or forty

pounds by year ... now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by

year." See also Latimer, _The Sermon of the Plough_, January 18,

1548.

[657] Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

[658] The proclamation appointing the Commission is printed by

Strype, _op. cit._, vol. ii., Book I., chap. ii. The operative

part of it runs: "And therefore, He ... hath appointed,

according to the said acts and proclamations, a view and inquiry

to be made of all such as contrary to the said acts and godly

ordinances have made enclosures and pasture of that which was

arable ground, or let any house, tenement, or mease decay or

fall down, or done anything contrary of the good and wholesome

articles contained in the said acts." In my account of the

situation under Somerset I have followed the documents printed

by Strype, and the appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to

_The Commonweal of this Realm of England_.

[659] Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

[660] For the pardon, see appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction

to _The Commonweal_, &c., p. lxi.; for the ploughing up of a

park and division of farms, _ibid._, pp. xli. and lxi.-lxii.;

for the Bills introduced by Hales, _ibid._, xl., xlv.-lii.,

lxii.-lxv. Strype's account appears to be based on that of

Hales.

In the meantime Somerset kept the general policy of agrarian reform

alive on the Council. In the autumn of 1548 Hales had returned to

London, and, as member for Preston, had prepared three Bills, dealing

partly with enclosures and partly with the high prices. The first,

requiring re-edification of decayed houses and the maintenance of

tillage, and the second, forbidding speculation in food-stuffs, were

introduced into the House of Lords. The third, which aimed at

encouraging cattle breeding as distinct from sheep grazing, was read

first in the House of Commons. Neither Bill came to anything, for

Parliament was as angry as the Council with Somerset's policy. But in

May 1549 the Protector issued another proclamation against the decay of

houses and enclosure; in June he infuriated the upper classes by a

proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own

hands by pulling down hedges; and throughout the whole period of his

power he used the Court of Requests as an instrument for protecting

tenants against landlords.[661] The Secretary[662] to the Council, who

was quite ready for a reign of terror provided that the gentry began it,

prophesied gloomily that the German peasants' revolt was to be

re-enacted in England, and Warwick attacked Hales fiercely for venturing

to discharge the duties laid upon him by the Government, of which

Warwick was a member.[663] "Sir," wrote a plaintive Norfolk gentleman to

Cecil about the time of Ket's rebellion, "Be plain with my Lord's Grace,

that under the pretence of simplicity and poverty there may not rest

much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Commonwealths

and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I

mean as well the greatest as the lowest) I assure you they are in such

doubt that almost they dare touch none of them, but for that some of

them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that

Commonwealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.... I may

well gather some of them to be in jealousy of my Lord's friendship, yea

and to be plain, think my Lord's grace rather to will the decay of the

gentlemen than otherwise."[664] Poor gentlemen! A Government which holds

that laws do not exist only to preserve the rich in their possessions!

Truly the mountains are removed.

[661] For these facts, see Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

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

the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549: "The king's subjects are out

of all discipline, out of all obedience, caring neither for

Protector nor King. And what is the cause? Your own lenity ...

the foot taketh upon him the part of the head, and commons is

become king, a king appointing conditions and laws to the

governors, saying, 'Grant this and that and we will go home.'...

What then is the matter, troweth your grace?... By my

faith, Sir, even that which I said to your grace.... Liberty,

Liberty.... In Germany, when the very like tumult to this began

first, it might have been appeased with the loss of 20 men, and

after with the loss of 100 or 200. But it was thought nothing

and might easily be appeased, and also some spiced consciences

taking pity of the poor ... thought it a sore matter to lose so

many of their country folk, saying they were simple folk.... It

cost, ere it was appeased, they say, 1000 or 2000 men."

[663] Appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to _The

Commonweal_, &c., pp. xli. and lii. But of course there was no

such thing as collective responsibility for policy in the

sixteenth century.

[664] Russel, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 202.

Somerset's Government had too short a life for us to judge how far, in

happier political circumstances, he might have succeeded, not in

checking agrarian changes, which would in any case have been impossible,

but in securing that reasonable consideration should be given to the

vested interests of the poorer classes. As Elizabethan statesmen

discovered[665] at the end of the century, there was room for a policy

which would prevent the wholesale displacement of tenants, and

nevertheless offer an encouragement to the formation of the compact

holdings out of the scattered strips and common pastures, which the

agricultural experts were unanimous in condemning. There are faint

indications of an understanding that a fair middle course was possible

in a remarkable case which comes from the little Huntingdonshire town of

Godmanchester.[666] At Godmanchester there had been the usual changes of

the preceding half century. Rents had been raised, cottages pulled down,

woods destroyed and turned to pasture, while the meadows, which under

the Act of 1547 had been confiscated from the local gild, offered a

tempting prey to some enterprising speculator. On complaints coming

before the Council in the summer of 1549 a comprehensive scheme of

reorganisation was drawn up. All persons with more than one house were

to let at the customary rent that which they did not use themselves. All

persons who had pulled down houses or converted them to other purposes

than the accommodation of tenants were either to rebuild them or to

build new ones, and to let them to any one offering the customary rent

before Michaelmas 1549. The groves of wood converted to pasture were to

be enclosed, so as to prevent the depredations made upon them by

straying beasts, and, if necessary, the land was to be sown with acorns.

With the gild lands a course was taken which, in the scramble for land

which was going on in the middle of the sixteenth century, was

unfortunately highly unusual. According to the Council's directions they

were to "be divided among the inhabitants thereof in this manner; that

is to say to every ploughland five acres, and to every cottager and

artificer there dwelling, or which hereafter upon the houses to be now

builded shall dwell, one acre, and, if the number do not extend, then

for every ploughland four, and so for lack of the rate every ploughland

three, and the residue of the said acres falling after that rate to be

divided among the cottagers, paying for every of the said acres 3/4."

This case is the high water mark of administrative interference on

behalf of the tenants. The action taken embraces nearly all the

expedients of re-edifying decayed cottages, fixing fair rents,

preventing common land from passing into the control of a single

individual, and making equal allotment among the inhabitants, which had

been demanded by the peasants and suggested by their friends. It shows

that the enclosing of land hitherto used in common was not resented,

provided that the division was made in such a way as to give a fair

share to all the parties interested. It may perhaps be taken as a

specimen of the kind of policy which lay behind Somerset's expressions

of sympathy with the peasantry, and which he would have pursued if his

colleagues on the Council had permitted. As it was, he was not strong

enough to carry out his programme. While the failure of the Commission

resulted in the revolts of 1549, his reluctance to crush their authors,

whom he believed to be men goaded into rebellion by intolerable

grievances, united the whole weight of the greater property against him

as a traitor to his order. In the attack made upon him as by his

colleagues, the actions which evoked their special denunciation were

those which embodied his agrarian policy, the use of the Court of

Requests to protect tenants, the appointment of the Royal Commission to

enforce the Acts against enclosures, the pardon granted in June 1549 to

the riotous peasants, and the statements attributed to him that "the

covetousness of the gentlemen gave cause to the common people to rise,"

and that "people had good cause to reform the things themselves,"

because "the lords of Parliament were loathe to incline themselves to

reformation of enclosures and other things."[667] To the last a popular

hero, the "good Duke" could expect no help from those whom he had

befriended, and no mercy from the sordid counter-revolution which he had

provoked. His epitaph was given by the sad cries of "Too true," with

which the crowd about the scaffold greeted his dying declaration that he

had "ever been glad of the furtherance ... of the commonwealth."[668]

[665] See p. 355.

[666] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. ii. pp.

294-296.

[667] Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

[668] Somerset's execution took place on January 22, 1552,

more than two years after he had been deposed from the

Protectorate, for supposed complicity in a plot to overthrow the

Government. The evidence for the existence of a conspiracy

appears to be feeble. See Pollard, _The Political History of

England_, 1547-1603, pp. 61-65.

With the fall of Somerset in October 1549 the landowning classes had

their revenge, and, under the guidance of Warwick, the policy of the

Government swung violently in the opposite direction. The intervention

of the Council to protect tenants of course stopped at once; in the two

cases which are reported as having come before it in the year 1550 and

1551 the line taken was that the presumption was against the tenants who

had broken open enclosures.[669] While, in the absence of John Hales,

who appears to have found it convenient to leave the country, the

Reports of the Royal Commission were allowed to slumber, the Government,

by way of reducing opportunities for undesirable meetings, instructed

the Bishop of London to prevent unseasonable preaching in his diocese,

and set itself to establish the new agrarian régime by law. The ways in

which men seek liberty are infinite in number, but the methods of

tyranny are everywhere the same; and the nearest parallel to the

behaviour of Somerset's successors is the attitude of the panic-stricken

aristocracy of the early nineteenth century towards trade unions. Under

an Act of 1550 all meetings of the peasantry were treated as a sort of

"illegal conspiracy." Any forty of them who assembled to break down an

enclosure might be condemned as traitors. Any twelve who assembled for

the same purpose were guilty of felony, as also were those who summoned

such a meeting, or who combined to reduce rents or the price of corn.

Even the rusty legislation of the thirteenth century was revived by the

re-enactment of the Statute of Merton of 1235,[670] which permitted

lords to enclose as much as they pleased, provided that "sufficient"

remained over for the tenants, with the significant improvement that the

latter qualification was swept away by a clause declaring that

enclosures might be made "notwithstanding their gainsaying and

contradiction." The tyranny of the oligarchy which ruled from 1549 to

1553 has been obscured by the more dramatic events which preceded and

succeeded it. But it marks the bottom point in the condition of the

sixteenth century peasantry. It indicates how the new agrarian régime

will develop when the political forces impeding it are removed. More had

asked, What is Government? and had answered that it is "a certein

conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne commodities under the

name and title of a Common Wealth." His immortal definition does less

than justice to the cynicism of the generation which succeeded his own.

Mary executed Protestants for reasons of religion, as Elizabeth executed

Catholics for reasons of State. But Warwick, a hypocrite in religion,

was at least guiltless of the hypocrisy of sheltering his land policy

"under the name and title of the Common Wealth." It was exactly what it

seemed to be, a straightforward attempt to prevent the poor from

protesting when their possessions were taken from them by the rich.

[669] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. iii. pp.

181-182 and 247 and 252. "Mr. Grenewaie was this day before the

Counsaill and rebuked sore for his attemptate in causeng Raf

Lees hedges to be broaken up; nevertheless considering his long

service [as gentleman usher] he was borne withall, and for this

tyme without further punishment he was commaunded to make up

those hedges again."

[670] 3 and 4 Edward VI. c. 3.

The general policy of the Government during the reign of Elizabeth and

the first half of the seventeenth century shows neither the desire of

Somerset to undo the agrarian revelation, nor the complete indifference

to the interests of the poorer classes of the party which succeeded him.

During the reign of Elizabeth there was little agrarian agitation. It is

possible that the limits of profitable pasture-farming had been reached.

It is possible that the policy of encouraging the export of corn, which

had been suggested by Hales, and which was adopted in 1563 and extended

in 1571, reacted favourably on arable farming. It is possible, again,

that Warwick's measures had had their effect, and that the peasantry had

been cowed into silence. Though, on the whole, the Government maintained

the traditional attitude, it did not interfere except in circumstances

of special hardship, or when there was danger of serious disturbance.

Cases of this nature came before it fairly frequently in the reigns of

Elizabeth, Charles, and James. One finds it intervening on the ground

that the poverty of tenants makes it impossible for them to go to law,

or that the offenders concerned are so powerful as to be able to

disregard inferior authorities, or that the local authorities themselves

have been unfairly biassed, or to prevent disturbances by hearing

tenants' grievances, or to compel a great noble, like the Earl of

Shrewsbury, to reinstate tenants whom it thinks to have been wrongfully

evicted, or to stop action being taken by a landlord pending a decision

by the courts in his favour. In 1579 the Council writes to the Lord

President of Wales ordering him to take proceedings against two persons

who have been enclosing part of the Forest of Fakenham, and have

disturbed the copyholders; he is to prevent any further enclosures being

made until the whole matter has been considered by the Government.[671]

In 1581 it interferes to protect a copyholder who has been kept out of

his holding by the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough.[672] In 1586 it

directs the Cambridgeshire justices to inquire into the complaint of

some tenants who claim that a piece of common pasture has been let over

their heads, and to see that both parties to the dispute come before the

Justices of Assize.[673] The Justices of Assize in Norfolk are to take

action in the matter of a common at Kettlestone which two of the tenants

allege to have been overstocked with sheep.[674] Several letters are

addressed to the Council of the Marches of Wales ordering them to

prevent the eviction of copyholders.[675] A landlord is requested to

attend the Council and prove that his tenants' fines are uncertain, and

not, as they allege, fixed.[676] The Court of Chancery has dismissed a

case arising out of the enclosure of commons at Bath, and the Council

orders a retrial.[677] Occasionally it cites offenders into the Court of

Star Chamber,[678] and in 1592, just when the Court of Requests was

beginning to be attacked by the common lawyers, we find a case as to

fold-courses coming before the Court of Requests.[679] More often it

appoints special Commissioners to act as arbitrators, or refers

petitioners to the Justices of Assize in their county, with a request to

take local evidence and inform the Council what they advise. Throughout

the reigns of James and Charles we get glimpses of administrative

activity which show that the traditional policy was, perhaps fitfully,

maintained. In 1603 the Council of the North[680] were instructed to

make "from time to time diligent and effectual inquisition of the

wrongful taking in of commons and other grounds, and the decay of

tillage and of towns or houses of husbandry," and to correct offenders

with "some notable punishment." The rebellion in the Midlands in 1607

produced special measures, the chief offenders being summoned before the

Council and bound over to rebuild houses which had fallen into decay,

while in the following years two Commissions were appointed to compound

with enclosers.[681] In Yorkshire the justices are evidently fairly

active in 1607 and 1608. A Richmond freeholder who owns two-thirds of

the manor is presented "for decaying five husbandries, and also for

converting 30 acres of tillage ground to meadow and pasture," and

similar presentments are made at Malton, Thirsk, and Helmsley.[682] A

Justice of Assize writes about the same time from the western counties

to the effect that twenty-six houses of husbandry have been rebuilt and

the offenders punished.[683] In 1614 the justices of Norfolk inform the

Council that in accordance with its directions they have examined the

enclosures made in the last two years, and have ordered the hedging and

ditching of lands to be stopped till further notice.[684] In the

following year one William Combe was negotiating with the corporation of

Stratford for their consent to the enclosure and conversion to pasture

of his freehold lands lying in the common fields at Welcombe; in 1615 an

order made at Warwick Assizes was confirmed by the Chief Justice

restraining him from doing so on the ground that it was "against the

laws of the realm," and in the following year a peremptory letter was

addressed to him by the Council directing his compliance.[685] In 1619

there was a temporary reaction owing to the low price of grain, which

led to the appointment of a Commission to grant pardons for breaches of

the Acts forbidding enclosure, and in 1624 all the Statutes except the

two passed in 1597 were repealed, But this did not stop administrative

interference. In 1621 the Justices of Assize for Bedfordshire are

directed to check encroachments on a common, and in 1623 a Commission is

appointed to remove grievances arising in connection with enclosures at

Cheshunt.[686] The rise in corn prices which occurred from 1629 to 1631

produced another burst of activity, which is to be attributed partly to

a genuine desire to protect the poorer classes, and partly to the hope

that the fines imposed upon enclosers might squeeze a few drops into the

Government's ever thirsty Exchequer. In 1630 directions were issued by

the Council to the justices of five Midland counties to remove all

enclosures made in the last two years on the ground that they led to

depopulation and were particularly harmful in time of dearth.[687] In

1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed, and special

instructions to enforce the Statutes against enclosure were issued to

the Justices of Assize.[688] That the inquiry was not a mere formality

is proved by the State Papers of the period. In part of the country, at

any rate, land which had been pasture was ploughed[689] up in obedience

to the Government's orders, and a list of offenders, including--the

Government must have seen his name with grim satisfaction--Lord Saye and

Sele, was returned to the Council, some of whom were still being

prosecuted in the Court of Star Chamber as late as 1639. This is the

last occasion on which we can trace the administration of this part of

the Tudor State policy. The agitation against enclosures was carried on

under the Commonwealth. The diggers under Winstanley came into

prominence for a moment, only to be disclaimed by the respectable[690]

opponents of enclosure and to be instantly suppressed by the Government,

and there was a crop of pamphlets in the years between 1650 and 1660

which dealt with the evils of depopulation in quite the old manner. But

the traditional doctrine as to the importance of the peasantry had

decayed, and the central machinery for forcing the justices to take

action had been destroyed in 1641. The last Bill to regulate enclosures

was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656, and was rejected on

the second reading.[691]

[671] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. xi. pp.

191-192. A letter to the Lord President of Wales that whereas

upon complaints exhibited to their lordships by the tenants of

the Forest of Fakenham against Sir John Throgmorton, and one Mr.

William Bell his stuarde, concerning an inclosure by him made of

certen commons ... encroachment upon their copieholds ... it was

by them ordered that the suite against the tenants commenced at

the Common Lawe in respect of their commons and copieholds

should surcease and the matters in controversy abyde triall

before their lordships ... and untill the matter should be heard

and determined they enjoyned to proceed no further in the

inclosure of the said Common ... forasmuch as the tenants do now

again complaine that since their lordships' said order Sir John

and the said William Bell have inclosed more of the said common

... but hath also caused Bell to proceed against the tenants by

_ejectione firmæ_ at the Common Lawe, he is therefore required

... to will and command the said Sir John and William Bell to

forbear their inclosures of the said Common ... untill the same

shall be ... determined by their lordships according to their

lordships' form and order."

[672] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. xiii. pp.

91-92. A letter to the Justices of the County of Lincoln: "If

they thinke it agreeable with equitie and justice that the poore

man should be put in possession of the said Landes, that they

give commandment unto the said Lacy to admit him thereunto."

[673] _Ibid._, vol. xiv. pp. 201-202.

[674] _Ibid._, vol. xv. pp. 394-395.

[675] See p. 373, n. 1, and _Acts of the Privy Council_, New

Series, vol. xvii. p. 76. For a similar letter to the Council of

the North, _ibid._, vol. xxvii. pp. 228-229.

[676] _Ibid._, vol. xxii. p. 379.

[677] _Ibid._, vol. xxii. pp. 360 and 370. Letters to the Master

of the Rolls ordering retrial of case concerning enclosure of

commons at Bath.

[678] _Ibid_., vol. xvi. pp. 366-367. A letter to the Solicitor:

"Whereas divers poor men, tenants of the manor of Chilton, have

exhibited very grievous complaints unto their lordships against

William Darrell, Esq., of divers and sundry misdemeanors

committed by him in breach of her majestie's peace" ... the

solicitor is to "cause a byll to be drawn into the Court of Star

Chamber against Darrel," and Camden Society 1886, _Cases in the

Court of Star Chamber and High Commission_, pp. 44-45.

[679] Holkham MSS., Sparham, Bdle. No. 5, 14th June, 34 Eliz:

"In the matter in variance brought before the Queenes Majestie

in her Maj{tie's} hon{ble} Court of Requests at the suit of John

Byrd against Christopher Saye and other defendants upon the

motion of Mr. Edward Coke recorder of the City of London being

of Councel with the said defendant.... For that it appeareth

that the said Defendant hath had three verdicts and judgments at

the Common Law, one of them against the said complainant

himself."... The defendant is awarded costs, "and the said

complainant shall from henceforth forbear to put any sheepe upon

the said ground, and suffer his sheepe to feede there."

[680] Prothero, _Statutes and Constitutional Documents_,

1558-1625, pp. 370-371.

[681] Prothero, _Statutes and Constitutional Documents_,

1558-1625, pp. 470-472, and Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New

Series, vol. xviii.

[682] Atkinson, _North Riding Quarter Sessions_, vol. i. pp.

106, 108, 111, 122. The last presentment runs: "Will Marwood of

Busby, gent{n}, for decaying of xxx acres of arable land or

thereabouts, and converting of xxx acres of arable land or

thereabouts, the same, from tillage into pasture or meadow, and

tilled nothing in the same parish in lieu thereof, contrary,

etc."

[683] Leonard, _Trans. Royal Hist. So.c_, vol. xix.

[684] Leonard, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xix.

[685] Ingleby, _Shakespeare and the Welcombe Enclosures_.

[686] _S. P. D._ J., I., vol. cxxiv., December 20, 1621, and _S.

P. D._, Ch. i. cliii., October 2, 1623.

[687] Leonard, _Trans. Royal Hist. Society_, vol. xix.

[688] _Ibid._

[689] For the ploughing up of pasture, _S. P. D._, Ch. I. vol.

cccciv. 142, and vol. cccclxxv. 72; for Lord Saye and Sele, vol.

ccclxii. 60, 1637; order of Council that the Attorney-General

should forthwith proceed by information in the Star Chamber

against Viscount Saye and Sele for depopulation and conversion

of houses and lands.

[690] J. Moore, _A Target for Tillage_: "My purpose is not here

to plead for ... any other idle drones and wretched atheists....

All these I acknowledge to be the greatest wasters and spoylers

of our country, worse by many degrees than any depopulators,

oppressors, and decayors of villages.... All these I know

abhorre the plough, and are enemies to the State; who yet (I

confesse) in their high talke do justify tillage and will be

ready no doubt to reforme the decay thereof with spade and

pickaxe." (The copy of this pamphlet which I have seen is dated

1611. I have ventured to assume that this is a misprint, and

that it should be placed with John Moore's other pamphlets on

enclosure, 1653-1656.)

[691] Leonard, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xix.

(c) _The Success and Failure of State Intervention_

It remains to ask how far the policy of trying to check the agrarian

changes, which was pursued by Governments for nearly a century and a

half, had any effect on economic practice. Statesmen were certainly

biassed in favour of protecting the weaker landholding classes. But was

their intervention simply the expression of a pious opinion? Was it so

entirely futile as--to give a modern parallel--the Small Holdings Act of

1892? Or did it to any extent modify or retard the course of economic

events? The view usually taken, that legislation was so ineffective as

to be almost negligible, is in accordance with what we know of the

character of local administration in the sixteenth century, and is

supported by much contemporary evidence. The constant introduction of

fresh proposals suggests that the previous laws were disappointing. The

failure of existing Acts was the reason given in Somerset's proclamation

for the appointment of the Commission of 1548. Hales, who is certainly

the most reliable authority on the situation between 1540 and 1550,

speaks of them as being notoriously a dead letter.[692] If one looks at

the Statutes passed against depopulation in the sixteenth century, with

a view to discovering how far they really met the situation, one will be

inclined to say that they quite failed to go to the root of the matter.

The special evil which they were intended to combat was depopulation

caused by evictions. But evictions could be checked only by giving

tenants security, which would have meant turning customary into legal

titles, and fixing judicial rents for leaseholders and immovable fines

for copyholders; in short, the sort of interference which the peasants

and their champions demanded, but on which no Government depending on

the support of the landed gentry would venture, except upon an

extraordinary emergency. In the absence of such an attempt to grapple

directly with the fundamental fact that the peasants' insecurity made

them liable to suffer whenever there was a change in the methods of

agriculture, legislation designed merely to prevent those changes was

almost certain to be evaded. Even with the best intentions the Statutes

could never have been easy to administer. There was the difficulty

inherent in the whole Tudor and Stuart policy of authoritative

interference with trade and industry, the difficulty of making State

action keep pace with economic changes. The Government is often like a

man pursuing a tram from one stopping-place to another, and just missing

it at each. It insists that land which has hitherto been in tillage

shall remain in tillage. But there are a few years of bumper harvests,

and the farmers complain that they cannot pay their way.[693] The

Government tries to get over the difficulty by allowing them to convert

arable to pasture, when a providence unversed in statecraft sends a wet

summer, and it scrambles hastily back to the position which it has just

abandoned.[694] By excepting from the operation of the Statutes certain

districts which are specially suitable for grazing, it encourages a

rough local division of labour, one part of a county confining itself to

pasture-farming and another to tillage. But then, in pursuit of its

traditional and quite reasonable policy of securing that food is cheap,

it insists that all farmers are to supply the markets with grain, with

the result that those who have specialised in corn-growing are

threatened with ruin by the fall in prices which ensues, and that it is

even questionable whether they will not convert arable to pasture to

evade the obligation imposed upon them.[695] Old enclosures were

tolerated and new forbidden. But how distinguish between old and new?

Land turned to pasture simply to restore it to a condition in which it

would be fit for tillage escaped the condemnation passed on other kinds

of "conversion," and one can imagine that nice arguments must have

arisen as to a farmer's motives. Again, suppose a man converted to

pasture land which should have remained under the plough, and then

leased it to some one else, who retained it as pasture, was the lessee

guilty of an offence? In a case which came before the Court of Exchequer

in 1582, the defendant pleaded that he merely "used" the land as

pasture, and had not converted it, while the Crown argued that use was

equivalent to conversion, that he was in the position of a man profiting

by the continuance of a nuisance, and that a fine of 10s. an acre for

each year since the original conversion ought to be imposed.[696] Points

like this give colour to Coke's complaint against the whole body of Acts

against enclosure that "they were labyrinthes, with such intricate

windings or turnings as little or no fruit proceeded from them."

[692] Hale's defence in appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction

to _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_.

[693] D'Ewes _Journal_, p. 674 (1601). Mr. Johnson said: "In the

time of dearth, when we made this Statute, it was not considered

that the hand of God was upon us; and now corn is cheap. If too

cheap, the husbandman is undone." See also Raleigh's speech in

the same debate.

[694] _e.g._ in 1593 the clause in the Act of 1563 forbidding

conversion of arable to pasture was repealed. In 1595 and 1596

bad harvests produced loud complaints of high prices, and in

1597 conversion to pasture was again prohibited.

[695] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_, 1907, pp. 131 ff.

[696] Moore's _Reports_, p. 117, plea 262, Claypole's case: "Le

conseil de Reigne argue que ... l'entent de Estatute fuit que le

user sera accompt equivalent en tort al convcon." Judgment was

apparently given for the Queen. The decision was quoted as an

authority in the debate in Parliament on the Bills introduced in

1597. _Hist. MSS. Com._, MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part

VII., pp. 541-543: "And 26 Eliz. in the Exchequer, in Claypole's

case, an information was exhibited upon the Statute of 4 Hen.

VII. against a purchaser for converting of tillage into pasture,

and adjudged good, though the purchaser were not the converter,

but only a continuer of the first conversion. So as this new law

tends but for an instruction and explanation of the old."

But, of course, the obscurity of the Statutes was the least part of the

difficulty with which Governments who wished to protect the peasantry

were confronted. Much more serious was the fact that the traditional

policy could be carried out only by disregarding the financial interests

of the wealthier classes, who could most easily influence Parliament and

the Council, and who were locally omnipotent. In the first half of the

sixteenth century the high position of many of those who were most

deeply implicated in cutting land free from communal restrictions made

them almost unassailable. The Royal Commission of 1517 returned among

enclosers the names of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the

Duke of Buckingham, Lord Danbury, Sir William Bolen, Sir R. Sheffield,

the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir J. Witte, the Under-Treasurers

of State, and Sir J. Cotton, who was himself one of the

Commissioners.[697] The angry unanimity with which Somerset's colleague

turned against his land policy was not wonderful, for they were nearly

all directly interested in the maintenance of the _status quo_. Warwick,

who led the _coup d'état_, had enclosed on a large scale. Sir William

Herbert had made extensive enclosures on the lands which he had acquired

from the Abbey of Wilton. The St. John family, the Darcy family, the

Earl of Westmoreland, had all local troubles with their tenants; and

there are some indications that Sir William Paget and the detested and

detestable Lord Rich were in the same position.[698]

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

[698] For Warwick, Herbert, and the St. Johns, see pp. 326, 368,

and 362. For Darcy and disturbances in Westmoreland, Gairdner,

_L. and P. Henry VIII._, xii. II., xii. I., 319, xi. 1080. For

Paget and Rich, Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

It is not, however, material to trace the records of individual members

of the Council, because their interest in checking the interference of

the State with the free disposal of land is evident from the fact that

many of them enormously increased their estates through the share which

they obtained in the property confiscated from the religious houses and

the gilds. A comparison of the lists of Privy Councillors for 1548 and

1552, published by Strype,[699] with Dr. Savine's[700] valuable analysis

of the grantees of the monastic estates, show that out of thirty-one

persons who got grants of land of £200 a year or more fourteen were

members of the Privy Council in one or other of those years, exclusive

of the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. This fact is by itself

almost sufficient to explain the impossibility of enforcing the laws

forbidding depopulation during the years which followed the death of

Henry VIII., and the despair of legal protection which seems to have

settled upon the classes affected by the movement. The view sometimes

expressed that the religious houses had been easier landlords than the

lay owners into whose hands their estates passed, though it can

occasionally be corroborated from the complaints made by tenants to the

Government, scarcely seems, as yet, to be satisfactorily proved. But the

distribution among the wealthier classes of land producing a net income

of not less than £110,000 gave them an enormous vested interest in

preventing and evading legislation to check the most profitable use of

the new possessions which were to endow the aristocracy of the future.

The supposition of peculiar harshness in the owners to whom the land

passed, though probably correct, is really not needed to explain the

part which the transference of these vast quantities of land had in

augmenting the distress of the rural classes. The worst side of all such

great and sudden redistributions of property is that the individual is

more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his

pound of flesh. A buyer must sell at a profit, or he had much better not

have bought. During the decade between 1540 and 1550 there was a furor

of land speculation. To the Abbey lands, which came into the market

after 1536, were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. It is

quite clear that some of the grantees of estates did not acquire them

with the intention of retaining them, but simply "bought for the rise."

The lands of the Abbey of Whitby, for example, pass first to the Crown,

and are then sold by it to the Duke of Northumberland, who in turn sells

them to Sir John Yorke.[701] A small official in the Royal household

buys the Cistercian nunnery at Brewood, and at once puts it up to sale

"for suche a price that no man will gladly by hit at hys hand."[702]

Trentham is surrendered to the Crown in 1536; in 1540 the Duke of

Suffolk obtains a grant of the rents and reversions reserved upon the

Crown leases there, and in the same year sells it to one Leveson, who

has already acquired lands belonging to Horlton Abbey, and already sold

them again to Biddulph.[703] One finds even the champion of the tenants,

Somerset himself, getting a grant of land from the Crown on July 1st,

leasing part of it for eighty years on July 2nd, and transferring it

back to the Crown, subject to the lease, on July 9th.[704] When property

changed hands three times in the course of ten days, it could hardly

fail to be rack-rented, or the transaction would not pay. What happened

to the tenants? Here and there, as at Whitby and Washerne,[705] a bitter

outburst against their new masters shows that the result has been what

we should expect. But for the rest, a cloud descends and we cannot say.

It is only in such occasional glimpses that we catch the solid earth

shifting beneath the feet of those who till it. It was such a glimpse

which led the last great English peasant, in a time of even more

widespread misery, to say that the wretchedness of the landless labourer

was the work of the Reformation. Cobbett, and those who follow Cobbett

in representing the economic evils of the sixteenth century as the fruit

of the religious changes, err in linking as parent and child movements

which were rather brother and sister, twin aspects of the individualism

which seems inseparable from any swift increase in riches. Their vision

of a time when mild ecclesiastics administered their estates as a

popular trust lays a spell upon the imagination. In the religious houses

of Lancashire and Yorkshire and Northumberland there may, here and

there, even on the eve of the dissolution, have been a reality

corresponding to it. But we need hardly go further than Sir Thomas

More[706] to learn that for parts, at least, of England it is only a

vision; and More does not speak without book. Holy men enclose land,

convert arable to pasture, claim villeins, turn copyholds into tenancies

at will. If prominent ecclesiastics had really wanted to champion the

cause of the peasantry, they had an excellent opportunity when Wolsey

sent out the first great Commission into enclosures in 1517. But, in

fact, there is no reason to suppose that any protest was made at all

comparable to that which came thirty-two years later from Latimer. How

could there be? The estates of the larger houses were often scattered

over several different counties, and before the dissolution they were

quite frequently managed by laymen. In such cases the monks were simply

rentiers,[707] who needed to know no more about their tenants than the

fellows of an Oxford college know about theirs at the present day.

[699] Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

[700] Fisher, _The Political History of England_, 1485-1547,

Appendix II.

[701] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_

(Leadam).

[702] Hibbert, _The Dissolution of the Monasteries_, pp.

209-210.

[703] _Ibid._, p. 210.

[704] _Hist. MSS. Com._, C.D. 3218, pp. 322-323 (MSS. of Earl of

Leicester at Holkham Hall).

[705] For Whitby and Washerne, see pp. 285 and 194. In 1545 the

tenants of the manor of Egglesdon, formerly the property of the

monastery of Sion, proceed against Palmer, the grantee, in the

Court of Star Chamber for evicting tenants and other oppressions

(Leadam, _E. H. R._, vol. viii. pp. 684-696).

[706] More, _Utopia_, p. 31 (Pitt Press edition): "Noblemen and

gentlemen, yea, and certain abbotts, holy men no doubt ... leave

no ground for tillage, they enclose all to pasture." For a case

of claiming a bondman, see Selden Society, _Select Cases in the

Court of Star Chamber_, Carter _v._ The Abbot of Malmesbury. For

conversion of copyholds to tenancies at will, Selden Society,

_Select Cases in the Court of Requests_, Kent and other

inhabitants of Abbot's Ripton _v._ St. John. The change was

alleged to have been made in 1471.

[707] The opposite view is expressed by Gasquet, _Henry the

Eighth and the English Monasteries_, chap. xxii. For a criticism

of it see Savine, _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_,

vol. i. pp. 263-267, and pp. 245-260 for facts as to lay

administrators. Hibbert, _op. cit._, pp. 210-211, who writes of

Staffordshire, supports Savine rather than Gasquet. The evidence

of Aske cannot be quoted as though what was true of the northern

houses were true of all. As a matter of fact, lay estates

preserved the old conditions in the north long after the

dissolution (see pp. 189-191). The hatred of the new landlords

is proof that they were specially detestable, rather than that

the monasteries had been above all ordinary economic

considerations.

Nevertheless, though facts will not allow us to accept the view which

ascribes the agrarian distress of our period to the Reformation, or even

to the particular changes brought about by the secularisation of

religious endowments, there was a real connection between them. The

Reformation in England is as much a social as a religious revolution. As

a social revolution it is the work of the commercial and middle classes.

It "made of yeomen and artificers gentlemen, and of gentlemen knights,

and so forth upward, and of the poorest sort stark beggars."[708] Their

support is given, in the main, on strict business principles. It is

purchased by ensuring that every one who counts shall have a solid

material interest in supporting the new order. The great Elizabethan

families, the Cecils, the Herberts, the Grenvilles, are well paid in

advance for their services, and continue to be paid long after their

services have ceased. The dissolution of the monasteries does for their

plastic consciences what the foundation of the Bank of England did for

the politics of the City Interest under William III. Having invested in

the Reformation at a time when the Reformation is a gambling stock,

they nurse the security with a solicitude which title-deeds have done

more to inspire than the New Testament, and are zealous to lay up for

themselves treasures in Heaven, as the best insurance for the treasures

which they have already accumulated on earth. A man who looks from the

window of his new mansion on the timber in his new park may well think

it worth the sacrifice of many masses. Though the economic effect of

endowing our landed gentry is not reducible to figures, it is not rash

to say that men who have sprung into wealth by suddenly purchasing new

estates will make those estates pay. And this means that ultimately the

cost will be borne by their tenants. That the new proprietors will be

extraordinarily sensitive to attacks on the rights of property goes

without saying. The lectures[709] delivered to the peasants by the

_nouveaux riches_ of 1549 on the wickedness of agrarian spoliation have

an irony which is eternal.

[708] Quoted by Gasquet, _op. cit._, p. 464, from a document

written about 1591.

[709] _e.g._ Paget's letter to Somerset, July 7, 1549 (Strype,

_Ecclesiastical Memorials_). Neville, De furoribus Norfolcensium

Ketto Duce, 1575. The words put into the mouths of the landed

gentry by Crowley in _The Way to Wealth_ (E. E. T. S.) no doubt

represent their attitude fairly: "Nowe if I should demand of the

gredie cormoraunts what they thinke should be the cause of

sedition, they would saie, 'The paisent knaves be too welthy,

provender pricketh them. They knowe no obedience, they regard no

lawes, they would have no gentlemen, they would have all men

like themselves, they would have all things commune. They would

not have us master of that which is our owne. They will appoint

us what rent we shall take for our grounds.... They will caste

down our parkes and lay our pastures open.... They wyll compel

the Kyng to graunt theyr requests.... We wyll tech them to know

theyr betters, and because they would have all in common we will

leave them nothing.'"

Apart from the special interest which the purchasers of the estates of

monastic and gild estates had in keeping a completely free hand over

their disposal, the normal organisation of English local government made

effective State interference very difficult. As has often been pointed

out, its peculiar strength lay in the success with which it made the

ordinary relationships between social classes the machinery for

executing the mandates of the State, by entrusting administration, not

to officials of the Central Government, but to persons who already

possessed local authority, and who were confirmed in it, rather than

given it, by the Crown. Such a system was favourable to the development

of representative government and of political freedom, because it

strengthened instead of repressing the local initiative on which the

success of representative government ultimately depends. But the very

absence of bureaucracy had the disadvantage that it made it almost

impossible to enforce the regular administration of the law, whenever it

conflicted with the local interests of classes who sat on the county

bench. A not unimportant chapter in English history is contained in the

complaint of the Norfolk rebels that the legislation of the last fifty

years had been "hidden" from them by the Justices of the Peace. The

account of the proceedings of the Commission of 1548, which had to drag

information out of juries packed with the employees of enclosing

landlords, and from witnesses who gave it under threat of

eviction--above all, the pained amazement of a great landowner who found

that the Commission declined to accept evidence from his servants as

unbiassed--is a specimen so typical, that, if it were found in

isolation, we could hardly fail to fit it back into its English

context.[710] Hales, the one statesman whom the agrarian problem

produced, put his finger on the root of the difficulty in the third Bill

which he introduced into Parliament in 1548. The substance of its

proposals, though sufficiently rigorous to modern notions, was not in

itself more drastic than others which actually became law. Its novelty

lay in the machinery by which it was to be enforced. Surveys of pastures

were to be made annually by the curate and two men of every parish, and

those breaking the law were to be presented for trial. In other words,

the initiative in returning offences was to be taken by those chiefly

interested in preventing them. According to Hales, it was the last

provision for making the administration of the Statute a reality which

Parliament found intolerable.[711]

[710] Appendix to Introduction to _The Commonweal of this Realm

of England_ (Lamond), p. lix.

[711] _Ibid._, p. lxv.: "This was it that byt the mare by the

thombe."

Must we, then, dismiss the efforts of the Tudor and Stuart statesmen to

soften the harshness of the agrarian revolution as a mere piece of

solemn futility? The simplicity of the solution makes it a tempting one;

but it is too simple to be true. In the first place we must notice that

our literary evidence is one-sided, because it is fullest for just those

years during which an exceptional freedom from restraint was enjoyed by

the great landlords. It is inevitable that Latimer and Hales should

often be quoted. But one cannot argue from comments on the uselessness

of legislation, uttered at a time when the Statutes against enclosing

were virtually repealed, to show that the law was equally ineffective

under Elizabeth and her two successors. And, in the second place, to

hold that the frequent intervention of the Council had no result is

really an unjustifiably high-handed proceeding. It runs counter to most

of what we know of the administration of the period. A Statute might be

a dead letter, but a letter from the Council was meant to be obeyed. By

1552 the Government has discovered the uselessness of relying for the

enforcement of the law on the intervention of superior lords, and places

its administration in the hands of special Commissioners directly

responsible to the Central Government. Such a view runs counter to the

opinion of the peasants and of the upper classes. The victims of

agrarian oppression recognise that though they have little to hope from

the local authorities, who are their landlords and employers, the

Government's policy is on the whole favourable to them, and they deluge

it with appeals for protection. The justices are naturally no friends to

that policy. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they are by

no means the independent autocracy which they became later, and are

watched closely by the Privy Council. From Norfolk, Nottinghamshire,

Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and the west of England, they

send returns to the Government of their action,[712] and the Government

is quite ready, as we have seen, to revise the action of its delegates

when it thinks they have been biassed by personal interests. In

Yorkshire the juries of several townships present offenders before the

justices. The authorities of Southampton[713] take steps to put the Acts

against enclosure into force. The authorities of Norfolk[714] request

that they may enjoy the exemption which has been granted them. When in

1597, a year in which legislation against enclosures is in the air, the

Earl of Huntingdon asks the burgesses of Leicester to return his nominee

to Parliament, they refuse bluntly to do anything of the kind, on the

ground that the candidate in question is "an encloser himself and

therefore unlikely to redress that wrong in others."[715] The courts

hear a large number of cases dealing with offences committed under the

enclosing Statutes.[716] Individuals obtain special permission, either

by royal license or by Act of Parliament, to use as pasture land which,

like undrained marshes, is obviously unsuitable for ploughing. No one

who is reported as having taken part in the Parliamentary discussions of

proposed legislation in the closing years of Elizabeth suggests that it

must necessarily be a dead letter. The chief fear that seems to have

been felt was lest it should prove too effective. In introducing two

Bills against enclosure and depopulation in 1597, Bacon apologised to

the great landlords for taking action which was likely to prejudice

their interests. When the question of continuing the Act against

depopulation, which was in force in 1601, was under consideration in the

House of Commons, both the members who argued for continuance and those

who argued for repeal, assumed that the law was being administered in

practice, one speaker urging that it had the result of keeping so much

land in tillage as to destroy the farmer's profits by causing excessive

supplies of grain to be placed on the market in any but the worst years;

another that it pressed hardly on the small farmer, who could not easily

find the capital needed to sow as much land as he was legally bound to

plough.[717] The ablest and most fully reported speech[718] which has

come down to us is that of an anonymous member, who, while approving of

the principle of the Bill, attacked it as too loosely drafted to meet

the situation. His criticisms are those of a man who understands his

subject, and are on just those points of detail which, though important

in a measure which is to work, would not be worth considering at all if

anything like effective interference were out of the question. After

commending the clauses which excepted from the provisions of the Bill

land lying temporarily fallow, and which punished the purchasers as well

as the original converter of arable which was turned into pasture, he

goes on to point out that loopholes have been left in the measure which

are likely to stultify its effect. The exemption of Crown lands from its

operation will encourage enclosing landlords to exchange properties with

the Crown, and then take on lease as tenants the land which they have

handed over, since by doing so, they will escape the risk of

prosecution. The persistent lobbying of the interests affected--"the

ears of our great sheepmasters do hang at the doors of this house"--has

resulted in the fine for enclosing being placed as low as 10s. per acre,

which is ridiculously disproportionate to the profits to be made by

enclosures. The clause excluding from the reconversion prescribed in the

Bill lands mown for hay plays into the hands of the enclosers by

facilitating the winter feeding of their sheep. The failure to limit the

acreage which a man may keep in his own hands will discourage the

creation of small holdings. At a later date there is the same belief,

both among those who approve, and among those who dislike, enclosure,

that enclosing can be checked, at any rate, by the Government. In the

keen controversy over enclosures which raged under the commonwealth the

opponents of further restriction urged that the mere threat of

legislation had resulted in checking agricultural enterprise.[719]

Harrington,[720] a specialist, not to say a faddist, on agrarian

policy, bases his interpretation of the history of the preceding century

on the supposed success of the Tudors in keeping the small cultivator on

the soil. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the golden

age of the enclosing landlord was just about to dawn, some dim memory of

the earlier State policy seems in parts of England to have survived.

"Why," asked a foreign traveller,[721] "do your farmers not keep

separate closes under turnips to feed sheep in the new approved manner?"

"Partly," answer the peasants, "because there is a common rotation of

crops which all must follow. But the principal reason of all is that on

a common land no one has freedom to enclose his strips without a special

permission and Act of Parliament."

[712] For Norfolk and the West of England, Leonard, _Trans.

Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xix. For Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire

and Derbyshire, _S. P. D._, Ch. I. vol. clxxxv. No. 86, and vol.

ccvi. No. 71 (quoted in Appendix I.), and vol. clxxxv. No. 41.

For Leicestershire, Privy Council Register, vi. 385, and Gonner,

_Common Land and Enclosure_, p. 165. For Yorkshire, see pp.

374-375. Professor Gonner (_op. cit._, p. 167) estimates that

about six hundred persons were fined, the sums obtained from

thirteen counties amounting to about £46,800.

[713] Hearnshaw, _Southampton Court Leet Records_, 1550.

Presentment of "the names of the Commoners which require redress

of the Commons inclosed, as they saye, contrary to the King's

Majesty's statutes, and that they may be laid abroad according

to the said statutes."

[714] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological

Society_, 1907, p. 185.

[715] Bateson, _Records of the Borough of Leicester_, 1509-1603,

pp. 300-301.

[716] Gay, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii.

[717] For the debates of 1597 and 1601 see _D'Ewes' Journal_,

pp. 551 and 674 ff.: a special exemption from the operations of

the Act was allowed to a landlord who had got letters patent

authorising him to enclose 340 acres "too moist and soft and

altogether unfit for tillage."