FOOTNOTES:
[119] Crondal Records, edited by Baigent, Part I., p. 159; the Crondal customary of 1567. Among the copyholders appears a knight and four gentlemen.
[120] Northumberland County History, e.g. Surveys of High Buston (vol. v. p. 208); Acklington (vol. v. p. 372); Birling (vol. v. p. 201), and figures of eight townships in Tynemouthshire, vol. viii. p. 230.
[121] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of the Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
[122] See below, pp. [105–115].
[123] Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., c. 24. Harrison, Elizabethan England (edited by Withington), p. 13.
[124] Edict of October 9, 1807, Clauses 10, 11, 12. See Cobden Club, Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries: Morier’s Essay on Germany.
[125] The instance is taken from a map of the manor of Edgeware now in the All Souls muniment room. The map was made in 1597. But many earlier examples can be found of land being known by the name of one of its early holders, long after it had passed into the possession of some one else.
[126] For the sources from which this table is constructed, and its defects, see [Appendix II.].
[127] On three small manors I have included some tenants who may possibly be freeholders or leaseholders.
[128] Merton Documents, Rentale de Cuxham (Nos. 5902 and 5905).
[129] Merton Documents, Rentale de Ibston (No. 5902).
[130] R.O. Rental and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 19, No. 7, f. 79–87.
[131] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 70.
[132] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
[133] Ibid.
[134] The inconvenience of reckoning in yardlands is noticed by a writer in the seventeenth century: “The tax of land is after the yardland; a name very deceitful by the disproportion and inequality thereof, the quantity of some one yardland being as much as one and a halfe or two in the same field, and yet there is an equality of taxes” (Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656).
[135] Merton Documents, MS. book labelled Kibworth and Barkby, 1636.
[136] Ibid.
[137] Merton Documents, Rental of Malden.
[138] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 85.
[139] Ibid., Portf. 22, No. 18.
[140] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
[141] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
[142] Ibid.
[143] Ibid.
[144] Crondal Record, Part I. (Baigent), pp. 210–221. Customary of 1567.
[145] All Souls Documents, Map and Description of the Manor of Edgeware (1597).
[146] Ibid., Map and Description of the Manor of Kingsbury (1597).
[147] Similar examples could be adduced from Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, were it worth while, e.g. at Duston in Northants in 1561 there were tenants holding 2 virgates, 1¾ virgates, 1½ virgates, ½ virgate, ¼ virgate (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 23). At Desford in Leicestershire, temp. Hen. VIII., one finds the same division and aggregation of virgates (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancs., Bdle. 6, No. 7).
[149] Crondal Records, loc. cit.
[150] Merton Documents, Rental of Maiden, 1496.
[151] History of Castle Combe (Scrope).
[152] For information as to Aspley Guise I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. H.G. Fowler of Aspley Guise, who has allowed me to see the material which he has collected for a history of the manor.
[153] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke (Straton).
[154] Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 111–116, and 210–222.
[155] Merton Documents, No. 5902, Rental of Cuxham, 1483: “Johannes ... pro uno messuagio et una virgata terræ et dimidia xxiiis. et 6 precaria in autumno vel 2s.... Thomas Lee, Rector ecclesiæ ibidem pro uno tofto ... et una virgata terræ 18s. et 4 precaria in autumno vel 16d.”
[156] Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 96, Rental of 1287: “Johannes filius Fabri, Stephanus Draghebreck, Rogerus de Hallie, et Willelmus le Hart ... tenent j dimidiam hidatam terræ. Reddendo inde per annum 5s. ad festum S. Mich. et xixd. de Pondpany et ad festum Beati Martini viii gallinas de chersetto, et ii gallinas contra Natale, et x ova contra Pascha, et facient in omnibus omnia sicut Willelmus de Haillie.” P. 125: “William, son of Gonnilda, and Galfrid Levesone, John, son of Matilda, and Emma, a widow, hold one virgate of land containing 27½ acres on paying and doing as the said Robert of Estfelde.” There are many similar entries.
[157] Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, pp. 250–251: “The general arrangement admitted a certain subdivision under the cover of an artificial unity, which found its expression in the settlement of the services and of the relations with the lord.”
[158] Ingoldmells Court Rolls (Massingberd), October 1315 to June 1316.
[159] Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 152–153. Court Roll of 1282. “Hugh Sweyn gives to the lord 15d. that he may be able to hold 2½ acres of arable land of the tenement formerly Richard Wisdom's, paying therefor yearly 15d. of rent: sureties for the services being Gilbert Swein and Roger Carter.” Nine other tenants take fractions of Richard Wisdom's holding in the same way.
[160] Victoria County History of Suffolk, “Social and Economic History” (Unwin). Professor Unwin has some suggestive remarks on similar developments in other parts of the county.
[161] History of Castle Combe (Scrope), p. 162: “Johannes Pleyslede, nativus domini, cepit de domino unum messuagium et duas virgatas terrae tenendas in bondagio, secundum consuetudinem manerii ... Reddit etiam annuatim sex denarios pro quadam pastura vocata le Hatche, et pro via ad eandem.”
[162] Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 129, Rental of Dupehale (Dippenhall) 1287: “Edmunde de Bosco and William de Bosco hold 2 cotlands which were formed out of one virgate of land which Adam de Bosco formerly held.”
[163] Ibid., p. 153: “Margery Palmer comes and surrenders into the hands of the lord a virgate of land with a house in Crondal, and Galfrid her son comes and gives to the lord 6s. 8d. to have seizin thereof, upon this condition, that the said Margery have the third part, and two pieces more, of the aforesaid tenement, for the term of her life.”
[164] Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 117, Rental of Yateleigh, 1287: “John de la Perke and Thomas Squel hold one virgate of land containing 22 acres, on payment therefor of 2s. 10d. on the Feast of St. Michael and 7½ for Pondpany, and one stoup of honey, and 75 eggs, and shall perform all services like Thomas Kach.... Walter le White and Osbert de la Knelle hold one virgate of land containing 29½ acres.... Roys de Pothulle and John le White hold one virgate of land containing 29 acres.”
[165] Court Rolls of the Lordships, Wapentakes, and Demesne Manors of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (edited by W. Farrer). Halmote of Colne, 1323: “Thomas le Harper for taverning 3 acres of land, 6d. Roger ... for the same of 2 acres of land, 4d.,” and passim.
[166] Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 140: “John Thomas holds a messuage and a 'ferdell' of land, excepting one cotland and a perch.... Thomas le Freyn holds of the above a cotland and a perch.”
[167] Ibid., p. 134: “William de Suche gives to the lord 12d. yearly, to be allowed to hold 6 acres through the rents of Hugh of Wyggeworthale.”
[168] Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 159–383. Customary of 1567. The name does not necessarily imply subtenancy in any way, the Hallmoot being simply the court of the manor. At Yateleigh one copyholder, Richard Allen, held about 263 acres, of which about 126 were held from him by 21 subtenants (pp. 258–265 and 378–379).
[169] Footnote in The Rebellion of Wat Tyler, by Petruschevsky (Russian), p. 210: “Ricardus Flaxman qui de domino tenuit in bondagio unum messuagium et II. bovatas terræ et xvi acras terræ de Forland quæ quondam fuerunt Johannis Colyn ad terminum xx. annorum ex dimissione prædicti Johannis per licenciam curiæ, venit hic et reddidit in manus domini prædictas duas bovatas terræ et acras di' terræ et prati ad opus Willelmi Dolynes deduct' prædicto messuagio.” Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 32, No. 307, and ibid., p. 211: “Robertus Bagges redd' in manus domini l bovatam terræ in bondagio ad opus Symonis Clerk Tenend 'sibi et suis, etc. Et idem Symon instanter redd' in manus domini prædictam bovatam terræ ad opus Willelmi Flaxman sibi et heredibus suis secundum consuetudinem manerii, et dat ad ingressum xiid.” Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 33, [No. 324]: “Instanter” is remarkable.
[170] See below, pp. [115–121].
[171] See E.H.R., vol. xv. pp. 774–813; Vinogradoff’s review of Page’s The End of Villeinage in England.
[172] Powell, The Revolt in East Anglia, Appendix I.; and Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers, pp. 80–81.
[173] Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe. p. 233.
[174] Victoria County History of Suffolk, Unwin's article on Social and Economic History.
[175] Ibid.
[176] Merton Documents, “A table of the Matters, Orders, and Customs Conteyned in Severall Courts of the Manor, 1563”: “Daye given to all ye tenants of ye manor to remove and expell their undertenants by Michaelmas that shall be in ye yeare 1563, upon paine of every delinquent forfeiting 20s.” “Daye given to the aforesaid tenants having above one customary tenement to be here at ye next court to shew,” etc., as above. See the Customary of High Furness quoted below, p. 101; also Hone, The Manor and Manorial Records, pp. 177–178, Court Rolls of Payton, Oxon.: “And the aforesaid Laurence Pemerton, in his life time, substituted Walter Milleward as his subtenant ... contrary to the custom of the Manor without license; therefore let him have a talk thereon with the King’s officer before the next court.”
[177] This is the meaning of entries of two names as “sureties” when land changes hands. See Crondal Records, Court Rolls of 1281 and 1282, passim.
[178] Since writing the above I have seen that the same view of the advantages of copyhold (the descendant of villein) tenure is taken by Dr. Hasbach, who quotes an eighteenth century writer to the effect that copyhold as compared with freehold land had the advantage of “the greater certainty of its title and the cheapness of its conveyance” (Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 72–73).
[179] 1235, c. 4. One may remark, however, that the power which a single freeholder had had before 1235 to prevent the breaking up or enclosure of common pastures, even when he had more than was sufficient for his own beasts, was a genuine hardship for the lord, for other freeholders, and for the customary tenants; see the remarks in Pollock and Maitland (History of English Law, vol. i. p. 612).
[180] Gesta Abbatum Monasterii St. Albani, vol. iii. pp. 120–121, quoted by Petruschevsky, op. cit., pp. 179–180.
[181] Victoria County History, Derbyshire, vol. ii. p. 170.
[182] Glover, History of Ashton, p. 355. “Richard the Hunte ... for an intake 3d. ... Thomas of the Leghes for the one half of the intake in Palden Wood 13s. 4d. The same Thomas of the Leghes for an intake besyde Alt Hey 10s.”
[183] Court Rolls of the Lordships, etc., of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (Farrer). Halmote of Ightenhill, 1324, January 18: “John de Briddeswail for entry to half an acre of waste in Habrincham, 6d., for the same yearly, 2d.” Same court, May 7, 1324.: “Richard le Skinner for entry to 4 acres of waste in Sommerfordrod, 6d., for the same yearly, 6d.,” and passim. In the north of England there seems to have been very much colonising of the waste, perhaps because original settlements were small. See Turner, History of Brighouse, Rastrick, and Hipperholme, pp. 66–67, and Trans. Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society, vol. vii., Rochdale Manor Inquisition.
[184] Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 116–120, e.g. “Robert, son of Peter de la Pierke, holds one acre of encroachment land on paying 4d.”
[185] Ibid., pp. 123–127.
[186] Ibid., pp. 131–134. “Richard Wysdon holds half a virgate of land containing 16 acres.... The same holds 63½ acres, which were in his ancient occupation, and were found to be over and above his said virgate, and (included) in many encroachments.”
[187] Ibid., pp. 122–123: “William of Southwoode holds 16 acres of encroachments and other detached pieces.”
[188] Thorold Rogers (Agriculture and Prices, vol. i. p. 34: “Not much less land was regularly under the plough than at present”) thinks otherwise. But (i.) modern agriculture has many ways of using land besides keeping it “under the plough”; (ii.) we know that in the eighteenth century large tracts now cultivated were barren heaths, and it is difficult to believe that these had been cultivated in the Middle Ages.
[189] See below, p. [189]. The instances there quoted are later than the period with which we are now dealing, but as they mostly come from Northumberland, a very conservative county, they are perhaps to the point.
[190] e.g. at South Newton in Wiltshire (see p. [74]), tithing of Swanthrop in Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was in 1287 about 360 acres, and in 1567 about 607 acres, and tithing of Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was in 1287 about 181, and in 1567 about 284. But these figures are not altogether satisfactory; and sometimes one finds a reduction, e.g. at Dippenhall (from about 287 acres at the earlier date to about 275 at the later date). The plague relieved the pressure of population, and thus removed one incentive for breaking up the waste; on the other hand, it left the survivors much better off, and thus more able to increase the scale of their husbandry. But until we know much more about the growth of population we shall not make much of general comparisons of this kind.
[191] e.g. at Hadleigh in 1305 (Victoria County History, Suffolk, Unwin’s article); at Crondal in 1287 (Crondal Records, p. 110); at Ormsby in 1324 (Massingberd, History of Ormsby).
[192] e.g. Scrope, Castle Combe, p. 164. Court Rolls of 1357: “Johannis filius Johannis Payn venit et finem fecit cum domino per 12d. pro ingressu habendo in illo messuagio et virgata terræ quæ Johannis le Parkare quondam tenuit.... Et dictum tenementum concessum est ei ad tam parvam finem eo quod dictum tenementum est ruinosum et decassum; et existebat in manu domini a tempore pestilentiæ pro defectu emptorum.” Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls for years 1349–1352. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence. Page, The End of Villeinage in England.
[193] The view that the equality of holdings was the creation not of the communal needs of the peasantry but of deliberate arrangement by the authorities, seems to be untenable in face of the evidence of early records showing that freeholders as well as the servile peasantry held roughly equal shares (see Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, Essay II., chap. iv. and chap. vi). On the other hand, the apportionment of services to holdings tended to stereotype the existing arrangement. A late example which displays both elements, that of authoritative pressure and that of communal organisation, is supplied by the Customary of High Furness (R.O. Duchy of Lancs. Special Commissions, No. 398): “As heretofore dividing and portioning of tenements hath caused great decay, chiefly of the service due to her Highness for horses, and of her woods, and has been the cause of making a great number of poor people in the lordship, it is now ordered that no one shall divide his Tenement or Tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be of the ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d.” See below, p. [101].
[194] Edict of October 9, 1807, Clause 1.
[195] Compare a document, temp. Hen. VIII., quoted by Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, p. 155 n., which states that whereas landlords at one time could not find tenants, now the case is altered and tenants want landlords.
[196] For the use of the demesne in the sixteenth century see below, pp. [200–213].
[197] Dugdale,Monasticon, vol. v., Survey of Tykeford.
[198] Northumberland County History, vol. v., Amble: "4s. 8d. de forlands dimissis diversis tenentibus." "4 acres leased by the Prior for 8 years to Roger at 8d. per acre.”
[199] Ibid., vol. v., Acklington.
[200] Hoare, History of Wiltshire, Hundred of Ambresbury.
[201] Ibid.
[202] Humberstone, Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i. p. 43. See below, pp. [208–209].
[203] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke (Straton).
[204] Ibid.
[205] Ibid.
[206] Ibid.
[207] Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., Survey of the Manor of Whitforde in the County of Devon.
[CHAPTER III]
THE PEASANTRY (continued)
(d) The Economic Environment of the Small Cultivator[ToC]
It was the argument of the previous chapter that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the emergence from the mass of manorial tenants of a class of wealthy peasants who bought and leased their neighbours' lands, added to their property parcels taken from the waste and demesne, and by these means built up estates far exceeding in size the normal villein holding. The change from labour services to money rents left the peasantry with time for the management of larger holdings, and the spread of a money economy increased their means of acquiring them. Cheap land and easy transfer favour the movement of property from one man to another. In the manorial courts transfer was easy, and, especially after the Great Plague, land was cheap. It is not necessary to take sides in the much debated question of the economic conditions of the fifteenth century, in order to hold that, on the whole, such changes made the greater part of it a period of increasing prosperity among the small cultivators. To support this view one could quote Fortescue's[208] proud description of the well-being of the common people. One could point out that in the dark days in the middle of the sixteenth century the peasants themselves looked back to the social conditions of the reign of Henry VII.[209] as a kind of golden age, and clamoured for their restoration. One could cite a good many examples pointing to an upward movement. Large estates are left at death by men who are legally villeins. Villeins, especially in the eastern counties, buy up freehold land and found considerable properties. A bond tenant in Lincolnshire marries into a knight’s family. Bond tenants are found leasing the manorial demesne in one block and farming estates of several hundred acres. Nor must we forget that the peasants of the sixteenth century are often very substantial people, and that even when the taint of personal villeinage is still upon them.
But isolated instances of this kind, suggestive though they are, are not likely to carry conviction unless they agree with what we know of the general economic situation. Economists who live after the days of Samuel Smiles will hesitate before they base optimistic conclusions as to the conditions of any class on cases of good fortune among individual members of it. We should be false to the spirit of our period if we did not recognise that the economic ideal of most men, an ideal often implied though not often formulated, was less the opening of avenues to enterprise than the maintenance of groups and communities at their customary level of prosperity. We shall have hereafter to speak of the changes which overtook the English social system in the course of the sixteenth century, in so far as they were connected with changes in the methods of agriculture and of land tenure. Before we do so we may pause for a moment to look at the village of the later Middle Ages as a social and economic unit.
The foundation of its whole life is the possession by the majority of households of holdings of land. Land is so widely distributed that the household, all of whose members are entirely dependent for their living upon work for wages, is the exception. Though this cannot be statistically proved, it is rendered almost certain by several converging lines of evidence. Turn first to the table on pp. 64 and 65, which sets out the acreage of the customary tenants' holdings. It will be seen that, when all the counties represented are grouped together, the tenants who have only cottages form less than one-tenth of the total number. In East Anglia and in Lancashire the proportion, it is true, is considerably higher; but these counties are exceptions to the general rule, and the cottagers usually have gardens, which, if they do not amount to the minimum of four acres laid down by the Act of 1589, are nevertheless not infrequently of one or two acres in extent. If we may trust these figures, the typical family has a small holding of from two and a half to fifteen acres. Our second line of evidence quite falls in with this conclusion. It is clear from the tone of legislation that the class of workers who depend solely on a contract of service is in sixteenth century England not very large. Elizabethan[210] legislation provides expressly for the needs of farmers by empowering Justices of the Peace to apprentice unoccupied youths to husbandry, and to set the unemployed to work in the fields. Even in the middle of the seventeenth[211] century, when a strong movement has been at work for one hundred and fifty years in the opposite direction, there are complaints from pamphleteers that men who should work as wage-labourers cling to the soil, and in the naughtiness of their hearts prefer independence as squatters to employment by a master. Such comments throw a flash of light on the way in which the peasants regard the alternatives of wage labour and landholding. Sometimes they themselves give us a glimpse into their mind on the matter. They tell us how they face that most fundamental of economic problems, the Achilles' heel of modern civilisation, the problem of so arranging their little societies that as many persons as possible may enter life with some material equipment for self-maintenance in addition to their personal strength and skill. Here is an extract from a customary of the Lancashire manor of High Furness[212] drawn up in the reign of Elizabeth:—
“As heretofore deviding and porcioning of tenements hath caused great decay, chiefly of the service due to her Highness for horses and of her woods, and has been the cause of making a great number of poor people in the lordship, it is now ordered that no one shall devide his tenement or tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be of ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d., and that before every such division there shall be several houses and ousettes for every part of such tenement.”
This seems a hard rule. Will it not result in the creation of a body of propertyless labourers employed by a small village aristocracy? That danger is appreciated, and is dealt with in the clauses which follow:—
“If any customary tenant die seized of a customary tenement, having no son but a daughter, or daughters, then the eldest daughter being preferred in marriage shall have the tenement as his next heir, and she shall pay to her younger sister, if she have but one sister, 20 years ancient rent, as is answered to her Majesty; and if she have more than one sister she shall pay 40 years ancient rent to be equally divided among them....
“For the avoiding of great trouble in the agreement with younger brothers, it is now ordered that the eldest son shall pay to his brothers in the form following:—If there is but one brother, 12 years ancient rent; if there are two brothers, 16 years ancient rent to be equally divided.
“If there be three or more, 20 years ancient rent to be equally divided.
“Whereas great inconvenience has grown by certain persons that at the marriage of son or daughter have promised their tenement to the same son or daughter and their heirs, according to the custom of the manor, and afterwards put the tenement away to another person; it is ordered that whatever tenements a tenant shall promise to the son or daughter being his sole heir apparent at the time of his or her marriage, the same ought to come to them according to the same covenant, which ought to be showed at the next court.”
The motive of the first rule is a mixed one. Its object is partly to obviate the risk that the Crown, which is lord, of the manor, may lose its services if holdings are too much subdivided, partly to prevent the appearance of a class which has too little land for a living. The motive of the other rules is to ensure that the custom of primogeniture, which obtains among the customary tenants on this manor, shall not result in the creation of a propertyless proletariat. Holdings are not to be divided. But the payment to other members of the family of a sum ranging from about one-half to more than the whole of their capital value is made a charge upon them, and with that money they can purchase land elsewhere, or take, like the French peasant girl, a considerable dot to their husbands. Sue,[213] the daughter of Old Carter, the rich yeoman, whose security for the marriage-portion “shall be present payment, because Bonds and Bills are but Tarriers to catch fools, and keep lazy knaves busy,” was a match for whom gentlemen’s sons were willing enough to compete.
These groups of from ten to a hundred households which constitute the ordinary village of southern and middle England, form small democracies of property holders, who are of course under the authority of a lord, but whose subjection does not prevent them from exercising considerable control over the management of their own economic affairs, nor impose any effective bar on those individuals who have the means and capacity to advance themselves. We can watch them arranging[214] the course of agriculture, deciding when the pastures at Wolsyke and Willoughbybroke are to be “broken,” imposing fines on those who encroach on the several pasture land, throwing open the Pesefield on Holy Thursday to the village horses, shutting them out of Street headlands for fear of the “stroyinge of Korn,” making charitable provision for gleaners who cannot work, punishing those who ought to work but in their depravity would rather glean. We can observe how the wide distribution of land gives an opportunity to a humble family to better itself by judicious husbandry and well-calculated purchases. True, the peasant’s land is no longer held in approximately equal shares as generally as it had been in the thirteenth century. The growth of a money economy, the withdrawal of the levelling pressure of villeinage, the growth of population, has in the more progressive parts of the country left a gap into which individualising commercial forces wind themselves in the way which has already been described. But these changes are important mainly as precursors of more extensive innovations. As yet they have done little more than make tiny breaches in the wall of custom. They have enabled individuals to rise from the general level into positions of comparative affluence. They have not proceeded so far as to enable the successful to exercise a decisive direction over the economic affairs of their fellows. Though Northumberland is exceptional in the way in which down to the very end of the sixteenth century it preserves its system of standardised holdings, it is none the less true that all the petty land speculation, whose operations we have traced above, has not the effect of producing any very large changes in the distribution of property. If, when compared with its condition two hundred years before, the village of our period shows remarkable irregularity, it offers precisely an opposite aspect to the observer who compares it as it is then with its condition two hundred years later. The gaps which have appeared between the holdings mark the disintegrating influence of economic enterprise; but they are gaps which enterprise can span, and the graduation of holdings from the two or three acres of the humblest to the fifty or sixty acres of the most prosperous, together with the abundance of unoccupied land, supplies a kind of staircase along which in the country the younger son can travel from the position of a labourer to that of a small holder, as he does in the towns from apprentice to master-craftsman. From this point of view the characteristic morcellement of holdings, so bitterly denounced by economists who, like Arthur Young, approached the problem from the point of view of the large farmer, was a positive advantage. It meant that land could be bought and sold, as it were, retail. It meant that the labourer could begin with one strip of land of half an acre, and add other strips to it as he worked his way up. It meant that even the humblest peasant usually had some live-stock of his own; for even the smallest customary holding usually carried with it rights of common. Such conditions are, of course, no safeguard against poverty. No doubt there were plenty of people like Widow Quin, whose “leaky thatch is growing more pasture for her buck goat than her square of fields.”[215] But they are a safeguard against destitution, and indeed against any complete loss of independence.
Let us turn to a part of England where something like the open field system survives to this day, and ask the inhabitants what they think of it. In the so-called Isle of Axholme there are still common fields with intermixed strips. Here is the evidence[216] which a body of labourers there sent into a Select Committee of Parliament in 1899: “We, the undersigned, being agricultural labourers at Epworth, are in occupation of allotments or small holdings, varying from two roods to three acres, and willingly testify to the great benefit we find from our holdings. Where we have sufficient quantity of land to grow two roods each of wheat, barley, and potatoes, we have bread, beans, and potatoes for a great part of the year, enabling us to face a long winter without the dread of hunger or pauperism staring us in the face.” One of the tests by which the economic prosperity of a community may be measured is its success in preventing the appearance of a residual population, which cannot fit itself into the moving mechanism of industry without ceaseless friction and maladjustments. In most villages before extensive evictions begin that mechanism moves very slowly; property is widely diffused, and the residuum must have been small. That there was often distress through bad harvests and pestilence is certain. But was there much of the economic helplessness, more terrible than physical distress itself, which is the normal lot of most of the propertyless wage-earners of the modern world? We hesitate to say. Hesitation on such a point may perhaps be counted to our peasants for righteousness.[217]
In the second place, let us examine the use which the peasants make of their holdings. Modern writers tell us that among the conditions necessary to the prosperity of a class of small holders the most important are a wise choice of the kind of farming to be pursued, a sound organisation of credit, cheap marketing, and rural bye-employments to back agriculture. Modern writers who are not English would probably add a tariff on imported agricultural produce. In our period the type of cultivation pursued by the large farmer was undergoing rapid changes. That of the peasantry was hardly a matter of choice. It was dictated by the necessity, under which most villages still lay, of being largely self-supporting in the matter of corn supplies, a necessity recognised and crystallised in the customary routine of village husbandry. The preponderance of arable farming among the peasantry is illustrated by the table[218] on page [107], which should be contrasted with that given on pages [225–226].
The figures in this table do not pretend to complete accuracy. But they indicate the distribution of land between different uses with sufficient correctness to show the sort of agriculture followed by the small holder of our period. They prove unmistakably that his standby was the grain crops grown on the open fields.[219] Students of rural conditions will be quick to recognise the contrast which the picture offers to the economy of the modern small holder. In our own day the breaking up of large farms into smaller tenancies has proceeded furthest in those parts of the country which are most suitable for pasture. The occupier of a holding of less than 70 or 80 acres usually relies mainly on stock farming in one form or another, and on the growing of vegetables and fruit. Corn-growing he leaves to much larger men, and, when he does grow grain, he does so mainly to provide fodder and straw for his beasts. In the sixteenth century almost exactly the opposite was the case. In so far as the large farmer with 200 or 300 acres can be said to have had a specialty, it was not corn-growing but sheep and cattle grazing. The small man relied mainly, though not entirely, upon tillage, and though, even in his case, pasture farming assumed increased importance as the century went on, grazing was chiefly a supplement to arable farming. To this statement there are of course certain exceptions. Though villages where the customary tenants hold more pasture than arable are rare, they are not unknown, and occasionally one finds one where large numbers of tenants of the most diverse economic conditions, with pasture holdings ranging from 6 to 100 acres, have no arable at all. Sometimes such an arrangement is to be accounted for by the fact that a part of the demesne lands of the manor, which happens not to be suitable for tillage, has been divided up among the population of younger sons and labourers who have no holdings in the open fields. In the neighbourhood of considerable towns, again, there was a market[220] for vegetables and dairy produce which gave an impetus to this side of agriculture, and the home counties poured butter and cheese, fowls, eggs, and fruit into London, as France and the Channel Islands do at the present day. Still, to speak broadly, the small holder of the sixteenth century, unlike the small holder of the twentieth, was before all things interested in arable farming, and interested in rights of pasture chiefly as a necessary adjunct to it.
[Table V]
| Manor (excluding houses, orchards, garths, &c.). | Total Area. | Arable. | Meadow. | Pasture. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Four in Northumberland and one in Lancashire |
|
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Seven in Wiltshire and one in Dorset |
|
|
| 202 (in close plus considerable rights of pasture not expressed in acres). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Four in Midlands (Bedford, Leicester, Northants, Stafford) |
|
|
|
|
Corn-growing in England has been for the last hundred years a branch of farming so completely surrendered to the large capitalist, that it is not easy to realise a state of things in which the typical corn-grower was a man with less than 60 acres, and a man who could make a good living from a holding of that size. To understand the economics of his position we must think away the conditions which have in the last century made it intolerable. Or rather we must think away all except one. That one was the perennial problem of agricultural credit. In this matter, certainly, the poorer among the peasantry suffered as their successors all over the world suffer to-day. They were apt to be in the grip of the moneylender. Cheap land, as the modern colonist knows, is of little avail to the man who has not the capital needed to stock it, and to carry over the interval between harvest and harvest, when his receipts fall off but his expenses continue. In the endless arguments which took place on the ethics of moneylending at a later date, it was a common complaint that village financiers drove a hard bargain with the peasants whom misfortune compelled to resort to them. In a backward village the only man with capital to lend might be the local corn-dealer, brewer, or maltster, the large farmer who held the lord's demesne, or the lord of the manor himself and his agent. Like an American farmer in the grip of an “elevator,” the peasant who wanted money for his crops had often to sell them to a dealer[221] who gave a ridiculously low price for them, and then made an enormous profit by holding them till the price of corn rose, or by sending them to a market where there was a scarcity. Lords[222] of manors, it was said, helped their tenants out of temporary difficulties by advancing them small sums, and then used their advantage to screw extra labour on the demesne out of them. Manor courts[223] in the Middle Ages had fined villagers for usury, but one may suspect that these were capitalists too potent for them to control, and one does not wonder at the headshakings of the prudent Fitzherbert over the man whose method of farming compels him to be a borrower. The form which charity and co-operative effort took points in the same direction. Hospitals[224] and monasteries advance money to buy seed. Well-to-do men aid their relatives by stocking their farms for them. Gilds[225] make loans of cattle and sheep, and the last legacy of a philanthropic parson to his parishioners is money with which to buy a cow for the poor. How far the charitable and corporate organisation of loans succeeded in keeping the small cultivator out of the clutches of the usurer, and how far the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the Gild lands deteriorated their condition by placing them more at his mercy, are questions which deserve consideration but which we have not sufficient evidence to answer.[226] In forming any estimate, however, of rural conditions, the hand to mouth economy of the poorer peasants, and their consequent helplessness in the face of any unexpected catastrophe, such as an unusually bad harvest, a cattle plague, and (in the fifteenth century) the destruction of crops by civil disturbances, must not be forgotten. In that age less capital was needed to stock a holding than in our own, but it was scraped together with even greater difficulty. On the very eve of the dissolution of the monasteries there were some remote manors where “Money was so scantie that coigned leather went bargaining between man and man,”[227] and where corn rents were substituted for money because the tenants had no money in which rent could be paid.
On the other hand, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century began, and in those parts of the country which were least affected by them, the economic environment was in other respects favourable to the class of which we have been speaking. As far as corn-growing is concerned, petite culture flourishes most readily when the methods of production are primitive and trade little developed. It is not necessary to point out that, in the sphere of production, the conditions which have given its present tremendous advantage to large-scale corn-growing are the fruit of the last century, and that in our period there were neither machinery nor expensive manures to require the outlay of large capital, and to make arable farming almost a branch of factory industry. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the growth of prosperity among the peasants had been accompanied by an improvement in the technique of cultivation. Not to mention the part which they took in enclosures, of which we shall speak later, there were, at any rate by the beginning of the seventeenth century, certain exceptional parts of the country where it was said[228] that in good years from thirty-two to eighty bushels of grain were raised to an acre, instead of the ten which Walter of Henley had thought a fair return in the thirteenth. We may believe this or not as we like; probably we should discount it by at least one-half. But even the average peasant, who could not possibly make his land perform these prodigies, was buttressed by the natural protection of unpassable roads, which tended to make every village, even almost every landholding family, more or less self-sufficing in the matter of food supplies. A highly organised corn trade is as unfavourable to the existence of small corn-growers as a wide market is to the small master-craftsman, because it sets a premium upon the qualities needed for business management—qualities often quite different from those needed for effective farming—and thus (in the absence of co-operation) plays into the hands of the capitalist, who buys and sells in bulk and can pick his market. To the mass of the peasantry in our period the commercial side of agriculture offered no problem, because for the mass of the peasantry it did not exist. The wealthier among them, it is true, did grow corn for the market, and sent their supplies far afield through the hands of middlemen, much further sometimes, if we may believe contemporaries, than Customs Officials should have allowed. In certain parts of England rudimentary industrial specialisation had made a regular corn trade a necessity. In Norfolk,[229] for example, where manufactures and agriculture had drawn apart to an extent unknown elsewhere, a rough local division of labour was concentrating the woollen industry in that part of the country most suitable for grazing, and was bringing together a huge population of wage-earners, who depended for their food supplies on the grain produced by the “tilth masters” in “the champion part of the country,” and whose needs baffled the traditional policy of trying to prevent corners by checking the transport of corn. But down to the very end of the eighteenth century, and still more under the Tudors, there was a large body of small landholders who pursued their way undisturbed by market fluctuations because they grew wheat almost entirely for subsistence. To a foreign observer[230] English agriculture in the reign of Henry VII. seemed “not to be practised beyond what is required for the consumption of the people.” Between the two extremes of capitalist farmer and hired labourer, the poles between which the needle of the Government’s policy as to prices uneasily oscillates, there stands the man whose family consumes the product of his land, and who rarely puts his small supplies on the market, because, if he tries to do so, “he loseth[231] the labours of himself, his horse and carte, and husbandry at home,” and “is in hazard to pay deare for a place to chamber it till the next market day.” Such a man, if entirely occupied in tillage, did little more than supply the wants of his own household; if a sheep farmer as well, he worked up the wool in his own home in the manner enjoined on thrifty housewives by Fitzherbert. From the point of view of national welfare his security was purchased by the distress in which the difficulty of moving corn supplies involved the wage-earner. The constant local famines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should remind us that the more self-sufficing a country’s agricultural economy, the narrower the margin there is likely to be between the landless classes and starvation. But with them for the present we are not concerned, and if we confine our attention to the landholding peasantry we can see that to them the backwardness of trade was a positive advantage. The risk of spoiling good farming by ineffective marketing was not one which faced the small holders of our period.
Moreover, in estimating the causes which in the fifteenth century favoured a growth in their prosperity, we should not overlook that it was a period in which commercial policy encouraged the corn-grower. In the series of compromises which were struck between the interests of the farmer and those of the consumer the scale during the greater part of it was tilted in the direction of the former, and when success had caused his holding to grow to a size which made trade in grain inevitable, he dealt in a market which the Government tried to turn in his favour. That section of the industry which supplied the market obviously gained by freedom of export and by import duties upon foreign wheat, though the fact that England was largely a corn exporting country made the latter less important than the former. From 1437 to 1491 free export of wheat was permitted, subject to the obligation to obtain an export licence when prices in the home market rose above a certain point. In 1463 the same policy was carried furthur, and an Act was passed restricting its importation. Such a commercial[232] policy was no doubt adopted mainly in the interests of the great landed proprietors. But that the prosperity of the small cultivators was to some extent bound up with the Government’s encouragement of corn-growing can hardly be doubted. Competent observers in the sixteenth century gave its abandonment by the Tudors as one cause of the subsequent decline in the condition of the peasantry, and a return to it as one remedy for their distress.
If the peasantry were favoured in the fifteenth century by a state of things in which the small corn-grower’s position was still unshaken, did they not also gain by the beginnings of industrial expansion and by the pasture farming that accompanied it? That a man who was mainly dependent upon tillage might also be a grazier upon a considerable scale, is shown by the following table of the animals kept by the customary tenants on six[233] manors in the south of England.
| I. | II. | III. | IV. |
| Manors. | Customary Tenants. | Sheep kept by Customary Tenants | Other Beasts (minimum) |
| 6 | 112 | 7440 | 793 |
One must not, of course, forget that a certain number of beasts were indispensable to arable farming. Perhaps one-third or one-half the cattle in column IV. should be written off as simply part of the corn-grower’s necessary equipment. The sixteenth century small holder, who keeps plough beasts, is no more a grazier on that account than his twentieth century successor, who uses his grain for fodder, is a corn-grower. But, when this has been remembered, we may perhaps allow these figures to remind us that in the agriculture even of the small man there was room for considerable diversity, and that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was probably much more diversified than it had been two centuries before. So much is said in the [writings] of our period of the harm done by the great grazier, that we perhaps do not always sufficiently realise that the customary tenants both then and long before were often themselves graziers on a considerable scale. They raise stock, and are interested in the woollen trade as well as in the corn-growing. Ultimately, when time enough had elapsed for the profitableness of sheep farming to supply lords of manors with a motive for clearing away interests which interfered with the formation of sheep runs, the movement for laying down land to pasture did result in evictions and rack-renting. But, looking at the fifteenth century as a whole, may we not say with some confidence that the growth of the woollen industry must have brought increasing prosperity to many villages? Though it is not till almost the last decade that complaints of enclosing become sufficiently clamorous to attract the attention of the Government, the spread of woollen manufacturers into rural districts was going quietly on throughout the whole century, and benefited the peasants both by the lucrative bye-employment which they offered to both sexes, and by the alternative to arable farming which the demand for wool supplied in the shape of sheep-grazing. The large number of sheep kept by the customary tenants of many manors in the south of England, and the increase in the complaints as to the over-stocking of commons contained in the Court Rolls of the fifteenth century, show that they were not slow to seize the opportunity, and that the great pasture farms, which aroused the indignation of More and Latimer, had their precedent in the small flocks of thirty or forty sheep which had long been run by the peasantry upon the common wastes or pastures. It would seem that, as so often happens, the new departure was first made on a small scale by small men, and chat it was not until some time had elapsed that its wholesale adoption by large capitalists plunged them in distress. The movement towards pasture-farming as a special branch of agriculture is one that proceeds gradually for a hundred years, before the demand for wool becomes sufficient to produce the body of capitalist graziers whose interests come into sharp collision with those of the peasantry.
But after all, the profits arising from favourable economic circumstances may be of very little advantage to the mass of cultivators. They may simply be handed on to the landlord in the shape of increased rents. At a time when, both in Ireland and Scotland, rents are being fixed by public tribunals, we are not likely to forget that the profitableness of agriculture has no necessary connection with the prosperity of tenants. Trade may be increasing, and the return from the land may be growing, and yet those things may profit the farmers and peasants very little, unless they have some security that they will not see them drained away in increased payments for their land. It is important, therefore, to consider how far rents were competitive and how far they were customary, how far the tenants held the surplus due to economic progress, and how far it passed to the landlord.
Some light is thrown on the general situation by the following table[234]:—
[Table VI]
| Manor. | Rents. | |||
| 1295–1308 | 1568 | |||
| 1. South Newton. | £ 13 19 3½ | £14 4 8 | ||
| 1347 | 1421 | 1485 | 1628 | |
| 2. Ingoldmells | £ 61 9 4 | £ 71 10 3 | £ 72 6 8 | £ 73 17 2 |
| 1287 | 1567 | |||
| 3. Crondal | £ 53 7 0 | £103 2 8¾ | ||
| 1351 | 1567 | |||
| 4. Sutton Warblington | £ 5 17 4¾ | £ 8 10 4 | ||
| 1295 | 1542 | |||
| 5. Aspley Guise | £ 7 8 4 | £ 10 5 10 | ||
| 1248 | 1567 | 1585 | ||
| 6. Birling | £ 9 2 6½ | £ 14 9 4 | £ 14 9 4 | |
| 1352 | 1478 | 1567 | 1580 | |
| 7. Acklington | £ 18 13 2 | £ 19 13 11 | £ 19 13 5 | £ 20 0 5 |
| 1483 | 1505 | |||
| 8. Cuxham | £ 9 9 3 | £ 8 9 3 | ||
| 1483 | 1600 | |||
| 9. Ibstone | £ 4 8 10 | £ 3 15 0½ | ||
| 1483 | 1567 | 1585 | 1702 | |
| 10. High Buston | £ 3 12 0 | £ 3 12 0 | £ 3 12 0 | £ 12 0 0 |
| 1539 | 1608 | |||
| 11. Amble | £ 22 14 6 | £ 16 0 5 | ||
| “The reign of King Henry VII.” | 1529 | |||
| 12. Malden | £ 4 9 10 | £ 4 6 7 | ||
| 1527 | 1588 | 1607 | ||
| 13. Kibworth | £ 23 6 7 | £ 26 15 1 | £ 19 14 5 | |
| 1304–5 | 1348–9 | 1373–4 | 1461 | |
| 14. Standon | £ 21 17 3 | £ 23 8 0 | £ 23 2 2½ | £ 33 3 3½ |
| 1317–8 | 1445–6 | Henry VIII. | ||
| 15. Feering | £ 29 10 9½ | £ 32 14 10 | £ 16 2 6½ | |
| 1321 | Henry VI. | 38–39 Henry VI. (1460) | ||
| 16. Appledrum | £ 7 0 11 | £ 10 11 6 | £ 13 14 10½ | |
| 1357 | 1501 | |||
| 17. Minchinhampton | £ 41 14 4 | £ 41 19 9 | ||
| (works) | £ 4 18 0 | |||
| 1280 | 1441 | 1547 | ||
| 18. Langley Marish | £ 20 16 5½ | £ 24 0 0 | £ 45 3 5¾ | |
| Henry VI. | 1521 | James I. | ||
| 19. Lewisham | £ 8 11 7 | £ 23 1 6½ | £ 90 3 3 | |
| Edward III.(?) | 15th century(?) | James I. | ||
| 20. Cuddington. For terms of Easter and Michaelmas | £ 6 4 2¾ | |||
| (for whole year) | £ 12 8 5½(?) | £ 15 16 7 | £ 9 19 8-3/4 | |
| 21. Isleworth | 1314–15 | 1386–7 | 1484–5 | |
| (Michaelmas) | £ 21 16 10 | £ 23 3 10-1/4 | £ 18 18 0 | |
| 22. Wootton | 1207–15 | 1607 | ||
| (free and customary tenants) | £ 9 11 2 | £ 13 19 0½ | ||
| 1271 | 1547 | |||
| 23. Speen | £ 6 13 9¾ | £ 17 4 2 | ||
| 1303–4 | 1314–15 | 1478–9 | ||
| 24. Schitlington | £ 29 13 0½ | £ 30 4 10 | £ 58 11 9 | (exclusive of ferm of land and ferm of manor). |
| 25. Cranfield (rent of vill | 1383–4 | 1474–5 | 1519–20 | |
| including ferm of lands) | £ 68 15 2 | £ 63 19 10¼ | £72 2 1¾ | |
| 1325–6 | 1482–3 | |||
| 26. Holywell | £ 12 18 2 | £ 22 7 8 | ||
| 1536 | 1803 | |||
| 27. Farleigh | £ 4 9 9 | £ 4 15 5 | ||
It will be seen that, in spite of some considerable increases, many rents were comparatively stationary during long periods of time. Moreover, in all probability, they were more stationary than is suggested by the statistics given above. For at the earlier dates there were works the value of which usually does not appear among the money rents. As time went on, more land was brought under cultivation and the demesne was leased; and though an attempt has been made to exclude the latter factor, it is not always possible to do so with certainty. The later figures, therefore, are, if anything, a more exhaustive account of the tenants' burdens than the earlier, and the small difference which exists between them on several manors is for this reason all the more remarkable.
These figures, it will be said, if they prove anything, prove too much. Do we not know that one of the grievances of the peasantry in the sixteenth century was the rack-renting of their holdings? Have we not the evidence of Fitzherbert, Latimer, and Hales to prove it? To these questions one must answer that it is certainly true that lords of manors did make a strenuous effort to get from their tenants increased payments for their holdings, and that the success which in many cases they achieved was one great cause of the decline in the condition of the peasantry. The matter, however, is not so simple as it appears. In respect of their liability to be competitively rented, some parts of the lands of a manor stood on a different footing from others; and again, fixed rents of customary lands were quite compatible with movable fines. An attempt will be made in subsequent chapters[235] to illustrate both the rack-renting of those parts of a manor where the rent was least controlled by custom, and the upward movement of the fines charged on the admission of tenants to their holdings. These figures of stationary or almost stationary rents must not, therefore, be taken as giving a full account of the relations between the customary tenants and the manorial authorities, as though there was no other way in which the latter could compensate themselves. Subject to this qualification, however, they do indicate that, at any rate on the customary holdings which formed the kernel of the manor, there is for a very long period little rack-renting. They suggest that the tenants' payments have a fixity which would make Arthur Young tear his hair. They fall in line with the statements of authorities like Fitzherbert and Norden as to the difficulty experienced by the manorial officials in forcing up rents of assize, that “are as in the beginning, neither risen nor fallen, but doe continue always one and the same.” And this fixity of rents is a factor in the prosperity of the peasantry which can hardly be over-estimated. When not neutralised by exorbitant fines, it means that any surplus arising on the customary tenements as the result of growing trade, or of the fall in the value of money, or of improved methods of agriculture, anything in fact which is in the nature of economic rent, is retained by the tenants. Secured by the custom of the manor, as by a dyke, against the competitive pressure which under modern conditions transfers so much of the fruits of progress into the hands of the owners of land and capital, they enjoy an unearned increment which grows with every growth in economic prosperity, and have an interest in their holdings almost similar to that of a landlord who is burdened only with a fixed rent-charge like the English land tax. One of the best established generalisations of economics, ground into the English people by thirty years of misery, is that the effect of agrarian protection is to make a present to landlords. But agrarian protection itself wears a different complexion when the rise in rents which it produces is not transferred to a small and wealthy class of absentee owners, but retained by thousands of men who are themselves cultivating the soil.
Lest such a picture should seem to be drawn too much in the spirit of the economic theorist, let us make its meaning more precise by pointing out that the retention of the unearned increment by copyhold tenants was a fact of which the manorial authorities were perfectly well aware, and the results of which they were sometimes at pains to estimate arithmetically by setting side by side with the actual rent paid the rent which the holdings would fetch if put up to competition. Four examples may be given. At Amble,[236] in 1608, the surveyor gives the rent of the customary tenants as £16, 0s. 5d., and “the annual value beyond rent” as £93, 4s. 4d. On the great manor of Hexham[237] in the same year the rents of the 314 copyhold tenants amounted to £126, 4s. 8-1/4d.; the “value above the oulde Rentes” was £624, 4s. 1d. In the various townships of the manor of Rochdale[238] part of the land was rack-rented. But a great deal of it was held at payments which left the tenant a substantial margin between the rent which he paid to the king and the letting value of the land, a margin which varied from 2d. an acre in parts of Wardleworth, to 6d. an acre in parts of Wardle, 8d. an acre in Walsden, and 10d. an acre in Castleton. On the manor of Barkby[239] in Leicestershire the difference was still more striking. The rents paid by free and customary tenants together amounted in 1636 to £11, 8s. 7-1/2d.; the value of their holdings was put by the surveyor at £215, 1s. 6d. And, of course, the fact that these rentals come from the very end of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the seventeenth, centuries, makes the evidence which they offer of the inability of manorial authorities to insist on copyhold rents keeping pace with the rising value of land, when they had every motive to enforce such correspondence if they could, all the more significant. For a century they have been screwing up rents wherever they can, and here are tenants, who, as far as rents go, put 6d. in their own pockets for every 1d. they give to the landlord. Let us repeat that these figures, striking as they are, would, if taken by themselves, give a misleading impression of the position of the copyhold tenants. Even when the lord of a manor cannot break the barrier opposed by manorial custom to a rise in rents, he may be able to dip his fingers in the surplus by raising the fines charged on admission; he may be all the more exacting in screwing the last penny out of those holdings where the rent is not fixed by custom. But though we must not forget the other side of the shield, though the very fixity of rents on many manors should make us scrutinise other conditions very carefully, we must not forget either that a tenant whose rent is unaltered for 200 or 250 years, a tenant who, after a period of sweeping agrarian changes in which a bitter cry has gone up against the exactions of landlords, is paying a fifth, or a sixth, or even an eighteenth of what could be got for his holding in the open market, is a tenant whom most modern English farmers would envy. Whatever his other disadvantages he has at any rate one condition of prosperity. He will not be eaten up by rack-renting. No wonder that such a man can accumulate capital and buy up land to add to his holding. No wonder that he can sublet parts of it at a profit. No wonder that in the day of agrarian oppression the wealthier peasantry stands stubbornly against it, that they can carry cases from one court to another, and that there are manors where they boast that "20[240] of them would spend 20 score pounds" in fighting an unpopular landlord. On the whole, the individual cases of enterprise and prosperity among the customary tenants of the fifteenth century do fit into the view that the economic environment was favourable to the peasantry. They may be regarded as symptoms, not exceptions.
Here, perhaps, we should stop. What manner of men these were in that personal life of which economics is but the squalid scaffolding; what stars threw for them their beams on that tremendous whirlpool of religion and politics into which Europe was plunging, we cannot say. Of the hopes and fears and aspirations of the men who tilled the fields which still give us in due season their kindly fruit, we know hardly more than of the Roman plebs, far less than of the democracy of Athens. Yet these men too had their visions. Their silence is the taciturnity of men, not the speechlessness of dumb beasts.
That the peasantry as a class were no politicians was a natural consequence of the position which they had occupied throughout the Middle Ages. On a small number among them, in the Eastern counties a large number, the State had for centuries showered duties and obligations with a lavish hand, and the freeholders, though they must often have cursed the tediousness of suit of court, and jury service, and Parliamentary elections, turned that tiresome discipline to good account in the days when the Stuarts had contrived to make politics to thousands of heavy-handed obstinate people throughout England a matter not only of money but of conscience. The non-participation of the bulk of the peasantry in the same large interests was not due to poverty, for often the copyholders were wealthier than the freeholders who listened to Pym and Hampden on that first great election campaign in 1640, and left their farms to fight for King or Parliament. Nor was it due to timidity or lack of spirit, for, as we shall see later, they frequently asserted themselves in the course of the sixteenth century in their own characteristic way of agrarian strikes.[241] It was rather that the centre of their interests and their social horizon were different. The freeholders from an early date had been brought into contact with the chief institutions of the organised political state. Since the twelfth century they had been protected in their holdings by the courts, and had learned through that cunning procedure which was the fruit of Henry II.'s[242] sleepless nights, that though often one cannot do much with the law, one can do even less without it. Since the thirteenth century they, along with their social superiors, had returned members to Parliament, and had acquired that facility in grumbling at taxation which is the beginning, though not, as is so commonly supposed, the end, of political wisdom. Thus they became a body in whose eyes the Law, Parliament, the State, loomed up, though for ages dimly enough, as a big something which it is well to have on your side, something which requires, like the new fangled arquebuses, to be carefully handled, something which, if neglected, may give you a surprising shock, but if treated with proper respect may teach manners even to your landlord. Of course your first duty is to him. You ride and fight for him readily enough as your fathers did. But still, you do it because you have said you will, not because he has said you shall, and though London lawyers are a pack of knaves, it is good to know that the law will, if necessary, make him see the difference.
But the freeholders have been for centuries a privileged class, and those of the peasants who are copyholders, a far more numerous body, are in a very different position. Your fathers were villeins, who hung on the words of the upstart manorial officials, who “had no right to know at night what they should do on the morrow,”[243] who never had the bitter satisfaction of grumbling that they got no return for the wages paid to the knights of the shire, who had no redress from the King's Courts if threatened with eviction. Of course you are not in the same position now. Your blood has been purged of the servile taint for generations. The lawyers have been competing for your business, and so the Court of Chancery has invented a new procedure to protect you in your holding. “When thieves fall out....” Still, it is better to run no risk of offending your superiors, for the law is a chancy thing, and your title (you keep the copy under lock and key and refuse to show it to the new surveyor lest he should twist it into meaning what it doesn’t) is none too clear.[244] Deep down in your mind, beneath the prosperity of to-day, there are dim memories of old, unhappy, far-off things, and your shoulders slouch at their recollection. Weh dir dass du ein Enkel bist! The bailiff has invented a pedigree as long as your arm to prove that your great-grandfather was a villein, and had no business to have bought his freedom for the preposterous reason that the money with which he bought it was the lord’s all along. The toadying beast is even trying to curry favour by saying that your copyhold is for life only, and that your fine is uncertain. True, there are plenty of ancient inhabitants who will swear in the manor court that your family has lived in the village before the present lord was ever heard of. But it is easy to bully and cajole them into silence. Were not Walter and Hugh turned adrift, “weeping bitterly,” because money had to be found to pay the young lord’s debts? As a copyholder, then, you are much less conscious of the State than if you are a freeholder, because in the matter which interests you most, the security of your holding, you have for centuries had no dealings with the State at all. Your idea of Government is a vague reverence for a King who sits far away in Westminster with a crown on his head and his judges about him, and who governs his kingdom as a good lord—not like yours—governs his manor. For the rest you are a non-political animal, who take little interest in affairs of State, because in the past the State has taken so little interest in you. When your fathers made London tremble in the great days of 1381 (you can see from your hay-stack the hill where they were hanged, hanged “like dogs”[245]) what they demanded was fair rents and freedom from villein services. When you went out with Ket in 1549 you asked the same, and, untaught by their experience, you begged that the King would see that you had the fair play which his Justices of the Peace, who are your landlords, will never allow you.[246] When King and Parliament come to blows, you curse both impartially, remain neutral as long as you can, and only turn out when they begin driving the village beasts. Your sentiments are pithily expressed in the motto which a local wit has devised for the village banner: “If you take our cattle, we will give you battle.”[247]
If, however, the peasantry are on the whole uninterested in the larger problems of government to which the world has agreed to confine the word politics, this is not because they are incapable of self-help, or destitute of any conception of public expediency. It is because the framework of their lives has for ages been different from that of the freeholders, because the centre round which their social interests revolve is even more localised than it is to the freeholders, because what matters to them most is not the law of the land but the custom of the manor. We shall have hereafter[248] to discuss the vexed question of the legal position occupied by the copyholders in the sixteenth century. But we may pause for a moment to point out here the decisive part which custom had played, and still played in our period, in moulding the lives of the mass of the peasantry, because unless this is firmly grasped we cannot understand their mental horizon. It is the custom of the manor which gives them their social environment and their conception of public order. The commonest name for all those who hold neither freely nor by lease is “customary tenants,” men whose title is rooted in custom. When the courts begin to interfere to protect copyholders, they introduce that sweeping innovation under the guise of enforcing customary conditions. They do not say “copyholders can be evicted.” Nor do they say “copyholders cannot be evicted.” They say, “Tell us what the custom of your manor is, and if it is one which does not seem to a plain man too unreasonable, we will enforce it.” When tenants and landlords fall out, it is always to custom that the tenants appeal. When the peasants ask the Government for assistance, they do so by demanding the observance of their “old customs.”
Let us look at the custom of the manor more closely. The phrase has, of course, misleading suggestions for modern ears. We tend to think of custom as something indefinite and inconclusive; something which is not, like the law (we speak of what should be), the embodiment of reason; something which fetters progress and is the opposite of freedom; something which is mere habit, and very likely a “bad habit” at that. All this is true in a sense. It is the way in which in the sixteenth century an enterprising landlord looks at the custom which ties his hands. But it is not the way in which it is regarded by the peasants. The custom of the manor does not mean to them a mere feeble acquiescence in existing conditions, mere inertia. It is not a negative, but a positive thing. It is no more inconsistent with progress to observe the custom, than it is inconsistent with progress to keep out of gaol by observing the law. For the custom is simply the law of the village. Like the main rules of the common law, it comes down from a dim age that is beyond the memory of man. Like law it is enforced by a court, the court of the manor. Like law it can be altered (and in some respects and on some manors often is altered to meet the new conditions of our period) by the proper authority, which again is the court of the manor. Of course it is not law in the fullest sense. From one standpoint it is the antithesis of law, the law of the King’s Courts, which, till the end of the fourteenth century, has taken no cognizance of the customary tenures, though since that time the Court of Chancery, by intervening to enforce the custom of the manor in respect of copyholds, has been breaking down the opposition. Still, for the mass of the peasantry, even in the sixteenth century, custom is a bigger, more important, thing than the law of the national courts. It is with custom that the first decision will lie.
Again, the custom of the manor is not at all a vague or indefinite thing. That it reposed partly on the Court Rolls, partly on the memory of ancient inhabitants, we can see from the frequent appeals which are made to both of them. But it certainly is no mere nebulous tradition. On the contrary, it is often most rigorous in its precision. It lays down boundaries and numbers stocks and stones. It adjusts and readjusts agricultural arrangements. It enters into the details of social life with a bold hand. Let us reflect, to take an example, on the customs of High Furness, parts of which have been quoted above. Here we have a whole village agreeing about matters which do not at first sight seem, like the use of pastures or the fixing of boundaries, of a specially public character. The term on which a man’s property is to be distributed among his descendants, this, if anything, one might expect to be left to his own discretion, once the succession of an heir to maintain the rents and services due from the holding had been provided for. The rules quoted above go much further than this. They settle exactly what proportion of a man’s property is to go to his different children, male and female, from the eldest down to the youngest. Imagine a Parish Council to-day distributing the wealth of deceased parishioners with the object of seeing that the whole of the younger generation shall obtain some kind of start in life, and you will have an analogy to what is done by the prudent men of High Furness.
Or take another example, where the points handled are of a somewhat different kind. Here are the customs of the manor of Bushey,[249] as set out in 1563 by twenty customary tenants in response to an inquiry by the lord:—
“In primis to the fyrste article we saye that no copyholder at the tyme of his death dying seased of twoo copyholdes hathe paid any more than one quycke heriott by the tyme of any remembrance, or before, to our knowledge.
“Item to the seconde we saye that the lorde oughtte to have the second beste for hys herryott and the heyer the beste.
“Item to the thyrde we saye that the copyholder that doth surrender his copyholde ought not to paye any herryott upon the surrender of his copyholde except yt be in extreme of deathe.
“Item to the fourth we saye that lords of the mannor have never demanded nor any copyholder payde any more for their ffyne than one yere’s rente of the lande.
“Item to the fyfth we saye that the widdowe upon the deathe of her husbande shall have the thyrde parte of the rente of the lande, but not the thyrde part of the lande except yt be surrendered to her by her husbande.
“Item to the syxth we saye that the copyholder may sell hys underwoode and stocke upp by the roote the same wytheout lycense of the lorde.
“Item to the seventh we saye that the copyholder may fell tymber for reparacion or otherwyse to sell the same to hys use and profyt; so hathe yt byn used by our tymes and by all tyme beyond the memory of man.
“Item to the eytthe we saye that the copyholder may make a grante of hys copyholde for three yeres wythoute the lord’s lycense, and the lorde to take nothing for the same.
“Item to the nineth we saye that the tenants maye take surrender bothe within the manor and without the manor.
“Item to the tenth we saye that we cannot answer for that we knowe not every man’s lande.
“Item to the eleventh we saye that every copyholde is not heryottable.
“Item to the xiith we knowe not where the Courte Rolles, Rentals, or customaryes of the manor are remayning or in whose custodye.
“Item to the xiiith we saye that we knowe not of any deutyes or rentys withdrawn from the lordshippe.
“Item to the xiiiith we saye that we never knewe nor hearde any heryott payde for freeholde at the dethe of the freholder.
“Item to the fyfteneth we say that the freholder hathe never payde relief at alienacion, but at deathe only.
“Item to the xvith we saye that a copyholder dying his heir being wythin the age of xiiii yeres the custody of the body and lande oughte to be comytted by the lorde to the nexte of the kyn to whom the inheritance may not dyscende.”
In themselves these customs are not in any way remarkable, except perhaps for the uniform favour which they show to the interests of the tenants. They might be paralleled from those of scores of other manors. What is worth noticing is the precision of the rules laid down. The relations between the lord and the tenants are settled with the definiteness of a sort of great collective bargain.
It would be going beyond the scope of this essay to enter upon the large question, on which so much learning has been expended, of the respective parts played in manorial origins by the communal organisation of villagers for the purpose of self-government in their agrarian affairs, and by the authoritative pressure of superior authorities for the purpose of using the village as the basis of a financial and political system. But one may point out that facts such as have been quoted above in illustration of the rule of custom cannot easily be fitted into any theory which regards the economic arrangements of the manor as the result simply of a system imposed from above, and which treats the customary rights of the peasants as the outcome of concessions made by lords from time to time in their own interests, the revocation of which involved no larger difficulties than necessarily surround the alteration of practices sanctioned by long use. However much the organisation of village life may have been stereotyped by the pressure directed upon it by the desire of the manorial authorities to extract rents and services on an unvarying plan, one cannot trace it altogether to its subordination to such external forces, because the custom of the manor acts as a restriction which impedes the free action of lords themselves and their agents, even when they are most anxious to break through its meshes. This is seen more clearly perhaps in the sixteenth century than in earlier periods, for the very reason that the sharp collision of interests between lords and tenants makes it more possible to distinguish those parts of manorial custom which represent the economic interests of the tenants, from those which represent the power of the manorial authorities imposed upon them. Under the latter heading would fall the rules as to heriots and reliefs, rules forbidding waste, rules requiring tenants to pay “for the rushes which they gather on the lord's common,”[250] or to perform the surviving remnants of labour services, while a rule such as that of High Furness, forbidding the division of holdings to such an extent as to prevent the discharge of services or the obtaining of an adequate living by the occupier, may be regarded as a compromise in which the interests of both lord and tenant receive consideration. Under the former may be placed the custom which fixes rents, and, on some fortunate manors like Bushey, fixes fines to be paid on admission, sanctions the sub-letting of copyholds and the felling of timber, and allots rights of pasture to each arable holding. Not all of these, of course, stand upon the same footing of importance. The right to cut wood is much less essential than the right to graze cattle. But some of them, at any rate, like rights of common pasture, seem to be bound up with the very existence of the village as an agricultural community, and all of them are dictated by the interests of the peasants in protecting themselves against encroachments, as clearly as are those of the first type by the desire of lords to make the manor a source of profit to themselves. It is scarcely possible to account for the obstacles put by manorial customs in the way of changes which would benefit the lord and be detrimental to the tenant, except on the supposition that they are rooted in something more indestructible than the mere concession of privileges which long use has solidified and hardened; something which can only be found in the fact that they are an essential part of the life of the village, to which the lord himself, as a condition of extracting revenue from it, is almost bound to conform.
This brings us to our original point, the way in which the whole social environment of all the tenants, except the freeholders, who do not need the protection of custom, and the leaseholders,[251] who cannot get it, is dependent upon the custom of the manor. Fraught with modern associations as it is, the phrase “collective[252] bargain” is perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing what the custom of the manor means to the peasants themselves. Of course it is much more than this. The custom has the sanction of immemorial antiquity. The phrase “time out of mind” is no mere piece of idle rhetoric. The stable self-perpetuating conditions of economic life create a sort of communal memory, in which centuries are focussed. There were villages where, in the reign of Elizabeth, the effects of the Great Plague[253] were still dimly remembered. But regarding the matter from the point of view of the practical working of village life, we shall not be far wrong if we think of the peasants as a body of men who are more or less organised, and of the custom as a system of common rules which regulates the relations between them and the lord. And it is evident that the custom of the manor, at any rate in our period, is a safeguard of the tenants' interests rather than of those of the manorial authorities. It is not only that the changes which followed the Great Plague have set the peasants free from the most irksome customary restrictions, but, further, that, in the sixteenth century, it is the lord who wants to make innovations and the tenants who resist them, and that it is therefore the latter who stand to gain most by clinging to custom. The custom sets up a standard by which encroachments can be opposed, by which the village as a whole can put a solid barrier in the way of change, by which blacklegging (in the shape of one man taking a holding over the head of another) can be prevented. Competitive forces have, it is true, been gradually undermining custom, and by the sixteenth century an increasing number of tenants have the terms on which they take their holdings settled by the higgling of the market without reference to any authoritative rule. Nevertheless, as far as the copyholders, who are the kernel of the manor, are concerned, competition is held in check by the fact that, on certain fundamental matters, there is a common understanding between the peasants, which is recognised by the lord himself. The manorial authorities cannot bargain with the tenants one by one. They have to deal with the villagers as men who are “organised,” who are members of a society, who know what they have to expect in the way of heriots and rents and fines, and who will be supported by village opinion in resisting innovations. On occasion the peasants will strike. On occasion they will force their landlord to arbitration.[254] One might almost say that the customary tenants are trade unionists to a man. Again, who shall determine what the custom is? The court rolls will throw light on certain points, and occasionally we find lords appealing to them successfully in order to upset the tenants' claims. But on many matters there is no guide but tradition; the exponents of tradition are the ancient inhabitants; the lord has to ask them to expound it, as he does the tenants of Bushey. Can we doubt that this was a powerful check on autocratic action on his part? Lords come and go. But the custom of the manor endures, and probably loses nothing in the telling.
If, then, we ask what the custom means to the peasantry, we must think not of the “forbidding, stale, and meagre ways,” which is what the word custom too often suggests in the twentieth century, but of the phrase “ancient customs and liberties,” which is so common in the charters of Boroughs. The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom which most concerns the mass of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from which they draw their political ideas. They cannot conceive the state except as a very great manor. Their idea of good government is the enforcement of an idealised customary.[255]
Having said this we can say little more. There is no standard by which we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village life of the sixteenth century—and England is all villages—would still be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller’s sketches of modern England, yet, like a traveller’s sketches, possessing a certain value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion selects for emphasis.
One is encouraged in one’s belief in the comparative prosperity of a large number of the peasantry in the earlier sixteenth century by the comments which the writers of the periods pass upon it, even after a decline has already begun. The picture we get is of an open-handed, turbulent, large-eating and deep-drinking people, much given to hospitality and to merriment both coarse and refined; according to modern standards very ignorant, yet capable of swift enthusiasm, litigious, great sticklers for their rights, quick to use force in defence of them, proud of their independence, and free from the grosser forms of poverty which crush the spirit. The latter feature strikes everybody. Foreign visitors[256] notice with amazement the outward signs of wealth among the humbler classes. English writers, though their tone becomes sadder and sadder as the century proceeds, are never tired of boasting of it. Even in the eighties of the sixteenth century, when many of the peasants are much worse off than they had been a hundred years before, Harrison, though he paints in dark colours the ruinous effects of the agrarian changes, describes their hearty life with good-humoured gusto. “Both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficiently liberal and very friendly at their tables, and when they meet they are so merry without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them.... Their food consisteth principally of beef and such meat as the butcher selleth. That is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork. In feasting also the latter sort, I mean the husbandmen, do exceed after their manner, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such odd meetings, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one bringing such a dish, or so many with him, as his wife and he consult upon, but always with this consideration that the lesser friend shall have the better provision.” The peasants themselves have a good conceit of their position, and all unmindful of the whirligig of time and its revenges, contrast it with that of their class in France, where women labour like beasts in the fields, where men go in wooden shoes or no shoes at all, where the people drink water instead of ale, eat rye bread and little meat, and have not even the heart, like honest Englishmen, to rob the rich who oppress them, and that in the most fertile realm in all the world;[257] "Caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldome as they dyd to the Romaynes, and gevynge tribute for theyr meat, drinke, brede, and salte, which for theyr wayke personayges and tymorous hartes I may compare to the pigmies who waged battayle against the Cranes, so that I dare let slip a hundred good yeomen of England against five hundred of such ribaldry.”[258] Apart from the utterances of these good Jingoes, stray glimpses show us a people which not only is materially prosperous, but is also bold in action, and can produce men of high moral ardour. In the twentieth century the rural population is a bye-word for its docility. Its ancestors in the sixteenth were notorious for their restiveness. Hales, who knew and loved them, makes one of the characters in his dialogue[259] suggest that men at arms should be used to put down the disturbances made by them and by the unemployed weavers, only to answer, through the lips of another, that to call in the military will be the best way to make them riot all the more:—“Marie, I think that waye wold be rather occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be quenched, for the stomakes of Englishmen would never beare that, to suffer such injuries and reproaches as I knowe suche (i.e. the men at arms) use to do to the subjects of France.”
These humble people have their idealisms. They produce martyrs for the new religion and for the old, Lollards who suffer persecution for upholding the Wycliffite tradition in the quiet villages of Buckinghamshire, Catholics who follow Aske in that wonderful movement of northern England, the last of the crusades, in 1536, or fall in Devonshire thirteen years later before the artillery of Herbert. Nor are they altogether cut off from the springs of learning. For at the beginning of the sixteenth century the upper classes have not yet begun to covet education for themselves sufficiently to withhold it from the poor. Bequests[260] show that the sons of well-to-do peasants may have been among those godly yeomanry whom Latimer[261] described as once, in happier social conditions than those amid which he preached, frequenting the older universities, and the records of some sixteenth century grammar-schools tell a similar story. Among the first twenty-two names on the register of Repton[262] there are five gentlemen, four husbandmen, nine yeomen, two websters or weavers, a carpenter, and a tanner.
But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these documents begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner things to think of than the schooling of their children.[Next Chapter]
FOOTNOTES
[208] Fortescue on the Governance of England (Plummer), chapter xii.: “But oure commons be riche, and therefore thai give to thair kynge, at somme times quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte tymes other grate subsidies.”
[209] Russell, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 48 foll.; see passage quoted below, pp. [335–337]. For the sentences immediately following, see Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 233: “A serf ... is said to have left at his death in 1435 chattels estimated at 3000 marks or £2000.” Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, int. xxix.; Davenport, History of a Norfolk Manor, p. 53.
[210] Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. c. 4.
[211] See below, pp. [277–279], and Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, pp. 322–323. Presentment by the grand jury, Worcestershire, 1661, April 23: “We desire that servants' wages may be rated according to the statute, for we find the unreasonableness of servants' wages a great grievance, so that the servants are grown so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the servant except it be because the servant wears better clothes than his master. We desire that the statute for setting poor men’s children to apprenticeship be more duly observed, for we find the usual course is that if any are apprenticed it is to some paltry trade, and when they have served their apprenticeship they are not able to live by their trades, whereby not being bred to labour they are not fit for husbandry. We therefore desire that such children may be set to husbandry for the benefit of tillage and the good of the Commonwealth.” See also Britannia Languens (1680) for remarks on the scarcity of labour even at the end of the seventeenth century.
[212] R.O. Duchy of Lancaster, Special Commissions, No. 398.
[213] See Dekker’s The Witch of Edmonton. I have ventured to assume that in this play “yeoman” is used in its wide non-technical sense.
[214] See e.g. Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567, pp. 106–107, and below, pp. [159–162].
[215] Synge, The Playboy of the Western World.
[216] Quoted by Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, pp. [58–59]. He remarks “a labourer ... begins with one ‘land,’ then takes a second, a third, and so on,” and quotes Mr. Haggard’s statement that the “Isle of Axholme ... is one of the few places ... in England ... truly prosperous in an agricultural sense.”
[217] Customs like those of High Furness, together with the complaints as to the scarcity of agricultural labour, make one reflect on a fundamental question of economics, viz., the average age of marriage and its relation to the distribution of property and organisation of industry. It is well known that the age of marriage is influenced by (among other things) the age at which maximum earning power begins, e.g. to-day it is lower for the unskilled labourer than for the artisan, for the former reaches his prime earlier than the latter; lower for the artisan than for the professional man, because the latter takes longer than the former in getting together a practice or rising from a low initial salary. The difference is not primarily due to differences of thrift or foresight as between different classes, but to the fact that the deferring of marriage, which is prudent in (say) a lawyer, who does not reach his full earning power till thirty-five or later, is imprudent in (say) an engineer who has all the experience he needs at twenty-six or twenty-seven, and still more imprudent in the labourer, who reaches his full earning power at twenty-one or twenty-two, and in whom it falls off rapidly after he has passed the prime of life. When a large number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth century probably a majority) were small landholders or small masters, did the fact that they had to wait for the death of a parent to succeed to their holding, or (in towns) for the permission of a guild to set up shop (i.e. to reach their maximum earning powers) tend to defer the age of marriage? If the possibility of this being the case is conceded, ought we to connect the slow growth of population between 1377 and 1500 (on which all historians seem to be agreed) with the wide distribution of property, and ought we to think of the considerable increase in the landless proletariate which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as tending in the opposite direction? In the absence of statistics we cannot answer these questions. But I am inclined to argue that they are at any rate worth investigation. (i) Contemporary opinion shows that in the eyes of sixteenth century writers the problem of population was a problem of underpopulation. The prevalent fear is “lack of men” for military purposes. Starkey’s Dialogue speaks of it as “a consumption of the body politic,” and suggests as remedies to allow priests to marry, to forbid gentlemen to employ more serving men than they are able to “set forward” to matrimony (on the ground that “men whych in service spend theyr lyfe never fynd means to marry”), to endow with a house and a portion of waste land at a nominal rent persons who marry, to exempt from taxation all persons who have five children and less than a hundred marks in goods, to tax bachelors 1s. in the pound, and give the proceeds to “them which have more children than they be wel abul to nurysch, and partely to the dote of poor damosellys and vyrgins” (Part II. p. 8). Hales (p. lv. of Miss Lamond’s introduction to Commonweal of England) speaks of depopulation in a similar strain, as also does Harrison forty years later. There are some complaints as to excess of population in 1620 (see below, pp. [278–279]), but these do not become general till the very end of the seventeenth century (see Defoe, Giving alms no charity). (ii) The position of a son who acquires a holding when his parent dies is analogous to that of an apprentice who cannot set up as a master till given permission by the proper authorities. It is quite plain that in the eyes of the ordinary man in the sixteenth century one of the advantages of a system of compulsory apprenticeship was that it prevented youths marrying at a very early age. E.g. an Act (2 & 3 Philip and Mary) forbids the admitting of any one to the freedom of the city of London before the age of twenty-four, and enacts that apprentices are not to be taken so young that they will come out of their time before they are twenty-four. The reason alleged for this rule is the distress in the city of which “one of the chief occasions is by reason of the overhasty marriages and over soon setting up of householdes by the young folke of the city ... be they never so young and unskilful.” A petition of weavers states (Hist. MSS. Com., C.D. 784, p. 114): “Whereas by the former good laws of their trade no one could exercise the same until he had served an apprenticeship for seven years and attained the age of twenty-four, now in these disordered times many apprentices having forsaken parents and masters ... refuse to serve out their time, but before they are eighteen or twenty years old betake themselves to marriage." One may contrast the extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage of the people of Lancashire brought about by the early factory system, with its armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the wages earned immediately on reaching maturity (Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 1836, and The Manufacturing Population of Great Britain, 1833), and compare the results usually ascribed to the wide distribution of landed property in France. See also the remarks of Slater on the effect of the eighteenth century enclosing (The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields, p. 256), and Hasbach, History of the English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 120 n. 138–139, 178. Young ascribed “a great multiplication of births” to the fact that “the labourer has no advancement to hope” (Suffolk, 1797, p. 260); Duncombe, “The practice of consolidating farms ... tends to licentiousness of manners" (Herefordshire, p. 33). A witness before the Select Committee on Emigration, 1827, stated, “The labourers no longer live in farm houses as they used to do, where they were better fed and had more comforts than they now get in a cottage, in consequence there was not the same inducement to early marriage" (qu. 3882). In the absence of direct statistical evidence all we can say is (i) that when persons look forward to entering on property or setting up as small masters their point of maximum earning power is later than it is when they can earn the standard rate of the trade at twenty-two or twenty-three; therefore (ii) that the average age of marriage is likely to be higher in a society composed largely of small property owners than in one composed largely of a propertyless proletariate.
[218] See [Appendix II.]
[219] It must be remembered, however, that there was pasture on the one field which every year lay fallow, and that the amount of this does not appear in the figures given below.
[220] Camden Society, Norden, Speculum Britanniæ, Part I., Intro.: “And these commonly are so furnished with kyne that their wives twice or thrice a week conveyeth to London mylke and butter, cheese, apples, pears, frutmentye, hens and chickens, baken, and other country drugs ... and this yieldeth them a large comfort and relief.”
[221] See The Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurers, 1594: “It is a common practice in this country, if a poore man come to borrow money of a maltster, he will not lend any, but tells him, if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of fore-hand buyers; the man being driven by distresse sells his corn far under foote, that when it comes to be delivered he loses halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value. I have heard many of these fore-hand sellers say that they had rather allow after 20 pounds in the hundred for money, than to sell their fore-hand bargaines of corn. These are most extreme usurers.”
[222] A Discourse upon Usurie, by Thomas Wilson, 1584: “A lord doth lend his tenants money, with this condition that they shall plough his land, whether doth he commit usurie or no? I do answer that if he does not pay them for their labour, but will take the benefit of their labour for the use of his money, he is an usurer.”
[223] Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 2319, p. 27: “Juetta ... is a usuress, and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation.”
[224] Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 7881, p. 129, St. Saviour’s Hospital gives "20d to a poor man to buy seed for his land.”
[225] Victoria County History, Suffolk, “Social and Economic History": “The gild let out in one year 8 cows and 4 neats at 19d. each.” For the parson’s cow, see Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, p. 46.
[226] On the subject of the monasteries see Gasquet, Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, chap. xxii., and passim.
[227] For reference see below, p. 198, n. 2.
[228] Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue. He is speaking of parts of Somersetshire. “Now I say if this sweet country of Tandeane and the western part of Somersetshire be not degenerated, surely, as their land is fruitful by nature, so doe they their best by art and industrie ... they take extraordinary pains in soyling, plowing, and dressing their land.... After the plough there goeth some 3 or 4 with mattocks to break the clods ... they have sometimes and in some places foure, five, six, eight, yea tenne quarters in an ordinary acre.” For Walter of Henley’s figures see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 437–438. Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth century estimated the average yield “in a year of moderate plenty" at a little more than 11 bushels (Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. v. pp. 92 and 783). I quote Norden not as giving what was general, but to show what it was thought could be done.
[229] Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907.
[230] Camden Society, 1857, An Italian Narration of England.
[231] Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907.
[233] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke; cf. R.O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182, fol. 1, Rental of the late Priory of Launde (Leicestershire, 1539), where there are tenants paying for common pasture for about 430 sheep.
[234] For the sources and defects of this table see [Appendix II.].
[235]See below, pp. [139–147] and [304–310.]
[236] Northumberland County History, vol. ii.
[237] Ibid., vol. iii. pp. 86–94. On this manor at the time of the survey, though the distinction between the old rent and the “cleare yearly value above the old rent" was noted, the latter seems to have been tapped by a rise in rents ("cleere improved rent above the ould rent").
[238] Rochdale Manor Inquisition, 1610, by H. Fishwick (Trans. of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society, vol. vii.).
[239] Merton Documents, MSS. Book labelled “Kibworth and Barkby, 1636.” For another illustration of fixed copyhold rents, see Maitland, English Hist. Review, vol. ix.: The History of a Cambridgeshire Manor.
[240] Quoted, Leadam, “The Security of Copyholders in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" (English Historical Review, vol. viii. pp. 684–696). The case in question was that of the inhabitants of Thingden v. John Mulsho.
[241] See below, pp. [329–331].
[242] Bracton, f. 164 b.: “Succuritur ei per recognitionem Assisæ novæ dissesinæ multis vigiliis excogitatam et inventam" (quoted Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, vol. i. p. 125 n.).
[243] Bracton, Lib. iv. cap. 28, f. 208.
[244] Northumberland County History, vol. iii., Pt. V., pp. 86–104, Survey of Hexham (1608): “Their fines they pretend to be certain, viz. one year’s rent at everye change of tenant, but not herritable. They have there, for certaine, very ancient evidences and Court Rolls, but they woulde not show them unto us, nor any of their coppies.” See also [Appendix I. No. IV].
[245] Hist. MSS. Com., Part VII., pp. 49–50 (1596): Some information concerning those intending the rebellion in Oxford.... “And Steer said that there was once a rising at Enscombe Hill by the commons, and they were persuaded to go down and were after hanged like dogs. ‘But,’ said he, ‘we will never yield, but will go through with it!’”
[246] See below, pp. [334–337.]
[247] Warburton’s Rupert, iii., 118 (quoted Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, p. 112).
[248] See below, pp. [287–310].
[249] I take them from the MSS. Court Rolls of the Manor of Bushey, kindly lent me by the late Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith.
[250] Aldeburgh, temp. Henry VIII., R.O. Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts, vol. clxiii. See [Appendix I., No. II.]
[251] Some copyholders, who held land which was not “customary land" but part of the demesne or the waste, were not protected by custom either: for a discussion of this point see below, pp. [293–294].
[252] See below for an example from Crondal, p. [295].
[253] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of “The Presentment and Verdict of the Jury for the Manor of Hewlington,” 1620 (Wrexham Free Library, Ancient Local Records, vol. ii.): “Which decay (as by the ancient records appeareth) did growe by reason of the great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in the reign of Edward III., and also of the rebellion of Owen Glendower and trouble that thereupon ensued.”
[254] Victoria County History of Gloucestershire, Social and Economic History, p. 146. For agrarian strikes see below, pp. [329–331].
[255] See below, pp. [338–340].
[256] Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), p. 114, quoting one of “the Spaniards in Queen Mary’s days." “These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king.”
[257] Fortescue, On the Governance of England, chaps. iii. and xiii. The Scots, he thinks, are only one degree less faint-hearted than the French. “Thai ben often tymes hanged for larceny, and stelynge off good in the absence off the owner theroff. But ther hartes serve them not to take a manys gode, while he is present, and woll defende it.”
[258] Coke, Debate of Heralds. See also the quotation, Froude’s Henry VIII., vol. i. chap, i., from a State Paper of 1515: “What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so stronge in the felde, as the comyns of England?”
[259] The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), p. 94.
[260] Victoria County History, Berkshire, ii., 208. In 1558 a yeoman leaves his son a portion of land worth £10 a year “for his keepinge and learninge in Oxford for five years nexte.” On the same page there is a case of a man described as a “yeoman” who is tenant by copy of Court Roll.
[261] Latimer’s Sermons. The first sermon preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549 (Everyman Series, p. 86): “We have good statutes made for the commonwealth, as touching commoners and enclosures; many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing I will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from the devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to pass that the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to school (as indeed universities do wondrously decay already); I say ye pluck salvation from the people and utterly destroy the realm. For by yeomen’s sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained chiefly.” See also A Supplication of the Poor Commons (E. E. T. S.): “This thing causeth that suche possessioners as heretofore were able and used to maintain their own children ... to lernynge and suche other qualities as are necessary to be had in this Your Highness Royalme, are now of necessitie compelled to set theyr own children to labour, and al is lytle enough to pay the lorde’s rent, and to take the house anew at the end of the yere.” The children of yeomen had no doubt been educated mainly for the Church, and some attained high position (Surtees Society, vol. lxxix. pp. 263–264, for the son of a yeoman becoming a Bishop, and vol. li. No. 53, the son of a yeoman becoming subdeacon of York, vol. lxxix. pp. 176–177, for a yeoman’s son sent to school for fifteen years). But in the fifteenth century this was not always so, v. Leach, Educational Charters, p. 41, for a school founded in Yorkshire, a county which “produced many youths endowed with light and sharpness of ability, who do not all want to attain the dignity and elevation of the priesthood, that these may be better fitted for the mechanical arts and other concerns of this world.” A case of hostility to the education of the poorer classes based on the idea that education should be reserved for “gentlemen" is given ibid. p. 470, where the notorious Lord Rich and other gentlemen argue “as for husbandsmen’s children, they were more meet ... for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the place of the learned sort. So that they wished none else to be put to school, but only gentlemen's children.” Cranmer retorted, “Poor men’s children ... are commonly more apt to apply their study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated ... the poor man’s son by painstaking will be learned, when the gentleman’s son will not take the pains to get it, ... wherefore if the gentleman’s son be apt to learning let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man's child being apt enter in his room.”
[262] Repton School Register, 1564–1910. One of the husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the attitude of most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why shouldn’t Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably off.
CHAPTER IV
THE PEASANTRY (continued)
(e) Signs of Change[ToC]
So far attention has been concentrated upon those phenomena which suggest that, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century begin, there has been a period—one may date it roughly from 1381 to 1489—of increasing prosperity for the small cultivator. We have emphasised the evidence of this upward movement which is given by the growth among the peasantry of a freer and more elastic economy. We have watched them shake off many of the restrictions imposed by villeinage and build up considerable properties. We have seen how the custom of the manor still acts as a dyke to defend them against encroachments, and to concentrate in their hands a large part of the fruits of economic progress. In the century from the Peasants' Revolt to the first Statute against Depopulation, in spite of the political anarchy which disfigures it, there is, as it seems to us an interval between one oppressive régime and another, between the leaden weight of villeinage and the stress and strain of the gathering power of competition. In that happy balance between the forces of custom and the forces of economic enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men cannot evade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it has not grown to such lengths as to undermine the security which the small man finds in the established relationships and immemorial routine of communal agriculture.
There is, however, we need hardly say, another side to the picture, and to that other side we must now turn. We must examine again from another point of view some of the ground over which we have already travelled, and we must modify the opinions which we have formed by bringing a fresh range of facts into perspective. The piecemeal changes which have been going on in the internal organisation of so many manors look forward as well as back, and are of significance as throwing light on the larger innovations of the later period. For one thing, they mean the appearance among the customary tenantry of persons who are in a small way capitalists, and who supply a link between the great farmer of the sixteenth century and the agricultural organisation of earlier periods. The emergence out of the mediæval peasantry of prosperous cultivators, occupying two or three times as much land as their grandfathers, is a proof that holdings of a considerable size can be managed successfully, and the farmers of the demesne are often drawn from among them. For another thing, the inequality which has appeared among the holdings of different tenants implies the growth of a state of things in which innovations in the customary methods of agriculture are much more likely to be made than they were when all the tenants were organised in fairly well-defined classes. The smaller among them are still practising subsistence farming when the larger are producing on a considerable scale for the market, are acquiring capital, are extending their holdings, are even becoming landlords themselves. There arises therefore a divergence of agricultural methods and economic interests between them, which is quite compatible with the fact that both large and small tenants stand in the same legal relationship to the lord of whom they hold. The enterprise which the former show in their dealings with land and in encroaching on the routine of manorial cultivation cannot fail to have a powerful influence in preparing the way for the individualistic movement which sweeps over agriculture in the sixteenth century, and from which the peasants, as a class, suffer so severely. The freedom with which parcels of land change hands must inevitably weaken the connection between the family and the holding, and result in leaving the least successful without any land at all. The difficulty of maintaining a peasant proprietary without restricting the alienation of land is one which is familiar to modern Governments, and there is clear evidence[263] that, even before the evictions of the sixteenth century began to attract attention, a decline in the number of customary tenants was brought about on a good many manors by the mere process of the well-to-do buying up the poorer men’s holdings.
Such movements prepare the way for greater changes: petty capitalism is naturally followed by capitalism on a larger scale. It is surely at first sight somewhat surprising that the noticeable upward movement in the condition of the rural population, which coincides with the disappearance of villeinage and the growth of copyhold tenure, should have been followed by the marked depression which all observers agree to have occurred in the following century. Why should a class which has displayed such remarkable signs of vigour and enterprise find such difficulty in holding its own? An answer to this question cannot be given till after a consideration of the new causes at work in the sixteenth century. But may it not be that their position had to some extent been undermined by the very changes which at first improved it, and that the enterprise of the larger customary tenants, while it added to their prosperity as long as they led the way in it, tended to weaken the customary relations and the customary methods of agriculture which had protected the small man, and to leave him at the mercy of competitive forces which he could not control? Such an undulating line of development, in which the small producer gains temporarily from the expansion of markets and improved technical methods which ultimately rob him of his independence, can be paralleled from the later history both of agriculture[264] and of manufacturing industry. It seems to us to offer a thread which connects the capitalist farmer of the sixteenth century with the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth. When there is much buying and selling of land among the peasantry, much colonising of new plots taken from the waste and the demesne, we should expect to see the influence of competition beginning to override that of custom; we should expect to see the paring away of communal restrictions to make room for individual arrangements of a more elastic nature. In the remainder of this chapter we shall approach this problem by considering two movements—the growth at an early date of competitive rents on those parts of manors where custom was weakest, and the enclosing of land by customary tenants themselves. The former offers a precedent for the rack-rents and excessive fines of which so much is heard in the sixteenth century, the latter at once an analogy and a contrast with the enclosures carried out by lords of manors and capitalist farmers, which we shall discuss in Part II.
(f) The Growth of Competitive Rents on New Allotments[ToC]
The development of competitive rents is a subject which must always possess a peculiar fascination for the historical economist, inasmuch as the distribution of wealth depends to no small degree upon the manner in which the surplus gains wrung from nature are shared between different classes. The wealth which, under a régime of great estates and leasehold tenure, accrues to a tiny body of landlords, is, in a community of small freeholders, retained by the cultivating tenant, and, when the tenure of land is such that custom sets a barrier to a rise in rents, is divided between owner and occupier in a way which prevents the former from absorbing the whole advantage of superior sites, or the latter from being reduced to working for bare wages of management. The causes which determine the allocation of rents must always be of crucial importance for an understanding of economic conditions, and any change which augments them, diminishes them, or varies the degree to which different classes participate in them, is likely in time to produce a substantial alteration both in the economic configuration of society and in the possession of social privileges and political power. In modern times, it is true, the enormous area from which food-stuffs are drawn, and the relatively small space upon which manufacturing industry can be concentrated, has made the differential payments accruing to the landowner from varieties of soil and situation almost trifling compared with the surpluses drawn from finance and manufacturing industry by the infra-marginal capitalist and entrepreneur. Such “quasi-rents" are, however, a comparatively modern phenomenon. In our period the basis of wealth was land, and a crucial question is that of the manner in which incomes drawn from land were determined. We have seen that in the sixteenth century custom still ruled the payments made by most of the copyhold tenants. But at that time there were many complaints of rack-renting, and though we must leave till later an inquiry into their justification, it will help us if we take a glance at the new forces, which, even in the Middle Ages, were beginning to operate on the margin of cultivation.
The gradual extension of cultivation over the waste lands surrounding the village fields, and the not infrequent addition of parts of the lord’s demesne to the tenants' holdings, was obviously the occasion, as it took place, of a number of new agreements between the payer and receiver of rents, which might or might not repeat the conditions of existing contracts. When new land was broken up for tillage an attempt seems in some cases to have been made by the manorial authorities to assimilate its treatment, as far as payment was concerned, to that of the existing customary holdings. The basis of the rent paid was a comparison between the areas of the encroachments and the ordinary holding of a customary tenant; the payment was so many ploughlands'[265] worth, and sometimes the corresponding services were extracted from them. On the other hand, the mere fact that the land was new land, which did not come into the original scheme of manorial finance and organisation, tended to make it the point from which new relationships could spring. For one thing, it was the natural starting-point for the process of substituting money rents for labour. When the customary holdings offered a sufficient supply of labour for the cultivation of the demesne, the manorial authorities naturally preferred to take the payments for additional land in the shape of money rather than in services of which they already had sufficient. Services are sometimes exacted for the new encroachments, but they are the exception; and the assimilation of the payments for these new holdings to those made for the customary holdings was either not seriously attempted or was unsuccessful. One can quite understand that, even if the lord wanted labour services from those parts of the waste which were broken up and added to the cultivated area, he might not be able to get the improvements made on the old terms. Quite apart, therefore, from the process of commutation, the growth of money rents developed as a natural accompaniment of the growth of population.
The second point is more important. It is that the rents paid for the new holdings taken from the waste differed from such money payments as were made for the customary holdings, in that they were not to the same extent dominated by custom, but were to a much greater extent influenced by competition. This contrast is the tiny seed of great changes, and may be illustrated by an example drawn from the south of England at a comparatively early date. At Yateleigh,[266] one of the tithings of the manor of Crondal, the absorption of the waste by the customary tenants went on with great rapidity even in the thirteenth century, and in the rental drawn up by the steward in 1287 we find the rents and services paid for the customary holdings and the rents paid for the encroachments set down side by side. The latter fall into a definite scheme which can be picked out at a glance. With a very few exceptions the rent charged for an acre of land taken from the waste is always 4d., and this is the basis for all other payments for the varying portions of waste occupied by the tenants. A two acre piece pays 8d. For a piece of 9-1/2 acres the payment is still about 4-1/4d. per acre, the awkward sum of 3s. 4-1/2d. The rents and services of the customary holdings, however, cannot be reduced to any such simple and uniform plan of adjusting rent to acreage. In the first place all of them, whatever their size, are liable to an initial charge of 9-1/2d., called “Pondpany.” In the second place there is only the roughest correspondence between the amount of land held by a tenant and the payment which he makes. A holding of 22 acres pays 2s. 10d., but so does a holding of 32 acres, while one of 29 acres pays 2s. 2d. Holdings of 12-1/2, of 16, and of 18-1/2 acres all make exactly the same payment of 2s. In short, though it would not be quite true to say that the payment made bears no relation to the size of the holding, the relation which it bears is not at all definite and precise. It is a general relation applying rather to groups of holdings roughly marked off from others by broad differences in extent, not to individual holdings. There is no standard price per acre at all, such as appears in a modern land market, and such as exists for the land taken from the waste.
What is the reason of this remarkable contrast between the rents of pieces of land lying quite near to each other and held by the same tenants, which causes the payment for one set of holdings, the encroachments, to be adjusted uniformly to the area held, and the other, the customary holdings, to be rented apparently without any economic plan at all? The answer is that the payments for the encroachments and the payments for the customary holdings, if they are both to be called rents, are rents of very different kinds. The payments made for the customary holdings are not based directly on the economic value of the land, but on the value of commuted services, and all the holdings, though of unequal size, are liable to much the same services. All make a general payment of 9-1/2d., because that sum is the value of some payment in kind or service which they had made before the money payment took its place. Holdings of 32 acres and 22 acres, just as holdings of 12½ and 18½ acres, make the same payments, because the labour rents had been only very roughly adjusted to the size of the holdings, and these payments are commuted labour rents, not rents fixed by putting up an acre for leasing and taking what can be got for it. It is of course quite true that services and the size of holdings were connected, and that therefore the money rents which took the place of services and the size of holdings were connected also. But the connection is rough, arrived at by apportioning between holdings the labour services needed to cultivate the demesne, without distinguishing precisely differences of a few acres in the size of different holdings, and the subsequent money rents are not adjusted to the acreage because they express the roughness of the original apportionment.
Now clearly these considerations did not apply to the rents paid for the encroachments which were taken from the waste. The greater part of them had never been liable to labour services at all. Each acre stood by itself, as it were, as simply a piece of cultivatable land of a certain area, not part of a complex on which certain obligations had been imposed. Each, therefore, gets a market value, based on what will be given for it, much sooner than does the land making up the customary holdings, which are not exposed to the levelling influence of the market because they are bound together by their place in the social organisation of the manor. Hence it is on this land, the land leased piecemeal from the waste by tenants who were prosperous enough to afford the extra outlay, that one gets the appearance of something like true competitive rents, because it is here that commercial influences have freest play and are least checked by their subordination to custom. In the same way, when the tenants at Brightwalton[267] do the full quota of work demanded, the rent of their customary holdings is abated accordingly. But not so the rent of the new land which was once part of the waste: in fixing its rent the lord is not checked by any collective sense on the part of the village community; he has a free hand and will make the best bargain he can.
Thus, at a very early date, a fringe of leasehold land forms itself round the manor in addition to the ordinary customary holdings. Because it is on the margin of cultivation the initial rent is low, and because the land is leased the rent can be raised. Exactly the same thing applies to the leasing of the demesne, and sometimes even to the land which one tenant hires from another, because here also the element of competition enters to adjust rents in accordance with supply and demand and with little regard to the influence of custom. When the greater part of the demesne is still cultivated by the labour of villeins, and only small plots are leased to the tenants by way of experiment, the bailiff balances one method against the other, and recommends the resumption of the land which “would pay better in the hands of the lord.”[268] On some manors, it is true, demesne land seems to have been merged inextricably in the customary holdings, and to have been held later, like them, by copy of court roll.[269] But the manorial authorities were anxious to keep it separate precisely because it was recognised that if kept separate it could be let at a competitive rent. Thus the charter which was granted to the little borough of Holt[270] in Denbighshire, in 1413, provided that the tenants should pay for “every burgage 12d., for every curtilage 12d., for every acre of land belonging to their free burgages 12d., and for every acre of land which was wont to be of the lord's demesne two shillings.” And though, during the confusion of the following century, much of the rent appears not to have been collected, the Crown, of whom the burgesses hold, does not forget that a high rent was due from the demesne, and one hundred and fifty years later requires them to bring up their payments for it to the level fixed in 1413. At Castle Combe, in the middle of the fifteenth century, one finds the steward of the manor watching the land market with a view to getting the best price that he can for the demesne, and speculating whether “any man will ferme the parkis and the conyes at any better price above X marks than yt ys now.”[271] The same tendency towards competitive rents can be seen equally well in the case of the land leased by one tenant from the holdings of others, which for one reason or another have been surrendered to the lord. Thus at Mildenhall,[272] in 1381, a villein pays for his land nearly 1s. 6d. an acre, a very high rent, which is at once explained when it is seen that his holding consists of pieces of land held on a ten years' lease from the holdings of five or more other tenants. Elsewhere one can almost see the bidding up of rents going on. For what else can happen when the demesne lands of a manor are leased to four tenants who, in turn, make their profit by leasing them again to the other tenants,[273] or when a villein pays £6 to enter on two acres of arable land,[274] or when land is worth 3s. 6d. an acre after the rents and services have been discharged from it to the lord,[275] so that the holder who cares to sublet can reap a substantial profit on the difference?
The truth is that, at any rate by the middle of the fifteenth century, the rents of different parts of a manor are being settled on quite different principles. They are not all customary rents, as they tended to be at an earlier date, nor are they all competitive rents, as they tend to be to-day. The latter are growing because of the improved economic position of the tenants, which enables them to hire or purchase land over and above their customary holdings, and their growth has been greatly accelerated by the enormously increased opportunities for land speculation which were offered when the Great Plague brought thousands of acres into the land market. It is in the demand put forward by the men of Essex in 1381,[276] “that no acre of land, which is held in villeinage or serfdom, may be had at a higher rent than 4d.,” rather than in the reference to the already decaying labour services, that there is a warning of troubles to come. But long after that, as we have already seen, a great deal of land is still held by rents which are customary and little influenced as yet by the play of competition. We have, in fact, what is almost an illustration of modern theories of rent, with this difference, that though the condition of competitive rents being charged appears as the margin of cultivation is lowered, custom at first prevents the owners of land from taking advantage of their position and asking the full competitive rents from the holders of the superior sites, so that part of the surplus is for a long time enjoyed by the tenants. Such a state of things is clearly a precarious one. When the tenements of Hugh and Thomas are being rack-rented there will obviously be a strong temptation to cause Walter’s to follow suit, and if the custom is a barrier to a rise in rents, but not to a rise in fines, to make heavy fines do on the latter what high rents do on the former. If it had been given to our peasants to happen on some monstrous mediæval Ricardo, would they not have wondered how long such an intermingling of payments fixed by custom and payments fixed by competition was likely to continue, and have foreseen, what actually occurred in the sixteenth century, an attempt, though not always a successful attempt, to force up the payments for customary holdings to something like the maximum which the condition of agriculture would allow? They would have said:—“This fellow fears not God, neither regards he man. He is a usurer, a great taker of advantages, an oppressor of his neighbour. We will beat him, and put him in our stocks, and maim his cattle. Nevertheless in the bottom of his foul mind there is some glimmering of sense, and we will give heed to his warning. The devil brings it, but it may be that God sent it. The Court shall recite our good customs once more, and our young men shall look to their bows. Weapon bodeth peace.”[277]
(g) The Progress of Enclosure among the Peasantry[ToC]
While competitive conditions are creeping forward on those parts of the village lands which have been most recently taken in, even more momentous changes are occurring on the customary holdings themselves. By the end of the fifteenth century we are walking through fields that are being cut up with the hedges which give the dullest English landscape the trim beauty of a garden. For a century and a half, while in the great world the new state rises on the ruins of the Middle Ages, while Tudors give way to Stuarts, and Stuarts browbeat and are browbeaten by ever more impatient Parliaments, in courts customary and sometimes in noisier assemblies not without arms, we shall be discussing whether those hedges are to stand or fall. The great enclosing movement has begun.
Like most great economic changes it has begun quietly and for a long time men are doubtful whether it is a great change at all, and, if it is mischievous, in what exactly the mischief consists. Nor indeed does the mass of the population, who feel the new conditions most, ever become quite clear on this point. Events are too various and move too swiftly for them. They see that great men enclose with little regard to the interests of their poorer neighbours. They curse them for their enclosures,[278] and believe with the faith of an age which has re-discovered the Bible, that they, like greedy Ahab, the father of enclosers, will be cursed. When the encloser should call on God to witness his deed the devil’s name starts to his lips. His cattle are struck by lightning, and his children do not live to reap the fruits of> his iniquity. But the peasants enclose themselves, and though they feel the difference between one sort of enclosing and another, they are simple men who cannot make the matter plain to lawyers and commissioners, and when things reach a certain point they will fight it out.
In every age there are words which are sufficiently definite to become a battle-cry, and yet which contain so many shades of meaning and are susceptible of such varying interpretations, that those who seem to differ most profoundly really differ because they are using the same word to express quite different ideas. Such a word was enclosing. For many years it was a burning question—with statesmen, with preachers, with the mass of the peasantry. But those who tell us exactly what it meant are few, and they tell us hardly more than is sufficient to show that it meant several different things in different connections. The picture of enclosure which carried Ket’s followers against the walls of Norwich was that immortalised two centuries later in Goldsmith's “Deserted Village"; a vision of village cornfields turned into dreary expanses of pasture, where sheep grazed amid ruined homesteads and cattle were stalled in the mouldering churches.[279] When the scientific agriculturists of the age eulogised enclosures, they thought of a more orderly and productive cultivation arising in place of the intolerable “mingle mangle" of the open fields. The Levellers, who in the seventeenth century carried on the agitation against enclosure, had no objection to such as took place “only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor.”[280] The panegyrists of enclosing like Fitzherbert and Norden denounced[281] lords who made enclosure an occasion to rack-rent and depopulate. The Justices of Nottinghamshire[282] complain to the Government that enclosure drives people into the already overburdened towns, but they are careful to explain that enclosures of less than five acres in size improve agriculture without depopulating the country. The Government itself under Elizabeth sets its face against the enclosures which produce evictions, but nevertheless expressly sanctions the exchanging of strips, which is desired chiefly in order that small enclosures may be made.[283] In this phase of the eternal quarrel between the plain man and the technical expert both the technical expert and the plain man were right, and needed only a definition to unite against the avarice and oppression which snatched a golden harvest from their confusion. It is the tragedy of a world where man must walk by sight that the discovery of the reconciling formula is always left to future generations, in which passion has cooled into curiosity, and the agonies of peoples have become the exercise of the schools. The devil who builds bridges does not span such chasms till much that is precious to mankind has vanished down them for ever.
One such distinction, however, we must draw at once. Enclosure is usually thought of in connection with the encroachments made by lords of manors or their farmers upon the land over which the manorial population had common rights or which lay in the open arable fields. And this is on the whole correct. This is what the word would have suggested to nine men out of ten in our period: this aspect of the movement was the most rapid in its development and the most far-reaching in its effects. But there was another side to it which was at once earlier in point of time and productive of quite dissimilar results. There is abundant evidence to show that the open field system of agriculture, with its intermingled strips and its collective, as opposed to individual, rules of cultivation, was undergoing a gradual dissolution from within even before the larger innovations of great capitalists gave it a shock from without. At the very time when the peasantry agitated most bitterly they were often hedging and ditching their own little holdings and nibbling away fragments of the waste to be cultivated in severalty. It is, of course, true that the effect of enclosure by the lord of a manor or large farmer was usually very different from that of enclosure by the customary tenants. The latter was a slow process of attrition, which went on quietly from one generation to another, often no doubt after discussions in the manorial court. The former was frequently an invasion. But though their social effects were dissimilar, from a technical point of view they were both part of the process through which cultivation at the discretion of the individual was substituted for cultivation in accordance with common customary rules. Enclosing by lords and large farmers was not so much a movement running counter to existing tendencies, as a continuation on a larger scale and with different results of developments which in parts of England were already at work. Great changes are best interpreted in the light of small, and it will therefore be worth our while to look shortly at the sort of enclosing which was being carried out by the peasantry themselves.
First, one may review briefly what is told us by those who wrote on the technique of agriculture. Fitzherbert[284] and Hales in the sixteenth century, Norden and Lee in the seventeenth, make it quite plain that, apart from enclosures carried out by lords of manors, a movement is going on among the tenants which is also known by the name of enclosure. It has as its object the formation of compact fields out of the scattered strips, and the substitution of closes surrounded by hedges for rights of grazing over the common pasture, meadow, and waste. It has as its effects a great increase in the output of wheat, opportunities for better grazing and stock-breeding, and a consequent rise in the value of land; the improvement being partly due to psychological[285] reasons, to the fact that a man who has a free hand will put more labour into the land than one who is fettered by customary rules, partly to technical causes such as the better draining and cleaning of land which the enclosure of arable ground makes possible, the greater security offered against damage done by straying cattle, the improvement in the quality of pasture when it is no longer liable to be eaten bare by the beasts of a whole township. The method by which such a change takes place is re-allotment. The construction of hedges—enclosing—is simply the machinery by which the new lines of demarcation between one man’s land and another’s are drawn and kept firmly in their place; and though the word enclosure gives a vivid picture of the alteration which is produced in the appearance of the country, re-allotment or redivision of land describes much better the process by which it is brought about. The ideal form of it is described by Fitzherbert.[286] All the landlords in a village must come to an agreement that their tenants should exchange their holdings with each other. An exact statement of the area of land in tillage and pasture held by each tenant must then be made. When this has been done, every man is “to change with his neighbour, and to leye them (i.e. the acres, which were formerly scattered) together, and to make him one several close in every field, to leye them together in one field and to make one several close for them all; and also another several close for his portion of his common pasture, and also his portion of his meadow in a several close by itself, and all kept in several both winter and summer. And every cottager to have his portion assigned to him according to his rent.” Such enclosure does not, it is contended, interfere unfairly with any one’s vested interests. It makes a spatial rearrangement of property, but it does not alter its economic distribution. It does not result in evictions or depopulation. It simply converts rights exercised jointly over a larger area into rights exercised individually over a smaller one. The map is dissolved into scattered pieces, but it is put together again; and when it is put together all the pieces are still there. The tenants part with shares in the common fields, meadows, and pastures, to get smaller fields, meadows, and pastures to themselves. The latter are more valuable than the former. What is lost in extension is gained in intension.
But this account is an ideal one, a description of the most excellent way, not necessarily a description of what is being actually done. For that we must turn to the surveys. In the picture of agriculture which is given by the surveyors one can see the open field system of cultivation at almost every stage of completeness and disintegration at different places. On many manors there is hardly any sign of the scattered strips, which make up the individual tenant’s holding, coalescing into compactness, hardly any sign of encroachments upon either the common pasture or the meadow or the waste. Elsewhere one finds that though the bulk of the land still lies in the open fields, and though the greater part of the meadow and pasture is undivided, a considerable proportion has been enclosed by the tenants and is held in severalty. Elsewhere one finds the common meadow split up and the arable enclosed, the arable enclosed and the waste unenclosed, or all of them enclosed more or less completely. It would be of great interest and importance to determine the relative preponderance of enclosure by the tenants in different parts of the country, and to see how far the districts where this type of enclosure by consent had been commonest were identical with those where the reports of the Royal Commissions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show that depopulating enclosures made least way. Very probably it would be found that the latter movement went on least rapidly where the former had proceeded furthest, and that where the tenants themselves had from an early date substituted enclosed for open field husbandry, as apparently they had in Kent, Essex, Cornwall, and parts of Devonshire[287] they had least to fear from that kind of enclosure which was accompanied by encroachments on the part of manorial authorities, and which seems to have produced most dislocation in the Midlands and Eastern counties. But this is a suggestion which our material is too scanty either to confirm or disprove. Enclosure by consent did not cause popular disorder; and therefore we cannot say, taking the country as a whole, how far enclosure on the part of the bulk of the smaller tenants had proceeded. We can only give cases which show that on some manors it had advanced very far, and which bear out the evidence of the writers on agriculture as to there being a well-defined movement away from open field husbandry on the part of the peasants themselves, without attempting to determine its extent or its geographical distribution.
Look, first, for example, at the picture given by the Commission of 1517. Thanks to Mr. Leadam,[288] we are able to say what the average acreage of the enclosures in each county represented was, what proportion of the enclosures was due to lords of manors, lay or ecclesiastical, and what proportion was due to the tenants. Now it is generally, though not universally, true that the enclosures reported to this Commission fall into two main types. The first consists of considerable enclosures carried out mainly by lords of manors. The second consists of smaller enclosures carried out mainly by other classes. Thus the five districts where the average size of the enclosures made is largest are Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire North Riding, Yorkshire West Riding, Yorkshire East Riding, where it is 129, 96, 84, 77, 62 acres respectively, and in these the proportion of the enclosures which is due to the lords of manors is high also—72 per cent., 52 per cent., 79 per cent., 92 per cent., 64 per cent. Contrast with the position in these counties that obtaining in Berkshire, in Salop, and in London and its suburbs. In Berkshire the average size of an enclosure is 32 acres, in Salop 18, in London 10, and in these districts the lords play a much smaller part in enclosing. They are responsible for 42 per cent. of the acreage enclosed in Berkshire, 12 per cent. of that enclosed in Salop, 3 per cent. of that enclosed in the vicinity of London. Does not this suggest that in parts of the country—we cannot yet say what parts—there is much small enclosing by small men?
Turn next to the story told by the surveys. Though Wiltshire is on the whole a country of recent enclosure, there was a certain amount of several farming on the part of the customary tenants on the Wiltshire manors in the middle of the sixteenth century. Out of 4128¼ acres held by them on eight manors the surveys show that 202¼ acres lie in closes.[289] This is a very small proportion, only 5 per cent., and suggests that on most of them the holdings lay in the open fields, and that, as a general rule, the common utilisation of meadows and pastures still obtained. On one, however, as much as 132 acres out of 1103, or just under 12 per cent, were enclosed, and at best these are minimum figures which do not accurately represent how far the movement had gone; for, though a surveyor would not describe unenclosed land as enclosed, he might very well class enclosed land with other land of the same description, for example as meadow or pasture, and omit to state that it was occupied in severalty. On some Staffordshire[290] manors again there are similar tentative beginnings of enclosure, and a similar impossibility of determining its actual extent. Then, too, there are manors where the greater part of the land still lies in the open fields, but where enclosure has proceeded a little further. At Salford,[291] in Bedfordshire, eight of the tenants have enclosed about 51 acres, which they hold separate from, and in addition to, their holdings in the open fields, in amounts varying from 2 to 17 acres. At Weeden Weston,[292] in Northamptonshire, the three largest tenants (apart from the farmer of the demesne) hold “in several ground enclosed" 28 acres. In addition to this, part of the manor called “the mere land,” the exact nature of which is obscure, has been broken off and split up among all the fourteen tenants, some holding only 2 or 3 acres, others holding 15 or 20 acres. Finally, as examples of manors where enclosure by the customary tenants was carried furthest, we may take those of Edgeware[293] and Kingsbury in Middlesex. From the admirable maps of these two manors, which were made in 1597, no one could even guess that the open field method of cultivation had ever existed there. The land of each of the numerous tenants lies in fields, often quite small fields, which are separated from each other by hedges. Instead of the “spider's web" of the older method we have the irregular chessboard of modern agriculture.
These instances tell us nothing of the origin, extent, or distribution of the movement which they represent. They are useful merely as offering concrete specimens of enclosure on the parts of free and customary tenants, which confirm what is told us by the surveyors. There was certainly a well-defined trend away from the methods of common field agriculture taking place in the course of the sixteenth century and before it on the part of the peasantry. We can, however, go further than this; and premising that in the infinite variety of rural conditions in different parts of the country any classification must be somewhat arbitrary, we can distinguish two main elements in the movement.
In the first place there is among the tenants on some manors something like a deliberate movement towards the substitution of “several” for open field husbandry. This was a change which occurred almost spontaneously when the economic interests of the majority of tenants were pushing in the same direction, and can be seen affecting both pasture, meadow, and arable holdings. The Commission[294] of 1517 found that in certain places land had been enclosed neither by individual landlords, nor by individual tenants, but by “the village,” and the manorial documents give us a clue to what such entries mean. In the surveys of the sixteenth century we not infrequently find that meadows and pastures which were originally occupied in common have been split up among the tenants, so that each has the exclusive occupation of a few acres, the share which each tenant takes being proportioned more or less exactly to his holding of arable in a manner which precludes the idea that the change can have taken place by piecemeal individual encroachments, or in any way except by an intentional redistribution of land, in which the interests of all the tenants received consideration.[295] Such a division of meadow and pasture is paralleled by cases in which the re-allotment of arable holdings is carried out both by freeholders and by copyholders almost exactly in the manner prescribed by Fitzherbert. Thus at Ewerne,[296] in Dorsetshire, the customary tenants got permission from the lord to make enclosure on the open fields; appointed persons to “extend and tread them out,” and then united the dispersed strips into compact holdings, so that “the more part of the manor was enclosed, and every tenant and farmer occupied his land several to himself.” At Mudford, in Somersetshire, the tenants were found by the surveyor in 1568 to be contemplating the same step. A similar course was taken in the early seventeenth century on several Northumbrian manors, of which Cowpen[297] may be taken as a typical example.
The procedure followed by the freeholders of that township was to get their land surveyed by an expert, to divide it into two great portions, and to agree that each man should have an allotment in one or other of the two divisions proportionate to the holding which he had occupied in the open fields, due regard being had to the quality as well as the acreage of each holding, “so that some have not all the best ground and others all the worst, but that each man have justice and right.” Such instances may prove to be exceptional in the sixteenth century; it is our impression that they were, and that the attempts which the peasantry made to overcome the difficulties associated with the open field system of cultivation more often took the form of individual exchanging of strips, than of a formal agreement to abandon one method of cultivation and to adopt another. But, even though exceptional, they are of some interest as offering complete examples of changes which have been going on more generally on a smaller scale and in a less systematic manner. They afford a striking contrast to the enclosing by the manorial authorities which we shall examine in a future chapter, and offer an analogy to the enclosures which were carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They resemble the latter in being a deliberate attempt to make a clean sweep of the old system of open field agriculture. They differ from them in being the outcome of voluntary agreement among the tenants, not of legislation.[298]
Much more general, however, than enclosure by agreement of the whole township, is the enclosure which takes place through the initiative of individual tenants, who, without any common agreement as to a policy of enclosure being reached by the village community as a whole, make sporadic encroachments on the common pasture or waste, and consolidate their arable holdings by exchanging strips with their neighbours. Our best information on the first point is obtained from the manorial court rolls. The court was the guardian of the customary methods of cultivation. How far it could maintain them against a lord or his farmer who wished to break them down, and how far it was merely his mouthpiece, is a difficult question, which we need not at present discuss. Certainly it did occasionally uphold the common rule of the township even against the lord; certainly the mere fact that when that rule is uncertain the lord refers the matter to the court in the form of a series of questions which it is to answer, gave the tenants the opportunity of building up a kind of case law which can hardly have failed to act as a brake upon arbitrary action by the manorial authorities. But however impotent it may often have been when confronted by an enclosing lord of the manor, its rules set very effective limits to the discretion exercised by tenants in their agricultural arrangements, and it checked enclosing by individuals for several reasons. It was of the essence of the open field system of tillage, and of the joint use of common meadows and pastures, that unauthorised encroachments by a single tenant should be an inconvenience to his neighbours. If made on the arable, they might interfere with the customary rotation of crops, and would certainly diminish the area of land available for the village cattle on the fallows and after harvest. If made on the common waste, they threw the village economy into confusion by upsetting the arrangements under which each holding could place so many beasts to be grazed there. “It is both law and reason,” wrote a surveyor grieved by such aggression on the part of a large tenant, “that every tenant of like land and like rent have like portion in all things upon the common pasture.”[299] The court, as the upholder of manorial custom, was occupied with discovering and checking breaches of it. On manors where there was not sufficient grazing land to allow of each tenant pasturing as many beasts as he pleased, it fixed “the stint" which each was allowed to turn out on the common. It decided whether rights of pasture were confined to old tenements or whether they could be extended to cottages recently erected. It made rules as to what fields should be sown with what crops. It would fine a man “for refusing to consult his neighbours touching the common affairs of the township.”[300]
Such action does not, of course, necessarily imply any highly developed communal organisation of village life. When four householders to-day bring an action against a fifth who has interfered with “ancient lights,” they act simply as individuals who are temporarily united in defence of a common interest, and when a court customary fines a man for over-stocking the common pasture, it is possible to argue that there is no more in its action than the temporary alliance of individuals to suppress a nuisance. Yet such a view of the matter is incomplete. The common interest is there in both cases; but in the case of the village community it is a permanent, not merely a passing, ground for co-operation; and if we must take to heart the warnings given by some legal historians not to see communism where there is only joint action, we must also insist that common action, which is in effect communal action, is quite possible without those who act either possessing, or feeling the need of possessing, any definite status.[301] It is perhaps not too presumptuous to suggest that the very precision with which the lawyer applies his keen analysis of juristic conceptions to remove the misconceptions of the lay mind, is sometimes an obstacle to the understanding of forms of organisation created by the daily routine of men quite unversed in the law. An employers' association or a trade union to-day in an industry which is not highly organised is, during two-thirds of its life, a mere collection of individuals. But in an emergency it can show very effectively that it is the organ of a common will. It is surely rather hard to deny the peasantry some measure of corporate management of common interests because they cannot answer questions as to the legal nature of a corporation, because they do not express their communal arrangements by the use of terms of art which they would not have understood. The economist, at any rate, will look at practice rather than theory. He will be inclined to doubt whether the villagers were any clearer as to the basis of their associated action than the mass of trade unionists were between 1875 and 1906. But he will see that, like trade unionists, they do in fact habitually act together and act effectively for the regulation of their common interests. No doubt such action was often mere adherence to a customary rule. But it is possible again to draw the antithesis between custom and organisation too sharply. After all custom does not work by itself. Especially in times of change, like the sixteenth century, it only works in so far as men make it work. On some manors it is frequently changed by the court, and clearly, when it is changed, we have not automatism but deliberate action.
But the power of a rule is not recognised till it is broken, and it is just these collisions between the plan of cultivation upheld by the court and the interests of individual tenants, which show how prevalent are the small enclosures made by the latter. They begin very early and are increasingly frequent throughout the fifteenth century. Let us make the picture more precise by giving one or two instances. In 1405 some customary tenants at Forncett[302] are fined 2s. 2d. because “they have made enclosures of their lands within the manor against the custom of the manor, on account of which action the tenants of the manor are not able to have their common there.” In 1418 the court at Castle[303] Combe presents that three tenants “have sown the common fields and kept them several without the licence of the lord, when they ought to be common, to the common damage.” At Ingoldmells,[304] in 1437, the court impounds the sheep of some tenants who have “entered upon the fields of Burgh and occupied the common there, where they have no common.” At Coventry[305] from the middle of the fifteenth century, and at Southampton[306] throughout almost the whole of the century and a half following, continuous war was waged by the Court Leet against those who “oppressed the common" by over-stocking it with more than their authorised quota of beasts. Yet, in spite of elaborate and ever-changing regulations which were made as to the number which any person might place upon it, in spite of bye-laws requiring them to be delivered personally or through a servant into the charge of the town herdsman, ruling off aged animals which were past work, and imposing heavy fines on offenders, the constant references in the documents of the sixteenth century to pieces of land which are held by customary tenants in severalty show that this sporadic individualising of part of the manorial area had to a great extent broken down the customary routine of cultivation, even on manors where no extensive enclosures were carried out by the manorial authorities.
So far we have spoken of the encroachments by tenants on the common pasture. The growth of several occupation could occur there with less disturbance than on the arable holdings, because, if the pasture was a large one, the clipping off of a corner might leave the other tenants with more than was sufficient for their cattle. But enclosure made by one tenant on the open arable fields created a disturbance which was immediate and obvious. Indeed, if his holding lay in scattered strips, separated from each other by the strips of his neighbours, how could he enclose at all? He would at once come into collision with their demand that his holding should lie open for grazing purposes after harvest. Moreover, even from his own point of view, enclosure could hardly pay, for he would have to put hedges round each of 30 or 40 or 50 acre and half acre plots. One would expect, therefore, that individual tenants would be slow to undertake the hedging and ditching of their arable holdings; and this expectation is on the whole confirmed by the impression which one gets from the surveys and from the accounts of contemporaries.[307] On the tenants' arable land enclosure has not proceeded by the middle of the sixteenth century as far as on their pasture and meadow. Yet, even in this matter, the tendency is perhaps to exaggerate the stability of agricultural conditions. Even on the arable fields themselves individual tenants set themselves to overcome the obstacles in the way of enclosure, and they do so in the only way they can, by attempting first of all to consolidate their strips into larger holdings. This tendency is revealed most clearly by the open field maps. The picture of mediæval agriculture, to which Mr. Seebohm has accustomed us, is one in which holdings were made up of strips which lay scattered over the open fields at a considerable distance from each other. In the sixteenth century this condition of things survived in its entirety on many manors and partially on most. But, side by side with it, there is going on a process by which the strips coalesce into larger bundles, so that one tenant’s pieces of land, instead of being far apart, very often lie next to each other, forming blocks of several acres. Those who make maps show the change by putting brackets round the contiguous strips.[308] Written surveys, instead of describing parts of holdings with the words “lying between the land of A and the land of B,” call attention to the new condition of things, which is still sufficiently unusual to deserve remark, with the words “lying together.”[309] Sometimes in the maps one finds twelve or twenty strips bracketed as belonging to one man; sometimes the surveys state that 16 or 20 acres lie together. But even 10 acres is a big field, quite big enough to repay the cost of hedging and ditching. When sufficient strips have become contiguous to form a close of this size one great obstacle to enclosure has been removed. Unity of cultivation has been added to unity of ownership. The difficulty that enclosure will probably, though not necessarily, mean the exclusion of the other tenants' beasts after harvest still remains. But an individual tenant will no longer find enclosure impossible if he can persuade his neighbours to acquiesce in it. In fact he does sometimes persuade them, and in the midst of fields which are still open one finds here and there blocks which have been enclosed.
I. PART OF THE MANOR OF SALFORD, IN BEDFORDSHIRE (1590.)
Nor can we doubt that this process of forming strips into blocks took place through deliberate action on the part of tenants, though we need not assume that the probability of its leading to enclosure was always foreseen. The amalgamation of the scattered parts of a single holding had sufficient advantages to commend it without any further change, and enclosure may often have been an afterthought. How could this amalgamation come about? It would naturally take place by a process of exchange[310] between tenants. As we have seen, the tenants were from an early date buying and selling, leasing and sub-letting, parts of their holdings. What could be more reasonable than that in doing so they should have regard to the situation of the plots which they acquired, and so arrange their bargains as gradually to substitute a few larger blocks for many scattered strips? This hypothesis (for it is only a hypothesis) receives a certain amount of confirmation from a curious fact to which attention was called for the first time by Professor Unwin.[311] It occasionally happens that we find the very tenants who sell and let part of their holdings are buying and leasing parts of other holdings from their neighbours. Thus, at Gorleston,[312] in Suffolk, a customary tenant sublets about half his holding of 12 acres to as many as eight other persons, and at the same time acquires plots of land from another eight holdings himself. At Crondal[313] Richard Wysdon adds enormously to his half-virgate by encroachments, and at the same time sublets 2½ acres to Hugh Sweyn. Henry Simmond enters on land belonging to the same Richard Wysdon, and in turn transfers 8 acres of his holding to Matilda Huthe. What is relevant to the question in these transactions is not the mere sub-letting and selling of land. That, as we have seen, was common enough. The noticeable thing is that the same tenant who surrenders part of his holding acquires part of the holdings of other people. After the transactions are completed he holds about as much land as before, only it is differently arranged. May it not be that the desire that it should be differently arranged was one of the motives of the double transaction, and that in this way he sought to substitute for his dispersed strips a compacter and more manageable holding? Is he not like a shareholder who sells out Canadian Pacifics and invests in Consols, in order to have his property more directly under his own eye? At any rate such an explanation would account for the undoubted fact that in the sixteenth century holdings are much more compact than they are in the thirteenth century. But whether it is correct or not the growth towards compactness is a fact, and a fact which makes possible the enclosure of holdings in the open fields.
It is plain from these and similar instances that there was a well-defined movement from the fourteenth century onwards which made for the gradual modification or dissolution of the open field system of cultivation, and that it originated not on the side of the lord or the great farmer, but on the side of the peasants themselves, who tried to overcome the inconvenience of that system by a spontaneous process of re-allotment, sometimes, but not always, in conjunction with actual enclosure. On one manor it proceeded by the piecemeal encroachments of individuals, on another by the deliberate division of the common meadow or pasture, on a third by the voluntary exchanging by tenants of their strips so as to build up compact holdings, on a fourth by the redistribution of the arable land. It was a spontaneous movement in the sense of being initiated by the tenants and not merely forced upon them. The economic, as distinct from the legal, arrangements of the village community were much less rigid than some of the books about it would suggest. The open field system of cultivation was, in fact, already in slow motion in several parts of England, when the impact of the large grazier struck it, enormously accelerated the speed of the movement, and diverted it on to lines which were new and disastrous to the bulk of the rural population.
This aspect of the enclosures, though not overlooked by contemporaries, has perhaps hardly received the emphasis which it deserves from modern writers. For one thing, a recollection of it explains certain apparent contradictions, the difference in the views expressed by different writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the social effect of enclosures, the disagreement between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay as to whether enclosing was or was not usually followed by conversion to pasture, the strange statement of Hales[314] that “the chief destruccion of Townes and decaye of houses was before the beginning of the reigne of Kynge Henry the Seventh.” The latter remark can hardly have been true of the great and sudden evictions which caused rioting and depopulation, and evoked the long series of statutes which begin in 1489. It may well have been a curt summary of the impression produced by a century of gradual consolidation and piecemeal enclosures carried out by the smaller cultivators. It would seem, again, to be the case that while landlords usually enclosed with the object of putting sheep where men had been, the tenants of customary holdings enclosed simply for the sake of better arable farming, or for the more convenient employment of meadow and pasture land. That is why Hales could make himself detested by landlords as the chairman of the only effective committee of Somerset’s ill-starred Enclosure Commission, and at the same time say that certain kinds of enclosure are “very beneficiall to the commonweal.” That is why Fuller and Moore a century later could damn enclosure in one sentence and qualify their verdict in the next. That is why Moore’s numerous critics could repudiate his aspersions with some acrimony, and nevertheless admit that “when townes are in the hands of one or few men ... enclosure doth produce depopulation.”[315]
For another thing, the prevalence of small enclosures suggests that the view of those who represent the agriculture of the period as needing a violent shock to rouse it from a state of intolerable inefficiency can only be accepted with considerable qualification. We know that by the middle of the sixteenth century in certain counties, notably Kent, Essex, and Devonshire, the common field system of cultivation was already the exception and not the rule. We know, too, that though in parts of these counties its absence may have been due to differences in the original forms of settlement and clearance, it had elsewhere disappeared within historical times. We may conjecture that the reason why it decayed sooner in Kent and Essex than elsewhere was the fact that the neighbourhood of those counties to London and the sea, and to the commercial routes from the Continent, caused the influence of commerce and of a money economy to be felt there sooner than in the Midlands, with the natural result of accelerating economic and agrarian changes, and that in the examples quoted above we have the same process of individualisation in the method of agriculture going on quietly elsewhere in a way which would sooner or later have brought about a similar result to that which had already occurred in those two progressive districts. At any rate these rearrangements suggest a good deal of adaptability among the tenants who carried them out, and not the condition of organised torpor which some writers profess to find in the unenclosed village. That communal cultivation was incompatible with swift change may be granted. Of that fact its survival into almost our own day is a sufficient proof. That it prevented improvements altogether must be denied; and though no doubt to large farmers and impatient surveyors the petty operations of the smaller tenants seemed intolerably dilatory and wasteful, the student who looks at them in an age which has some experience of economic revolutions may well doubt whether rapid technical progress cannot be bought too dear, and regret that the gradual movement towards more rational methods of farming on the part of the small man was so soon overtaken by one over which the small man could exercise no effective control. Now, as then, land agents shake grave heads at the wastefulness of sacrificing the well-ordered dignity of a great estate to the encouragement of undercapitalised, untidy, higgledy-piggledy small holdings, and prove by arithmetic that the labourer has more comforts for less work. Now, as then, in those countries where the peasant tradition has not died altogether away, the unreasonable creature prefers starving on land which is his own, though it be but a tiny patch where he sweats from dawn to dark.
If it be objected to the view which we have taken of the slow spread of enclosure among the peasantry that they were notoriously opposed to enclosing, we must answer by repeating that there was nothing inconsistent in approving one kind and detesting another. After all there is no curse attached to landmarks, but only to the man who removes his neighbour's. Even in an open field village no one had a conscientious objection to fences in general; it all depended on where the fences were put. The object of enclosure was to shut in, or to shut out, or to do both. The villagers were not unwilling that an agreement should be reached whereby each man should shut his own beasts in a close of pasture, and shut out the beasts of other people from his arable after harvest. On the contrary, it was sometimes a grievance[316] that enclosure was not allowed. What they objected to was that one man should exclude others without compensation from rights of pasture or from their arable holdings. Moreover, provided that enclosure took place by consent, the advantages of it were overwhelming. When the superior[317] value of enclosed over unenclosed land was so marked that the former was sometimes assessed to subsidies at a higher rate than the latter, a man who, like many of our tenants, had money to spend on timber, would naturally wish to enclose. The growth of pasture farming by large graziers turned the minds of the smaller tenants in the direction of enclosing for themselves, because this, paradoxical though it may seem when the outcry against enclosure is remembered, was the most obvious way in which they could protect themselves. The explanation is that the system of open field cultivation and of common pasturage made it peculiarly easy for one large shareholder to ruin the rest by letting his cattle stray at large over the common, and even by encroachments on his neighbour’s strips. Its underlying principle had been the apportionment of rights on a basis which was settled by the custom of the manor, as opposed to the acquisition by individuals for themselves of such rights as they could obtain by economic power, or by the accumulation of capital. This was the meaning of the strict allotment of grazing privileges by the establishment of a stint which each tenant, or rather each tenement, was not to exceed. The limitation to the capital which a man could acquire in the shape of stock—cattle and sheep—was practicable as long as that capital was small. When it became large, as in the sixteenth century it did, it was too powerful to be dammed up by the rules as to cultivation enforced in the manorial court, and the outward sign of this was the failure of the latter to prevent the “overcharging" both of the common waste, and of the common pasture formed by the field after harvest, with the beasts of the large grazier. Hence in some places the enclosing of pasture or arable was used by the tenants as a way of protecting themselves: at Mudford the tenants, at Newham and Tughall the surveyor in the interests of the tenants, at Southampton the Leet jury, were anxious[318] for enclosing, in order that the weak barriers which the custom of the manor offered to the farmers' or to neighbouring villagers' depredations might be supplemented by a strong quickset hedge. What damaged the smaller tenants, and produced the popular revolts against enclosure, was not merely enclosing, but enclosing accompanied either by eviction and conversion to pasture, or by the monopolising of common rights. When some of the tenants became large capitalists, what the rest lost by surrendering common rights might be more than compensated by the security which they thus obtained of grazing their own beasts undisturbed on a smaller area.
At the same time, though voluntary enclosing by the peasants was partly a symptom of the overshadowing of small property by large, it was much more than this, and was due partly to a change in their methods of agriculture, and partly, perhaps, to a genuine progress in the technique of cultivation. This is indicated by the enthusiasm of the expert opinion of the period for “several” holdings, and by the qualified praise of discriminating critics like Hales.[319] As we have seen above, there were parts of England—for example, “the sweet country of Tandeane,” described by Norden—where cultivation was quite intensive in character, and intensive cultivation naturally gave an impetus to the individualising of arable holdings. Again, the advantage to the cattle breeder of “several closes and pastures to put his cattle in, the which would be well quicksetted, hedged, and ditched,”[320] was a commonplace. It has been already pointed out that on many manors of Southern and Eastern England the customary tenants were sheep farmers on a considerable scale. The adjustment of common rights must always have involved some difficulty: the fixing of so many head of beasts to each tenement was obviously a rough and ready arrangement based on the idea that the holding in the arable fields was the backbone of a man's substance, and that therefore it might properly be taken as a standard by which his rights of pasture and common could fairly be measured. The problems which arose could be imagined, even if they were not described for us at some length: “Where fields lie open and the land is used in common, he that is rich and fully stocked (up to the limit allowed) eateth with his cattle not his own part only, but also his neighbour's who is poor and out of stock. Besides that, it is an ordinary practice with unconscionable people to keep above their just proportion ... those who have consciences large enough to do it will lengthen their ropes, or stake them down so that their horses may reach into other men's lots.”[321] As long as the great bulk of the customary tenants relied for a livelihood mainly on the subsistence farming of the arable land, these practical difficulties were probably not felt very keenly, because the comparatively few beasts which were kept could pick up a living without overcrowding each other. But when the raising of stock became almost as important as the cultivation of arable, the demand for more pasture and for better pasture grew enormously, and in the face of the competition for it the strict maintenance of the customary stint became more difficult. On manors where 150 or 200 sheep were kept by almost every tenant the motive either to enclose surreptitiously and in defiance of the custom of the manor, or to divide and enclose meadow and pasture by agreement, must have been extremely strong. Ought we not to ask why the open field system survived so long, rather than why it partially disappeared in the sixteenth century?
We may now summarise the argument of this part of our work. The manor, as we see it from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, is not the rigid, motionless organisation which it is sometimes represented as being. Though it is governed by custom, custom leaves room for the growth of commercial relationships on the extending fringe of new land over which the village spreads; for the withdrawal by the villagers of part of their holdings from the common scheme of open field husbandry, the division of meadows and pastures, the exchanging of strips, the formation of closes like those represented in the map on the opposite page, which a man can use as he pleases and over which the customary routine of agriculture has no authority. This side of the enclosing movement, more properly described as redivision and reallotment than as enclosure, develops earliest in those parts of the country which, owing to their geographical position, are particularly exposed to the dissolving forces of trade and of a money economy. But with the improvement in the condition of the peasantry and the growth of pasture farming it spreads far afield, and by the middle of the sixteenth century, quite apart from the large changes introduced by lords of manors and capitalist farmers, it has effected a considerable alteration in the methods of agriculture even of the more stationary inland counties. Such piecemeal alterations are a gradual process; they are not regarded unfavourably by the peasantry; and a balance between their tentative individualism and the rule of communal custom is preserved by the action of the manorial court. They are to be carefully distinguished from the sweeping innovations of the sixteenth century, which alone deserve the name of an Agrarian Revolution. But they are closely connected with that revolution. For by making a breach in the walls of custom they bring us to the edge of two great problems, the growth of competitive rents, and the formation of large pasture farms out of the holdings of evicted tenants.
II. PART OF THE MANOR OF EDGEWARE, IN MIDDLESEX (1597.)
We have spoken at length of the prosperity of the peasants, because it is necessary to appreciate it in order to sympathise with the point of view from which they and their contemporaries regarded the agrarian problem. But evil days are coming upon the rural middle classes. Indeed they have already come. There is by this time much anger against depopulating landlords, much talk of the good customs of Henry VII., much murmuring lest men be brought to that slavery the Frenchman be in. We must leave the light and follow them into the shadow.[Next Chapter]