The landlords remained in this difficult position till about 1450[197], when a new and very efficacious remedy was suggested [[369]]to them: they applied a new mode of working their estates, which rendered them the practical command over the land, without need of a denser population. The extension of the wool trade and the dearth of labour made it far more profitable to keep large flocks of sheep than to grow corn. Consequently much land was laid down in pasture; there was a steady increase of sheep farming during the 15th century and a corresponding decrease of corn growing[198].
In our chapter on pastoral tribes it has been shown that the care of flocks and herds does not require much labour. We can, therefore, easily understand that after the rise of sheep farming there was far less need for agricultural labour than before. There had been scarcity of labour; now there was over-population and many people were thrown out of employment; for over-population exists, not only when there are more people than the land can support, but when there are more people dependent on wages than can be profitably employed by the owners of land and capital[199].
Sheep farming was introduced in the first place on the manorial demesnes, of which the lords had the free disposal. The demesne usually formed from one-third to a half of the whole arable area of a manor. Since the labour services of the villeins had been commuted, the tillage of the demesne had furnished employment to many small tenants and landless cottagers who, partly or entirely, depended on wages. The substitution of pasture for tillage on the demesne, therefore, brought many of them to ruin; for none but a few shepherds could thenceforth be employed[200].
But far graver evils resulted from the appropriation by the lords of the commons and the land held by villeins or customary tenants.
The commons, i.e. the common pasture and waste, had always been used jointly by the lord and villeins. Whether the latter had any legal right to them is not certain; probably they had not; but they had always been accustomed to have the [[370]]free use of them. Now the lords began to inclose large parts of these commons for the formation of sheep runs. The consequence was that many of the customary tenants, who had relied on the commons for pasturing their cattle, could no longer keep the cattle necessary for the cultivation of their holding. Their farming became unprofitable, and they had to leave their lands, which were instantly occupied by the lords and laid down in pasture[201].
Even when the cultivator had not left his tenement, the lord sometimes appropriated and “inclosed” it.
The inclosures which took place, especially in the 16th century, are a fact of foremost importance in the history of English agriculture. The term “inclosure” has two different meanings. In medieval England the lands of the villeins, with those of the lord interspersed between them, lay scattered in a number of acre or half-acre strips, no two strips held by one man being contiguous. This system, dating from a time of extensive tillage, fell short of the exigencies of advanced culture, and had to be removed before any improvement in the mode of cultivation could be made. Therefore inclosures have often, especially in the reign of Elizabeth, been made with the common consent of all the landholders concerned, the result being that every tenant, instead of many scattered strips, obtained one or a few fields lying together. “But in the earlier part of the same movement, during the period which may be roughly defined as from 1450 to 1550, inclosure meant to a large extent the actual dispossession of the customary tenants by their manorial lords. This took place either in the form of the violent ousting of the sitting tenant, or of a refusal on the death of one tenant to admit the son who in earlier centuries would have been treated as his natural successor”[202]. It was this latter kind of inclosure that was condemned by several writers of the 16th century, for instance by Hales, who by inclosure did not mean “where a man doth enclose and hedge in his own proper grounds where no man hath commons. For such enclosure is very beneficial to the commonwealth; it is a cause of great encrease of wood; but it is meant thereby when any man hath taken away and enclosed any other men’s commons, [[371]]or hath pulled down houses of husbandry and converted the lands from tillage to pasture”[203].
Ashley, discussing the question as to whether the lords had a right to turn out the villeins, arrives at the conclusion that “during historical times and until comparatively modern days, the cultivators of the soil were always in a condition of dependence, and held their lands at the arbitrary will of their lords. For centuries the lord knew no other way of getting his land cultivated, and had no wish to get rid of a tenant; whenever he did so, it was altogether exceptional. But with the tendency to limitation and definition so characteristic of the feudal period, custom tended to harden into law, and it would seem to have been on the point of becoming law when a change in the economic situation,—the increasing advantage of pasture over tillage,—prompted the lords to fall back on their old rights. Then followed a struggle between a legal theory becoming obsolete, but backed by the influence of the landowners, and a custom on its way to become law, backed by public sentiment and by the policy of the government”[204].
This is in perfect keeping with our theory. In former times land was abundant, and therefore the lord “had no wish to get rid of a tenant,” for he “knew no other way of getting his land cultivated”. But now sheep farming made appropriation of the whole of the land possible, and so the lord was no longer in need of the villeins; he even went so far as to evict those whom his ancestors had attached to the soil. And even where the cultivators remained on the land, they often, and not always voluntarily, became leaseholders instead of copyholders; and “in many cases a lease was but a stepping-stone to tenure at will”[205]. The lords no longer contented themselves with the customary payments; instead of villeins they wanted leaseholders, whose rents they could raise at the end of each term, according as the value of the land had increased. “Rents were raised with great rapidity as the tenant had to pay a sum equivalent to the utility of his holding as part of a large pasture farm.”[206].
There was also far less need for agricultural labourers than [[372]]before. “The decay of tillage and lack of rural employment, during this century,” says Professor Cunningham “rest on unimpeachable evidence”[207]. In the 14th century “the problem of the unemployed, as it now presents itself, had not yet arisen.” But the agrarian changes “deprived great numbers of the agricultural labouring class,—small customary tenants and cottagers,—of the means of support in their old places of abode, and sent them wandering over the country”[208].