A class that wishes to preserve its special powers and privileges has to discover some way of protecting its corporate interests from the misdemeanours and follies of individual members. The great landlords found such a device in the system of entail which gave to each successive generation merely a life interest in the estates, and kept the estates themselves as the permanent possession of the family. But the lawyers managed to elude this device of the landowners by the invention of sham law-suits, an arrangement by which a stranger brought a claim for the estate against the limited owner in possession, and got a judgment by his connivance. The stranger was in truth the agent of the limited owner, who was converted by this procedure into an absolute owner. The famous case known as Taltarums case in 1472, established the validity of these lawsuits, and for the next two hundred years ‘Family Law’ no longer controlled the actions of the landowners and the market for their estates. During this time Courts of Law and Parliament set their faces against all attempts to reintroduce the system of entails. As a consequence estates were sometimes melted down, and the inheritances of ancient families passed into the possession of yeomen and merchants. The landowners had never accepted their defeat. In the reign of Elizabeth they tried to devise family settlements that would answer their purpose as effectually as the old law of entail, but they were foiled by the great judges, Popham and Coke. After the Restoration, unhappily, conditions were more propitious. In the first place, the risks of the Civil War had made it specially important for rich men to save their estates from forfeiture by means of such settlements, and in the second place the landowning class was now all-powerful. Consequently the attempt which Coke had crushed now succeeded, and rich families were enabled to tie up their wealth.[4] Family settlements have ever since been a very important part of our social system. The merchants who became landowners bought up the estates of yeomen, whereas in eighteenth-century France it was the land of noblemen that passed to the nouveaux riches.

The second point to be noticed in the history of this landlord class is the abolition of the military tenures in 1660. The form and the method of this abolition are both significant. The military dues were the last remaining feudal liability of the landlords to the Crown. They were money payments that had taken the place of old feudal services. The landlords, who found them vexatious and capricious, had been trying to get rid of them ever since the reign of James I. In 1660 they succeeded, and the Restoration Parliament revived the Act of Cromwell’s Parliament four years earlier which abolished military tenures. The bargain which the landlords made with the Crown on this occasion was ingenious and characteristic; it was something like the Concordat between Francis I. and Leo X., which abolished the Pragmatic sanction at the expense of the Gallican Church; for the landowners simply transferred their liability to the general taxpayer. The Crown forgave the landlords their dues in consideration of receiving a grant from the taxation of the food of the nation. An Excise tax was the substitute.

Now the logical corollary of the abolition of the feudal dues that vexed the large landowners would have been the abolition of the feudal dues that vexed the small landowners. If the great landlords were no longer to be subject to their dues in their relation to the Crown, why should the small copyholder continue to owe feudal dues to the lord? The injustice of abolishing the one set of liabilities and retaining the other struck one observer very forcibly, and he was an observer who knew something, unlike most of the governing class, from intimate experience of the grievances of the small landowner under this feudal survival. This was Francis North (1637–1685), the first Lord Guildford, the famous lawyer and Lord Chancellor. North had begun his career by acting as the steward of various manors, thinking that he would gain an insight into human nature which would be of great value to him in his practice at the bar. His experience in this capacity, as we know from Roger North’s book The Lives of the Norths, disclosed to him an aspect of feudalism which escaped the large landowners—the hardships of their dependants. He used to describe the copyhold exactions, and to say that in many cases that came under his notice small tenements and pieces of land which had been in a poor family for generations were swallowed up in the monstrous fines imposed on copyholders. He said he had often found himself the executioner of the cruelty of the lords and ladies of manors upon poor men, and he remarked the inconsistency that left all these oppressions untouched in emancipating the large landowners. Maine, in discussing this system, pointed out that these signorial dues were of the kind that provoked the French Revolution. There were two reasons why a state of things which produced a revolution in France remained disregarded in England. One was that the English copyholders were a much smaller class: the other that, as small proprietors were disappearing in England, the English copyholder was apt to contrast his position with the status of the landless labourer, and to congratulate himself on the possession of a property, whereas in France the copyholder contrasted his position with the status of the freeholder and complained of his services. The copyholders were thus not in a condition to raise a violent or dangerous discontent, and their grievances were left unredressed. It is sometimes said that England got rid of feudalism a century earlier than the continent. That is true of the English State, but to understand the agrarian history of the eighteenth century we must remember that, as it has been well said, ‘whereas the English State is less feudal, the English land law is more feudal than that of any other country in Europe.’[5]

Lastly, the class that is armed with all these social and political powers dominates the universities and the public schools. The story of how the colleges changed from communities of poor men into societies of rich men, and then gradually swallowed up the university, has been told in the Reports of University Commissions. By the eighteenth century the transformation was complete, and both the ancient universities were the universities of the rich. There is a passage in Macaulay describing the state and pomp of Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘when her Chancellor, the venerable Duke of Ormonde, sat in his embroidered mantle on his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian theatre, surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly presented to him as candidates for academical honours.’ The university was a power, not in the sense in which that could be said of a university like the old university of Paris, whose learning could make popes tremble, but in the sense that the university was part of the recognised machinery of aristocracy. What was true of the universities was true of the public schools. Education was the nursery not of a society, but of an order; not of a state, but of a race of rulers.

Thus on every side this class is omnipotent. In Parliament with its ludicrous representation, in the towns with their decayed government, in the country, sleeping under the absolute rule of the Justice of the Peace, there is no rival power. The Crown is for all purposes its accomplice rather than its competitor. It controls the universities, the Church, the law, and all the springs of life and discussion. Its own influence is consolidated by the strong social discipline embodied in the family settlements. Its supremacy is complete and unquestioned. Whereas in France the fermentation of ideas was an intellectual revolt against the governing system and all literature spoke treason, in England the existing régime was accepted, we might say assumed, by the world of letters and art, by the England that admired Reynolds and Gibbon, or listened to Johnson and Goldsmith, or laughed with Sheridan and Sterne. To the reason of France, the government under which France lived was an expensive paradox: to the reason of England, any other government than the government under which England lived was unthinkable. Hence De Tocqueville saw only a homogeneous society, a society revering its institutions in the spirit of Burke in contrast with a society that mocked at its institutions in the spirit of Voltaire.

‘You people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes,’ wrote Burke to the Duke of Richmond in 1772, ‘are not like such as I am, who, whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth and even by the fruit we bear, flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our season, and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate your benefits from generation to generation.’ We propose in this book to examine the social history of England in the days when the great oaks were in the fulness of their vigour and strength, and to see what happened to some of the classes that found shelter in their shade.

CHAPTER II
THE VILLAGE BEFORE ENCLOSURE

To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for those who are interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix containing the history, and tolerably full particulars, of twelve separate enclosures. These instances have not been chosen on any plan. They are taken from different parts of the country, and are of various dates; some are enclosures of common fields, some enclosures of commons and waste, and some include enclosures of both kinds.

At the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in the main a country of commons and of common fields[6]; at the time of the Reform Bill, England was in the main a country of individualist agriculture and of large enclosed farms. There has probably been no change in Europe in the last two centuries comparable to this in importance of which so little is known to-day, or of which so little is to be learnt from the general histories of the time. The accepted view is that this change marks a great national advance, and that the hardships which incidentally followed could not have been avoided: that it meant a vast increase in the food resources of England in comparison with which the sufferings of individuals counted for little: and that the great estates which then came into existence were rather the gift of economic forces than the deliberate acquisitions of powerful men. We are not concerned to corroborate or to dispute the contention that enclosure made England more productive,[7] or to discuss the merits of enclosure itself as a public policy or a means to agricultural progress in the eighteenth century. Our business is with the changes that the enclosures caused in the social structure of England, from the manner in which they were in practice carried out. We propose, therefore, to describe the actual operations by which society passed through this revolution, the old village vanished, and rural life assumed its modern form and character.

It is difficult for us, who think of a common as a wild sweep of heather and beauty and freedom, saved for the enjoyment of the world in the midst of guarded parks and forbidden meadows, to realise that the commons that disappeared from so many an English village in the eighteenth century belonged to a very elaborate, complex, and ancient economy. The antiquity of that elaborate economy has been the subject of fierce contention, and the controversies that rage round the nursery of the English village recall the controversies that raged round the nursery of Homer. The main subject of contention has been this. Was the manor or the township, or whatever name we like to give to the primitive unit of agricultural life, an organisation imposed by a despotic landowner on his dependents, or was it created by the co-operation of a group of free tribesmen, afterwards dominated by a military overlord? Did it owe more to Roman tradition or to Teutonic tendencies? Professor Vinogradoff, the latest historian, inclines to a compromise between these conflicting theories. He thinks that it is impossible to trace the open-field system of cultivation to any exclusive right of ownership or to the power of coercion, and that the communal organisation of the peasantry, a village community of shareholders who cultivated the land on the open-field system and treated the other requisites of rural life as appendant to it, is more ancient than the manorial order. It derives, in his view, from the old English society. The manor itself, an institution which partakes at once of the character of an estate and of a unit of local government, was produced by the needs of government and the development of individualist husbandry, side by side with this communal village. These conditions lead to the creation of lordships, and after the Conquest they take form in the manor. The manorial element, in fact, is superimposed on the communal, and is not the foundation of it: the mediæval village is a free village gradually feudalised. Fortunately it is not incumbent on us to do more than touch on this fascinating study, as it is enough for our purposes to note that the greater part of England in cultivation at the beginning of the eighteenth century was cultivated on a system which, with certain local variations, belonged to a common type, representing this common ancestry.