Fines per Acre Paid on Six Manors[542] in Wilts and One in Somerset

1520–39, average fine per acre for each of 42 tenants . . . 1s. 3d.
1540–39, " " " " " " " 28 " . . . 2s. 11d.
1550–59, " " " " " " " 36 " . . . 5s. 6d.
1560–69, " " " " " " " 36 " . . . 11s. 0d.

The figures show a steady upward movement during the third and fourth decades of the century of a little over 100 per cent., a rather less rapid rise between 1549 and 1559, and another rise of 100 per cent. between 1559 and 1569. They are of course too small to be the basis of a wide generalisation, but perhaps they may be held to offer some documentary confirmation of a grievance which bulks large in the literature of the period. The elasticity of fines at any rate corrects the impression which would be formed of the tenants' position from looking only at the comparatively stationary rents. The same tendency is suggested by the details of individual copies. It was a not uncommon practice for a tenant who was in possession and had an estate for life to buy at a later date the right of his heir to succeed him. When this was done we have an opportunity of comparing the fines paid at different periods, and the complaints of contemporaries about unreasonable and excessive fines become intelligible. This may be illustrated by a few extreme instances taken from the manors of Estoverton and Donnington in Wiltshire, and of South Brent in Somersetshire.

Fine for Copy. Fine for Reversion.
1.6/8(1537)£5(1563)
2.40/— "£13, 6s. 8d.(1566)
3.54/4 "£23(1561)
4.60/— "£30(1565)
5.20/— "£10(1561)
6.20/—(1529)£40(1563)
7.33/4 (1542)£20(1565)
8. 66/8 (1522)£20(1563)
9.13/4(1516)£13, 6s. 8d.(1563)
10.40/—(1513) £40(1565)
11.46/8(1531) £20(1563)
12.6/8(1545) £20(1565)
13.£5, 6s. 8d.(1545) £20(1558)
14.£9(1532) £12(1557)

Though these are extreme cases, a considerable rise is the rule and not the exception. The advantage of the fixed rent is in fact neutralised by the movable fine. Such figures give point to Crowley’s outbursts, “They take our houses over our heads; they buye our groundes out of handes, they reyse our rents, they levy great, yea unreasonable fines.”[543] It is not surprising that the programme[544] of agrarian reform put forward by the Yorkshire insurgents in 1536, and by the rebels under Ket in 1549, should have contained a demand for copyhold lands “to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable sum of money.” It is not surprising that the Court of Chancery[545] should have been bombarded with petitions to declare or enforce customs limiting the demands which a lord might make of an incoming tenant. It is perhaps more surprising that, in those cases where the fine was by custom uncertain, the rule that a reasonable fine was about two years' rent should not have been enforced by judges at an earlier date and more generally than it seems to have been. For in the sixteenth century, though many old economic ideas are going by the board, public opinion still clings to the conception that there is a standard of fairness in economic dealings which exists independently of the impersonal movements of the market, which honest men can discover, if they please, and which it is a matter of conscience for public authorities to enforce. Even a good Protestant who hates the Pope will admit that there is more than a little in the Canon Law prohibition of usury,[546] and under usury, be it noted, the plain man includes rack-rents, as well as interest on capital and exorbitant prices. If to a modern economist the demand for reasonable fines and rents savours of sentimentality and confusion, he must logically condemn not only the peasants and their champions, but the statesmen; not only Ket and Hales and More and Latimer, but almost every member of every Elizabethan Privy Council. After all, all the precedents are on the side of an attempt to enforce a standard which shall be independent of the result which might be reached by higgling between this landlord and that tenant. Prices are fixed, wages are fixed, the rate of interest is fixed, though the money market is becoming more and more elusive, more and more critical of old-fashioned attempts at interference; the fines which freeholders must pay on admission have been fixed for centuries. Now that copyhold has got the protection of the Courts, it is not unnatural that tenants should ask the State to do with regard to the bargain most affecting them what it already does for bargains of nearly every other kind. It is not unnatural that, even when the fine is not settled by custom at a definite sum, they should demand nevertheless that the Courts should sanction that establishment of a “common rule," which is the ideal of the economically weak in all ages.

Yet we shall miss the full significance of the movement which we have examined, if we take their demands without analysis, and do not look at the other side of the picture. There was much to be said on the side of the manorial authorities, harsh as they often were. The criticism which Norden,[547] with a surveyor’s experience, makes upon the outcry against the upward movement of fines, by pointing out that the whole scale of prices and payments has been shifted by the depreciation in the value of money, is perfectly justified. For money had depreciated, depreciated enormously; and landlords, who were faced with swiftly rising prices on the one hand and fixed freehold and copyhold rents on the other, were in a cleft stick from which it is not easy to blame them for extricating themselves as best they could. The truth is that if we content ourselves with the supposition of an access of exceptional unscrupulousness on the part of lords of manors which was favoured by contemporaries, we shall misread the situation. The real facts were much more complex, much more serious, much more interesting. A large impersonal cause, the flooding of Europe with American silver, upsets all traditional standards of payment. The first brunt is borne by those whose incomes are fixed, or relatively fixed, the owners of landed property, and the wage-earning classes. But all over the country thousands of new bargains are being struck as leases fall in and copies are renewed. Each fresh contract is the opportunity for a readjustment of relationships, for shifting the burden from the shoulders where it rested. The wage-earners do this to some extent, but not successfully; wages do not keep pace with prices. The landlords do it much more effectively. But there is no mechanical means of measuring what change is necessary in order to place them and their tenants in the same position relatively to each other as they were before. Once customary fines are thrown overboard, there is, unless the Government interferes, no other standard except the full fine which can be got in the open market, and, when the custom of the manor allows it to be demanded, it is demanded. Thus the readjustment, as it were, overshoots itself, and the economic rent, unearned increment, surplus value—it is difficult to avoid phrases which modern associations have made trite—only part of which represents the rise in the price of land caused by the fall in the value of money, tends, instead of being, as hitherto, shared between landlord and copyholder, to be transferred en bloc to the former. It is rarely in modern society that classes are sufficiently definite and self-contained, rarely that economic changes are sufficiently catastrophic, for a great shifting of income from one to the other to be detected. Here we can see it going on before our eyes. We can note the result. But in this matter the twentieth century is not in a position to be critical of the sixteenth.

We may now sum up this part of our subject. The extreme lucrativeness of sheep-farming, and the depreciation in the value of money, offered an incentive to landlords to make the most profitable use which they could of their property by amalgamating small holdings into large leasehold farms, which were used mainly, though not entirely, for pasture. To carry out this new policy they had to get rid of the small tenants. When the tenants held at will, or were lessees for a short term of years, lords could do this without difficulty. When they were copyholders for one life or more, they could do it more slowly; but still they could do it in time. When they were copyholders with an estate of inheritance, lords had only two alternatives—to induce them to accept leases, or to raise the fines for admission. The latter course enabled them to offer the tenants the alternative of surrendering their holdings or paying the full competitive price which could be got for them. And thus it caused an almost revolutionary deterioration in their position. Hitherto the custom of the manor had been a dyke which protected them against the downward pressure of competition, and behind which they built up their prosperity. Now the unearned increment was transferred from tenant to landlord by the simple process of capitalising it in the fine demanded on entry. The interest of the customary tenant, therefore, virtually depreciated to the level of that of a leaseholder. The interest of the manorial lord appreciated to the full and effective ownership of all surpluses arising between the grant of one copy and the grant of the next. Thus the differences in the degree of security enjoyed by copyholders are to be explained by differences in manorial customs. Whom custom helps the law helps; who by custom are without protection, are without protection from the law, except in so far as it gradually builds up a doctrine as to what is reasonable. Long after villeinage has disappeared, copyholders still bear traces of having sprung from a class of whom the law was reluctant to take cognizance, traces of being nurtured in a “villein nest.”[Next Chapter]

FOOTNOTES:

[491] Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Pembroke Manors.