The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

by R. H. Tawney

In almost all ages the first task of Governments is the preservation of order. Though the economic ideas of the sixteenth century were very different from those of the nineteenth, one of the reasons which made it impossible for the statesmen of the period to leave the land question altogether alone was the same as that which induced their successors to deal with Irish land in 1870 and 1881. It was that agrarian discontent created a permanent supply of inflammable material, which a spark might turn into a conflagration. The years between 1500 and 1650 are the last great age of the peasant uprisings which, in all countries of Western Europe except France and Ireland, are incredible to-day as a romance of giants, and hardly a generation in that stormy period elapsed without one. Sometimes nothing more happened than a collision of justices and gentry with angry mobs who were tearing down hedges and restoring common to common again under mysterious figures who flit across the darkening country-side with weapons in their hands and the eternal insurrection of the New Testament on their lips—Jack o' the Style, Pyrce Plowman, and that prophetic Captain Pouch, who “was sent of God to satisfie all degrees whatsoever, and in this present work was directed by the Lord of Heaven.”[554] Sometimes the discontent swelled to a small civil war, as it did in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, and in the eastern and southern counties in 1549. The Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace were, it is true, mainly motived by discontent with the attack on the abbeys. But the explanation of their objects given by those insurgents who were cross-examined by the Government makes it difficult to agree with Professor Gay that only an insignificant part was played in these movements by agrarian discontent. The truth is that we ought to distinguish between the objects of different sections. The rebels of 1536 were not a class, but almost the whole society of northern England, which suddenly rolls forward with all its members, spirituality and laity, peasants and peers, in fervent motion together. The weaker side of these great conservative demonstrations was that, though all classes were united against the régime typified by Cromwell, all classes were not moved to the same degree by the same grievances. Even when the old religion was the cause that took the gentry into the field, the humbler rebels were brought out as much by hatred of agrarian as of religious innovations. The men of Lincolnshire marched under a banner embroidered with a ploughshare, and laggards were spurred forward with the cry “What will ye do? Shall we go home and keep sheep?”[555] In Cumberland the four Captains of Penrith—Faith, Poverty, Pity, and Charity—marched in solemn procession with drawn swords round Burgh Church, and then, having heard Mass, led their followers, with the blessing of the vicar, on a crusade to put an end to gentlemen and to withhold rents and fines.[556] In the North generally the arrival of Aske’s messengers was a signal for the wholesale plucking down of new enclosures; a programme of agrarian reform was included in the demands put forward at Doncaster; and Aske himself told the Government at his examination that the practice of letting out farms over the heads of poor tenants was one of the causes of the rising.[557] A well-informed officer of State like Sir William Paget seems to have thought that even the rebellion which took place in Devonshire and Somersetshire in 1549, the causes of which were mainly ecclesiastical, was partly also agrarian.[558] In that year, indeed, nearly the whole of the southern counties, beginning in May with Hertfordshire, from Norfolk in the east to Hampshire in the south and Worcester in the west, were driven into riot by disappointment with the ineffective Royal Commission appointed in the preceding year. In 1550 there were disturbances in Kent, and the Government anticipated their appearance in Essex. In 1552 the Buckinghamshire peasants rose on account of high rents and high prices. In 1554 Wyatt's[559] adherents demanded that all pasture lands which had forcibly been seized by persons in power should be restored. In 1569 an armed band pulled down enclosures near Chinley[560] in Derbyshire, threatened to kill the encloser, and rescued by force those of their number who were arrested. Twenty-six years later, at a time of unusually high prices, even the peasantry of Oxfordshire,[561] that most imperturbable of English counties, planned “to knock down the gentlemen and rich men who made corn so dear, and who took the commons.” In 1607 in the Midlands, where in the preceding decade enclosure and depopulation had created a situation as acute as that of half a century before, there was a riot which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission.

This was perhaps the last serious agrarian rising which England has seen. But though henceforward the hatred of the new agrarian régime ran for the most part underground, it had been burned too deep into the minds of the people to be lightly forgotten, and more than once its smouldering embers flickered up in occasional riots. In the first flush of the army’s victory over King and Parliament, when the shattering of authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, not only the political, but the economic, ideas of two centuries later burst for a moment, as in an early spring, into wonderful and premature life. The programme of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the Veto of the House of Lords, but also “that you would have laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor.”[562] Theoretical communism, repudiated by some of the Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, those “true born sons and friends of England" who, under Everard and Winstanley, set themselves, in the spirit of an Owenite Community, to convert the waste land at Weybridge into the New Jerusalem.[563] For to many earnest souls the day of the Lord seems very near, and Israel must make ready against it, not with anguish of spirit only, but with spade labour upon the barren earth. The contrast between the prevalence of organised agrarian revolts in the middle of the sixteenth century, dragging on in small sporadic agitations for nearly one hundred years, with their comparative rarity two hundred years later, when similar causes were at work to produce them, marks the new grouping of social classes and economic forces which was going on apace in our period. The intelligence of toiling England, that for a century now has gone to build up a new civilisation in factory and mine, in trade union and co-operative store, still lay in the larger villages, its immemorial home. Discontent travelled across the enclosing counties as it does to-day in a Welsh mining valley, outcoursing oppression itself, like Elijah running before Ahab into Jezreel. “If three or four good fellows would ride in the night with every man a bell, and cry in every town that they pass, 'To Swaffham! To Swaffham!' by the morning there would be ten thousand assembled at the least; and then one bold fellow to stand forth and say, 'Sirs, now we be here assembled, you know how little favour the gentlemen bear us poor men.... Let us ... harness ourselves.'”[564] Good fellows and bold were not wanting. “From that time forward no man could keep his servant at plough; but every man that could bear a staff went forward.”[565] Before the appearance of almost universal leasehold tenure, standing armies, and omnipotent aristocratic Parliaments, unrest among the rural population might cause the Government a not inexpensive campaign, in which the reluctant militia of yesterday were the enthusiastic rebels of to-day, and there was not therefore much disparity between the discipline and equipment of the forces engaged on either side. Both in the mainly agrarian revolts in Norfolk, and in the mainly religious revolts in Devonshire, the peasants fell, as they hoped they might, like men, and it was the arquebuses of the foreign mercenaries which really decided the struggle. Poor homeless hirelings, what could they know but to clamour for their pay, and shoot better men than themselves?

To understand the nature of a body at rest it is sometimes advisable to look at the same body when it is in motion. The agrarian disturbances of our period possess certain features which are of interest even to those who are concerned primarily not with social politics, but with economic organisation. In the first place, they mark the transition from the feudal revolts of the fifteenth century, based on the union of all classes in a locality against the central government, to those in which one class stands against another through the opposition of economic interests. In the Lincolnshire rebellion and in the Pilgrimage of Grace the old spirit predominated. In the North of England the new agrarian régime had not proceeded far enough to sap entirely the ancient bonds between landlord and tenant, and the plunder of the monastic estates had not yet set a commercial aristocracy in the seat of the old-fashioned Catholic landlords. The commons of Westmoreland, who declare that they will trust no gentlemen with their councils, nevertheless feel sufficient confidence in Lord Darcy to write to him for his advice as to how far they will be justified in insisting on reduced admission fines, and in pulling down “all the intakes yt be noysum for poor men.”[566] Had the Catholic gentry generally been willing to sacrifice the rents got from pasture-farming, these movements might have found leaders who would have made them more formidable. As it was, even when hatred of the religious changes or of some particular piece of legislation, like the unpopular Statute of Uses, enrolled the gentry with the peasants, as in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, the incompatibility of the allies was obvious, and the presence of the wealthier classes inspired distrust among the rank and file, who saw in them the authors of their economic evils, and who, though genuinely concerned at the painful destruction of the social institutions of the old religion, were fighting mainly for the maintenance of “old customs and tenant right,” fair rents and security of tenure. In spite of the temporary union of all classes in 1536, the insurgents tended to break up into two camps corresponding roughly with the division between landlord and tenant. In Lincolnshire, though the commons were influenced by the gentry so far as to demand the repeal of the Act of Uses, “not knowing,” as a witness said, “what that Act of Uses meant,” they showed their distrust of the upper classes by refusing to allow them to discuss their future policy apart from the general body of insurgents, while the extremists clamoured that “they ought to kill some of the justices; also that if they hanged for this, they would not leave one gentleman alive in Lincolnshire.”[567] At Richmond all lords and gentlemen were to swear on the mass-book to maintain the profit of Holy Church, to take nothing of their tenants but the usual rents, to put down Cromwell and not to go to London, on pain of death if they refused.[568] For courts have strange arts of seduction, and though London (thank Heaven) is not England now, it was still less England then. The rough rhymes that ran through the North contain the warning of all popular movements against the treachery of leaders, the sad eternal warning which buoys the sands where so many high endeavours have gone to wreck. “All commons stick ye together, rise with no great man till ye know his intent. Keep your harness in your hands, and ye shall obtain all your purpose in all this North land.... Claim ye old customs and tenant right, to take your farms by a God's penny, all gressums and heightenings to be laid down. Then may we serve our sovereign Lord King Henry VIII., God save his noble Grace.

We shall serve our lands’ lords in every righteous cause
With horse and harness as custom will demand.
Lords spiritual and temporal have it in your mind
This world as it waveth, and to your tenants be kind.
Adieu, gentle commons, thus make I an end:
Writer of this letter, pray Jesu be his speed;
He shall be your captain, when that ye have need.”[569]

The temporary solidarity which had drawn all classes into the Pilgrimage of Grace, though it flickered up for the last time in the feudal revolt of the northern earls in 1569, was absent altogether from the widespread agitation of 1549 to 1550. Except in Devonshire and Cornwall, the disturbances of those years were purely agrarian, a movement of tenants against landlords. The Eastern rebels were for leaving “as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls";[570] the gentry responded by rallying to the Government; and both in that country and in Devonshire the military forces which put down the peasants were led by the two most notoriously unpopular landlords in England, who had built up their estates out of confiscated abbey lands, the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. In the reign of Henry VII. the problem before Governments had still been to prevent a great landlord from using his authority over his tenants to make war on his neighbours or on the State. Sixty years later it is to prevent tenants in several different counties from combining against landlords. The landed classes recognise the new spirit. They denounce the peasants as communists and agitators; and when they get a free hand, as in the years from 1549 to 1553, they insist on legislation which will make effective combination impossible.

In the second place, the way in which the agrarian agitations were conducted is interesting as showing both the comparative prosperity and independence of the English peasantry, even at a time when the fortunes of many of them were declining, and the general conceptions of social expediency held by what was regarded as the most representative part of the English nation. It would be a mistake to think of the rebels who joined these revolts as mere unorganised malcontents, with nothing to lose. There is no resemblance at all, either in personnel or methods, between the agrarian disturbances of our period and the riots of starving agricultural labourers who burned ricks under Captain Swing in the early nineteenth century. The peasants who formed the backbone of the movements were often well-to-do men, who were fighting to keep their land with the dreadful tenacity of small proprietors. They had arms and were accustomed to their use. They had sufficient money to raise common funds. They included among their number sanguine and pertinacious litigants who, so far from being disposed to throw up their case at the hint of the landlord’s displeasure, were quite capable of making his life one long lawsuit. The readiness of a class to make effective the protection given it by the law in the face of the opposition of powerful individuals, quenched, alas! too often by ignorance, and timidity, and generations of dull oppression, is a very good test of its spirit and of the practical freedom which it enjoys. In the sixteenth century, though we certainly see many gross cases of intimidation, we also see tenants appealing to the law courts and to the Government over the heads of lords of manors. Such appeals are a proof of the helplessness of the victims which has been commented on above. But they are also a proof of the persistence and cohesion of some among them. For while in the absence of oppression they would not have been necessary, in the absence of a determination to resist oppression they could not have been made. To enclose was in parts of the country to stir up a hornet’s nest. There was not much obsequiousness about the villagers of Thingden,[571] who from 1494 to 1538 pursued their landlord through almost every Court in the Kingdom. The leaders of the popular agitation were often the more prosperous among the middle-classes. Sanders, the general in the interminable struggle over the common lands of the city of Coventry which began in 1460, was a member of the important craft of Dyers, and had occupied the high civic office of Chamberlain.[572] At Louth[573] the initiative among the commons was taken by a tailor and a weaver. Ket[574] himself was a considerable landed proprietor as well as a tanner.

The peasants' agitations took the form both of more or less organised risings and of sporadic rioting, which aimed at ends varying from place to place according to the grievances inspired by the varying conditions of different districts. Everywhere there were the throwing down of enclosures and the driving of sheep.[575] In Yorkshire the enclosures which were pulled down seem to have been mainly intakes from the waste, and in Norfolk and the Midlands enclosures of arable land which had been converted to pasture. In Warwickshire the Earl of Warwick’s park was demolished, while in Wiltshire, where Sir William Herbert had acquired the lands of Wilton Abbey, and enclosed a whole village in his new park at Washerne, the peasants rose and tore down the palings.[576] In the North generally the bitterest outcry seems to have arisen over the excessive fines and “gressums” charged for the admission of copyholders. In Cumberland[577] there was a general strike against the payment of rents, and almost everywhere there were complaints of the diminution in the area available for pasturing the beasts of commoners through the enclosing by landlords of manorial wastes.

Though it involves abandoning the order of events, let us illustrate by a single example[578] the shape assumed by agrarian rioting, which has not yet become a rebellion. In the summer of 1569, when Cecil and Elizabeth were waiting anxiously for news from those northern counties which “know no other prince but a Percy,” there was much running and riding, much sending for warrants and plentiful delay in their execution, in the wild country between Chinley and Bakewell, whose centre is the Peak, and whose principal gorge now carries the most [beautiful] piece of railway line in England. The Derbyshire peasantry seem to have been ill to deal with. A few years later some of those in Glossopdale succeeded in setting the Earl of Shrewsbury at defiance, and, when evicted from their farms, induced the Council to intervene to insist on their reinstatement.[579] Just now those of them who lived in the neighbourhood of Chinley were in a ferment over the enclosure of some common land. The story is a curious one, and shows both the kind of conditions under which agrarian discontent developed, and the way in which it was associated in the mind of the Government with fears of political disturbance. The Duchy of Lancaster, to whom the land near Chinley belonged, had let a parcel of herbage called Mayston Field to one Lawrence Wynter, his lease to begin as soon as that of the existing tenant had expired. In that age of land speculation land changed hands rapidly. On the same day as Wynter obtained the lease he sold it to a certain Richard Celey. Celey transferred it to Godfrey Bradshaw, and Godfrey Bradshaw got rid of it to his brother Anthony. The trouble began when the land came into the hands of Godfrey Bradshaw. He started to hedge and ditch it, which of course involved the exclusion of the other inhabitants from the rights of pasture which they had hitherto enjoyed. Accordingly the villagers, led by twelve of their number, of whom four belonged to one family, removed the ditch, tore down the enclosure, which consisted of “XLIII hundredth quicksetts willowes and willowe stackes ... and did utterlye destroy and cutt the sayd stacks and quick setts in pieces,” proceeding at the same time, with the object of protecting their own grazing land against encroachments, themselves to divide up the land into smaller enclosures to be held by each man in severalty. Godfrey Bradshaw then obtained warrants for the preservation of the peace against the ringleaders, and at the same time induced the lessor, who was Sir Ralph Sadler, the Chancellor of the Duchy, to address a letter to them directing them not to interfere with any houses, hedges, or ditches, which might in future be constructed round the land. They received his communication, but massed in force with arms on Chinley Hill, pulled down what still remained of Bradshaw’s hedges, and then proceeded to organise the nucleus of a very pretty agitation. They gave part of the herbage, which was nominally in the occupation of the unfortunate lessee, to one William Beard, on condition that, after the manner of his betters in the good old days before the Tudors, he should “maynteyn them geynst the Queenes Majestie,” his support taking the form of an agreement that he “should from tyme to tyme send them Ydill ryotouse p'sons to assyste them in these yll doinges.” They then raised a fund, presumably by a levy on the inhabitants, called a meeting in the forest of High Peak, and set off about the tenth of June to Bakewell for a further conference, arranging in the meantime that some one should burn Godfrey Bradshaw’s house, and that while his enclosures, if re-erected, should be pulled down, the other inhabitants should make haste to divide up the disputed land into twenty-one separate parcels. When the Bradshaws, having got their warrants, tried with the aid of the village constable to execute them, their opponents (“the land was grabbed from him, and he did what any decent man would do”[580]) threatened them with murder, and, on one of the party being actually arrested, came very near to carrying their threat out. “The said p'tyes ... did ryotouslye assemble themselves together in great companies at the town of Hayfield with unlawfull weapons, that is to saye, with bowes, pytchefforkes, clobbes, staves, swords, and daggers drawen, and ryotouslye dyd then and there assaulte and p'sue the sayd Godfrey and Edward Bradshawe, and in ryotouse manner dyd reskewe and take from them the body of the sayd Richard Shower, being attached; the Queenes Officer, George Yeavely of Bawdon, then being p'sent commanding the peace to be kepte.” Having chased the enemy for some distance, they camped on the contested territory, and kept a watchful eye and a firm hand for any sign of the reappearance of the detested hedges. More serious still in the eyes of the Government (and this, one suspects, was their undoing), the leaders of this village revolution went so far as to entangle themselves in high politics. At their examination they are asked, “Whether dyd Reynold Kirke about May day last paste, and dyvers tymes since and before, or any other tyme, confederate, consulte, practise, or otherwise confer and talk with one Mr. Bircles of the countye of Chester ... touching or concerning prophesis by noblemen, or otherwise, and what books of prophesie have you or the said Bircles seen or heard, and what is the effect thereof, and how often have you or he perused, used, or conferred of the same, or about such purposes, and with whom?" We do not know how they answered this question. It may be that the anger of these Derbyshire peasants at their vanishing commons was indeed a fraction to be set among weightier assets by schemers in high places, and that the sinister Mr. Bircles had really talked with them of matters more serious than the pulling down of hedges and the baiting of enclosers, of things forbidden to the vulgar, of the scattering of upstart officials, of the restoration of a Catholic monarchy, of Mary, who in the previous year had made her irrevocable plunge across the Border. It may be merely that all in authority had that autumn an unusually bad attack of nerves. In 1569 the North was full of prophets, both noble and other.

It was not always the case, however, that agrarian discontent ended in casual rioting of this kind. Of mere destructive violence there is, indeed, in all the social disturbances of the period, singularly little. There was a good deal in the routine of rural life, with its common administration of land and dependence on a collectively binding custom, to teach habits of discipline and co-operation. It must be remembered that those who took the initiative in breaking the law were not the peasants who pulled down enclosures, but the landlords who made them in defiance of repeated statutes forbidding them. On the whole the organised character of the action taken is more conspicuous than the individual excesses, and if one is to look for a modern analogy to the mixture of deliberation and violence which it shows, it must be sought in an Irish fair rent campaign rather than in the bread riots of a despairing urban proletariat. When the agitation was confined to individual manors it occasionally took the form of agrarian trade unionism. Tenants collectively decline to serve as jurors in the court of the manor till their demands are granted.[581] They raise a common purse.[582] They refuse to pay more than a certain rent. When more than one manor is implicated different localities display a rough cohesion. Whole communities seem to have joined the movement in 1536 and 1540 with a certain formality. In Lincolnshire and Yorkshire townships were brought out on the ringing of the town bell with the cohesion of a well-organised trade union; Beverley[583] sent messages to the Lincolnshire rebels under its common seal; and the part which was played by the village officers in the movements of the peasantry is proved by the Proclamation[584] which the Council issued in 1549, when disorders were at their height, forbidding constables, bailiffs, and head-boroughs to call meetings except for the purposes required by the law. Hales,[585] as he rode through the South and Midlands in 1548, was struck by the patience with which people waited for the Government to take action, and attributed the disturbances of the ensuing year to the despair caused by the victory of the local landlords over the Commission, and to the rejection by Parliament of the Bills which he had introduced. Even Ket’s campaign in Norfolk, which ended in a sanguinary battle, during the greater part of it was carried on with an orderliness from which the Government which suppressed it might profitably have taken a lesson. Nothing could have been more unlike the popular idea of a jacquerie. The peasants enjoyed the enormous joke of making the gentry look foolish a great deal more than cutting their throats, as during the four weeks in which they were “playing” they might have done without any difficulty.

“Mr. Pratt, your sheep are very fat,
And we thank you for that;
We have left you the skins to pay your wife’s pins,
And you must thank us for that.”[586]