“We pray that your Grace give license and authority by your gracious commission under your Great Seal to such commissioners as your poor commons hath chosen, or to as many of them as your Majesty and your Council shall appoint and think meet, for to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings, which hath been hidden by your justices of your peace, shreves, escheators, and other your officers, from your poor commons, since the first year of the reign of your noble grandfather, King Henry VII.

“We pray that no lord, knight, esquire, nor gentleman, do graze nor feed any bullocks or sheep, if he may spend forty pounds a year by his lands, but only for the provision of his house.”

The programme of the peasants is partly political. The Northerners insist that Parliament and the Crown must interfere, and the Norfolk leaders ask for a permanent commission to do the work which the county justices, who are interested in enclosing, have wilfully neglected. But it is mainly economic. The State is to do no more than restore the old usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised manorial customary enforced by a strong central Government throughout the length of the land, free use of common lands, reduced rents of meadow and marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free fisheries, and the abolition of the lingering disability of personal villeinage. The most striking thing about these demands is their conservatism. Almost exactly a hundred years later agrarian reform will be demanded as part of a new heaven and a new earth. Agrarian agitation will be carried on in terms of theories as to the social contract, of theories as to the origin of private property. Its leaders will be appealing to Anglo-Saxon history to prove to the indifferent ears of a Government which has saved them “from Charles, our Norman oppressor,” that “England cannot be a free commonwealth, unless the poore commoners have a use and benefit of the land.”[596] They will appeal also to a more awful sanction than that of history. “At this very day,” cries Winstanley,[597] “poor people are forced to work for 4d. a day and corn is dear, and the tithing-priest stops their mouths and tells them that 'inward satisfaction of mind' was meant by the declaration 'the poor shall inherit the earth.' I tell you, the scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled.... You jeer at the name of Leveller. I tell you Jesus Christ is the head leveller." Such communistic doctrines are always the ultimate fruit of the breakdown of practical co-operation and brotherliness among men. To human nature, as to other kinds of nature, a vacuum is abhorrent.

But as yet the soil has not been ploughed by a century of political and religious controversy, and there is little sign of these high arguments in the social disturbances of our period. The earliest levellers[598] get their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset hedges and park palings. What communism there is in the movement is not that of the saints or the theorists, but the spontaneous doctrineless communism of the open field village, where men set out their fields, and plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the wet, with natural fellowship. The middle-class terror of the appearance in England of the political theories of the German Peasants' War, though it was forcibly expressed by Sir William Paget[599] in remonstrating with Somerset's policy in 1549, and though John Hales thought it worth while to repudiate it, is not justified by any recorded utterances or programmes which have come to us. There are, indeed, many verbal similarities between the articles of Ket and those put out by the German peasants at Memmingen in 1525, which suggest that some refugee from Germany had carried them with him to the most Protestant county in England. Both, for example, demand a reduction in rents, the abolition of villeinage, and free fisheries. But the contrasts are much more striking, and are due not only to the fact that the onerous villein services which survived in Germany had become almost nominal in England, but to the difference in the spirit of their conception, which leads one to appeal to the New Testament and the other to the customs of the first years of Henry VII. There is, in fact, the same broad difference between the peasant movements in England and Germany as there is between the English and German Reformation. In Germany the ecclesiastical changes spring from a widespread popular discontent, and are swept forward on a wave of radical enthusiasm, which carries the peasants (German Social Democrats are metaphysicians to this day) into the revolutionary mysticism of Münzer. In England changes in Church government are forced upon the people by the State, and outside the South and East of England are regarded with abhorrence. It is not until the later rise of Puritanism that either religious or economic radicalism becomes a popular force. In the middle of the sixteenth century the English peasants accepted the established system of society with its hierarchy of authorities and division of class functions, and they had a most pathetic confidence in the Crown. What they wanted, in the first place, was fair conditions of land tenure, the restoration of the customary relationships which had protected them against the screw of commercial competition. When they went further, they looked for an exercise of Royal Power to reduce to order the petty tyranny of local magnates, and to carry out the intentions of a Government which they were inclined to think meant them well, “to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings which hath been bidden by your justices of your Peace ... from your poor commons.” Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. They are the outcome of a society where the normal relations are healthy, where men are attached to the established order, where they possess the security and control over the management of their own lives which is given by property, and, possessing this, possess the reality of freedom even though they stand outside the political state. Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.

The social disturbances caused by enclosure, with its accompaniments of rack-renting and evictions, were one cause which compelled the Governments of our period to give attention to the subject. Though no direct concessions were made to them, their lessons were not altogether wasted, because it is plain that they impressed on the minds of statesmen the idea that to prevent disorder it was necessary for the State to interfere in favour of tenants. Rural discontent, which might have been insignificant in an age of greater political stability, derived a factitious importance from the circumstances of the sixteenth century, when it might be exploited by a rebellious minority, which, for all that most men knew, might really be a majority of the nation, by Yorkist Plotters under Henry VII., religious enthusiasts under Henry VIII., restorers of a Catholic monarchy, supported by a Spanish invasion or a Franco-Scottish alliance, under Elizabeth. Governments so uncertain of their popularity as these had a strong reason for [protecting the class] which would be the backbone of a revolt. One way in which they could secure themselves against the discontent of the disaffected nobility was to encourage the yeomanry, who might act as a counterpoise. The way in which self-preservation and a popular agrarian policy went hand in hand is illustrated by Burleigh’s cynical advice to Elizabeth to make a practice of supporting tenants in any quarrel which might arise between them and Catholic landlords.[600]

But there were other causes as well working in the same direction. No one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed can fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of agrarian relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man, and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the peasants themselves. Not, of course, that the authorities had any intention of depressing landlords or raising peasants, but that the whole established system of Government was based on a certain organisation of social life, and that the Government tended to maintain that organisation in maintaining itself and carrying on the work of the State. For this attitude, which is in striking contrast with the policy of the statesmen of the eighteenth century when faced with an analogous problem, there were several practical reasons which we shall do well to understand. In judging the motives of economic policy in past ages we are even more apt to be misled by modern analogies than we are in estimating its effects. We see that in our own day most of the legislative protection accorded to those who are economically weak has been produced by a combination of two causes, the political enfranchisement of the wage-earning classes and the spread of humanitarian sentiment. We know that in the sixteenth century the first cause was absent and the second was feeble. The Macchiavellis of that iron age were neither democrats nor philanthropists; and when they avow a policy of protecting the weaker classes in society against economic evils we are inclined to think with Professor Thorold Rogers that they are merely hypocritical. But this analogy is a false light. To be influenced by it is to confuse political power with its symbols, and to forget that the economic importance of a class may be a more effective claim to the interest of Governments than the ballot-box. Under the Tudors there were strong practical reasons for protecting the peasantry which are not felt to the same extent to-day. The modern State has so specialised its organs that its maintenance is quite compatible with the existence of the extremes of poverty, not only among the exceptionally unfortunate, but among those whose position is not more insecure than that of their neighbours. They may be able neither to fight, nor to take part in public duties, nor to contribute much to the Exchequer. But if their incompetence is a menace, it is a menace which is not felt till after the lapse of generations, a menace the fulfilment of which no single life is long enough to behold. For the State hires specialists to fight, and specialists to keep order; indeed, the poorer they are, the more cheaply it can obtain their services.[601] Its local government is conducted mainly by specialised officials, and the concentration of wealth makes possible a concentration of taxation. The extension of political power has been accompanied by a subdivision of political functions, which has diminished the importance of the individual citizen, and turned him, as far as the routine of Government is concerned, into a sleeping partner, whose consent is necessary, but whose active co-operation is superfluous.

Now we need not point out that this would be as fair a description of large classes of persons in the sixteenth century as it is now, and that the day labourer and handicraftsman who “are to be ruled and not to rule”[602] were, as a class, far more completely beneath the consideration of statesmen than they are at the present day. But we are concerned with the landholding population, not with the landless wage-earner, and in the slightly differentiated state of our period both economic and political conditions made a decline in the standard of life among a class so important as the peasantry a danger which might cause the most authoritarian of Governments to be confronted with very grave practical difficulties. It might find itself unable to raise an effective military force. The States of Continental Europe had introduced standing armies. But England relied mainly on the shire levies, and the shire levies were recruited from the small farmers. Just as the lord of a manor in the North of England, whose tenants held by border service with horse and harness, was anxious to prevent the decline in their numbers which landlords elsewhere were welcoming, so the Government regarded with quite genuine dismay an agrarian movement which seemed to threaten its military resources by [impoverishing the finest fighting material] in the country. Shadow, Feeble, and Wart may “fill a pit as well as better"; but to make good infantry it requires not “housed beggars,” but “men bred in some free and plentiful manner." One Depopulation Statute after another recites how “the defence of this land against our enemies outward is enfeebled and impaired.”[603] In the settlement of the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace the Government took care to instruct its officials to see that the Northumbrian tenants, on whom the defence of the border depended, “should be put in comfort, that no more shall be exacted with gyrsums and like charges, instead of which they shall be ready with horse and harness when required.”[604] In 1601 Cecil[605] crushed a proposal to repeal the acts then in force against depopulation by pointing out that the majority of the militia levies were ploughmen. And in the instructions for the choice of persons to be enrolled in the trained bands which were issued by the Government of Charles I., particular care was taken to emphasise that they were not to be selected at haphazard, but were to be drawn from the families of the gentry, freeholders, and substantial farmers.[606]

This cogent reason for intervening to protect the peasantry was supported by another which was not less convincing. The classes who suffered most from enclosure were important from a fiscal, as well as a military, point of view. In the simple economic life of that age the connection between the output of wealth and the individual worker's opportunities for production and standard of subsistence, if not more important than to-day, was certainly more patent to observation. “The hole welth of the body of the realm cometh out of the labours and works of the common peple ... a riche welthy body of a realm maketh a riche welthy king, and a poore feble body of a realm must needs make a poore weak feble king.”[607] In our period “pauvre paysans pauvre royaume, pauvre royaume pauvre roi" was a statement not of any recondite theory, but of an obvious economic fact, and one can hardly be mistaken in supposing that part of the favour which sixteenth century Governments were inclined to show the small farmer was due to the fact that the methods of taxation in use made him important as a source of revenue. To a State which relies largely for its supplies on a direct declaration of income, it is indifferent whether the total assessable income is made up of a few large or many small ones; indeed if the tax be a progressive one, most will be got from the former. But look at the way in which taxation is raised in the sixteenth century. The chief direct tax is the subsidy. A typical subsidy, for example that of the first year of Elizabeth,[608] is assessed partly on the capital value of property, including farm and trade stock and household furniture, partly on the yearly profits of land. When a village of small and fairly prosperous cultivators is wiped out to make room for a large and sparsely populated estate, will the Government get as large a revenue from direct taxation as before? A modern reader may very well answer “Yes.” The motive of converting land to pasture is to increase the profits of agriculture. If they are increased, does not this mean a corresponding increase in the taxable wealth of the country? Now to inquire how far one can assume in any age that the personal interests of landlords will lead to land being put to its most productive use would take us far beyond the scope of this essay, and it is unnecessary for our present purpose. For, as far as our period is concerned, the answer is certainly wrong. Apart from the subtler reactions of the agrarian changes upon social welfare, there is then no such identity between the economic interests of the landlord and the economic interests of the State. Speaking broadly, the former consist in securing the largest net income, the latter in securing the largest gross product. And these two things are by no means necessarily found together. If a pasture farm managed by a shepherd and his dog is substituted by an enclosing proprietor for several score of families living by tillage, the rent roll of the estate can hardly fail to be increased, for the value of wool is so high, and the cost of sheep-farming so low, that the net income from which rent can be paid is large. But subsidies are assessed on property, not only on income; and on personal as well as real property. A rise in rents is quite compatible with a falling off in the gross produce of the land, and the conversion of an estate from arable to pasture, by displacing tenants, means a diminution in the farm stock and household property which has hitherto contributed towards the revenue.