It remains to ask how far the policy of trying to check the agrarian changes, which was pursued by Governments for nearly a century and a half, had any effect on economic practice. Statesmen were certainly biassed in favour of protecting the weaker landholding classes. But was their intervention simply the expression of a pious opinion? Was it so entirely futile as—to give a modern parallel—the Small Holdings Act of 1892? Or did it to any extent modify or retard the course of economic events? The view usually taken, that legislation was so ineffective as to be almost negligible, is in accordance with what we know of the character of local administration in the sixteenth century, and is supported by much contemporary evidence. The constant introduction of fresh proposals suggests that the previous laws were disappointing. The failure of existing Acts was the reason given in Somerset’s proclamation for the appointment of the Commission of 1548. Hales, who is certainly the most reliable authority on the situation between 1540 and 1550, speaks of them as being notoriously a dead letter.[692] If one looks at the Statutes passed against depopulation in the sixteenth century, with a view to discovering how far they really met the situation, one will be inclined to say that they quite failed to go to the root of the matter. The special evil which they were intended to combat was depopulation caused by evictions. But evictions could be checked only by giving tenants security, which would have meant turning customary into legal titles, and fixing judicial rents for leaseholders and immovable fines for copyholders; in short, the sort of interference which the peasants and their champions demanded, but on which no Government depending on the support of the landed gentry would venture, except upon an extraordinary emergency. In the absence of such an attempt to grapple directly with the fundamental fact that the peasants' insecurity made them liable to suffer whenever there was a change in the methods of agriculture, legislation designed merely to prevent those changes was almost certain to be evaded. Even with the best intentions the Statutes could never have been easy to administer. There was the difficulty inherent in the whole Tudor and Stuart policy of authoritative interference with trade and industry, the difficulty of making State action keep pace with economic changes. The Government is often like a man pursuing a tram from one stopping-place to another, and just missing it at each. It insists that land which has hitherto been in tillage shall remain in tillage. But there are a few years of bumper harvests, and the farmers complain that they cannot pay their way.[693] The Government tries to get over the difficulty by allowing them to convert arable to pasture, when a providence unversed in statecraft sends a wet summer, and it scrambles hastily back to the position which it has just abandoned.[694] By excepting from the operation of the Statutes certain districts which are specially suitable for grazing, it encourages a rough local division of labour, one part of a county confining itself to pasture-farming and another to tillage. But then, in pursuit of its traditional and quite reasonable policy of securing that food is cheap, it insists that all farmers are to supply the markets with grain, with the result that those who have specialised in corn-growing are threatened with ruin by the fall in prices which ensues, and that it is even questionable whether they will not convert arable to pasture to evade the obligation imposed upon them.[695] Old enclosures were tolerated and new forbidden. But how distinguish between old and new? Land turned to pasture simply to restore it to a condition in which it would be fit for tillage escaped the condemnation passed on other kinds of “conversion,” and one can imagine that nice arguments must have arisen as to a farmer’s motives. Again, suppose a man converted to pasture land which should have remained under the plough, and then leased it to some one else, who retained it as pasture, was the lessee guilty of an offence? In a case which came before the Court of Exchequer in 1582, the defendant pleaded that he merely “used” the land as pasture, and had not converted it, while the Crown argued that use was equivalent to conversion, that he was in the position of a man profiting by the continuance of a nuisance, and that a fine of 10s. an acre for each year since the original conversion ought to be imposed.[696] Points like this give colour to Coke’s complaint against the whole body of Acts against enclosure that “they were labyrinthes, with such intricate windings or turnings as little or no fruit proceeded from them.”
But, of course, the obscurity of the Statutes was the least part of the difficulty with which Governments who wished to protect the peasantry were confronted. Much more serious was the fact that the traditional policy could be carried out only by disregarding the financial interests of the wealthier classes, who could most easily influence Parliament and the Council, and who were locally omnipotent. In the first half of the sixteenth century the high position of many of those who were most deeply implicated in cutting land free from communal restrictions made them almost unassailable. The Royal Commission of 1517 returned among enclosers the names of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Danbury, Sir William Bolen, Sir R. Sheffield, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir J. Witte, the Under-Treasurers of State, and Sir J. Cotton, who was himself one of the Commissioners.[697] The angry unanimity with which Somerset’s colleague turned against his land policy was not wonderful, for they were nearly all directly interested in the maintenance of the status quo. Warwick, who led the coup d'état, had enclosed on a large scale. Sir William Herbert had made extensive enclosures on the lands which he had acquired from the Abbey of Wilton. The St. John family, the Darcy family, the Earl of Westmoreland, had all local troubles with their tenants; and there are some indications that Sir William Paget and the detested and detestable Lord Rich were in the same position.[698]
It is not, however, material to trace the records of individual members of the Council, because their interest in checking the interference of the State with the free disposal of land is evident from the fact that many of them enormously increased their estates through the share which they obtained in the property confiscated from the religious houses and the gilds. A comparison of the lists of Privy Councillors for 1548 and 1552, published by Strype,[699] with Dr. Savine's[700] valuable analysis of the grantees of the monastic estates, show that out of thirty-one persons who got grants of land of £200 a year or more fourteen were members of the Privy Council in one or other of those years, exclusive of the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. This fact is by itself almost sufficient to explain the impossibility of enforcing the laws forbidding depopulation during the years which followed the death of Henry VIII., and the despair of legal protection which seems to have settled upon the classes affected by the movement. The view sometimes expressed that the religious houses had been easier landlords than the lay owners into whose hands their estates passed, though it can occasionally be corroborated from the complaints made by tenants to the Government, scarcely seems, as yet, to be satisfactorily proved. But the distribution among the wealthier classes of land producing a net income of not less than £110,000 gave them an enormous vested interest in preventing and evading legislation to check the most profitable use of the new possessions which were to endow the aristocracy of the future. The supposition of peculiar harshness in the owners to whom the land passed, though probably correct, is really not needed to explain the part which the transference of these vast quantities of land had in augmenting the distress of the rural classes. The worst side of all such great and sudden redistributions of property is that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. A buyer must sell at a profit, or he had much better not have bought. During the decade between 1540 and 1550 there was a furor of land speculation. To the Abbey lands, which came into the market after 1536, were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. It is quite clear that some of the grantees of estates did not acquire them with the intention of retaining them, but simply “bought for the rise." The lands of the Abbey of Whitby, for example, pass first to the Crown, and are then sold by it to the Duke of Northumberland, who in turn sells them to Sir John Yorke.[701] A small official in the Royal household buys the Cistercian nunnery at Brewood, and at once puts it up to sale “for suche a price that no man will gladly by hit at hys hand.”[702] Trentham is surrendered to the Crown in 1536; in 1540 the Duke of Suffolk obtains a grant of the rents and reversions reserved upon the Crown leases there, and in the same year sells it to one Leveson, who has already acquired lands belonging to Horlton Abbey, and already sold them again to Biddulph.[703] One finds even the champion of the tenants, Somerset himself, getting a grant of land from the Crown on July 1st, leasing part of it for eighty years on July 2nd, and transferring it back to the Crown, subject to the lease, on July 9th.[704] When property changed hands three times in the course of ten days, it could hardly fail to be rack-rented, or the transaction would not pay. What happened to the tenants? Here and there, as at Whitby and Washerne,[705] a bitter outburst against their new masters shows that the result has been what we should expect. But for the rest, a cloud descends and we cannot say. It is only in such occasional glimpses that we catch the solid earth shifting beneath the feet of those who till it. It was such a glimpse which led the last great English peasant, in a time of even more widespread misery, to say that the wretchedness of the landless labourer was the work of the Reformation. Cobbett, and those who follow Cobbett in representing the economic evils of the sixteenth century as the fruit of the religious changes, err in linking as parent and child movements which were rather brother and sister, twin aspects of the individualism which seems inseparable from any swift increase in riches. Their vision of a time when mild ecclesiastics administered their estates as a popular trust lays a spell upon the imagination. In the religious houses of Lancashire and Yorkshire and Northumberland there may, here and there, even on the eve of the dissolution, have been a reality corresponding to it. But we need hardly go further than Sir Thomas More[706] to learn that for parts, at least, of England it is only a vision; and More does not speak without book. Holy men enclose land, convert arable to pasture, claim villeins, turn copyholds into tenancies at will. If prominent ecclesiastics had really wanted to champion the cause of the peasantry, they had an excellent opportunity when Wolsey sent out the first great Commission into enclosures in 1517. But, in fact, there is no reason to suppose that any protest was made at all comparable to that which came thirty-two years later from Latimer. How could there be? The estates of the larger houses were often scattered over several different counties, and before the dissolution they were quite frequently managed by laymen. In such cases the monks were simply rentiers,[707] who needed to know no more about their tenants than the fellows of an Oxford college know about theirs at the present day.
Nevertheless, though facts will not allow us to accept the view which ascribes the agrarian distress of our period to the Reformation, or even to the particular changes brought about by the secularisation of religious endowments, there was a real connection between them. The Reformation in England is as much a social as a religious revolution. As a social revolution it is the work of the commercial and middle classes. It “made of yeomen and artificers gentlemen, and of gentlemen knights, and so forth upward, and of the poorest sort stark beggars.”[708] Their support is given, in the main, on strict business principles. It is purchased by ensuring that every one who counts shall have a solid material interest in supporting the new order. The great Elizabethan families, the Cecils, the Herberts, the Grenvilles, are well paid in advance for their services, and continue to be paid long after their services have ceased. The dissolution of the monasteries does for their plastic consciences what the foundation of the Bank of England did for the politics of the City Interest under William III. Having invested in the Reformation at a time when the Reformation is a gambling stock, they nurse the security with a solicitude which title-deeds have done more to inspire than the New Testament, and are zealous to lay up for themselves treasures in Heaven, as the best insurance for the treasures which they have already accumulated on earth. A man who looks from the window of his new mansion on the timber in his new park may well think it worth the sacrifice of many masses. Though the economic effect of endowing our landed gentry is not reducible to figures, it is not rash to say that men who have sprung into wealth by suddenly purchasing new estates will make those estates pay. And this means that ultimately the cost will be borne by their tenants. That the new proprietors will be extraordinarily sensitive to attacks on the rights of property goes without saying. The lectures[709] delivered to the peasants by the nouveaux riches of 1549 on the wickedness of agrarian spoliation have an irony which is eternal.
Apart from the special interest which the purchasers of the estates of monastic and gild estates had in keeping a completely free hand over their disposal, the normal organisation of English local government made effective State interference very difficult. As has often been pointed out, its peculiar strength lay in the success with which it made the ordinary relationships between social classes the machinery for executing the mandates of the State, by entrusting administration, not to officials of the Central Government, but to persons who already possessed local authority, and who were confirmed in it, rather than given it, by the Crown. Such a system was favourable to the development of representative government and of political freedom, because it strengthened instead of repressing the local initiative on which the success of representative government ultimately depends. But the very absence of bureaucracy had the disadvantage that it made it almost impossible to enforce the regular administration of the law, whenever it conflicted with the local interests of classes who sat on the county bench. A not unimportant chapter in English history is contained in the complaint of the Norfolk rebels that the legislation of the last fifty years had been “hidden” from them by the Justices of the Peace. The account of the proceedings of the Commission of 1548, which had to drag information out of juries packed with the employees of enclosing landlords, and from witnesses who gave it under threat of eviction—above all, the pained amazement of a great landowner who found that the Commission declined to accept evidence from his servants as unbiassed—is a specimen so typical, that, if it were found in isolation, we could hardly fail to fit it back into its English context.[710] Hales, the one statesman whom the agrarian problem produced, put his finger on the root of the difficulty in the third Bill which he introduced into Parliament in 1548. The substance of its proposals, though sufficiently rigorous to modern notions, was not in itself more drastic than others which actually became law. Its novelty lay in the machinery by which it was to be enforced. Surveys of pastures were to be made annually by the curate and two men of every parish, and those breaking the law were to be presented for trial. In other words, the initiative in returning offences was to be taken by those chiefly interested in preventing them. According to Hales, it was the last provision for making the administration of the Statute a reality which Parliament found intolerable.[711]
Must we, then, dismiss the efforts of the Tudor and Stuart statesmen to soften the harshness of the agrarian revolution as a mere piece of solemn futility? The simplicity of the solution makes it a tempting one; but it is too simple to be true. In the first place we must notice that our literary evidence is one-sided, because it is fullest for just those years during which an exceptional freedom from restraint was enjoyed by the great landlords. It is inevitable that Latimer and Hales should often be quoted. But one cannot argue from comments on the uselessness of legislation, uttered at a time when the Statutes against enclosing were virtually repealed, to show that the law was equally ineffective under Elizabeth and her two successors. And, in the second place, to hold that the frequent intervention of the Council had no result is really an unjustifiably high-handed proceeding. It runs counter to most of what we know of the administration of the period. A Statute might be a dead letter, but a letter from the Council was meant to be obeyed. By 1552 the Government has discovered the uselessness of relying for the enforcement of the law on the intervention of superior lords, and places its administration in the hands of special Commissioners directly responsible to the Central Government. Such a view runs counter to the opinion of the peasants and of the upper classes. The victims of agrarian oppression recognise that though they have little to hope from the local authorities, who are their landlords and employers, the Government’s policy is on the whole favourable to them, and they deluge it with appeals for protection. The justices are naturally no friends to that policy. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they are by no means the independent autocracy which they became later, and are watched closely by the Privy Council. From Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and the west of England, they send returns to the Government of their action,[712] and the Government is quite ready, as we have seen, to revise the action of its delegates when it thinks they have been biassed by personal interests. In Yorkshire the juries of several townships present offenders before the justices. The authorities of Southampton[713] take steps to put the Acts against enclosure into force. The authorities of Norfolk[714] request that they may enjoy the exemption which has been granted them. When in 1597, a year in which legislation against enclosures is in the air, the Earl of Huntingdon asks the burgesses of Leicester to return his nominee to Parliament, they refuse bluntly to do anything of the kind, on the ground that the candidate in question is “an encloser himself and therefore unlikely to redress that wrong in others.”[715] The courts hear a large number of cases dealing with offences committed under the enclosing Statutes.[716] Individuals obtain special permission, either by royal license or by Act of Parliament, to use as pasture land which, like undrained marshes, is obviously unsuitable for ploughing. No one who is reported as having taken part in the Parliamentary discussions of proposed legislation in the closing years of Elizabeth suggests that it must necessarily be a dead letter. The chief fear that seems to have been felt was lest it should prove too effective. In introducing two Bills against enclosure and depopulation in 1597, Bacon apologised to the great landlords for taking action which was likely to prejudice their interests. When the question of continuing the Act against depopulation, which was in force in 1601, was under consideration in the House of Commons, both the members who argued for continuance and those who argued for repeal, assumed that the law was being administered in practice, one speaker urging that it had the result of keeping so much land in tillage as to destroy the farmer’s profits by causing excessive supplies of grain to be placed on the market in any but the worst years; another that it pressed hardly on the small farmer, who could not easily find the capital needed to sow as much land as he was legally bound to plough.[717] The ablest and most fully reported speech[718] which has come down to us is that of an anonymous member, who, while approving of the principle of the Bill, attacked it as too loosely drafted to meet the situation. His criticisms are those of a man who understands his subject, and are on just those points of detail which, though important in a measure which is to work, would not be worth considering at all if anything like effective interference were out of the question. After commending the clauses which excepted from the provisions of the Bill land lying temporarily fallow, and which punished the purchasers as well as the original converter of arable which was turned into pasture, he goes on to point out that loopholes have been left in the measure which are likely to stultify its effect. The exemption of Crown lands from its operation will encourage enclosing landlords to exchange properties with the Crown, and then take on lease as tenants the land which they have handed over, since by doing so, they will escape the risk of prosecution. The persistent lobbying of the interests affected—“the ears of our great sheepmasters do hang at the doors of this house"—has resulted in the fine for enclosing being placed as low as 10s. per acre, which is ridiculously disproportionate to the profits to be made by enclosures. The clause excluding from the reconversion prescribed in the Bill lands mown for hay plays into the hands of the enclosers by facilitating the winter feeding of their sheep. The failure to limit the acreage which a man may keep in his own hands will discourage the creation of small holdings. At a later date there is the same belief, both among those who approve, and among those who dislike, enclosure, that enclosing can be checked, at any rate, by the Government. In the keen controversy over enclosures which raged under the commonwealth the opponents of further restriction urged that the mere threat of legislation had resulted in checking agricultural enterprise.[719] Harrington,[720] a specialist, not to say a faddist, on agrarian policy, bases his interpretation of the history of the preceding century on the supposed success of the Tudors in keeping the small cultivator on the soil. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the golden age of the enclosing landlord was just about to dawn, some dim memory of the earlier State policy seems in parts of England to have survived. “Why,” asked a foreign traveller,[721] “do your farmers not keep separate closes under turnips to feed sheep in the new approved manner?" “Partly,” answer the peasants, “because there is a common rotation of crops which all must follow. But the principal reason of all is that on a common land no one has freedom to enclose his strips without a special permission and Act of Parliament.”
What weight is to be attached to this body of opinion that enclosure and conversion to pasture were in practice checked by the opposition of the Government, it is not easy to say. If it is hardly compatible with the view that interference was entirely ineffective, it nevertheless need not imply anything more than a temporary retardation of the movement on those special occasions and in those particular parts of the country that were the object of peculiar attention. The test of comparison with facts by which one would like to try it is difficult to apply. Our knowledge of the real extent of enclosure in the sixteenth century is too scanty to permit of our following with confidence the line of argument which has been ingeniously worked out by Miss Leonard,[722] and which, starting from the indisputable fact that in those Midland counties where enclosure had been felt most acutely in the sixteenth century, there was still much land unenclosed in the seventeenth and eighteenth, suggests that the explanation is to be found in its temporary cessation under the authoritative pressure of the Tudor and Stuart Governments. Nevertheless, without going beyond our evidence, we may venture to put forward two propositions. The first is that it is extremely improbable that the anti-enclosing policy which we have traced succeeded in altering permanently or on a large scale the course of economic development. That suggestion is surely incredible in view of the continuance of the complaints against enclosure, and of what we know of the slack and biassed routine of rural administration. To expect the justices to stop enclosing, unless actually compelled to do so, was almost as Utopian as it was to expect them to administer the early Factory Acts two centuries later. The second is that the intervention of the Government certainly mitigated the hardships of the movement to the rural classes. The protection which the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests offered to the equitable interests of tenants, while it could not turn the general course of events, tempered its harshness to individuals. A landlord who was determined to depopulate could hardly in the long run be prevented from succeeding in his object. But he might have to wait till leases or life tenancies had expired, instead of being able to clear his estate at one sweep. He might be compelled, as the St. Johns[723] were in the reign of Henry VIII., as Sir John Yorke in 1553, or Lloyd under Elizabeth, to bind himself to respect the titles of the existing generation of tenants. In the same way the occasional campaigns undertaken for the reconversion of pasture to arable, while they could not turn the tide, almost certainly slackened its course. There is no way of escaping from the positive evidence which we possess that in parts of the country houses which had been pulled down were rebuilt, and that land which had been turned from arable to pasture was turned back again, at the command of the Government, from pasture to arable. We have already described the doings of the justices under James I. Look for a moment at the similar agitation which was started in 1630. The agrarian policy of the Council is seen at its worst under Charles I., because the whole of it is smeared with the trail of finance. Some of the offenders were allowed to compound upon payment of a fine, and one’s first inclination is to believe that the Commissions of 1632, 1635, and 1636 were nothing but one of those odious financial engines, like the revival of forest claims and the exaction of fines for knighthood, by which Charles tried to dispense with Parliamentary taxation. That they were this among other things is certain. That they were nothing more than this must be denied, for we have clear evidence from enclosers themselves to the contrary. They do not only, like Lord Brudenell, write to the Council begging that their fines may be reduced from £1000 to £500, and explaining that “the enclosures made within man’s memory amount not to the decay of one farm.”[724] They are not only haled before the Star Chamber to be rebuked by Laud.[725] They beg to be allowed to pay a fine instead of being imprisoned. They reconvert pasture to arable. In Northamptonshire[726] a man turns thirty-five acres of arable into pasture. But he ploughs up ninety-five acres of ancient pasture to set off against it. From Nottinghamshire[727] comes a letter explaining that the petitioner has complied with the orders of the Commissioners of Depopulation to throw open all his enclosures, and apologising humbly for keeping hedges round three acres on the ground that they are necessary to mark the boundaries.
On the whole one is inclined to regard the Government’s intervention in this matter as resembling in its effects the attempts which were made at the same time to fix prices and wages. It retarded, though it could not check altogether, economic changes. It imposed a brake which somewhat eased the shock of sudden movements. But when the hand of authority was removed, when Commissions were called in and justices ceased to be admonished by the Council, affairs swung back into their original position. A rough attempt to illustrate the occasional retardation of pasture-farming by these spasmodic attacks upon it is given in the diagram opposite.
The figures are taken from a list of Final Concords as to land lying mainly in Staffordshire, but occasionally in other counties as well. The period selected is one in which there were two agitations among the peasants, two important Acts against depopulation, and a Royal Commission. It will be seen that while some of the fluctuations in the percentages of arable and pasture bear no relation to any known activity on the part of the Government, the repeal in 1593 of the Acts for the maintenance of tillage comes as a climax to a well-defined increase in the percentage of pasture, the passage of the two Acts of 1599 is followed by a similar though less marked rise in the percentage of arable, and the riots of 1607, which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission, appear to be accompanied by another increase in the area under the plough. Of course the acreage represented is absurdly small, and it is possible that the apparent correlation is a mere coincidence. Still, one is inclined to think that the fluctuations on the chart fit in very well with what we know from other sources of the temporary effect and subsequent ineffectiveness of these transient eruptions of governmental activity. The creation of social habits by continuous pressure, such as is exercised by modern states through their paid inspectorates, is quite foreign to the ideas of the age. The Government, when it is most active, never gets beyond making an example of a few notorious offenders whose sins are sufficiently black to bring in good round sums to the Exchequer, and having vindicated the majesty of the law and pocketed their fines, it leaves the small fry to wonder, and hastily set their house in order against the coming of the Judges of Assize, and then gradually to slide back into the ancient ways when the storm has blown over. After all, the fact that A was punished for enclosing last year is in itself sufficient to make it extremely probable that this year B will escape.
