The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

by R. H. Tawney

The figures for 1592–3 and 1593–4 have been combined, as the latter are too small to be given separately.

Such “occasional conformity" was, however, too much the rule in all economic matters that were the object of authoritative regulation—and few were not—to be by itself any cause for abandoning it. The real reason for the cessation of interference in the land question which we notice after 1640 is to be found, not in the fact that intervention had invariably proved too ineffective to be worth continuing, but in the change of policy caused by the unchecked domination of Parliament in domestic affairs. The victory of the Parliamentary forces over the Crown meant the triumph of the landed gentry over the only power which was strong enough to enforce the administration of unpopular Statutes in the teeth of their opposition. It prepared the way for the reign of the great landlord who regards himself as charged with a peculiar responsibility for promoting the needs of agriculture, which he alone is presumed to understand—and in fact, to do him justice, does sometimes understand very thoroughly—a weary Titan who pushes forward enclosure from a sheer sense of public duty. On the one hand there is a change in the standpoint from which agrarian policy is regarded. The aim of maintaining a prosperous peasantry becomes subordinate to that of obtaining the maximum output from the soil. This change materially affects the attitude adopted towards enclosure. The Tudor Governments had endeavoured to protect the rights of commoners, because commons were an indispensable adjunct to small-scale subsistence farming. The new view is that commons are waste lands which had much better be improved, and which are most likely to be improved if they pass into the control of men who have capital to spend upon them. Even under the Stuarts this doctrine begins to gather weight, and naturally so, for it both flattered their ambitious conception of the monarchy as a cornucopia whence all economic improvements should flow, and was in line with their general policy of trying to secure cheap food by regulating the supplies of grain. In 1623 Commissioners are busy improving Tiptree Heath, which squatters have occupied without any legal title.[728] In 1637 the King is approached by an influential syndicate which asks for a concession permitting it to reclaim the heaths and barren commons belonging to the Crown, and which displays a glowing prospectus of the advantages which will accrue in the shape of increased supplies of food-stuffs.[729] In 1629 the Commission of Sewers had engaged Vermuyden on his celebrated task of draining the great Level, and, in spite of the fierce opposition of the fenmen, the work was in 1637 adjudged to be completed.[730] All this is quite in the vein of the eighteenth century. It is quite in that vein also for a strong line to be taken against the wastefulness of those who impede good farming, even though the farmer be a grazier, by sowing a few acres here and a few acres there, instead of cultivating a compact holding; in short, by the immemorial system of strip cultivation. The last but one of the Statutes against depopulation[731] was itself the first expressly to authorise that exchanging of holdings for the purposes of more business-like husbandry, which, as we have seen, had been going on informally from an early date. In 1606 we get what may be called the first Enclosure Act of the modern pattern, under which certain Herefordshire parishes are allowed to separate and enclose one-third of the land lying in common in each parish.[732] In 1627 a case arising out of a dispute about fold-courses comes before the courts, and sound agricultural doctrine is laid down with a confidence of which Arthur Young himself might have approved. “This Court,” say the judges, “was now of opinion that the plowing and sowing of small quantities of land dispersedlye or disorderlye within ye shacks and winter feedinge of ye said ffouldcourses, and the refusal of a few wilfull persons to lett ye owners of ffouldcourses have their quillets of land (Llying intermixt in the places where ye sheep pasture is layd) upon indifferent exchange or other recompense for the same, are things very mischievous and will tend to ye overthrow of very many fould courses.”[733] Their opinion is enforced with a judgment decreeing an exchange of lands.

When the whole question comes up again towards the close of the Commonwealth, the old attitude is maintained by the opponents of enclosure, who protest, with all the fervour of Latimer, against the greed of landlords and the pauperising of commoners. But its defenders have overhauled their arguments, and the lines on which the controversy will be fought out for the next century and a half are already obvious. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Restoration commoners are lewd people, who would be much better employed if at work for wages. All beneath the “nobility and gentry" are “the poor,” and the poor themselves (it is well known) are of two kinds, “the industrious poor," who make a living by working for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who make a living by working for themselves. Christianity and patriotism require that the latter should enter some “productive employment,” and this can best be secured by excluding them from the commons on which their distressingly irregular livelihood depends. Even so Europeans to-day teach habits of industry to the African savage, by taxing him until he can no longer live upon the lands which Europeans desire to exploit. Moreover, the commercial spirit of the later seventeenth century is impatient of antiquated restrictions, and is already groping blindly after some formula which may prove them to be superfluous. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is best suited to produce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him a free hand to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim,” writes a pamphleteer, “that every one by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage. Whensoever corn bear a considerable rate, viz., wheat four or five shillings, and barley two shillings and sixpence, men may make more profit by ploughing their pasture, and consequently will plough for their own advantage.”[734] Hales had said something like this a hundred years before. He had said it to show the need of special measures to divert agricultural enterprise into beneficial channels. Now an identity between the interests of landowners and those of the public is assumed as part of a pre-established harmony, which human intervention may disturb, but which it is neither needed nor competent to secure. Authoritative statecraft fades out in the dawn of reason and the light of nature. With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men are steering for uncharted waters.

While opinion on the subject of enclosing was beginning to change even before the Civil War, the final blow at the maintenance of the old policy was struck by the destruction of the Court of Requests and Court of Star Chamber. The abandonment by Governments of all attempts to protect the peasantry against oppression was an indirect consequence of the victory of the Common Law over the prerogative jurisdiction of the Crown. The interference in agrarian matters of the administrative courts of the Tudor monarchy had always been detested by the landed gentry for the very reasons which made it popular with the peasantry. They were the last resort of men who could not get what they considered justice elsewhere. One finds a defendant in whose favour the Common Law Courts have given three decisions being sued again before the Court of Requests.[735] They were the only authority which could prevent a landlord from asserting his claims to a common or to a copyhold by means which the poorer classes found it impossible to resist. Complaints from aggrieved landowners that they are undermining the right of the lord of the manor to exercise jurisdiction over his own copyholders, by trying cases which ought to be heard in manorial courts, that they are interfering with the course of Common Law, that they make it impossible for a lord to “rule his lands" by the countenance which they lend to discontent, are not infrequent[736] in the sixteenth century, and both Wolsey and Somerset were in turn attacked by the upper classes for the favour which they showed to such unconstitutional interference with the rights of property. Such protests are the best proof that the Court of Requests and the Court of Star Chamber had exercised functions which were in some respects beneficial. The strictest constitutionalist will have some sympathy to spare for the address in which Lord Coventry in 1635 charges the Judges of Assize to “beware of the corruptions of sheriffs and their deputies, partiality of jurors, the bearing and siding with men of power and countenance in their country,” and to set on foot “strict inquiry after depopulation and enclosures, an oppression of a high nature and commonly done by the greatest persons that keep the juries under their awe, which was the cause there are no more presented and brought in question.”[737] Such words paint the ideal of Government by prerogative, parcere subjectis et debellare superbos, which may have floated before the minds of a Bacon or a Strafford, and which had been partially realised under the Government of Elizabeth. When set side by side with the actual practice of the Council under Charles I. they are its final and self-recorded condemnation. For we look for them to be made good in action, and we look, save during a few years, in vain. If much may be forgiven those who boldly do wrong believing it to be right, there is no mercy for “the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin" of a body which, believing a certain system of government to be right, entangles its execution with sloth, and makes a sordid financial instrument out of the very prerogative which itself has declared to be the gift of God for the protection of the poor. The defence which the Council and its courts had offered to the peasantry against economic evils, though real, was too irregular to do more than slightly mitigate the verdict which history has passed upon their employment in the hands of Charles I. Whether the peasants regretted their disappearance we do not know. To those contemporaries whose opinion counted, the occasional onslaughts made by the Council and Star Chamber upon enclosing landlords were an aggravation, not an extenuation, of the indictment brought against them. Though the Grand Remonstrance, in which the Long Parliament sought to unite all classes with a recital of grievance accumulated upon grievance, taunted the Government with its failure to check the conversion of arable land to pasture,[738] the authors of that tremendous indictment had no substitute to suggest for the interference by the Council with “freeholds, estates, suits, and actions,” which they denounced; and Laud, who, according to even a friendly critic, “did a little too much countenance the Commission for Depopulation,”[739] lived to be reminded in the day of his ruin of the sharp words with which he had barbed the fine imposed by that body upon an enclosing landlord.[740] The Court of Requests was never formally abolished, but from the closing decade of the sixteenth century it had been gradually stripped of its powers by prohibitions issued by the Common Law Judges, and forbidding plaintiffs to proceed with their cases before it, and after 1642 it quietly disappeared. With the destruction in 1641 of the Court of Star Chamber and the Councils of Wales and of the North, an end was put to the last administrative organs which could bridle the great landed proprietors. Clarendon, himself a relic of an age before the deluge, would seem to have added to his other offences by trying to revive the old policy in a world which would have none of it.[741] But the royalist squirearchy who in 1660 streamed back to their plundered manors, were, when their property was at stake, as sound constitutionalists as Hampden himself, and after 1688 that absorption of the “State” by “Society” which Gneist, a worshipper of the eighteenth century régime, dates with curious perversity from 1832, was, in his sense of the words, complete. Henceforward there was to be no obstacle to enclosure, to evictions, to rack-renting, other than the shadowy protection of the Common Law; and for men who were very poor or easily intimidated, or in enjoyment of rights for which no clear legal title could be shown, the Common Law, with its expense, its packed juries, its strict rules of procedure, had little help. Thus the good side of the Absolute Monarchy was swept away with the bad. Its epitaph was written by Locke:[742]—“The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent.” But it was forgotten as soon as it was written. For to the upper classes in the eighteenth century the possession of landed property by a poor man seemed in itself a surprising impertinence which it was the duty of Parliament to correct, and Parliament responded to the call of its relatives outside the House with the pious zeal of family affection.[Next Chapter]

FOOTNOTES:

[548] Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials. Sir William Paget to the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549.

[549] 4 Henry VII., c. 19.

[550] Journal of House of Commons, December 19, 1656. See Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Society, vol. xix.

[551] e.g. Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, 1773. See Levy, Large and Small Holdings, p. 41.