In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture, such as is often supplied for other classes of tenants, we may say with some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agricultural economy differed from that of the neighbouring copyholders,[75] and that the backbone of their living, except when the plots were so small as merely to supply them with garden produce, was therefore in almost every case tillage. If in any way they departed from the practice of their neighbours who were not freeholders, they did so probably only in being somewhat more alert and enterprising, somewhat more ready to use their security to break with custom and to introduce innovations. It is clear that many of them were very far from being tied down to the stagnant routine which some writers would have us believe is inseparable from all small scale farming. Often, indeed, they had enough initiative to realise the advantages of improved methods of cultivation, and on several manors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the freeholders agreed with each other to survey their lands and separate them, so that they could be cultivated in severalty.[76] In many cases, again, they extended their holdings, which were sometimes large and sometimes mere patches of a few acres, by acting as farmers for the lord of the manor and leasing[77] the demesne or part of it. Above all they had nothing to fear from the agrarian changes which disturbed the copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good deal to gain; for the rise in prices increased their incomes; while, unlike many copyholders and the tenant farmers, they could not be forced to pay more for their lands.

[Table II]

Column Key

ATotal Number of TenantsK35 and under 40 Acres.U85 and under 90 Acres.
BHouses or Cottages only L40 and under 45 Acres.V90 and under 95 Acres.
CUnder 2½ Acres. M45 and under 50Acres.W95 and under 100 Acres.
D2½ and under 5 Acres.N50 and under 55 Acres.X100 and under 105 Acres.
E5 and under 10 Acres. O55 and under 60 Acres.Y105 and under 110 Acres.
F10 and under 15 Acres. P60 and under 65 Acres.Z110 and under 115 Acres.
G15 and under 20 Acres. Q65 and under 70 Acres.A'115 and under 120 Acres.
H20 and under 25 Acres. R70 and under 75 Acres.B'120 and over.
I25 and under 30 Acres. S75 and under 80 Acres.C'Uncertain.
J30 and under 35 Acres. T80 and under 85 Acres.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZA'B'C'
Norfolk, six manors 139253312179102...212... ... ... ... ... ... ... .........12... ... ... ... 23
Suffolk, four manors85271810112... 113.........21............1........................8
Staffordshire, three manors2474231...12...11... ......... ... ... ... ...... ... ...2...............
Lancashire, three manors9...13111 ..................1..........................................1
Northants, four manors116101141395 114232......3.................................345
Wiltshire, one manor6.........2...... ...... ... ... 1... 1...1... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... 1...
Leicestershire, one manor111221...11............1.............................................2
Total, twenty-two manors390706933482217649473414.........1......14.........479

The apparent immunity of the freeholders in the face of movements which overwhelmed other groups of tenants suggests indeed that economic causes alone, which all classes, whatever the legal nature of their tenure, would have experienced equally, are not sufficient to explain the sufferings of the latter. The situation in our period is not like that which arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when widening markets throw all the advantages of increasing returns on the side of the large wheat farmer, and the yeomanry sell their holdings to try their fortunes in the rapidly growing towns. The struggle is not so much between the large scale and small scale production of corn as between corn growing and grazing. The small corn grower, provided he has security of tenure, can still make a very good living.[78] From the point of view of the economist all the smaller men, whether freeholders, leaseholders, or customary tenants, are in much the same position. The decisive factor, which causes the fortunes of the former class to wax, and those of the two latter to wane, is to be found in the realm not of economics but of law. Leaseholders and many copyholders suffer, because they can be rack-rented and evicted. The freeholders stand firm, because their legal position is unassailable. Here, as so often elsewhere, not only in the investigation of the past but in the analysis of the present, the trail followed by the economist leads across a country whose boundaries and contours and lines of least resistance have been fashioned by the labour of lawyers. It is his wisdom to recognise that economic forces operate in a framework created by legal institutions, that to neglect those institutions in examining the causes of economic development or the distribution of wealth is as though a geographer should discuss the river system of a country without reference to its mountain ranges, and that, if lawyers have wrought in ignorance of economics, he must nevertheless consult their own art in order to unravel the effect of their operations.

From the larger standpoint of social and political organisation the freeholders constituted an element in society the very nature of which we can hardly understand, because our modern life offers no analogy to it. We tend to draw our social lines not between small properties and great, but between those who have property and those who have not, and to think of the men who stand between the very rich and the very poor, the men of whom our ancestors boasted as the “Commons of England,” as men who do not own but are employed by owners. Independence and the virtues which go with independence, energy, a sober, self-respecting forethought, public spirit, are apt to become identified in our minds with the possession of wealth, because so few except the comparatively wealthy have the means of climbing beyond the reach of the stream of impersonal economic pressure which whirls the mass of mankind this way and that with the violence of an irresponsible Titan.

The sixteenth century was poor with a poverty which no industrial community can understand, the poverty of the colonist and the peasant. It lived in terror of floods and bad harvests and disease, of plague, pestilence, and famine. If one may judge by its churchyards, it had an infantile mortality which might make even Lancashire blush under its soot. Yet (and we do not forget the black page of the early Poor Law) it was possible for men who by our standards would be called poor to exercise that control over the conditions of their lives which is of the essence of freedom, and which in most modern communities is too expensive a privilege to be enjoyed by more than comparatively few. Such men were the freeholders. They formed a class which had security and independence without having affluence, which spanned the gulf between the wealthy and the humble with a chain of estates ranging from the few acres of the peasant proprietor to the many manors of the noble, which was not too poor to be below public duties nor too rich to be above them, which could feel that “it is a quietness to a man’s mind to dwell upon his owne and to know his heire certaine.”[79] Look for a moment at the jolly picture drawn by Fuller,[80] who wrote at the very end of the period with which we are dealing:—

“The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore whom the next age may see refined, and is the most capable of genteel impressions when the Prince shall stamp.... France and Italy are like a die which has no points between cinque and ace, nobility and peasantry.... Indeed, Germany hath her boors like our yeomen; but by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarify their blood. In England the temple of honour is closed to none who have passed through the temple of virtue.

“He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket. He is the surest landmark whence foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs, the gentry more floating after foreign fashions.