[55] e.g. the prayer for merchants in Edward VI.’s Book of Private Prayer: “So occupy their merchandise without fraud, guile, or deceit.”
[56] Coventry Leet Book, Part III., pp. 679–680.
[57] See Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I. c. 23: “These are they which in the old world got that honour to Englande ... because they be so manie in number, so obedient at the Lorde’s call, so strong of bodie, so hard to endure paine, so courageous to adventure ... these were the good archers in times past, and the stable troops of footmen that affaide all France that would rather die all, than once abandon the knight or gentleman their captaine,” and Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), pp. 11–13.
[58] E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Starkey’s Dialogue, Part II., p. 49: “To the handes are resemblyd both craftysmen and warryarys.... To the fete the plowmen and tyllarys of the ground, beycause they, by theyr labour, susteyne and support the rest of the body.”
[59] In this essay we are concerned only with the landholders, not with the wage workers. The relative number of persons holding land and of agricultural labourers without land is an important question on which it is not easy to get light. The surveys and rentals, a species of private census invaluable in giving information about the holders of property, tell us only the number of householders, and as the labourers employed in agriculture (like many of those employed in manufacturing industry) usually lived on the premises of their masters, they do not enable us to calculate the number of those living entirely by their labour. Still, since they include all tenants, whether holders of a cottage only or holders of land in addition, they enable us to say what proportion of heads of families held land, and what proportion had none, or none except a garden. This is of some importance. A tenant holding even as much as fifty acres can hardly have employed more than two or three agricultural labourers, and most tenants held less than this; so that in those places where the cottagers form a small proportion of the whole population we may conclude that a large proportion of the villagers were landholders (for the figures on this point see the tables given below).
Unfortunately, we do not possess for the sixteenth century even such a loose estimate as was made by Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth. In 1688 he calculated that there were 16,560 families of nobles and gentlemen, 60,000 families of yeomen, 150,000 of farmers—presumably on lease—400,000 cottagers and poor, 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, obviously a very rough calculation, the most remarkable feature of which is the large number of yeomen. Poll Tax returns might give us the kind of information we require, since they included, or were meant to include, the whole population above a certain age, irrespective of whether they held land or not, and sometimes divided them roughly into classes. Thus on sixteen manors in the Norfolk Hundred of Thingoe the return to the Poll Tax of 1381 showed a population of 870 male and female inhabitants over fifteen years of age, of whom 9 were set down as knights, 53 as farmers, 102 as artificers, 344 as “labourers” (laboratores), 362 as “servants” (servientes). If, as is not improbable, the first four classes held land (the labourers being serfs working on the demesne), and the last consisted of farm and household employees who did not, this would put the landholding classes on these manors at a little more than half the total population over the age of fifteen. But this return was probably falsified to escape the tax; see Powell, The East Anglian Rising, App. I., and Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381. The figures published by Dr. Savine (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i., pp. 223–226) of the monastic population show that on the eve of the dissolution there were residing in 22 houses in Leicester, Warwick, and Sussex, 255 “hinds” and 76 “women servants,” presumably employed on the demesne farm, which gives an average to each farm of about 11 hinds and about 3 women servants. In the Kentish Nunnery of St. Sexburge, Sheppey, the demesne farm employed a carter, a carpenter, two cowherds, a thatcher, a horse keeper, a malter, three shepherds. Best, describing his farming arrangements in Yorkshire in 1641 (Surtees Society, vol. xxxiii.), states: “Wee kept constantly five plowes goinge, and milked fowerteene kine, wherefore wee had always fower men, two boyes to go with the oxeploughe, and two good lusty mayde-servants.” These were in each case only the permanent staff, and their comparatively small numbers suggest that much work must have been done by men who worked on their own land and only occasionally helped on the demesne, i.e. that the proportion of landholders to non-landholders was high. This conclusion agrees with the evidence of the surveys, which show that, especially in the East of England, many of both the free and the customary tenants' holdings were so small that they could hardly have made a living out of them without working as wage-labourers as well, and also with other indications as to the classes in rural society; e.g. out of 3780 persons mentioned in Worcestershire recognizances, 1591–1643, as either “labourers,” “husbandmen,” or “yeomen,” 667 are entered as labourers, 1303 as husbandmen, 1810 as yeomen, the latter designation always, and the second usually, implying a holder of land (J.W. Willis Bund, Kalendar of the Sessions Rolls, 1591–1643, Part II.) On the other hand, conditions varied enormously from place to place. Where there was a considerable body of small landowners the number of hired labourers tended to be small, the work of cultivation being done by the holder and his family; e.g. we read of a manor in the seventeenth century where thirteen freeholders farmed 580 acres with the aid of only ten men-servants and shepherds before enclosure, and six or seven afterwards (Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure).
Some of the surveys supply us with extreme cases of the opposite kind, where the whole manor consists of two or three holdings or of even one great estate, and where almost the whole of the population must have been working for wages; these illustrate Harrison’s complaint that in many places “The land of the parish is gotten up into a few men’s hands; yea, sometimes, into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled betimes to be hired servants unto the others, or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door” (Withington’s edition of Elizabethan England, p. 21). A protest made to the Council from Norfolk in 1631 against its policy of trying to keep down prices by insisting that all corn should be sold in the open market points out that in “the woodland and pasture part” of the country there are “a great many handicraftsmen which live by dressinge and combinge of wool, carding, spinning and weaving, etc., and the Townes there commonly very great consisting of such like people and other artificers with many poor, and none of them all ordinarilye having any corn but from the market.” As to the “champion part” of the county, the document divides the rural population into three classes: “1. Tilth masters that have corn of their own growing and sell it to others. 2. Labourers that buy it at an under-price of them unto whom they worke. 3. Poore people that are relieved by good orders in every towne” (Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907). But the case of Norfolk was exceptional, owing to its position as the chief seat of the textile industries.
On the whole I am inclined to think that though the process of commutation which went on from 1350 onwards can hardly be explained except on the supposition that there was a considerable population of persons who held little land and were ready to eke out a living by working for wages, yet in the sixteenth century even the wage-working heads of families usually held a certain amount of land (even if only a garden) as well. This agrees with what we are told by contemporaries of the scarcity of wage-earners (see below, pp. 99–102). One may add, that in view of this, the fixing of maximum wages bears a somewhat different colour from that often given it. It was only practicable, one is inclined to say, because so few persons depended entirely on wages for a living. The social problem in the sixteenth century was not a problem of wages, but of rents and fines, prices and usury, matters which concern the small-holder or the small master craftsman as much as the wage-earner. The “working classes” were largely small property holders and small traders.
[60] The summary statement given above is liable to be misleading. The reader will find a fuller discussion of the questions arising in connection with it below in Part II., chap. iii.
[61] They include also tenants on the lands belonging to Cockersand Abbey, lying in many different parts of Lancashire, in 1503. For the sources from which this table is constructed and its defects, see [Appendix II.].