But after all, the profits arising from favourable economic circumstances may be of very little advantage to the mass of cultivators. They may simply be handed on to the landlord in the shape of increased rents. At a time when, both in Ireland and Scotland, rents are being fixed by public tribunals, we are not likely to forget that the profitableness of agriculture has no necessary connection with the prosperity of tenants. Trade may be increasing, and the return from the land may be growing, and yet those things may profit the farmers and peasants very little, unless they have some security that they will not see them drained away in increased payments for their land. It is important, therefore, to consider how far rents were competitive and how far they were customary, how far the tenants held the surplus due to economic progress, and how far it passed to the landlord.
Some light is thrown on the general situation by the following table[234]:—
[Table VI]
| Manor. | Rents. | |||
| 1295–1308 | 1568 | |||
| 1. South Newton. | £ 13 19 3½ | £14 4 8 | ||
| 1347 | 1421 | 1485 | 1628 | |
| 2. Ingoldmells | £ 61 9 4 | £ 71 10 3 | £ 72 6 8 | £ 73 17 2 |
| 1287 | 1567 | |||
| 3. Crondal | £ 53 7 0 | £103 2 8¾ | ||
| 1351 | 1567 | |||
| 4. Sutton Warblington | £ 5 17 4¾ | £ 8 10 4 | ||
| 1295 | 1542 | |||
| 5. Aspley Guise | £ 7 8 4 | £ 10 5 10 | ||
| 1248 | 1567 | 1585 | ||
| 6. Birling | £ 9 2 6½ | £ 14 9 4 | £ 14 9 4 | |
| 1352 | 1478 | 1567 | 1580 | |
| 7. Acklington | £ 18 13 2 | £ 19 13 11 | £ 19 13 5 | £ 20 0 5 |
| 1483 | 1505 | |||
| 8. Cuxham | £ 9 9 3 | £ 8 9 3 | ||
| 1483 | 1600 | |||
| 9. Ibstone | £ 4 8 10 | £ 3 15 0½ | ||
| 1483 | 1567 | 1585 | 1702 | |
| 10. High Buston | £ 3 12 0 | £ 3 12 0 | £ 3 12 0 | £ 12 0 0 |
| 1539 | 1608 | |||
| 11. Amble | £ 22 14 6 | £ 16 0 5 | ||
| “The reign of King Henry VII.” | 1529 | |||
| 12. Malden | £ 4 9 10 | £ 4 6 7 | ||
| 1527 | 1588 | 1607 | ||
| 13. Kibworth | £ 23 6 7 | £ 26 15 1 | £ 19 14 5 | |
| 1304–5 | 1348–9 | 1373–4 | 1461 | |
| 14. Standon | £ 21 17 3 | £ 23 8 0 | £ 23 2 2½ | £ 33 3 3½ |
| 1317–8 | 1445–6 | Henry VIII. | ||
| 15. Feering | £ 29 10 9½ | £ 32 14 10 | £ 16 2 6½ | |
| 1321 | Henry VI. | 38–39 Henry VI. (1460) | ||
| 16. Appledrum | £ 7 0 11 | £ 10 11 6 | £ 13 14 10½ | |
| 1357 | 1501 | |||
| 17. Minchinhampton | £ 41 14 4 | £ 41 19 9 | ||
| (works) | £ 4 18 0 | |||
| 1280 | 1441 | 1547 | ||
| 18. Langley Marish | £ 20 16 5½ | £ 24 0 0 | £ 45 3 5¾ | |
| Henry VI. | 1521 | James I. | ||
| 19. Lewisham | £ 8 11 7 | £ 23 1 6½ | £ 90 3 3 | |
| Edward III.(?) | 15th century(?) | James I. | ||
| 20. Cuddington. For terms of Easter and Michaelmas | £ 6 4 2¾ | |||
| (for whole year) | £ 12 8 5½(?) | £ 15 16 7 | £ 9 19 8-3/4 | |
| 21. Isleworth | 1314–15 | 1386–7 | 1484–5 | |
| (Michaelmas) | £ 21 16 10 | £ 23 3 10-1/4 | £ 18 18 0 | |
| 22. Wootton | 1207–15 | 1607 | ||
| (free and customary tenants) | £ 9 11 2 | £ 13 19 0½ | ||
| 1271 | 1547 | |||
| 23. Speen | £ 6 13 9¾ | £ 17 4 2 | ||
| 1303–4 | 1314–15 | 1478–9 | ||
| 24. Schitlington | £ 29 13 0½ | £ 30 4 10 | £ 58 11 9 | (exclusive of ferm of land and ferm of manor). |
| 25. Cranfield (rent of vill | 1383–4 | 1474–5 | 1519–20 | |
| including ferm of lands) | £ 68 15 2 | £ 63 19 10¼ | £72 2 1¾ | |
| 1325–6 | 1482–3 | |||
| 26. Holywell | £ 12 18 2 | £ 22 7 8 | ||
| 1536 | 1803 | |||
| 27. Farleigh | £ 4 9 9 | £ 4 15 5 | ||
It will be seen that, in spite of some considerable increases, many rents were comparatively stationary during long periods of time. Moreover, in all probability, they were more stationary than is suggested by the statistics given above. For at the earlier dates there were works the value of which usually does not appear among the money rents. As time went on, more land was brought under cultivation and the demesne was leased; and though an attempt has been made to exclude the latter factor, it is not always possible to do so with certainty. The later figures, therefore, are, if anything, a more exhaustive account of the tenants' burdens than the earlier, and the small difference which exists between them on several manors is for this reason all the more remarkable.
These figures, it will be said, if they prove anything, prove too much. Do we not know that one of the grievances of the peasantry in the sixteenth century was the rack-renting of their holdings? Have we not the evidence of Fitzherbert, Latimer, and Hales to prove it? To these questions one must answer that it is certainly true that lords of manors did make a strenuous effort to get from their tenants increased payments for their holdings, and that the success which in many cases they achieved was one great cause of the decline in the condition of the peasantry. The matter, however, is not so simple as it appears. In respect of their liability to be competitively rented, some parts of the lands of a manor stood on a different footing from others; and again, fixed rents of customary lands were quite compatible with movable fines. An attempt will be made in subsequent chapters[235] to illustrate both the rack-renting of those parts of a manor where the rent was least controlled by custom, and the upward movement of the fines charged on the admission of tenants to their holdings. These figures of stationary or almost stationary rents must not, therefore, be taken as giving a full account of the relations between the customary tenants and the manorial authorities, as though there was no other way in which the latter could compensate themselves. Subject to this qualification, however, they do indicate that, at any rate on the customary holdings which formed the kernel of the manor, there is for a very long period little rack-renting. They suggest that the tenants' payments have a fixity which would make Arthur Young tear his hair. They fall in line with the statements of authorities like Fitzherbert and Norden as to the difficulty experienced by the manorial officials in forcing up rents of assize, that “are as in the beginning, neither risen nor fallen, but doe continue always one and the same.” And this fixity of rents is a factor in the prosperity of the peasantry which can hardly be over-estimated. When not neutralised by exorbitant fines, it means that any surplus arising on the customary tenements as the result of growing trade, or of the fall in the value of money, or of improved methods of agriculture, anything in fact which is in the nature of economic rent, is retained by the tenants. Secured by the custom of the manor, as by a dyke, against the competitive pressure which under modern conditions transfers so much of the fruits of progress into the hands of the owners of land and capital, they enjoy an unearned increment which grows with every growth in economic prosperity, and have an interest in their holdings almost similar to that of a landlord who is burdened only with a fixed rent-charge like the English land tax. One of the best established generalisations of economics, ground into the English people by thirty years of misery, is that the effect of agrarian protection is to make a present to landlords. But agrarian protection itself wears a different complexion when the rise in rents which it produces is not transferred to a small and wealthy class of absentee owners, but retained by thousands of men who are themselves cultivating the soil.
Lest such a picture should seem to be drawn too much in the spirit of the economic theorist, let us make its meaning more precise by pointing out that the retention of the unearned increment by copyhold tenants was a fact of which the manorial authorities were perfectly well aware, and the results of which they were sometimes at pains to estimate arithmetically by setting side by side with the actual rent paid the rent which the holdings would fetch if put up to competition. Four examples may be given. At Amble,[236] in 1608, the surveyor gives the rent of the customary tenants as £16, 0s. 5d., and “the annual value beyond rent” as £93, 4s. 4d. On the great manor of Hexham[237] in the same year the rents of the 314 copyhold tenants amounted to £126, 4s. 8-1/4d.; the “value above the oulde Rentes” was £624, 4s. 1d. In the various townships of the manor of Rochdale[238] part of the land was rack-rented. But a great deal of it was held at payments which left the tenant a substantial margin between the rent which he paid to the king and the letting value of the land, a margin which varied from 2d. an acre in parts of Wardleworth, to 6d. an acre in parts of Wardle, 8d. an acre in Walsden, and 10d. an acre in Castleton. On the manor of Barkby[239] in Leicestershire the difference was still more striking. The rents paid by free and customary tenants together amounted in 1636 to £11, 8s. 7-1/2d.; the value of their holdings was put by the surveyor at £215, 1s. 6d. And, of course, the fact that these rentals come from the very end of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the seventeenth, centuries, makes the evidence which they offer of the inability of manorial authorities to insist on copyhold rents keeping pace with the rising value of land, when they had every motive to enforce such correspondence if they could, all the more significant. For a century they have been screwing up rents wherever they can, and here are tenants, who, as far as rents go, put 6d. in their own pockets for every 1d. they give to the landlord. Let us repeat that these figures, striking as they are, would, if taken by themselves, give a misleading impression of the position of the copyhold tenants. Even when the lord of a manor cannot break the barrier opposed by manorial custom to a rise in rents, he may be able to dip his fingers in the surplus by raising the fines charged on admission; he may be all the more exacting in screwing the last penny out of those holdings where the rent is not fixed by custom. But though we must not forget the other side of the shield, though the very fixity of rents on many manors should make us scrutinise other conditions very carefully, we must not forget either that a tenant whose rent is unaltered for 200 or 250 years, a tenant who, after a period of sweeping agrarian changes in which a bitter cry has gone up against the exactions of landlords, is paying a fifth, or a sixth, or even an eighteenth of what could be got for his holding in the open market, is a tenant whom most modern English farmers would envy. Whatever his other disadvantages he has at any rate one condition of prosperity. He will not be eaten up by rack-renting. No wonder that such a man can accumulate capital and buy up land to add to his holding. No wonder that he can sublet parts of it at a profit. No wonder that in the day of agrarian oppression the wealthier peasantry stands stubbornly against it, that they can carry cases from one court to another, and that there are manors where they boast that "20[240] of them would spend 20 score pounds" in fighting an unpopular landlord. On the whole, the individual cases of enterprise and prosperity among the customary tenants of the fifteenth century do fit into the view that the economic environment was favourable to the peasantry. They may be regarded as symptoms, not exceptions.
Here, perhaps, we should stop. What manner of men these were in that personal life of which economics is but the squalid scaffolding; what stars threw for them their beams on that tremendous whirlpool of religion and politics into which Europe was plunging, we cannot say. Of the hopes and fears and aspirations of the men who tilled the fields which still give us in due season their kindly fruit, we know hardly more than of the Roman plebs, far less than of the democracy of Athens. Yet these men too had their visions. Their silence is the taciturnity of men, not the speechlessness of dumb beasts.