The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

by R. H. Tawney

“Item to the xiiith we saye that we knowe not of any deutyes or rentys withdrawn from the lordshippe.

“Item to the xiiiith we saye that we never knewe nor hearde any heryott payde for freeholde at the dethe of the freholder.

“Item to the fyfteneth we say that the freholder hathe never payde relief at alienacion, but at deathe only.

“Item to the xvith we saye that a copyholder dying his heir being wythin the age of xiiii yeres the custody of the body and lande oughte to be comytted by the lorde to the nexte of the kyn to whom the inheritance may not dyscende.”

In themselves these customs are not in any way remarkable, except perhaps for the uniform favour which they show to the interests of the tenants. They might be paralleled from those of scores of other manors. What is worth noticing is the precision of the rules laid down. The relations between the lord and the tenants are settled with the definiteness of a sort of great collective bargain.

It would be going beyond the scope of this essay to enter upon the large question, on which so much learning has been expended, of the respective parts played in manorial origins by the communal organisation of villagers for the purpose of self-government in their agrarian affairs, and by the authoritative pressure of superior authorities for the purpose of using the village as the basis of a financial and political system. But one may point out that facts such as have been quoted above in illustration of the rule of custom cannot easily be fitted into any theory which regards the economic arrangements of the manor as the result simply of a system imposed from above, and which treats the customary rights of the peasants as the outcome of concessions made by lords from time to time in their own interests, the revocation of which involved no larger difficulties than necessarily surround the alteration of practices sanctioned by long use. However much the organisation of village life may have been stereotyped by the pressure directed upon it by the desire of the manorial authorities to extract rents and services on an unvarying plan, one cannot trace it altogether to its subordination to such external forces, because the custom of the manor acts as a restriction which impedes the free action of lords themselves and their agents, even when they are most anxious to break through its meshes. This is seen more clearly perhaps in the sixteenth century than in earlier periods, for the very reason that the sharp collision of interests between lords and tenants makes it more possible to distinguish those parts of manorial custom which represent the economic interests of the tenants, from those which represent the power of the manorial authorities imposed upon them. Under the latter heading would fall the rules as to heriots and reliefs, rules forbidding waste, rules requiring tenants to pay “for the rushes which they gather on the lord's common,”[250] or to perform the surviving remnants of labour services, while a rule such as that of High Furness, forbidding the division of holdings to such an extent as to prevent the discharge of services or the obtaining of an adequate living by the occupier, may be regarded as a compromise in which the interests of both lord and tenant receive consideration. Under the former may be placed the custom which fixes rents, and, on some fortunate manors like Bushey, fixes fines to be paid on admission, sanctions the sub-letting of copyholds and the felling of timber, and allots rights of pasture to each arable holding. Not all of these, of course, stand upon the same footing of importance. The right to cut wood is much less essential than the right to graze cattle. But some of them, at any rate, like rights of common pasture, seem to be bound up with the very existence of the village as an agricultural community, and all of them are dictated by the interests of the peasants in protecting themselves against encroachments, as clearly as are those of the first type by the desire of lords to make the manor a source of profit to themselves. It is scarcely possible to account for the obstacles put by manorial customs in the way of changes which would benefit the lord and be detrimental to the tenant, except on the supposition that they are rooted in something more indestructible than the mere concession of privileges which long use has solidified and hardened; something which can only be found in the fact that they are an essential part of the life of the village, to which the lord himself, as a condition of extracting revenue from it, is almost bound to conform.

This brings us to our original point, the way in which the whole social environment of all the tenants, except the freeholders, who do not need the protection of custom, and the leaseholders,[251] who cannot get it, is dependent upon the custom of the manor. Fraught with modern associations as it is, the phrase “collective[252] bargain” is perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing what the custom of the manor means to the peasants themselves. Of course it is much more than this. The custom has the sanction of immemorial antiquity. The phrase “time out of mind” is no mere piece of idle rhetoric. The stable self-perpetuating conditions of economic life create a sort of communal memory, in which centuries are focussed. There were villages where, in the reign of Elizabeth, the effects of the Great Plague[253] were still dimly remembered. But regarding the matter from the point of view of the practical working of village life, we shall not be far wrong if we think of the peasants as a body of men who are more or less organised, and of the custom as a system of common rules which regulates the relations between them and the lord. And it is evident that the custom of the manor, at any rate in our period, is a safeguard of the tenants' interests rather than of those of the manorial authorities. It is not only that the changes which followed the Great Plague have set the peasants free from the most irksome customary restrictions, but, further, that, in the sixteenth century, it is the lord who wants to make innovations and the tenants who resist them, and that it is therefore the latter who stand to gain most by clinging to custom. The custom sets up a standard by which encroachments can be opposed, by which the village as a whole can put a solid barrier in the way of change, by which blacklegging (in the shape of one man taking a holding over the head of another) can be prevented. Competitive forces have, it is true, been gradually undermining custom, and by the sixteenth century an increasing number of tenants have the terms on which they take their holdings settled by the higgling of the market without reference to any authoritative rule. Nevertheless, as far as the copyholders, who are the kernel of the manor, are concerned, competition is held in check by the fact that, on certain fundamental matters, there is a common understanding between the peasants, which is recognised by the lord himself. The manorial authorities cannot bargain with the tenants one by one. They have to deal with the villagers as men who are “organised,” who are members of a society, who know what they have to expect in the way of heriots and rents and fines, and who will be supported by village opinion in resisting innovations. On occasion the peasants will strike. On occasion they will force their landlord to arbitration.[254] One might almost say that the customary tenants are trade unionists to a man. Again, who shall determine what the custom is? The court rolls will throw light on certain points, and occasionally we find lords appealing to them successfully in order to upset the tenants' claims. But on many matters there is no guide but tradition; the exponents of tradition are the ancient inhabitants; the lord has to ask them to expound it, as he does the tenants of Bushey. Can we doubt that this was a powerful check on autocratic action on his part? Lords come and go. But the custom of the manor endures, and probably loses nothing in the telling.

If, then, we ask what the custom means to the peasantry, we must think not of the “forbidding, stale, and meagre ways,” which is what the word custom too often suggests in the twentieth century, but of the phrase “ancient customs and liberties,” which is so common in the charters of Boroughs. The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom which most concerns the mass of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from which they draw their political ideas. They cannot conceive the state except as a very great manor. Their idea of good government is the enforcement of an idealised customary.[255]

Having said this we can say little more. There is no standard by which we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village life of the sixteenth century—and England is all villages—would still be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller’s sketches of modern England, yet, like a traveller’s sketches, possessing a certain value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion selects for emphasis.

One is encouraged in one’s belief in the comparative prosperity of a large number of the peasantry in the earlier sixteenth century by the comments which the writers of the periods pass upon it, even after a decline has already begun. The picture we get is of an open-handed, turbulent, large-eating and deep-drinking people, much given to hospitality and to merriment both coarse and refined; according to modern standards very ignorant, yet capable of swift enthusiasm, litigious, great sticklers for their rights, quick to use force in defence of them, proud of their independence, and free from the grosser forms of poverty which crush the spirit. The latter feature strikes everybody. Foreign visitors[256] notice with amazement the outward signs of wealth among the humbler classes. English writers, though their tone becomes sadder and sadder as the century proceeds, are never tired of boasting of it. Even in the eighties of the sixteenth century, when many of the peasants are much worse off than they had been a hundred years before, Harrison, though he paints in dark colours the ruinous effects of the agrarian changes, describes their hearty life with good-humoured gusto. “Both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficiently liberal and very friendly at their tables, and when they meet they are so merry without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them.... Their food consisteth principally of beef and such meat as the butcher selleth. That is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork. In feasting also the latter sort, I mean the husbandmen, do exceed after their manner, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such odd meetings, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one bringing such a dish, or so many with him, as his wife and he consult upon, but always with this consideration that the lesser friend shall have the better provision.” The peasants themselves have a good conceit of their position, and all unmindful of the whirligig of time and its revenges, contrast it with that of their class in France, where women labour like beasts in the fields, where men go in wooden shoes or no shoes at all, where the people drink water instead of ale, eat rye bread and little meat, and have not even the heart, like honest Englishmen, to rob the rich who oppress them, and that in the most fertile realm in all the world;[257] "Caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldome as they dyd to the Romaynes, and gevynge tribute for theyr meat, drinke, brede, and salte, which for theyr wayke personayges and tymorous hartes I may compare to the pigmies who waged battayle against the Cranes, so that I dare let slip a hundred good yeomen of England against five hundred of such ribaldry.”[258] Apart from the utterances of these good Jingoes, stray glimpses show us a people which not only is materially prosperous, but is also bold in action, and can produce men of high moral ardour. In the twentieth century the rural population is a bye-word for its docility. Its ancestors in the sixteenth were notorious for their restiveness. Hales, who knew and loved them, makes one of the characters in his dialogue[259] suggest that men at arms should be used to put down the disturbances made by them and by the unemployed weavers, only to answer, through the lips of another, that to call in the military will be the best way to make them riot all the more:—“Marie, I think that waye wold be rather occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be quenched, for the stomakes of Englishmen would never beare that, to suffer such injuries and reproaches as I knowe suche (i.e. the men at arms) use to do to the subjects of France.”