[215] Synge, The Playboy of the Western World.
[216] Quoted by Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, pp. [58–59]. He remarks “a labourer ... begins with one ‘land,’ then takes a second, a third, and so on,” and quotes Mr. Haggard’s statement that the “Isle of Axholme ... is one of the few places ... in England ... truly prosperous in an agricultural sense.”
[217] Customs like those of High Furness, together with the complaints as to the scarcity of agricultural labour, make one reflect on a fundamental question of economics, viz., the average age of marriage and its relation to the distribution of property and organisation of industry. It is well known that the age of marriage is influenced by (among other things) the age at which maximum earning power begins, e.g. to-day it is lower for the unskilled labourer than for the artisan, for the former reaches his prime earlier than the latter; lower for the artisan than for the professional man, because the latter takes longer than the former in getting together a practice or rising from a low initial salary. The difference is not primarily due to differences of thrift or foresight as between different classes, but to the fact that the deferring of marriage, which is prudent in (say) a lawyer, who does not reach his full earning power till thirty-five or later, is imprudent in (say) an engineer who has all the experience he needs at twenty-six or twenty-seven, and still more imprudent in the labourer, who reaches his full earning power at twenty-one or twenty-two, and in whom it falls off rapidly after he has passed the prime of life. When a large number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth century probably a majority) were small landholders or small masters, did the fact that they had to wait for the death of a parent to succeed to their holding, or (in towns) for the permission of a guild to set up shop (i.e. to reach their maximum earning powers) tend to defer the age of marriage? If the possibility of this being the case is conceded, ought we to connect the slow growth of population between 1377 and 1500 (on which all historians seem to be agreed) with the wide distribution of property, and ought we to think of the considerable increase in the landless proletariate which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as tending in the opposite direction? In the absence of statistics we cannot answer these questions. But I am inclined to argue that they are at any rate worth investigation. (i) Contemporary opinion shows that in the eyes of sixteenth century writers the problem of population was a problem of underpopulation. The prevalent fear is “lack of men” for military purposes. Starkey’s Dialogue speaks of it as “a consumption of the body politic,” and suggests as remedies to allow priests to marry, to forbid gentlemen to employ more serving men than they are able to “set forward” to matrimony (on the ground that “men whych in service spend theyr lyfe never fynd means to marry”), to endow with a house and a portion of waste land at a nominal rent persons who marry, to exempt from taxation all persons who have five children and less than a hundred marks in goods, to tax bachelors 1s. in the pound, and give the proceeds to “them which have more children than they be wel abul to nurysch, and partely to the dote of poor damosellys and vyrgins” (Part II. p. 8). Hales (p. lv. of Miss Lamond’s introduction to Commonweal of England) speaks of depopulation in a similar strain, as also does Harrison forty years later. There are some complaints as to excess of population in 1620 (see below, pp. [278–279]), but these do not become general till the very end of the seventeenth century (see Defoe, Giving alms no charity). (ii) The position of a son who acquires a holding when his parent dies is analogous to that of an apprentice who cannot set up as a master till given permission by the proper authorities. It is quite plain that in the eyes of the ordinary man in the sixteenth century one of the advantages of a system of compulsory apprenticeship was that it prevented youths marrying at a very early age. E.g. an Act (2 & 3 Philip and Mary) forbids the admitting of any one to the freedom of the city of London before the age of twenty-four, and enacts that apprentices are not to be taken so young that they will come out of their time before they are twenty-four. The reason alleged for this rule is the distress in the city of which “one of the chief occasions is by reason of the overhasty marriages and over soon setting up of householdes by the young folke of the city ... be they never so young and unskilful.” A petition of weavers states (Hist. MSS. Com., C.D. 784, p. 114): “Whereas by the former good laws of their trade no one could exercise the same until he had served an apprenticeship for seven years and attained the age of twenty-four, now in these disordered times many apprentices having forsaken parents and masters ... refuse to serve out their time, but before they are eighteen or twenty years old betake themselves to marriage." One may contrast the extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage of the people of Lancashire brought about by the early factory system, with its armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the wages earned immediately on reaching maturity (Gaskell, Artisans and Machinery, 1836, and The Manufacturing Population of Great Britain, 1833), and compare the results usually ascribed to the wide distribution of landed property in France. See also the remarks of Slater on the effect of the eighteenth century enclosing (The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields, p. 256), and Hasbach, History of the English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 120 n. 138–139, 178. Young ascribed “a great multiplication of births” to the fact that “the labourer has no advancement to hope” (Suffolk, 1797, p. 260); Duncombe, “The practice of consolidating farms ... tends to licentiousness of manners" (Herefordshire, p. 33). A witness before the Select Committee on Emigration, 1827, stated, “The labourers no longer live in farm houses as they used to do, where they were better fed and had more comforts than they now get in a cottage, in consequence there was not the same inducement to early marriage" (qu. 3882). In the absence of direct statistical evidence all we can say is (i) that when persons look forward to entering on property or setting up as small masters their point of maximum earning power is later than it is when they can earn the standard rate of the trade at twenty-two or twenty-three; therefore (ii) that the average age of marriage is likely to be higher in a society composed largely of small property owners than in one composed largely of a propertyless proletariate.
[218] See [Appendix II.]
[219] It must be remembered, however, that there was pasture on the one field which every year lay fallow, and that the amount of this does not appear in the figures given below.
[220] Camden Society, Norden, Speculum Britanniæ, Part I., Intro.: “And these commonly are so furnished with kyne that their wives twice or thrice a week conveyeth to London mylke and butter, cheese, apples, pears, frutmentye, hens and chickens, baken, and other country drugs ... and this yieldeth them a large comfort and relief.”
[221] See The Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurers, 1594: “It is a common practice in this country, if a poore man come to borrow money of a maltster, he will not lend any, but tells him, if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of fore-hand buyers; the man being driven by distresse sells his corn far under foote, that when it comes to be delivered he loses halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value. I have heard many of these fore-hand sellers say that they had rather allow after 20 pounds in the hundred for money, than to sell their fore-hand bargaines of corn. These are most extreme usurers.”
[222] A Discourse upon Usurie, by Thomas Wilson, 1584: “A lord doth lend his tenants money, with this condition that they shall plough his land, whether doth he commit usurie or no? I do answer that if he does not pay them for their labour, but will take the benefit of their labour for the use of his money, he is an usurer.”
[223] Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 2319, p. 27: “Juetta ... is a usuress, and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation.”
[224] Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 7881, p. 129, St. Saviour’s Hospital gives "20d to a poor man to buy seed for his land.”