The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

by R. H. Tawney

INTRODUCTION[ToC]

Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. The economist can watch the reaction of growing markets on the methods of subsistence farming, the development of competitive rents, the building up of the great estate, and the appearance, or at any rate the extension, of the tripartite division into landlord, capitalist farmer, and landless agricultural labourer, the peculiar feature of English rural society which has been given so much eulogy in the eighteenth century and so much criticism in our own. From a legal point of view the great feature of the period is the struggle between copyhold and leasehold, and the ground gained by the latter. Before the century begins, leases for years, though common enough on the demesne lands and on land taken from the waste, are the exception so far as concerns the land of the customary tenants. When the century closes, leasehold has won many obstinately resisted triumphs; much land that was formerly held by copy of court roll is held by lease; and copyhold tenure itself, through the weakening of manorial custom, has partially changed its character. The copyholders, though still a very numerous and important class, are already one against which the course of events has visibly begun to turn, and economic rent, long intercepted and shared, through the fixity of customary tenure, between tenant and landlord under the more elastic adjustments of leasehold and competitive fines, begins to drain itself into the pockets of the latter. Politically, one can see different views of the basis of wealth in conflict, that which measures it by the number of tenants “able to do service” contending with that which tests it by the maximum pecuniary returns to be got from an estate, and which treats the number of tenants as quite a subordinate consideration. The former is the ideal of philosophical conservatives, is supported, for military and social reasons, by the Government, and survives long in the North; the latter is that of the new landed proprietors, and wins in the South.

And its victory results in much more than a mere displacement of tenants. It means ultimately a change in the whole attitude towards landholding, in the doctrine of the place which it should occupy in the State, and in the standards by which the prosperity of agriculture is measured, drawing a line between modern English conceptions and those of the sixteenth century as distinct as that which exists between those of the Irish peasantry and Irish landlords, or between the standpoint of a French peasant and that of the agent of a great English estate. The decline of important classes alters the balance of rural society, though the Crown for a long time tries to maintain it, and the way is prepared both for the economic and political omnipotence which the great landed aristocracy will exercise over England as soon as the power of the Crown is broken, and for the triumph of the modern English conception of landownership, a conception so repugnant both to our ancestors and to the younger English communities,[1] as in the main a luxury of the richer classes. If it had not been for the undermining of the small farmer’s position in the sixteenth century, would the proposal[2] to enfranchise copyholders have been thrown out in 1654, and would the enclosures[3] of the eighteenth century have been carried out with such obstinate indifference to the vested interests of the weaker rural classes? Would England have been unique among European countries in the concentration of its landed property, and in the divorce of its peasantry from [the] soil?

From a wider point of view the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century may be regarded as a long step in the commercialising of English life. The growth of the textile industries is closely connected with the development of pasture farming, and it was the export of woollen cloth, that “prodigy of trade,$rdquot; which first brought England conspicuously into world-commerce, and was the motive for more than one of those early expeditions to discover new markets, out of which grew plantations, colonies, and empire. Dr. Cunningham[4] has shown that the system of fostering the corn trade, which was embodied in the Corn Bounty Act of 1689, and which was a principle of English policy long after the reason for it had disappeared, was adopted in a milder form in the reign of Elizabeth with the object of checking the decline in the rural population. Again, new agricultural methods were a powerful factor in the struggle between custom and competition, which colours so much of the economic life of the period, and, owing to this fact, they produced reactions which spread far beyond their immediate effect on the classes most closely concerned with them. The displacement of a considerable number of families from the soil accelerated, if it did not initiate, the transition from the mediæval wage problem, which consisted in the scarcity of labour, to the modern wage problem, which consists in its abundance. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries municipal[5] authorities were engaged in a prolonged struggle to enforce their exclusive economic privileges against the rural immigrant who had lost his customary means of livelihood and who overcrowded town dwellings and violated professional byelaws; while the Government prevented him from moving without a licence, and when he moved, straitened[6] his path between the Statute of Inmates on the one hand and the House of Correction on the other. Observers were agreed that the increase in pauperism[7] had one capital cause in the vagrancy produced by the new agrarian régime; and the English Poor Law system, or the peculiar part of it providing for relief of the able-bodied, which England was the first of European countries to adopt, came into existence partly as a form of social insurance against the effect of the rack rents and evictions, which England was the first of European countries to experience. Whatever uncertainty attaches to the causes and effects of the agrarian problem, there can be no doubt that those who were in the best position to judge thought it highly important. If it is not a watershed separating periods, it is at least a high range from which both events and ideas descend with added velocity and definiteness. To the economic historian the ideas are as important as the events. For though conceptions of social expediency are largely the product of economic conditions, they acquire a momentum which persists long after the circumstances which gave them birth have disappeared, and act as over-ruling forces to which, in the interval between one great change and another, events themselves tend to conform.

A consideration of these great movements naturally begins with those contemporary writers who described them. Though the books and pamphlets of the age contain much that is of interest in the development of economic theory, their writers rarely attempted to separate economic from other issues, and economic speculation usually took the form of discussions upon particular points of public policy, or of a casuistry prescribing rules for personal conduct in difficult cases. Such a difficult case, such a problem of public policy, was offered by the growth of competitive methods of agriculture. The moral objections felt to the new conditions caused them to be a favourite subject with writers of sermons and pamphlets, and made the sins of the encloser, like those of the usurer, one of the standbys of the sixteenth century preacher. There is, therefore, a considerable volume of writings dealing with the question from the point of view of the teacher of morality. At the same time the political significance of the movement, and the fact that the classes concerned were important enough to elicit attempts at protection on the part of the Government, called forth a crop of suggestions and comments like those of More, Starkey,[8] Forest,[9] the author of the Commonwealth[10] of England, and, at a later date, Powell[11] and Moore.[12] Further, the new agricultural methods were explained by persons interested in the economics of agriculture, such as Fitzherbert,[13] Tusser,[14] Clarkson,[15] who surveyed the manors of the Earl of Northumberland in 1567, Humberstone[16] who did the same for those of the Earl of Devonshire, and Norden.[17] The accounts of surveyors, a dull but indispensable tribe, are reliable, as they are usually statements of facts which have occurred within their own experience, or at any rate, generalised descriptions of such facts. The same may be said of the evidence of John Hales, who was employed by the Government in investigating the question, and who had to explain it in such a way as to convince opponents, and to get legislation on this subject through a bitterly hostile Parliament. The description given by writers like Latimer,[18] Crowley,[19] and Becon[20] are valuable as showing the way in which the movement was regarded by contemporaries; but they are mainly somewhat vague denunciations launched in an age when the pulpit was the best political platform, and their very positiveness warns one that they are one-sided and must be received with caution. Still, they mark out a field for inquiry, and one may begin by setting out the main characteristics of the agrarian changes as pictured in their writings.

The movement originates, they agree, through the covetousness[21] of lords of manors and large farmers, who have acquired capital in the shape of flocks of sheep, and who, by insisting on putting the land to the use most profitable to themselves, break through the customary methods of cultivation. The outward sign of this is enclosing, the cutting adrift of a piece of land from the common course of cultivation in use, by placing a hedge or paling round it, and utilising it according to the discretion of the individual encloser, usually with the object of pasturing sheep. This is accompanied by land speculation and rack-renting, which is intensified by the land-hunger which causes successful capitalists,[22] who have made money in trade, to buy up land as a profitable investment for their savings, and by the sale of corporate property which took place on the dissolution[23] of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the gild estates. The consequence is, first, that there is a scarcity of agricultural produce and a rise[24] in prices, which is partly (it is supposed) attributable to the operations of the great graziers who control the supplies of wool, grain, and dairy produce, and secondly and more important that the small cultivator suffers in three ways. Agricultural employment is lessened. Small holdings are thrown[25] together and are managed by large capitalists, with the result that he is driven off the land, either by direct eviction, or by a rise in rents and fines, or by mere intimidation. At the same time the commonable[26] area, consisting of the common waste, meadow, and pasture of the manor is diminished, with the result that the tenants who are not evicted suffer through loss of the facilities which they had previously had for grazing beasts without payment. There is, in consequence, a drift into the towns and a general lowering in the standard of rural life, due to the decay of the class which formerly sent recruits to the learned professions, which was an important counterpoise to the power of the great landed proprietors, and which was the backbone of the military forces of the country.[27]

The picture drawn by the literary authorities suggests questions, some of which have been satisfactorily cleared up and some of which are still obscure. Dissertations as to method are usually more controversial than profitable, and we do not propose at this point to give any detailed account of the order in which these problems have been taken up by previous scholars, to pass any judgment upon the different kinds of evidence which they have used, or to offer any estimate of the value of their conclusions. If we are at all successful in our presentation of the subject, the reader will discover for himself the nature of the evidence upon which we have relied, and where we differ from and agree with the treatment of other writers. All we can attempt here is to give a short statement of some of the principal issues which demand attention, a statement which does not pretend to be exhaustive, but which may serve to indicate the more salient features of the ground over which we shall travel.

As to the counties mainly affected by the agrarian changes there is now substantial agreement. The work of Mr. Leadam[28] and Professor Gay[29] seems to have put the geographical distribution of the movement towards enclosure, or at least of those enclosures which produced hardships, upon a fairly firm basis. We can say with some confidence that it mainly affected the Midlands and eastern counties, from Berkshire and Oxfordshire in the south to Lincoln and Norfolk in the north-east, and that it was least important in the south-western counties of Cornwall and Devon, and in the south-eastern counties of Kent and Essex, much of which had been enclosed before the sixteenth century began, and in the northern counties of Lancashire, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland, and Durham, though, by the end of the sixteenth century, parts of the two latter counties, at any rate, were considerably affected by it. Again, the same authors have offered a statistical estimate of the extent of the movement which, while it is manifestly defective, and while it can only be used with great caution to support arguments as to the practical effect of enclosures, does offer some guide to the imagination, and is, at least, a valuable check on the conjectures made by contemporaries without any statistics at all and on a basis merely of their personal impressions. Finally, the difficult question of the security of copyhold tenants as against the landlords who desired to evict them seems to have been put in the right perspective by the evidence which Dr. Savine[30] has adduced to prove that, in the case of copyholds of inheritance, a plaintiff who could show a clear title could get legal redress.

On the other hand, certain points must still be pronounced highly obscure. The first is a simple one. The agrarian changes are usually summed up under the name of “Enclosure.” But what exactly did enclosing mean? Contemporary writers represent it as almost always being carried out by lords and large farmers against the interests of the smaller tenantry. But there is abundant proof that the tenants themselves enclosed; and as they can hardly be supposed to have been forward in initiating changes which damaged their own prospects, ought we not to begin by drawing a distinction between the piecemeal enclosures made by the peasantry, often after agreement between neighbours, from which they hoped to gain, and the great enclosures made by lords of manors from which the peasants obviously lost? Further, different authorities assign different degrees of importance to different aspects of the movement. Mr. Johnson[31] holds, for example, that the enclosure of the common waste, as distinct from the enclosure of the arable fields, was relatively unimportant. Such a view, however, is not easily reconciled with the constant complaints which relate clearly to the enclosing of common wastes and pastures and with the state of things depicted in the surveys.[32] Again, the writings of the period speak as though the movement were mainly one from arable to pasture farming. But this was questioned as long ago as the first thorough study of the question—that of Nasse[33]—and the doubts which he threw on their view of the problem are supported by Mr. Leadam by means of the statistics which he has drawn from the returns of the Commission of 1517, though his conclusions are in their turn disputed by Professor Gay. In fact no one who examines the picture given by the Commissions and by surveys and field maps can help feeling that the word “enclosing,” used by contemporaries as though it bore its explanation on its face, covered many different kinds of action and has a somewhat delusive appearance of simplicity.

Moreover, who gained and who suffered by the enclosures, and to what extent? If the movement deserves to be called an agrarian revolution, it was certainly one which left a great many holders of small landed property intact, and perhaps even improved their position. Otherwise we can hardly account for the optimistic description of them, or of some of them, which is given in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by writers like Harrison,[34] Norden,[35] and Fuller,[36] or for the part which this class played in the Civil War. Nor can we say with confidence how the statistical evidence derived by Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay from the reports of Royal Commissions should be interpreted. The comparative smallness of the percentage of land which the Commissioners returned as enclosed has led to the view[37] that the importance of the whole movement was grossly exaggerated by the writers of the period, who created a storm in a tea-cup over changes which really affected only an inconsiderable proportion of the whole country. If this is so, it is not easy to explain either the continuous attention which was paid to the question by the Government, or the revolts of the peasantry, or the strong views of reasonable and fair-minded men with first-hand knowledge, such as John Hales.