The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

by R. H. Tawney

(a) The Removing of Landmarks[ToC]

The history of the agrarian problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—indeed its history ever since—is largely the story of the small cultivator’s struggle to protect his interests against the changes caused by the growth of the great estate. In that struggle there is much that is detailed, tiresome, and obscure. The student hears very little about general principles, very much of technicalities about the nature of common appendant and common appurtenant, of stinted and unstinted pastures, of gressums and fines, of copyholds for years, for lives, or of inheritance, of land which is old enclosure that ought to stand, or new enclosure that ought to fall. But at the centre of this maze of dry and infinitely diverse details there is a real regrouping of social forces going on, and a rearrangement, at once rapid and profound, of economic and political ideas. We must no more picture the changes of our period as mere matters of the technique of agriculture, than we must think of the industrial revolution of two centuries later in terms of spinning-jennies and steam-power. On the contrary, these very details are the channel along which rural life is beginning to slip from one form of economic organisation to another, the seed-plot in which new conceptions of social expediency are being brought to maturity. In numberless English villages between 1500 and 1600 large issues are being decided which will profoundly modify the course of social development. Is the communal administration of meadow and wastes to survive (as it has survived in France and Belgium) or is it to disappear? Is England to be a country of large cultivators working with many hired labourers, or of small cultivators working with few? Is leasehold or copyhold to be the predominant form of land tenure? When the final transition to modern agriculture takes place, will England face the change with a population the bulk of which has been rooted in the soil since the Middle Ages, or will the middle classes in rural society have been already so far undermined that opinion turns spontaneously to the great landlord as the sole representative of agricultural progress? Of course the answer to these questions was not given by 1600 or even by 1700; we must not forget Arthur Young and the far more extensive enclosures of the eighteenth century. But in our period development certainly took a distinct bias away from one set of arrangements and in the direction of another. The best standpoint from which to examine its course is found by watching the reaction upon the tenants of the agricultural changes which we have tried to summarise in the preceding sections.

The economic effect of the policy pursued by the large farmer depended upon what proportion of the land he controlled, and in particular upon the part of the manor upon which enclosure was made. He might enclose only the land actually belonging to the demesne farm when he took it over; or he might enclose parts of the waste or meadow over which other tenants had rights of pasture; or he might enclose the holdings in the open arable fields belonging to other tenants, for this purpose evicting, or inducing the lord to evict, them. When only the demesne lands were enclosed the other interests were sometimes little disturbed, unless indeed the demesne had already been parcelled out among some of the smaller tenants, a contingency to be considered later. But, even when that was not the case, the conversion of the demesne to pasture and its enclosure had two consequences which were not unimportant. On the one hand, the wage-earning population of cottagers and younger sons, who had found employment as hired labourers when the demesne was used for tillage, were thrown out of work, and with the limited demand for labour offered by a sixteenth century village, were obliged, one would suppose, to join the armies of tramps who figure so largely in the pages of the writers of the period. As the bailiffs accounts of some manors show, the demesne farm had sometimes employed a quite considerable staff of workmen of different kinds, and though no clear instance of a reduction of the number of employees, consequent on the transition to pasture farming, has come to light, one can occasionally compare the demand for labour under the old régime and under the new in a way which does something to substantiate the lamentations of contemporaries.[416] It is this which gives point to their complaints as to the decay of “hospitality.” Hospitality in the sixteenth century does not merely mean a general attitude of open-handed friendliness. When the Government intervenes to enjoin hospitality, we are not to think that, even in that age of grandmotherly legislation, it is going out of its way to insist that every man shall provide his neighbour with a glass of beer and a bed for the night. Hospitality has a quite precise meaning and a quite definite social importance. It is, in the most literal sense, housekeeping, and the household does not merely imply what we mean by “the family,” a group of persons connected by blood but pursuing often quite separate occupations, and, except in the small number of cases where property owned by the head of the family supplies a financial basis for unity, possessing quite separate economic interests. It is, on the contrary, a miniature co-operative society, housed under one roof, dependent upon one industry, and including not only man and wife and children, but servants and labourers, ploughmen and threshers, cowherds and milkmaids, who live together, work together, and play together, just as one can see them doing in parts of Norway and Switzerland at the present day. When the economic foundations of this small organism are swept away by a change in the method of farming, the effect is not merely to ruin a family, it is to break up a business. It is analogous not to the unemployment of an individual householder, but to the bankruptcy of a firm.

On the other hand, even when they lost nothing else, the rest of the landholding population was deprived of some of the rights of grazing which they had exercised on the enclosed arable after harvest. If the demesne formed a large proportion of the whole area of the village, or if there was little other pasture, their loss, as the frequent complaints of interference with “shack”[417] prove, might be a very considerable one; for it meant that there might be no means of feeding some proportion of the village beasts. Moreover, the mere presence of a large capitalist who controlled a great part of the land, and converted it to pasture or retained it as arable according to the price of wool and wheat, prejudiced them in various indirect ways. The farmer of the demesne seems at an early date to have had a bad name for hard dealings. He was often a stranger, and therefore indifferent to the influence of local customs and personal relationships. Where the manoral officials had offered direct employment, he was a middleman with a high rent to pay, and, like most middlemen, a channel for pressure without responsibility. As the largest shareholder in the small agricultural community, he could disturb its arrangements by altering his course of cultivation, and, since he was the representative of the lord, he could not easily be checked. Sometimes, indeed, a clause was inserted in his lease expressly providing that he should not disturb the neighbouring peasants.[418] But there are many cases in which there is no mention of formal enclosing, and in which, nevertheless, it is complained that the farmer persistently molests and harries the customary tenants. It was the essence of the open field system of agriculture—at once its strength and its weakness—that its maintenance reposed upon a common custom and tradition, not upon documentary records capable of precise construction. Its boundaries were often rather a question of the degree of conviction with which ancient inhabitants could be induced to affirm them, than visible to the mere eye of sense, and their indefiniteness made the way of the transgressor extremely easy. Even the lord of the manor sometimes found the large farmer too much for his vigilance. “John Langford and his ancesters,” the College of All Souls petitioned in Chancery in 1637, “have for many yeares by vertue of several demises farmed and rented of your oratours their said messuage and lands, and used and occupied the same with their own lands, and during the time of such occupation have pulled up, destroyed and removed, the metes, mere londs, and boundaries of your oratours their said lands, and confounded the same so that the same cannot be set forth.... Mr. Langford’s lands and grounds lying next adjoining unto the said oratours their grounds, ... the said John Langford hath extended his said cottages, orchards, gardens, and curtilages thereunto belonging, to your oratours their said grounds, and hath made hedges, ditches, fences and mounds wherein and whereby he hath enclosed your oratours their said grounds unto his own cottages and land, ... and intendeth so ... to keep from your orators all the said land so encroached and enclosed.”[419] When a farmer would thus calmly expropriate the lord of the manor, it is not surprising to find constant small disputes between him and the other tenants, on the ground of his entering upon their holdings, or “surcharging the fieldes by waye of intercommon and destroying the corn of greane by drifte of cattle over the common of fieldes and suche other.”[420] Often, no doubt, the sporadic encroachments which provoked quarrels with the other tenants appeared to the great grazier a natural exercise of his obvious rights. Who should say where one man’s land began and another’s ended? But it can hardly be doubted that such irregularities were sometimes a deliberate attempt to worry the weaker members of the village community into throwing up their lands, by making profitable cultivation impossible. “If any man do sow any ground,” ran the direction given by a lord to the shepherd who looked after the demesne farm on a Suffolk manor, “and the stifts of the field are broken, and may not duly be taken and fed as heretofore they have been used, then the said Tillot to feed off the said corn and drive his sheep on that part of the ploughed land, and to forbid any particular man to sow his ground or any part thereof whereby the sheep-walks may be hindered.”[421] Such an order points to the difficulty of adjusting the different methods of cultivation pursued by the smaller tenants and on the demesne. Though the complaints of the former were often indefinite enough, it is probable that the very difficulty of defining what a large capitalist might or might not do was in itself a substantial grievance. The truth is that it was not easy for the great pasture farm, with its flocks of sheep, to subsist side by side with the smaller arable holdings of the other tenants, without a good deal of friction arising, even in those cases in which no deliberate attempt was made to evict the latter or to deprive them of their rights of common. The traditional organisation of agriculture was based on the assumption that much the same methods of utilising the land would be followed by all the tenants. When that assumption broke down with the growth of large-scale sheep-farming, there was naturally a collision of interests between the great men who made innovations and the small men who adhered to the customary rule.

(b) The Struggle for the Commons[ToC]

But sporadic encroachments are not the worst which the small man has to fear. He may wake to find the path along which he drives his beasts to pasture blocked by a hedge. When he goes to renew his lease or buy the reversion of his copy, he may be told that his holding is to be merged in a pasture farm. The great estate is not always built up by the mere consolidation of pieces of land which are already united in ownership, though spatially they may be separate. If it were there would be few statutes and few riots; for the law looks with a favourable eye on such attempts at improved cultivation, and the peasants have long been doing on a small scale what the capitalist farmer does on a large. The great estate is formed in another and less innocent way, by throwing together holdings whose possession is separate, though spatially they may be contiguous. It is the result of addition, not simply of organisation; of addition in which the cyphers are the holdings of numerous small tenants. In such a process the opposition between the interests of the peasantry and those of the manorial authorities is brought to a head. If one man is to run a hedge round a pasture, the pasture must first be stripped of the rights of common which enmesh it. If sheep are to be fed on the sites of ruined cottages, their occupants must first be evicted. It is over the absorption of commons and the eviction of tenants that agrarian warfare—the expression is not too modern or too strong—is waged in the sixteenth century. Let us look at both these movements more closely.

The obscurity to one age of the everyday economic arrangements of another is excellently illustrated by the difficulty of appreciating the part which common rights played in English husbandry before the nineteenth century. It is not so long since it became a memory. There are villages where the old men still remember—how could they forget it?—the year when the commons finally “went in.” Yet there is hardly a feature in the plain man’s view of the nature of a common which corresponds to the reality as it was used by our ancestors, and as it is used to-day by communities whose land system has followed a different course of development from our own. He thinks of a common as land which, like a municipal park, “belongs to the public,” land which any one may use and any one abuse. In the innocence of his heart he will even move his local authority to put in a claim for its possession, and is very much surprised when its solicitors tell him that he is fighting for the rights of two or three mouldy tenements. Again, he thinks of a common as a place of fresh air and recreation, not of business; as land for which, at the moment, no serious economic use can be found; unprofitable scraps, whose ineligibility has secured them a precarious immunity from park-loving squires and speculative builders. In connection with agriculture he thinks of it not at all—is not waste land the opposite of land which is under cultivation? In one respect he is right. Our existing commons are remnants—remnants which have survived the deluge of eighteenth century Private Acts, mainly because they consist of land too poor to pay counsel’s fees. In all other respects he is wrong. In the earlier period the word common implied common exclusiveness quite as much as common enjoyment. The value of a common to the commoners consisted precisely in the guarantee given them by custom that no one might use it except holders of tenements which time out of mind had a right thereto, and that no man might use it to a greater extent than the custom of the manor allowed. And the modern man is especially wrong in regarding commons as though they fell below the margin of economic employment. Commons and common rights, so far from being merely a luxury or a convenience, were really an integral and indispensable part of the system of agriculture, a linch pin, the removal of which brought the whole structure of village society tumbling down.

No one who reads the petitions and the legal proceedings of our period can doubt that this was what the small cultivator felt. No one who consults the surveyors can doubt that he was right. Yet, at first sight, the importance attached to commons is certainly surprising. Is not the outcry disproportionate to the grievance? To riot and rebel when you lose grazing rights—is not this, it may be asked, rather like shooting your landlord because he will not let you keep poultry? The answer is perhaps a twofold one. The peasants' economy in the sixteenth century was one in which, in many parts of England, the pastoral side of agriculture played a very important rôle, and for which, therefore, abundance of pasture land was very essential. As any one who has lived in a Swiss châlet knows, a family which has sufficient cattle and goats on a good mountain can, during half the year, be almost self-sufficing. It has milk, butter, cheese, eggs, and meat. The only thing it really misses is bread, and that it has the means of purchasing, even if it does not, like the sensible people of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and probably of most parts of England before the industrial revolution, bake its own supplies at home or in a common public oven. Our sixteenth century peasants do not keep goats, but they keep a great many horses and cows, on some manors an average of 6 or 8 per holding; they keep a great many sheep, sometimes 150 or 200 each; they meet depressions in the corn trade by falling back on other sides of agriculture, and sending to market miscellaneous produce which, in a time of rising prices, sells well. But to do this successfully they must have plenty of grazing land. A Swiss commune measures its wealth very largely by the quality of its pasture, and will take pains to buy a good one, even though it be a long distance from the village.[422] Can we doubt that the same was true of many parts of England, and that Hales' husbandmen who “could never be able to make up my lordes rent weare it not for a little brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese, and hens,”[423] was typical, not, it is true, of the more substantial men, but of many of the less well-to-do?

But there was another and more fundamental reason for the importance attached to rights of common, and for the disastrous re-action upon the tenantry involved in their curtailment. It was that the possession of pasture was not only a source of subsidiary income but also quite indispensable to the maintenance of the arable holding, which was everywhere the backbone of the tenants' livelihood. Ask a modern small holder, and he will tell you that what he wants is a certain proportion of grass-land to arable, in order that he may feed his horses without having to resort to the hire of extra land, to the purchase of foodstuffs, or to turning them out to pick up a living where they can by the side of the road.[424] In the normal village community this was secured by the apportionment of rights of pasture to each arable holding, the tenants grazing their cattle on the common in the summer, and only feeding them on their separate closes when the approach of winter made shelter a necessity.[425] It is, therefore, a mistake to think of the engrossing of commons by large farmers as affecting the peasant only in so far as he was a shepherd or a grazier. On the contrary, it struck a blow at an indispensable adjunct of his arable holding, an adjunct without which the ploughland itself was unprofitable; for to work the ploughland one must have the wherewithal to feed the plough beasts. It is this close interdependence of common rights with tillage which explains both the manner of their organisation and the distress caused by encroachments upon them. Rights of common of the most general type go with the tenement, not with the tenant, because what is considered is the maintenance of a fully equipped arable holding in the open fields, and for this end it is not necessary to allow common rights to the population of younger sons, servants, or others who do not hold one of these primary units of tillage. The commoners are often “stinted,” restricted[426] that is in the number of beasts which they may put upon the pasture, because rights of grazing have to be distributed among all the arable holdings, such holdings being unworkable without them. Rights of common are often apportioned among the tenants “according to the magnitude of their holdings,” for, of course, a large holding will need more plough beasts, and therefore more pasture, than a small one. Their boundaries are accurately recorded from this tree to that stone and such and such a hill, because otherwise an invasion of foreigners with their cattle from a neighbouring village may eat them up like locusts. To divide them up among the tenants may do no harm provided the division is an equitable one, for each man will still have his equipment of pasture, though in the form of a limited area instead of in the form of a limited quota of beasts. To appropriate common pastures without compensation may ruin a whole village; it is to seize a piece of free capital without which cows and horses cannot be fed, and thus it is virtually to confiscate the beasts, which are the peasant’s tools. When that is done he must either re-assert his rights, or throw up his arable holding, or hire pasture for a money rent; sometimes—a bitter thought—he must hire grass-land from the very man who has robbed him.[427]

One must not, of course, unduly simplify the picture. Different villages are very differently endowed with grazing land. On some there is a common waste, and a common pasture in addition of superior quality, so that the waste can be left to animals which will thrive on rough land. On others there is not even a common waste, and the tenants have to do the best they can on the stubble which lies open after harvest. Nor do they all manage the apportionment of grazing rights in the same way. As we have seen, there has been a movement towards the formation of separate closes; and even when all the pasture is administered in common, it may either be that each villager looks after his own animals, or that the township, intent on seeing that the common is not overstocked, appoints a common shepherd and a common cowherd, who drives them all afield together “under the opening eyelids of the morn.” Under all such diversities, however, which can often be paralleled from the practice of continental communes to-day, there is the fundamental fact of the necessity of rights of pasture to successful tillage. Fitzherbert’s remark that “an husband cannot well thrive by his corne without he have other cattle, nor by his cattle without corne,”[428] is reiterated in different forms by other surveyors. When they tell us that a common adjoining a town is a “great relief to the poor tenants,” and recommend that a special clause be inserted in a farmer’s lease binding him not to appropriate the pasture without which the tenants “were not able to maintain their tenements,” they are speaking of matters which they understand far better than we possibly can, and must be believed.