It is easy to understand the strong motives for throwing together peasant holdings, if we keep our eyes on the picture of agricultural arrangements given in the maps. It will be seen that the different blocks of demesne land are often separated from each other by two or three strips belonging to the smaller tenantry, and that if such strips were removed they could be fitted together into a wide and unbroken expanse of territory. The manorial authorities have often, it is clear, been for a long time consolidating the demesne by exchange and purchase, so as to avoid the wastefulness of having land scattered in a hundred separate pieces, and the only obstacle to its complete unification consists of strips and patches which are held by tenants who are for one reason or another unwilling to sell, small spits and islands which stand out of the surrounding sea. Clearly there is an enormous temptation to make the tide flow over them as well, to complete the circuit by merging them in the demesne. Look, for example, at maps Nos. III., IV., and V. Here it is evident that there has been a good deal of consolidation. Both the tenants and the lord of the manor have been forming their strips into compact blocks. To unity of ownership has been added something like spatial unity. Still the process is by no means complete. There are awkward little pieces of land which interrupt the smooth surface of the great estate, pieces which one will have to walk round, where, if the demesne is used as arable, the demesne plough must stop, where, if it is used as pasture, a fence must be erected to shut out the demesne sheep. Or walk down a typical field and mark how the land is held. Here are the strips which one would pass, if one travelled from end to end of two parallel furlongs at West Lexham[441] in Norfolk in the year 1575. They are copied in order from the map—
These furlongs, though the predominance of demesne land in them makes them not quite typical, illustrate sufficiently the awkward way in which the great farmer’s stretch of land is interrupted by the little property of a freeholder or copyholder. The strips of Will Yelverton, Robert Clement, Will Lee, and Will Gell must have been a constant eyesore to the manorial authorities. Buy them out or evict them, and then the two furlongs will consist of nothing but demesne land and glebe. They will be two fields of quite a modern pattern and quite ready for enclosure. Leave these tenants where they are, and they are a permanent obstacle to unified management, all the more annoying because they are so petty. They may even insist on the farmer observing the same course of cultivation as themselves, and on turning their beasts to common on his land after harvest! Is it not inevitable that, as soon as the lord is pushed by economic forces into making his estate yield the maximum money return irrespective of a numerous tenantry or of the ancient methods of tillage, he should try in any way he can to get rid of what to him are troublesome excrescences, that he should begin questioning titles, screwing up rents, turning copyhold to leasehold?
If our hypothesis is correct we ought to be able to find manors where the strips formerly held by tenants have been merged in the demesne, so as to form a continuous expanse, in the hands of the lord or his farmer, out of what was formerly a collection of fragments of separate holdings. To see it verified, let us turn to another manor in the same county, that of Walsingham,[442] which was surveyed in the reign of Henry VIII. Here is a statement of the land which is “in the hands of the lord" in the west field—
In the West Felde
| 1. In manus domine [sic] | 1/2 acre of land of the tenement Marre. |
| 2. " | 1½ roods of the tenement Furell. |
| 3. " | ½ acre land of the tenement Stanx. |
| 4. " | 1 acre, 1 rood land of the tenement Gryne. |
| 5. " | 3 roods land of the tenement Scot. |
| 6. " | 3½ roods land of the tenement Townsend. |
| 7. " | ½ acre land of the tenement Byelaugh. |
| 8. " | 1/2 acre land of the tenement Wheteloffe. |
| 9. " | 1/2 acre land of the tenement Scutt. |
| 10. " | ½ acre land of the tenement Coyefor. |
| 11. " | 1 acre with the gravel pit. |
| 12. " | 3 roods land of the tenement Nedwyn. |
| 13. " | 1 acre land late of J. Cockerell. |
| 14. " | 3 roods land of the tenement Gilbert. |
| 15. " | 1 acre and 1 rood of the tenement Spotell. |
| 16. " | 3 roods land of the tenement Spotell. |
| 17. " | 3 roods land of the tenement Husbond. |
| 18. " | 1 acre of the tenement Rodengh. |
| 19. " | ½ acre land of the tenement Pymans. |
| 20. " | 3 roods of the tenement Scutt. |
| 21. " | 1 acre of decay of the tenement Spotell. |
Here one has a field divided into twenty-one strips. Of these strips eighteen had at one time been in the occupation of separate individuals. The picture is just what we are accustomed to in mediæval surveys. It is illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the map of part of Salford, on page 163. But some time before this survey of Walsingham was made a great change had taken place. The separate fragments had been taken out of the hands of the tenants and combined in the hands of the lord; the field is ready for conversion to pasture and for enclosure. How extremely profitable it might be to substitute a single large farm for a number of small holdings is proved by Manorial Rentals. Taking five manors in Wiltshire in the year 1568, one finds that the rents paid by the farmer of the demesne work out at 1s. 6d., 7¾d., 1s. 5¾d., 1s. 1¾d., 1s. 5½d. per acre; those paid by the customary tenants at 7½d., 5d., 1s. 0¾d., 5¾d., 5¾d. per acre.[443]
The difference is, in itself, enough to explain a decided movement towards an increase in the size of the unit of agriculture. But of course a powerful incentive to such procedure was supplied by the growth of pasture farming. In the days when the cultivation of the demesne depended on the labour of the tenants there was obviously bound to be a certain proportion between the land belonging to the former and the land held by the latter, a proportion which might be expressed by saying “no tenants, no demesne cultivation; no demesne cultivation, no income for the lord.” But when tillage was replaced by pasture farming this economic rule of three ceased to work. On the one hand, the limit of size imposed on the demesne farm by considerations of management was removed or at any rate enormously extended, for many thousand sheep could be fed by two or three shepherds. On the other hand, the economic motive for preventing a decline in the number of small landholders was weakened, because there was little use for their labour on a pasture farm; while there was a great deal of use for their land, if only it could be cleared of existing rights and added to it. We have, in fact, an ordinary case of the depreciation of particular[444] kinds of human labour in comparison with capital, of the kind to which the modern world has become accustomed in the case of machinery—become accustomed and become callous.
We shall perhaps best give precision to our ideas of the sort of policy which landlords were inclined to adopt, by taking a single concrete instance, though of course conditions varied locally very much from place to place. It comes from Hartley[445] in Northumberland, where Robert Delavale was lord of the manor in the reign of Elizabeth. The narrator is his cousin, Joshua Delavale—
“Since which time" (i.e. 16 Eliz.), he says, “the said Robert Delavale purchased all the freeholder’s lands and tenements, displaced the said tenants, defaced their tenements, converted their tillage to pasture, being 720 acres of arable ground or thereabouts, and made one demaine, whereon there is but three plows now kept by hinds and servants, besides the 720 acres. So that where there was then in Hartley 15 serviceable men furnished with sufficient horse and furniture, there is now not any, nor hath been these 20 years last past or thereabouts.”