Latimer wrote, 'where there were a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.' 'I am sorie to report it,' says Harrison,[224] 'but most sorrowful of all to understand that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have anie gaine at all that they themselves become graziers, butchers, tanners, sheepmasters, and woodmen, thereby to enrich themselves.' The Act against pulling down farmhouses was evaded by repairing one room for the use of a shepherd; a single furrow was driven across a field to prove it was still under the plough; to avoid holding illegal numbers of sheep flocks were held in the names of sons and servants.[225] The country swarmed with heaps of miserable paupers, 'sturdy and valiant' beggars, and thieves who, though hanged twenty at a time on a single gallows, still infested all the countryside, their numbers being swollen by the dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking up of the bands of retainers kept by the great nobles.
Rents also were rising rapidly. Latimer's account of his father's farm is too well known to be again quoted; his opinions were shared by all the writers of the day. Sir William Forrest, about 1540, says that landlords now demand fourfold rents, so that the farmer has to raise his prices in proportion, and beef and mutton were so dear that a poor man could not 'bye a morsell'. 'Howe joyne they lordshyp to lordshyppe, manner to manner, ferme to ferme. How do the rych men, and especially such as be shepemongers, oppresse the king's people by devourynge their common pastures with the shepe so that the poore are not able to keepe a cowe, but are like to starve. And yet when was beef ever so dere or mutton, wool now 8s. a stone.
'Now', says another, later in the century, 'I can never get a horse shoed under 10d. or 12d., when I have also seen the common pryce was 6d. And cannot your neighbour remember that within these thirty years I could bye the best pigge or goose that I could lay my hand on for four pence which now costeth 12d., a good capon for 3d. or 4d., a hen for 2d., which now costeth me double and triple.'[226]
Parliament, of course, tried to regulate the price of food; an Act of 1532, 24 Hen. VIII, c. 3, ordained that beef and pork should be 1/2d. a lb. and mutton and veal 5/8d. a lb. The decrease in the number of cows also received its attention; 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 3, states that forasmuch of late years a great number of persons have fed in their pastures sheep and cattle with no regard to breeding, so that there was great scarcity of stock, therefore for every 60 sheep kept one milk cow shall be kept, and for every 120 sheep one calf shall be bred, and for every 10 head of horned cattle shall be kept one milk cow, and for every two cows so kept one calf shall be bred. The Act was to last seven years, but 13 Eliz. c. 25 made it perpetual.
In 1549 came the rising of Robert Kett in Norfolk, the last attempt of the English labourer to obtain redress of his wrongs by force of arms, though Kett himself belonged to the landlord class and took the side of the people probably by accident. The petition of grievances drawn up by his followers aimed at diminishing the power of lords of manors as regards enclosures, the keeping of dove-cots, and other feudal wrongs. 'We pray', said the insurgents, 'that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free with His precious blood-shedding.' The rebellion came to nothing, and some of the abuses at which it was aimed were dying a natural death, though enclosure often acted hardly on the poor man.
The manorial system went on steadily decaying, and by this time the demesne lands had much diminished in area on most manors. Many parcels had been sold to the new landlord class, who had made their fortunes in the towns and, like most Englishmen, desired to become country gentlemen.
Much of the demesne had been sold in small lots to well-off tradesmen, and as the villeins had become copyholders a large part of the land was owned or occupied by yeomen or tenant farmers, who cultivated from 20 to 150 acres. Many of the labourers also owned or rented cottages with 4 or 5 acres attached to them. Such was the rural society at the end of the Tudor period. The progress of enclosures helped to destroy this, for the labourers gradually ceased to own or occupy land, farms increased in size, the ownership of land came to be more and more the privilege of the rich, and people flocked in increasing numbers to the towns.[227a] In five Norfolk manors in Elizabeth's time only from one-seventh to one-tenth was in demesne, and little of what was left was farmed by the lord, but let to farmers on leases.[227b] On some manors the demesne land lay in compact blocks near the manor house; on others it was in scattered strips of various size; in others it lay in blocks and strips. The following particulars of a manor in Norfolk give a good picture of an estate in 1586-8, the tenants on it, their rank, and the size of their holdings:—
There were also 12 tenants without houses, holding from 1 to 20 acres; the demesne was 230 acres; there were two glebes containing 84 acres, and town lands of 7 acres. The waste amounted to 350 acres, which by 1599 had all disappeared.
On this manor the houses were not collected together in a village as usual in most parts of England, but scattered about the estate. In two other manors the amount of waste remaining at this period was very small, but in three others little had been 'approved' and much consequently remained; most of the 'approvements', where made, seem to have been of long standing, and all the enclosures made were for tillage, not for grass as we should expect. The 350 acres of waste that remained at Horstead in 1586-8 was enclosed in 1599 by agreement between the lords of the manor and the tenants on the following terms:—