CHAPTER IITHE PEASANTRY

[53]Pauli,Drei volkswirthschaftliche Denkschriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England: How to reform the Realme in setting them to work, and to restore tillage. “The whole welth of the body of the realm riseth out of labours and workes of the common people.”

[54]The Commonweal of this Realm of England(Lamond), p. 63: “And I marvell no man taketh heade unto it, what nombre first of trifles cometh hether from beyonde the seas, that we might either clene spare, or els make them within oure owne Realme, for the which we paie inestimable treasure every yeare, or els exchange substanciall wares and necessaries for them.” E. E. T. S.,England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Part II., p. 84: “Craftys men and makers of tryfullys are too many.” Harrison inElizebethan England(Withington), p. 15: “O how many trades and handicrafts are now in England whereof the Commonwealth hath no need!” &c.

[55]e.g.the prayer for merchants in Edward VI.’sBook of Private Prayer: “So occupy their merchandise without fraud, guile, or deceit.”

[56]Coventry Leet Book, Part III., pp. 679–680.

[57]See Smith,De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I. c. 23: “These are they which in the old world got that honour to Englande ... because they be so manie in number, so obedient at the Lorde’s call, so strong of bodie, so hard to endure paine, so courageous to adventure ... these were the good archers in times past, and the stable troops of footmen that affaide all France that would rather die all, than once abandon the knight or gentleman their captaine,” and Harrison inElizabethan England(Withington), pp. 11–13.

[58]E. E. T. S.,England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Starkey’s Dialogue, Part II., p. 49: “To the handes are resemblyd both craftysmen and warryarys.... To the fete the plowmen and tyllarys of the ground, beycause they, by theyr labour, susteyne and support the rest of the body.”

[59]In this essay we are concerned only with the landholders, not with the wage workers. The relative number of persons holding land and of agricultural labourers without land is an important question on which it is not easy to get light. The surveys and rentals, a species of private census invaluable in giving information about the holders of property, tell us only the number of householders, and as the labourers employed in agriculture (like many of those employed in manufacturing industry) usually lived on the premises of their masters, they do not enable us to calculate the number of those living entirely by their labour. Still, since they include all tenants, whether holders of a cottage only or holders of land in addition, they enable us to say what proportion of heads of families held land, and what proportion had none, or none except a garden. This is of some importance. A tenant holding even as much as fifty acres can hardly have employed more than two or three agricultural labourers, and most tenants held less than this; so that in those places where the cottagers form a small proportion of the whole population we may conclude that a large proportion of the villagers were landholders (for the figures on this point see the tables given below).Unfortunately, we do not possess for the sixteenth century even such a loose estimate as was made by Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth. In 1688 he calculated that there were 16,560 families of nobles and gentlemen, 60,000 families of yeomen, 150,000 of farmers—presumably on lease—400,000 cottagers and poor, 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, obviously a very rough calculation, the most remarkable feature of which is the large number of yeomen. Poll Tax returns might give us the kind of information we require, since they included, or were meant to include, the whole population above a certain age, irrespective of whether they held land or not, and sometimes divided them roughly into classes. Thus on sixteen manors in the Norfolk Hundred of Thingoe the return to the Poll Tax of 1381 showed a population of 870 male and female inhabitants over fifteen years of age, of whom 9 were set down as knights, 53 as farmers, 102 as artificers, 344 as “labourers” (laboratores), 362 as “servants” (servientes). If, as is not improbable, the first four classes held land (the labourers being serfs working on the demesne), and the last consisted of farm and household employees who did not, this would put the landholding classes on these manors at a little more than half the total population over the age of fifteen. But this return was probably falsified to escape the tax; see Powell,The East Anglian Rising, App. I., and Oman,The Great Revolt of 1381. The figures published by Dr. Savine (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i., pp. 223–226) of the monastic population show that on the eve of the dissolution there were residing in 22 houses in Leicester, Warwick, and Sussex, 255 “hinds” and 76 “women servants,” presumably employed on the demesne farm, which gives an average to each farm of about 11 hinds and about 3 women servants. In the Kentish Nunnery of St. Sexburge, Sheppey, the demesne farm employed a carter, a carpenter, two cowherds, a thatcher, a horse keeper, a malter, three shepherds. Best, describing his farming arrangements in Yorkshire in 1641 (Surtees Society, vol. xxxiii.), states: “Wee kept constantly five plowes goinge, and milked fowerteene kine, wherefore wee had always fower men, two boyes to go with the oxeploughe, and two good lusty mayde-servants.” These were in each case only the permanent staff, and their comparatively small numbers suggest that much work must have been done by men who worked on their own land and only occasionally helped on the demesne,i.e.that the proportion of landholders to non-landholders was high. This conclusion agrees with the evidence of the surveys, which show that, especially in the East of England, many of both the free and the customary tenants' holdings were so small that they could hardly have made a living out of them without working as wage-labourers as well, and also with other indications as to the classes in rural society;e.g.out of 3780 persons mentioned in Worcestershire recognizances, 1591–1643, as either “labourers,” “husbandmen,” or “yeomen,” 667 are entered as labourers, 1303 as husbandmen, 1810 as yeomen, the latter designation always, and the second usually, implying a holder of land (J.W. Willis Bund,Kalendar of the Sessions Rolls, 1591–1643, Part II.) On the other hand, conditions varied enormously from place to place. Where there was a considerable body of small landowners the number of hired labourers tended to be small, the work of cultivation being done by the holder and his family;e.g.we read of a manor in the seventeenth century where thirteen freeholders farmed 580 acres with the aid of only ten men-servants and shepherds before enclosure, and six or seven afterwards (Joseph Lee,A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure).Some of the surveys supply us with extreme cases of the opposite kind, where the whole manor consists of two or three holdings or of even one great estate, and where almost the whole of the population must have been working for wages; these illustrate Harrison’s complaint that in many places “The land of the parish is gotten up into a few men’s hands; yea, sometimes, into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled betimes to be hired servants unto the others, or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door” (Withington’s edition ofElizabethan England, p. 21). A protest made to the Council from Norfolk in 1631 against its policy of trying to keep down prices by insisting that all corn should be sold in the open market points out that in “the woodland and pasture part” of the country there are “a great many handicraftsmen which live by dressinge and combinge of wool, carding, spinning and weaving, etc., and the Townes there commonly very great consisting of such like people and other artificers with many poor, and none of them all ordinarilye having any corn but from the market.” As to the “champion part” of the county, the document divides the rural population into three classes: “1. Tilth masters that have corn of their own growing and sell it to others. 2. Labourers that buy it at an under-price of them unto whom they worke. 3. Poore people that are relieved by good orders in every towne” (Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907). But the case of Norfolk was exceptional, owing to its position as the chief seat of the textile industries.On the whole I am inclined to think that though the process of commutation which went on from 1350 onwards can hardly be explained except on the supposition that there was a considerable population of persons who held little land and were ready to eke out a living by working for wages, yet in the sixteenth century even the wage-working heads of families usually held a certain amount of land (even if only a garden) as well. This agrees with what we are told by contemporaries of the scarcity of wage-earners (see below, pp. 99–102). One may add, that in view of this, the fixing of maximum wages bears a somewhat different colour from that often given it. It was only practicable, one is inclined to say, because so few persons depended entirely on wages for a living. The social problem in the sixteenth century was not a problem of wages, but of rents and fines, prices and usury, matters which concern the small-holder or the small master craftsman as much as the wage-earner. The “working classes” were largely small property holders and small traders.

Unfortunately, we do not possess for the sixteenth century even such a loose estimate as was made by Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth. In 1688 he calculated that there were 16,560 families of nobles and gentlemen, 60,000 families of yeomen, 150,000 of farmers—presumably on lease—400,000 cottagers and poor, 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, obviously a very rough calculation, the most remarkable feature of which is the large number of yeomen. Poll Tax returns might give us the kind of information we require, since they included, or were meant to include, the whole population above a certain age, irrespective of whether they held land or not, and sometimes divided them roughly into classes. Thus on sixteen manors in the Norfolk Hundred of Thingoe the return to the Poll Tax of 1381 showed a population of 870 male and female inhabitants over fifteen years of age, of whom 9 were set down as knights, 53 as farmers, 102 as artificers, 344 as “labourers” (laboratores), 362 as “servants” (servientes). If, as is not improbable, the first four classes held land (the labourers being serfs working on the demesne), and the last consisted of farm and household employees who did not, this would put the landholding classes on these manors at a little more than half the total population over the age of fifteen. But this return was probably falsified to escape the tax; see Powell,The East Anglian Rising, App. I., and Oman,The Great Revolt of 1381. The figures published by Dr. Savine (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i., pp. 223–226) of the monastic population show that on the eve of the dissolution there were residing in 22 houses in Leicester, Warwick, and Sussex, 255 “hinds” and 76 “women servants,” presumably employed on the demesne farm, which gives an average to each farm of about 11 hinds and about 3 women servants. In the Kentish Nunnery of St. Sexburge, Sheppey, the demesne farm employed a carter, a carpenter, two cowherds, a thatcher, a horse keeper, a malter, three shepherds. Best, describing his farming arrangements in Yorkshire in 1641 (Surtees Society, vol. xxxiii.), states: “Wee kept constantly five plowes goinge, and milked fowerteene kine, wherefore wee had always fower men, two boyes to go with the oxeploughe, and two good lusty mayde-servants.” These were in each case only the permanent staff, and their comparatively small numbers suggest that much work must have been done by men who worked on their own land and only occasionally helped on the demesne,i.e.that the proportion of landholders to non-landholders was high. This conclusion agrees with the evidence of the surveys, which show that, especially in the East of England, many of both the free and the customary tenants' holdings were so small that they could hardly have made a living out of them without working as wage-labourers as well, and also with other indications as to the classes in rural society;e.g.out of 3780 persons mentioned in Worcestershire recognizances, 1591–1643, as either “labourers,” “husbandmen,” or “yeomen,” 667 are entered as labourers, 1303 as husbandmen, 1810 as yeomen, the latter designation always, and the second usually, implying a holder of land (J.W. Willis Bund,Kalendar of the Sessions Rolls, 1591–1643, Part II.) On the other hand, conditions varied enormously from place to place. Where there was a considerable body of small landowners the number of hired labourers tended to be small, the work of cultivation being done by the holder and his family;e.g.we read of a manor in the seventeenth century where thirteen freeholders farmed 580 acres with the aid of only ten men-servants and shepherds before enclosure, and six or seven afterwards (Joseph Lee,A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure).

Some of the surveys supply us with extreme cases of the opposite kind, where the whole manor consists of two or three holdings or of even one great estate, and where almost the whole of the population must have been working for wages; these illustrate Harrison’s complaint that in many places “The land of the parish is gotten up into a few men’s hands; yea, sometimes, into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled betimes to be hired servants unto the others, or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door” (Withington’s edition ofElizabethan England, p. 21). A protest made to the Council from Norfolk in 1631 against its policy of trying to keep down prices by insisting that all corn should be sold in the open market points out that in “the woodland and pasture part” of the country there are “a great many handicraftsmen which live by dressinge and combinge of wool, carding, spinning and weaving, etc., and the Townes there commonly very great consisting of such like people and other artificers with many poor, and none of them all ordinarilye having any corn but from the market.” As to the “champion part” of the county, the document divides the rural population into three classes: “1. Tilth masters that have corn of their own growing and sell it to others. 2. Labourers that buy it at an under-price of them unto whom they worke. 3. Poore people that are relieved by good orders in every towne” (Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907). But the case of Norfolk was exceptional, owing to its position as the chief seat of the textile industries.

On the whole I am inclined to think that though the process of commutation which went on from 1350 onwards can hardly be explained except on the supposition that there was a considerable population of persons who held little land and were ready to eke out a living by working for wages, yet in the sixteenth century even the wage-working heads of families usually held a certain amount of land (even if only a garden) as well. This agrees with what we are told by contemporaries of the scarcity of wage-earners (see below, pp. 99–102). One may add, that in view of this, the fixing of maximum wages bears a somewhat different colour from that often given it. It was only practicable, one is inclined to say, because so few persons depended entirely on wages for a living. The social problem in the sixteenth century was not a problem of wages, but of rents and fines, prices and usury, matters which concern the small-holder or the small master craftsman as much as the wage-earner. The “working classes” were largely small property holders and small traders.

[60]The summary statement given above is liable to be misleading. The reader will find a fuller discussion of the questions arising in connection with it below in Part II., chap. iii.

[61]They include also tenants on the lands belonging to Cockersand Abbey, lying in many different parts of Lancashire, in 1503. For the sources from which this table is constructed and its defects, seeAppendix II..

[62]The Lancashire figures are unduly weighted by those of the single large manor of Rochdale, where, in 1626, there were 612 tenants. If this manor be omitted, there remain only 19 leaseholders on the other Lancashire manors. Like Northumberland, Lancashire seems to be (as one would expect) a county of customary tenants.

[63]There is an error of 4 in the Norfolk figures which I have been unable to trace and correct.

[64]In Domesday Book 35 per cent. of all the tenants in Suffolk areliberi homines, 32 per cent. of all those in Norfolk are eitherliberi hominesorsochemanni. See Vinogradoff,The Growth of the Manor, note 24 to chap. iii. Book III. (p. 376); Maitland,Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23; Seebohm,The English Village Community, map opposite p. 85. Domesday also gives a large number ofliberi hominesandsochemanniin Leicestershire. In the table given above the Leicestershire manors come after Suffolk and Norfolk as having the third largest proportion of freeholders, viz., 21.6 per cent. The return of freeholders supplied to the Government in 1561 (Lansdowne MSS. V., 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) appear to be considerably understated, probably because only the more substantial men were thought worth mentioning. They are as follows: Beds 282, Berks 166, Essex 880, Notts 189, Oxon. 198, Herts 363, York 787, Lincoln 444. The large number in Essex is noteworthy.

[65]Smith,De Republica Anglorum, Lib I., c. 23.

[66]History of King Henry VII.(Lumley), pp. 70–72. He makes his meaning quite clear by saying “tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes.”

[67]Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii. (Savine, “Bondmen under the Tudors”).

[68]Ibid.

[69]Smith,De Republica Anglorum, loc. cit.

[70]MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham. Billingford and Bintry MSS. No. 9 (Manor of Foxley, 1568).

[71]e.g. ibid., Sparham MSS. No. 5, a freeholder pays “a pounde of cumming seede and a gillyflower” (c.1590). R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Portf. 6, No. 15: “nyne golden threads of vi.d.” (1568). R.O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182, fol. 1: a tenant “holds freely a cottage paying a red rose.”

[72]Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue, Book I., pp. 4–5, to which the farmer answers: “Fie upon you. Will you bring us to be slaves? Neither lawe, nor reason, nor least of all religion, can allowe what you affirme.”

[73]Op. cit., Book III. Here is a bitter cry from the bailiff of a manor (Merton Documents, No. 4381). “Good sir let me entreat you yf the Colledge determyne to make survey this spring of the lands at Kibworth and Barkly to send Mr. Kay or me word a month or 3 weeks before your coming that we may have Beare and other necessaries, and I desire you to gather up all evidences that may be needful for the Lordshipp, for all testimony will be little enough, the Colledge land is so mingled with Mr. Pochin’s freehold and others in our towne. There ys an awarde for keepinge in of the old wol (?) close in our fields for (from ?) Mr. Pochin’s occupation, very needfulle for the ynhabitannts yf that awarde can be founde at the colledge where yt was loste.” (For the remainder of this letter seeAppendix I.) The Crown suffered especially, see Norden,Speculum Britanniae, Part I., pp. xl.-xliii. of introduction (Camden Society): “In many of his Majesty’s manors, free holders, their rents, services, tenures and landes ... become strange and unknown ... and when escheates happen the lande that should redound to his Majesty cannot be found.” In the common entry in manorial surveys under the heading of freeholders of “certain lands” we should probably take the word “certain” to mean “uncertain.”

[74]For the sources and defects of this table seeAppendix II..

[75]See below, pp.105–115.

[76]Seee.g. Northumberland County History, vol. ix. p. 327, below, pp.157–158, andCalendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz.B, b. 1, 58, Ll. 10, 62.

[77]Smith,De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., c. 23: “These be for the most part fermors unto gentlemen.”Elizabethan England(Withington), p. 120. “Yeomen” frequently occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as lessees of the Merton Manors.

[78]See below,pp. 105–115.

[79]Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue.

[80]Fuller,Holy and Profane State. The concluding paragraph is obviously copied from Bacon’sHistory of King Henry VII.

[81]Paston Letters, I. 12, II. 248. Plummer’s edition of Fortescue,On the Governance of England, Intro., p. 21.

[82]Atkinson’sQuarter Sessions of the North Riding of Yorkshire, lists of recusants.

[83]e.g. Topographer and Genealogist, vol. iii. (quoted below, pp.251–253), and Selden Society,Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, vol. ii.,Inhabitants of Thingdenv.Mulsho; also Holkham MSS., Burnham Documents, Bdle. 5, No. 94 (quoted below, p. 245n.).

[84]Harrington’s works, 1700 edition, p. 69 (Oceana), pp. 388–389 (The Art of Law-giving). See also Firth,The House of Lords during the Civil War, pp. 28–32.

[85]It is stated by good authorities that between 12 Ed. IV., when the collusive action known as a common recovery used to evade the Statutede donis conditionalibuswas confirmed by a judicial decision (Taltarum’s case), and the introduction into settlements of “Trustees to preserve contingent remainders” by Sir Orlando Bridgeman and Sir Geoffrey Palmer under the Commonwealth, the tieing up of lands in one family was impossible (e.g.Johnson,The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, pp. 11–13). But in 1538 Starkey’s Dialogue speaks strongly of the practice of entailing lands. “This faute sprange of a certayn arrogancy, whereby, wyth the entaylyng of landys, every Jake would be a gentylman, and every gentylman a knight or a lord” (E. E. T. S.,England in the Reign of Henry VIII., Part II. pp. 112–113, and pp. 195–196.)

[86]Reyce,Breviary of Suffolk, p. 58, quotedVictoria County History, Suffolk.

[87]See below, pp.200–213and283–287.

[88]Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i. Savine,English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution, pp. 156–159.

[89]Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii.

[90]R.O.Misc. Bks. Land Rev., vol. 220, fol. 220, Brisingham (Norfolk) 1589: “Alice Bartram, the widow of W. Bartram, the lord’s villain by blood, took by surrender of said William for term of life on 4 Feby., remainder to Roger Bartram, lord’s villain by blood.” Holkham MSS., Titleshall Documents, Terrier of Godwick, 1508: “Also five roods of the Prior in the hands of Thomas Frend, native.”

[91]Among the 742 customary tenants on the manors belonging to the Earl of Pembroke surveyed in 1568 there appears to be 7nativi domini, i.e.villeins by blood, viz., 1 at Washerne (Wilts), 2 at Stooke Trister and Cucklington (Somerset), 4 at Chedeseye (Somerset), of whom one has been manumitted.

[92]Selected Records of Norwich(Tingey), vol. vi. p. 180: “Robert Ryngwoode brought in a certain indenture wherein Lewis Lowth was [bound] to hym to serve as a prentys for seven years. And Mr. John Holdiche cam before the Mayor and other Justices and declared that the said Lewis is a bondman to my lord of Norfolk’s Grace, and further that he was brought up in husbandry untyl he was xx year old. Whereupon he was discharged of his service.”Note the way in which Statute law is used to compel the agricultural labour which the vanishing jurisdiction of lord over serf is ceasing to be able to enforce.

Note the way in which Statute law is used to compel the agricultural labour which the vanishing jurisdiction of lord over serf is ceasing to be able to enforce.

[93]Roxburghe Club,Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke, Manor of Chilmerke: “Johannes Reve tenet per indenturam totum illud capitale messuagium excepta et omnino reservata omnia wardas, maritagia fines ... nativos,” &c.

[94]Russell,Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 49: “We pray that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding.” The German peasants in the articles drawn up at Memmingen in 1525 demanded the abolition of serfdom “since Christ hath purchased and redeemed us all with his precious blood.” TheChristianappeal is a common one; see below.

[95]Selden Society,Select Cases in the Court of Requests, John Burde and another v. The Earl of Bath. The quarrel dragged on from 1535 to 1544, when the plaintiff's goods were restored. (In 1551, however, when all bad landlords were raising their heads, his house and cattle were again seized.)

[96]Ibid., Nethewayv.George, 1534. For other cases see Selden Society,Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber. Carterv.Abbot of Malmesbury (vol. i., 1500), and Selbyv.Middlemore (vol. ii., 1516–1522). Mr. Leadam's remarks (int. cxxix.) show that a man who was legally a villein might be economically very prosperous: “Thomas Carter ... was charged 40 marks for his enfranchisement. He kept a man-servant. He rode on horseback. He gave a feast to celebrate his freedom. He was even on friendly terms with the gentlemen of the Abbot’s household.” See also Savine,Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii. Lord Stafford actually tried to seize the Mayor of Bristol and his brother as bondmen!

[97]Hargreave’s speech in Somersett’s case (1771–1772, Howell,State Trials, xx.) is based largely on precedents drawn from villeinage: “Though villeinage itself is obsolete ... those rules, by which the claim of it was regulated, are not yet buried in oblivion.... By a strange progress of human affairs the memory of slavery expired now furnishes one of the chief obstacles to slavery attempted to be revived.... The law of England, then, excludes every slavery not commencing in England, every slavery, though commencing there, not being ancient and immemorial. Villeinage is the only slavery which can possibly answer to such a description, and that has long expired by the death or emancipation of all those who were once the objects of it. Consequently there is now no slavery which can be lawful in England.”

[98]1 Ed. VI., c. 3. Possibly, however, the penalty of bondage was regarded as a step towards greater leniency, as the punishment of “incorrigible rogues” had hitherto been death.

[99]More’s remarks on the lot of the wage-workers of his day have a refreshing note of reality. The Utopians are “not to be wearied from earlie in the morning to late in the evenninge with continuall worke, like labouringe and toylinge beastes. For this is worse then the miserable and wretched condition of bondemen. Whiche nevertheless is almooste everywhere the lyfe of workemen and artificers, saving in Utopia” (More,Utopia, Pitt Press Edition, pp. 79–80).

[100]Smith,De Republica Anglorum, Lib. III., ch. 8. See also Fitzherbert,Surveying(1539): “How be it, in some places the bondmen continue as yet, the which me seemeth is the greatest inconvenience that now is suffered by the law.” Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue(1608): “Which kinde of service and slavery, thanks be to God, is in most places of this Realme quite abolished and worne out of memory.... Truly I think it is a Christian parte so to do [i.e.manumit bondsmen], for seeing we be nowe all as the children of one father, the servants of one God, and the subjects of one king, it is very uncharitable to retain our brethren in bondage, sith, when we were all bond, Christ did make us free.”

[101]Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue. He continues: “For in some places of this Realme Tennants have no copies at all of their lands or tenements, or anything to show for that they hold, but there is an entry made in the Court Books, and that is their evidence.”

[102]SeeAppendix II.

[103]Archbishop Sandys to Queen Elizabeth, Saturday 24 November to 4 December, 1582 (quoted by E. Arber,The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, pp. 61–64).

[104]Harrison inElizabethan England(Withington), p. 120.

[105]Quoted by Nasse,The Land Community of the Middle Ages(Ouvry’s trans.). I have not been able to trace the reference.

[106]Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue.

[107]E.g., R.O. Rentals and Surveys Gen. Ser., Portf. 27, No. 32, Dunstall (Suffolk): “Bond land held by copy of court roll, 13s. 4d. Of holders of 3 bond pightells, 5s. 4d.” MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Tittleshall Books, No. 62, Langham Hall (Norfolk): “Redditus assissæ native tenentium. ... John Rose per copiam, 4d.” R.O. Rentals and Surveys Gen. Ser. Portf. 14, No. 70, Barton (Staffs.): “T. Collinson 1 messuage 1/4 virgate land de bond ... by copy 2 Hen. viii.”

[108]MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Billingford and Bintry MSS., No. 9, Foxley: “Native tenentium per copiam rotuli curiæ.”

[109]Roxburghe Club,Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke.

[110]Roxburghe Club,Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke.

[111]Merton Documents, 5902.

[112]Northumberland County History, vol. viii., p. 220 (one may add that in parts of Northumberland the labourers are still called “bondagers”; Mr. Clay tells me that in the Calder valley farmers still use “daywork” as a unit for measuring fields). See alsoCalendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz., D. d. 2, 44, for a suit by a farmer to recover services due from tenants.

[113]Pembroke Surveys.

[114]Chetham Society Miscellanies, vol. iii.

[115]Pembroke Surveys, Estoverton and Phipheld: “Tenentes de Estoverton reddunt annuatim pro pannagio et tallagio ... ivs.” For salt silver,ibid., South Newton. For liability to serve as Reeve,ibid., Paynton.

[116]Chetham Society Miscellanies, vol. iii.: “I would wish you to call the tenants first all together and to signify unto them that my father and I have gone through with Mr. Ireland for Warrington, and the summe we are to give is above £7000; and this was done making no doubt that towards it every one of them being tenants would by their assistance enable us to finish it.... If they faile in this, they may provoke us to sharp courses, especially mee, who have had a purpose to take the third part of every living as it falls.”

[117]Wrexham Free Library,Ancient Local Records, vol. ii. MS. transcript by A.N. Palmer, “Survey of the Town and Liberty of Holt.”

[118]Savine,Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xix.

When one turns from what legal historians have said on the origin and development of copyhold tenure to consider the economic position of this class of tenants, one finds oneself in a region of much greater uncertainty. The legal historian may speak of the copyholders as constituting, in spite of minor differences, a fairly well-defined class. The economic historian cannot. He finds, on the contrary, the widest difference between the economic conditions of tenants holding their land by copy of court roll, not only, as would be expected, in different parts of the country, but on the same manor. In the thirteenth century to say that a man is a villein tells us something at least about his economic position, at any rate when the general features of the manor on which he is a villein are known. He will probably have a standard holding of a virgate or half-virgate; he will have rights in the common meadow land and in the common waste; he will do work on the lord’s demesne. In the sixteenth century tenure is no clue to economic status, and to say that a man is a copyhold tenant tells us nothing at all about the extent of his holding or the sort of husbandry which he pursues. The vast majority of copyhold tenants are peasants, men who make a toilsome living from their land with the help of their families and a few hired servants. But in England by our period the line between class and class has ceased to coincide with differences of title; if copyhold tenure is born of a humble stock, yet it has risen so much in the world that the upper classes are not ashamed to hold out a hand to welcome it; and among copyholders are found thenames not only of many small freeholders, but also of gentlemen and knights.[119]

Among the peasants who form the bulk of the population there is, again, the greatest diversity. Sometimes the copyholders are simply emancipated villeins, who have commuted most of their services, and who hold by copy instead of at the will of the lord, but whose economic condition has hardly changed at all. Thus in Northumberland[120]the holdings of the copyholders on several manors reflect very accurately the distribution of land between the bondage tenants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the holdings have grown slightly in size, but they have apparently a more or less continuous individual existence from the earliest times. In parts of Wiltshire,[121]on the other hand, though not in all parts, there is no possibility of establishing any connection between the virgate and semi-virgate of the fourteenth century villeins and the acreage held by the copyholders two hundred and fifty years later; both in size and number the holdings are markedly different. In Norfolk and Suffolk ancient class divisions have often been obliterated altogether, and bond and free lands are interlaced in the holdings of the customary tenants in quite inextricable confusion.

Again, there is the greatest variety in the methods of agriculture.[122]Everywhere among the copyhold tenancies arable land predominates to an extent which is in marked contrast to the frequent preponderance of pasture land on many of the demesne farms. But to some tillage seems to be their sole livelihood, while others are very considerable sheep-farmers. Some are cultivators on quite a big scale, well outside the Board of Agriculture’s interpretation of a “small-holder” to-day, with 80, 90, 100, or even 200 acres of land. Often they are better off economically than many freeholders, and when Harrison and Sir Thomas Smithclassify[123]copyholders in general with “day labourers and poor husbandmen,” they must surely have been either speaking loosely, or else thinking not of their economic but of their legal position. But others hold only 5, 10, 15, or 20 acres, so that arithmetical averages of the size of their holdings are very little guide to the real distribution of land. Yet it would not be true to say that such inequality is universal, for in the same county one finds some manors on which the holdings seem all to be cut to a regular standard pattern, and others where the variety of size is almost infinite, while in the North striking divergences of area seem to be as much the exception as they are the rule in the South and the East. On some manors, again, the copyhold tenants have enclosed land and hold much in severalty; on others nearly all of it lies in the open fields. Some have extensive rights of common, while on other manors such rights are non-existent, or are too insignificant to be recorded by surveyors.

In fact the impression given by the surveys is that of a condition of things which is very far from being stationary, but in which, on the contrary, much shifting of property and many changes in the methods of cultivation have been going on, and in which the legal position of the peasants is no guide at all to their economic characteristics. The task of finding a manor to serve as a pattern and standard for the rest, which is hard enough in the thirteenth century, is a sheer impossibility in the sixteenth, and the student works with a deep sense of the danger of sacrificing fidelity to simplicity of statement.

But difficult as it is to reduce to any order the very diverse economic conditions of the customary tenants at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the task, at any rate in outline, has got to be faced. And this involves a short account of movements which take us some way back into the Middle Ages. No one can understand thecontrast between the conditions of the Irish peasantry in 1850 and their condition to-day without knowing something of the agencies which have been at work in the interval, of the Fair Rent Courts, the Congested Districts Board, and the Land Purchase Acts; no one can appreciate the changes which are taking place in rural France without having taken at any rate a glance at the position of the peasantry before the Revolution, and at the Code Napoleon. Certainly the substantial alteration which overtook agrarian relationships in many parts of England between 1500 and 1640 is unintelligible if it is regarded as a wave suddenly appearing in a calm sea, a revolution by means of which commercial relationships of sometimes an almost modern elasticity developed quite rapidly in village communities of an almost mediæval immobility. To understand the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century we must know the sort of framework on which the new forces worked, and the sort of tendencies of which they were the continuation.

Moreover, the history with which we are concerned is primarily the history of the peasants as landholders, and only secondarily the history of their personal condition. Generalisations about the disappearance of villeinage and the substitution of hired labour for the working out of rents in labour services do not help us much here. Speaking broadly, it is no doubt true that, in spite of the survival of many vestiges of the old order, wage-labourers are as normally the means of cultivating the demesne at the end of the fifteenth century as servile tenants are at the end of the thirteenth. But significant as this change is for the history of the wage-earning classes, it does not by itself seem to throw much light on the characteristic features of the sixteenth century problem, the substitution of large tenancies for small, the displacement of small holders, and the undermining of the customary routine of the open field village. Certainly the two movements are connected; equally certainly that connection is not a direct or obvious one. The change in the personal condition of the peasantry is not by itself the key to changes in the use and distribution of property. Why should it be? In Prussia theabolition[124]of villein services in 1807 was carried out by a decree which had as its object not a diminution, but an increase, in the number of small tenants; and it is not self-evident that an alteration in the method of cultivating the lord’s demesne must have produced changes in the disposition of the customary holdings in fifteenth and sixteenth century England.

The very variety in the economic conditions of the peasantry which makes generalisation so difficult is, however, itself a significant feature, because it is in marked contrast with the comparative uniformity which existed among great masses of them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It suggests that even in agriculture custom has to some extent been broken down by commercial enterprise, and that commercial enterprise has had the natural result of accentuating inequality in the possession of property. It warns a student of the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century that he has not only to explain the way in which the small cultivator lost ground then before the large estate, but also how it was that his economic position differed in many cases so much from that of the villein of two hundred years before, and that it may very well be that the answer to the latter question will throw light upon the former.

Let us put ourselves in the position of a jury catechising some “aged man” about the year 1500, catechising him not about boundaries, or rights of common, or manorial customs, but about the general changes in the distribution of property in his village. If surveys and court rolls may be trusted, there is one thing that he could hardly fail to tell us, and that is that for as long as he can remember there has been a great deal of buying and selling of land by the customary tenants, a great many changes in occupancy, and on the whole a tendency for those changes to result in the concentration of several holdings in fewer and larger tenancies. “Virgates which in grandfather's time,” he would say, “used to belong to A., B., C., and D. now belong to A. alone. Men who used to occupy one holding each, now occupy twoor three; when they cannot buy they lease, and some have bought so much that they sublet part of their holdings to others. Indeed there is not much sense in talking about virgates or half-virgates at all. Once each of them had a separate holder; once Durrant’s shottes belonged to Durrant, Gunter’s mead to Gunter, Parry’s croft to Parry, Hawkins' meade to Hawkins, Woolmer's lande to Woolmer, Blake’s tenement to Blake. To-day, though the old names remain, they are no guide to the families holding the land. Frankling has bought Durrant’s and Gunter’s and Blake's, Vites has bought Parry's, while Pynnole’s and Pope’s and Hawkins' and the rest of Blake’s holdings have all passed into the hands of Blackwell.”[125]

One thing at any rate is clear. If frequent changes of occupancy point to a free land-market, then such a free land-market has existed for a long time among the customary tenants; and if a keen demand for land among the peasantry is a proof that small men are thriving, and see their way to thriving still more by adding to their properties, then there is a good deal of this healthy land hunger in English villages before the age of the Tudors. We read to-day of how the French peasant will pinch himself and his family to add a few acres to his little estate, and we take it as an indication that small cultivation has a firm root in France, and that rural life is on the whole enterprising and prosperous. Certainly such a state of things is in marked contrast with the stagnation prevailing in the lower ranges of village society in countries where great estates pass almost intact from generation to generation between the tall palings of family settlements, with the small man, who would get land if he could, staring helplessly through the bars. Now, at any rate in the fifteenth century, England belonged very markedly to the first type, not to the second; to the type where there is much buying and selling of land in small plots by small cultivators, not to the type where land is locked up and rarely comes into the market, rarely at any rate into a market where it can be bought by the smallpeasantry. This mobility of land is of much significance when we come to consider the breaking down of customary rules before the forces of competition, and the formation of great estates out of the holdings of the customary tenants. Let us consider it in more detail, first from the point of view of the changes in the economic basis of rural life which it produces, and secondly from the point of view of the process by which those changes were brought about. We will for the present leave on one side the demesne farm and the land held on lease, and look only at the customary land which forms the backbone of the copyholders' estates.

The first source of information to which we turn consists of the surveys and rentals, in which the holdings of the tenants are set out in detail. To those accustomed to the picture of village life contained in the records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the surveys of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries present certain features which at once arrest attention. For one thing, there is a much greater inequality between the holdings of different customary tenants on the same manors than is usually found among the holdings of virgators and semi-virgators two centuries before. For another thing, some of their holdings are very much larger than anything we find belonging to the same class of tenants at an earlier date; occasionally, indeed, they can only be described as enormous, running into 150 or 200 acres of land; often they amount to 80 or 90. In the third place, the number of customary tenants is, on the whole, much smaller than it was 200 years before, and that even on manors where there has been an increase in the area cultivated by them. The latter fact is significant, and we shall return to it later. But before doing so, let us ask the meaning of the growing inequality in the holdings of the customary tenants and of the great increase in the size of some among them.

Great as is the variety of conditions visible on a thirteenth century manor, it is on the whole true to say that this variety usually conforms to a rough rule or principle. One can find on the same manor families whose holdings differ very largely in size, from the 25 to 40 acres occupied by the holder of a virgate, the 12 to 16 acres of a semi-virgator, to the 2 or 3 acres or less occupied by a cottar. But normally each individual holds much the same amount of land as other individuals of the same class; one holder of a virgate has about as much as another holder of a virgate, one holder of half a virgate about as much as his fellow, one cottager about as much as another cottager. There are in fact different grades, but for each grade there is what may be called a standard area of land, a unit of agrarian organisation, and though that standard area varies a good deal in different parts of the country it is usually fairly easy to discover what it is on any one manor. Outwardly, at any rate, village life is organised, and the distribution of property is settled in the main by the authority of custom, rather than by commercial forces acting directly upon the tenants.

Now after the middle of the fifteenth century it is common to find quite a different condition of things from this. There are, it is true, manors where holdings preserve their primitive equality down to the very end of the sixteenth century, especially manors in backward parts of the country, where the influence of commerce has been little felt; especially also manors where the demesne farm, instead of being leased, has been retained in the hands of the lord. But in the South of England these are the exception. The rule is that with regard to the area held by the customary tenants there is no rule at all. On the same manor copyholders may be cultivating anything from a quarter of a virgate to two, three, four, or even more virgates; if their holdings are expressed in acres they may be holding anything from 1 acre to 100 or 150. Economically, indeed, customary tenants are often not a class at all, if the essence of a class is common characteristics and a similarity of economic status, though in the face of certain dangers they will act as one. On many manors the nature of their tenure is the only common link between them, and the nature of their tenure is compatible with the greatest economic variety.

This variety is most noticeable when we examine a large number of manors one by one, since, when the figures of many different manors are added together, their distinctive features are liable to be concealed in the aggregate. Still, to get some idea of the scale on which the peasants carried ontheir agriculture, it is perhaps worth examining the following table[126]of the holdings of 1600 odd customary[127]tenants on fifty-two manors.

This table enables us, in the first place, to make a comparison between the economic positions of groups of tenants in different parts of England. It will be seen that the “predominant rate”—what we may call the predominant acreage—varies considerably. In Wiltshire it is between 20 and 25 acres, and, including the next two columns, 36 per cent. of all the tenants hold something between 20 and 35 acres. In Northumberland the predominant acreage is between 30 and 35, and nearly one half the tenants, 41 per cent., hold between 30 and 40 acres. Elsewhere the most common holding is a good deal smaller. In Lancashire (if we omit the cottagers, nearly all of whom come from one manor) the predominant acreage is between 10 and 15 acres, though a great many persons hold between 5 to 10 acres. In Staffordshire the largest group of tenants is that holding under 2½ acres, and more than one-half of them hold less than 10 acres. In Norfolk and Suffolk the same state of things obtains, but in a more pronounced form. Little emphasis need be laid on the large number of cottagers there, nearly all of whom are found on a single semi-urban manor, that of Aylsham. But it is clear that the mass of the peasantry in those counties are very small holders indeed. When the cottagers are left on one side, 22 per cent., about one-fifth, of the landholders have under 2½ acres; 54 per cent., more than one-half, have under 10 acres. It is fortunate for them that Norfolk and Suffolk are the home of the woollen industry.

In the second place, let us notice a fact which is more relevant to our immediate purpose. That fact is the great variety in the scale of landholding obtaining between different tenants in the same part of the country. In this matter, again, some counties present a marked contrast to others. In Northumberland the uniformity in the size of the holdings of the tenants is much more marked than thevariety. About two-thirds of them appear in the four columns representing holdings from 30 to 50 acres. Only six hold more than 50, and though on one manor there are ten tenants holding less than 2½ acres, there are, apart from these, comparatively few holding under 25 acres. On all the manors which have been examined in this county there is, in fact, a regular standard holding in the sixteenth century, which varies from 30 to 45 acres on different manors, but which on the same manor varies hardly at all. But Northumbrian agriculture is always several generations behind that of the South and East, and when we turn to Wiltshire, or to East Anglia, or to the nine manors given at the bottom of the table, we find a condition of things in which there is much greater irregularity. The line extends farther at both ends than it does in Northumberland. There aremore individuals and fewer clusters. The grouping of holdings round certain standard patterns is much less marked. If we look at all the manors together, we find that the four most populous columns contain almost exactly one-half (49.1 per cent.) of the whole population, exclusive of cottagers without land. In Northumberland the corresponding columns contain two-thirds, in East Anglia, Lancashire, and Staffordshire rather less, on the nine manors in the South and Midlands about one-half, in Wiltshire a little over one-third. Again there are more large holders and more very small holders in the South and East, than there are in Lancashire and on the Northumbrian border. In Lancashire and Northumberland 4.4 per cent. of the tenants, exclusive of cottagers, have holdings of more than 50 acres. In Suffolk and Norfolk the corresponding figure is 8.5 percent., in Wiltshire 16.9 per cent., on the nine other manors 14 per cent.

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