CHAPTER IVTHE PEASANTRY (continued)

[208]Fortescue on the Governance of England (Plummer), chapter xii.: “But oure commons be riche, and therefore thai give to thair kynge, at somme times quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte tymes other grate subsidies.”

[209]Russell,Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 48 foll.; see passage quoted below, pp.335–337. For the sentences immediately following, see Scrope,History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 233: “A serf ... is said to have left at his death in 1435 chattels estimated at 3000 marks or £2000.” Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, int. xxix.; Davenport,History of a Norfolk Manor, p. 53.

[210]Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. c. 4.

[211]See below, pp.277–279, andHist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, pp. 322–323. Presentment by the grand jury, Worcestershire, 1661, April 23: “We desire that servants' wages may be rated according to the statute, for we find the unreasonableness of servants' wages a great grievance, so that the servants are grown so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the servant except it be because the servant wears better clothes than his master. We desire that the statute for setting poor men’s children to apprenticeship be more duly observed, for we find the usual course is that if any are apprenticed it is to some paltry trade, and when they have served their apprenticeship they are not able to live by their trades, whereby not being bred to labour they are not fit for husbandry. We therefore desire that such children may be set to husbandry for the benefit of tillage and the good of the Commonwealth.” See also Britannia Languens (1680) for remarks on the scarcity of labour even at the end of the seventeenth century.

[212]R.O. Duchy of Lancaster, Special Commissions, No. 398.

[213]See Dekker’sThe Witch of Edmonton. I have ventured to assume that in this play “yeoman” is used in its wide non-technical sense.

[214]Seee.g. Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567, pp. 106–107, and below, pp.159–162.

[215]Synge,The Playboy of the Western World.

[216]Quoted by Slater,The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, pp.58–59. He remarks “a labourer ... begins with one ‘land,’ then takes a second, a third, and so on,” and quotes Mr. Haggard’s statement that the “Isle of Axholme ... is one of the few places ... in England ... truly prosperous in an agricultural sense.”

[217]Customs like those of High Furness, together with the complaints as to the scarcity of agricultural labour, make one reflect on a fundamental question of economics, viz., the average age of marriage and its relation to the distribution of property and organisation of industry. It is well known that the age of marriage is influenced by (among other things) the age at which maximum earning power begins,e.g.to-day it is lower for the unskilled labourer than for the artisan, for the former reaches his prime earlier than the latter; lower for the artisan than for the professional man, because the latter takes longer than the former in getting together a practice or rising from a low initial salary. The difference is not primarily due to differences of thrift or foresight as between different classes, but to the fact that the deferring of marriage, which is prudent in (say) a lawyer, who does not reach his full earning power till thirty-five or later, is imprudent in (say) an engineer who has all the experience he needs at twenty-six or twenty-seven, and still more imprudent in the labourer, who reaches his full earning power at twenty-one or twenty-two, and in whom it falls off rapidly after he has passed the prime of life. When a large number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth century probably a majority) were small landholders or small masters, did the fact that they had to wait for the death of a parent to succeed to their holding, or (in towns) for the permission of a guild to set up shop (i.e.to reach their maximum earning powers) tend to defer the age of marriage? If the possibility of this being the case is conceded, ought we to connect the slow growth of population between 1377 and 1500 (on which all historians seem to be agreed) with the wide distribution of property, and ought we to think of the considerable increase in the landless proletariate which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as tending in the opposite direction? In the absence of statistics we cannot answer these questions. But I am inclined to argue that they are at any rate worth investigation. (i) Contemporary opinion shows that in the eyes of sixteenth century writers the problem of population was a problem of underpopulation. The prevalent fear is “lack of men” for military purposes. Starkey’s Dialogue speaks of it as “a consumption of the body politic,” and suggests as remedies to allow priests to marry, to forbid gentlemen to employ more serving men than they are able to “set forward” to matrimony (on the ground that “men whych in service spend theyr lyfe never fynd means to marry”), to endow with a house and a portion of waste land at a nominal rent persons who marry, to exempt from taxation all persons who have five children and less than a hundred marks in goods, to tax bachelors 1s. in the pound, and give the proceeds to “them which have more children than they be wel abul to nurysch, and partely to the dote of poor damosellys and vyrgins” (Part II. p. 8). Hales (p. lv. of Miss Lamond’s introduction toCommonweal of England) speaks of depopulation in a similar strain, as also does Harrison forty years later. There are some complaints as to excess of population in 1620 (see below, pp.278–279), but these do not become general till the very end of the seventeenth century (see Defoe,Giving alms no charity). (ii) The position of a son who acquires a holding when his parent dies is analogous to that of an apprentice who cannot set up as a master till given permission by the proper authorities. It is quite plain that in the eyes of the ordinary man in the sixteenth century one of the advantages of a system of compulsory apprenticeship was that it prevented youths marrying at a very early age.E.g.an Act (2 & 3 Philip and Mary) forbids the admitting of any one to the freedom of the city of London before the age of twenty-four, and enacts that apprentices are not to be taken so young that they will come out of their time before they are twenty-four. The reason alleged for this rule is the distress in the city of which “one of the chief occasions is by reason of the overhasty marriages and over soon setting up of householdes by the young folke of the city ... be they never so young and unskilful.” A petition of weavers states (Hist. MSS. Com., C.D. 784, p. 114): “Whereas by the former good laws of their trade no one could exercise the same until he had served an apprenticeship for seven years and attained the age of twenty-four, now in these disordered times many apprentices having forsaken parents and masters ... refuse to serve out their time, but before they are eighteen or twenty years old betake themselves to marriage." One may contrast the extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage of the people of Lancashire brought about by the early factory system, with its armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the wages earned immediately on reaching maturity (Gaskell,Artisans and Machinery, 1836, andThe Manufacturing Population of Great Britain, 1833), and compare the results usually ascribed to the wide distribution of landed property in France. See also the remarks of Slater on the effect of the eighteenth century enclosing (The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields, p. 256), and Hasbach,History of the English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 120 n. 138–139, 178. Young ascribed “a great multiplication of births” to the fact that “the labourer has no advancement to hope” (Suffolk, 1797, p. 260); Duncombe, “The practice of consolidating farms ... tends to licentiousness of manners" (Herefordshire, p. 33). A witness before the Select Committee on Emigration, 1827, stated, “The labourers no longer live in farm houses as they used to do, where they were better fed and had more comforts than they now get in a cottage, in consequence there was not the same inducement to early marriage" (qu.3882). In the absence of direct statistical evidence all we can say is (i) that when persons look forward to entering on property or setting up as small masters their point of maximum earning power is later than it is when they can earn the standard rate of the trade at twenty-two or twenty-three; therefore (ii) that the average age of marriage is likely to be higher in a society composed largely of small property owners than in one composed largely of a propertyless proletariate.

[218]SeeAppendix II.

[219]It must be remembered, however, that there was pasture on the one field which every year lay fallow, and that the amount of this does not appear in the figures given below.

[220]Camden Society, Norden, Speculum Britanniæ, Part I., Intro.: “And these commonly are so furnished with kyne that their wives twice or thrice a week conveyeth to London mylke and butter, cheese, apples, pears, frutmentye, hens and chickens, baken, and other country drugs ... and this yieldeth them a large comfort and relief.”

[221]SeeThe Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurers, 1594: “It is a common practice in this country, if a poore man come to borrow money of a maltster, he will not lend any, but tells him, if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of fore-hand buyers; the man being driven by distresse sells his corn far under foote, that when it comes to be delivered he loses halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value. I have heard many of these fore-hand sellers say that they had rather allow after 20 pounds in the hundred for money, than to sell their fore-hand bargaines of corn. These are most extreme usurers.”

[222]A Discourse upon Usurie, by Thomas Wilson, 1584: “A lord doth lend his tenants money, with this condition that they shall plough his land, whether doth he commit usurie or no? I do answer that if he does not pay them for their labour, but will take the benefit of their labour for the use of his money, he is an usurer.”

[223]Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 2319, p. 27: “Juetta ... is a usuress, and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation.”

[224]Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 7881, p. 129, St. Saviour’s Hospital gives "20d to a poor man to buy seed for his land.”

[225]Victoria County History, Suffolk, “Social and Economic History": “The gild let out in one year 8 cows and 4 neats at 19d. each.” For the parson’s cow, seeHist. MSS. Com., Cd. 784, p. 46.

[226]On the subject of the monasteries see Gasquet,Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries, chap. xxii., andpassim.

[227]For reference see below, p. 198, n. 2.

[228]Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue. He is speaking of parts of Somersetshire. “Now I say if this sweet country of Tandeane and the western part of Somersetshire be not degenerated, surely, as their land is fruitful by nature, so doe they their best by art and industrie ... they take extraordinary pains in soyling, plowing, and dressing their land.... After the plough there goeth some 3 or 4 with mattocks to break the clods ... they have sometimes and in some places foure, five, six, eight, yea tenne quarters in an ordinary acre.” For Walter of Henley’s figures see Maitland,Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 437–438. Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth century estimated the average yield “in a year of moderate plenty" at a little more than 11 bushels (Rogers,History of Agriculture and Prices, vol. v. pp. 92 and 783). I quote Norden not as giving what was general, but to show what it was thought could be done.

[229]Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907.

[230]Camden Society, 1857,An Italian Narration of England.

[231]Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907.

[232]See below, p.197.

[233]Roxburghe Club,Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke;cf.R.O.Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182, fol. 1, Rental of the late Priory of Launde (Leicestershire, 1539), where there are tenants paying for common pasture for about 430 sheep.

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

[235]See below, pp.139–147and304–310.

[236]Northumberland County History, vol. ii.

[237]Ibid., vol. iii. pp. 86–94. On this manor at the time of the survey, though the distinction between the old rent and the “cleare yearly value above the old rent" was noted, the latter seems to have been tapped by a rise in rents ("cleere improved rent above the ould rent").

[238]Rochdale Manor Inquisition, 1610, by H. Fishwick (Trans. of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society, vol. vii.).

[239]Merton Documents, MSS. Book labelled “Kibworth and Barkby, 1636.” For another illustration of fixed copyhold rents, see Maitland,English Hist. Review, vol. ix.: The History of a Cambridgeshire Manor.

[240]Quoted, Leadam, “The Security of Copyholders in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" (English Historical Review, vol. viii. pp. 684–696). The case in question was that of the inhabitants of Thingdenv.John Mulsho.

[241]See below, pp.329–331.

[242]Bracton, f. 164 b.: “Succuritur ei per recognitionem Assisæ novæ dissesinæ multis vigiliis excogitatam et inventam" (quoted Pollock and Maitland,History of English Law, vol. i. p. 125 n.).

[243]Bracton, Lib. iv. cap. 28, f. 208.

[244]Northumberland County History, vol. iii., Pt. V., pp. 86–104, Survey of Hexham (1608): “Their fines they pretend to be certain, viz. one year’s rent at everye change of tenant, but not herritable. They have there, for certaine, very ancient evidences and Court Rolls, but they woulde not show them unto us, nor any of their coppies.” See alsoAppendix I. No. IV.

[245]Hist. MSS. Com., Part VII., pp. 49–50 (1596): Some information concerning those intending the rebellion in Oxford.... “And Steer said that there was once a rising at Enscombe Hill by the commons, and they were persuaded to go down and were after hanged like dogs. ‘But,’ said he, ‘we will never yield, but will go through with it!’”

[246]See below, pp.334–337.

[247]Warburton’sRupert, iii., 118 (quoted Gooch,English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, p. 112).

[248]See below, pp.287–310.

[249]I take them from the MSS. Court Rolls of the Manor of Bushey, kindly lent me by the late Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith.

[250]Aldeburgh,temp.Henry VIII., R.O.Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts, vol. clxiii. SeeAppendix I., No. II.

[251]Some copyholders, who held land which was not “customary land" but part of the demesne or the waste, were not protected by custom either: for a discussion of this point see below, pp.293–294.

[252]See below for an example from Crondal, p.295.

[253]MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of “The Presentment and Verdict of the Jury for the Manor of Hewlington,” 1620 (Wrexham Free Library,Ancient Local Records, vol. ii.): “Which decay (as by the ancient records appeareth) did growe by reason of the great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in the reign of Edward III., and also of the rebellion of Owen Glendower and trouble that thereupon ensued.”

[254]Victoria County History of Gloucestershire, Social and Economic History, p. 146. For agrarian strikes see below, pp.329–331.

[255]See below, pp.338–340.

[256]Harrison inElizabethan England(Withington), p. 114, quoting one of “the Spaniards in Queen Mary’s days." “These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king.”

[257]Fortescue,On the Governance of England, chaps. iii. and xiii. The Scots, he thinks, are only one degree less faint-hearted than the French. “Thai ben often tymes hanged for larceny, and stelynge off good in the absence off the owner theroff. But ther hartes serve them not to take a manys gode, while he is present, and woll defende it.”

[258]Coke,Debate of Heralds. See also the quotation, Froude’sHenry VIII., vol. i. chap, i., from a State Paper of 1515: “What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so stronge in the felde, as the comyns of England?”

[259]The Commonweal of this Realm of England(Lamond), p. 94.

[260]Victoria County History, Berkshire, ii., 208. In 1558 a yeoman leaves his son a portion of land worth £10 a year “for his keepinge and learninge in Oxford for five years nexte.” On the same page there is a case of a man described as a “yeoman” who is tenant by copy of Court Roll.

[261]Latimer’sSermons. The first sermon preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549 (Everyman Series, p. 86): “We have good statutes made for the commonwealth, as touching commoners and enclosures; many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing I will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from the devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to pass that the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to school (as indeed universities do wondrously decay already); I say ye pluck salvation from the people and utterly destroy the realm. For by yeomen’s sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained chiefly.” See alsoA Supplication of the Poor Commons(E. E. T. S.): “This thing causeth that suche possessioners as heretofore were able and used to maintain their own children ... to lernynge and suche other qualities as are necessary to be had in this Your Highness Royalme, are now of necessitie compelled to set theyr own children to labour, and al is lytle enough to pay the lorde’s rent, and to take the house anew at the end of the yere.” The children of yeomen had no doubt been educated mainly for the Church, and some attained high position (Surtees Society, vol. lxxix. pp. 263–264, for the son of a yeoman becoming a Bishop, and vol. li. No. 53, the son of a yeoman becoming subdeacon of York, vol. lxxix. pp. 176–177, for a yeoman’s son sent to school for fifteen years). But in the fifteenth century this was not always so, v. Leach,Educational Charters, p. 41, for a school founded in Yorkshire, a county which “produced many youths endowed with light and sharpness of ability, who do not all want to attain the dignity and elevation of the priesthood, that these may be better fitted for the mechanical arts and other concerns of this world.” A case of hostility to the education of the poorer classes based on the idea that education should be reserved for “gentlemen" is givenibid.p. 470, where the notorious Lord Rich and other gentlemen argue “as for husbandsmen’s children, they were more meet ... for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the place of the learned sort. So that they wished none else to be put to school, but only gentlemen's children.” Cranmer retorted, “Poor men’s children ... are commonly more apt to apply their study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated ... the poor man’s son by painstaking will be learned, when the gentleman’s son will not take the pains to get it, ... wherefore if the gentleman’s son be apt to learning let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man's child being apt enter in his room.”

[262]Repton School Register, 1564–1910. One of the husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the attitude of most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why shouldn’t Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably off.

So far attention has been concentrated upon those phenomena which suggest that, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century begin, there has been a period—one may date it roughly from 1381 to 1489—of increasing prosperity for the small cultivator. We have emphasised the evidence of this upward movement which is given by the growth among the peasantry of a freer and more elastic economy. We have watched them shake off many of the restrictions imposed by villeinage and build up considerable properties. We have seen how the custom of the manor still acts as a dyke to defend them against encroachments, and to concentrate in their hands a large part of the fruits of economic progress. In the century from the Peasants' Revolt to the first Statute against Depopulation, in spite of the political anarchy which disfigures it, there is, as it seems to us an interval between one oppressive régime and another, between the leaden weight of villeinage and the stress and strain of the gathering power of competition. In that happy balance between the forces of custom and the forces of economic enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men cannot evade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it has not grown to such lengths as to undermine the security which the small man finds in the established relationships and immemorial routine of communal agriculture.

There is, however, we need hardly say, another side to the picture, and to that other side we must now turn. We must examine again from another point of view some ofthe ground over which we have already travelled, and we must modify the opinions which we have formed by bringing a fresh range of facts into perspective. The piecemeal changes which have been going on in the internal organisation of so many manors look forward as well as back, and are of significance as throwing light on the larger innovations of the later period. For one thing, they mean the appearance among the customary tenantry of persons who are in a small way capitalists, and who supply a link between the great farmer of the sixteenth century and the agricultural organisation of earlier periods. The emergence out of the mediæval peasantry of prosperous cultivators, occupying two or three times as much land as their grandfathers, is a proof that holdings of a considerable size can be managed successfully, and the farmers of the demesne are often drawn from among them. For another thing, the inequality which has appeared among the holdings of different tenants implies the growth of a state of things in which innovations in the customary methods of agriculture are much more likely to be made than they were when all the tenants were organised in fairly well-defined classes. The smaller among them are still practising subsistence farming when the larger are producing on a considerable scale for the market, are acquiring capital, are extending their holdings, are even becoming landlords themselves. There arises therefore a divergence of agricultural methods and economic interests between them, which is quite compatible with the fact that both large and small tenants stand in the same legal relationship to the lord of whom they hold. The enterprise which the former show in their dealings with land and in encroaching on the routine of manorial cultivation cannot fail to have a powerful influence in preparing the way for the individualistic movement which sweeps over agriculture in the sixteenth century, and from which the peasants, as a class, suffer so severely. The freedom with which parcels of land change hands must inevitably weaken the connection between the family and the holding, and result in leaving the least successful without any land at all. The difficulty of maintaining a peasant proprietary without restricting the alienation of land is one which is familiar to modern Governments, and there is clearevidence[263]that, even before the evictions of the sixteenth century began to attract attention, a decline in the number of customary tenants was brought about on a good many manors by the mere process of the well-to-do buying up the poorer men’s holdings.

Such movements prepare the way for greater changes: petty capitalism is naturally followed by capitalism on a larger scale. It is surely at first sight somewhat surprising that the noticeable upward movement in the condition of the rural population, which coincides with the disappearance of villeinage and the growth of copyhold tenure, should have been followed by the marked depression which all observers agree to have occurred in the following century. Why should a class which has displayed such remarkable signs of vigour and enterprise find such difficulty in holding its own? An answer to this question cannot begiven till after a consideration of the new causes at work in the sixteenth century. But may it not be that their position had to some extent been undermined by the very changes which at first improved it, and that the enterprise of the larger customary tenants, while it added to their prosperity as long as they led the way in it, tended to weaken the customary relations and the customary methods of agriculture which had protected the small man, and to leave him at the mercy of competitive forces which he could not control? Such an undulating line of development, in which the small producer gains temporarily from the expansion of markets and improved technical methods which ultimately rob him of his independence, can be paralleled from the later history both of agriculture[264]and of manufacturing industry. It seems to us to offer a thread which connects the capitalist farmer of the sixteenth century with the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth. When there is much buying and selling of land among the peasantry, much colonising of new plots taken from the waste and the demesne, we should expect to see the influence of competition beginning to override that of custom; we should expect to see the paring away of communal restrictions to make room for individual arrangements of a more elastic nature. In the remainder of this chapter we shall approach this problem by considering two movements—the growth at an early date of competitive rents on those parts of manors where custom was weakest, and the enclosing of land by customary tenants themselves. The former offers a precedent for the rack-rents and excessive fines of which so much is heard in the sixteenth century, the latter at once an analogy and a contrast with the enclosures carried out by lords of manors and capitalist farmers, which we shall discuss in Part II.

The development of competitive rents is a subject which must always possess a peculiar fascination for the historicaleconomist, inasmuch as the distribution of wealth depends to no small degree upon the manner in which the surplus gains wrung from nature are shared between different classes. The wealth which, under a régime of great estates and leasehold tenure, accrues to a tiny body of landlords, is, in a community of small freeholders, retained by the cultivating tenant, and, when the tenure of land is such that custom sets a barrier to a rise in rents, is divided between owner and occupier in a way which prevents the former from absorbing the whole advantage of superior sites, or the latter from being reduced to working for bare wages of management. The causes which determine the allocation of rents must always be of crucial importance for an understanding of economic conditions, and any change which augments them, diminishes them, or varies the degree to which different classes participate in them, is likely in time to produce a substantial alteration both in the economic configuration of society and in the possession of social privileges and political power. In modern times, it is true, the enormous area from which food-stuffs are drawn, and the relatively small space upon which manufacturing industry can be concentrated, has made the differential payments accruing to the landowner from varieties of soil and situation almost trifling compared with the surpluses drawn from finance and manufacturing industry by the infra-marginal capitalist and entrepreneur. Such “quasi-rents" are, however, a comparatively modern phenomenon. In our period the basis of wealth was land, and a crucial question is that of the manner in which incomes drawn from land were determined. We have seen that in the sixteenth century custom still ruled the payments made by most of the copyhold tenants. But at that time there were many complaints of rack-renting, and though we must leave till later an inquiry into their justification, it will help us if we take a glance at the new forces, which, even in the Middle Ages, were beginning to operate on the margin of cultivation.

The gradual extension of cultivation over the waste lands surrounding the village fields, and the not infrequent addition of parts of the lord’s demesne to the tenants' holdings, was obviously the occasion, as it took place, of anumber of new agreements between the payer and receiver of rents, which might or might not repeat the conditions of existing contracts. When new land was broken up for tillage an attempt seems in some cases to have been made by the manorial authorities to assimilate its treatment, as far as payment was concerned, to that of the existing customary holdings. The basis of the rent paid was a comparison between the areas of the encroachments and the ordinary holding of a customary tenant; the payment was so many ploughlands'[265]worth, and sometimes the corresponding services were extracted from them. On the other hand, the mere fact that the land was new land, which did not come into the original scheme of manorial finance and organisation, tended to make it the point from which new relationships could spring. For one thing, it was the natural starting-point for the process of substituting money rents for labour. When the customary holdings offered a sufficient supply of labour for the cultivation of the demesne, the manorial authorities naturally preferred to take the payments for additional land in the shape of money rather than in services of which they already had sufficient. Services are sometimes exacted for the new encroachments, but they are the exception; and the assimilation of the payments for these new holdings to those made for the customary holdings was either not seriously attempted or was unsuccessful. One can quite understand that, even if the lord wanted labour services from those parts of the waste which were broken up and added to the cultivated area, he might not be able to get the improvements made on the old terms. Quite apart, therefore, from the process of commutation, the growth of money rents developed as a natural accompaniment of the growth of population.

The second point is more important. It is that the rents paid for the new holdings taken from the waste differed from such money payments as were made for thecustomary holdings, in that they were not to the same extent dominated by custom, but were to a much greater extent influenced by competition. This contrast is the tiny seed of great changes, and may be illustrated by an example drawn from the south of England at a comparatively early date. At Yateleigh,[266]one of the tithings of the manor of Crondal, the absorption of the waste by the customary tenants went on with great rapidity even in the thirteenth century, and in the rental drawn up by the steward in 1287 we find the rents and services paid for the customary holdings and the rents paid for the encroachments set down side by side. The latter fall into a definite scheme which can be picked out at a glance. With a very few exceptions the rent charged for an acre of land taken from the waste is always 4d., and this is the basis for all other payments for the varying portions of waste occupied by the tenants. A two acre piece pays 8d. For a piece of 9-1/2 acres the payment is still about 4-1/4d. per acre, the awkward sum of 3s. 4-1/2d. The rents and services of the customary holdings, however, cannot be reduced to any such simple and uniform plan of adjusting rent to acreage. In the first place all of them, whatever their size, are liable to an initial charge of 9-1/2d., called “Pondpany.” In the second place there is only the roughest correspondence between the amount of land held by a tenant and the payment which he makes. A holding of 22 acres pays 2s. 10d., but so does a holding of 32 acres, while one of 29 acres pays 2s. 2d. Holdings of 12-1/2, of 16, and of 18-1/2 acres all make exactly the same payment of 2s. In short, though it would not be quite true to say that the payment made bears no relation to the size of the holding, the relation which it bears is not at all definite and precise. It is a general relation applying rather to groups of holdings roughly marked off from others by broad differences in extent, not to individual holdings. There is no standard price per acre at all, such as appears in a modern land market, and such as exists for the land taken from the waste.

What is the reason of this remarkable contrast between the rents of pieces of land lying quite near to each otherand held by the same tenants, which causes the payment for one set of holdings, the encroachments, to be adjusted uniformly to the area held, and the other, the customary holdings, to be rented apparently without any economic plan at all? The answer is that the payments for the encroachments and the payments for the customary holdings, if they are both to be called rents, are rents of very different kinds. The payments made for the customary holdings are not based directly on the economic value of the land, but on the value of commuted services, and all the holdings, though of unequal size, are liable to much the same services. All make a general payment of 9-1/2d., because that sum is the value of some payment in kind or service which they had made before the money payment took its place. Holdings of 32 acres and 22 acres, just as holdings of 12½ and 18½ acres, make the same payments, because the labour rents had been only very roughly adjusted to the size of the holdings, and these payments are commuted labour rents, not rents fixed by putting up an acre for leasing and taking what can be got for it. It is of course quite true that services and the size of holdings were connected, and that therefore the money rents which took the place of services and the size of holdings were connected also. But the connection is rough, arrived at by apportioning between holdings the labour services needed to cultivate the demesne, without distinguishing precisely differences of a few acres in the size of different holdings, and the subsequent money rents are not adjusted to the acreage because they express the roughness of the original apportionment.

Now clearly these considerations did not apply to the rents paid for the encroachments which were taken from the waste. The greater part of them had never been liable to labour services at all. Each acre stood by itself, as it were, as simply a piece of cultivatable land of a certain area, not part of a complex on which certain obligations had been imposed. Each, therefore, gets a market value, based on what will be given for it, much sooner than does the land making up the customary holdings, which are not exposed to the levelling influence of the market because they arebound together by their place in the social organisation of the manor. Hence it is on this land, the land leased piecemeal from the waste by tenants who were prosperous enough to afford the extra outlay, that one gets the appearance of something like true competitive rents, because it is here that commercial influences have freest play and are least checked by their subordination to custom. In the same way, when the tenants at Brightwalton[267]do the full quota of work demanded, the rent of their customary holdings is abated accordingly. But not so the rent of the new land which was once part of the waste: in fixing its rent the lord is not checked by any collective sense on the part of the village community; he has a free hand and will make the best bargain he can.

Thus, at a very early date, a fringe of leasehold land forms itself round the manor in addition to the ordinary customary holdings. Because it is on the margin of cultivation the initial rent is low, and because the land is leased the rent can be raised. Exactly the same thing applies to the leasing of the demesne, and sometimes even to the land which one tenant hires from another, because here also the element of competition enters to adjust rents in accordance with supply and demand and with little regard to the influence of custom. When the greater part of the demesne is still cultivated by the labour of villeins, and only small plots are leased to the tenants by way of experiment, the bailiff balances one method against the other, and recommends the resumption of the land which “would pay better in the hands of the lord.”[268]On some manors, it is true, demesne land seems to have been merged inextricably in the customary holdings, and to have been held later, like them, by copy of court roll.[269]But the manorial authorities wereanxious to keep it separate precisely because it was recognised that if kept separate it could be let at a competitive rent. Thus the charter which was granted to the little borough of Holt[270]in Denbighshire, in 1413, provided that the tenants should pay for “every burgage 12d., for every curtilage 12d., for every acre of land belonging to their free burgages 12d., and for every acre of land which was wont to be of the lord's demesne two shillings.” And though, during the confusion of the following century, much of the rent appears not to have been collected, the Crown, of whom the burgesses hold, does not forget that a high rent was due from the demesne, and one hundred and fifty years later requires them to bring up their payments for it to the level fixed in 1413. At Castle Combe, in the middle of the fifteenth century, one finds the steward of the manor watching the land market with a view to getting the best price that he can for the demesne, and speculating whether “any man will ferme the parkis and the conyes at any better price above X marks than yt ys now.”[271]The same tendency towards competitive rents can be seen equally well in the case of the land leased by one tenant from the holdings of others, which for one reason or another have been surrendered to the lord. Thus at Mildenhall,[272]in 1381, a villein pays for his land nearly 1s. 6d. an acre, a very high rent, which is at once explained when it is seen that his holding consists of pieces of land held on a ten years' lease from the holdings of five or more other tenants. Elsewhere one can almost see the bidding up of rents going on. For what else can happenwhen the demesne lands of a manor are leased to four tenants who, in turn, make their profit by leasing them again to the other tenants,[273]or when a villein pays £6 to enter on two acres of arable land,[274]or when land is worth 3s. 6d. an acre after the rents and services have been discharged from it to the lord,[275]so that the holder who cares to sublet can reap a substantial profit on the difference?

The truth is that, at any rate by the middle of the fifteenth century, the rents of different parts of a manor are being settled on quite different principles. They are not all customary rents, as they tended to be at an earlier date, nor are they all competitive rents, as they tend to be to-day. The latter are growing because of the improved economic position of the tenants, which enables them to hire or purchase land over and above their customary holdings, and their growth has been greatly accelerated by the enormously increased opportunities for land speculation which were offered when the Great Plague brought thousands of acres into the land market. It is in the demand put forward by the men of Essex in 1381,[276]“that no acre of land, which is held in villeinage or serfdom, may be had at a higher rent than 4d.,” rather than in the reference to the already decaying labour services, that there is a warning of troubles to come. But long after that, as we have already seen, a great deal of land is still held by rents which are customary and little influenced as yet by the play of competition. We have, in fact, what is almost an illustration of modern theories of rent, with this difference, that though the condition of competitive rents being charged appears as the margin of cultivation is lowered, custom at first prevents the owners of land from taking advantage of their position and asking the full competitive rents from the holders of the superior sites, so that part of the surplus is for a long time enjoyed by the tenants. Such a state of things is clearly a precarious one. When the tenements of Hugh and Thomas are being rack-rented there will obviously be a strong temptation to cause Walter’s to follow suit, and if the customis a barrier to a rise in rents, but not to a rise in fines, to make heavy fines do on the latter what high rents do on the former. If it had been given to our peasants to happen on some monstrous mediæval Ricardo, would they not have wondered how long such an intermingling of payments fixed by custom and payments fixed by competition was likely to continue, and have foreseen, what actually occurred in the sixteenth century, an attempt, though not always a successful attempt, to force up the payments for customary holdings to something like the maximum which the condition of agriculture would allow? They would have said:—“This fellow fears not God, neither regards he man. He is a usurer, a great taker of advantages, an oppressor of his neighbour. We will beat him, and put him in our stocks, and maim his cattle. Nevertheless in the bottom of his foul mind there is some glimmering of sense, and we will give heed to his warning. The devil brings it, but it may be that God sent it. The Court shall recite our good customs once more, and our young men shall look to their bows. Weapon bodeth peace.”[277]

While competitive conditions are creeping forward on those parts of the village lands which have been most recently taken in, even more momentous changes are occurring on the customary holdings themselves. By the end of the fifteenth century we are walking through fields that are being cut up with the hedges which give the dullest Englishlandscape the trim beauty of a garden. For a century and a half, while in the great world the new state rises on the ruins of the Middle Ages, while Tudors give way to Stuarts, and Stuarts browbeat and are browbeaten by ever more impatient Parliaments, in courts customary and sometimes in noisier assemblies not without arms, we shall be discussing whether those hedges are to stand or fall. The great enclosing movement has begun.

Like most great economic changes it has begun quietly and for a long time men are doubtful whether it is a great change at all, and, if it is mischievous, in what exactly the mischief consists. Nor indeed does the mass of the population, who feel the new conditions most, ever become quite clear on this point. Events are too various and move too swiftly for them. They see that great men enclose with little regard to the interests of their poorer neighbours. They curse them for their enclosures,[278]and believe with the faith of an age which has re-discovered the Bible, that they, like greedy Ahab, the father of enclosers, will be cursed. When the encloser should call on God to witness his deed the devil’s name starts to his lips. His cattle are struck by lightning, and his children do not live to reap the fruits of> his iniquity. But the peasants enclose themselves, and though they feel the difference between one sort of enclosing and another, they are simple men who cannot make the matter plain to lawyers and commissioners, and when things reach a certain point they will fight it out.

In every age there are words which are sufficiently definite to become a battle-cry, and yet which contain so many shades of meaning and are susceptible of such varying interpretations, that those who seem to differ most profoundly really differ because they are using the same word to express quite different ideas. Such a word was enclosing. For many years it was a burning question—with statesmen, with preachers, with the mass of the peasantry. But those who tell us exactly what it meant are few, and they tell us hardly more than is sufficient to show that it meant several different things in different connections. The picture of enclosure which carried Ket’s followers against the walls of Norwich was that immortalised two centuries later in Goldsmith's “Deserted Village"; a vision of village cornfields turned into dreary expanses of pasture, where sheep grazed amid ruined homesteads and cattle were stalled in the mouldering churches.[279]When the scientific agriculturists of the age eulogised enclosures, they thought of a more orderly and productive cultivation arising in place of the intolerable “mingle mangle" of the open fields. The Levellers, who in the seventeenth century carried on the agitation against enclosure, had no objection to such as took place “only orchiefly for the benefit of the poor.”[280]The panegyrists of enclosing like Fitzherbert and Norden denounced[281]lords who made enclosure an occasion to rack-rent and depopulate. The Justices of Nottinghamshire[282]complain to the Government that enclosure drives people into the already overburdened towns, but they are careful to explain that enclosures of less than five acres in size improve agriculture without depopulating the country. The Government itself under Elizabeth sets its face against the enclosures which produce evictions, but nevertheless expressly sanctions the exchanging of strips, which is desired chiefly in order that small enclosures may be made.[283]In this phase of the eternal quarrel between the plain man and the technical expert both the technical expert and the plain man were right, and needed only a definition to unite against the avarice and oppression which snatched a golden harvest from their confusion. It is the tragedy of a world where man must walk by sight that the discovery of the reconciling formula is always left to future generations, in which passion has cooled into curiosity, and the agonies of peoples have become the exercise of the schools. The devil who builds bridges does not span such chasms till much that is precious to mankind has vanished down them for ever.

One such distinction, however, we must draw at once. Enclosure is usually thought of in connection with the encroachments made by lords of manors or their farmers upon the land over which the manorial population had common rights or which lay in the open arable fields. And this is on the whole correct. This is what the word would have suggested to nine men out of ten in our period: this aspect of the movement was the most rapid in its development and the most far-reaching in its effects. But there was another side to it which was at once earlier in point of time andproductive of quite dissimilar results. There is abundant evidence to show that the open field system of agriculture, with its intermingled strips and its collective, as opposed to individual, rules of cultivation, was undergoing a gradual dissolution from within even before the larger innovations of great capitalists gave it a shock from without. At the very time when the peasantry agitated most bitterly they were often hedging and ditching their own little holdings and nibbling away fragments of the waste to be cultivated in severalty. It is, of course, true that the effect of enclosure by the lord of a manor or large farmer was usually very different from that of enclosure by the customary tenants. The latter was a slow process of attrition, which went on quietly from one generation to another, often no doubt after discussions in the manorial court. The former was frequently an invasion. But though their social effects were dissimilar, from a technical point of view they were both part of the process through which cultivation at the discretion of the individual was substituted for cultivation in accordance with common customary rules. Enclosing by lords and large farmers was not so much a movement running counter to existing tendencies, as a continuation on a larger scale and with different results of developments which in parts of England were already at work. Great changes are best interpreted in the light of small, and it will therefore be worth our while to look shortly at the sort of enclosing which was being carried out by the peasantry themselves.

First, one may review briefly what is told us by those who wrote on the technique of agriculture. Fitzherbert[284]and Hales in the sixteenth century, Norden and Lee in the seventeenth, make it quite plain that, apart from enclosures carried out by lords of manors, a movement is going on among the tenants which is also known by the name of enclosure. It has as its object the formation of compact fields out of the scattered strips, and the substitution of closes surrounded by hedges for rights of grazing over the common pasture, meadow, and waste.It has as its effects a great increase in the output of wheat, opportunities for better grazing and stock-breeding, and a consequent rise in the value of land; the improvement being partly due to psychological[285]reasons, to the fact that a man who has a free hand will put more labour into the land than one who is fettered by customary rules, partly to technical causes such as the better draining and cleaning of land which the enclosure of arable ground makes possible, the greater security offered against damage done by straying cattle, the improvement in the quality of pasture when it is no longer liable to be eaten bare by the beasts of a whole township. The method by which such a change takes place is re-allotment. The construction of hedges—enclosing—is simply the machinery by which the new lines of demarcation between one man’s land and another’s are drawn and kept firmly in their place; and though the wordenclosuregives a vivid picture of the alteration which is produced in the appearance of the country,re-allotmentorredivisionof land describes much better the process by which it is brought about. The ideal form of it is described by Fitzherbert.[286]All the landlords in a village must come to an agreement that their tenants should exchange their holdings with each other. An exact statement of the area of land in tillage and pasture held by each tenant must then be made. When this has been done, every man is “to change with his neighbour, and to leye them (i.e.the acres, which were formerly scattered) together, and to make him one several close in every field, to leye them together in one field and to make one several close for them all; and also another several close for his portion of his common pasture, and also his portion of his meadow in a several close by itself, and all kept in several both winter and summer. And every cottager to have his portion assigned to him according to his rent.” Such enclosure does not, it is contended, interfere unfairly with any one’s vested interests. It makes a spatial rearrangement of property, but it doesnot alter its economic distribution. It does not result in evictions or depopulation. It simply converts rights exercised jointly over a larger area into rights exercised individually over a smaller one. The map is dissolved into scattered pieces, but it is put together again; and when it is put together all the pieces are still there. The tenants part with shares in the common fields, meadows, and pastures, to get smaller fields, meadows, and pastures to themselves. The latter are more valuable than the former. What is lost in extension is gained in intension.

But this account is an ideal one, a description of the most excellent way, not necessarily a description of what is being actually done. For that we must turn to the surveys. In the picture of agriculture which is given by the surveyors one can see the open field system of cultivation at almost every stage of completeness and disintegration at different places. On many manors there is hardly any sign of the scattered strips, which make up the individual tenant’s holding, coalescing into compactness, hardly any sign of encroachments upon either the common pasture or the meadow or the waste. Elsewhere one finds that though the bulk of the land still lies in the open fields, and though the greater part of the meadow and pasture is undivided, a considerable proportion has been enclosed by the tenants and is held in severalty. Elsewhere one finds the common meadow split up and the arable enclosed, the arable enclosed and the waste unenclosed, or all of them enclosed more or less completely. It would be of great interest and importance to determine the relative preponderance of enclosure by the tenants in different parts of the country, and to see how far the districts where this type of enclosure by consent had been commonest were identical with those where the reports of the Royal Commissions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show that depopulating enclosures made least way. Very probably it would be found that the latter movement went on least rapidly where the former had proceeded furthest, and that where the tenants themselves had from an early date substituted enclosed for open field husbandry, as apparently they had in Kent,Essex, Cornwall, and parts of Devonshire[287]they had least to fear from that kind of enclosure which was accompanied by encroachments on the part of manorial authorities, and which seems to have produced most dislocation in the Midlands and Eastern counties. But this is a suggestion which our material is too scanty either to confirm or disprove. Enclosure by consent did not cause popular disorder; and therefore we cannot say, taking the country as a whole, how far enclosure on the part of the bulk of the smaller tenants had proceeded. We can only give cases which show that on some manors it had advanced very far, and which bear out the evidence of the writers on agriculture as to there being a well-defined movement away from open field husbandry on the part of the peasants themselves, without attempting to determine its extent or its geographical distribution.

Look, first, for example, at the picture given by the Commission of 1517. Thanks to Mr. Leadam,[288]we are able to say what the average acreage of the enclosures in each county represented was, what proportion of the enclosures was due to lords of manors, lay or ecclesiastical, and what proportion was due to the tenants. Now it is generally, though not universally, true that the enclosures reported to this Commission fall into two main types. The first consists of considerable enclosures carried out mainly by lords of manors. The second consists of smaller enclosures carried out mainly by other classes. Thus the five districts where the average size of the enclosures made is largest are Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire North Riding, Yorkshire West Riding, Yorkshire East Riding, where it is 129, 96, 84, 77, 62 acres respectively, and in these the proportion of the enclosures which is due to the lords of manors is high also—72 per cent., 52 per cent., 79 per cent., 92 per cent., 64 per cent. Contrast with the position in these counties that obtaining in Berkshire, in Salop, and in London and its suburbs. In Berkshire the average size of an enclosure is 32 acres, in Salop 18, in London 10, and in these districtsthe lords play a much smaller part in enclosing. They are responsible for 42 per cent. of the acreage enclosed in Berkshire, 12 per cent. of that enclosed in Salop, 3 per cent. of that enclosed in the vicinity of London. Does not this suggest that in parts of the country—we cannot yet say what parts—there is much small enclosing by small men?

Turn next to the story told by the surveys. Though Wiltshire is on the whole a country of recent enclosure, there was a certain amount of several farming on the part of the customary tenants on the Wiltshire manors in the middle of the sixteenth century. Out of 4128¼ acres held by them on eight manors the surveys show that 202¼ acres lie in closes.[289]This is a very small proportion, only 5 per cent., and suggests that on most of them the holdings lay in the open fields, and that, as a general rule, the common utilisation of meadows and pastures still obtained. On one, however, as much as 132 acres out of 1103, or just under 12 per cent, were enclosed, and at best these are minimum figures which do not accurately represent how far the movement had gone; for, though a surveyor would not describe unenclosed land as enclosed, he might very well class enclosed land with other land of the same description, for example as meadow or pasture, and omit to state that it was occupied in severalty. On some Staffordshire[290]manors again there are similar tentative beginnings of enclosure, and a similar impossibility of determining its actual extent. Then, too, there are manors where the greater part of the land still lies in the open fields, but where enclosure has proceeded a little further. At Salford,[291]in Bedfordshire, eight of the tenants have enclosed about 51 acres, which they hold separate from, and in addition to, their holdings in the open fields, in amounts varying from 2 to 17 acres. At WeedenWeston,[292]in Northamptonshire, the three largest tenants (apart from the farmer of the demesne) hold “in several ground enclosed" 28 acres. In addition to this, part of the manor called “the mere land,” the exact nature of which is obscure, has been broken off and split up among all the fourteen tenants, some holding only 2 or 3 acres, others holding 15 or 20 acres. Finally, as examples of manors where enclosure by the customary tenants was carried furthest, we may take those of Edgeware[293]and Kingsbury in Middlesex. From the admirable maps of these two manors, which were made in 1597, no one could even guess that the open field method of cultivation had ever existed there. The land of each of the numerous tenants lies in fields, often quite small fields, which are separated from each other by hedges. Instead of the “spider's web" of the older method we have the irregular chessboard of modern agriculture.

Back to Index Next