PART ITHE SMALL LANDHOLDER

[1]See the land legislation of the Australasian Colonies.

[2]The Instrument of Government (December 1653) established a franchise qualification of rent or personal estate to the value of £200. This certainly would have enfranchised a large number of copyholders and leaseholders, some of whom were much better off than the small freeholders. For an estate of £299, 15s. 4d. left at death by a tenant “Husbandman"” seeNottingham Borough Recordsunder the year 1599 (vol. iv. pp. 249–252). It was made up as follows: “Money in purse and his clothes, £15; value of beasts, £74; corn sowne in fields, £35; value of furniture in hall, £2, 13s.; in parlour, £5, 14s., and other miscellaneous possessions.” Forwills of husbandmenand yeomen seeSurtees Society, vol. lxxix., pp. 181–182, 263–264, 294, 310. For the restoration of the franchise to the freeholders, see Gardiner,The Commonwealth, iii. 78.

[3]Hammond,The Village Labourer, 1760–1832. One may add—if English statesmen had studied the history of customary tenures in England, would they have deferred until 1870 legislation protecting tenant right in Ireland? See Lord Morley’s description of the Irish cultivator “as a kind of copyholder or customary freeholder” (Life of Gladstone, vol. ii. p. 281).

[4]Cunningham,Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, Part i. pp. 85–88, 101–107, 540–543.

[5]Seee.g. Records of the Borough of Reading, vol ii. pp. 36, 94, 156; vol. iii., 131, and those of Leicester, Norwich, Nottingham, and Southampton,passim; also below, pp. 275–277.

[6]“Mr. Secretary Cecil said, ... If we debar tillage, we give scope to the Depopulator, and then, if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the Statute of Inmates; if they wander abroad, they are within the danger of the Statute of the Poor to be whipt” (D'Ewes'Journal of the House of Commons, 1601, pp. 674–675).

[7]See below, pp.273–275.

[8]E. E. T. S.,England in the Reign of King Henry the Eighth, Part II.: “A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford, by Thomas Starkey, Chaplain to the King,” edited by J.M. Cowper (date of composition about 1538).

[9]E. E. T. S., as above, Part I. (Appendix).The Pleasant Poesye of Princelie Practise, by Sir William Forest (date of composition 1548).

[10]The Commonweal of this Realm of England, edited by Elizabeth Lamond (date of composition 1549; the author was almost certainly John Hales).

[11]Powell,Depopulation Arraigned, 1636.

[12]The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the Poor, wherein Enclosure such as doth unpeople Towns and Common Fields is Arraigned, Convicted, and Condemned by the Word of God, by John Moore, Minister of Knaptoft, in Leicestershire, 1653.

[13]Fitzherbert,Boke of Husbandry, 1534.Surveyinge, 1539.

[14]Tusser,Five Hundred Points of Husbandry.

[15]Northumberland County History, vol. i. p. 350 and passim.

[16]Surveystemp.Philip and Mary of various estates belonging to the Earl Devon (Topographer and Genealogist, i. p. 43).

[17]Norden,The Surveyor’s Dialogue(1607).

[18]Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime Bishop of Worcester (Everyman’s Library, J.M. Dent & Co.).

[19]Crowley, Select Works (E.E.T.S., 1872).

[20]Becon,Jewel of Joy. Extract quoted in England in the reign of King Henry the Eighth (Part I., p. lxxvi.).

[21]“For looke in what partes of the realm doth growe the fynest and therefore dearest woll, there noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certeyn abbotes, holy men no doubt, not contenting them selfes with the yearely revenues and profytes, that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessours of their landes, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothinge profitting, yea much noyinge, the weal publique, leave no grounde for tillage, thei inclose al into pasture; thei throw doune houses; they plucke downe townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to be made a shepehouse” (More’sUtopia, Book I., p. 32, Pitt Press Series).

[22]“The Grazier, the Farmer, the Merchants become landed men, and call themselves gentlemen, though they be churls; yea, the farmer will have ten farms, some twenty, and will be a Pedlar-merchant” (King Edward’s Remains: A Discourse about the Reformation of many Abuses). “Look at the merchants of London, and ye shall see, when by their honest vocation God hath endowed them with great riches, then can they not be content, but their riches must be abrode in the country, to bie fermes out the handes of worshipful gentlemen, honest yeomen, and poor laborynge husbands” (Lever’s Sermons, Arber’s Reprints, p. 29).

[23]“Do not these ryche worldlynges defraude the pore man of his bread, ... and suffer townes so to decay that the pore hath not what to eat, nor yet where to dwell? What other are they, then, but very manslears? They abhorre the names of Monkes, Friars, Chanons, Nounes, etc., but their goods they gredely gripe. And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at a reasonable pryce, noryshed scholes, brought up youths in good letters, they doe none of all these thinges” (Becon,Works, 1564, vol. ii. fols. xvi., xvii.).

[24]“A proclamation set fourthe by the King’s Majestie with the assent and consent of his dear uncle Edward, Duke of Somerset ... and the said cattell also by all lyklyhode of truth should be more cheape beynge in many men’s handes as they be nowe in fewe, who may holde them deare and tarye the avantage of the market” (Brit. Mus.Lansdown, 238, p. 205). See also E. E. T. S.: “Certayne causes gathered together, wherein is showed the decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (date 1550–1553), andThe Commonweal of this Realm of England, passim, especially pp. xlv.-lxvii. It is worth noting that Hales, who was quite conversant with the effect on general prices of an increase in the supply of money, thought that the rise which took place in his day was in some measure due to monopolists. He describes his third Bill as ensuring that “ther wolde have byn within fyve yeares after the execution therof suche plentie of vitteyll and so good cheape as never was in England" (Commonweal, p. lxiii.).

[25]Proclamation as before: “Of late by thynclosinge of landes and erable grounds, many have byn drevyn to extreme povertie, insomuche that wheareas in tyme past, tenne, twentie, yea in some places C. or CC. Chrysten people hathe byn inhabytynge ... nowe ther is nothynge kept but sheepe and bullocks. All that lande, whiche heretofore was tilled and occupied by so many men, is nowe gotten by insaciable gredyness of mynde into one or two men’s handes, and scarcely dwelled upon with one poore shepherd.”

[26]“There be a manie a M cottagers in England, which, havinge no land to live of theire owne but their handie labours, and some refreshinge upon the said commons, yf they were sodenly thrust out from that commoditie might make a great tumult and discorde in the commonwealth” (Commonweal of England, pp. 49–50).

[27]See below, pp.341–344.

[28]Leadam,Domesday of Enclosures.

[29]Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xiv. and vol. xvii.;Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii. See also Gonner,Common Land and Inclosure, pp. 132–152.

[30]Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xix. See below,pp. 287–297.

[31]Johnson,The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, p. 40.

[32]See below, pp.218–221and237–253.

[33]Nasse,The Land Community of the Middle Ages(translated for the Cobden Club by Colonel Ouvry, 1871), pp. 81–91: “With regard to the proper agricultural character of these movements they are represented commonly as having been caused by an exclusively pure pasture husbandry, which expelled the tillage husbandman. Different circumstances, however, and witnesses show us closely that this, for the most part, was not the case.” The discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay is contained in theTrans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xiv. See also Miss Davenport,Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xi., and below, pp. 223–228.

[34]Elizabethan England, edited by Lothrop Withington, with introduction by F.J. Furnivall, p. 119.

[35]J. Norden,The Surveyor's Dialogue.

[36]Thomas Fuller,Holy and Profane State.

[37]Gay,Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii., p. 587: “Hysterical and rhetorical complaint ... condemned by its very exaggeration.”

[38]Ashley,Economic History, vol. i. Part II., p. 286: “There were two periods of rapid change ... namely from c. 1470 to c. 1530, and again from about 1760 to 1830. After about 1530 the movement somewhat slackened.”

[39]See below,Part III., chap. i.

[40]Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix. See also Gonner,Common Land and Inclosure, pp. 153–186. Professor Gonner is no doubt right in saying that “the view which regards inclosure ... as taking place mainly at two epochs, in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries respectively ... gives an almost entirely false presentation of what occurred.”

[41]Moore.The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the Poor, 1653, andA Scripture Word against Enclosure, 1656. Moore’s pamphlets provoked rejoinders, viz.,A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, by Joseph Lee, 1656,Considerations concerning Common Fields and Enclosures(1654, Pseudonismus), andA Vindication, of the Considerations concerning Common Fields and Enclosures, or a Rejoynder unto that Reply which Mr. Moore hath pretended to make unto those Considerations(1656, Pseudonismus).

[42]4 Henry VII. c. 19.

[43]“For the chief destruccion of Townes and decaye of houses was before the begynnynge of the reign of King Henry the Seventh" (The defence of John Hales, quoted p. lxiii. of Miss Lamond’s edition ofThe Commonweal of this Realm of England).

[44]Camden Society, 1854, lii.

[45]J. Rossus,Historia Regum Angliæ(T. Hearne).

[46]See below, pp.161–162.

[47]Seee.g.More’sUtopiaquoted above, and Pauli,Drei volkswirthschaftliche Denkscriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England. It is suggested that if the council will only fix the price which stappellers and clothmakers are to pay for raw wool, “it shall cause the pasturers of sheep to open their enclosures and suffer the more earth to be wrought by works of husbandry.”

[48]See the discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay on the wool prices of Thorold Roger inTrans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xiv. The best account of the price movements of the sixteenth century is contained inStudien zur Geschichte der Englischen Lohnarbeiter, Band I., by Gustaf F. Steffen.

[49]Hasbach,A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 31–33.

[50]See below, pp.197–200and304–310.

[51]e.g.by Hasbach,op. cit.p. 37. Gay,Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xviii. Contrast Miss Leonard, Trans.Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix. On the subject of the policy of the State towards the agrarian problem, see below, Part III., chap. i.

[52]Preface toThe Commonweal of this Realm of England(ed. Lamond).

“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 strong in the felde as the comyns of England?”—State Papers, Henry VIII., vol. ii. p. 10.

“My thynketh that as the wise husbandman makethe and maynteyneth his nursery of yonge trees to plante in the steede of the olde, when he seeth them begynne to fail, because he will be sure at all tymes of fruyte: so shulde politique governours (as the kynges maiestie and his councell mynde) provide for thencrease and mayntenance of people, so that at no tyme they maye lacke to serve his highnes and the commenwelthe.”—The defence of John Hales agenst certeyn sclaundres and false reaportes made of hym.

If an Englishman of ordinary intelligence had been asked in the reign of Henry VIII. to explain the foundations of national prosperity, he would probably have answered that the whole wealth[53]of the country arises out of the labours of the common people, and that, of all who labour, it is by the work of those engaged in tillage that the State most certainly stands. True, it cannot dispense with handicraftsmen and merchants, for ours is an age of new buildings, new manufactures, new markets. The traders of Europe are already beginning to look west and east after the explorers; there are signs of an oceanic commerce arising out of the coastwise traffic of the Middle Ages; and Governments are increasingly exercised with keeping foreign ports open and English ports closed. But whether any particular artisan or trader is a profitable member of the commonwealth is an open question. Too many of the manufactures which men buy are luxurious[54]trifles brought from abroad and paid for with good English cloth or wool or corn or tin, if not with gold itself—articles whose use sumptuary legislation would do well to repress. As for merchants,[55]if like honest men they give their minds to navigation,well and good. But theirs is an occupation in which there is much room for “unlawful subtlety and sleight,” for eking out the legitimate profits earned by the labour of transport, with underhand gains filched from the necessitous by buying cheap and selling dear, for speculations perilously near the sin of the usurers who traffic in time itself. Outside the circle of a few statesmen and financiers, the men of the sixteenth century have not mastered the secret by which modern societies feed and clothe (with partial success) dense millions who have never seen wheat or wool, though London and Bristol and Southampton are beginning to grope towards it. Looking at the cornfields which are visible from the centre of even the largest cities, they see that a small harvest means poverty and a good harvest prosperity, and that a decrease of a few hundred acres in the area sown may make all the difference between scarcity and abundance. A shortage in grain, which would cause a modern State to throw open its ports and to revise its railway tariff, sets a sixteenth century town[56]breaking up its pastures and extending the area under tillage. No man is so clearly a “productive labourer” as the husbandman, because no man so unmistakably adds to the most obvious and indispensable forms of wealth; and though, in the system of classes which makes up the State, there are some whose function is more honourable, there is none whose function is more necessary. In most ages there is some body of men to whom their countrymen look with pride as representing in a special degree the strength and virtues of the nation. In the sixteenth century that class consisted of the substantial yeoman. Men speak of them with the same swaggering affection as is given by later generations to the sea-dogs. The genius of England is a rural divinity and does not yet rule the waves; but the English yeomen have “in time past made all France afraid.”[57]They absorbmost of the attention of writers, both on the technique and on the social relations of agriculture. They are the feet[58]upon which the body politic stands—the hands which, by ministering to its wants, leave the brain free to act and plan. Let us begin by trying to see how the landholding classes were composed.

The manorial documents supply us with much information about the landholders, and though we cannot say what proportion[59]they formed of the population, we ought to beable to say with some certainty the relative numbers of different classes among them. In the surveys and rentals of the period persons holding land may usually be divided roughly according to the nature of their tenure into three groups—freeholders, customary tenants, and leaseholders.This classification[60]of course is an elastic and tentative one, which raises almost as many questions as it settles. The customary tenure of one part of the country differs very much from the customary tenure of another part. Customary tenants include copyholders and the vast majority of tenants at will, who are holding customary land, and who are often entered under the latter heading merely because the surveyor did not trouble to set out their full description. But tenancy at will is sometimes used to describe the condition, not only of the holder of customary land, but also of men who are mere squatters on the waste or on the demesne, and who are not protected in their holdings by any manorial custom. Again, it is not always easy to draw a line between copyhold and leasehold. On a manor where the custom is least favourable to the tenants' interests the former shades into the latter. There is not much difference, for example, between a lease for thirty-three years and a copyhold for life. Again, the classification is one of tenures not of tenants. In parts of England, it is true, it does divide individual tenants with almost complete exhaustiveness and precision. In most districts, for example, the free tenant usually holds freehold land and nothing else, the customary tenant customary land and no other. But in East Anglia there is no such simplicity of arrangement, no such permanence of tenurial compartments. Many free tenants hold land which is said to be bond or villein or customary land; many customary tenants hold free land; many of both have added to their holdings by leasing parts of the demesne or of the waste, and thoughin this respect the Eastern counties are exceptional, it is in them often impossible to say in what class any individual should be placed.

Nevertheless, in spite of many marginal cases, we may perhaps find in the surveyors' classification a map of the broader features of the country through which we are to travel. Property holders, profit makers, and wage-earners are to-day inextricably confused, but to the economist who writes on our social problems 200 years hence it will not be altogether useless to know that his predecessors did in practice draw rough distinctions between these classes, and formed estimates of the numbers of each. Much of the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century turns on the question of the legal interest in their holdings enjoyed by different classes of tenants, and though we cannot hope to escape the pitfalls which await compilers of even the humblest census, a preliminary survey of their distribution in a few counties may not be altogether without value. The following figures are taken from the surveys and rentals of 118 manors.[61]The majority were made in the reign of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth. There are included, however, three from the latter half of the fifteenth century and three from the years between 1630 and 1650. Under the heading of customary tenants are grouped copyholders and tenants at will, as well as those who are called customary tenants in the rentals and surveys.

Scanty as they are, these figures show that there is the very greatest variety in the distribution of different classes of tenants in different parts of the country, and remind us that we must be careful how we generalise from the conditions of one district to those of another. When all localities are handled together, customary tenants form nearly two-thirds of the whole landholding population, freeholders about one-fifth, leaseholders between one-eighth and one-ninth. But in parts of the Midlands and in parts of the West the leaseholders are much more numerous than they are elsewhere; in Leicestershire they form over one-fifth, andare almost as numerous as the freeholders, while if we isolate the five Somersetshire and Devonshire manors which above are combined with those of Wiltshire, we find that in them the leaseholders exceed the freeholders by nearly two to one. Again, in Northumberland the preponderance of customary tenants (where they form 91 per cent. of the landholding population) over the two other classes is much more markedthan it is in Wiltshire, and in Wiltshire it is greater than it is in the three Midland counties and in East Anglia. That customary tenants should overwhelmingly preponderate in Northumberland is intelligible enough. If the single great manor of Rochdale be removed, they preponderate almost as much in Lancashire. In those two wild counties mediæval conditions survive long after they have begun elsewhere to disappear. There has been no growth of trade to bring mobile leasehold tenures in its train, or to accumulate the wealth which the peasants need to enfranchise their servile tenancies. But why should they be so much more numerous in the southern counties than they are in the twenty-two Midland villages, where one would suppose the conditions to be much the same? Here, as often hereafter, we raise a question only to leave it unanswered.

TotalFreeholdersCustomary TenantsLeaseholdersUncertainNorthumberland, six manors4742643612Lancashire, seven manors, and lands belonging to Cockers and Abbey1280217451334[62]278Total1754243887334346(13.8%)(50.5%)(19.04%)(15%)Staffordshire, six manors356442722317Leicestershire, nine manors61813431112449Northamptonshire, seven manors5311003556610Total150527893821376(18.1%)(62.3%)(14.2%)(5%)Norfolk, twenty-five manors1011[63]]3165965350Suffolk, fourteen manors353176146256Total1364[63]4927427856(36%)(54.3%)(5.7%)(4.1%)Wiltshire, Somerset, and Devonshire, thirty-two manors1102149817136Hampshire, two manors2598251Ten other manors in the south of England21943158126Total158020012261486(12.6%)(77.2%)(9.3%)(0.3%)Grand Total6203[63]12133793785416(19.5%)(61.1%)(12.6%)(6.7%)

Yet there is one point emerging from these figures of which the explanation can hardly be in doubt. It will be noticed that in Norfolk and Suffolk combined the proportion of freeholders is about double what it is in the country as a whole. In the former county they form more than one-third of all the landholders, and in the latter they are almost equal to the other two classes together. The number of peasant proprietors in Suffolk is indeed quite exceptional, and is one of the most remarkable facts revealed by the surveys, drawing an unmistakable line between the land tenure of the east and that of the south-west and the northern border. In Wiltshire and Northumberland it is not uncommon to find villages where no freeholders at all are recorded. In Norfolk and Lancashire it is the exception for them to be in a majority. But on half the Suffolk manors summarised above they are the largest class represented, and on some they stand to the other landholders in a proportion of two, three, and even four to one. Is it fanciful, one may ask, to turn from the sixteenth century to the dim beginnings of things, to that first and greatest survey in which the land of England was described so that not an ox or an acre escaped valuation, and in which, before freehold tenure had been hammered into any precise legal shape, Suffolk and Norfolk abounded more than all other counties inliberi hominesandsochemanni? Though a longer time separates thesedocuments from Domesday[64]than separates them from us, perhaps it is not altogether fanciful. Rural life, except for one great catastrophe, has been very permanent. Unlike rural life to-day, it has been most permanent in its lower ranges. How ever often manors may have changed hands, there has been little to break the connection with the soil of peasants whose title is good, no change at all comparable to the buying out of small freeholders which took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It may well be that the main outlines of the social system which the Domesday commissioners found already laid in the east of England crop out again after the lapse of between four and five hundred years. It may well be that Suffolk is a county of small freeholders in the days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, because it was a county of free men and socmen in the days of William I.

In spite of the constant complaints of the sixteenth century writers that one effect of the agrarian changes was the decay of the yeomanry, we shall not in the following pages be much concerned with the freeholders. In our period the word “yeomen" was ceasing to be given the narrow semi-technical sense which it possessed in Acts of Parliament and legal documents, and was beginning to acquire the wide significance which it possesses at the present day. To the lawyer the yeoman meant a freeholder,[65]“a man who may dispend of his own free lande in yerely revenue to the summe of 40s. sterling,” and if the word yeoman was used in its strict legal sense, the decay of the yeomanry ought to have meant a decline in the numbers of freeholders, such asoccurred on a very large scale two and a half centuries later. But in this matter it seems that popular usage was more elastic than legal definition, and, except when the significance to be given it is defined by the context, the word itself is not an accurate guide to the legal position of those to whom it is applied. Writers on constitutional questions were careful to observe the stricter usage, because the 40s. freeholder occupied a position in the State, both as a voter and in serving on juries, from which persons who, though much wealthier, were not freeholders, were excluded. But the word yeoman was used, in speaking of agricultural conditions, to describe any well-to-do farmer beneath the rank of gentleman, even though he was not a freeholder. Thus Bacon[66]writes quite vaguely of “the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between gentlemen and cottagers or peasants.” Those who insisted that the military power of England depended on the yeomanry can hardly have meant to exclude well-to-do copyholders;[67]not only copyholders but even villeins[68]by blood were sometimes described as yeomen; and, in fact, even writers who, like Sir Thomas Smith,[69]use the word most clearly in its strict legal sense on one page, allow themselves to slip into using it in its wider and more popular sense on the next, when the social importance of the class and not its legal status is uppermost in their minds.

Nor is there much evidence that the freeholders suffered generally from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. It is true that there are some complaints from freeholders as to the loss of rights of pasture through the encroachments of large farmers upon the commonable area, some cases of litigation between them and enclosing landlords. But, since their payments were fixed, there was no way of getting rid of them except by buying them out, and though this method, which was so important a cause of the decline of the small freeholder in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was occasionally employed to round off a great estate, it seems to have played a comparatively unimportant part in our period. There is no sign of any large diminution in their numbers, such as would have been expected if the movement had affected them in the same way as it did the customary tenants.

Indeed, if the accounts of contemporary writers may be trusted, it would appear that their position was actually improved in the course of the century. Though even among quite small men one occasionally finds a tenant by knight[70]service, the vast majority of freeholders held in free socage, owing fealty and suit of court, and paying a money rent, sometimes combined with the old recognitions[71]of dependent tenure, such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of cummin. But while on some manors some outward form of feudalism, such as homage and fealty, were still maintained, the decay of feudal relations in the middle order of society had combined with economic causes to better their condition, and the time was already not far distant when those who held by the more honourable tenure of knight service would insist on its being assimilated to the humbler and less onerous tenure of the socager. The agricultural services of the socage tenants had long disappeared. There are many instances of work on the demesne being done in the sixteenth century by copyholders; but there is in our records only one manor where it was exacted from the freeholders, and other obligations were tending to go the way of the vanished predial labour. Suits of court might be owing, and set down as owing in the surveys, but one may doubt very much whether they were often enforced. Owing to the fall in the value of money the fixed rent of the socager often yielded only a small income to the lord of the manor, and in a good many cases these payments had disappeared altogether before the end of the century, or were so unimportant as to be hardly worth the trouble of collecting. Surveyors for this reason were often little interested in them, and, while recording the acreage held by the customarytenants and leaseholders with scrupulous accuracy, did not always trouble to set out in detail the holdings of a class which was financially so insignificant, with the result that sometimes the freeholders shook themselves loose from all payments and services altogether. Nor, had the surveyors been as careful as the heads of the profession would have had them be, would they always have been successful in dealing with this very independent class. They may protest that “next[72]under the king" the freeholders “may be said to be the lord’s,” but freehold lands have a way of getting mislaid[73]to the despair of manorial officials, as copyhold lands do to-day. When escheats occur, the holding cannot be found; when rents are overdue, distraint is impossible, because the bailiff does not know on whom to distrain. The suggestion that, as long as rents are paid and services discharged, the lord has any interest in the property of his freehold tenants, rouses instant resentment, and it would seem that by our period, at any rate in the south of England, the connection of the freeholders with the manor was a matter rather of form and sentiment than of substance. In fact freehold has almost assumed its modern shape.

In assuming its modern shape it has made this particular strand in rural life harder to unravel. By escaping from the supervision of the manorial authorities the freeholders escape at the same time from the economic historian, andsince the facts of their position go so often unrecorded, we can speak of it with much less confidence than we can about that of the leaseholders and customary tenants. Out of over one hundred manors which we have examined, there are only twenty-two where it is possible to ascertain with any accuracy the acreage held by the freeholders, and, even on these, one too often meets cases in which the extent of the holding is either unknown to the surveyor, or in which he does not think it worth while to record it. Our results, such as they are, are set out in the table on pages 32 and 33.[74]

Combining the information supplied by these figures with that obtained from other sources, we can form a rough idea of the agrarian conditions under which the freeholders live. They are, in the first place, a most heterogeneous class, including on the one hand men of considerable wealth and position, and on the other mere cottagers. If we could trust the statistics given above we should have to say that the latter enormously outnumbered the former. But our impression is that, though, no doubt, a large number of freeholders were extremely small men, the preponderance of the latter was not nearly so marked as is suggested by the table. For one thing, it is difficult to reconcile it with the accounts given us of the substantial yeomen by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For another thing, it is in dealing with the larger freeholders that the inclination of surveyors to omit any estimate of the extent of the land is strongest, because it is naturally in their case that an estimate is most difficult to form. Probably, therefore, if we could obtain for the freehold tenancies figures even as full as we can for those of the customary tenants, we should find that the proportion holding between twenty and forty acres was considerably larger than these partial statistics would suggest.

In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture, such as is often supplied for other classes of tenants, we may say with some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agriculturaleconomy differed from that of the neighbouring copyholders,[75]and that the backbone of their living, except when the plots were so small as merely to supply them with garden produce, was therefore in almost every case tillage. If in any way they departed from the practice of their neighbours who were not freeholders, they did so probably only in being somewhat more alert and enterprising, somewhat more ready to use their security to break with custom and to introduce innovations. It is clear that many of them were very far from being tied down to the stagnant routine which some writers would have us believe is inseparable from all small scale farming. Often, indeed, they had enough initiative to realise the advantages of improved methods of cultivation, and on several manors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the freeholders agreed with each other to survey theirlands and separate them, so that they could be cultivated in severalty.[76]In many cases, again, they extended their holdings, which were sometimes large and sometimes mere patches of a few acres, by acting as farmers for the lord of the manor and leasing[77]the demesne or part of it. Above all they had nothing to fear from the agrarian changes which disturbed the copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good deal to gain; for the rise in prices increased their incomes; while, unlike many copyholders and the tenant farmers, they could not be forced to pay more for their lands.

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