The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

Part Iii. of the Book, and I Hope to Treat the Whole Subject More

fully on some future occasion. If in the present work I have given, as I am conscious that I have, undue space to the detailed illustration of particular changes, I must plead that one cannot have the dessert without the dinner, and that a firm foundation of fact, even though as tedious to read as to arrange, is a necessary preliminary to the higher and more philosophical task of analysing economic conceptions. The reader who desires to start with a bird's-eye view of the subject is advised to turn first to the concluding chapter of Part III.

One word may be allowed in extenuation of the statistical tables, which will be found scattered at intervals through the following pages. In dealing with modern economic conditions it is increasingly recognised that analysis, to be effective, must be quantitative, and one of the disadvantages under which the student of all periods before the eighteenth century labours is that for large departments of life, such as population, foreign trade, and the occupations of the people, anything approaching satisfactory quantitative description is out of the question. The difficulty in the treatment of agrarian history is different. Certain classes of manorial documents offer material which can easily be reduced to a statistical shape. Indeed one difficulty is its very abundance. The first feeling of a person who sees a manuscript collection such as that at Holkham must be "If fifty maids with fifty mops--," and a sad consciousness that the mop which he wields is a very feeble one. But historical statistics should be regarded with more than ordinary scepticism, inasmuch as they cannot easily be checked by comparison with other sources of information, and it may reasonably be asked whether it is possible to obtain figures that are sufficiently reliable to be used with any confidence. Often, no doubt, it is not possible. The strong point of surveyors was not always arithmetic. The forms in which their information has been cast are sometimes too various to permit of it being used for the purpose of a summary or a comparison. Even when figures are both accurate and comparable the student who works over considerable masses of material will be fortunate if he does not introduce some errors of his own. The tables printed below are marred by all these defects, and I have included them only after considerable hesitation. I have tried to prevent the reader from being misled by pointing out in an appendix what I consider to be their principal faults and ambiguities. But no doubt there are others which have escaped my notice.

It remains for me to express my gratitude to those whose kind assistance has made this work somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. I have to thank the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, the Senior Bursar of Merton College, the Clerk of the Peace for the County of Warwick, and the Earl of Leicester for permission to examine the manuscripts in their possession. The maps illustrating enclosure are taken from the beautiful maps of the All Souls estates; my thanks are due to the College for allowing me to use them, and to Mr. W. Tomlinson, of the Oxford Tutorial Class at Longton, for helping me to prepare them for reproduction. Circumstances preventing me from working in the Record Office, I was so fortunate as to secure the co-operation of Miss Niemeyer and Miss L. Drucker, who have transcribed for me a large number of surveys and rentals. How much I owe to their help will be apparent to any one who consults my footnotes and references. Among those who have aided me with advice and information I must mention Professor Vinogradoff, Professor Unwin, and Professor Powicke, the late Miss Toulmin Smith, Mr. Kenneth Leys, Mr. F.W. Kolthammer, Lieut.-Colonel Fishwick, Dr. G.H. Fowler, and the Hon. Gerard Collier. Especially great are my obligations to Mr. R.V. Lennard and Mr. H. Clay, who have read through the whole of the following pages in manuscript or in proof, and who have helped me with numberless criticisms and improvements.

In conclusion I owe two debts which are beyond acknowledgment. The first is to my wife, who has collaborated with me throughout, and without whose constant assistance this book could not have been completed. The second is to the members of the Tutorial Classes conducted by Oxford University, with whom for the last four years it has been my privilege to be a fellow-worker. The friendly smitings of weavers, potters, miners, and engineers, have taught me much about problems of political and economic science which cannot easily be learned from books.

R.H.T. MANCHESTER, April 1912.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION 1

Part I.--the Small Landholder

CHAP.

I. THE RURAL POPULATION--

(a) THE CLASSES OF LANDHOLDERS 19

(b) THE FREEHOLDERS 27

(c) THE CUSTOMARY TENANTS 40

II. THE PEASANTRY--

(a) THE VARIETY OF CONDITIONS 55

(b) THE CONSOLIDATION OF PEASANT HOLDINGS 57

(c) THE GROWTH OF THE LAND MARKET AMONG THE PEASANTS 72

III. THE PEASANTRY (continued)--

(d) THE ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT OF THE SMALL CULTIVATOR 98

IV. THE PEASANTRY (continued)--

(e) SIGNS OF CHANGE 136

(f) THE GROWTH OF COMPETITIVE RENTS ON NEW ALLOTMENTS 139

(g) THE PROGRESS OF ENCLOSURE AMONT THE PEASANTRY 147

Part Ii.--the Transition to Capitalist Agriculture

I. THE NEW RURAL ECONOMY--

(a) MOTIVES AND CAUSES 177

(b) THE GROWTH OF THE LARGE LEASEHOLD FARM 200

(c) ENCLOSURE AND CONVERSION BY THE MANORIAL AUTHORITIES 213

II. THE PEASANTRY--

(a) THE REMOVING OF LANDMARKS 231

(b) THE STRUGGLE FOR THE COMMONS 237

(c) THE ENGROSSING OF HOLDINGS AND DISPLACEMENT OF TENANTS 253

(d) THE AGRARIAN CHANGES AND THE POOR LAW 266

III. THE QUESTION OF TENANT RIGHT--

(a) THE TENANTS AT WILL AND THE LEASEHOLDERS 281

(b) THE COPYHOLDERS 287

(c) THE UNDERMINING OF CUSTOMARY TENURES 301

Part Iii.--the Outcome of the Agrarian Revolution

I. THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM AND THE STATE--

(a) THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL IMPORTANCE OF THE PEASANTRY 313

(b) LEGISLATION AND ADMINISTRATION 351

(c) SUCCESS AND FAILURE OF STATE INTERVENTION 377

II. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 401

Appendix I 410

APPENDIX II 422

INDEX 437

LIST OF MAPS

I. PART OF THE MANOR OF SALFORD, IN BEDFORDSHIRE (1590) To face page 163

II. PART OF THE MANOR OF EDGEWARE, IN MIDDLESEX (1597) " " 172

III. PART OF THE MANOR OF MAIDS MORTON, IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE (1590) " " 221

IV. PART OF THE MANOR OF CRENDON IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE (about 1590) " " 221

V. PART OF THE MANOR OF WEEDON WESTON, IN NORTHAMPTONSHIRE (1590) " " 222

VI. PART OF THE MANOR OF WHADBOROUGH IN LEICESTERSHIRE (1620) " " 223

THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

INTRODUCTION

Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. The economist can watch the reaction of growing markets on the methods of subsistence farming, the development of competitive rents, the building up of the great estate, and the appearance, or at any rate the extension, of the tripartite division into landlord, capitalist farmer, and landless agricultural labourer, the peculiar feature of English rural society which has been given so much eulogy in the eighteenth century and so much criticism in our own. From a legal point of view the great feature of the period is the struggle between copyhold and leasehold, and the ground gained by the latter. Before the century begins, leases for years, though common enough on the demesne lands and on land taken from the waste, are the exception so far as concerns the land of the customary tenants. When the century closes, leasehold has won many obstinately resisted triumphs; much land that was formerly held by copy of court roll is held by lease; and copyhold tenure itself, through the weakening of manorial custom, has partially changed its character. The copyholders, though still a very numerous and important class, are already one against which the course of events has visibly begun to turn, and economic rent, long intercepted and shared, through the fixity of customary tenure, between tenant and landlord under the more elastic adjustments of leasehold and competitive fines, begins to drain itself into the pockets of the latter. Politically, one can see different views of the basis of wealth in conflict, that which measures it by the number of tenants "able to do service" contending with that which tests it by the maximum pecuniary returns to be got from an estate, and which treats the number of tenants as quite a subordinate consideration. The former is the ideal of philosophical conservatives, is supported, for military and social reasons, by the Government, and survives long in the North; the latter is that of the new landed proprietors, and wins in the South.

And its victory results in much more than a mere displacement of tenants. It means ultimately a change in the whole attitude towards landholding, in the doctrine of the place which it should occupy in the State, and in the standards by which the prosperity of agriculture is measured, drawing a line between modern English conceptions and those of the sixteenth century as distinct as that which exists between those of the Irish peasantry and Irish landlords, or between the standpoint of a French peasant and that of the agent of a great English estate. The decline of important classes alters the balance of rural society, though the Crown for a long time tries to maintain it, and the way is prepared both for the economic and political omnipotence which the great landed aristocracy will exercise over England as soon as the power of the Crown is broken, and for the triumph of the modern English conception of landownership, a conception so repugnant both to our ancestors and to the younger English communities, as in the main a luxury of the richer classes. If it had not been for the undermining of the small farmer's position in the sixteenth century, would the proposal to enfranchise copyholders have been thrown out in 1654, and would the enclosures of the eighteenth century have been carried out with such obstinate indifference to the vested interests of the weaker rural classes? Would England have been unique among European countries in the concentration of its landed property, and in the divorce of its peasantry from the soil?

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