wunder · LibraryCHAPTER II. The Peasantry
Read in the Wunder reader — freeTHE PEASANTRY
(a) The Variety of Conditions
When one turns from what legal historians have said on the origin and development of copyhold tenure to consider the economic position of this class of tenants, one finds oneself in a region of much greater uncertainty. The legal historian may speak of the copyholders as constituting, in spite of minor differences, a fairly well-defined class. The economic historian cannot. He finds, on the contrary, the widest difference between the economic conditions of tenants holding their land by copy of court roll, not only, as would be expected, in different parts of the country, but on the same manor. In the thirteenth century to say that a man is a villein tells us something at least about his economic position, at any rate when the general features of the manor on which he is a villein are known. He will probably have a standard holding of a virgate or half-virgate; he will have rights in the common meadow land and in the common waste; he will do work on the lord's demesne. In the sixteenth century tenure is no clue to economic status, and to say that a man is a copyhold tenant tells us nothing at all about the extent of his holding or the sort of husbandry which he pursues. The vast majority of copyhold tenants are peasants, men who make a toilsome living from their land with the help of their families and a few hired servants. But in England by our period the line between class and class has ceased to coincide with differences of title; if copyhold tenure is born of a humble stock, yet it has risen so much in the world that the upper classes are not ashamed to hold out a hand to welcome it; and among copyholders are found the names not only of many small freeholders, but also of gentlemen and knights.
Crondal Records, edited by Baigent, Part I., p. 159; the Crondal customary of 1567. Among the copyholders appears a knight and four gentlemen.
Among the peasants who form the bulk of the population there is, again, the greatest diversity. Sometimes the copyholders are simply emancipated villeins, who have commuted most of their services, and who hold by copy instead of at the will of the lord, but whose economic condition has hardly changed at all. Thus in Northumberland the holdings of the copyholders on several manors reflect very accurately the distribution of land between the bondage tenants in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; the holdings have grown slightly in size, but they have apparently a more or less continuous individual existence from the earliest times. In parts of Wiltshire, on the other hand, though not in all parts, there is no possibility of establishing any connection between the virgate and semi-virgate of the fourteenth century villeins and the acreage held by the copyholders two hundred and fifty years later; both in size and number the holdings are markedly different. In Norfolk and Suffolk ancient class divisions have often been obliterated altogether, and bond and free lands are interlaced in the holdings of the customary tenants in quite inextricable confusion.
Northumberland County History, e.g. Surveys of High Buston (vol. v. p. 208); Acklington (vol. v. p. 372); Birling (vol. v. p. 201), and figures of eight townships in Tynemouthshire, vol. viii. p. 230.
Roxburghe Club, Surveys of the Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
Again, there is the greatest variety in the methods of agriculture. Everywhere among the copyhold tenancies arable land predominates to an extent which is in marked contrast to the frequent preponderance of pasture land on many of the demesne farms. But to some tillage seems to be their sole livelihood, while others are very considerable sheep-farmers. Some are cultivators on quite a big scale, well outside the Board of Agriculture's interpretation of a "small-holder" to-day, with 80, 90, 100, or even 200 acres of land. Often they are better off economically than many freeholders, and when Harrison and Sir Thomas Smith classify copyholders in general with "day labourers and poor husbandmen," they must surely have been either speaking loosely, or else thinking not of their economic but of their legal position. But others hold only 5, 10, 15, or 20 acres, so that arithmetical averages of the size of their holdings are very little guide to the real distribution of land. Yet it would not be true to say that such inequality is universal, for in the same county one finds some manors on which the holdings seem all to be cut to a regular standard pattern, and others where the variety of size is almost infinite, while in the North striking divergences of area seem to be as much the exception as they are the rule in the South and the East. On some manors, again, the copyhold tenants have enclosed land and hold much in severalty; on others nearly all of it lies in the open fields. Some have extensive rights of common, while on other manors such rights are non-existent, or are too insignificant to be recorded by surveyors.
See below, pp. 105-115.
Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., c. 24. Harrison, Elizabethan England (edited by Withington), p. 13.
In fact the impression given by the surveys is that of a condition of things which is very far from being stationary, but in which, on the contrary, much shifting of property and many changes in the methods of cultivation have been going on, and in which the legal position of the peasants is no guide at all to their economic characteristics. The task of finding a manor to serve as a pattern and standard for the rest, which is hard enough in the thirteenth century, is a sheer impossibility in the sixteenth, and the student works with a deep sense of the danger of sacrificing fidelity to simplicity of statement.
(b) The Consolidation of Peasant Holdings
But difficult as it is to reduce to any order the very diverse economic conditions of the customary tenants at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the task, at any rate in outline, has got to be faced. And this involves a short account of movements which take us some way back into the Middle Ages. No one can understand the contrast between the conditions of the Irish peasantry in 1850 and their condition to-day without knowing something of the agencies which have been at work in the interval, of the Fair Rent Courts, the Congested Districts Board, and the Land Purchase Acts; no one can appreciate the changes which are taking place in rural France without having taken at any rate a glance at the position of the peasantry before the Revolution, and at the Code Napoleon. Certainly the substantial alteration which overtook agrarian relationships in many parts of England between 1500 and 1640 is unintelligible if it is regarded as a wave suddenly appearing in a calm sea, a revolution by means of which commercial relationships of sometimes an almost modern elasticity developed quite rapidly in village communities of an almost mediæval immobility. To understand the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century we must know the sort of framework on which the new forces worked, and the sort of tendencies of which they were the continuation.
Moreover, the history with which we are concerned is primarily the history of the peasants as landholders, and only secondarily the history of their personal condition. Generalisations about the disappearance of villeinage and the substitution of hired labour for the working out of rents in labour services do not help us much here. Speaking broadly, it is no doubt true that, in spite of the survival of many vestiges of the old order, wage-labourers are as normally the means of cultivating the demesne at the end of the fifteenth century as servile tenants are at the end of the thirteenth. But significant as this change is for the history of the wage-earning classes, it does not by itself seem to throw much light on the characteristic features of the sixteenth century problem, the substitution of large tenancies for small, the displacement of small holders, and the undermining of the customary routine of the open field village. Certainly the two movements are connected; equally certainly that connection is not a direct or obvious one. The change in the personal condition of the peasantry is not by itself the key to changes in the use and distribution of property. Why should it be? In Prussia the abolition of villein services in 1807 was carried out by a decree which had as its object not a diminution, but an increase, in the number of small tenants; and it is not self-evident that an alteration in the method of cultivating the lord's demesne must have produced changes in the disposition of the customary holdings in fifteenth and sixteenth century England.
Edict of October 9, 1807, Clauses 10, 11, 12. See Cobden Club, Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries: Morier's Essay on Germany.
The very variety in the economic conditions of the peasantry which makes generalisation so difficult is, however, itself a significant feature, because it is in marked contrast with the comparative uniformity which existed among great masses of them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It suggests that even in agriculture custom has to some extent been broken down by commercial enterprise, and that commercial enterprise has had the natural result of accentuating inequality in the possession of property. It warns a student of the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century that he has not only to explain the way in which the small cultivator lost ground then before the large estate, but also how it was that his economic position differed in many cases so much from that of the villein of two hundred years before, and that it may very well be that the answer to the latter question will throw light upon the former.
Let us put ourselves in the position of a jury catechising some "aged man" about the year 1500, catechising him not about boundaries, or rights of common, or manorial customs, but about the general changes in the distribution of property in his village. If surveys and court rolls may be trusted, there is one thing that he could hardly fail to tell us, and that is that for as long as he can remember there has been a great deal of buying and selling of land by the customary tenants, a great many changes in occupancy, and on the whole a tendency for those changes to result in the concentration of several holdings in fewer and larger tenancies. "Virgates which in grandfather's time," he would say, "used to belong to A., B., C., and D. now belong to A. alone. Men who used to occupy one holding each, now occupy two or three; when they cannot buy they lease, and some have bought so much that they sublet part of their holdings to others. Indeed there is not much sense in talking about virgates or half-virgates at all. Once each of them had a separate holder; once Durrant's shottes belonged to Durrant, Gunter's mead to Gunter, Parry's croft to Parry, Hawkins' meade to Hawkins, Woolmer's lande to Woolmer, Blake's tenement to Blake. To-day, though the old names remain, they are no guide to the families holding the land. Frankling has bought Durrant's and Gunter's and Blake's, Vites has bought Parry's, while Pynnole's and Pope's and Hawkins' and the rest of Blake's holdings have all passed into the hands of Blackwell."
The instance is taken from a map of the manor of Edgeware now in the All Souls muniment room. The map was made in 1597. But many earlier examples can be found of land being known by the name of one of its early holders, long after it had passed into the possession of some one else.
One thing at any rate is clear. If frequent changes of occupancy point to a free land-market, then such a free land-market has existed for a long time among the customary tenants; and if a keen demand for land among the peasantry is a proof that small men are thriving, and see their way to thriving still more by adding to their properties, then there is a good deal of this healthy land hunger in English villages before the age of the Tudors. We read to-day of how the French peasant will pinch himself and his family to add a few acres to his little estate, and we take it as an indication that small cultivation has a firm root in France, and that rural life is on the whole enterprising and prosperous. Certainly such a state of things is in marked contrast with the stagnation prevailing in the lower ranges of village society in countries where great estates pass almost intact from generation to generation between the tall palings of family settlements, with the small man, who would get land if he could, staring helplessly through the bars. Now, at any rate in the fifteenth century, England belonged very markedly to the first type, not to the second; to the type where there is much buying and selling of land in small plots by small cultivators, not to the type where land is locked up and rarely comes into the market, rarely at any rate into a market where it can be bought by the small peasantry. This mobility of land is of much significance when we come to consider the breaking down of customary rules before the forces of competition, and the formation of great estates out of the holdings of the customary tenants. Let us consider it in more detail, first from the point of view of the changes in the economic basis of rural life which it produces, and secondly from the point of view of the process by which those changes were brought about. We will for the present leave on one side the demesne farm and the land held on lease, and look only at the customary land which forms the backbone of the copyholders' estates.
The first source of information to which we turn consists of the surveys and rentals, in which the holdings of the tenants are set out in detail. To those accustomed to the picture of village life contained in the records of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the surveys of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries present certain features which at once arrest attention. For one thing, there is a much greater inequality between the holdings of different customary tenants on the same manors than is usually found among the holdings of virgators and semi-virgators two centuries before. For another thing, some of their holdings are very much larger than anything we find belonging to the same class of tenants at an earlier date; occasionally, indeed, they can only be described as enormous, running into 150 or 200 acres of land; often they amount to 80 or 90. In the third place, the number of customary tenants is, on the whole, much smaller than it was 200 years before, and that even on manors where there has been an increase in the area cultivated by them. The latter fact is significant, and we shall return to it later. But before doing so, let us ask the meaning of the growing inequality in the holdings of the customary tenants and of the great increase in the size of some among them.
Great as is the variety of conditions visible on a thirteenth century manor, it is on the whole true to say that this variety usually conforms to a rough rule or principle. One can find on the same manor families whose holdings differ very largely in size, from the 25 to 40 acres occupied by the holder of a virgate, the 12 to 16 acres of a semi-virgator, to the 2 or 3 acres or less occupied by a cottar. But normally each individual holds much the same amount of land as other individuals of the same class; one holder of a virgate has about as much as another holder of a virgate, one holder of half a virgate about as much as his fellow, one cottager about as much as another cottager. There are in fact different grades, but for each grade there is what may be called a standard area of land, a unit of agrarian organisation, and though that standard area varies a good deal in different parts of the country it is usually fairly easy to discover what it is on any one manor. Outwardly, at any rate, village life is organised, and the distribution of property is settled in the main by the authority of custom, rather than by commercial forces acting directly upon the tenants.
Now after the middle of the fifteenth century it is common to find quite a different condition of things from this. There are, it is true, manors where holdings preserve their primitive equality down to the very end of the sixteenth century, especially manors in backward parts of the country, where the influence of commerce has been little felt; especially also manors where the demesne farm, instead of being leased, has been retained in the hands of the lord. But in the South of England these are the exception. The rule is that with regard to the area held by the customary tenants there is no rule at all. On the same manor copyholders may be cultivating anything from a quarter of a virgate to two, three, four, or even more virgates; if their holdings are expressed in acres they may be holding anything from 1 acre to 100 or 150. Economically, indeed, customary tenants are often not a class at all, if the essence of a class is common characteristics and a similarity of economic status, though in the face of certain dangers they will act as one. On many manors the nature of their tenure is the only common link between them, and the nature of their tenure is compatible with the greatest economic variety.
This variety is most noticeable when we examine a large number of manors one by one, since, when the figures of many different manors are added together, their distinctive features are liable to be concealed in the aggregate. Still, to get some idea of the scale on which the peasants carried on their agriculture, it is perhaps worth examining the following table of the holdings of 1600 odd customary tenants on fifty-two manors.
For the sources from which this table is constructed, and its defects, see Appendix II.
On three small manors I have included some tenants who may possibly be freeholders or leaseholders.
This table enables us, in the first place, to make a comparison between the economic positions of groups of tenants in different parts of England. It will be seen that the "predominant rate"--what we may call the predominant acreage--varies considerably. In Wiltshire it is between 20 and 25 acres, and, including the next two columns, 36 per cent. of all the tenants hold something between 20 and 35 acres. In Northumberland the predominant acreage is between 30 and 35, and nearly one half the tenants, 41 per cent., hold between 30 and 40 acres. Elsewhere the most common holding is a good deal smaller. In Lancashire (if we omit the cottagers, nearly all of whom come from one manor) the predominant acreage is between 10 and 15 acres, though a great many persons hold between 5 to 10 acres. In Staffordshire the largest group of tenants is that holding under 2-1/2 acres, and more than one-half of them hold less than 10 acres. In Norfolk and Suffolk the same state of things obtains, but in a more pronounced form. Little emphasis need be laid on the large number of cottagers there, nearly all of whom are found on a single semi-urban manor, that of Aylsham. But it is clear that the mass of the peasantry in those counties are very small holders indeed. When the cottagers are left on one side, 22 per cent., about one-fifth, of the landholders have under 2-1/2 acres; 54 per cent., more than one-half, have under 10 acres. It is fortunate for them that Norfolk and Suffolk are the home of the woollen industry.
In the second place, let us notice a fact which is more relevant to our immediate purpose. That fact is the great variety in the scale of landholding obtaining between different tenants in the same part of the country. In this matter, again, some counties present a marked contrast to others. In Northumberland the uniformity in the size of the holdings of the tenants is much more marked than the variety. About two-thirds of them appear in the four columns representing holdings from 30 to 50 acres. Only six hold more than 50, and though on one manor there are ten tenants holding less than 2-1/2 acres, there are, apart from these, comparatively few holding under 25 acres. On all the manors which have been examined in this county there is, in fact, a regular standard holding in the sixteenth century, which varies from 30 to 45 acres on different manors, but which on the same manor varies hardly at all. But Northumbrian agriculture is always several generations behind that of the South and East, and when we turn to Wiltshire, or to East Anglia, or to the nine manors given at the bottom of the table, we find a condition of things in which there is much greater irregularity. The line extends farther at both ends than it does in Northumberland. There are more individuals and fewer clusters. The grouping of holdings round certain standard patterns is much less marked. If we look at all the manors together, we find that the four most populous columns contain almost exactly one-half (49.1 per cent.) of the whole population, exclusive of cottagers without land. In Northumberland the corresponding columns contain two-thirds, in East Anglia, Lancashire, and Staffordshire rather less, on the nine manors in the South and Midlands about one-half, in Wiltshire a little over one-third. Again there are more large holders and more very small holders in the South and East, than there are in Lancashire and on the Northumbrian border. In Lancashire and Northumberland 4.4 per cent. of the tenants, exclusive of cottagers, have holdings of more than 50 acres. In Suffolk and Norfolk the corresponding figure is 8.5 per cent., in Wiltshire 16.9 per cent., on the nine other manors 14 per cent.
TABLE IV
--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ 30 and under 35 Acres. | 25 and under 30 Acres. | . | 20 and under 25 Acres. | . | . | 15 and under 20 Acres. | . | . | . | 10 and under 15 Acres. | . | . | . | . | 5 and under 10 Acres. | . | . | . | . | . | 2-1/2 and under 5 Acres. | . | . | . | . | . | . | Under 2-1/2 Acres. | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | Cottages or Houses with or without . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | Gardens . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | Total Number of Tenants. | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | |--------------------------------| . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | . | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Ten manors in Northumberland | 96| | 10| 1| 2| 1| 3| 1| 12| 27| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Four manors in Lancashire | 168| 38| 14| 19| 29| 35| 7| 4| 7| 7| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Three manors in Staffordshire | 103| 8| 21| 16| 14| 6| 10| 11| 3| 1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Two manors in Northamptonshire | 255| 30| 53| 24| 22| 22| 13| 22| 5| 10| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Three manors in Leicestershire | 129| 13| 17| 6| 6| 8 | 3| 3| 5| 1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Five manors in Suffolk and | | | | | | | | | | | | eight manors in Norfolk | 391| 52| 77| 40| 69| 28| 26| 19| 14| 5 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Seven manors in Wiltshire and | | | | | | | | | | | | one manor in Somersetshire | 156| 3| 5| 7| 12| 8| 7| 27| 16| 14| | | | | | | | | | | | | | Nine other manors in the South | | | | | | | | | | | | of England | 366| 23| 58| 27| 52| 29| 31| 16| 22| 12| +--------------------------------+----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+ | Total |1664|167|255|140|206|137|100|103| 84| 77| +--------------------------------+----+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
TABLE IV (cont'd)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Uncertain.| 120 and over.| .| 115 and under 120 Acres.| .| .| 110 and under 115 Acres.| .| .| .| 105 and under 110 Acres.| .| .| .| .| 100 and under 105 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| 95 and under 100 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| 90 and under 95 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 85 and under 90 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 80 and under 85 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 75 and under 80 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 70 and under 75 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 65 and under 70 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 60 and under 65 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 55 and under 60 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 50 and under 55 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 45 and under 50 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 40 and under 45 Acres.| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 35 and under .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| 40 Acres .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| +----------------| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| .| |Northumberland |13|10|10| | | 1| 1| 2| 1| | 1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Lancashire | 2| | | | 2| | | 1| | | | | | | | | | 1| 2| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Staffordshire | 2| 2| 2| 2| | 1| 1| | | | | | | | | | | 1| 2| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Northamptonshire| 3| 7| 2| 5| 2| 7| 2| 2| 2| 2| | | | | 2| | | 4|14| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Leicestershire |10| 7| 8| 7| 7| 6| 2| 4| 1| 2| 1| 1| 2| | | | 1| 1| 7| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Suffolk/Norfolk | 9| 4| 2| 4| 7| 3| 3| 1| 1| 1| 1| | 1| | 2| 1| | 4|17| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |Wiltshire/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Somersetshire |10|12| 5| 7| 2| 4| 3| 4| 1| 2| 1| | 2| | | | | | 4| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |South of England|11|10|13| 3| 6| 7| 6| 3| 5| 4| 4| 1| 2| 4| | 1| 1| 7| 9| +----------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+ | |60|52|42|28|26|29|18|17|11|11| 8| 2| 7| 4| 4| 2| 1|18|55| +----------------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
In the non-commercial, non-industrial North there is something like economic equality, something like the fixed equipment of each group of tenants with a standard area of land which is one of the first things to strike us in a mediæval survey, and, as we shall see later, manorial authorities for a long time insist on that rough equality being maintained, because any weakening of it would disorganise the old-fashioned economy which characterises the northern border. In the industrial East and South this uniformity existed once, but it exists now no longer. Wiltshire is humming with looms; Norfolk and Suffolk are linked to the Continent by a thousand commercial ties, and will starve if the clothiers lose their market. The mighty forces of capital and competitive industry and foreign trade are beginning to heave in their sleep--forces that will one day fuse and sunder, exalt and put down, enrich and impoverish, unpeople populous counties and pour Elizabethan England into a smoking caldron between the Irish Sea and the Pennines; forces that at present are so weak that a Clerk of the Market can lead them and a Justice of the Peace put a hook in their jaws. It is natural that mediæval conditions of agriculture should survive longest in the North. It is natural that they should survive least where trade and industry are most developed, and where men are being linked by other bonds than those of land tenure. But we must not comment until we have examined the text more closely. We would only draw attention to the contrast between the South and the North, to the contrast also between the great diversity in the size of the peasants' holdings in the sixteenth century, and the much greater uniformity two or three hundred years before.
This contrast gives a clue to certain features of village life which are distinctive of our period, and at the risk of wearying the reader one may illustrate it from the circumstances of particular manors. At Cuxham, in 1483, there are, in addition to tiny holdings of a few acres or of fractions of acres, holdings of one-quarter of a virgate, of half a virgate, of one virgate, of four virgates. At Ibstone in the same year there are two tenants at will holding one virgate each, one tenant holding five tofts and three crofts, while the rest hold little except cottages and gardens. At Warton in Lancashire, there are in the reign of Henry VIII., in addition to various holdings expressed in terms of acres, four holdings of half a bovate, two of three-quarters of a bovate, seven of one bovate, two of one and a quarter bovates, four of one and a half bovates, four of two bovates, one of two and a quarter bovates, one of three bovates. At Barton in Staffordshire, in 1556, the typical holding is one virgate of 24 acres. But though this forms the nucleus of the copyholders' properties a good many of them have acquired so much extra land, and a good many apparently have parted with so much of the land which they once held, that though 24 acres is still the predominant holding, the majority of the tenants hold something more or something less than this. At Byshopeston, in 1567, there are men holding half a virgate, two virgates, three virgates, four virgates, six virgates. At Knyghton there are holders of anything from a half to two and a half virgates.
Merton Documents, Rentale de Cuxham (Nos. 5902 and 5905).
Merton Documents, Rentale de Ibston (No. 5902).
R.O. Rental and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 19, No. 7, f. 79-87.
R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 70.
Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
Ibid.
Looking at this grouping of holdings, one is tempted at first sight to say that the virgate has ceased to be a unit of open field tillage, and has become merely a common form, an idea which is laid up in the minds of surveyors, and which is produced automatically, even when it corresponds to nothing in the fluid world of agriculture. This, however, would be an error. On the contrary, the conservatism of rural arrangements is such that yardlands, bovates, virgates, and oxgangs, continue to do duty in circumstances which seem quite incongruous, and to be used, not only in theory, but in practice, to apportion rights over arable, meadow, and pasture, long after holdings have been redistributed in such a way as altogether to destroy the former equality of shares. On the Leicestershire manors of Barkby and Kibworth holdings were set down in terms of yardlands in 1636, though the condition of things in which a yardland or half yardland formed one tenant's holding had long since given way to one in which the smaller holders occupied a few acres and the wealthier 2-1/2, 3, and 3-1/2 yardlands. Still, though the continuance of these measures even into the eighteenth century should be noted, there is no reason why we should use them, and the modern reader will perhaps get a better idea of the growing heterogeneity in the economic conditions of the customary tenants if the distribution of their property is expressed in terms of acres.
The inconvenience of reckoning in yardlands is noticed by a writer in the seventeenth century: "The tax of land is after the yardland; a name very deceitful by the disproportion and inequality thereof, the quantity of some one yardland being as much as one and a halfe or two in the same field, and yet there is an equality of taxes" (Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656).
Merton Documents, MS. book labelled Kibworth and Barkby, 1636.
Ibid.
Our first example comes from Malden in Surrey. It shows on a small scale the tendency towards concentration of property in larger parcels. In 1452 there were on that manor one holder of 24 acres, three holders of 16 acres, two holders of 15 acres, and families holding 10, 8, 6, 5, 2 acres respectively. That 16 acres had been the normal holding is fairly obvious; it is obvious also that though this normal holding is still traceable, it is on the way to being obliterated. Later specimens of a similar kind come from Ashfield in Suffolk and Ormesby in Norfolk. In 1513 there were on the former manor tenants holding 7, 10, 15, 21, 22, 36, 37, 45, 107, 121 acres, and all intermediate sizes. On the latter, in 1516, the holdings were much smaller, but they were still more various in area, ranging from 2 to 31 acres. One or two of the Wiltshire and Somersetshire manors surveyed for the Earl of Pembroke in 1567 offer examples of the reverse state of things in which the tenants' holdings were all cut out to a standard pattern. At Washerne, for example, a manor where the demesnes were not leased but retained "in the hand of the lord," nearly all the copyholders had exactly 20 acres each. But this is an exception which proves the rule. At Estoverton there were some tenants holding 69, 48, 38 acres of arable, and others with 12, 10, 9, 3, and 2 acres. At Donnington there were holders of 63 and 52 acres in the fields and holders with only 8 or 9 acres. At South Brent the divergence between large and small customary tenants is more striking still. One occupies about 90 acres, several others over 50, while the vast majority hold less than 30 acres in holdings which are hardly ever of the same size. At Crondal we find in 1567 exactly the same inequality in the area cultivated by different tenants, exactly the same combination of very large with very small holdings. Taking one tithing only of that manor--that of Swanthrop--we are met by tenants holding 112, 104, 66, 58, 47, 44, 30, 27, 25, and 3 acres. Finally, let us take two extreme instances. They are drawn from the closing years of the sixteenth century; but their inclusion may be justified by the fact that they reveal in a pronounced form the tendencies which we have seen at work elsewhere a century and a half before, and that they offer a peculiarly clear example of larger customary holdings formed out of the aggregation of several smaller ones, since the names of the previous tenants are stated by the surveyor. On the two Middlesex manors of Edgeware and Kingsbury all relics of the state of things which had presumably existed there, as on other manors, two or three centuries before, the state of things in which there were groups of men holding virgates or half virgates, has disappeared so entirely as to leave no traces behind. On the former the thirty-eight copyholders occupy holdings of almost any size between 1 rood and 130 acres; out of the 722 acres of copyhold land as much as 254, a little over one-third, are in the hands of two large tenants. On the latter there is, mutatis mutandis, the same story; out of the twenty-seven copyholders thirteen hold less than 15 acres, eight hold more than 30, and of those eight two hold more than 100 acres apiece.
Merton Documents, Rental of Malden.
R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 85.
Ibid., Portf. 22, No. 18.
Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Crondal Record, Part I. (Baigent), pp. 210-221. Customary of 1567.
All Souls Documents, Map and Description of the Manor of Edgeware (1597).
Ibid., Map and Description of the Manor of Kingsbury (1597).
These examples are drawn from 12 different counties. Let us see more exactly what they suggest. They suggest that, quite apart from any movement on the part of lords of manors to throw the holdings of the customary tenants into large farms and to evict their holders, quite apart from any external shock such as was given to the organisation of village life by the change from tillage to pasture on the part of lords and their farmers, there has been going on an internal change in the relation of the customary tenants to each other. So far we have been concerned only with the result of that change, not with the process by which it is brought about. The result, as evidenced by the surveys, is the consolidation of several holdings, or parts of holdings, into fewer and larger tenancies, the appearance of a class of well-to-do peasants by whom such larger tenancies are held, and a widening of the gap between the most prosperous and least prosperous. Customary tenants hold 3 or 4 virgates, 80 or 90 or 100 acres, and their holdings are composed of holdings and parts of holdings which formerly belonged to several different tenants. Customary tenants even become the landlords of other customary tenants. At Yateleigh one copyholder has as many as twenty sub-tenants, and it is not at all uncommon for the surveyors of the sixteenth century to record the names both of owners and occupiers in estate and field maps. There can hardly be a clearer proof of the re-arrangement of property which has been going on among them than the fact that some of them hold more land than they can cultivate themselves and sub-let it to smaller men, who become their sub-tenants.
Similar examples could be adduced from Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, were it worth while, e.g. at Duston in Northants in 1561 there were tenants holding 2 virgates, 1-3/4 virgates, 1-1/2 virgates, 1/2 virgate, 1/4 virgate (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 23). At Desford in Leicestershire, temp. Hen. VIII., one finds the same division and aggregation of virgates (R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancs., Bdle. 6, No. 7).
See below, pp. 72-75.
Crondal Records, loc. cit.
May one not say, in fact, that by the beginning of the sixteenth century the rough equality which had once existed between the holdings of different groups of customary tenants is fast disappearing, and that by the middle of that century it has, in some parts of the country, disappeared altogether? The village community is often no longer made up of compact groups of holders with more or less equal holdings, more or less equal rents and services, more or less similar economic positions. Even as early as the time when the great agrarian changes which contemporaries summed up under the name of "enclosing" begin to produce legislation on the part of governments and riots among the peasantry, its appearance of a systematic adjustment of property and obligation is already far on the way to disappearance. Its members still hold shares in the open fields, and are still bound by a common routine of cultivation, save in so far as that routine has been undermined in the ways to be described below. But it is easy to be deceived by the external shell of organisation into thinking of village life at the end of the fifteenth century as being much more homogeneous than it really was. After all there are shareholders and shareholders. There is very little similarity in economic interest or social position between the artisan who buys a £5 share in a Bolton spinning-mill and a capitalist who invests £5000 in the same concern. There was hardly more, one may suspect, between the copyholder who cultivated a few acres and the copyholder who held 100 or 200 acres and sublet part of his holding to a poorer neighbour, though the lands of both were intermixed, though both held of the same manor, though both were nominally bound by the same custom. This comparison says more than we mean; for, with few exceptions, the inequality in the holdings of the peasantry revealed by the manorial documents is not so great that it cannot be spanned by enterprise and good fortune. Looking back from a world in which the mass of mankind have no legal interest in the land which they cultivate or the tools which they use, what strikes the modern reader most in the sixteenth century is not the concentration of property, but its wide distribution. Nevertheless, even in these petty rearrangements of holdings there is a meaning. They are the beginning of greater things. To appreciate their importance we must obliterate from our minds our knowledge of later developments, and regard them as the innovation which they are. We must remember that they are the economic foundation of a prosperous rural middle class.
(c) The Growth of a Land Market among the Peasants
If the surveys were our sole source of information it would not be easy to say how this regrouping of holdings has been brought about. Even the surveys, however, do not leave us quite in the dark. They suggest that it has taken place very largely through the play of commercial forces within the ranks of the customary tenants themselves, through the eager purchasing of land which we noticed as one feature of rural life at the close of the Middle Ages, and through the growth of a cash nexus between individuals side by side with the rule of custom. This is a factor in the break up of the mediæval condition of landholding upon which sufficient emphasis has perhaps not always been laid. The pre-occupation of the writers of the sixteenth century with the special problem of their own day, when the existence of a class of well-to-do copyholders was taken as something needing no explanation, and their decay before the growth of the great leasehold estate occupied the attention of all interested in agricultural problems, caused the significance of the development of these thriving peasants to be forgotten in the agitation and regrets which accompanied their depression, and naturally concentrated interest on the changes introduced by lords and great farmers, through which that depression was mainly caused. In every age prosperity is taken as a matter of course, and, in defiance of all experience, mankind reserves its surprise for distress.
But the special phenomenon of the growth of large customary tenancies which we have been considering can hardly be explained except as a result of enterprise among the tenants themselves. The piling up of customary holdings in the hands of one individual is quite a different thing from the adding of customary holdings to the demesne which the lord retained or leased to a farmer. It means a transference of property, but a transference not from a customary tenant to the lord or the lord's farmer, but from one customary tenant to another. It suggests that before the "enclosing movement" of the sixteenth century brought its crop of evictions, economic forces had long been at work to break up the village community into large holders and small. When in 1452 John Blackman, copyhold tenant of Maiden, holds Keyser's, Key's, and Skinner's tenements, it can only mean that Keyser, Key, and Skinner have parted with their tenements to John Blackman. The lord may have put pressure upon them to sell, but the customary land is not diminished, it is simply rearranged; the result is not an addition to the manorial demesne, but the appearance of a copyhold tenant with a great deal more land than his neighbours. The cases in which the existence of more than one survey of the same manor enables us to contrast the condition of the customary tenants at different dates make it quite clear that this aggregation of holdings was a well-marked movement which went on quite apart from any encroachment by manorial authorities on the customary land. Some time between 1340 and 1454 two virgates at Castle Combe, which at the earlier date were in separate hands, have been formed into one holding. And naturally, the later we come, the more marked the change which we find. At Aspley Guise in 1275 the forty customary tenants each held almost exactly half a virgate. In 1542 one finds among the tenants at will and copyholders three occupants of the original half virgate, one tenant with 30 acres, two tenants with 60 acres each, three tenants with 75 acres each. These large holdings have plainly been formed by the aggregation of half virgates in fewer hands and into parcels of two, three, four, and five half virgates apiece. This case is a very clear one, because nearly all the holdings are multiples of the original standard, even the rent being calculated from this basis.
Merton Documents, Rental of Maiden, 1496.
History of Castle Combe (Scrope).
For information as to Aspley Guise I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. H.G. Fowler of Aspley Guise, who has allowed me to see the material which he has collected for a history of the manor.
Elsewhere the aggregation of small customary holdings into large is equally marked, but it has not been carried out with such a nice regard to the maintenance of the original units. In the tithing of South Newton, part of the Manor of South Newton in Wiltshire, there were in 1315 seven holders of a virgate, each of whom occupied 23 acres, seventeen holders of half a virgate with 12 acres each, and eight cottagers. When the manor was surveyed in 1567 the customary tenants, though fewer in number, cultivated a good deal more land than they had two and a half centuries before, so that there is no question of their holdings having been merged in the demesne. But the land was very differently distributed between them. Of the ten copyholders then remaining only one held the original virgate. Of the rest there were holders of 59, 65, 80, and 96 acres, of 7, 13, and 15 acres, and of various acreages between these wide limits. The symmetry of the earlier arrangement has entirely vanished. Instead of a cluster of small cultivators organised in three well-defined layers, we have a chain stretching from a mere cottager up to a petty capitalist. A very similar change has taken place on the Manor of Crondal. If one compares, for example, the arrangement of holdings on the tithing of Swanthrop in 1287 and 1567, one finds that the rough symmetry which existed at the former date has altogether disappeared by the latter. In 1287 there were eight persons holding virgates, seven holding half virgates, two holding quarter-virgates, and four whose holdings are not expressed in virgates. By 1567 all this has been altered. There are tenants holding 100, 66, 58, 47 acres; there are three with less than 10 acres, and there are five with holdings of various sizes between these limits, but in no case reducible to any common measure. How could such a transformation come about, unless, as was suggested above, there was much buying and selling of land, much rudimentary commercialism inside and behind the decent cloak of routine which seems to be spread over our villages? Is not this explanation forced upon us when we examine the holdings of the larger peasants and find them made up of pieces bought from one and leased from another, pieces taken from the waste or from the lord's demesne or from the common pasture? And if it is correct, does it not point, on the one hand, to a good deal of enterprise among the small holders, and since enterprise can hardly exist without a certain level of prosperity, to a good deal of prosperity; and, on the other hand, to movements which in time are likely to dethrone custom altogether and put competition in its place?
Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke (Straton).
Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 111-116, and 210-222.
To these questions we shall return later. But happily we are not restricted to inferential argument for our knowledge of these internal changes in the economy of village life before the sixteenth century. We have the court rolls of manors, and the court rolls are full, from a very early date, of transactions which show how the state of things which has been described was being brought about. In examining the evidence which they offer of the shifting of property among the peasantry we shall have to go some way back, and we shall do well to begin with a distinction and a warning--a distinction between the legal framework of rural life and its economic tendencies, and a warning that we shall have to deal with a somewhat tiresome mass of detail, which the general reader can avoid by turning to the summary at the end of this chapter.
In the picture of the mediæval manor which is usually offered us the features which receive most emphasis are its systematic apportionment of works and services, its regulation by binding customary rules, its immobility and imperviousness to competitive and commercial influences; in short, its character as an organisation in which even the details are settled by custom. In the "typical manor," as it appears in some accounts, the main lines are drawn with almost photographic sharpness. There are the free holders on the free land, the bond tenants each with his virgate or half virgate of bond land, and the officers and servants of the lord, a system the parts of which are knit together by the lord's need of extracting labour services to cultivate his demesne. Now that the internal economy of a thirteenth century manor displays to a very remarkable degree the authority of custom in all its arrangements is not, of course, denied; and it is specially proper to emphasise it when we are contrasting it with modern agriculture, or when we are regarding it from the standpoint of law. But this is only one aspect of it, and if we assume that the economic relationships between the different members of it always followed the same grouping and ran on the same lines as the legal ones, we are likely to ascribe to them a simplicity and a hard and fast character which, we may be quite sure, they never possessed in real life, and to miss those very innovations which throw most light on economic development.
True of such development early rentals and surveys show little trace. But let us remember the purpose for which they were prepared. The manorial officials were concerned with getting in an income, not with supplying information about the methods of agriculture or the cross-relations between one tenant and another, except in so far as they affected the manorial revenue. The source of the income was the holding, not the holder; or, rather, it did not matter to them who the landholder was, whether he was one individual or another, or whether he was a partnership of half-a-dozen individuals, provided that the land, however held, yielded the customary services and payments. The nearest analogy would be an apportioned tax which a Government divides between different localities, each locality having to raise a certain sum, but making its own arrangements as to what individuals shall pay. It is the virgate which pays rents, which mows the lord's meadow, reaps the lord's fields, carries the lord's messages, pays a stoup of honey and a churchshot of white corn; and as long as the meadow is mowed and the message carried, the question what individual holds the virgate is quite a subsidiary one for the bailiff, and one which the tenants can arrange among themselves much as they please. Each half virgate at Cuxham has got to do two boonworks or pay 4d. But the manorial economy is not at all disturbed by the fact of one tenant holding not half a virgate, but a virgate and a half; for he has to do, or pay some one else to do, six boonworks and pay 2s. if he does not. A half-hide at Bramshot has to make half-a-dozen different payments in money and kind; but there is another to prevent John, Stephen, Roger, and William clubbing together to work it and arranging the payments among themselves as they please.
Merton Documents, No. 5902, Rental of Cuxham, 1483: "Johannes ... pro uno messuagio et una virgata terræ et dimidia xxiiis. et 6 precaria in autumno vel 2s.... Thomas Lee, Rector ecclesiæ ibidem pro uno tofto ... et una virgata terræ 18s. et 4 precaria in autumno vel 16d."
Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 96, Rental of 1287: "Johannes filius Fabri, Stephanus Draghebreck, Rogerus de Hallie, et Willelmus le Hart ... tenent j dimidiam hidatam terræ. Reddendo inde per annum 5s. ad festum S. Mich. et xixd. de Pondpany et ad festum Beati Martini viii gallinas de chersetto, et ii gallinas contra Natale, et x ova contra Pascha, et facient in omnibus omnia sicut Willelmus de Haillie." P. 125: "William, son of Gonnilda, and Galfrid Levesone, John, son of Matilda, and Emma, a widow, hold one virgate of land containing 27-1/2 acres on paying and doing as the said Robert of Estfelde." There are many similar entries.
Clearly in these circumstances a rigid classification of holdings by the manorial authorities is quite compatible with a great deal of diversity in the arrangements made with each other by the holders, and we are likely to miss a good many innovations if we look at the manor only through the eyes of officials and as a revenue-producing concern. We must no more expect to get from them an exhaustive account of the exact individuals at any one time using the land, or of the scale on which farming is carried on by the peasants, than we expect the shareholders' list of a limited company to tell us who has the spending of the dividends. The shares stand in A.'s name, but the interest may go to A.'s married daughter. The holding stands in the name of Thomas in the books of the manor, but it may be that part or all of it is worked by Walter. To put the case in another way, to the lord and his steward a manor is primarily a business, a business on which various obligations can be imposed and from which various profits can be extracted. But it is also a village community consisting of peasants whose economic relations are by no means exhausted in the interest which the lord takes in them as part of its stock, and who have economic dealings which are important when we begin to inquire into changes in the distribution of peasant property. The number of the holdings and the amount of payments and services may remain quite unaltered, and yet at the same time if one individual begins to acquire several shares his property will grow at the expense of other persons. Precisely because it is new, the appearance of such small capitalists is not readily traceable in the stereotyped forms used by the manorial officials. Precisely because it is new, it is of the greatest economic significance. It shows what may be called, by contrast with later developments, the old agrarian régime, producing the new type of well-to-do peasant who is one of the protagonists in the class struggles of the sixteenth century.
Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, pp. 250-251: "The general arrangement admitted a certain subdivision under the cover of an artificial unity, which found its expression in the settlement of the services and of the relations with the lord."
And this upward movement is no mere matter of conjecture. That behind the stiff legal framework of the manorial organisation there was a tendency for property to pass into the hands of the more prosperous tenants, and that there was a sort of primitive commercialism even at a time when commercial ideas had little influence over the methods of agriculture, becomes evident if we examine the elements out of which the small properties of the fourteenth century are composed. The gradual formation of a class of wealthy peasants took place in three ways, through the buying up by well-to-do men of parts of their neighbours' properties, through the colonising by villages of the unoccupied land surrounding them, and through the addition to the customary holdings of plots which had at one time been in the occupation of the lord, but which, for one reason or another, he found it more profitable to sell or lease to his tenants. Even before the end of the thirteenth century it is by no means unusual to find land changing holders pretty rapidly both by transfer and by lease. The customary land passes in the manorial court; the outgoing tenant surrenders it, and the incoming tenant is formally admitted by the steward. When a peasant leaves the manor or dies without heirs, the other tenants offer a sort of small land-market, and bid for his land or part of it to add to their own. Hence holdings or fractions of holdings change hands with some frequency at the court customary, the well-to-do, who can afford to take more land, offering the lord an increased rent to obtain a share in a holding the possession of which has for some reason lapsed. In the court rolls of the Lincolnshire manor of Ingoldmells, for example, there are many such transfers, six sales occurring in successive courts held in 1315 and 1316. At Crondal, in 1282, a tenant has for some reason given up his holding; the rest of the community dart on it like minnows on a piece of bread; and it is at once split up among as many as ten other tenants, who find sureties for the continuance of the normal services. At Hadleigh, in 1305, a tenant sells part of his land to be built upon. At Castle Combe, in 1367, a villein enters by licence of the lord on two virgates of land and a separate pasture.
Ingoldmells Court Rolls (Massingberd), October 1315 to June 1316.
Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 152-153. Court Roll of 1282. "Hugh Sweyn gives to the lord 15d. that he may be able to hold 2-1/2 acres of arable land of the tenement formerly Richard Wisdom's, paying therefor yearly 15d. of rent: sureties for the services being Gilbert Swein and Roger Carter." Nine other tenants take fractions of Richard Wisdom's holding in the same way.
Victoria County History of Suffolk, "Social and Economic History" (Unwin). Professor Unwin has some suggestive remarks on similar developments in other parts of the county.
History of Castle Combe (Scrope), p. 162: "Johannes Pleyslede, nativus domini, cepit de domino unum messuagium et duas virgatas terrae tenendas in bondagio, secundum consuetudinem manerii ... Reddit etiam annuatim sex denarios pro quadam pastura vocata le Hatche, et pro via ad eandem."
Such examples of what may be called petty land speculation could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and point to a good deal of mobility in rural society even in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. At the same time one can see signs of relationships of a more complicated character tending to establish themselves between the tenants, and breaking up the symmetry of the manorial arrangements. There is a marked tendency for holdings not to remain intact but to be split up among different holders. Sometimes this takes place in the ordinary course of transference from father to son. The virgate held by the former is divided, for example, into two cotlands, each of which is held by one child, or the heir to a holding divides it with his mother. More frequently one is left to infer the actual process of division from the way in which the Rentals describe holdings as being occupied by groups or partnerships of tenants, who share the land between them, each being responsible for a part of the rents and services owing from the virgate. Such an arrangement does not imply that there is any partnership in actual cultivation, any partnership in the modern sense of the word. It means, on the contrary, that the different parts of the holding are divided among several different cultivators, and that its apparent unity is quite artificial, simply a fiscal expression to enable the authorities to see that it renders its share of payments and services.
Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 129, Rental of Dupehale (Dippenhall) 1287: "Edmunde de Bosco and William de Bosco hold 2 cotlands which were formed out of one virgate of land which Adam de Bosco formerly held."
Ibid., p. 153: "Margery Palmer comes and surrenders into the hands of the lord a virgate of land with a house in Crondal, and Galfrid her son comes and gives to the lord 6s. 8d. to have seizin thereof, upon this condition, that the said Margery have the third part, and two pieces more, of the aforesaid tenement, for the term of her life."
Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 117, Rental of Yateleigh, 1287: "John de la Perke and Thomas Squel hold one virgate of land containing 22 acres, on payment therefor of 2s. 10d. on the Feast of St. Michael and 7-1/2 for Pondpany, and one stoup of honey, and 75 eggs, and shall perform all services like Thomas Kach.... Walter le White and Osbert de la Knelle hold one virgate of land containing 29-1/2 acres.... Roys de Pothulle and John le White hold one virgate of land containing 29 acres."
Again there is much leasing and sub-letting of land by the more prosperous of the customary tenants. Like labourers who hold allotments to-day, they often find it convenient to hire extra land and at the same time to let out parts of their own holdings, which may be inconveniently situated, or hard to work, or for some other reason not worth retaining. Thus in Lancashire the Clitheroe court rolls show many fines being paid in the early fourteenth century for permission to "tavern," that is simply to lease, land. In 1351 there are several tenants on the manor of Sutton in Hampshire who have leased cotlands from the larger customary tenants. At Crokeham on the neighbouring manor of Crondal we hear as early as 1287 of one tenant paying 12d. for his holding "through the rents of" another customary tenant, who stands as an intermediate landlord between him and the manorial authorities. On this manor, indeed, sub-letting of land proceeded very far, and had created by the middle of the sixteenth century exactly the result which one would have expected, the existence, namely, of a considerable number of subtenants holding land from the copyholders and known by the name of Hallmote tenants. Nor is mere subtenancy the most elaborate of the arrangements which arise among these Lilliputian capitalists. The peasants deal in land, and naturally they employ land agents to act as brokers for their bargains. When "Robert Bagges surrenders one bovate of villein land into the hands of the lord for the use of Symon Clerk, and the same Symon forthwith surrenders the aforesaid bovate to the lord for the use of William Flaxman, and William Flaxman pays 12d. to enter thereupon," may we not say that we have the whole machinery of land speculation, seller, middleman, and client, complete?
Court Rolls of the Lordships, Wapentakes, and Demesne Manors of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (edited by W. Farrer). Halmote of Colne, 1323: "Thomas le Harper for taverning 3 acres of land, 6d. Roger ... for the same of 2 acres of land, 4d.," and passim.
Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 140: "John Thomas holds a messuage and a 'ferdell' of land, excepting one cotland and a perch.... Thomas le Freyn holds of the above a cotland and a perch."
Ibid., p. 134: "William de Suche gives to the lord 12d. yearly, to be allowed to hold 6 acres through the rents of Hugh of Wyggeworthale."
Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 159-383. Customary of 1567. The name does not necessarily imply subtenancy in any way, the Hallmoot being simply the court of the manor. At Yateleigh one copyholder, Richard Allen, held about 263 acres, of which about 126 were held from him by 21 subtenants (pp. 258-265 and 378-379).
Footnote in The Rebellion of Wat Tyler, by Petruschevsky (Russian), p. 210: "Ricardus Flaxman qui de domino tenuit in bondagio unum messuagium et II. bovatas terræ et xvi acras terræ de Forland quæ quondam fuerunt Johannis Colyn ad terminum xx. annorum ex dimissione prædicti Johannis per licenciam curiæ, venit hic et reddidit in manus domini prædictas duas bovatas terræ et acras di' terræ et prati ad opus Willelmi Dolynes deduct' prædicto messuagio." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 32, No. 307, and ibid., p. 211: "Robertus Bagges redd' in manus domini l bovatam terræ in bondagio ad opus Symonis Clerk Tenend 'sibi et suis, etc. Et idem Symon instanter redd' in manus domini prædictam bovatam terræ ad opus Willelmi Flaxman sibi et heredibus suis secundum consuetudinem manerii, et dat ad ingressum xiid." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 33, No. 324: "Instanter" is remarkable.
So far we are on safe ground. But it is not easy to describe the sort of conditions in which this petty commercialism, this emergence of peasants richer and more prosperous than their fellows, takes place. Clearly it implies the existence of small stores of capital, of some surplus over the consumption of the current year, which its fortunate possessors can use as a starting-point for further acquisitions; nor ought this to surprise us, for the usurer who traffics in his neighbours' misfortunes by lending money or corn at exorbitant rates, is by no means an unfamiliar bugbear in the mediæval village. Clearly, again, we must not look for some single primum mobile to explain how such small capitals could be brought into existence. With all its apparent homogeneity the manorial population had, from the beginning of things, included people some of whom were in so much better a position than others for building up considerable properties as to make it no matter for astonishment that, as time went on, they should improve their advantage and attract more than their share of any increase in wealth which might take place. The appearance in the fourteenth century of a rural middle class is, indeed, much less remarkable than the extreme slowness of its development in the more backward parts of the country. For one thing, even the strictest equalisation of shares could not prevent the holder of exceptionally fertile land from being better off than his less fortunate fellow. Since services and rents were based on the requirements of the demesne, with a view to their rough apportionment among all the peasants, and were not adjusted, like modern competitive rents, so as to sweep away the surplus arising on superior sites, the occupants of the latter could build up, under the ægis of custom, the nucleus of a very considerable property. For another thing, the mere fact that the village was subordinated to a lord, who exploited it by means of officers and servants, supplied village society with an upper layer of people who had larger opportunities than the mass of the peasantry for improving their position. Stewards, bailiffs, and greaves were frequently rewarded for their services with grants of land for which only a nominal rent was asked, and of course the most obvious way of using their advantage was further to increase it by adding to their properties. In a somewhat similar position to these were the peasants who were let off easily because their labour was not needed for the lord's estate. It is quite a mistake to think of the mediæval villager as a man pinned down to subsistence level by the economic pressure which grinds, as in a mortar, the poorest classes in modern society. Of course individuals were cruelly oppressed, and when the harvest failed whole communities, as in India to-day, must sometimes have been blotted out at a blow. But the whole story of the extraordinary upward movement which took place among the peasantry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is unintelligible, unless we admit that the legal rightlessness of the villein was, in fact, quite compatible with a good deal of economic prosperity. His liability to the manorial authorities, though in law unqualified, was in reality a liability limited, on the one hand, by the rule of custom, and, on the other, by the fact that he worked, not for an ever hungry world-market, but for a by no means insatiable local demand. Since services were adjusted to holdings, not to holders, a family of five or six persons usually did not send more than one or two to work on the lord's estate, and the remainder had opportunities for economic advancement, which necessarily became greater as the growth of population made the weight of the lord's requirements less exacting. Moreover, the rudimentary specialisation of industrial employments, which can plainly be seen going on in the villages of the fourteenth century, brought into existence the man who was half peasant, half artisan or tradesman, and who could employ the money which he made in trade to carry on his husbandry on a larger scale than his neighbours. Such, for example, were the smiths, carpenters, turners, shoemakers, tailors, butchers, walkers, websters, and shearmen, who appear so constantly in Poll Tax returns. When a weaver is able, though a villein, to leave 3000 marks to his heirs, the village capitalist has plainly come upon the scenes. Nor must we forget that, however self-contained some manors may have been, there were others whose proximity to a chartered town or to a seaport acted as a magnet to draw rural conditions out of the rut of custom. Among the serfs who bought permission to emigrate, there were some who, having made money as town craftsmen, strayed back to their "villein nest," and acquired considerable properties with their hardly amassed wealth, like the Italian or Austrian peasant of to-day, who, after years spent in the sunless tenements and restaurants of New York, returns at last to be the envy of Calabrian and Tyrolese villages. From several sides at once, therefore, from those who socially rank above the mass of the population, from the peasant who combines trade and husbandry, from the enterprising serf who sets out to make his fortune at a distance, forces are at work to build up the considerable holdings that are the basis of the well-to-do peasantry of the future.
See below, pp. 115-121.
See E.H.R., vol. xv. pp. 774-813; Vinogradoff's review of Page's The End of Villeinage in England.
Powell, The Revolt in East Anglia, Appendix I.; and Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers, pp. 80-81.
Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe. p. 233.
But while these causes were always operating on individuals, the most potent influence in forming a class of prosperous peasants was, no doubt, the spread of commerce and its reaction on agriculture. Its effect is shown by the fact that it is just in those parts of the country where trade is most highly developed, and where, therefore, the use of money and the growth of wealth encourage speculation of all kinds, that the commercialising of landed relationships, and the appearance of a middle class, arises earliest and spreads furthest. The change is specially noticeable in the Eastern counties, which, from an early date, are the home of industry. Examples of the extreme variety and irregularity in the holdings of the customary tenants on the manors of Suffolk in the sixteenth century, which we have already contrasted with the arrangements in the backward parts of the country such as Northumberland, begin to make their appearance at a very early date in that county of fisheries and manufactures. At Hadleigh, where the woollen industry has set money in circulation, the processes both of splitting up the customary holdings, and of letting two or three of them to a single tenant, is conspicuous at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and has completely altered the distribution of property which existed a century before. At the little fishing village of Gorleston at the end of the thirteenth century each of the former tenancies was divided up among several tenants, sometimes three or four, sometimes eight or ten, and once as many as twenty. At Hawstead, in the same county, the free tenants have let off part of their holdings and added to them by leasing additional land in its place. In short, whenever trade becomes a serious factor in rural life, one finds a very general tendency for new arrangements of land to grow up side by side with the customary holdings, which are the backbone of the manor, because it is from them that the lord extracts his services for the cultivation of the desmesne. As long as the necessity for labour services continues, the number of holdings does not undergo any appreciable alteration, but the number of holdings ceases to be a guide to the number of holders.
Victoria County History of Suffolk, Unwin's article on Social and Economic History.
Ibid.
It is clear that the organisation of the manor is compatible with a good deal of shifting of property among the customary tenants, and that an alteration in its arrangements begins at a comparatively early date, without any external shock and through the desire of such tenants as can afford it to buy and lease land from other tenants who are less well off. If such a tendency were at all general, it would explain the gradual aggregation of larger holdings into fewer hands, and the appearance of considerable inequality in economic status among members of the village community whose legal position was the same. Sometimes, indeed, the authorities of the manor think that the process is going on too fast, that tenants have forgotten that, though they deal in land as though it were their own, it is really the lord's, and that they must not jeopardise the rents and services which he expects from it by alienating it without his permission. Sometimes a day of reckoning comes, when "tenants having more than one customary tenement" are "to show cause why they should not be excluded from the other tenements but one, unless license be granted them." But in view of the multitude of transactions which come before us, we can hardly doubt that licence was nearly always granted if the purchaser or lessee was thought by the steward to be substantial enough to make the land do its duty, and that tenants who wanted to buy and sell, lease and let, had very little opposition to expect from the lord or his steward.
Merton Documents, "A table of the Matters, Orders, and Customs Conteyned in Severall Courts of the Manor, 1563": "Daye given to all ye tenants of ye manor to remove and expell their undertenants by Michaelmas that shall be in ye yeare 1563, upon paine of every delinquent forfeiting 20s." "Daye given to the aforesaid tenants having above one customary tenement to be here at ye next court to shew," etc., as above. See the Customary of High Furness quoted below, p. 101; also Hone, The Manor and Manorial Records, pp. 177-178, Court Rolls of Payton, Oxon.: "And the aforesaid Laurence Pemerton, in his life time, substituted Walter Milleward as his subtenant ... contrary to the custom of the Manor without license; therefore let him have a talk thereon with the King's officer before the next court."
This is the meaning of entries of two names as "sureties" when land changes hands. See Crondal Records, Court Rolls of 1281 and 1282, passim.
After all the picture is one which we ought not to have any difficulty in understanding, if once we get rid of the idea, born of our melancholy modern experience, that the buying of land in small parcels is for the small man the road to ruin, a luxury in which none but the well-to-do can afford to indulge. We have all heard much of the iniquities of the English system of land transfer, and have contrasted its cumbersomeness, its expense, its uncertainty, with the facilities for buying small plots offered by methods like those of France, where sales and mortgages are entered in a public registry, which any one has the right to inspect. But we need not look to the Continent or the British Dominions to see a market for real property working freely and smoothly. In our period by far the most general form of tenure was one customary tenure or another, and whatever the disadvantages of customary tenure may have been--and they were many--they had one great compensating advantage. Customary holdings could be transferred easily, cheaply, and with certainty, by surrender and admission in the court of the manor. Since there was no doubt that the freehold was in the lord, there was no expensive investigation of titles to eat up the prospective profits of the purchaser, and the Court Rolls offered a record, one is tempted to say a register, of the nature of the interest which a tenant had had in any holding from time immemorial. Of course the adjustment of the respective claims of lords and tenants raised very knotty problems, and these will be examined later. But, as long as they were in abeyance, the fact that peasant holdings could be transferred so readily contributed to the breaking up in the regularity of manorial arrangements, to the passage of land from one family to another, and to the formation of larger properties out of small.
Since writing the above I have seen that the same view of the advantages of copyhold (the descendant of villein) tenure is taken by Dr. Hasbach, who quotes an eighteenth century writer to the effect that copyhold as compared with freehold land had the advantage of "the greater certainty of its title and the cheapness of its conveyance" (Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, pp. 72-73).
Such petty transactions among the peasantry were not, however, the only way in which substantial peasant properties came into existence. In addition to the transference of land from one tenant to another there were other causes working to produce much the same results. The first was the continuous taking in of plots of waste land by tenants who got permission from the manorial authorities to make encroachments upon it. The second was the abandonment of the system of cultivating the demesne by the labour rents of the tenants. Long before the enclosing of the common waste by lords of manors and farmers had become a very serious grievance--that it was a grievance at an early date is proved by the Statute of Merton--one finds arrangements being made for bringing unused land under cultivation. Sometimes this movement goes on on a very large scale indeed; the Abbey of St. Albans gets a licence from the King in 1347 to "improve its wastes aforesaid and to grant and let them for their true value to whomsoever of their tenants comes to take them;" and about the same time 500 acres of waste in the forest of High Peak are let by the Crown to three tenants, much to the disgust of the neighbouring commoners. Usually the encroachments on the waste take place piecemeal. The process by which piece after piece was clipped off it and added to the tenants' holdings is shown very clearly in Rentals and Court Rolls. Occasionally it goes on without sanction; a tenant surreptitiously draws into his holding an extra piece of land for which he pays nothing, and is only found out when he has occupied it for some time. But this is rare, for such encroachments are a source of profit to the lord, both in the payment made for the original permission to make them and in the rent coming from them, and the steward is therefore careful that they should be made through the court and entered in detail on the rolls of the manor. Thus at Ashton-under-Lyne, in 1422, both freeholders and customary tenants had made large intakes of wood and waste and were paying for some of them as much as 13s. 4d. and 10s. The Halmote Court of Colne in 1324 shows many tenants paying a few pence for acres and half acres of waste. At Yateleigh, in 1287, almost every one of the fifty-three customary tenants held, in addition to his land in the open fields, land taken from the waste amounting in the aggregate to 37 acres, while some possessed no land at all except that which they had thus reclaimed. In the tithing of Aldershot, on the same manor, one tenant held 52 acres in encroachments. At Crokeham another held 63-1/2 acres in addition to the standard half virgate of customary land; another, at Southwood, 16 acres.
1235, c. 4. One may remark, however, that the power which a single freeholder had had before 1235 to prevent the breaking up or enclosure of common pastures, even when he had more than was sufficient for his own beasts, was a genuine hardship for the lord, for other freeholders, and for the customary tenants; see the remarks in Pollock and Maitland (History of English Law, vol. i. p. 612).
Gesta Abbatum Monasterii St. Albani, vol. iii. pp. 120?-121, quoted by Petruschevsky, op. cit., pp. 179?-180.
Victoria County History, Derbyshire, vol. ii. p. 170.
Glover, History of Ashton, p. 355. "Richard the Hunte ... for an intake 3d. ... Thomas of the Leghes for the one half of the intake in Palden Wood 13s. 4d. The same Thomas of the Leghes for an intake besyde Alt Hey 10s."
Court Rolls of the Lordships, etc., of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (Farrer). Halmote of Ightenhill, 1324, January 18: "John de Briddeswail for entry to half an acre of waste in Habrincham, 6d., for the same yearly, 2d." Same court, May 7, 1324.: "Richard le Skinner for entry to 4 acres of waste in Sommerfordrod, 6d., for the same yearly, 6d.," and passim. In the north of England there seems to have been very much colonising of the waste, perhaps because original settlements were small. See Turner, History of Brighouse, Rastrick, and Hipperholme, pp. 66?-67, and Trans. Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society, vol. vii., Rochdale Manor Inquisition.
Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 116?-120, e.g. "Robert, son of Peter de la Pierke, holds one acre of encroachment land on paying 4d."
Ibid., pp. 123-?127.
Ibid., pp. 131?-134. "Richard Wysdon holds half a virgate of land containing 16 acres.... The same holds 63-1/2 acres, which were in his ancient occupation, and were found to be over and above his said virgate, and (included) in many encroachments."
Ibid., pp. 122-?123: "William of Southwoode holds 16 acres of encroachments and other detached pieces."
The process of nibbling away the waste was, in fact, very general, and was a natural and inevitable one. The lord gained by leasing part of it to be broken up and cultivated, while, so long as sufficient land was left for grazing, the tenants gained by getting land which they could add to their holdings, and on which the growing population could settle. It must be remembered that the area under cultivation was everywhere an island in an ocean of unreclaimed barrenness which cried out for colonists. In the Middle Ages land was abundant and men were scarce; the land wanted the people much more than the people wanted the land. Moreover, with the simple methods of cultivation prevailing, the number of persons which a villein's holding could maintain was strictly limited, and the tendency to "diminishing returns," with the consequent difficulty of maintaining a growing population on the same area, must have come into play very soon and very sharply. Surveyors appreciated this, and pointed out on some manors that unless the tenants' holdings were enlarged they could not make a decent living and, what was more important to the authorities, could not perform the customary services. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that at a comparatively early date the manorial population began to overflow the boundaries of the customary land and to occupy the waste, with the result that the area under cultivation grew, in some cases, enormously. We can hardly be mistaken in supposing that this was the chief cause of the remarkable difference in the amount of land which strikes one when one compares some of the surveys of later and earlier dates. In any case the result was to increase the opportunities possessed by the more prosperous tenants, who could afford to rent additional land, of adding to their holdings, and thus to produce a growing inequality in the distribution of property among them.
Thorold Rogers (Agriculture and Prices, vol. i. p. 34: "Not much less land was regularly under the plough than at present") thinks otherwise. But (i.) modern agriculture has many ways of using land besides keeping it "under the plough"; (ii.) we know that in the eighteenth century large tracts now cultivated were barren heaths, and it is difficult to believe that these had been cultivated in the Middle Ages.
See below, p. 189. The instances there quoted are later than the period with which we are now dealing, but as they mostly come from Northumberland, a very conservative county, they are perhaps to the point.
e.g. at South Newton in Wiltshire (see p. 74), tithing of Swanthrop in Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was in 1287 about 360 acres, and in 1567 about 607 acres, and tithing of Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was in 1287 about 181, and in 1567 about 284. But these figures are not altogether satisfactory; and sometimes one finds a reduction, e.g. at Dippenhall (from about 287 acres at the earlier date to about 275 at the later date). The plague relieved the pressure of population, and thus removed one incentive for breaking up the waste; on the other hand, it left the survivors much better off, and thus more able to increase the scale of their husbandry. But until we know much more about the growth of population we shall not make much of general comparisons of this kind.
If the instances which have been given above are at all typical of the state of things on many manors, the economic rigidity of rural life in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries must have been a good deal less than is often suggested. The legal forms are stiff and unchanging, but the life behind them is fluid, and produces all sorts of new combinations and arrangements which make legal forms a better index of what was a hundred years before than of what at any moment is. In particular one finds considerable movement going on before the Great Plague. The more fully manorial records are explored, the more difficult does it seem to generalise about the effects of that great catastrophe. One cannot say that it was the beginning of the commutation of labour services into rents, for on some manors they were partially commuted before it, and on some they were not entirely commuted till nearly two centuries later. One cannot say that the leasing of the demesne was due to the Plague; for where the labour supply was small, parts of it were leased already, and after the Plague the authorities of different manors met the crisis in different ways, sometimes beginning by letting the demesne only to return later to the older system. It may be suggested, however, that its influence has been somewhat exaggerated by those authorities who would have us regard it as the watershed of economic history. No doubt the Great Plague was the single most important event in the economic history of the fourteenth century, just as the Irish famine of 1846 was the single most important event in the economic history of Ireland in the nineteenth century. But neither the Irish famine nor the Plague had the effect of sweeping economic development on to wholly new lines. What they both did was enormously to accelerate tendencies already at work. The customary tenants were buying and leasing land from each other before the Plague, and before the Plague some lords were leasing out their demesnes, but on a small scale. After the Plague the death of many holders and the poverty of many survivors caused land to come into the market on a vastly greater scale and at a cheaper rate, with the result that the aggregation of holdings, the beginnings of which have been described as above, proceeded with vastly increased rapidity. That this was the case immediately after the Plague is shown by the familiar entries as to the transference of holdings which have lost their cultivators in the Court Rolls. The movement seems to have continued, however, long after the immediate effects of the Plague had passed away, and to have resulted on some manors in the fifteenth century in something which might almost be called free trade in land. One finds a readiness to buy and sell customary holdings which belies the idea of the manor as a rigid organisation in which little room was left for changing contractual arrangements, and one finds also the natural result of the rising commercialisation of land tenure in the grouping of several holdings under one tenant, in the appearance of the practice of some tenants sub-letting lands to others, and in general in the passing of property from the economically weak to the economically strong, which naturally does not go on rapidly till there is a market in which they both can meet.
e.g. at Hadleigh in 1305 (Victoria County History, Suffolk, Unwin's article); at Crondal in 1287 (Crondal Records, p. 110); at Ormsby in 1324 (Massingberd, History of Ormsby).
e.g. Scrope, Castle Combe, p. 164. Court Rolls of 1357: "Johannis filius Johannis Payn venit et finem fecit cum domino per 12d. pro ingressu habendo in illo messuagio et virgata terræ quæ Johannis le Parkare quondam tenuit.... Et dictum tenementum concessum est ei ad tam parvam finem eo quod dictum tenementum est ruinosum et decassum; et existebat in manu domini a tempore pestilentiæ pro defectu emptorum." Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls for years 1349?-1352. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence. Page, The End of Villeinage in England.
At the same time by the beginning of the fifteenth century another force of great importance was beginning to operate. The increase in the size of the customary tenants' holdings, and the growth of a class occupying much more land than the ordinary villein tenancy, was brought about not only by encroachment on the waste and the aggregation of holdings, but also by the transference to the tenants of that part of the manorial land which has been the lord's demesne. The process by which the demesne ceased to be cultivated by villein labour, and became frequently an area subject to the more elastic arrangements of leasehold tenure, has been often described, and we shall have to return to it later in speaking of the development of the large capitalist farm. Here it is sufficient to point out that, the abandonment of the primitive system, by which the tenants worked out their rents in labour on the demesne, had two consequences which are of great significance in the development of the villein into the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
In the first place, it meant that one great force making for equality between the holdings of different tenants was removed. The system which gave each customary tenant on a manor what may be called a standard holding was surely an artificial one, in the sense that it bears the mark of deliberate arrangement, and is not one which would tend to be established by the play of economic forces. As we have seen, economic forces did begin to impair it at an early date. Its persistence is more remarkable than its disappearance, and why had it persisted? Partly, no doubt, because the idea that each full household should be equipped with a standard holding was part of the original organisation of the village community, upon which the feudal superstructure had been imposed, and which it used as a machine for grinding out its revenue. Partly also through the needs of that superstructure itself. As the tenants were the instruments by which the demesne was cultivated, and as the demesne could not be cultivated unless the tenants were adequately equipped with the means of livelihood, the rough equality which existed between their holdings, though arising from the communal arrangement of village life, and not deliberately imposed from above, had, nevertheless, been, in fact, a quite necessary condition for the working of the lord's private estate. A settled relation between holdings and services was a convenience to the manorial authorities, and in this sense the work done on the demesne was a force tending to keep the tenants' holdings fixed, as it were, on a scale which did not easily allow of much variation. When the demesne ceased to be cultivated by labour services, what had been from the point of view of the manorial officers, though not from that of the villagers, the chief practical reason for maintaining equality between the different holdings disappeared, and the inequality which economic forces were tending to produce developed more rapidly.
The view that the equality of holdings was the creation not of the communal needs of the peasantry but of deliberate arrangement by the authorities, seems to be untenable in face of the evidence of early records showing that freeholders as well as the servile peasantry held roughly equal shares (see Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, Essay II., chap. iv. and chap. vi). On the other hand, the apportionment of services to holdings tended to stereotype the existing arrangement. A late example which displays both elements, that of authoritative pressure and that of communal organisation, is supplied by the Customary of High Furness (R.O. Duchy of Lancs. Special Commissions, No. 398): "As heretofore dividing and portioning of tenements hath caused great decay, chiefly of the service due to her Highness for horses, and of her woods, and has been the cause of making a great number of poor people in the lordship, it is now ordered that no one shall divide his Tenement or Tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be of the ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d." See below, p. 101.
In the second place, when labour rents were commuted into money, the demesne was often added to the tenants' holdings, with the result of still further destroying their symmetry, by the opportunity which was given to men with money to buy up parcels of land. This movement went on so unobtrusively that its significance is liable to be overlooked. In reality, however, it was a change of very great importance, scarcely less important than the decay of villein services and disabilities which was the other side, the personal as contrasted with the agrarian side, of the same break up of the old system of cultivation. One must remember that the lord's demesne formed a very large part of a great many manors, often no doubt the most fertile and desirable part. One may recall again that there are other European countries in which the sharp distinction between the demesne and the holdings of the peasants was maintained in full mediæval vigour almost to our own day. In Prussia, for example, a Royal Decree, the Decree of 1807, was needed to break it down, and to allow the land held by lords of manors to be bought by the small cultivator. What the partial obliteration of this line meant in fourteenth and fifteenth century England was that a great deal of land, land on which the peasantry, one would suppose, had often turned covetous eyes, was thrown into the market for families who could afford it to buy and lease, that for a century or so after the Plague great estates were being broken up into small, instead of small being consolidated into great, that for a century or so the land market turned in favour of the small man as much as it afterwards turned against him.
Edict of October 9, 1807, Clause 1.
Compare a document, temp. Hen. VIII., quoted by Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, p. 155 n., which states that whereas landlords at one time could not find tenants, now the case is altered and tenants want landlords.
Of course the leasing of the demesne was not universal; nor, when it was leased, was it always divided up among the tenants. Often it was transferred en bloc to a single farmer, and became the nucleus of the large leasehold farm whose management we shall examine later. Sometimes it was first divided up and later consolidated again, with results disastrous to the interests which had grown up upon it. But the existence in the sixteenth century of many small demesne tenancies is a proof that a common way of treating it was to divide it up among the peasants; and if we cast our eyes back over the records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we can find many examples to show how such a state of things was brought about. Sometimes small plots of the demesne are leased for terms of years. At Tykeford, in 1325, the surveyor found that 48 acres of demesne which were then in the hands of the lords used to be leased to the tenants. The bailiff's accounts of the manor of Amble in Northumberland show that in 1328 "the forlands" were let out to the bondage tenants, and in 1337 four of the latter got leases of from 2 to 4 acres of demesne at Acklington. In 1436 at Ambresbury 2 carucates were leased to various tenants for a term of years, as well as 8 acres of meadow and 400 acres of pasture; and at Winterborne 2 carucates, 6 acres of meadow, and 300 acres of pasture were leased in the same year. But in the fifteenth century the leasing of the demesne was constant, and there is no need to multiply examples which can be found in almost every survey of the period. Where the land was not leased it was quite usual for it to be held by copy. This was a common practice in the fifteenth century in the south-west of England. The surveyor who, in 1568, gave an account of six manors in the Western counties, found that in all of them the Barton or demesne had been split up among the customary tenants for very many years and was held by them as copyholders. The same thing happened on the manors of the Earl of Northumberland, where the tenants' holdings were increased by pieces taken from the lord's demesne and divided equally among them. It happened at South Newton in Wiltshire, where in 1567 a good deal of the Barton land was held by the tenants, who were copyholders, on the same terms as the rest of their customary holdings; at Stovard, and Childhampton, and Estoverton, where the customary tenants held "Bordland." Very probably those pieces of the demesne which on some manors were held by copy of Court Roll, had originally been let on lease in the way described above. The difficulty of distinguishing them was very great, since normally they would lie in the open fields scattered among the strips which formed the customary holdings, in such a way that the movement of a balk obliterated the difference. It is not surprising, therefore, that in spite of the efforts of the lord's officials, they should constantly have lost their identity. The remarkable thing is that they retained it so often, and that surveyors were able to pin down a couple of acres among 30 or 40 others as not being, like the rest, customary land, but as having at one time, perhaps several generations before, been parts of the lord's demesne which it is "good to revyve and keep in memory that it should not hereafter decay, but that at all tymes it may be devyded from the customarye."
For the use of the demesne in the sixteenth century see below, pp. 200?-213.
Dugdale,Monasticon, vol. v., Survey of Tykeford.
Northumberland County History, vol. v., Amble: "4s. 8d. de forlands dimissis diversis tenentibus." "4 acres leased by the Prior for 8 years to Roger at 8d. per acre."
Ibid., vol. v., Acklington.
Hoare, History of Wiltshire, Hundred of Ambresbury.
Ibid.
Humberstone, Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i. p. 43. See below, pp. 208?-209.
Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke (Straton).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., Survey of the Manor of Whitforde in the County of Devon.
With these words, so suggestive of the blurring of lines which in previous ages were sharply drawn, we may pause to consider where we stand. Our argument has aimed at showing the large changes which have taken place in the position of the peasantry as landholders before the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century begins. We have not been able to give any quantitative measurements of the developments. But we have seen enough to understand the direction in which economic forces are setting. The substitution of hired labour for villein services, and the formation of a middle class of considerable landholders out of the occupiers of virgates and semi-virgates who formed the bulk of the population on most mediæval manors, are changes which have taken place quietly and which have nothing sensational about them. But the growth of relationships based on a cash nexus between individuals, which they both imply, has effected a very real alteration in rural conditions, an alteration which is in a small way like that occurring to-day when the discovery that a quiet village possesses mineral wealth or is a convenient holiday resort puts money into circulation there, causes farming lands to be cut up into plots which are bought by the savings of speculative tradesmen, and adds a new tangle of commercial relationships to the slowly moving economy of village life. Speculation in land on a small scale begins among the more prosperous villeins at an early date, as the inevitable result of an increase in prosperity and of the land hunger of a growing population. It is immensely accelerated through the impetus which the plague, by emptying holdings of their occupants, gives to the formation of something like a land market, and the result is that the holdings of the more fortunate grow and the holdings of the less fortunate diminish. As a consequence, there is in many fifteenth century villages the greatest variety in the economic conditions of the peasantry. Except where commercial forces have been held in check by the remoteness of the township from centres of trade, or where the needs of the manorial authorities oblige them to resist any subdivision of holdings for fear it should lead to the loss of services, the comparative uniformity characteristic of their holdings in the thirteenth century has disappeared, and the equality in poverty of the modern agricultural labourer has not yet taken its place. Though the old Adam of economic enterprise seems to be banished by the insistence of stewards and bailiffs that holdings which are responsible for certain works shall be treated as an indivisible unity, he sneaks back, even in the mediæval manor, in the shape of agreements among the peasantry, agreements which break that unity up by way of exchange, of sale, of leasing, and sub-letting. By the end of the fifteenth century the different elements in rural society are spread, as it were, along a more extended scale, and there is a much wider gap between those who are most, and those who are least, successful.
Taken together these changes mean, on the whole, an upward movement, an increase in the opportunities possessed by the peasantry of advancing themselves by purchasing and leasing land, more mobility, more enterprise, greater scope for the man who has saved money and wishes to invest it. They mean that custom and authority have less influence and that class distinctions based upon tenure are weakened. But the upward curve may turn and descend; for they imply also a tendency towards the dissolution of fixed customary arrangements and of the protection which they offer against revolutionary changes, a tendency which in the future, when great landowners and capitalists turn their attentions to discovering the most profitable methods of farming, may damage the very men who have gained by it in the past. In the next two chapters we shall glance at the first point, and pause at greater length upon the second: first, the economic condition of the mass of the peasantry before the great agrarian movements of the sixteenth century begin; secondly, the signs of coming change which may react to their disadvantage. We shall try to maintain the standpoint of an observer in the early years of the sixteenth century. But economic periods overlap, and Northumberland is still in the Middle Ages when Middlesex is in the eighteenth century. So we shall not hesitate to use evidence drawn from sources that are in point of time far apart.
The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century · The Wunder Library — complete classics, free to read, with narration.