CHAPTER IV. The Peasantry (_continued_)

THE PEASANTRY (continued)

(e) Signs of Change

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

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

I am inclined to think that an investigation of the manorial records of the fifteenth century would show a considerable decrease in the number of customary tenants, not as a result of evictions, but simply as a consequence of one man buying out another and forming one larger holding out of two or more smaller ones. The evidence for this is as follows: (1) When several holdings pass to one man there must be a diminution unless more land is brought under cultivation. Such an agglomeration of holdings has been shown to be very frequent. (2) A comparison of fifteenth and sixteenth century surveys with those of an earlier date shows a marked diminution in the number of customary tenants (a) before complaints as to enclosure become loud, and on manors where there is no trace of enclosing by lords or large farmers; (b) on manors where more land is cultivated by the customary tenants than at an earlier date. Thus at Haversham there were 52 tenants of all kinds in 1305, 35 in 1458, 14 in 1497 (Victoria County History, Gloucestershire, vol. ii. pp. 61?-62). On six Northumbrian manors, where there is no sign of evictions on a large scale, there were 82 customary tenants in 1294, and 37 in 1567, and where intermediate surveys enable one to narrow the limiting points, one finds that there has been a considerable diminution before the end of the fifteenth century. On the four tithings, of South Newton, Childhampton, Stovord, and Little Wishford, which made up the manor of South Newton, customary tenants numbered at the beginning of the fourteenth century 32, 7, 13, 13, and in 1567 10, 3, 7, 1, the average holding having grown from 10-1/2 to about 43 acres (Roxburghe Club, Pembroke Surveys). At Sutton Warblington there were in 1351, 28 customary tenants, and in 1568 there were 7, while the average acreage of each tenant's holding had increased enormously (Crondal Records, Baigent). At Dippenhall and Swanthrop, two tithings of the manor of Crondal, the customary tenants numbered 40 in 1287, 24 in 1568, while the average size of their holdings had risen from between 18 and 19 to just under 35 acres. At Aldershot the number of customary tenants during the same period fell from 48 to 37 (ibid.). Such figures are of course full of pitfalls. In the North border warfare reduced the population, and the effects of the Great Plague have to be considered. The great growth in the size of holdings does, however, suggest that a diminution in the number of customary tenants may have occurred without any encroachments being made by lords on the customary land, and merely through one tenant buying up the land of another.

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

Thus the yeomen seem to have increased in prosperity at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century (though at the same time large classes of agrarian workers were suffering terribly), because the rise in prices made corn-growing a gold-mine. The collapse came probably after 1815 (see Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, chap. vii.).

(f) The Growth of Competitive Rents on New Allotments

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

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

Crondal Records (Baigent), p. 132?-133, Rental of 1287: "The same Hugh holds certain encroachments on payment of 3 ploughlands' worth, 3 hens, and 3d. at the said term." "Emma of Wyggeworthhall ... holds certain encroachments on payment therefor 11s. 6d. and one ploughland's worth." These documents throw much light on the whole process of the extension of cultivation over the waste.

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

Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 116?-120.

What is the reason of this remarkable contrast between the rents of pieces of land lying quite near to each other and held by the same tenants, which causes the payment for one set of holdings, the encroachments, to be adjusted uniformly to the area held, and the other, the customary holdings, to be rented apparently without any economic plan at all? The answer is that the payments for the encroachments and the payments for the customary holdings, if they are both to be called rents, are rents of very different kinds. The payments made for the customary holdings are not based directly on the economic value of the land, but on the value of commuted services, and all the holdings, though of unequal size, are liable to much the same services. All make a general payment of 9-1/2d., because that sum is the value of some payment in kind or service which they had made before the money payment took its place. Holdings of 32 acres and 22 acres, just as holdings of 12-1/2 and 18-1/2 acres, make the same payments, because the labour rents had been only very roughly adjusted to the size of the holdings, and these payments are commuted labour rents, not rents fixed by putting up an acre for leasing and taking what can be got for it. It is of course quite true that services and the size of holdings were connected, and that therefore the money rents which took the place of services and the size of holdings were connected also. But the connection is rough, arrived at by apportioning between holdings the labour services needed to cultivate the demesne, without distinguishing precisely differences of a few acres in the size of different holdings, and the subsequent money rents are not adjusted to the acreage because they express the roughness of the original apportionment.

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

Camden Society, 1857. Rental and Custumal of the Manor of Brightwalton. Under the heading virgators it is said, "If they do the full day's work set out above each of them ought to have his rent reduced 12d." Under the heading of villeins holding assarted land it is said, "Be it known that no customary tenant shall have any reduction of rent of the lands which he holds by way of assart or in the common of Greeneholt for any office or work to be done for the lord."

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

Camden Society, Inquisition of the Manors of Glastonbury Abbey, Brentmarsh, 1189. A tenant holds "1 acre de terra arabili in dominico, utilius esset quod esset in manu domini."

e.g., on the Devonshire, Somerset, and Cornwall manors surveyed by Humberstone temp. Phil, and Mary (Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.).

MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of the Survey of the Manor of Holt, 1620 (Wrexham Free Library, Ancient Local Records, vol. ii.).

Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 258 (1440?-1550).

Victoria County History, Suffolk. I quote the writer's remarks in full. "The bailiff's accounts for the manor begin in that very year , and the one striking feature in them is the system of leases which appears to have gradually displaced other kinds of tenure since the time of the pestilence. A few are for forty years, but most are for ten or six years.... The land so leased is not mainly demesne land. It belongs largely to villein tenements that have fallen into the lord's hands, and the process of consolidation described had already taken place at Mildenhall. The land held by John Kelsynd on a ten years' lease includes, for example, '3 acres of Frere's, Hayward's and Willway's tenement in Bradinhawfield, 1 acre of Holmes' tenement in Suttonfield, 5 acres of Zabulo's tenement in one piece at Lambwash,' and the rent of the whole 22 acres is 31s. 1d., or nearly 1s. 5d. an acre, an extremely high rent for land not stated to be meadow or pasture."

Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 203.

Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, Introduction, p. xxx.

Ibid.

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

Stubbs, Constl. Hist., vol. ii. p. 479, n. 5.

The word "usury" denoted in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century not merely exorbitant interest on a loan, but any oppressive bargain, including the raising of prices, the beating down of wages, and the rack-renting of land (see e.g. A Discourse on Usurie, by Thomas Wilson, 1584). The phrase "a great taker of advantages" comes from a complaint by the people of Hereford against an unpopular divine who lent money at interest and rack-rented land (S. P. D. Eliz., cclxxxvi. Nos. 19 and 20), and the phrase "weapon bodeth peace" from an account of an agrarian dispute in Lancashire--it is the sort of grim joke that stubborn and humorous people would appreciate--in L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xiii., Pt. II., p. 535. "On Sunday night Wheateley sent his daughter to bid him to come to Parson's Close to mow Mr. Tempest's meadow there. Had heard that whoever should mow the meadow should be beaten off the ground, and sent to ask if he should bring a weapon. Wheateley sent word again 'howe weapon boded peace, therefore bring his weapon with him.' Brought his bow and shafts."

(g) The Progress of Enclosure among the Peasantry

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

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

For the popular attitude towards enclosures see below, pp. 313?-340, and Leland (quoted Hone, The Manor and Manorial Records, p. 117): "The Duke of Buckingham made a fair park by the Castle of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, and took very much fair land in, very fruitful of corn, now fair lands for coursing. The inhabitants cursed the Duke for those lands so enclosed." I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage (Topographer and Genealogist, vol. iii): "To the Right Honble. House of Parliament now assembled, the Humble Petition of the Mayor and Free Tenants of the Borough of Wootton Basset in the Countie of Wilts, Humble sheweth to this Honourable House" [that their common has been seized and enclosed by the lord of the manor, who] "did divers times attempt to gaine the possession thereof by putting in of divers sorts of cattle, in so much that at length, when his servants did put in cowes by force into the said common, many times and present upon the putting of them in, the Lord in his mercy did send thunder and lightning from heaven, which did make the cattle of the said Francis Englefield [the lord of the Manor] to run so violent out of the said ground, that at one time one of the beasts was killed therewith; and it was so often that people that were not there in presence to see it, when it thundered would say, Sir Francis Englefield's men were putting in their cattle into the land, and so it was, and as soon as those cattle were gone forth, it would presently be very calm and fair, and the cattle of the towne would never stir, but follow their feeding as at other times, and never offer to move out of the way." For the allusion to invoking the devil, see Moore, The Crying Sin of England, &c. It was said that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations (Erdeswick, Survey of Stafford, ed. Harwood, p. 55). The same was said of enclosers (Moore, op. cit.).

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

See the ballad of Nowadays (1520):

"Envy waxeth wonders strong, The Riche doth the poore wrong, God of his mercy sufferith long The Devil his workes to worke. The Townes go downe, the land decayes; Of cornefeldes playne layes, Gret men makithe now a dayes A shepecote in the Church.

The places that we Right holy call Ordeyned ffor Christyan buriall Off them to make an ox-stall These men be wonders wyse; Commons to close and kepe, Poor folk for bred to cry and wepe; Towns pulled down to pastur shepe, This ys the newe gyse."

"The Leveller's Petition" (Bodleian Pamphlets, 1648, c. 15, 3, Linc.).

Fitzherbert, Surveying: "I advertise and exhort in God's behalf all manner of persons, that ... the lords do not heighten the rents of their tenants or cause them to pay more rent or a greater fine. A greater bribery and extortion a man cannot do than upon his own tenants, for they dare not say him naye, nor yet complain." Norden, The Surveyor's Dialogue, Book III.: "Lords should not depopulate by usurping enclosures, a thing hateful to God and offensive to man."

Victoria County History, Nottinghamshire, vol. ii. p. 282.

39 Eliz. c. i.

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

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

Fitzherbert, Book of Husbandry. Norden, op. cit.: "One acre enclosed is worth one and halfe in common." Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. 56. Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure.

Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. 49: "That which is possessed of many in common is neglected of all."

Fitzherbert, Surveying, chap. xl.

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

Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. 49. Victoria County History, Essex. I am inclined to say "almost certainly" rather than "very probably" (see below, pp. 167 and 262?-263).

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

Trans. R. H. S., New Series, vol. vi., and The Domesday of Enclosures.

Turn next to the story told by the surveys. Though Wiltshire is on the whole a country of recent enclosure, there was a certain amount of several farming on the part of the customary tenants on the Wiltshire manors in the middle of the sixteenth century. Out of 4128-1/4 acres held by them on eight manors the surveys show that 202-1/4 acres lie in closes. This is a very small proportion, only 5 per cent., and suggests that on most of them the holdings lay in the open fields, and that, as a general rule, the common utilisation of meadows and pastures still obtained. On one, however, as much as 132 acres out of 1103, or just under 12 per cent. were enclosed, and at best these are minimum figures which do not accurately represent how far the movement had gone; for, though a surveyor would not describe unenclosed land as enclosed, he might very well class enclosed land with other land of the same description, for example as meadow or pasture, and omit to state that it was occupied in severalty. On some Staffordshire manors again there are similar tentative beginnings of enclosure, and a similar impossibility of determining its actual extent. Then, too, there are manors where the greater part of the land still lies in the open fields, but where enclosure has proceeded a little further. At Salford, in Bedfordshire, eight of the tenants have enclosed about 51 acres, which they hold separate from, and in addition to, their holdings in the open fields, in amounts varying from 2 to 17 acres. At Weeden Weston, in Northamptonshire, the three largest tenants (apart from the farmer of the demesne) hold "in several ground enclosed" 28 acres. In addition to this, part of the manor called "the mere land," the exact nature of which is obscure, has been broken off and split up among all the fourteen tenants, some holding only 2 or 3 acres, others holding 15 or 20 acres. Finally, as examples of manors where enclosure by the customary tenants was carried furthest, we may take those of Edgeware and Kingsbury in Middlesex. From the admirable maps of these two manors, which were made in 1597, no one could even guess that the open field method of cultivation had ever existed there. The land of each of the numerous tenants lies in fields, often quite small fields, which are separated from each other by hedges. Instead of the "spider's web" of the older method we have the irregular chessboard of modern agriculture.

Roxburghe Club, Surveys of the Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke. The manors are South Newton, Washerne, Donnington, Knyghton Estoverton and Phiphelde, Wynterbourne Basset, Byschopeston, and South Brent and Huish (the last in Somersetshire.) The manor where most is enclosed by the customary tenants is Donnington.

e.g., R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 70, Barton (3 & 4 Ph. and Mary): "J. Whiting ... 1 close of 7 acres by copy ... J. Whiting ... 1/2 virgate ... 1 intake of 2 acres by copy."

All Souls' Maps (survey on back of map of Salford).

Ibid., Weedon Weston.

Ibid., Edgeware and Kingbury. All these four instances come from the last decade of the sixteenth century.

These instances tell us nothing of the origin, extent, or distribution of the movement which they represent. They are useful merely as offering concrete specimens of enclosure on the parts of free and customary tenants, which confirm what is told us by the surveyors. There was certainly a well-defined trend away from the methods of common field agriculture taking place in the course of the sixteenth century and before it on the part of the peasantry. We can, however, go further than this; and premising that in the infinite variety of rural conditions in different parts of the country any classification must be somewhat arbitrary, we can distinguish two main elements in the movement.

In the first place there is among the tenants on some manors something like a deliberate movement towards the substitution of "several" for open field husbandry. This was a change which occurred almost spontaneously when the economic interests of the majority of tenants were pushing in the same direction, and can be seen affecting both pasture, meadow, and arable holdings. The Commission of 1517 found that in certain places land had been enclosed neither by individual landlords, nor by individual tenants, but by "the village," and the manorial documents give us a clue to what such entries mean. In the surveys of the sixteenth century we not infrequently find that meadows and pastures which were originally occupied in common have been split up among the tenants, so that each has the exclusive occupation of a few acres, the share which each tenant takes being proportioned more or less exactly to his holding of arable in a manner which precludes the idea that the change can have taken place by piecemeal individual encroachments, or in any way except by an intentional redistribution of land, in which the interests of all the tenants received consideration. Such a division of meadow and pasture is paralleled by cases in which the re-allotment of arable holdings is carried out both by freeholders and by copyholders almost exactly in the manner prescribed by Fitzherbert. Thus at Ewerne, in Dorsetshire, the customary tenants got permission from the lord to make enclosure on the open fields; appointed persons to "extend and tread them out," and then united the dispersed strips into compact holdings, so that "the more part of the manor was enclosed, and every tenant and farmer occupied his land several to himself." At Mudford, in Somersetshire, the tenants were found by the surveyor in 1568 to be contemplating the same step. A similar course was taken in the early seventeenth century on several Northumbrian manors, of which Cowpen may be taken as a typical example.

e.g. Whitecote (Salop) 40 acres, and at Wyndeferthing (Norf.) 25 acres are enclosed by the villata (see Leadam, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. vi.).

Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Pembroke Manors. At Washerne nineteen out of twenty-one customary tenants held separate pieces of meadow and pasture, the largest 7-1/2 and the smallest 3-1/2 acres, but usually almost equal. At Donnyngton, twelve out of thirty-two customary tenants had pieces of land "extractum de communia." R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Bdle. 3, No. 29, Agarsley (Staffs., 1611).; here the pasture appears to have been divided up among the copyholders, but there are considerable inequalities in their shares.

Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.

Northumberland County History, vol. ix. In this case enclosure was carried out by the freeholders. But the procedure is similar to that at Ewerne. The allusion to "justice and right" shows what the reason for the intermixing of strips had been.

The procedure followed by the freeholders of that township was to get their land surveyed by an expert, to divide it into two great portions, and to agree that each man should have an allotment in one or other of the two divisions proportionate to the holding which he had occupied in the open fields, due regard being had to the quality as well as the acreage of each holding, "so that some have not all the best ground and others all the worst, but that each man have justice and right." Such instances may prove to be exceptional in the sixteenth century; it is our impression that they were, and that the attempts which the peasantry made to overcome the difficulties associated with the open field system of cultivation more often took the form of individual exchanging of strips, than of a formal agreement to abandon one method of cultivation and to adopt another. But, even though exceptional, they are of some interest as offering complete examples of changes which have been going on more generally on a smaller scale and in a less systematic manner. They afford a striking contrast to the enclosing by the manorial authorities which we shall examine in a future chapter, and offer an analogy to the enclosures which were carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They resemble the latter in being a deliberate attempt to make a clean sweep of the old system of open field agriculture. They differ from them in being the outcome of voluntary agreement among the tenants, not of legislation.

We know why lords wanted to enclose much better than we know why tenants wanted to enclose. Here is a petition from a freeholder (Northumberland County History, vol. v. undated): "To the Right Honourable Earl of Northumberland, William Bednell ... gent., humbly prayeth: That where the said village of Over Buston is held in common ... it would please your good lordship to consent that partition may be made of the same, and that also there may be convenient exchange of the arable lands lyinge in the common fields there to be rateable reduced into severall by the same partition for the reasons under-written.

"First, for that the common and pasture of the said village lying open, unfenced upon the common and fields of Wordon and Bilton, wherein are many tenants and great number of cattle, the profits of the same are continually by them surcharged, and your lordship's tenants prevented.

"By reason hereof divers quarrels and variances have happened, and daily like to ensue between the tenants of both towns, by chasing, rechasing, and impounding of their cattle damage fezant, which cannot be kept out but by perpetual staffherding, to the great charge of your honour's poor tenants.

"Your lordship's tenants being four in number, unprovided to keep able horses by reason of the want of convenient pastures and meadow, may be enabled by this particion for that purpose.

"Inclosure would greatly strengthen the said village, and your lordship's tenants, against the incursions of Scotts and foren ryders, which otherwyse, lying open, cannot be defended by the number there, who are forced to watch generally together every night, to their great charge and endurable toil.

"This breeding betterment to the soil and ease to your lordship's tenants will augment your honour's revenue there, avoid forren commoners, prevent contentions, enable your lordship's tenants to do your honour their requisite service, and bind your orator to pray that your lordship live long in happy state."

Much more general, however, than enclosure by agreement of the whole township, is the enclosure which takes place through the initiative of individual tenants, who, without any common agreement as to a policy of enclosure being reached by the village community as a whole, make sporadic encroachments on the common pasture or waste, and consolidate their arable holdings by exchanging strips with their neighbours. Our best information on the first point is obtained from the manorial court rolls. The court was the guardian of the customary methods of cultivation. How far it could maintain them against a lord or his farmer who wished to break them down, and how far it was merely his mouthpiece, is a difficult question, which we need not at present discuss. Certainly it did occasionally uphold the common rule of the township even against the lord; certainly the mere fact that when that rule is uncertain the lord refers the matter to the court in the form of a series of questions which it is to answer, gave the tenants the opportunity of building up a kind of case law which can hardly have failed to act as a brake upon arbitrary action by the manorial authorities. But however impotent it may often have been when confronted by an enclosing lord of the manor, its rules set very effective limits to the discretion exercised by tenants in their agricultural arrangements, and it checked enclosing by individuals for several reasons. It was of the essence of the open field system of tillage, and of the joint use of common meadows and pastures, that unauthorised encroachments by a single tenant should be an inconvenience to his neighbours. If made on the arable, they might interfere with the customary rotation of crops, and would certainly diminish the area of land available for the village cattle on the fallows and after harvest. If made on the common waste, they threw the village economy into confusion by upsetting the arrangements under which each holding could place so many beasts to be grazed there. "It is both law and reason," wrote a surveyor grieved by such aggression on the part of a large tenant, "that every tenant of like land and like rent have like portion in all things upon the common pasture." The court, as the upholder of manorial custom, was occupied with discovering and checking breaches of it. On manors where there was not sufficient grazing land to allow of each tenant pasturing as many beasts as he pleased, it fixed "the stint" which each was allowed to turn out on the common. It decided whether rights of pasture were confined to old tenements or whether they could be extended to cottages recently erected. It made rules as to what fields should be sown with what crops. It would fine a man "for refusing to consult his neighbours touching the common affairs of the township."

Northumberland County History, vol. v. The Surveyor of Buston (1569).

Ibid.

Such action does not, of course, necessarily imply any highly developed communal organisation of village life. When four householders to-day bring an action against a fifth who has interfered with "ancient lights," they act simply as individuals who are temporarily united in defence of a common interest, and when a court customary fines a man for over-stocking the common pasture, it is possible to argue that there is no more in its action than the temporary alliance of individuals to suppress a nuisance. Yet such a view of the matter is incomplete. The common interest is there in both cases; but in the case of the village community it is a permanent, not merely a passing, ground for co-operation; and if we must take to heart the warnings given by some legal historians not to see communism where there is only joint action, we must also insist that common action, which is in effect communal action, is quite possible without those who act either possessing, or feeling the need of possessing, any definite status. It is perhaps not too presumptuous to suggest that the very precision with which the lawyer applies his keen analysis of juristic conceptions to remove the misconceptions of the lay mind, is sometimes an obstacle to the understanding of forms of organisation created by the daily routine of men quite unversed in the law. An employers' association or a trade union to-day in an industry which is not highly organised is, during two-thirds of its life, a mere collection of individuals. But in an emergency it can show very effectively that it is the organ of a common will. It is surely rather hard to deny the peasantry some measure of corporate management of common interests because they cannot answer questions as to the legal nature of a corporation, because they do not express their communal arrangements by the use of terms of art which they would not have understood. The economist, at any rate, will look at practice rather than theory. He will be inclined to doubt whether the villagers were any clearer as to the basis of their associated action than the mass of trade unionists were between 1875 and 1906. But he will see that, like trade unionists, they do in fact habitually act together and act effectively for the regulation of their common interests. No doubt such action was often mere adherence to a customary rule. But it is possible again to draw the antithesis between custom and organisation too sharply. After all custom does not work by itself. Especially in times of change, like the sixteenth century, it only works in so far as men make it work. On some manors it is frequently changed by the court, and clearly, when it is changed, we have not automatism but deliberate action.

For references to the discussion on this point, see below, p. 244.

But the power of a rule is not recognised till it is broken, and it is just these collisions between the plan of cultivation upheld by the court and the interests of individual tenants, which show how prevalent are the small enclosures made by the latter. They begin very early and are increasingly frequent throughout the fifteenth century. Let us make the picture more precise by giving one or two instances. In 1405 some customary tenants at Forncett are fined 2s. 2d. because "they have made enclosures of their lands within the manor against the custom of the manor, on account of which action the tenants of the manor are not able to have their common there." In 1418 the court at Castle Combe presents that three tenants "have sown the common fields and kept them several without the licence of the lord, when they ought to be common, to the common damage." At Ingoldmells, in 1437, the court impounds the sheep of some tenants who have "entered upon the fields of Burgh and occupied the common there, where they have no common." At Coventry from the middle of the fifteenth century, and at Southampton throughout almost the whole of the century and a half following, continuous war was waged by the Court Leet against those who "oppressed the common" by over-stocking it with more than their authorised quota of beasts. Yet, in spite of elaborate and ever-changing regulations which were made as to the number which any person might place upon it, in spite of bye-laws requiring them to be delivered personally or through a servant into the charge of the town herdsman, ruling off aged animals which were past work, and imposing heavy fines on offenders, the constant references in the documents of the sixteenth century to pieces of land which are held by customary tenants in severalty show that this sporadic individualising of part of the manorial area had to a great extent broken down the customary routine of cultivation, even on manors where no extensive enclosures were carried out by the manorial authorities.

Davenport, History of a Norfolk Manor, p. 80.

Scrope, History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 236.

Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, p. 276.

M.D. Harris, Coventry Leet Book, vol. ii., pp. 445, 456, 510, and elsewhere.

Hearnshaw, Court Leet Records of Southampton, passim, e.g. 1551: "Thomas Betts and Thomas Fuller continue to oppress the common with sheep, therefore they are fined 8s. each" (p. 21).

So far we have spoken of the encroachments by tenants on the common pasture. The growth of several occupation could occur there with less disturbance than on the arable holdings, because, if the pasture was a large one, the clipping off of a corner might leave the other tenants with more than was sufficient for their cattle. But enclosure made by one tenant on the open arable fields created a disturbance which was immediate and obvious. Indeed, if his holding lay in scattered strips, separated from each other by the strips of his neighbours, how could he enclose at all? He would at once come into collision with their demand that his holding should lie open for grazing purposes after harvest. Moreover, even from his own point of view, enclosure could hardly pay, for he would have to put hedges round each of 30 or 40 or 50 acre and half acre plots. One would expect, therefore, that individual tenants would be slow to undertake the hedging and ditching of their arable holdings; and this expectation is on the whole confirmed by the impression which one gets from the surveys and from the accounts of contemporaries. On the tenants' arable land enclosure has not proceeded by the middle of the sixteenth century as far as on their pasture and meadow. Yet, even in this matter, the tendency is perhaps to exaggerate the stability of agricultural conditions. Even on the arable fields themselves individual tenants set themselves to overcome the obstacles in the way of enclosure, and they do so in the only way they can, by attempting first of all to consolidate their strips into larger holdings. This tendency is revealed most clearly by the open field maps. The picture of mediæval agriculture, to which Mr. Seebohm has accustomed us, is one in which holdings were made up of strips which lay scattered over the open fields at a considerable distance from each other. In the sixteenth century this condition of things survived in its entirety on many manors and partially on most. But, side by side with it, there is going on a process by which the strips coalesce into larger bundles, so that one tenant's pieces of land, instead of being far apart, very often lie next to each other, forming blocks of several acres. Those who make maps show the change by putting brackets round the contiguous strips. Written surveys, instead of describing parts of holdings with the words "lying between the land of A and the land of B," call attention to the new condition of things, which is still sufficiently unusual to deserve remark, with the words "lying together." Sometimes in the maps one finds twelve or twenty strips bracketed as belonging to one man; sometimes the surveys state that 16 or 20 acres lie together. But even 10 acres is a big field, quite big enough to repay the cost of hedging and ditching. When sufficient strips have become contiguous to form a close of this size one great obstacle to enclosure has been removed. Unity of cultivation has been added to unity of ownership. The difficulty that enclosure will probably, though not necessarily, mean the exclusion of the other tenants' beasts after harvest still remains. But an individual tenant will no longer find enclosure impossible if he can persuade his neighbours to acquiesce in it. In fact he does sometimes persuade them, and in the midst of fields which are still open one finds here and there blocks which have been enclosed.

e.g. The Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. 56: "And weare it not that oure grounde lieth in the common fieldes, intermingled one with another, I thincke also oure fieldes had been inclosed, of a common agreement of all the townshippe, longe ere this time."

See opposite, the map of part of Salford.

Merton Documents, No. 5209, Rental of Ibstone (about 1600): "Item, Thomas Skott holdeth ix acres as it is estymed lieinge together in Tillage." "John ... holdeth 16 acres of Lande lieinge together in Redfield."

Nor can we doubt that this process of forming strips into blocks took place through deliberate action on the part of tenants, though we need not assume that the probability of its leading to enclosure was always foreseen. The amalgamation of the scattered parts of a single holding had sufficient advantages to commend it without any further change, and enclosure may often have been an afterthought. How could this amalgamation come about? It would naturally take place by a process of exchange between tenants. As we have seen, the tenants were from an early date buying and selling, leasing and sub-letting, parts of their holdings. What could be more reasonable than that in doing so they should have regard to the situation of the plots which they acquired, and so arrange their bargains as gradually to substitute a few larger blocks for many scattered strips? This hypothesis (for it is only a hypothesis) receives a certain amount of confirmation from a curious fact to which attention was called for the first time by Professor Unwin. It occasionally happens that we find the very tenants who sell and let part of their holdings are buying and leasing parts of other holdings from their neighbours. Thus, at Gorleston, in Suffolk, a customary tenant sublets about half his holding of 12 acres to as many as eight other persons, and at the same time acquires plots of land from another eight holdings himself. At Crondal Richard Wysdon adds enormously to his half-virgate by encroachments, and at the same time sublets 2-1/2 acres to Hugh Sweyn. Henry Simmond enters on land belonging to the same Richard Wysdon, and in turn transfers 8 acres of his holding to Matilda Huthe. What is relevant to the question in these transactions is not the mere sub-letting and selling of land. That, as we have seen, was common enough. The noticeable thing is that the same tenant who surrenders part of his holding acquires part of the holdings of other people. After the transactions are completed he holds about as much land as before, only it is differently arranged. May it not be that the desire that it should be differently arranged was one of the motives of the double transaction, and that in this way he sought to substitute for his dispersed strips a compacter and more manageable holding? Is he not like a shareholder who sells out Canadian Pacifics and invests in Consols, in order to have his property more directly under his own eye? At any rate such an explanation would account for the undoubted fact that in the sixteenth century holdings are much more compact than they are in the thirteenth century. But whether it is correct or not the growth towards compactness is a fact, and a fact which makes possible the enclosure of holdings in the open fields.

Exchanges are not uncommon, e.g. Roxburghe Club, Pembroke Surveys, Manor of South Brent and Huish: "Note that the same Thomas with leave of the Court has exchanged the said acre lying near Appleworth with John Moore, customary tenant of the lord, for one acre lyinge in Holmefield." Mr. Kolthammer has called my attention to a case (Ashford Court Rolls, 1605), in which a tenant gives up a number of half acre strips lying between the lands of another, and receives in exchange some strips of the latter which lie between his own.

Victoria County History, Suffolk, Social and Economic History.

Victoria County History, Suffolk, Social and Economic History.

Crondal Records (Baigent), pp. 134, 149, 152, 154-155.

It is plain from these and similar instances that there was a well-defined movement from the fourteenth century onwards which made for the gradual modification or dissolution of the open field system of cultivation, and that it originated not on the side of the lord or the great farmer, but on the side of the peasants themselves, who tried to overcome the inconvenience of that system by a spontaneous process of re-allotment, sometimes, but not always, in conjunction with actual enclosure. On one manor it proceeded by the piecemeal encroachments of individuals, on another by the deliberate division of the common meadow or pasture, on a third by the voluntary exchanging by tenants of their strips so as to build up compact holdings, on a fourth by the redistribution of the arable land. It was a spontaneous movement in the sense of being initiated by the tenants and not merely forced upon them. The economic, as distinct from the legal, arrangements of the village community were much less rigid than some of the books about it would suggest. The open field system of cultivation was, in fact, already in slow motion in several parts of England, when the impact of the large grazier struck it, enormously accelerated the speed of the movement, and diverted it on to lines which were new and disastrous to the bulk of the rural population.

This aspect of the enclosures, though not overlooked by contemporaries, has perhaps hardly received the emphasis which it deserves from modern writers. For one thing, a recollection of it explains certain apparent contradictions, the difference in the views expressed by different writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the social effect of enclosures, the disagreement between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay as to whether enclosing was or was not usually followed by conversion to pasture, the strange statement of Hales that "the chief destruccion of Townes and decaye of houses was before the beginning of the reigne of Kynge Henry the Seventh." The latter remark can hardly have been true of the great and sudden evictions which caused rioting and depopulation, and evoked the long series of statutes which begin in 1489. It may well have been a curt summary of the impression produced by a century of gradual consolidation and piecemeal enclosures carried out by the smaller cultivators. It would seem, again, to be the case that while landlords usually enclosed with the object of putting sheep where men had been, the tenants of customary holdings enclosed simply for the sake of better arable farming, or for the more convenient employment of meadow and pasture land. That is why Hales could make himself detested by landlords as the chairman of the only effective committee of Somerset's ill-starred Enclosure Commission, and at the same time say that certain kinds of enclosure are "very beneficiall to the commonweal." That is why Fuller and Moore a century later could damn enclosure in one sentence and qualify their verdict in the next. That is why Moore's numerous critics could repudiate his aspersions with some acrimony, and nevertheless admit that "when townes are in the hands of one or few men ... enclosure doth produce depopulation."

"The defence of John Hales agenst certyn sclaundres and false reaportes made of hym" (Appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. liii.). Two things make the effect of the fifteenth century enclosures obscure. First, the pamphlets on popular grievances which begin in the sixteenth century were hardly possible before the general use of the printing press. Second, in the sixteenth century people appealed to the Tudor government for protection because it was strong enough to give it. In the fifteenth century there was no Government to preserve order, let alone protect the poorer classes. Even if there were, therefore, extensive enclosures producing depopulation, we might very well hear little of them. But, while confessing ignorance, I think Hales' statement compatible with the view expressed above and on page 138, note 1, that the fifteenth century was a time when the consolidation of holdings was going forward slowly through the small speculations of the peasants.

A Vindication of the Considerations concerning Common Fields and Enclosures (Pseudonismus).

For another thing, the prevalence of small enclosures suggests that the view of those who represent the agriculture of the period as needing a violent shock to rouse it from a state of intolerable inefficiency can only be accepted with considerable qualification. We know that by the middle of the sixteenth century in certain counties, notably Kent, Essex, and Devonshire, the common field system of cultivation was already the exception and not the rule. We know, too, that though in parts of these counties its absence may have been due to differences in the original forms of settlement and clearance, it had elsewhere disappeared within historical times. We may conjecture that the reason why it decayed sooner in Kent and Essex than elsewhere was the fact that the neighbourhood of those counties to London and the sea, and to the commercial routes from the Continent, caused the influence of commerce and of a money economy to be felt there sooner than in the Midlands, with the natural result of accelerating economic and agrarian changes, and that in the examples quoted above we have the same process of individualisation in the method of agriculture going on quietly elsewhere in a way which would sooner or later have brought about a similar result to that which had already occurred in those two progressive districts. At any rate these rearrangements suggest a good deal of adaptability among the tenants who carried them out, and not the condition of organised torpor which some writers profess to find in the unenclosed village. That communal cultivation was incompatible with swift change may be granted. Of that fact its survival into almost our own day is a sufficient proof. That it prevented improvements altogether must be denied; and though no doubt to large farmers and impatient surveyors the petty operations of the smaller tenants seemed intolerably dilatory and wasteful, the student who looks at them in an age which has some experience of economic revolutions may well doubt whether rapid technical progress cannot be bought too dear, and regret that the gradual movement towards more rational methods of farming on the part of the small man was so soon overtaken by one over which the small man could exercise no effective control. Now, as then, land agents shake grave heads at the wastefulness of sacrificing the well-ordered dignity of a great estate to the encouragement of undercapitalised, untidy, higgledy-piggledy small holdings, and prove by arithmetic that the labourer has more comforts for less work. Now, as then, in those countries where the peasant tradition has not died altogether away, the unreasonable creature prefers starving on land which is his own, though it be but a tiny patch where he sweats from dawn to dark.

If it be objected to the view which we have taken of the slow spread of enclosure among the peasantry that they were notoriously opposed to enclosing, we must answer by repeating that there was nothing inconsistent in approving one kind and detesting another. After all there is no curse attached to landmarks, but only to the man who removes his neighbour's. Even in an open field village no one had a conscientious objection to fences in general; it all depended on where the fences were put. The object of enclosure was to shut in, or to shut out, or to do both. The villagers were not unwilling that an agreement should be reached whereby each man should shut his own beasts in a close of pasture, and shut out the beasts of other people from his arable after harvest. On the contrary, it was sometimes a grievance that enclosure was not allowed. What they objected to was that one man should exclude others without compensation from rights of pasture or from their arable holdings. Moreover, provided that enclosure took place by consent, the advantages of it were overwhelming. When the superior value of enclosed over unenclosed land was so marked that the former was sometimes assessed to subsidies at a higher rate than the latter, a man who, like many of our tenants, had money to spend on timber, would naturally wish to enclose. The growth of pasture farming by large graziers turned the minds of the smaller tenants in the direction of enclosing for themselves, because this, paradoxical though it may seem when the outcry against enclosure is remembered, was the most obvious way in which they could protect themselves. The explanation is that the system of open field cultivation and of common pasturage made it peculiarly easy for one large shareholder to ruin the rest by letting his cattle stray at large over the common, and even by encroachments on his neighbour's strips. Its underlying principle had been the apportionment of rights on a basis which was settled by the custom of the manor, as opposed to the acquisition by individuals for themselves of such rights as they could obtain by economic power, or by the accumulation of capital. This was the meaning of the strict allotment of grazing privileges by the establishment of a stint which each tenant, or rather each tenement, was not to exceed. The limitation to the capital which a man could acquire in the shape of stock--cattle and sheep--was practicable as long as that capital was small. When it became large, as in the sixteenth century it did, it was too powerful to be dammed up by the rules as to cultivation enforced in the manorial court, and the outward sign of this was the failure of the latter to prevent the "overcharging" both of the common waste, and of the common pasture formed by the field after harvest, with the beasts of the large grazier. Hence in some places the enclosing of pasture or arable was used by the tenants as a way of protecting themselves: at Mudford the tenants, at Newham and Tughall the surveyor in the interests of the tenants, at Southampton the Leet jury, were anxious for enclosing, in order that the weak barriers which the custom of the manor offered to the farmers' or to neighbouring villagers' depredations might be supplemented by a strong quickset hedge. What damaged the smaller tenants, and produced the popular revolts against enclosure, was not merely enclosing, but enclosing accompanied either by eviction and conversion to pasture, or by the monopolising of common rights. When some of the tenants became large capitalists, what the rest lost by surrendering common rights might be more than compensated by the security which they thus obtained of grazing their own beasts undisturbed on a smaller area.

Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., Survey of Whitford: "I woulde wish that the same [the common] were divided among the tenants yielding some small rente ... the poore men with dyligence and labour woulde soon convert yt to amendement, and alter the nature thereof, but the ritche men will not consent to that, for yt is as good to them as theire several grounde or pasture. The poore are not able to store yt with cattle, nor to use the commodytie as they might do if welth woulde serve them. But the rytche do consume their own parts and their neighbouris also: and that is the cause they will not consent to the enclosure and partition thereof."

There is interesting documentary proof of the statements of surveyors. Warwickshire MSS. Quarter Sessions Records, Michaelmas, 1636: "Fforasmuche as this Courte is informed that Overhinton (?) in this countie consists of 30 yardlands, of which 22 are enclosed and 8 yardlands thereof residue in the possession of Thomas [surname illegible] do lie in the common fields, and whereas the same 8 yardlands lyinge in the comon fields have been heretofore rated equally and proportionablie in all levies with thother yardlands, the said 22 yard of inclosed land being worth xx [pounds], for every yardland and the seid other 8 yardlands being worth but after the rate of x the yardland, it is ordered that the said 8 yardlands shall from henceforth pay in all levies but after the rate of x pounds for every yardland and the said 22 yardlands after the rate of xx pounds for every yardland, unless the owners of the said 22 yardlands shall att the next sessions uppon convenient notice hereof to them given shewe cause to the contrarie." The Justices do not understand the taxation of unimproved land.

See Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., for Mudford; for Newham and Tughall, Northumberland County History, vol. i.; for Southampton, Hearnshaw, Court Leet Records of Southampton.

At the same time, though voluntary enclosing by the peasants was partly a symptom of the overshadowing of small property by large, it was much more than this, and was due partly to a change in their methods of agriculture, and partly, perhaps, to a genuine progress in the technique of cultivation. This is indicated by the enthusiasm of the expert opinion of the period for "several" holdings, and by the qualified praise of discriminating critics like Hales. As we have seen above, there were parts of England--for example, "the sweet country of Tandeane," described by Norden--where cultivation was quite intensive in character, and intensive cultivation naturally gave an impetus to the individualising of arable holdings. Again, the advantage to the cattle breeder of "several closes and pastures to put his cattle in, the which would be well quicksetted, hedged, and ditched," was a commonplace. It has been already pointed out that on many manors of Southern and Eastern England the customary tenants were sheep farmers on a considerable scale. The adjustment of common rights must always have involved some difficulty: the fixing of so many head of beasts to each tenement was obviously a rough and ready arrangement based on the idea that the holding in the arable fields was the backbone of a man's substance, and that therefore it might properly be taken as a standard by which his rights of pasture and common could fairly be measured. The problems which arose could be imagined, even if they were not described for us at some length: "Where fields lie open and the land is used in common, he that is rich and fully stocked (up to the limit allowed) eateth with his cattle not his own part only, but also his neighbour's who is poor and out of stock. Besides that, it is an ordinary practice with unconscionable people to keep above their just proportion ... those who have consciences large enough to do it will lengthen their ropes, or stake them down so that their horses may reach into other men's lots." As long as the great bulk of the customary tenants relied for a livelihood mainly on the subsistence farming of the arable land, these practical difficulties were probably not felt very keenly, because the comparatively few beasts which were kept could pick up a living without overcrowding each other. But when the raising of stock became almost as important as the cultivation of arable, the demand for more pasture and for better pasture grew enormously, and in the face of the competition for it the strict maintenance of the customary stint became more difficult. On manors where 150 or 200 sheep were kept by almost every tenant the motive either to enclose surreptitiously and in defiance of the custom of the manor, or to divide and enclose meadow and pasture by agreement, must have been extremely strong. Ought we not to ask why the open field system survived so long, rather than why it partially disappeared in the sixteenth century?

The Commonweal of this Realm of England, p. 49: "I meane not all inclosures, nor yet all commons, but only of such inclosures as turneth commonly arable lands into pastures; and violent inclosures, without recompence of them that have right to comen therein; for if land weare severallie inclosed, to the intent to continue husbandrie thereon, and everie man, that had Right to Common, had for his portion a pece of the same to himselfe enclosed, I thincke no harme but rather good should come thereof, yf everie man did agre theirto."

Fitzherbert, Book of Husbandry.

Pseudonismus, 1654, Considerations concerning Common Fields and Enclosures.

We may now summarise the argument of this part of our work. The manor, as we see it from the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, is not the rigid, motionless organisation which it is sometimes represented as being. Though it is governed by custom, custom leaves room for the growth of commercial relationships on the extending fringe of new land over which the village spreads; for the withdrawal by the villagers of part of their holdings from the common scheme of open field husbandry, the division of meadows and pastures, the exchanging of strips, the formation of closes like those represented in the map on the opposite page, which a man can use as he pleases and over which the customary routine of agriculture has no authority. This side of the enclosing movement, more properly described as redivision and reallotment than as enclosure, develops earliest in those parts of the country which, owing to their geographical position, are particularly exposed to the dissolving forces of trade and of a money economy. But with the improvement in the condition of the peasantry and the growth of pasture farming it spreads far afield, and by the middle of the sixteenth century, quite apart from the large changes introduced by lords of manors and capitalist farmers, it has effected a considerable alteration in the methods of agriculture even of the more stationary inland counties. Such piecemeal alterations are a gradual process; they are not regarded unfavourably by the peasantry; and a balance between their tentative individualism and the rule of communal custom is preserved by the action of the manorial court. They are to be carefully distinguished from the sweeping innovations of the sixteenth century, which alone deserve the name of an Agrarian Revolution. But they are closely connected with that revolution. For by making a breach in the walls of custom they bring us to the edge of two great problems, the growth of competitive rents, and the formation of large pasture farms out of the holdings of evicted tenants.

We have spoken at length of the prosperity of the peasants, because it is necessary to appreciate it in order to sympathise with the point of view from which they and their contemporaries regarded the agrarian problem. But evil days are coming upon the rural middle classes. Indeed they have already come. There is by this time much anger against depopulating landlords, much talk of the good customs of Henry VII., much murmuring lest men be brought to that slavery the Frenchman be in. We must leave the light and follow them into the shadow.