CHAPTER I. The New Rural Economy

THE NEW RURAL ECONOMY

(a) Motives and Causes

A common view of social development regards it as the outcome of irresistible causes working towards results which can be neither hastened nor averted, and treats the fact that events have followed a certain course as in itself an indication that no other course was possible. Whatever is has always been implicit in the past; the established fact rules by the divine right of being the only possible dynasty, and no scope is left for pretenders to contest or acts of settlement to alter its legitimate title. It is not surprising that such a theory should be peculiarly popular in interpreting economic history. On their frontiers even the most different forms of social organisation shade into one another. Each generation naturally sees in a strong light those regions of the past which reproduce the features with which it is familiar, and overlooks the existence of wide Hinterlands whose general features are quite different. Since important classes, like important individuals, find it difficult to believe in the truthfulness of any picture where they do not occupy the greater part of the canvas, they insensibly encourage a conventional interpretation of history, which lends an air of respectable antiquity to the legal and economic arrangements which favour them and which they favour, by treating such arrangements as an essential characteristic of civilisation itself. In reality, however, it is only by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed, and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up, that an appearance of inevitableness is given to existing institutions, which satisfies the desire to see them as links in an orderly chain of unavoidable sequences. Useful as the conception of a continuous development is, it can easily be carried too far. It is carried too far when it causes us to forget that a small alteration in the lie of the land might have caused the stream to take quite a different channel, and that the smoothly flowing waters of the plain are the outcome of a series of crises in the higher regions, where the spur of a mountain or a cleft in the rocks might easily have diverted their course into other directions. If we must talk of social evolution, we ought to remember that it takes place through the action of human beings, that such action is constantly violent, or merely short-sighted, or deliberately selfish, and that a form of social organisation which appears to us now to be inevitable, once hung in the balance as one of several competing possibilities.

Certainly the possibility that economic changes should have followed a quite different line from that which they actually have can hardly fail to strike the student of agrarian history. The facts, as we read them, do not lend unqualified support to the idea that the growth, at the expense of the little landholders, of great estates cultivated by hired labour was the inevitable result of irresistible forces, or that the new agricultural régime was a necessity on account of the sluggishness of the old. To an observer of agrarian conditions living about the year 1500, who looked back over the conditions of the last century, all the possibilities must have seemed to point in the direction of a continuous improvement in the condition of the peasantry. It is evident that the growth of prosperity among the small cultivators was leading from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the gradual consolidation of holdings, to keen competition for the use of land, and to increasing individualism in the methods of agriculture. Though the movement caused a diminution in the number of landholders, the diminution was very gradual. It was not the result of a sudden revolution affecting large numbers of tenants simultaneously; and even those who regarded enclosing with hostility were favourable to the process of gradual redistribution, which did not violate vested interests or cause any sensational disturbance. The appearance of the country would have changed, and the methods of cultivation would have improved. But there would have been no great cause at work to displace the peasantry from the soil, with the rapidity which entailed hardship, until a much later period than we are now considering. Obviously, however, it was not these slow internal changes in the manorial organisation which impressed observers. On the contrary, though they are noticed by the writer who took a scientific interest in agricultural questions, they are hardly mentioned by the majority of commentators on the life of the period, who were interested not in the technique of agriculture but in the social results of changing methods. What aroused their alarm and produced rioting and legislation was, as every one knows, a movement the distinctive feature of which was that it was initiated by lords of manors and great farmers, "the Graziers, the rich buchars, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the Knights, the Lords," in short by the wealthiest and most powerful classes, and that it was carried out frequently against the will of the tenants, and in such a way as to prejudice their interests.

Crowley, The Way to Wealth (E. E. T. S.).

As the small capitalist prepared the way for the great, the two movements were connected, and the simultaneous development of both of them explains the rather puzzling mixture of approval and criticism which is to be found in the comments of observers upon enclosing. But their economic and social results were very different. No doubt the incipient movement in the direction of reorganising national life on the basis of industry involved a breach with the customary methods of agriculture, which must in any case have caused a certain degree of dislocation. The development of the textile manufactures, which for two centuries were the chief source of English wealth, could not have taken place without the production of cheap supplies of raw material, and the growth of the towns was dependent on the saving of labour from agriculture. But in such changes the element of time--the speed at which the transition takes place--is all important, because upon it depends the feasibility of social readjustments to meet the new situation. The slow breaking up of the open field system, though it changed the methods of cultivation, might quite conceivably have effected only such a gradual diminution in the number of the small farmers, as to make the absorption into industry of those displaced comparatively easy. In so far as the changes of the sixteenth century were a social revolution, and not merely a gradual development, this revolution was the result not only of technical advances, but of the concentration of landed property and the development of new relationships between landlord and tenant. It is to the second of the two movements that we must now turn.

The new agrarian arrangements which we shall have to consider are called by the name of enclosure, and we will discuss later what exactly enclosure means in this connection. But there are enclosures and enclosures, and we shall do well to begin by drawing some distinctions. In the first place, then, the enclosing movement that will occupy us in this chapter has very little resemblance to the enclosure which we have considered in the last. It is carried out by great men, not by small. It proceeds wholesale, not piecemeal. It does not consist in many little cultivators rearranging their holdings by purchase, or sale, or agreement, but in one great proprietor or his agent consolidating small holdings into great estates. The new arrangements are imposed rapidly and with a high hand from without. They do not arise gradually from within through the spontaneous development of the peasants' needs and resources.

Again, the new movement bears very little resemblance to the rearrangements introduced by lords of manors, which, from an early date, have gone by the name of enclosing. Such rearrangements have not been few. People have talked about enclosing long before they have begun to lament enclosures. Not to mention the encroachments on the waste evidenced by the Statute of Merton, one finds the word "enclosure" used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to describe a variety of agreements made between lords whose lands were contiguous, or between lords and their free tenants, by which, instead of the parties concerned using a given area in common as their pasture, each surrenders his right of access to part of it, and obtains in return the right to use another part in severalty. The Abbot of Malmesbury and the men of Niwentone come to an arrangement with Walter of Asselegge and the men of that village, whereby the monastery agrees to follow the customary routine in cultivating the land lying between Niwentone and Asselegge, and not to common on the marsh at Cheggeberge, getting in return exclusive rights of pasture over another marsh, and over the east field of Niwentone. The Abbot and Monastery of St. Peter's of Gloucester make an agreement with Lord Thomas Berkeley whereby the former are "to have and hold in severalty and enclose and approve at their will" certain lands lying in Southfield "so that the said Thomas and his free tenants may not ... claim or demand common, but be excluded from it for ever," and in return covenant that the latter may "enclose and approve their lands in all parts of the summit of the Pike of Coveleigh." Similar arrangements are made between the Abbot of Glastonbury and a neighbouring landowner, between the Abbot of Cerne and Robert of Bloxworth, and between the City of Coventry and the master and brethren of the Trinity Gild of that town.

Registrum Malmesburiense, vol. ii. pp. 220-?221: "Quod ... dictus abbas de Malmesburia non debet de cetero colere terram de Niwentone ... nisi antiquitus consueverat coli. Et quod dictus Walterus de Asselegge habebit mariscum suum de Cheggeberge quietum a communia hominum de Niwentone. Dicti vero abbas et conventus Malmesburia habebunt mariscum suum iacentem ex Orientali parte stratæ publicæ quæ vocatur Fos quietum et exceptum a communia hominum de Asselegge. Habebunt etiam ... campum Australem in Niwentone quietum et exceptum a communia hominum de Asselegge. Omnes vero aliæ terræ ad dictas villas pertinentes ... erunt in pastura communi."

Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriæ, i. 147-?149.

Hoare, History of Wiltshire, Hundred of South Domerham.

Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord Middleton), pp. 61?-62. This agreement was made in 1231.

Coventry Leet Book (edited by Mary Dormer Harris).

Whether it is a chance that such agreements seem to occur with special frequency in the records of religious houses we cannot say. It is possible that the perpetual character of a corporation made exclusive enjoyment at once more desirable and more feasible; a great abbey, like St. Peter's of Gloucester, could pursue a continuous and far-sighted policy, and wait more than a generation to see the results of its experiments. Nor is it possible to understand the motives for such arrangements without information as to local conditions which is not easily obtainable. Sometimes the object was simply to protect land used for agriculture against the depredations caused by the game of a hunting landlord. Sometimes it would seem to have been to allow of a variation in the methods of agriculture, for example the sowing of a piece of land which could not be sown as long as several persons had right of pasture over it. Occasionally it was simply to realise an obvious convenience dictated by the lie of the land, each party gaining more by the exclusive use of pasture lying near to him, than he would lose by surrendering rights of common over that part which lay at a distance. Two points, however, are worth noticing. The first is the use of the word "enclosure." Arrangements which go by the name "enclosure" are made at a very early date by the manorial authorities, and the latter would have been very much surprised to be told that they were inaugurating an agrarian revolution. The second is the character of these enclosures. They are in every way different from those which produced discontent in the sixteenth century. Though they affected the routine of cultivation they did not imply any abandonment of arable farming. Since they were carried out mainly by an exchange of rights they did not prejudice the tenants. Further, the disputes of which they were sometimes the result were not disputes between the lord of a manor and his tenantry, but between the lord and tenants of one manor and the lord and tenants of another, the ground of the disagreement being the difficulty of adjusting rights of common over the debatable land which must often have lain between two manors, and the division of interests being, as it were, a vertical, not a horizontal, division. In fact, these early examples of enclosure throw light on the later movement only by way of contrast. What we meet in our period is not isolated innovations of this character, but a general movement spreading across England from Berkshire in the South to Norfolk and Lincoln in the North-East, and affecting especially the corn-growing counties of the Midlands, a movement which meant a great extension of pasture-farming, a violent collision of interests between the manorial authorities and the peasantry, and a considerable displacement of population. Clearly some new and powerful causes must have been at work to account for it.

In the third place, the movement which goes by the name of enclosing in the sixteenth century has little similarity with the changes which proceeded under the same name from about 1700 to 1850, and which went on most swiftly in the reign of George III. It differs from them in method. In the eighteenth century Parliament is supreme. It is simply a committee of landlords and their hangers-on, and it makes Private Bill legislation a very easy method of getting enclosure carried out. In our period the Government, for reasons to be discussed later, sets its face against most kinds of enclosing, and such enclosures as are made are made in defiance of the law. It differs from them in motive. We must not prejudge the question whether the enclosures of our period were made mainly for pasture or for arable. But leaving this question on one side, we can point to certain broad contrasts. The ostensible motive of the eighteenth century enclosures is to improve the productive capacity of the land by spending capital upon it. This is the reason alleged when Private Bills are being promoted, and this is the aspect of the movement which causes it to be eulogised by the agricultural experts. Of course landlords were not philanthropists. As Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have demonstrated, there were often very sordid motives behind their resounding platitudes on the advantage of throwing commons and small holdings into large compact estates, and, even when these were not too conspicuous, the interests of the smaller landholders were sometimes treated with the most outrageous injustice. Still the general nature of the movement was clearly in the direction of bringing under better cultivation land which had hitherto not been used to its full economic capacity. The price of foodstuffs after 1750 rose enormously, and the rise in prices offered a golden harvest to any one who would prepare land for producing larger supplies. The landlords of the eighteenth century did not merely enclose. They improved as well. Part of their increased rent rolls was interest on capital which they had invested for the purpose. Now in the sixteenth century there is very little trace of any movement of this kind. What improving is done, is done by the peasants themselves. There is no sign of the great proprietors making large capital outlays in order to render their estates more productive, except in the way of the trifling expenditure entailed by fencing, hedging, and ditching. They are by no means pioneers of agricultural progress. Enclosing is profitable to them not because it enables them to convert barren heaths into smiling corn-fields in the manner described by Arthur Young, but because it enables them to use the land as they please, to let it down to pasture when the price of wool is high, to employ few labourers on it instead of many, and, possibly, to add to their own estates part of their neighbours' holdings. They do not bring under cultivation land which would otherwise lie waste. On the contrary, very often they turn into a waste land which would otherwise be under cultivation. Whether the picture which represents the eighteenth century enclosures as the effort of an energetic and public-spirited class to overcome old-fashioned prejudices by applying the resources of science to agriculture is veracious or not, we need not now inquire. As far as the century and a half from 1485 is concerned it is altogether out of place.

In their book, The Village Labourer from 1760 to 1832.

The changes which we are about to describe have at once a social and an economic reference. The former is the aspect which receives most attention from contemporaries. They lament the decay of the peasantry, the embittered relations between classes, the distress and discontent caused by the new agrarian régime. They are usually not much concerned with the economics of the situation. Economic issues are not yet separated from questions of personal and public morality. To find subtle reasons why it is unavoidable that a large number of persons should be impoverished seems to them very like condoning a crime. Some excuses only aggravate the offence, and if men are cursed with a neighbour who insists on fulfilling economic laws by raising prices or taking usury, they are less likely to discuss his conclusions than first to present him for breaking the statutes and then to break his head for his bad principles. So they judge the dominant movement by its fruits, and its fruits seem very evil. But to us the economic problem is the primary one. The occurrence of rapid changes in the structure of an old and stable society implies either some radical revolution in the basis of economic life, or some great change in men's conception of social expediency, or, what is most likely, an economic and a spiritual change occurring together. To understand its effect we must understand the sort of economic environment from which it springs.

In the first place, then, the age of the Tudors is a commercial age, and it becomes more commercial as the century goes on. No doubt it is only of certain classes and in certain relations of life that such a statement is true. The permanence of economic arrangements, which makes Froude declare that at the end of the fifteenth century the model of the upper classes was still the chivalry of the Arthurian legends, is seen still more strikingly among the artisans and peasants, and it is only very slowly and painfully that they are drawn into the net woven by the growth of capitalist trade. But it is with the classes who respond to the new movement that the power of the future, though not its graces, lies, and it is through the widening of the influence of commerce and commercial transactions that the economic developments most typical of our period take place. The age is a commercial one in the sense that much attention is given by Governments from the reign of Henry VII. onwards to fostering the conditions which promote trade and industry. This is not the place to discuss the meaning of Mercantilism or the truth of Bacon's epigram that Henry VII. "bowed the ancient policy of this State from consideration of plenty to consideration of power." Though in the reign of Henry VIII. the State is almost a religion, one can easily exaggerate the influence of its interference even in that much governed age. Nevertheless no one who looks at the Statutes, or the Acts of the Privy Council, or the Domestic State Papers for the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, can fail to realise that much of the time of Governments is occupied with devising measures which are intended to hasten industrial and commercial development. There is a settled habit of mind with regard to these matters which is quite conscious of its ends, though its means may often be ill-chosen. Every one is agreed that the encouragement of trade is the duty of the Prince. There is a real popular demand for the intervention of the authorities, and they respond to it readily enough.

Bacon, History of King Henry VII.

See e.g. Starkey's England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., p. 173 (E. E. T. S.): "Ye, and though our cloth, at the fyrst begynnyng, wold not be so gud peradventure, as hyt ys made in other partys, yet, in processe of tyme, I cannot see why, but that our men, by dylygence, myght attayne therto ryght wel; specially yf the Prince wold study thereto, in whose powar hyt lyeth chefely such thyngys to helpe." Also The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), and Pauli, Drei Denkschriften, &c.

The age is a commercial one in the more fundamental sense that large economic changes are initiated by classes and individuals. Foreign trade grows enormously in the early years of Henry VIII., though certain branches of it suffer a temporary set back at the end of the reign. The use of money, of which during the first quarter of the century there was a shortage, begins in the middle of it to spread throughout all classes. The industry which for the next three centuries is to be the chief manufacture of England becomes firmly established. Under the influence of widening markets, trade separates from trade. Within single industries there is an increasing subdivision of labour; many links intervene between the group supplying the raw material and the group which hands the finished article to the consumer; a special class of capitalist entrepreneurs appears to hold the various stages of production together, to organise supplies, and to find markets. Side by side with the development of manufacturing industry goes a development in the organisation of finance. In the woollen industry men buy and sell on credit. In tin-mining and coal-mining they sink shafts with borrowed capital. The first joint-stock companies are established in the middle of the century with capitals of from £5000 to £20,000. There is a regular money market in London, there are bill brokers, arbitrage dealings between it and the Continent, adventurers who take advantage of the increasing fluidity of capital to speculate on the difference in the rates at which it can be borrowed in the Low Countries and in England. By the end of the century London has partially ousted Antwerp as the financial capital of Europe.

Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende der Mittelalters, Band II., "Zoll und Handelstatistik," pp. 1?-156.

Unwin, Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.

See e.g. the account of the East Anglian woollen industry in the Victoria County History, Suffolk (Unwin's article on "Social and Economic History").

G.R. Lewis, The Stanneries, pp. 214?-215, and quotations from Lansdowne MSS. 76, fol. 34, given there.

Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord Middleton).

W.R. Scott, Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, vol. ii.

For a description of "The Exchange and What It is," see T. Wilson, Discourse upon Usurie (1584): his remark, "The second kind of bill ... may be called sicke and dry exchange, and is practised where one doth borrowe money abroad ... not meaning to make any real payment abroad, but compoundeth with the exchange to have it returned again," illustrates what is said above. See also Camden Society, Dialogue or Confabulation of Two Travellers (1580): "The said Hans had provided £10,000 for the Prince of Condy upon five in the 100 at interest, and if I would have the like he would help me unto it. Then I ... pondered what benefit it would be to me to let it out again at ten in the hundred to some nobleman in England." Down to about 1560 at any rate the English Government was constantly in the hands of foreign capitalists. See Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., and Burgon's Life of Gresham.

In the second place, the social arrangements of England are such as to make it certain that this increasing activity will react almost immediately on agriculture and on agrarian relationships. There have been countries where a sharp line has been drawn between trade and agriculture, where the landowner could not engage in trade without degrading himself, where the tradesman could not buy up the noble's land. But this has never been the case in England. In that precocious island the Lombards had hardly settled in Lombard Street, when Mr. Pole's daughters discovered that the fine shades flourished their finest in country air, and there was a market for heiresses among the English aristocracy long before Columbus had revealed to Europe the Eldorado of the New World. From a very early date the successful merchant has bought dignity and social consideration by investing his savings in an estate. The impecunious gentleman has restored the falling fortunes of his house by commercial speculations, of which marriage into a merchant family, if not the least speculative, is not the least profitable. At the beginning of the sixteenth century both movements were going on simultaneously with a rapidity which was before unknown, and which must be explained as the consequence of the great growth of all forms of commercial activity. The rise of great incomes drawn from trade had brought into existence a new order of business men whose enterprise was not confined to the seaport and privileged town, but flowed over into the purchase of landed estates, even before the secularisation of monastic endowments made land speculation the mania of a whole generation. Great nobles plunged into commerce, were granted special trading privileges, and intermarried with the rising middle-class families who were often better off than themselves. In all ages wealth allies itself with wealth, and power with power. As soon as the appearance of rich merchant families creates a fresh and powerful interest in society, the old social system and the new coalesce, and each learns from the other--the merchant how to make a display as a landed proprietor and a Justice of the Peace, the old-fashioned landlord how to cut down expenses and squeeze the utmost farthing out of his property in the best City manner. Even if the political and economic environment had remained unchanged, the mere formation of commercial capital and of a moneyed class could hardly have failed to work a slow revolution in agrarian relationships.

e.g. Prussia before 1807.

For examples see A. Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Century, especially Part II., chap, ii., "The Rise of the Middle Class," and Plummer's Fortescue, p. 17. In the Cely Papers (Camden Society), p. 153, a correspondent of George Cely writes, "yowre sallys made withyn lesse than thys yere amountes above £2000 sterling."

But the environment did not remain unchanged; and as a consequence, in economic affairs as in religion, the new order came, not gradually, but swiftly and with violence, sapping ancient loyalties, confronting with insoluble problems simple men who desired only to plough the land like their fathers, holding out to the privileged orders that prospect of suddenly increasing their wealth which is the most awful temptation from which any class can pray--if it will pray--to be delivered. On the side of politics a powerful motive for a change in the relations between landlords and tenants was supplied by the Tudor peace. In the turbulent days of the fifteenth century land had still a military and social significance apart from its economic value; lords had ridden out at the head of their retainers to convince a bad neighbour with bows and bills; and a numerous tenantry had been more important than a high pecuniary return from the soil. The Tudor discipline, with its stern prohibition of livery and maintenance, its administrative jurisdictions and tireless bureaucracy, had put down private warfare with a heavy hand, and, by drawing the teeth of feudalism, had made the command of money more important than the command of men. It is easy to underrate the significance of this change, yet it is in a sense more fundamental than any other; for it marks the transition from the mediæval conception of land as the basis of political functions and obligations to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment. Landholding tends, in short, to become commercialised. The meaning of this movement is best understood if one compares with the South and Midlands those parts of England where to the very end of the sixteenth century the older conditions survived. The surveys of many Northumbrian manors reveal throughout this period of rapid agrarian changes the continuance of a very primitive condition of things. The holdings of the customary tenants are often almost rigidly equal; there is hardly any change in their numbers; son succeeds father, and grandson succeeds son, with only the very slightest disturbance. The manorial officials, who in the South were cursed as the agents of evictions and rack-renting, were in the North much concerned with keeping tenants on the soil. At Acklington the tenants, writes Clarkson, "must be helped and rather cherished for service sake." At High Buston the holdings of the tenantry have been increased in order that "they should the better live and do their dutiful service to their Lord and master," and a freeholder is rebuked for action which results in curtailing the commonable area on the ground that "the tenants be but poor men and be not well horsed, as they are bound by their copies." At Tughall the surveyor complains bitterly in 1567 that in time past, apparently a long time past, twenty-three tenants had been reduced to eight by "such as nothing regard his lordship's service, nor the commonwealth." To what are we to ascribe this permanence of tenure among the peasants, this exceptional solicitude for the maintenance of a numerous tenantry on the part of surveyors? Partly, no doubt, to the fact that Northumberland lay apart from the main stream of commercial life, and was as yet little affected by the growth of the woollen industry. Mainly, however, it was the result of the military importance of a numerous tenantry on the Northumbrian border. In that wild corner which is neither England nor Scotland, English and Scots, Scroopes and bold Buccleughs, gnash their teeth at each other across the wan water of the Eden. In the long northern evenings about Lammastide moormen win their hay with axes in their belts and bows piled in the corner of the field, and customary tenants are bound by their copies to provide horse and armour, and to ride to the musters in person or by proxy. No wonder that while elsewhere landlords pore over their accounts of wool or timber, in Northumberland they should measure their wealth by the men whom they can bring out when the summons goes, and insist on feudal obligations with a rigour unknown in the South. When any night Scotch raiders may come storming over the marches, any night the red cock may crow up to the very walls of merry Carlisle, a holding means not only a piece of land that grows wheat and feeds sheep, but a horseman in harness; and the dropping out of a holding, or its merging in that of some one else, results in the weakening of the force on which the peace of the border depends. As a consequence, there is nothing like free trade in land between the tenants, such as developed in the South under the forms of surrender and admission, and there is little incentive for the lord or his officials to get rid of them. Such an exceptional state of things comes to an end in Northumberland with the union of the two Crowns under James I., and its termination is the signal for an attempt to break down customary tenures on the part both of the Crown and of private landowners. But it survives a century longer on the border than it does elsewhere, and while it lasts it offers a standard by which may be measured the extent and significance of the change which is overtaking agrarian relationships in other parts of England, where commerce is more developed, and where, since a tenant can no longer serve his lord by fighting, a sheep may easily be more valuable than a man. With the development of a strong central Government the military strength of the great landlords was broken, though it blazed up in the Pilgrimage of Grace and in the rebellion of 1569, and as a consequence they turned their attention to getting the maximum economic return from the soil, or to adding to their social dignity by parks, instead of maintaining a large body of tenants upon it.

See the Paston Letters, passim; and also the account given in Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord Middleton), 142?-145, of the marvellous doings of Sir Gylles Strangways in Dorsetshire as late as 1539; pp. 115?-117 contain a similar case of private warfare from the year 1477.

Northumberland County History, e.g. Amble (vol. v.), Acklington (ibid.), High Buston (ibid.), Birling (ibid.); vol. viii. p. 230, figures as to eight manors in Tynmouthshire. At Birling out of ten names which appear in the surveys of 1567, eight reappear in 1616; at Acklington, out of eighteen names, nine reappear; at High Buston, out of four names, four reappear in 1616 and two in 1702. But in parts of the county there were rapid changes at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries; see below, pp. 257-258 and 260.

Northumberland County History, vol. i. p. 350: "In the ancient tyme the fermor of the demaines had the charge of the tenants of the said lordship as bailiff, with the fee of £3, 0s. 5d. by year. Then was the town of Tughall planted with xi husbandmen well horsed and in good order, viii cottagers, iiii cotterells, one common smith for the relief and better aid of the said tenants and bailiff, being in number 23 householders, besides the demains, which are nowe by suche as nothing regard his lordship's service nor the commonwealthe brought to 8 farmers only, to the great decay of his lordship's service and discommodity of the said commonwealth."

See e.g. the ballad of "Kinmont Willie," turning on an incident which occurred in 1596.

Cal. S. P. D. James I., vol. cxxxii., July 27, 1622. Letter to the Bishop of Durham to confer with the judges of Assize for the Northern Counties touching tenant-right or customary estate of inheritance claimed in those parts, ordering them to abide strictly by the King's Proclamation against tenant-right, or the holding of lands by border service, to countenance no claim founded thereupon, and to acquaint the tenants of his Majesty's pleasure therein, giving them no hope to the contrary. Apparently the instructions were not carried out, as in 1642 the Long Parliament was discussing the subject of the border tenures (Rushworth Collections, Pt. III., vol. ii. p. 86).

See below, pp. 257?-258.

The effect of the Tudor policy on the land system is excellently described by Harrington in Oceana, and also in The Art of Law-giving: "Henry VII. being conscious of the infirmity of his title, yet finding with what strength and vigour he was brought in by the Nobility, conceived jealousy of the like power in case of a decay or change of affections. Nondum orbis adoraverat Roman. The lords yet led country lives; their houses were open to retainers, men experienced in military affairs and capable of commanding; their hospitality was the delight of their tenants who by their tenure or dependence were obliged to follow their lords in arms. So that, this being the Militia of the nation, a few noblemen discontented could at any time levy a great army, the effect whereof both in the Barons Wars and those of York and Lancaster had been well known to divers kings. This state of things was that which enabled Henry VII. to make his advantage of troublesome times and the frequent unruliness of retainers; while, under pretence of curbing riots, he obtained the passing of such laws as did cut off these retainers, whereby the nobility wholly lost their officers. Then, whereas the dependence of the people on their lords was of a strict ty or nature, he found means to loosen this also by laws which he obtained upon a fair pretence, even that of Population. But the nobility, who by the former law had lost their officers, by this lost their soldiery. Yet remained to them their estates, till the same Prince introducing the Statutes for alienations, these also became loose; and the lords, less taken (for the reasons shown) with their country lives, where their trains were clipped, by degrees became more resident at court, where greater pomp and expense by the Statute of Alienations began to plume them of their Estates" (Harrington, Works, 1700 edition, pp. 388-?389).

The change meant an advance in civilisation among the upper classes, and a tightening of economic pressure upon the peasantry. The feudal seigneur had at his worst been a lawless tyrant, and at his best a despotic parent. But he had governed his estate as the sovereign, often the resident sovereign, of a petty kingdom, whose interests were roughly identical with his own; and though his depredations were a terror to his neighbours, his own tenants had little to fear from them, for his tenants were the force on which his very existence depended. In the new political conditions his occupation was gone, and his place was taken by two types of landed proprietor who were at once more peaceable and less popular. On the one hand, there emerges the landlord who is a laborious and acute man of business, and who sets about exploiting the material resources of his estate with the instincts of a shopkeeper and the methods of a land-agent. Of this kind are the Willoughbys in the Midlands and the Delavales in Northumberland. Often they are sheep-farmers. When their land is rich in minerals they sink coal-pits and mine for iron ore. The predecessors of the captains of industry of two and a half centuries later, they employ labour on a large scale, they open up trade across country by river, they higgle over port dues, they experiment with new inventions, they clear away without mercy any customary rights which conflict with their own. On the other hand, there are the gentry who buzz about the Court, regard London as the centre of the universe, and have periodically to be ordered home to look after the affairs of their country-sides by a peremptory mandate from the Government. When this type becomes prominent, in the reign of Elizabeth, it most commonly spends its time in the interminable pursuit of profitable sinecures, and in endeavouring to induce the City to believe that thrice-mortgaged estates are a gilt-edged security. At its worst it produces Sir Petronel Flash, a figure as typical of the sixteenth century as Squire Western is of the eighteenth. At its best it patronises the arts, sets sail for a new world of drama and romance, sighs over Vergil's Eclogues, and goes pricking, almost too graceful a chivalry, through the fairy kingdoms of Spenser. But the men of business, and the men of fashion, and the patrons of literature, are alike in being the symptoms of a new economic and political system, a system which has shorn landownership of the territorial sovereignty which had gone with it, broken down the personal relations of landlord and tenant, and, by turning agriculture into a business, has made it at once more profitable and less strenuous for the former, more exacting and less stable for the latter, than it had been when a lordlord was not only a drawer of rents but a local sovereign, a tenant not only a source of income but a dependent who was bound by a tie which was almost sacramental. "It was never a merry world since gentlemen came up"; "never so many gentlemen and so little gentleness"; "the commons long since did rise in Spain and kill the gentlemen, and since have lived merrily there"; such are some of the blessings the new landlords would hear from men who grumble to their mates between the spells of shearing sheep and mowing hay. Those who have watched the uncouth, rough-handed master of a backward industry, who has wrought among his workmen as a friend or a tyrant, blossom, under the fertilising influence of expanding markets, into the sedate suburban capitalist who sets up a country house in the second generation and sends his sons to Oxford in the third, and who scientifically speeds up his distant operatives through the mediation of an army of managers and assistant-managers and foremen, will not need to be reminded that economic changes which bring civilisation to one class may often be fraught with ruin to another. The brilliant age which begins with Elizabeth gleams against a background of social squalor and misery. The descendant of the illiterate, bloody-minded baron who is muzzled by Henry VII. becomes a courteous gentleman who rhapsodises in verse at the Court of Gloriana. But all that the peasants know is that his land-agents are harsher. An Earl of Pembroke has been given immortality by Shakespeare. But the first of his name had founded the family on estates which had belonged to the Abbey of Wilton, and by his exactions had provoked the Wiltshire peasants into rebellion. The Raleigh family--it was a Raleigh's chance gibe at the old religion which set the West in a blaze in 1549--had endowed itself with a manor torn from the see of Wells, as the Grenvilles had done with the lands of Buckland Abbey. The gentle Sidney's Arcadia is one of the glories of the age, and it was composed, if we may trust tradition, in the park at the Herberts' country-seat at Washerne, which they had made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants. The dramatists who reflect the high popular estimation of the freeholder see nothing in the grievances of Mouldy and Bullcalf except the disposition of an ignorant populace to cry for the moon. Shakespeare's Cade, with his programme of seven half-penny loaves for a penny, and the three-hooped pot that shall have ten hoops, is so far proposing only what an energetic mayor is quite prepared to carry out before breakfast. His crowning absurdity, which makes the stalls hiss and the pit cheer, is the promise that "all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass." A few months after these words were printed Cade came to life in earnest. In the autumn of 1596 some Oxfordshire artisans and peasants organised a revolt against "the gentlemen who took the commons," and from that year onwards to 1601 Parliament and the Council had their hands full of the question of enclosures. Men feel the contrast, even when it is only just beginning, and with natural inconsistency sigh for the old order even while they are glorifying the new. "Princes and Lords," wrote Henry VIII.'s chaplain about 1538, "seldom look to the good order and wealth of their subjects, only they look to the receiving of their rents and revenues of their lands with great study of enhancing thereof, to the further maintaining of their pompous state; so that if their subjects do their duty therein justly, paying their rents at time affixed, for the rest they care not (as is commonly said) 'whether they sink or swim'"!

Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord Middleton), especially the entries relating to the development of the coal trade.

Northumberland County History, vol. viii., p. 238, vol. ix. (under Cowpen). Robert Delavale apparently began life as an agent to the Earl of Northumberland, but he owned considerable property himself; in 1605 the whole of the lands of Cowpen were in his hands. He was an energetic encloser; see below, p. 260.

See Marston's Eastward Ho!

See the following extract (Lodge, Illustrations of English History, iii., 41). William Hammond to the Earl of Shrewsbury on the subject of raising money on the latter's estates from Palavicini, a moneylender: "Though his froward fortune hath made him unable to stand you almost in any steadde, hee hathe dealt with Mr. Maynard to aide him in the provision of this £3000 against the second of next month. He finds him very backwarde to disburse any money upon bond or any other security but lands; neither will he deal with lands in any way of mortgage for years or any long time, but only 2 or 3 months.... Yf, therefore, it stands with your honour's good liking to make a conveyance of Kingston to Sir Horatio ... after the rate of £7000 ... and withal to passe it in this absolute sort that iff the money then laid out by them for your Honour's use bee not repaid on May day next, that they fully enjoy and possess the lands as their owne.... Hee saith besides that his surveyors have certified him £500 will bee the most the lands will ever yeald yerely rent, without racking and oppressions, which are no course for suche meane men as they be to take."

Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Manor of William, First Earl of Pembroke, Straton's introduction.

History of the Parish of Wiveliscombe, by Hancock. For Walter Raleigh and the revolt of 1549, see the dramatic account given by Holinshed. The incident is described in Froude's Edward VI. For the Grenvilles and Buckland Abbey see Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. vi. It ultimately came to Francis Drake.

Straton's introduction to Surveys of Pembroke Manors.

e.g. Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness, Act iii. sc. 1.

Henry VI., Part II., Act iv. scene 2. I am indebted for the reference to Professor Unwin. Part II. was first printed in 1595.

Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part III., pp. 49?-50: "The attorney-general to Mr. Robert Cecil. Some information concerning those that intended the rebellion in Oxfordshire. Bartholemew Stere, carpenter ... was the first person of this insurrection. His outward pretence was to overthrow enclosures, and to help the poor commonalty, that were like to perish for want of corn, but intended to kill the gentlemen of that county and take the spoil, affirming that the commons long since in Spain did rise and kill the gentlemen in Spain and sithen have lived merrily there. After that he meant to have gone to London and joined with the prentices ... and it was but a month's work to overrun England."

E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of Henry VIII., p. 85.

While the centralised government of the Tudors gave a new bias to the interests of landlords by stripping them of part of their political power, economic changes were hurrying the more enterprising among them into novel methods of estate management. In the situation which developed in the first fifty years of the sixteenth century they were exposed to pressure from two sides at once. They stood to gain much if they adapted their farming to meet the new commercial conditions. They stood to lose much if they were so conservative as to adhere to the old methods. The explanation of the agrarian revolution most generally given by contemporary observers was that enclosing was due to the increased profitableness of pasture farming, consequent upon the development of the textile industries; and though a recent writer has endeavoured to show that most of the land enclosed was used for tillage, and that therefore this explanation cannot hold good, there does not seem any valid reason for disputing it. The testimony of observers is very strong; they might be mistaken as to the extent of the movement towards pasture, but hardly as to its tendency; and with scarcely an exception they point to the growth of the woollen trade as the chief motive for enclosing.

See the discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay in Trans. Royal Hist. Society, vol. xiv., new series.

Moreover, their evidence is confirmed by the proofs which we possess of the expansion of the woollen industry at the end of the fifteenth century. It is true that the figures collected by Thorold Rogers do not enable any satisfactory correlation to be made between the rise in wool prices and the progress of pasture farming. But they are statistically much too unreliable to upset the direct evidence of eyewitnesses, being based on various measures which are somewhat arbitrarily reduced to a supposed common standard, relating to many different qualities of wool, and being weighted in particular years by a preponderance of prices from particular counties which are sometimes clearly not typical at all. The figures of Schanz as to the export trade in wool and woollen cloths, are a sufficient proof of the growth in the output of wool, and therefore in the growth of sheep-farming. They show that while the export of unmanufactured wool fell off in the sixteenth century, that of grey cloth grew enormously. In 1354 the export had been 4774-1/2 pieces, from 1509 to 1523 it averaged 84,789 pieces a year, from 1524 to 1533, 91,394 pieces, from 1534 to 1539, 102,647 pieces, and from 1540 to 1547, 122,354 pieces, while in 1554 the total manufacture was estimated at 160,000 pieces of cloth and 250,000 pieces of hosiery. This expansion of the manufactured cloth industry was only the culmination of a growth which had been going on gradually for a hundred years. In 1464 the Flemish manufacturers were complaining that their market had been invaded by English clothiers. Merchants like the Celys shipped enormous consignments of wool from the Cotswolds to the Continent. The large number of sheep kept in England at the end of the fifteenth century was the amazement of foreigners; and English buyers groaned over the high prices to which wool was driven by the competition of continental buyers. The revolution in the technique of agriculture when sucked into the vortex of expanding commerce is, in fact, simply an early, and, owing to the immobility of sixteenth century conditions, a peculiarly striking example of that reaction of widening markets on the methods of production, which is one of the best established of economic generalisations.

Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des Mittelalters, Band II., p. 18.

Abram, Social England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 33.

Ibid., pp. 40-41.

Camden Society (1847), Italian Relation of England.

Camden Society (third series, vol. i.), Cely Papers. In 1480 the elder Cely writes: "I have not bought this year a loke of woll, for the woll of Cottyswolde is bought by the Lombardys;" and in the following year, "Ye avyse me for to buye woll in Cottyswolde, bot it is at grate prise, 3s. 4d. a tod, and gret ryding for woll in Cottyswolde as was any yere this vii yere."

At the same time, the revolution was probably hastened by a change in commercial policy, which, while encouraging the export trade in woollen cloth, was after 1485 less favourable to the corn-grower. During the greater part of the fifteenth century the Government was forced by the agrarian interests to allow freedom of export for grain except when prices reached a certain height, after which point an export licence was required. But the victory of Henry VII. produced a policy which was less influenced by the traditional object of helping the corn-growing landlords, and more favourable to commerce and the middle classes on which the new monarchy rested. In 1491 the export of grain, except with a special licence, was forbidden altogether, and in 1512 the prohibition was repeated by Henry VIII. Though the administration of such a policy must have been difficult, and its exact effect must be a matter of conjecture, the view taken by some contemporaries, that it was a subordinate cause which stimulated the abandonment of old agricultural methods and caused a good deal of land to go out of cultivation, is at any rate intrinsically probable.

Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages, pp. 447-448. The statute sanctioning export without licence when the price was below 6s. 8d. was 15 Hen. VI., c. 2, which was made perpetual by 23 Hen. VI., c. 5. 3 Ed. IV., c. 2, forbade the importation of foreign corn except when the price reached 6s. 8d.

Ibid., Modern Times, Part I., p. 85.

e.g. The Commonweal of this Realm of England, pp. 54-60.

If the expansion of the woollen industry offered a fortune to those who adopted the new methods of estate management, the depreciation in the value of money threatened with ruin those who did not. The agrarian changes of the sixteenth century cannot be traced primarily to the revolution in general prices which all European countries experienced, because they had already proceeded some way before the full extent of the movement in prices became apparent. Throughout the fifteenth century the value of money, as far as can be judged from such statistics as we possess, was fairly stable, and, if anything, somewhat appreciated. During the first half of Henry VIII.'s reign there were complaints of the scarcity of the metallic currency. On the very eve of the dissolution of the monasteries we find a religious house in Northumberland reversing the movement which had been going on for two centuries in most parts of the country, and actually commuting money rents into payments in kind, on the ground that the tenants could not command the necessary coin. Such facts should warn us that England was far from being a single economic community, and that the effects of the cheap money penetrated into the more backward regions only very slowly indeed. Nevertheless, in the more advanced parts of the country, the tide turned soon after the beginning of the new century, though it was not till the fourth decade of it that it became a mill-race in which all old economic standards were submerged. The general course of the movement, so far as it affected commodities in general use, is set forth below. The figures are re-arranged from those supplied by Steffen, whose work is mainly based on that of Thorold Rogers.

See the whole question discussed in Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, Band II., pp. 481-540.

Northumberland County History, vol. viii. p. 232. In 1595 a dispute as to corn rents arose between the Earl of Northumberland and the Tynemouthshire tenants, the Earl insisting on payment by the Newcastle measure, the tenants demanding to pay by the Winchester measure, on the ground that they are so poor that "they are not able with horse, furniture, and geare to serve as their ancestors have done, as it appeared upon the late muster." Evidence given by an ancient yeoman before the Commission appointed to hear the case showed that the tenants had formerly paid in money, and that the change from money to corn had been introduced in the time of the last Prior for the sake of the tenants, not for the sake of the Priory.

Steffen, Studien zur Geschichte der Englischen Lohnarbeiter, Band I., pp. 254-255 and 365-366.

TABLE VII

+---------+----------+----------+----------+---------+ | | Wheat | Peas | Oats | Barley | | | per Qr. | per Qr. | per Qr. | Malt | | | | | | per Qr .| +---------+----------+----------+----------+---------+ | | | | | | | | s. d. | s. d. | s. d. | s. d. | |1401-1450| 5 9-1/4| 3 2-3/4| 7 9 | 4 3 | |1451-1500| 5 6-1/4| 3 4-3/4| 6 6-3/4| 3 8 | |1501-1540| 6 10-1/4| 5 1-3/4| 9 4-3/4| 4 5 | |1541-1582| 13 10-1/2| . . . | 20 10-3/4| 10 5 | | | | | | | +---------+----------+----------+----------+---------+

+---------+----------+----------+----------+------+------+ | | | | | | Eggs | | | Oxen. | Sheep. | Pigs. | Hens.| per | | | | | | |Gross.| +---------+----------+----------+----------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | | s. d. | s. d. | s. d. | d. | d. | | | | | | | | |1401-1450| 16 5-1/2| 2 1 | 7 6-3/4| 2 | 5 | |1451-1500| 15 7-1/2| 1 10-1/4| 8 3-1/4| 2-1/4| 5-1/4| |1501-1540| 22 9 | 2 10-1/4| 10 0 | 3 | 9 | |1541-1582| 70 0-1/4| 6 4 | . . . | 4-3/4| . . .| | | | | | | | +---------+----------+----------+----------+------+------+

Though it would not be right, of course, to force these figures too far, as one cannot be sure that they are in all cases typical, the indication which they offer of a remarkable rise in prices beginning soon after 1500 is in all probability substantially correct. The result of this movement in dragging down the standard of comfort of the people has often been noticed, and need not be emphasised here. But it is important to observe that it had a very marked effect upon the traditional methods of agriculture, because it supplied landowners with a new incentive to squeeze the utmost possible income out of their estates. Since they were buying everything dearer, they were under a strong inducement to turn land to the most profitable use, and to revise all existing contracts which prevented an advance in tenants' payments. In the not unnatural confusion which surrounded the question of the cause of the general rise in prices, this aspect of the agrarian troubles failed very generally to be appreciated by contemporary writers, who were inclined to argue that the higher prices were due to the increased rents, instead of seeing that the increased rents were themselves the consequence of the increased prices. But it was emphasised in the middle of the century by the author of the Commonwealth of England, and at the end of it by Gerrard de Malynes, who puts the case with great power and perspicacity, though he perhaps may be thought to exaggerate the importance of the debasement of the currency. "Every man knoweth," he wrote in 1601, "that by reason of the base money coined in the end of the most victorious reign of King Henry VIII. all the forrain commodities were sold dearer, which made afterwards the commodities of the realm to rise at the farmers' and tenants' hands, and therefore gentlemen did raise the rents of their lands and take farms themselves and made inclosures of grounds, and the price of everything being dearer was made dearer though plenty of money and bullion coming daily from the West Indies.... If we require gentlemen to abate their rents, give over farms, and break up enclosures, it may be they would do so if they might have all their provisions at the price heretofore." Yet such a statement gives but a faint indication of the revolutionary effect upon agrarian relationships of the depreciation in the value of money. The modern reader, before whose eyes all economic standards are fluctuating from day to day, can hardly grasp the anarchy which it tended to produce in a world where values, especially land values, were objective realities which had stood unaltered for centuries together. The landlord sees his income slipping from him, though his estate pays as much as before. The tenant finds his landlord pressing for higher rents and fines, though the yield of the land has not increased. Yet neither desires anything but to remain as they were, and both are ignorant of the force which sweeps them out of the ancient ways. For, in the wholesome manner of the age, they ascribe all economic evils to personal misdemeanours, the unreasonableness of merchants, the covetousness of gentlemen, the extortions of husbandmen, and the real cause is an impersonal one, which carries them forward against their will, like men "thrusting one another in a throng, one driving on another." It is easy to understand that it must have been difficult to maintain customary payments and traditional methods of agriculture against the screw which the rise in prices turned on the landowning classes. Agricultural experiments were in the air, and with experts explaining how to double the value of an estate by enclosure without prejudicing the tenants, it is not surprising that landowners, who saw their real incomes dwindling with the fall in the value of money, should have adopted the principle of their advice and neglected the qualifications.

The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), especially p. 81: "Knight: What sorte is that which youe said had greater loss thereby then those men had profitte? Doctor: It is all noblemen, and gentlemen, and all other that live by a fixed rent, or stipend, or doe not maner the grounde, or do occupie no byinge or sellinge.... He that maie spend £300 a yeare by such revennewes and fees, may kepe no better porte then his father, or anie before him, that could spend but £200. And so ye maie perceave, it is a great abatement of a man's countenance to take awaie the third part of his livinge. And therefore gentlemen doe so much studie the Increase of theire landes, enhauncing of their rentes, and so take farmes and pastures into theire owne hands."

A Treatise of the Canker of England's Commonwealth (1601).

The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), p. 100.

(b) The Growth of the Large Leasehold Farm

The changed situation created by these causes had the effect of producing a new policy on the part of landlords, which took different forms according to the circumstances of different localities, but which in the counties most deeply affected resulted in an increase in pasture-farming and in an upward movement in the payments made by tenants. The new régime seems to have affected first, as was natural, that part of their estates which was most entirely under their own control, and the disposal of which was least involved in other interests, namely, the manorial demesne. It is not altogether easy to construct a picture of the policy pursued by a typical enclosing landlord from the accounts of contemporaries, who were more interested in results than in the steps by which they were reached. According to some of them, lords in the sixteenth century were resuming into their own hands those parts of the demesne which had been let out, in order to supply their establishments with produce without having to rely on the markets when prices were rapidly rising. On some manors again, when the demesne was "in the hand of the lord," considerations which were not purely economic came into play; for example, one finds part of it being turned into a park, which was at once profitable as a means of grazing sheep, and prized for those motives of social amenity and ostentation which have done so much to make the English countryside the admiration of travellers, and so much to ruin the English peasantry. It was not seldom that the confiscated estates of monastic houses were converted into a pleasaunce or a deer-park by their new proprietors.

On the other hand, the manorial documents suggest that landlords were usually rather parties to changes in the methods of cultivation than themselves the agents who carried them out, because, at any rate in the case of the larger landowners, the demesnes were usually leased. The actual process of experiment and innovation took place on most manors through the instrumentality of the lessee. The large farmer, who on many manors is found managing the demesne, is much the most striking character in the rural development of the sixteenth century. His fortunes wax while those of the peasantry wane. Gradually he thrusts them, first copyholders and then yeomen, into the background, and becomes in time the parent of a mighty line, which later ages, forgetting poor Piers Plowman, whose place he has usurped, will look on as the representative of all that is solid and unchanging in the English social order. In our period he plays in the economics of agriculture the part which was played in industry by the capitalist clothier, and his position as the pivot of agrarian change is so important that it will repay close attention.

This may seem inconsistent with the fact that in the statistics published by Mr. Leadam from the Inquisition of 1517 most enclosures in most counties are entered as made by lords of manors. I do not think, however, that this is necessarily so. When it is stated that a lord of a manor has enclosed and converted to pasture, it may very well be meant that his agent did so with his consent. I.e. the distinction would appear to be not between the lord and the lord's farmer, but between the manorial authorities (lord and farmer) and the rest of the landholders. The phrase used in the Berkshire returns, "converti permisit," indicates what I take to have been the most general, though not, of course, the invariable, course of events.

In the first place, then, it is clear that the foundation of the large farm was the practice of leasing the demesne for a term of years, which was the normal way of disposing of it in the sixteenth century. In the reign of Elizabeth the distinction between the demesne and the customary tenancies still survived, and surveyors were at some pains to separate them in order to prevent the demesne being merged in the customary holdings. But the original meaning of the distinction had been almost obliterated; the demesne was no longer the centre of the manorial economy, as it had been when its produce maintained the lord's household, and the labour of the customary tenants, in spite of the survival of many services, no longer supplied the chief means of cultivating it. On the whole, it would be true to say that on ninety-nine manors out of a hundred the demesne was leased by the middle of the sixteenth century, and on the majority of them probably at a much earlier date. There are, of course, some exceptions. Certain manors the lord makes his headquarters, and there the home farm is retained in his hands, because it is required to supply his establishment. On other manors the demesne or part of it can no longer be distinguished from the holdings of the customary tenants, and is held by them by copy of Court Roll in the same way as the "customary land." In certain parts of England, again, the leasing of the demesne has not proceeded far, because the demesne has always been relatively unimportant. On several Northumberland manors, for example, the surveyor could in 1567 find no demesne at all, either because it had all been divided up among the tenants, or because it had never existed. Nevertheless, in spite of these exceptions, a lease for a term of years to a farmer or farmers is the ordinary method of disposing of the demesne in the sixteenth century. This is proved in a very satisfactory way by the investigations of Professor Savine into the disposition of the lands of monastic houses in 1534. After an exhaustive inquiry relating to several hundred manors he found that the cases in which the demesne was not leased were an insignificant proportion of the whole. An examination of smaller groups of manors tells the same story. Out of thirty-six manors in Wiltshire, Somersetshire, and Devonshire surveyed for the Earl of Pembroke in 1568, it is possible to determine the use made of the demesne on thirty-two, and on twenty-nine of them it was leased. Of twenty-nine other manors examined at random at different periods in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century every one was in the same condition. There is no reason to distrust these instances on the ground that they may represent a development occurring too late in the century to be relevant to movements found in existence at the beginning of it, because in several cases where the history of a manor can be traced backwards, it is clear, as has been shown above, that the leasing of the demesne was quite common at least from the middle of the fifteenth century, and in parts of the country much earlier.

e.g. at Acklington (Northumberland County History, vol. v.), of which Clarkson the surveyor writes: "Neither is there any demaine lands or demaine meadows, but all is occupied together in husbandry"; at Birling (ibid.): "There is no demaine land or meadow, with all their husbandlands and meadows appertaining to the same"; apparently also at High Buston. Compare Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, p. 316: "Villages without a manorial demesne ... are found ... where the power of the lord was more a political than an economical one" (Norfolk and Suffolk, Lincoln, Northumberland, Westmoreland, &c.). For a manor where the demesne is kept in the hand of the lord in 1568 for the reason given above, see Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Pembroke Manors, Manor of Washerne.

Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, pp. 153-154.

Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.

From the allusions made by contemporaries to the large farmer as one of the mainsprings of the changes of the period, one is disposed to look first at the demesne for the beginning of capitalist agriculture. Whether, however, the method of cultivating the demesne differed much from the cultivation of the customary holdings depended to a considerable extent upon the terms on which it was leased, and, in particular, upon whether it passed into the control of a single considerable tenant. It would be a mistake to think that the economic relationships which were established when the demesne ceased to be cultivated by villein labour were all of one type, or in particular that the demesne invariably passed into the hands of one holder. Mention has already been made of the practice of adding the demesne lands, or part of them, to the customary land held by copy of Court Roll, a practice which obviously resulted in maintaining in the hands of small cultivators land which might have gone to build up large properties.

Even when the demesne is leased it is not always leased to a single large farmer. In reality the surveys of the sixteenth century reveal two well-defined types of leasehold property subsisting on the lord's demesne, sometimes on neighbouring manors. The first type has as its distinctive feature that the lessees are a number, sometimes a very large number, of small farmers, who have been given allotments on the demesne and who hold them for various periods of years, sometimes for life only, sometimes for eighty, sometimes for ninety-two or ninety-nine, years. Many examples of this type of small leaseholder come from the west of England. Thus at Ablode, in Somersetshire, before the demesne was leased out by St. Peter's to a large farmer in 1515, it had already been leased to seventeen of the customary tenants. At Paynton, in 1568, the Barton land was held in small plots by fifty-one leaseholders, at South Brent by eighteen. But examples of this arrangement are found all over England. At Higham Ferrers, in Northamptonshire, the demesne has been divided among nine tenants; at Stondelf, in Staffordshire, among thirty-one. At Shape in Suffolk and Northendale in Norfolk the demesnes are added to the holdings of the customary tenants. At Forncett, in Norfolk, parts of the demesne are in the same way leased out in small parcels in the fifteenth century for gradually lengthening periods of years, though by the beginning of our period they seem to have been held by copy in the same way as the customary land. Elsewhere we get what appear to be variations of the same system, in the form of sub-letting or of joint-cultivation. At Castle Combe, for example, the demesne lands were leased in 1454 to four tenants, "with the intention that they themselves should let to farm to all the tenants of the lord some portion of those lands." On other manors groups of tenants seem to make themselves jointly responsible for the rent required. It was not an unknown thing even at quite an early date for a whole village to come forward and make a kind of collective bargain with the lord as to the terms upon which they would take over the demesne lands, and when the leasing of the demesne became the regular practice townships sometimes stepped into the shoes of the bailiffs, and averted the entry of the large farmer by leasing the lands themselves, and making their own arrangements as to the way in which they should be utilised. One may suspect, indeed, that such action took place in a good many cases when the land was leased to many small tenants, as at Paynton and South Brent, even though the intervention of the township is not expressly stated. Sometimes, however, the communal character of the bargain is quite beyond doubt. For example, at Cucklington, on the manor of Stooke Trister in Somersetshire, twelve tenants leased together at a rent of £8 for forty years a sheep house with 250 acres of land. At Chedsey, in the same county, the whole of the demesne, which lay mainly in small parcels of one or two acres, was held in 1568 on a twenty-one years' lease by the tenants of the manor. At Caston, in Norfolk, we find an entry of rent which is paid by "the inhabitants of the town of Scratby for certain lands occupied for their benefit." The phrase "town lands," which appears not infrequently in the surveys and estate maps of the sixteenth century may perhaps be taken as indicating the same conclusion. In what way exactly we ought to interpret these arrangements--whether we should regard them as nothing more than a summary expression of the fact that all the tenants have severally rights over part of the estate, or whether we should conceive of them as implying some higher degree of corporate action than this, and as the outcome of a bargain struck with the lord by the village as a village, is an interesting and difficult question, to which we shall recur later in speaking of rights of common. But we may mention two points which suggest that there is in them a certain element of practical communism to which legal historians sometimes do less than justice. The first is that we occasionally find certain tenants acting on behalf of, one might almost say, representing, others. The second is that in some cases the demesne lands are divided among them in exactly equal shares, so that, though every one has more land than before, the relative sizes of their holdings are unaltered. The last fact is a very striking one. It means, in the first place, that the new land has been allotted on some common principle and by some formal agreement. Clearly, if each tenant had bought as much land as he pleased, we should have had not equality but inequality. It points, in the second place, to the enduring strength of the ideas and interests underlying the system of agricultural shareholding which is characteristic of the mediæval village. We can understand a very primitive system of agriculture designed to secure each household the standard equipment needed to support it. But one would naturally suppose that at the end of the Middle Ages, when new land which had hitherto belonged to the lord was offered to the villagers, each would buy up as much as he could without regard to the interests of his neighbours. It is probable that in most cases, as in those quoted in Chapter III., this is what happened. But in some instances it is not. The old economic ideas which had governed the disposition of the ancient customary holdings are applied to the new land which the cessation of demesne cultivation by the lord throws into the market, and the villagers re-allot it on the old plan. Even in its decay the mediæval land system shows its vitality by meeting new situations with the ancient methods.

Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriæ, vol. iii. App., pp. 291-295.

Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke.

Ibid.

R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 34.

R.O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., vol. clxxxv., ff. 70-74.

R.O. Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts, vol. clxiii., ff. 187.

R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Roll 478, No. 3.

Davenport, History of a Norfolk Manor.

Scrope, History of Manor and Barony of Castle Combe, p. 208.

Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, note to chap. ii.,