CHAPTER I. The Agrarian Problem and the State

THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM AND THE STATE

(a) The Political and Social Importance of the Peasantry

The changes which have been described in the organisation of agriculture created problems which were less absorbing than those arising out of the religious reformation and the relation of England to continental powers. When we turn over the elaborate economic legislation of the reign of Elizabeth, with its attempts to promote industry, to define class relationships, and to regulate with sublime optimism almost every contract which one man can make with another, we are tempted at first to see statesmen giving sleepless nights to the solution of economic problems, and to think of a modern bureaucratic state using the resources of scientific administration to pursue a deliberate and clearly conceived economic policy. But this is both to exaggerate the importance which economic questions occupied in the minds of the governing aristocracies of the age, and to credit them with a foresight which they did not possess. If they are to be called mercantilists, in England, at any rate, they wear their mercantilism with a difference; as a vague habit of mind, not as a reasoned system of economic doctrines. Their administrative optimism is the optimism of innocence as much as of omnipotence; the fruit of a self-confidence which, in the name of the public interests, will prop a falling trade, or cut down a flourishing one, with a bland naïveté unperturbed by the hesitations which perplex even the most courageous of modern protectionists. Though in several departments of life--in commercial policy, in the regulation of the wage contract, in the relief of distress--the main lines drawn by Elizabethan statesmen will stand for two centuries, much of their legislation is very rough and ready; much of it again is undertaken after generations of dilatory experiments; much of it is devoid of any originality, and is a mere reproduction on a national scale of the practice of individual localities, a reproduction which sometimes does less than justice to the original. If it is popular, it is popular because it tells men to do what most decent men have been doing for a long time already, and when it tells them to do something else it is carried out only with great difficulty. If it is permanent, it is permanent not because Parliamentary draughtsmen possess any great skill or foresight, but because, before the rise of modern industry, all social relationships have a great amount of permanence. Though there was much interesting speculation on economic matters, economic rationalism was as a practical force almost negligible; and since the only instrument through which it could have achieved influence was the monarchy, its lack of influence was perhaps politically fortunate. Sixteenth century England was too busy getting the State on to its feet to produce a Colbert. Lath and plaster Colberts built their card castles on the Council table of James and Charles, and all was in train for the sage paternal monarchy which was the ideal of Bacon. But a wind blew from strange regions beyond their ken, and they were scattered before they could do much either for good or evil, leaving, as they fled, a cloud of dark suspicion round all those who would be wiser in the art of Government than their neighbours, from which, in the lapse of three centuries, the expert has hardly emerged. In spite of mercantilism, economic questions never became in England the pre-occupation of specialists. In spite of the genuine indignation roused by the sufferings of the weaker classes in society, questions affecting them were questions which statesmen did not handle for their own sake, but only in so far as they forced themselves into the circle of political interests by cutting across the order, or military defence, or financial system, of the country. Apart from these high matters of policy most members of the governing classes were inclined to answer petitions on the subject of economic grievances as Paget did to Somerset: Why can't you let it alone? "What a good year ... is victuals so dear in England and nowhere else? If they and their fathers before them have lived quietly these sixty years, pastures being enclosed, the most part of these rufflers have least cause to complain."

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials. Sir William Paget to the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549.

The subordinate place occupied by economic questions during our period makes the attention which was given to the results of pasture-farming all the more remarkable. Though to the statesmanship of the sixteenth century the agrarian problem was one of the second order, it was, at any rate till the accession of Elizabeth, the most serious of its own class, and it was important enough to occupy Governments at intervals for over a century and a half. The first Statute against depopulation was passed in 1489; an abortive Bill was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656; and between the two lies a series of seven Royal Commissions, twelve Statutes, and a considerable number of Proclamations dealing with one aspect or another of the enclosing movement, as well as numerous decisions on particular cases by the Privy Council, the Court of Star Chamber, and the Court of Requests. This reaction of the new agrarian developments upon public policy is interesting in several ways. It illustrates the growth of new classes and forms of social organisation, the methods and defects of sixteenth century administration, and the ideas of the period as to the proper functions of the State in relation to an important set of questions, upon which political opinion was in some ways nearer to our own than it was to that of the age following the Civil War. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether without importance from the point of view of general history. We need not discuss how far the reaction of some recent historians against the familiar judgments which contrast Tudor tyranny with the constitutional revolutions of the seventeenth century as darkness with light, is likely to be permanent. But it is perhaps safe to say that it is in the sphere of social policy that their case is seen at its strongest. After all, tyranny is often the name which one class gives to the protection of another. To the small copyholder or tenant farmer the merciless encroachments of his immediate landlord were a more dreaded danger than the far-off impersonal autocracy of the Crown to which he appealed for defence. The period in which he suffered most in the sixteenth century was the interval between the death of the despotic Henry VIII. and the accession of the despotic Elizabeth. Though the interference of the Tudor, and--in a feebler fashion--of the Stuart, Governments to protect the peasantry was neither disinterested nor always effective, its complete cessation after 1642, and the long line of Enclosure Acts which follow the revolution of 1688, suggest that, as far as their immediate economic interests were concerned, the smaller landholders had more to lose than to gain from a revolution which took power from the Crown to give it to the squires. The writers who after 1750 turned with a sigh from the decaying villages which they saw around them, to glorify the policy of the absolutist Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were received with the ridicule which awaits all who set themselves against a strong current of interests and ideas. But historically they were right. The revolution, which brought constitutional liberty, brought no power to control the aristocracy who, for a century and a half, alone knew how such liberty could be used--that blind, selfish, indomitable, aristocracy of county families, which made the British Empire and ruined a considerable proportion of the English nation. From the galleries of their great mansions and the walls of their old inns their calm, proud faces, set off with an occasional drunkard, stare down on us with the unshakable assurance of men who are untroubled by regrets or perplexities, men who have deserved well of their order and their descendants, and await with confidence an eternity where preserves will be closer, family settlements stricter, dependents more respectful, cards more reliable, than in this imperfect world they well can be. Let them have their due. They opened a door which later even they could not close. They fostered a tree which even they could not cut down. But neither let us forget that to the poorer classes its fruits were thorns and briars, loss of their little properties, loss of economic independence, the hot fit of the hateful Speenhamland policy, the cold fit of the more hateful workhouse system. Those who would understand the social forces of modern England must realise that long disillusionment. Even in the seventeenth century there are whisperings of it. At the end of the Civil War there were men who were dimly conscious that the freedom for which they had fought involved economic, as well as political and ecclesiastical, changes. "Wee the poor impoverisht commoners," wrote the leaders of a little band of agrarian reformers to the Council of War in 1649, "claim freedom in the common lands by vertue of this conquest over the King, which is gotten by our joynt consent.... If this freedom be not granted, wee that are the poor commoners are in a worse case than we were in the King's day." But from the reign of Henry VII. to the Civil War official opinion was as generally in favour of protecting the peasantry against the ruinous effects of agrarian innovations, as it was on the side of leaving the landlords free to work their will in the two centuries which succeeded. We must explain this state of mind, for it certainly needs explanation; and this will necessitate our looking at the movements of the peasants and at their place in the State. We must estimate how far it was effective in practice; and to do this we must say a few words about the administrative machinery of the Tudors and of the first two Stuarts.

4 Henry VII., c. 19.

Journal of House of Commons, December 19, 1656. See Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Society, vol. xix.

e.g. Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, 1773. See Levy, Large and Small Holdings, p. 41.

The general adoption of the "Test Workhouse" for the able-bodied, which dates from the Poor Law Reform Act of 1884, was the direct result of a one-sided reaction against the disastrous Speenhamland policy.

Camden Society, Clarke Papers, vol. ii. p. 217.

In almost all ages the first task of Governments is the preservation of order. Though the economic ideas of the sixteenth century were very different from those of the nineteenth, one of the reasons which made it impossible for the statesmen of the period to leave the land question altogether alone was the same as that which induced their successors to deal with Irish land in 1870 and 1881. It was that agrarian discontent created a permanent supply of inflammable material, which a spark might turn into a conflagration. The years between 1500 and 1650 are the last great age of the peasant uprisings which, in all countries of Western Europe except France and Ireland, are incredible to-day as a romance of giants, and hardly a generation in that stormy period elapsed without one. Sometimes nothing more happened than a collision of justices and gentry with angry mobs who were tearing down hedges and restoring common to common again under mysterious figures who flit across the darkening country-side with weapons in their hands and the eternal insurrection of the New Testament on their lips--Jack o' the Style, Pyrce Plowman, and that prophetic Captain Pouch, who "was sent of God to satisfie all degrees whatsoever, and in this present work was directed by the Lord of Heaven." Sometimes the discontent swelled to a small civil war, as it did in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, and in the eastern and southern counties in 1549. The Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace were, it is true, mainly motived by discontent with the attack on the abbeys. But the explanation of their objects given by those insurgents who were cross-examined by the Government makes it difficult to agree with Professor Gay that only an insignificant part was played in these movements by agrarian discontent. The truth is that we ought to distinguish between the objects of different sections. The rebels of 1536 were not a class, but almost the whole society of northern England, which suddenly rolls forward with all its members, spirituality and laity, peasants and peers, in fervent motion together. The weaker side of these great conservative demonstrations was that, though all classes were united against the régime typified by Cromwell, all classes were not moved to the same degree by the same grievances. Even when the old religion was the cause that took the gentry into the field, the humbler rebels were brought out as much by hatred of agrarian as of religious innovations. The men of Lincolnshire marched under a banner embroidered with a ploughshare, and laggards were spurred forward with the cry "What will ye do? Shall we go home and keep sheep?" In Cumberland the four Captains of Penrith--Faith, Poverty, Pity, and Charity--marched in solemn procession with drawn swords round Burgh Church, and then, having heard Mass, led their followers, with the blessing of the vicar, on a crusade to put an end to gentlemen and to withhold rents and fines. In the North generally the arrival of Aske's messengers was a signal for the wholesale plucking down of new enclosures; a programme of agrarian reform was included in the demands put forward at Doncaster; and Aske himself told the Government at his examination that the practice of letting out farms over the heads of poor tenants was one of the causes of the rising. A well-informed officer of State like Sir William Paget seems to have thought that even the rebellion which took place in Devonshire and Somersetshire in 1549, the causes of which were mainly ecclesiastical, was partly also agrarian. In that year, indeed, nearly the whole of the southern counties, beginning in May with Hertfordshire, from Norfolk in the east to Hampshire in the south and Worcester in the west, were driven into riot by disappointment with the ineffective Royal Commission appointed in the preceding year. In 1550 there were disturbances in Kent, and the Government anticipated their appearance in Essex. In 1552 the Buckinghamshire peasants rose on account of high rents and high prices. In 1554 Wyatt's adherents demanded that all pasture lands which had forcibly been seized by persons in power should be restored. In 1569 an armed band pulled down enclosures near Chinley in Derbyshire, threatened to kill the encloser, and rescued by force those of their number who were arrested. Twenty-six years later, at a time of unusually high prices, even the peasantry of Oxfordshire, that most imperturbable of English counties, planned "to knock down the gentlemen and rich men who made corn so dear, and who took the commons." In 1607 in the Midlands, where in the preceding decade enclosure and depopulation had created a situation as acute as that of half a century before, there was a riot which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission.

For Captain Pouch see Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii. For the other names Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. ii. p. 40.

Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., vol. xii.,