Part I., 70, 1537. Examination of R. Leedes: "the Rebels ..

were half inclined to go home. But Ralph Green ... encouraged them to go forward, saying, 'God's blood, sirs, what will ye now do? Shall we go home and keep sheep? Nay, by God's body, yet had I rather be hanged,'" and ibid.: "The said Trotter says the meaning of the plough borne in the banner was the encouraging of the husbandman."

Ibid., vol. xii., Part I., 687, 1537. Confession of Barnarde Townleye, Clerk: "The beginners of the insurrection in Cumberland were the 4 captains of Penrith; Faith, Poverty, Pity and Charity, as the Vicar of Burgh proclaimed them at each meeting.... Conjectures that the intent was to destroy the gentlemen, that none should pay ingressums to his landlord, and little or no rent or tithe"; also ibid., Examination of Sir Robert Thompson, Vicar of Burgh: "On the Wednesday and Thursday the 4 captains followed examinand in procession with their swords drawn, and examinand said mass, which they called the Captains' mass."

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 687: "They of Kirkby Stephen plucked down the new intacks of enclosures, and sent to other Parishes to do the like, which was done at Burgh, 28th January." For the Doncaster programme see below, p. 334. Aske said (L. and P., vol. xii., Part I., p. 901) that the new farmers of monastic estates "let and tavern out the farms of the same houses to other farmers for lucre."

These particulars are taken from Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii., which also gives an account of the Midland riot of 1607.

MSS. in possession of Charles E. Bradshaw Bowles, Esq., of Wirksworth, for a transcript of which I am indebted to Mr. Kolthammer. See below, pp. 327?-329.

Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part VI., pp. 49?-50.

This was perhaps the last serious agrarian rising which England has seen. But though henceforward the hatred of the new agrarian régime ran for the most part underground, it had been burned too deep into the minds of the people to be lightly forgotten, and more than once its smouldering embers flickered up in occasional riots. In the first flush of the army's victory over King and Parliament, when the shattering of authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, not only the political, but the economic, ideas of two centuries later burst for a moment, as in an early spring, into wonderful and premature life. The programme of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the Veto of the House of Lords, but also "that you would have laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor." Theoretical communism, repudiated by some of the Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, those "true born sons and friends of England" who, under Everard and Winstanley, set themselves, in the spirit of an Owenite Community, to convert the waste land at Weybridge into the New Jerusalem. For to many earnest souls the day of the Lord seems very near, and Israel must make ready against it, not with anguish of spirit only, but with spade labour upon the barren earth. The contrast between the prevalence of organised agrarian revolts in the middle of the sixteenth century, dragging on in small sporadic agitations for nearly one hundred years, with their comparative rarity two hundred years later, when similar causes were at work to produce them, marks the new grouping of social classes and economic forces which was going on apace in our period. The intelligence of toiling England, that for a century now has gone to build up a new civilisation in factory and mine, in trade union and co-operative store, still lay in the larger villages, its immemorial home. Discontent travelled across the enclosing counties as it does to-day in a Welsh mining valley, outcoursing oppression itself, like Elijah running before Ahab into Jezreel. "If three or four good fellows would ride in the night with every man a bell, and cry in every town that they pass, 'To Swaffham! To Swaffham!' by the morning there would be ten thousand assembled at the least; and then one bold fellow to stand forth and say, 'Sirs, now we be here assembled, you know how little favour the gentlemen bear us poor men.... Let us ... harness ourselves.'" Good fellows and bold were not wanting. "From that time forward no man could keep his servant at plough; but every man that could bear a staff went forward." Before the appearance of almost universal leasehold tenure, standing armies, and omnipotent aristocratic Parliaments, unrest among the rural population might cause the Government a not inexpensive campaign, in which the reluctant militia of yesterday were the enthusiastic rebels of to-day, and there was not therefore much disparity between the discipline and equipment of the forces engaged on either side. Both in the mainly agrarian revolts in Norfolk, and in the mainly religious revolts in Devonshire, the peasants fell, as they hoped they might, like men, and it was the arquebuses of the foreign mercenaries which really decided the struggle. Poor homeless hirelings, what could they know but to clamour for their pay, and shoot better men than themselves?

The Humble Petition of thousands well affected persons inhabiting the city of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets, and places adjacent. In Bodleian Pamphlets, The Leveller's Petition, c. 15, 3 Linc. See also Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 139?-226.

Camden Society, Clarke Papers, vol. ii. pp. 215?-217. Winstanley's letter to Lord Fairfax and the Council of War begins: "That whereas we have begun to dig upon the Commons for livelihood, and have declared unto your excellency and the whole world our reasons, which are four. First, from the righteous law of creation that gives the earth freely to one as well as another, without respect of persons"; also Gooch, op. cit. The Owenite note may be more than a mere chance. Owen himself stated ("New View of Society"): "Any merit due for the discovery calculated to effect more substantial and permanent benefit to mankind than any ever yet contemplated by the human mind belongs exclusively to John Bellers." Bellers published his College of Industry in 1696, and may easily have been acquainted with the story of the Diggers' agitation.

Russell, Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 8.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 201, Examination of John Halom of Calkehill, yeoman.

To understand the nature of a body at rest it is sometimes advisable to look at the same body when it is in motion. The agrarian disturbances of our period possess certain features which are of interest even to those who are concerned primarily not with social politics, but with economic organisation. In the first place, they mark the transition from the feudal revolts of the fifteenth century, based on the union of all classes in a locality against the central government, to those in which one class stands against another through the opposition of economic interests. In the Lincolnshire rebellion and in the Pilgrimage of Grace the old spirit predominated. In the North of England the new agrarian régime had not proceeded far enough to sap entirely the ancient bonds between landlord and tenant, and the plunder of the monastic estates had not yet set a commercial aristocracy in the seat of the old-fashioned Catholic landlords. The commons of Westmoreland, who declare that they will trust no gentlemen with their councils, nevertheless feel sufficient confidence in Lord Darcy to write to him for his advice as to how far they will be justified in insisting on reduced admission fines, and in pulling down "all the intakes yt be noysum for poor men." Had the Catholic gentry generally been willing to sacrifice the rents got from pasture-farming, these movements might have found leaders who would have made them more formidable. As it was, even when hatred of the religious changes or of some particular piece of legislation, like the unpopular Statute of Uses, enrolled the gentry with the peasants, as in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, the incompatibility of the allies was obvious, and the presence of the wealthier classes inspired distrust among the rank and file, who saw in them the authors of their economic evils, and who, though genuinely concerned at the painful destruction of the social institutions of the old religion, were fighting mainly for the maintenance of "old customs and tenant right," fair rents and security of tenure. In spite of the temporary union of all classes in 1536, the insurgents tended to break up into two camps corresponding roughly with the division between landlord and tenant. In Lincolnshire, though the commons were influenced by the gentry so far as to demand the repeal of the Act of Uses, "not knowing," as a witness said, "what that Act of Uses meant," they showed their distrust of the upper classes by refusing to allow them to discuss their future policy apart from the general body of insurgents, while the extremists clamoured that "they ought to kill some of the justices; also that if they hanged for this, they would not leave one gentleman alive in Lincolnshire." At Richmond all lords and gentlemen were to swear on the mass-book to maintain the profit of Holy Church, to take nothing of their tenants but the usual rents, to put down Cromwell and not to go to London, on pain of death if they refused. For courts have strange arts of seduction, and though London (thank Heaven) is not England now, it was still less England then. The rough rhymes that ran through the North contain the warning of all popular movements against the treachery of leaders, the sad eternal warning which buoys the sands where so many high endeavours have gone to wreck. "All commons stick ye together, rise with no great man till ye know his intent. Keep your harness in your hands, and ye shall obtain all your purpose in all this North land.... Claim ye old customs and tenant right, to take your farms by a God's penny, all gressums and heightenings to be laid down. Then may we serve our sovereign Lord King Henry VIII., God save his noble Grace.

We shall serve our lands' lords in every righteous cause With horse and harness as custom will demand. Lords spiritual and temporal have it in your mind This world as it waveth, and to your tenants be kind. Adieu, gentle commons, thus make I an end: Writer of this letter, pray Jesu be his speed; He shall be your captain, when that ye have need."

Ibid., vol. xi., 1080.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xi., 975.

Ibid., vol. xii., Part I., 163.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 163. The Proclamation of the Commons; see also ibid., 138, the manifesto which says, "Ye shall have captains just and true, and not be stayed by the gentry in no wise."

The temporary solidarity which had drawn all classes into the Pilgrimage of Grace, though it flickered up for the last time in the feudal revolt of the northern earls in 1569, was absent altogether from the widespread agitation of 1549 to 1550. Except in Devonshire and Cornwall, the disturbances of those years were purely agrarian, a movement of tenants against landlords. The Eastern rebels were for leaving "as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls"; the gentry responded by rallying to the Government; and both in that country and in Devonshire the military forces which put down the peasants were led by the two most notoriously unpopular landlords in England, who had built up their estates out of confiscated abbey lands, the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. In the reign of Henry VII. the problem before Governments had still been to prevent a great landlord from using his authority over his tenants to make war on his neighbours or on the State. Sixty years later it is to prevent tenants in several different counties from combining against landlords. The landed classes recognise the new spirit. They denounce the peasants as communists and agitators; and when they get a free hand, as in the years from 1549 to 1553, they insist on legislation which will make effective combination impossible.

Russell, Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk, Introduction, p. 8. The advice of John Walker of Griston.

In the second place, the way in which the agrarian agitations were conducted is interesting as showing both the comparative prosperity and independence of the English peasantry, even at a time when the fortunes of many of them were declining, and the general conceptions of social expediency held by what was regarded as the most representative part of the English nation. It would be a mistake to think of the rebels who joined these revolts as mere unorganised malcontents, with nothing to lose. There is no resemblance at all, either in personnel or methods, between the agrarian disturbances of our period and the riots of starving agricultural labourers who burned ricks under Captain Swing in the early nineteenth century. The peasants who formed the backbone of the movements were often well-to-do men, who were fighting to keep their land with the dreadful tenacity of small proprietors. They had arms and were accustomed to their use. They had sufficient money to raise common funds. They included among their number sanguine and pertinacious litigants who, so far from being disposed to throw up their case at the hint of the landlord's displeasure, were quite capable of making his life one long lawsuit. The readiness of a class to make effective the protection given it by the law in the face of the opposition of powerful individuals, quenched, alas! too often by ignorance, and timidity, and generations of dull oppression, is a very good test of its spirit and of the practical freedom which it enjoys. In the sixteenth century, though we certainly see many gross cases of intimidation, we also see tenants appealing to the law courts and to the Government over the heads of lords of manors. Such appeals are a proof of the helplessness of the victims which has been commented on above. But they are also a proof of the persistence and cohesion of some among them. For while in the absence of oppression they would not have been necessary, in the absence of a determination to resist oppression they could not have been made. To enclose was in parts of the country to stir up a hornet's nest. There was not much obsequiousness about the villagers of Thingden, who from 1494 to 1538 pursued their landlord through almost every Court in the Kingdom. The leaders of the popular agitation were often the more prosperous among the middle-classes. Sanders, the general in the interminable struggle over the common lands of the city of Coventry which began in 1460, was a member of the important craft of Dyers, and had occupied the high civic office of Chamberlain. At Louth the initiative among the commons was taken by a tailor and a weaver. Ket himself was a considerable landed proprietor as well as a tanner.

Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, and Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684?-696.

Coventry Leet Book, edited by M.D. Harris, vol. ii. 510 and passim.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 380, The Examination of the Monk late of Louth Park: "Plummer and one James, a tailor, were the most quick and chiefest rulers of the company.... Melton, whom they named 'Captain Cobbles,' was the most chief and busy man among these commoners.... John Tailor, of Louth, webster, brought out of the house a great brand of fire, and the commons carried the books into the market-place."

Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 2319, p. 75, Copy of Letters Patent (28 May, 4 Ed. VI.) granting to Thomas Audeley ... all that manor called Gunvyles Manor in Norfolk, parcel of the possessions of the said ... Robert Ket, in consideration "boni, veri, fidelis, et magnanimi servitii in conflictu versus innaturales subditos nostros proditores ac nobis rebelles in Com. nostro Norf.... quorum ... quidam Bobertus Kett existit capitanus et conductor."

The peasants' agitations took the form both of more or less organised risings and of sporadic rioting, which aimed at ends varying from place to place according to the grievances inspired by the varying conditions of different districts. Everywhere there were the throwing down of enclosures and the driving of sheep. In Yorkshire the enclosures which were pulled down seem to have been mainly intakes from the waste, and in Norfolk and the Midlands enclosures of arable land which had been converted to pasture. In Warwickshire the Earl of Warwick's park was demolished, while in Wiltshire, where Sir William Herbert had acquired the lands of Wilton Abbey, and enclosed a whole village in his new park at Washerne, the peasants rose and tore down the palings. In the North generally the bitterest outcry seems to have arisen over the excessive fines and "gressums" charged for the admission of copyholders. In Cumberland there was a general strike against the payment of rents, and almost everywhere there were complaints of the diminution in the area available for pasturing the beasts of commoners through the enclosing by landlords of manorial wastes.

Sheep-driving in the sixteenth century was like cattle-driving in Ireland to-day; see Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 201: "When they first went to York, they drove one Coppyndale's sheep because he fled away, and sold them again to his deputy for £10," and the behaviour of the Norfolk rebels in 1549.

Gairdner, L. and P., xi., II., 186, and Rutland MSS., p. 36, quoted by Leadam: "There is a great number of the commons up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir William Herbert's Park that is about his new house ... they say they will not have their common grounds to be enclosed and taken from them."

Gairdner, L. and P., xii., I., 362: "Your rents and others cannot yet be collected."

Though it involves abandoning the order of events, let us illustrate by a single example the shape assumed by agrarian rioting, which has not yet become a rebellion. In the summer of 1569, when Cecil and Elizabeth were waiting anxiously for news from those northern counties which "know no other prince but a Percy," there was much running and riding, much sending for warrants and plentiful delay in their execution, in the wild country between Chinley and Bakewell, whose centre is the Peak, and whose principal gorge now carries the most beautiful piece of railway line in England. The Derbyshire peasantry seem to have been ill to deal with. A few years later some of those in Glossopdale succeeded in setting the Earl of Shrewsbury at defiance, and, when evicted from their farms, induced the Council to intervene to insist on their reinstatement. Just now those of them who lived in the neighbourhood of Chinley were in a ferment over the enclosure of some common land. The story is a curious one, and shows both the kind of conditions under which agrarian discontent developed, and the way in which it was associated in the mind of the Government with fears of political disturbance. The Duchy of Lancaster, to whom the land near Chinley belonged, had let a parcel of herbage called Mayston Field to one Lawrence Wynter, his lease to begin as soon as that of the existing tenant had expired. In that age of land speculation land changed hands rapidly. On the same day as Wynter obtained the lease he sold it to a certain Richard Celey. Celey transferred it to Godfrey Bradshaw, and Godfrey Bradshaw got rid of it to his brother Anthony. The trouble began when the land came into the hands of Godfrey Bradshaw. He started to hedge and ditch it, which of course involved the exclusion of the other inhabitants from the rights of pasture which they had hitherto enjoyed. Accordingly the villagers, led by twelve of their number, of whom four belonged to one family, removed the ditch, tore down the enclosure, which consisted of "XLIII hundredth quicksetts willowes and willowe stackes ... and did utterlye destroy and cutt the sayd stacks and quick setts in pieces," proceeding at the same time, with the object of protecting their own grazing land against encroachments, themselves to divide up the land into smaller enclosures to be held by each man in severalty. Godfrey Bradshaw then obtained warrants for the preservation of the peace against the ringleaders, and at the same time induced the lessor, who was Sir Ralph Sadler, the Chancellor of the Duchy, to address a letter to them directing them not to interfere with any houses, hedges, or ditches, which might in future be constructed round the land. They received his communication, but massed in force with arms on Chinley Hill, pulled down what still remained of Bradshaw's hedges, and then proceeded to organise the nucleus of a very pretty agitation. They gave part of the herbage, which was nominally in the occupation of the unfortunate lessee, to one William Beard, on condition that, after the manner of his betters in the good old days before the Tudors, he should "maynteyn them geynst the Queenes Majestie," his support taking the form of an agreement that he "should from tyme to tyme send them Ydill ryotouse p'sons to assyste them in these yll doinges." They then raised a fund, presumably by a levy on the inhabitants, called a meeting in the forest of High Peak, and set off about the tenth of June to Bakewell for a further conference, arranging in the meantime that some one should burn Godfrey Bradshaw's house, and that while his enclosures, if re-erected, should be pulled down, the other inhabitants should make haste to divide up the disputed land into twenty-one separate parcels. When the Bradshaws, having got their warrants, tried with the aid of the village constable to execute them, their opponents ("the land was grabbed from him, and he did what any decent man would do") threatened them with murder, and, on one of the party being actually arrested, came very near to carrying their threat out. "The said p'tyes ... did ryotouslye assemble themselves together in great companies at the town of Hayfield with unlawfull weapons, that is to saye, with bowes, pytchefforkes, clobbes, staves, swords, and daggers drawen, and ryotouslye dyd then and there assaulte and p'sue the sayd Godfrey and Edward Bradshawe, and in ryotouse manner dyd reskewe and take from them the body of the sayd Richard Shower, being attached; the Queenes Officer, George Yeavely of Bawdon, then being p'sent commanding the peace to be kepte." Having chased the enemy for some distance, they camped on the contested territory, and kept a watchful eye and a firm hand for any sign of the reappearance of the detested hedges. More serious still in the eyes of the Government (and this, one suspects, was their undoing), the leaders of this village revolution went so far as to entangle themselves in high politics. At their examination they are asked, "Whether dyd Reynold Kirke about May day last paste, and dyvers tymes since and before, or any other tyme, confederate, consulte, practise, or otherwise confer and talk with one Mr. Bircles of the countye of Chester ... touching or concerning prophesis by noblemen, or otherwise, and what books of prophesie have you or the said Bircles seen or heard, and what is the effect thereof, and how often have you or he perused, used, or conferred of the same, or about such purposes, and with whom?" We do not know how they answered this question. It may be that the anger of these Derbyshire peasants at their vanishing commons was indeed a fraction to be set among weightier assets by schemers in high places, and that the sinister Mr. Bircles had really talked with them of matters more serious than the pulling down of hedges and the baiting of enclosers, of things forbidden to the vulgar, of the scattering of upstart officials, of the restoration of a Catholic monarchy, of Mary, who in the previous year had made her irrevocable plunge across the Border. It may be merely that all in authority had that autumn an unusually bad attack of nerves. In 1569 the North was full of prophets, both noble and other.

I take this story from a transcript kindly supplied me by Mr. Kolthammer of MSS. in the possession of Charles E. Bradshaw Bowles of Wirksworth.

Lodge, Illustrations, ii. p. 218.

Synge, The Playboy of the Western World.

It was not always the case, however, that agrarian discontent ended in casual rioting of this kind. Of mere destructive violence there is, indeed, in all the social disturbances of the period, singularly little. There was a good deal in the routine of rural life, with its common administration of land and dependence on a collectively binding custom, to teach habits of discipline and co-operation. It must be remembered that those who took the initiative in breaking the law were not the peasants who pulled down enclosures, but the landlords who made them in defiance of repeated statutes forbidding them. On the whole the organised character of the action taken is more conspicuous than the individual excesses, and if one is to look for a modern analogy to the mixture of deliberation and violence which it shows, it must be sought in an Irish fair rent campaign rather than in the bread riots of a despairing urban proletariat. When the agitation was confined to individual manors it occasionally took the form of agrarian trade unionism. Tenants collectively decline to serve as jurors in the court of the manor till their demands are granted. They raise a common purse. They refuse to pay more than a certain rent. When more than one manor is implicated different localities display a rough cohesion. Whole communities seem to have joined the movement in 1536 and 1540 with a certain formality. In Lincolnshire and Yorkshire townships were brought out on the ringing of the town bell with the cohesion of a well-organised trade union; Beverley sent messages to the Lincolnshire rebels under its common seal; and the part which was played by the village officers in the movements of the peasantry is proved by the Proclamation which the Council issued in 1549, when disorders were at their height, forbidding constables, bailiffs, and head-boroughs to call meetings except for the purposes required by the law. Hales, as he rode through the South and Midlands in 1548, was struck by the patience with which people waited for the Government to take action, and attributed the disturbances of the ensuing year to the despair caused by the victory of the local landlords over the Commission, and to the rejection by Parliament of the Bills which he had introduced. Even Ket's campaign in Norfolk, which ended in a sanguinary battle, during the greater part of it was carried on with an orderliness from which the Government which suppressed it might profitably have taken a lesson. Nothing could have been more unlike the popular idea of a jacquerie. The peasants enjoyed the enormous joke of making the gentry look foolish a great deal more than cutting their throats, as during the four weeks in which they were "playing" they might have done without any difficulty.

"Mr. Pratt, your sheep are very fat, And we thank you for that; We have left you the skins to pay your wife's pins, And you must thank us for that."

Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests (Leadam). Customary tenants of Bradford v. Francis: "The said stuard called ... the ... tenants of the manor to be sworn to enquire as they ought to doo, the which to do ... the said tenants ... obstinately and sturdily then and there refused, and said that unless the said defendent ... wold grante them forthwith and immediatelye that they should have and enjoy the commodity of the said three matters ... that they, nor any of them, wolde be sworn at that Court, but wolde depart."

Leadam, E. H. R., pp. 684-696. The tenants at Thingden, in their proceedings against Mulsho, "calle commen Councelles ... and make a commen purse among them, promising all of them to take parte with other, saying that xx. of them would spend xx. score pounds ayenet the said John Mulsho." The tenants of Abbot's Ripton "procured one common purse to be ordeyned together one common stock to thentent obstinately to defend their perverse and ffrowned appetitez." As to Rents, see L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 154: "In many counties little or no ferms will they pay" (Darcy to Shrewsbury).

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 392.

Proclamation of July 22, 1549. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, who remarks that these village officers, "in the places where these risings were, had been the very ringleaders and procurers by their example and exhortation."

Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), Appendix to Introduction, lviii.: "In dyvers places wher we were, and wher the people had just cause of Gryef, and have complayned a great many yeares without remedy, there have they byn very quiet, shewed themselves most humble and obedient subiectes taryenge the Kynges Maiesties Reformation."

Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1905, p. 2.

These lines, pinned on the carcasses of an enclosing landlord's flocks and herds, are a fair specimen of their humour. Men may well be merry together, when they have seen hovering over the fields of an English county, though but in a fleeting glimpse, the New Jerusalem where the humble are exalted and the mighty put down; and there is no inconsistency between such mundane gaiety and the long pent up passion which on the lips of a nameless labourer burst into the cry, "As sheepe or lambs are a prey to the wolfe or lion, so are the poor men to the rich men." There was much lecturing (the matter is easily imagined) at the Oak of Reformation, and not on one side only, for the peasants were tolerant compared with their betters, and a future archbishop was allowed to address the insurgents on the evils of their ways; much laying down of hedges and enclosures; much slaughtering of that beast of iniquity, the man-devouring sheep. There was none of the massacring of unarmed men which both Henry VIII. and Elizabeth ordered without compunction when they thought the times required it, very little of the "making the public good a pretext for private revenge," against which the insurgents were warned by Parker. Though for months after the final tragedy the badges of the justly-hated Warwick "were not so fast set up but that they were as fast pulled down" from the city walls, the rebels even in the heat of their early triumphs claimed only to be executing the Protector's Proclamations, and, while indignantly repudiating the name of traitors, showed a complete readiness to negotiate peaceably with the Government. The whole movement was less a rising against the State than a practical illustration of the peasants' ideals, a mixture of May-day demonstration and successful strike embodied in one gigantic festival of rural good fellowship. Its bloody termination was, as far as can be judged, the result of two errors of judgment, one, a pardonable one, on the part of Ket, the other, unpardonable, on the part of a nameless member of the other party. When all was over, and each man reflected after his kind on the great days of Mousehold Heath, what the camp followers, who attach themselves to every popular movement, remembered was that for about a month they had filled their bellies at other people's expense. "'Twas a merry world when we were yonder, eating of mutton." But there were some who, as they saw Ket swinging on the gallows before the City gates, were seized with the tumult of pity and hoarse indignation which serves Englishmen, who are not good at revolutions, in place of the revolutionary spirit. "O Kette," one countryman was heard to say to another, "God have mercy upon thy soul; and I trust in God that the King's Majesty and his Councell shall be enformed once between this and Midsummer evening, that of their own gentleness thou shalt be taken down and buried, not hanged up for winter store; and set a quietness in the realm, and that the ragged staff shall be taken down of their own gentleness from the gentlemen's gates in this City, and to have no more King's arms but one within the City, under Christ." The Council, in its gentleness, thought otherwise. Ket still creaked in his chains, and in the meantime other gallows were rising for other rebels in Somerset, and Devon, and Cornwall.

Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1905, p. 22.

Ket refused the pardon offered on July 31st on the ground that the insurgents had committed no offence requiring to be pardoned, and fighting followed. On August 23rd a pardon was again offered. While it was being read by a herald, a boy standing by insulted him "with words as unseemly as his gesture was filthy" (Holinshed), and was shot by one of the herald's retinue. Ket tried to pacify the anger of his followers at what they took to be treachery, but without effect.

Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1905, p. 20.

What were the aims which at intervals between 1530 and 1560 set half the counties of England in a blaze? Let us look at the peasants' programme more closely. It will help us to see the agrarian problem from the inside. Reduced to its elements their complaint is a very simple one, very ancient and yet very modern. It is that what, in effect, whatever lawyers may say, has been their property, is being taken from them. To be told that social disorders take place because an envious proletariat aims at seizing the property of the rich would seem to them a very strange perversion of the truth. They want only to have what they have always had. They are conservatives, not radicals or levellers, and to them it seems that all the trouble arises because the rich have been stealing the property of the poor. Here is part of a colloquy between Jack of the North beyond the Style, Robin and Harry Clowte, Tom of Trumpington, Peter Potter, Pyrce Plowman, and divers other worthies. As will be seen from the verses, they are birds of night--

"JACK. Now for that Slaunder's sake, Companye by night I take, And, with all that I may make, Cast hedge and ditch in the lake, Fyxed with many a stake Though it was never so faste Yet asondre it is wraste.

* * * * *

HARRY CLOWTE. Gud conscience should them move Ther neighbours quietly to love, And thus not for to wrynche The commons styl for to pinch, To take into their hande That be other mennes land.

JACK. Thus do I, Jack of the Style, Now subscrybe upon a tyle. This I do and will do with all my myght, For sclaundering me yet do I but right, For common to common again I restore Wherever it hath been yet common before. If agayne they enclose it never so faste Agayne asondre it shall be wraste. They may be ware by that is paste To make it agayne is but waste."

Printed by Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. ii. p. 40.

To take into your hand what is other men's land, that is the grievance. To restore common to common again, that is the obvious remedy, a remedy which is not seriously opposed to the agrarian policy of most sixteenth century statesmen. But the more far-seeing of the peasants realise what their followers do not, that these troubles which are going on in so many different parts of England cannot be dealt with by isolated bodies of villagers, however good their cause may be. They require the intervention of the Government. How the Government is to intervene they lay down in two documents which are perhaps the only two popular programmes of agrarian reform ever published in England since 1381. The first, contained in two of the articles drawn up at Doncaster in 1536, is short enough:--

"That the lands in Westmoreland, Cumberland, Kendall, Dent, Sedbergh, Furness, and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kyrkbyshire, Notherdale, may be by tenant right, and the lord to have, at every change, 2 years' rent for gressum, according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there. This to be done by Act of Parliament.

"The Statutes for Enclosures and Intacks to be put in execution, and all enclosures and Intacks since the fourth year of Henry VII. to be pulled down, except mountains, forests, and Parks" (a noticeable exception which shows the composite character of the movement. In the South of England the peasant did not spare parks).

Gairdner, L. and P. of Henry VIII., xi. 1246.

The articles signed by Ket, Aldryche, and Cod in 1549 are a much more elaborate affair. Here are the most noteworthy of them:--

"We pray your grace that where it is enacted for enclosing, that it be not hurtful to such as have enclosed saffren grounds, for they be greatly chargeable to them, and that from henceforth no man shall enclose any more.

"We certify your grace that whereas the lords of the mannors hath been charged with certe fre rent, the same lords hath sought means to charge the freeholders to pay the same rent, contrary to right.

"We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall comon uppon the commons.

"We pray that priests from henceforth shall purchase no lande neither free nor bondy, and the lands that they have in possession may be letten to temporal men, as they were in the first year of the reign of King Henry VII.

"We pray that reed ground and meadow ground may be at such price as they were in the first year of King Henry VII.

* * * * *

"We pray that the payments of castleward rent, and blanch ferm and office lands, which hath been accustomed to be gathered of the tenements, whereas we suppose the lords ought to pay the same to their bailiffs for their rents gathering, and not the tenants.

"We pray that no man under the degree of a knight or esquire keep a dove house, except it hath been of an old ancient custom.

"We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor to take profits of the same.

"We pray that no feudatory within your shires shall be a councellor to any man in his office making, whereby the King may be truly served, so that a man being of good conscience may be yearly chosen to the same office by the commons of the same shire.

* * * * *

"We pray that copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII., and that at the death of a tenant or of a sale the same lands to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable of money for a remembrance.

* * * * *

"We pray that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free with his precious bloodshedding.

"We pray that rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and passage.

* * * * *

"We pray that the poor mariners or Fishermen may have the whole profits of their fishings, as porpoises, grampuses, whales, or any great fish, so it be not prejudicial to your Grace.

* * * * *

"We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase land freely, or to let them out again by copy of court roll to their great advancement and to the undoing of your poor subjects.

* * * * *

"We pray that no man under the degree of ... shall keep any conies upon any of their freehold or copyhold, unless he pale them in, so that it shall not be to the common nuisance.

* * * * *

"We pray that your Grace give license and authority by your gracious commission under your Great Seal to such commissioners as your poor commons hath chosen, or to as many of them as your Majesty and your Council shall appoint and think meet, for to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings, which hath been hidden by your justices of your peace, shreves, escheators, and other your officers, from your poor commons, since the first year of the reign of your noble grandfather, King Henry VII.

* * * * *

"We pray that no lord, knight, esquire, nor gentleman, do graze nor feed any bullocks or sheep, if he may spend forty pounds a year by his lands, but only for the provision of his house."

Russell, Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 48.

Some doubt has been expressed as to the interpretation of these words. They should probably be read in the light of what was said above (Part I. chap. iv.) as to enclosures made by the tenants themselves. The rebels point out that a considerable number of people have spent capital on hedging and ditching their lands for the better cultivation of saffron, and therefore ask that, while other enclosures may be pulled down, a special exception may be made in favour of this particular kind of enclosure.

Contrast the feeling in Protestant Norfolk with that of Cornwall and Devon in 1549, and of the North in 1536.

The grammar is bad, but the sense is clear enough. Lords must stop shifting on to tenants burdens which lords ought to bear.

The programme of the peasants is partly political. The Northerners insist that Parliament and the Crown must interfere, and the Norfolk leaders ask for a permanent commission to do the work which the county justices, who are interested in enclosing, have wilfully neglected. But it is mainly economic. The State is to do no more than restore the old usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised manorial customary enforced by a strong central Government throughout the length of the land, free use of common lands, reduced rents of meadow and marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free fisheries, and the abolition of the lingering disability of personal villeinage. The most striking thing about these demands is their conservatism. Almost exactly a hundred years later agrarian reform will be demanded as part of a new heaven and a new earth. Agrarian agitation will be carried on in terms of theories as to the social contract, of theories as to the origin of private property. Its leaders will be appealing to Anglo-Saxon history to prove to the indifferent ears of a Government which has saved them "from Charles, our Norman oppressor," that "England cannot be a free commonwealth, unless the poore commoners have a use and benefit of the land." They will appeal also to a more awful sanction than that of history. "At this very day," cries Winstanley, "poor people are forced to work for 4d. a day and corn is dear, and the tithing-priest stops their mouths and tells them that 'inward satisfaction of mind' was meant by the declaration 'the poor shall inherit the earth.' I tell you, the scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled.... You jeer at the name of Leveller. I tell you Jesus Christ is the head leveller." Such communistic doctrines are always the ultimate fruit of the breakdown of practical co-operation and brotherliness among men. To human nature, as to other kinds of nature, a vacuum is abhorrent.

Camden Society, Clarke Papers, vol. ii. p. 217. Letter addressed by the Diggers, December 8, 1649: "To my lord generall and his Councell of War." The allusion to the usurping Normans occurs also (ibid., p. 215) in another letter in a statement of the reasons of the agitation: "Secondly by vertue of yours and our victory over the king, whereby the enslaved people of England have recovered themselves from under the Norman Conquest; though wee do not yet enjoy the benefit of our victories, nor cannot soe long as the use of the Common land is held from the younger brethren by the Lords of Mannours that yet sit in the Norman chair and uphold that tyranny as if the kingly power were in force still."

Winstanley: "The curse and blessing that is in mankind," quoted Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century.

But as yet the soil has not been ploughed by a century of political and religious controversy, and there is little sign of these high arguments in the social disturbances of our period. The earliest levellers get their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset hedges and park palings. What communism there is in the movement is not that of the saints or the theorists, but the spontaneous doctrineless communism of the open field village, where men set out their fields, and plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the wet, with natural fellowship. The middle-class terror of the appearance in England of the political theories of the German Peasants' War, though it was forcibly expressed by Sir William Paget in remonstrating with Somerset's policy in 1549, and though John Hales thought it worth while to repudiate it, is not justified by any recorded utterances or programmes which have come to us. There are, indeed, many verbal similarities between the articles of Ket and those put out by the German peasants at Memmingen in 1525, which suggest that some refugee from Germany had carried them with him to the most Protestant county in England. Both, for example, demand a reduction in rents, the abolition of villeinage, and free fisheries. But the contrasts are much more striking, and are due not only to the fact that the onerous villein services which survived in Germany had become almost nominal in England, but to the difference in the spirit of their conception, which leads one to appeal to the New Testament and the other to the customs of the first years of Henry VII. There is, in fact, the same broad difference between the peasant movements in England and Germany as there is between the English and German Reformation. In Germany the ecclesiastical changes spring from a widespread popular discontent, and are swept forward on a wave of radical enthusiasm, which carries the peasants (German Social Democrats are metaphysicians to this day) into the revolutionary mysticism of Münzer. In England changes in Church government are forced upon the people by the State, and outside the South and East of England are regarded with abhorrence. It is not until the later rise of Puritanism that either religious or economic radicalism becomes a popular force. In the middle of the sixteenth century the English peasants accepted the established system of society with its hierarchy of authorities and division of class functions, and they had a most pathetic confidence in the Crown. What they wanted, in the first place, was fair conditions of land tenure, the restoration of the customary relationships which had protected them against the screw of commercial competition. When they went further, they looked for an exercise of Royal Power to reduce to order the petty tyranny of local magnates, and to carry out the intentions of a Government which they were inclined to think meant them well, "to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings which hath been bidden by your justices of your Peace ... from your poor commons." Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. They are the outcome of a society where the normal relations are healthy, where men are attached to the established order, where they possess the security and control over the management of their own lives which is given by property, and, possessing this, possess the reality of freedom even though they stand outside the political state. Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.

A reference to the Levellers occurs in connection with the Midland Revolt of 1607, Lodge, Illustrations, iii. 320: "You cannot but have hearde what courses have been taken in Leicestershire and Warwickshire by the two Lord Lieutenants there, and by the gentlemen ... and lastlie howe Sir Anth. Mildmay and Sir Edward Montacute repaired to Newton ... where one thousand of these fellowes who term themselves levellers were busily digging, but weare furnished with many half-pikes, pyked staves, long bills, and bowes and arrows and stones ... there were slaine some 40 or 50 of them and a verie great number hurt" (January 11, 1607, the Earl of Shrewsbury to Sir John Manners, Sir Francis Leake, and Sir John Harper). The name Diggers seems to have cropped up about the same time, v. Wit and Wisdom, edited by Halliwell for New Shakespeare Society, pp. 140-141, for a petition from "the Diggers of Warwickshire to all other diggers," and signed "poore Delvers and Day Labourers for ye good of ye commonwealth till death" (quoted by Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii.)

See below, pp. 367-368.

The social disturbances caused by enclosure, with its accompaniments of rack-renting and evictions, were one cause which compelled the Governments of our period to give attention to the subject. Though no direct concessions were made to them, their lessons were not altogether wasted, because it is plain that they impressed on the minds of statesmen the idea that to prevent disorder it was necessary for the State to interfere in favour of tenants. Rural discontent, which might have been insignificant in an age of greater political stability, derived a factitious importance from the circumstances of the sixteenth century, when it might be exploited by a rebellious minority, which, for all that most men knew, might really be a majority of the nation, by Yorkist Plotters under Henry VII., religious enthusiasts under Henry VIII., restorers of a Catholic monarchy, supported by a Spanish invasion or a Franco-Scottish alliance, under Elizabeth. Governments so uncertain of their popularity as these had a strong reason for protecting the class which would be the backbone of a revolt. One way in which they could secure themselves against the discontent of the disaffected nobility was to encourage the yeomanry, who might act as a counterpoise. The way in which self-preservation and a popular agrarian policy went hand in hand is illustrated by Burleigh's cynical advice to Elizabeth to make a practice of supporting tenants in any quarrel which might arise between them and Catholic landlords.

Somers' Tracts, vol. i., pp. 164-168: "For their tenantries, this conceit I have thought upon ... that your Majesty, in every shire, should give instruction to some that are indeed trusty and religious gentlemen, that, whereas your Majesty is given to understand that divers popish landlords do hardly use some of your people and subjects, ... you do constitute and appoint them to deal both with entreaty and authority, that such tenants, paying as others do, be not thrust out of their living, nor otherwise molested. This would greatly bind the commons' hearts unto you, on whom indeed consisteth the power and strength of your realm, and it will make them less, or nothing at all, depend upon their landlords."

But there were other causes as well working in the same direction. No one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed can fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of agrarian relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man, and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the peasants themselves. Not, of course, that the authorities had any intention of depressing landlords or raising peasants, but that the whole established system of Government was based on a certain organisation of social life, and that the Government tended to maintain that organisation in maintaining itself and carrying on the work of the State. For this attitude, which is in striking contrast with the policy of the statesmen of the eighteenth century when faced with an analogous problem, there were several practical reasons which we shall do well to understand. In judging the motives of economic policy in past ages we are even more apt to be misled by modern analogies than we are in estimating its effects. We see that in our own day most of the legislative protection accorded to those who are economically weak has been produced by a combination of two causes, the political enfranchisement of the wage-earning classes and the spread of humanitarian sentiment. We know that in the sixteenth century the first cause was absent and the second was feeble. The Macchiavellis of that iron age were neither democrats nor philanthropists; and when they avow a policy of protecting the weaker classes in society against economic evils we are inclined to think with Professor Thorold Rogers that they are merely hypocritical. But this analogy is a false light. To be influenced by it is to confuse political power with its symbols, and to forget that the economic importance of a class may be a more effective claim to the interest of Governments than the ballot-box. Under the Tudors there were strong practical reasons for protecting the peasantry which are not felt to the same extent to-day. The modern State has so specialised its organs that its maintenance is quite compatible with the existence of the extremes of poverty, not only among the exceptionally unfortunate, but among those whose position is not more insecure than that of their neighbours. They may be able neither to fight, nor to take part in public duties, nor to contribute much to the Exchequer. But if their incompetence is a menace, it is a menace which is not felt till after the lapse of generations, a menace the fulfilment of which no single life is long enough to behold. For the State hires specialists to fight, and specialists to keep order; indeed, the poorer they are, the more cheaply it can obtain their services. Its local government is conducted mainly by specialised officials, and the concentration of wealth makes possible a concentration of taxation. The extension of political power has been accompanied by a subdivision of political functions, which has diminished the importance of the individual citizen, and turned him, as far as the routine of Government is concerned, into a sleeping partner, whose consent is necessary, but whose active co-operation is superfluous.

For the manner in which the British army is recruited by starvation, see Mr. Cyril Jackson's Report on Boy Labour to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, Cd. 4632, pp. 166-168.

Now we need not point out that this would be as fair a description of large classes of persons in the sixteenth century as it is now, and that the day labourer and handicraftsman who "are to be ruled and not to rule" were, as a class, far more completely beneath the consideration of statesmen than they are at the present day. But we are concerned with the landholding population, not with the landless wage-earner, and in the slightly differentiated state of our period both economic and political conditions made a decline in the standard of life among a class so important as the peasantry a danger which might cause the most authoritarian of Governments to be confronted with very grave practical difficulties. It might find itself unable to raise an effective military force. The States of Continental Europe had introduced standing armies. But England relied mainly on the shire levies, and the shire levies were recruited from the small farmers. Just as the lord of a manor in the North of England, whose tenants held by border service with horse and harness, was anxious to prevent the decline in their numbers which landlords elsewhere were welcoming, so the Government regarded with quite genuine dismay an agrarian movement which seemed to threaten its military resources by impoverishing the finest fighting material in the country. Shadow, Feeble, and Wart may "fill a pit as well as better"; but to make good infantry it requires not "housed beggars," but "men bred in some free and plentiful manner." One Depopulation Statute after another recites how "the defence of this land against our enemies outward is enfeebled and impaired." In the settlement of the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace the Government took care to instruct its officials to see that the Northumbrian tenants, on whom the defence of the border depended, "should be put in comfort, that no more shall be exacted with gyrsums and like charges, instead of which they shall be ready with horse and harness when required." In 1601 Cecil crushed a proposal to repeal the acts then in force against depopulation by pointing out that the majority of the militia levies were ploughmen. And in the instructions for the choice of persons to be enrolled in the trained bands which were issued by the Government of Charles I., particular care was taken to emphasise that they were not to be selected at haphazard, but were to be drawn from the families of the gentry, freeholders, and substantial farmers.

Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., chap. xxiv.

4 Henry VII., c. 19.

Gairdner, L. and P. Hen. VIII., xii., I. p. 595.

D'Ewes' Journal, p. 674: "Mr. Secretary Cecil said, '... I think that whosoever doth not maintain the plough destroys this kingdom.... I am sure when warrants go from the Council for levying of men in the counties, and the certificates be returned unto us again, we find the greatest part of them to be ploughmen.'" See also on this point Appendix I., Nos. iv., v., vi., and viii.

Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society (1909), p. 144.

This cogent reason for intervening to protect the peasantry was supported by another which was not less convincing. The classes who suffered most from enclosure were important from a fiscal, as well as a military, point of view. In the simple economic life of that age the connection between the output of wealth and the individual worker's opportunities for production and standard of subsistence, if not more important than to-day, was certainly more patent to observation. "The hole welth of the body of the realm cometh out of the labours and works of the common peple ... a riche welthy body of a realm maketh a riche welthy king, and a poore feble body of a realm must needs make a poore weak feble king." In our period "pauvre paysans pauvre royaume, pauvre royaume pauvre roi" was a statement not of any recondite theory, but of an obvious economic fact, and one can hardly be mistaken in supposing that part of the favour which sixteenth century Governments were inclined to show the small farmer was due to the fact that the methods of taxation in use made him important as a source of revenue. To a State which relies largely for its supplies on a direct declaration of income, it is indifferent whether the total assessable income is made up of a few large or many small ones; indeed if the tax be a progressive one, most will be got from the former. But look at the way in which taxation is raised in the sixteenth century. The chief direct tax is the subsidy. A typical subsidy, for example that of the first year of Elizabeth, is assessed partly on the capital value of property, including farm and trade stock and household furniture, partly on the yearly profits of land. When a village of small and fairly prosperous cultivators is wiped out to make room for a large and sparsely populated estate, will the Government get as large a revenue from direct taxation as before? A modern reader may very well answer "Yes." The motive of converting land to pasture is to increase the profits of agriculture. If they are increased, does not this mean a corresponding increase in the taxable wealth of the country? Now to inquire how far one can assume in any age that the personal interests of landlords will lead to land being put to its most productive use would take us far beyond the scope of this essay, and it is unnecessary for our present purpose. For, as far as our period is concerned, the answer is certainly wrong. Apart from the subtler reactions of the agrarian changes upon social welfare, there is then no such identity between the economic interests of the landlord and the economic interests of the State. Speaking broadly, the former consist in securing the largest net income, the latter in securing the largest gross product. And these two things are by no means necessarily found together. If a pasture farm managed by a shepherd and his dog is substituted by an enclosing proprietor for several score of families living by tillage, the rent roll of the estate can hardly fail to be increased, for the value of wool is so high, and the cost of sheep-farming so low, that the net income from which rent can be paid is large. But subsidies are assessed on property, not only on income; and on personal as well as real property. A rise in rents is quite compatible with a falling off in the gross produce of the land, and the conversion of an estate from arable to pasture, by displacing tenants, means a diminution in the farm stock and household property which has hitherto contributed towards the revenue.

Pauli, Drei volkswirthshaftliche Denkscriften, How to Reform the Realm in Setting Men to Work to restore Tillage: "The kynge and his lordes have nede to mynyster right ordre of common wele; or els they must needs destroy their own wealth by the very ordenaince of God, for they are upholden and borne upon the body. Yf they will be riche, they must first see all common people have riches."

1 Eliz. cap. xxi. Prothero Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558-1625. Two subsidies of 1s. 8d. and 1s. were imposed on "every pound, as well in coin, ... as also plate, stock of merchandises, all manner of corn and blades, household stuff, and of all other goods moveable," and two subsidies of 2s. 8d. and 1s. 4d. on the "yearly profits" of land.

Lest such a view should seem unduly theoretical, let us hasten to add that it is one which is endorsed by the authority of contemporaries. When subsidies are being debated in the House of Commons members complain that, while the wealthy are under-assessed, the small men pay more than their share. Political writers from Fortescue to Bacon emphasise the fact that the ability of the country to bear taxation depends on the maintenance of a high level of prosperity among the yeomanry. The yeoman is a man who "makes a whole line in the subsidy book." "The weight thereof," says a pamphleteer in 1647, "falls heavily ... especially upon the yeomanry." The occasional glimpses which we get of harassed collectors trying in vain to screw taxes out of small farmers, whom a rise in rents or a bad season has plunged in distress, show the truth of their accounts. In the reign of Edward VI. subsidies cannot be collected on the northern border owing to the oppression to which some of the tenants have been subjected. From Norfolk in 1628 comes a still more melancholy tale. "The ffarmors and such as use Husbandrye and tilth," write the Commissioners of the subsidy to the Government, "from whom in times past was accustomed to be drawne the greatest part of ye money leviable by way of subsidye, present unto us their pitiful estates, growen into decay through the base price and noe vent in these later years for their corne ... that some of them doo owe unto their landlordes two yeares rent, many of them one years.... All which considered we much feare that the collectors shall not gather in the monye soe speedily as they would or we desire." The truth is that so much of the wealth of the country had been in the hands of the more prosperous among the small cultivators that any decline in their position was likely to place the Governments of our period in financial straits. They regard it with the self-interested apprehension which modern statesmen feel lest capital should be "driven abroad." Hence there was a strong fiscal motive for protecting the rural classes. Rebels who pointed out that "A man can have no more of a cat but the skin; that is the King can have no more of us than we have, which in a manner he has already," or tenants who urged the Crown to protect them on the ground that "they paie your Majesty subsidies, fifteens, and loans," were using language which the impecunious Government of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could understand much better than appeals to humanitarian sentiment. The military, financial, and political importance of the yeomanry was, in fact, great enough to make them one of the classes with whom the defence and order of the country were identified, and therefore sufficient to make them an object of solicitude to statesmen who were concerned with national interests.

D'Ewes' Journal, p. 633. "Sir Walter Raleigh said ... 'Call you this par iugum when a poor man pays as much as a rich, and peradventure his estate is no better than he is set at, or little better; when our estates, that be thirty or forty pounds in the queen's books, are not the hundredth part of our wealth?'"

Fortescue, On the Governance of England, chap. xii.: "The reaume off Ffraunce givith never ffrely off thair owne good will any subsidie to thair prince, because the commons thereoff be so pouere.... But owre commons be riche, and therefore thai give to thair kynge as somme tymes quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte tymes other grete subsidies."

Bacon, History of King Henry VII. (Pitt Press Series), pp. 70-71: "The more gentlemen, ever the lower book of subsidies."

Fuller, The Holy and Profane State.

The Standard of Equality in Subsidiary Taxes and Payments, London, 1647.

S. P. D. Ed. VI., Addenda IV., p. 26: "Subsidies and duties must be levied on that border for your service, and they are loosed by oppression of your officers."

Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907, pp. 139-140.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xi. 1244. See the remarks about Cromwell: "Item, the false flatterer says he will make the king the richest prince in Christendom.... I think he goes about to make him the poorest."

See Appendix I., iv.

Economic policies are not to be explained in terms of economics alone. When an old and strong society is challenged by a new phenomenon, its response is torn from a living body of assumptions as to the right conduct of human affairs, which feels that more than material interests are menaced, and which braces itself anxiously against the shock. The swift agrarian changes of the sixteenth century differ from the swifter changes of the eighteenth, in that enlightened opinion is, on the whole, against them, and that even the technical experts feel misgivings. If the attitude of statesmen is to be explained by the practical reasons which have already been given, the opposition of men like More, Latimer, Crowley, Starkey, and Hales seemed to themselves a plain matter of morals. In Germany Luther denounced the revolting peasants. In England those who in ecclesiastical matters were poles apart united in a plea for economic conservatism. Leading reformers preach and write against enclosing; and terrified landlords complain that "none ever spake so vilely as these so-called commonwealths." Their understanding of the technique of the agrarian changes is often deficient. Like the Carlyles and Ruskins of a later age, they make Philistia merry with their sad blunders over economic details. But it would be a mistake to regard their views of the social effects of enclosing as abnormal or sentimental. They are the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by the old agrarian order, the cry of a spirit which is departing, and which, in its agony, utters words that are a shining light for all periods of change.

Letter to Mr. Cecill from Sir Anthony Auchar, quoted by Russell, Ket's Rebellion, in Norfolk, p. 202.

Several paths of argument lead to their position. There is the traditional importance of tillage. It is a "foundation industry," an industry from which four-fifths of the people directly or indirectly get their living. English Governments have always shown it special favour. Its maintenance is almost part of the common law of the land. And it is right that it should be so. For the partition which separates men from starvation is thin, and if tillage fails how shall the people be fed? The Government insists on a certain minimum area being under the plough for exactly the same reason that the city of Coventry, when it is in the grip of a bad harvest, decides to break up part of its common pastures for wheat. All men are agreed that the price of food ought to be fixed by authority, and one cannot control prices unless one can control supplies. There is the argument from social functions. The State is a community of classes. Between classes there must be inequality, for each has a different function, fighting, or merchandise, or handicraft, or husbandry. Unless there is inequality between classes no class can perform its duties or (strange thought) enjoy its rights. But one class must not encroach upon the livelihood of another. If we will not have villein blood on the Council, neither will we let gentlemen take into their hands the holdings of their tenants. For this means that one limb of the body politic drains nourishment from another limb, and that men drop into a superfluous residuum from which the State gets no profit. And within a class there should be substantial equality. When one man has the livelihoods of two must not another man go without any living at all? There is the argument from economic morality. In every bargain there is the possibility of oppression. The unscrupulous man makes the most of this. He regards only his own profit. He is "a great taker of advantages." This is the sin of the usurer, the bodger, and the tyrannous landlord, and of this bad trinity the last is the worst. To oppress men by rack-renting land is particularly detestable. For though in all contracts there is certainly (if only it can be found!) an objective standard of value, yet a man may with reason be in doubt as to what is fair price to charge for an article the value of which has not been fixed by authority. But he can hardly be in doubt as to what is a fair rent. The fair rent is the usual rent; equity is custom. There is the argument from the very nature of the bond between tenant and landlord. Tenure is no longer as sacred a thing as once it was, and, even if it were, men who are legally the descendants of right-less villeins could not easily appeal to its sanctity. But opinion feels that there is something despicably sordid in using this particular relation as a financial engine. Though surveyors' economics are as notorious as lawyers' justice, even one of that detested class can preface his business-like account of western manors with words idealising the conditions which have "knit such a knot of colaterall amytie between the Lords and the tenants that the lord tendered his tenants as his childe, and the tenants again loved the lord as naturally as the childe his father." The bond between landlord and tenant is perhaps, indeed, the only economic relationship which has ever yet stirred the affection of large masses of men. It has done so because it has been in the past so much more than economic. The pitiful cry of that nameless old man to whose care Shakespeare commits the blinded Gloucester, "O my good lord, I have been your tenant, and your father's tenant, these fourscore years," is the voice of an attachment which once was real. In the sixteenth century the tie of tenure is still the symbol of greater things, and the wrench which is given it by the partial commercialising of agriculture seems to portend more ruinous innovations. Most men make the State in the image of their own village, or city, or business. It is perhaps not an unfair description of one side of the social philosophy of our period to say that a manor is still a "little commonwealth," the kingdom still the greatest of manors. If the lord holds from the King, does not the tenant hold from his lord by as good a right? If the tenant who encroaches on his neighbour's strips is checked by the manorial court, should not the lord who depopulates half a village be checked by the King in his High Court of Parliament? If gentlemen oppress yeomen, how can they "live together as they be joined in one body politic under the King?"

Miss Leonard (Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series vol. xix.) quotes Coke, Institutes, Book III., p. 105 (1644 ed.), and S. P. D. Chas. I., clxxxvii., No. 95: "The decay of tillage and houses of husbandry are the undoubted causes and grounds of depopulation, and a crime against the Common Laws of this Realm, and every continuance thereof is a new crime." But the words "against the Common Laws" are hardly to be interpreted strictly.

S. P. D. Eliz., vol. cclxxxvi., Nos. 19 and 20: "He is a great taker of advantages. He granted a lease to his brother, who dying a year past, he sued his brother's wife to overthrow the lease to the undoing of her and her children." For a strong expression of these views see Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part II., 1575, Nov. 20. Lord North to the Bishop of Ely: "My lord, it wilbe no pleasure for you to have hir Majestye and the Councell knowe howe wretchedly yowe live within and without your house, howe extremely covetous, how great a grazier, how marvellous a dayrye man, howe ritche a farmer, how grete an owner. It will not lyke yowe that the world knowe of your decayed houses, ... of the leases you pull violently from many, of the copyeholdes that yowe lawlesslye enter into, of the fre land that yowe wrongfully posese.... Yowe suffer no man to live longer under yowe than yowe lyke him."

Norden, The Surveyor's Dialogue, p. 1: "Farmer, I have heard much evill of the profession, and to tell you my conceit plainly I think the same both evill and unprofitable ... and oftentime you are the cause that men lose their land and sometimes they are abridged of such liberties as they have long used in mannors."

Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.

Norden, op. cit.: "And is not every mannor a little commonwealth, whereof the tenants are the members, the land the body, and the lord the head?"

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 98, Instructions to the Duke of Norfolk.

It is true that it is just these ideas which in our period are on their trial, and that if one were to seek the watershed where the mediæval theory of land tenure, as something contingent on the fulfilment of obligations, parts company from modern conceptions of ownership, as conferring an unlimited right to unconditional disposal by the owner, one would find it in the century and a half between 1500 and the final abolition of feudal tenures in 1660. The combination of forces both economic and political making for a change of attitude is unmistakable; on the one hand the severance of the personal relationship of tenure through the development of the great leasehold farm, the breaking up of the customary routine of cultivation through the increasing dependence of agriculture on the market, the general revision of contracts brought about through the fall in the value of money; on the other hand the enormous redistribution of landed property through the confiscation of monastic and gild endowments, the consequent creation of a new aristocracy ready to apply commercial ideas to land tenure, the desire of proprietors to escape from the obnoxious feudal incidents and of the Crown to find some more lucrative substitute for them. But the decay of the older conceptions goes on very slowly. The Government is on the whole on the conservative side; for naturally it has to work on the material to hand, and the best hope of maintaining order lies in the preservation of fixed customary relationships between the different classes in society. Its instinct is therefore still to treat the control and disposition of land as to a special degree a question of public policy, in regard to which landlords are bound "rather to consider what is agreeable ... to the use of the state and for the good of the commonwealth, than to seeke the utmost profit which a landlord for his particular advantage may take among his tenants."

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xxvii. p. 129. Letter from the Council to William Harman, Esq.

(b) Legislation and Administration

This was its instinct. But can we say more than this? Can we say that the presumption in favour of protecting the small landholder was translated into any definite policy, and that such a policy was carried out in practice? The answer to these questions is by no means easily given. There is the difficulty of making any generalisation which will cover the century and a half during which, from time to time, the agrarian problem claimed public attention. True, this difficulty is not so serious as might at first sight appear, or as it would be in an age of swiftly changing ideas. The political historian may treat the Tudors as one period and the first two Stuarts as another. But the economist finds much the same views on economic matters obtaining under Charles I. as under Henry VIII., and much the same administrative system to carry them out. There is in our period no marked change in responsible opinion upon the enclosing movement. The Commission which deals with the subject in 1607 shows the same attitude as the Commission of 1517. Enclosers are fined in 1637 as they have been fined in the reign of James I. But the opinion which counts is not always responsible opinion. During the six years which intervene between the death of Henry VIII. and the accession of Philip and Mary the Government is in the hands of the great landlords,--landlords who have built up their fortunes out of the spoils of the monasteries, and whom no authority is strong enough to check. By a curious chance the first head of the Government is a man who is an agrarian reformer by conviction. But, when he falls, his colleagues throw over his policy, and turn savagely to the work of crushing out the very possibility of organised protest among the peasantry. These years, the so-called reign of Edward VI., will be an exception to whatever conclusions may be reached as to the policy of the State under the Tudors and the first two Stuarts. Again, there is the difficulty, the great difficulty, of saying how far the interference of Governments is successful even when they honestly desire it to have effect. The modern assumption, which is sometimes all too sanguine, is that a Law is being carried out unless it is proved that it is not. For the sixteenth century there are those who would say that we must assume that a Law is not being administered unless it is proved that it is, and, though scepticism is sometimes pushed to absurd lengths, one certainly cannot build much on the letter of Acts of Parliament. But how exacting are our tests of effective administration to be? All will agree that in our period the mere enacting of a Statute causes and cures very little, unless special efforts are applied to making it work. But is a peremptory order from the Council to the Justices of the Peace, or to the Council of the North, to redress this or that grievance among tenants, a proof that the grievance will be redressed? Or must we be content with nothing less than a record of cases actually handled? If we decline to believe in the efficacy of any economic legislation about which we have not a full list of decisions, we shall have little left to rely on. The famous Statute of Artificers will look shaky, and so will the legislation with regard to prices and quality. Perhaps a reasonable view would be to look askance at mere Acts of Parliament, but to accept action, or orders to take action, on the part of the executive authorities, as a proof that the law is being applied in practice.

Of the Statutes prohibiting the conversion of arable to pasture we need not, then, say much. The long series of Acts which were passed between 1489 and 1597 show little originality. They were at bottom simply a series of great manorial customaries framed to apply to the whole country, or to all parts of the country which were not expressly excepted from their operation, an attempt to maintain the status quo obtaining at any time by laying down for the whole country a common rule of cultivation of much the same kind as had been in the past maintained by local customs. They did not prohibit enclosure as such, but they proceeded on the assumption that a fixed proportion of the land, usually the average of a certain number of years preceding the Act, ought to be under the plough, and that the small cultivator's farm accommodation should be maintained or renewed at the expense of the landlord. They differed only in the methods used to achieve this end. The Statutes before 1550 usually insisted merely on the reconversion of pasture land to tillage, the re-edification of decayed houses of husbandry, and the limitation to 2000 of the sheep to be kept by any one farmer. They relied on most unpromising machinery. Like the ancient Statute of Mortmain, they tried to make the feudal contract the means for enforcing the law, by empowering superior lords to take half the profits of mesne lords and tenants who infringed it. The Statutes after 1550 were somewhat bolder in their experiments. The most important departure was the provision, first introduced into the Statutes of 1552 and 1555, for the creation of permanent bodies of Commissioners to do the work which, when most landlords were anxious to enclose, no landlord would undertake. Under the Statute of 1555, subsequently declared "too mild and gentle," but on the face of it a drastic measure, the Commissioners were empowered both to bind over offenders to rebuild decayed houses, to plough up pasture land, and to fix the judicial rents which had been demanded by the peasantry and suggested by certain reformers. It was repealed (together with the Statutes of 1536 and 1552) in 1563, the Act of that year confirming the earlier Acts passed in the reign of Henry VIII., and requiring all land which had been under the plough for four successive years since 1529 to be kept in tillage, on pain of a fine of 10s. per acre for all land converted to pasture contrary to the Act. In 1589 a Statute was passed for the protection of cottagers, prohibiting the letting of cottages to agricultural labourers with less than four acres of land attached. In 1593 it was thought that sufficient land was in tillage to make the maintenance of legislation on the subject unnecessary, and the clause in the Act of 1563, which forbade conversion to pasture, was repealed. But the result seems to have been a recrudescence of the movement for converting arable land to pasture, with the result that in 1597 two more Acts were passed, both of which adopted the expedient of setting up a special authority, apart from the ordinary machinery of local government, to enforce the Act, by empowering the Lord Chancellor to nominate bodies of Commissioners. The first enacted that all houses of husbandry decayed within seven years preceding the Act, and half of those decayed within seven years before that, were to be rebuilt and let, the former with not less than 40 acres, and the latter with not less than 20 acres, of land. It also took the significant step of expressly sanctioning the consolidation of intermixed holdings by way of exchange between lord and tenants, or between one tenant and another. The second applied only to twenty-five counties, where, presumably, enclosing had proceeded furthest or was most disastrous in its effects. It enacted that all land converted from tillage to pasture since 1558 should be reconverted within three years, if it had been under the plough for twelve years immediately preceding conversion, and that land which had been in tillage for twelve years preceding the Act should remain in tillage, the penalty for disobedience being a fine of 20s. per acre. These two Acts escaped the general repeal of the laws against depopulation which took place in 1624, and remained on the Statute Book till the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863.

A useful list of these Acts, with a summary of their provisions, is given by Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, Appendix D.

4 Henry VII., c. 19. All occupiers of twenty acres and more which have been in tillage during three years preceding the Act to maintain tillage.

6 Henry VIII., c. 5, and 7 Henry VIII., c. 1. In parishes "whereof the more part was or were used and occupied to tillage and husbandry," any person who "shall decay a town, a hamlet, a house of husbandry, or convert tillage into pasture," and has not "within one yeere next after such wylfull decaye reedifyed and made ageyn mete and convenyent for people to dwell and inhabyte the same ... and therein to exercyse husbandry and tillage," forfeits one half of his land to the lord of the manor. Land converted to pasture must be tilled "after the maner and usage of the countrey where the seyd land lyeth."

25 Henry VIII., c. 13.

5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 5.

2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 2.

5 Elizabeth, c. 2.

31 Elizabeth, c. 7.

35 Elizabeth, c. 7.

39 Elizabeth, c. 1 and c. 2.

The Statutes are evidence of a state of opinion. To judge how far that opinion wrote itself on the world of affairs we must look elsewhere. Nor are they in themselves very interesting. The genius of sixteenth century statesmanship lay in administration not in legislation. It dwelt not in Parliament but in the Council, and in those administrative courts, the Court of Star Chamber, the Court of Requests, the Council of the North, the Council of Wales, which were the Privy Council's organs. In studying economic questions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, one is met at every turn by the apparatus of special administrative jurisdictions, which was built up by the Tudors, and which fell to pieces with the final rupture between the Crown and Parliament. On the one hand, they supply the control and stimulus in matters of detailed administration, without which all legislation designed to regulate shifting economic relationships, or running counter to the prejudices of a powerful class, is doomed to be ineffective. Are the Justices of the Peace lax in carrying out the Statutes for the relief of the poor and punishment of vagrants? The Council will remonstrate. Have they omitted to assess wages and fix prices? The Council will let them know that their neglect has been noted at headquarters and that it must be corrected. Are capitalists in the clothing counties dismissing workmen in times of trade depression? The Council will direct the justices to read them a lesson on the duty of employers to their operatives and to the State, and threaten them with a summons to Whitehall unless they mend their ways. A stream of correspondence pours into London from the Government's agents in the counties--returns as to the supplies of wheat available for consumption, applications for permission to license the export of food-stuffs, statistics as to prices, information as to unemployment, information as to vagrancy based on a "day-count" of vagabonds. The Council digests it, and sends out its mandates to continue this and alter that, to raise wages or reduce prices, to inspect granaries, punish middlemen, whip sturdy rogues, relieve the poor. Bad means of communication, scanty and inaccurate intelligence, incompetent local officials, prevent administration from running smoothly; and as the Civil War approaches incompetence becomes recalcitrance. Nevertheless the engine is a powerful one, and up to a year or two before the meeting of the Long Parliament its throb is felt throughout the country.

Such a system of centralised supervision, which can meet emergencies with promptitude, and can adjust regulations to the varying needs of different years and different localities, is a necessity in any society where economic relationships are made the object of authoritative control. Under the Tudors and first two Stuarts the Council does much that is done to-day by several State departments--the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Board of Education, the Local Government Board, the Home Office, as well as much that is left to Private Bill legislation. But the Council is, of course, much more than an executive organ. It is also a court of law. It does not only make rules, it punishes people for breaking them. Sometimes it exercises jurisdiction itself. More often, at any rate in the cases arising out of the economic questions with which we are chiefly concerned, it issues an order, and leaves the punishment of breaches of it to the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests. Into the controversy as to the constitutional position of these courts we need not enter; we need only point out their extreme importance as buttresses of the Government's control over economic affairs. Both in personnel and procedure they were admirably qualified to be the instruments of a thorough system of State intervention in matters of industry and agriculture. Both of them were committees of the Council, and in both the governmental predominated over the judicial element, the two judges who attended the Court of Star Chamber, and the Masters of Requests who sat in the Court of Requests, being in the position rather of legal advisers or assessors than of judicial authorities. In theory the former court dealt with criminal, the latter with civil cases. But in an age when the majority of the populace were armed, a dispute was extremely likely to terminate in a riot, and in practice there were subjects on which complaints came before either court indifferently. They dispensed with a jury. They took account of equitable considerations which had no place in the common law courts. They were guided by reasons of State, not by the letter of the law, and would punish behaviour as contrary to public policy. For the execution of their rulings they used not only the ordinary officers of the law, the Justices of the Peace, but also special bodies of Commissioners.

Whatever may have been the abuses of this system of administrative jurisdictions, one can easily understand that it was well fitted to deal with the agrarian problem. It is seen at its worst in ecclesiastical matters. It is seen at its best in protecting the poorer classes against economic tyranny; and we shall fail to understand the popularity of the Tudor Governments unless we lay as much emphasis on the good side as on the bad. The Court of Requests in particular is a popular court, a court which punishes the rich, a court which brings, in the words of the aristocratic chronicler, "many an honest man to trouble and vexacion," a court to which the poor "compleyned without number." The notorious difficulty of getting a verdict from a jury of tenants who are liable to eviction means that a landlord can break the law with impunity. Here are courts before which the intimidator can be intimidated; courts which will handle him "on that sort, that what courage soever he hath, his heart will fall to the grounde." The enormous importance of manorial custom in determining the fate of all classes of peasants, except the freeholders, makes it certain that grave injustice will be done to vested interests by any court which confines itself to the strict letter of the law. The Council will direct that "such order be taken in the matter as in justyce and equitie shall appertayn." The mere fact that its ruling is not simply the verdict of a court but the command of the Government, increases the probability that it will receive due attention from those whose duty it is to enforce it. The landlord who has enclosed may be the very man who hears the peasant's complaint. The Council will interfere to insist on the local authorities taking "a more indifferent course."

Hall's Chronicle of Henry VIII., p. 585 (Edition 1809), quoted by Leadam, introduction to Select Cases in the Court of Requests (Selden Society).

Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. III., chap. iv.

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xiii. pp. 91-92.

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xxx. pp. 36-37. A letter to the Council in the Marches of Wales, concerning the tenants of Aston in Montgomeryshire: "And if it be true, as they do inform us by their petitions, that examinations in a case concerning one of that Counsell should be taken by a kinsman of his owne and a clerk underneathe him, wee wyshe ... that you would have taken a more indifferent course, especially in a matter of commons, which, concerning many persons, doth easily give occasion of offence and scandal."

The activity of the Government in matters of land was not so incessant as it was in the regulation of prices and the administration of the Poor Laws; for its land policy was strongly opposed to the interests of the country gentry who were its officials, and it had to proceed with caution. If we except the first great Commission appointed by Wolsey in 1517, the periods in which it was especially energetic in dealing with the land question were three, the years between 1536 and 1549, the years from 1607 to 1618, the years from 1630 to 1636; and on each of these three occasions there was some temporary cause to explain its peculiar zeal--on the two first the revolts of the peasantry, and on the last the rise in the price of grain, which suggested that an unduly small proportion of the land was under tillage. Nevertheless it handles individual cases with considerable frequency throughout the whole period from 1517 to 1640. Usually it acts as a final court of appeal, which intervenes only when other means of redress have broken down, and it is sometimes at pains to explain to offended landlords that it does not intend to debar them from asserting their rights at Common Law, if they can. Its aim is to stop very gross cases of oppression, to prevent the peasants being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to induce landlords to take a larger view of their responsibilities, to settle disputes by the use of common sense and moral pressure. It steps in when the tenants are poor men who are being ruined by vexatious lawsuits, or when enclosure is thought likely to produce disorder, or to forbid a landlord to take action pending a decision by the courts. It has to hear many cases touching copyholders and many touching commons; for no one is quite certain as to the legal rights of copyholders, and in the matter of commons there is a fearful gulf between law and equity. Occasionally in the reign of Henry VIII., and even in that of Elizabeth, it deals with cases of villeinage. But these, though more numerous than might have been supposed, are nevertheless rare, for the principal economic evils of the period consist not in the revival of old claims, but in the new competitive conditions of agriculture. The treatment of the latter is by no means a simple matter--even the strong Governments of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth will not lightly thrust forceful fingers into the mysterious custom-bound recesses of the manor--and when we have said that on the whole the bias of the Tudor and early Stuart statesmen is against revolutionary changes that damage the peasants, we can say little more without citing individual cases of interference.

Let us look shortly at the more striking among them. The famous Commission upon enclosure appointed by Wolsey in 1517 set a precedent to be followed in several subsequent inquiries, and has left us an invaluable body of information as to the nature and extent of the enclosing movement. It was, however, by no means the first example of the Government intervening in the agrarian problem, and the partial reconversion of pasture to arable, which seems to have resulted from its labours, still left an urgent need for a continuous supervision of the relations between landlord and tenant by some tribunal sufficiently independent to do justice to the weaker party. In 1494 the earliest proceedings in the interminable case of John Mulsho v. the inhabitants of Thingden ended in the Court of Star Chamber (the same court was dealing with the same matter in 1538) with a decree in favour of the tenants. In 1510 the same body was dealing with a quarrel between the Abbot and the copyholders of Peterborough, and in 1516 with a complaint from the inhabitants of Draycote and Stoke Gifford that the lord of the manor had evicted copyholders, stopped up rights of way, and enclosed common land. The policy of Wolsey is sufficiently indicated by the active campaign which he set on foot against depopulation, and requires no further illustration. But it is interesting to observe that his attitude towards the agrarian question was not a mere personal idiosyncrasy, and that it was the same in all essential particulars as that of his successor. Thomas Cromwell must bear the blame for part of the agrarian distress which prevailed during the closing years of Henry VIII. and the reign of Edward VI.; for that distress was enhanced by the wild land speculation which followed the secularisation of the monastic estates. In that age, however, such indirect social reactions of their policy were matters quite beneath the consideration of statesmen, and the fact that the Government was responsible for changes which operated most disastrously on the established order of rural society did not prevent administrative interference to impede agrarian innovations from going on to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. Indeed the King, influenced no doubt by the fear that agrarian agitation might add fuel to religious discontent, seems himself to have taken some interest in the matter. In 1534 one finds Cromwell writing to congratulate him on the passage through the House of Commons of a Bill providing that no man shall keep more than 2000 sheep, and that one-eighth of every farmer's land shall always remain in tillage, "The most profitable and most benefycyall thing that ever was done to this the commonwealthe of your realm;" and in the following year there is a letter from Cromwell to Rich directing him to apprise the Duke of Suffolk of the King's displeasure at the decay of certain towns which the Duke had promised to repair. The agrarian grievances expressed in the Pilgrimage of Grace were admitted, and in the instructions issued to the officers who were appointed to restore order in the disaffected counties special directions were included to throw open enclosures, and to reduce the excessive fines charged to tenants on admission to their holdings. In the years immediately following the same policy was pursued in other parts of the country. In 1538 the Earl of Derby writes to Cromwell protesting against the pressure put upon him to reinstate seven tenants whom he has turned out. In 1540 a landlord in the Isle of Wight is compelled to restore to their holdings some recently evicted tenants. In 1541 several cases come before the Council. It appoints a Commission to investigate the case of a Northamptonshire landlord who has prevented the tenants of Brigstock from feeding their pigs, calves, and sheep, by cutting up part of a common wood "into several pastures for his own private use and benefit." It meets a complaint from the borderers of the Forest of Dartmoor that the owner of the lands of the monastery of Buckfast is breaking the statute which required the lands of dissolved abbeys to be farmed in the traditional way, by excluding them from the common, with a decision upholding the tenants' case and with the appointment of Commissioners to carry out the award. It sets a certain choleric Sir Nicholas Poyntz, who has dared to procure the imprisonment of a tenant for proceeding against him before the Council, to cool his temper in the Fleet, and when he comes out compels him to grant his victim a new farm in exchange for one which he has surrendered, to reduce his rent from 20s. to 6s., and to pay him forty marks as compensation for his "damages and travailles." In 1543 the tenants of Abbots Ripton lay a complaint in the Court of Requests against Sir John St. John on the ground that, in addition to other acts of oppression, he has entered forcibly on their holdings. Sir John replies that they are not copyholders, but merely tenants at will, who are unprotected by any immemorial custom, and after an examination of the manor rolls the court holds that he is right. But the legal insecurity of the tenants does not prevent them from getting protection. The court requires their landlord to grant them leases for years at reasonable rents, and orders that the property which he has distrained shall be restored.

Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, edited by Leadam, and Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684-696.

Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684-696.

Ibid.

Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, vol. i. p. 273.

Ibid., vol. i. p. 413.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 98 and 595.

Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xiii., I., 334 (see also 66, where an appeal is made January 11, 1536, to Cromwell to protect some tenants in Denbighshire.)

Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, vol. vii. p. 42: "The King's pleasure was signified to John Dawney, Knight, that whereas he had turned certain persons in the Isle of Wight out of their farms, whereof they pretended to have leases, and had demised the same to others that minded not to dwell upon the same, he should take order that the old tenants might enjoy their leases until Michaelmas, come a twelve month, and that in the mean season the King's Highness would see a direction taken in the matter."

Ibid., vol. vii. pp. 225-226. July 30 and August 1, 1541.

Ibid., vol. vii. pp. 123-125. January 25, 1541.

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. i. pp. 5 and 9.

Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684-696.

With the Protectorate of Somerset we enter upon a period of more violent agitation and more drastic expedients. There was a large difference between using the jurisdiction of the Council to redress individual cases of hardship and a deliberate attempt to effect a general settlement of the land question upon lines which would do substantial justice to the peasants. The former course involved no perilous assertion of principles, and could be pursued under the guise of a purely conservative policy, merely by referring disputes between landlords and tenants to the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests, which, though in fact administrative and governmental bodies, were none the less protected to some extent against criticism by wearing the appearance of mere legal tribunals. The latter might, perhaps, have been attempted with some faint hope of success, if statesmen had been much more careful than they were to discriminate between the different aspects of the problem with which they were confronted. To us, who look back on the situation from a distance of three and a half centuries, it seems that the one guiding thread, which might have led some way through the welter of confusion, was offered by the sharp distinction drawn by Hales between those enclosures which were made by the exchange and consolidation of strips, with a view to better husbandry, and those which had as their effect the conversion of arable land to pasture, the monopolising of commons, and the eviction of tenants. The arguments in favour of the first type of enclosure were too cogent for any policy which condemned enclosing in general to have the smallest prospect of success. The only possibility of averting the ruin to the peasantry which accompanied depopulation lay in encouraging them generally to follow the example of their brothers in Kent, Essex, Devonshire, and Cornwall, who had for centuries been substituting a more progressive husbandry for the "mingle mangle" of the open fields, without the disastrous consequences entailed by the spread of capitalist agriculture in other parts of the South and Midlands. But such a frank encouragement of certain kinds of enclosure for the sake of repressing others implied an appreciation of the economics of the problem to which comparatively few persons in our period had attained, and was quite beyond the grasp of Governments, which, at their worst, as under Warwick, were quite indifferent to the sufferings of the poorer classes, and, at their best, conceived public interests to be served best by a strict maintenance of customary conditions. Somerset's policy of deliberately restoring ancient relationships with a strong hand could hardly even be begun without those who pursued it taking sides in a bitter economic agitation, and essaying openly to reverse the whole agrarian movement with which, in the course of the past half century, the wealth of the middle and upper classes, at any rate south of the Trent, had become inextricably identified. It involved in fact a return to the policy of Wolsey, and a return to it under conditions which made Wolsey's policy doubly hard to carry out, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the position of Somerset as temporary head of a jealous aristocracy was far weaker than that of the omnipotent Cardinal, and, on the other hand, the lapse of twenty years had seen the growth of a generation to which enclosures were a vested interest.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of the whole agrarian episode between the death of Henry VIII. and the fall of Somerset as the mere freak of a misguided doctrinaire. If we can see difficulties which he did not, if we can smile at the thought of any Government at once so incompetent, and but for Somerset himself, so entirely selfish, carrying out a great conservative revolution in the teeth of the new wealth and power of the country, we must also remember that he was not alone in thinking the spoliation of the weaker rural classes not only, as it certainly was, illegal, but also so patently unjust as to amount to a national crime, and that in that age men overestimated the ability of a Government fiat to modify economic habits almost as much as they underestimated it two and a half centuries later. Somerset can hardly have been ignorant of the tremendous risks involved in his policy. But he may well have thought inaction not only baser than, but almost as dangerous as, action. It was certain that, unless the Government interfered to protect tenants, there would be a series of peasants' revolts. The best answer to the charge of stirring up class hatred, which was made against Somerset, as against all who call attention to its causes, was that agrarian rioting had begun in Hertfordshire before the Commission on Enclosures was sent out, that in those counties where it took its work seriously order was maintained till the end of 1548, and that grave disturbances did not take place until the following year, when it became evident that, both in Parliament and on the Council, the Protector's policy had been beaten by the opposition of the great landowners. Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Somerset himself (though he, like every one else, had speculated in monastic estates), however much there may be to regret that his policy did not come into stronger hands, or fall upon times which were, from a political point of view, less hopelessly impracticable. An attempt was made to set a good example on the Crown Estates. In 1548, in response to complaints from the tenants at Walton, Weybridge, Esher, and Shepperton, that the making of the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ruining them through the loss of common rights which it entailed, an order was issued dechasing the Park, and throwing open the enclosed lands to the commoners. In the following year Somerset secured the passage through Parliament of a Private Act conferring a good title on those copyholders on his own manors to whom demesne lands had been let, and who, as occupiers of other than customary tenancies, could not claim the protection of manorial custom. It is plain from the comparatively few complaints which came in the sixteenth century from freeholders that, if such a course had been generally pursued, the chief objection to the changes grouped together under the name of enclosure would have been removed, because the harsh disturbance of vested interests which they involved would have been avoided. But that, of course, was quite outside the bounds of political possibility.

Appendix to Miss Lamond's edition of The Commonweal of this Realm of England, Hale's defence, p. lviii.: "Whas ther not, longe before this Commyssyon was sent forthe, an insurrection in Hertfordshire for the comens at Northall and Cheshunt?"

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. ii. pp. 190-193, May 5, 1548: a complaint from "many poor men of the Parishes of Walton, Weybridge, East Molson, West Molson, Caverham, Esher, Byfiete, Temsditton ... in the name of the whole parishes before rehearsed, that by reason of the making of the late chase of Hampton Court, forsomyche as their commons, pastures, and meadows be taken in, and that all the said parishes are overlaid with the deer now increasing daily upon them, very many households of the same parishes be let fall down, the families decayed, and the king's liege people much diminished, the country thereabout in manner made desolate."

See p. 294.

The story of Somerset's attempt to deal with the land question is soon told. In 1548 agrarian discontent was at its height. Some time in that year there must have come to the hands of the Government the small tract on the effect of sheep-farming in Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, which was printed in 1551 under the name of "Certayne causes of the Present Discontent." In spring and summer Latimer was thundering against the "Step-lords" at Paul's Cross. In autumn Crowley published his "Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons." Above all, the poor commons had earlier in the year shown unmistakable signs of fending for themselves. The result of Somerset's own sympathy with the prevalent discontent was the formation of something like a party, under the name of the "Commonwealth men," with Latimer as its prophet and Hales as its man of action, which had a programme sufficiently definite to put heart into the peasantry and to terrify the great landed proprietors. On June 1st a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into offences committed against the Acts forbidding conversion of arable to pasture and depopulation. The Commission divided itself into several committees to deal with different parts of the country. Only one of them, however, consisting of John Hales and five of his colleagues, got seriously to work. It had a large area to cover--the counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire--and one which was the centre of the agitation against enclosure. It seems to have interrupted its labours during autumn and winter, but it was busy in June, July, and August 1548, and again in the summer of 1549, by which time, however, the anger of the landed gentry against its proceedings, and of the peasants against the inactivity of the Commission as a whole, had reached a point which made it hardly possible for it to do more than collect information. Considering the difficulties of its task, and the wide tract of country to be covered, its behaviour appears to have been thorough and business-like. The usual procedure was to empanel a jury of twelve in each place visited, to whom Hales delivered an address explaining the objects and methods of the inquiry, as set out in the instructions issued by the Government to the Commissioners. These stated the Commission to have been formed in particular "for the maintenance and keeping up of houses of husbandry, for avoiding destruction and pulling down of houses for enclosures and converting of arable land into pasture, for limiting what number of sheep men should have and keep in their possession at one time, against plurality and keeping together of farms, and for maintenance of housekeeping, hospitality, and tillage on the sites ... of such monasteries, priories, and religious houses as were dissolved." Offenders were then presented by the jury, and though, on Hales' advice, a pardon was granted them for their past illegalities, their enclosures seem to have been thrown down, arable which had been turned into pasture to have been ploughed up, and farms which had been united to have been separated.

Published by the E. E. T. S.

The first sermon preached before King Edward the Sixth, March 8, 1549: "You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possession yearly too much. For that herebefore went for twenty or forty pounds by year ... now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year." See also Latimer, The Sermon of the Plough, January 18, 1548.

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

The proclamation appointing the Commission is printed by Strype, op. cit., vol. ii., Book I., chap. ii. The operative part of it runs: "And therefore, He ... hath appointed, according to the said acts and proclamations, a view and inquiry to be made of all such as contrary to the said acts and godly ordinances have made enclosures and pasture of that which was arable ground, or let any house, tenement, or mease decay or fall down, or done anything contrary of the good and wholesome articles contained in the said acts." In my account of the situation under Somerset I have followed the documents printed by Strype, and the appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England.

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

For the pardon, see appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to The Commonweal, &c., p. lxi.; for the ploughing up of a park and division of farms, ibid., pp. xli. and lxi.-lxii.; for the Bills introduced by Hales, ibid., xl., xlv.-lii., lxii.-lxv. Strype's account appears to be based on that of Hales.

In the meantime Somerset kept the general policy of agrarian reform alive on the Council. In the autumn of 1548 Hales had returned to London, and, as member for Preston, had prepared three Bills, dealing partly with enclosures and partly with the high prices. The first, requiring re-edification of decayed houses and the maintenance of tillage, and the second, forbidding speculation in food-stuffs, were introduced into the House of Lords. The third, which aimed at encouraging cattle breeding as distinct from sheep grazing, was read first in the House of Commons. Neither Bill came to anything, for Parliament was as angry as the Council with Somerset's policy. But in May 1549 the Protector issued another proclamation against the decay of houses and enclosure; in June he infuriated the upper classes by a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges; and throughout the whole period of his power he used the Court of Requests as an instrument for protecting tenants against landlords. The Secretary to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror provided that the gentry began it, prophesied gloomily that the German peasants' revolt was to be re-enacted in England, and Warwick attacked Hales fiercely for venturing to discharge the duties laid upon him by the Government, of which Warwick was a member. "Sir," wrote a plaintive Norfolk gentleman to Cecil about the time of Ket's rebellion, "Be plain with my Lord's Grace, that under the pretence of simplicity and poverty there may not rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Commonwealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest) I assure you they are in such doubt that almost they dare touch none of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that Commonwealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.... I may well gather some of them to be in jealousy of my Lord's friendship, yea and to be plain, think my Lord's grace rather to will the decay of the gentlemen than otherwise." Poor gentlemen! A Government which holds that laws do not exist only to preserve the rich in their possessions! Truly the mountains are removed.

For these facts, see Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials. Sir William Paget to the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549: "The king's subjects are out of all discipline, out of all obedience, caring neither for Protector nor King. And what is the cause? Your own lenity ... the foot taketh upon him the part of the head, and commons is become king, a king appointing conditions and laws to the governors, saying, 'Grant this and that and we will go home.'... What then is the matter, troweth your grace?... By my faith, Sir, even that which I said to your grace.... Liberty, Liberty.... In Germany, when the very like tumult to this began first, it might have been appeased with the loss of 20 men, and after with the loss of 100 or 200. But it was thought nothing and might easily be appeased, and also some spiced consciences taking pity of the poor ... thought it a sore matter to lose so many of their country folk, saying they were simple folk.... It cost, ere it was appeased, they say, 1000 or 2000 men."

Appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to The Commonweal, &c., pp. xli. and lii. But of course there was no such thing as collective responsibility for policy in the sixteenth century.

Russel, Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 202.

Somerset's Government had too short a life for us to judge how far, in happier political circumstances, he might have succeeded, not in checking agrarian changes, which would in any case have been impossible, but in securing that reasonable consideration should be given to the vested interests of the poorer classes. As Elizabethan statesmen discovered at the end of the century, there was room for a policy which would prevent the wholesale displacement of tenants, and nevertheless offer an encouragement to the formation of the compact holdings out of the scattered strips and common pastures, which the agricultural experts were unanimous in condemning. There are faint indications of an understanding that a fair middle course was possible in a remarkable case which comes from the little Huntingdonshire town of Godmanchester. At Godmanchester there had been the usual changes of the preceding half century. Rents had been raised, cottages pulled down, woods destroyed and turned to pasture, while the meadows, which under the Act of 1547 had been confiscated from the local gild, offered a tempting prey to some enterprising speculator. On complaints coming before the Council in the summer of 1549 a comprehensive scheme of reorganisation was drawn up. All persons with more than one house were to let at the customary rent that which they did not use themselves. All persons who had pulled down houses or converted them to other purposes than the accommodation of tenants were either to rebuild them or to build new ones, and to let them to any one offering the customary rent before Michaelmas 1549. The groves of wood converted to pasture were to be enclosed, so as to prevent the depredations made upon them by straying beasts, and, if necessary, the land was to be sown with acorns. With the gild lands a course was taken which, in the scramble for land which was going on in the middle of the sixteenth century, was unfortunately highly unusual. According to the Council's directions they were to "be divided among the inhabitants thereof in this manner; that is to say to every ploughland five acres, and to every cottager and artificer there dwelling, or which hereafter upon the houses to be now builded shall dwell, one acre, and, if the number do not extend, then for every ploughland four, and so for lack of the rate every ploughland three, and the residue of the said acres falling after that rate to be divided among the cottagers, paying for every of the said acres 3/4." This case is the high water mark of administrative interference on behalf of the tenants. The action taken embraces nearly all the expedients of re-edifying decayed cottages, fixing fair rents, preventing common land from passing into the control of a single individual, and making equal allotment among the inhabitants, which had been demanded by the peasants and suggested by their friends. It shows that the enclosing of land hitherto used in common was not resented, provided that the division was made in such a way as to give a fair share to all the parties interested. It may perhaps be taken as a specimen of the kind of policy which lay behind Somerset's expressions of sympathy with the peasantry, and which he would have pursued if his colleagues on the Council had permitted. As it was, he was not strong enough to carry out his programme. While the failure of the Commission resulted in the revolts of 1549, his reluctance to crush their authors, whom he believed to be men goaded into rebellion by intolerable grievances, united the whole weight of the greater property against him as a traitor to his order. In the attack made upon him as by his colleagues, the actions which evoked their special denunciation were those which embodied his agrarian policy, the use of the Court of Requests to protect tenants, the appointment of the Royal Commission to enforce the Acts against enclosures, the pardon granted in June 1549 to the riotous peasants, and the statements attributed to him that "the covetousness of the gentlemen gave cause to the common people to rise," and that "people had good cause to reform the things themselves," because "the lords of Parliament were loathe to incline themselves to reformation of enclosures and other things." To the last a popular hero, the "good Duke" could expect no help from those whom he had befriended, and no mercy from the sordid counter-revolution which he had provoked. His epitaph was given by the sad cries of "Too true," with which the crowd about the scaffold greeted his dying declaration that he had "ever been glad of the furtherance ... of the commonwealth."

See p. 355.

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. ii. pp. 294-296.

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

Somerset's execution took place on January 22, 1552, more than two years after he had been deposed from the Protectorate, for supposed complicity in a plot to overthrow the Government. The evidence for the existence of a conspiracy appears to be feeble. See Pollard, The Political History of England, 1547-1603, pp. 61-65.

With the fall of Somerset in October 1549 the landowning classes had their revenge, and, under the guidance of Warwick, the policy of the Government swung violently in the opposite direction. The intervention of the Council to protect tenants of course stopped at once; in the two cases which are reported as having come before it in the year 1550 and 1551 the line taken was that the presumption was against the tenants who had broken open enclosures. While, in the absence of John Hales, who appears to have found it convenient to leave the country, the Reports of the Royal Commission were allowed to slumber, the Government, by way of reducing opportunities for undesirable meetings, instructed the Bishop of London to prevent unseasonable preaching in his diocese, and set itself to establish the new agrarian régime by law. The ways in which men seek liberty are infinite in number, but the methods of tyranny are everywhere the same; and the nearest parallel to the behaviour of Somerset's successors is the attitude of the panic-stricken aristocracy of the early nineteenth century towards trade unions. Under an Act of 1550 all meetings of the peasantry were treated as a sort of "illegal conspiracy." Any forty of them who assembled to break down an enclosure might be condemned as traitors. Any twelve who assembled for the same purpose were guilty of felony, as also were those who summoned such a meeting, or who combined to reduce rents or the price of corn. Even the rusty legislation of the thirteenth century was revived by the re-enactment of the Statute of Merton of 1235, which permitted lords to enclose as much as they pleased, provided that "sufficient" remained over for the tenants, with the significant improvement that the latter qualification was swept away by a clause declaring that enclosures might be made "notwithstanding their gainsaying and contradiction." The tyranny of the oligarchy which ruled from 1549 to 1553 has been obscured by the more dramatic events which preceded and succeeded it. But it marks the bottom point in the condition of the sixteenth century peasantry. It indicates how the new agrarian régime will develop when the political forces impeding it are removed. More had asked, What is Government? and had answered that it is "a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title of a Common Wealth." His immortal definition does less than justice to the cynicism of the generation which succeeded his own. Mary executed Protestants for reasons of religion, as Elizabeth executed Catholics for reasons of State. But Warwick, a hypocrite in religion, was at least guiltless of the hypocrisy of sheltering his land policy "under the name and title of the Common Wealth." It was exactly what it seemed to be, a straightforward attempt to prevent the poor from protesting when their possessions were taken from them by the rich.

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. iii. pp. 181-182 and 247 and 252. "Mr. Grenewaie was this day before the Counsaill and rebuked sore for his attemptate in causeng Raf Lees hedges to be broaken up; nevertheless considering his long service [as gentleman usher] he was borne withall, and for this tyme without further punishment he was commaunded to make up those hedges again."

3 and 4 Edward VI. c. 3.

The general policy of the Government during the reign of Elizabeth and the first half of the seventeenth century shows neither the desire of Somerset to undo the agrarian revelation, nor the complete indifference to the interests of the poorer classes of the party which succeeded him. During the reign of Elizabeth there was little agrarian agitation. It is possible that the limits of profitable pasture-farming had been reached. It is possible that the policy of encouraging the export of corn, which had been suggested by Hales, and which was adopted in 1563 and extended in 1571, reacted favourably on arable farming. It is possible, again, that Warwick's measures had had their effect, and that the peasantry had been cowed into silence. Though, on the whole, the Government maintained the traditional attitude, it did not interfere except in circumstances of special hardship, or when there was danger of serious disturbance. Cases of this nature came before it fairly frequently in the reigns of Elizabeth, Charles, and James. One finds it intervening on the ground that the poverty of tenants makes it impossible for them to go to law, or that the offenders concerned are so powerful as to be able to disregard inferior authorities, or that the local authorities themselves have been unfairly biassed, or to prevent disturbances by hearing tenants' grievances, or to compel a great noble, like the Earl of Shrewsbury, to reinstate tenants whom it thinks to have been wrongfully evicted, or to stop action being taken by a landlord pending a decision by the courts in his favour. In 1579 the Council writes to the Lord President of Wales ordering him to take proceedings against two persons who have been enclosing part of the Forest of Fakenham, and have disturbed the copyholders; he is to prevent any further enclosures being made until the whole matter has been considered by the Government. In 1581 it interferes to protect a copyholder who has been kept out of his holding by the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough. In 1586 it directs the Cambridgeshire justices to inquire into the complaint of some tenants who claim that a piece of common pasture has been let over their heads, and to see that both parties to the dispute come before the Justices of Assize. The Justices of Assize in Norfolk are to take action in the matter of a common at Kettlestone which two of the tenants allege to have been overstocked with sheep. Several letters are addressed to the Council of the Marches of Wales ordering them to prevent the eviction of copyholders. A landlord is requested to attend the Council and prove that his tenants' fines are uncertain, and not, as they allege, fixed. The Court of Chancery has dismissed a case arising out of the enclosure of commons at Bath, and the Council orders a retrial. Occasionally it cites offenders into the Court of Star Chamber, and in 1592, just when the Court of Requests was beginning to be attacked by the common lawyers, we find a case as to fold-courses coming before the Court of Requests. More often it appoints special Commissioners to act as arbitrators, or refers petitioners to the Justices of Assize in their county, with a request to take local evidence and inform the Council what they advise. Throughout the reigns of James and Charles we get glimpses of administrative activity which show that the traditional policy was, perhaps fitfully, maintained. In 1603 the Council of the North were instructed to make "from time to time diligent and effectual inquisition of the wrongful taking in of commons and other grounds, and the decay of tillage and of towns or houses of husbandry," and to correct offenders with "some notable punishment." The rebellion in the Midlands in 1607 produced special measures, the chief offenders being summoned before the Council and bound over to rebuild houses which had fallen into decay, while in the following years two Commissions were appointed to compound with enclosers. In Yorkshire the justices are evidently fairly active in 1607 and 1608. A Richmond freeholder who owns two-thirds of the manor is presented "for decaying five husbandries, and also for converting 30 acres of tillage ground to meadow and pasture," and similar presentments are made at Malton, Thirsk, and Helmsley. A Justice of Assize writes about the same time from the western counties to the effect that twenty-six houses of husbandry have been rebuilt and the offenders punished. In 1614 the justices of Norfolk inform the Council that in accordance with its directions they have examined the enclosures made in the last two years, and have ordered the hedging and ditching of lands to be stopped till further notice. In the following year one William Combe was negotiating with the corporation of Stratford for their consent to the enclosure and conversion to pasture of his freehold lands lying in the common fields at Welcombe; in 1615 an order made at Warwick Assizes was confirmed by the Chief Justice restraining him from doing so on the ground that it was "against the laws of the realm," and in the following year a peremptory letter was addressed to him by the Council directing his compliance. In 1619 there was a temporary reaction owing to the low price of grain, which led to the appointment of a Commission to grant pardons for breaches of the Acts forbidding enclosure, and in 1624 all the Statutes except the two passed in 1597 were repealed, But this did not stop administrative interference. In 1621 the Justices of Assize for Bedfordshire are directed to check encroachments on a common, and in 1623 a Commission is appointed to remove grievances arising in connection with enclosures at Cheshunt. The rise in corn prices which occurred from 1629 to 1631 produced another burst of activity, which is to be attributed partly to a genuine desire to protect the poorer classes, and partly to the hope that the fines imposed upon enclosers might squeeze a few drops into the Government's ever thirsty Exchequer. In 1630 directions were issued by the Council to the justices of five Midland counties to remove all enclosures made in the last two years on the ground that they led to depopulation and were particularly harmful in time of dearth. In 1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed, and special instructions to enforce the Statutes against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. That the inquiry was not a mere formality is proved by the State Papers of the period. In part of the country, at any rate, land which had been pasture was ploughed up in obedience to the Government's orders, and a list of offenders, including--the Government must have seen his name with grim satisfaction--Lord Saye and Sele, was returned to the Council, some of whom were still being prosecuted in the Court of Star Chamber as late as 1639. This is the last occasion on which we can trace the administration of this part of the Tudor State policy. The agitation against enclosures was carried on under the Commonwealth. The diggers under Winstanley came into prominence for a moment, only to be disclaimed by the respectable opponents of enclosure and to be instantly suppressed by the Government, and there was a crop of pamphlets in the years between 1650 and 1660 which dealt with the evils of depopulation in quite the old manner. But the traditional doctrine as to the importance of the peasantry had decayed, and the central machinery for forcing the justices to take action had been destroyed in 1641. The last Bill to regulate enclosures was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656, and was rejected on the second reading.

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xi. pp. 191-192. A letter to the Lord President of Wales that whereas upon complaints exhibited to their lordships by the tenants of the Forest of Fakenham against Sir John Throgmorton, and one Mr. William Bell his stuarde, concerning an inclosure by him made of certen commons ... encroachment upon their copieholds ... it was by them ordered that the suite against the tenants commenced at the Common Lawe in respect of their commons and copieholds should surcease and the matters in controversy abyde triall before their lordships ... and untill the matter should be heard and determined they enjoyned to proceed no further in the inclosure of the said Common ... forasmuch as the tenants do now again complaine that since their lordships' said order Sir John and the said William Bell have inclosed more of the said common ... but hath also caused Bell to proceed against the tenants by ejectione firmæ at the Common Lawe, he is therefore required ... to will and command the said Sir John and William Bell to forbear their inclosures of the said Common ... untill the same shall be ... determined by their lordships according to their lordships' form and order."

Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xiii. pp. 91-92. A letter to the Justices of the County of Lincoln: "If they thinke it agreeable with equitie and justice that the poore man should be put in possession of the said Landes, that they give commandment unto the said Lacy to admit him thereunto."

Ibid., vol. xiv. pp. 201-202.

Ibid., vol. xv. pp. 394-395.

See p. 373, n. 1, and Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xvii. p. 76. For a similar letter to the Council of the North, ibid., vol. xxvii. pp. 228-229.

Ibid., vol. xxii. p. 379.

Ibid., vol. xxii. pp. 360 and 370. Letters to the Master of the Rolls ordering retrial of case concerning enclosure of commons at Bath.

Ibid., vol. xvi. pp. 366-367. A letter to the Solicitor: "Whereas divers poor men, tenants of the manor of Chilton, have exhibited very grievous complaints unto their lordships against William Darrell, Esq., of divers and sundry misdemeanors committed by him in breach of her majestie's peace" ... the solicitor is to "cause a byll to be drawn into the Court of Star Chamber against Darrel," and Camden Society 1886, Cases in the Court of Star Chamber and High Commission, pp. 44-45.

Holkham MSS., Sparham, Bdle. No. 5, 14th June, 34 Eliz: "In the matter in variance brought before the Queenes Majestie in her Maj{tie's} hon{ble} Court of Requests at the suit of John Byrd against Christopher Saye and other defendants upon the motion of Mr. Edward Coke recorder of the City of London being of Councel with the said defendant.... For that it appeareth that the said Defendant hath had three verdicts and judgments at the Common Law, one of them against the said complainant himself."... The defendant is awarded costs, "and the said complainant shall from henceforth forbear to put any sheepe upon the said ground, and suffer his sheepe to feede there."

Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558-1625, pp. 370-371.

Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558-1625, pp. 470-472, and Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii.

Atkinson, North Riding Quarter Sessions, vol. i. pp. 106, 108, 111, 122. The last presentment runs: "Will Marwood of Busby, gent{n}, for decaying of xxx acres of arable land or thereabouts, and converting of xxx acres of arable land or thereabouts, the same, from tillage into pasture or meadow, and tilled nothing in the same parish in lieu thereof, contrary, etc."

Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. So.c, vol. xix.

Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.

Ingleby, Shakespeare and the Welcombe Enclosures.

S. P. D. J., I., vol. cxxiv., December 20, 1621, and S. P. D., Ch. i. cliii., October 2, 1623.

Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Society, vol. xix.

Ibid.

For the ploughing up of pasture, S. P. D., Ch. I. vol. cccciv. 142, and vol. cccclxxv. 72; for Lord Saye and Sele, vol. ccclxii. 60, 1637; order of Council that the Attorney-General should forthwith proceed by information in the Star Chamber against Viscount Saye and Sele for depopulation and conversion of houses and lands.

J. Moore, A Target for Tillage: "My purpose is not here to plead for ... any other idle drones and wretched atheists.... All these I acknowledge to be the greatest wasters and spoylers of our country, worse by many degrees than any depopulators, oppressors, and decayors of villages.... All these I know abhorre the plough, and are enemies to the State; who yet (I confesse) in their high talke do justify tillage and will be ready no doubt to reforme the decay thereof with spade and pickaxe." (The copy of this pamphlet which I have seen is dated 1611. I have ventured to assume that this is a misprint, and that it should be placed with John Moore's other pamphlets on enclosure, 1653-1656.)

Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.

(c) The Success and Failure of State Intervention

It remains to ask how far the policy of trying to check the agrarian changes, which was pursued by Governments for nearly a century and a half, had any effect on economic practice. Statesmen were certainly biassed in favour of protecting the weaker landholding classes. But was their intervention simply the expression of a pious opinion? Was it so entirely futile as--to give a modern parallel--the Small Holdings Act of 1892? Or did it to any extent modify or retard the course of economic events? The view usually taken, that legislation was so ineffective as to be almost negligible, is in accordance with what we know of the character of local administration in the sixteenth century, and is supported by much contemporary evidence. The constant introduction of fresh proposals suggests that the previous laws were disappointing. The failure of existing Acts was the reason given in Somerset's proclamation for the appointment of the Commission of 1548. Hales, who is certainly the most reliable authority on the situation between 1540 and 1550, speaks of them as being notoriously a dead letter. If one looks at the Statutes passed against depopulation in the sixteenth century, with a view to discovering how far they really met the situation, one will be inclined to say that they quite failed to go to the root of the matter. The special evil which they were intended to combat was depopulation caused by evictions. But evictions could be checked only by giving tenants security, which would have meant turning customary into legal titles, and fixing judicial rents for leaseholders and immovable fines for copyholders; in short, the sort of interference which the peasants and their champions demanded, but on which no Government depending on the support of the landed gentry would venture, except upon an extraordinary emergency. In the absence of such an attempt to grapple directly with the fundamental fact that the peasants' insecurity made them liable to suffer whenever there was a change in the methods of agriculture, legislation designed merely to prevent those changes was almost certain to be evaded. Even with the best intentions the Statutes could never have been easy to administer. There was the difficulty inherent in the whole Tudor and Stuart policy of authoritative interference with trade and industry, the difficulty of making State action keep pace with economic changes. The Government is often like a man pursuing a tram from one stopping-place to another, and just missing it at each. It insists that land which has hitherto been in tillage shall remain in tillage. But there are a few years of bumper harvests, and the farmers complain that they cannot pay their way. The Government tries to get over the difficulty by allowing them to convert arable to pasture, when a providence unversed in statecraft sends a wet summer, and it scrambles hastily back to the position which it has just abandoned. By excepting from the operation of the Statutes certain districts which are specially suitable for grazing, it encourages a rough local division of labour, one part of a county confining itself to pasture-farming and another to tillage. But then, in pursuit of its traditional and quite reasonable policy of securing that food is cheap, it insists that all farmers are to supply the markets with grain, with the result that those who have specialised in corn-growing are threatened with ruin by the fall in prices which ensues, and that it is even questionable whether they will not convert arable to pasture to evade the obligation imposed upon them. Old enclosures were tolerated and new forbidden. But how distinguish between old and new? Land turned to pasture simply to restore it to a condition in which it would be fit for tillage escaped the condemnation passed on other kinds of "conversion," and one can imagine that nice arguments must have arisen as to a farmer's motives. Again, suppose a man converted to pasture land which should have remained under the plough, and then leased it to some one else, who retained it as pasture, was the lessee guilty of an offence? In a case which came before the Court of Exchequer in 1582, the defendant pleaded that he merely "used" the land as pasture, and had not converted it, while the Crown argued that use was equivalent to conversion, that he was in the position of a man profiting by the continuance of a nuisance, and that a fine of 10s. an acre for each year since the original conversion ought to be imposed. Points like this give colour to Coke's complaint against the whole body of Acts against enclosure that "they were labyrinthes, with such intricate windings or turnings as little or no fruit proceeded from them."

Hale's defence in appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England.

D'Ewes Journal, p. 674 (1601). Mr. Johnson said: "In the time of dearth, when we made this Statute, it was not considered that the hand of God was upon us; and now corn is cheap. If too cheap, the husbandman is undone." See also Raleigh's speech in the same debate.

e.g. in 1593 the clause in the Act of 1563 forbidding conversion of arable to pasture was repealed. In 1595 and 1596 bad harvests produced loud complaints of high prices, and in 1597 conversion to pasture was again prohibited.

Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907, pp. 131 ff.

Moore's Reports, p. 117, plea 262, Claypole's case: "Le conseil de Reigne argue que ... l'entent de Estatute fuit que le user sera accompt equivalent en tort al convcon." Judgment was apparently given for the Queen. The decision was quoted as an authority in the debate in Parliament on the Bills introduced in 1597. Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp. 541-543: "And 26 Eliz. in the Exchequer, in Claypole's case, an information was exhibited upon the Statute of 4 Hen. VII. against a purchaser for converting of tillage into pasture, and adjudged good, though the purchaser were not the converter, but only a continuer of the first conversion. So as this new law tends but for an instruction and explanation of the old."

But, of course, the obscurity of the Statutes was the least part of the difficulty with which Governments who wished to protect the peasantry were confronted. Much more serious was the fact that the traditional policy could be carried out only by disregarding the financial interests of the wealthier classes, who could most easily influence Parliament and the Council, and who were locally omnipotent. In the first half of the sixteenth century the high position of many of those who were most deeply implicated in cutting land free from communal restrictions made them almost unassailable. The Royal Commission of 1517 returned among enclosers the names of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Danbury, Sir William Bolen, Sir R. Sheffield, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir J. Witte, the Under-Treasurers of State, and Sir J. Cotton, who was himself one of the Commissioners. The angry unanimity with which Somerset's colleague turned against his land policy was not wonderful, for they were nearly all directly interested in the maintenance of the status quo. Warwick, who led the coup d'état, had enclosed on a large scale. Sir William Herbert had made extensive enclosures on the lands which he had acquired from the Abbey of Wilton. The St. John family, the Darcy family, the Earl of Westmoreland, had all local troubles with their tenants; and there are some indications that Sir William Paget and the detested and detestable Lord Rich were in the same position.

Leadam, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. vi.

For Warwick, Herbert, and the St. Johns, see pp. 326, 368, and 362. For Darcy and disturbances in Westmoreland, Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii. II., xii. I., 319, xi. 1080. For Paget and Rich, Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

It is not, however, material to trace the records of individual members of the Council, because their interest in checking the interference of the State with the free disposal of land is evident from the fact that many of them enormously increased their estates through the share which they obtained in the property confiscated from the religious houses and the gilds. A comparison of the lists of Privy Councillors for 1548 and 1552, published by Strype, with Dr. Savine's valuable analysis of the grantees of the monastic estates, show that out of thirty-one persons who got grants of land of £200 a year or more fourteen were members of the Privy Council in one or other of those years, exclusive of the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. This fact is by itself almost sufficient to explain the impossibility of enforcing the laws forbidding depopulation during the years which followed the death of Henry VIII., and the despair of legal protection which seems to have settled upon the classes affected by the movement. The view sometimes expressed that the religious houses had been easier landlords than the lay owners into whose hands their estates passed, though it can occasionally be corroborated from the complaints made by tenants to the Government, scarcely seems, as yet, to be satisfactorily proved. But the distribution among the wealthier classes of land producing a net income of not less than £110,000 gave them an enormous vested interest in preventing and evading legislation to check the most profitable use of the new possessions which were to endow the aristocracy of the future. The supposition of peculiar harshness in the owners to whom the land passed, though probably correct, is really not needed to explain the part which the transference of these vast quantities of land had in augmenting the distress of the rural classes. The worst side of all such great and sudden redistributions of property is that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. A buyer must sell at a profit, or he had much better not have bought. During the decade between 1540 and 1550 there was a furor of land speculation. To the Abbey lands, which came into the market after 1536, were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. It is quite clear that some of the grantees of estates did not acquire them with the intention of retaining them, but simply "bought for the rise." The lands of the Abbey of Whitby, for example, pass first to the Crown, and are then sold by it to the Duke of Northumberland, who in turn sells them to Sir John Yorke. A small official in the Royal household buys the Cistercian nunnery at Brewood, and at once puts it up to sale "for suche a price that no man will gladly by hit at hys hand." Trentham is surrendered to the Crown in 1536; in 1540 the Duke of Suffolk obtains a grant of the rents and reversions reserved upon the Crown leases there, and in the same year sells it to one Leveson, who has already acquired lands belonging to Horlton Abbey, and already sold them again to Biddulph. One finds even the champion of the tenants, Somerset himself, getting a grant of land from the Crown on July 1st, leasing part of it for eighty years on July 2nd, and transferring it back to the Crown, subject to the lease, on July 9th. When property changed hands three times in the course of ten days, it could hardly fail to be rack-rented, or the transaction would not pay. What happened to the tenants? Here and there, as at Whitby and Washerne, a bitter outburst against their new masters shows that the result has been what we should expect. But for the rest, a cloud descends and we cannot say. It is only in such occasional glimpses that we catch the solid earth shifting beneath the feet of those who till it. It was such a glimpse which led the last great English peasant, in a time of even more widespread misery, to say that the wretchedness of the landless labourer was the work of the Reformation. Cobbett, and those who follow Cobbett in representing the economic evils of the sixteenth century as the fruit of the religious changes, err in linking as parent and child movements which were rather brother and sister, twin aspects of the individualism which seems inseparable from any swift increase in riches. Their vision of a time when mild ecclesiastics administered their estates as a popular trust lays a spell upon the imagination. In the religious houses of Lancashire and Yorkshire and Northumberland there may, here and there, even on the eve of the dissolution, have been a reality corresponding to it. But we need hardly go further than Sir Thomas More to learn that for parts, at least, of England it is only a vision; and More does not speak without book. Holy men enclose land, convert arable to pasture, claim villeins, turn copyholds into tenancies at will. If prominent ecclesiastics had really wanted to champion the cause of the peasantry, they had an excellent opportunity when Wolsey sent out the first great Commission into enclosures in 1517. But, in fact, there is no reason to suppose that any protest was made at all comparable to that which came thirty-two years later from Latimer. How could there be? The estates of the larger houses were often scattered over several different counties, and before the dissolution they were quite frequently managed by laymen. In such cases the monks were simply rentiers, who needed to know no more about their tenants than the fellows of an Oxford college know about theirs at the present day.

Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

Fisher, The Political History of England, 1485-1547,