CHAPTER I. The Rural Population

THE RURAL POPULATION

(a) The Classes of Landholders

If an Englishman of ordinary intelligence had been asked in the reign of Henry VIII. to explain the foundations of national prosperity, he would probably have answered that the whole wealth of the country arises out of the labours of the common people, and that, of all who labour, it is by the work of those engaged in tillage that the State most certainly stands. True, it cannot dispense with handicraftsmen and merchants, for ours is an age of new buildings, new manufactures, new markets. The traders of Europe are already beginning to look west and east after the explorers; there are signs of an oceanic commerce arising out of the coastwise traffic of the Middle Ages; and Governments are increasingly exercised with keeping foreign ports open and English ports closed. But whether any particular artisan or trader is a profitable member of the commonwealth is an open question. Too many of the manufactures which men buy are luxurious trifles brought from abroad and paid for with good English cloth or wool or corn or tin, if not with gold itself--articles whose use sumptuary legislation would do well to repress. As for merchants, if like honest men they give their minds to navigation, well and good. But theirs is an occupation in which there is much room for "unlawful subtlety and sleight," for eking out the legitimate profits earned by the labour of transport, with underhand gains filched from the necessitous by buying cheap and selling dear, for speculations perilously near the sin of the usurers who traffic in time itself. Outside the circle of a few statesmen and financiers, the men of the sixteenth century have not mastered the secret by which modern societies feed and clothe (with partial success) dense millions who have never seen wheat or wool, though London and Bristol and Southampton are beginning to grope towards it. Looking at the cornfields which are visible from the centre of even the largest cities, they see that a small harvest means poverty and a good harvest prosperity, and that a decrease of a few hundred acres in the area sown may make all the difference between scarcity and abundance. A shortage in grain, which would cause a modern State to throw open its ports and to revise its railway tariff, sets a sixteenth century town breaking up its pastures and extending the area under tillage. No man is so clearly a "productive labourer" as the husbandman, because no man so unmistakably adds to the most obvious and indispensable forms of wealth; and though, in the system of classes which makes up the State, there are some whose function is more honourable, there is none whose function is more necessary. In most ages there is some body of men to whom their countrymen look with pride as representing in a special degree the strength and virtues of the nation. In the sixteenth century that class consisted of the substantial yeoman. Men speak of them with the same swaggering affection as is given by later generations to the sea-dogs. The genius of England is a rural divinity and does not yet rule the waves; but the English yeomen have "in time past made all France afraid." They absorb most of the attention of writers, both on the technique and on the social relations of agriculture. They are the feet upon which the body politic stands--the hands which, by ministering to its wants, leave the brain free to act and plan. Let us begin by trying to see how the landholding classes were composed.

Pauli, Drei volkswirthschaftliche Denkschriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England: How to reform the Realme in setting them to work, and to restore tillage. "The whole welth of the body of the realm riseth out of labours and workes of the common people."

The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), p. 63: "And I marvell no man taketh heade unto it, what nombre first of trifles cometh hether from beyonde the seas, that we might either clene spare, or els make them within oure owne Realme, for the which we paie inestimable treasure every yeare, or els exchange substanciall wares and necessaries for them." E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Part II., p. 84: "Craftys men and makers of tryfullys are too many." Harrison in Elizebethan England (Withington), p. 15: "O how many trades and handicrafts are now in England whereof the Commonwealth hath no need!" &c.

e.g. the prayer for merchants in Edward VI.'s Book of Private Prayer: "So occupy their merchandise without fraud, guile, or deceit."

Coventry Leet Book, Part III., pp. 679-680.

See Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I. c. 23: "These are they which in the old world got that honour to Englande ... because they be so manie in number, so obedient at the Lorde's call, so strong of bodie, so hard to endure paine, so courageous to adventure ... these were the good archers in times past, and the stable troops of footmen that affaide all France that would rather die all, than once abandon the knight or gentleman their captaine," and Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), pp. 11-13.

E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Starkey's Dialogue, Part II., p. 49: "To the handes are resemblyd both craftysmen and warryarys.... To the fete the plowmen and tyllarys of the ground, beycause they, by theyr labour, susteyne and support the rest of the body."

The manorial documents supply us with much information about the landholders, and though we cannot say what proportion they formed of the population, we ought to be able to say with some certainty the relative numbers of different classes among them. In the surveys and rentals of the period persons holding land may usually be divided roughly according to the nature of their tenure into three groups--freeholders, customary tenants, and leaseholders. This classification of course is an elastic and tentative one, which raises almost as many questions as it settles. The customary tenure of one part of the country differs very much from the customary tenure of another part. Customary tenants include copyholders and the vast majority of tenants at will, who are holding customary land, and who are often entered under the latter heading merely because the surveyor did not trouble to set out their full description. But tenancy at will is sometimes used to describe the condition, not only of the holder of customary land, but also of men who are mere squatters on the waste or on the demesne, and who are not protected in their holdings by any manorial custom. Again, it is not always easy to draw a line between copyhold and leasehold. On a manor where the custom is least favourable to the tenants' interests the former shades into the latter. There is not much difference, for example, between a lease for thirty-three years and a copyhold for life. Again, the classification is one of tenures not of tenants. In parts of England, it is true, it does divide individual tenants with almost complete exhaustiveness and precision. In most districts, for example, the free tenant usually holds freehold land and nothing else, the customary tenant customary land and no other. But in East Anglia there is no such simplicity of arrangement, no such permanence of tenurial compartments. Many free tenants hold land which is said to be bond or villein or customary land; many customary tenants hold free land; many of both have added to their holdings by leasing parts of the demesne or of the waste, and though in this respect the Eastern counties are exceptional, it is in them often impossible to say in what class any individual should be placed.

In this essay we are concerned only with the landholders, not with the wage workers. The relative number of persons holding land and of agricultural labourers without land is an important question on which it is not easy to get light. The surveys and rentals, a species of private census invaluable in giving information about the holders of property, tell us only the number of householders, and as the labourers employed in agriculture (like many of those employed in manufacturing industry) usually lived on the premises of their masters, they do not enable us to calculate the number of those living entirely by their labour. Still, since they include all tenants, whether holders of a cottage only or holders of land in addition, they enable us to say what proportion of heads of families held land, and what proportion had none, or none except a garden. This is of some importance. A tenant holding even as much as fifty acres can hardly have employed more than two or three agricultural labourers, and most tenants held less than this; so that in those places where the cottagers form a small proportion of the whole population we may conclude that a large proportion of the villagers were landholders (for the figures on this point see the tables given below).

Unfortunately, we do not possess for the sixteenth century even such a loose estimate as was made by Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth. In 1688 he calculated that there were 16,560 families of nobles and gentlemen, 60,000 families of yeomen, 150,000 of farmers--presumably on lease--400,000 cottagers and poor, 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, obviously a very rough calculation, the most remarkable feature of which is the large number of yeomen. Poll Tax returns might give us the kind of information we require, since they included, or were meant to include, the whole population above a certain age, irrespective of whether they held land or not, and sometimes divided them roughly into classes. Thus on sixteen manors in the Norfolk Hundred of Thingoe the return to the Poll Tax of 1381 showed a population of 870 male and female inhabitants over fifteen years of age, of whom 9 were set down as knights, 53 as farmers, 102 as artificers, 344 as "labourers" (laboratores), 362 as "servants" (servientes). If, as is not improbable, the first four classes held land (the labourers being serfs working on the demesne), and the last consisted of farm and household employees who did not, this would put the landholding classes on these manors at a little more than half the total population over the age of fifteen. But this return was probably falsified to escape the tax; see Powell, The East Anglian Rising, App. I., and Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381. The figures published by Dr. Savine (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i., pp. 223-226) of the monastic population show that on the eve of the dissolution there were residing in 22 houses in Leicester, Warwick, and Sussex, 255 "hinds" and 76 "women servants," presumably employed on the demesne farm, which gives an average to each farm of about 11 hinds and about 3 women servants. In the Kentish Nunnery of St. Sexburge, Sheppey, the demesne farm employed a carter, a carpenter, two cowherds, a thatcher, a horse keeper, a malter, three shepherds. Best, describing his farming arrangements in Yorkshire in 1641 (Surtees Society, vol. xxxiii.), states: "Wee kept constantly five plowes goinge, and milked fowerteene kine, wherefore wee had always fower men, two boyes to go with the oxeploughe, and two good lusty mayde-servants." These were in each case only the permanent staff, and their comparatively small numbers suggest that much work must have been done by men who worked on their own land and only occasionally helped on the demesne, i.e. that the proportion of landholders to non-landholders was high. This conclusion agrees with the evidence of the surveys, which show that, especially in the East of England, many of both the free and the customary tenants' holdings were so small that they could hardly have made a living out of them without working as wage-labourers as well, and also with other indications as to the classes in rural society; e.g. out of 3780 persons mentioned in Worcestershire recognizances, 1591-1643, as either "labourers," "husbandmen," or "yeomen," 667 are entered as labourers, 1303 as husbandmen, 1810 as yeomen, the latter designation always, and the second usually, implying a holder of land (J.W. Willis Bund, Kalendar of the Sessions Rolls, 1591-1643, Part II.) On the other hand, conditions varied enormously from place to place. Where there was a considerable body of small landowners the number of hired labourers tended to be small, the work of cultivation being done by the holder and his family; e.g. we read of a manor in the seventeenth century where thirteen freeholders farmed 580 acres with the aid of only ten men-servants and shepherds before enclosure, and six or seven afterwards (Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure).

Some of the surveys supply us with extreme cases of the opposite kind, where the whole manor consists of two or three holdings or of even one great estate, and where almost the whole of the population must have been working for wages; these illustrate Harrison's complaint that in many places "The land of the parish is gotten up into a few men's hands; yea, sometimes, into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled betimes to be hired servants unto the others, or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door" (Withington's edition of Elizabethan England, p. 21). A protest made to the Council from Norfolk in 1631 against its policy of trying to keep down prices by insisting that all corn should be sold in the open market points out that in "the woodland and pasture part" of the country there are "a great many handicraftsmen which live by dressinge and combinge of wool, carding, spinning and weaving, etc., and the Townes there commonly very great consisting of such like people and other artificers with many poor, and none of them all ordinarilye having any corn but from the market." As to the "champion part" of the county, the document divides the rural population into three classes: "1. Tilth masters that have corn of their own growing and sell it to others. 2. Labourers that buy it at an under-price of them unto whom they worke. 3. Poore people that are relieved by good orders in every towne" (Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907). But the case of Norfolk was exceptional, owing to its position as the chief seat of the textile industries.

On the whole I am inclined to think that though the process of commutation which went on from 1350 onwards can hardly be explained except on the supposition that there was a considerable population of persons who held little land and were ready to eke out a living by working for wages, yet in the sixteenth century even the wage-working heads of families usually held a certain amount of land (even if only a garden) as well. This agrees with what we are told by contemporaries of the scarcity of wage-earners (see below, pp. 99-102). One may add, that in view of this, the fixing of maximum wages bears a somewhat different colour from that often given it. It was only practicable, one is inclined to say, because so few persons depended entirely on wages for a living. The social problem in the sixteenth century was not a problem of wages, but of rents and fines, prices and usury, matters which concern the small-holder or the small master craftsman as much as the wage-earner. The "working classes" were largely small property holders and small traders.

The summary statement given above is liable to be misleading. The reader will find a fuller discussion of the questions arising in connection with it below in Part II., chap. iii.

Nevertheless, in spite of many marginal cases, we may perhaps find in the surveyors' classification a map of the broader features of the country through which we are to travel. Property holders, profit makers, and wage-earners are to-day inextricably confused, but to the economist who writes on our social problems 200 years hence it will not be altogether useless to know that his predecessors did in practice draw rough distinctions between these classes, and formed estimates of the numbers of each. Much of the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century turns on the question of the legal interest in their holdings enjoyed by different classes of tenants, and though we cannot hope to escape the pitfalls which await compilers of even the humblest census, a preliminary survey of their distribution in a few counties may not be altogether without value. The following figures are taken from the surveys and rentals of 118 manors. The majority were made in the reign of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth. There are included, however, three from the latter half of the fifteenth century and three from the years between 1630 and 1650. Under the heading of customary tenants are grouped copyholders and tenants at will, as well as those who are called customary tenants in the rentals and surveys.

They include also tenants on the lands belonging to Cockersand Abbey, lying in many different parts of Lancashire, in 1503. For the sources from which this table is constructed and its defects, see Appendix II.

Scanty as they are, these figures show that there is the very greatest variety in the distribution of different classes of tenants in different parts of the country, and remind us that we must be careful how we generalise from the conditions of one district to those of another. When all localities are handled together, customary tenants form nearly two-thirds of the whole landholding population, freeholders about one-fifth, leaseholders between one-eighth and one-ninth. But in parts of the Midlands and in parts of the West the leaseholders are much more numerous than they are elsewhere; in Leicestershire they form over one-fifth, and are almost as numerous as the freeholders, while if we isolate the five Somersetshire and Devonshire manors which above are combined with those of Wiltshire, we find that in them the leaseholders exceed the freeholders by nearly two to one. Again, in Northumberland the preponderance of customary tenants (where they form 91 per cent. of the landholding population) over the two other classes is much more marked than it is in Wiltshire, and in Wiltshire it is greater than it is in the three Midland counties and in East Anglia. That customary tenants should overwhelmingly preponderate in Northumberland is intelligible enough. If the single great manor of Rochdale be removed, they preponderate almost as much in Lancashire. In those two wild counties mediæval conditions survive long after they have begun elsewhere to disappear. There has been no growth of trade to bring mobile leasehold tenures in its train, or to accumulate the wealth which the peasants need to enfranchise their servile tenancies. But why should they be so much more numerous in the southern counties than they are in the twenty-two Midland villages, where one would suppose the conditions to be much the same? Here, as often hereafter, we raise a question only to leave it unanswered.

TABLE I

--------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ | Total. | Free- |Customary|Lease- |Uncertain.| | |holders.| Tenants.|holders.| | --------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Northumberland, | 474 | 26 | 436 | 12 | | six manors | | | | | | | | | | | | Lancashire, | | | | | | seven manors, and lands | | | | | | belonging to Cockersand | | | | | | Abbey | 1280 | 217 | 451 | 334| 278 | +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total | 1754 | 243 | 887 | 346 | 278 | | |(13.8%) | (50.5%) |(19.04%)| (15%) | | | | | | | Staffordshire, | 356 | 44 | 272 | 23 | 17 | six manors | | | | | | | | | | | | Leicestershire, | 618 | 134 | 311 | 124 | 49 | nine manors | | | | | | | | | | | | Northamptonshire, | 531 | 100 | 355 | 66 | 10 | seven manors | | | | | | +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total | 1505 | 278 | 938 | 213 | 76 | | |(18.1%) | (62.3%) |(14.2%) | (5%) | | | | | | | Norfolk, |1011| 316 | 596 | 53 | 50 | twenty-five manors | | | | | | | | | | | | Suffolk, | 353 | 176 | 146 | 25 | 6 | fourteen manors | | | | | | +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total |1364| 492 | 742 | 78 | 56 | | | (36%) | (54.3%) | (5.7%) | (4.1%) | | | | | | | Wiltshire, Somerset, | | | | | | and Devonshire, | | | | | | thirty-two manors | 1102 | 149 | 817 | 136 | | | | | | | | Hampshire, | 259 | 8 | 251 | | | two manors | | | | | | | | | | | | Ten other manors | | | | | | in the south of | | | | | | of England | 219 | 43 | 158 | 12 | 6 | +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total | 1580 | 200 | 1226 | 148 | 6 | | |(12.6%) | (77.2%) | (9.3%) | (0.3%) | +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Grand total |6203| 1213 | 3793 | 785 | 416 | | |(19.5%) | (61.1%) |(12.6%) | (6.7%) | --------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+

The Lancashire figures are unduly weighted by those of the single large manor of Rochdale, where, in 1626, there were 612 tenants. If this manor be omitted, there remain only 19 leaseholders on the other Lancashire manors. Like Northumberland, Lancashire seems to be (as one would expect) a county of customary tenants.

There is an error of 4 in the Norfolk figures which I have been unable to trace and correct.

Yet there is one point emerging from these figures of which the explanation can hardly be in doubt. It will be noticed that in Norfolk and Suffolk combined the proportion of freeholders is about double what it is in the country as a whole. In the former county they form more than one-third of all the landholders, and in the latter they are almost equal to the other two classes together. The number of peasant proprietors in Suffolk is indeed quite exceptional, and is one of the most remarkable facts revealed by the surveys, drawing an unmistakable line between the land tenure of the east and that of the south-west and the northern border. In Wiltshire and Northumberland it is not uncommon to find villages where no freeholders at all are recorded. In Norfolk and Lancashire it is the exception for them to be in a majority. But on half the Suffolk manors summarised above they are the largest class represented, and on some they stand to the other landholders in a proportion of two, three, and even four to one. Is it fanciful, one may ask, to turn from the sixteenth century to the dim beginnings of things, to that first and greatest survey in which the land of England was described so that not an ox or an acre escaped valuation, and in which, before freehold tenure had been hammered into any precise legal shape, Suffolk and Norfolk abounded more than all other counties in liberi homines and sochemanni? Though a longer time separates these documents from Domesday than separates them from us, perhaps it is not altogether fanciful. Rural life, except for one great catastrophe, has been very permanent. Unlike rural life to-day, it has been most permanent in its lower ranges. How ever often manors may have changed hands, there has been little to break the connection with the soil of peasants whose title is good, no change at all comparable to the buying out of small freeholders which took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It may well be that the main outlines of the social system which the Domesday commissioners found already laid in the east of England crop out again after the lapse of between four and five hundred years. It may well be that Suffolk is a county of small freeholders in the days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, because it was a county of free men and socmen in the days of William I.

In Domesday Book 35 per cent. of all the tenants in Suffolk are liberi homines, 32 per cent. of all those in Norfolk are either liberi homines or sochemanni. See Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, note 24 to chap. iii. Book III. (p. 376); Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23; Seebohm, The English Village Community, map opposite p. 85. Domesday also gives a large number of liberi homines and sochemanni in Leicestershire. In the table given above the Leicestershire manors come after Suffolk and Norfolk as having the third largest proportion of freeholders, viz., 21.6 per cent. The return of freeholders supplied to the Government in 1561 (Lansdowne MSS. V., 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) appear to be considerably understated, probably because only the more substantial men were thought worth mentioning. They are as follows: Beds 282, Berks 166, Essex 880, Notts 189, Oxon. 198, Herts 363, York 787, Lincoln 444. The large number in Essex is noteworthy.

(b) The Freeholders

In spite of the constant complaints of the sixteenth century writers that one effect of the agrarian changes was the decay of the yeomanry, we shall not in the following pages be much concerned with the freeholders. In our period the word "yeomen" was ceasing to be given the narrow semi-technical sense which it possessed in Acts of Parliament and legal documents, and was beginning to acquire the wide significance which it possesses at the present day. To the lawyer the yeoman meant a freeholder, "a man who may dispend of his own free lande in yerely revenue to the summe of 40s. sterling," and if the word yeoman was used in its strict legal sense, the decay of the yeomanry ought to have meant a decline in the numbers of freeholders, such as occurred on a very large scale two and a half centuries later. But in this matter it seems that popular usage was more elastic than legal definition, and, except when the significance to be given it is defined by the context, the word itself is not an accurate guide to the legal position of those to whom it is applied. Writers on constitutional questions were careful to observe the stricter usage, because the 40s. freeholder occupied a position in the State, both as a voter and in serving on juries, from which persons who, though much wealthier, were not freeholders, were excluded. But the word yeoman was used, in speaking of agricultural conditions, to describe any well-to-do farmer beneath the rank of gentleman, even though he was not a freeholder. Thus Bacon writes quite vaguely of "the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between gentlemen and cottagers or peasants." Those who insisted that the military power of England depended on the yeomanry can hardly have meant to exclude well-to-do copyholders; not only copyholders but even villeins by blood were sometimes described as yeomen; and, in fact, even writers who, like Sir Thomas Smith, use the word most clearly in its strict legal sense on one page, allow themselves to slip into using it in its wider and more popular sense on the next, when the social importance of the class and not its legal status is uppermost in their minds.

Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib I., c. 23.

History of King Henry VII. (Lumley), pp. 70-72. He makes his meaning quite clear by saying "tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes."

Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii. (Savine, "Bondmen under the Tudors").

Ibid.

Smith, De Republica Anglorum, loc. cit.

Nor is there much evidence that the freeholders suffered generally from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. It is true that there are some complaints from freeholders as to the loss of rights of pasture through the encroachments of large farmers upon the commonable area, some cases of litigation between them and enclosing landlords. But, since their payments were fixed, there was no way of getting rid of them except by buying them out, and though this method, which was so important a cause of the decline of the small freeholder in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was occasionally employed to round off a great estate, it seems to have played a comparatively unimportant part in our period. There is no sign of any large diminution in their numbers, such as would have been expected if the movement had affected them in the same way as it did the customary tenants.

Indeed, if the accounts of contemporary writers may be trusted, it would appear that their position was actually improved in the course of the century. Though even among quite small men one occasionally finds a tenant by knight service, the vast majority of freeholders held in free socage, owing fealty and suit of court, and paying a money rent, sometimes combined with the old recognitions of dependent tenure, such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of cummin. But while on some manors some outward form of feudalism, such as homage and fealty, were still maintained, the decay of feudal relations in the middle order of society had combined with economic causes to better their condition, and the time was already not far distant when those who held by the more honourable tenure of knight service would insist on its being assimilated to the humbler and less onerous tenure of the socager. The agricultural services of the socage tenants had long disappeared. There are many instances of work on the demesne being done in the sixteenth century by copyholders; but there is in our records only one manor where it was exacted from the freeholders, and other obligations were tending to go the way of the vanished predial labour. Suits of court might be owing, and set down as owing in the surveys, but one may doubt very much whether they were often enforced. Owing to the fall in the value of money the fixed rent of the socager often yielded only a small income to the lord of the manor, and in a good many cases these payments had disappeared altogether before the end of the century, or were so unimportant as to be hardly worth the trouble of collecting. Surveyors for this reason were often little interested in them, and, while recording the acreage held by the customary tenants and leaseholders with scrupulous accuracy, did not always trouble to set out in detail the holdings of a class which was financially so insignificant, with the result that sometimes the freeholders shook themselves loose from all payments and services altogether. Nor, had the surveyors been as careful as the heads of the profession would have had them be, would they always have been successful in dealing with this very independent class. They may protest that "next under the king" the freeholders "may be said to be the lord's," but freehold lands have a way of getting mislaid to the despair of manorial officials, as copyhold lands do to-day. When escheats occur, the holding cannot be found; when rents are overdue, distraint is impossible, because the bailiff does not know on whom to distrain. The suggestion that, as long as rents are paid and services discharged, the lord has any interest in the property of his freehold tenants, rouses instant resentment, and it would seem that by our period, at any rate in the south of England, the connection of the freeholders with the manor was a matter rather of form and sentiment than of substance. In fact freehold has almost assumed its modern shape.

MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham. Billingford and Bintry MSS. No. 9 (Manor of Foxley, 1568).

e.g. ibid., Sparham MSS. No. 5, a freeholder pays "a pounde of cumming seede and a gillyflower" (c. 1590). R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Portf. 6, No. 15: "nyne golden threads of vi.d." (1568). R.O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182, fol. 1: a tenant "holds freely a cottage paying a red rose."

Norden, The Surveyor's Dialogue, Book I., pp. 4-5, to which the farmer answers: "Fie upon you. Will you bring us to be slaves? Neither lawe, nor reason, nor least of all religion, can allowe what you affirme."

Op. cit., Book III. Here is a bitter cry from the bailiff of a manor (Merton Documents, No. 4381). "Good sir let me entreat you yf the Colledge determyne to make survey this spring of the lands at Kibworth and Barkly to send Mr. Kay or me word a month or 3 weeks before your coming that we may have Beare and other necessaries, and I desire you to gather up all evidences that may be needful for the Lordshipp, for all testimony will be little enough, the Colledge land is so mingled with Mr. Pochin's freehold and others in our towne. There ys an awarde for keepinge in of the old wol (?) close in our fields for (from ?) Mr. Pochin's occupation, very needfulle for the ynhabitannts yf that awarde can be founde at the colledge where yt was loste." (For the remainder of this letter see Appendix I.) The Crown suffered especially, see Norden, Speculum Britanniae, Part I., pp. xl.-xliii. of introduction (Camden Society): "In many of his Majesty's manors, free holders, their rents, services, tenures and landes ... become strange and unknown ... and when escheates happen the lande that should redound to his Majesty cannot be found." In the common entry in manorial surveys under the heading of freeholders of "certain lands" we should probably take the word "certain" to mean "uncertain."

In assuming its modern shape it has made this particular strand in rural life harder to unravel. By escaping from the supervision of the manorial authorities the freeholders escape at the same time from the economic historian, and since the facts of their position go so often unrecorded, we can speak of it with much less confidence than we can about that of the leaseholders and customary tenants. Out of over one hundred manors which we have examined, there are only twenty-two where it is possible to ascertain with any accuracy the acreage held by the freeholders, and, even on these, one too often meets cases in which the extent of the holding is either unknown to the surveyor, or in which he does not think it worth while to record it. Our results, such as they are, are set out in the table on pages 32 and 33.

For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II.

Combining the information supplied by these figures with that obtained from other sources, we can form a rough idea of the agrarian conditions under which the freeholders live. They are, in the first place, a most heterogeneous class, including on the one hand men of considerable wealth and position, and on the other mere cottagers. If we could trust the statistics given above we should have to say that the latter enormously outnumbered the former. But our impression is that, though, no doubt, a large number of freeholders were extremely small men, the preponderance of the latter was not nearly so marked as is suggested by the table. For one thing, it is difficult to reconcile it with the accounts given us of the substantial yeomen by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For another thing, it is in dealing with the larger freeholders that the inclination of surveyors to omit any estimate of the extent of the land is strongest, because it is naturally in their case that an estimate is most difficult to form. Probably, therefore, if we could obtain for the freehold tenancies figures even as full as we can for those of the customary tenants, we should find that the proportion holding between twenty and forty acres was considerably larger than these partial statistics would suggest.

In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture, such as is often supplied for other classes of tenants, we may say with some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agricultural economy differed from that of the neighbouring copyholders, and that the backbone of their living, except when the plots were so small as merely to supply them with garden produce, was therefore in almost every case tillage. If in any way they departed from the practice of their neighbours who were not freeholders, they did so probably only in being somewhat more alert and enterprising, somewhat more ready to use their security to break with custom and to introduce innovations. It is clear that many of them were very far from being tied down to the stagnant routine which some writers would have us believe is inseparable from all small scale farming. Often, indeed, they had enough initiative to realise the advantages of improved methods of cultivation, and on several manors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the freeholders agreed with each other to survey their lands and separate them, so that they could be cultivated in severalty. In many cases, again, they extended their holdings, which were sometimes large and sometimes mere patches of a few acres, by acting as farmers for the lord of the manor and leasing the demesne or part of it. Above all they had nothing to fear from the agrarian changes which disturbed the copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good deal to gain; for the rise in prices increased their incomes; while, unlike many copyholders and the tenant farmers, they could not be forced to pay more for their lands.

TABLE II

---------------------------------------------------------------+ 15 and under 20 Acres. | 10 and under 15 Acres. | . | 5 and under 10 Acres. | . | . | 2-1/2 and under 5 Acres. | . | . | . | Under 2-1/2 Acres. | . | . | . | . | Houses or Cottages only. | . | . | . | . | . | Total Number of Tenants. | . | . | . | . | . | . | ----------------------------+ | | | | | | + Norfolk, six manors | 139| 25| 33| 12| 17| 9 | 10 | ----------------------------| | | | | | | + Suffolk, four manors | 85| 27| 18| 10| 11| 2 | | ----------------------------| | | | | | | + Staffordshire, three manors | 24| 7| 4| 2| 3| 1 | | ----------------------------| | | | | | | + Lancashire, three manors | 9| | 1| 3| 1| 1 | 1 | ----------------------------| | | | | | | + Northants, four manors | 116| 10| 11| 4| 13| 9 | 5 | ----------------------------| | | | | | | + Wiltshire, one manor | 6| | | | 2 | | | ----------------------------| | | | | | | + Leicestershire, one manor | 11| 1| 2| 2| 1| | 1 | ----------------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ Total, twenty-two manors| 390| 70| 69| 33| 48| 22 | 17 | ----------------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

TABLE II (CONT'D) ---------------------------------------------------------------+ Uncertain.| 120 and over.| .| 115 and under Acres.|.| .| 110 and under Acres.|.|.| .| 105 and under Acres.|.|.|.| .| 100 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.| .| 95 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 90 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 85 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 80 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 75 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 70 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 65 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 60 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 55 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 50 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 45 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 40 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 35 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 30 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 25 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| 20 and under Acres.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.|.| .| --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Norfolk |2| |2|1|2| | | | | | | | | | |1|2| | | | |23| --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Suffolk |1|1|3| | | |2|1| | | | |1| | | | | | | | | 8| --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Staffordshire |1|2| |1|1| | | | | | | | | | | |2| | | | | | --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Lancashire | | | | | | |1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 1| --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Northants |1|1|4|2|3|2| | |3| | | | | | | | | | | |3|45| --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Wiltshire | | | | |1| |1| |1| | | | | | | | | | | |1| | --------------------| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | + Leicestershire |1| | | | |1| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | 2| --------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+ Total |6|4|9|4|7|3|4|1|4| | | |1| | |1|4| | | |4|79| --------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+

See below, pp. 105?-115.

See e.g. Northumberland County History, vol. ix. p. 327, below, pp. 157-?158, and Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz. B, b. 1, 58, Ll. 10, 62.

Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., c. 23: "These be for the most part fermors unto gentlemen." Elizabethan England (Withington), p. 120. "Yeomen" frequently occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as lessees of the Merton Manors.

The apparent immunity of the freeholders in the face of movements which overwhelmed other groups of tenants suggests indeed that economic causes alone, which all classes, whatever the legal nature of their tenure, would have experienced equally, are not sufficient to explain the sufferings of the latter. The situation in our period is not like that which arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when widening markets throw all the advantages of increasing returns on the side of the large wheat farmer, and the yeomanry sell their holdings to try their fortunes in the rapidly growing towns. The struggle is not so much between the large scale and small scale production of corn as between corn growing and grazing. The small corn grower, provided he has security of tenure, can still make a very good living. From the point of view of the economist all the smaller men, whether freeholders, leaseholders, or customary tenants, are in much the same position. The decisive factor, which causes the fortunes of the former class to wax, and those of the two latter to wane, is to be found in the realm not of economics but of law. Leaseholders and many copyholders suffer, because they can be rack-rented and evicted. The freeholders stand firm, because their legal position is unassailable. Here, as so often elsewhere, not only in the investigation of the past but in the analysis of the present, the trail followed by the economist leads across a country whose boundaries and contours and lines of least resistance have been fashioned by the labour of lawyers. It is his wisdom to recognise that economic forces operate in a framework created by legal institutions, that to neglect those institutions in examining the causes of economic development or the distribution of wealth is as though a geographer should discuss the river system of a country without reference to its mountain ranges, and that, if lawyers have wrought in ignorance of economics, he must nevertheless consult their own art in order to unravel the effect of their operations.

See below, pp. 105?-115.

From the larger standpoint of social and political organisation the freeholders constituted an element in society the very nature of which we can hardly understand, because our modern life offers no analogy to it. We tend to draw our social lines not between small properties and great, but between those who have property and those who have not, and to think of the men who stand between the very rich and the very poor, the men of whom our ancestors boasted as the "Commons of England," as men who do not own but are employed by owners. Independence and the virtues which go with independence, energy, a sober, self-respecting forethought, public spirit, are apt to become identified in our minds with the possession of wealth, because so few except the comparatively wealthy have the means of climbing beyond the reach of the stream of impersonal economic pressure which whirls the mass of mankind this way and that with the violence of an irresponsible Titan.

The sixteenth century was poor with a poverty which no industrial community can understand, the poverty of the colonist and the peasant. It lived in terror of floods and bad harvests and disease, of plague, pestilence, and famine. If one may judge by its churchyards, it had an infantile mortality which might make even Lancashire blush under its soot. Yet (and we do not forget the black page of the early Poor Law) it was possible for men who by our standards would be called poor to exercise that control over the conditions of their lives which is of the essence of freedom, and which in most modern communities is too expensive a privilege to be enjoyed by more than comparatively few. Such men were the freeholders. They formed a class which had security and independence without having affluence, which spanned the gulf between the wealthy and the humble with a chain of estates ranging from the few acres of the peasant proprietor to the many manors of the noble, which was not too poor to be below public duties nor too rich to be above them, which could feel that "it is a quietness to a man's mind to dwell upon his owne and to know his heire certaine." Look for a moment at the jolly picture drawn by Fuller, who wrote at the very end of the period with which we are dealing:--

"The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore whom the next age may see refined, and is the most capable of genteel impressions when the Prince shall stamp.... France and Italy are like a die which has no points between cinque and ace, nobility and peasantry.... Indeed, Germany hath her boors like our yeomen; but by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarify their blood. In England the temple of honour is closed to none who have passed through the temple of virtue.

"He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket. He is the surest landmark whence foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs, the gentry more floating after foreign fashions.

"In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and poor people. Some hold, when hospitality died, she gave her last groan among the yeomen of Kent. And still at our yeoman's table you shall have as many joints as dishes; no meat disguised with strange sauce; no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass, but solid, substantial food.

"He hath a great stroke in the making of a knight of the Shire. Good reason, for he makes a whole line in the subsidy book, where, whatsoever he is rated, he payeth without regret, not caring how much his purse be let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of the state.

"In his own country he is a main man on juries; where, if the Judge open his eyes on a matter of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in matters of fact.... Otherwise (though not mutinous in a jury) he cares not whom he displeaseth, so he pleaseth his own conscience.

"In a time of famine he is the Joseph of the country and keeps the poor from starving ... and to his poor neighbour abateth somewhat of the high price of the market. The neighbour gentry court him for his acquaintance, which either he modestly waveth, or thankfully accepteth, but in no way greedily desireth.

"In war, though he serveth on foot, he is ever mounted on a high spirit, as being a slave to none, and subject only to his own Prince. Innocence and independence make a brave spirit, whereas otherwise one must ask his leave to be valiant on whom one depends. Therefore if a state run up all to noblemen and gentlemen, so that the husbandmen be only mere labourers or cottagers (which one calls but 'housed beggars'), it may have good cavalry, but never good bands of foot.... Wherefore to make good infantry it requireth men bred not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner."

Norden, The Surveyor's Dialogue.

Fuller, Holy and Profane State. The concluding paragraph is obviously copied from Bacon's History of King Henry VII.

The ancestors of the yeomanry had suffered much in the anarchy of the fifteenth century, when the violent ejection of freeholders seems to have become almost as common as it had been in the evil days before the reforms of Henry II. But the Tudor monarchy had put an end to that nightmare of lawlessness, and in any society governed by law this body of small property-owners was bound to be a powerful element, even though they had no occasion for making any concerted use of their power, as during the greater part of our period they had not. One must not, of course, exaggerate their importance, or forget that, though a special dignity was attached by opinion to all freeholders, they included in reality men of various economic positions. Many of them must have been quite poor. In the eastern counties, where they are most numerous, they frequently own not more than three or four acres apiece, and can hardly, one would suppose, have supported themselves without working for wages in addition to tilling their holdings. Nevertheless the part which they played in the routine of rural life was an indispensable one, and the very diversity of the elements which they included made them a link between different ends of the social scale. It was from the more substantial among them that the government was most anxious to recruit the military forces. The obligation of serving the State as voters and upon juries fell upon the 40s. freeholders. The security of their tenure caused them to be the natural leaders of the peasantry in resisting pressure from above. No efforts of Elizabeth's Government could induce the yeomanry of the North Riding to abandon the old religion; and when tenants and lords fall out over common rights and enclosures, it is often the freeholders--though on occasion they enclose themselves--who speak for the less independent classes and take the initiative in instituting legal proceedings. The upward movement which went on among this class in many parts of England meant a change in the distribution of material wealth which necessarily involved a corresponding change in the balance of social forces and in the control of political power. To Harrington, who sought in the seventeenth century to find in economic causes an explanation of the revolution through which the country had passed, it seemed that the seeds of the civil war had been sown by the Tudor kings themselves in the care which they showed for the small proprietor. In destroying feudalism to establish the monarchy, they had raised a power which was more dangerous to the monarchy than feudalism itself. They had snapped the bond between landlord and tenant by the Statute of Retainers. They had given the tenant security by forbidding depopulation. Most important of all, by encouraging alienation they had caused an enormous transference of property from the upper to the middle and lower middle classes. "The lands in possession of the Nobility and Clergy of England till Henry VII. cannot be estimated to have over-balanced those held by the People less than four to one. Whereas, in our days, the Clergy being destroyed, the Lands in possession of the People over-balance those held by the Nobility at least nine in ten." But property is political power individualised and made visible. The destruction of the monarchy was only the political expression of an economic change which had begun in the reign of Henry VII. "He suffered the balance to fall into the power of the people.... But the balance being in the People, the Commonwealth (though they do not see it) is already in the nature of them." We need not accept Harrington's view in its entirety in order to appreciate the significance of the change which he describes. Certainly the yeomanry were growing in political power, and were strong in that spirit of self-respect and pride in their order, which, when, as too often, it is confined to a single class, means social oppression, but which, when widely diffused throughout society, is the mother of public spirit and political virtue. The long discipline of tiresome public duties which they had borne throughout the Middle Ages had formed them into a body which was alive to political issues and conscious of political influence, and which, when participation in public affairs became not only a duty but a right, would use their power to press urgent petitions from one county after another upon the King and upon the Parliament, or by riding up from Buckinghamshire to protect Hampden at Westminster in 1642, or by fighting behind Cromwell in Cambridgeshire, or by fighting for the King in the West. Compared with the bulk of the population, they were a privileged class and stood by their own; it was they who restored the franchise to the 40s. freeholders in 1654 and refused to extend it to the copyholders. But the tenure of much of the land of England by men with whom, however poor, no landlord or employer could interfere, set a limit to the power of wealth, and made rural society at once more alert and more stubborn, a field where great ideas could grow and great causes find adherents. Political and religious idealism flourish bravely in a stony soil. What makes them droop is not poverty, but the withering shadow cast by complete economic dependence.

Paston Letters, I. 12, II. 248. Plummer's edition of Fortescue, On the Governance of England, Intro., p. 21.

Atkinson's Quarter Sessions of the North Riding of Yorkshire, lists of recusants.

e.g. Topographer and Genealogist, vol. iii. (quoted below, pp. 251-253), and Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, vol. ii., Inhabitants of Thingden v. Mulsho; also Holkham MSS., Burnham Documents, Bdle. 5, No. 94 (quoted below, p. 245 n.).

Harrington's works, 1700 edition, p. 69 (Oceana), pp. 388-?389 (The Art of Law-giving). See also Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War, pp. 28-?32.

From such degrading subservience the freeholders, "slaves to none," were secure. As it was, they often left substantial fortunes to their children, and by the middle of the sixteenth century were already following the examples of their social superiors in entailing their lands. One can quite understand therefore that there is nothing inconsistent between the glowing accounts of their prosperity at the end of the century given by Harrison and his lamentation over the decline of the rural population, or between the well-attested sufferings of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century and his equally well-attested importance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth. The explanation is that the freeholders, though most important politically, did not form the larger proportion of those substantial yeomen whose decay was lamented. The day of their ruin was to come. But for the next two centuries they were safe enough, and, if anything, gained on the class immediately above them, whose lands they bought or leased, into whose families they married, and with whose children their own competed in the learned professions, laying, as the historian of Suffolk said, "such strong, sure and deep foundations that from thence in time are derived many noble and worthy families." Nothing in the life of the period caused more pride than the prosperity of this solid body of small property-owners, and the contrast which it offered to the downtrodden peasantry of the Continent. No loss has been sustained by the modern world greater than their disappearance.

It is stated by good authorities that between 12 Ed. IV., when the collusive action known as a common recovery used to evade the Statute de donis conditionalibus was confirmed by a judicial decision (Taltarum's case), and the introduction into settlements of "Trustees to preserve contingent remainders" by Sir Orlando Bridgeman and Sir Geoffrey Palmer under the Commonwealth, the tieing up of lands in one family was impossible (e.g. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, pp. 11-?13). But in 1538 Starkey's Dialogue speaks strongly of the practice of entailing lands. "This faute sprange of a certayn arrogancy, whereby, wyth the entaylyng of landys, every Jake would be a gentylman, and every gentylman a knight or a lord" (E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of Henry VIII.,