The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 1

The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century.

by Richard Henry Tawney.

PREFACE

This book is an attempt to trace one strand in the economic life of England from the close of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Civil War. As originally planned, it included an account of the relations of the State to trade and manufacturing industry, the growth of which is the most pregnant economic phenomenon of the period. But I soon found that the material was too abundant to be treated satisfactorily in a single work, and I have therefore confined myself in the following pages to a study of agrarian conditions, whose transformation created so much distress, and aroused such searchings of heart among contemporaries. The subject is one upon which much light has been thrown by the researches of eminent scholars, notably Mr. Leadam, Professor Gay, Dr. Savine, and Professor Ashley, and its mediaeval background has been firmly drawn in the great works of Maitland, Seebohm, and Professor Vinogradoff. The reader will see that I have availed myself freely of the results of their investigations.

But I have tried, as far as the time at my disposal allowed, to base my picture on original authorities, both printed and ma.n.u.script.

The supreme interest of economic history lies, it seems to me, in the clue which it offers to the development of those dimly conceived presuppositions as to social expediency which influence the actions not only of statesmen, but of humble individuals and cla.s.ses, and influence, perhaps, most decisively those who are least conscious of any theoretical bias. On the economic ideas of the sixteenth century in their relation to agrarian conditions I have touched shortly in Part III. of the book, and I hope to treat the whole subject more fully on some future occasion. If in the present work I have given, as I am conscious that I have, undue s.p.a.ce to the detailed ill.u.s.tration of particular changes, I must plead that one cannot have the dessert without the dinner, and that a firm foundation of fact, even though as tedious to read as to arrange, is a necessary preliminary to the higher and more philosophical task of a.n.a.lysing economic conceptions.

The reader who desires to start with a bird's-eye view of the subject is advised to turn first to the concluding chapter of Part III.

One word may be allowed in extenuation of the statistical tables, which will be found scattered at intervals through the following pages. In dealing with modern economic conditions it is increasingly recognised that a.n.a.lysis, to be effective, must be quant.i.tative, and one of the disadvantages under which the student of all periods before the eighteenth century labours is that for large departments of life, such as population, foreign trade, and the occupations of the people, anything approaching satisfactory quant.i.tative description is out of the question. The difficulty in the treatment of agrarian history is different. Certain cla.s.ses of manorial doc.u.ments offer material which can easily be reduced to a statistical shape. Indeed one difficulty is its very abundance. The first feeling of a person who sees a ma.n.u.script collection such as that at Holkham must be "If fifty maids with fifty mops--," and a sad consciousness that the mop which he wields is a very feeble one. But historical statistics should be regarded with more than ordinary scepticism, inasmuch as they cannot easily be checked by comparison with other sources of information, and it may reasonably be asked whether it is possible to obtain figures that are sufficiently reliable to be used with any confidence. Often, no doubt, it is not possible. The strong point of surveyors was not always arithmetic. The forms in which their information has been cast are sometimes too various to permit of it being used for the purpose of a summary or a comparison. Even when figures are both accurate and comparable the student who works over considerable ma.s.ses of material will be fortunate if he does not introduce some errors of his own. The tables printed below are marred by all these defects, and I have included them only after considerable hesitation. I have tried to prevent the reader from being misled by pointing out in an appendix what I consider to be their princ.i.p.al faults and ambiguities. But no doubt there are others which have escaped my notice.

It remains for me to express my grat.i.tude to those whose kind a.s.sistance has made this work somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. I have to thank the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, the Senior Bursar of Merton College, the Clerk of the Peace for the County of Warwick, and the Earl of Leicester for permission to examine the ma.n.u.scripts in their possession. The maps ill.u.s.trating enclosure are taken from the beautiful maps of the All Souls estates; my thanks are due to the College for allowing me to use them, and to Mr. W. Tomlinson, of the Oxford Tutorial Cla.s.s at Longton, for helping me to prepare them for reproduction.

Circ.u.mstances preventing me from working in the Record Office, I was so fortunate as to secure the co-operation of Miss Niemeyer and Miss L. Drucker, who have transcribed for me a large number of surveys and rentals. How much I owe to their help will be apparent to any one who consults my footnotes and references. Among those who have aided me with advice and information I must mention Professor Vinogradoff, Professor Unwin, and Professor Powicke, the late Miss Toulmin Smith, Mr. Kenneth Leys, Mr. F.W. Kolthammer, Lieut.-Colonel Fishwick, Dr.

G.H. Fowler, and the Hon. Gerard Collier. Especially great are my obligations to Mr. R.V. Lennard and Mr. H. Clay, who have read through the whole of the following pages in ma.n.u.script or in proof, and who have helped me with numberless criticisms and improvements.

In conclusion I owe two debts which are beyond acknowledgment. The first is to my wife, who has collaborated with me throughout, and without whose constant a.s.sistance this book could not have been completed. The second is to the members of the Tutorial Cla.s.ses conducted by Oxford University, with whom for the last four years it has been my privilege to be a fellow-worker. The friendly smitings of weavers, potters, miners, and engineers, have taught me much about problems of political and economic science which cannot easily be learned from books.

R.H.T.

MANCHESTER, _April 1912_.

INTRODUCTION

Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. The economist can watch the reaction of growing markets on the methods of subsistence farming, the development of compet.i.tive rents, the building up of the great estate, and the appearance, or at any rate the extension, of the tripart.i.te division into landlord, capitalist farmer, and landless agricultural labourer, the peculiar feature of English rural society which has been given so much eulogy in the eighteenth century and so much criticism in our own. From a legal point of view the great feature of the period is the struggle between copyhold and leasehold, and the ground gained by the latter. Before the century begins, leases for years, though common enough on the demesne lands and on land taken from the waste, are the exception so far as concerns the land of the customary tenants. When the century closes, leasehold has won many obstinately resisted triumphs; much land that was formerly held by copy of court roll is held by lease; and copyhold tenure itself, through the weakening of manorial custom, has partially changed its character. The copyholders, though still a very numerous and important cla.s.s, are already one against which the course of events has visibly begun to turn, and economic rent, long intercepted and shared, through the fixity of customary tenure, between tenant and landlord under the more elastic adjustments of leasehold and compet.i.tive fines, begins to drain itself into the pockets of the latter. Politically, one can see different views of the basis of wealth in conflict, that which measures it by the number of tenants "able to do service" contending with that which tests it by the maximum pecuniary returns to be got from an estate, and which treats the number of tenants as quite a subordinate consideration. The former is the ideal of philosophical conservatives, is supported, for military and social reasons, by the Government, and survives long in the North; the latter is that of the new landed proprietors, and wins in the South.

And its victory results in much more than a mere displacement of tenants. It means ultimately a change in the whole att.i.tude towards landholding, in the doctrine of the place which it should occupy in the State, and in the standards by which the prosperity of agriculture is measured, drawing a line between modern English conceptions and those of the sixteenth century as distinct as that which exists between those of the Irish peasantry and Irish landlords, or between the standpoint of a French peasant and that of the agent of a great English estate. The decline of important cla.s.ses alters the balance of rural society, though the Crown for a long time tries to maintain it, and the way is prepared both for the economic and political omnipotence which the great landed aristocracy will exercise over England as soon as the power of the Crown is broken, and for the triumph of the modern English conception of landownership, a conception so repugnant both to our ancestors and to the younger English communities,[1] as in the main a luxury of the richer cla.s.ses. If it had not been for the undermining of the small farmer's position in the sixteenth century, would the proposal[2] to enfranchise copyholders have been thrown out in 1654, and would the enclosures[3] of the eighteenth century have been carried out with such obstinate indifference to the vested interests of the weaker rural cla.s.ses? Would England have been unique among European countries in the concentration of its landed property, and in the divorce of its peasantry from the soil?

[1] See the land legislation of the Australasian Colonies.

[2] The Instrument of Government (December 1653) established a franchise qualification of rent or personal estate to the value of 200. This certainly would have enfranchised a large number of copyholders and leaseholders, some of whom were much better off than the small freeholders. For an estate of 299, 15s. 4d.

left at death by a tenant "Husbandman" see _Nottingham Borough Records_ under the year 1599 (vol. iv. pp. 249-252). It was made up as follows: "Money in purse and his clothes, 15; value of beasts, 74; corn sowne in fields, 35; value of furniture in hall, 2, 13s.; in parlour, 5, 14s., and other miscellaneous possessions." For wills of husbandmen and yeomen see _Surtees Society_, vol. lxxix., pp. 181-182, 263-264, 294, 310. For the restoration of the franchise to the freeholders, see Gardiner, _The Commonwealth_, iii. 78.

[3] Hammond, _The Village Labourer_, 1760-1832. One may add--if English statesmen had studied the history of customary tenures in England, would they have deferred until 1870 legislation protecting tenant right in Ireland? See Lord Morley's description of the Irish cultivator "as a kind of copyholder or customary freeholder" (_Life of Gladstone_, vol. ii. p. 281).

From a wider point of view the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century may be regarded as a long step in the commercialising of English life.

The growth of the textile industries is closely connected with the development of pasture farming, and it was the export of woollen cloth, that "prodigy of trade," which first brought England conspicuously into world-commerce, and was the motive for more than one of those early expeditions to discover new markets, out of which grew plantations, colonies, and empire. Dr. Cunningham[4] has shown that the system of fostering the corn trade, which was embodied in the Corn Bounty Act of 1689, and which was a principle of English policy long after the reason for it had disappeared, was adopted in a milder form in the reign of Elizabeth with the object of checking the decline in the rural population. Again, new agricultural methods were a powerful factor in the struggle between custom and compet.i.tion, which colours so much of the economic life of the period, and, owing to this fact, they produced reactions which spread far beyond their immediate effect on the cla.s.ses most closely concerned with them. The displacement of a considerable number of families from the soil accelerated, if it did not initiate, the transition from the mediaeval wage problem, which consisted in the scarcity of labour, to the modern wage problem, which consists in its abundance. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries munic.i.p.al[5] authorities were engaged in a prolonged struggle to enforce their exclusive economic privileges against the rural immigrant who had lost his customary means of livelihood and who overcrowded town dwellings and violated professional byelaws; while the Government prevented him from moving without a licence, and when he moved, straitened[6] his path between the Statute of Inmates on the one hand and the House of Correction on the other. Observers were agreed that the increase in pauperism[7] had one capital cause in the vagrancy produced by the new agrarian regime; and the English Poor Law system, or the peculiar part of it providing for relief of the able-bodied, which England was the first of European countries to adopt, came into existence partly as a form of social insurance against the effect of the rack rents and evictions, which England was the first of European countries to experience. Whatever uncertainty attaches to the causes and effects of the agrarian problem, there can be no doubt that those who were in the best position to judge thought it highly important. If it is not a watershed separating periods, it is at least a high range from which both events and ideas descend with added velocity and definiteness. To the economic historian the ideas are as important as the events. For though conceptions of social expediency are largely the product of economic conditions, they acquire a momentum which persists long after the circ.u.mstances which gave them birth have disappeared, and act as over-ruling forces to which, in the interval between one great change and another, events themselves tend to conform.

[4] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times_, Part i. pp. 85-88, 101-107, 540-543.

[5] See _e.g. Records of the Borough of Reading_, vol ii. pp.

36, 94, 156; vol. iii., 131, and those of Leicester, Norwich, Nottingham, and Southampton, _pa.s.sim_; also below, pp. 275-277.

[6] "Mr. Secretary Cecil said, ... If we debar tillage, we give scope to the Depopulator, and then, if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the Statute of Inmates; if they wander abroad, they are within the danger of the Statute of the Poor to be whipt"

(D'Ewes' _Journal of the House of Commons_, 1601, pp. 674-675).

[7] See below, pp. 273-275.

A consideration of these great movements naturally begins with those contemporary writers who described them. Though the books and pamphlets of the age contain much that is of interest in the development of economic theory, their writers rarely attempted to separate economic from other issues, and economic speculation usually took the form of discussions upon particular points of public policy, or of a casuistry prescribing rules for personal conduct in difficult cases. Such a difficult case, such a problem of public policy, was offered by the growth of compet.i.tive methods of agriculture. The moral objections felt to the new conditions caused them to be a favourite subject with writers of sermons and pamphlets, and made the sins of the encloser, like those of the usurer, one of the standbys of the sixteenth century preacher.

There is, therefore, a considerable volume of writings dealing with the question from the point of view of the teacher of morality. At the same time the political significance of the movement, and the fact that the cla.s.ses concerned were important enough to elicit attempts at protection on the part of the Government, called forth a crop of suggestions and comments like those of More, Starkey,[8] Forest,[9] the author of the Commonwealth[10] of England, and, at a later date, Powell[11] and Moore.[12] Further, the new agricultural methods were explained by persons interested in the economics of agriculture, such as Fitzherbert,[13] Tusser,[14] Clarkson,[15] who surveyed the manors of the Earl of Northumberland in 1567, Humberstone[16] who did the same for those of the Earl of Devonshire, and Norden.[17] The accounts of surveyors, a dull but indispensable tribe, are reliable, as they are usually statements of facts which have occurred within their own experience, or at any rate, generalised descriptions of such facts. The same may be said of the evidence of John Hales, who was employed by the Government in investigating the question, and who had to explain it in such a way as to convince opponents, and to get legislation on this subject through a bitterly hostile Parliament. The description given by writers like Latimer,[18] Crowley,[19] and Becon[20] are valuable as showing the way in which the movement was regarded by contemporaries; but they are mainly somewhat vague denunciations launched in an age when the pulpit was the best political platform, and their very positiveness warns one that they are one-sided and must be received with caution.

Still, they mark out a field for inquiry, and one may begin by setting out the main characteristics of the agrarian changes as pictured in their writings.

[8] E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of King Henry the Eighth_, Part II.: "A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford, by Thomas Starkey, Chaplain to the King," edited by J.M. Cowper (date of composition about 1538).

[9] E. E. T. S., as above, Part I. (Appendix). _The Pleasant Poesye of Princelie Practise_, by Sir William Forest (date of composition 1548).

[10] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, edited by Elizabeth Lamond (date of composition 1549; the author was almost certainly John Hales).

[11] Powell, _Depopulation Arraigned_, 1636.

[12] _The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the Poor, wherein Enclosure such as doth unpeople Towns and Common Fields is Arraigned, Convicted, and Condemned by the Word of G.o.d_, by John Moore, Minister of Knaptoft, in Leicestershire, 1653.

[13] Fitzherbert, _Boke of Husbandry_, 1534. _Surveyinge_, 1539.

[14] Tusser, _Five Hundred Points of Husbandry._

[15] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350 and pa.s.sim.

[16] Surveys _temp._ Philip and Mary of various estates belonging to the Earl Devon (_Topographer and Genealogist_, i.

p. 43).

[17] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_ (1607).

[18] Sermons by Hugh Latimer, sometime Bishop of Worcester (Everyman's Library, J.M. Dent & Co.).

[19] Crowley, Select Works (E. E. T. S., 1872).

[20] Becon, _Jewel of Joy_. Extract quoted in England in the reign of King Henry the Eighth (Part I., p. lxxvi.).

The movement originates, they agree, through the covetousness[21] of lords of manors and large farmers, who have acquired capital in the shape of flocks of sheep, and who, by insisting on putting the land to the use most profitable to themselves, break through the customary methods of cultivation. The outward sign of this is enclosing, the cutting adrift of a piece of land from the common course of cultivation in use, by placing a hedge or paling round it, and utilising it according to the discretion of the individual encloser, usually with the object of pasturing sheep. This is accompanied by land speculation and rack-renting, which is intensified by the land-hunger which causes successful capitalists,[22] who have made money in trade, to buy up land as a profitable investment for their savings, and by the sale of corporate property which took place on the dissolution[23] of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the gild estates. The consequence is, first, that there is a scarcity of agricultural produce and a rise[24] in prices, which is partly (it is supposed) attributable to the operations of the great graziers who control the supplies of wool, grain, and dairy produce, and secondly and more important that the small cultivator suffers in three ways. Agricultural employment is lessened. Small holdings are thrown[25] together and are managed by large capitalists, with the result that he is driven off the land, either by direct eviction, or by a rise in rents and fines, or by mere intimidation. At the same time the commonable[26] area, consisting of the common waste, meadow, and pasture of the manor is diminished, with the result that the tenants who are not evicted suffer through loss of the facilities which they had previously had for grazing beasts without payment. There is, in consequence, a drift into the towns and a general lowering in the standard of rural life, due to the decay of the cla.s.s which formerly sent recruits to the learned professions, which was an important counterpoise to the power of the great landed proprietors, and which was the backbone of the military forces of the country.[27]

[21] "For looke in what partes of the realm doth growe the fynest and therefore dearest woll, there n.o.blemen and gentlemen, yea, and certeyn abbotes, holy men no doubt, not contenting them selfes with the yearely revenues and profytes, that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessours of their landes, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothinge profitting, yea much noyinge, the weal publique, leave no grounde for tillage, thei inclose al into pasture; thei throw doune houses; they plucke downe townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to be made a shepehouse" (More's _Utopia_, Book I., p. 32, Pitt Press Series).

[22] "The Grazier, the Farmer, the Merchants become landed men, and call themselves gentlemen, though they be churls; yea, the farmer will have ten farms, some twenty, and will be a Pedlar-merchant" (_King Edward's Remains: A Discourse about the Reformation of many Abuses_). "Look at the merchants of London, and ye shall see, when by their honest vocation G.o.d hath endowed them with great riches, then can they not be content, but their riches must be abrode in the country, to bie fermes out the handes of worshipful gentlemen, honest yeomen, and poor laborynge husbands" (_Lever's Sermons_, Arber's Reprints, p.

29).

[23] "Do not these ryche worldlynges defraude the pore man of his bread, ... and suffer townes so to decay that the pore hath not what to eat, nor yet where to dwell? What other are they, then, but very manslears? They abhorre the names of Monkes, Friars, Chanons, Nounes, etc., but their goods they gredely gripe. And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at a reasonable pryce, noryshed scholes, brought up youths in good letters, they doe none of all these thinges"

(Becon, _Works_, 1564, vol. ii. fols. xvi., xvii.).

[24] "A proclamation set fourthe by the King's Majestie with the a.s.sent and consent of his dear uncle Edward, Duke of Somerset ... and the said cattell also by all lyklyhode of truth should be more cheape beynge in many men's handes as they be nowe in fewe, who may holde them deare and tarye the avantage of the market" (Brit. Mus. _Lansdown_, 238, p. 205). See also E. E. T.

S.: "Certayne causes gathered together, wherein is showed the decaye of England only by the great mult.i.tude of shepe" (date 1550-1553), and _The Commonweal of this Realm of England, pa.s.sim_, especially pp. xlv.-lxvii. It is worth noting that Hales, who was quite conversant with the effect on general prices of an increase in the supply of money, thought that the rise which took place in his day was in some measure due to monopolists. He describes his third Bill as ensuring that "ther wolde have byn within fyve yeares after the execution therof suche plentie of vitteyll and so good cheape as never was in England" (_Commonweal_, p. lxiii.).