The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 12

[276] Stubbs, _Constl. Hist._, vol. ii. p. 479, n. 5.

[277] The word "usury" denoted in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century not merely exorbitant interest on a loan, but any oppressive bargain, including the raising of prices, the beating down of wages, and the rack-renting of land (see _e.g. A Discourse on Usurie_, by Thomas Wilson, 1584). The phrase "a great taker of advantages" comes from a complaint by the people of Hereford against an unpopular divine who lent money at interest and rack-rented land (_S. P. D. Eliz._, cclx.x.xvi. Nos.

19 and 20), and the phrase "weapon bodeth peace" from an account of an agrarian dispute in Lancashire--it is the sort of grim joke that stubborn and humorous people would appreciate--in _L.

and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xiii., Pt. II., p. 535. "On Sunday night Wheateley sent his daughter to bid him to come to Parson's Close to mow Mr. Tempest's meadow there. Had heard that whoever should mow the meadow should be beaten off the ground, and sent to ask if he should bring a weapon. Wheateley sent word again 'howe weapon boded peace, therefore bring his weapon with him.'

Brought his bow and shafts."

(g) _The Progress of Enclosure among the Peasantry_

While compet.i.tive conditions are creeping forward on those parts of the village lands which have been most recently taken in, even more momentous changes are occurring on the customary holdings themselves. By the end of the fifteenth century we are walking through fields that are being cut up with the hedges which give the dullest English landscape the trim beauty of a garden. For a century and a half, while in the great world the new state rises on the ruins of the Middle Ages, while Tudors give way to Stuarts, and Stuarts browbeat and are browbeaten by ever more impatient Parliaments, in courts customary and sometimes in noisier a.s.semblies not without arms, we shall be discussing whether those hedges are to stand or fall. The great enclosing movement has begun.

Like most great economic changes it has begun quietly and for a long time men are doubtful whether it is a great change at all, and, if it is mischievous, in what exactly the mischief consists. Nor indeed does the ma.s.s of the population, who feel the new conditions most, ever become quite clear on this point. Events are too various and move too swiftly for them. They see that great men enclose with little regard to the interests of their poorer neighbours. They curse them for their enclosures,[278] and believe with the faith of an age which has re-discovered the Bible, that they, like greedy Ahab, the father of enclosers, will be cursed. When the encloser should call on G.o.d to witness his deed the devil's name starts to his lips. His cattle are struck by lightning, and his children do not live to reap the fruits of his iniquity. But the peasants enclose themselves, and though they feel the difference between one sort of enclosing and another, they are simple men who cannot make the matter plain to lawyers and commissioners, and when things reach a certain point they will fight it out.

[278] For the popular att.i.tude towards enclosures see below, pp.

313?-340, and Leland (quoted Hone, _The Manor and Manorial Records_, p. 117): "The Duke of Buckingham made a fair park by the Castle of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, and took very much fair land in, very fruitful of corn, now fair lands for coursing. The inhabitants cursed the Duke for those lands so enclosed." I cannot refrain from quoting the following pa.s.sage (_Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii): "To the Right Honble.

House of Parliament now a.s.sembled, the Humble Pet.i.tion of the Mayor and Free Tenants of the Borough of Wootton Ba.s.set in the Countie of Wilts, Humble sheweth to this Honourable House" [that their common has been seized and enclosed by the lord of the manor, who] "did divers times attempt to gaine the possession thereof by putting in of divers sorts of cattle, in so much that at length, when his servants did put in cowes by force into the said common, many times and present upon the putting of them in, the Lord in his mercy did send thunder and lightning from heaven, which did make the cattle of the said Francis Englefield [the lord of the Manor] to run so violent out of the said ground, that at one time one of the beasts was killed therewith; and it was so often that people that were not there in presence to see it, when it thundered would say, Sir Francis Englefield's men were putting in their cattle into the land, and so it was, and as soon as those cattle were gone forth, it would presently be very calm and fair, and the cattle of the towne would never stir, but follow their feeding as at other times, and never offer to move out of the way." For the allusion to invoking the devil, see Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c. It was said that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations (Erdeswick, _Survey of Stafford_, ed. Harwood, p.

55). The same was said of enclosers (Moore, _op. cit._).

In every age there are words which are sufficiently definite to become a battle-cry, and yet which contain so many shades of meaning and are susceptible of such varying interpretations, that those who seem to differ most profoundly really differ because they are using the same word to express quite different ideas. Such a word was enclosing. For many years it was a burning question--with statesmen, with preachers, with the ma.s.s of the peasantry. But those who tell us exactly what it meant are few, and they tell us hardly more than is sufficient to show that it meant several different things in different connections. The picture of enclosure which carried Ket's followers against the walls of Norwich was that immortalised two centuries later in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"; a vision of village cornfields turned into dreary expanses of pasture, where sheep grazed amid ruined homesteads and cattle were stalled in the mouldering churches.[279] When the scientific agriculturists of the age eulogised enclosures, they thought of a more orderly and productive cultivation arising in place of the intolerable "mingle mangle" of the open fields. The Levellers, who in the seventeenth century carried on the agitation against enclosure, had no objection to such as took place "only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor."[280] The panegyrists of enclosing like Fitzherbert and Norden denounced[281] lords who made enclosure an occasion to rack-rent and depopulate. The Justices of Nottinghamshire[282] complain to the Government that enclosure drives people into the already overburdened towns, but they are careful to explain that enclosures of less than five acres in size improve agriculture without depopulating the country. The Government itself under Elizabeth sets its face against the enclosures which produce evictions, but nevertheless expressly sanctions the exchanging of strips, which is desired chiefly in order that small enclosures may be made.[283] In this phase of the eternal quarrel between the plain man and the technical expert both the technical expert and the plain man were right, and needed only a definition to unite against the avarice and oppression which s.n.a.t.c.hed a golden harvest from their confusion. It is the tragedy of a world where man must walk by sight that the discovery of the reconciling formula is always left to future generations, in which pa.s.sion has cooled into curiosity, and the agonies of peoples have become the exercise of the schools. The devil who builds bridges does not span such chasms till much that is precious to mankind has vanished down them for ever.

[279] See the ballad of Nowadays (1520):

"Envy waxeth wonders strong, The Riche doth the poore wrong, G.o.d of his mercy sufferith long The Devil his workes to worke.

The Townes go downe, the land decayes; Of cornefeldes playne layes, Gret men makithe now a dayes A shepecote in the Church.

The places that we Right holy call Ordeyned ffor Christyan buriall Off them to make an ox-stall These men be wonders wyse; Commons to close and kepe, Poor folk for bred to cry and wepe; Towns pulled down to pastur shepe, This ys the newe gyse."

[280] "The Leveller's Pet.i.tion" (Bodleian Pamphlets, 1648, c.

15, 3, Linc.).

[281] Fitzherbert, _Surveying_: "I advertise and exhort in G.o.d's behalf all manner of persons, that ... the lords do not heighten the rents of their tenants or cause them to pay more rent or a greater fine. A greater bribery and extortion a man cannot do than upon his own tenants, for they dare not say him naye, nor yet complain." Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, Book III.: "Lords should not depopulate by usurping enclosures, a thing hateful to G.o.d and offensive to man."

[282] _Victoria County History, Nottinghamshire_, vol. ii. p.

282.

[283] 39 Eliz. c. i.

One such distinction, however, we must draw at once. Enclosure is usually thought of in connection with the encroachments made by lords of manors or their farmers upon the land over which the manorial population had common rights or which lay in the open arable fields. And this is on the whole correct. This is what the word would have suggested to nine men out of ten in our period: this aspect of the movement was the most rapid in its development and the most far-reaching in its effects. But there was another side to it which was at once earlier in point of time and productive of quite dissimilar results. There is abundant evidence to show that the open field system of agriculture, with its intermingled strips and its collective, as opposed to individual, rules of cultivation, was undergoing a gradual dissolution from within even before the larger innovations of great capitalists gave it a shock from without. At the very time when the peasantry agitated most bitterly they were often hedging and ditching their own little holdings and nibbling away fragments of the waste to be cultivated in severalty. It is, of course, true that the effect of enclosure by the lord of a manor or large farmer was usually very different from that of enclosure by the customary tenants. The latter was a slow process of attrition, which went on quietly from one generation to another, often no doubt after discussions in the manorial court. The former was frequently an invasion. But though their social effects were dissimilar, from a technical point of view they were both part of the process through which cultivation at the discretion of the individual was subst.i.tuted for cultivation in accordance with common customary rules. Enclosing by lords and large farmers was not so much a movement running counter to existing tendencies, as a continuation on a larger scale and with different results of developments which in parts of England were already at work. Great changes are best interpreted in the light of small, and it will therefore be worth our while to look shortly at the sort of enclosing which was being carried out by the peasantry themselves.

First, one may review briefly what is told us by those who wrote on the technique of agriculture. Fitzherbert[284] and Hales in the sixteenth century, Norden and Lee in the seventeenth, make it quite plain that, apart from enclosures carried out by lords of manors, a movement is going on among the tenants which is also known by the name of enclosure.

It has as its object the formation of compact fields out of the scattered strips, and the subst.i.tution of closes surrounded by hedges for rights of grazing over the common pasture, meadow, and waste. It has as its effects a great increase in the output of wheat, opportunities for better grazing and stock-breeding, and a consequent rise in the value of land; the improvement being partly due to psychological[285] reasons, to the fact that a man who has a free hand will put more labour into the land than one who is fettered by customary rules, partly to technical causes such as the better draining and cleaning of land which the enclosure of arable ground makes possible, the greater security offered against damage done by straying cattle, the improvement in the quality of pasture when it is no longer liable to be eaten bare by the beasts of a whole township. The method by which such a change takes place is re-allotment. The construction of hedges--enclosing--is simply the machinery by which the new lines of demarcation between one man's land and another's are drawn and kept firmly in their place; and though the word _enclosure_ gives a vivid picture of the alteration which is produced in the appearance of the country, _re-allotment_ or _redivision_ of land describes much better the process by which it is brought about. The ideal form of it is described by Fitzherbert.[286] All the landlords in a village must come to an agreement that their tenants should exchange their holdings with each other. An exact statement of the area of land in tillage and pasture held by each tenant must then be made. When this has been done, every man is "to change with his neighbour, and to leye them (_i.e._ the acres, which were formerly scattered) together, and to make him one several close in every field, to leye them together in one field and to make one several close for them all; and also another several close for his portion of his common pasture, and also his portion of his meadow in a several close by itself, and all kept in several both winter and summer. And every cottager to have his portion a.s.signed to him according to his rent." Such enclosure does not, it is contended, interfere unfairly with any one's vested interests. It makes a spatial rearrangement of property, but it does not alter its economic distribution. It does not result in evictions or depopulation. It simply converts rights exercised jointly over a larger area into rights exercised individually over a smaller one. The map is dissolved into scattered pieces, but it is put together again; and when it is put together all the pieces are still there. The tenants part with shares in the common fields, meadows, and pastures, to get smaller fields, meadows, and pastures to themselves. The latter are more valuable than the former. What is lost in extension is gained in intension.

[284] Fitzherbert, _Book of Husbandry_. Norden, _op. cit._: "One acre enclosed is worth one and halfe in common." _Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 56. Lee, _A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure_.

[285] _Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 49: "That which is possessed of many in common is neglected of all."

[286] Fitzherbert, _Surveying_, chap. xl.

But this account is an ideal one, a description of the most excellent way, not necessarily a description of what is being actually done. For that we must turn to the surveys. In the picture of agriculture which is given by the surveyors one can see the open field system of cultivation at almost every stage of completeness and disintegration at different places. On many manors there is hardly any sign of the scattered strips, which make up the individual tenant's holding, coalescing into compactness, hardly any sign of encroachments upon either the common pasture or the meadow or the waste. Elsewhere one finds that though the bulk of the land still lies in the open fields, and though the greater part of the meadow and pasture is undivided, a considerable proportion has been enclosed by the tenants and is held in severalty. Elsewhere one finds the common meadow split up and the arable enclosed, the arable enclosed and the waste unenclosed, or all of them enclosed more or less completely. It would be of great interest and importance to determine the relative preponderance of enclosure by the tenants in different parts of the country, and to see how far the districts where this type of enclosure by consent had been commonest were identical with those where the reports of the Royal Commissions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show that depopulating enclosures made least way.

Very probably it would be found that the latter movement went on least rapidly where the former had proceeded furthest, and that where the tenants themselves had from an early date subst.i.tuted enclosed for open field husbandry, as apparently they had in Kent, Ess.e.x, Cornwall, and parts of Devonshire[287] they had least to fear from that kind of enclosure which was accompanied by encroachments on the part of manorial authorities, and which seems to have produced most dislocation in the Midlands and Eastern counties. But this is a suggestion which our material is too scanty either to confirm or disprove. Enclosure by consent did not cause popular disorder; and therefore we cannot say, taking the country as a whole, how far enclosure on the part of the bulk of the smaller tenants had proceeded. We can only give cases which show that on some manors it had advanced very far, and which bear out the evidence of the writers on agriculture as to there being a well-defined movement away from open field husbandry on the part of the peasants themselves, without attempting to determine its extent or its geographical distribution.

[287] _Commonweal of this Realm of England_, p. 49. _Victoria County History_, Ess.e.x. I am inclined to say "almost certainly"

rather than "very probably" (see below, pp. 167 and 262?-263).

Look, first, for example, at the picture given by the Commission of 1517. Thanks to Mr. Leadam,[288] we are able to say what the average acreage of the enclosures in each county represented was, what proportion of the enclosures was due to lords of manors, lay or ecclesiastical, and what proportion was due to the tenants. Now it is generally, though not universally, true that the enclosures reported to this Commission fall into two main types. The first consists of considerable enclosures carried out mainly by lords of manors. The second consists of smaller enclosures carried out mainly by other cla.s.ses. Thus the five districts where the average size of the enclosures made is largest are Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire North Riding, Yorkshire West Riding, Yorkshire East Riding, where it is 129, 96, 84, 77, 62 acres respectively, and in these the proportion of the enclosures which is due to the lords of manors is high also--72 per cent., 52 per cent., 79 per cent., 92 per cent., 64 per cent. Contrast with the position in these counties that obtaining in Berkshire, in Salop, and in London and its suburbs. In Berkshire the average size of an enclosure is 32 acres, in Salop 18, in London 10, and in these districts the lords play a much smaller part in enclosing.

They are responsible for 42 per cent. of the acreage enclosed in Berkshire, 12 per cent. of that enclosed in Salop, 3 per cent. of that enclosed in the vicinity of London. Does not this suggest that in parts of the country--we cannot yet say what parts--there is much small enclosing by small men?

[288] _Trans. R. H. S._, New Series, vol. vi., and _The Domesday of Enclosures_.

Turn next to the story told by the surveys. Though Wiltshire is on the whole a country of recent enclosure, there was a certain amount of several farming on the part of the customary tenants on the Wiltshire manors in the middle of the sixteenth century. Out of 4128-1/4 acres held by them on eight manors the surveys show that 202-1/4 acres lie in closes.[289] This is a very small proportion, only 5 per cent., and suggests that on most of them the holdings lay in the open fields, and that, as a general rule, the common utilisation of meadows and pastures still obtained. On one, however, as much as 132 acres out of 1103, or just under 12 per cent. were enclosed, and at best these are minimum figures which do not accurately represent how far the movement had gone; for, though a surveyor would not describe unenclosed land as enclosed, he might very well cla.s.s enclosed land with other land of the same description, for example as meadow or pasture, and omit to state that it was occupied in severalty. On some Staffordshire[290] manors again there are similar tentative beginnings of enclosure, and a similar impossibility of determining its actual extent. Then, too, there are manors where the greater part of the land still lies in the open fields, but where enclosure has proceeded a little further. At Salford,[291] in Bedfordshire, eight of the tenants have enclosed about 51 acres, which they hold separate from, and in addition to, their holdings in the open fields, in amounts varying from 2 to 17 acres. At Weeden Weston,[292]

in Northamptonshire, the three largest tenants (apart from the farmer of the demesne) hold "in several ground enclosed" 28 acres. In addition to this, part of the manor called "the mere land," the exact nature of which is obscure, has been broken off and split up among all the fourteen tenants, some holding only 2 or 3 acres, others holding 15 or 20 acres. Finally, as examples of manors where enclosure by the customary tenants was carried furthest, we may take those of Edgeware[293] and Kingsbury in Middles.e.x. From the admirable maps of these two manors, which were made in 1597, no one could even guess that the open field method of cultivation had ever existed there. The land of each of the numerous tenants lies in fields, often quite small fields, which are separated from each other by hedges. Instead of the "spider's web" of the older method we have the irregular chessboard of modern agriculture.

[289] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of the Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke_. The manors are South Newton, Washerne, Donnington, Knyghton Estoverton and Phiphelde, Wynterbourne Ba.s.set, Byschopeston, and South Brent and Huish (the last in Somersetshire.) The manor where most is enclosed by the customary tenants is Donnington.

[290] _e.g._, R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 14, No. 70, Barton (3 & 4 Ph. and Mary): "J. Whiting ... 1 close of 7 acres by copy ... J. Whiting ... 1/2 virgate ... 1 intake of 2 acres by copy."

[291] All Souls' Maps (survey on back of map of Salford).

[292] _Ibid._, Weedon Weston.

[293] _Ibid._, Edgeware and Kingbury. All these four instances come from the last decade of the sixteenth century.

These instances tell us nothing of the origin, extent, or distribution of the movement which they represent. They are useful merely as offering concrete specimens of enclosure on the parts of free and customary tenants, which confirm what is told us by the surveyors. There was certainly a well-defined trend away from the methods of common field agriculture taking place in the course of the sixteenth century and before it on the part of the peasantry. We can, however, go further than this; and premising that in the infinite variety of rural conditions in different parts of the country any cla.s.sification must be somewhat arbitrary, we can distinguish two main elements in the movement.

In the first place there is among the tenants on some manors something like a deliberate movement towards the subst.i.tution of "several" for open field husbandry. This was a change which occurred almost spontaneously when the economic interests of the majority of tenants were pushing in the same direction, and can be seen affecting both pasture, meadow, and arable holdings. The Commission[294] of 1517 found that in certain places land had been enclosed neither by individual landlords, nor by individual tenants, but by "the village," and the manorial doc.u.ments give us a clue to what such entries mean. In the surveys of the sixteenth century we not infrequently find that meadows and pastures which were originally occupied in common have been split up among the tenants, so that each has the exclusive occupation of a few acres, the share which each tenant takes being proportioned more or less exactly to his holding of arable in a manner which precludes the idea that the change can have taken place by piecemeal individual encroachments, or in any way except by an intentional redistribution of land, in which the interests of all the tenants received consideration.[295] Such a division of meadow and pasture is paralleled by cases in which the re-allotment of arable holdings is carried out both by freeholders and by copyholders almost exactly in the manner prescribed by Fitzherbert. Thus at Ewerne,[296] in Dorsetshire, the customary tenants got permission from the lord to make enclosure on the open fields; appointed persons to "extend and tread them out," and then united the dispersed strips into compact holdings, so that "the more part of the manor was enclosed, and every tenant and farmer occupied his land several to himself." At Mudford, in Somersetshire, the tenants were found by the surveyor in 1568 to be contemplating the same step. A similar course was taken in the early seventeenth century on several Northumbrian manors, of which Cowpen[297] may be taken as a typical example.

[294] _e.g._ Whitecote (Salop) 40 acres, and at Wyndeferthing (Norf.) 25 acres are enclosed by the _villata_ (see Leadam, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. vi.).

[295] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_. At Washerne nineteen out of twenty-one customary tenants held separate pieces of meadow and pasture, the largest 7-1/2 and the smallest 3-1/2 acres, but usually almost equal. At Donnyngton, twelve out of thirty-two customary tenants had pieces of land "extractum de communia." R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Bdle.

3, No. 29, Agarsley (Staffs., 1611).; here the pasture appears to have been divided up among the copyholders, but there are considerable inequalities in their shares.

[296] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.

[297] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. In this case enclosure was carried out by the freeholders. But the procedure is similar to that at Ewerne. The allusion to "justice and right" shows what the reason for the intermixing of strips had been.

The procedure followed by the freeholders of that township was to get their land surveyed by an expert, to divide it into two great portions, and to agree that each man should have an allotment in one or other of the two divisions proportionate to the holding which he had occupied in the open fields, due regard being had to the quality as well as the acreage of each holding, "so that some have not all the best ground and others all the worst, but that each man have justice and right." Such instances may prove to be exceptional in the sixteenth century; it is our impression that they were, and that the attempts which the peasantry made to overcome the difficulties a.s.sociated with the open field system of cultivation more often took the form of individual exchanging of strips, than of a formal agreement to abandon one method of cultivation and to adopt another. But, even though exceptional, they are of some interest as offering complete examples of changes which have been going on more generally on a smaller scale and in a less systematic manner.

They afford a striking contrast to the enclosing by the manorial authorities which we shall examine in a future chapter, and offer an a.n.a.logy to the enclosures which were carried out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They resemble the latter in being a deliberate attempt to make a clean sweep of the old system of open field agriculture. They differ from them in being the outcome of voluntary agreement among the tenants, not of legislation.[298]

[298] We know why lords wanted to enclose much better than we know why tenants wanted to enclose. Here is a pet.i.tion from a freeholder (_Northumberland County History_, vol. v. undated): "To the Right Honourable Earl of Northumberland, William Bednell ... gent., humbly prayeth: That where the said village of Over Buston is held in common ... it would please your good lordship to consent that part.i.tion may be made of the same, and that also there may be convenient exchange of the arable lands lyinge in the common fields there to be rateable reduced into severall by the same part.i.tion for the reasons under-written.

"First, for that the common and pasture of the said village lying open, unfenced upon the common and fields of Wordon and Bilton, wherein are many tenants and great number of cattle, the profits of the same are continually by them surcharged, and your lordship's tenants prevented.

"By reason hereof divers quarrels and variances have happened, and daily like to ensue between the tenants of both towns, by chasing, rechasing, and impounding of their cattle damage fezant, which cannot be kept out but by perpetual staffherding, to the great charge of your honour's poor tenants.

"Your lordship's tenants being four in number, unprovided to keep able horses by reason of the want of convenient pastures and meadow, may be enabled by this particion for that purpose.

"Inclosure would greatly strengthen the said village, and your lordship's tenants, against the incursions of Scotts and foren ryders, which otherwyse, lying open, cannot be defended by the number there, who are forced to watch generally together every night, to their great charge and endurable toil.