The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 16

(b) _The Growth of the Large Leasehold Farm_

The changed situation created by these causes had the effect of producing a new policy on the part of landlords, which took different forms according to the circ.u.mstances of different localities, but which in the counties most deeply affected resulted in an increase in pasture-farming and in an upward movement in the payments made by tenants. The new regime seems to have affected first, as was natural, that part of their estates which was most entirely under their own control, and the disposal of which was least involved in other interests, namely, the manorial demesne. It is not altogether easy to construct a picture of the policy pursued by a typical enclosing landlord from the accounts of contemporaries, who were more interested in results than in the steps by which they were reached. According to some of them, lords in the sixteenth century were resuming into their own hands those parts of the demesne which had been let out, in order to supply their establishments with produce without having to rely on the markets when prices were rapidly rising. On some manors again, when the demesne was "in the hand of the lord," considerations which were not purely economic came into play; for example, one finds part of it being turned into a park, which was at once profitable as a means of grazing sheep, and prized for those motives of social amenity and ostentation which have done so much to make the English countryside the admiration of travellers, and so much to ruin the English peasantry. It was not seldom that the confiscated estates of monastic houses were converted into a pleasaunce or a deer-park by their new proprietors.

On the other hand, the manorial doc.u.ments suggest that landlords were usually rather parties to changes in the methods of cultivation than themselves the agents who carried them out, because, at any rate in the case of the larger landowners, the demesnes were usually leased. The actual process of experiment and innovation took place on most manors through the instrumentality of the lessee.[373] The large farmer, who on many manors is found managing the demesne, is much the most striking character in the rural development of the sixteenth century. His fortunes wax while those of the peasantry wane. Gradually he thrusts them, first copyholders and then yeomen, into the background, and becomes in time the parent of a mighty line, which later ages, forgetting poor Piers Plowman, whose place he has usurped, will look on as the representative of all that is solid and unchanging in the English social order. In our period he plays in the economics of agriculture the part which was played in industry by the capitalist clothier, and his position as the pivot of agrarian change is so important that it will repay close attention.

[373] This may seem inconsistent with the fact that in the statistics published by Mr. Leadam from the Inquisition of 1517 most enclosures in most counties are entered as made by lords of manors. I do not think, however, that this is necessarily so.

When it is stated that a lord of a manor has enclosed and converted to pasture, it may very well be meant that his agent did so with his consent. _I.e._ the distinction would appear to be not between the lord and the lord's farmer, but between the manorial authorities (lord and farmer) and the rest of the landholders. The phrase used in the Berkshire returns, "converti permisit," indicates what I take to have been the most general, though not, of course, the invariable, course of events.

In the first place, then, it is clear that the foundation of the large farm was the practice of leasing the demesne for a term of years, which was the normal way of disposing of it in the sixteenth century. In the reign of Elizabeth the distinction between the demesne and the customary tenancies still survived, and surveyors were at some pains to separate them in order to prevent the demesne being merged in the customary holdings. But the original meaning of the distinction had been almost obliterated; the demesne was no longer the centre of the manorial economy, as it had been when its produce maintained the lord's household, and the labour of the customary tenants, in spite of the survival of many services, no longer supplied the chief means of cultivating it. On the whole, it would be true to say that on ninety-nine manors out of a hundred the demesne was leased by the middle of the sixteenth century, and on the majority of them probably at a much earlier date. There are, of course, some exceptions. Certain manors the lord makes his headquarters, and there the home farm is retained in his hands, because it is required to supply his establishment. On other manors the demesne or part of it can no longer be distinguished from the holdings of the customary tenants, and is held by them by copy of Court Roll in the same way as the "customary land." In certain parts of England, again, the leasing of the demesne has not proceeded far, because the demesne has always been relatively unimportant. On several Northumberland manors, for example, the surveyor[374] could in 1567 find no demesne at all, either because it had all been divided up among the tenants, or because it had never existed. Nevertheless, in spite of these exceptions, a lease for a term of years to a farmer or farmers is the ordinary method of disposing of the demesne in the sixteenth century. This is proved in a very satisfactory way by the investigations of Professor Savine[375] into the disposition of the lands of monastic houses in 1534. After an exhaustive inquiry relating to several hundred manors he found that the cases in which the demesne was not leased were an insignificant proportion of the whole. An examination of smaller groups of manors tells the same story. Out of thirty-six[376] manors in Wiltshire, Somersetshire, and Devonshire surveyed for the Earl of Pembroke in 1568, it is possible to determine the use made of the demesne on thirty-two, and on twenty-nine of them it was leased. Of twenty-nine other manors examined at random at different periods in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century every one was in the same condition. There is no reason to distrust these instances on the ground that they may represent a development occurring too late in the century to be relevant to movements found in existence at the beginning of it, because in several cases where the history of a manor can be traced backwards, it is clear, as has been shown above, that the leasing of the demesne was quite common at least from the middle of the fifteenth century, and in parts of the country much earlier.

[374] _e.g._ at Acklington (_Northumberland County History_, vol. v.), of which Clarkson the surveyor writes: "Neither is there any demaine lands or demaine meadows, but all is occupied together in husbandry"; at Birling (_ibid._): "There is no demaine land or meadow, with all their husbandlands and meadows appertaining to the same"; apparently also at High Buston.

Compare Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, p. 316: "Villages without a manorial demesne ... are found ... where the power of the lord was more a political than an economical one" (Norfolk and Suffolk, Lincoln, Northumberland, Westmoreland, &c.). For a manor where the demesne is kept in the hand of the lord in 1568 for the reason given above, see Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_, Manor of Washerne.

[375] _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, pp. 153-154.

[376] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.

From the allusions made by contemporaries to the large farmer as one of the mainsprings of the changes of the period, one is disposed to look first at the demesne for the beginning of capitalist agriculture.

Whether, however, the method of cultivating the demesne differed much from the cultivation of the customary holdings depended to a considerable extent upon the terms on which it was leased, and, in particular, upon whether it pa.s.sed into the control of a single considerable tenant. It would be a mistake to think that the economic relationships which were established when the demesne ceased to be cultivated by villein labour were all of one type, or in particular that the demesne invariably pa.s.sed into the hands of one holder. Mention has already been made of the practice of adding the demesne lands, or part of them, to the customary land held by copy of Court Roll, a practice which obviously resulted in maintaining in the hands of small cultivators land which might have gone to build up large properties.

Even when the demesne is leased it is not always leased to a single large farmer. In reality the surveys of the sixteenth century reveal two well-defined types of leasehold property subsisting on the lord's demesne, sometimes on neighbouring manors. The first type has as its distinctive feature that the lessees are a number, sometimes a very large number, of small farmers, who have been given allotments on the demesne and who hold them for various periods of years, sometimes for life only, sometimes for eighty, sometimes for ninety-two or ninety-nine, years. Many examples of this type of small leaseholder come from the west of England. Thus at Ablode,[377] in Somersetshire, before the demesne was leased out by St. Peter's to a large farmer in 1515, it had already been leased to seventeen of the customary tenants. At Paynton,[378] in 1568, the Barton land was held in small plots by fifty-one leaseholders, at South Brent[379] by eighteen. But examples of this arrangement are found all over England. At Higham Ferrers,[380] in Northamptonshire, the demesne has been divided among nine tenants; at Stondelf,[381] in Staffordshire, among thirty-one. At Shape[382] in Suffolk and Northendale[383] in Norfolk the demesnes are added to the holdings of the customary tenants. At Forncett,[384] in Norfolk, parts of the demesne are in the same way leased out in small parcels in the fifteenth century for gradually lengthening periods of years, though by the beginning of our period they seem to have been held by copy in the same way as the customary land. Elsewhere we get what appear to be variations of the same system, in the form of sub-letting or of joint-cultivation. At Castle Combe,[385] for example, the demesne lands were leased in 1454 to four tenants, "with the intention that they themselves should let to farm to all the tenants of the lord some portion of those lands." On other manors groups of tenants seem to make themselves jointly responsible for the rent required. It was not an unknown[386] thing even at quite an early date for a whole village to come forward and make a kind of collective bargain with the lord as to the terms upon which they would take over the demesne lands, and when the leasing of the demesne became the regular practice townships sometimes stepped into the shoes of the bailiffs, and averted the entry of the large farmer by leasing the lands themselves, and making their own arrangements as to the way in which they should be utilised. One may suspect, indeed, that such action took place in a good many cases when the land was leased to many small tenants, as at Paynton and South Brent, even though the intervention of the township is not expressly stated. Sometimes, however, the communal character of the bargain is quite beyond doubt. For example, at Cucklington,[387] on the manor of Stooke Trister in Somersetshire, twelve tenants leased together at a rent of 8 for forty years a sheep house with 250 acres of land. At Chedsey,[388] in the same county, the whole of the demesne, which lay mainly in small parcels of one or two acres, was held in 1568 on a twenty-one years' lease by the tenants of the manor. At Caston,[389] in Norfolk, we find an entry of rent which is paid by "the inhabitants of the town of Scratby for certain lands occupied for their benefit." The phrase "town lands," which appears not infrequently[390] in the surveys and estate maps of the sixteenth century may perhaps be taken as indicating the same conclusion. In what way exactly we ought to interpret these arrangements--whether we should regard them as nothing more than a summary expression of the fact that all the tenants have severally rights over part of the estate, or whether we should conceive of them as implying some higher degree of corporate action than this, and as the outcome of a bargain struck with the lord by the village as a village, is an interesting and difficult question,[391] to which we shall recur later in speaking of rights of common. But we may mention two points which suggest that there is in them a certain element of practical communism to which legal historians sometimes do less than justice. The first is that we occasionally find certain tenants acting on behalf[392] of, one might almost say, representing, others. The second is that in some cases the demesne lands are divided among them in exactly equal[393] shares, so that, though every one has more land than before, the relative sizes of their holdings are unaltered. The last fact is a very striking one. It means, in the first place, that the new land has been allotted on some common principle and by some formal agreement. Clearly, if each tenant had bought as much land as he pleased, we should have had not equality but inequality. It points, in the second place, to the enduring strength of the ideas and interests underlying the system of agricultural shareholding which is characteristic of the mediaeval village. We can understand a very primitive system of agriculture designed to secure each household the standard equipment needed to support it. But one would naturally suppose that at the end of the Middle Ages, when new land which had hitherto belonged to the lord was offered to the villagers, each would buy up as much as he could without regard to the interests of his neighbours. It is probable that in most cases, as in those quoted in Chapter III., this is what happened. But in some instances it is not. The old economic ideas which had governed the disposition of the ancient customary holdings are applied to the new land which the cessation of demesne cultivation by the lord throws into the market, and the villagers re-allot it on the old plan. Even in its decay the mediaeval land system shows its vitality by meeting new situations with the ancient methods.

[377] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriae_, vol.

iii. App., pp. 291-295.

[378] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.

[379] _Ibid._

[380] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Portf. 13, No. 34.

[381] R.O. _Land Rev. Misc. Bks._, vol. clx.x.xv., ff. 70-74.

[382] R.O. _Misc. Bks. Treas. of Receipts_, vol. clxiii., ff.

187.

[383] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Roll 478, No. 3.

[384] Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_.

[385] Scrope, _History of Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, p.

208.

[386] Vinogradoff, _The Growth of the Manor_, note to chap. ii., Book III., p. 370, and his quotations from Maitland: "The villains of Bright Waltham ... const.i.tuted a community which held land, which was capable of receiving a grant of land, which could contract with the lord, which could make exchange with the lord."

[387] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.

[388] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl of Pembroke_.

[389] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 12, No. 52, p.

10 d.

[390] See the map of part of Salford, p. 163, and compare R.O.

Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 27, No. 32 (Lavenham in Suffolk): "Of Township of Tuddenham Free land foldcourse, 6s.

9d." _Ibid._, Portf. 13, No 21 (Colly Weston in Northants): "The inhabitants for bushy ground paying two years 11s. Item, in every third year they pay nothing." At Wymondham (R.O. _Aug.

Off. Misc. Bks._, vol. ccclx., f. 91) one finds under the heading "Towne lands" 38 acres held by copy by the "feoffees of the Vill of Wymondham" (37 Eliz.) in Trust for the school.

[391] See references quoted below, pp. 244-253.

[392] _e.g._ Scrope, _History of Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, p. 203. Extent of Manor, 1454: "Et notandum quod praedictae terrae dominicates c.u.m pratis et pasturis supra specificatis dimittebantur ad firmam Ricardo Hallewey, Edwardo Yonge, Johanni Costyn, Willelmo Gaudeby, et Edwardo Noorth, ea intentione quod ipsi dimitterent ad firmam omnibus tenentibus domini aliquas portiones dictorum terrarum secundum magis et minus pro earum cultura, et reddunt pro firma inter se cxiiis.

viiid."

[393] R.O. _Land Revenue Misc. Bks._, vol. ccxxi., fol. 1.

Survey of Manor of Brigstock (Northants) 4, James I. Here the demesne is held by twenty-two tenants, each having 8 acres, 3 roods, and 1 acre of meadow. Mickleholme meadow (also demesne land) is held by five tenants, each having 1 acre. One finds on some Northumberland manors a growth in the size of customary holdings combined with the preservation of almost exact equality between them, which surely must be taken as proving that the increase in the area held grew, not by sporadic encroachments on the part of individuals, but by definite allotment on some communal plan. Thus at Birling there were in 1248 ten "bondi,"

each holding 30 acres or one husbandland; in 1498 nine holding 30 acres or one husbandland, and four holding one husbandland of 30 acres between them; in 1567 ten customary tenants, each holding 33 acres; in 1616 the average holding has risen from 33 to 42-1/2 acres, but there is still substantial equality, the largest holding amounting to 44 acres, 3 roods, 3-1/2 poles, and the smallest to 40 acres, 0 roods, 33 poles (I omit the facts as to the cottagers). In spite of two considerable additions to the land of the village, there is little change in the relative proportions of the tenancies. At Acklington there were in 1352 thirty-five bondage holdings of 16 acres each, of which nine were vacant (presumably on account of the plague). In 1368 these nine vacant holdings were let to the other tenants for herbage.

In 1498 there were eighteen tenants, of whom seventeen held two husbandlands apiece (_i.e._ 32 acres) and one, one husbandland (_i.e._ 16 acres). _Northumberland County History_, vol. v.

These small tenants were described as "farming the demesne," and their existence may perhaps mark a sort of half-way house in the evolution of the manorial demesne into the large leasehold farm. One may suspect that that development was not at all likely to take place rapidly in the circ.u.mstances of the fifteenth century. According to the generally accepted view the practice of leasing part of the demesne, though occurring at a very early date on manors where the labour supply was too small for it to be cultivated by the villeins, received a great impetus from the scarcity of labour which was produced by the Great Plague, and went on side by side with the gradual commutation of labour services into money rents. Of course one must not dogmatise about changes which took centuries to accomplish, and which developed at very different degrees of speed in different parts of the country. But the accounts of particular manors supplied us by surveyors bear out the view that the development of a cla.s.s of small leaseholders took place as the result of the abandonment of the old system of cultivating the demesne by means of the works of the tenants organised under the supervision of the manorial officials. "The lorde departed his habitation and caused his officers to grant out parte of his landes to his tenants at will." "The medowes lying in Hinton were the lordes' severall meadowes, which nowe are divided among the tenants." "When the lorde departed his habitation, and granted out the demesnes, the part was delivered and letten to the use of the tenants." "One Sir John Taverney, Knight, dyd inhabit within the said mannor, and kept great hospitalitie, and occupied the demesnes in his own possession, which are large and greate, and now of late years granted out by copye for terms of lyves among the tenants." Such information, collected by a curious investigator[394] in the middle of the sixteenth century from the lips of aged peasants in the west of England, takes us back to a time when the leasing of the demesne was a comparative novelty. Is it surprising that the landlord who leased for the first time should prefer to do so on this small scale, should choose to grant plots of land piecemeal for short terms of years rather than to form a single farm? The practice was at first an experiment, an alarming departure from accepted methods undertaken only through dire necessity.

A great catastrophe like the plague might make it profitable, but time would naturally elapse before it was done systematically and on a large scale. At the same time a cla.s.s of farmers with sufficient capital to manage several hundred acres of land could not come into existence at once. The ordinary villein tenants, who were the first lessees on many manors, could hardly jump immediately from farming twenty or thirty acres to farming a whole estate, though those of them who as bailiffs had previously been responsible for managing the demesne, and who seem sometimes to have managed it as farmers for the lord, rather than as hired servants, were certainly in a better position to do so.

[394] Humberstone, _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.

(surveys _temp._ Phil. and Mary of various manors belonging to the Earl of Devon).

It would seem indeed that the question whether, when the sixteenth century began, the demesne lands of a manor were leased to many small tenants or to one or two large farmers, was decided largely by local and personal conditions, and may fairly be described as a matter of chance.

When they lay in many scattered strips unified culture was impossible till they had been consolidated, and therefore there was no particular reason for leasing them to one tenant rather than to many; whereas, when they were from the start in two or three great blocks, it was obviously very improbable that they would be sub-divided. In those parts of the country where sheep-farming was less profitable than elsewhere one motive for introducing a single large farm was absent, while where the demesne had already been leased in small plots the manorial authorities might dislike to make an abrupt change affecting many households disadvantageously. The general movement would appear, however, to have been in the direction of longer leases and larger tenancies. Thus Miss Davenport has shown that at Forncett the leasing of the demesne began[395] in small parcels and for short periods from the end of the fourteenth century, and gradually took place on a larger scale and for longer periods as the practice became more familiar. The earlier leases of the Oxfordshire manor of Cuxham[396] alternate between six and seven years in length, and it is not till 1472 that the College owning it appears to have granted a lease of as much as twenty years. Sometimes one can see the system of leasing small parcels to many little farmers, and that of leasing the whole demesne to one large farmer, coming into compet.i.tion with each other. A case in point comes from Ablode[397] in Somersetshire. In 1515 the Abbot and Convent of St. Peter's, Gloucester, leased the whole manor of Ablode to a farmer for eighty years. But at the time when the lease was made the demesne lands and demesne meadows were already occupied by the customary tenants. Accordingly the covenant with the farmer provides that as soon as the other tenants' agreements terminate, he shall have the reversion of their lands to use as he pleases. Here the two types of demesne cultivation are seen merging into one another, with the result that the large farm is consolidated out of the small tenancies which preceded it.

[395] Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 57. When first leased in 1373 the demesne was leased as a whole, but this plan was abandoned. Early in the fifteenth century it was leased in small plots, at first for six or seven years, and then for twelve, twenty, or forty years. Finally parts of the demesne were granted to be held at fee farm.

[396] Merton Doc.u.ments, Nos. 3100 (lease of 1361 for seven years), 3002 (lease of 1420 for seven years); 2856 (lease of 1424 for one year); 1874 (lease of 1472 for twenty years).

[397] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriae_, vol.

iii. App., pp. 291-295. The words are "Sed bene licebit praefatis ... subst.i.tuere tenentes ad eorum bene placitum in omnibus illis terris dominicalibus supradictis modo in manibus tenentium ibidem existentibus, c.u.m reversio praedicta inde acciderit."

At the beginning of our period these small demesne tenancies had already disappeared from many manors, if they had ever existed on them, and the normal method of using the demesne was to lease it to a single[398]

large farmer, or at any rate to not more than three or four. In spite of the instances given above, in which the home farm and its lands were split up among numerous small tenants, most of the evidence suggests that the leasing of the demesne to a single farmer was as regular a way of disposing of it in the sixteenth century as its cultivation by manorial officials with the labour of villeins had been in the thirteenth. The very slow development of the large farm in certain parts of the country was due rather to the insignificance or absence of the demesne on some northern manors than to the prevalence of any alternative methods of utilising it. The terms on which the farmer took over the land varied naturally in detail, but these differences are unimportant. In a few cases he holds it by copy. Normally he is a leaseholder, sometimes for life, more usually for a period of years ranging from twenty-one to eighty. Again the lessee's interest may be more or less inclusive. Sometimes only the demesne, including any customary works upon it of the tenants which may survive, is leased.

Sometimes the lease includes the live-stock of the manor, which, or the equivalent of which, the farmer must replace at the end of his term.

Sometimes the profits of the court are leased as well, though more usually they are reserved, together with any income from fines, to the lord. Sometimes there is an arrangement of great interest and importance by which the whole body of manorial rights, including the income from the courts, confiscation of straying beasts, and the rents of the customary tenants, are leased to the farmer, who thus becomes the immediate landlord of the other tenants.[399] The greater part of the farmer's rent is by the middle of the sixteenth century paid in money.

But certain payments in kind[400] survive, and supply a link between the vanishing subsistence cultivation, and the growing commercial economy.

Where money was scarce, tenants were sometimes allowed to pay in kind as a concession to their interests, and some landlords still found it convenient to receive part of their rent in grain, fowls, pigeons, fish, or a fat bull, a practice which on college estates lasted down to the very end of the seventeenth century. But the value of such payments was carefully calculated in terms of money, and they were the exception.

[398] Thus in 1535, on nineteen out of twenty-two manors owned by Battle Abbey, the demesne was farmed by a single tenant, on one by two, on one by three, while on one it was retained in the hands of the monks (_Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, vol. i.; _English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution_, by A. Savine). On twenty-five manors out of thirty-two held by the Earl of Pembroke in 1568, the same unified management obtained (Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_). Savine's remarks are to the point: "The lord of the manor seldom divided up the demesne into separate plots of land to be let to local tenants. Usually the demesne and its buildings, sometimes even together with the live and dead stock, pa.s.sed into the hands of one farmer" (_ibid._).

[399] As at Knyghton in Wilts in 1568 (Roxburghe Club, _Pembroke Surveys_), where the holdings and rents of the customary tenants appear in the farmer's lease, _e.g._ "Walter Savage ad voluntatem tenet ut parcellam dicti manerii l close etc. ... et reddit 56s. ad ma.n.u.s dicti firmarii."

[400] Here is an example from a lease of 1562. The farmer pays "yearly to the lord for the aforesaid farm--

10 quarters of corn, per bushel, 12d. 4 20 quarters of barley, per bushel, 8d. 106s. 8d.

10 quarters of oats, per bushel, 3d. 26s. 8d.