The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 24

[541] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v.

[542] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_. The manors are South Newton, Washerne, Donnington, Winterbourne Ba.s.set, Estoverton and Phipheld, Byshopeston (all Wilts), and South Brent and Huish (Somerset).

The figures show a steady upward movement during the third and fourth decades of the century of a little over 100 per cent., a rather less rapid rise between 1549 and 1559, and another rise of 100 per cent.

between 1559 and 1569. They are of course too small to be the basis of a wide generalisation, but perhaps they may be held to offer some doc.u.mentary confirmation of a grievance which bulks large in the literature of the period. The elasticity of fines at any rate corrects the impression which would be formed of the tenants' position from looking only at the comparatively stationary rents. The same tendency is suggested by the details of individual copies. It was a not uncommon practice for a tenant who was in possession and had an estate for life to buy at a later date the right of his heir to succeed him. When this was done we have an opportunity of comparing the fines paid at different periods, and the complaints of contemporaries about unreasonable and excessive fines become intelligible. This may be ill.u.s.trated by a few extreme instances taken from the manors of Estoverton and Donnington in Wiltshire, and of South Brent in Somersetshire.

Fine for Copy. Fine for Reversion.

1. 6/8 (1537) 5 (1563) 2. 40/? " 13, 6s. 8d. (1566) 3. 54/4 " 23 (1561) 4. 60/? " 30 (1565) 5. 20/? " 10 (1561) 6. 20/? (1529) 40 (1563) 7. 33/4 (1542) 20 (1565) 8. 66/8 (1522) 20 (1563) 9. 13/4 (1516) 13, 6s. 8d. (1563) 10. 40/? (1513) 40 (1565) 11. 46/8 (1531) 20 (1563) 12. 6/8 (1545) 20 (1565) 13. 13/4 (1522) 5, 6s. 8d. (1558) 14. 9 (1532) 12 (1557)

Though these are extreme cases, a considerable rise is the rule and not the exception. The advantage of the fixed rent is in fact neutralised by the movable fine. Such figures give point to Crowley's outbursts, "They take our houses over our heads; they buye our groundes out of handes, they reyse our rents, they levy great, yea unreasonable fines."[543] It is not surprising that the programme[544] of agrarian reform put forward by the Yorkshire insurgents in 1536, and by the rebels under Ket in 1549, should have contained a demand for copyhold lands "to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable sum of money." It is not surprising that the Court of Chancery[545] should have been bombarded with pet.i.tions to declare or enforce customs limiting the demands which a lord might make of an incoming tenant. It is perhaps more surprising that, in those cases where the fine was by custom uncertain, the rule that a reasonable fine was about two years'

rent should not have been enforced by judges at an earlier date and more generally than it seems to have been. For in the sixteenth century, though many old economic ideas are going by the board, public opinion still clings to the conception that there is a standard of fairness in economic dealings which exists independently of the impersonal movements of the market, which honest men can discover, if they please, and which it is a matter of conscience for public authorities to enforce. Even a good Protestant who hates the Pope will admit that there is more than a little in the Canon Law prohibition of usury,[546] and under usury, be it noted, the plain man includes rack-rents, as well as interest on capital and exorbitant prices. If to a modern economist the demand for reasonable fines and rents savours of sentimentality and confusion, he must logically condemn not only the peasants and their champions, but the statesmen; not only Ket and Hales and More and Latimer, but almost every member of every Elizabethan Privy Council. After all, all the precedents are on the side of an attempt to enforce a standard which shall be independent of the result which might be reached by higgling between this landlord and that tenant. Prices are fixed, wages are fixed, the rate of interest is fixed, though the money market is becoming more and more elusive, more and more critical of old-fashioned attempts at interference; the fines which freeholders must pay on admission have been fixed for centuries. Now that copyhold has got the protection of the Courts, it is not unnatural that tenants should ask the State to do with regard to the bargain most affecting them what it already does for bargains of nearly every other kind. It is not unnatural that, even when the fine is not settled by custom at a definite sum, they should demand nevertheless that the Courts should sanction that establishment of a "common rule," which is the ideal of the economically weak in all ages.

[543] E. E. T. S., Crowley, _The Way to Wealth_.

[544] See below, pp. 334-337.

[545] _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery in the Reign of Edward VI._ Bills to establish a fine certain on admission and alienation, to get protection against exorbitant fines, &c. are common. For popular complaints see E. E. T. S., _A Supplication of the Poore Commons_: "These extortioners have so improved theyr lands that they make of a xls. fyne xl. pounds," &c. For an actual instance see the following case. The tenants of Austenfield claim "that of ancient time all the customary tenants of the said manor of Austenfield were finable at fines certain, until of late years the lords moved by covetousness, by troubling and vexing their copyholders, drove many of them, for the buying of their quietness, to be at fines uncertain"

(William Salt Collection, vol. ix. Chancery Proceedings. Bdle.

12, No. 70).

[546] Th. Wilson, _A Discourse upon Usurie_, 1584: "And therefore I would not have men altogether to be enemies to the Canon Lawe, and to condemn everything there written, because the Pope was author of them.... Naie, I will saie plainlie that there be some such lawes made by the Pope as be right G.o.dlie, saie others what they list."

Yet we shall miss the full significance of the movement which we have examined, if we take their demands without a.n.a.lysis, and do not look at the other side of the picture. There was much to be said on the side of the manorial authorities, harsh as they often were. The criticism which Norden,[547] with a surveyor's experience, makes upon the outcry against the upward movement of fines, by pointing out that the whole scale of prices and payments has been shifted by the depreciation in the value of money, is perfectly justified. For money had depreciated, depreciated enormously; and landlords, who were faced with swiftly rising prices on the one hand and fixed freehold and copyhold rents on the other, were in a cleft stick from which it is not easy to blame them for extricating themselves as best they could. The truth is that if we content ourselves with the supposition of an access of exceptional unscrupulousness on the part of lords of manors which was favoured by contemporaries, we shall misread the situation. The real facts were much more complex, much more serious, much more interesting. A large impersonal cause, the flooding of Europe with American silver, upsets all traditional standards of payment. The first brunt is borne by those whose incomes are fixed, or relatively fixed, the owners of landed property, and the wage-earning cla.s.ses. But all over the country thousands of new bargains are being struck as leases fall in and copies are renewed. Each fresh contract is the opportunity for a readjustment of relationships, for shifting the burden from the shoulders where it rested. The wage-earners do this to some extent, but not successfully; wages do not keep pace with prices.

The landlords do it much more effectively. But there is no mechanical means of measuring what change is necessary in order to place them and their tenants in the same position relatively to each other as they were before. Once customary fines are thrown overboard, there is, unless the Government interferes, no other standard except the full fine which can be got in the open market, and, when the custom of the manor allows it to be demanded, it is demanded. Thus the readjustment, as it were, overshoots itself, and the economic rent, unearned increment, surplus value--it is difficult to avoid phrases which modern a.s.sociations have made trite--only part of which represents the rise in the price of land caused by the fall in the value of money, tends, instead of being, as. .h.i.therto, shared between landlord and copyholder, to be transferred _en bloc_ to the former. It is rarely in modern society that cla.s.ses are sufficiently definite and self-contained, rarely that economic changes are sufficiently catastrophic, for a great shifting of income from one to the other to be detected. Here we can see it going on before our eyes. We can note the result. But in this matter the twentieth century is not in a position to be critical of the sixteenth.

[547] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, Book I.: "_Surveyor._ The tennant leaveth commonly one either in right of inheritance, or by surrender, to succeed him, and he by custome of the manor is to be accepted tenant, alwaies provided he must agree with the lord, if the custome of the manor hold not the fine certain as in few it doth.... _Farmer._ You much mistake it, for I will show by ancient court rolls that the fine of that which is now 20 was then but 13s. 4d., and yet will you say they are now as they were then? _Surveyor._ Yea, and I thinke I erre little in it. For if you consider the state of things then and now, you shall find the proportion little differing; for so much are the prices of things vendible ... now increased as may well be said to exceed the prices then as much as 20 exceede the 13s. 4d."

We may now sum up this part of our subject. The extreme lucrativeness of sheep-farming, and the depreciation in the value of money, offered an incentive to landlords to make the most profitable use which they could of their property by amalgamating small holdings into large leasehold farms, which were used mainly, though not entirely, for pasture. To carry out this new policy they had to get rid of the small tenants. When the tenants held at will, or were lessees for a short term of years, lords could do this without difficulty. When they were copyholders for one life or more, they could do it more slowly; but still they could do it in time. When they were copyholders with an estate of inheritance, lords had only two alternatives--to induce them to accept leases, or to raise the fines for admission. The latter course enabled them to offer the tenants the alternative of surrendering their holdings or paying the full compet.i.tive price which could be got for them. And thus it caused an almost revolutionary deterioration in their position. Hitherto the custom of the manor had been a d.y.k.e which protected them against the downward pressure of compet.i.tion, and behind which they built up their prosperity. Now the unearned increment was transferred from tenant to landlord by the simple process of capitalising it in the fine demanded on entry. The interest of the customary tenant, therefore, virtually depreciated to the level of that of a leaseholder. The interest of the manorial lord appreciated to the full and effective ownership of all surpluses arising between the grant of one copy and the grant of the next. Thus the differences in the degree of security enjoyed by copyholders are to be explained by differences in manorial customs. Whom custom helps the law helps; who by custom are without protection, are without protection from the law, except in so far as it gradually builds up a doctrine as to what is reasonable. Long after villeinage has disappeared, copyholders still bear traces of having sprung from a cla.s.s of whom the law was reluctant to take cognizance, traces of being nurtured in a "villein nest."

PART III

THE OUTCOME OF THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION

"Lords spiritual and temporal, have it in your mind This world as it waveth, and to your tenants be kind."

--_The Proclamation of the Commons_, Gairdner, _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._, xii. I. 163.

"We must needs fight it out, or els be brought to the lyke slavery that the Frenchmen are in.... Better yt were therefore for us to dye like men, than after so great misery in youth to dye more miserably in age."--E. E. T. S., Crowley, _The Way to Wealth_.

_Doctor._ "On my faithe youe trouble youreselves ... youe that be justices of everie countrie ... in sittinge upon commissions almost wekely."

_Knight._ "Surely it is so, yet the Kinge must be served and the commonwealth. For G.o.d and the Kinge hathe not sent us the poore lyving we have, but to doe services therefore amonge our neighbours abroad."--_The Commonweal of this Realm of England._

"We have good Statutes made for the Commonwealth, as touching commoners and inclosers, many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth."--Latimer, _First Sermon preached before King Edward VI._, March 8, 1549.

CHAPTER I

THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM AND THE STATE

(a) _The Political and Social Importance of the Peasantry_

The changes which have been described in the organisation of agriculture created problems which were less absorbing than those arising out of the religious reformation and the relation of England to continental powers.

When we turn over the elaborate economic legislation of the reign of Elizabeth, with its attempts to promote industry, to define cla.s.s relationships, and to regulate with sublime optimism almost every contract which one man can make with another, we are tempted at first to see statesmen giving sleepless nights to the solution of economic problems, and to think of a modern bureaucratic state using the resources of scientific administration to pursue a deliberate and clearly conceived economic policy. But this is both to exaggerate the importance which economic questions occupied in the minds of the governing aristocracies of the age, and to credit them with a foresight which they did not possess. If they are to be called mercantilists, in England, at any rate, they wear their mercantilism with a difference; as a vague habit of mind, not as a reasoned system of economic doctrines.

Their administrative optimism is the optimism of innocence as much as of omnipotence; the fruit of a self-confidence which, in the name of the public interests, will prop a falling trade, or cut down a flourishing one, with a bland navete unperturbed by the hesitations which perplex even the most courageous of modern protectionists. Though in several departments of life--in commercial policy, in the regulation of the wage contract, in the relief of distress--the main lines drawn by Elizabethan statesmen will stand for two centuries, much of their legislation is very rough and ready; much of it again is undertaken after generations of dilatory experiments; much of it is devoid of any originality, and is a mere reproduction on a national scale of the practice of individual localities, a reproduction which sometimes does less than justice to the original. If it is popular, it is popular because it tells men to do what most decent men have been doing for a long time already, and when it tells them to do something else it is carried out only with great difficulty. If it is permanent, it is permanent not because Parliamentary draughtsmen possess any great skill or foresight, but because, before the rise of modern industry, all social relationships have a great amount of permanence. Though there was much interesting speculation on economic matters, economic rationalism was as a practical force almost negligible; and since the only instrument through which it could have achieved influence was the monarchy, its lack of influence was perhaps politically fortunate. Sixteenth century England was too busy getting the State on to its feet to produce a Colbert. Lath and plaster Colberts built their card castles on the Council table of James and Charles, and all was in train for the sage paternal monarchy which was the ideal of Bacon. But a wind blew from strange regions beyond their ken, and they were scattered before they could do much either for good or evil, leaving, as they fled, a cloud of dark suspicion round all those who would be wiser in the art of Government than their neighbours, from which, in the lapse of three centuries, the expert has hardly emerged. In spite of mercantilism, economic questions never became in England the pre-occupation of specialists. In spite of the genuine indignation roused by the sufferings of the weaker cla.s.ses in society, questions affecting them were questions which statesmen did not handle for their own sake, but only in so far as they forced themselves into the circle of political interests by cutting across the order, or military defence, or financial system, of the country. Apart from these high matters of policy most members of the governing cla.s.ses were inclined to answer pet.i.tions on the subject of economic grievances as Paget did to Somerset: Why can't you let it alone? "What a good year ...

is victuals so dear in England and nowhere else? If they and their fathers before them have lived quietly these sixty years, pastures being enclosed, the most part of these rufflers have least cause to complain."[548]

[548] Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_. Sir William Paget to the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549.

The subordinate place occupied by economic questions during our period makes the attention which was given to the results of pasture-farming all the more remarkable. Though to the statesmanship of the sixteenth century the agrarian problem was one of the second order, it was, at any rate till the accession of Elizabeth, the most serious of its own cla.s.s, and it was important enough to occupy Governments at intervals for over a century and a half. The first Statute against depopulation was pa.s.sed in 1489;[549] an abortive Bill was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656;[550] and between the two lies a series of seven Royal Commissions, twelve Statutes, and a considerable number of Proclamations dealing with one aspect or another of the enclosing movement, as well as numerous decisions on particular cases by the Privy Council, the Court of Star Chamber, and the Court of Requests. This reaction of the new agrarian developments upon public policy is interesting in several ways.

It ill.u.s.trates the growth of new cla.s.ses and forms of social organisation, the methods and defects of sixteenth century administration, and the ideas of the period as to the proper functions of the State in relation to an important set of questions, upon which political opinion was in some ways nearer to our own than it was to that of the age following the Civil War. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether without importance from the point of view of general history. We need not discuss how far the reaction of some recent historians against the familiar judgments which contrast Tudor tyranny with the const.i.tutional revolutions of the seventeenth century as darkness with light, is likely to be permanent. But it is perhaps safe to say that it is in the sphere of social policy that their case is seen at its strongest. After all, tyranny is often the name which one cla.s.s gives to the protection of another. To the small copyholder or tenant farmer the merciless encroachments of his immediate landlord were a more dreaded danger than the far-off impersonal autocracy of the Crown to which he appealed for defence. The period in which he suffered most in the sixteenth century was the interval between the death of the despotic Henry VIII. and the accession of the despotic Elizabeth. Though the interference of the Tudor, and--in a feebler fashion--of the Stuart, Governments to protect the peasantry was neither disinterested nor always effective, its complete cessation after 1642, and the long line of Enclosure Acts which follow the revolution of 1688, suggest that, as far as their immediate economic interests were concerned, the smaller landholders had more to lose than to gain from a revolution which took power from the Crown to give it to the squires. The writers[551] who after 1750 turned with a sigh from the decaying villages which they saw around them, to glorify the policy of the absolutist Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were received with the ridicule which awaits all who set themselves against a strong current of interests and ideas. But historically they were right. The revolution, which brought const.i.tutional liberty, brought no power to control the aristocracy who, for a century and a half, alone knew how such liberty could be used--that blind, selfish, indomitable, aristocracy of county families, which made the British Empire and ruined a considerable proportion of the English nation. From the galleries of their great mansions and the walls of their old inns their calm, proud faces, set off with an occasional drunkard, stare down on us with the unshakable a.s.surance of men who are untroubled by regrets or perplexities, men who have deserved well of their order and their descendants, and await with confidence an eternity where preserves will be closer, family settlements stricter, dependents more respectful, cards more reliable, than in this imperfect world they well can be. Let them have their due. They opened a door which later even they could not close. They fostered a tree which even they could not cut down. But neither let us forget that to the poorer cla.s.ses its fruits were thorns and briars, loss of their little properties, loss of economic independence, the hot fit of the hateful Speenhamland policy, the cold fit of the more hateful workhouse system.[552] Those who would understand the social forces of modern England must realise that long disillusionment. Even in the seventeenth century there are whisperings of it. At the end of the Civil War there were men who were dimly conscious that the freedom for which they had fought involved economic, as well as political and ecclesiastical, changes. "Wee the poor impoverisht commoners," wrote the leaders of a little band of agrarian reformers to the Council of War in 1649, "claim freedom in the common lands by vertue of this conquest over the King, which is gotten by our joynt consent.... If this freedom be not granted, wee that are the poor commoners are in a worse case than we were in the King's day."[553] But from the reign of Henry VII. to the Civil War official opinion was as generally in favour of protecting the peasantry against the ruinous effects of agrarian innovations, as it was on the side of leaving the landlords free to work their will in the two centuries which succeeded. We must explain this state of mind, for it certainly needs explanation; and this will necessitate our looking at the movements of the peasants and at their place in the State. We must estimate how far it was effective in practice; and to do this we must say a few words about the administrative machinery of the Tudors and of the first two Stuarts.

[549] 4 Henry VII., c. 19.

[550] Journal of House of Commons, December 19, 1656. See Leonard, _Trans. Royal Hist. Society_, vol. xix.

[551] _e.g._ Price, _Observations on Reversionary Payments_, 1773. See Levy, _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 41.

[552] The general adoption of the "Test Workhouse" for the able-bodied, which dates from the Poor Law Reform Act of 1884, was the direct result of a one-sided reaction against the disastrous Speenhamland policy.

[553] Camden Society, _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii. p. 217.

In almost all ages the first task of Governments is the preservation of order. Though the economic ideas of the sixteenth century were very different from those of the nineteenth, one of the reasons which made it impossible for the statesmen of the period to leave the land question altogether alone was the same as that which induced their successors to deal with Irish land in 1870 and 1881. It was that agrarian discontent created a permanent supply of inflammable material, which a spark might turn into a conflagration. The years between 1500 and 1650 are the last great age of the peasant uprisings which, in all countries of Western Europe except France and Ireland, are incredible to-day as a romance of giants, and hardly a generation in that stormy period elapsed without one. Sometimes nothing more happened than a collision of justices and gentry with angry mobs who were tearing down hedges and restoring common to common again under mysterious figures who flit across the darkening country-side with weapons in their hands and the eternal insurrection of the New Testament on their lips--Jack o' the Style, Pyrce Plowman, and that prophetic Captain Pouch, who "was sent of G.o.d to satisfie all degrees whatsoever, and in this present work was directed by the Lord of Heaven."[554] Sometimes the discontent swelled to a small civil war, as it did in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, and in the eastern and southern counties in 1549. The Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace were, it is true, mainly motived by discontent with the attack on the abbeys. But the explanation of their objects given by those insurgents who were cross-examined by the Government makes it difficult to agree with Professor Gay that only an insignificant part was played in these movements by agrarian discontent. The truth is that we ought to distinguish between the objects of different sections. The rebels of 1536 were not a cla.s.s, but almost the whole society of northern England, which suddenly rolls forward with all its members, spirituality and laity, peasants and peers, in fervent motion together. The weaker side of these great conservative demonstrations was that, though all cla.s.ses were united against the regime typified by Cromwell, all cla.s.ses were not moved to the same degree by the same grievances. Even when the old religion was the cause that took the gentry into the field, the humbler rebels were brought out as much by hatred of agrarian as of religious innovations. The men of Lincolnshire marched under a banner embroidered with a ploughshare, and laggards were spurred forward with the cry "What will ye do? Shall we go home and keep sheep?"[555] In c.u.mberland the four Captains of Penrith--Faith, Poverty, Pity, and Charity--marched in solemn procession with drawn swords round Burgh Church, and then, having heard Ma.s.s, led their followers, with the blessing of the vicar, on a crusade to put an end to gentlemen and to withhold rents and fines.[556]

In the North generally the arrival of Aske's messengers was a signal for the wholesale plucking down of new enclosures; a programme of agrarian reform was included in the demands put forward at Doncaster; and Aske himself told the Government at his examination that the practice of letting out farms over the heads of poor tenants was one of the causes of the rising.[557] A well-informed officer of State like Sir William Paget seems to have thought that even the rebellion which took place in Devonshire and Somersetshire in 1549, the causes of which were mainly ecclesiastical, was partly also agrarian.[558] In that year, indeed, nearly the whole of the southern counties, beginning in May with Hertfordshire, from Norfolk in the east to Hampshire in the south and Worcester in the west, were driven into riot by disappointment with the ineffective Royal Commission appointed in the preceding year. In 1550 there were disturbances in Kent, and the Government antic.i.p.ated their appearance in Ess.e.x. In 1552 the Buckinghamshire peasants rose on account of high rents and high prices. In 1554 Wyatt's[559] adherents demanded that all pasture lands which had forcibly been seized by persons in power should be restored. In 1569 an armed band pulled down enclosures near Chinley[560] in Derbyshire, threatened to kill the encloser, and rescued by force those of their number who were arrested.

Twenty-six years later, at a time of unusually high prices, even the peasantry of Oxfordshire,[561] that most imperturbable of English counties, planned "to knock down the gentlemen and rich men who made corn so dear, and who took the commons." In 1607 in the Midlands, where in the preceding decade enclosure and depopulation had created a situation as acute as that of half a century before, there was a riot which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission.

[554] For Captain Pouch see Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii. For the other names Cooper, _Annals of Cambridge_, vol. ii. p. 40.

[555] Gairdner, _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._, vol. xii., Part I., 70, 1537. Examination of R. Leedes: "The rebels ...

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

[556] _Ibid._, vol. xii., Part I., 687, 1537. Confession of Barnarde Townleye, Clerk: "The beginners of the insurrection in c.u.mberland were the 4 captains of Penrith; Faith, Poverty, Pity and Charity, as the Vicar of Burgh proclaimed them at each meeting.... Conjectures that the intent was to destroy the gentlemen, that none should pay ingressums to his landlord, and little or no rent or t.i.the"; also _ibid._, Examination of Sir Robert Thompson, Vicar of Burgh: "On the Wednesday and Thursday the 4 captains followed examinand in procession with their swords drawn, and examinand said ma.s.s, which they called the Captains' ma.s.s."

[557] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, vol. xii., Part I., 687: "They of Kirkby Stephen plucked down the new intacks of enclosures, and sent to other Parishes to do the like, which was done at Burgh, 28th January." For the Doncaster programme see below, p. 334. Aske said (_L. and P._, vol. xii., Part I., p.

901) that the new farmers of monastic estates "let and tavern out the farms of the same houses to other farmers for lucre."

[558] These particulars are taken from Strype, _Ecclesiastical Memorials_.

[559] Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii., which also gives an account of the Midland riot of 1607.

[560] MSS. in possession of Charles E. Bradshaw Bowles, Esq., of Wirksworth, for a transcript of which I am indebted to Mr.

Kolthammer. See below, pp. 327?-329.