The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 26

"JACK. Now for that Slaunder's sake, Companye by night I take, And, with all that I may make, Cast hedge and ditch in the lake, Fyxed with many a stake Though it was never so faste Yet asondre it is wraste.

HARRY CLOWTE. Gud conscience should them move Ther neighbours quietly to love, And thus not for to wrynche The commons styl for to pinch, To take into their hande That be other mennes land.

JACK. Thus do I, Jack of the Style, Now subscrybe upon a tyle.

This I do and will do with all my myght, For sclaundering me yet do I but right, For common to common again I restore Wherever it hath been yet common before.

If agayne they enclose it never so faste Agayne asondre it shall be wraste.

They may be ware by that is paste To make it agayne is but waste."

[590] Printed by Cooper, _Annals of Cambridge_, vol. ii. p. 40.

To take into your hand what is other men's land, that is the grievance.

To restore common to common again, that is the obvious remedy, a remedy which is not seriously opposed to the agrarian policy of most sixteenth century statesmen. But the more far-seeing of the peasants realise what their followers do not, that these troubles which are going on in so many different parts of England cannot be dealt with by isolated bodies of villagers, however good their cause may be. They require the intervention of the Government. How the Government is to intervene they lay down in two doc.u.ments which are perhaps the only two popular programmes of agrarian reform ever published in England since 1381. The first, contained in two of the articles[591] drawn up at Doncaster in 1536, is short enough:--

"That the lands in Westmoreland, c.u.mberland, Kendall, Dent, Sedbergh, Furness, and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kyrkbyshire, Notherdale, may be by tenant right, and the lord to have, at every change, 2 years' rent for gressum, according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there. This to be done by Act of Parliament.

"The Statutes for Enclosures and Intacks to be put in execution, and all enclosures and Intacks since the fourth year of Henry VII. to be pulled down, except mountains, forests, and Parks" (a noticeable exception which shows the composite character of the movement. In the South of England the peasant did not spare parks).

[591] Gairdner, _L. and P. of Henry VIII._, xi. 1246.

The articles[592] signed by Ket, Aldryche, and Cod in 1549 are a much more elaborate affair. Here are the most noteworthy of them:--

"We pray your grace that where it is enacted for enclosing, that it be not hurtful to such as have enclosed saffren grounds, for they be greatly chargeable to them, and that from henceforth no man shall enclose any more.[593]

"We certify your grace that whereas the lords of the mannors hath been charged with certe fre rent, the same lords hath sought means to charge the freeholders to pay the same rent, contrary to right.

"We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall comon uppon the commons.

"We pray that priests from henceforth shall purchase no lande neither free nor bondy, and the lands that they have in possession may be letten to temporal men, as they were in the first year of the reign of King Henry VII.[594]

"We pray that reed ground and meadow ground may be at such price as they were in the first year of King Henry VII.

"We pray that the payments of castleward rent, and blanch ferm and office lands, which hath been accustomed to be gathered of the tenements, whereas we suppose the lords ought to pay the same to their bailiffs for their rents gathering, and not the tenants.[595]

"We pray that no man under the degree of a knight or esquire keep a dove house, except it hath been of an old ancient custom.

"We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor to take profits of the same.

"We pray that no feudatory within your shires shall be a councellor to any man in his office making, whereby the King may be truly served, so that a man being of good conscience may be yearly chosen to the same office by the commons of the same shire.

"We pray that copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII., and that at the death of a tenant or of [at] a sale the same lands to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable [sum] of money for a remembrance.

"We pray that all bondmen may be made free, for G.o.d made all free with his precious bloodshedding.

"We pray that rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and pa.s.sage.

"We pray that the poor mariners or Fishermen may have the whole profits of their fishings, as porpoises, grampuses, whales, or any great fish, so it be not prejudicial to your Grace.

"We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase land freely, or [and] to let them out again by copy of court roll to their great advancement and to the undoing of your poor subjects.

"We pray that no man under the degree of ... shall keep any conies upon any of their freehold or copyhold, unless he pale them in, so that it shall not be to the common nuisance.

"We pray that your Grace give license and authority by your gracious commission under your Great Seal to such commissioners as your poor commons hath chosen, or to as many of them as your Majesty and your Council shall appoint and think meet, for to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings, which hath been hidden by your justices of your peace, shreves, escheators, and other your officers, from your poor commons, since the first year of the reign of your n.o.ble grandfather, King Henry VII.

"We pray that no lord, knight, esquire, nor gentleman, do graze nor feed any bullocks or sheep, if he may spend forty pounds a year by his lands, but only for the provision of his house."

[592] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 48.

[593] Some doubt has been expressed as to the interpretation of these words. They should probably be read in the light of what was said above (Part I. chap. iv.) as to enclosures made by the tenants themselves. The rebels point out that a considerable number of people have spent capital on hedging and ditching their lands for the better cultivation of saffron, and therefore ask that, while other enclosures may be pulled down, a special exception may be made in favour of this particular kind of enclosure.

[594] Contrast the feeling in Protestant Norfolk with that of Cornwall and Devon in 1549, and of the North in 1536.

[595] The grammar is bad, but the sense is clear enough. Lords must stop shifting on to tenants burdens which lords ought to bear.

The programme of the peasants is partly political. The Northerners insist that Parliament and the Crown must interfere, and the Norfolk leaders ask for a permanent commission to do the work which the county justices, who are interested in enclosing, have wilfully neglected. But it is mainly economic. The State is to do no more than restore the old usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised manorial customary enforced by a strong central Government throughout the length of the land, free use of common lands, reduced rents of meadow and marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free fisheries, and the abolition of the lingering disability of personal villeinage. The most striking thing about these demands is their conservatism. Almost exactly a hundred years later agrarian reform will be demanded as part of a new heaven and a new earth. Agrarian agitation will be carried on in terms of theories as to the social contract, of theories as to the origin of private property. Its leaders will be appealing to Anglo-Saxon history to prove to the indifferent ears of a Government which has saved them "from Charles, our Norman oppressor," that "England cannot be a free commonwealth, unless the poore commoners have a use and benefit of the land."[596] They will appeal also to a more awful sanction than that of history. "At this very day," cries Winstanley,[597] "poor people are forced to work for 4d. a day and corn is dear, and the t.i.thing-priest stops their mouths and tells them that 'inward satisfaction of mind' was meant by the declaration 'the poor shall inherit the earth.' I tell you, the scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled.... You jeer at the name of Leveller. I tell you Jesus Christ is the head leveller."

Such communistic doctrines are always the ultimate fruit of the breakdown of practical co-operation and brotherliness among men. To human nature, as to other kinds of nature, a vacuum is abhorrent.

[596] Camden Society, _Clarke Papers_, vol. ii. p. 217. Letter addressed by the Diggers, December 8, 1649: "To my lord generall and his Councell of War." The allusion to the usurping Normans occurs also (_ibid._, p. 215) in another letter in a statement of the reasons of the agitation: "Secondly by vertue of yours and our victory over the king, whereby the enslaved people of England have recovered themselves from under the Norman Conquest; though wee do not yet enjoy the benefit of our victories, nor cannot soe long as the use of the Common land is held from the younger brethren by the Lords of Mannours that yet sit in the Norman chair and uphold that tyranny as if the kingly power were in force still."

[597] Winstanley: "The curse and blessing that is in mankind,"

quoted Gooch, _English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_.

But as yet the soil has not been ploughed by a century of political and religious controversy, and there is little sign of these high arguments in the social disturbances of our period. The earliest levellers[598]

get their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset hedges and park palings. What communism there is in the movement is not that of the saints or the theorists, but the spontaneous doctrineless communism of the open field village, where men set out their fields, and plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the wet, with natural fellowship. The middle-cla.s.s terror of the appearance in England of the political theories of the German Peasants' War, though it was forcibly expressed by Sir William Paget[599] in remonstrating with Somerset's policy in 1549, and though John Hales thought it worth while to repudiate it, is not justified by any recorded utterances or programmes which have come to us. There are, indeed, many verbal similarities between the articles of Ket and those put out by the German peasants at Memmingen in 1525, which suggest that some refugee from Germany had carried them with him to the most Protestant county in England. Both, for example, demand a reduction in rents, the abolition of villeinage, and free fisheries. But the contrasts are much more striking, and are due not only to the fact that the onerous villein services which survived in Germany had become almost nominal in England, but to the difference in the spirit of their conception, which leads one to appeal to the New Testament and the other to the customs of the first years of Henry VII. There is, in fact, the same broad difference between the peasant movements in England and Germany as there is between the English and German Reformation. In Germany the ecclesiastical changes spring from a widespread popular discontent, and are swept forward on a wave of radical enthusiasm, which carries the peasants (German Social Democrats are metaphysicians to this day) into the revolutionary mysticism of Munzer. In England changes in Church government are forced upon the people by the State, and outside the South and East of England are regarded with abhorrence. It is not until the later rise of Puritanism that either religious or economic radicalism becomes a popular force. In the middle of the sixteenth century the English peasants accepted the established system of society with its hierarchy of authorities and division of cla.s.s functions, and they had a most pathetic confidence in the Crown. What they wanted, in the first place, was fair conditions of land tenure, the restoration of the customary relationships which had protected them against the screw of commercial compet.i.tion. When they went further, they looked for an exercise of Royal Power to reduce to order the petty tyranny of local magnates, and to carry out the intentions of a Government which they were inclined to think meant them well, "to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings which hath been bidden by your justices of your Peace ... from your poor commons." Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. They are the outcome of a society where the normal relations are healthy, where men are attached to the established order, where they possess the security and control over the management of their own lives which is given by property, and, possessing this, possess the reality of freedom even though they stand outside the political state. Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.

[598] A reference to the Levellers occurs in connection with the Midland Revolt of 1607, Lodge, _Ill.u.s.trations_, iii. 320: "You cannot but have hearde what courses have been taken in Leicestershire and Warwickshire by the two Lord Lieutenants there, and by the gentlemen ... and lastlie howe Sir Anth.

Mildmay and Sir Edward Montacute repaired to Newton ... where one thousand of these fellowes who term themselves levellers were busily digging, but weare furnished with many half-pikes, pyked staves, long bills, and bowes and arrows and stones ...

there were slaine some 40 or 50 of them and a verie great number hurt" (January 11, 1607, the Earl of Shrewsbury to Sir John Manners, Sir Francis Leake, and Sir John Harper). The name Diggers seems to have cropped up about the same time, v. _Wit and Wisdom_, edited by Halliwell for New Shakespeare Society, pp. 140-141, for a pet.i.tion from "the Diggers of Warwickshire to all other diggers," and signed "poore Delvers and Day Labourers for ye good of ye commonwealth till death" (quoted by Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii.)

[599] See below, pp. 367-368.

The social disturbances caused by enclosure, with its accompaniments of rack-renting and evictions, were one cause which compelled the Governments of our period to give attention to the subject. Though no direct concessions were made to them, their lessons were not altogether wasted, because it is plain that they impressed on the minds of statesmen the idea that to prevent disorder it was necessary for the State to interfere in favour of tenants. Rural discontent, which might have been insignificant in an age of greater political stability, derived a fact.i.tious importance from the circ.u.mstances of the sixteenth century, when it might be exploited by a rebellious minority, which, for all that most men knew, might really be a majority of the nation, by Yorkist Plotters under Henry VII., religious enthusiasts under Henry VIII., restorers of a Catholic monarchy, supported by a Spanish invasion or a Franco-Scottish alliance, under Elizabeth. Governments so uncertain of their popularity as these had a strong reason for protecting the cla.s.s which would be the backbone of a revolt. One way in which they could secure themselves against the discontent of the disaffected n.o.bility was to encourage the yeomanry, who might act as a counterpoise.