The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 27

The way in which self-preservation and a popular agrarian policy went hand in hand is ill.u.s.trated by Burleigh's cynical advice to Elizabeth to make a practice of supporting tenants in any quarrel which might arise between them and Catholic landlords.[600]

[600] _Somers' Tracts_, vol. i., pp. 164-168: "For their tenantries, this conceit I have thought upon ... that your Majesty, in every shire, should give instruction to some that are indeed trusty and religious gentlemen, that, whereas your Majesty is given to understand that divers popish landlords do hardly use some of your people and subjects, ... you do const.i.tute and appoint them to deal both with entreaty and authority, that such tenants, paying as others do, be not thrust out of their living, nor otherwise molested. This would greatly bind the commons' hearts unto you, on whom indeed consisteth the power and strength of your realm, and it will make them less, or nothing at all, depend upon their landlords."

But there were other causes as well working in the same direction. No one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed can fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of agrarian relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man, and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the peasants themselves. Not, of course, that the authorities had any intention of depressing landlords or raising peasants, but that the whole established system of Government was based on a certain organisation of social life, and that the Government tended to maintain that organisation in maintaining itself and carrying on the work of the State. For this att.i.tude, which is in striking contrast with the policy of the statesmen of the eighteenth century when faced with an a.n.a.logous problem, there were several practical reasons which we shall do well to understand. In judging the motives of economic policy in past ages we are even more apt to be misled by modern a.n.a.logies than we are in estimating its effects. We see that in our own day most of the legislative protection accorded to those who are economically weak has been produced by a combination of two causes, the political enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the wage-earning cla.s.ses and the spread of humanitarian sentiment. We know that in the sixteenth century the first cause was absent and the second was feeble. The Macchiavellis of that iron age were neither democrats nor philanthropists; and when they avow a policy of protecting the weaker cla.s.ses in society against economic evils we are inclined to think with Professor Thorold Rogers that they are merely hypocritical. But this a.n.a.logy is a false light. To be influenced by it is to confuse political power with its symbols, and to forget that the economic importance of a cla.s.s may be a more effective claim to the interest of Governments than the ballot-box.

Under the Tudors there were strong practical reasons for protecting the peasantry which are not felt to the same extent to-day. The modern State has so specialised its organs that its maintenance is quite compatible with the existence of the extremes of poverty, not only among the exceptionally unfortunate, but among those whose position is not more insecure than that of their neighbours. They may be able neither to fight, nor to take part in public duties, nor to contribute much to the Exchequer. But if their incompetence is a menace, it is a menace which is not felt till after the lapse of generations, a menace the fulfilment of which no single life is long enough to behold. For the State hires specialists to fight, and specialists to keep order; indeed, the poorer they are, the more cheaply it can obtain their services.[601] Its local government is conducted mainly by specialised officials, and the concentration of wealth makes possible a concentration of taxation. The extension of political power has been accompanied by a subdivision of political functions, which has diminished the importance of the individual citizen, and turned him, as far as the routine of Government is concerned, into a sleeping partner, whose consent is necessary, but whose active co-operation is superfluous.

[601] For the manner in which the British army is recruited by starvation, see Mr. Cyril Jackson's Report on Boy Labour to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, Cd.

4632, pp. 166-168.

Now we need not point out that this would be as fair a description of large cla.s.ses of persons in the sixteenth century as it is now, and that the day labourer and handicraftsman who "are to be ruled and not to rule"[602] were, as a cla.s.s, far more completely beneath the consideration of statesmen than they are at the present day. But we are concerned with the landholding population, not with the landless wage-earner, and in the slightly differentiated state of our period both economic and political conditions made a decline in the standard of life among a cla.s.s so important as the peasantry a danger which might cause the most authoritarian of Governments to be confronted with very grave practical difficulties. It might find itself unable to raise an effective military force. The States of Continental Europe had introduced standing armies. But England relied mainly on the shire levies, and the shire levies were recruited from the small farmers. Just as the lord of a manor in the North of England, whose tenants held by border service with horse and harness, was anxious to prevent the decline in their numbers which landlords elsewhere were welcoming, so the Government regarded with quite genuine dismay an agrarian movement which seemed to threaten its military resources by impoverishing the finest fighting material in the country. Shadow, Feeble, and Wart may "fill a pit as well as better"; but to make good infantry it requires not "housed beggars," but "men bred in some free and plentiful manner."

One Depopulation Statute after another recites how "the defence of this land against our enemies outward is enfeebled and impaired."[603] In the settlement of the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace the Government took care to instruct its officials to see that the Northumbrian tenants, on whom the defence of the border depended, "should be put in comfort, that no more shall be exacted with gyrsums and like charges, instead of which they shall be ready with horse and harness when required."[604] In 1601 Cecil[605] crushed a proposal to repeal the acts then in force against depopulation by pointing out that the majority of the militia levies were ploughmen. And in the instructions for the choice of persons to be enrolled in the trained bands which were issued by the Government of Charles I., particular care was taken to emphasise that they were not to be selected at haphazard, but were to be drawn from the families of the gentry, freeholders, and substantial farmers.[606]

[602] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. I., chap. xxiv.

[603] 4 _Henry VII._, c. 19.

[604] Gairdner, _L. and P. Hen. VIII._, xii., I. p. 595.

[605] _D'Ewes' Journal_, p. 674: "Mr. Secretary Cecil said, '...

I think that whosoever doth not maintain the plough destroys this kingdom.... I am sure when warrants go from the Council for levying of men in the counties, and the certificates be returned unto us again, we find the greatest part of them to be ploughmen.'" See also on this point Appendix I., Nos. iv., v., vi., and viii.

[606] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society_ (1909), p. 144.

This cogent reason for intervening to protect the peasantry was supported by another which was not less convincing. The cla.s.ses who suffered most from enclosure were important from a fiscal, as well as a military, point of view. In the simple economic life of that age the connection between the output of wealth and the individual worker's opportunities for production and standard of subsistence, if not more important than to-day, was certainly more patent to observation. "The hole welth of the body of the realm cometh out of the labours and works of the common peple ... a riche welthy body of a realm maketh a riche welthy king, and a poore feble body of a realm must needs make a poore weak feble king."[607] In our period "_pauvre paysans pauvre royaume, pauvre royaume pauvre roi_" was a statement not of any recondite theory, but of an obvious economic fact, and one can hardly be mistaken in supposing that part of the favour which sixteenth century Governments were inclined to show the small farmer was due to the fact that the methods of taxation in use made him important as a source of revenue. To a State which relies largely for its supplies on a direct declaration of income, it is indifferent whether the total a.s.sessable income is made up of a few large or many small ones; indeed if the tax be a progressive one, most will be got from the former. But look at the way in which taxation is raised in the sixteenth century. The chief direct tax is the subsidy. A typical subsidy, for example that of the first year of Elizabeth,[608] is a.s.sessed partly on the capital value of property, including farm and trade stock and household furniture, partly on the yearly profits of land. When a village of small and fairly prosperous cultivators is wiped out to make room for a large and spa.r.s.ely populated estate, will the Government get as large a revenue from direct taxation as before? A modern reader may very well answer "Yes." The motive of converting land to pasture is to increase the profits of agriculture. If they are increased, does not this mean a corresponding increase in the taxable wealth of the country? Now to inquire how far one can a.s.sume in any age that the personal interests of landlords will lead to land being put to its most productive use would take us far beyond the scope of this essay, and it is unnecessary for our present purpose. For, as far as our period is concerned, the answer is certainly wrong. Apart from the subtler reactions of the agrarian changes upon social welfare, there is then no such ident.i.ty between the economic interests of the landlord and the economic interests of the State. Speaking broadly, the former consist in securing the largest net income, the latter in securing the largest gross product. And these two things are by no means necessarily found together. If a pasture farm managed by a shepherd and his dog is subst.i.tuted by an enclosing proprietor for several score of families living by tillage, the rent roll of the estate can hardly fail to be increased, for the value of wool is so high, and the cost of sheep-farming so low, that the net income from which rent can be paid is large. But subsidies are a.s.sessed on property, not only on income; and on personal as well as real property. A rise in rents is quite compatible with a falling off in the gross produce of the land, and the conversion of an estate from arable to pasture, by displacing tenants, means a diminution in the farm stock and household property which has. .h.i.therto contributed towards the revenue.

[607] Pauli, _Drei volkswirthshaftliche Denkscriften_, How to Reform the Realm in Setting Men to Work to restore Tillage: "The kynge and his lordes have nede to mynyster right ordre of common wele; or els they must needs destroy their own wealth by the very ordenaince of G.o.d, for they are upholden and borne upon the body. Yf they will be riche, they must first see all common people have riches."

[608] 1 Eliz. cap. xxi. Prothero Statutes and Const.i.tutional Doc.u.ments, 1558-1625. Two subsidies of 1s. 8d. and 1s. were imposed on "every pound, as well in coin, ... as also plate, stock of merchandises, all manner of corn and blades, household stuff, and of all other goods moveable," and two subsidies of 2s. 8d. and 1s. 4d. on the "yearly profits" of land.

Lest such a view should seem unduly theoretical, let us hasten to add that it is one which is endorsed by the authority of contemporaries.

When subsidies are being debated in the House of Commons members complain that, while the wealthy are under-a.s.sessed, the small men pay more than their share.[609] Political writers from Fortescue[610] to Bacon[611] emphasise the fact that the ability of the country to bear taxation depends on the maintenance of a high level of prosperity among the yeomanry. The yeoman is a man who "makes a whole line in the subsidy book."[612] "The weight thereof," says a pamphleteer in 1647, "falls heavily ... especially upon the yeomanry."[613] The occasional glimpses which we get of hara.s.sed collectors trying in vain to screw taxes out of small farmers, whom a rise in rents or a bad season has plunged in distress, show the truth of their accounts. In the reign of Edward VI.

subsidies cannot be collected on the northern border owing to the oppression to which some of the tenants have been subjected.[614] From Norfolk in 1628 comes a still more melancholy tale. "The ffarmors and such as use Husbandrye and tilth," write the Commissioners of the subsidy to the Government, "from whom in times past was accustomed to be drawne the greatest part of ye money leviable by way of subsidye, present unto us their pitiful estates, growen into decay through the base price and noe vent in these later years for their corne ... that some of them doo owe unto their landlordes two yeares rent, many of them one years.... All which considered we much feare that the collectors shall not gather in the monye soe speedily as they would or we desire."[615] The truth is that so much of the wealth of the country had been in the hands of the more prosperous among the small cultivators that any decline in their position was likely to place the Governments of our period in financial straits. They regard it with the self-interested apprehension which modern statesmen feel lest capital should be "driven abroad." Hence there was a strong fiscal motive for protecting the rural cla.s.ses. Rebels who pointed out that "A man can have no more of a cat but the skin; that is the King can have no more of us than we have, which in a manner he has already,"[616] or tenants who urged the Crown to protect them on the ground that "they paie your Majesty subsidies, fifteens, and loans,"[617] were using language which the impecunious Government of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could understand much better than appeals to humanitarian sentiment. The military, financial, and political importance of the yeomanry was, in fact, great enough to make them one of the cla.s.ses with whom the defence and order of the country were identified, and therefore sufficient to make them an object of solicitude to statesmen who were concerned with national interests.

[609] _D'Ewes' Journal_, p. 633. "Sir Walter Raleigh said ...

'Call you this par iugum when a poor man pays as much as a rich, and peradventure his estate is no better than he is set at, or little better; when our estates, that be thirty or forty pounds in the queen's books, are not the hundredth part of our wealth?'"

[610] Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, chap. xii.: "The reaume off Ffraunce givith never ffrely off thair owne good will any subsidie to thair prince, because the commons thereoff be so pouere.... But owre commons be riche, and therefore thai give to thair kynge as somme tymes quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte tymes other grete subsidies."

[611] Bacon, _History of King Henry VII._ (Pitt Press Series), pp. 70-71: "The more gentlemen, ever the lower book of subsidies."

[612] Fuller, _The Holy and Profane State_.

[613] _The Standard of Equality in Subsidiary Taxes and Payments_, London, 1647.

[614] _S. P. D. Ed. VI._, Addenda IV., p. 26: "Subsidies and duties must be levied on that border for your service, and they are loosed by oppression of your officers."

[615] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society_, 1907, pp. 139-140.

[616] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xi. 1244. See the remarks about Cromwell: "Item, the false flatterer says he will make the king the richest prince in Christendom.... I think he goes about to make him the poorest."

[617] See Appendix I., iv.

Economic policies are not to be explained in terms of economics alone.

When an old and strong society is challenged by a new phenomenon, its response is torn from a living body of a.s.sumptions as to the right conduct of human affairs, which feels that more than material interests are menaced, and which braces itself anxiously against the shock. The swift agrarian changes of the sixteenth century differ from the swifter changes of the eighteenth, in that enlightened opinion is, on the whole, against them, and that even the technical experts feel misgivings. If the att.i.tude of statesmen is to be explained by the practical reasons which have already been given, the opposition of men like More, Latimer, Crowley, Starkey, and Hales seemed to themselves a plain matter of morals. In Germany Luther denounced the revolting peasants. In England those who in ecclesiastical matters were poles apart united in a plea for economic conservatism. Leading reformers preach and write against enclosing; and terrified landlords complain that "none ever spake so vilely as these so-called commonwealths."[618] Their understanding of the technique of the agrarian changes is often deficient. Like the Carlyles and Ruskins of a later age, they make Philistia merry with their sad blunders over economic details. But it would be a mistake to regard their views of the social effects of enclosing as abnormal or sentimental. They are the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by the old agrarian order, the cry of a spirit which is departing, and which, in its agony, utters words that are a shining light for all periods of change.

[618] Letter to Mr. Cecill from Sir Anthony Auchar, quoted by Russell, _Ket's Rebellion, in Norfolk_, p. 202.

Several paths of argument lead to their position. There is the traditional importance of tillage. It is a "foundation industry," an industry from which four-fifths of the people directly or indirectly get their living. English Governments have always shown it special favour.

Its maintenance is almost part of the common law[619] of the land. And it is right that it should be so. For the part.i.tion which separates men from starvation is thin, and if tillage fails how shall the people be fed? The Government insists on a certain minimum area being under the plough for exactly the same reason that the city of Coventry, when it is in the grip of a bad harvest, decides to break up part of its common pastures for wheat. All men are agreed that the price of food ought to be fixed by authority, and one cannot control prices unless one can control supplies. There is the argument from social functions. The State is a community of cla.s.ses. Between cla.s.ses there must be inequality, for each has a different function, fighting, or merchandise, or handicraft, or husbandry. Unless there is inequality between cla.s.ses no cla.s.s can perform its duties or (strange thought) enjoy its rights. But one cla.s.s must not encroach upon the livelihood of another. If we will not have villein blood on the Council, neither will we let gentlemen take into their hands the holdings of their tenants. For this means that one limb of the body politic drains nourishment from another limb, and that men drop into a superfluous residuum from which the State gets no profit.

And within a cla.s.s there should be substantial equality. When one man has the livelihoods of two must not another man go without any living at all? There is the argument from economic morality. In every bargain there is the possibility of oppression. The unscrupulous man makes the most of this. He regards only his own profit. He is "a great taker of advantages."[620] This is the sin of the usurer, the bodger, and the tyrannous landlord, and of this bad trinity the last is the worst. To oppress men by rack-renting land is particularly detestable. For though in all contracts there is certainly (if only it can be found!) an objective standard of value, yet a man may with reason be in doubt as to what is fair price to charge for an article the value of which has not been fixed by authority. But he can hardly be in doubt as to what is a fair rent. The fair rent is the usual rent; equity is custom. There is the argument from the very nature of the bond between tenant and landlord. Tenure is no longer as sacred a thing as once it was, and, even if it were, men who are legally the descendants of right-less villeins could not easily appeal to its sanct.i.ty. But opinion feels that there is something despicably sordid in using this particular relation as a financial engine. Though surveyors' economics are as notorious as lawyers' justice,[621] even one of that detested cla.s.s can preface his business-like account of western manors with words idealising the conditions which have "knit such a knot of colaterall amytie between the Lords and the tenants that the lord tendered his tenants as his childe, and the tenants again loved the lord as naturally as the childe his father."[622] The bond between landlord and tenant is perhaps, indeed, the only economic relationship which has ever yet stirred the affection of large ma.s.ses of men. It has done so because it has been in the past so much more than economic. The pitiful cry of that nameless old man to whose care Shakespeare commits the blinded Gloucester, "O my good lord, I have been your tenant, and your father's tenant, these fourscore years," is the voice of an attachment which once was real. In the sixteenth century the tie of tenure is still the symbol of greater things, and the wrench which is given it by the partial commercialising of agriculture seems to portend more ruinous innovations. Most men make the State in the image of their own village, or city, or business. It is perhaps not an unfair description of one side of the social philosophy of our period to say that a manor is still a "little commonwealth,"[623]

the kingdom still the greatest of manors. If the lord holds from the King, does not the tenant hold from his lord by as good a right? If the tenant who encroaches on his neighbour's strips is checked by the manorial court, should not the lord who depopulates half a village be checked by the King in his High Court of Parliament? If gentlemen oppress yeomen, how can they "live together as they be joined in one body politic under the King?"[624]

[619] Miss Leonard (_Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series vol.

xix.) quotes c.o.ke, _Inst.i.tutes_, Book III., p. 105 (1644 ed.), and _S. P. D. Chas. I._, clx.x.xvii., No. 95: "The decay of tillage and houses of husbandry are the undoubted causes and grounds of depopulation, and a crime against the Common Laws of this Realm, and every continuance thereof is a new crime." But the words "against the Common Laws" are hardly to be interpreted strictly.

[620] _S. P. D. Eliz._, vol. cclx.x.xvi., Nos. 19 and 20: "He is a great taker of advantages. He granted a lease to his brother, who dying a year past, he sued his brother's wife to overthrow the lease to the undoing of her and her children." For a strong expression of these views see _Hist. MSS. Com._, MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part II., 1575, Nov. 20. Lord North to the Bishop of Ely: "My lord, it wilbe no pleasure for you to have hir Majestye and the Councell knowe howe wretchedly yowe live within and without your house, howe extremely covetous, how great a grazier, how marvellous a dayrye man, howe ritche a farmer, how grete an owner. It will not lyke yowe that the world knowe of your decayed houses, ... of the leases you pull violently from many, of the copyeholdes that yowe lawlesslye enter into, of the fre land that yowe wrongfully posese.... Yowe suffer no man to live longer under yowe than yowe lyke him."

[621] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_, p. 1: "Farmer, I have heard much evill of the profession, and to tell you my conceit plainly I think the same both evill and unprofitable ... and oftentime you are the cause that men lose their land and sometimes they are abridged of such liberties as they have long used in mannors."

[622] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.

[623] Norden, _op. cit._: "And is not every mannor a little commonwealth, whereof the tenants are the members, the land the body, and the lord the head?"

[624] Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, xii., I., 98, Instructions to the Duke of Norfolk.

It is true that it is just these ideas which in our period are on their trial, and that if one were to seek the watershed where the mediaeval theory of land tenure, as something contingent on the fulfilment of obligations, parts company from modern conceptions of ownership, as conferring an unlimited right to unconditional disposal by the owner, one would find it in the century and a half between 1500 and the final abolition of feudal tenures in 1660. The combination of forces both economic and political making for a change of att.i.tude is unmistakable; on the one hand the severance of the personal relationship of tenure through the development of the great leasehold farm, the breaking up of the customary routine of cultivation through the increasing dependence of agriculture on the market, the general revision of contracts brought about through the fall in the value of money; on the other hand the enormous redistribution of landed property through the confiscation of monastic and gild endowments, the consequent creation of a new aristocracy ready to apply commercial ideas to land tenure, the desire of proprietors to escape from the obnoxious feudal incidents and of the Crown to find some more lucrative subst.i.tute for them. But the decay of the older conceptions goes on very slowly. The Government is on the whole on the conservative side; for naturally it has to work on the material to hand, and the best hope of maintaining order lies in the preservation of fixed customary relationships between the different cla.s.ses in society. Its instinct is therefore still to treat the control and disposition of land as to a special degree a question of public policy, in regard to which landlords are bound "rather to consider what is agreeable ... to the use of the state and for the good of the commonwealth, than to seeke the utmost profit which a landlord for his particular advantage may take among his tenants."[625]

[625] _Acts of the Privy Council_, New Series, vol. xxvii. p.

129. Letter from the Council to William Harman, Esq.

(b) _Legislation and Administration_

This was its instinct. But can we say more than this? Can we say that the presumption in favour of protecting the small landholder was translated into any definite policy, and that such a policy was carried out in practice? The answer to these questions is by no means easily given. There is the difficulty of making any generalisation which will cover the century and a half during which, from time to time, the agrarian problem claimed public attention. True, this difficulty is not so serious as might at first sight appear, or as it would be in an age of swiftly changing ideas. The political historian may treat the Tudors as one period and the first two Stuarts as another. But the economist finds much the same views on economic matters obtaining under Charles I.

as under Henry VIII., and much the same administrative system to carry them out. There is in our period no marked change in responsible opinion upon the enclosing movement. The Commission which deals with the subject in 1607 shows the same att.i.tude as the Commission of 1517. Enclosers are fined in 1637 as they have been fined in the reign of James I. But the opinion which counts is not always responsible opinion. During the six years which intervene between the death of Henry VIII. and the accession of Philip and Mary the Government is in the hands of the great landlords,--landlords who have built up their fortunes out of the spoils of the monasteries, and whom no authority is strong enough to check. By a curious chance the first head of the Government is a man who is an agrarian reformer by conviction. But, when he falls, his colleagues throw over his policy, and turn savagely to the work of crushing out the very possibility of organised protest among the peasantry. These years, the so-called reign of Edward VI., will be an exception to whatever conclusions may be reached as to the policy of the State under the Tudors and the first two Stuarts. Again, there is the difficulty, the great difficulty, of saying how far the interference of Governments is successful even when they honestly desire it to have effect. The modern a.s.sumption, which is sometimes all too sanguine, is that a Law is being carried out unless it is proved that it is not. For the sixteenth century there are those who would say that we must a.s.sume that a Law is not being administered unless it is proved that it is, and, though scepticism is sometimes pushed to absurd lengths, one certainly cannot build much on the letter of Acts of Parliament. But how exacting are our tests of effective administration to be? All will agree that in our period the mere enacting of a Statute causes and cures very little, unless special efforts are applied to making it work. But is a peremptory order from the Council to the Justices of the Peace, or to the Council of the North, to redress this or that grievance among tenants, a proof that the grievance will be redressed? Or must we be content with nothing less than a record of cases actually handled? If we decline to believe in the efficacy of any economic legislation about which we have not a full list of decisions, we shall have little left to rely on. The famous Statute of Artificers will look shaky, and so will the legislation with regard to prices and quality. Perhaps a reasonable view would be to look askance at mere Acts of Parliament, but to accept action, or orders to take action, on the part of the executive authorities, as a proof that the law is being applied in practice.

Of the Statutes prohibiting the conversion of arable to pasture we need not, then, say much. The long series of Acts[626] which were pa.s.sed between 1489 and 1597 show little originality. They were at bottom simply a series of great manorial customaries framed to apply to the whole country, or to all parts of the country which were not expressly excepted from their operation, an attempt to maintain the _status quo_ obtaining at any time by laying down for the whole country a common rule of cultivation of much the same kind as had been in the past maintained by local customs. They did not prohibit enclosure as such, but they proceeded on the a.s.sumption that a fixed proportion of the land, usually the average of a certain number of years preceding the Act, ought to be under the plough, and that the small cultivator's farm accommodation should be maintained or renewed at the expense of the landlord. They differed only in the methods used to achieve this end. The Statutes before 1550 usually insisted merely on the reconversion of pasture land to tillage,[627] the re-edification of decayed houses of husbandry,[628]

and the limitation to 2000 of the sheep to be kept by any one farmer.[629] They relied on most unpromising machinery. Like the ancient Statute of Mortmain, they tried to make the feudal contract the means for enforcing the law, by empowering superior lords to take half the profits of mesne lords and tenants who infringed it. The Statutes after 1550 were somewhat bolder in their experiments. The most important departure was the provision, first introduced into the Statutes of 1552[630] and 1555,[631] for the creation of permanent bodies of Commissioners to do the work which, when most landlords were anxious to enclose, no landlord would undertake. Under the Statute of 1555, subsequently declared "too mild and gentle," but on the face of it a drastic measure, the Commissioners were empowered both to bind over offenders to rebuild decayed houses, to plough up pasture land, and to fix the judicial rents which had been demanded by the peasantry and suggested by certain reformers. It was repealed (together with the Statutes of 1536 and 1552) in 1563, the Act[632] of that year confirming the earlier Acts pa.s.sed in the reign of Henry VIII., and requiring all land which had been under the plough for four successive years since 1529 to be kept in tillage, on pain of a fine of 10s. per acre for all land converted to pasture contrary to the Act. In 1589[633] a Statute was pa.s.sed for the protection of cottagers, prohibiting the letting of cottages to agricultural labourers with less than four acres of land attached. In 1593[634] it was thought that sufficient land was in tillage to make the maintenance of legislation on the subject unnecessary, and the clause in the Act of 1563, which forbade conversion to pasture, was repealed. But the result seems to have been a recrudescence of the movement for converting arable land to pasture, with the result that in 1597[635] two more Acts were pa.s.sed, both of which adopted the expedient of setting up a special authority, apart from the ordinary machinery of local government, to enforce the Act, by empowering the Lord Chancellor to nominate bodies of Commissioners. The first enacted that all houses of husbandry decayed within seven years preceding the Act, and half of those decayed within seven years before that, were to be rebuilt and let, the former with not less than 40 acres, and the latter with not less than 20 acres, of land. It also took the significant step of expressly sanctioning the consolidation of intermixed holdings by way of exchange between lord and tenants, or between one tenant and another. The second applied only to twenty-five counties, where, presumably, enclosing had proceeded furthest or was most disastrous in its effects. It enacted that all land converted from tillage to pasture since 1558 should be reconverted within three years, if it had been under the plough for twelve years immediately preceding conversion, and that land which had been in tillage for twelve years preceding the Act should remain in tillage, the penalty for disobedience being a fine of 20s. per acre. These two Acts escaped the general repeal of the laws against depopulation which took place in 1624, and remained on the Statute Book till the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863.

[626] A useful list of these Acts, with a summary of their provisions, is given by Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields_, Appendix D.

[627] 4 Henry VII., c. 19. All occupiers of twenty acres and more which have been in tillage during three years preceding the Act to maintain tillage.

[628] 6 Henry VIII., c. 5, and 7 Henry VIII., c. 1. In parishes "whereof the more part was or were used and occupied to tillage and husbandry," any person who "shall decay a town, a hamlet, a house of husbandry, or convert tillage into pasture," and has not "within one yeere next after such wylfull decaye reedifyed and made ageyn mete and convenyent for people to dwell and inhabyte the same ... and therein to exercyse husbandry and tillage," forfeits one half of his land to the lord of the manor. Land converted to pasture must be tilled "after the maner and usage of the countrey where the seyd land lyeth."

[629] 25 Henry VIII., c. 13.

[630] 5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 5.