The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 3

[74] For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II.

Combining the information supplied by these figures with that obtained from other sources, we can form a rough idea of the agrarian conditions under which the freeholders live. They are, in the first place, a most heterogeneous cla.s.s, including on the one hand men of considerable wealth and position, and on the other mere cottagers. If we could trust the statistics given above we should have to say that the latter enormously outnumbered the former. But our impression is that, though, no doubt, a large number of freeholders were extremely small men, the preponderance of the latter was not nearly so marked as is suggested by the table. For one thing, it is difficult to reconcile it with the accounts given us of the substantial yeomen by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For another thing, it is in dealing with the larger freeholders that the inclination of surveyors to omit any estimate of the extent of the land is strongest, because it is naturally in their case that an estimate is most difficult to form.

Probably, therefore, if we could obtain for the freehold tenancies figures even as full as we can for those of the customary tenants, we should find that the proportion holding between twenty and forty acres was considerably larger than these partial statistics would suggest.

In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture, such as is often supplied for other cla.s.ses of tenants, we may say with some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agricultural economy differed from that of the neighbouring copyholders,[75] and that the backbone of their living, except when the plots were so small as merely to supply them with garden produce, was therefore in almost every case tillage. If in any way they departed from the practice of their neighbours who were not freeholders, they did so probably only in being somewhat more alert and enterprising, somewhat more ready to use their security to break with custom and to introduce innovations. It is clear that many of them were very far from being tied down to the stagnant routine which some writers would have us believe is inseparable from all small scale farming. Often, indeed, they had enough initiative to realise the advantages of improved methods of cultivation, and on several manors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the freeholders agreed with each other to survey their lands and separate them, so that they could be cultivated in severalty.[76] In many cases, again, they extended their holdings, which were sometimes large and sometimes mere patches of a few acres, by acting as farmers for the lord of the manor and leasing[77] the demesne or part of it. Above all they had nothing to fear from the agrarian changes which disturbed the copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good deal to gain; for the rise in prices increased their incomes; while, unlike many copyholders and the tenant farmers, they could not be forced to pay more for their lands.

TABLE II

---------------------------------------------------------------+ 15 and under 20 Acres. 10 and under 15 Acres. . 5 and under 10 Acres. . . 2-1/2 and under 5 Acres. . . . Under 2-1/2 Acres. . . . . Houses or Cottages only. . . . . . Total Number of Tenants. . . . . . . ----------------------------+ + Norfolk, six manors 139 25 33 12 17 9 10 ---------------------------- + Suffolk, four manors 85 27 18 10 11 2 ---------------------------- + Staffordshire, three manors 24 7 4 2 3 1 ---------------------------- + Lancashire, three manors 9 1 3 1 1 1 ---------------------------- + Northants, four manors 116 10 11 4 13 9 5 ---------------------------- + Wiltshire, one manor 6 2 ---------------------------- + Leicestershire, one manor 11 1 2 2 1 1 ----------------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+ Total, twenty-two manors 390 70 69 33 48 22 17 ----------------------------+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+

TABLE II (CONT'D) ---------------------------------------------------------------+ Uncertain. 120 and over. . 115 and under Acres. . . 110 and under Acres. . . . 105 and under Acres. . . . . 100 and under Acres. . . . . . 95 and under Acres. . . . . . . 90 and under Acres. . . . . . . . 85 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . 80 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . 75 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . 70 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . 65 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 and under Acres. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . -------------------- + Norfolk 2 2 1 2 1 2 23 -------------------- + Suffolk 1 1 3 2 1 1 8 -------------------- + Staffordshire 1 2 1 1 2 -------------------- + Lancashire 1 1 -------------------- + Northants 1 1 4 2 3 2 3 3 45 -------------------- + Wiltshire 1 1 1 1 -------------------- + Leicestershire 1 1 2 --------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+ Total 6 4 9 4 7 3 4 1 4 1 1 4 4 79 --------------------+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--+

[75] See below, pp. 105?-115.

[76] See _e.g. Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. p. 327, below, pp. 157-?158, and _Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz._ B, b. 1, 58, Ll. 10, 62.

[77] Smith, _De Republica Anglorum_, Lib. I., c. 23: "These be for the most part fermors unto gentlemen." _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), p. 120. "Yeomen" frequently occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as lessees of the Merton Manors.

The apparent immunity of the freeholders in the face of movements which overwhelmed other groups of tenants suggests indeed that economic causes alone, which all cla.s.ses, whatever the legal nature of their tenure, would have experienced equally, are not sufficient to explain the sufferings of the latter. The situation in our period is not like that which arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when widening markets throw all the advantages of increasing returns on the side of the large wheat farmer, and the yeomanry sell their holdings to try their fortunes in the rapidly growing towns. The struggle is not so much between the large scale and small scale production of corn as between corn growing and grazing. The small corn grower, provided he has security of tenure, can still make a very good living.[78] From the point of view of the economist all the smaller men, whether freeholders, leaseholders, or customary tenants, are in much the same position. The decisive factor, which causes the fortunes of the former cla.s.s to wax, and those of the two latter to wane, is to be found in the realm not of economics but of law. Leaseholders and many copyholders suffer, because they can be rack-rented and evicted. The freeholders stand firm, because their legal position is una.s.sailable. Here, as so often elsewhere, not only in the investigation of the past but in the a.n.a.lysis of the present, the trail followed by the economist leads across a country whose boundaries and contours and lines of least resistance have been fashioned by the labour of lawyers. It is his wisdom to recognise that economic forces operate in a framework created by legal inst.i.tutions, that to neglect those inst.i.tutions in examining the causes of economic development or the distribution of wealth is as though a geographer should discuss the river system of a country without reference to its mountain ranges, and that, if lawyers have wrought in ignorance of economics, he must nevertheless consult their own art in order to unravel the effect of their operations.

[78] See below, pp. 105?-115.

From the larger standpoint of social and political organisation the freeholders const.i.tuted an element in society the very nature of which we can hardly understand, because our modern life offers no a.n.a.logy to it. We tend to draw our social lines not between small properties and great, but between those who have property and those who have not, and to think of the men who stand between the very rich and the very poor, the men of whom our ancestors boasted as the "Commons of England," as men who do not own but are employed by owners. Independence and the virtues which go with independence, energy, a sober, self-respecting forethought, public spirit, are apt to become identified in our minds with the possession of wealth, because so few except the comparatively wealthy have the means of climbing beyond the reach of the stream of impersonal economic pressure which whirls the ma.s.s of mankind this way and that with the violence of an irresponsible t.i.tan.

The sixteenth century was poor with a poverty which no industrial community can understand, the poverty of the colonist and the peasant.

It lived in terror of floods and bad harvests and disease, of plague, pestilence, and famine. If one may judge by its churchyards, it had an infantile mortality which might make even Lancashire blush under its soot. Yet (and we do not forget the black page of the early Poor Law) it was possible for men who by our standards would be called poor to exercise that control over the conditions of their lives which is of the essence of freedom, and which in most modern communities is too expensive a privilege to be enjoyed by more than comparatively few. Such men were the freeholders. They formed a cla.s.s which had security and independence without having affluence, which spanned the gulf between the wealthy and the humble with a chain of estates ranging from the few acres of the peasant proprietor to the many manors of the n.o.ble, which was not too poor to be below public duties nor too rich to be above them, which could feel that "it is a quietness to a man's mind to dwell upon his owne and to know his heire certaine."[79] Look for a moment at the jolly picture drawn by Fuller,[80] who wrote at the very end of the period with which we are dealing:--

"The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore whom the next age may see refined, and is the most capable of genteel impressions when the Prince shall stamp.... France and Italy are like a die which has no points between cinque and ace, n.o.bility and peasantry.... Indeed, Germany hath her boors like our yeomen; but by a tyrannical appropriation of n.o.bility to some few ancient families their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarify their blood. In England the temple of honour is closed to none who have pa.s.sed through the temple of virtue.

"He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his b.u.t.tons and silver in his pocket. He is the surest landmark whence foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs, the gentry more floating after foreign fashions.

"In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and poor people. Some hold, when hospitality died, she gave her last groan among the yeomen of Kent. And still at our yeoman's table you shall have as many joints as dishes; no meat disguised with strange sauce; no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of gra.s.s, but solid, substantial food.

"He hath a great stroke in the making of a knight of the Shire. Good reason, for he makes a whole line in the subsidy book, where, whatsoever he is rated, he payeth without regret, not caring how much his purse be let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of the state.

"In his own country he is a main man on juries; where, if the Judge open his eyes on a matter of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in matters of fact.... Otherwise (though not mutinous in a jury) he cares not whom he displeaseth, so he pleaseth his own conscience.

"In a time of famine he is the Joseph of the country and keeps the poor from starving ... and to his poor neighbour abateth somewhat of the high price of the market. The neighbour gentry court him for his acquaintance, which either he modestly waveth, or thankfully accepteth, but in no way greedily desireth.

"In war, though he serveth on foot, he is ever mounted on a high spirit, as being a slave to none, and subject only to his own Prince. Innocence and independence make a brave spirit, whereas otherwise one must ask his leave to be valiant on whom one depends. Therefore if a state run up all to n.o.blemen and gentlemen, so that the husbandmen be only mere labourers or cottagers (which one calls but 'housed beggars'), it may have good cavalry, but never good bands of foot.... Wherefore to make good infantry it requireth men bred not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner."

[79] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_.

[80] Fuller, _Holy and Profane State_. The concluding paragraph is obviously copied from Bacon's _History of King Henry VII._

The ancestors of the yeomanry had suffered much in the anarchy of the fifteenth century, when the violent ejection of freeholders seems to have become almost as common[81] as it had been in the evil days before the reforms of Henry II. But the Tudor monarchy had put an end to that nightmare of lawlessness, and in any society governed by law this body of small property-owners was bound to be a powerful element, even though they had no occasion for making any concerted use of their power, as during the greater part of our period they had not. One must not, of course, exaggerate their importance, or forget that, though a special dignity was attached by opinion to all freeholders, they included in reality men of various economic positions. Many of them must have been quite poor. In the eastern counties, where they are most numerous, they frequently own not more than three or four acres apiece, and can hardly, one would suppose, have supported themselves without working for wages in addition to tilling their holdings. Nevertheless the part which they played in the routine of rural life was an indispensable one, and the very diversity of the elements which they included made them a link between different ends of the social scale. It was from the more substantial among them that the government was most anxious to recruit the military forces. The obligation of serving the State as voters and upon juries fell upon the 40s. freeholders. The security of their tenure caused them to be the natural leaders of the peasantry in resisting pressure from above. No efforts of Elizabeth's Government could induce the yeomanry of the North[82] Riding to abandon the old religion; and when tenants and lords fall out over common rights and enclosures, it is often the freeholders--though on occasion they enclose themselves--who speak[83] for the less independent cla.s.ses and take the initiative in inst.i.tuting legal proceedings. The upward movement which went on among this cla.s.s in many parts of England meant a change in the distribution of material wealth which necessarily involved a corresponding change in the balance of social forces and in the control of political power. To Harrington,[84] who sought in the seventeenth century to find in economic causes an explanation of the revolution through which the country had pa.s.sed, it seemed that the seeds of the civil war had been sown by the Tudor kings themselves in the care which they showed for the small proprietor. In destroying feudalism to establish the monarchy, they had raised a power which was more dangerous to the monarchy than feudalism itself. They had snapped the bond between landlord and tenant by the Statute of Retainers. They had given the tenant security by forbidding depopulation. Most important of all, by encouraging alienation they had caused an enormous transference of property from the upper to the middle and lower middle cla.s.ses. "The lands in possession of the n.o.bility and Clergy of England till Henry VII. cannot be estimated to have over-balanced those held by the People less than four to one. Whereas, in our days, the Clergy being destroyed, the Lands in possession of the People over-balance those held by the n.o.bility at least nine in ten." But property is political power individualised and made visible. The destruction of the monarchy was only the political expression of an economic change which had begun in the reign of Henry VII. "He suffered the balance to fall into the power of the people....

But the balance being in the People, the Commonwealth (though they do not see it) is already in the nature of them." We need not accept Harrington's view in its entirety in order to appreciate the significance of the change which he describes. Certainly the yeomanry were growing in political power, and were strong in that spirit of self-respect and pride in their order, which, when, as too often, it is confined to a single cla.s.s, means social oppression, but which, when widely diffused throughout society, is the mother of public spirit and political virtue. The long discipline of tiresome public duties which they had borne throughout the Middle Ages had formed them into a body which was alive to political issues and conscious of political influence, and which, when partic.i.p.ation in public affairs became not only a duty but a right, would use their power to press urgent pet.i.tions from one county after another upon the King and upon the Parliament, or by riding up from Buckinghamshire to protect Hampden at Westminster in 1642, or by fighting behind Cromwell in Cambridgeshire, or by fighting for the King in the West. Compared with the bulk of the population, they were a privileged cla.s.s and stood by their own; it was they who restored the franchise to the 40s. freeholders in 1654 and refused to extend it to the copyholders. But the tenure of much of the land of England by men with whom, however poor, no landlord or employer could interfere, set a limit to the power of wealth, and made rural society at once more alert and more stubborn, a field where great ideas could grow and great causes find adherents. Political and religious idealism flourish bravely in a stony soil. What makes them droop is not poverty, but the withering shadow cast by complete economic dependence.

[81] Paston Letters, I. 12, II. 248. Plummer's edition of Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, Intro., p. 21.

[82] Atkinson's _Quarter Sessions of the North Riding of Yorkshire_, lists of recusants.

[83] _e.g. Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii. (quoted below, pp. 251-253), and Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber_, vol. ii., _Inhabitants of Thingden_ v. _Mulsho_; also Holkham MSS., Burnham Doc.u.ments, Bdle. 5, No.

94 (quoted below, p. 245 _n_.).

[84] Harrington's works, 1700 edition, p. 69 (_Oceana_), pp.

388-?389 (_The Art of Law-giving_). See also Firth, _The House of Lords during the Civil War_, pp. 28-?32.

From such degrading subservience the freeholders, "slaves to none," were secure. As it was, they often left substantial fortunes to their children, and by the middle of the sixteenth century were already following the examples of their social superiors in entailing[85] their lands. One can quite understand therefore that there is nothing inconsistent between the glowing accounts of their prosperity at the end of the century given by Harrison and his lamentation over the decline of the rural population, or between the well-attested sufferings of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century and his equally well-attested importance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth. The explanation is that the freeholders, though most important politically, did not form the larger proportion of those substantial yeomen whose decay was lamented. The day of their ruin was to come. But for the next two centuries they were safe enough, and, if anything, gained on the cla.s.s immediately above them, whose lands they bought or leased, into whose families they married, and with whose children their own competed in the learned professions, laying, as the historian of Suffolk[86] said, "such strong, sure and deep foundations that from thence in time are derived many n.o.ble and worthy families." Nothing in the life of the period caused more pride than the prosperity of this solid body of small property-owners, and the contrast which it offered to the downtrodden peasantry of the Continent. No loss has been sustained by the modern world greater than their disappearance.

[85] It is stated by good authorities that between 12 Ed. IV., when the collusive action known as a common recovery used to evade the Statute _de donis conditionalibus_ was confirmed by a judicial decision (Taltarum's case), and the introduction into settlements of "Trustees to preserve contingent remainders" by Sir Orlando Bridgeman and Sir Geoffrey Palmer under the Commonwealth, the tieing up of lands in one family was impossible (_e.g._ Johnson, _The Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, pp. 11-?13). But in 1538 Starkey's Dialogue speaks strongly of the practice of entailing lands. "This faute sprange of a certayn arrogancy, whereby, wyth the entaylyng of landys, every Jake would be a gentylman, and every gentylman a knight or a lord" (E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of Henry VIII._, Part II. pp. 112?-113, and pp. 195?-196.)

[86] Reyce, _Breviary of Suffolk_, p. 58, quoted _Victoria County History, Suffolk_.

(c) _The Customary Tenants_

Important, however, as the freeholders were from a social and political standpoint, they were in most parts of England far inferior in point of numbers to those described as "customary tenants." It is with the latter cla.s.s that we are mainly concerned, and leaving the leaseholders on one side for examination later,[87] we may summarise shortly certain features in their position. The number of customary tenants varied from one manor to another, according to the extent to which in different districts farmers holding by lease had been subst.i.tuted for them, and on some by the middle of the sixteenth century there were none at all. But there are many indications that, down to the end of that century at any rate, and probably much longer, they formed over the great part of England the bulk of the landholding population. Of the revenues of 74 manors held by monastic[88] houses in 1535, 116 came from free, and 1310 from customary, tenants. On 81 of the 118 manors a.n.a.lysed above they are the most numerous cla.s.s. When all the different districts are grouped together, they amount to about 61 per cent. of all landholders, and even this figure does not give an adequate idea of their numerical importance. As we have seen, Norfolk and Suffolk are quite peculiar in the mult.i.tude of freeholders they embrace, while the large number of leaseholders on one extensive Lancashire manor unduly weights the figures for that county. On the Midland manors 62 per cent., in Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Somerset 77 per cent., in Northumberland 91 per cent. of all those holding land are customary tenants. No doubt the area of land held under lease was growing in the course of the sixteenth, and still more in the course of the seventeenth, century, and its growth is an extremely important movement, of which something will be said later. But it seems true to say that, down to the end of the sixteenth century, both in numbers and payments, though not in prestige and influence, the customary tenants, as distinct from the freeholders and leaseholders, were by far the most important cla.s.s in the agricultural life of the country.

[87] See below, pp. 200?-213 and 283?-287.

[88] _Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History_, vol. i.

Savine, _English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution_, pp.

156?-159.

Among the customary tenants, however, there are certain important subdivisions. There are in the first place, differences of legal status.

Though villeinage by blood had been disappearing rapidly for several generations, partly through manumission on payment of a fine to the lord, partly through the absorption of migrating villeins into the growing industries of the towns, a certain number of villeins by blood lingered on into the sixteenth century. Dr. Savine[89] has estimated that there were at least as many as 500 villein families in 1485, and as many as 250 in the reign of Elizabeth; and the fact that they occur occasionally on our Norfolk[90] manors, and rather more often on those in Wiltshire[91] and Somersetshire, suggests that his list could be considerably extended on further investigation. Even in 1561 a borough surrenders an apprentice on the ground that he is a runaway villein.[92]

Even in 1568 it is worth while in leasing[93] a manor to a farmer for the lord to reserve to himself the villeins upon it, together with other forms of property like quarries and advowsons.

[89] _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xvii.

[90] R.O. _Misc. Bks. Land Rev._, vol. 220, fol. 220, Brisingham (Norfolk) 1589: "Alice Bartram, the widow of W. Bartram, the lord's villain by blood, took by surrender of said William for term of life on 4 Feby., remainder to Roger Bartram, lord's villain by blood." Holkham MSS., t.i.tleshall Doc.u.ments, Terrier of G.o.dwick, 1508: "Also five roods of the Prior in the hands of Thomas Frend, native."

[91] Among the 742 customary tenants on the manors belonging to the Earl of Pembroke surveyed in 1568 there appears to be 7 _nativi domini, i.e._ villeins by blood, viz., 1 at Washerne (Wilts), 2 at Stooke Trister and Cucklington (Somerset), 4 at Chedeseye (Somerset), of whom one has been manumitted.

[92] _Selected Records of Norwich_ (Tingey), vol. vi. p. 180: "Robert Ryngwoode brought in a certain indenture wherein Lewis Lowth was [bound] to hym to serve as a prentys for seven years.

And Mr. John Holdiche cam before the Mayor and other Justices and declared that the said Lewis is a bondman to my lord of Norfolk's Grace, and further that he was brought up in husbandry untyl he was xx year old. Whereupon he was discharged of his service."

Note the way in which Statute law is used to compel the agricultural labour which the vanishing jurisdiction of lord over serf is ceasing to be able to enforce.

[93] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke_, Manor of Chilmerke: "Johannes Reve tenet per indenturam totum illud capitale messuagium excepta et omnino reservata omnia wardas, maritagia fines ... nativos," &c.

One cannot, therefore, take the almost sanctimonious abhorrence of bondage expressed by the writers of the period quite at its face value.

On the other hand, though villeinage by blood was still worth recording, since it offered an impecunious lord an opportunity for arbitrary taxation, and still sufficiently irksome for the rebels under Ket[94]

(influenced perhaps by some dim memory of the German peasants'

programme) to set its abolition among their demands, its practical importance was slight, and it was quite compatible with a good deal of prosperity on the part of those who were legally bondmen. How completely out of date it was by the middle of the sixteenth century is best shown by some of the cases in which attempts were made to enforce it. When the Earl of Bath[95] seizes 400 from a family on the ground that the members are his villeins, and is pursued by them for nine years from one court to another, or when a lord[96] of a manor is compelled by a royal commission appointed for the purpose of investigating the matter, to repay the value of the beast taken from a man who is proved by the court rolls to be his villein, and the latter, having received it back, declines to stop proceedings unless he be paid heavy compensation in addition, one must see rather a proof of the practical disappearance of villeinage than of its survival. Its occasional enforcement is clearly regarded as something outrageous; it is a freak of arbitrary despotism, which has hardly more historical significance than the seizure of the Derby winner as a copyhold heriot would have at the present day. Public opinion, even the opinion of those engaged in estate management, condemns such attempts unreservedly, and when they come to the ears of the authorities they strain the law on the side of the bondmen.

[94] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 49: "We pray that all bond men may be made free, for G.o.d made all free with his precious blood shedding." The German peasants in the articles drawn up at Memmingen in 1525 demanded the abolition of serfdom "since Christ hath purchased and redeemed us all with his precious blood." The Christian appeal is a common one; see below.