i Digitized by tine Internet Archive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.archive.org/details/englishlandsysteOOmarrrich THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR MAKERS OF MODERN ITALY. 5th edition. Macmilian. IS. dd. GEORGE CANNING AND HIS TIMES. Popular edition. Murray. 2s. dd. UFE AND TIMES OF LUCIUS GARY, LORD FALK- LAND. 2nd edition. Methuen. 7s. dd. THE RE-MAKING OF MODERN EUROPE. 5th edition. Methuen. 2s. 6. from 14,943,127 to 11,335,276. THE YIELD OF THE SOIL 21 should show an increase of nearly 50 per cent. : from 11,376,298 in 1871 to 15,949,603 in 191 1. That figures such as these go far to explain the decline in our rural population is sufficiently obvious. But no explanation can dispose of the facts, and the facts cannot fail to inspire mis- giving and disquietude. The social argument has already merged into the economic. The two cannot indeed be entirely distinguished. But the purely economic aspect of the question is of such transcendent import- ance that a few words may be added in reply to a reiterated question : Is the soil of this country under-cultivated ? Could it produce, even with- out recourse to protection against foreign com- petition, substantially more than it does at present? On this point there is, as the Land Enquiry Report states,^ " a general consensus of opinion among large numbers of agriculturists without distinction of party." " Whether tested by its own past or by comparison with other countries, British agriculture is revealed in a state of increasing failure to fulfil its due functions as an industry." Thus wrote The Times in bringing to a close the remarkable series of articles to which reference has already been made. One startling fact confronts us at the outset. The yield per cultivated acre in England compares very badly with that obtained by our nearest continental neighbours. In this country the average yield is something less than £\ per acre ; in Germany it is £1 55. ; in France £^ 9s. ; in Denmark just under £6 ; and in Belgium ;^20. How much above the average the good farmer can get out of the soil may be learnt from Mr. Christopher Turnor, from whom the above figures are quoted. " I have," he writes, " compared 500 acre ' P. 230. 22 INTRODUCTORY farms, as nearly alike as possible in soil, buildings, and market facilities, and I have found the first- class farmer producing perhaps £\2 worth of food-stuff per acre — that is the gross yield, the total amount received for stock, corn, etc., derived by the number of acres on the farm ; while other farmers, the average men, had very different results to show, £j, £6^ £^^ and £'^ per acre and some even less." ^ The Duke of Marlborough declares that on " fair ground " in his own neighbourhood (Oxford- shire) he has seen people who are growing food at the rate of £^o to the acre.^ Even if it be admitted, as I think it must be, that such an experience is exceptional, there can be no ques- tion that there is room for very considerable improvement in the average yield. -Experts maintain that the soil of this country could be made to produce twice as much food as it does at present. Whether this could be done without a substantial increase in the price (a point which is frequently ignored), I am not personally clear. But even officialdom admits that " a considerable quantity of the soil of the country might be made to return twice as much as it does at present." ^ The words I have italicised materially limit the general conclusion at which less cautious or less responsible enquirers arrive, but it appears to be impossible to rebut the main charge of under- cultivation preferred against the existing system of agriculture in England. On this point the evidence adduced by the Radical Land Enquiry is in complete accord with that of Conservative landlords and impartial experts. The conclusion reached by Mr. Rowland Prothero is as follows : ' Tumor, op. cit., pp. 56-64 ; but see Note, p. 24. 2 The Land, p. 17. ' Annual Report on Small Holdings, 1910. UNDER-CULTIVATION 23 " Much ought to be done, which is left undone, to put land to its most profitable use and to adapt Its ecjuipment to the requirements of diversified farming. . . . The modern system of farming has broken down in one of its most essential features. . . . Prolonged depression compelled landlords to practise economies themselves and to acquiesce in the economies of their tenants. The land has suffered and is still suffering. Thousands of acres of tillage and grass land are comparatively wasted, underfarmed and undermanned." There is no higher authority than Mr. Prothero, and his words will be endorsed by men of all parties. No such unanimity is to be expected or found when we pass from the facts to the explanation of them. By some it is attributed primarily to the system of land tenure, to the growth of great landlords and the lack of security for tenants ; by others to lack of capital and credit facihties ; by others again to lack of scientific education, or to the reluctance of British farmers to organise their industries on a co-operative basis. Some lay the responsibility on the game preserves, and declare that the peasants are sacrificed to the phea- sants. Others blame the railway companies and complain of preferential rates. Some demand the readjustment of taxation, others the imposition of a tariff. But neither with explanations nor remedies are we for the moment concerned. The facts are not in dispute. Nobody is prepared to maintain that the present system reacts satis- factorily to any of the tests which may legitimately be applied. Neither politically, socially, nor economically can the results secured be regarded as adequate. Is the system likely to survive the convergent assaults from so many diverse quarters ? A few years ago the tripartite division of the 24 INTRODUCTORY agricultural population — landlord, tenant farmer, and landless labourer — was popularly supposed to rest, if not upon an ordinance from Heaven, at least upon the sanction of immemorial antiquity. A very slight acquaintance with the records of the past sufficed to show that whatever the expediency of the existing system, it could not claim the reverence due to age. The English land system is indeed in its entirety not much more than a century old. No sooner was this generally realised than people rushed to the conclusion — equally erroneous — that it was the result of a recent and gigantic expropriation of the sons of the soil on the part of a new race of capitalistic landlords. It may, perhaps, serve to put the whole pro- blem in less distorted perspective and transfer the controversy to a less heated atmosphere if we sketch briefly the process by which the present has come to be. Such is the modest purpose of the pages that follow. Note. — And while these pages were passing through the press there appeared Land and the Politicians, by PL Grisewood and E. Robins (Duckworth & Co., 1914). In chapter vii. of this admirable booklet the writers discuss the question of "under-cultivation " wdth a closeness of argument and wealth of statistical illustration which I have not seen equalled. Their conclusion is that in this matter the detractors of England are guilty of exaggeration, and that English farming will bear comparison with the best. The cogency of the argument compels a doubt whether I am justified in subscription to the contrary opinions recorded above. ./v CHAPTER II THE ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM' § I. The Manorial System "The fundamental characteristic of th« manorial group, regarded from the economic point of view, was its self-sufficiency, its social independence. . . . Thus the inhabitants of an average English village went on — year in, year out — with the same customary methods of cultivation, living on what they produced, and scarcely coming in contact with the outside world." — Ashley. In the history of English agriculture and land tenure there have been three critical epochs : the latter half of the fourteenth century ; the sixteenth century, and the century which intervened be- tween 1760 and i860. To those epochs we may ascribe the delineation of the main features of the system as it is familiar to us to-day. The first witnessed the dissolution of the manorial economy, and the beginning of the divorce of the peasantry from the soil they tilled ; the second saw the conversion of England, or some parts of it, into a sheep walk ; the third was noteworthy for the final extinction of the common-field system of cultivation, for the triumph of enclosures, the disappearance of the yeoman, and the emergence of the modern agricultural hierarchy. The present chapter is concerned with the first of these periods. ' For list of authorities see p. 32. 3 25 26 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM A sketch of the English land system — however slight — must begin with some account of the organisation of the mediaeval manor. For four centuries at least — from the eleventh century to the fourteenth — the soil of rural England was occupied by a continuous series of agricultural communities known by the Norman name of manors. Between manor and manor there were infinite varieties of detail; hardly any two manors • indeed were precisely alike, but nevertheless \ they all conformed, in their outstanding features, to a common type. This type we must be at some pains to realise. The first essential to a comprehension of the characteristic features of the manorial economy is to put out of mind those which distinguish the rural communities of modern England. The typical village street of to-day is, indeed, commonly enough, a survival of manorial times. But in those days the street contained the dwellings of all the members of the village community except the lord and his immediate dependants and the parish priest. The modern hierarchy of land- lord, tenant farmers, and labourers was unknown. There was indeed a lord, but he was not in the modern sense a landlord. Of compact, self- contained farms, cultivated by tenant farmers, there were none ; while of labourers, landless and living on money wages, there were very few. Nor was the manner and method of cultivation left to the caprice of the individual cultivator. Every member of the manorial group had to conform to rigid rules, and to cultivate his land on a prescribed plan. The manor was indeed not a mere aggregation of individuals but a com- munity, living not on detached holdings but side by side, working not in isolation but according to a common and coherent scheme. THE MANOR 27 The various classes of the community and the plan of their work must be described in something more of detail. . The property of the manor was vested in a lord^ \ who held it either from the King himself, or from some intermediate lord, to whom various services, chiefly of a military character, were owed. The lord might be the holder of one manor or of many. Besides the lord and the parish priest, there were in every manor three principal officials :| the steward or seneschal, whose duty it was to represent the lord in the courts of the manor ; the bailiff, who looked after the agricultural interests of the lord, more particularly the cultivation of^ the demesne; and the reevey who represented and was chosen by the villagers, and who was responsible to the lord for the due performance of the various services owed by the villagers. Most manors, but not all, contained a certain number of freeholders, holding from the lord, sometimes by "knight service," and sometimes by free socage tenure. They were all subject to the soc or jurisdiction of the lord, and paid for their land, besides military service, a fixed rent in money, kind, or more rarely in labour. Taking the 9,250 manors surveyed in Domesday as a whole, these freeholders averaged only about 4 per cent, of the inhabitants, though in the eastern counties, where there was a large infu- sion of Danes, they constituted a far larger proportion of the manorial population. At the opposite extreme of the social hierarchy were the slaves, who constituted only some 9 per cent, of the Domesday population, though the counties on the Welsh borders and in the south-west yielded a much higher proportion. The mass of the inhabitants were either villeins or bordars or cottars. Between them these latter classes 28 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM supplied 70 per cent, of the population. Besides his cottage in the village street^ generally with a small patch of land known as a close or toft round it, every villein held a virgate or half virgate of land, and was the possessor of one or two oxen, and a right to a share of the use of the common ploughs. The virgate or yardland or yoke^ con- sisted generally of thirty acres of arable land, together with proportionate rights in the meadow and pasture of the manor. The owner of a pair of oxen seems to have been entitled to a whole virgate; the owner of one ox only to a half virgate. Below the villeins, but superior to the slaves, were the bordars or cottars^ who held from one to ten acres, and were distinguished from the full villeins not only by the smaller size of their holdings, but specifically by the fact that they possessed neither oxen nor any share in the co-operative ploughs. The land of the manor was divided, in a tenurial sense, into tw^o parts. Something less than half consisted of demesne — the lord's land or " inland " ; rather more than half was " outland " — mostly villenagium. In an agricultural sense the land was divided into four categories : the arable, the meadows, the permanent pasture, and the wood and waste. Besides these there were on many manors "closes" or enclosed meadows, held by the lord himself, or let in severalty to individual tenants. The arable land lay in great open fields, of which there were sometimes only two, occasion- ally as many as four, but almost invariably three. Each of the three fields was further divided into acre or half-acre strips, separated from each other only by grass balks. On some manors the lord's portion or demesne was consohdated, just like a modern farm; on others it was distributed in THE VILLEINS 29 strips among the common fields. The villeins' holdings were invariably distributed between the three fields, and frequently it happened that no two contiguous strips belonged to the same cultivator. A most elaborate code of rules governed the course of cultivation. Of the three arable fields one lay fallow every year, one was sown with wheat, and one with oats or beans. Only until these crops were gathered were the strips held in severalty ; after harvest the beasts were turned in to graze on the stubble. Similarly with the meadows. These also were apportioned among the villagers, according to the extent of their arable holdings, until hay harvest, after which they were grazed in common. On the permanent pastures the tenants could graze cattle, sheep, and swine " with or without stint " ; they also had grazing and turbary rights in the " waste," and rights of " pannage " and fuel-getting in the " wood." The extent of these further rights was, as a rule, determined by the extent of their holdings in the common arable fields. The cultivation of the demesne was done partly by hired labour, to some small extent by slaves, but mainly by the villeins, cottars, and bordars, under the superintendence of the bailiff and the reeve. The villeins owed to the lord two kinds of service : " week work," i.e. regular work so many days a week all the year round ; and *' boon work," or precarice, i.e. special services at busy seasons of the year, such as the autumnal, Lenten, and summer ploughing, harvest time, and sowing season (August 12 — November i). It was the duty of the villeins to supply ox-teams and plough, and to perform a number of miscellaneous services, such as carting. But the lord's live-stock was tended by a large staff of permanent agri- cultural servants, such as the waggoner, the 3* 30 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM oxherd, the cowherd, the shepherd, the swine- herd, and the warrener. The wages of these labourers were paid, as a rule, in kind. There was, indeed, very little money or other medium of exchange in a mediaeval manor. Nor was it needed. Except in manors contiguous to a town, there was very little external trade or interchange of commodities. Mill-stones, salt, iron, steel, tar^. and canvas were the most important of the articles which every manor had to import. Thes^ were paid for by exports of live stock and surplus agricultural produce. But the surplus was, as a rule, scanty. For the most part each manor was economically independent, isolated, and self- sufficing. This was, indeed, the distinguishing characteristic of the manorial economy. Nor did the internal transactions demand a monetary medium. The services rendered to the lord by the villeins were remunerated by land ; the rent payable by the villeins to the lord was discharged in labour. The question is often asked : ** How did the position of a villein compare with that of a modern labourer? It is not easy to answer it; for the position of a villein was midway between that of the farmer and the labourer in the modern agricultural economy. In one sense it was better even than that of the tenant farmer. So long as his services were duly rendered to the lord, the villein had absolute security of tenure. The lord himself was the " proprietor " of the manor only so long as he could and did discharge the services in virtue of which he held it from the king or an intermediate " tenant." Mutatis mutandis, it was the same with the villein. Tied as he was to the soil, the soil was tied to him. In respect, then, of personal independence the villein's position was inferior to that of a modern THE ORIGIN OF THE MANOR 31 labourer; in regard to fixity of tenure it was superior to that of a tenant farmer. His rights, it is true, were based upon custom rather than upon law ; but they were not, upon that account, in practice, less valid or effective. The life of the villein was laborious and monotonous ; his fare, at any rate in winter, must have been scanty ; and, unless he could get ordained or secure an apprenticeship, his prospects of advancement were dim ; but, on the other hand, when victuals were abundant he had his share of them ; in any case, he had no fear of starvation nor of the workhouse in old age, and he was secure against unemployment or arbitrary ejectment from his holding or his home. Such, in briefest and broadest outline, were the main features, social and economic, of the manorial system — a system which dominated the rural life of England for at least four centuries. During the course of those centuries several significant changes, as we shall see, were registered, affecting more particularly the mutual relations of lords and villeins; but the system itself remained intact. Even after the dissolution of the manor as a social and judicial unit, many of its characteristic agricultural features sur- vived, some of them — such as the open-field arable cultivation— until towards the end of the eighteenth century. But at this point, two questions naturally present themselves. How had the manorial system arisen ? When and why did it disappear ? The two questions are obviously of very different degrees of immediate significance. The former is mainly academic and antiquarian, and may be briefly dismissed ; the latter has a real bearing upon current controversies, and cannot be so lightly regarded. 32 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM The former question may be stated crudely thus : did the village community of the Middle Ages originate in freedom or slavery ? Does the manorial system, as described above, represent a progressive degeneration from the free " mark " of our Teutonic ancestors ? Or does it supply the middle stage in the upward development from slavery to freedom? In a word, is the origin of the manor to be sought in the Roman villa^ slave-worked and lord-ruled, or in the free, self-governing, and common-cultivating commu- nity described by the writers of the " Teutonic " school?^ Until some thirty years ago most English historians accepted, in comfortable assurance of finality, the conclusion, in this as in other matters, of the ** Teutonic " school, who regarded the mark as the original basis on which all Teutonic society rests (Kemble). By the mark^ Maurer, Kemble, and their disciples understood "a voluntary association of freemen" governing themselves, acknowledging no superior or lord, owning and cultivating the land of the village in common. The system is thus described in a classical * On the whole controversy cf. Kemble, Saxons in England (iS^S) ; George Von Maurer, Einieitung zur Geschichte der Mark- Verfassung ( 1854) ; Nasse, The Agricultural Community oj the Middle Ages (Eng. trans. 187 1) ; Sir H. Maine, Village Communities (1871) ; W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (1873) ; J- R- Green, The Making of England (1881) ; F. W. Maitland, Domesday and Beyond (1897) ; P. Vinogradoflf, Villainage in England (1892); The Growth of the Manor (1905) ; English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908). The above accept, in varying degrees, the Teutonic view. On the other side cf. F. Seebohm, English Village Community (1883) ; Fustel de Coulanges, Recherches sur quelques Problimes d^Histoire (1885); W. J. Ashley, Economic History, vol. i. (1888) ; Coulanges, Origin of Property in Land (Eng. trans, with introduction by W. J. Ashley) (1891) ; and others. Cf. also C. M. Andrews, Old English Manor (1892) ; E. A. Bryan, The Mark in Europe and America, (1893) ; Petit-Dutaillis, Studies Supplementary to Stubbs (trans. W. E. Rhodes) (1908) ; E. C. K. Conner, Common Land and Inclosure (191 2). THE MARK SYSTEM 33 passage by Bishop Stubbs : " The general name of the mark is given to the territory which is held by the community, the absolute ownership of which resides in the community itself, or in the tribe or nation of which the community forms a part. The mark has been formed by a primitive settlement of a family or kindred. ... In the centre of the clearing the primitive village is placed : each of the mark-men has there his house, courtyard, and farm-buildings. This possession, the exponent as we may call it of his character as a fully qualified freeman, entitles him to a share in the land of the community. He has a right to the enjoyment of the woods, the pastures, the meadow, and the arable land of the mark ; but the right is of the nature of usufruct or possession only, his only title to absolute ownership being merged in the general title of the tribe which he of course shares." ^ This, it was maintained, was the normal type of agricultural community among our Teutonic ancestors, both before and after the migration to Britain. It was, indeed, conceded that from the first there would be variations from the normal type. Here and there one of the greater warriors would organise a community with semi-servile cultivators on manorial lines. But the free, self- governing community was, it was argued, the rule. To this theory two violent and almost simul- taneous shocks were administered about thirty years ago. In 1883 Mr, Frederick Seebohm pub- lished his great work on The English Village Community, Two years later M. Fustel de Coulanges published his Recherches sur quelques Problemes aHistoire. In the latter Coulanges roundly declared that the whole theory of the mark was a " figment of the Teutonic brain," ' Constitutional History, vol. i. p. 49. 34 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM while Mr. Seebohm contended that " English history begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population . . . — a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years to set them free." His argument, which is pre-eminently logical, may be summarised as follows : The Roman provincial system — the villa — was practically ** manorial " ; from the Romans the Romanised Teutons of south-eastern Britain ^ derived it, and they, in their turn, handed on the system to their un- Romanised kinsmen from north Germany. Consequently, the Anglo-Saxon invaders found in Britain and adopted the " three-field system," which, though unknown in north Germany, was common in the Romanised south. That our Teutonic ancestors could have introduced a system with which they were themselves unac- quainted is inconceivable, and the village com- munity subsequently developed on English soil must, therefore, have survived from the days of the Roman occupation ! The argument is plausi- ble, but it is not conclusive. Nor does it exhaust the alternatives. It is not denied — at any rate by the more cautious investigators — that there were, from the first, some village communities dependent upon a " lord," cultivated by semi-servile labour, and to all intents and purposes " manors." Nor is it denied that between the Roman villa and the Norman manor there is a close analogy. But analogy does not prove derivation. Further : both Seebohm and Coulanges appear to concen- trate their attention too exclusively upon the economic aspect ; upon the question of land tenure and the details of agricultural organisation. If ' I.e. the Teutons of " the Saxon Shore," who according to Seebohm, Coote, and others, settled in Britain long before the main Teutonic immigration of the fifth century. THE ORIGIN OF THE MANOR 35 their theory be accepted ; if the normal type of village community consisted of a body of slaves under a lord, it is difficult to see what room is left for the freeman of the Germania, the freeman with equal political rights : the right of assembly, of electing the princeps^ of deciding on judicial ques- tions, and so forth. That the Roman villa supplied the economic mould ; that the manorial system of cultivation descended by unbroken tradition to the Teutonic immigrants, seems to me probable ; but that our Frisian forefathers poured mto the economic mould their free political organisation seems equally so. The question cannot be further discussed here. One of the latest and most trustworthy experts has expressed his conviction that *' the communal organisation of the [English] peasantry is more ancient and more deeply laid than the manorial order. Even the feudal period shows everywhere traces of a peasant class living and working in economically self-dependent communities under the loose authority of a lord whose claims may proceed from political causes and affect the semblance of ownership, but do not give rise to the manorial connection between estate and village." ^ At this we must leave it. The question of origin is of undeniable interest to the academic investigator. But the significance of the answer is antiquarian rather than political. It is otherwise with the second of the two questions proposed above. When and why did the manorial system come to an end ? Was its dissolution brought about or accelerated by the " act of God," or was it due to the malice of man ? Was it the result of the operation of economic ' VinogradofF, Villainage in England, p. 409. The Corpus Professor attempts to penetrate to pre-Roman influences, but in so slight a sketch I cannot pretend to explore these remote regions. X. 36 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM forces, or did social and political motives combine to hasten it ? Was it the outcome of a sudden and catastrophic dislocation of the labour market in the middle of the fourteenth century ? Or was it the inevitable result of slow but gradual pressure exerted without observation but without remission throughout the course of centuries ? Did the manorial economy break up in consequence of the deliberate action or the recklessness of the peasant cultivators? Were the villeins consumed with anxiety to escape from bondage at the first oppor- tunity ? Did they voluntarily abandon holdmgs of which they were virtually owners though nominally tenants ? Or were they forcibly evicted ? In short, were the villein holdings deserted by the cultivators or were they enclosed and consolidated to satisfy the economic cupidity or minister to the social ambition of a self-seeking aristocracy ? It is obvious that these questions are still calculated to arouse not merely scientific contro- versy but political passion. What are the true historical answers ? § 2. The Fourteenth Century ^ The Black Death and the Peasant Revolt ** Seeing that a great part of the people, and principally of labourers and servants, is dead of the plague, and that some, seeing the necessity of masters and the scarcity of servants, will not work unless they receive exorbitant wages, and others choosing rather to beg in idleness than to earn their bread by labour. We, considering the grievous discommodity which of the lack of ploughmen and labourers may hereafter come have . . . ordained . . . that every able-bodied man and woman of our kingdom, bond or free, under sixty years of age, not living by trading, or having of his or her own wherewithal! to live . . . shall, if so ' In connection with the subject of this section the following books, in addition to those already cited, will be found useful : F. A. Gasquet, TA^ GrecU Pestilence. A. Jessop, The Coming of the Friars. C. Oman, The Great Revolt of i-^i. G. M. Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wyclif. Creighton, Epidemics. Fortnightly Review, vols, ii., iii., iv. Powell, East Anglian Rising, THE BLACK DEATH 37 required, serve another for the same wages as were the custom in the twentieth year of our reign."— Ordinance of Edward III. (1349). *' Laboreres that have no lande . to lyve on but her handes Deyned nought to dyne a-day . nyght olde wortes. May no peny-ale hem paye . ne no pace of bakoun, But it be fresch flesch other fische . fryed other bake, And that chaude or plus chaude . for chilling of her mawe. And but if he be heighlich huyred . ellis wil he chyde . . . And thanne curseth he the kynge . and al his conseille after, Such lawes to loke . laboreres to greve." William Langland, Vision of Piers the Plowman. The previous section was devoted to a delinea- tion of the main features of the manorial system. When and why did that system disappear ? It has been the fashion among historians during the last half-century to attribute its dissolution to a catastrophic disturbance in the conditions of agriculture and labour in the latter half of the fourteenth century. That disturbance has been in turn ascribed to the visitation of the Bubonic Plague in 1348-9, and to the Peasant Revolt, commonly known as Wat the Tyler's Rebellion, in 1381. The author of this interesting and ingenious explanation was Mr. Frederick Seebohm, who, in 1865, contributed to the Fortnightly Review two noteworthy and arresting articles on the ''Black Death." Mr. Seebohm's conclusions were, from the first, fiercely assailed in many expert quarters, and they are not now accepted in their entirety by any competent critic. But the picture which he drew of the havoc wrought by the " Black Death " was extraordinarily vivid, and it is not too much to say that his articles, despite much destructive criticism, have left a permanent impress upon the literature of the subject. It is, therefore, worth while to recall the substance of his argument. In the first place, he claimed to have proved by a variety of tests that the population of England prior to the Black Death was considerably greater /' 38 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM than had been commonly supposed. He computed it at about 5,000,000— a figure which is now accepted by the most recent and most competent critics. The Poll Tax of 1377 affords fairly con- clusive evidence that in that year the population did not exceed 2,500,000, and it is certain that it did not again attain to the previous figure of 5,000,000 until the seventeenth century was well advanced. If Mr. Seebohm's computation is correct, the mortality caused by the plague must have been stupendous, amounting to not less than I a half of the total population. This is the basis J of his argumentative superstructure. Depopula- '^ tion, particularly severe in the ranks of the villeins, ) I was mainly responsible for the dissolution of the ? manorial economy ; for the abandonment of the customary system of tillage ; the beginning of ," enclosures " ; the laying down of the arable t fields to permanent pasture ; the development of ^: sheep-breeding; the export of wool, on a large i scale, to the Low Countries; above all, for the rpremature emancipation of the great mass of the ^English peasantry, and the divorce of the cultivator from the ownership of the soil. ^ If Mr. Seebohm's contentions be accepted, it is clear that the Black Death ought to be regarded as the central event in the social and economic history of England. How far is it possible to accept them r The manorial records prove, beyond all possi- bihty of doubt, that the mortality caused by the visitation of the plague in 1348-9 was particularly heavy among the villeins, and this evidence is ,^ confirmed by the testimony of contemporaries. " So great was the want of labourers and workmen of every art and mystery, that a third part and more of the land throughout the entire kingdom remained uncultivated ; labourers and skilled workmen became so rebellious that neither the THE BLACK DEATH 39 king nor the law nor the justices, the guardians of the law, were able to punish them."> The re- sults of the depopulation were quickly reflected in a fall in the value of land. Land which (accord- ing to Seebohm) was worth ii^d. an acre in 1336 fell to g^d. in 1381 and to 6d. in 141 7. Prices also fell rapidly. " In that time," writes a contemporary, " there was sold a quarter of wheat for i2d., a quarter of barley for gd., a quarter of beans for Sd., a quarter of oats for 6d., a large ox for 4od., a good horse for 6s., a good cow for 2s., and even lor iSd. And even at this price buyers were only rarely to be found. And this pestilence lasted for two years and more before England was freed from it." Labour, naturally, was in great demand. " When," continues the same writer, " by God's mercy, it [the plague] ceased, there was such a scarcity of labourers that none could be had for agricultural purposes. On account of this scarcity, women, and even small children, were to be seen with the plough and leading the waggons." The shortage of labour necessarily led to a rapid in- crease in the scale of its remuneration. Individual lords, it would seem, were almost as anxious to pay the current rates as labourers were to demand them. But mediaeval ideas were entirely opposed to leaving such matters to be determined by the free play of supply and demand, and while the plague was still raging the king, with the advice of certain nobles and prelates, issued an Ordinance ^ (1349) which formed the basis of all the subse- quent Statutes of Labourers. All able-bodied persons, under the age of sixty, v^ere to be com- pelled, if required, to work on penalty of imprison- ' Registrum Roffense in Cotton MS-, quoted by Vickers England in the Later Middle Ages, p. 251. ' See extract at the head of this section. 40 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM ment. No employer was, on pain of treble fine, to pay higher wages, and no labourer was, on pain of imprisonment, to accept higher wages than those which were customary before the plague. '' Carters, ploughmen, drivers of the plough, shepherds, swineherds, and all other servants shall take liveries and wages, accustomed in the twentieth year of the present King's reign, or four years before, so that in the country where wheat was wont to be given, they shall take for the bushel ten pence, or wheat at the will of the giver, till it be otherwise ordained . . . and none shall pay in the time of hay-making but a penny the day ; and a mower of meadows for the acre five pence, or by the day five pence ; and reapers of corn in the first week of August two pence, and in the second three pence, and so till the end of August. . . . None shall take for the threshing of a quarter of wheat or rye over two pence, and the quarter of barley, beans, peas and oats over one penny if so much were wont to be given. . . . Carpenters, masons, and tilers, and other work- men of houses, shall not take by the day for their work, but in manner as they were wont, that is to say : A master carpenter three pence and another two pence; a master mason four pence and other masons three pence; and their ser- vants one penny. Tilers three pence and their knaves one penny, and other coverers of fern and straw three pence and their knaves one penny." ^ But if wages were fixed by authority, so were prices. There was to be no attempt to take advantage of scarcity on either side. All victuals and necessaries of life were to be sold at reason- able prices. The Ordinance was embodied in a Statute in 1350, and the Statute was re-enacted, with penalties of increased severity for dis- * Statutes i. 311 (1350-51). THE STATUTES OF LABOURERS 41 obedience, in 1361, and nine times more at fre- quent intervals before the middle of the fifteenth century. The Statutes of Labourers do not, perhaps, de- serve all the strictures passed upon them by those who seek and find in them evidence of selfish class legislation. But though less malicious than has been commonly supposed, they v^ere not less impotent. " The labourers," so we read in Knighton's Chronicle, "were so lifted up and obstinate that they would not listen to the king's command, but if any one wished to have them he had to give them what they wanted, and either lose his fruit and crops, or satisfy the lofty and covetous wishes of the population . . . and after- wards the king had many labourers arrested and sent them to prison ; many withdrew themselves and went into the forests and woods ; and those who were taken were heavily fined." In other words, in face of an economic crisis so over- whelming in its intensity, the Legislature found itself impotent. It made strenuous efforts to enforce its authority. Special justices were ap- pointed to secure obedience to the law, and penalties of increasing and indeed excessive severity were imposed. Thus in 1361 it was ordained that any labourer who strayed from his own domicile in search of higher wages should be branded on his forehead with the letter F. But all to no purpose ; for nine years later Parliament complains that the errant labourers " are so warmly received in strange places suddenly into service, that this reception gives example and comfort to all servants, as soon as they are displeased with anything, to run from master to master into strange places." Human nature and economic law combined were, as usual, much too strong for mere statute law. 42 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM Let us attempt to visualise the contemporary situation. Land was, for the moment, a drug in the market ; labour, on the contrary, was in a position of unprecedented economic advantage. Small wonder that under these circumstances the peasants should have preferred their labour to their land, and should have sacrificed the posses- sion of the latter in order to secure a free market for the former. For the villein was bound to work for his lord so long as he adhered to his own manor. It is true, as will be seen later, that on many manors a certain portion, if not the whole, of the services of the villein-cultivators had been commuted for payments in money or kind. But on many manors no commutation had taken place, and even where it had, there would be strong tempta- tion on the part of the lords to insist on a rever- sion to the status quo ante. How far the lords yielded to this temptation is still matter of con- troversy.^ For the villeins, on the contrary, there was every inducement to flee from the manors to which they were legally attached and take service under alien lords at a rate of re- muneration determined, not by the Legislature, but by economic conditions. No migration, however, could satisfy the demand for labour, and the lords found them- selves face to face with an agrarian crisis of unprecedented severity. They made desperate efforts to counteract the economic tendencies, to compel the villeins to remain upon or return to the soil to which they were ascripti. Such efforts * Cf. e.g. Johnson, Disappearance of the Small Landowner^ p. 25. Mr. Johnson declares that Mr. Thorold Rogers's affirmative assertion '* rests upon an assumption for which there is no proof," and many of the best modem authorities are with Mr. Johnson. RESULTS OF THE BLACK DEATH 43 were only very partially successful, and by degrees the lords accepted the inevitable. They abandoned the vain effort to recapture errant villeins, they adopted new agricultural methods, and made experiments in unaccustomed forms of tenure. One such form of experiment is of peculiar interest because it was of relatively short duration and testifies to the special and transitory conditions of the period. I refer to ** stock and land lease," or what was later known as the metayer system. This expedient was probably borrowed from monastic usage, and is thus described by Mr. Rogers : " In the stock and land lease, the owner of the soil ... let a farm furnished with seed, corn, and stock, live and dead, to a tenant for a time, the condition being that at the end of the term the tenant should deliver the stock scheduled to him, in good condition, or pay the money at which they were valued when the lease com- menced. . . . The stock and land lease generally prevailed for about seventy years after the owner had put it into operation on his own estate. Thus, Merton College let most of its land on this principle, shortly after the Great Plague, and continued it to about the end of the first quarter in the fifteenth century. . . . But the monasteries had it in operation until the close of the century." ^ Another expedient adopted on some manors was to let off the demesne in "Separate farms at money rents. " Sometimes the entire manor was leased to one or more tenants, who paid a fixed annual rent for the whole, and these sublet portions of the land."* Such expedients were, however, Eresumably exceptional. What most commonly appened was that the lords took advantage of * Economic Interpretation of English History^ p. 6$. * Prothero {pp. cit., p. 43), who cites in illustration the case of the Manor of Hansted in Suffolk. 44 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM the death or desertion of the villein occupiers to enclose and consolidate their holdings in the common arable fields. Where soil and climate permitted, they laid the arable land down to grass ; grazed it off with sheep, and developed a lucrative trade in wool. The cities of the Low Countries, then the great centres of the woollen industry, were ready to absorb any quantity of English wool. Farming, therefore, came to be regarded not only as a means of sustenance, but as a source of profit. Commercial ideas were applied to land-holding, and men made room for sheep. Nevertheless, it must be observed that, in one substantial sense, victory rested with the villeins. They made good their claim to do what they would with their own labour. In a word, they gained their freedom. But in gaining their freedom they lost their land. This generalisation must not, however, be pushed too far. Some of the villeins — how large a proportion it is impos- sible to say — undoubtedly remained upon their native manors, got their services commuted for a quit-rent, and so passed into a position of security and independence by becoming copyholders. Nevertheless, it is not too much to say that before the end of the fourteenth century a great many villeins, if not, as some assert, the great mass of the Enghsh peasantry, had ceased to be interested, as quasi-proprietors, in the soil they tilled. The first of a series of violent shocks had been administered to the old rural economy. Some of the villeins had risen to the position of copyholders, a few had become tenant farmers, but the great mass of them had been permanently divorced from all ownership of land and had sunk to the level of landless labourers. Far different were the fortunes of the con- tinental serfs. Not for four hundred years later FREEING OF THE SERFS 45 did the3^ secure emancipation. But the postpone- ment of personal freedom gave them one signal advantage. Emancipation was accomplished without the sacrifice of their rights in the soil.^ In France, indeed, the peasants had become virtually owners of the soil, subject only to a Suit-rent reserved to the lord, long before the devolution brought them complete personal liberty. Nor did the attainment of the latter rights involve, as was frequently the case in England, the loss of the former. In Prussia the agrarian legislation of Stein and Hardenburg enabled the serfs to attain the same end by a different method.* In both countries the result has been that a very large proportion of the land is still cultivated not by tenants, but by owners. Into the merits or demerits of a system of peasant-ownership it is no part of my immediate purpose to enter. I am concerned only with an exposition of the facts, and the pertinent fact is that in England, and in England alone among the Western nations, the peasantry — or many of them — lost their proprietary rights in the land about the same time that they acquired personal freedom. That the one was the result of the other I am not disposed, in the light of recent criticism, to affirm. Changes of this kind are more gradual than the exigencies of historical drama demand. Long before the visitation of the Black Death there had been forces in opera- tion which were threatening the manorial system. ' The statement in the text is necessarily a broad one, but it is sufficiently accurate for my immediate purpose. The precise time and mode of emancipation varied much in different countries. ^ The text of the Edict of Emancipation (October 9, 1807) is printed in Sir Robert Morier's article in System of Land Tenure in Different Countries (Cobden Club Essays), pp. 369 seq. Cf. also Seeley, Life and Times of Stein. 4* 46 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM Of these perhaps the two most powerful were, on the one hand, the desire of the lords for money payments; and, on the other, the anxiety of the villeins to get rid of the more burdensome of the services — more particularly the " boon " work at busy seasons — which they owed to their lords. The introduction of scutage — a composition for the military services of the sub-tenants — in 1156 necessitated money payments from the lords to the king ; this in turn naturally reacted upon the demands of the lords upon their villeins. More- over, villein labour, like all forced labour, was grudging and ineffective, and on economic grounds the lords were disposed to encourage commutation. The villein, on his part, was only too thankful to get quit of his labour dues in exchange for payment in money or kind. Thus, from the twelfth century onwards, serious in- roads began to be made upon the symmetrical coherence of the old manorial economy. Villein- age was, in fact, gradually developing into a system of copyhold ; more and more the villeins were getting their services defined and inscribed upon the "copy" or roll of the manor. Mean- while, the place of the villein in the cultivation of the demesne was taken by a new agricultural class, a class of hired labourers, " recruited from the landless sons of tenants, or from cottagers who either had no holding at all or not enough to supply them with the necessaries of life." But neither in this nor in any other matter was there uniformity of practice. " Thus," as Mr. Prothero points out, " there were hired farm ser- vants and day-labourers cultivating the demesne land for money wages; tenants paying money rents only for their holdings; others who still paid their whole rent in produce or in labour ; others whose labour services had been partially COMMUTATION OF SERVICES 47 commuted for money payments, either for a period or permanently." Such was the condition of English agriculture and land tenure when the Black Death descended upon the country and swept away half the popu- lation. That Seebohm exaggerated the effects of that sudden visitation has been stoutly main- tained and may be true. Undoubtedly he painted his picture with too big a brush. He certainly ignored important exceptions and limita- tions. Some of the phenomena attributed by him to a sudden and catastrophic disturbance were in reality observable at least a century earlier, some of them are not apparent until much later. The Constitutions of Clarendon^ for example, afford evidence that villeins were already leaving the land in the twelfth century. Among those who remained upon it there was already, as we have seen, a marked tendency to commute their services — or some of them — for a quit-rent. The Statute of Merton (1236) exists to prove that the lords were already beginning to realise the importance of sheep-farming, and were enclosing portions of the common pasture and the un- tilled waste, though the rights of commoners were respected and safeguarded. The enclosure, or at any rate the consolidation of the lord's portion of the arable — the demesne — had begun still earlier. The lords, according to Mr. Prothero, *' had also begun to encourage partners in village farms to agree among themselves, to extinguish their mutual rights of common over the cultivated land which they occupied, to consolidate their holdings by exchange, and to till them as separate farms." ^ The tenant farmer had begun, here and there, to make his appear- ance in the village community, and of wage-paid, » op. cit. p. 38. 48 ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM independent labourers there were not a few. All these things compel us constantly to bear in mind Maitland's warning that economic history is not catastrophic.^ It is obviously true that in this department of national development, even more perhaps than in others, changes are gradual, and only perceptible if registered at considerable intervals. Yet it is none the less true that certain stages in the process of evolution stand out as peculiarly critical and significant, and it would land us in lamentable error, if, in the cautious and laudable desire to avoid exaggera- tion, we were to minimise their startling and dramatic results. One such epoch in the history of the English land system is unquestionably furnished by the century which followed the visitation of the Bubonic Plague in 1348-9, and we owe to Seebohm a debt, which it is now fashionable to underestimate, for calling special attention to its real significance. Whatever the ultimate results of the depopu- lation may have been, there can be no question as to its effect upon the immediate situation. The social economy was completely disorganised ; the labour market was dislocated, and the gradual processes of economic evolution were, if not per- manently arrested, at least temporarily diverted. One, at any rate, of those processes was in the long run emphasised and accelerated. Commuta- tion of labour services for rent in money or kind was far more rapid after the Black Death than before. Taking eighty-one specified manors, before the Plague, it has been found that on six all labour services had been commuted ; on ' And the not less impressive warning of Mr. L. L. Price that people are too prone to think that changes are not merely catastrophic, but universally simultaneous and uniform ,in their occurrences, whereas in one place we hnd survivals and in another anticipations. THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR 49 thirty-one there had been partial commutation ; on forty-four none. Taking 126 manors in the decade 1371-80, complete commutation had taken place on forty ; partial on sixt3^-four, and only on twenty-two had there been none. On 182 manors somewhat later (1440) there was complete commutation on loi, partial on 71, while only on 8 was there no commutation ex- cept for team work.^ it is clear, therefore, that by the middle of the fifteenth century the old manorial economy was rapidly breaking up. There were traces of villeinage to be found even in the later years of the sixteenth century, but so cautious a scholar as the Rev. A. H. Johnson is able to affirm that for all practical purposes villeinage by tenure and villeinage by blood had disappeared before the end of the fifteenth century. Its disappearance cannot, of course, be ascribed wholly to a single cause. The Peasant Revolt of 1381, though generally de- scribed as a failure, contributed something to the general result. The development of the export trade in wool and the beginnings of a rough woollen manufacture provided an even more powerful solvent. But despite the anxiety of the modern scholar to minimise the import- ance of catastrophic changes, I cannot doubt that among the operative factors place must still be found for the great pestilence of 1349. Discussion of causes may, how^ever, be allowed to rest. I am concerned rather to estimate broad results. As to these there can be no dispute. The manorial organisation which for four cen- turies at least had dominated the rural life of England, was broken into fragments before the * The figures are from Mr. T. W. Page's Villeinage in England^ and are cited partly by Prothero, 0^. cit. p. 40, partly by Johnson, op. cit. p. 32. , so ORIGINS OF THE ENGLISH LAND SYSTEM middle of the fifteenth century. Traces of it survived, in an agricultural sense, down to the last decades of the eighteenth century, but as a coherent system — as the judicial and social unit — it disappeared four hundred years earlier. In place of the feudal hierarchy of lord, freeholder, and villein, there had definitely and clearly emerged the new classes of landlord, capitalist- farmer, and landless wage-paid labourer.^ Rela- tions are determined no longer exclusively by status, but by contract. Wages and rents are alike becoming obnoxious to the influence of com- petition. There is no rigid uniformity in the new system, any more than there was in the old. There are numberless exceptions, anomalies, and survivals recalling social and economic conditions which in their integrity have passed away. Never- theless, profound changes have taken place and must be registered — changes which have left a deep and permanent impress upon the English land system and upon the social and economic life of the English people. Among these 1 have desired to lay particular emphasis upon two. The first is the fact that the mass of the English peasantry attained personal liberty at least four hundred years sooner than the corresponding class in continental countries. The second is the no less striking fact that whereas in France and Prussia and elsewhere great numbers of the actual cultivators of the soil have, throughout the ages, remained attached to it by ties of ownership, in England proprietary rights are confined to a relatively small class, while the actual work of agriculture is done by tenant farmers and landless labourers who have no permanent connection with the land they cultivate. ' The copyholder to whom allusion has been frequently made above may be regarded as the link between the older system and the new. THE LAND-LESS LABOURER 51 One other point has, I submit, emerged : the English peasant of the fourteenth century was not driven from the land to make room for sheep. His removal — so far, indeed, as he v^as removed — was due partly to " the act of God," and partly to his own very natural and intelligible anxiety to take advantage of a sudden and unprecedented economic opportunity. The turn of the landlord came later, and may furnish an appropriate text for another chapter. CHAPTER III THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY » The Enclosure Movement ** And there where hath been many houses and churches to the Honor of God, now you shall find nothing but sheepcots and stables, to the ruin of man." — Starkey's Dialogue. '• Envy waxeth wonders strong The rich doth the poore wrong, God of His mercy suffereth long The devil his workes to worke, The towns go down, the land decayes Off cornefyldes, playne layes (grass lands) Gret men makithe now-a-dayes, A shepecott in the Church," — Contemporary Poem. ** O what a lamentable thing it is to consider that there are not at this day ten plows whereas were wont to be forty or fifty. Whereas your Majesties progenitors had an hundred men to serve them in time of peace and in time of wars, with their strength, policy, goods and bodies, your Majesty have now scant half so many." — Bishop Scory to Edward VI. " Where there were once a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog." — Bishop Latimer. "Noblemen, and gentlemen, yea and certeyn Abbottes . . . leave no grounde for tillage, thei inclose al into pastures : thei throw doune houses : thei plucke downe townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to be made a shepehowse." Sir Thomas More, Utopia^ p. 41. The first of the three critical epochs in the history of the evolution of the English land system was described in the last chapter. The ^ For further information on the subjects treated in this chapter, reference may be made to : I. S. Leadam, Dotnesday of Tnclosures 52 THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 53 second is that of the sixteenth century, and it is the purpose of the pages that follow to examine its features in detail and to measure its general significance. The changes registered during the sixteenth century were so rapid and various that they may be said without inaccuracy to amount in the aggregate to a revolution. Of all these changes perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching IS represented by the fact that for the first time agriculture becomes a business — a commercial / occupation. The manorial economy of the Middle Ages was, as we have seen, self-contained and self-sufiicing ; the intercourse of the members of the agricultural community with outsiders was casual and infrequent ; the exchange of com- modities was restricted ; a few necessaries had to be imported, and, conversely, a limited amount of agricultural produce — and later of leather and wool— was exported ; but the scale of this external trade was relatively insignificant, and insufficient to negative the generalisations already enunciated. With the oncoming of the sixteenth century all this is changed. But the changes in the agrarian (1897). R. E. Prothero, English Farming Past and Present (191 2). R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. A. H. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (1909). W. J. Ashley, Economic history ^ vol ii. J. E. T. Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices^ and Six Centuries of Work and Wages. Cunningham as before. E. C. K. Conner, Common Land and Inclosure. Miss E. M. Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief. G. Unwin, Lndustrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. F. A. Gasquet, Henry VIIL. and the English Monasteries. E. P. Cheney, Social Changes in England in the Sixteenth Century. A. F. Pollard, The Protector Somerset. J. A. Froude, History of England. Besides such accessible contem- porary authorities as More, Utopia ; Latimer, Sermons ; Discourse on the Commonweal of England (ed. Miss Lamond). Ballads from MSS. (ed. F. J. Furnivall) ; and various publications of the Early English Text Society. 54 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION system are closely connected with a change, even more fundamental, in the whole position of England in the European economy. On the nature and significance of this, a preliminary word must, therefore, be said. The great geographical discoveries in the last years of the fifteenth century brought these islands for the first time into the main stream of the world's commerce. Until then Britain was the ultima Thule of the commercial world ; the mediaeval trade-routes converged on the Mediter- ranean ; the products of the East reached northern Europe by way of Venice and the Rhine valley, or Genoa and Marseilles and the Rhone valley. By the time it reached England the stream of commerce was attenuated and sluggish. In all the apparatus, therefore, of com- merce and finance, England was far behind the cities of Italy or the Rhineland ; far behind those of Southern France, or even of the Low Countries. But the blocking of the old trade-routes by the conquering advent of the Ottoman Turk ; the discovery of the Cape route to the East by the mariners of Portugal ; the discovery of the great Western Continent by Italian mariners sailing from Spain and England respectively, caused a momentous shifting in the centre ot economic, and, indeed, of political, gravity, and, in the long run, brought England into the forefront of the nations of the world. Domestic legislation quickly responded to the altered condition of external affairs. From the time of Henry VI I. onwards we perceive an altogether novel solicitude in regard to the interests of trade. The first of the Tudors was not slow to apprehend the importance of adapting policy to the new situation. '* He ever strove," wrote Bacon, " that merchandize A NEW ECONOMIC ERA 55 being of all crafts the chief craft, and to all men most profitable and necessary, might be the more plentifuller used, haunted, and employed in his realms and dominions." The statute- book bears witness to the changed attitude of the Government. Legislation is obviously dictated by the principles afterwards identified with " mercantilism." ^ Protection is afforded to infant industries at home : partly by checking the export of raw materials, partly by restraining the import of manufactures ; the export of manu- factures is, on the other hand, encouraged ; navi- gation is regulated in the interests of native shippers and native manufacturers ; Gascon wines are to be imported only in British ships; com- mercial treaties are concluded with foreign countries ; the currency is improved ; a standard is maintained in measures and weights. Nor are the interests of " labour " forgotten. Idleness, indeed, is treated as a crime ; but to those willing to work every encouragement is given, and the State does its utmost to maintain a reasonable rate of wages, and to limit the hours of work. All these things point to the coming of a new economic era. But how, it may be asked, did the change react upon the agrarian system ? How, if at all, did it affect the land problem ? The agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century can, I submit, only be understood and interpreted in the light of the facts which 1 have roughly summarised above. The widening of commercial markets, due mainly but not exclusively to the geographical discoveries, led, in time, to the division of labour and to the specialisation of industry. Among the industries thus specialised agriculture was incomparably the most important. * Anticipations of the new mercantilist policy may be discovered in legislative enactments as early as Richard II. 56 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION But if agriculture was to take its place in a system of specialised industries, its methods must be modified, if not revolutionised. Pro- duction for the sustenance of a series of self- sufficing communities is one thing ; production for a nation which is passing into the com- mercial stage is something which may be worse or better, but is, at any rate, vastly different. Agriculture, then, was to be commercialised. How did this affect the agricultural community economically, legally, and socially — as regards production, land tenure, and the relations of class with class? The process of agricultural change is usually described as involving the substitution of pasturage for tillage, of sheep for men ; and the method indicated is that of enclosure. But the latter term is not free from ambiguity. In its primitive signification it means nothing more than the construction of hedges or walls or ditches to " enclose " land which had hitherto been open. In economic literature, however, it has come to be applied to three separate pro- cesses which, though roughly convergent in effect, ought to be clearly distinguished. To distinguish them it is important to bear in mind the several parts of the manorial organisa- tion : the lord's demesne ; the arable holdmgs of the " tenants " ; the meadowland ; the common- able pasture; the waste and wood. Nor is it less important to distinguish the several classes which constituted the community : the lord ; the freeholders ; the customary tenants ; and the cottars. Tenant farmers and hired labourers have to be added to these categories after the Black Death, but they are not of the essence of the manorial organisation. They presage, indeed, its impending dissolution. Enclosure operated in various ways, according ENCLOSURES 57 as it was applied to these different parts of the manor and was effected by these different classes. If enclosure had meant nothing more than enclosing the lord's demesne it need not have caused any violent dislocation of the manorial economy — provided that the demesne had been consolidated, and did not remain inter- mixed with the strip-holdings of the tenants in the common arable fields. Assuming, however, that the demesne, as was very often the case, was compact, how did its enclosure affect the life and interests of the manorial community as a whole ? Before answering this question it is important to observe that the " enclosing," even of the demesne, was frequently done, not by the lord himself, but by the capitalist farmer, to whom it was let. These large tenant farmers, bringing enterprise and capital to a new specialised industry, supply the most striking and charac- teristic of the new features of the new agricultural economy. They were generally graziers. Hold- ing not by customary tenure but simply by rack- rent, they were compelled to put the land to the best economic use. The diminution of popula- tion after the Black Death, the scarcity of labour, the growth of the export trade in wool, the remarkable development of a home manufacture of cloth — all these circumstances combined to indicate sheep-breeding as the most profitable form of farming. Thus, enclosing came generally to mean the conversion of arable land to pasture, the breeding of sheep instead of the growing of corn. But not invariably. A certain amount of enclosure was unquestionably effected in order to improve the conditions of arable farming. Mr. Leadam, indeed, to whose opinion great weight must be attached, held that the amount of land enclosed for arable farming was consider- 58 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION able. But contemporary opinion, as reflected in the popular literature of the day, is against him, as is that of Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gay.^ And this is surely a point on which contemporaries have the best right to be heard. They may, as Mr. Tawney points out, be mistaken as to the extent of the process, but hardly as to its general tendency. And contemporaries speak with no uncertain voice : it is against the sheep that their diatribes are directed. " Those shepe," wrote W. S., "is the cause of all those mischiefs, for they have driven husbandrie out of the country, by the which was increased all kind of foode. But now only shepe, shepe, shepe." " In the said Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire . . . where tillage was wont to be, now is stored great umberment of shepe." ^ " Where both corne of all sortes and also cattle of all kind were reared aforetime now is there nothing but only shepe." ^ Prose is unequal to the expression of adequate indignation : " Commons to close and kepe Pore folk for bread to cry and wepe, Townes pulled down to pasture shepe, This ys the new gyse." Sir Thomas More's vigorous denunciation of enclosers, trite as it has become, is too apposite to be omitted. "That one couetous and vnsati- able 'cormaraunte and uery plage of his natyue contrey maye compasse aboute and inclose many thousand akers of grounde to gether within one pale or hedge the husbandmen be thrust owte ' vSee on the whole controversy : I. S. Leadam, Domesday of Enclosures ; Gay, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. (New Series), vol. xiv. ; Johnson, Disappearance of the Small Landowner y p. 40 ; Tawney, Agrarian Problem of Sixteenth Century ^ p. 224. ■^ Certain Causes gathered in Four Supplications. ' Discourse of the Commonweal of England (^^^. Lamond), p. 48. SHEEP-FARMING 59 of their owne, or els either by coneyne and fraude, or by violent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wronges and iniuries thei be so weried, that they be compelled to sell all : by one meanes therfore or by other, either by hooke or crooke they muste needes departe awaye, poore, selye, wretched soules, men, women, husbands, wiues, fatherlesse children, widowes, wofull mothers, with their yonge babes, and their whole houshold smal in substance, and muche in numbre, as husbandrye requireth manye handes. Awaye thei trudge, I say, out of their knowen and accustomed houses, fyndynge no place to reste in." ^ Equally well known and much more precise is Bishop Latimer's lament : " My father was a yeo- man and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound a year at the utter- most, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did find the king a harness, with himself and his horse, while he came to the place that he should receive the king's wages. . . . He kept me to school. . . . He married my sisters with five pound or twenty nobles apiece. . . . He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did off the said farm, where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds by year or more, and is not able to do anything for his prince, for himself nor for his children, or give a cup of drink to the poor."* Latimer may have been guilty of the rhetorical exaggeration sometimes deemed permissible in the pulpit or on the platform. More was tracing the lines of an ideal commonwealth, and may for purposes of contrast have darkened the shadows ^ Utopia^ P' 41. ' First sermon before Edward VI. 6o THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION in the actual society of his day. But the concur- rence of contemporary opinion is overwhelm- ing, and its significance is unmistakable. Whole villages were destroyed and their inhabitants were evicted from their homes and their lands to make room for sheep. As More picturesquely puts it: "Your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame and so smal eaters, now be be- come so great devowerers and so wylde that they eate up, and swallow downe the very men themselves. They consume, destroye, and de- voure whole fieldes, houses, and cities." The broad fact, then, is beyond dispute. But in accepting it we must be critical as to its precise significance. In particular, we must be careful to discriminate between enclosure and enclosure. The conversion of the arable land of the demesne to pasture would necessarily decrease the demand for labour, and would, therefore, be resented as a grievance by two classes: by the landless labourers, increasingly numerous since the middle of the fourteenth century, and also by the cottars, who eked out the subsistence afforded by their few^ acres by working for hire. But, after all, the demesne was in an especial sense the property of the lord, and in enclosing it he was undeniably doing what he would with his own. The lord, however, was not the only encloser; , nor was the demesne the only portion of the manor which was laid down to grass. The class which was primarily affected by the enclosure movement was that of the customary tenants — the villeins of an earlier age. But before we consider their position a passing word may be said as to that of the freeholders. Except in the eastern counties they were a relatively unim-. portant section of the manorial economy, and> their position was comparatively secure. Never-^ ENCLOSURES 6i theless, they also were affected by the enclosing movement, and complaints on their behalf are not rare. Besides the strips which they held in the common arable fields, the freeholders, like the lord and the customary tenants, had rights in the meadows, the common pasture, and the wood and waste. Any diminution in the extent of common pasture would, of course, react disadvantageously on their arable cultivation. To this extent they suffered, but their grievances were relatively slight. Mr. Tawney, indeed, in his elaborate study of the sixteenth century, shows that there is ground for the belief that the freeholder's position actually improved during this period owing to the fact that the rights of the lord were hardly worth enforcing against the freeholders. There was no means of evicting them except by purchase, and there is no evidence that, as a fact, they were evicted. "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 made to pay more for their lands. . . . Leaseholders ana copyholders suffer because they can be rack- rented and evicted. The freeholders stand firm, because their legal position is unassailable."^ The freeholders, it need hardly be added, formed the backbone of the class of "stout yeomen" whose existence moved the admiration of social observers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They failed, however, to survive the rapid changes at the close of the latter century, and the causes of their disappearance will be discussed in the next chapter. • Op. cit. pp. 33, 34, The tenant farmers, of course, in the form of rent ; the copyholders by an increase in fines. 5. 62 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION Meanwhile, it remains to consider the position of the customary tenants. These latter, despite the increase of leasehold tenancies, formed the great bulk of the agricultural population in the sixteenth century. According to one estimate ^ they amounted to 60 per cent of all landholders. It is, therefore, of supreme importance to under- stand how they were affected by the changes in progress. At this point one word of caution must be interposed. It is misleading to assume that the customary tenants were altogether passive spectators of the revolution, or the unwilling victims of it. A great deal of enclosure was voluntarily effected by them. There is, indeed, evidence to prove that the policy of enclosure was actually initiated by them. But this was enclosure of an entirely different kind from that which excited the indignation of contemporaries. It was not the conversion of arable land to pasture, but the redistribution, the concentration and consoli- dation of the intermingled strips in the common open-fields. " It is plain," writes Mr. Tawney, " that there was a well-defined movement from the fourteenth century onwards which made for the gradual modification or dissolution of the open-field system of cultivation, and that it originated not on the side of the lord or the great farmer, but on the side of the peasants themselves, who tried to overcome the incon- , venience of that system by a spontaneous process . of re-allotment, sometimes, but not always, in conjunction with actual enclosure. On one manor it proceeded by the piece-meal encroach- ment of individuals, on another by the deliberate ' Tawney, p. 41, who adds : *' On the Midland manors 62 per cent., in Wilts, Devonshire, and Somerset 77 per cent., in Northumberland 91 per cent., of all those holding land are customary tenants." ENCLOSURES 6$ division of the common meadow or pasture, on a third by the voluntary exchanging by tenants of their strips so as to build up compact holdings, on a fourth by the redistribution of the arable land. . . . The open-field system of cultivation was, in fact, already in slow motion in several parts of England, when the impact of the large grazier struck it, enormously accelerated the speed of the movement, and diverted it on to lines which were new and disastrous to the bulk of the rural population." ^ Against "enclosure" in the sense of consohda- tion, there was nothing whatever to be said. On the contrary, it increased the productivity of the land, and minimised social friction without dimin- ishing or even redistributing population. All that it involved was the redistribution of holdings in such a way that they could be cultivated in severalty and according to the individual wishes of the holder instead of conformably with the common scheme.^ The report of the first of a lengthy series of Royal Commissions— the In- quisition ordered by Wolsey in 15 17 — must refer in the main, though not exclusively, to enclosures of this character. That report contains a com- plete account of the enclosure movement since 1488, and the results already attained during the intervening twenty-nine years are remarkable. ' op. ciL p. 165-6. ' Mr. Johnson {op. cit. p. 55) gives an instance of one manor in which a tenant owned 19 acres in 36 diflferent strips, and where a common-field of 1,074 acres was divided among 23 owners with 1,238 separate parcels. Can we wonder that he then vehemently asks, '* How in Heaven's name could that intensive cultivation which alone has enabled England to compete with other lands have been carried on under such a system"? For a modern illustration of similar incon- veniences cf. account of the Isle of Axholme, ap. A. D. Hall, Pilgrimage of British Farmings pp. 104 seq. t " It is difficult to under- stand how a system of farming so wasteful of labour can possibly survive.*' Contra cf. Slater, op. cit. p. 52. 64 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION The rental value of enclosed arable as compared with open-field arable had already increased 31 per cent, while the value of enclosed pasture was greater and exceeded that of enclosed arable by 27 per cent. No wonder that William Harrison, in his Historical Description of the Island 0) Britayney could affirm (1577): "The soil had growne to be more fruitful, and the countryman more painful, more careful, and more skilful for recompense of gain."^ The same point is made by the greatest of modern authorities with un- answerable force : " When once land was regarded as an important asset in the wealth of the nation, national interests demanded that it should be utilised to the greatest possible advantage. With- out enclosures the soil could not be used for the purposes to which it was best adapted, or its resources fully developed. . . . Under the open- field system one man's idleness might cripple the industry of twenty : only on enclosed farms sepa- rately occupied could men secure the full fruit of their enterprise." This fact had slowly re- vealed itself during the last two centuries. Few practical men would have disputed the truth of Fuller's statement : " The poor man who is monarch of but one enclosed acre will receive more profit from it than from his share of many acres m common with others."^ It was not the poor man only whose eyes were open to this truth. If it behoved the owner of \ one virgate (30 acres) to enclose, a fortiori it behoved the owner of many virgates. Initiated by the peasantry, who were the first to feel the practical inconvenience, if not to appreciate the economic wastefulness of the open-field system, * Quoted ap. Prothero, p. 97. ' Prothero, p. 64. The advantages are not denied by Mr. Tawney, ** provided that enclosure took place by consent " (cf. p. 169). ^ EXTENT OF ENCLOSURES 65 the policy was adopted by the lord of the manor, or more frequently by the tenant farmer to whom, in an increasing number of instances, the manor was let. Neither lord nor rack-rented tenant was, it may be feared, over-scrupulous as to the rights of customary tenants, while the nature of customary tenure made eviction comparatively easy. Many copyholders made a brave fight for their land. The Tudor Government, as we shall see, was on their side. The " Prerogative Courts" — notably the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests — decidedly favoured their cause. But not many even of the more substantial copyholders could afford to fight a powerful lord or a rich grazier. Still less could the cottars. Where the peasants had anticipated the enclosure movement and had themselves voluntarily consolidated their holdings, their position was decidedly more favourable. On such manors there was at once less excuse and less opportunity for the operations of the big encloser.^ Nevertheless, contemporary authori- ties attest the fact that whole towns {i.e. town- ships) were destroyed and thousands of peasants were evicted. The extent of these evictions, and of the enclosures which were primarily responsible for them, has been and is the subject of acute con- troversy. The Four Supplications (1551) puts the evictions at the enormous total of 300,000, an estimate based upon the calculation that every plough, of which 50,000 are said to have " decayed," supported six persons.^ But it is difficult to believe that one person in every ten of the population was disturbed, and most * E.g. in Kent, Essex, Cornwall, and parts of Devonshire. Cf. Tawney, pp. 153-4, who makes this interesting point. "^ E. E. Text Society, p. loi. 66 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION authorities agree that the estimate contains gross exaggeration. Mr. Gay estimates that the total number of persons displaced between 1455 and 1637 amounts to about 34,000, and that figure is substantially accepted by Mr. Prothero and Mr. Johnson.^ Estimates as to the acreage enclosed are equally divergent. Reference has been already made to contemporary opinions on this matter, and similar testimony might be multiplied to any extent. Such opinions, emanating for the most part from preachers, pamphleteers, and philanthropists, do not, as a rule, pretend to be based upon precise investigation, and from one point of view are clearly devoid of scientific value. Professor Gay, indeed, speaks of the contemporary literature as marked by ** hysterical and rhetorical complaint " and as " condemned by its very exaggeration." Contemporaries cannot, of course, be expected to see any economic movement in its true per- spective ; they cannot gauge ultimate results ; they cannot reach scientific conclusions. They see the suffering, which is perhaps the inevitable incident, as it is unquestionably the usual accompaniment of periods of profound economic upheaval. Whether anything can be done by wise legislation and sympathetic administration to render inevitable changes less harsh in their operation, and to mitigate the sufferings of innocent victims, is a question to which I shall recur. Be that as it may, the changes of this particular period were so rapid and far-reaching as to justify the use of the term " revolution." How far did that revolution extend ? * Cf. Johnson, p. 58, Prothero, p. 66, but cf. Leadam (Trans. R. H. Soc, xiv.), who puts it higher. Mr. Tawney reckons (using the reports of the Commissioners) that from 1485 to 1517, 6,931 persons were displaced, and 2,232 between 1578 and 1607, p. 262. EXTENT OF ENCLOSURES 67 The ground has been worked over with minute care by several modern investigators. To what conclusions do their investigations tend ? The reader, may be again reminded that the subject was investigated by a Royal Commission in 1517, and that the process was repeated in 1548, under the sympathetic rule of the Protector Somerset ; by Queen Elizabeth in 1566 ; by James I. in 1607 ; and no less than four times during the " personal rule" of Charles I.: between the dissolution of his third Parliament (1629) and the meeting of the fourth in 1640.^ All the figures thus obtained are partial, and must be used with caution. None of the Commissions surveyed the whole ground. The investigations carried on in 15 17-19 cover twenty-four counties; the returns for 1548 and 1566 relate only to four counties already sur- veyed in 1 5 17-19, while that of 1607 relates to six, only one of which — Huntingdon — had not been included in any of the earlier returns. The aggregate result revealed in these returns is that out of a total acreage of 18,947,958, only 171,051, or 0-90, had during the period 1455-1607 been enclosed. These returns are, however, as Mr. Johnson ^ points out, " manifestly incomplete." In order to give them some completeness, Mr. Gay has worked out an ingenious calculation,' as a result of which he estimates that the en- closures amounted to 516,673 acres, or 276 per cent, of the total area of England. But even this does not satisfy Mr. Johnson. " It would seem," writes the latter, " that Mr. Gay, with all his care, has underestimated the extent of the en- * The dates of Charles's Commissions are 1632, 1635, and 1636. On the whole subject cf. Leadam, Domesday of Enclosures ; Gay, Trans. Hist. Soc, vols. xiv. and xviii., and Quarterly Journal qf Economics^ vol. xvii. * Op. cit. p. 44. * Quarterly Journal of Economics t xviL 68 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION closures in the twenty-five counties (enumerated in the surveys of 15 17-19 and 1607), and that at the very least some 127,000 more acres v^ere enclosed between 1607-37." His own conclusion is that the total enclosures amounted to 744,000. Even so, as he justly adds, " when we compare this with the enclosures of the eighteenth century, it must be confessed that the extent is com- paratively small." But these precise calculations, interesting as they are, concern rather the specialist historian. The amount enclosed may have been small in relation to the total area of England, but it may nevertheless have repre- sented a considerable proportion of the land which was at that time practically accessible and available for cultivation.^ Be this as it may, by the people immediately concerned the enclosers were regarded as "greedy cormorants" who make "parks or pastures of whole parishes," as '* caterpillars of the commonweal " who "join lord- ship to lordship, manor to manor, farm to farm, land to land, pasture to pasture," and gather many thousands of acres of ground " together within one pale or hedge." ^ Nor did the people stop short at strong language. From time to time the growing indignation found vent in actual insur- rection, as in the rebellion led by Robert Kett in East Anglia in 1549. Not that the East Anglians were in any special degree sufferers from en- closure. Norfolk and Suffolk were, in fact, among the lowest in the scale of enclosures — partly, perhaps, owing to the predominance of freeholders, and partly to the fact that the com- mercial character of the district had induced a ^ The point is made by Professor Pollard, Political History o England^ vol. vi. p. 29. * See Prothero, p. 62, who quotes these and many similar de- nunciations. TUDOR LEGISLATION 69 good deal of voluntary enclosure at a relatively early date among the customary tenants. The special grievances alleged by the peasants who rose under Kett were enclosure of the common waste and pasture, and the survival of villeinage. Kett's rebellion was, of course, suppressed; but it is important to ascertain how the move- ment which gave rise to social unrest was re- garded by the ruling powers. The Tudor monarchs may have been despotic in temper, but their despotism was pre-eminently of the paternal sort. They had not accepted the com- mercial ideals which commanded increasing adherence among the nobles and the merchants of the realm. None of the Tudors were in- different to money, but if the statute book may be accepted as indicative of policy, their conception of the Commonwealth was not that of the abstract economist. They were, on the contrary, obviously concerned to maintain upon the soil a sturdy and contented peasantry. This concern may, as some have hinted, have been prompted by anxiety as to national defence — the security of the realm against external foes. But their agrarian policy was not inspired exclusively by this motive. There mingled with it, at any rate, a genuine solicitude for the social wellcbeing of the mass of their people. Parliament was never permitted by the Crown to neglect the agrarian problem. On the con- trary, from the accession of Henry VII. down to the close of the reign of Queen Elizabeth we have constantly recurring legislation on this subject. The preambles of this extended series of statutes paint, in colours hardly less lurid than those employed by the preachers and pamph- leteers, the social and economic grievances of 70 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION the day. The two first statutes date from 1488. One was passed " for the keeping up houses for husbandage." Its preamble declares that " in some towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours, now be there occupied two or three herdsmen, and the residue fall in idleness, the husbandry which is one of the greatest commodities of this realm is greatly decayed, churches destroyed, the service of God withdrawn, the bodies then buried not prayed for, the patrons and curates wronged, the defence of the land against our enemies outward feebled and impaired." To avert these evils, owners of houses let to farm with twenty acres of land were to be bound to maintain such houses and buildings " as were convenient and necessary' for main- taining and upholding of tillage and husbandry." A second Act was passed by the same Parliament specifically to restrain enclosures in the Isle of Wight, lest the depopulation of that island should weaken our national defence at one of its most vulnerable points. The policy initiated by Henry VII. was consistently followed by Henry VIII., by Edward VI., by Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. Acts of Parliament were passed in 1514, 1515, 1534, 1536, 1551, 1555, 1563, 1593, 1598, and 1601. The burden of the song varied little. The proportion of arable land was to be scrupu- lously maintained ; newly-laid pasture was to be restored ; no single individual was to be allowed to keep more than a limited number of sheep or to engross more than a given amount of land. The preamble of the Act of 1534 is typical of many. It runs as follows : " Forasmuch as divers persons, to whom God in his goodness hath disposed great plenty, now of late have daily studied and invented ways how they might accumulate into few hands, as well TUDOR LEGISLATION 7' great multitude of farms as great plenty of cattle, and in especial sheep, putting such land to pas- ture and not tillage ; whereby they have not only pulled down churches and towns, and enhanced the rents and fines of land so that no poor man may meddle with it, but also have raised the prices which hath been accustomed, by reason whereof a marvellous number of the people of this realm be not able to provide for themselves, their wives, and children, but be so discouraged with misery and poverty that they fall daily to theft and robbery, or pitifully die for hunger and cold." This was the Act to which Thomas Cromwell, writing to his royal master, referred in the following optimistic terms : ** It may also please your most royal Majesty to know how that yesterday there passed your Commons a bill that no person within this your realm shall hereafter keep and nourish above the number of 2,000 sheep, and also that the eighth part of every man's land, being a farmer, shall for ever hereafter be put in tillage yearly; which bill, if by the great wisdom, virtue, goodness and zeal that your highness beareth towards this your realm, might have good success and take good effect among your lords above, I do conjecture and suppose in my poor, simple and unworthy judgment, that your highness shall do the most noble, profitable and most beneficial thing that ever was done to the commonwealth of this your realm, and shall thereby increase such wealth in the same amongst the great number and multitude for your most loving and obedient subjects as never was seen in this realm since Brutus' time." No opportunity was neglected by the Tudor Government for enforcing the policy indicated in 72 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION the above letter. Thus, in the Act of 1536 for the suppression of the lesser monasteries, the grantees of the monastic lands were to be bound, under pain of heavy penalties, " to keep, or cause to be kept, an honest continual house and household in the same site or precinct, and to occupy yearly as much of the same demesnes in ploughing and tillage of husbandry, that is to say, as much of the said demesnes which hath been commonly used to be kept in tillage by the governors, abbots, or priors of the same houses, monasteries, or priories, or by their farmer or farmers occupy- ing the same within the time of twenty years next before this Act." Mention of the Act of 1536 suggests an interesting question as to the relation between the ecclesiastical and the agrarian movements of the sixteenth century. It is the fashion in some quarters — far removed from Roman Catho- licism — to assert that the Reformation was a conspiracy devised by the rich for the impoverish- ment of the poor. That similar suspicions were entertained by contemporaries it is impossible to deny. Many of the peasants who rose in rebellion in the reign of Edward VI. undoubtedly associated religious innovations with economic and social changes effected to their own detri- ment. But that any such motive inspired those who were responsible for the ecclesiastical changes cannot be proved and is contrary to probability. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was pre-eminently the work of the State. It has been shown that the State was genuinely anxious, on more than one ground, to arrest and circumscribe the economic tendencies of the day. But notwithstanding the motives and intentions of the Government, it is an unquestionable fact that the Reformation did accentuate and accelerate THE SUPPRESSION OF THE MONASTERIES 73 the agrarian revolution. By the dissolution of the monasteries, lands worth ;^i40,ooo a year (in the currency of that day) were confiscated to the Crown. The new bishoprics established by Henry VIII. and other corporations absorbed land worth ;^2 1,000 a year. Lands worth ;^5o,ooo a year were let on lease by the Crown ; the rest, of the yearly value of ;^69,ooo, were granted or sold to nobles, courtiers, officials, lawyers, and industrials, with a small amount to physicians, clerks, and yeomen.^ There is reason to suppose that a not inconsiderable portion of the land thus granted was resold by the grantees, tending, as Mr. Fisher points out, to an extremely brisk speculation in land during the last decade of the reign of Henry VIII. But whether the monastic lands were retained by the original grantees or resold, in either case they passed into the hands of men whose prime motive for the acquisition was to obtain the highest possible commercial return for the money invested. Between them and their tenants there were no ties of sentiment, and there was, therefore, nothing to restrain them from putting the land to the best economic use. Men might have to be evicted to make room for sheep ; but what if they were ? With the monas- tic owners it had been otherwise. Their methods of management may not have tended to get the best out of the land ; leniency on the part of the landlords may have encouraged inefficiency and slackness among the tenants ; but as to their leniency ithere can be little doubt. Nor as to their popularity ; at any rate in the north of Eng- land and in the south-west. For it is significant that both in the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) and in the western insurrection of 1549 there was a ' This follows the computation of Dr. Alexander Savine, of Moscow, whose materials were utilised by Mr. Fisher, Political History^ v. 497, 74 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION clamorous demand for the restoration of the abbeys. There is no reason to doubt that this demand was inspired partly by religious motives, but that the economic motive was also operative is certain. One other question must, at this point, be obtruded. The sixteenth century, more par- ticularly the latter half of it, was a period of distress among the poor. It was then that the problem of pauperism first presented itself in an acute form. How far was the dissolution of the abbeys responsible for the emergence of this new problem ? To ascribe it wholly to a single cause would be perversely unhistorical. Many causes con- tributed to the prevailing labour unrest : the dislocation of industry caused by the intro- duction of new commercial methods; the de- preciation in the purchasing power of silver due to the discovery of the new world and the exploitation of the South American mines ; the rise of prices, consequent partly upon the depreciation of the precious metals and partly upon the debasement of the coinage. All these factors had their share in the accentuation of distress. But the operation of such causes, then as always, was relatively subtle if not imperceptible. They did not strike the imagina- tion and impress contemporaries as did the suppression of the monastic houses. For cen- turies past the monasteries had afforded the most accessible means of " poor relief." It is, indeed, a moot point whether, as Fuller asserted, they did not create as much pauperism as they cured. Father Gasquet is careful to vindicate the monks against the charge of indiscriminate almsgiving, yet even he admits that "no wayfaring person could depart without a night's lodging, meat, THE PROBLEM OF PAUPERISM 75 drink, and money, it not being demanded whence he or she came or whither he would go." The abbeys, in fact, offered a good deal more than the ordinary facilities of the casual ward, without the deterrent concomitants of the latter institu- tion. That their dissolution threw a good many vagrants on their own resources, and that in this way it intensified the gravity of the problem by which the State was confronted is indubitable. An extended series of statutes exists to prove that the State was baffled in its efforts to solve that problem. But it is probable that the loss of the customary means of relief was the least important among the several ways in which the dissolution of the abbeys accentuated the evils of vagrancy and pauperism. The loss of shelter was, of course, acutely felt by those who were accus- tomed to rely upon the hospitality of the monasteries. Nevertheless, it was the indirect results of the dissolution, far more than the direct, which intensified the social and economic crisis of the sixteenth century. A vast amount of landed property had been vested in the monas- teries. This property was suddenly thrown upon the market. The agrarian changes would have been sufficiently grave and rapid and extensive had there been no ecclesiastical reformation. But there can be no question that the coincidence of the latter did much to increase^ their magnitude and quicken their pace. The Tudor Government made valiant, if mis- guided, efforts to counteract economic tendencies which seemed to threaten both the security of the country and the well-being of its poorer inhabitants. They attempted by legislation to minimise the results of enclosures; they enacted statutes, of ever-increasing severity, against ** lusty vagabonds," ** valiant beggars 76 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION and vagrants ; by the famous Statute of Appren- tices (1563) they endeavoured to fix a scale of prices, to secure to the labourer a minimum wage and regular employment, and to com- pensate for the decadence of the gilds by en- forcing a uniform system of apprenticeships ; they renovated the currency; they did every- thing in their power to stimulate private charity and encourage voluntary almsgiving ; and finally, by the memorable legislation of 1601, they laid upon the shoulders of the State a vast and direct responsibility for all such citizens as could not, or would not, maintain themselves. Under the Elizabethan Poor Law, definite, elaborate, and compulsory machinery was set up. Poor rehef was for the first time recognised as a department of State activity. In every parish overseers of the poor were to be appointed under the control of the Justices of the Peace. Funds were to be raised by a parochial rate and were to be applied for the benefit of three distinct categories : the " lusty and able of body " were to be " set on work " ; the impotent poor were to be relieved and maintained ; and the children were to be appren- ticed to trades, the boys until the age of twenty- four, the girls to that of twenty-one or until marriage. By such means did the Tudors en- deavour to preserve social order and to mitigate the undeserved suff'erings of the victims of an economic revolution. How far, it may be asked, did this legislation achieve its object? How far was the interven- tion of the State effective? It is clear that, despite much continued distress, things were on the mend under Elizabeth. Was this amendment due to the action of the Government, or to the operation of economic forces ? In some degree, doubtless, to the former ; much more, I submit, to ECONOMICS AND POLITICS 77 the latter. The ills caused by misgovernment good government can cure. For the debasement of the coinage, for example, the greed of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. was directly responsible. And debasement was one of the factors con- tributing to depreciation : but only one. Debase- ment could be stojDped, and the purity of the coinage restored. This self-denying task Queen Elizabeth accomplished. But, as we have seen, depreciation was due in far greater measure to the fact that the mines of South America were flooding the Old World with silver. With the operation of that force no Governments could effectually cope, and, despite their efforts, prices steadily rose. So did rents. In both cases the rise was due to natural causes, and legislation could do little to mitigate the effects. Nature, however, was more efficacious in the application of remedies. The economic movement ran its course. Enclosure was overdone; the price of wool declined ; the price of wheat rose. Tillage once more became profitable, and reaction set in. Meanwhile, displaced labour gradually found its own level. The development of cloth manufac- tures ; the extension of over-sea commerce ; the call of maritime adventure — all these things did something to absorb redundant agricultural labour. Not, of course, immediately. The remedies prescribed by nature may be efficacious, but they are slow. Nature is prodigal of human life and careless as to human suffering. The cries of the afflicted rose to heaven, and sensitive and pitiful souls called upon the Government to restrain the greed of the wealthy and to assuage the sufferings of the poor. That Government did its utmost to provide remedies is certain. It is equally certain that the remedies so applied were only partially 78 THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION successful. Would it have been well for the community had their success been more complete ? Much suffering, wholly unmerited, might have been averted. But at what cost ? Assume that the paternal despotism of the Tudors had succeeded in checking enclosures, in restraining evictions, in preventing rural depopulation, in damming the flow of labour towards the towns — in short, in neutralising the play of economic forces. Had it been well ? It is perhaps dangerous to attempt to deal summarily with such a question, and detailed consideration is not appropriate to our immediate purposes. The question obviously raises others of a more general character. It raises the whole question of the relation of ethics to politics, and of both to economics. Upon such an enlarged discussion it would be impossible to enter. Some points, however, seem to emerge with tolerable clearness. It is clear that, in the agrarian movement of the sixteenth century, mere cupidity played a considerable part ; that some of the hardships suffered by the poor were avoid- able and ought to have been avoided ; that some of the advantages might have been secured with- out the concomitant evils. But is it not equally clear that the process was in the main natural, healthy, and, in the largest sense, profitable and advantageous? That the wealth of the nation was augmented is not denied. Was it at the cost of individual welfare ? Let us suppose that the agrarian revolution had never taken place ; or that, having been initiated, victory had remained with the forces of reaction. Suppose that the open-field system had continued to supply the nor- mal type of arable cultivation (as, indeed, in many parts of the country it did) ; that the customary WEALTH AND WELFARE 79 tenants had remained rooted to the soil ; that the cupidity of the " cormorants " had been defeated, and that the men had succeeded in evicting the sheep. Whence would have come the impulse to maritime activity; to world-adventure; to geo- graphical discovery and colonisation ? whence would the sea-ports and the market-towns which rose to prominence under the Tudors have derived their supply of labour ? Had the tide of economic progress been averted in the sixteenth century, England might still have occupied in the polity of nations a contented place among the Denmarks, perhaps ultimately among the Belgiums. But she would have answered, in literal truth, to the description of Tennyson: " Some third-rate isle half lost among her seas I " Her place, among the great nations of the world, has been purchased with a price. Part of the price paid was the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century. Was it too high ? CHAPTER IV THE AGRARIAN REVOLUTION OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY > 1 1. The Territorial Oligarchy **If ever a privileged class existed it was the English aristocracy dwing the eighteenth century." — Emile Boutmv. **In no other country has so large an amount of salutary labour been accomplished by the upper classes as in England." — W. E. H. Lecky. The two previous chapters were intended to disclose the characteristic phenomena of two critical epochs in the history of the English land system. Before passing to the third it may ' On the subject of this chapter, refer (in addition to works already cited) to : Defoe, Tour through Great Britain. Horner, An Essay upon the Nature and Method of ascertaining the Specific Shares of Proprietors upon the Inclosure of Common Fields (1761). Arthur Young, Farmer's Letters (1768), Political Arithmetic (1774), and Tours in England. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations {\*jl(i). F. M. Eden, The State of the Poor (1797). W. Cobbett, Rural Rides. W. Marshall, The Rural Economy oj Norfolk (1787), Midland and Southern Counties. Porter, Progress of the Nation (ed. F. W. Hirst, 1912). A. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution. P. Mantoux, La Rivolu' tion Industrielle. Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords. Mrs. Stirling, Coke of Norfolk and his Friends. Lady Verney, Peasant Properties. G. Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields. E. C. K. Conner, Common Land and Inclosure. W. Hasbach, A History of the English Agricultural Labourer. H. Levy, Large and Small Holdings. J. L. and B. Ham- mond, The Village Labourer (1760-1832). W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century. C. G. Robertson, England under the Hanoverians. J. A. R. Marriott, England since Waterloo. Cf. also Retorts of Poor Law Commission (1834); of Select Com- 80 EPOCHS OF AGRARIAN HISTORY 8i be convenient to summarise the argument and to | indicate briefly the stage which has been reached, i The capital events of the fourteenth century — | the Great Pestilence and the Peasant Revolt — are | said to have administered a violent shock to the | rural economy of England. The effects of those t events may have been exaggerated or misunder- % stood. Nevertheless, the fact remains that at the ^, beginning of the fourteenth century the old mano- W rial organisation existed in its integrity, and that * before the century closed it had undergone violent I dislocation. At the beginning of the century the ^ land of England was cultivated by a semi-servile t class remunerated for its labour by a share in ^ the common arable fields, in the common pasture, | and the common waste ; practically secure in | tenure, but " tied to the soil " ; at the close of |- it villeinage was— despite legal survival — to all | intents and purposes extinct, alike as a tenurial f and as a social system, and the agricultural | economy — based upon villein labour — was vir- | tually shattered. That all this might have f happened without the intervention of a violent ^ catastrophe is not denied ; that many other | causes, tending to disintegration, were in opera- | tion is certain ; but it is nevertheless true that in ^ the evolution of the English land system we must I regard the fourteenth century as the first of the | critical epochs. | The second is marked by the agrarian revolution % of the sixteenth century. The outstanding feature f of that epoch was the commercialising of agri- ; culture. The mercantile spirit — in more than I one sense of the term — was abroad. Men looked I mittees on Agriculture (1814, 1821-2, 1833, 1836, 1848) ; of Royal Commissions on Agriculture (1879, 1893-7). W. J. Ashley (ap. Economic fournal. No. 90, vol. xxiii.), Comparative Economic History and the English Landlord. 82 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY to production .to supply not merely subsistence but profit. Of this spirit there were many and diverse manifestations. Not the least important was the agrarian revolution, the core oi which was the process of enclosure, the substitution ^ of grazing for tillage, of sheep-breeding for corn^ growing. The new graziers might be owners or tenants, but in either case command of capital was indispensable, and it was this condition which tended to knock out the small man. Con-' temporary literature bears testimony to much suffering, and manifestations of discontent were not infrequent. Nor can any one deny that the grievances of the peasants in the sixteenth century were genuine, or that the protests of preachers and philanthropists were intelligible, but it is quite certain that the actual extent of enclosure was far less than contemporaries would lead us to suppose, and that the ill-effects were far more transitory. Still, the agrarian changes of that period left a permanent impress upon the English land system, and registered an important stage in its evolution. Far more important, however, is the period which it is proposed to pass under review in the present chapter — that oi the eighteenth century. For our immediate purpose the "eighteenth century " must be interpreted rather liberally, for nature, as Mr. Balfour once remarked, " does not exhibit her uniformity by any pedantic ad- herence to the decimal system." Politically, the "century" extends from the Revolution of 1688 to that of 1832; in an economic sense, it begins rather later, but it must be prolonged, at least, until 1850. It was, in fact, during the century between 1750 and 1850 that the modern England, with whose features we are familiar, came into being. And if this be true of the economic THE TERRITORIAL OLIGARCHY 83 system as a whole, not least is it true of land tenure and agrarian organisation. On the threshold of the enquiry it is necessary to utter one word of caution and protest. To treat the history of the land system in isolation is almost bound to lead, as in conspicuous cases it has led, to misconception and misrepresentation. The agrarian movement which eventuated in the establishment of our existing land system cannot be understood ; the social and economic changes by which it was accompanied cannot be fairly interpreted, unless the fact be kept steadily in view that the^a grarian movement furnished only one factor iii aTmuch l arger problem. We are not likely nowadays 10 be allowed to forget that the period which witnessed the con- solidation of great landed estates was marked also by the political triumph of the aristocracy. The Revolution of 1688, so often regarded as the climax of a struggle between the Crown and the people, served, in fact, to inaugurate the rule of a territorial oligarchy. It is true that in the eighteenth century the centre of political gravity was to be found in the House of Commons ; but the House of Commons itself was dominated, and in large measure nominated, by a group of great famiHes whose members monopolised the principal offices in the executive government. Into these close preserves even a Pitt found it difficult to force an entrance, a Burke found it impossible. Nor was the triumph of the oligarchy confined to the central govern- ment. The administration of local affairs was dominated by the same class. The Tudors, in the development of their benevolent dictatorship, had been compelled, as we have seen, to impose many onerous and responsible duties upon their " men- of-all-work" — the Justices of the Peace. But 84 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY they always kept a tight hold upon their agents. To the opposition of these same country gentle- men the Stuarts succumbed, and by the Revo- lution of 1688 the victory of the aristocracy was complete. Their ascendancy lasted for nearly a century and a half, until it was overthrown by the enactment of the Reform Bill of 1832. Of that ascendancy, and its effect upon the political, social, and economic life of this country, two strongly contrasted views have been taken and expressed. The epigrammatic judgments of M. Emile Boutmy and of Mr. Lecky, prefixed to this chapter, may be accepted as typical of the two points of view. By the former the eighteenth century is regarded as a warning against oligar- chical privilege; by the latter as a brilliant exemplification of the patriotic services which an enlightened aristocracy can render to a State. Into the general merits of the controversy it is not necessary to enter. It is, however, important to enquire howthe concentration of political power reacted upon the evolution of the land system. Its first and most obvious result was to make the exercise of all governmental functions, central and local alike, dependent upon the possession of land. Thus, knights of the shire were required to possess landed property of the value of ;^6oo a year, borough members were to possess ;^3oo worth ; the qualification for a Justice of the Peace was raised by successive stages from £20 a year in land to ;^ioo, except for the sons of Peers and the heirs to landed property ; deputy-lieutenants had to possess ;£"200 a year in land ; colonels of militia regiments ;^i,ooo, and lieutenant-colonels ;^6oo, and so on. The county franchise had been confined, ever since the reign of Henry VI., to 405. freeholders, but as a liberal interpretation THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 85 was given to the term " freehold," no one who had any substantial and tolerably permanent interest in land was excluded. On the foun- dation of land, however, the whole political and^ social fabric was erected. That this political monopoly had a powerful influence upon the agrarian movement of the eighteenth century cannot be doubted. But this factor, though an important one, was not the only factor in the problem. Economic forces were also in active operation, and to insist exclusively upon the political ascendancy of the great landed pro- prietors, though it may give unity and coherence to the picture, involves a neglect of perspective, not to say a distortion of facts. For the agrarian' J movement was coincident not only with the period / of political oligarchy, but with that of the Industrial 1 Revolution. ^ ^ Down to 1750 England, it must be remembered, was a land which carried a small and scattered population. The whole population could have been comfortably contained in the Greater London of to-day.^ Not more than 24 per cent, of this population were town-dwellers. Three-fourths of the people lived on and by the land — but not wholly by it. No description of the agrarian movement can be other than misleading which does not emphasise the fact that under the old industrial system there was no sharp division of labour, no clear differentiation of economic functions, no specialisation of employment. Every farmer was at once farmer and manu- ' Before 1801 — the date of the first official census — estimates of population are little better than guesses, but the most probable guess puts the population of England and Wales at just over 6,000,000 in the year 1750. Before 1750 the largest decennial increase was 3 per cent. ; by 1801 the population was 9,187,176. For detailed discussion of this question cf. an interesting paper by E. C. K. Qtonntt^ Journal of the Statistical Society (Feb. 4, 191 3). 86 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY facturer, generally spinning his own wool, and sometimes weaving his own cloth. The first serious blow to the small agriculturist, whether owner or occupier, was the development of the cotton trade and the relative decline in the woollen industry. The second blow was dealt by a remarkable series of mechanical inventions : the fly-shuttle invented by a Lancashire weaver, Hargreaves, in 1764; the waterframe by Ark- wright, of Cromford, in 1769; Compton's mule; Dr. Cartwright's power-loom ;- and, finally, the invention of the steam-engine by James Watt, and its application to manufacturing industry about the year 1790. These inventions gradually trans- formed the whole textile industry, and ultimately led to the establishment of the factory system. A third blow, hardly less important, was the discovery of a new method of smelting iron, by the substitution of coal for wood. Thus industry was transferred from the woodlands of the South to the coalfields of the Midlands and the North ; the textile workers were dragged out of the farms and cottages and the country-sides, and massed into the factories and the towns. The bye-industry of the farmer was destroyed. For tlie first time the agriculturist had to live on agriculture or perish. Nay, more; for the first time the agriculturist had to feed a rapidly in- creasing urban population who produced no food- supplies for themselves. Unless agriculture — and English agriculture — could feed them, they, too, must needs perish. To extemporise an im- port trade in foodstuffs would in any case, under the circumstances of that time, have been difficult. To do so during the Revolutionary and Napo- leonic wars would have been impossible. For it tnust not be forgotten that the crisis of the agrarian and industrial revolutions was coin- THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 87 cident with the greatest military struggle in which this country has ever been engaged. To the partisan historian this coincidence simply affords further evidence of the malignant subtlety and skill with which the territorial aristocracy wove the web of their coherent conspiracy against the poor. But such argument proves too much. From the Napoleonic wars to the evolution of the English land system may seem to be a, far cry, but, in fact, it is impossible to understand how the existing land system has come into being without a comprehension of the political and industrial movements which were coincident with, and incessantly reacted upon, the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century. Some of the more characteristic features of that revolution will be described in the following section. § 2. Science and Agriculture *' A fine picture is a good thing, but I had rather it had been a fine tup."— Arthur Young. "It is impossible to consider the history of English agriculture in the last century without arriving at the conclusion that its peculiar excellence and type sprang from the fact that the ownership and control of land were chiefly in the hands of a wealthy and not of a needy class."— W. E. H. Lecky. " Point de fourrage, point de bestiaux : sans bestiaux aucun engrais ; sans engrais nulle r^colte." — Flemish adage quoted by Prothero. The first characteristic of the period now under review, in point both of time and importance, was the improvement of agricultural methods, the application of science to the art of farming. These improvements were introduced by an enlightened minority whose efforts were for a long time stubbornly resisted by the conservative 88 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY majority. Among the reforming agriculturists special mention must be made of such men as Jethro Tull, "Turnip" Townshend, Robert Bake^ well, Ellmann of Glynde, Arthur Young, and Coke of Norfolk. Jethro Tull (i 674-1 741) was a Berkshire gentleman who is chiefly famous for the in- vention of the drill, and the introduction of horse- hoeing industry. The father of the "Tullian system," he paved the way for many of the more important innovations of the century. Contemporary with Tull was Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1674-1738), the brother-in- law of Sir Robert Walpole and Secretary of State under the first two Hanoverian kings. Friction with his brother-in-law drove him out of politics into agriculture, and in 1730 he settled down at Raynham in Norfolk. Walpole's jealousy was in this case of indubitable advantage to his country, for it is safe to say that the few years which Lord Townshend devoted to the improve- ment of his Norfolk property were infinitely more fruitful in results than the whole of his political career. It was he who first taught English farmers the advantages of a scientific rotation of crops. He introduced the four-course, or " Norfolk," system, regularly alternating roots and artificial grasses with two kinds of cereals, and never taking two corn crops in succession. His devotion to root-crops earned him, indeed, the sobriquet by which he is known to history. Robert Bakewell (1725-94) was remarkable for improvements in stock-breeding. Hitherto, oxen had been prized for their power of draught, sheep for the quality of their fleece. To scientific breeding little, if any, attention had been paid; t breeding, according to the proverbial aphorism, meant nothing but " a promiscuous union of SCIENCE AND AGRICULTURE 89 rnobody's son with everybody's daughter." Bake- well was the first to perceive that the time had come when both sheep and oxen would be regarded primarily for their meat-producing qualities ; he set himself, by careful selection, to produce the requisite type, and, as regards sheep, with such success that Mr. Prothero has de- scribed him as " the creator not only of the new Leicesters, but of the Southdowns and the Cheviots." Incidentally, Bakewell made a large fortune. In 1789 his rams were hired for the season at 6,000 guineas by a society formed to extend his breed of sheep, and in 1793 the foundation of the Smithfield Club gave per- manence to the system which he initiated. Its success may be judged from the fact that in 1710 the average weight of the cattle and sheep sold in Smithfield Market was : beeves 370 lbs., calves 50 lbs., sheep 28 lbs., lambs 18 lbs. ; in 1795 they weighed respectively 800 lbs., 148 lbs., 80 lbs., and 50 Ibs.^ The services rendered to scientific agriculture by Arthur Young (i 741- 1820) were of a different kind, but to the average reader are probably even more familiar. A failure as a practical farmer, he became the first Secretary to the Board of Agriculture, established in 1793, and did an immense work in the collection and dis- semination of agricultural information. He was, in fact, the literary prophet of the new move- ment, and by his keenness and precision of observation, by his lucidity in exposition, and, above all, by his power of exciting enthusiasm for the subject which he made his own, he served well not merely his own generation, but all that have come after. 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