The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

Chapter III: THE PEASANTRY (continued) (1)

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(d) _The Economic Environment of the Small Cultivator_

It was the argument of the previous chapter that the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the emergence from the mass of manorial tenants of a class of wealthy peasants who bought and leased their neighbours' lands, added to their property parcels taken from the waste and demesne, and by these means built up estates far exceeding in size the normal villein holding. The change from labour services to money rents left the peasantry with time for the management of larger holdings, and the spread of a money economy increased their means of acquiring them. Cheap land and easy transfer favour the movement of property from one man to another. In the manorial courts transfer was easy, and, especially after the Great Plague, land was cheap. It is not necessary to take sides in the much debated question of the economic conditions of the fifteenth century, in order to hold that, on the whole, such changes made the greater part of it a period of increasing prosperity among the small cultivators. To support this view one could quote Fortescue's[208] proud description of the well-being of the common people. One could point out that in the dark days in the middle of the sixteenth century the peasants themselves looked back to the social conditions of the reign of Henry VII.[209] as a kind of golden age, and clamoured for their restoration. One could cite a good many examples pointing to an upward movement. Large estates are left at death by men who are legally villeins. Villeins, especially in the eastern counties, buy up freehold land and found considerable properties. A bond tenant in Lincolnshire marries into a knight's family. Bond tenants are found leasing the manorial demesne in one block and farming estates of several hundred acres. Nor must we forget that the peasants of the sixteenth century are often very substantial people, and that even when the taint of personal villeinage is still upon them.

[208] Fortescue on the Governance of England (Plummer), chapter
xii.: "But oure commons be riche, and therefore thai give to
thair kynge, at somme times quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte
tymes other grate subsidies."

[209] Russell, _Ket's Rebellion in Norfolk_, p. 48 foll.; see
passage quoted below, pp. 335?-337. For the sentences
immediately following, see Scrope, _History of the Manor and
Barony of Castle Combe_, p. 233: "A serf ... is said to have
left at his death in 1435 chattels estimated at 3000 marks or
£2000." Massingberd, Ingoldmells Court Rolls, int. xxix.;
Davenport, _History of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 53.

But isolated instances of this kind, suggestive though they are, are not likely to carry conviction unless they agree with what we know of the general economic situation. Economists who live after the days of Samuel Smiles will hesitate before they base optimistic conclusions as to the conditions of any class on cases of good fortune among individual members of it. We should be false to the spirit of our period if we did not recognise that the economic ideal of most men, an ideal often implied though not often formulated, was less the opening of avenues to enterprise than the maintenance of groups and communities at their customary level of prosperity. We shall have hereafter to speak of the changes which overtook the English social system in the course of the sixteenth century, in so far as they were connected with changes in the methods of agriculture and of land tenure. Before we do so we may pause for a moment to look at the village of the later Middle Ages as a social and economic unit.

The foundation of its whole life is the possession by the majority of households of holdings of land. Land is so widely distributed that the household, all of whose members are entirely dependent for their living upon work for wages, is the exception. Though this cannot be statistically proved, it is rendered almost certain by several converging lines of evidence. Turn first to the table on pp. 64 and 65, which sets out the acreage of the customary tenants' holdings. It will be seen that, when all the counties represented are grouped together, the tenants who have only cottages form less than one-tenth of the total number. In East Anglia and in Lancashire the proportion, it is true, is considerably higher; but these counties are exceptions to the general rule, and the cottagers usually have gardens, which, if they do not amount to the minimum of four acres laid down by the Act of 1589, are nevertheless not infrequently of one or two acres in extent. If we may trust these figures, the typical family has a small holding of from two and a half to fifteen acres. Our second line of evidence quite falls in with this conclusion. It is clear from the tone of legislation that the class of workers who depend solely on a contract of service is in sixteenth century England not very large. Elizabethan[210] legislation provides expressly for the needs of farmers by empowering Justices of the Peace to apprentice unoccupied youths to husbandry, and to set the unemployed to work in the fields. Even in the middle of the seventeenth[211] century, when a strong movement has been at work for one hundred and fifty years in the opposite direction, there are complaints from pamphleteers that men who should work as wage-labourers cling to the soil, and in the naughtiness of their hearts prefer independence as squatters to employment by a master. Such comments throw a flash of light on the way in which the peasants regard the alternatives of wage labour and landholding. Sometimes they themselves give us a glimpse into their mind on the matter. They tell us how they face that most fundamental of economic problems, the Achilles' heel of modern civilisation, the problem of so arranging their little societies that as many persons as possible may enter life with some material equipment for self-maintenance in addition to their personal strength and skill. Here is an extract from a customary of the Lancashire manor of High Furness[212] drawn up in the reign of Elizabeth:--

"As heretofore deviding and porcioning of tenements hath caused great decay, chiefly of the service due to her Highness for horses and of her woods, and has been the cause of making a great number of poor people in the lordship, it is now ordered that no one shall devide his tenement or tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be of ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d., and that before every such division there shall be several houses and ousettes for every part of such tenement."

This seems a hard rule. Will it not result in the creation of a body of propertyless labourers employed by a small village aristocracy? That danger is appreciated, and is dealt with in the clauses which follow:--

"If any customary tenant die seized of a customary tenement, having no son but a daughter, or daughters, then the eldest daughter being preferred in marriage shall have the tenement as his next heir, and she shall pay to her younger sister, if she have but one sister, 20 years ancient rent, as is answered to her Majesty; and if she have more than one sister she shall pay 40 years ancient rent to be equally divided among them....

"For the avoiding of great trouble in the agreement with younger brothers, it is now ordered that the eldest son shall pay to his brothers in the form following:--If there is but one brother, 12 years ancient rent; if there are two brothers, 16 years ancient rent to be equally divided.

"If there be three or more, 20 years ancient rent to be equally divided.

"Whereas great inconvenience has grown by certain persons that at the marriage of son or daughter have promised their tenement to the same son or daughter and their heirs, according to the custom of the manor, and afterwards put the tenement away to another person; it is ordered that whatever tenements a tenant shall promise to the son or daughter being his sole heir apparent at the time of his or her marriage, the same ought to come to them according to the same covenant, which ought to be showed at the next court."

[210] Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz. c. 4.

[211] See below, pp. 277?-279, and _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 784,
pp. 322?-323. Presentment by the grand jury, Worcestershire,
1661, April 23: "We desire that servants' wages may be rated
according to the statute, for we find the unreasonableness of
servants' wages a great grievance, so that the servants are
grown so proud and idle that the master cannot be known from the
servant except it be because the servant wears better clothes
than his master. We desire that the statute for setting poor
men's children to apprenticeship be more duly observed, for we
find the usual course is that if any are apprenticed it is to
some paltry trade, and when they have served their
apprenticeship they are not able to live by their trades,
whereby not being bred to labour they are not fit for husbandry.
We therefore desire that such children may be set to husbandry
for the benefit of tillage and the good of the Commonwealth."
See also Britannia Languens (1680) for remarks on the scarcity
of labour even at the end of the seventeenth century.

[212] R.O. Duchy of Lancaster, Special Commissions, No. 398.

The motive of the first rule is a mixed one. Its object is partly to obviate the risk that the Crown, which is lord, of the manor, may lose its services if holdings are too much subdivided, partly to prevent the appearance of a class which has too little land for a living. The motive of the other rules is to ensure that the custom of primogeniture, which obtains among the customary tenants on this manor, shall not result in the creation of a propertyless proletariat. Holdings are not to be divided. But the payment to other members of the family of a sum ranging from about one-half to more than the whole of their capital value is made a charge upon them, and with that money they can purchase land elsewhere, or take, like the French peasant girl, a considerable _dot_ to their husbands. Sue,[213] the daughter of Old Carter, the rich yeoman, whose security for the marriage-portion "shall be present payment, because Bonds and Bills are but Tarriers to catch fools, and keep lazy knaves busy," was a match for whom gentlemen's sons were willing enough to compete.

[213] See Dekker's _The Witch of Edmonton_. I have ventured to
assume that in this play "yeoman" is used in its wide
non-technical sense.

These groups of from ten to a hundred households which constitute the ordinary village of southern and middle England, form small democracies of property holders, who are of course under the authority of a lord, but whose subjection does not prevent them from exercising considerable control over the management of their own economic affairs, nor impose any effective bar on those individuals who have the means and capacity to advance themselves. We can watch them arranging[214] the course of agriculture, deciding when the pastures at Wolsyke and Willoughbybroke are to be "broken," imposing fines on those who encroach on the several pasture land, throwing open the Pesefield on Holy Thursday to the village horses, shutting them out of Street headlands for fear of the "stroyinge of Korn," making charitable provision for gleaners who cannot work, punishing those who ought to work but in their depravity would rather glean. We can observe how the wide distribution of land gives an opportunity to a humble family to better itself by judicious husbandry and well-calculated purchases. True, the peasant's land is no longer held in approximately equal shares as generally as it had been in the thirteenth century. The growth of a money economy, the withdrawal of the levelling pressure of villeinage, the growth of population, has in the more progressive parts of the country left a gap into which individualising commercial forces wind themselves in the way which has already been described. But these changes are important mainly as precursors of more extensive innovations. As yet they have done little more than make tiny breaches in the wall of custom. They have enabled individuals to rise from the general level into positions of comparative affluence. They have not proceeded so far as to enable the successful to exercise a decisive direction over the economic affairs of their fellows. Though Northumberland is exceptional in the way in which down to the very end of the sixteenth century it preserves its system of standardised holdings, it is none the less true that all the petty land speculation, whose operations we have traced above, has not the effect of producing any very large changes in the distribution of property. If, when compared with its condition two hundred years before, the village of our period shows remarkable irregularity, it offers precisely an opposite aspect to the observer who compares it as it is then with its condition two hundred years later. The gaps which have appeared between the holdings mark the disintegrating influence of economic enterprise; but they are gaps which enterprise can span, and the graduation of holdings from the two or three acres of the humblest to the fifty or sixty acres of the most prosperous, together with the abundance of unoccupied land, supplies a kind of staircase along which in the country the younger son can travel from the position of a labourer to that of a small holder, as he does in the towns from apprentice to master-craftsman. From this point of view the characteristic _morcellement_ of holdings, so bitterly denounced by economists who, like Arthur Young, approached the problem from the point of view of the large farmer, was a positive advantage. It meant that land could be bought and sold, as it were, retail. It meant that the labourer could begin with one strip of land of half an acre, and add other strips to it as he worked his way up. It meant that even the humblest peasant usually had some live-stock of his own; for even the smallest customary holding usually carried with it rights of common. Such conditions are, of course, no safeguard against poverty. No doubt there were plenty of people like Widow Quin, whose "leaky thatch is growing more pasture for her buck goat than her square of fields."[215] But they are a safeguard against destitution, and indeed against any complete loss of independence.

[214] See _e.g. Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567, pp. 106-?107, and
below, pp. 159-?162.

[215] Synge, _The Playboy of the Western World_.

Let us turn to a part of England where something like the open field system survives to this day, and ask the inhabitants what they think of it. In the so-called Isle of Axholme there are still common fields with intermixed strips. Here is the evidence[216] which a body of labourers there sent into a Select Committee of Parliament in 1899: "We, the undersigned, being agricultural labourers at Epworth, are in occupation of allotments or small holdings, varying from two roods to three acres, and willingly testify to the great benefit we find from our holdings. Where we have sufficient quantity of land to grow two roods each of wheat, barley, and potatoes, we have bread, beans, and potatoes for a great part of the year, enabling us to face a long winter without the dread of hunger or pauperism staring us in the face." One of the tests by which the economic prosperity of a community may be measured is its success in preventing the appearance of a residual population, which cannot fit itself into the moving mechanism of industry without ceaseless friction and maladjustments. In most villages before extensive evictions begin that mechanism moves very slowly; property is widely diffused, and the residuum must have been small. That there was often distress through bad harvests and pestilence is certain. But was there much of the economic helplessness, more terrible than physical distress itself, which is the normal lot of most of the propertyless wage-earners of the modern world? We hesitate to say. Hesitation on such a point may perhaps be counted to our peasants for righteousness.[217]

[216] Quoted by Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure
of Common Fields_, pp. 58?-59. He remarks "a labourer ... begins
with one 'land,' then takes a second, a third, and so on," and
quotes Mr. Haggard's statement that the "Isle of Axholme ... is
one of the few places ... in England ... truly prosperous in an
agricultural sense."

[217] Customs like those of High Furness, together with the
complaints as to the scarcity of agricultural labour, make one
reflect on a fundamental question of economics, viz., the
average age of marriage and its relation to the distribution of
property and organisation of industry. It is well known that the
age of marriage is influenced by (among other things) the age at
which maximum earning power begins, _e.g._ to-day it is lower
for the unskilled labourer than for the artisan, for the former
reaches his prime earlier than the latter; lower for the artisan
than for the professional man, because the latter takes longer
than the former in getting together a practice or rising from a
low initial salary. The difference is not primarily due to
differences of thrift or foresight as between different classes,
but to the fact that the deferring of marriage, which is prudent
in (say) a lawyer, who does not reach his full earning power
till thirty-five or later, is imprudent in (say) an engineer who
has all the experience he needs at twenty-six or twenty-seven,
and still more imprudent in the labourer, who reaches his full
earning power at twenty-one or twenty-two, and in whom it falls
off rapidly after he has passed the prime of life. When a large
number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth
century probably a majority) were small landholders or small
masters, did the fact that they had to wait for the death of a
parent to succeed to their holding, or (in towns) for the
permission of a guild to set up shop (_i.e._ to reach their
maximum earning powers) tend to defer the age of marriage? If
the possibility of this being the case is conceded, ought we to
connect the slow growth of population between 1377 and 1500 (on
which all historians seem to be agreed) with the wide
distribution of property, and ought we to think of the
considerable increase in the landless proletariate which took
place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as tending in
the opposite direction? In the absence of statistics we cannot
answer these questions. But I am inclined to argue that they are
at any rate worth investigation. (i) Contemporary opinion shows
that in the eyes of sixteenth century writers the problem of
population was a problem of underpopulation. The prevalent fear
is "lack of men" for military purposes. Starkey's Dialogue
speaks of it as "a consumption of the body politic," and
suggests as remedies to allow priests to marry, to forbid
gentlemen to employ more serving men than they are able to "set
forward" to matrimony (on the ground that "men whych in service
spend theyr lyfe never fynd means to marry"), to endow with a
house and a portion of waste land at a nominal rent persons who
marry, to exempt from taxation all persons who have five
children and less than a hundred marks in goods, to tax
bachelors 1s. in the pound, and give the proceeds to "them which
have more children than they be wel abul to nurysch, and partely
to the dote of poor damosellys and vyrgins" (Part II. p. 8).
Hales (p. lv. of Miss Lamond's introduction to _Commonweal of
England_) speaks of depopulation in a similar strain, as also
does Harrison forty years later. There are some complaints as to
excess of population in 1620 (see below, pp. 278?-279), but
these do not become general till the very end of the seventeenth
century (see Defoe, _Giving alms no charity_). (ii) The position
of a son who acquires a holding when his parent dies is
analogous to that of an apprentice who cannot set up as a master
till given permission by the proper authorities. It is quite
plain that in the eyes of the ordinary man in the sixteenth
century one of the advantages of a system of compulsory
apprenticeship was that it prevented youths marrying at a very
early age. _E.g._ an Act (2 & 3 Philip and Mary) forbids the
admitting of any one to the freedom of the city of London before
the age of twenty-four, and enacts that apprentices are not to
be taken so young that they will come out of their time before
they are twenty-four. The reason alleged for this rule is the
distress in the city of which "one of the chief occasions is by
reason of the overhasty marriages and over soon setting up of
householdes by the young folke of the city ... be they never so
young and unskilful." A petition of weavers states (_Hist. MSS.
Com._, C.D. 784, p. 114): "Whereas by the former good laws of
their trade no one could exercise the same until he had served
an apprenticeship for seven years and attained the age of
twenty-four, now in these disordered times many apprentices
having forsaken parents and masters ... refuse to serve out
their time, but before they are eighteen or twenty years old
betake themselves to marriage." One may contrast the
extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage of the people of
Lancashire brought about by the early factory system, with its
armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the
wages earned immediately on reaching maturity (Gaskell,
_Artisans and Machinery_, 1836, and _The Manufacturing
Population of Great Britain_, 1833), and compare the results
usually ascribed to the wide distribution of landed property in
France. See also the remarks of Slater on the effect of the
eighteenth century enclosing (_The English Peasantry and the
Enclosure of the Common Fields_, p. 256), and Hasbach, _History
of the English Agricultural Labourer_, pp. 120 n. 138-?139, 178.
Young ascribed "a great multiplication of births" to the fact
that "the labourer has no advancement to hope" (_Suffolk_, 1797,
p. 260); Duncombe, "The practice of consolidating farms ...
tends to licentiousness of manners" (_Herefordshire_, p. 33). A
witness before the Select Committee on Emigration, 1827, stated,
"The labourers no longer live in farm houses as they used to do,
where they were better fed and had more comforts than they now
get in a cottage, in consequence there was not the same
inducement to early marriage" (_qu._ 3882). In the absence of
direct statistical evidence all we can say is (i) that when
persons look forward to entering on property or setting up as
small masters their point of maximum earning power is later than
it is when they can earn the standard rate of the trade at
twenty-two or twenty-three; therefore (ii) that the average age
of marriage is likely to be higher in a society composed largely
of small property owners than in one composed largely of a
propertyless proletariate.

In the second place, let us examine the use which the peasants make of their holdings. Modern writers tell us that among the conditions necessary to the prosperity of a class of small holders the most important are a wise choice of the kind of farming to be pursued, a sound organisation of credit, cheap marketing, and rural bye-employments to back agriculture. Modern writers who are not English would probably add a tariff on imported agricultural produce. In our period the type of cultivation pursued by the large farmer was undergoing rapid changes. That of the peasantry was hardly a matter of choice. It was dictated by the necessity, under which most villages still lay, of being largely self-supporting in the matter of corn supplies, a necessity recognised and crystallised in the customary routine of village husbandry. The preponderance of arable farming among the peasantry is illustrated by the table[218] on page 107, which should be contrasted with that given on pages 225?-226.

The figures in this table do not pretend to complete accuracy. But they indicate the distribution of land between different uses with sufficient correctness to show the sort of agriculture followed by the small holder of our period. They prove unmistakably that his standby was the grain crops grown on the open fields.[219] Students of rural conditions will be quick to recognise the contrast which the picture offers to the economy of the modern small holder. In our own day the breaking up of large farms into smaller tenancies has proceeded furthest in those parts of the country which are most suitable for pasture. The occupier of a holding of less than 70 or 80 acres usually relies mainly on stock farming in one form or another, and on the growing of vegetables and fruit. Corn-growing he leaves to much larger men, and, when he does grow grain, he does so mainly to provide fodder and straw for his beasts. In the sixteenth century almost exactly the opposite was the case. In so far as the large farmer with 200 or 300 acres can be said to have had a specialty, it was not corn-growing but sheep and cattle grazing. The small man relied mainly, though not entirely, upon tillage, and though, even in his case, pasture farming assumed increased importance as the century went on, grazing was chiefly a supplement to arable farming. To this statement there are of course certain exceptions. Though villages where the customary tenants hold more pasture than arable are rare, they are not unknown, and occasionally one finds one where large numbers of tenants of the most diverse economic conditions, with pasture holdings ranging from 6 to 100 acres, have no arable at all. Sometimes such an arrangement is to be accounted for by the fact that a part of the demesne lands of the manor, which happens not to be suitable for tillage, has been divided up among the population of younger sons and labourers who have no holdings in the open fields. In the neighbourhood of considerable towns, again, there was a market[220] for vegetables and dairy produce which gave an impetus to this side of agriculture, and the home counties poured butter and cheese, fowls, eggs, and fruit into London, as France and the Channel Islands do at the present day. Still, to speak broadly, the small holder of the sixteenth century, unlike the small holder of the twentieth, was before all things interested in arable farming, and interested in rights of pasture chiefly as a necessary adjunct to it.

TABLE V

[218] See Appendix II.

[219] It must be remembered, however, that there was pasture on
the one field which every year lay fallow, and that the amount
of this does not appear in the figures given below.

[220] Camden Society, Norden, Speculum Britanniæ, Part I.,
Intro.: "And these commonly are so furnished with kyne that
their wives twice or thrice a week conveyeth to London mylke and
butter, cheese, apples, pears, frutmentye, hens and chickens,
baken, and other country drugs ... and this yieldeth them a
large comfort and relief."

Corn-growing in England has been for the last hundred years a branch of farming so completely surrendered to the large capitalist, that it is not easy to realise a state of things in which the typical corn-grower was a man with less than 60 acres, and a man who could make a good living from a holding of that size. To understand the economics of his position we must think away the conditions which have in the last century made it intolerable. Or rather we must think away all except one. That one was the perennial problem of agricultural credit. In this matter, certainly, the poorer among the peasantry suffered as their successors all over the world suffer to-day. They were apt to be in the grip of the moneylender. Cheap land, as the modern colonist knows, is of little avail to the man who has not the capital needed to stock it, and to carry over the interval between harvest and harvest, when his receipts fall off but his expenses continue. In the endless arguments which took place on the ethics of moneylending at a later date, it was a common complaint that village financiers drove a hard bargain with the peasants whom misfortune compelled to resort to them. In a backward village the only man with capital to lend might be the local corn-dealer, brewer, or maltster, the large farmer who held the lord's demesne, or the lord of the manor himself and his agent. Like an American farmer in the grip of an "elevator," the peasant who wanted money for his crops had often to sell them to a dealer[221] who gave a ridiculously low price for them, and then made an enormous profit by holding them till the price of corn rose, or by sending them to a market where there was a scarcity. Lords[222] of manors, it was said, helped their tenants out of temporary difficulties by advancing them small sums, and then used their advantage to screw extra labour on the demesne out of them. Manor courts[223] in the Middle Ages had fined villagers for usury, but one may suspect that these were capitalists too potent for them to control, and one does not wonder at the headshakings of the prudent Fitzherbert over the man whose method of farming compels him to be a borrower. The form which charity and co-operative effort took points in the same direction. Hospitals[224] and monasteries advance money to buy seed. Well-to-do men aid their relatives by stocking their farms for them. Gilds[225] make loans of cattle and sheep, and the last legacy of a philanthropic parson to his parishioners is money with which to buy a cow for the poor. How far the charitable and corporate organisation of loans succeeded in keeping the small cultivator out of the clutches of the usurer, and how far the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the Gild lands deteriorated their condition by placing them more at his mercy, are questions which deserve consideration but which we have not sufficient evidence to answer.[226] In forming any estimate, however, of rural conditions, the hand to mouth economy of the poorer peasants, and their consequent helplessness in the face of any unexpected catastrophe, such as an unusually bad harvest, a cattle plague, and (in the fifteenth century) the destruction of crops by civil disturbances, must not be forgotten. In that age less capital was needed to stock a holding than in our own, but it was scraped together with even greater difficulty. On the very eve of the dissolution of the monasteries there were some remote manors where "Money was so scantie that coigned leather went bargaining between man and man,"[227] and where corn rents were substituted for money because the tenants had no money in which rent could be paid.

[221] See _The Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurers_, 1594:
"It is a common practice in this country, if a poore man come to
borrow money of a maltster, he will not lend any, but tells him,
if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of
fore-hand buyers; the man being driven by distresse sells his
corn far under foote, that when it comes to be delivered he
loses halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value. I have heard
many of these fore-hand sellers say that they had rather allow
after 20 pounds in the hundred for money, than to sell their
fore-hand bargaines of corn. These are most extreme usurers."

[222] _A Discourse upon Usurie_, by Thomas Wilson, 1584: "A lord
doth lend his tenants money, with this condition that they shall
plough his land, whether doth he commit usurie or no? I do
answer that if he does not pay them for their labour, but will
take the benefit of their labour for the use of his money, he is
an usurer."

[223] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 2319, p. 27: "Juetta ... is a
usuress, and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation."

[224] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 7881, p. 129, St. Saviour's
Hospital gives "20d to a poor man to buy seed for his land."

[225] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk, "Social and Economic
History": "The gild let out in one year 8 cows and 4 neats at
19d. each." For the parson's cow, see _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd.
784, p. 46.

[226] On the subject of the monasteries see Gasquet, _Henry
VIII. and the English Monasteries_, chap. xxii., and _passim_.

[227] For reference see below, p. 198, n. 2.

On the other hand, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century began, and in those parts of the country which were least affected by them, the economic environment was in other respects favourable to the class of which we have been speaking. As far as corn-growing is concerned, _petite culture_ flourishes most readily when the methods of production are primitive and trade little developed. It is not necessary to point out that, in the sphere of production, the conditions which have given its present tremendous advantage to large-scale corn-growing are the fruit of the last century, and that in our period there were neither machinery nor expensive manures to require the outlay of large capital, and to make arable farming almost a branch of factory industry. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the growth of prosperity among the peasants had been accompanied by an improvement in the technique of cultivation. Not to mention the part which they took in enclosures, of which we shall speak later, there were, at any rate by the beginning of the seventeenth century, certain exceptional parts of the country where it was said[228] that in good years from thirty-two to eighty bushels of grain were raised to an acre, instead of the ten which Walter of Henley had thought a fair return in the thirteenth. We may believe this or not as we like; probably we should discount it by at least one-half. But even the average peasant, who could not possibly make his land perform these prodigies, was buttressed by the natural protection of unpassable roads, which tended to make every village, even almost every landholding family, more or less self-sufficing in the matter of food supplies. A highly organised corn trade is as unfavourable to the existence of small corn-growers as a wide market is to the small master-craftsman, because it sets a premium upon the qualities needed for business management--qualities often quite different from those needed for effective farming--and thus (in the absence of co-operation) plays into the hands of the capitalist, who buys and sells in bulk and can pick his market. To the mass of the peasantry in our period the commercial side of agriculture offered no problem, because for the mass of the peasantry it did not exist. The wealthier among them, it is true, did grow corn for the market, and sent their supplies far afield through the hands of middlemen, much further sometimes, if we may believe contemporaries, than Customs Officials should have allowed. In certain parts of England rudimentary industrial specialisation had made a regular corn trade a necessity. In Norfolk,[229] for example, where manufactures and agriculture had drawn apart to an extent unknown elsewhere, a rough local division of labour was concentrating the woollen industry in that part of the country most suitable for grazing, and was bringing together a huge population of wage-earners, who depended for their food supplies on the grain produced by the "tilth masters" in "the champion part of the country," and whose needs baffled the traditional policy of trying to prevent corners by checking the transport of corn. But down to the very end of the eighteenth century, and still more under the Tudors, there was a large body of small landholders who pursued their way undisturbed by market fluctuations because they grew wheat almost entirely for subsistence. To a foreign observer[230] English agriculture in the reign of Henry VII. seemed "not to be practised beyond what is required for the consumption of the people." Between the two extremes of capitalist farmer and hired labourer, the poles between which the needle of the Government's policy as to prices uneasily oscillates, there stands the man whose family consumes the product of his land, and who rarely puts his small supplies on the market, because, if he tries to do so, "he loseth[231] the labours of himself, his horse and carte, and husbandry at home," and "is in hazard to pay deare for a place to chamber it till the next market day." Such a man, if entirely occupied in tillage, did little more than supply the wants of his own household; if a sheep farmer as well, he worked up the wool in his own home in the manner enjoined on thrifty housewives by Fitzherbert. From the point of view of national welfare his security was purchased by the distress in which the difficulty of moving corn supplies involved the wage-earner. The constant local famines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should remind us that the more self-sufficing a country's agricultural economy, the narrower the margin there is likely to be between the landless classes and starvation. But with them for the present we are not concerned, and if we confine our attention to the landholding peasantry we can see that to them the backwardness of trade was a positive advantage. The risk of spoiling good farming by ineffective marketing was not one which faced the small holders of our period.

[228] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_. He is speaking of parts
of Somersetshire. "Now I say if this sweet country of Tandeane
and the western part of Somersetshire be not degenerated,
surely, as their land is fruitful by nature, so doe they their
best by art and industrie ... they take extraordinary pains in
soyling, plowing, and dressing their land.... After the plough
there goeth some 3 or 4 with mattocks to break the clods ...
they have sometimes and in some places foure, five, six, eight,
yea tenne quarters in an ordinary acre." For Walter of Henley's
figures see Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 437-438.
Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth century estimated the
average yield "in a year of moderate plenty" at a little more
than 11 bushels (Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_,
vol. v. pp. 92 and 783). I quote Norden not as giving what was
general, but to show what it was thought could be done.

[229] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological
Society_, 1907.

[230] Camden Society, 1857, _An Italian Narration of England_.

[231] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological
Society_, 1907.

Moreover, in estimating the causes which in the fifteenth century favoured a growth in their prosperity, we should not overlook that it was a period in which commercial policy encouraged the corn-grower. In the series of compromises which were struck between the interests of the farmer and those of the consumer the scale during the greater part of it was tilted in the direction of the former, and when success had caused his holding to grow to a size which made trade in grain inevitable, he dealt in a market which the Government tried to turn in his favour. That section of the industry which supplied the market obviously gained by freedom of export and by import duties upon foreign wheat, though the fact that England was largely a corn exporting country made the latter less important than the former. From 1437 to 1491 free export of wheat was permitted, subject to the obligation to obtain an export licence when prices in the home market rose above a certain point. In 1463 the same policy was carried furthur, and an Act was passed restricting its importation. Such a commercial[232] policy was no doubt adopted mainly in the interests of the great landed proprietors. But that the prosperity of the small cultivators was to some extent bound up with the Government's encouragement of corn-growing can hardly be doubted. Competent observers in the sixteenth century gave its abandonment by the Tudors as one cause of the subsequent decline in the condition of the peasantry, and a return to it as one remedy for their distress.

[232] See below, p. 197.

If the peasantry were favoured in the fifteenth century by a state of things in which the small corn-grower's position was still unshaken, did they not also gain by the beginnings of industrial expansion and by the pasture farming that accompanied it? That a man who was mainly dependent upon tillage might also be a grazier upon a considerable scale, is shown by the following table of the animals kept by the customary tenants on six[233] manors in the south of England.

I. II. III. IV.

Manors. Customary Tenants. Sheep kept by Customary Other Beasts
Tenants. (minimum).

6 112 7440 793

[233] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_; _cf._ R.O. _Land Rev. Misc. Bks._, 182, fol. 1,
Rental of the late Priory of Launde (Leicestershire, 1539),
where there are tenants paying for common pasture for about 430
sheep.

One must not, of course, forget that a certain number of beasts were indispensable to arable farming. Perhaps one-third or one-half the cattle in column IV. should be written off as simply part of the corn-grower's necessary equipment. The sixteenth century small holder, who keeps plough beasts, is no more a grazier on that account than his twentieth century successor, who uses his grain for fodder, is a corn-grower. But, when this has been remembered, we may perhaps allow these figures to remind us that in the agriculture even of the small man there was room for considerable diversity, and that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was probably much more diversified than it had been two centuries before. So much is said in the writings of our period of the harm done by the great grazier, that we perhaps do not always sufficiently realise that the customary tenants both then and long before were often themselves graziers on a considerable scale. They raise stock, and are interested in the woollen trade as well as in the corn-growing. Ultimately, when time enough had elapsed for the profitableness of sheep farming to supply lords of manors with a motive for clearing away interests which interfered with the formation of sheep runs, the movement for laying down land to pasture did result in evictions and rack-renting. But, looking at the fifteenth century as a whole, may we not say with some confidence that the growth of the woollen industry must have brought increasing prosperity to many villages? Though it is not till almost the last decade that complaints of enclosing become sufficiently clamorous to attract the attention of the Government, the spread of woollen manufacturers into rural districts was going quietly on throughout the whole century, and benefited the peasants both by the lucrative bye-employment which they offered to both sexes, and by the alternative to arable farming which the demand for wool supplied in the shape of sheep-grazing. The large number of sheep kept by the customary tenants of many manors in the south of England, and the increase in the complaints as to the over-stocking of commons contained in the Court Rolls of the fifteenth century, show that they were not slow to seize the opportunity, and that the great pasture farms, which aroused the indignation of More and Latimer, had their precedent in the small flocks of thirty or forty sheep which had long been run by the peasantry upon the common wastes or pastures. It would seem that, as so often happens, the new departure was first made on a small scale by small men, and chat it was not until some time had elapsed that its wholesale adoption by large capitalists plunged them in distress. The movement towards pasture-farming as a special branch of agriculture is one that proceeds gradually for a hundred years, before the demand for wool becomes sufficient to produce the body of capitalist graziers whose interests come into sharp collision with those of the peasantry.

But after all, the profits arising from favourable economic circumstances may be of very little advantage to the mass of cultivators. They may simply be handed on to the landlord in the shape of increased rents. At a time when, both in Ireland and Scotland, rents are being fixed by public tribunals, we are not likely to forget that the profitableness of agriculture has no necessary connection with the prosperity of tenants. Trade may be increasing, and the return from the land may be growing, and yet those things may profit the farmers and peasants very little, unless they have some security that they will not see them drained away in increased payments for their land. It is important, therefore, to consider how far rents were competitive and how far they were customary, how far the tenants held the surplus due to economic progress, and how far it passed to the landlord.

Some light is thrown on the general situation by the following table[234]:--

TABLE VI

+---------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
| Manor. | Rents. |
+--------------------+--------------------------------------------------+
| | |
| | 1295-1308 1568 |
|1. South Newton | £13 19 3-1/2 £14 4 8 |
| | |
| | 1347 1421 1485 1628 |
|2. Ingoldmells | £61 9 4 £71 10 3 £72 6 8 £73 17 2 |
| | |
| | 1287 1567 |
|3. Crondal | £53 7 0 £103 2 8-3/4 |
| | |
|4. Sutton Warbling- | |
| ton | 1351 1567 |
| | £5 17 4-3/4 £8 10 4 |
| | |
| | 1295 1542 |
|5. Aspley Guise | £7 8 4 £10 5 10 |
| | |
| | 1248 1567 1585 |
|6. Birling | £9 2 6-1/2 £14 9 4 £14 9 4 |
| | |
| | 1352 1478 1567 1580 |
|7. Acklington | £18 13 2 £19 13 11 £19 13 5 £20 0 5 |
| | |
| | 1483 1505 |
|8. Cuxham | £9 9 3 £8 9 3 |
| | |
| | 1483 1600 |
|9. Ibstone | £4 8 10 £3 15 0-1/2 |
| | |
| | 1498 1567 1585 1702 |
|10. High Buston | £3 12 0 £3 12 0 £3 12 0 £12 0 0 |
| | |
| | 1539 1608 |
|11. Amble | £22 14 6 £16 0 5 |
| | |
| | "The reign of King Henry VII." 1529 |
|12. Malden | £4 9 10 £4 6 7 |
| | |
| | 1527 1588 1607 |
|13. Kibworth | £23 6 7 £26 15 1 £19 14 5 |
| | |
| | 1304-5 1348-9 1373-4 1461 |
|14. Standon | £21 17 3 £23 8 0 £23 2 2-1/2 £33 3 3-1/2|
| | |
| | 1317-8 1445-6 Henry VIII. |
|15. Feering | £29 10 9-1/2 £32 14 10 £16 2 6-1/2 |
| | |
| | 38-39 Henry VI. |
| | 1321 Henry VI. (1460) |
|16. Appledrum | £7 0 11 £10 11 6 £13 14 10-1/2 |
| | |
| | 1357 1501 |
|17. Minchinhampton | £41 14 4 £41 19 9 |
| (works) | £4 18 0 |
| | |
| | 1280 1441 1547 |
|18. Langley Marish | £20 16 5-1/2 £24 0 0 £45 3 5-3/4 |
| | |
| | Henry VI. 1521 James I. |
|19. Lewisham | £8 11 7 £23 1 6-1/2 £90 3 3 |
| | |
|20. Cuddington. For | Edward III.(?) 15th century(?) James I. |
| terms of Easter | £6 4 2-3/4 |
| and Michaelmas | |
| (for whole year) | £12 8 5-1/2(?) £15 16 7 £9 19 8-3/4 |
| | |
|21. Isleworth | 1314-15 1386-7 1484-5 |
| (Michaelmas) | £21 16 10 £23 3 10-1/4 £18 18 0 |
| | |
|22. Wootton (free | |
| and customary | 1207 1607 |
| tenants) | £9 11 2 £13 19 0-1/2 |
| | |
| | 1271-2 1547 |
|23. Speen | £6 13 9-3/4 £17 4 2 |
| | |
| | 1303-4 1314-15 1478-9 |
|24. Schitlington | £29 13 0-1/2 £30 4 10 £58 11 9 (exclusive of|
| | ferm of land|
| | and ferm of |
| | manor). |
| | |
|25. Cranfield (rent | |
| of vill including | 1383-4 1474-5 1519-20 |
| ferm of lands) | £68 15 2 £63 19 10-1/4 £72 2 1-3/4 |
| | |
| | 1325-6 1482-3 |
|26. Holywell | £12 18 2 £22 7 8 |
| | |
| | 1536 1803 |
|27. Farleigh | £4 9 9 £4 15 5 |
+--------------------+--------------------------------------------------+

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

It will be seen that, in spite of some considerable increases, many rents were comparatively stationary during long periods of time. Moreover, in all probability, they were more stationary than is suggested by the statistics given above. For at the earlier dates there were works the value of which usually does not appear among the money rents. As time went on, more land was brought under cultivation and the demesne was leased; and though an attempt has been made to exclude the latter factor, it is not always possible to do so with certainty. The later figures, therefore, are, if anything, a more exhaustive account of the tenants' burdens than the earlier, and the small difference which exists between them on several manors is for this reason all the more remarkable.

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The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth CenturyChapter III: THE PEASANTRY (continued) (1)

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