Chapter III: THE PEASANTRY (continued) (2)

These figures, it will be said, if they prove anything, prove too much. Do we not know that one of the grievances of the peasantry in the sixteenth century was the rack-renting of their holdings? Have we not the evidence of Fitzherbert, Latimer, and Hales to prove it? To these questions one must answer that it is certainly true that lords of manors did make a strenuous effort to get from their tenants increased payments for their holdings, and that the success which in many cases they achieved was one great cause of the decline in the condition of the peasantry. The matter, however, is not so simple as it appears. In respect of their liability to be competitively rented, some parts of the lands of a manor stood on a different footing from others; and again, fixed rents of customary lands were quite compatible with movable fines. An attempt will be made in subsequent chapters[235] to illustrate both the rack-renting of those parts of a manor where the rent was least controlled by custom, and the upward movement of the fines charged on the admission of tenants to their holdings. These figures of stationary or almost stationary rents must not, therefore, be taken as giving a full account of the relations between the customary tenants and the manorial authorities, as though there was no other way in which the latter could compensate themselves. Subject to this qualification, however, they do indicate that, at any rate on the customary holdings which formed the kernel of the manor, there is for a very long period little rack-renting. They suggest that the tenants' payments have a fixity which would make Arthur Young tear his hair. They fall in line with the statements of authorities like Fitzherbert and Norden as to the difficulty experienced by the manorial officials in forcing up rents of assize, that "are as in the beginning, neither risen nor fallen, but doe continue always one and the same." And this fixity of rents is a factor in the prosperity of the peasantry which can hardly be over-estimated. When not neutralised by exorbitant fines, it means that any surplus arising on the customary tenements as the result of growing trade, or of the fall in the value of money, or of improved methods of agriculture, anything in fact which is in the nature of economic rent, is retained by the tenants. Secured by the custom of the manor, as by a dyke, against the competitive pressure which under modern conditions transfers so much of the fruits of progress into the hands of the owners of land and capital, they enjoy an unearned increment which grows with every growth in economic prosperity, and have an interest in their holdings almost similar to that of a landlord who is burdened only with a fixed rent-charge like the English land tax. One of the best established generalisations of economics, ground into the English people by thirty years of misery, is that the effect of agrarian protection is to make a present to landlords. But agrarian protection itself wears a different complexion when the rise in rents which it produces is not transferred to a small and wealthy class of absentee owners, but retained by thousands of men who are themselves cultivating the soil.

[235] See below, pp. 139-147 and 304-310.

Lest such a picture should seem to be drawn too much in the spirit of the economic theorist, let us make its meaning more precise by pointing out that the retention of the unearned increment by copyhold tenants was a fact of which the manorial authorities were perfectly well aware, and the results of which they were sometimes at pains to estimate arithmetically by setting side by side with the actual rent paid the rent which the holdings would fetch if put up to competition. Four examples may be given. At Amble,[236] in 1608, the surveyor gives the rent of the customary tenants as £16, 0s. 5d., and "the annual value beyond rent" as £93, 4s. 4d. On the great manor of Hexham[237] in the same year the rents of the 314 copyhold tenants amounted to £126, 4s. 8-1/4d.; the "value above the oulde Rentes" was £624, 4s. 1d. In the various townships of the manor of Rochdale[238] part of the land was rack-rented. But a great deal of it was held at payments which left the tenant a substantial margin between the rent which he paid to the king and the letting value of the land, a margin which varied from 2d. an acre in parts of Wardleworth, to 6d. an acre in parts of Wardle, 8d. an acre in Walsden, and 10d. an acre in Castleton. On the manor of Barkby[239] in Leicestershire the difference was still more striking. The rents paid by free and customary tenants together amounted in 1636 to £11, 8s. 7-1/2d.; the value of their holdings was put by the surveyor at £215, 1s. 6d. And, of course, the fact that these rentals come from the very end of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the seventeenth, centuries, makes the evidence which they offer of the inability of manorial authorities to insist on copyhold rents keeping pace with the rising value of land, when they had every motive to enforce such correspondence if they could, all the more significant. For a century they have been screwing up rents wherever they can, and here are tenants, who, as far as rents go, put 6d. in their own pockets for every 1d. they give to the landlord. Let us repeat that these figures, striking as they are, would, if taken by themselves, give a misleading impression of the position of the copyhold tenants. Even when the lord of a manor cannot break the barrier opposed by manorial custom to a rise in rents, he may be able to dip his fingers in the surplus by raising the fines charged on admission; he may be all the more exacting in screwing the last penny out of those holdings where the rent is not fixed by custom. But though we must not forget the other side of the shield, though the very fixity of rents on many manors should make us scrutinise other conditions very carefully, we must not forget either that a tenant whose rent is unaltered for 200 or 250 years, a tenant who, after a period of sweeping agrarian changes in which a bitter cry has gone up against the exactions of landlords, is paying a fifth, or a sixth, or even an eighteenth of what could be got for his holding in the open market, is a tenant whom most modern English farmers would envy. Whatever his other disadvantages he has at any rate one condition of prosperity. He will not be eaten up by rack-renting. No wonder that such a man can accumulate capital and buy up land to add to his holding. No wonder that he can sublet parts of it at a profit. No wonder that in the day of agrarian oppression the wealthier peasantry stands stubbornly against it, that they can carry cases from one court to another, and that there are manors where they boast that "20[240] of them would spend 20 score pounds" in fighting an unpopular landlord. On the whole, the individual cases of enterprise and prosperity among the customary tenants of the fifteenth century do fit into the view that the economic environment was favourable to the peasantry. They may be regarded as symptoms, not exceptions.

[236] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ii.

[237] _Ibid._, vol. iii. pp. 86?-94. On this manor at the time
of the survey, though the distinction between the old rent and
the "cleare yearly value above the old rent" was noted, the
latter seems to have been tapped by a rise in rents ("cleere
improved rent above the ould rent").

[238] _Rochdale Manor Inquisition_, 1610, by H. Fishwick
(_Trans. of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society_, vol.
vii.).

[239] Merton Documents, MSS. Book labelled "Kibworth and Barkby,
1636." For another illustration of fixed copyhold rents, see
Maitland, _English Hist. Review_, vol. ix.: The History of a
Cambridgeshire Manor.

[240] Quoted, Leadam, "The Security of Copyholders in the
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries" (_English Historical Review_,
vol. viii. pp. 684-?696). The case in question was that of the
inhabitants of Thingden _v._ John Mulsho.

Here, perhaps, we should stop. What manner of men these were in that personal life of which economics is but the squalid scaffolding; what stars threw for them their beams on that tremendous whirlpool of religion and politics into which Europe was plunging, we cannot say. Of the hopes and fears and aspirations of the men who tilled the fields which still give us in due season their kindly fruit, we know hardly more than of the Roman plebs, far less than of the democracy of Athens. Yet these men too had their visions. Their silence is the taciturnity of men, not the speechlessness of dumb beasts.

That the peasantry as a class were no politicians was a natural consequence of the position which they had occupied throughout the Middle Ages. On a small number among them, in the Eastern counties a large number, the State had for centuries showered duties and obligations with a lavish hand, and the freeholders, though they must often have cursed the tediousness of suit of court, and jury service, and Parliamentary elections, turned that tiresome discipline to good account in the days when the Stuarts had contrived to make politics to thousands of heavy-handed obstinate people throughout England a matter not only of money but of conscience. The non-participation of the bulk of the peasantry in the same large interests was not due to poverty, for often the copyholders were wealthier than the freeholders who listened to Pym and Hampden on that first great election campaign in 1640, and left their farms to fight for King or Parliament. Nor was it due to timidity or lack of spirit, for, as we shall see later, they frequently asserted themselves in the course of the sixteenth century in their own characteristic way of agrarian strikes.[241] It was rather that the centre of their interests and their social horizon were different. The freeholders from an early date had been brought into contact with the chief institutions of the organised political state. Since the twelfth century they had been protected in their holdings by the courts, and had learned through that cunning procedure which was the fruit of Henry II.'s[242] sleepless nights, that though often one cannot do much with the law, one can do even less without it. Since the thirteenth century they, along with their social superiors, had returned members to Parliament, and had acquired that facility in grumbling at taxation which is the beginning, though not, as is so commonly supposed, the end, of political wisdom. Thus they became a body in whose eyes the Law, Parliament, the State, loomed up, though for ages dimly enough, as a big something which it is well to have on your side, something which requires, like the new fangled arquebuses, to be carefully handled, something which, if neglected, may give you a surprising shock, but if treated with proper respect may teach manners even to your landlord. Of course your first duty is to him. You ride and fight for him readily enough as your fathers did. But still, you do it because you have said you will, not because he has said you shall, and though London lawyers are a pack of knaves, it is good to know that the law will, if necessary, make him see the difference.

[241] See below, pp. 329-331.

[242] Bracton, f. 164 b.: "Succuritur ei per recognitionem
Assisæ novæ dissesinæ multis vigiliis excogitatam et inventam"
(quoted Pollock and Maitland, _History of English Law_, vol. i.
p. 125 n.).

But the freeholders have been for centuries a privileged class, and those of the peasants who are copyholders, a far more numerous body, are in a very different position. Your fathers were villeins, who hung on the words of the upstart manorial officials, who "had no right to know at night what they should do on the morrow,"[243] who never had the bitter satisfaction of grumbling that they got no return for the wages paid to the knights of the shire, who had no redress from the King's Courts if threatened with eviction. Of course you are not in the same position now. Your blood has been purged of the servile taint for generations. The lawyers have been competing for your business, and so the Court of Chancery has invented a new procedure to protect you in your holding. "When thieves fall out...." Still, it is better to run no risk of offending your superiors, for the law is a chancy thing, and your title (you keep the copy under lock and key and refuse to show it to the new surveyor lest he should twist it into meaning what it doesn't) is none too clear.[244] Deep down in your mind, beneath the prosperity of to-day, there are dim memories of old, unhappy, far-off things, and your shoulders slouch at their recollection. _Weh dir dass du ein Enkel bist!_ The bailiff has invented a pedigree as long as your arm to prove that your great-grandfather was a villein, and had no business to have bought his freedom for the preposterous reason that the money with which he bought it was the lord's all along. The toadying beast is even trying to curry favour by saying that your copyhold is for life only, and that your fine is uncertain. True, there are plenty of ancient inhabitants who will swear in the manor court that your family has lived in the village before the present lord was ever heard of. But it is easy to bully and cajole them into silence. Were not Walter and Hugh turned adrift, "weeping bitterly," because money had to be found to pay the young lord's debts? As a copyholder, then, you are much less conscious of the State than if you are a freeholder, because in the matter which interests you most, the security of your holding, you have for centuries had no dealings with the State at all. Your idea of Government is a vague reverence for a King who sits far away in Westminster with a crown on his head and his judges about him, and who governs his kingdom as a good lord--not like yours--governs his manor. For the rest you are a non-political animal, who take little interest in affairs of State, because in the past the State has taken so little interest in you. When your fathers made London tremble in the great days of 1381 (you can see from your hay-stack the hill where they were hanged, hanged "like dogs"[245]) what they demanded was fair rents and freedom from villein services. When you went out with Ket in 1549 you asked the same, and, untaught by their experience, you begged that the King would see that you had the fair play which his Justices of the Peace, who are your landlords, will never allow you.[246] When King and Parliament come to blows, you curse both impartially, remain neutral as long as you can, and only turn out when they begin driving the village beasts. Your sentiments are pithily expressed in the motto which a local wit has devised for the village banner: "If you take our cattle, we will give you battle."[247]

[243] Bracton, Lib. iv. cap. 28, f. 208.

[244] _Northumberland County History_, vol. iii., Pt. V., pp.
86-?104, Survey of Hexham (1608): "Their fines they pretend to
be certain, viz. one year's rent at everye change of tenant, but
not herritable. They have there, for certaine, very ancient
evidences and Court Rolls, but they woulde not show them unto
us, nor any of their coppies." See also Appendix I. No. IV.

[245] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Part VII., pp. 49?-50 (1596): Some
information concerning those intending the rebellion in
Oxford.... "And Steer said that there was once a rising at
Enscombe Hill by the commons, and they were persuaded to go down
and were after hanged like dogs. 'But,' said he, 'we will never
yield, but will go through with it!'"

[246] See below, pp. 334?-337.

[247] Warburton's _Rupert_, iii., 118 (quoted Gooch, _English
Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century_, p. 112).

If, however, the peasantry are on the whole uninterested in the larger problems of government to which the world has agreed to confine the word politics, this is not because they are incapable of self-help, or destitute of any conception of public expediency. It is because the framework of their lives has for ages been different from that of the freeholders, because the centre round which their social interests revolve is even more localised than it is to the freeholders, because what matters to them most is not the law of the land but the custom of the manor. We shall have hereafter[248] to discuss the vexed question of the legal position occupied by the copyholders in the sixteenth century. But we may pause for a moment to point out here the decisive part which custom had played, and still played in our period, in moulding the lives of the mass of the peasantry, because unless this is firmly grasped we cannot understand their mental horizon. It is the custom of the manor which gives them their social environment and their conception of public order. The commonest name for all those who hold neither freely nor by lease is "customary tenants," men whose title is rooted in custom. When the courts begin to interfere to protect copyholders, they introduce that sweeping innovation under the guise of enforcing customary conditions. They do not say "copyholders can be evicted." Nor do they say "copyholders cannot be evicted." They say, "Tell us what the custom of your manor is, and if it is one which does not seem to a plain man too unreasonable, we will enforce it." When tenants and landlords fall out, it is always to custom that the tenants appeal. When the peasants ask the Government for assistance, they do so by demanding the observance of their "old customs."

[248] See below, pp. 287?-310.

Let us look at the custom of the manor more closely. The phrase has, of course, misleading suggestions for modern ears. We tend to think of custom as something indefinite and inconclusive; something which is not, like the law (we speak of what should be), the embodiment of reason; something which fetters progress and is the opposite of freedom; something which is mere habit, and very likely a "bad habit" at that. All this is true in a sense. It is the way in which in the sixteenth century an enterprising landlord looks at the custom which ties his hands. But it is not the way in which it is regarded by the peasants. The custom of the manor does not mean to them a mere feeble acquiescence in existing conditions, mere inertia. It is not a negative, but a positive thing. It is no more inconsistent with progress to observe the custom, than it is inconsistent with progress to keep out of gaol by observing the law. For the custom is simply the law of the village. Like the main rules of the common law, it comes down from a dim age that is beyond the memory of man. Like law it is enforced by a court, the court of the manor. Like law it can be altered (and in some respects and on some manors often is altered to meet the new conditions of our period) by the proper authority, which again is the court of the manor. Of course it is not law in the fullest sense. From one standpoint it is the antithesis of law, the law of the King's Courts, which, till the end of the fourteenth century, has taken no cognizance of the customary tenures, though since that time the Court of Chancery, by intervening to enforce the custom of the manor in respect of copyholds, has been breaking down the opposition. Still, for the mass of the peasantry, even in the sixteenth century, custom is a bigger, more important, thing than the law of the national courts. It is with custom that the first decision will lie.

Again, the custom of the manor is not at all a vague or indefinite thing. That it reposed partly on the Court Rolls, partly on the memory of ancient inhabitants, we can see from the frequent appeals which are made to both of them. But it certainly is no mere nebulous tradition. On the contrary, it is often most rigorous in its precision. It lays down boundaries and numbers stocks and stones. It adjusts and readjusts agricultural arrangements. It enters into the details of social life with a bold hand. Let us reflect, to take an example, on the customs of High Furness, parts of which have been quoted above. Here we have a whole village agreeing about matters which do not at first sight seem, like the use of pastures or the fixing of boundaries, of a specially public character. The term on which a man's property is to be distributed among his descendants, this, if anything, one might expect to be left to his own discretion, once the succession of an heir to maintain the rents and services due from the holding had been provided for. The rules quoted above go much further than this. They settle exactly what proportion of a man's property is to go to his different children, male and female, from the eldest down to the youngest. Imagine a Parish Council to-day distributing the wealth of deceased parishioners with the object of seeing that the whole of the younger generation shall obtain some kind of start in life, and you will have an analogy to what is done by the prudent men of High Furness.

Or take another example, where the points handled are of a somewhat different kind. Here are the customs of the manor of Bushey,[249] as set out in 1563 by twenty customary tenants in response to an inquiry by the lord:--

"In primis to the fyrste article we saye that no copyholder at the tyme of his death dying seased of twoo copyholdes hathe paid any more than one quycke heriott by the tyme of any remembrance, or before, to our knowledge.

"Item to the seconde we saye that the lorde oughtte to have the second beste for hys herryott and the heyer the beste.

"Item to the thyrde we saye that the copyholder that doth surrender his copyholde ought not to paye any herryott upon the surrender of his copyholde except yt be in extreme of deathe.

"Item to the fourth we saye that lords of the mannor have never demanded nor any copyholder payde any more for their ffyne than one yere's rente of the lande.

"Item to the fyfth we saye that the widdowe upon the deathe of her husbande shall have the thyrde parte of the rente of the lande, but not the thyrde part of the lande except yt be surrendered to her by her husbande.

"Item to the syxth we saye that the copyholder may sell hys underwoode and stocke upp by the roote the same wytheout lycense of the lorde.

"Item to the seventh we saye that the copyholder may fell tymber for reparacion or otherwyse to sell the same to hys use and profyt; so hathe yt byn used by our tymes and by all tyme beyond the memory of man.

"Item to the eytthe we saye that the copyholder may make a grante of hys copyholde for three yeres wythoute the lord's lycense, and the lorde to take nothing for the same.

"Item to the nineth we saye that the tenants maye take surrender bothe within the manor and without the manor.

"Item to the tenth we saye that we cannot answer for that we knowe not every man's lande.

"Item to the eleventh we saye that every copyholde is not heryottable.

"Item to the xiith we knowe not where the Courte Rolles, Rentals, or customaryes of the manor are remayning or in whose custodye.

"Item to the xiiith we saye that we knowe not of any deutyes or rentys withdrawn from the lordshippe.

"Item to the xiiiith we saye that we never knewe nor hearde any heryott payde for freeholde at the dethe of the freholder.

"Item to the fyfteneth we say that the freholder hathe never payde relief at alienacion, but at deathe only.

"Item to the xvith we saye that a copyholder dying his heir being wythin the age of xiiii yeres the custody of the body and lande oughte to be comytted by the lorde to the nexte of the kyn to whom the inheritance may not dyscende."

[249] I take them from the MSS. Court Rolls of the Manor of Bushey,
kindly lent me by the late Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith.

In themselves these customs are not in any way remarkable, except perhaps for the uniform favour which they show to the interests of the tenants. They might be paralleled from those of scores of other manors. What is worth noticing is the precision of the rules laid down. The relations between the lord and the tenants are settled with the definiteness of a sort of great collective bargain.

It would be going beyond the scope of this essay to enter upon the large question, on which so much learning has been expended, of the respective parts played in manorial origins by the communal organisation of villagers for the purpose of self-government in their agrarian affairs, and by the authoritative pressure of superior authorities for the purpose of using the village as the basis of a financial and political system. But one may point out that facts such as have been quoted above in illustration of the rule of custom cannot easily be fitted into any theory which regards the economic arrangements of the manor as the result simply of a system imposed from above, and which treats the customary rights of the peasants as the outcome of concessions made by lords from time to time in their own interests, the revocation of which involved no larger difficulties than necessarily surround the alteration of practices sanctioned by long use. However much the organisation of village life may have been stereotyped by the pressure directed upon it by the desire of the manorial authorities to extract rents and services on an unvarying plan, one cannot trace it altogether to its subordination to such external forces, because the custom of the manor acts as a restriction which impedes the free action of lords themselves and their agents, even when they are most anxious to break through its meshes. This is seen more clearly perhaps in the sixteenth century than in earlier periods, for the very reason that the sharp collision of interests between lords and tenants makes it more possible to distinguish those parts of manorial custom which represent the economic interests of the tenants, from those which represent the power of the manorial authorities imposed upon them. Under the latter heading would fall the rules as to heriots and reliefs, rules forbidding waste, rules requiring tenants to pay "for the rushes which they gather on the lord's common,"[250] or to perform the surviving remnants of labour services, while a rule such as that of High Furness, forbidding the division of holdings to such an extent as to prevent the discharge of services or the obtaining of an adequate living by the occupier, may be regarded as a compromise in which the interests of both lord and tenant receive consideration. Under the former may be placed the custom which fixes rents, and, on some fortunate manors like Bushey, fixes fines to be paid on admission, sanctions the sub-letting of copyholds and the felling of timber, and allots rights of pasture to each arable holding. Not all of these, of course, stand upon the same footing of importance. The right to cut wood is much less essential than the right to graze cattle. But some of them, at any rate, like rights of common pasture, seem to be bound up with the very existence of the village as an agricultural community, and all of them are dictated by the interests of the peasants in protecting themselves against encroachments, as clearly as are those of the first type by the desire of lords to make the manor a source of profit to themselves. It is scarcely possible to account for the obstacles put by manorial customs in the way of changes which would benefit the lord and be detrimental to the tenant, except on the supposition that they are rooted in something more indestructible than the mere concession of privileges which long use has solidified and hardened; something which can only be found in the fact that they are an essential part of the life of the village, to which the lord himself, as a condition of extracting revenue from it, is almost bound to conform.

[250] Aldeburgh, _temp._ Henry VIII., R.O. _Misc. Bks. Treas. of
Receipts_, vol. clxiii. See Appendix I., No. II.

This brings us to our original point, the way in which the whole social environment of all the tenants, except the freeholders, who do not need the protection of custom, and the leaseholders,[251] who cannot get it, is dependent upon the custom of the manor. Fraught with modern associations as it is, the phrase "collective[252] bargain" is perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing what the custom of the manor means to the peasants themselves. Of course it is much more than this. The custom has the sanction of immemorial antiquity. The phrase "time out of mind" is no mere piece of idle rhetoric. The stable self-perpetuating conditions of economic life create a sort of communal memory, in which centuries are focussed. There were villages where, in the reign of Elizabeth, the effects of the Great Plague[253] were still dimly remembered. But regarding the matter from the point of view of the practical working of village life, we shall not be far wrong if we think of the peasants as a body of men who are more or less organised, and of the custom as a system of common rules which regulates the relations between them and the lord. And it is evident that the custom of the manor, at any rate in our period, is a safeguard of the tenants' interests rather than of those of the manorial authorities. It is not only that the changes which followed the Great Plague have set the peasants free from the most irksome customary restrictions, but, further, that, in the sixteenth century, it is the lord who wants to make innovations and the tenants who resist them, and that it is therefore the latter who stand to gain most by clinging to custom. The custom sets up a standard by which encroachments can be opposed, by which the village as a whole can put a solid barrier in the way of change, by which blacklegging (in the shape of one man taking a holding over the head of another) can be prevented. Competitive forces have, it is true, been gradually undermining custom, and by the sixteenth century an increasing number of tenants have the terms on which they take their holdings settled by the higgling of the market without reference to any authoritative rule. Nevertheless, as far as the copyholders, who are the kernel of the manor, are concerned, competition is held in check by the fact that, on certain fundamental matters, there is a common understanding between the peasants, which is recognised by the lord himself. The manorial authorities cannot bargain with the tenants one by one. They have to deal with the villagers as men who are "organised," who are members of a society, who know what they have to expect in the way of heriots and rents and fines, and who will be supported by village opinion in resisting innovations. On occasion the peasants will strike. On occasion they will force their landlord to arbitration.[254] One might almost say that the customary tenants are trade unionists to a man. Again, who shall determine what the custom is? The court rolls will throw light on certain points, and occasionally we find lords appealing to them successfully in order to upset the tenants' claims. But on many matters there is no guide but tradition; the exponents of tradition are the ancient inhabitants; the lord has to ask them to expound it, as he does the tenants of Bushey. Can we doubt that this was a powerful check on autocratic action on his part? Lords come and go. But the custom of the manor endures, and probably loses nothing in the telling.

[251] Some copyholders, who held land which was not "customary
land" but part of the demesne or the waste, were not protected
by custom either: for a discussion of this point see below, pp.
293?-294.

[252] See below for an example from Crondal, p. 295.

[253] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of "The Presentment and
Verdict of the Jury for the Manor of Hewlington," 1620 (Wrexham
Free Library, _Ancient Local Records_, vol. ii.): "Which decay
(as by the ancient records appeareth) did growe by reason of the
great mortalitie and plague which in former tymes had been in
the reign of Edward III., and also of the rebellion of Owen
Glendower and trouble that thereupon ensued."

[254] _Victoria County History of Gloucestershire_, Social and
Economic History, p. 146. For agrarian strikes see below, pp.
329?-331.

If, then, we ask what the custom means to the peasantry, we must think not of the "forbidding, stale, and meagre ways," which is what the word custom too often suggests in the twentieth century, but of the phrase "ancient customs and liberties," which is so common in the charters of Boroughs. The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom which most concerns the mass of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from which they draw their political ideas. They cannot conceive the state except as a very great manor. Their idea of good government is the enforcement of an idealised customary.[255]

[255] See below, pp. 338?-340.

Having said this we can say little more. There is no standard by which we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village life of the sixteenth century--and England is all villages--would still be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller's sketches of modern England, yet, like a traveller's sketches, possessing a certain value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion selects for emphasis.

One is encouraged in one's belief in the comparative prosperity of a large number of the peasantry in the earlier sixteenth century by the comments which the writers of the periods pass upon it, even after a decline has already begun. The picture we get is of an open-handed, turbulent, large-eating and deep-drinking people, much given to hospitality and to merriment both coarse and refined; according to modern standards very ignorant, yet capable of swift enthusiasm, litigious, great sticklers for their rights, quick to use force in defence of them, proud of their independence, and free from the grosser forms of poverty which crush the spirit. The latter feature strikes everybody. Foreign visitors[256] notice with amazement the outward signs of wealth among the humbler classes. English writers, though their tone becomes sadder and sadder as the century proceeds, are never tired of boasting of it. Even in the eighties of the sixteenth century, when many of the peasants are much worse off than they had been a hundred years before, Harrison, though he paints in dark colours the ruinous effects of the agrarian changes, describes their hearty life with good-humoured gusto. "Both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficiently liberal and very friendly at their tables, and when they meet they are so merry without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them.... Their food consisteth principally of beef and such meat as the butcher selleth. That is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork. In feasting also the latter sort, I mean the husbandmen, do exceed after their manner, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such odd meetings, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one bringing such a dish, or so many with him, as his wife and he consult upon, but always with this consideration that the lesser friend shall have the better provision." The peasants themselves have a good conceit of their position, and all unmindful of the whirligig of time and its revenges, contrast it with that of their class in France, where women labour like beasts in the fields, where men go in wooden shoes or no shoes at all, where the people drink water instead of ale, eat rye bread and little meat, and have not even the heart, like honest Englishmen, to rob the rich who oppress them, and that in the most fertile realm in all the world;[257] "Caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldome as they dyd to the Romaynes, and gevynge tribute for theyr meat, drinke, brede, and salte, which for theyr wayke personayges and tymorous hartes I may compare to the pigmies who waged battayle against the Cranes, so that I dare let slip a hundred good yeomen of England against five hundred of such ribaldry."[258] Apart from the utterances of these good Jingoes, stray glimpses show us a people which not only is materially prosperous, but is also bold in action, and can produce men of high moral ardour. In the twentieth century the rural population is a bye-word for its docility. Its ancestors in the sixteenth were notorious for their restiveness. Hales, who knew and loved them, makes one of the characters in his dialogue[259] suggest that men at arms should be used to put down the disturbances made by them and by the unemployed weavers, only to answer, through the lips of another, that to call in the military will be the best way to make them riot all the more:--"Marie, I think that waye wold be rather occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be quenched, for the stomakes of Englishmen would never beare that, to suffer such injuries and reproaches as I knowe suche (_i.e._ the men at arms) use to do to the subjects of France."

[256] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), p. 114,
quoting one of "the Spaniards in Queen Mary's days." "These
English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare
commonly so well as the king."

[257] Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, chaps. iii. and
xiii. The Scots, he thinks, are only one degree less
faint-hearted than the French. "Thai ben often tymes hanged for
larceny, and stelynge off good in the absence off the owner
theroff. But ther hartes serve them not to take a manys gode,
while he is present, and woll defende it."

[258] Coke, _Debate of Heralds_. See also the quotation,
Froude's _Henry VIII._, vol. i. chap, i., from a State Paper of
1515: "What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the
comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all
prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so stronge in the
felde, as the comyns of England?"

[259] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond), p. 94.

These humble people have their idealisms. They produce martyrs for the new religion and for the old, Lollards who suffer persecution for upholding the Wycliffite tradition in the quiet villages of Buckinghamshire, Catholics who follow Aske in that wonderful movement of northern England, the last of the crusades, in 1536, or fall in Devonshire thirteen years later before the artillery of Herbert. Nor are they altogether cut off from the springs of learning. For at the beginning of the sixteenth century the upper classes have not yet begun to covet education for themselves sufficiently to withhold it from the poor. Bequests[260] show that the sons of well-to-do peasants may have been among those godly yeomanry whom Latimer[261] described as once, in happier social conditions than those amid which he preached, frequenting the older universities, and the records of some sixteenth century grammar-schools tell a similar story. Among the first twenty-two names on the register of Repton[262] there are five gentlemen, four husbandmen, nine yeomen, two websters or weavers, a carpenter, and a tanner.

[260] _Victoria County History_, Berkshire, ii., 208. In 1558 a
yeoman leaves his son a portion of land worth £10 a year "for
his keepinge and learninge in Oxford for five years nexte." On
the same page there is a case of a man described as a "yeoman"
who is tenant by copy of Court Roll.

[261] Latimer's _Sermons_. The first sermon preached before King
Edward, March 8, 1549 (Everyman Series, p. 86): "We have good
statutes made for the commonwealth, as touching commoners and
enclosures; many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the
matter there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing
I will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from the
devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to pass that
the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to school (as indeed
universities do wondrously decay already); I say ye pluck
salvation from the people and utterly destroy the realm. For by
yeomen's sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained
chiefly." See also _A Supplication of the Poor Commons_ (E. E.
T. S.): "This thing causeth that suche possessioners as
heretofore were able and used to maintain their own children ...
to lernynge and suche other qualities as are necessary to be had
in this Your Highness Royalme, are now of necessitie compelled
to set theyr own children to labour, and al is lytle enough to
pay the lorde's rent, and to take the house anew at the end of
the yere." The children of yeomen had no doubt been educated
mainly for the Church, and some attained high position (_Surtees
Society_, vol. lxxix. pp. 263-?264, for the son of a yeoman
becoming a Bishop, and vol. li. No. 53, the son of a yeoman
becoming subdeacon of York, vol. lxxix. pp. 176?-177, for a
yeoman's son sent to school for fifteen years). But in the
fifteenth century this was not always so, v. Leach, _Educational
Charters_, p. 41, for a school founded in Yorkshire, a county
which "produced many youths endowed with light and sharpness of
ability, who do not all want to attain the dignity and elevation
of the priesthood, that these may be better fitted for the
mechanical arts and other concerns of this world." A case of
hostility to the education of the poorer classes based on the
idea that education should be reserved for "gentlemen" is given
_ibid._ p. 470, where the notorious Lord Rich and other
gentlemen argue "as for husbandsmen's children, they were more
meet ... for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the
place of the learned sort. So that they wished none else to be
put to school, but only gentlemen's children." Cranmer retorted,
"Poor men's children ... are commonly more apt to apply their
study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated ... the
poor man's son by painstaking will be learned, when the
gentleman's son will not take the pains to get it, ... wherefore
if the gentleman's son be apt to learning let him be admitted;
if not apt, let the poor man's child being apt enter in his
room."

[262] _Repton School Register_, 1564-?1910. One of the
husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average
school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and
seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five
and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the attitude of
most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why
shouldn't Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably
off.

But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these documents begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner things to think of than the schooling of their children.