Chapter I: The New Rural Economy (1)

(a) _Motives and Causes_

A common view of social development regards it as the outcome of irresistible causes working towards results which can be neither hastened nor averted, and treats the fact that events have followed a certain course as in itself an indication that no other course was possible. Whatever is has always been implicit in the past; the established fact rules by the divine right of being the only possible dynasty, and no scope is left for pretenders to contest or acts of settlement to alter its legitimate title. It is not surprising that such a theory should be peculiarly popular in interpreting economic history. On their frontiers even the most different forms of social organisation shade into one another. Each generation naturally sees in a strong light those regions of the past which reproduce the features with which it is familiar, and overlooks the existence of wide Hinterlands whose general features are quite different. Since important classes, like important individuals, find it difficult to believe in the truthfulness of any picture where they do not occupy the greater part of the canvas, they insensibly encourage a conventional interpretation of history, which lends an air of respectable antiquity to the legal and economic arrangements which favour them and which they favour, by treating such arrangements as an essential characteristic of civilisation itself. In reality, however, it is only by dragging into prominence the forces which have triumphed, and thrusting into the background those which they have swallowed up, that an appearance of inevitableness is given to existing institutions, which satisfies the desire to see them as links in an orderly chain of unavoidable sequences. Useful as the conception of a continuous development is, it can easily be carried too far. It is carried too far when it causes us to forget that a small alteration in the lie of the land might have caused the stream to take quite a different channel, and that the smoothly flowing waters of the plain are the outcome of a series of crises in the higher regions, where the spur of a mountain or a cleft in the rocks might easily have diverted their course into other directions. If we must talk of social evolution, we ought to remember that it takes place through the action of human beings, that such action is constantly violent, or merely short-sighted, or deliberately selfish, and that a form of social organisation which appears to us now to be inevitable, once hung in the balance as one of several competing possibilities.

Certainly the possibility that economic changes should have followed a quite different line from that which they actually have can hardly fail to strike the student of agrarian history. The facts, as we read them, do not lend unqualified support to the idea that the growth, at the expense of the little landholders, of great estates cultivated by hired labour was the inevitable result of irresistible forces, or that the new agricultural régime was a necessity on account of the sluggishness of the old. To an observer of agrarian conditions living about the year 1500, who looked back over the conditions of the last century, all the possibilities must have seemed to point in the direction of a continuous improvement in the condition of the peasantry. It is evident that the growth of prosperity among the small cultivators was leading from the beginning of the fifteenth century to the gradual consolidation of holdings, to keen competition for the use of land, and to increasing individualism in the methods of agriculture. Though the movement caused a diminution in the number of landholders, the diminution was very gradual. It was not the result of a sudden revolution affecting large numbers of tenants simultaneously; and even those who regarded enclosing with hostility were favourable to the process of gradual redistribution, which did not violate vested interests or cause any sensational disturbance. The appearance of the country would have changed, and the methods of cultivation would have improved. But there would have been no great cause at work to displace the peasantry from the soil, with the rapidity which entailed hardship, until a much later period than we are now considering. Obviously, however, it was not these slow internal changes in the manorial organisation which impressed observers. On the contrary, though they are noticed by the writer who took a scientific interest in agricultural questions, they are hardly mentioned by the majority of commentators on the life of the period, who were interested not in the technique of agriculture but in the social results of changing methods. What aroused their alarm and produced rioting and legislation was, as every one knows, a movement the distinctive feature of which was that it was initiated by lords of manors and great farmers, "the Graziers, the rich buchars, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the Knights, the Lords,"[322] in short by the wealthiest and most powerful classes, and that it was carried out frequently against the will of the tenants, and in such a way as to prejudice their interests.

[322] Crowley, _The Way to Wealth_ (E. E. T. S.).

As the small capitalist prepared the way for the great, the two movements were connected, and the simultaneous development of both of them explains the rather puzzling mixture of approval and criticism which is to be found in the comments of observers upon enclosing. But their economic and social results were very different. No doubt the incipient movement in the direction of reorganising national life on the basis of industry involved a breach with the customary methods of agriculture, which must in any case have caused a certain degree of dislocation. The development of the textile manufactures, which for two centuries were the chief source of English wealth, could not have taken place without the production of cheap supplies of raw material, and the growth of the towns was dependent on the saving of labour from agriculture. But in such changes the element of time--the speed at which the transition takes place--is all important, because upon it depends the feasibility of social readjustments to meet the new situation. The slow breaking up of the open field system, though it changed the methods of cultivation, might quite conceivably have effected only such a gradual diminution in the number of the small farmers, as to make the absorption into industry of those displaced comparatively easy. In so far as the changes of the sixteenth century were a social revolution, and not merely a gradual development, this revolution was the result not only of technical advances, but of the concentration of landed property and the development of new relationships between landlord and tenant. It is to the second of the two movements that we must now turn.

The new agrarian arrangements which we shall have to consider are called by the name of enclosure, and we will discuss later what exactly enclosure means in this connection. But there are enclosures and enclosures, and we shall do well to begin by drawing some distinctions. In the first place, then, the enclosing movement that will occupy us in this chapter has very little resemblance to the enclosure which we have considered in the last. It is carried out by great men, not by small. It proceeds wholesale, not piecemeal. It does not consist in many little cultivators rearranging their holdings by purchase, or sale, or agreement, but in one great proprietor or his agent consolidating small holdings into great estates. The new arrangements are imposed rapidly and with a high hand from without. They do not arise gradually from within through the spontaneous development of the peasants' needs and resources.

Again, the new movement bears very little resemblance to the rearrangements introduced by lords of manors, which, from an early date, have gone by the name of enclosing. Such rearrangements have not been few. People have talked about enclosing long before they have begun to lament enclosures. Not to mention the encroachments on the waste evidenced by the Statute of Merton, one finds the word "enclosure" used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to describe a variety of agreements made between lords whose lands were contiguous, or between lords and their free tenants, by which, instead of the parties concerned using a given area in common as their pasture, each surrenders his right of access to part of it, and obtains in return the right to use another part in severalty. The Abbot of Malmesbury[323] and the men of Niwentone come to an arrangement with Walter of Asselegge and the men of that village, whereby the monastery agrees to follow the customary routine in cultivating the land lying between Niwentone and Asselegge, and not to common on the marsh at Cheggeberge, getting in return exclusive rights of pasture over another marsh, and over the east field of Niwentone. The Abbot and Monastery of St. Peter's[324] of Gloucester make an agreement with Lord Thomas Berkeley whereby the former are "to have and hold in severalty and enclose and approve at their will" certain lands lying in Southfield "so that the said Thomas and his free tenants may not ... claim or demand common, but be excluded from it for ever," and in return covenant that the latter may "enclose and approve their lands in all parts of the summit of the Pike of Coveleigh." Similar arrangements are made between the Abbot of Glastonbury[325] and a neighbouring landowner, between the Abbot of Cerne[326] and Robert of Bloxworth, and between the City of Coventry[327] and the master and brethren of the Trinity Gild of that town.

[323] _Registrum Malmesburiense_, vol. ii. pp. 220-?221: "Quod
... dictus abbas de Malmesburia non debet de cetero colere
terram de Niwentone ... nisi antiquitus consueverat coli. Et
quod dictus Walterus de Asselegge habebit mariscum suum de
Cheggeberge quietum a communia hominum de Niwentone. Dicti vero
abbas et conventus Malmesburia habebunt mariscum suum iacentem
ex Orientali parte stratæ publicæ quæ vocatur Fos quietum et
exceptum a communia hominum de Asselegge. Habebunt etiam ...
campum Australem in Niwentone quietum et exceptum a communia
hominum de Asselegge. Omnes vero aliæ terræ ad dictas villas
pertinentes ... erunt in pastura communi."

[324] _Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Gloucestriæ_, i.
147-?149.

[325] Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of South Domerham.

[326] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord
Middleton), pp. 61?-62. This agreement was made in 1231.

[327] _Coventry Leet Book_ (edited by Mary Dormer Harris).

Whether it is a chance that such agreements seem to occur with special frequency in the records of religious houses we cannot say. It is possible that the perpetual character of a corporation made exclusive enjoyment at once more desirable and more feasible; a great abbey, like St. Peter's of Gloucester, could pursue a continuous and far-sighted policy, and wait more than a generation to see the results of its experiments. Nor is it possible to understand the motives for such arrangements without information as to local conditions which is not easily obtainable. Sometimes the object was simply to protect land used for agriculture against the depredations caused by the game of a hunting landlord. Sometimes it would seem to have been to allow of a variation in the methods of agriculture, for example the sowing of a piece of land which could not be sown as long as several persons had right of pasture over it. Occasionally it was simply to realise an obvious convenience dictated by the lie of the land, each party gaining more by the exclusive use of pasture lying near to him, than he would lose by surrendering rights of common over that part which lay at a distance. Two points, however, are worth noticing. The first is the use of the word "enclosure." Arrangements which go by the name "enclosure" are made at a very early date by the manorial authorities, and the latter would have been very much surprised to be told that they were inaugurating an agrarian revolution. The second is the character of these enclosures. They are in every way different from those which produced discontent in the sixteenth century. Though they affected the routine of cultivation they did not imply any abandonment of arable farming. Since they were carried out mainly by an exchange of rights they did not prejudice the tenants. Further, the disputes of which they were sometimes the result were not disputes between the lord of a manor and his tenantry, but between the lord and tenants of one manor and the lord and tenants of another, the ground of the disagreement being the difficulty of adjusting rights of common over the debatable land which must often have lain between two manors, and the division of interests being, as it were, a vertical, not a horizontal, division. In fact, these early examples of enclosure throw light on the later movement only by way of contrast. What we meet in our period is not isolated innovations of this character, but a general movement spreading across England from Berkshire in the South to Norfolk and Lincoln in the North-East, and affecting especially the corn-growing counties of the Midlands, a movement which meant a great extension of pasture-farming, a violent collision of interests between the manorial authorities and the peasantry, and a considerable displacement of population. Clearly some new and powerful causes must have been at work to account for it.

In the third place, the movement which goes by the name of enclosing in the sixteenth century has little similarity with the changes which proceeded under the same name from about 1700 to 1850, and which went on most swiftly in the reign of George III. It differs from them in method. In the eighteenth century Parliament is supreme. It is simply a committee of landlords and their hangers-on, and it makes Private Bill legislation a very easy method of getting enclosure carried out. In our period the Government, for reasons to be discussed later, sets its face against most kinds of enclosing, and such enclosures as are made are made in defiance of the law. It differs from them in motive. We must not prejudge the question whether the enclosures of our period were made mainly for pasture or for arable. But leaving this question on one side, we can point to certain broad contrasts. The ostensible motive of the eighteenth century enclosures is to improve the productive capacity of the land by spending capital upon it. This is the reason alleged when Private Bills are being promoted, and this is the aspect of the movement which causes it to be eulogised by the agricultural experts. Of course landlords were not philanthropists. As Mr. and Mrs. Hammond[328] have demonstrated, there were often very sordid motives behind their resounding platitudes on the advantage of throwing commons and small holdings into large compact estates, and, even when these were not too conspicuous, the interests of the smaller landholders were sometimes treated with the most outrageous injustice. Still the general nature of the movement was clearly in the direction of bringing under better cultivation land which had hitherto not been used to its full economic capacity. The price of foodstuffs after 1750 rose enormously, and the rise in prices offered a golden harvest to any one who would prepare land for producing larger supplies. The landlords of the eighteenth century did not merely enclose. They improved as well. Part of their increased rent rolls was interest on capital which they had invested for the purpose. Now in the sixteenth century there is very little trace of any movement of this kind. What improving is done, is done by the peasants themselves. There is no sign of the great proprietors making large capital outlays in order to render their estates more productive, except in the way of the trifling expenditure entailed by fencing, hedging, and ditching. They are by no means pioneers of agricultural progress. Enclosing is profitable to them not because it enables them to convert barren heaths into smiling corn-fields in the manner described by Arthur Young, but because it enables them to use the land as they please, to let it down to pasture when the price of wool is high, to employ few labourers on it instead of many, and, possibly, to add to their own estates part of their neighbours' holdings. They do not bring under cultivation land which would otherwise lie waste. On the contrary, very often they turn into a waste land which would otherwise be under cultivation. Whether the picture which represents the eighteenth century enclosures as the effort of an energetic and public-spirited class to overcome old-fashioned prejudices by applying the resources of science to agriculture is veracious or not, we need not now inquire. As far as the century and a half from 1485 is concerned it is altogether out of place.

[328] In their book, _The Village Labourer from_ 1760 to 1832.

The changes which we are about to describe have at once a social and an economic reference. The former is the aspect which receives most attention from contemporaries. They lament the decay of the peasantry, the embittered relations between classes, the distress and discontent caused by the new agrarian régime. They are usually not much concerned with the economics of the situation. Economic issues are not yet separated from questions of personal and public morality. To find subtle reasons why it is unavoidable that a large number of persons should be impoverished seems to them very like condoning a crime. Some excuses only aggravate the offence, and if men are cursed with a neighbour who insists on fulfilling economic laws by raising prices or taking usury, they are less likely to discuss his conclusions than first to present him for breaking the statutes and then to break his head for his bad principles. So they judge the dominant movement by its fruits, and its fruits seem very evil. But to us the economic problem is the primary one. The occurrence of rapid changes in the structure of an old and stable society implies either some radical revolution in the basis of economic life, or some great change in men's conception of social expediency, or, what is most likely, an economic and a spiritual change occurring together. To understand its effect we must understand the sort of economic environment from which it springs.

In the first place, then, the age of the Tudors is a commercial age, and it becomes more commercial as the century goes on. No doubt it is only of certain classes and in certain relations of life that such a statement is true. The permanence of economic arrangements, which makes Froude declare that at the end of the fifteenth century the model of the upper classes was still the chivalry of the Arthurian legends, is seen still more strikingly among the artisans and peasants, and it is only very slowly and painfully that they are drawn into the net woven by the growth of capitalist trade. But it is with the classes who respond to the new movement that the power of the future, though not its graces, lies, and it is through the widening of the influence of commerce and commercial transactions that the economic developments most typical of our period take place. The age is a commercial one in the sense that much attention is given by Governments from the reign of Henry VII. onwards to fostering the conditions which promote trade and industry. This is not the place to discuss the meaning of Mercantilism or the truth of Bacon's[329] epigram that Henry VII. "bowed the ancient policy of this State from consideration of plenty to consideration of power." Though in the reign of Henry VIII. the State is almost a religion, one can easily exaggerate the influence of its interference even in that much governed age. Nevertheless no one who looks at the Statutes, or the Acts of the Privy Council, or the Domestic State Papers for the reigns of Henry VII., Henry VIII., and Elizabeth, can fail to realise that much of the time of Governments is occupied with devising measures which are intended to hasten industrial and commercial development. There is a settled habit of mind with regard to these matters which is quite conscious of its ends, though its means may often be ill-chosen. Every one is agreed that the encouragement of trade is the duty of the Prince.[330] There is a real popular demand for the intervention of the authorities, and they respond to it readily enough.

[329] Bacon, _History of King Henry VII._

[330] See _e.g._ Starkey's _England in the Reign of King Henry
VIII._, p. 173 (E. E. T. S.): "Ye, and though our cloth, at the
fyrst begynnyng, wold not be so gud peradventure, as hyt ys made
in other partys, yet, in processe of tyme, I cannot see why, but
that our men, by dylygence, myght attayne therto ryght wel;
specially yf the Prince wold study thereto, in whose powar hyt
lyeth chefely such thyngys to helpe." Also _The Commonweal of
this Realm of England_ (Lamond), and Pauli, _Drei
Denkschriften_, &c.

The age is a commercial one in the more fundamental sense that large economic changes are initiated by classes and individuals. Foreign trade grows enormously in the early years of Henry VIII., though certain branches of it suffer a temporary set back at the end of the reign.[331] The use of money, of which during the first quarter of the century there was a shortage, begins in the middle of it to spread throughout all classes. The industry which for the next three centuries is to be the chief manufacture of England becomes firmly established. Under the influence of widening markets, trade separates from trade.[332] Within single industries there is an increasing subdivision of labour; many links intervene between the group supplying the raw material and the group which hands the finished article to the consumer; a special class of capitalist entrepreneurs[333] appears to hold the various stages of production together, to organise supplies, and to find markets. Side by side with the development of manufacturing industry goes a development in the organisation of finance. In the woollen industry men buy and sell on credit. In tin-mining[334] and coal-mining[335] they sink shafts with borrowed capital. The first joint-stock[336] companies are established in the middle of the century with capitals of from £5000 to £20,000. There is a regular money market in London, there are bill brokers, arbitrage dealings between it and the Continent, adventurers who take advantage of the increasing fluidity of capital to speculate on the difference in the rates at which it can be borrowed in the Low Countries and in England. By the end of the century London has partially ousted Antwerp as the financial capital of Europe.[337]

[331] Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende der
Mittelalters_, Band II., "Zoll und Handelstatistik," pp. 1?-156.

[332] Unwin, _Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries_.

[333] See _e.g._ the account of the East Anglian woollen
industry in the _Victoria County History_, Suffolk (Unwin's
article on "Social and Economic History").

[334] G.R. Lewis, _The Stanneries_, pp. 214?-215, and quotations
from Lansdowne MSS. 76, fol. 34, given there.

[335] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord
Middleton).

[336] W.R. Scott, _Joint-Stock Companies to 1720_, vol. ii.

[337] For a description of "The Exchange and What It is," see T.
Wilson, _Discourse upon Usurie_ (1584): his remark, "The second
kind of bill ... may be called sicke and dry exchange, and is
practised where one doth borrowe money abroad ... not meaning to
make any real payment abroad, but compoundeth with the exchange
to have it returned again," illustrates what is said above. See
also Camden Society, _Dialogue or Confabulation of Two
Travellers_ (1580): "The said Hans had provided £10,000 for the
Prince of Condy upon five in the 100 at interest, and if I would
have the like he would help me unto it. Then I ... pondered what
benefit it would be to me to let it out again at ten in the
hundred to some nobleman in England." Down to about 1560 at any
rate the English Government was constantly in the hands of
foreign capitalists. See Gairdner, _L. and P. Henry VIII._, and
Burgon's _Life of Gresham_.

In the second place, the social arrangements of England are such as to make it certain that this increasing activity will react almost immediately on agriculture and on agrarian relationships. There have been countries where a sharp line has been drawn between trade and agriculture, where the landowner could not engage in trade without degrading himself, where the tradesman could not buy up the noble's land.[338] But this has never been the case in England. In that precocious island the Lombards had hardly settled in Lombard Street, when Mr. Pole's daughters discovered that the fine shades flourished their finest in country air, and there was a market for heiresses among the English aristocracy long before Columbus had revealed to Europe the Eldorado of the New World. From a very early date the successful merchant has bought dignity and social consideration by investing his savings in an estate. The impecunious gentleman has restored the falling fortunes of his house by commercial speculations, of which marriage into a merchant family, if not the least speculative, is not the least profitable. At the beginning of the sixteenth century both movements were going on simultaneously with a rapidity which was before unknown, and which must be explained as the consequence of the great growth of all forms of commercial activity. The rise of great incomes drawn from trade had brought into existence a new order of business men whose enterprise was not confined to the seaport and privileged town, but flowed over into the purchase of landed estates, even before the secularisation of monastic endowments made land speculation the mania of a whole generation. Great nobles plunged into commerce, were granted special trading privileges, and intermarried with the rising middle-class families who were often better off than themselves. In all ages wealth allies itself with wealth, and power with power. As soon as the appearance of rich merchant families creates a fresh and powerful interest in society, the old social system and the new[339] coalesce, and each learns from the other--the merchant how to make a display as a landed proprietor and a Justice of the Peace, the old-fashioned landlord how to cut down expenses and squeeze the utmost farthing out of his property in the best City manner. Even if the political and economic environment had remained unchanged, the mere formation of commercial capital and of a moneyed class could hardly have failed to work a slow revolution in agrarian relationships.

[338] _e.g._ Prussia before 1807.

[339] For examples see A. Abram, _Social England in the
Fifteenth Century_, especially Part II., chap, ii., "The Rise of
the Middle Class," and Plummer's _Fortescue_, p. 17. In the
_Cely Papers_ (Camden Society), p. 153, a correspondent of
George Cely writes, "yowre sallys made withyn lesse than thys
yere amountes above £2000 sterling."

But the environment did not remain unchanged; and as a consequence, in economic affairs as in religion, the new order came, not gradually, but swiftly and with violence, sapping ancient loyalties, confronting with insoluble problems simple men who desired only to plough the land like their fathers, holding out to the privileged orders that prospect of suddenly increasing their wealth which is the most awful temptation from which any class can pray--if it will pray--to be delivered. On the side of politics a powerful motive for a change in the relations between landlords and tenants was supplied by the Tudor peace. In the turbulent days of the fifteenth century land had still a military and social significance apart from its economic value; lords had ridden out at the head of their retainers to convince a bad neighbour with bows and bills; and a numerous tenantry had been more important than a high pecuniary return from the soil.[340] The Tudor discipline, with its stern prohibition of livery and maintenance, its administrative jurisdictions and tireless bureaucracy, had put down private warfare with a heavy hand, and, by drawing the teeth of feudalism, had made the command of money more important than the command of men. It is easy to underrate the significance of this change, yet it is in a sense more fundamental than any other; for it marks the transition from the mediæval conception of land as the basis of political functions and obligations to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment. Landholding tends, in short, to become commercialised. The meaning of this movement is best understood if one compares with the South and Midlands those parts of England where to the very end of the sixteenth century the older conditions survived. The surveys of many Northumbrian[341] manors reveal throughout this period of rapid agrarian changes the continuance of a very primitive condition of things. The holdings of the customary tenants are often almost rigidly equal; there is hardly any change in their numbers; son succeeds father, and grandson succeeds son, with only the very slightest disturbance. The manorial officials, who in the South were cursed as the agents of evictions and rack-renting, were in the North much concerned with keeping tenants on the soil. At Acklington the tenants, writes Clarkson, "must be helped and rather cherished for service sake." At High Buston the holdings of the tenantry have been increased in order that "they should the better live and do their dutiful service to their Lord and master," and a freeholder is rebuked for action which results in curtailing the commonable area on the ground that "the tenants be but poor men and be not well horsed, as they are bound by their copies." At Tughall[342] the surveyor complains bitterly in 1567 that in time past, apparently a long time past, twenty-three tenants had been reduced to eight by "such as nothing regard his lordship's service, nor the commonwealth." To what are we to ascribe this permanence of tenure among the peasants, this exceptional solicitude for the maintenance of a numerous tenantry on the part of surveyors? Partly, no doubt, to the fact that Northumberland lay apart from the main stream of commercial life, and was as yet little affected by the growth of the woollen industry. Mainly, however, it was the result of the military importance of a numerous tenantry on the Northumbrian border. In that wild corner which is neither England nor Scotland, English and Scots, Scroopes and bold Buccleughs, gnash their teeth at each other across the wan water of the Eden. In the long northern evenings about Lammastide moormen win their hay with axes in their belts and bows piled in the corner of the field, and customary tenants are bound by their copies to provide horse and armour, and to ride to the musters in person or by proxy. No wonder that while elsewhere landlords pore over their accounts of wool or timber, in Northumberland they should measure their wealth by the men whom they can bring out when the summons goes, and insist on feudal obligations with a rigour unknown in the South. When any night Scotch[343] raiders may come storming over the marches, any night the red cock may crow up to the very walls of merry Carlisle, a holding means not only a piece of land that grows wheat and feeds sheep, but a horseman in harness; and the dropping out of a holding, or its merging in that of some one else, results in the weakening of the force on which the peace of the border depends. As a consequence, there is nothing like free trade in land between the tenants, such as developed in the South under the forms of surrender and admission, and there is little incentive for the lord or his officials to get rid of them. Such an exceptional state of things comes to an end in Northumberland with the union of the two Crowns under James I., and its termination is the signal for an attempt to break down customary tenures on the part both of the Crown[344] and of private landowners.[345] But it survives a century longer on the border than it does elsewhere, and while it lasts it offers a standard by which may be measured the extent and significance of the change which is overtaking agrarian relationships in other parts of England, where commerce is more developed, and where, since a tenant can no longer serve his lord by fighting, a sheep may easily be more valuable than a man. With the development of a strong central Government the military strength of the great landlords was broken, though it blazed up in the Pilgrimage of Grace and in the rebellion of 1569, and as a consequence they turned their attention to getting the maximum economic return from the soil, or to adding to their social dignity by parks, instead of maintaining a large body of tenants upon it.[346]

[340] See the Paston Letters, _passim_; and also the account
given in _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord
Middleton), 142?-145, of the marvellous doings of Sir Gylles
Strangways in Dorsetshire as late as 1539; pp. 115?-117 contain
a similar case of private warfare from the year 1477.

[341] _Northumberland County History_, _e.g._ Amble (vol. v.),
Acklington (_ibid._), High Buston (_ibid._), Birling (_ibid._);
vol. viii. p. 230, figures as to eight manors in Tynmouthshire.
At Birling out of ten names which appear in the surveys of 1567,
eight reappear in 1616; at Acklington, out of eighteen names,
nine reappear; at High Buston, out of four names, four reappear
in 1616 and two in 1702. But in parts of the county there were
rapid changes at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the
seventeenth centuries; see below, pp. 257-258 and 260.

[342] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350: "In the
ancient tyme the fermor of the demaines had the charge of the
tenants of the said lordship as bailiff, with the fee of £3, 0s.
5d. by year. Then was the town of Tughall planted with xi
husbandmen well horsed and in good order, viii cottagers, iiii
cotterells, one common smith for the relief and better aid of
the said tenants and bailiff, being in number 23 householders,
besides the demains, which are nowe by suche as nothing regard
his lordship's service nor the commonwealthe brought to 8
farmers only, to the great decay of his lordship's service and
discommodity of the said commonwealth."

[343] See _e.g._ the ballad of "Kinmont Willie," turning on an
incident which occurred in 1596.

[344] _Cal. S. P. D. James I._, vol. cxxxii., July 27, 1622.
Letter to the Bishop of Durham to confer with the judges of
Assize for the Northern Counties touching tenant-right or
customary estate of inheritance claimed in those parts, ordering
them to abide strictly by the King's Proclamation against
tenant-right, or the holding of lands by border service, to
countenance no claim founded thereupon, and to acquaint the
tenants of his Majesty's pleasure therein, giving them no hope
to the contrary. Apparently the instructions were not carried
out, as in 1642 the Long Parliament was discussing the subject
of the border tenures (Rushworth _Collections_, Pt. III., vol.
ii. p. 86).

[345] See below, pp. 257?-258.

[346] The effect of the Tudor policy on the land system is
excellently described by Harrington in _Oceana_, and also in
_The Art of Law-giving_: "Henry VII. being conscious of the
infirmity of his title, yet finding with what strength and
vigour he was brought in by the Nobility, conceived jealousy of
the like power in case of a decay or change of affections.
_Nondum orbis adoraverat Roman._ The lords yet led country
lives; their houses were open to retainers, men experienced in
military affairs and capable of commanding; their hospitality
was the delight of their tenants who by their tenure or
dependence were obliged to follow their lords in arms. So that,
this being the Militia of the nation, a few noblemen
discontented could at any time levy a great army, the effect
whereof both in the Barons Wars and those of York and Lancaster
had been well known to divers kings. This state of things was
that which enabled Henry VII. to make his advantage of
troublesome times and the frequent unruliness of retainers;
while, under pretence of curbing riots, he obtained the passing
of such laws as did cut off these retainers, whereby the
nobility wholly lost their officers. Then, whereas the
dependence of the people on their lords was of a strict ty or
nature, he found means to loosen this also by laws which he
obtained upon a fair pretence, even that of Population. But the
nobility, who by the former law had lost their officers, by this
lost their soldiery. Yet remained to them their estates, till
the same Prince introducing the Statutes for alienations, these
also became loose; and the lords, less taken (for the reasons
shown) with their country lives, where their trains were
clipped, by degrees became more resident at court, where greater
pomp and expense by the Statute of Alienations began to plume
them of their Estates" (Harrington, _Works_, 1700 edition, pp.
388-?389).

The change meant an advance in civilisation among the upper classes, and a tightening of economic pressure upon the peasantry. The feudal seigneur had at his worst been a lawless tyrant, and at his best a despotic parent. But he had governed his estate as the sovereign, often the resident sovereign, of a petty kingdom, whose interests were roughly identical with his own; and though his depredations were a terror to his neighbours, his own tenants had little to fear from them, for his tenants were the force on which his very existence depended. In the new political conditions his occupation was gone, and his place was taken by two types of landed proprietor who were at once more peaceable and less popular. On the one hand, there emerges the landlord who is a laborious and acute man of business, and who sets about exploiting the material resources of his estate with the instincts of a shopkeeper and the methods of a land-agent. Of this kind are the Willoughbys[347] in the Midlands and the Delavales[348] in Northumberland. Often they are sheep-farmers. When their land is rich in minerals they sink coal-pits and mine for iron ore. The predecessors of the captains of industry of two and a half centuries later, they employ labour on a large scale, they open up trade across country by river, they higgle over port dues, they experiment with new inventions, they clear away without mercy any customary rights which conflict with their own. On the other hand, there are the gentry who buzz about the Court, regard London as the centre of the universe, and have periodically to be ordered home to look after the affairs of their country-sides by a peremptory mandate from the Government. When this type becomes prominent, in the reign of Elizabeth, it most commonly spends its time in the interminable pursuit of profitable sinecures, and in endeavouring to induce the City to believe that thrice-mortgaged estates are a gilt-edged security. At its worst it produces Sir Petronel Flash,[349] a figure as typical of the sixteenth century as Squire Western is of the eighteenth. At its best it patronises the arts, sets sail for a new world of drama and romance, sighs over Vergil's Eclogues, and goes pricking, almost too graceful a chivalry, through the fairy kingdoms of Spenser. But the men of business, and the men of fashion, and the patrons of literature, are alike in being the symptoms of a new economic and political system, a system which has shorn landownership of the territorial sovereignty which had gone with it, broken down the personal relations of landlord and tenant, and, by turning agriculture into a business, has made it at once more profitable and less strenuous for the former, more exacting and less stable for the latter, than it had been when a lordlord was not only a drawer of rents but a local sovereign, a tenant not only a source of income but a dependent who was bound by a tie which was almost sacramental. "It was never a merry world since gentlemen came up"; "never so many gentlemen and so little gentleness"; "the commons long since did rise in Spain and kill the gentlemen, and since have lived merrily there"; such are some of the blessings the new landlords would hear from men who grumble to their mates between the spells of shearing sheep and mowing hay. Those who have watched the uncouth, rough-handed master of a backward industry, who has wrought among his workmen as a friend or a tyrant, blossom, under the fertilising influence of expanding markets, into the sedate suburban capitalist who sets up a country house in the second generation and sends his sons to Oxford in the third, and who scientifically speeds up his distant operatives through the mediation of an army of managers and assistant-managers and foremen, will not need to be reminded that economic changes which bring civilisation to one class may often be fraught with ruin to another. The brilliant age which begins with Elizabeth gleams against a background of social squalor and misery. The descendant of the illiterate, bloody-minded baron who is muzzled by Henry VII. becomes a courteous gentleman who rhapsodises in verse at the Court of Gloriana. But all that the peasants know is that his land-agents[350] are harsher. An Earl of Pembroke has been given immortality by Shakespeare. But the first of his name had founded the family on estates which had belonged to the Abbey of Wilton,[351] and by his exactions had provoked the Wiltshire peasants into rebellion. The Raleigh family--it was a Raleigh's chance gibe at the old religion which set the West in a blaze in 1549--had endowed itself with a manor torn from the see of Wells,[352] as the Grenvilles had done with the lands of Buckland Abbey. The gentle Sidney's _Arcadia_ is one of the glories of the age, and it was composed, if we may trust tradition, in the park at the Herberts' country-seat at Washerne,[353] which they had made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants. The dramatists who reflect the high popular estimation of the freeholder[354] see nothing in the grievances of Mouldy and Bullcalf except the disposition of an ignorant populace to cry for the moon. Shakespeare's Cade, with his programme[355] of seven half-penny loaves for a penny, and the three-hooped pot that shall have ten hoops, is so far proposing only what an energetic mayor is quite prepared to carry out before breakfast. His crowning absurdity, which makes the stalls hiss and the pit cheer, is the promise that "all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass." A few months after these words were printed Cade came to life in earnest. In the autumn of 1596 some Oxfordshire[356] artisans and peasants organised a revolt against "the gentlemen who took the commons," and from that year onwards to 1601 Parliament and the Council had their hands full of the question of enclosures. Men feel the contrast, even when it is only just beginning, and with natural inconsistency sigh for the old order even while they are glorifying the new. "Princes and Lords," wrote Henry VIII.'s chaplain[357] about 1538, "seldom look to the good order and wealth of their subjects, only they look to the receiving of their rents and revenues of their lands with great study of enhancing thereof, to the further maintaining of their pompous state; so that if their subjects do their duty therein justly, paying their rents at time affixed, for the rest they care not (as is commonly said) 'whether they sink or swim'"!

[347] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 5567 (Report on the MSS. of Lord
Middleton), especially the entries relating to the development
of the coal trade.

[348] _Northumberland County History_, vol. viii., p. 238, vol.
ix. (under Cowpen). Robert Delavale apparently began life as an
agent to the Earl of Northumberland, but he owned considerable
property himself; in 1605 the whole of the lands of Cowpen were
in his hands. He was an energetic encloser; see below, p. 260.

[349] See Marston's _Eastward Ho!_

[350] See the following extract (Lodge, _Illustrations of
English History_, iii., 41). William Hammond to the Earl of
Shrewsbury on the subject of raising money on the latter's
estates from Palavicini, a moneylender: "Though his froward
fortune hath made him unable to stand you almost in any steadde,
hee hathe dealt with Mr. Maynard to aide him in the provision of
this £3000 against the second of next month. He finds him very
backwarde to disburse any money upon bond or any other security
but lands; neither will he deal with lands in any way of
mortgage for years or any long time, but only 2 or 3 months....
Yf, therefore, it stands with your honour's good liking to make
a conveyance of Kingston to Sir Horatio ... after the rate of
£7000 ... and withal to passe it in this absolute sort that iff
the money then laid out by them for your Honour's use bee not
repaid on May day next, that they fully enjoy and possess the
lands as their owne.... Hee saith besides that his surveyors
have certified him £500 will bee the most the lands will ever
yeald yerely rent, without racking and oppressions, which are no
course for suche meane men as they be to take."

[351] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manor of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_, Straton's introduction.

[352] _History of the Parish of Wiveliscombe_, by Hancock. For
Walter Raleigh and the revolt of 1549, see the dramatic account
given by Holinshed. The incident is described in Froude's
_Edward VI._ For the Grenvilles and Buckland Abbey see _Trans.
Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. vi. It ultimately came to Francis Drake.

[353] Straton's introduction to _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.

[354] _e.g._ Heywood's _A Woman Killed with Kindness_, Act iii.
sc. 1.

[355] _Henry VI._, Part II., Act iv. scene 2. I am indebted for
the reference to Professor Unwin. Part II. was first printed in
1595.

[356] _Hist. MSS. Com._, MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part
III., pp. 49?-50: "The attorney-general to Mr. Robert Cecil.
Some information concerning those that intended the rebellion in
Oxfordshire. Bartholemew Stere, carpenter ... was the first
person of this insurrection. His outward pretence was to
overthrow enclosures, and to help the poor commonalty, that were
like to perish for want of corn, but intended to kill the
gentlemen of that county and take the spoil, affirming that the
commons long since in Spain did rise and kill the gentlemen in
Spain and sithen have lived merrily there. After that he meant
to have gone to London and joined with the prentices ... and it
was but a month's work to overrun England."

[357] E. E. T. S., _England in the Reign of Henry VIII._, p. 85.

While the centralised government of the Tudors gave a new bias to the interests of landlords by stripping them of part of their political power, economic changes were hurrying the more enterprising among them into novel methods of estate management. In the situation which developed in the first fifty years of the sixteenth century they were exposed to pressure from two sides at once. They stood to gain much if they adapted their farming to meet the new commercial conditions. They stood to lose much if they were so conservative as to adhere to the old methods. The explanation of the agrarian revolution most generally given by contemporary observers was that enclosing was due to the increased profitableness of pasture farming, consequent upon the development of the textile industries; and though a recent writer[358] has endeavoured to show that most of the land enclosed was used for tillage, and that therefore this explanation cannot hold good, there does not seem any valid reason for disputing it. The testimony of observers is very strong; they might be mistaken as to the extent of the movement towards pasture, but hardly as to its tendency; and with scarcely an exception they point to the growth of the woollen trade as the chief motive for enclosing.

[358] See the discussion between Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay
in _Trans. Royal Hist. Society_, vol. xiv., new series.

Moreover, their evidence is confirmed by the proofs which we possess of the expansion of the woollen industry at the end of the fifteenth century. It is true that the figures collected by Thorold Rogers do not enable any satisfactory correlation to be made between the rise in wool prices and the progress of pasture farming. But they are statistically much too unreliable to upset the direct evidence of eyewitnesses, being based on various measures which are somewhat arbitrarily reduced to a supposed common standard, relating to many different qualities of wool, and being weighted in particular years by a preponderance of prices from particular counties which are sometimes clearly not typical at all. The figures of Schanz[359] as to the export trade in wool and woollen cloths, are a sufficient proof of the growth in the output of wool, and therefore in the growth of sheep-farming. They show that while the export of unmanufactured wool fell off in the sixteenth century, that of grey cloth grew enormously. In 1354 the export had been 4774-1/2 pieces, from 1509 to 1523 it averaged 84,789 pieces a year, from 1524 to 1533, 91,394 pieces, from 1534 to 1539, 102,647 pieces, and from 1540 to 1547, 122,354 pieces, while in 1554 the total manufacture was estimated at 160,000 pieces of cloth and 250,000 pieces of hosiery. This expansion of the manufactured cloth industry was only the culmination of a growth which had been going on gradually for a hundred years. In 1464 the Flemish manufacturers[360] were complaining that their market had been invaded by English clothiers. Merchants like the Celys shipped enormous consignments of wool from the Cotswolds to the Continent.[361] The large number of sheep kept in England at the end of the fifteenth century was the amazement of foreigners;[362] and English buyers groaned over the high prices to which wool was driven by the competition of continental buyers.[363] The revolution in the technique of agriculture when sucked into the vortex of expanding commerce is, in fact, simply an early, and, owing to the immobility of sixteenth century conditions, a peculiarly striking example of that reaction of widening markets on the methods of production, which is one of the best established of economic generalisations.

[359] Schanz, _Englische Handelspolitik gegen Ende des
Mittelalters_, Band II., p. 18.

[360] Abram, _Social England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 33.

[361] _Ibid._, pp. 40-41.

[362] Camden Society (1847), _Italian Relation of England_.

[363] Camden Society (third series, vol. i.), _Cely Papers_. In
1480 the elder Cely writes: "I have not bought this year a loke
of woll, for the woll of Cottyswolde is bought by the
Lombardys;" and in the following year, "Ye avyse me for to buye
woll in Cottyswolde, bot it is at grate prise, 3s. 4d. a tod,
and gret ryding for woll in Cottyswolde as was any yere this vii
yere."

At the same time, the revolution was probably hastened by a change in commercial policy, which, while encouraging the export trade in woollen cloth, was after 1485 less favourable to the corn-grower. During the greater part of the fifteenth[364] century the Government was forced by the agrarian interests to allow freedom of export for grain except when prices reached a certain height, after which point an export licence was required. But the victory of Henry VII. produced a policy which was less influenced by the traditional object of helping the corn-growing landlords, and more favourable to commerce and the middle classes on which the new monarchy rested. In 1491[365] the export of grain, except with a special licence, was forbidden altogether, and in 1512 the prohibition was repeated by Henry VIII. Though the administration of such a policy must have been difficult, and its exact effect must be a matter of conjecture, the view taken by some contemporaries,[366] that it was a subordinate cause which stimulated the abandonment of old agricultural methods and caused a good deal of land to go out of cultivation, is at any rate intrinsically probable.

[364] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_,
Early and Middle Ages, pp. 447-448. The statute sanctioning
export without licence when the price was below 6s. 8d. was 15
Hen. VI., c. 2, which was made perpetual by 23 Hen. VI., c. 5. 3
Ed. IV., c. 2, forbade the importation of foreign corn except
when the price reached 6s. 8d.

[365] _Ibid._, Modern Times, Part I., p. 85.

[366] _e.g. The Commonweal of this Realm of England_, pp.
54-60.