The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

Chapter II: The Reaction of the Agrarian Changes on the Peasantry (2)

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[439] If the common was so large that it had been unnecessary to
"stint" it, why did the city object to the lord putting
additional beasts on? I take the situation to be that the
Prior--probably tempted by the profitableness of sheep-farming
in the latter part of the fifteenth century--diminished the
pasture which the city could use, by putting on many more beasts
than ever before, which, in the absence of a recognised "stint,"
he was able to do without violating any custom, as he would have
done if there had been a customary limit, as on many manors.
Another aspect of the problem is illustrated by a story of a
similar struggle at Wootton Basset,[440] a small borough in
Wiltshire. Early in the seventeenth century the mayor and
freemen of Wootton Basset petition Parliament to "enact
something for us, that we may enjoy our right again." What they
want is a restoration of certain rights of common which a
powerful neighbour has taken from them. Their story--they seem
to rehearse it with tears in their eyes--is a perfect Odyssey of
misfortunes. According to them, the manor of Wootton Basset had
passed in 1555 into the hands of Sir Francis Englefield, who
enclosed a park containing 2000 acres, in which the free tenants
had hitherto had rights of pasture, and had them without stint,
owing to its great size. This wicked man showed them, however, a
sort of contemptuous compassion. He left them 100 acres, with
which they had to be content, and the rights over which they
carefully apportioned, "to the Mayor for the time being two
cowes feeding, and to the constable one cowe feeding, and to
every inhabitant of the said Borough, each and every of them,
one cowe feeding and no more, as well the poore as the riche."
These rights of common were in practice vested in all the
tenements in the town (not only, it would appear, the free
tenements), and property was bought and sold subject to them.
The occasion of the petition was that the grand nephew of the
original grantee, having apparently got, by some means which the
petitioners could not explain, the title deed of the common into
his hands, set out to ruin those whom his ancestor had only
robbed. He began lawsuits against the free tenants, excluded
them from the 100 acres of common which remained to them, and
put his own cattle on it. The suits, according to our story,
were purposely deferred, and dragged on so long that one of the
free tenants was actually made bankrupt by legal charges and the
rest were impoverished, the common being used meantime by the
plaintiff, Sir Francis Englefield.

[440] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii. These are the
people whom Heaven protected in the way described on p. 148
note. Observe what this little community endured. (i.) Sir
Francis Englefield, senior, seizes 1900 out of 2000 acres of
their common. (ii.) Sir Francis Englefield, junior, seizes "the
charter of our town ... and the deed of the said common." (iii.)
He tries to seize the remaining 100 acres, and ruins them by
lawsuits "for the space of seven or eight years at the least,
and never suffers any one to come to triall in all that space
... that the said Free tenants were not able to wage law any
longer, for one John Rous ... was thereby enforced to sell all
his land (to the value of £500) with following the suits in law,
and many were thereby impoverished." (iv.) He turns them out of
their shops in the market-place, and introduces instead "a
stranger that liveth not in the town." (v.) He appoints his own
nominee as mayor, in defiance of the custom which requires him
to appoint one of two men submitted to him by the jury. (vi.) He
prevents his victims from signing this petition by threats of
eviction. ("They are fearful that they shall be put forth of
their bargaines, and then they shall not tell how to live,
otherwise they would have set to their hands.")

These examples of struggles over rights of common pasture are instructive in several ways. In the first place, they suggest that the freeholders were regarded as having a better title than the rest of the community, and that they led the movement to resist encroachments for that reason. It is the free tenants who petition Parliament for redress, and the free tenants who are sued. If they lose their case it is not worth while, it seems, for the customary tenants to take any action. In the second place, they show that the classes who have the best legal title to right of pasture are not at all commensurate with the classes who will lose if they are taken away. Whatever the legal rights of the other tenants may be they have as much practical benefit out of the common, and as great an interest in protecting it against encroachments, as the freeholders have. When the shearing away of part of it makes it necessary to limit the number of beasts to be kept there, the limitation is applied to free and customary tenements alike without distinction, and both classes of tenements are bought and sold on the understanding that they carry with them a right of common pasture. In the third place, the case of Wootton Basset is one of many examples of the way in which poverty, ignorance of the law, and the practical difficulties of getting justice against a powerful landlord, prevent humble litigants from enforcing their legal rights. Finally, it reinforces what has been said above as to the economic importance of rights of pasture. The arrangements which are made at Wootton Basset when the first assault upon the commons takes place show clearly that grazing land is thought of as a quite indispensable adjunct to every man's holding, and its loss is so disastrous to the community that they are ready to be slowly bled to death by lawyer's fees, rather than be beggared at a blow by submitting tamely without a contest.

We have dwelt at some length on the loss of rights of common, because the misleading modern associations of the word seem sometimes to prevent a proper appreciation of the very important place which they occupied in the agricultural economy of our period. It must be confessed, however, that, in dealing with them first, we have reversed the order in which grievances due to enclosure were set out by the writers of the time. Though there are many bitter complaints against the enclosure of commons, it was, notwithstanding this, less the loss of rights of pasture than the consolidation of small tenancies into great farms, which aroused public excitement, at any rate, in the southern and midland counties. In the Statutes the words enclosure and depopulation are again and again combined as though they were almost synonymous; and if a contemporary had been asked to explain the special evils most characteristic of enclosing, he would certainly have given the first place to the "engrossing of farms" and "depopulation," the throwing together of peasant holdings and the eviction of their tenants. We must now examine this side of the movement. Did the displacement of tenants through the concentration of properties take place on the large scale suggested by the passionate outbursts of contemporary writers, or were their complaints as to empty villages and ruined churches mere rhetorical exaggeration? Again, what was the legal position of the classes of people who suffered? Were they entirely without the protection of the law, or did they fail to obtain legal protection principally in consequence of ignorance and intimidation?

It is easy to understand the strong motives for throwing together peasant holdings, if we keep our eyes on the picture of agricultural arrangements given in the maps. It will be seen that the different blocks of demesne land are often separated from each other by two or three strips belonging to the smaller tenantry, and that if such strips were removed they could be fitted together into a wide and unbroken expanse of territory. The manorial authorities have often, it is clear, been for a long time consolidating the demesne by exchange and purchase, so as to avoid the wastefulness of having land scattered in a hundred separate pieces, and the only obstacle to its complete unification consists of strips and patches which are held by tenants who are for one reason or another unwilling to sell, small spits and islands which stand out of the surrounding sea. Clearly there is an enormous temptation to make the tide flow over them as well, to complete the circuit by merging them in the demesne. Look, for example, at maps Nos. III., IV., and V. Here it is evident that there has been a good deal of consolidation. Both the tenants and the lord of the manor have been forming their strips into compact blocks. To unity of ownership has been added something like spatial unity. Still the process is by no means complete. There are awkward little pieces of land which interrupt the smooth surface of the great estate, pieces which one will have to walk round, where, if the demesne is used as arable, the demesne plough must stop, where, if it is used as pasture, a fence must be erected to shut out the demesne sheep. Or walk down a typical field and mark how the land is held. Here are the strips which one would pass, if one travelled from end to end of two parallel furlongs at West Lexham[441] in Norfolk in the year 1575. They are copied in order from the map--

These furlongs, though the predominance of demesne land in them makes them not quite typical, illustrate sufficiently the awkward way in which the great farmer's stretch of land is interrupted by the little property of a freeholder or copyholder. The strips of Will Yelverton, Robert Clement, Will Lee, and Will Gell must have been a constant eyesore to the manorial authorities. Buy them out or evict them, and then the two furlongs will consist of nothing but demesne land and glebe. They will be two fields of quite a modern pattern and quite ready for enclosure. Leave these tenants where they are, and they are a permanent obstacle to unified management, all the more annoying because they are so petty. They may even insist on the farmer observing the same course of cultivation as themselves, and on turning their beasts to common on his land after harvest! Is it not inevitable that, as soon as the lord is pushed by economic forces into making his estate yield the maximum money return irrespective of a numerous tenantry or of the ancient methods of tillage, he should try in any way he can to get rid of what to him are troublesome excrescences, that he should begin questioning titles, screwing up rents, turning copyhold to leasehold?

If our hypothesis is correct we ought to be able to find manors where the strips formerly held by tenants have been merged in the demesne, so as to form a continuous expanse, in the hands of the lord or his farmer, out of what was formerly a collection of fragments of separate holdings. To see it verified, let us turn to another manor in the same county, that of Walsingham,[442] which was surveyed in the reign of Henry VIII. Here is a statement of the land which is "in the hands of the lord" in the west field--

IN THE WEST FELDE

1. In manus domine [sic] 1/2 acre of land of the tenement Marre.
2. " " 1-1/2 roods of the tenement Furell.
3. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Stanx.
4. " " 1 acre, 1 rood land of the tenement Gryne.
5. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Scot.
6. " " 3-1/2 roods land of the tenement Townsend.
7. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Byelaugh.
8. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Wheteloffe.
9. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Scutt.
10. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Coyefor.
11. " " 1 acre with the gravel pit.
12. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Nedwyn.
13. " " 1 acre land late of J. Cockerell.
14. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Gilbert.
15. " " 1 acre and 1 rood of the tenement Spotell.
16. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Spotell.
17. " " 3 roods land of the tenement Husbond.
18. " " 1 acre of the tenement Rodengh.
19. " " 1/2 acre land of the tenement Pymans.
20. " " 3 roods of the tenement Scutt.
21. " " 1 acre of decay of the tenement Spotell.

[441] Holkham MSS., Map of West Lexham.

[442] R.O. _Aug. Off. Misc. Bks._, vol. cccxcix., f. 201 ff.

Here one has a field divided into twenty-one strips. Of these strips eighteen had at one time been in the occupation of separate individuals. The picture is just what we are accustomed to in mediæval surveys. It is illustrated sufficiently for our purpose by the map of part of Salford, on page 163. But some time before this survey of Walsingham was made a great change had taken place. The separate fragments had been taken out of the hands of the tenants and combined in the hands of the lord; the field is ready for conversion to pasture and for enclosure. How extremely profitable it might be to substitute a single large farm for a number of small holdings is proved by Manorial Rentals. Taking five manors in Wiltshire in the year 1568, one finds that the rents paid by the farmer of the demesne work out at 1s. 6d., 7-3/4d., 1s. 5-3/4d., 1s. 1-3/4d., 1s. 5-1/2d. per acre; those paid by the customary tenants at 7-1/2d., 5d., 1s. 0-3/4d., 5-3/4d., 5-3/4d. per acre.[443]

[443] The manors are South Newton, Winterbourne Basset,
Knyghton, Donnington, and Estoverton and Phipheld (Roxburghe
Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_).

The difference is, in itself, enough to explain a decided movement towards an increase in the size of the unit of agriculture. But of course a powerful incentive to such procedure was supplied by the growth of pasture farming. In the days when the cultivation of the demesne depended on the labour of the tenants there was obviously bound to be a certain proportion between the land belonging to the former and the land held by the latter, a proportion which might be expressed by saying "no tenants, no demesne cultivation; no demesne cultivation, no income for the lord." But when tillage was replaced by pasture farming this economic rule of three ceased to work. On the one hand, the limit of size imposed on the demesne farm by considerations of management was removed or at any rate enormously extended, for many thousand sheep could be fed by two or three shepherds. On the other hand, the economic motive for preventing a decline in the number of small landholders was weakened, because there was little use for their labour on a pasture farm; while there was a great deal of use for their land, if only it could be cleared of existing rights and added to it. We have, in fact, an ordinary case of the depreciation of particular[444] kinds of human labour in comparison with capital, of the kind to which the modern world has become accustomed in the case of machinery--become accustomed and become callous.

[444] This, of course, is not inconsistent with a general
appreciation, _i.e._ a general rise in wages and fall in the
rate of interest.

We shall perhaps best give precision to our ideas of the sort of policy which landlords were inclined to adopt, by taking a single concrete instance, though of course conditions varied locally very much from place to place. It comes from Hartley[445] in Northumberland, where Robert Delavale was lord of the manor in the reign of Elizabeth. The narrator is his cousin, Joshua Delavale--

"Since which time" (_i.e._ 16 Eliz.), he says, "the said Robert
Delavale purchased all the freeholder's lands and tenements,
displaced the said tenants, defaced their tenements, converted
their tillage to pasture, being 720 acres of arable ground or
thereabouts, and made one demaine, whereon there is but three
plows now kept by hinds and servants, besides the 720 acres. So
that where there was then in Hartley 15 serviceable men
furnished with sufficient horse and furniture, there is now not
any, nor hath been these 20 years last past or thereabouts."

Here we get a complete example of the various steps which are taken to build up a great pasture farm. The freeholders are bought out; the other tenants are (it is to be inferred) evicted summarily; their houses are pulled down; their land is thrown into the demesne; the whole area is let down to pasture and managed by hired labourers, while the land-holding population is turned adrift. It is worth noticing that the word "enclosing" is not used. All the drastic changes that are usually ascribed to enclosure can on occasion take place without it. Indeed, the more drastic they are the less need is there to complete them by the erection of fences, for the smaller the population left to commit encroachments.

[445] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. p. 124. For a
similar case of evictions by Delavale, showing how they were
carried out, _ibid._, pp. 201-?202: "There was in Seaton
Delavale township 12 tenements, whereon there dwelt 12 able men
sufficiently furnished with horse and furniture to serve his
Majestie ... who paid 46s. 8d. rent yearlie a piece or
thereabouts. All the said tenants and their successors saving 5
the said Robert Delavale eyther thrust out of their fermholds or
weried them by taking excessive fines, increasing of their rents
unto £3 a piece, and withdrawing part of their best land and
meadow from their tenements ... by taking their good land from
them and compelling them to winne moorishe and heathe ground,
and after their hedging heth ground to their great charge, and
paying a great fine, and bestowing great reparation on building
their tenements, he quite thrust them off in one yeare, refusing
either to repay the fine or to repay the charge bestowed in
diking or building.... The said seven fermholds displaced had to
every one of them 60 acres of arable land, viz. 20 in every
field at the least, as the tenants affirme, which amounteth to
480 acres of land yearlie or thereabouts, converted for the most
part from tillage to pasture, and united to the demaine of the
lordship of Seaton Delavale."

If such a process were general or even common, we should certainly have the materials of a social revolution. But was it? The much discussed question of the effect of the agrarian changes on the numbers of the rural population is one which it is not possible to answer with any approach to accuracy, owing to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient number of continuous series of surveys and rentals. Those relating to single years tell mainly results, when what we want to see is a process. Nevertheless even single surveys are not altogether without value. They show the distribution of land between different classes at a given moment, and sometimes contain indications of the changes by which the existing distribution was reached. In particular they show us the relative areas of the demesne farm and of the land in the hands of all other classes of tenants. And this has a certain interest. For since the demesne farm on a manor where conditions approximated most closely to those of the Middle Ages and had been least affected by more recent changes, rarely contained more than half the whole manorial territory and generally not so much, there is a _prima facie_ case for surmising concentration of holdings and evictions when one finds two-thirds, three-quarters, or even ninety per cent. of it in the hands of one large farmer. It is, however, a very tedious task calculating the acreage held by a number of different tenants, and this may perhaps excuse the small number of instances which are given below. They are as follows:--

TABLE XII

+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+
| | (I.) | (II.) | |
| Manor. | Whole Area | Area held | Percentage |
| | Ascertainable. | by Farmers | of |
| | [446] | of Demesnes.| (II.) to (I.).|
+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+
|Donnyngton | 1523-1/2 | 418 | 27.8 |
|Salford | 856 | 295 | 34.4 |
|Estoverton and Phipheld| 1160 | 484-3/4 | 41.0 |
|Weedon Weston | 715 | 301 | 42.0 |
|South Newton | 1365 | 632 | 46.3 |
|Washerne | 1249 | 707 (in | 56.6 |
| | | hands of | |
| | | lord) | |
|Knyghton | 452 | 268 | 59.2 |
|Bishopeston | 1280 | 805 | 62.9 |
|Gamlingay Merton | 283-1/2 | 199-3/4 | 70.3 |
|Winterborne Basset | 708-1/2 | 532 | 75.1 |
|Billingford | 666 | 507 | 76.1 |
|Gamlingay Avenells[447]| 531-3/4 | 420-1/4 | 79.0 |
|Domerham[448] | 960-1/2 | 824-1/2 | 85.8 |
|Ewerne | 473 | 428 | 90.5 |
|Burdonsball | 190 | 190 | 100.0 |
|Whadborough | 469 | 469 | 100.0 |
+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+

[446] In several cases the freeholders' lands are not stated in
the survey, and are therefore not included in this table.

[447] A few acres described as "held without title" are omitted.

[448] I am not sure that there are not other lands in Domerham
not included in the survey or in the demesne. If this is so, the
proportion of the latter to the rest of the manorial land would
of course be reduced.

It will be seen that on eight of these sixteen manors more than two-thirds of the whole area, and on seven more than three-quarters, is in the hands of one individual, the farmer of the demesnes. These figures are at any rate not inconsistent with a considerable consolidation of tenancies and displacement of tenants, though we cannot say that they prove it.

Occasionally the surveys take us behind this presumptive evidence and enable us to trace the building up of large farms out of small holdings. For example, at Ormesby,[449] in 1516, the lord of the manor held 219 acres "late in farm" of six tenants. At Domerham,[450] some time before 1568, enclosure of land in the open fields and conversion of arable to pasture had been carried out by the largest of the three farmers. The process had been accompanied by depopulation; for in 1568 his farm included pieces of land which had formerly belonged to four smaller tenants, and the two large farms which he held had formerly been in separate hands. It is probable that at Winterbourne Basset[451] somewhat the same movement had taken place. In 1436 two carucates of land were held by an unspecified number of tenants; in 1568 three customary tenants are still found there, but three-quarters of the manor is in the hands of a single farmer who has recently enclosed a field of 40 acres. Elsewhere one can fill in the picture in somewhat greater detail. At Tughall,[452] in Northumberland, the surveyor tells us in 1567, the demesne lands had been let to a farmer, who acted as the lord's bailiff and collected the rents and services of the other tenants. He used his position to partition the manor so as to get rid of the intermingled holdings, and at the same time so harassed the smaller tenants that they were reduced from twenty-three to eight. At Cowpen[453] a similar concentration of land was going on at the end of the sixteenth century; first five tenancies were thrown into one, and then the whole manor passed into the hands of one large farmer. At Newham,[454] near Alnwick, we are told that a hundred and forty men, women, and children were evicted simultaneously. At Seaton[455] Delavale, the Robert Delavale who had depopulated Hartly, turned adrift seven families out of twelve. The map of a Leicestershire manor which is reproduced opposite page 223 is more eloquent than many lamentations. In "the place where the town of Whadboroughe once stood" there was by 1620 not a single tenant left. The whole of it formed one great expanse of pasture.

[449] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 22, No. 18.

[450] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.

[451] _Ibid._, and Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of
Ambresbury.

[452] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350.

[453] _Ibid._, vol. ix., Cowpen.

[454] _Ibid._, vol. i. p. 275.

[455] _Ibid._, vol. ix. pp. 201-202.

But these isolated instances are obviously worthless as a basis for generalisation. The most that can be said of them is that they prove that the writers who spoke of whole towns being depopulated were not romancing. Nor are the statistics offered by contemporaries of any practical help towards determining the social effects of enclosure. Those who state, like Moore[456] (writing in the seventeenth century), that they have seen "in some townes fourteen, sixteen, and twenty tenants discharged of plowing," or, like the Dean of Durham,[457] that "500 ploughs have decayed in a few years" and "of 8000 acres lately in tillage now not 8 score are tilled," may have seen what they say. But these figures are suspiciously round, and the cases are obviously extreme ones, not samples. The one[458] writer who makes an estimate for the whole country, putting the number of persons of all ages displaced between 1485 and 1550 at 300,000, is rash enough to explain how his estimate was reached, and his explanation shows that it was not even a plausible guess.

[456] Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c.

[457] Cal. S. P. D. Eliz., 1595-1597 (p. 347), quoted Gay,
_Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii.

[458] "Certayne Causes gathered together wherein is shewed the
decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (E. E.
T. S. date 1550-1553). "It is to understande ... that there is
in England townes and villages to the number of fifty thousand
and upward, and for every town and village ... there is one
plough decayed since the fyrst year of the reign of King Henry
VII.... The whiche 50,000 ploughs every plough was able to
maintain 6 persons, and nowe they have nothing, but goeth about
in England from dore to dore."

The returns collected for the Government seem at first to take us on to surer ground. Investigations were made by Royal Commissioners[459] in the years 1517-1519, 1548, 1566, 1607, 1632, 1635, and 1636. The returns collected for twenty-three counties by the Commission of 1517, for four counties by those of 1548-1566, and for six counties by that of 1607 have been printed. According to them, it would appear that between 1485 and 1517 about one-half per cent. of the total area of the counties investigated was enclosed, and 6931 persons displaced, the corresponding figures for the period 1578-1607 being 69,758 acres and 2232 evictions. Both in the earlier, and in the later, period, the county which was affected most severely was Northamptonshire, where 2.21 per cent. of the county was returned as enclosed in the years 1485-1517, and in the years 1578-1607 4.30 per cent., the numbers displaced being respectively 1405 and 1444. If we like, we may adopt the conjectural estimates of Professor Gay, and, assuming that the pace of the movement was the same during the years for which we have not information as during those for which we have, may say with him that from 1455 to 1607 the agrarian changes affected about 2.76 of the whole area of twenty-four counties, and displaced something between 30,000 and 50,000 persons.

[459] For a discussion of the value of these reports see Leadam,
_Domesday of Enclosures_, and _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New
Series, vol. vi.; Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series,
vol. xiv. and vol. xviii.; Gay, _Quarterly Journal of
Economics_, vol. xvii. (1902-1903). A useful summary of the
evidence, with a map illustrating the probable geographical
distribution of the movement, is given by Johnson, _The
Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, pp. 42-54 and Map I.

The statistics which have been worked up by Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay from the inquiries of the Government are extremely valuable as showing the geographical distribution of the enclosing movement. It is most powerful in the Midland counties, which were in the sixteenth century the chief granary of the country, and its influence is least in the South-West and South-East. In Somersetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall, Suffolk, Essex and Kent the small enclosures[460] described in Part I. had probably often been carried out by the peasants themselves at an early date, with the result that those districts were, compared with the open field villages of the Midlands, little disturbed. Those parts of the country, in fact, where the peasantry have been most progressive, are relatively unaffected by the changes of our period. They have been inoculated and they are almost immune. On the other hand, one is inclined to say that the figures are not of much value for other purposes. In the nature of things they cannot be reliable, and, if they were reliable, they would not really answer the most important questions which are asked about the social results of the changes to which they refer. Let us remember the methods by which they were collected. They are taken from returns which are in the form of answers delivered to commissioners by juries of peasants, juries which we know from the most active of the commissioners to have been occasionally packed by the local proprietors, and often intimidated,[461] and to have been examined by the commissioners under the eyes of their landlords. It is hardly necessary to point out that no evidence of even approximate accuracy would be derived from an inquiry conducted in such a fashion at the present day. Is it probable that it was obtained any more satisfactorily in the sixteenth century?

[460] It is a question how far there had ever been an open field
system in some of these counties, _e.g._ Cornwall and Kent.
There certainly were some open field villages of the ordinary
pattern in Kent (see Slater, _The English Peasantry and the
Enclosure of Common Fields_, p. 230). But Kent from an early
date develops on its own lines, and does not go through the same
stages of manorialism and commutation as other counties. Much of
it seems to start at the point which they reach only in the
sixteenth century. Cornwall again, though in the sixteenth
century there were commons where the villagers pastured their
cattle together (see accounts of Landress and Porpehan,
_Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.), was largely a county of
scattered homesteads and very early enclosure (for the
"nucleated village" and "scattered homesteads," see Maitland,
_Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 15-16), pointing to a different
system of settlement from that of the counties where the open
field system obtained. For enclosures in Devon and Somerset see
Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, Modern
Times, Part II., App. B: "A consideration of the cause in
question before the lords touchinge depopulation," and Carlyle's
_Cromwell_, Letter XXIV. "Lest we should engage our body of
horse too far into that enclosed country."

[461] For intimidation see the case of Wootton Basset, quoted
above, pp. 251-253, and below, pp. 302-304. Also Gay, _Trans.
Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii.; and Hales' defence
(appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to _The Commonweal of
this Realm of England_).

Nor, if accurate, could these statistics really be used as a means of disproving the accounts given by contemporary writers of the dislocation produced by enclosure. That those accounts were highly coloured, no one familiar with the methods which the age brought to the discussion of economic questions will doubt. Professor Gay does well to warn us against credulity. It is certainly a salutary discipline to turn from the burning words of Latimer or Crowley to these official calculations, and then, by a glance at the chapters of Dr. Slater and Professor Gonner on the enclosures of the eighteenth century, to realise that even in those parts of England where the cry against depopulation had arisen most bitterly two centuries before, there were still thousands of acres to be enclosed by some hundreds of Enclosure Acts. But if we must discount the protests of authors to whom all large economic changes seem to smell of the pit, we must not forget either that their views are formed by the conditions of their age, and that it is just in the conditions productive of this state of mind that even a moderate change is likely to work with the most disastrous effects. We who reckon in millions and count a year lost which does not see some new outburst of economic energy, must be very careful how we apply our statistics to measure the movements of an age where economic life differs not only in quantity but in quality, where most men have never seen more than a hundred separate individuals in the course of their whole lives, where most households live by tilling their great-grandfathers' fields with their great-grandfathers' plough. We must not be too clever--our ancestors would have said too wicked--for our subject. We must not accept an estimate of the amount of depopulation as an explanation of its effects; for the two things are not in _pari materia_. Certainly we must not argue that, because the returns collected by Royal Commissions show that in the counties affected most severely less than one-twentieth of the total area was enclosed, therefore the complaints of observers must be taken as a hysterical exaggeration of slow and unimportant changes. For one thing, summary tables are no measure of the distress caused by eviction, till we know how the tables are made up. The drifting away of one tenant from each of fifty manors, and the eviction of fifty tenants from one manor, yield precisely the same statistical results when the total displacement from a given county is being calculated. But the former would be scarcely noticeable; the latter might ruin a village. For another thing, the total area of a county is a mere spatial expression, which is important to no one except geographers. What mattered to the peasantry, and what matters to us, is not the proportion which the land enclosed bore to the whole area of the county, but the proportion which it bore to the whole area available for cultivation. This, which is of course not ascertainable, is clearly a very different thing.[462] It is no consolation to a family which has been evicted from a prosperous farm to be told that it can settle on a moor or a marsh, on Blackstone Edge or Deeping Fen. To argue that enclosing was of little consequence, because so small a proportion of the total land area was enclosed, is almost precisely similar to arguing that overcrowding is of little consequence, because the area of Great Britain divided by the population gives a quotient of about one and a half acres to every human being in the country. The evidence of a general trend of opinion during a century and a half--opinion by no means confined to the peasants, or to the peasants' champions like Hales, or to idealists like Sir Thomas More, or to the preachers of social righteousness like Latimer and Crowley, but shared by Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell in the earlier part of the century, Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon[463] at the end of it--to the effect that the agrarian changes caused extensive depopulation, is really a firmer basis for judging their effects than are statistics which, however carefully worked up, are necessarily unreliable, and which, when reliable, are not quite the statistics required. When that opinion is backed by documentary proof that from one village thirty persons, from another fifty, from another the whole population, were displaced, though of course we cannot say that such displacement was general, we can say that it was not unknown, and that if contemporaries were guilty of exaggeration (as they probably were), their exaggeration took the form not of inventing extreme cases, but of suggesting that such extreme cases were the rule. On the whole, therefore, our conclusions as to the quantitative measurement of depopulation caused in the sixteenth century must still, in spite of the researches of Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, be a negative one. In the first place, we cannot say, even approximately, what proportion of the total landholding population was displaced. In the second place, such figures as we do possess are not of a kind to outweigh the direct evidence of contemporary observers that the movement was so extensive as in parts of England to cause serious suffering and disturbance.

[462] Professor Pollard has good remarks on this point
(_Political History of England_, 1547-1603, p. 29).

[463] Wolsey was responsible for the Commission of 1517. For a
letter of Cromwell to Henry VIII. on the subject of enclosure,
and for the views of Cecil and Bacon, see below, pp. 273-274,
279, 343, 387.

(d) _The Agrarian Changes and the Poor Law_

The obscurity in which the statistics of depopulation are involved does not prevent us from seeing that it played an important part in providing an incentive to the organisation of relief on a national and secular basis, which was the most enduring achievement of the social legislation of sixteenth century statesmen. An influential theory of Poor Law History regards the admission finally made in 1601 that the destitute person has, not only a moral, but a legal, right to maintenance, as a last fatal legacy handed to the modern state by the expiring social order of the Middle Ages, a relic of villeinage which was given a statutory basis at the very moment when a little more patience would have shown that a national system of poor relief was not only unnecessary, but positively harmful, in the new mobile society which the expansion of commerce and industry was bringing into existence. "Serfdom," says an eminent exponent of this view, "is itself a system of Poor Law. The Poor Law is not therefore a new device invented in the time of Elizabeth to meet a new disease. The very conception of a society based on status involves the conception of a Poor Law far more searching and rigid than the celebrated 43 Eng. cap. 2.... The collective provision is appropriate to the then expiring condition of status.... A wide diffusion of private property, not collective property, is the obvious and natural method by which the unable-bodied periods of life are to be met. With the disappearance of Feudalism we might have expected that there would have disappeared the custom which made the poor a charge upon the manor or parish of which they had formerly been serfs. This, however, did not happen, and a history of this survival of mediæval custom is the history of the English Poor Law.... To sum the matter up:--In following the development of Poor Law legislation, we watch society struggling to free itself from the fetters of a primitive communism of poverty and subjection, a state of things possessing many 'plausible advantages.' Legislation for the management of the Poor often impeded, and only occasionally expedited, this beneficent process.... It proceeded from ignorance of the true nature of progress, and from a denial or neglect of the power of absorption possessed by a free society."[464] It is obvious that in this passage Mr. Mackay uses his interpretation of Poor Law origins to make a very trenchant criticism upon the whole principle involved in the public maintenance of the destitute. That principle was not introduced because new conditions made its adoption indispensable. It survived from an older order of things into a world in which the only serious causes of destitution are personal and not economic, and in which therefore it is quite inappropriate. To tolerate it is to drag for ever a clanking chain, one end of which is fastened round the bleeding ankles of modern society, and the other anchored in the hideous provisions of the Statute of Labourers. Nor should we be wrong if we said that a similar theory, though less lucidly expressed, has had a considerable influence upon Poor Law practice. For the idea of a Poor Law as an anachronism which is quite out of place in a developed economic society is implied more than once in the celebrated report drafted by Senior and Chadwick in 1834, and has passed from that brilliant piece of special pleading into the minds of three generations of administrators. "A person," they state, "who attributes pauperism to the inability to procure employment, will doubt the efficiency of the cause which we propose to remove it," whereas "whenever inquiries have been made as to the previous condition of the able-bodied individuals who live in such numbers on the town parishes, it has been found that the pauperism of the greater number has originated in indolence, improvidence, and vice, and might have been avoided by ordinary care and industry. The majority of the Statutes connected with the administration of public relief have created new evils, and aggravated those which they were intended to prevent."[465]

[464] Mackay, _History of the English Poor Law_, 1834-1898, pp.
10-11, 16-17.

[465] _Poor Law Commission Report of 1834_, pp. 264-277, 281.

A discussion of Poor Law theory and history falls outside the limits of this essay. But in forming an estimate of the effects of the agrarian changes which have been described above, it is perhaps not out of place to consider the minor question of the connection between them and the system of Poor Relief which took its final shape in the reign of Elizabeth. Since the distress which the relief institutions of an age exist to meet stands to its general economic conditions in the relation of reverse to obverse, of effect to cause, of disease to environment, much light is thrown on the economic difficulties most characteristic of any period by ascertaining the type of distress with which relieving authorities are most generally confronted. Equally important, any student of Poor Law History, who is not the partisan of a theory, finds himself constantly driven to look for an explanation of Poor Law developments in regions which, at first sight, appear to lie far outside his immediate subject, but where, in reality, is grown the grim harvest which it is the duty of Poor Law authorities, often acting in complete ignorance of its origin, to reap. Much wild theorising and some tragic practical blunders might have been avoided, had it been more generally realised that, of all branches of administration, the treatment of persons in distress is that which can least bear to be left to the exclusive attention of Poor Law specialists, because it, most of all matters, depends for its success on being carefully adapted to the changing economic conditions, the organisation or disorganisation of industry, the stability or instability of trade, the diffusion or concentration of property, by which the nature and extent of the distress requiring treatment are determined.

When one turns to the age in which the Poor Law took shape, the first thing to strike one is that the need for it arises, according to the views expressed by most writers of the period, from that very development in commercial relationships, that very increase in economic mobility, which Mr. Mackay seems to imply should have made it unnecessary. The special feature of sixteenth century pauperism is written large over all the documents of the period--in Statutes, in Privy Council proceedings, in the records of Quarter Sessions. The new and terrible problem is the increase in vagrancy. The sixteenth century lives in terror of the tramp. He is denounced by moralists, analysed into species by the curious or scientific, scourged and buffeted by all men. The destitution of the aged and impotent, of fatherless children and widows, is familiar enough. It has been with the world from time immemorial. It has been for centuries the object of voluntary charitable effort; and when the dissolution of the monasteries dries up one great channel of provision, the Government intervenes with special arrangements[466] to take their place a whole generation before it can be brought to admit that there is any problem of the unemployed, other than the problem of the sturdy rogue. The distinction between the able-bodied unemployed and the impotent is one which is visible to the eye of sense. The distinction between the man who is unemployed because he cannot get work and the man who is unemployed because he does not want work, requires a modicum of knowledge and reflection which even at the present day is not always forthcoming. The former distinction, therefore, is not supplemented by the latter until the beginning of the last quarter of the century.[467] In one respect, that of the Law of Settlement, the English Poor Law does show traces of a mediæval origin. In all other respects, so far from being a survival from the Middle Ages, it comes into existence just at the time when mediæval economic conditions are disappearing. It is not accepted at once as a matter of course that the destitute shall be publicly relieved, still less that the able-bodied destitute deserve anything but punishment. Governments make desperate efforts for about one hundred years to evade their new obligations. They whip and brand and bore ears; they offer the vagrant as a slave to the man who seizes him; they appeal to charity; they introduce the parish clergy to put pressure on the uncharitable; they direct the bishops to reason with those who stop their ears against the parish clergy. When merely repressive measures and voluntary effort are finally discredited, they levy a compulsory charge rather as a fine for contumacy than as a rate, and slide reluctantly into obligatory assessments[468] only when all else has failed. And if we ask why the obligation of maintaining the destitute should have received national recognition first in the sixteenth century, we can only answer by pointing to that trend away from the stationary conditions of agriculture to the fluctuating conditions of trade, and in particular to that displacement of the rural population, which we have already seen was one result of enclosure. The national Poor Law is not a mediæval anachronism. It is the outcome of conditions which seem to the men of the sixteenth century new and appalling. Of these conditions the most important are the agrarian changes.

[466] 27 Hen. VIII., c. 25. Under this Act city and county
authorities are to relieve impotent beggars "by way of voluntary
and charitable alms." They are also for the first time given
power to apprentice vagrant children.

[467] 18 Eliz. c. 3 directed that a stock of wool, flax, hemp,
iron, or other stuff should be provided in cities, corporate
towns, and market towns. The important words which show the
change of opinion are, "To the intente also that ... Roges ...
may not have any just excuse in saying they cannot get any
service or work."

[468] 14 Eliz. c. 5.

Let us try for a moment to put ourselves in the position of a family which has been evicted from its holding to make room for sheep. When the last stick of furniture has been tumbled out by the bailiff, where, poor houseless wretches, are they to turn? They cannot get work in their old home, even if they can get lodgings, for the attraction of sheep-farming is that the wage bill is so low. Will they emigrate from England like the Scotch crofters? There are people who in the seventeenth century will advise them to seek a haven with the godly folk who have crossed the Atlantic, who will argue that England is overstocked, that "there is such pressing and oppressing in town and country about farms, trades, traffic, so as a man can hardly anywhere set up a trade but he shall pull down two of his neighbours," and point out that "the country is replenished with new farmers, and the almhouses are filled with old labourers," that "the rent-taker lives on sweet morsels, but the rent-payer eats a dry crust often with watery eyes."[469] But enclosures have been going on for a century before the plantations exist to offer a refuge, and in any case the probability of the country folk hearing of them is very remote. Can a man migrate to seek work in another part of the country? Not easily, for, apart from the enormous practical difficulties, the law puts obstacles in his way, and the law is backed up with enthusiasm by every parish and town in the country. There are three possible attitudes which a State may adopt towards the questions arising from the ebb and flow of population. It may argue, with the optimists of 1834, that the mobility of labour is a good thing, a symptom of alertness and energy, and that it will take place of itself to the extent which is economically desirable, provided that no impediments are placed in the way of those who desire to better themselves by looking for work elsewhere. Or, while believing that it is much to be desired that people should migrate freely from place to place in search of employment, it may nevertheless reflect that the mere absence of restrictions does not in fact stimulate such movement, and therefore take upon itself its encouragement through the publication of information and the registration of unemployed workers. Or, subordinating economic to political considerations, it may hold that the movement of a large number of unemployed persons up and down the country is not an indication of a praiseworthy spirit of enterprise, but a menace to public order which must be sternly repressed. We need hardly say that this last view is the one characteristic of the sixteenth century. The attitude towards the man on tramp in search of employment is exactly the opposite of that which is held at the present day. He is not less, but much more, culpable than he who remains in his own parish and lives on his neighbours. He is assumed not to be seeking work but to be avoiding it, and avoiding it in a restless and disorderly manner. Hear what the worthy Harrison says when the State has already made the provision for the unemployed a charge upon each parish:--"But if they refuse to be supported by this benefit of the law, and will rather endeavour by going to and fro to maintain their idle trades, then are they adjudged to be parcel of the third sort (_i.e._ wilful vagrants), and so, instead of courteous refreshing at home, are often corrected with sharp execution and whip of justice abroad. Many there are which, notwithstanding the rigour of the laws provided on that behalf, yield rather with this liberty (as they call it) to be daily under the fear and terror of the whip, than by abiding where they were born or bred, to be provided for by the devotion of the parishes."[470] The village is still thought of as the unit of employment. It is still regarded as being equipped with the means of finding work for all its inhabitants, as though there had been no movement towards pasture-farming to prick a hole in its economic self-sufficiency. The presumption, therefore, is against the man who leaves the parish where he is known to his neighbours. He must prove that he is going to take up work for which he is already engaged. He must get a licence from his last employer. As far as the able-bodied are concerned the Poor Law is in origin a measure of social police. Relief is thrown in as a makeweight, because by the end of the sixteenth century our statesmen have discovered that when economic pressure reaches a certain point they cannot control men without it. The whip has no terrors for the man who must look for work or starve. So every Sunday after church, while Parson's sermon is still fresh in our minds, we board out our poor by rotation "among such householders as will maintain them meat and work and such wages as they shall deserve for the week following."[471] Heaven help us if the next parish does not do the same!

[469] Robert Cushman, "Reasons and Considerations touching the
Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the parts of America"
(printed by E. Arber, _The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers_).

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The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth CenturyChapter II: The Reaction of the Agrarian Changes on the Peasantry (2)

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