Chapter II: The Reaction of the Agrarian Changes on the Peasantry (3)

[470] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), chap. x.

[471] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp.
160-161: "Orders agreed to by the Justices of the Peace for
Cornwall at General Sessions for Bodmin the 5th and Truro the
8th of April, 39 Eliz."

And the Poor Law is a police measure for the necessity of which the agrarian changes are largely responsible. In spite of all the obstacles in the way of migration, in spite of whip and courteous refreshment, men do in fact migrate, and not only men, but women and children. By the latter part of the century, at any rate, statesmen have begun to understand that pauperism and vagrancy stand to the depopulation caused by enclosure in the relation of effect to cause. The revolution in the official attitude to the problem caused by this belated illumination is as great as that which has taken place in the last ten years with regard to unemployment. Once the new standpoint has been seized, though opinion, and the opinion not only of the ruling classes, but of burgesses and villagers, still treats the vagrant with iron severity, it never quite relapses into the comfortable doctrine, the grand discovery of a commercial age, that distress is itself a proof of the demerits of its victim, and that Heaven, like a Utilitarian philosopher, permits the existence of destitution only that it may make "less eligible" the lot of "improvidence and vice." It is saved from this last error not by the lore of economists, but because it regards economic questions through the eyes of a sturdy matter-of-fact morality. It is sufficiently enlightened to recognise that even among vagrants there is a class which is more sinned against than sinning, a class of whom it can be asked "at whose hands shall the blood of these men be required?"[472] It is sufficiently ingenuous to answer by pointing to "some covetous man" who, "espying a further commodity in their commons, holds, and tenures, doth find such means as thereby to wipe many out of their occupyings and turn the same unto his private gains."[473] Occasionally the effect of enclosures is brought home to the encloser in a practical way, by compelling him not only to pay a fine to the Crown, but also to make a contribution towards the relief of the poor whose numbers he has increased.[474]

[472] Harrison, _loc. cit._

[473] _Ibid._

[474] Camden Society, 1886. Cases in Courts of Star Chamber and
High Commission, Michaelmas, 7 Caroli, Case of Archer. (The
allusion in the text is to a precedent cited in this case.)

To see the way in which the relation between the problems of pauperism and of agrarian depopulation is regarded, turn to the debates in the House of Commons. In the year 1597, when both questions are acute (the preceding year had seen a recrudescence of agrarian rioting), a member or minister, probably Robert Cecil, is preparing notes for a speech[475] on the subject in Parliament. What are the points he emphasises? They are the high price of corn caused by bad harvests and the manipulations of middlemen, the enclosing of land and the conversion of arable to pasture, which naturally intensifies the difficulty of securing adequate food supplies, "the decaying and plucking down of houses, ... and not only the plucking down of some few houses, but the depopulating of whole towns ... and keeping of a shepherd only, whereby many subjects are turned without habitation, and fill the country with rogues and idle persons." When Parliament meets in October, the House is at once busy with different aspects of the same question.[476] Bills are introduced dealing with forestallers, regrators, and engrossers of corn, with vagrancy and pauperism, and with enclosures, and a committee is appointed to consider the latter question. In the debates which follow there is the usual division of opinion between the champions of economic reform and the advocates of more, and more ruthless, "deterrence," between those who wish to legislate as to causes and those who are mainly occupied with symptoms. Bacon, master as ever of the science of his subject, insists with invincible logic that pauperism is one part of the general agrarian problem, and he is supported by Robert Cecil. On the other hand, the experts as to pauperism--we can imagine the county justices fresh from their whippings and relief committees and houses of correction, fresh, too, from enclosure and depopulation--complain that their special subject is being overlooked in a general and dangerous discussion on the economic causes of distress, and that the committee "has spent all their travel about the said enclosures and tillage, and nothing about the said rogues and poor." That this should have been the popular line to take needs no explanation. A Parliament which dares discuss not only how to manipulate the lives of the poor, but the fundamental causes of their misery, is a Parliament which the eye of man had not yet, has not yet, beheld. Compared with other representative assemblies, compared with itself at a later date, the Elizabethan House of Commons, debating in an age when it could be said that government was "nothing but a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title of the Common Wealth," had the grace to show some stirrings of compunction. If members who had grown fat on the tragedy which they were discussing spoke of their victims as members will speak, ministers at least were independent, and could venture, like Cecil, to tell the House unpalatable truths. Of the two Acts against enclosure, which were the result of this session's deliberations, we shall speak later. What is worth noticing here is the disposition, even in a Parliament composed of country gentlemen, to emphasise the connection between the problems with which anti-enclosure and anti-vagrancy legislation have to deal. It is summed up in the eloquent peroration of a nameless member. "As this bill entered at first with a short prayer, 'God speed the plough,' so I wish it may end with such success as the plough shall speed the poor."[477]

[475] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., Nov.
1597. "Notes for the present Parliament."

[476] _D'Ewes' Journal_, pp. 551-555; see also Leonard, _The
Early History of English Poor Relief_, pp. 73-75.

[477] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp.
541-543.

What became of the families displaced from the soil between their final eviction and that subsidence upon the stony breast of the Elizabethan Poor Law, which, for some of them, was their ultimate fate? There is no certain information to guide us. The tragedy of the tramp is his isolation. Every man's hand is against him; and his history is inevitably written by his enemies. Yet, beneath denunciations hurled upon him by those who lived warm and slept soft, we can see two movements going on, two waves in a vast and silent ebbing of population from its accustomed seats. In the first place there is a steady immigration into the towns on the part of those "who, being driven out of their habitations, are forced into the great cities, where, being very burdensome, men shut their doors against them, suffering them to die in the streets and highways."[478] The municipal records of the periods teem with complaints of the disorder, the overcrowding, the violation of professional bye-laws, caused by rural immigration. The displaced peasant is the Irishman of the sixteenth century, and, like the Irishman, he makes his very misery a whip with which to scourge, not alas! his oppressors, but men who often are not much less wretched than himself. He turns whole quarters into slums, spreads disease through congested town dwellings, and disorganises the labour market by crowding out the native artisan. Gild members find themselves eaten up by unlawful men who have never served an apprenticeship in the town, and retort with regulations requiring the deposit of a prohibitive sum as an entrance fee from all immigrants who want to set up shop, especially from those wretches who are thought to have a large family of children, at present snugly concealed in their last place of residence, but soon to be surreptitiously introduced, a brood of hungry young cuckoos, if once their parents get a footing in the town.[479] Borough authorities, who see cottages "made down" into tenements in which pestilence spreads with fearful rapidity, seek to stamp out the very possibility of invasion by prohibiting the erection of new cottages or the subdivision of old. To judge by their behaviour, the notorious Statute of 1662, which codified the existing customs as to settlement, must have been one of the most popular pieces of legislation ever passed by Parliament. Town[480] after town in the course of the sixteenth century tries to protect itself by a system of stringent inspection worthy of modern Germany. Sometimes there is a regular expulsion of the aliens. "Forasmuch as it is found by daily experience," declare the authorities of Nottingham,[481] "that by the continual building and erecting of new cottages and poor habitations, and by the transferring of barns and suchlike buildings into cottages, and also by the great confluence of many poor people from forrein parts out of this towne to inhabit here, and lykewise by the usual and frequent taking in of inmates into many poor habitations here, the poorer sort of people do much increase ... it is ordered that no burgess or freeman on pain of £5 erect any cottage or convert any building into a cottage in the town without license of the Mayor, that no burgess or freeman, without a license, receive any one from the country as a tenant, that every landlord be bound in the sum of £10 to remove all foreign tenants who have entered in the last three years before May 1st next." What most boroughs do for themselves is finally, after many regulations have been made by the Common Council, done for London by Parliamentary legislation. It is not a chance that the end of Elizabeth's reign sees the first two Housing Acts, one[482] in 1589, enacting that only one family may live in a house, the other[483] applying to London alone, and forbidding the division of houses into tenements, the receiving of lodgers, or the erection of new houses for persons who are assessed in the subsidy book at less than £5 in goods or £3 in lands. The evicted peasants are beginning to take their revenge. They have been taking it ever since.

[478] Lansd. MSS. 83, f. 68, quoted Gonner, _Common Land and
Enclosure_, p. 156 n.

[479] _e.g. Nottingham Records_, vol. iv. pp. 170-171, Nov. 4,
1577: "Any burgess that hath not been prentice to pay £10 and no
pardon. _Records of Leicester_, vol. iii. p. 351, Oct. 17, 1598:
"He is inhibited from dwelling in your corporation unless he
finds bonds for £200 that neither his wife nor children shall be
burdensome to the town." _Southampton Court Leet Records_, vol.
i., Part I.: "One William Dye, undertenant to John Netley, dothe
lyve idelly and hathe no trade.... He hathe 4 or 5 children in
places from whence he came whom he will bring shortly hither, yf
he may be suffered here to remayne, whom we desyer may be
examined and removed from hence according to the Statute."

[480] Some instances are given by Leonard, _Early History of
English Poor Relief_, pp. 107-109.

[481] _Nottingham Records_, vol. iv. pp. 304-307.

[482] 31 Eliz. c. 7.

[483] 35 Eliz. c. 6.

In the second place there is a general movement from the enclosed to the open field villages. The families displaced by enclosure cannot easily enter into industry, even if they wish to do so, for the avenue to most trades is blocked both by the Corporations and by the statutory system of a seven years' apprenticeship, which maintains professional standards at the expense of an unprivileged residuum. What they do is to follow the orthodox advice given to those who have lost their customary means of livelihood. They proceed to colonise, and to colonise in such numbers that they cannot easily be kept out. They settle as squatters on the waste lands of those manors which have not been enclosed, and which, before the waste is turned into a sheep-run, offer no obstacle to immigration. That the possibility of using the manorial waste to accommodate those who had no settled abode had occurred to statesmen as one expedient for meeting the problem of the infirm and destitute, is shown by the sanction expressly given in the Poor Law of 1597[484] to the expenditure of parish funds on the erection of cottages on the waste as residences for the impotent poor. In fact, however, the mobility of labour was becoming such that it was impossible, even if it had been desirable, to reserve those unutilised territories for the maintenance of the impotent. In spite of bitter protests from the existing inhabitants, refugees from other villages swarm down upon them in such numbers that the Act requiring four acres of land to be attached to each cottage cannot be observed, and the issuing of licences for the erection of cottages on the waste for able-bodied men, who have come with their families from a distance, becomes a regular part of the business of Quarter Sessions.[485] Such a redistribution of the population solves one problem only to create others. Stern economists in the seventeenth century lament that the ease with which permission to build cottages on the waste is obtained encourages the existence of an improvident and idle class, which will neither work for wages nor make good use of the land. "In all or most towns where the fields lie open and are used in common, there is a new brood of upstart intruders as inmates, and the inhabitants of unlawful cottages erected contrary unto law.... Loyterers who will not usually be got to work unless they may have such excessive wages as they themselves desire."[486] The opponents of enclosure answer with some justice that, in effect, the open field villages are saddled with the destitution caused by enclosing landlords, who first ruin their tenants and then, like a modern Dock Company which relies on the Poor Rate to save its wage-bill, leave them to be supported by those places to which they are compelled to migrate.[487] The latter difficulty is indeed a very serious one, which not only is the occasion of numberless petitions[488] from villages who wish to be assisted by, or to avoid assisting, their neighbours, but on occasion converts even the country gentry into opponents of enclosure. "We further conceive," write the Justices of Nottingham to the Council, "that if depopulation may be reformed it will bring a great good to the whole Kingdom; for where homes are pulled down the people are forced to seek new habitations in other towns and countries, whereof those towns where they get a settling are pestered so as they are hardly able to live one by another, and it is likewise the cause of erecting new cottages upon the waste and other places who are not able to relieve themselves ... which causes rogues and vagabonds to increase."[489] In the elaborate book of Poor Law orders published in 1631 the Government recognises the genuineness of this grievance, and, to its direction that richer parishes should contribute funds to the aid of the poor, adds a special rider pointing out that such extra contributions would come with special appropriateness from those places where there had been depopulation.

[484] 39 Eliz. c. 3.

[485] For petitions on this subject see _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd.
784, pp. 81-82 (Wiltshire). The Warwickshire Quarter Sessions
were much occupied with this, _e.g._ the following: "Trinity
Sessions 1625. Fforasmuch as this Court was this present day
informed ... by Sir Edward Marrowe, kt., and Thomas Ashley as
the lords of the manor of Woolvey in this county ... that the
said lords are content that William Wilcox of Woolvey in this
countie shall build and erect a cottage for hys habitation hys
wyfe and his small children uppon the waste within the said
lordshippe, it is therefore ordered that the same being with
consent of the lord as aforesaid that the same cottage shall be
and continue," and later "which cottage the Court doth licence"
(_Warwick Quarter Sessions MSS. Records_).

[486] "Considerations Concerning Common Fields and Enclosures,"
Pseudonismus, 1654.

[487] Moore, _The Crying Sin of England in not Caring for the
Poor_: "And now alas, saith the poor cottier, there is no work
for me, I must go where I may get my living. And hence it comes
to pass that the open fielden towns have above double the number
of cottiers they had wont to have, so that they cannot live one
by another, and so put the fielden towns to vast expense, in
caring for these poor that these enclosures have made."

[488] _e.g. Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 784, p. 95 (Wiltshire), pp.
292 and 298 (Worcester).

[489] See Appendix I., No. VI. Miss Leonard (_Trans. Royal Hist.
Soc._, vol. xix.) prints this document as referring to Norfolk,
which appears to be an error.

We may now summarise our view of the social effects of the changes introduced by lords of manors, and by the capitalist farmers who manage their estates. When the demesne land is enclosed and converted to pasture, there is an appreciable diminution in the demand for labour, and consequently an increase in unemployment. When the common rights of tenants are curtailed, they lose not only an important subsidiary source of income, but often, at the same time, the means of cultivating their arable holdings. When their holdings are merged in the great estate of the capitalist farmer, they are turned adrift to seek their living in a world where most trades and most towns are barred against them, where they are punished if they do not find work, and punished if they look for work without permission, where "if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the Statute of Inmates; if they wander abroad, they are in danger of the Statute of the Poor to be whipped."[490] Thus, quite apart both from the eternal source of poverty which consists in the recalcitrance of nature to human effort, and from those causes of individual destitution which in all ages and in all economic conditions lie in wait for the exceptionally unfortunate or the exceptionally improvident, for the sick, the aged, and the orphan, there is an increase in the number of those for whom access to the land, their customary means of livelihood, is unobtainable, and consequently a multiplication of the residuum for whom the haunting insecurity of the propertyless modern labourer is, not the exception, but the normal lot. It is this extension of destitution among able-bodied men, who have the will, but not the means, to find employment, which is the peculiar feature of sixteenth century pauperism, and which leads in 1576 to the most characteristic expedient of the Elizabethan Poor Law--the provision of materials upon which the unemployed can be set to work. The recognition that the relief of the destitute must be enforced as a public obligation was not the consequence of the survival of mediæval ideas into an age where they were out of place, but an attempt on the part of the powerful Tudor state to prevent the social disorder caused by economic changes, which, in spite of its efforts, it had not been strong enough to control.

[490] _D'Ewes' Journal._ Speech of Cecil, 1597.