Chapter II: The Peasantry (2)

True of such development early rentals and surveys show little trace. But let us remember the purpose for which they were prepared. The manorial officials were concerned with getting in an income, not with supplying information about the methods of agriculture or the cross-relations between one tenant and another, except in so far as they affected the manorial revenue. The source of the income was the holding, not the holder; or, rather, it did not matter to them who the landholder was, whether he was one individual or another, or whether he was a partnership of half-a-dozen individuals, provided that the land, however held, yielded the customary services and payments. The nearest analogy would be an apportioned tax which a Government divides between different localities, each locality having to raise a certain sum, but making its own arrangements as to what individuals shall pay. It is the virgate which pays rents, which mows the lord's meadow, reaps the lord's fields, carries the lord's messages, pays a stoup of honey and a churchshot of white corn; and as long as the meadow is mowed and the message carried, the question what individual holds the virgate is quite a subsidiary one for the bailiff, and one which the tenants can arrange among themselves much as they please. Each half virgate at Cuxham[155] has got to do two boonworks or pay 4d. But the manorial economy is not at all disturbed by the fact of one tenant holding not half a virgate, but a virgate and a half; for he has to do, or pay some one else to do, six boonworks and pay 2s. if he does not. A half-hide at Bramshot[156] has to make half-a-dozen different payments in money and kind; but there is another to prevent John, Stephen, Roger, and William clubbing together to work it and arranging the payments among themselves as they please.

[155] Merton Documents, No. 5902, Rental of Cuxham, 1483:
"Johannes ... pro uno messuagio et una virgata terræ et dimidia
xxiiis. et 6 precaria in autumno vel 2s.... Thomas Lee, Rector
ecclesiæ ibidem pro uno tofto ... et una virgata terræ 18s. et 4
precaria in autumno vel 16d."

[156] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 96, Rental of 1287:
"Johannes filius Fabri, Stephanus Draghebreck, Rogerus de
Hallie, et Willelmus le Hart ... tenent j dimidiam hidatam
terræ. Reddendo inde per annum 5s. ad festum S. Mich. et xixd.
de Pondpany et ad festum Beati Martini viii gallinas de
chersetto, et ii gallinas contra Natale, et x ova contra Pascha,
et facient in omnibus omnia sicut Willelmus de Haillie." P. 125:
"William, son of Gonnilda, and Galfrid Levesone, John, son of
Matilda, and Emma, a widow, hold one virgate of land containing
27-1/2 acres on paying and doing as the said Robert of
Estfelde." There are many similar entries.

Clearly in these circumstances a rigid classification of holdings by the manorial authorities is quite compatible with a great deal of diversity in the arrangements made with each other by the holders, and we are likely to miss a good many innovations if we look at the manor only through the eyes of officials and as a revenue-producing concern.[157] We must no more expect to get from them an exhaustive account of the exact individuals at any one time using the land, or of the scale on which farming is carried on by the peasants, than we expect the shareholders' list of a limited company to tell us who has the spending of the dividends. The shares stand in A.'s name, but the interest may go to A.'s married daughter. The holding stands in the name of Thomas in the books of the manor, but it may be that part or all of it is worked by Walter. To put the case in another way, to the lord and his steward a manor is primarily a business, a business on which various obligations can be imposed and from which various profits can be extracted. But it is also a village community consisting of peasants whose economic relations are by no means exhausted in the interest which the lord takes in them as part of its stock, and who have economic dealings which are important when we begin to inquire into changes in the distribution of peasant property. The number of the holdings and the amount of payments and services may remain quite unaltered, and yet at the same time if one individual begins to acquire several shares his property will grow at the expense of other persons. Precisely because it is new, the appearance of such small capitalists is not readily traceable in the stereotyped forms used by the manorial officials. Precisely because it is new, it is of the greatest economic significance. It shows what may be called, by contrast with later developments, the old agrarian régime, producing the new type of well-to-do peasant who is one of the protagonists in the class struggles of the sixteenth century.

[157] Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, pp. 250-251: "The
general arrangement admitted a certain subdivision under the
cover of an artificial unity, which found its expression in the
settlement of the services and of the relations with the lord."

And this upward movement is no mere matter of conjecture. That behind the stiff legal framework of the manorial organisation there was a tendency for property to pass into the hands of the more prosperous tenants, and that there was a sort of primitive commercialism even at a time when commercial ideas had little influence over the methods of agriculture, becomes evident if we examine the elements out of which the small properties of the fourteenth century are composed. The gradual formation of a class of wealthy peasants took place in three ways, through the buying up by well-to-do men of parts of their neighbours' properties, through the colonising by villages of the unoccupied land surrounding them, and through the addition to the customary holdings of plots which had at one time been in the occupation of the lord, but which, for one reason or another, he found it more profitable to sell or lease to his tenants. Even before the end of the thirteenth century it is by no means unusual to find land changing holders pretty rapidly both by transfer and by lease. The customary land passes in the manorial court; the outgoing tenant surrenders it, and the incoming tenant is formally admitted by the steward. When a peasant leaves the manor or dies without heirs, the other tenants offer a sort of small land-market, and bid for his land or part of it to add to their own. Hence holdings or fractions of holdings change hands with some frequency at the court customary, the well-to-do, who can afford to take more land, offering the lord an increased rent to obtain a share in a holding the possession of which has for some reason lapsed. In the court rolls of the Lincolnshire manor of Ingoldmells,[158] for example, there are many such transfers, six sales occurring in successive courts held in 1315 and 1316. At Crondal,[159] in 1282, a tenant has for some reason given up his holding; the rest of the community dart on it like minnows on a piece of bread; and it is at once split up among as many as ten other tenants, who find sureties for the continuance of the normal services. At Hadleigh,[160] in 1305, a tenant sells part of his land to be built upon. At Castle[161] Combe, in 1367, a villein enters by licence of the lord on two virgates of land and a separate pasture.

[158] _Ingoldmells Court Rolls_ (Massingberd), October 1315 to
June 1316.

[159] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 152-153. Court Roll of
1282. "Hugh Sweyn gives to the lord 15d. that he may be able to
hold 2-1/2 acres of arable land of the tenement formerly Richard
Wisdom's, paying therefor yearly 15d. of rent: sureties for the
services being Gilbert Swein and Roger Carter." Nine other
tenants take fractions of Richard Wisdom's holding in the same
way.

[160] _Victoria County History of Suffolk_, "Social and Economic
History" (Unwin). Professor Unwin has some suggestive remarks on
similar developments in other parts of the county.

[161] _History of Castle Combe_ (Scrope), p. 162: "Johannes
Pleyslede, nativus domini, cepit de domino unum messuagium et
duas virgatas terrae tenendas in bondagio, secundum
consuetudinem manerii ... Reddit etiam annuatim sex denarios pro
quadam pastura vocata le Hatche, et pro via ad eandem."

Such examples of what may be called petty land speculation could be multiplied almost indefinitely, and point to a good deal of mobility in rural society even in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. At the same time one can see signs of relationships of a more complicated character tending to establish themselves between the tenants, and breaking up the symmetry of the manorial arrangements. There is a marked tendency for holdings not to remain intact but to be split up among different holders. Sometimes this takes place in the ordinary course of transference from father to son. The virgate held by the former is divided, for example, into two cotlands, each of which is held by one child,[162] or the heir to a holding divides it with his mother.[163] More frequently one is left to infer the actual process of division from the way in which the Rentals describe holdings as being occupied by groups or partnerships[164] of tenants, who share the land between them, each being responsible for a part of the rents and services owing from the virgate. Such an arrangement does not imply that there is any partnership in actual cultivation, any partnership in the modern sense of the word. It means, on the contrary, that the different parts of the holding are divided among several different cultivators, and that its apparent unity is quite artificial, simply a fiscal expression to enable the authorities to see that it renders its share of payments and services.

[162] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 129, Rental of Dupehale
(Dippenhall) 1287: "Edmunde de Bosco and William de Bosco hold 2
cotlands which were formed out of one virgate of land which Adam
de Bosco formerly held."

[163] _Ibid._, p. 153: "Margery Palmer comes and surrenders into
the hands of the lord a virgate of land with a house in Crondal,
and Galfrid her son comes and gives to the lord 6s. 8d. to have
seizin thereof, upon this condition, that the said Margery have
the third part, and two pieces more, of the aforesaid tenement,
for the term of her life."

[164] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 117, Rental of Yateleigh,
1287: "John de la Perke and Thomas Squel hold one virgate of
land containing 22 acres, on payment therefor of 2s. 10d. on the
Feast of St. Michael and 7-1/2 for Pondpany, and one stoup of
honey, and 75 eggs, and shall perform all services like Thomas
Kach.... Walter le White and Osbert de la Knelle hold one
virgate of land containing 29-1/2 acres.... Roys de Pothulle and
John le White hold one virgate of land containing 29 acres."

Again there is much leasing and sub-letting of land by the more prosperous of the customary tenants. Like labourers who hold allotments to-day, they often find it convenient to hire extra land and at the same time to let out parts of their own holdings, which may be inconveniently situated, or hard to work, or for some other reason not worth retaining. Thus in Lancashire the Clitheroe[165] court rolls show many fines being paid in the early fourteenth century for permission to "tavern," that is simply to lease, land. In 1351 there are several tenants on the manor of Sutton[166] in Hampshire who have leased cotlands from the larger customary tenants. At Crokeham on the neighbouring manor of Crondal[167] we hear as early as 1287 of one tenant paying 12d. for his holding "through the rents of" another customary tenant, who stands as an intermediate landlord between him and the manorial authorities. On this manor, indeed, sub-letting of land proceeded very far, and had created by the middle of the sixteenth century exactly the result which one would have expected, the existence, namely, of a considerable number of subtenants holding land from the copyholders and known by the name of Hallmote[168] tenants. Nor is mere subtenancy the most elaborate of the arrangements which arise among these Lilliputian capitalists. The peasants deal in land, and naturally they employ land agents to act as brokers for their bargains. When "Robert Bagges surrenders one bovate of villein land into the hands of the lord for the use of Symon Clerk, and the same Symon forthwith surrenders the aforesaid bovate to the lord for the use of William Flaxman, and William Flaxman pays 12d. to enter thereupon,"[169] may we not say that we have the whole machinery of land speculation, seller, middleman, and client, complete?

[165] _Court Rolls of the Lordships, Wapentakes, and Demesne
Manors of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster_ (edited by W. Farrer).
Halmote of Colne, 1323: "Thomas le Harper for taverning 3 acres
of land, 6d. Roger ... for the same of 2 acres of land, 4d.,"
and _passim_.

[166] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 140: "John Thomas holds a
messuage and a 'ferdell' of land, excepting one cotland and a
perch.... Thomas le Freyn holds of the above a cotland and a
perch."

[167] _Ibid._, p. 134: "William de Suche gives to the lord 12d.
yearly, to be allowed to hold 6 acres through the rents of Hugh
of Wyggeworthale."

[168] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 159-383. Customary of
1567. The name does not necessarily imply subtenancy in any way,
the Hallmoot being simply the court of the manor. At Yateleigh
one copyholder, Richard Allen, held about 263 acres, of which
about 126 were held from him by 21 subtenants (pp. 258-265 and
378-379).

[169] Footnote in _The Rebellion of Wat Tyler_, by Petruschevsky
(Russian), p. 210: "Ricardus Flaxman qui de domino tenuit in
bondagio unum messuagium et II. bovatas terræ et xvi acras terræ
de Forland quæ quondam fuerunt Johannis Colyn ad terminum xx.
annorum ex dimissione prædicti Johannis per licenciam curiæ,
venit hic et reddidit in manus domini prædictas duas bovatas
terræ et acras di' terræ et prati ad opus Willelmi Dolynes
deduct' prædicto messuagio." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls,
Bdle. 32, No. 307, and _ibid._, p. 211: "Robertus Bagges redd'
in manus domini l bovatam terræ in bondagio ad opus Symonis
Clerk Tenend 'sibi et suis, etc. Et idem Symon instanter redd'
in manus domini prædictam bovatam terræ ad opus Willelmi Flaxman
sibi et heredibus suis secundum consuetudinem manerii, et dat ad
ingressum xiid." Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, Bdle. 33, No.
324: "Instanter" is remarkable.

So far we are on safe ground. But it is not easy to describe the sort of conditions in which this petty commercialism, this emergence of peasants richer and more prosperous than their fellows, takes place. Clearly it implies the existence of small stores of capital, of some surplus over the consumption of the current year, which its fortunate possessors can use as a starting-point for further acquisitions; nor ought this to surprise us, for the usurer who traffics in his neighbours' misfortunes by lending money or corn at exorbitant rates, is by no means an unfamiliar bugbear in the mediæval village. Clearly, again, we must not look for some single _primum mobile_ to explain how such small capitals could be brought into existence. With all its apparent homogeneity the manorial population had, from the beginning of things, included people some of whom were in so much better a position than others for building up considerable properties as to make it no matter for astonishment that, as time went on, they should improve their advantage and attract more than their share of any increase in wealth which might take place. The appearance in the fourteenth century of a rural middle class is, indeed, much less remarkable than the extreme slowness of its development in the more backward parts of the country. For one thing, even the strictest equalisation of shares could not prevent the holder of exceptionally fertile land from being better off than his less fortunate fellow. Since services and rents were based on the requirements of the demesne, with a view to their rough apportionment among all the peasants, and were not adjusted, like modern competitive rents, so as to sweep away the surplus arising on superior sites, the occupants of the latter could build up, under the ægis of custom, the nucleus of a very considerable property.[170] For another thing, the mere fact that the village was subordinated to a lord, who exploited it by means of officers and servants, supplied village society with an upper layer of people who had larger opportunities than the mass of the peasantry for improving their position. Stewards, bailiffs, and greaves were frequently rewarded for their services with grants of land for which only a nominal rent was asked, and of course the most obvious way of using their advantage was further to increase it by adding to their properties. In a somewhat similar position to these were the peasants who were let off easily because their labour was not needed for the lord's estate. It is quite a mistake to think of the mediæval villager as a man pinned down to subsistence level by the economic pressure which grinds, as in a mortar, the poorest classes in modern society. Of course individuals were cruelly oppressed, and when the harvest failed whole communities, as in India to-day, must sometimes have been blotted out at a blow. But the whole story of the extraordinary upward movement which took place among the peasantry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is unintelligible, unless we admit that the legal rightlessness of the villein was, in fact, quite compatible with a good deal of economic prosperity. His liability to the manorial authorities, though in law unqualified, was in reality a liability limited, on the one hand, by the rule of custom, and, on the other, by the fact that he worked, not for an ever hungry world-market, but for a by no means insatiable local demand. Since services were adjusted to holdings, not to holders, a family of five or six persons usually did not send more than one or two to work on the lord's estate, and the remainder had opportunities for economic advancement, which necessarily became greater as the growth of population made the weight of the lord's requirements less exacting.[171] Moreover, the rudimentary specialisation of industrial employments, which can plainly be seen going on in the villages of the fourteenth century, brought into existence the man who was half peasant, half artisan or tradesman, and who could employ the money which he made in trade to carry on his husbandry on a larger scale than his neighbours. Such, for example, were the smiths, carpenters, turners, shoemakers, tailors, butchers, walkers, websters, and shearmen, who appear so constantly in Poll Tax returns.[172] When a weaver is able, though a villein, to leave 3000 marks to his heirs,[173] the village capitalist has plainly come upon the scenes. Nor must we forget that, however self-contained some manors may have been, there were others whose proximity to a chartered town or to a seaport acted as a magnet to draw rural conditions out of the rut of custom. Among the serfs who bought permission to emigrate, there were some who, having made money as town craftsmen, strayed back to their "villein nest," and acquired considerable properties with their hardly amassed wealth, like the Italian or Austrian peasant of to-day, who, after years spent in the sunless tenements and restaurants of New York, returns at last to be the envy of Calabrian and Tyrolese villages. From several sides at once, therefore, from those who socially rank above the mass of the population, from the peasant who combines trade and husbandry, from the enterprising serf who sets out to make his fortune at a distance, forces are at work to build up the considerable holdings that are the basis of the well-to-do peasantry of the future.

[170] See below, pp. 115-121.

[171] See _E.H.R._, vol. xv. pp. 774-813; Vinogradoff's review
of Page's _The End of Villeinage in England_.

[172] Powell, _The Revolt in East Anglia_, Appendix I.; and
Putnam, _The Enforcement of the Statute of Labourers_, pp.
80-81.

[173] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_.
p. 233.

But while these causes were always operating on individuals, the most potent influence in forming a class of prosperous peasants was, no doubt, the spread of commerce and its reaction on agriculture. Its effect is shown by the fact that it is just in those parts of the country where trade is most highly developed, and where, therefore, the use of money and the growth of wealth encourage speculation of all kinds, that the commercialising of landed relationships, and the appearance of a middle class, arises earliest and spreads furthest. The change is specially noticeable in the Eastern counties, which, from an early date, are the home of industry. Examples of the extreme variety and irregularity in the holdings of the customary tenants on the manors of Suffolk in the sixteenth century, which we have already contrasted with the arrangements in the backward parts of the country such as Northumberland, begin to make their appearance at a very early date in that county of fisheries and manufactures. At Hadleigh,[174] where the woollen industry has set money in circulation, the processes both of splitting up the customary holdings, and of letting two or three of them to a single tenant, is conspicuous at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and has completely altered the distribution of property which existed a century before. At the little fishing village of Gorleston[175] at the end of the thirteenth century each of the former tenancies was divided up among several tenants, sometimes three or four, sometimes eight or ten, and once as many as twenty. At Hawstead, in the same county, the free tenants have let off part of their holdings and added to them by leasing additional land in its place. In short, whenever trade becomes a serious factor in rural life, one finds a very general tendency for new arrangements of land to grow up side by side with the customary holdings, which are the backbone of the manor, because it is from them that the lord extracts his services for the cultivation of the desmesne. As long as the necessity for labour services continues, the number of holdings does not undergo any appreciable alteration, but the number of holdings ceases to be a guide to the number of holders.

[174] _Victoria County History of Suffolk_, Unwin's article on
Social and Economic History.

[175] _Ibid._

It is clear that the organisation of the manor is compatible with a good deal of shifting of property among the customary tenants, and that an alteration in its arrangements begins at a comparatively early date, without any external shock and through the desire of such tenants as can afford it to buy and lease land from other tenants who are less well off. If such a tendency were at all general, it would explain the gradual aggregation of larger holdings into fewer hands, and the appearance of considerable inequality in economic status among members of the village community whose legal position was the same. Sometimes, indeed, the authorities of the manor think that the process is going on too fast, that tenants have forgotten that, though they deal in land as though it were their own, it is really the lord's, and that they must not jeopardise the rents and services which he expects from it by alienating it without his permission. Sometimes a day of reckoning comes, when "tenants having more than one customary tenement" are "to show cause why they should not be excluded from the other tenements but one, unless license be granted them."[176] But in view of the multitude of transactions which come before us, we can hardly doubt that licence was nearly always granted if the purchaser or lessee was thought by the steward to be substantial enough to make the land do its duty,[177] and that tenants who wanted to buy and sell, lease and let, had very little opposition to expect from the lord or his steward.

[176] _Merton Documents_, "A table of the Matters, Orders, and
Customs Conteyned in Severall Courts of the Manor, 1563": "Daye
given to all ye tenants of ye manor to remove and expell their
undertenants by Michaelmas that shall be in ye yeare 1563, upon
paine of every delinquent forfeiting 20s." "Daye given to the
aforesaid tenants having above one customary tenement to be here
at ye next court to shew," etc., as above. See the Customary of
High Furness quoted below, p. 101; also Hone, _The Manor and
Manorial Records_, pp. 177-178, Court Rolls of Payton, Oxon.:
"And the aforesaid Laurence Pemerton, in his life time,
substituted Walter Milleward as his subtenant ... contrary to
the custom of the Manor without license; therefore let him have
a talk thereon with the King's officer before the next court."

[177] This is the meaning of entries of two names as "sureties"
when land changes hands. See _Crondal Records_, Court Rolls of
1281 and 1282, _passim_.

After all the picture is one which we ought not to have any difficulty in understanding, if once we get rid of the idea, born of our melancholy modern experience, that the buying of land in small parcels is for the small man the road to ruin, a luxury in which none but the well-to-do can afford to indulge. We have all heard much of the iniquities of the English system of land transfer, and have contrasted its cumbersomeness, its expense, its uncertainty, with the facilities for buying small plots offered by methods like those of France, where sales and mortgages are entered in a public registry, which any one has the right to inspect. But we need not look to the Continent or the British Dominions to see a market for real property working freely and smoothly. In our period by far the most general form of tenure was one customary tenure or another, and whatever the disadvantages of customary tenure may have been--and they were many--they had one great compensating advantage. Customary holdings could be transferred easily, cheaply, and with certainty, by surrender and admission in the court of the manor. Since there was no doubt that the freehold was in the lord, there was no expensive investigation of titles to eat up the prospective profits of the purchaser, and the Court Rolls offered a record, one is tempted to say a register, of the nature of the interest which a tenant had had in any holding from time immemorial. Of course the adjustment of the respective claims of lords and tenants raised very knotty problems, and these will be examined later. But, as long as they were in abeyance, the fact that peasant holdings could be transferred so readily contributed to the breaking up in the regularity of manorial arrangements, to the passage of land from one family to another, and to the formation of larger properties out of small.[178]

[178] Since writing the above I have seen that the same view of
the advantages of copyhold (the descendant of villein) tenure is
taken by Dr. Hasbach, who quotes an eighteenth century writer to
the effect that copyhold as compared with freehold land had the
advantage of "the greater certainty of its title and the
cheapness of its conveyance" (Hasbach, _A History of the English
Agricultural Labourer_, pp. 72-73).

Such petty transactions among the peasantry were not, however, the only way in which substantial peasant properties came into existence. In addition to the transference of land from one tenant to another there were other causes working to produce much the same results. The first was the continuous taking in of plots of waste land by tenants who got permission from the manorial authorities to make encroachments upon it. The second was the abandonment of the system of cultivating the demesne by the labour rents of the tenants. Long before the enclosing of the common waste by lords of manors and farmers had become a very serious grievance--that it was a grievance at an early date is proved by the Statute of Merton[179]--one finds arrangements being made for bringing unused land under cultivation. Sometimes this movement goes on on a very large scale indeed; the Abbey of St. Albans gets a licence from the King in 1347 to "improve its wastes aforesaid and to grant and let them for their true value to whomsoever of their tenants comes to take them;"[180] and about the same time 500 acres of waste in the forest of High Peak[181] are let by the Crown to three tenants, much to the disgust of the neighbouring commoners. Usually the encroachments on the waste take place piecemeal. The process by which piece after piece was clipped off it and added to the tenants' holdings is shown very clearly in Rentals and Court Rolls. Occasionally it goes on without sanction; a tenant surreptitiously draws into his holding an extra piece of land for which he pays nothing, and is only found out when he has occupied it for some time. But this is rare, for such encroachments are a source of profit to the lord, both in the payment made for the original permission to make them and in the rent coming from them, and the steward is therefore careful that they should be made through the court and entered in detail on the rolls of the manor. Thus at Ashton-under-Lyne,[182] in 1422, both freeholders and customary tenants had made large intakes of wood and waste and were paying for some of them as much as 13s. 4d. and 10s. The Halmote Court of Colne[183] in 1324 shows many tenants paying a few pence for acres and half acres of waste. At Yateleigh,[184] in 1287, almost every one of the fifty-three customary tenants held, in addition to his land in the open fields, land taken from the waste amounting in the aggregate to 37 acres, while some possessed no land at all except that which they had thus reclaimed. In the tithing of Aldershot,[185] on the same manor, one tenant held 52 acres in encroachments. At Crokeham[186] another held 63-1/2 acres in addition to the standard half virgate of customary land; another, at Southwood,[187] 16 acres.

[179] 1235, c. 4. One may remark, however, that the power which
a single freeholder had had before 1235 to prevent the breaking
up or enclosure of common pastures, even when he had more than
was sufficient for his own beasts, was a genuine hardship for
the lord, for other freeholders, and for the customary tenants;
see the remarks in Pollock and Maitland (_History of English
Law_, vol. i. p. 612).

[180] _Gesta Abbatum Monasterii St. Albani_, vol. iii. pp.
120?-121, quoted by Petruschevsky, _op. cit._, pp. 179?-180.

[181] _Victoria County History_, Derbyshire, vol. ii. p. 170.

[182] Glover, _History of Ashton_, p. 355. "Richard the Hunte
... for an intake 3d. ... Thomas of the Leghes for the one half
of the intake in Palden Wood 13s. 4d. The same Thomas of the
Leghes for an intake besyde Alt Hey 10s."

[183] _Court Rolls of the Lordships, etc., of Thomas, Earl of
Lancaster_ (Farrer). Halmote of Ightenhill, 1324, January 18:
"John de Briddeswail for entry to half an acre of waste in
Habrincham, 6d., for the same yearly, 2d." Same court, May 7,
1324.: "Richard le Skinner for entry to 4 acres of waste in
Sommerfordrod, 6d., for the same yearly, 6d.," and _passim_. In
the north of England there seems to have been very much
colonising of the waste, perhaps because original settlements
were small. See Turner, _History of Brighouse, Rastrick, and
Hipperholme_, pp. 66?-67, and _Trans. Rochdale Literary and
Philosophical Society_, vol. vii., Rochdale Manor Inquisition.

[184] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 116?-120, _e.g._ "Robert,
son of Peter de la Pierke, holds one acre of encroachment land
on paying 4d."

[185] _Ibid._, pp. 123-?127.

[186] _Ibid._, pp. 131?-134. "Richard Wysdon holds half a
virgate of land containing 16 acres.... The same holds 63-1/2
acres, which were in his ancient occupation, and were found to
be over and above his said virgate, and (included) in many
encroachments."

[187] _Ibid._, pp. 122-?123: "William of Southwoode holds 16
acres of encroachments and other detached pieces."

The process of nibbling away the waste was, in fact, very general, and was a natural and inevitable one. The lord gained by leasing part of it to be broken up and cultivated, while, so long as sufficient land was left for grazing, the tenants gained by getting land which they could add to their holdings, and on which the growing population could settle. It must be remembered that the area under cultivation was everywhere an island in an ocean of unreclaimed barrenness which cried out for colonists.[188] In the Middle Ages land was abundant and men were scarce; the land wanted the people much more than the people wanted the land. Moreover, with the simple methods of cultivation prevailing, the number of persons which a villein's holding could maintain was strictly limited, and the tendency to "diminishing returns," with the consequent difficulty of maintaining a growing population on the same area, must have come into play very soon and very sharply. Surveyors[189] appreciated this, and pointed out on some manors that unless the tenants' holdings were enlarged they could not make a decent living and, what was more important to the authorities, could not perform the customary services. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that at a comparatively early date the manorial population began to overflow the boundaries of the customary land and to occupy the waste, with the result that the area under cultivation grew, in some cases, enormously.[190] We can hardly be mistaken in supposing that this was the chief cause of the remarkable difference in the amount of land which strikes one when one compares some of the surveys of later and earlier dates. In any case the result was to increase the opportunities possessed by the more prosperous tenants, who could afford to rent additional land, of adding to their holdings, and thus to produce a growing inequality in the distribution of property among them.

[188] Thorold Rogers _(Agriculture and Prices_, vol. i. p. 34:
"Not much less land was regularly under the plough than at
present") thinks otherwise. But (i.) modern agriculture has many
ways of using land besides keeping it "under the plough"; (ii.)
we know that in the eighteenth century large tracts now
cultivated were barren heaths, and it is difficult to believe
that these had been cultivated in the Middle Ages.

[189] See below, p. 189. The instances there quoted are later
than the period with which we are now dealing, but as they
mostly come from Northumberland, a very conservative county,
they are perhaps to the point.

[190] _e.g._ at South Newton in Wiltshire (see p. 74), tithing
of Swanthrop in Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings
was in 1287 about 360 acres, and in 1567 about 607 acres, and
tithing of Crondal, where the area of the tenants' holdings was
in 1287 about 181, and in 1567 about 284. But these figures are
not altogether satisfactory; and sometimes one finds a
reduction, _e.g._ at Dippenhall (from about 287 acres at the
earlier date to about 275 at the later date). The plague
relieved the pressure of population, and thus removed one
incentive for breaking up the waste; on the other hand, it left
the survivors much better off, and thus more able to increase
the scale of their husbandry. But until we know much more about
the growth of population we shall not make much of general
comparisons of this kind.

If the instances which have been given above are at all typical of the state of things on many manors, the economic rigidity of rural life in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries must have been a good deal less than is often suggested. The legal forms are stiff and unchanging, but the life behind them is fluid, and produces all sorts of new combinations and arrangements which make legal forms a better index of what was a hundred years before than of what at any moment is. In particular one finds considerable movement going on before the Great Plague. The more fully manorial records are explored, the more difficult does it seem to generalise about the effects of that great catastrophe. One cannot say that it was the beginning of the commutation of labour services into rents, for on some manors they were partially commuted before it, and on some they were not entirely commuted till nearly two centuries later. One cannot say that the leasing of the demesne was due to the Plague; for where the labour supply was small, parts of it were leased already,[191] and after the Plague the authorities of different manors met the crisis in different ways, sometimes beginning by letting the demesne only to return later to the older system. It may be suggested, however, that its influence has been somewhat exaggerated by those authorities who would have us regard it as the watershed of economic history. No doubt the Great Plague was the single most important event in the economic history of the fourteenth century, just as the Irish famine of 1846 was the single most important event in the economic history of Ireland in the nineteenth century. But neither the Irish famine nor the Plague had the effect of sweeping economic development on to wholly new lines. What they both did was enormously to accelerate tendencies already at work. The customary tenants were buying and leasing land from each other before the Plague, and before the Plague some lords were leasing out their demesnes, but on a small scale. After the Plague the death of many holders and the poverty of many survivors caused land to come into the market on a vastly greater scale and at a cheaper rate, with the result that the aggregation of holdings, the beginnings of which have been described as above, proceeded with vastly increased rapidity. That this was the case immediately after the Plague is shown by the familiar entries[192] as to the transference of holdings which have lost their cultivators in the Court Rolls. The movement seems to have continued, however, long after the immediate effects of the Plague had passed away, and to have resulted on some manors in the fifteenth century in something which might almost be called free trade in land. One finds a readiness to buy and sell customary holdings which belies the idea of the manor as a rigid organisation in which little room was left for changing contractual arrangements, and one finds also the natural result of the rising commercialisation of land tenure in the grouping of several holdings under one tenant, in the appearance of the practice of some tenants sub-letting lands to others, and in general in the passing of property from the economically weak to the economically strong, which naturally does not go on rapidly till there is a market in which they both can meet.

[191] _e.g._ at Hadleigh in 1305 (_Victoria County History_,
Suffolk, Unwin's article); at Crondal in 1287 (_Crondal
Records_, p. 110); at Ormsby in 1324 (Massingberd, _History of
Ormsby_).

[192] _e.g._ Scrope, _Castle Combe_, p. 164. Court Rolls of
1357: "Johannis filius Johannis Payn venit et finem fecit cum
domino per 12d. pro ingressu habendo in illo messuagio et
virgata terræ quæ Johannis le Parkare quondam tenuit.... Et
dictum tenementum concessum est ei ad tam parvam finem eo quod
dictum tenementum est ruinosum et decassum; et existebat in manu
domini a tempore pestilentiæ pro defectu emptorum." Massingberd,
Ingoldmells Court Rolls for years 1349?-1352. Gasquet, _The
Great Pestilence_. Page, _The End of Villeinage in England_.

At the same time by the beginning of the fifteenth century another force of great importance was beginning to operate. The increase in the size of the customary tenants' holdings, and the growth of a class occupying much more land than the ordinary villein tenancy, was brought about not only by encroachment on the waste and the aggregation of holdings, but also by the transference to the tenants of that part of the manorial land which has been the lord's demesne. The process by which the demesne ceased to be cultivated by villein labour, and became frequently an area subject to the more elastic arrangements of leasehold tenure, has been often described, and we shall have to return to it later in speaking of the development of the large capitalist farm. Here it is sufficient to point out that, the abandonment of the primitive system, by which the tenants worked out their rents in labour on the demesne, had two consequences which are of great significance in the development of the villein into the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

In the first place, it meant that one great force making for equality between the holdings of different tenants was removed. The system which gave each customary tenant on a manor what may be called a standard holding was surely an artificial one, in the sense that it bears the mark of deliberate arrangement, and is not one which would tend to be established by the play of economic forces. As we have seen, economic forces did begin to impair it at an early date. Its persistence is more remarkable than its disappearance, and why had it persisted? Partly, no doubt, because the idea that each full household should be equipped with a standard holding was part of the original organisation of the village community, upon which the feudal superstructure had been imposed, and which it used as a machine for grinding out its revenue. Partly also through the needs of that superstructure itself. As the tenants were the instruments by which the demesne was cultivated, and as the demesne could not be cultivated unless the tenants were adequately equipped with the means of livelihood, the rough equality which existed between their holdings, though arising from the communal arrangement of village life, and not deliberately imposed from above, had, nevertheless, been, in fact, a quite necessary condition for the working of the lord's private estate. A settled relation between holdings and services was a convenience to the manorial authorities, and in this sense the work done on the demesne was a force tending to keep the tenants' holdings fixed, as it were, on a scale which did not easily allow of much variation.[193] When the demesne ceased to be cultivated by labour services, what had been from the point of view of the manorial officers, though not from that of the villagers, the chief practical reason for maintaining equality between the different holdings disappeared, and the inequality which economic forces were tending to produce developed more rapidly.

[193] The view that the equality of holdings was the creation
not of the communal needs of the peasantry but of deliberate
arrangement by the authorities, seems to be untenable in face of
the evidence of early records showing that freeholders as well
as the servile peasantry held roughly equal shares (see
Vinogradoff, _Villainage in England_, Essay II., chap. iv. and
chap. vi). On the other hand, the apportionment of services to
holdings tended to stereotype the existing arrangement. A late
example which displays both elements, that of authoritative
pressure and that of communal organisation, is supplied by the
Customary of High Furness (R.O. Duchy of Lancs. Special
Commissions, No. 398): "As heretofore dividing and portioning of
tenements hath caused great decay, chiefly of the service due to
her Highness for horses, and of her woods, and has been the
cause of making a great number of poor people in the lordship,
it is now ordered that no one shall divide his Tenement or
Tenements among his children, but that the least part shall be
of the ancient yearly rent to her Highness of 6s. 8d." See
below, p. 101.

In the second place, when labour rents were commuted into money, the demesne was often added to the tenants' holdings, with the result of still further destroying their symmetry, by the opportunity which was given to men with money to buy up parcels of land. This movement went on so unobtrusively that its significance is liable to be overlooked. In reality, however, it was a change of very great importance, scarcely less important than the decay of villein services and disabilities which was the other side, the personal as contrasted with the agrarian side, of the same break up of the old system of cultivation. One must remember that the lord's demesne formed a very large part of a great many manors, often no doubt the most fertile and desirable part. One may recall again that there are other European countries in which the sharp distinction between the demesne and the holdings of the peasants was maintained in full mediæval vigour almost to our own day. In Prussia,[194] for example, a Royal Decree, the Decree of 1807, was needed to break it down, and to allow the land held by lords of manors to be bought by the small cultivator. What the partial obliteration of this line meant in fourteenth and fifteenth century England was that a great deal of land, land on which the peasantry, one would suppose, had often turned covetous eyes, was thrown into the market for families who could afford it to buy and lease, that for a century or so after the Plague great estates were being broken up into small, instead of small being consolidated into great, that for a century or so the land market turned in favour of the small man as much as it afterwards turned against him.[195]

[194] Edict of October 9, 1807, Clause 1.

[195] Compare a document, _temp._ Hen. VIII., quoted by Gonner,
_Common Land and Enclosure_, p. 155 n., which states that
whereas landlords at one time could not find tenants, now the
case is altered and tenants want landlords.

Of course the leasing of the demesne was not universal; nor, when it was leased, was it always divided up among the tenants. Often it was transferred _en bloc_ to a single farmer, and became the nucleus of the large leasehold farm whose management we shall examine later. Sometimes it was first divided up and later consolidated again, with results disastrous to the interests which had grown up upon it. But the existence in the sixteenth century[196] of many small demesne tenancies is a proof that a common way of treating it was to divide it up among the peasants; and if we cast our eyes back over the records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we can find many examples to show how such a state of things was brought about. Sometimes small plots of the demesne are leased for terms of years. At Tykeford, in 1325,[197] the surveyor found that 48 acres of demesne which were then in the hands of the lords used to be leased to the tenants. The bailiff's accounts of the manor of Amble[198] in Northumberland show that in 1328 "the forlands" were let out to the bondage tenants, and in 1337 four of the latter got leases of from 2 to 4 acres of demesne at Acklington.[199] In 1436 at Ambresbury[200] 2 carucates were leased to various tenants for a term of years, as well as 8 acres of meadow and 400 acres of pasture; and at Winterborne[201] 2 carucates, 6 acres of meadow, and 300 acres of pasture were leased in the same year. But in the fifteenth century the leasing of the demesne was constant, and there is no need to multiply examples which can be found in almost every survey of the period. Where the land was not leased it was quite usual for it to be held by copy. This was a common practice in the fifteenth century in the south-west of England. The surveyor[202] who, in 1568, gave an account of six manors in the Western counties, found that in all of them the Barton or demesne had been split up among the customary tenants for very many years and was held by them as copyholders. The same thing happened on the manors of the Earl of Northumberland, where the tenants' holdings were increased by pieces taken from the lord's demesne and divided equally among them. It happened at South[203] Newton in Wiltshire, where in 1567 a good deal of the Barton land was held by the tenants, who were copyholders, on the same terms as the rest of their customary holdings; at Stovard,[204] and Childhampton,[205] and Estoverton,[206] where the customary tenants held "Bordland." Very probably those pieces of the demesne which on some manors were held by copy of Court Roll, had originally been let on lease in the way described above. The difficulty of distinguishing them was very great, since normally they would lie in the open fields scattered among the strips which formed the customary holdings, in such a way that the movement of a balk obliterated the difference. It is not surprising, therefore, that in spite of the efforts of the lord's officials, they should constantly have lost their identity. The remarkable thing is that they retained it so often, and that surveyors were able to pin down a couple of acres among 30 or 40 others as not being, like the rest, customary land, but as having at one time, perhaps several generations before, been parts of the lord's demesne which it is "good to revyve and keep in memory that it should not hereafter decay, but that at all tymes it may be devyded from the customarye."[207]

[196] For the use of the demesne in the sixteenth century see
below, pp. 200?-213.

[197] Dugdale,_Monasticon_, vol. v., Survey of Tykeford.

[198] _Northumberland County History_, vol. v., Amble: "4s. 8d.
de forlands dimissis diversis tenentibus." "4 acres leased by
the Prior for 8 years to Roger at 8d. per acre."

[199] _Ibid._, vol. v., Acklington.

[200] Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of Ambresbury.

[201] _Ibid._

[202] Humberstone, _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i. p. 43.
See below, pp. 208?-209.

[203] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Lands of William, First Earl
of Pembroke_ (Straton).

[204] _Ibid._

[205] _Ibid._

[206] _Ibid._

[207] _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i., Survey of the
Manor of Whitforde in the County of Devon.

With these words, so suggestive of the blurring of lines which in previous ages were sharply drawn, we may pause to consider where we stand. Our argument has aimed at showing the large changes which have taken place in the position of the peasantry as landholders before the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century begins. We have not been able to give any quantitative measurements of the developments. But we have seen enough to understand the direction in which economic forces are setting. The substitution of hired labour for villein services, and the formation of a middle class of considerable landholders out of the occupiers of virgates and semi-virgates who formed the bulk of the population on most mediæval manors, are changes which have taken place quietly and which have nothing sensational about them. But the growth of relationships based on a cash nexus between individuals, which they both imply, has effected a very real alteration in rural conditions, an alteration which is in a small way like that occurring to-day when the discovery that a quiet village possesses mineral wealth or is a convenient holiday resort puts money into circulation there, causes farming lands to be cut up into plots which are bought by the savings of speculative tradesmen, and adds a new tangle of commercial relationships to the slowly moving economy of village life. Speculation in land on a small scale begins among the more prosperous villeins at an early date, as the inevitable result of an increase in prosperity and of the land hunger of a growing population. It is immensely accelerated through the impetus which the plague, by emptying holdings of their occupants, gives to the formation of something like a land market, and the result is that the holdings of the more fortunate grow and the holdings of the less fortunate diminish. As a consequence, there is in many fifteenth century villages the greatest variety in the economic conditions of the peasantry. Except where commercial forces have been held in check by the remoteness of the township from centres of trade, or where the needs of the manorial authorities oblige them to resist any subdivision of holdings for fear it should lead to the loss of services, the comparative uniformity characteristic of their holdings in the thirteenth century has disappeared, and the equality in poverty of the modern agricultural labourer has not yet taken its place. Though the old Adam of economic enterprise seems to be banished by the insistence of stewards and bailiffs that holdings which are responsible for certain works shall be treated as an indivisible unity, he sneaks back, even in the mediæval manor, in the shape of agreements among the peasantry, agreements which break that unity up by way of exchange, of sale, of leasing, and sub-letting. By the end of the fifteenth century the different elements in rural society are spread, as it were, along a more extended scale, and there is a much wider gap between those who are most, and those who are least, successful.