Chapter I — The Agrarian Problem and the State — The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century by R. H. Tawney

Chapter I The Agrarian Problem and the State

(a) The Political and Social Importance of the Peasantry

The changes which have been described in the organisation of agriculture created problems which were less absorbing than those arising out of the religious reformation and the relation of England to continental powers. When we turn over the elaborate economic legislation of the reign of Elizabeth, with its attempts to promote industry, to define class relationships, and to regulate with sublime optimism almost every contract which one man can make with another, we are tempted at first to see statesmen giving sleepless nights to the solution of economic problems, and to think of a modern bureaucratic state using the resources of scientific administration to pursue a deliberate and clearly conceived economic policy. But this is both to exaggerate the importance which economic questions occupied in the minds of the governing aristocracies of the age, and to credit them with a foresight which they did not possess. If they are to be called mercantilists, in England, at any rate, they wear their mercantilism with a difference; as a vague habit of mind, not as a reasoned system of economic doctrines. Their administrative optimism is the optimism of innocence as much as of omnipotence; the fruit of a self-confidence which, in the name of the public interests, will prop a falling trade, or cut down a flourishing one, with a bland naïveté unperturbed by the hesitations which perplex even the most courageous of modern protectionists. Though in several departments of life—in commercial policy, in the regulation of the wage contract, in the relief of distress—the main lines drawn by Elizabethan statesmen will stand for two centuries, much of their legislation is very rough and ready; much of it again is undertaken after generations of dilatory experiments; much of it is devoid of any originality, and is a mere reproduction on a national scale of the practice of individual localities, a reproduction which sometimes does less than justice to the original. If it is popular, it is popular because it tells men to do what most decent men have been doing for a long time already, and when it tells them to do something else it is carried out only with great difficulty. If it is permanent, it is permanent not because Parliamentary draughtsmen possess any great skill or foresight, but because, before the rise of modern industry, all social relationships have a great amount of permanence. Though there was much interesting speculation on economic matters, economic rationalism was as a practical force almost negligible; and since the only instrument through which it could have achieved influence was the monarchy, its lack of influence was perhaps politically fortunate. Sixteenth century England was too busy getting the State on to its feet to produce a Colbert. Lath and plaster Colberts built their card castles on the Council table of James and Charles, and all was in train for the sage paternal monarchy which was the ideal of Bacon. But a wind blew from strange regions beyond their ken, and they were scattered before they could do much either for good or evil, leaving, as they fled, a cloud of dark suspicion round all those who would be wiser in the art of Government than their neighbours, from which, in the lapse of three centuries, the expert has hardly emerged. In spite of mercantilism, economic questions never became in England the pre-occupation of specialists. In spite of the genuine indignation roused by the sufferings of the weaker classes in society, questions affecting them were questions which statesmen did not handle for their own sake, but only in so far as they forced themselves into the circle of political interests by cutting across the order, or military defence, or financial system, of the country. Apart from these high matters of policy most members of the governing classes were inclined to answer petitions on the subject of economic grievances as Paget did to Somerset: Why can’t you let it alone? “What a good year... is victuals so dear in England and nowhere else? If they and their fathers before them have lived quietly these sixty years, pastures being enclosed, the most part of these rufflers have least cause to complain.”548

The subordinate place occupied by economic questions during our period makes the attention which was given to the results of pasture-farming all the more remarkable. Though to the statesmanship of the sixteenth century the agrarian problem was one of the second order, it was, at any rate till the accession of Elizabeth, the most serious of its own class, and it was important enough to occupy Governments at intervals for over a century and a half. The first Statute against depopulation was passed in 1489;549 an abortive Bill was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656;550 and between the two lies a series of seven Royal Commissions, twelve Statutes, and a considerable number of Proclamations dealing with one aspect or another of the enclosing movement, as well as numerous decisions on particular cases by the Privy Council, the Court of Star Chamber, and the Court of Requests. This reaction of the new agrarian developments upon public policy is interesting in several ways. It illustrates the growth of new classes and forms of social organisation, the methods and defects of sixteenth century administration, and the ideas of the period as to the proper functions of the State in relation to an important set of questions, upon which political opinion was in some ways nearer to our own than it was to that of the age following the Civil War. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether without importance from the point of view of general history. We need not discuss how far the reaction of some recent historians against the familiar judgments which contrast Tudor tyranny with the constitutional revolutions of the seventeenth century as darkness with light, is likely to be permanent. But it is perhaps safe to say that it is in the sphere of social policy that their case is seen at its strongest. After all, tyranny is often the name which one class gives to the protection of another. To the small copyholder or tenant farmer the merciless encroachments of his immediate landlord were a more dreaded danger than the far-off impersonal autocracy of the Crown to which he appealed for defence. The period in which he suffered most in the sixteenth century was the interval between the death of the despotic Henry VIII. and the accession of the despotic Elizabeth. Though the interference of the Tudor, and—in a feebler fashion—of the Stuart, Governments to protect the peasantry was neither disinterested nor always effective, its complete cessation after 1642, and the long line of Enclosure Acts which follow the revolution of 1688, suggest that, as far as their immediate economic interests were concerned, the smaller landholders had more to lose than to gain from a revolution which took power from the Crown to give it to the squires. The writers 551 who after 1750 turned with a sigh from the decaying villages which they saw around them, to glorify the policy of the absolutist Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were received with the ridicule which awaits all who set themselves against a strong current of interests and ideas. But historically they were right. The revolution, which brought constitutional liberty, brought no power to control the aristocracy who, for a century and a half, alone knew how such liberty could be used—that blind, selfish, indomitable, aristocracy of county families, which made the British Empire and ruined a considerable proportion of the English nation. From the galleries of their great mansions and the walls of their old inns their calm, proud faces, set off with an occasional drunkard, stare down on us with the unshakable assurance of men who are untroubled by regrets or perplexities, men who have deserved well of their order and their descendants, and await with confidence an eternity where preserves will be closer, family settlements stricter, dependents more respectful, cards more reliable, than in this imperfect world they well can be. Let them have their due. They opened a door which later even they could not close. They fostered a tree which even they could not cut down. But neither let us forget that to the poorer classes its fruits were thorns and briars, loss of their little properties, loss of economic independence, the hot fit of the hateful Speenhamland policy, the cold fit of the more hateful workhouse system.552 Those who would understand the social forces of modern England must realise that long disillusionment. Even in the seventeenth century there are whisperings of it. At the end of the Civil War there were men who were dimly conscious that the freedom for which they had fought involved economic, as well as political and ecclesiastical, changes. “Wee the poor impoverisht commoners,” wrote the leaders of a little band of agrarian reformers to the Council of War in 1649, “claim freedom in the common lands by vertue of this conquest over the King, which is gotten by our joynt consent.... If this freedom be not granted, wee that are the poor commoners are in a worse case than we were in the King’s day.”553 But from the reign of Henry VII. to the Civil War official opinion was as generally in favour of protecting the peasantry against the ruinous effects of agrarian innovations, as it was on the side of leaving the landlords free to work their will in the two centuries which succeeded. We must explain this state of mind, for it certainly needs explanation; and this will necessitate our looking at the movements of the peasants and at their place in the State. We must estimate how far it was effective in practice; and to do this we must say a few words about the administrative machinery of the Tudors and of the first two Stuarts.

In almost all ages the first task of Governments is the preservation of order. Though the economic ideas of the sixteenth century were very different from those of the nineteenth, one of the reasons which made it impossible for the statesmen of the period to leave the land question altogether alone was the same as that which induced their successors to deal with Irish land in 1870 and 1881. It was that agrarian discontent created a permanent supply of inflammable material, which a spark might turn into a conflagration. The years between 1500 and 1650 are the last great age of the peasant uprisings which, in all countries of Western Europe except France and Ireland, are incredible to-day as a romance of giants, and hardly a generation in that stormy period elapsed without one. Sometimes nothing more happened than a collision of justices and gentry with angry mobs who were tearing down hedges and restoring common to common again under mysterious figures who flit across the darkening country-side with weapons in their hands and the eternal insurrection of the New Testament on their lips—Jack o’ the Style, Pyrce Plowman, and that prophetic Captain Pouch, who “was sent of God to satisfie all degrees whatsoever, and in this present work was directed by the Lord of Heaven.”554 Sometimes the discontent swelled to a small civil war, as it did in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, and in the eastern and southern counties in 1549. The Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace were, it is true, mainly motived by discontent with the attack on the abbeys. But the explanation of their objects given by those insurgents who were cross-examined by the Government makes it difficult to agree with Professor Gay that only an insignificant part was played in these movements by agrarian discontent. The truth is that we ought to distinguish between the objects of different sections. The rebels of 1536 were not a class, but almost the whole society of northern England, which suddenly rolls forward with all its members, spirituality and laity, peasants and peers, in fervent motion together. The weaker side of these great conservative demonstrations was that, though all classes were united against the régime typified by Cromwell, all classes were not moved to the same degree by the same grievances. Even when the old religion was the cause that took the gentry into the field, the humbler rebels were brought out as much by hatred of agrarian as of religious innovations. The men of Lincolnshire marched under a banner embroidered with a ploughshare, and laggards were spurred forward with the cry “What will ye do? Shall we go home and keep sheep?”555 In Cumberland the four Captains of Penrith—Faith, Poverty, Pity, and Charity—marched in solemn procession with drawn swords round Burgh Church, and then, having heard Mass, led their followers, with the blessing of the vicar, on a crusade to put an end to gentlemen and to withhold rents and fines.556 In the North generally the arrival of Aske’s messengers was a signal for the wholesale plucking down of new enclosures; a programme of agrarian reform was included in the demands put forward at Doncaster; and Aske himself told the Government at his examination that the practice of letting out farms over the heads of poor tenants was one of the causes of the rising.557 A well-informed officer of State like Sir William Paget seems to have thought that even the rebellion which took place in Devonshire and Somersetshire in 1549, the causes of which were mainly ecclesiastical, was partly also agrarian.558 In that year, indeed, nearly the whole of the southern counties, beginning in May with Hertfordshire, from Norfolk in the east to Hampshire in the south and Worcester in the west, were driven into riot by disappointment with the ineffective Royal Commission appointed in the preceding year. In 1550 there were disturbances in Kent, and the Government anticipated their appearance in Essex. In 1552 the Buckinghamshire peasants rose on account of high rents and high prices. In 1554 Wyatt’s 559 adherents demanded that all pasture lands which had forcibly been seized by persons in power should be restored. In 1569 an armed band pulled down enclosures near Chinley 560 in Derbyshire, threatened to kill the encloser, and rescued by force those of their number who were arrested. Twenty-six years later, at a time of unusually high prices, even the peasantry of Oxfordshire,561 that most imperturbable of English counties, planned “to knock down the gentlemen and rich men who made corn so dear, and who took the commons.” In 1607 in the Midlands, where in the preceding decade enclosure and depopulation had created a situation as acute as that of half a century before, there was a riot which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission.

This was perhaps the last serious agrarian rising which England has seen. But though henceforward the hatred of the new agrarian régime ran for the most part underground, it had been burned too deep into the minds of the people to be lightly forgotten, and more than once its smouldering embers flickered up in occasional riots. In the first flush of the army’s victory over King and Parliament, when the shattering of authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, not only the political, but the economic, ideas of two centuries later burst for a moment, as in an early spring, into wonderful and premature life. The programme of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the Veto of the House of Lords, but also “that you would have laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor.”562 Theoretical communism, repudiated by some of the Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, those “true born sons and friends of England” who, under Everard and Winstanley, set themselves, in the spirit of an Owenite Community, to convert the waste land at Weybridge into the New Jerusalem.563 For to many earnest souls the day of the Lord seems very near, and Israel must make ready against it, not with anguish of spirit only, but with spade labour upon the barren earth. The contrast between the prevalence of organised agrarian revolts in the middle of the sixteenth century, dragging on in small sporadic agitations for nearly one hundred years, with their comparative rarity two hundred years later, when similar causes were at work to produce them, marks the new grouping of social classes and economic forces which was going on apace in our period. The intelligence of toiling England, that for a century now has gone to build up a new civilisation in factory and mine, in trade union and co-operative store, still lay in the larger villages, its immemorial home. Discontent travelled across the enclosing counties as it does to-day in a Welsh mining valley, outcoursing oppression itself, like Elijah running before Ahab into Jezreel. “If three or four good fellows would ride in the night with every man a bell, and cry in every town that they pass, ‘To Swaffham! To Swaffham!’ by the morning there would be ten thousand assembled at the least; and then one bold fellow to stand forth and say, ‘Sirs, now we be here assembled, you know how little favour the gentlemen bear us poor men.... Let us... harness ourselves.’”564 Good fellows and bold were not wanting. “From that time forward no man could keep his servant at plough; but every man that could bear a staff went forward.”565 Before the appearance of almost universal leasehold tenure, standing armies, and omnipotent aristocratic Parliaments, unrest among the rural population might cause the Government a not inexpensive campaign, in which the reluctant militia of yesterday were the enthusiastic rebels of to-day, and there was not therefore much disparity between the discipline and equipment of the forces engaged on either side. Both in the mainly agrarian revolts in Norfolk, and in the mainly religious revolts in Devonshire, the peasants fell, as they hoped they might, like men, and it was the arquebuses of the foreign mercenaries which really decided the struggle. Poor homeless hirelings, what could they know but to clamour for their pay, and shoot better men than themselves?

To understand the nature of a body at rest it is sometimes advisable to look at the same body when it is in motion. The agrarian disturbances of our period possess certain features which are of interest even to those who are concerned primarily not with social politics, but with economic organisation. In the first place, they mark the transition from the feudal revolts of the fifteenth century, based on the union of all classes in a locality against the central government, to those in which one class stands against another through the opposition of economic interests. In the Lincolnshire rebellion and in the Pilgrimage of Grace the old spirit predominated. In the North of England the new agrarian régime had not proceeded far enough to sap entirely the ancient bonds between landlord and tenant, and the plunder of the monastic estates had not yet set a commercial aristocracy in the seat of the old-fashioned Catholic landlords. The commons of Westmoreland, who declare that they will trust no gentlemen with their councils, nevertheless feel sufficient confidence in Lord Darcy to write to him for his advice as to how far they will be justified in insisting on reduced admission fines, and in pulling down “all the intakes yt be noysum for poor men.”566 Had the Catholic gentry generally been willing to sacrifice the rents got from pasture-farming, these movements might have found leaders who would have made them more formidable. As it was, even when hatred of the religious changes or of some particular piece of legislation, like the unpopular Statute of Uses, enrolled the gentry with the peasants, as in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire in 1536, the incompatibility of the allies was obvious, and the presence of the wealthier classes inspired distrust among the rank and file, who saw in them the authors of their economic evils, and who, though genuinely concerned at the painful destruction of the social institutions of the old religion, were fighting mainly for the maintenance of “old customs and tenant right,” fair rents and security of tenure. In spite of the temporary union of all classes in 1536, the insurgents tended to break up into two camps corresponding roughly with the division between landlord and tenant. In Lincolnshire, though the commons were influenced by the gentry so far as to demand the repeal of the Act of Uses, “not knowing,” as a witness said, “what that Act of Uses meant,” they showed their distrust of the upper classes by refusing to allow them to discuss their future policy apart from the general body of insurgents, while the extremists clamoured that “they ought to kill some of the justices; also that if they hanged for this, they would not leave one gentleman alive in Lincolnshire.”567 At Richmond all lords and gentlemen were to swear on the mass-book to maintain the profit of Holy Church, to take nothing of their tenants but the usual rents, to put down Cromwell and not to go to London, on pain of death if they refused.568 For courts have strange arts of seduction, and though London (thank Heaven) is not England now, it was still less England then. The rough rhymes that ran through the North contain the warning of all popular movements against the treachery of leaders, the sad eternal warning which buoys the sands where so many high endeavours have gone to wreck. “All commons stick ye together, rise with no great man till ye know his intent. Keep your harness in your hands, and ye shall obtain all your purpose in all this North land.... Claim ye old customs and tenant right, to take your farms by a God’s penny, all gressums and heightenings to be laid down. Then may we serve our sovereign Lord King Henry VIII., God save his noble Grace.

We shall serve our lands’ lords in every righteous cause
With horse and harness as custom will demand.
Lords spiritual and temporal have it in your mind
This world as it waveth, and to your tenants be kind.
Adieu, gentle commons, thus make I an end:
Writer of this letter, pray Jesu be his speed;
He shall be your captain, when that ye have need.”569

The temporary solidarity which had drawn all classes into the Pilgrimage of Grace, though it flickered up for the last time in the feudal revolt of the northern earls in 1569, was absent altogether from the widespread agitation of 1549 to 1550. Except in Devonshire and Cornwall, the disturbances of those years were purely agrarian, a movement of tenants against landlords. The Eastern rebels were for leaving “as many gentlemen in Norfolk as there be white bulls”;570 the gentry responded by rallying to the Government; and both in that country and in Devonshire the military forces which put down the peasants were led by the two most notoriously unpopular landlords in England, who had built up their estates out of confiscated abbey lands, the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. In the reign of Henry VII. the problem before Governments had still been to prevent a great landlord from using his authority over his tenants to make war on his neighbours or on the State. Sixty years later it is to prevent tenants in several different counties from combining against landlords. The landed classes recognise the new spirit. They denounce the peasants as communists and agitators; and when they get a free hand, as in the years from 1549 to 1553, they insist on legislation which will make effective combination impossible.

In the second place, the way in which the agrarian agitations were conducted is interesting as showing both the comparative prosperity and independence of the English peasantry, even at a time when the fortunes of many of them were declining, and the general conceptions of social expediency held by what was regarded as the most representative part of the English nation. It would be a mistake to think of the rebels who joined these revolts as mere unorganised malcontents, with nothing to lose. There is no resemblance at all, either in personnel or methods, between the agrarian disturbances of our period and the riots of starving agricultural labourers who burned ricks under Captain Swing in the early nineteenth century. The peasants who formed the backbone of the movements were often well-to-do men, who were fighting to keep their land with the dreadful tenacity of small proprietors. They had arms and were accustomed to their use. They had sufficient money to raise common funds. They included among their number sanguine and pertinacious litigants who, so far from being disposed to throw up their case at the hint of the landlord’s displeasure, were quite capable of making his life one long lawsuit. The readiness of a class to make effective the protection given it by the law in the face of the opposition of powerful individuals, quenched, alas! too often by ignorance, and timidity, and generations of dull oppression, is a very good test of its spirit and of the practical freedom which it enjoys. In the sixteenth century, though we certainly see many gross cases of intimidation, we also see tenants appealing to the law courts and to the Government over the heads of lords of manors. Such appeals are a proof of the helplessness of the victims which has been commented on above. But they are also a proof of the persistence and cohesion of some among them. For while in the absence of oppression they would not have been necessary, in the absence of a determination to resist oppression they could not have been made. To enclose was in parts of the country to stir up a hornet’s nest. There was not much obsequiousness about the villagers of Thingden,571 who from 1494 to 1538 pursued their landlord through almost every Court in the Kingdom. The leaders of the popular agitation were often the more prosperous among the middle-classes. Sanders, the general in the interminable struggle over the common lands of the city of Coventry which began in 1460, was a member of the important craft of Dyers, and had occupied the high civic office of Chamberlain.572 At Louth 573 the initiative among the commons was taken by a tailor and a weaver. Ket 574 himself was a considerable landed proprietor as well as a tanner.

The peasants’ agitations took the form both of more or less organised risings and of sporadic rioting, which aimed at ends varying from place to place according to the grievances inspired by the varying conditions of different districts. Everywhere there were the throwing down of enclosures and the driving of sheep.575 In Yorkshire the enclosures which were pulled down seem to have been mainly intakes from the waste, and in Norfolk and the Midlands enclosures of arable land which had been converted to pasture. In Warwickshire the Earl of Warwick’s park was demolished, while in Wiltshire, where Sir William Herbert had acquired the lands of Wilton Abbey, and enclosed a whole village in his new park at Washerne, the peasants rose and tore down the palings.576 In the North generally the bitterest outcry seems to have arisen over the excessive fines and “gressums” charged for the admission of copyholders. In Cumberland 577 there was a general strike against the payment of rents, and almost everywhere there were complaints of the diminution in the area available for pasturing the beasts of commoners through the enclosing by landlords of manorial wastes.

Though it involves abandoning the order of events, let us illustrate by a single example 578 the shape assumed by agrarian rioting, which has not yet become a rebellion. In the summer of 1569, when Cecil and Elizabeth were waiting anxiously for news from those northern counties which “know no other prince but a Percy,” there was much running and riding, much sending for warrants and plentiful delay in their execution, in the wild country between Chinley and Bakewell, whose centre is the Peak, and whose principal gorge now carries the most beautiful piece of railway line in England. The Derbyshire peasantry seem to have been ill to deal with. A few years later some of those in Glossopdale succeeded in setting the Earl of Shrewsbury at defiance, and, when evicted from their farms, induced the Council to intervene to insist on their reinstatement.579 Just now those of them who lived in the neighbourhood of Chinley were in a ferment over the enclosure of some common land. The story is a curious one, and shows both the kind of conditions under which agrarian discontent developed, and the way in which it was associated in the mind of the Government with fears of political disturbance. The Duchy of Lancaster, to whom the land near Chinley belonged, had let a parcel of herbage called Mayston Field to one Lawrence Wynter, his lease to begin as soon as that of the existing tenant had expired. In that age of land speculation land changed hands rapidly. On the same day as Wynter obtained the lease he sold it to a certain Richard Celey. Celey transferred it to Godfrey Bradshaw, and Godfrey Bradshaw got rid of it to his brother Anthony. The trouble began when the land came into the hands of Godfrey Bradshaw. He started to hedge and ditch it, which of course involved the exclusion of the other inhabitants from the rights of pasture which they had hitherto enjoyed. Accordingly the villagers, led by twelve of their number, of whom four belonged to one family, removed the ditch, tore down the enclosure, which consisted of “XLIII hundredth quicksetts willowes and willowe stackes... and did utterlye destroy and cutt the sayd stacks and quick setts in pieces,” proceeding at the same time, with the object of protecting their own grazing land against encroachments, themselves to divide up the land into smaller enclosures to be held by each man in severalty. Godfrey Bradshaw then obtained warrants for the preservation of the peace against the ringleaders, and at the same time induced the lessor, who was Sir Ralph Sadler, the Chancellor of the Duchy, to address a letter to them directing them not to interfere with any houses, hedges, or ditches, which might in future be constructed round the land. They received his communication, but massed in force with arms on Chinley Hill, pulled down what still remained of Bradshaw’s hedges, and then proceeded to organise the nucleus of a very pretty agitation. They gave part of the herbage, which was nominally in the occupation of the unfortunate lessee, to one William Beard, on condition that, after the manner of his betters in the good old days before the Tudors, he should “maynteyn them geynst the Queenes Majestie,” his support taking the form of an agreement that he “should from tyme to tyme send them Ydill ryotouse p’sons to assyste them in these yll doinges.” They then raised a fund, presumably by a levy on the inhabitants, called a meeting in the forest of High Peak, and set off about the tenth of June to Bakewell for a further conference, arranging in the meantime that some one should burn Godfrey Bradshaw’s house, and that while his enclosures, if re-erected, should be pulled down, the other inhabitants should make haste to divide up the disputed land into twenty-one separate parcels. When the Bradshaws, having got their warrants, tried with the aid of the village constable to execute them, their opponents (“the land was grabbed from him, and he did what any decent man would do”580) threatened them with murder, and, on one of the party being actually arrested, came very near to carrying their threat out. “The said p’tyes... did ryotouslye assemble themselves together in great companies at the town of Hayfield with unlawfull weapons, that is to saye, with bowes, pytchefforkes, clobbes, staves, swords, and daggers drawen, and ryotouslye dyd then and there assaulte and p’sue the sayd Godfrey and Edward Bradshawe, and in ryotouse manner dyd reskewe and take from them the body of the sayd Richard Shower, being attached; the Queenes Officer, George Yeavely of Bawdon, then being p’sent commanding the peace to be kepte.” Having chased the enemy for some distance, they camped on the contested territory, and kept a watchful eye and a firm hand for any sign of the reappearance of the detested hedges. More serious still in the eyes of the Government (and this, one suspects, was their undoing), the leaders of this village revolution went so far as to entangle themselves in high politics. At their examination they are asked, “Whether dyd Reynold Kirke about May day last paste, and dyvers tymes since and before, or any other tyme, confederate, consulte, practise, or otherwise confer and talk with one Mr. Bircles of the countye of Chester... touching or concerning prophesis by noblemen, or otherwise, and what books of prophesie have you or the said Bircles seen or heard, and what is the effect thereof, and how often have you or he perused, used, or conferred of the same, or about such purposes, and with whom?” We do not know how they answered this question. It may be that the anger of these Derbyshire peasants at their vanishing commons was indeed a fraction to be set among weightier assets by schemers in high places, and that the sinister Mr. Bircles had really talked with them of matters more serious than the pulling down of hedges and the baiting of enclosers, of things forbidden to the vulgar, of the scattering of upstart officials, of the restoration of a Catholic monarchy, of Mary, who in the previous year had made her irrevocable plunge across the Border. It may be merely that all in authority had that autumn an unusually bad attack of nerves. In 1569 the North was full of prophets, both noble and other.

It was not always the case, however, that agrarian discontent ended in casual rioting of this kind. Of mere destructive violence there is, indeed, in all the social disturbances of the period, singularly little. There was a good deal in the routine of rural life, with its common administration of land and dependence on a collectively binding custom, to teach habits of discipline and co-operation. It must be remembered that those who took the initiative in breaking the law were not the peasants who pulled down enclosures, but the landlords who made them in defiance of repeated statutes forbidding them. On the whole the organised character of the action taken is more conspicuous than the individual excesses, and if one is to look for a modern analogy to the mixture of deliberation and violence which it shows, it must be sought in an Irish fair rent campaign rather than in the bread riots of a despairing urban proletariat. When the agitation was confined to individual manors it occasionally took the form of agrarian trade unionism. Tenants collectively decline to serve as jurors in the court of the manor till their demands are granted.581 They raise a common purse.582 They refuse to pay more than a certain rent. When more than one manor is implicated different localities display a rough cohesion. Whole communities seem to have joined the movement in 1536 and 1540 with a certain formality. In Lincolnshire and Yorkshire townships were brought out on the ringing of the town bell with the cohesion of a well-organised trade union; Beverley 583 sent messages to the Lincolnshire rebels under its common seal; and the part which was played by the village officers in the movements of the peasantry is proved by the Proclamation 584 which the Council issued in 1549, when disorders were at their height, forbidding constables, bailiffs, and head-boroughs to call meetings except for the purposes required by the law. Hales,585 as he rode through the South and Midlands in 1548, was struck by the patience with which people waited for the Government to take action, and attributed the disturbances of the ensuing year to the despair caused by the victory of the local landlords over the Commission, and to the rejection by Parliament of the Bills which he had introduced. Even Ket’s campaign in Norfolk, which ended in a sanguinary battle, during the greater part of it was carried on with an orderliness from which the Government which suppressed it might profitably have taken a lesson. Nothing could have been more unlike the popular idea of a jacquerie. The peasants enjoyed the enormous joke of making the gentry look foolish a great deal more than cutting their throats, as during the four weeks in which they were “playing” they might have done without any difficulty.

“Mr. Pratt, your sheep are very fat,
And we thank you for that;
We have left you the skins to pay your wife’s pins,
And you must thank us for that.”586

These lines, pinned on the carcasses of an enclosing landlord’s flocks and herds, are a fair specimen of their humour. Men may well be merry together, when they have seen hovering over the fields of an English county, though but in a fleeting glimpse, the New Jerusalem where the humble are exalted and the mighty put down; and there is no inconsistency between such mundane gaiety and the long pent up passion which on the lips of a nameless labourer burst into the cry, “As sheepe or lambs are a prey to the wolfe or lion, so are the poor men to the rich men.”587 There was much lecturing (the matter is easily imagined) at the Oak of Reformation, and not on one side only, for the peasants were tolerant compared with their betters, and a future archbishop was allowed to address the insurgents on the evils of their ways; much laying down of hedges and enclosures; much slaughtering of that beast of iniquity, the man-devouring sheep. There was none of the massacring of unarmed men which both Henry VIII. and Elizabeth ordered without compunction when they thought the times required it, very little of the “making the public good a pretext for private revenge,” against which the insurgents were warned by Parker. Though for months after the final tragedy the badges of the justly-hated Warwick “were not so fast set up but that they were as fast pulled down” from the city walls, the rebels even in the heat of their early triumphs claimed only to be executing the Protector’s Proclamations, and, while indignantly repudiating the name of traitors, showed a complete readiness to negotiate peaceably with the Government. The whole movement was less a rising against the State than a practical illustration of the peasants’ ideals, a mixture of May-day demonstration and successful strike embodied in one gigantic festival of rural good fellowship. Its bloody termination was, as far as can be judged, the result of two errors of judgment, one, a pardonable one, on the part of Ket, the other, unpardonable, on the part of a nameless member of the other party.588 When all was over, and each man reflected after his kind on the great days of Mousehold Heath, what the camp followers, who attach themselves to every popular movement, remembered was that for about a month they had filled their bellies at other people’s expense. “’Twas a merry world when we were yonder, eating of mutton.” But there were some who, as they saw Ket swinging on the gallows before the City gates, were seized with the tumult of pity and hoarse indignation which serves Englishmen, who are not good at revolutions, in place of the revolutionary spirit. “O Kette,” one countryman was heard to say to another, “God have mercy upon thy soul; and I trust in God that the King’s Majesty and his Councell shall be enformed once between this and Midsummer evening, that of their own gentleness thou shalt be taken down and buried, not hanged up for winter store; and set a quietness in the realm, and that the ragged staff shall be taken down of their own gentleness from the gentlemen’s gates in this City, and to have no more King’s arms but one within the City, under Christ.”589 The Council, in its gentleness, thought otherwise. Ket still creaked in his chains, and in the meantime other gallows were rising for other rebels in Somerset, and Devon, and Cornwall.

What were the aims which at intervals between 1530 and 1560 set half the counties of England in a blaze? Let us look at the peasants’ programme more closely. It will help us to see the agrarian problem from the inside. Reduced to its elements their complaint is a very simple one, very ancient and yet very modern. It is that what, in effect, whatever lawyers may say, has been their property, is being taken from them. To be told that social disorders take place because an envious proletariat aims at seizing the property of the rich would seem to them a very strange perversion of the truth. They want only to have what they have always had. They are conservatives, not radicals or levellers, and to them it seems that all the trouble arises because the rich have been stealing the property of the poor. Here is part of a colloquy 590 between Jack of the North beyond the Style, Robin and Harry Clowte, Tom of Trumpington, Peter Potter, Pyrce Plowman, and divers other worthies. As will be seen from the verses, they are birds of night—

    Jack. Now for that Slaunder’s sake,
  Companye by night I take,
  And, with all that I may make,
  Cast hedge and ditch in the lake,
  Fyxed with many a stake
  Though it was never so faste
  Yet asondre it is wraste.
* * * * * * *

Harry Clowte. Gud conscience should them move
Ther neighbours quietly to love,
And thus not for to wrynche
The commons styl for to pinch,
To take into their hande
That be other mennes land.

Jack. Thus do I, Jack of the Style,
Now subscrybe upon a tyle.
This I do and will do with all my myght,
For sclaundering me yet do I but right,
For common to common again I restore
Wherever it hath been yet common before.
If agayne they enclose it never so faste
Agayne asondre it shall be wraste.
They may be ware by that is paste
To make it agayne is but waste.”

To take into your hand what is other men’s land, that is the grievance. To restore common to common again, that is the obvious remedy, a remedy which is not seriously opposed to the agrarian policy of most sixteenth century statesmen. But the more far-seeing of the peasants realise what their followers do not, that these troubles which are going on in so many different parts of England cannot be dealt with by isolated bodies of villagers, however good their cause may be. They require the intervention of the Government. How the Government is to intervene they lay down in two documents which are perhaps the only two popular programmes of agrarian reform ever published in England since 1381. The first, contained in two of the articles 591 drawn up at Doncaster in 1536, is short enough:—

“That the lands in Westmoreland, Cumberland, Kendall, Dent, Sedbergh, Furness, and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kyrkbyshire, Notherdale, may be by tenant right, and the lord to have, at every change, 2 years’ rent for gressum, according to the grant now made by the lords to the commons there. This to be done by Act of Parliament.

“The Statutes for Enclosures and Intacks to be put in execution, and all enclosures and Intacks since the fourth year of Henry VII. to be pulled down, except mountains, forests, and Parks” (a noticeable exception which shows the composite character of the movement. In the South of England the peasant did not spare parks).

The articles 592 signed by Ket, Aldryche, and Cod in 1549 are a much more elaborate affair. Here are the most noteworthy of them:—

“We pray your grace that where it is enacted for enclosing, that it be not hurtful to such as have enclosed saffren grounds, for they be greatly chargeable to them, and that from henceforth no man shall enclose any more.593

“We certify your grace that whereas the lords of the mannors hath been charged with certe fre rent, the same lords hath sought means to charge the freeholders to pay the same rent, contrary to right.

“We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall comon uppon the commons.

“We pray that priests from henceforth shall purchase no lande neither free nor bondy, and the lands that they have in possession may be letten to temporal men, as they were in the first year of the reign of King Henry VII.594

“We pray that reed ground and meadow ground may be at such price as they were in the first year of King Henry VII.

“We pray that the payments of castleward rent, and blanch ferm and office lands, which hath been accustomed to be gathered of the tenements, whereas we suppose the lords ought to pay the same to their bailiffs for their rents gathering, and not the tenants.595

“We pray that no man under the degree of a knight or esquire keep a dove house, except it hath been of an old ancient custom.

“We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor to take profits of the same.

“We pray that no feudatory within your shires shall be a councellor to any man in his office making, whereby the King may be truly served, so that a man being of good conscience may be yearly chosen to the same office by the commons of the same shire.

“We pray that copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it did in the first year of King Henry VII., and that at the death of a tenant or of [at] a sale the same lands to be charged with an easy fine, as a capon or a reasonable [sum] of money for a remembrance.

“We pray that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free with his precious bloodshedding.

“We pray that rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing and passage.

“We pray that the poor mariners or Fishermen may have the whole profits of their fishings, as porpoises, grampuses, whales, or any great fish, so it be not prejudicial to your Grace.

“We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase land freely, or [and] to let them out again by copy of court roll to their great advancement and to the undoing of your poor subjects.

“We pray that no man under the degree of... shall keep any conies upon any of their freehold or copyhold, unless he pale them in, so that it shall not be to the common nuisance.

“We pray that your Grace give license and authority by your gracious commission under your Great Seal to such commissioners as your poor commons hath chosen, or to as many of them as your Majesty and your Council shall appoint and think meet, for to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings, which hath been hidden by your justices of your peace, shreves, escheators, and other your officers, from your poor commons, since the first year of the reign of your noble grandfather, King Henry VII.

“We pray that no lord, knight, esquire, nor gentleman, do graze nor feed any bullocks or sheep, if he may spend forty pounds a year by his lands, but only for the provision of his house.”

The programme of the peasants is partly political. The Northerners insist that Parliament and the Crown must interfere, and the Norfolk leaders ask for a permanent commission to do the work which the county justices, who are interested in enclosing, have wilfully neglected. But it is mainly economic. The State is to do no more than restore the old usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised manorial customary enforced by a strong central Government throughout the length of the land, free use of common lands, reduced rents of meadow and marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free fisheries, and the abolition of the lingering disability of personal villeinage. The most striking thing about these demands is their conservatism. Almost exactly a hundred years later agrarian reform will be demanded as part of a new heaven and a new earth. Agrarian agitation will be carried on in terms of theories as to the social contract, of theories as to the origin of private property. Its leaders will be appealing to Anglo-Saxon history to prove to the indifferent ears of a Government which has saved them “from Charles, our Norman oppressor,” that “England cannot be a free commonwealth, unless the poore commoners have a use and benefit of the land.”596 They will appeal also to a more awful sanction than that of history. “At this very day,” cries Winstanley,597 “poor people are forced to work for 4d. a day and corn is dear, and the tithing-priest stops their mouths and tells them that ‘inward satisfaction of mind’ was meant by the declaration ‘the poor shall inherit the earth.’ I tell you, the scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled.... You jeer at the name of Leveller. I tell you Jesus Christ is the head leveller.” Such communistic doctrines are always the ultimate fruit of the breakdown of practical co-operation and brotherliness among men. To human nature, as to other kinds of nature, a vacuum is abhorrent.

But as yet the soil has not been ploughed by a century of political and religious controversy, and there is little sign of these high arguments in the social disturbances of our period. The earliest levellers 598 get their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset hedges and park palings. What communism there is in the movement is not that of the saints or the theorists, but the spontaneous doctrineless communism of the open field village, where men set out their fields, and plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the wet, with natural fellowship. The middle-class terror of the appearance in England of the political theories of the German Peasants’ War, though it was forcibly expressed by Sir William Paget 599 in remonstrating with Somerset’s policy in 1549, and though John Hales thought it worth while to repudiate it, is not justified by any recorded utterances or programmes which have come to us. There are, indeed, many verbal similarities between the articles of Ket and those put out by the German peasants at Memmingen in 1525, which suggest that some refugee from Germany had carried them with him to the most Protestant county in England. Both, for example, demand a reduction in rents, the abolition of villeinage, and free fisheries. But the contrasts are much more striking, and are due not only to the fact that the onerous villein services which survived in Germany had become almost nominal in England, but to the difference in the spirit of their conception, which leads one to appeal to the New Testament and the other to the customs of the first years of Henry VII. There is, in fact, the same broad difference between the peasant movements in England and Germany as there is between the English and German Reformation. In Germany the ecclesiastical changes spring from a widespread popular discontent, and are swept forward on a wave of radical enthusiasm, which carries the peasants (German Social Democrats are metaphysicians to this day) into the revolutionary mysticism of Münzer. In England changes in Church government are forced upon the people by the State, and outside the South and East of England are regarded with abhorrence. It is not until the later rise of Puritanism that either religious or economic radicalism becomes a popular force. In the middle of the sixteenth century the English peasants accepted the established system of society with its hierarchy of authorities and division of class functions, and they had a most pathetic confidence in the Crown. What they wanted, in the first place, was fair conditions of land tenure, the restoration of the customary relationships which had protected them against the screw of commercial competition. When they went further, they looked for an exercise of Royal Power to reduce to order the petty tyranny of local magnates, and to carry out the intentions of a Government which they were inclined to think meant them well, “to redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your proceedings which hath been bidden by your justices of your Peace... from your poor commons.” Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. They are the outcome of a society where the normal relations are healthy, where men are attached to the established order, where they possess the security and control over the management of their own lives which is given by property, and, possessing this, possess the reality of freedom even though they stand outside the political state. Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.

The social disturbances caused by enclosure, with its accompaniments of rack-renting and evictions, were one cause which compelled the Governments of our period to give attention to the subject. Though no direct concessions were made to them, their lessons were not altogether wasted, because it is plain that they impressed on the minds of statesmen the idea that to prevent disorder it was necessary for the State to interfere in favour of tenants. Rural discontent, which might have been insignificant in an age of greater political stability, derived a factitious importance from the circumstances of the sixteenth century, when it might be exploited by a rebellious minority, which, for all that most men knew, might really be a majority of the nation, by Yorkist Plotters under Henry VII., religious enthusiasts under Henry VIII., restorers of a Catholic monarchy, supported by a Spanish invasion or a Franco-Scottish alliance, under Elizabeth. Governments so uncertain of their popularity as these had a strong reason for protecting the class which would be the backbone of a revolt. One way in which they could secure themselves against the discontent of the disaffected nobility was to encourage the yeomanry, who might act as a counterpoise. The way in which self-preservation and a popular agrarian policy went hand in hand is illustrated by Burleigh’s cynical advice to Elizabeth to make a practice of supporting tenants in any quarrel which might arise between them and Catholic landlords.600

But there were other causes as well working in the same direction. No one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed can fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of agrarian relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man, and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the peasants themselves. Not, of course, that the authorities had any intention of depressing landlords or raising peasants, but that the whole established system of Government was based on a certain organisation of social life, and that the Government tended to maintain that organisation in maintaining itself and carrying on the work of the State. For this attitude, which is in striking contrast with the policy of the statesmen of the eighteenth century when faced with an analogous problem, there were several practical reasons which we shall do well to understand. In judging the motives of economic policy in past ages we are even more apt to be misled by modern analogies than we are in estimating its effects. We see that in our own day most of the legislative protection accorded to those who are economically weak has been produced by a combination of two causes, the political enfranchisement of the wage-earning classes and the spread of humanitarian sentiment. We know that in the sixteenth century the first cause was absent and the second was feeble. The Macchiavellis of that iron age were neither democrats nor philanthropists; and when they avow a policy of protecting the weaker classes in society against economic evils we are inclined to think with Professor Thorold Rogers that they are merely hypocritical. But this analogy is a false light. To be influenced by it is to confuse political power with its symbols, and to forget that the economic importance of a class may be a more effective claim to the interest of Governments than the ballot-box. Under the Tudors there were strong practical reasons for protecting the peasantry which are not felt to the same extent to-day. The modern State has so specialised its organs that its maintenance is quite compatible with the existence of the extremes of poverty, not only among the exceptionally unfortunate, but among those whose position is not more insecure than that of their neighbours. They may be able neither to fight, nor to take part in public duties, nor to contribute much to the Exchequer. But if their incompetence is a menace, it is a menace which is not felt till after the lapse of generations, a menace the fulfilment of which no single life is long enough to behold. For the State hires specialists to fight, and specialists to keep order; indeed, the poorer they are, the more cheaply it can obtain their services.601 Its local government is conducted mainly by specialised officials, and the concentration of wealth makes possible a concentration of taxation. The extension of political power has been accompanied by a subdivision of political functions, which has diminished the importance of the individual citizen, and turned him, as far as the routine of Government is concerned, into a sleeping partner, whose consent is necessary, but whose active co-operation is superfluous.

Now we need not point out that this would be as fair a description of large classes of persons in the sixteenth century as it is now, and that the day labourer and handicraftsman who “are to be ruled and not to rule”602 were, as a class, far more completely beneath the consideration of statesmen than they are at the present day. But we are concerned with the landholding population, not with the landless wage-earner, and in the slightly differentiated state of our period both economic and political conditions made a decline in the standard of life among a class so important as the peasantry a danger which might cause the most authoritarian of Governments to be confronted with very grave practical difficulties. It might find itself unable to raise an effective military force. The States of Continental Europe had introduced standing armies. But England relied mainly on the shire levies, and the shire levies were recruited from the small farmers. Just as the lord of a manor in the North of England, whose tenants held by border service with horse and harness, was anxious to prevent the decline in their numbers which landlords elsewhere were welcoming, so the Government regarded with quite genuine dismay an agrarian movement which seemed to threaten its military resources by impoverishing the finest fighting material in the country. Shadow, Feeble, and Wart may “fill a pit as well as better”; but to make good infantry it requires not “housed beggars,” but “men bred in some free and plentiful manner.” One Depopulation Statute after another recites how “the defence of this land against our enemies outward is enfeebled and impaired.”603 In the settlement of the North after the Pilgrimage of Grace the Government took care to instruct its officials to see that the Northumbrian tenants, on whom the defence of the border depended, “should be put in comfort, that no more shall be exacted with gyrsums and like charges, instead of which they shall be ready with horse and harness when required.”604 In 1601 Cecil 605 crushed a proposal to repeal the acts then in force against depopulation by pointing out that the majority of the militia levies were ploughmen. And in the instructions for the choice of persons to be enrolled in the trained bands which were issued by the Government of Charles I., particular care was taken to emphasise that they were not to be selected at haphazard, but were to be drawn from the families of the gentry, freeholders, and substantial farmers.606

This cogent reason for intervening to protect the peasantry was supported by another which was not less convincing. The classes who suffered most from enclosure were important from a fiscal, as well as a military, point of view. In the simple economic life of that age the connection between the output of wealth and the individual worker’s opportunities for production and standard of subsistence, if not more important than to-day, was certainly more patent to observation. “The hole welth of the body of the realm cometh out of the labours and works of the common peple... a riche welthy body of a realm maketh a riche welthy king, and a poore feble body of a realm must needs make a poore weak feble king.”607 In our period “pauvre paysans pauvre royaume, pauvre royaume pauvre roi” was a statement not of any recondite theory, but of an obvious economic fact, and one can hardly be mistaken in supposing that part of the favour which sixteenth century Governments were inclined to show the small farmer was due to the fact that the methods of taxation in use made him important as a source of revenue. To a State which relies largely for its supplies on a direct declaration of income, it is indifferent whether the total assessable income is made up of a few large or many small ones; indeed if the tax be a progressive one, most will be got from the former. But look at the way in which taxation is raised in the sixteenth century. The chief direct tax is the subsidy. A typical subsidy, for example that of the first year of Elizabeth,608 is assessed partly on the capital value of property, including farm and trade stock and household furniture, partly on the yearly profits of land. When a village of small and fairly prosperous cultivators is wiped out to make room for a large and sparsely populated estate, will the Government get as large a revenue from direct taxation as before? A modern reader may very well answer “Yes.” The motive of converting land to pasture is to increase the profits of agriculture. If they are increased, does not this mean a corresponding increase in the taxable wealth of the country? Now to inquire how far one can assume in any age that the personal interests of landlords will lead to land being put to its most productive use would take us far beyond the scope of this essay, and it is unnecessary for our present purpose. For, as far as our period is concerned, the answer is certainly wrong. Apart from the subtler reactions of the agrarian changes upon social welfare, there is then no such identity between the economic interests of the landlord and the economic interests of the State. Speaking broadly, the former consist in securing the largest net income, the latter in securing the largest gross product. And these two things are by no means necessarily found together. If a pasture farm managed by a shepherd and his dog is substituted by an enclosing proprietor for several score of families living by tillage, the rent roll of the estate can hardly fail to be increased, for the value of wool is so high, and the cost of sheep-farming so low, that the net income from which rent can be paid is large. But subsidies are assessed on property, not only on income; and on personal as well as real property. A rise in rents is quite compatible with a falling off in the gross produce of the land, and the conversion of an estate from arable to pasture, by displacing tenants, means a diminution in the farm stock and household property which has hitherto contributed towards the revenue.

Lest such a view should seem unduly theoretical, let us hasten to add that it is one which is endorsed by the authority of contemporaries. When subsidies are being debated in the House of Commons members complain that, while the wealthy are under-assessed, the small men pay more than their share.609 Political writers from Fortescue 610 to Bacon 611 emphasise the fact that the ability of the country to bear taxation depends on the maintenance of a high level of prosperity among the yeomanry. The yeoman is a man who “makes a whole line in the subsidy book.”612 “The weight thereof,” says a pamphleteer in 1647, “falls heavily... especially upon the yeomanry.”613 The occasional glimpses which we get of harassed collectors trying in vain to screw taxes out of small farmers, whom a rise in rents or a bad season has plunged in distress, show the truth of their accounts. In the reign of Edward VI. subsidies cannot be collected on the northern border owing to the oppression to which some of the tenants have been subjected.614 From Norfolk in 1628 comes a still more melancholy tale. “The ffarmors and such as use Husbandrye and tilth,” write the Commissioners of the subsidy to the Government, “from whom in times past was accustomed to be drawne the greatest part of ye money leviable by way of subsidye, present unto us their pitiful estates, growen into decay through the base price and noe vent in these later years for their corne... that some of them doo owe unto their landlordes two yeares rent, many of them one years.... All which considered we much feare that the collectors shall not gather in the monye soe speedily as they would or we desire.”615 The truth is that so much of the wealth of the country had been in the hands of the more prosperous among the small cultivators that any decline in their position was likely to place the Governments of our period in financial straits. They regard it with the self-interested apprehension which modern statesmen feel lest capital should be “driven abroad.” Hence there was a strong fiscal motive for protecting the rural classes. Rebels who pointed out that “A man can have no more of a cat but the skin; that is the King can have no more of us than we have, which in a manner he has already,”616 or tenants who urged the Crown to protect them on the ground that “they paie your Majesty subsidies, fifteens, and loans,”617 were using language which the impecunious Government of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could understand much better than appeals to humanitarian sentiment. The military, financial, and political importance of the yeomanry was, in fact, great enough to make them one of the classes with whom the defence and order of the country were identified, and therefore sufficient to make them an object of solicitude to statesmen who were concerned with national interests.

Economic policies are not to be explained in terms of economics alone. When an old and strong society is challenged by a new phenomenon, its response is torn from a living body of assumptions as to the right conduct of human affairs, which feels that more than material interests are menaced, and which braces itself anxiously against the shock. The swift agrarian changes of the sixteenth century differ from the swifter changes of the eighteenth, in that enlightened opinion is, on the whole, against them, and that even the technical experts feel misgivings. If the attitude of statesmen is to be explained by the practical reasons which have already been given, the opposition of men like More, Latimer, Crowley, Starkey, and Hales seemed to themselves a plain matter of morals. In Germany Luther denounced the revolting peasants. In England those who in ecclesiastical matters were poles apart united in a plea for economic conservatism. Leading reformers preach and write against enclosing; and terrified landlords complain that “none ever spake so vilely as these so-called commonwealths.”618 Their understanding of the technique of the agrarian changes is often deficient. Like the Carlyles and Ruskins of a later age, they make Philistia merry with their sad blunders over economic details. But it would be a mistake to regard their views of the social effects of enclosing as abnormal or sentimental. They are the last great literary expression of the appeal to the average conscience which had been made by the old agrarian order, the cry of a spirit which is departing, and which, in its agony, utters words that are a shining light for all periods of change.

Several paths of argument lead to their position. There is the traditional importance of tillage. It is a “foundation industry,” an industry from which four-fifths of the people directly or indirectly get their living. English Governments have always shown it special favour. Its maintenance is almost part of the common law 619 of the land. And it is right that it should be so. For the partition which separates men from starvation is thin, and if tillage fails how shall the people be fed? The Government insists on a certain minimum area being under the plough for exactly the same reason that the city of Coventry, when it is in the grip of a bad harvest, decides to break up part of its common pastures for wheat. All men are agreed that the price of food ought to be fixed by authority, and one cannot control prices unless one can control supplies. There is the argument from social functions. The State is a community of classes. Between classes there must be inequality, for each has a different function, fighting, or merchandise, or handicraft, or husbandry. Unless there is inequality between classes no class can perform its duties or (strange thought) enjoy its rights. But one class must not encroach upon the livelihood of another. If we will not have villein blood on the Council, neither will we let gentlemen take into their hands the holdings of their tenants. For this means that one limb of the body politic drains nourishment from another limb, and that men drop into a superfluous residuum from which the State gets no profit. And within a class there should be substantial equality. When one man has the livelihoods of two must not another man go without any living at all? There is the argument from economic morality. In every bargain there is the possibility of oppression. The unscrupulous man makes the most of this. He regards only his own profit. He is “a great taker of advantages.”620 This is the sin of the usurer, the bodger, and the tyrannous landlord, and of this bad trinity the last is the worst. To oppress men by rack-renting land is particularly detestable. For though in all contracts there is certainly (if only it can be found!) an objective standard of value, yet a man may with reason be in doubt as to what is fair price to charge for an article the value of which has not been fixed by authority. But he can hardly be in doubt as to what is a fair rent. The fair rent is the usual rent; equity is custom. There is the argument from the very nature of the bond between tenant and landlord. Tenure is no longer as sacred a thing as once it was, and, even if it were, men who are legally the descendants of right-less villeins could not easily appeal to its sanctity. But opinion feels that there is something despicably sordid in using this particular relation as a financial engine. Though surveyors’ economics are as notorious as lawyers’ justice,621 even one of that detested class can preface his business-like account of western manors with words idealising the conditions which have “knit such a knot of colaterall amytie between the Lords and the tenants that the lord tendered his tenants as his childe, and the tenants again loved the lord as naturally as the childe his father.”622 The bond between landlord and tenant is perhaps, indeed, the only economic relationship which has ever yet stirred the affection of large masses of men. It has done so because it has been in the past so much more than economic. The pitiful cry of that nameless old man to whose care Shakespeare commits the blinded Gloucester, “O my good lord, I have been your tenant, and your father’s tenant, these fourscore years,” is the voice of an attachment which once was real. In the sixteenth century the tie of tenure is still the symbol of greater things, and the wrench which is given it by the partial commercialising of agriculture seems to portend more ruinous innovations. Most men make the State in the image of their own village, or city, or business. It is perhaps not an unfair description of one side of the social philosophy of our period to say that a manor is still a “little commonwealth,”623 the kingdom still the greatest of manors. If the lord holds from the King, does not the tenant hold from his lord by as good a right? If the tenant who encroaches on his neighbour’s strips is checked by the manorial court, should not the lord who depopulates half a village be checked by the King in his High Court of Parliament? If gentlemen oppress yeomen, how can they “live together as they be joined in one body politic under the King?”624

It is true that it is just these ideas which in our period are on their trial, and that if one were to seek the watershed where the mediæval theory of land tenure, as something contingent on the fulfilment of obligations, parts company from modern conceptions of ownership, as conferring an unlimited right to unconditional disposal by the owner, one would find it in the century and a half between 1500 and the final abolition of feudal tenures in 1660. The combination of forces both economic and political making for a change of attitude is unmistakable; on the one hand the severance of the personal relationship of tenure through the development of the great leasehold farm, the breaking up of the customary routine of cultivation through the increasing dependence of agriculture on the market, the general revision of contracts brought about through the fall in the value of money; on the other hand the enormous redistribution of landed property through the confiscation of monastic and gild endowments, the consequent creation of a new aristocracy ready to apply commercial ideas to land tenure, the desire of proprietors to escape from the obnoxious feudal incidents and of the Crown to find some more lucrative substitute for them. But the decay of the older conceptions goes on very slowly. The Government is on the whole on the conservative side; for naturally it has to work on the material to hand, and the best hope of maintaining order lies in the preservation of fixed customary relationships between the different classes in society. Its instinct is therefore still to treat the control and disposition of land as to a special degree a question of public policy, in regard to which landlords are bound “rather to consider what is agreeable... to the use of the state and for the good of the commonwealth, than to seeke the utmost profit which a landlord for his particular advantage may take among his tenants.”625

(b) Legislation and Administration

This was its instinct. But can we say more than this? Can we say that the presumption in favour of protecting the small landholder was translated into any definite policy, and that such a policy was carried out in practice? The answer to these questions is by no means easily given. There is the difficulty of making any generalisation which will cover the century and a half during which, from time to time, the agrarian problem claimed public attention. True, this difficulty is not so serious as might at first sight appear, or as it would be in an age of swiftly changing ideas. The political historian may treat the Tudors as one period and the first two Stuarts as another. But the economist finds much the same views on economic matters obtaining under Charles I. as under Henry VIII., and much the same administrative system to carry them out. There is in our period no marked change in responsible opinion upon the enclosing movement. The Commission which deals with the subject in 1607 shows the same attitude as the Commission of 1517. Enclosers are fined in 1637 as they have been fined in the reign of James I. But the opinion which counts is not always responsible opinion. During the six years which intervene between the death of Henry VIII. and the accession of Philip and Mary the Government is in the hands of the great landlords,—landlords who have built up their fortunes out of the spoils of the monasteries, and whom no authority is strong enough to check. By a curious chance the first head of the Government is a man who is an agrarian reformer by conviction. But, when he falls, his colleagues throw over his policy, and turn savagely to the work of crushing out the very possibility of organised protest among the peasantry. These years, the so-called reign of Edward VI., will be an exception to whatever conclusions may be reached as to the policy of the State under the Tudors and the first two Stuarts. Again, there is the difficulty, the great difficulty, of saying how far the interference of Governments is successful even when they honestly desire it to have effect. The modern assumption, which is sometimes all too sanguine, is that a Law is being carried out unless it is proved that it is not. For the sixteenth century there are those who would say that we must assume that a Law is not being administered unless it is proved that it is, and, though scepticism is sometimes pushed to absurd lengths, one certainly cannot build much on the letter of Acts of Parliament. But how exacting are our tests of effective administration to be? All will agree that in our period the mere enacting of a Statute causes and cures very little, unless special efforts are applied to making it work. But is a peremptory order from the Council to the Justices of the Peace, or to the Council of the North, to redress this or that grievance among tenants, a proof that the grievance will be redressed? Or must we be content with nothing less than a record of cases actually handled? If we decline to believe in the efficacy of any economic legislation about which we have not a full list of decisions, we shall have little left to rely on. The famous Statute of Artificers will look shaky, and so will the legislation with regard to prices and quality. Perhaps a reasonable view would be to look askance at mere Acts of Parliament, but to accept action, or orders to take action, on the part of the executive authorities, as a proof that the law is being applied in practice.

Of the Statutes prohibiting the conversion of arable to pasture we need not, then, say much. The long series of Acts 626 which were passed between 1489 and 1597 show little originality. They were at bottom simply a series of great manorial customaries framed to apply to the whole country, or to all parts of the country which were not expressly excepted from their operation, an attempt to maintain the status quo obtaining at any time by laying down for the whole country a common rule of cultivation of much the same kind as had been in the past maintained by local customs. They did not prohibit enclosure as such, but they proceeded on the assumption that a fixed proportion of the land, usually the average of a certain number of years preceding the Act, ought to be under the plough, and that the small cultivator’s farm accommodation should be maintained or renewed at the expense of the landlord. They differed only in the methods used to achieve this end. The Statutes before 1550 usually insisted merely on the reconversion of pasture land to tillage,627 the re-edification of decayed houses of husbandry,628 and the limitation to 2000 of the sheep to be kept by any one farmer.629 They relied on most unpromising machinery. Like the ancient Statute of Mortmain, they tried to make the feudal contract the means for enforcing the law, by empowering superior lords to take half the profits of mesne lords and tenants who infringed it. The Statutes after 1550 were somewhat bolder in their experiments. The most important departure was the provision, first introduced into the Statutes of 1552 630 and 1555,631 for the creation of permanent bodies of Commissioners to do the work which, when most landlords were anxious to enclose, no landlord would undertake. Under the Statute of 1555, subsequently declared “too mild and gentle,” but on the face of it a drastic measure, the Commissioners were empowered both to bind over offenders to rebuild decayed houses, to plough up pasture land, and to fix the judicial rents which had been demanded by the peasantry and suggested by certain reformers. It was repealed (together with the Statutes of 1536 and 1552) in 1563, the Act 632 of that year confirming the earlier Acts passed in the reign of Henry VIII., and requiring all land which had been under the plough for four successive years since 1529 to be kept in tillage, on pain of a fine of 10s. per acre for all land converted to pasture contrary to the Act. In 1589 633 a Statute was passed for the protection of cottagers, prohibiting the letting of cottages to agricultural labourers with less than four acres of land attached. In 1593 634 it was thought that sufficient land was in tillage to make the maintenance of legislation on the subject unnecessary, and the clause in the Act of 1563, which forbade conversion to pasture, was repealed. But the result seems to have been a recrudescence of the movement for converting arable land to pasture, with the result that in 1597 635 two more Acts were passed, both of which adopted the expedient of setting up a special authority, apart from the ordinary machinery of local government, to enforce the Act, by empowering the Lord Chancellor to nominate bodies of Commissioners. The first enacted that all houses of husbandry decayed within seven years preceding the Act, and half of those decayed within seven years before that, were to be rebuilt and let, the former with not less than 40 acres, and the latter with not less than 20 acres, of land. It also took the significant step of expressly sanctioning the consolidation of intermixed holdings by way of exchange between lord and tenants, or between one tenant and another. The second applied only to twenty-five counties, where, presumably, enclosing had proceeded furthest or was most disastrous in its effects. It enacted that all land converted from tillage to pasture since 1558 should be reconverted within three years, if it had been under the plough for twelve years immediately preceding conversion, and that land which had been in tillage for twelve years preceding the Act should remain in tillage, the penalty for disobedience being a fine of 20s. per acre. These two Acts escaped the general repeal of the laws against depopulation which took place in 1624, and remained on the Statute Book till the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863.

The Statutes are evidence of a state of opinion. To judge how far that opinion wrote itself on the world of affairs we must look elsewhere. Nor are they in themselves very interesting. The genius of sixteenth century statesmanship lay in administration not in legislation. It dwelt not in Parliament but in the Council, and in those administrative courts, the Court of Star Chamber, the Court of Requests, the Council of the North, the Council of Wales, which were the Privy Council’s organs. In studying economic questions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, one is met at every turn by the apparatus of special administrative jurisdictions, which was built up by the Tudors, and which fell to pieces with the final rupture between the Crown and Parliament. On the one hand, they supply the control and stimulus in matters of detailed administration, without which all legislation designed to regulate shifting economic relationships, or running counter to the prejudices of a powerful class, is doomed to be ineffective. Are the Justices of the Peace lax in carrying out the Statutes for the relief of the poor and punishment of vagrants? The Council will remonstrate. Have they omitted to assess wages and fix prices? The Council will let them know that their neglect has been noted at headquarters and that it must be corrected. Are capitalists in the clothing counties dismissing workmen in times of trade depression? The Council will direct the justices to read them a lesson on the duty of employers to their operatives and to the State, and threaten them with a summons to Whitehall unless they mend their ways. A stream of correspondence pours into London from the Government’s agents in the counties—returns as to the supplies of wheat available for consumption, applications for permission to license the export of food-stuffs, statistics as to prices, information as to unemployment, information as to vagrancy based on a “day-count” of vagabonds. The Council digests it, and sends out its mandates to continue this and alter that, to raise wages or reduce prices, to inspect granaries, punish middlemen, whip sturdy rogues, relieve the poor. Bad means of communication, scanty and inaccurate intelligence, incompetent local officials, prevent administration from running smoothly; and as the Civil War approaches incompetence becomes recalcitrance. Nevertheless the engine is a powerful one, and up to a year or two before the meeting of the Long Parliament its throb is felt throughout the country.

Such a system of centralised supervision, which can meet emergencies with promptitude, and can adjust regulations to the varying needs of different years and different localities, is a necessity in any society where economic relationships are made the object of authoritative control. Under the Tudors and first two Stuarts the Council does much that is done to-day by several State departments—the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Board of Education, the Local Government Board, the Home Office, as well as much that is left to Private Bill legislation. But the Council is, of course, much more than an executive organ. It is also a court of law. It does not only make rules, it punishes people for breaking them. Sometimes it exercises jurisdiction itself. More often, at any rate in the cases arising out of the economic questions with which we are chiefly concerned, it issues an order, and leaves the punishment of breaches of it to the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests. Into the controversy as to the constitutional position of these courts we need not enter; we need only point out their extreme importance as buttresses of the Government’s control over economic affairs. Both in personnel and procedure they were admirably qualified to be the instruments of a thorough system of State intervention in matters of industry and agriculture. Both of them were committees of the Council, and in both the governmental predominated over the judicial element, the two judges who attended the Court of Star Chamber, and the Masters of Requests who sat in the Court of Requests, being in the position rather of legal advisers or assessors than of judicial authorities. In theory the former court dealt with criminal, the latter with civil cases. But in an age when the majority of the populace were armed, a dispute was extremely likely to terminate in a riot, and in practice there were subjects on which complaints came before either court indifferently. They dispensed with a jury. They took account of equitable considerations which had no place in the common law courts. They were guided by reasons of State, not by the letter of the law, and would punish behaviour as contrary to public policy. For the execution of their rulings they used not only the ordinary officers of the law, the Justices of the Peace, but also special bodies of Commissioners.

Whatever may have been the abuses of this system of administrative jurisdictions, one can easily understand that it was well fitted to deal with the agrarian problem. It is seen at its worst in ecclesiastical matters. It is seen at its best in protecting the poorer classes against economic tyranny; and we shall fail to understand the popularity of the Tudor Governments unless we lay as much emphasis on the good side as on the bad. The Court of Requests in particular is a popular court, a court which punishes the rich, a court which brings, in the words of the aristocratic chronicler, “many an honest man to trouble and vexacion,” a court to which the poor “compleyned without number.”636 The notorious difficulty of getting a verdict from a jury of tenants who are liable to eviction means that a landlord can break the law with impunity. Here are courts before which the intimidator can be intimidated; courts which will handle him “on that sort, that what courage soever he hath, his heart will fall to the grounde.”637 The enormous importance of manorial custom in determining the fate of all classes of peasants, except the freeholders, makes it certain that grave injustice will be done to vested interests by any court which confines itself to the strict letter of the law. The Council will direct that “such order be taken in the matter as in justyce and equitie shall appertayn.”638 The mere fact that its ruling is not simply the verdict of a court but the command of the Government, increases the probability that it will receive due attention from those whose duty it is to enforce it. The landlord who has enclosed may be the very man who hears the peasant’s complaint. The Council will interfere to insist on the local authorities taking “a more indifferent course.”639

The activity of the Government in matters of land was not so incessant as it was in the regulation of prices and the administration of the Poor Laws; for its land policy was strongly opposed to the interests of the country gentry who were its officials, and it had to proceed with caution. If we except the first great Commission appointed by Wolsey in 1517, the periods in which it was especially energetic in dealing with the land question were three, the years between 1536 and 1549, the years from 1607 to 1618, the years from 1630 to 1636; and on each of these three occasions there was some temporary cause to explain its peculiar zeal—on the two first the revolts of the peasantry, and on the last the rise in the price of grain, which suggested that an unduly small proportion of the land was under tillage. Nevertheless it handles individual cases with considerable frequency throughout the whole period from 1517 to 1640. Usually it acts as a final court of appeal, which intervenes only when other means of redress have broken down, and it is sometimes at pains to explain to offended landlords that it does not intend to debar them from asserting their rights at Common Law, if they can. Its aim is to stop very gross cases of oppression, to prevent the peasants being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to induce landlords to take a larger view of their responsibilities, to settle disputes by the use of common sense and moral pressure. It steps in when the tenants are poor men who are being ruined by vexatious lawsuits, or when enclosure is thought likely to produce disorder, or to forbid a landlord to take action pending a decision by the courts. It has to hear many cases touching copyholders and many touching commons; for no one is quite certain as to the legal rights of copyholders, and in the matter of commons there is a fearful gulf between law and equity. Occasionally in the reign of Henry VIII., and even in that of Elizabeth, it deals with cases of villeinage. But these, though more numerous than might have been supposed, are nevertheless rare, for the principal economic evils of the period consist not in the revival of old claims, but in the new competitive conditions of agriculture. The treatment of the latter is by no means a simple matter—even the strong Governments of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth will not lightly thrust forceful fingers into the mysterious custom-bound recesses of the manor—and when we have said that on the whole the bias of the Tudor and early Stuart statesmen is against revolutionary changes that damage the peasants, we can say little more without citing individual cases of interference.

Let us look shortly at the more striking among them. The famous Commission upon enclosure appointed by Wolsey in 1517 set a precedent to be followed in several subsequent inquiries, and has left us an invaluable body of information as to the nature and extent of the enclosing movement. It was, however, by no means the first example of the Government intervening in the agrarian problem, and the partial reconversion of pasture to arable, which seems to have resulted from its labours, still left an urgent need for a continuous supervision of the relations between landlord and tenant by some tribunal sufficiently independent to do justice to the weaker party. In 1494 the earliest proceedings in the interminable case 640 of John Mulsho v. the inhabitants of Thingden ended in the Court of Star Chamber (the same court was dealing with the same matter in 1538) with a decree in favour of the tenants. In 1510 the same body was dealing with a quarrel between the Abbot and the copyholders of Peterborough,641 and in 1516 with a complaint from the inhabitants of Draycote 642 and Stoke Gifford that the lord of the manor had evicted copyholders, stopped up rights of way, and enclosed common land. The policy of Wolsey is sufficiently indicated by the active campaign which he set on foot against depopulation, and requires no further illustration. But it is interesting to observe that his attitude towards the agrarian question was not a mere personal idiosyncrasy, and that it was the same in all essential particulars as that of his successor. Thomas Cromwell must bear the blame for part of the agrarian distress which prevailed during the closing years of Henry VIII. and the reign of Edward VI.; for that distress was enhanced by the wild land speculation which followed the secularisation of the monastic estates. In that age, however, such indirect social reactions of their policy were matters quite beneath the consideration of statesmen, and the fact that the Government was responsible for changes which operated most disastrously on the established order of rural society did not prevent administrative interference to impede agrarian innovations from going on to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. Indeed the King, influenced no doubt by the fear that agrarian agitation might add fuel to religious discontent, seems himself to have taken some interest in the matter. In 1534 one finds Cromwell writing to congratulate him on the passage through the House of Commons of a Bill providing that no man shall keep more than 2000 sheep, and that one-eighth of every farmer’s land shall always remain in tillage, “The most profitable and most benefycyall thing that ever was done to this the commonwealthe of your realm”643 and in the following year there is a letter 644 from Cromwell to Rich directing him to apprise the Duke of Suffolk of the King’s displeasure at the decay of certain towns which the Duke had promised to repair. The agrarian grievances expressed in the Pilgrimage of Grace were admitted, and in the instructions issued to the officers who were appointed to restore order in the disaffected counties special directions 645 were included to throw open enclosures, and to reduce the excessive fines charged to tenants on admission to their holdings. In the years immediately following the same policy was pursued in other parts of the country. In 1538 the Earl of Derby 646 writes to Cromwell protesting against the pressure put upon him to reinstate seven tenants whom he has turned out. In 1540 a landlord 647 in the Isle of Wight is compelled to restore to their holdings some recently evicted tenants. In 1541 several cases come before the Council. It appoints a Commission to investigate the case of a Northamptonshire 648 landlord who has prevented the tenants of Brigstock from feeding their pigs, calves, and sheep, by cutting up part of a common wood “into several pastures for his own private use and benefit.” It meets a complaint from the borderers 649 of the Forest of Dartmoor that the owner of the lands of the monastery of Buckfast is breaking the statute which required the lands of dissolved abbeys to be farmed in the traditional way, by excluding them from the common, with a decision upholding the tenants’ case and with the appointment of Commissioners to carry out the award. It sets a certain choleric Sir Nicholas Poyntz,650 who has dared to procure the imprisonment of a tenant for proceeding against him before the Council, to cool his temper in the Fleet, and when he comes out compels him to grant his victim a new farm in exchange for one which he has surrendered, to reduce his rent from 20s. to 6s., and to pay him forty marks as compensation for his “damages and travailles.” In 1543 651 the tenants of Abbots Ripton lay a complaint in the Court of Requests against Sir John St. John on the ground that, in addition to other acts of oppression, he has entered forcibly on their holdings. Sir John replies that they are not copyholders, but merely tenants at will, who are unprotected by any immemorial custom, and after an examination of the manor rolls the court holds that he is right. But the legal insecurity of the tenants does not prevent them from getting protection. The court requires their landlord to grant them leases for years at reasonable rents, and orders that the property which he has distrained shall be restored.

With the Protectorate of Somerset we enter upon a period of more violent agitation and more drastic expedients. There was a large difference between using the jurisdiction of the Council to redress individual cases of hardship and a deliberate attempt to effect a general settlement of the land question upon lines which would do substantial justice to the peasants. The former course involved no perilous assertion of principles, and could be pursued under the guise of a purely conservative policy, merely by referring disputes between landlords and tenants to the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests, which, though in fact administrative and governmental bodies, were none the less protected to some extent against criticism by wearing the appearance of mere legal tribunals. The latter might, perhaps, have been attempted with some faint hope of success, if statesmen had been much more careful than they were to discriminate between the different aspects of the problem with which they were confronted. To us, who look back on the situation from a distance of three and a half centuries, it seems that the one guiding thread, which might have led some way through the welter of confusion, was offered by the sharp distinction drawn by Hales between those enclosures which were made by the exchange and consolidation of strips, with a view to better husbandry, and those which had as their effect the conversion of arable land to pasture, the monopolising of commons, and the eviction of tenants. The arguments in favour of the first type of enclosure were too cogent for any policy which condemned enclosing in general to have the smallest prospect of success. The only possibility of averting the ruin to the peasantry which accompanied depopulation lay in encouraging them generally to follow the example of their brothers in Kent, Essex, Devonshire, and Cornwall, who had for centuries been substituting a more progressive husbandry for the “mingle mangle” of the open fields, without the disastrous consequences entailed by the spread of capitalist agriculture in other parts of the South and Midlands. But such a frank encouragement of certain kinds of enclosure for the sake of repressing others implied an appreciation of the economics of the problem to which comparatively few persons in our period had attained, and was quite beyond the grasp of Governments, which, at their worst, as under Warwick, were quite indifferent to the sufferings of the poorer classes, and, at their best, conceived public interests to be served best by a strict maintenance of customary conditions. Somerset’s policy of deliberately restoring ancient relationships with a strong hand could hardly even be begun without those who pursued it taking sides in a bitter economic agitation, and essaying openly to reverse the whole agrarian movement with which, in the course of the past half century, the wealth of the middle and upper classes, at any rate south of the Trent, had become inextricably identified. It involved in fact a return to the policy of Wolsey, and a return to it under conditions which made Wolsey’s policy doubly hard to carry out, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the position of Somerset as temporary head of a jealous aristocracy was far weaker than that of the omnipotent Cardinal, and, on the other hand, the lapse of twenty years had seen the growth of a generation to which enclosures were a vested interest.

Yet it would be a mistake to think of the whole agrarian episode between the death of Henry VIII. and the fall of Somerset as the mere freak of a misguided doctrinaire. If we can see difficulties which he did not, if we can smile at the thought of any Government at once so incompetent, and but for Somerset himself, so entirely selfish, carrying out a great conservative revolution in the teeth of the new wealth and power of the country, we must also remember that he was not alone in thinking the spoliation of the weaker rural classes not only, as it certainly was, illegal, but also so patently unjust as to amount to a national crime, and that in that age men overestimated the ability of a Government fiat to modify economic habits almost as much as they underestimated it two and a half centuries later. Somerset can hardly have been ignorant of the tremendous risks involved in his policy. But he may well have thought inaction not only baser than, but almost as dangerous as, action. It was certain that, unless the Government interfered to protect tenants, there would be a series of peasants’ revolts. The best answer to the charge of stirring up class hatred, which was made against Somerset, as against all who call attention to its causes, was that agrarian rioting had begun in Hertfordshire 652 before the Commission on Enclosures was sent out, that in those counties where it took its work seriously order was maintained till the end of 1548, and that grave disturbances did not take place until the following year, when it became evident that, both in Parliament and on the Council, the Protector’s policy had been beaten by the opposition of the great landowners. Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Somerset himself (though he, like every one else, had speculated in monastic estates), however much there may be to regret that his policy did not come into stronger hands, or fall upon times which were, from a political point of view, less hopelessly impracticable. An attempt was made to set a good example on the Crown Estates. In 1548, in response to complaints from the tenants at Walton, Weybridge, Esher, and Shepperton, that the making of the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ruining them through the loss of common rights which it entailed, an order 653 was issued dechasing the Park, and throwing open the enclosed lands to the commoners. In the following year Somerset secured the passage through Parliament of a Private Act 654 conferring a good title on those copyholders on his own manors to whom demesne lands had been let, and who, as occupiers of other than customary tenancies, could not claim the protection of manorial custom. It is plain from the comparatively few complaints which came in the sixteenth century from freeholders that, if such a course had been generally pursued, the chief objection to the changes grouped together under the name of enclosure would have been removed, because the harsh disturbance of vested interests which they involved would have been avoided. But that, of course, was quite outside the bounds of political possibility.

The story of Somerset’s attempt to deal with the land question is soon told. In 1548 agrarian discontent was at its height. Some time in that year there must have come to the hands of the Government the small tract on the effect of sheep-farming in Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, which was printed in 1551 under the name of “Certayne causes of the Present Discontent.”655 In spring and summer Latimer was thundering against the “Step-lords”656 at Paul’s Cross. In autumn Crowley published his “Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons.”657 Above all, the poor commons had earlier in the year shown unmistakable signs of fending for themselves. The result of Somerset’s own sympathy with the prevalent discontent was the formation of something like a party, under the name of the “Commonwealth men,” with Latimer as its prophet and Hales as its man of action, which had a programme sufficiently definite to put heart into the peasantry and to terrify the great landed proprietors. On June 1st a Royal Commission 658 was appointed to inquire into offences committed against the Acts forbidding conversion of arable to pasture and depopulation. The Commission divided itself into several committees to deal with different parts of the country. Only one of them, however, consisting of John Hales and five of his colleagues, got seriously to work. It had a large area to cover—the counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire—and one which was the centre of the agitation against enclosure. It seems to have interrupted its labours during autumn and winter, but it was busy in June, July, and August 1548, and again in the summer of 1549, by which time, however, the anger of the landed gentry against its proceedings, and of the peasants against the inactivity of the Commission as a whole, had reached a point which made it hardly possible for it to do more than collect information. Considering the difficulties of its task, and the wide tract of country to be covered, its behaviour appears to have been thorough and business-like. The usual procedure was to empanel a jury of twelve in each place visited, to whom Hales delivered an address explaining the objects and methods of the inquiry, as set out in the instructions issued by the Government to the Commissioners. These stated the Commission to have been formed in particular “for the maintenance and keeping up of houses of husbandry, for avoiding destruction and pulling down of houses for enclosures and converting of arable land into pasture, for limiting what number of sheep men should have and keep in their possession at one time, against plurality and keeping together of farms, and for maintenance of housekeeping, hospitality, and tillage on the sites... of such monasteries, priories, and religious houses as were dissolved.”659 Offenders were then presented by the jury, and though, on Hales’ advice, a pardon was granted them for their past illegalities, their enclosures seem to have been thrown down, arable which had been turned into pasture to have been ploughed up, and farms which had been united to have been separated.660

In the meantime Somerset kept the general policy of agrarian reform alive on the Council. In the autumn of 1548 Hales had returned to London, and, as member for Preston, had prepared three Bills, dealing partly with enclosures and partly with the high prices. The first, requiring re-edification of decayed houses and the maintenance of tillage, and the second, forbidding speculation in food-stuffs, were introduced into the House of Lords. The third, which aimed at encouraging cattle breeding as distinct from sheep grazing, was read first in the House of Commons. Neither Bill came to anything, for Parliament was as angry as the Council with Somerset’s policy. But in May 1549 the Protector issued another proclamation against the decay of houses and enclosure; in June he infuriated the upper classes by a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges; and throughout the whole period of his power he used the Court of Requests as an instrument for protecting tenants against landlords.661 The Secretary 662 to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror provided that the gentry began it, prophesied gloomily that the German peasants’ revolt was to be re-enacted in England, and Warwick attacked Hales fiercely for venturing to discharge the duties laid upon him by the Government, of which Warwick was a member.663 “Sir,” wrote a plaintive Norfolk gentleman to Cecil about the time of Ket’s rebellion, “Be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretence of simplicity and poverty there may not rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Commonwealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest) I assure you they are in such doubt that almost they dare touch none of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that Commonwealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.... I may well gather some of them to be in jealousy of my Lord’s friendship, yea and to be plain, think my Lord’s grace rather to will the decay of the gentlemen than otherwise.”664 Poor gentlemen! A Government which holds that laws do not exist only to preserve the rich in their possessions! Truly the mountains are removed.

Somerset’s Government had too short a life for us to judge how far, in happier political circumstances, he might have succeeded, not in checking agrarian changes, which would in any case have been impossible, but in securing that reasonable consideration should be given to the vested interests of the poorer classes. As Elizabethan statesmen discovered 665 at the end of the century, there was room for a policy which would prevent the wholesale displacement of tenants, and nevertheless offer an encouragement to the formation of the compact holdings out of the scattered strips and common pastures, which the agricultural experts were unanimous in condemning. There are faint indications of an understanding that a fair middle course was possible in a remarkable case which comes from the little Huntingdonshire town of Godmanchester.666 At Godmanchester there had been the usual changes of the preceding half century. Rents had been raised, cottages pulled down, woods destroyed and turned to pasture, while the meadows, which under the Act of 1547 had been confiscated from the local gild, offered a tempting prey to some enterprising speculator. On complaints coming before the Council in the summer of 1549 a comprehensive scheme of reorganisation was drawn up. All persons with more than one house were to let at the customary rent that which they did not use themselves. All persons who had pulled down houses or converted them to other purposes than the accommodation of tenants were either to rebuild them or to build new ones, and to let them to any one offering the customary rent before Michaelmas 1549. The groves of wood converted to pasture were to be enclosed, so as to prevent the depredations made upon them by straying beasts, and, if necessary, the land was to be sown with acorns. With the gild lands a course was taken which, in the scramble for land which was going on in the middle of the sixteenth century, was unfortunately highly unusual. According to the Council’s directions they were to “be divided among the inhabitants thereof in this manner; that is to say to every ploughland five acres, and to every cottager and artificer there dwelling, or which hereafter upon the houses to be now builded shall dwell, one acre, and, if the number do not extend, then for every ploughland four, and so for lack of the rate every ploughland three, and the residue of the said acres falling after that rate to be divided among the cottagers, paying for every of the said acres 3/4.” This case is the high water mark of administrative interference on behalf of the tenants. The action taken embraces nearly all the expedients of re-edifying decayed cottages, fixing fair rents, preventing common land from passing into the control of a single individual, and making equal allotment among the inhabitants, which had been demanded by the peasants and suggested by their friends. It shows that the enclosing of land hitherto used in common was not resented, provided that the division was made in such a way as to give a fair share to all the parties interested. It may perhaps be taken as a specimen of the kind of policy which lay behind Somerset’s expressions of sympathy with the peasantry, and which he would have pursued if his colleagues on the Council had permitted. As it was, he was not strong enough to carry out his programme. While the failure of the Commission resulted in the revolts of 1549, his reluctance to crush their authors, whom he believed to be men goaded into rebellion by intolerable grievances, united the whole weight of the greater property against him as a traitor to his order. In the attack made upon him as by his colleagues, the actions which evoked their special denunciation were those which embodied his agrarian policy, the use of the Court of Requests to protect tenants, the appointment of the Royal Commission to enforce the Acts against enclosures, the pardon granted in June 1549 to the riotous peasants, and the statements attributed to him that “the covetousness of the gentlemen gave cause to the common people to rise,” and that “people had good cause to reform the things themselves,” because “the lords of Parliament were loathe to incline themselves to reformation of enclosures and other things.”667 To the last a popular hero, the “good Duke” could expect no help from those whom he had befriended, and no mercy from the sordid counter-revolution which he had provoked. His epitaph was given by the sad cries of “Too true,” with which the crowd about the scaffold greeted his dying declaration that he had “ever been glad of the furtherance... of the commonwealth.”668

With the fall of Somerset in October 1549 the landowning classes had their revenge, and, under the guidance of Warwick, the policy of the Government swung violently in the opposite direction. The intervention of the Council to protect tenants of course stopped at once; in the two cases which are reported as having come before it in the year 1550 and 1551 the line taken was that the presumption was against the tenants who had broken open enclosures.669 While, in the absence of John Hales, who appears to have found it convenient to leave the country, the Reports of the Royal Commission were allowed to slumber, the Government, by way of reducing opportunities for undesirable meetings, instructed the Bishop of London to prevent unseasonable preaching in his diocese, and set itself to establish the new agrarian régime by law. The ways in which men seek liberty are infinite in number, but the methods of tyranny are everywhere the same; and the nearest parallel to the behaviour of Somerset’s successors is the attitude of the panic-stricken aristocracy of the early nineteenth century towards trade unions. Under an Act of 1550 all meetings of the peasantry were treated as a sort of “illegal conspiracy.” Any forty of them who assembled to break down an enclosure might be condemned as traitors. Any twelve who assembled for the same purpose were guilty of felony, as also were those who summoned such a meeting, or who combined to reduce rents or the price of corn. Even the rusty legislation of the thirteenth century was revived by the re-enactment of the Statute of Merton of 1235,670 which permitted lords to enclose as much as they pleased, provided that “sufficient” remained over for the tenants, with the significant improvement that the latter qualification was swept away by a clause declaring that enclosures might be made “notwithstanding their gainsaying and contradiction.” The tyranny of the oligarchy which ruled from 1549 to 1553 has been obscured by the more dramatic events which preceded and succeeded it. But it marks the bottom point in the condition of the sixteenth century peasantry. It indicates how the new agrarian régime will develop when the political forces impeding it are removed. More had asked, What is Government? and had answered that it is “a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title of a Common Wealth.” His immortal definition does less than justice to the cynicism of the generation which succeeded his own. Mary executed Protestants for reasons of religion, as Elizabeth executed Catholics for reasons of State. But Warwick, a hypocrite in religion, was at least guiltless of the hypocrisy of sheltering his land policy “under the name and title of the Common Wealth.” It was exactly what it seemed to be, a straightforward attempt to prevent the poor from protesting when their possessions were taken from them by the rich.

The general policy of the Government during the reign of Elizabeth and the first half of the seventeenth century shows neither the desire of Somerset to undo the agrarian revelation, nor the complete indifference to the interests of the poorer classes of the party which succeeded him. During the reign of Elizabeth there was little agrarian agitation. It is possible that the limits of profitable pasture-farming had been reached. It is possible that the policy of encouraging the export of corn, which had been suggested by Hales, and which was adopted in 1563 and extended in 1571, reacted favourably on arable farming. It is possible, again, that Warwick’s measures had had their effect, and that the peasantry had been cowed into silence. Though, on the whole, the Government maintained the traditional attitude, it did not interfere except in circumstances of special hardship, or when there was danger of serious disturbance. Cases of this nature came before it fairly frequently in the reigns of Elizabeth, Charles, and James. One finds it intervening on the ground that the poverty of tenants makes it impossible for them to go to law, or that the offenders concerned are so powerful as to be able to disregard inferior authorities, or that the local authorities themselves have been unfairly biassed, or to prevent disturbances by hearing tenants’ grievances, or to compel a great noble, like the Earl of Shrewsbury, to reinstate tenants whom it thinks to have been wrongfully evicted, or to stop action being taken by a landlord pending a decision by the courts in his favour. In 1579 the Council writes to the Lord President of Wales ordering him to take proceedings against two persons who have been enclosing part of the Forest of Fakenham, and have disturbed the copyholders; he is to prevent any further enclosures being made until the whole matter has been considered by the Government.671 In 1581 it interferes to protect a copyholder who has been kept out of his holding by the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough.672 In 1586 it directs the Cambridgeshire justices to inquire into the complaint of some tenants who claim that a piece of common pasture has been let over their heads, and to see that both parties to the dispute come before the Justices of Assize.673 The Justices of Assize in Norfolk are to take action in the matter of a common at Kettlestone which two of the tenants allege to have been overstocked with sheep.674 Several letters are addressed to the Council of the Marches of Wales ordering them to prevent the eviction of copyholders.675 A landlord is requested to attend the Council and prove that his tenants’ fines are uncertain, and not, as they allege, fixed.676 The Court of Chancery has dismissed a case arising out of the enclosure of commons at Bath, and the Council orders a retrial.677 Occasionally it cites offenders into the Court of Star Chamber,678 and in 1592, just when the Court of Requests was beginning to be attacked by the common lawyers, we find a case as to fold-courses coming before the Court of Requests.679 More often it appoints special Commissioners to act as arbitrators, or refers petitioners to the Justices of Assize in their county, with a request to take local evidence and inform the Council what they advise. Throughout the reigns of James and Charles we get glimpses of administrative activity which show that the traditional policy was, perhaps fitfully, maintained. In 1603 the Council of the North 680 were instructed to make “from time to time diligent and effectual inquisition of the wrongful taking in of commons and other grounds, and the decay of tillage and of towns or houses of husbandry,” and to correct offenders with “some notable punishment.” The rebellion in the Midlands in 1607 produced special measures, the chief offenders being summoned before the Council and bound over to rebuild houses which had fallen into decay, while in the following years two Commissions were appointed to compound with enclosers.681 In Yorkshire the justices are evidently fairly active in 1607 and 1608. A Richmond freeholder who owns two-thirds of the manor is presented “for decaying five husbandries, and also for converting 30 acres of tillage ground to meadow and pasture,” and similar presentments are made at Malton, Thirsk, and Helmsley.682 A Justice of Assize writes about the same time from the western counties to the effect that twenty-six houses of husbandry have been rebuilt and the offenders punished.683 In 1614 the justices of Norfolk inform the Council that in accordance with its directions they have examined the enclosures made in the last two years, and have ordered the hedging and ditching of lands to be stopped till further notice.684 In the following year one William Combe was negotiating with the corporation of Stratford for their consent to the enclosure and conversion to pasture of his freehold lands lying in the common fields at Welcombe; in 1615 an order made at Warwick Assizes was confirmed by the Chief Justice restraining him from doing so on the ground that it was “against the laws of the realm,” and in the following year a peremptory letter was addressed to him by the Council directing his compliance.685 In 1619 there was a temporary reaction owing to the low price of grain, which led to the appointment of a Commission to grant pardons for breaches of the Acts forbidding enclosure, and in 1624 all the Statutes except the two passed in 1597 were repealed. But this did not stop administrative interference. In 1621 the Justices of Assize for Bedfordshire are directed to check encroachments on a common, and in 1623 a Commission is appointed to remove grievances arising in connection with enclosures at Cheshunt.686 The rise in corn prices which occurred from 1629 to 1631 produced another burst of activity, which is to be attributed partly to a genuine desire to protect the poorer classes, and partly to the hope that the fines imposed upon enclosers might squeeze a few drops into the Government’s ever thirsty Exchequer. In 1630 directions were issued by the Council to the justices of five Midland counties to remove all enclosures made in the last two years on the ground that they led to depopulation and were particularly harmful in time of dearth.687 In 1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed, and special instructions to enforce the Statutes against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize.688 That the inquiry was not a mere formality is proved by the State Papers of the period. In part of the country, at any rate, land which had been pasture was ploughed 689 up in obedience to the Government’s orders, and a list of offenders, including—the Government must have seen his name with grim satisfaction—Lord Saye and Sele, was returned to the Council, some of whom were still being prosecuted in the Court of Star Chamber as late as 1639. This is the last occasion on which we can trace the administration of this part of the Tudor State policy. The agitation against enclosures was carried on under the Commonwealth. The diggers under Winstanley came into prominence for a moment, only to be disclaimed by the respectable 690 opponents of enclosure and to be instantly suppressed by the Government, and there was a crop of pamphlets in the years between 1650 and 1660 which dealt with the evils of depopulation in quite the old manner. But the traditional doctrine as to the importance of the peasantry had decayed, and the central machinery for forcing the justices to take action had been destroyed in 1641. The last Bill to regulate enclosures was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656, and was rejected on the second reading.691

(c) Success and Failure of State Intervention

It remains to ask how far the policy of trying to check the agrarian changes, which was pursued by Governments for nearly a century and a half, had any effect on economic practice. Statesmen were certainly biassed in favour of protecting the weaker landholding classes. But was their intervention simply the expression of a pious opinion? Was it so entirely futile as—to give a modern parallel—the Small Holdings Act of 1892? Or did it to any extent modify or retard the course of economic events? The view usually taken, that legislation was so ineffective as to be almost negligible, is in accordance with what we know of the character of local administration in the sixteenth century, and is supported by much contemporary evidence. The constant introduction of fresh proposals suggests that the previous laws were disappointing. The failure of existing Acts was the reason given in Somerset’s proclamation for the appointment of the Commission of 1548. Hales, who is certainly the most reliable authority on the situation between 1540 and 1550, speaks of them as being notoriously a dead letter.692 If one looks at the Statutes passed against depopulation in the sixteenth century, with a view to discovering how far they really met the situation, one will be inclined to say that they quite failed to go to the root of the matter. The special evil which they were intended to combat was depopulation caused by evictions. But evictions could be checked only by giving tenants security, which would have meant turning customary into legal titles, and fixing judicial rents for leaseholders and immovable fines for copyholders; in short, the sort of interference which the peasants and their champions demanded, but on which no Government depending on the support of the landed gentry would venture, except upon an extraordinary emergency. In the absence of such an attempt to grapple directly with the fundamental fact that the peasants’ insecurity made them liable to suffer whenever there was a change in the methods of agriculture, legislation designed merely to prevent those changes was almost certain to be evaded. Even with the best intentions the Statutes could never have been easy to administer. There was the difficulty inherent in the whole Tudor and Stuart policy of authoritative interference with trade and industry, the difficulty of making State action keep pace with economic changes. The Government is often like a man pursuing a tram from one stopping-place to another, and just missing it at each. It insists that land which has hitherto been in tillage shall remain in tillage. But there are a few years of bumper harvests, and the farmers complain that they cannot pay their way.693 The Government tries to get over the difficulty by allowing them to convert arable to pasture, when a providence unversed in statecraft sends a wet summer, and it scrambles hastily back to the position which it has just abandoned.694 By excepting from the operation of the Statutes certain districts which are specially suitable for grazing, it encourages a rough local division of labour, one part of a county confining itself to pasture-farming and another to tillage. But then, in pursuit of its traditional and quite reasonable policy of securing that food is cheap, it insists that all farmers are to supply the markets with grain, with the result that those who have specialised in corn-growing are threatened with ruin by the fall in prices which ensues, and that it is even questionable whether they will not convert arable to pasture to evade the obligation imposed upon them.695 Old enclosures were tolerated and new forbidden. But how distinguish between old and new? Land turned to pasture simply to restore it to a condition in which it would be fit for tillage escaped the condemnation passed on other kinds of “conversion,” and one can imagine that nice arguments must have arisen as to a farmer’s motives. Again, suppose a man converted to pasture land which should have remained under the plough, and then leased it to some one else, who retained it as pasture, was the lessee guilty of an offence? In a case which came before the Court of Exchequer in 1582, the defendant pleaded that he merely “used” the land as pasture, and had not converted it, while the Crown argued that use was equivalent to conversion, that he was in the position of a man profiting by the continuance of a nuisance, and that a fine of 10s. an acre for each year since the original conversion ought to be imposed.696 Points like this give colour to Coke’s complaint against the whole body of Acts against enclosure that “they were labyrinthes, with such intricate windings or turnings as little or no fruit proceeded from them.”

But, of course, the obscurity of the Statutes was the least part of the difficulty with which Governments who wished to protect the peasantry were confronted. Much more serious was the fact that the traditional policy could be carried out only by disregarding the financial interests of the wealthier classes, who could most easily influence Parliament and the Council, and who were locally omnipotent. In the first half of the sixteenth century the high position of many of those who were most deeply implicated in cutting land free from communal restrictions made them almost unassailable. The Royal Commission of 1517 returned among enclosers the names of the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Danbury, Sir William Bolen, Sir R. Sheffield, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir J. Witte, the Under-Treasurers of State, and Sir J. Cotton, who was himself one of the Commissioners.697 The angry unanimity with which Somerset’s colleague turned against his land policy was not wonderful, for they were nearly all directly interested in the maintenance of the status quo. Warwick, who led the coup d’état, had enclosed on a large scale. Sir William Herbert had made extensive enclosures on the lands which he had acquired from the Abbey of Wilton. The St. John family, the Darcy family, the Earl of Westmoreland, had all local troubles with their tenants; and there are some indications that Sir William Paget and the detested and detestable Lord Rich were in the same position.698

It is not, however, material to trace the records of individual members of the Council, because their interest in checking the interference of the State with the free disposal of land is evident from the fact that many of them enormously increased their estates through the share which they obtained in the property confiscated from the religious houses and the gilds. A comparison of the lists of Privy Councillors for 1548 and 1552, published by Strype,699 with Dr. Savine’s 700 valuable analysis of the grantees of the monastic estates, show that out of thirty-one persons who got grants of land of £200 a year or more fourteen were members of the Privy Council in one or other of those years, exclusive of the Earl of Warwick and Sir William Herbert. This fact is by itself almost sufficient to explain the impossibility of enforcing the laws forbidding depopulation during the years which followed the death of Henry VIII., and the despair of legal protection which seems to have settled upon the classes affected by the movement. The view sometimes expressed that the religious houses had been easier landlords than the lay owners into whose hands their estates passed, though it can occasionally be corroborated from the complaints made by tenants to the Government, scarcely seems, as yet, to be satisfactorily proved. But the distribution among the wealthier classes of land producing a net income of not less than £110,000 gave them an enormous vested interest in preventing and evading legislation to check the most profitable use of the new possessions which were to endow the aristocracy of the future. The supposition of peculiar harshness in the owners to whom the land passed, though probably correct, is really not needed to explain the part which the transference of these vast quantities of land had in augmenting the distress of the rural classes. The worst side of all such great and sudden redistributions of property is that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. A buyer must sell at a profit, or he had much better not have bought. During the decade between 1540 and 1550 there was a furor of land speculation. To the Abbey lands, which came into the market after 1536, were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. It is quite clear that some of the grantees of estates did not acquire them with the intention of retaining them, but simply “bought for the rise.” The lands of the Abbey of Whitby, for example, pass first to the Crown, and are then sold by it to the Duke of Northumberland, who in turn sells them to Sir John Yorke.701 A small official in the Royal household buys the Cistercian nunnery at Brewood, and at once puts it up to sale “for suche a price that no man will gladly by hit at hys hand.”702 Trentham is surrendered to the Crown in 1536; in 1540 the Duke of Suffolk obtains a grant of the rents and reversions reserved upon the Crown leases there, and in the same year sells it to one Leveson, who has already acquired lands belonging to Horlton Abbey, and already sold them again to Biddulph.703 One finds even the champion of the tenants, Somerset himself, getting a grant of land from the Crown on July 1st, leasing part of it for eighty years on July 2nd, and transferring it back to the Crown, subject to the lease, on July 9th.704 When property changed hands three times in the course of ten days, it could hardly fail to be rack-rented, or the transaction would not pay. What happened to the tenants? Here and there, as at Whitby and Washerne,705 a bitter outburst against their new masters shows that the result has been what we should expect. But for the rest, a cloud descends and we cannot say. It is only in such occasional glimpses that we catch the solid earth shifting beneath the feet of those who till it. It was such a glimpse which led the last great English peasant, in a time of even more widespread misery, to say that the wretchedness of the landless labourer was the work of the Reformation. Cobbett, and those who follow Cobbett in representing the economic evils of the sixteenth century as the fruit of the religious changes, err in linking as parent and child movements which were rather brother and sister, twin aspects of the individualism which seems inseparable from any swift increase in riches. Their vision of a time when mild ecclesiastics administered their estates as a popular trust lays a spell upon the imagination. In the religious houses of Lancashire and Yorkshire and Northumberland there may, here and there, even on the eve of the dissolution, have been a reality corresponding to it. But we need hardly go further than Sir Thomas More 706 to learn that for parts, at least, of England it is only a vision; and More does not speak without book. Holy men enclose land, convert arable to pasture, claim villeins, turn copyholds into tenancies at will. If prominent ecclesiastics had really wanted to champion the cause of the peasantry, they had an excellent opportunity when Wolsey sent out the first great Commission into enclosures in 1517. But, in fact, there is no reason to suppose that any protest was made at all comparable to that which came thirty-two years later from Latimer. How could there be? The estates of the larger houses were often scattered over several different counties, and before the dissolution they were quite frequently managed by laymen. In such cases the monks were simply rentiers,707 who needed to know no more about their tenants than the fellows of an Oxford college know about theirs at the present day.

Nevertheless, though facts will not allow us to accept the view which ascribes the agrarian distress of our period to the Reformation, or even to the particular changes brought about by the secularisation of religious endowments, there was a real connection between them. The Reformation in England is as much a social as a religious revolution. As a social revolution it is the work of the commercial and middle classes. It “made of yeomen and artificers gentlemen, and of gentlemen knights, and so forth upward, and of the poorest sort stark beggars.”708 Their support is given, in the main, on strict business principles. It is purchased by ensuring that every one who counts shall have a solid material interest in supporting the new order. The great Elizabethan families, the Cecils, the Herberts, the Grenvilles, are well paid in advance for their services, and continue to be paid long after their services have ceased. The dissolution of the monasteries does for their plastic consciences what the foundation of the Bank of England did for the politics of the City Interest under William III. Having invested in the Reformation at a time when the Reformation is a gambling stock, they nurse the security with a solicitude which title-deeds have done more to inspire than the New Testament, and are zealous to lay up for themselves treasures in Heaven, as the best insurance for the treasures which they have already accumulated on earth. A man who looks from the window of his new mansion on the timber in his new park may well think it worth the sacrifice of many masses. Though the economic effect of endowing our landed gentry is not reducible to figures, it is not rash to say that men who have sprung into wealth by suddenly purchasing new estates will make those estates pay. And this means that ultimately the cost will be borne by their tenants. That the new proprietors will be extraordinarily sensitive to attacks on the rights of property goes without saying. The lectures 709 delivered to the peasants by the nouveaux riches of 1549 on the wickedness of agrarian spoliation have an irony which is eternal.

Apart from the special interest which the purchasers of the estates of monastic and gild estates had in keeping a completely free hand over their disposal, the normal organisation of English local government made effective State interference very difficult. As has often been pointed out, its peculiar strength lay in the success with which it made the ordinary relationships between social classes the machinery for executing the mandates of the State, by entrusting administration, not to officials of the Central Government, but to persons who already possessed local authority, and who were confirmed in it, rather than given it, by the Crown. Such a system was favourable to the development of representative government and of political freedom, because it strengthened instead of repressing the local initiative on which the success of representative government ultimately depends. But the very absence of bureaucracy had the disadvantage that it made it almost impossible to enforce the regular administration of the law, whenever it conflicted with the local interests of classes who sat on the county bench. A not unimportant chapter in English history is contained in the complaint of the Norfolk rebels that the legislation of the last fifty years had been “hidden” from them by the Justices of the Peace. The account of the proceedings of the Commission of 1548, which had to drag information out of juries packed with the employees of enclosing landlords, and from witnesses who gave it under threat of eviction—above all, the pained amazement of a great landowner who found that the Commission declined to accept evidence from his servants as unbiassed—is a specimen so typical, that, if it were found in isolation, we could hardly fail to fit it back into its English context.710 Hales, the one statesman whom the agrarian problem produced, put his finger on the root of the difficulty in the third Bill which he introduced into Parliament in 1548. The substance of its proposals, though sufficiently rigorous to modern notions, was not in itself more drastic than others which actually became law. Its novelty lay in the machinery by which it was to be enforced. Surveys of pastures were to be made annually by the curate and two men of every parish, and those breaking the law were to be presented for trial. In other words, the initiative in returning offences was to be taken by those chiefly interested in preventing them. According to Hales, it was the last provision for making the administration of the Statute a reality which Parliament found intolerable.711

Must we, then, dismiss the efforts of the Tudor and Stuart statesmen to soften the harshness of the agrarian revolution as a mere piece of solemn futility? The simplicity of the solution makes it a tempting one; but it is too simple to be true. In the first place we must notice that our literary evidence is one-sided, because it is fullest for just those years during which an exceptional freedom from restraint was enjoyed by the great landlords. It is inevitable that Latimer and Hales should often be quoted. But one cannot argue from comments on the uselessness of legislation, uttered at a time when the Statutes against enclosing were virtually repealed, to show that the law was equally ineffective under Elizabeth and her two successors. And, in the second place, to hold that the frequent intervention of the Council had no result is really an unjustifiably high-handed proceeding. It runs counter to most of what we know of the administration of the period. A Statute might be a dead letter, but a letter from the Council was meant to be obeyed. By 1552 the Government has discovered the uselessness of relying for the enforcement of the law on the intervention of superior lords, and places its administration in the hands of special Commissioners directly responsible to the Central Government. Such a view runs counter to the opinion of the peasants and of the upper classes. The victims of agrarian oppression recognise that though they have little to hope from the local authorities, who are their landlords and employers, the Government’s policy is on the whole favourable to them, and they deluge it with appeals for protection. The justices are naturally no friends to that policy. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they are by no means the independent autocracy which they became later, and are watched closely by the Privy Council. From Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and the west of England, they send returns to the Government of their action,712 and the Government is quite ready, as we have seen, to revise the action of its delegates when it thinks they have been biassed by personal interests. In Yorkshire the juries of several townships present offenders before the justices. The authorities of Southampton 713 take steps to put the Acts against enclosure into force. The authorities of Norfolk 714 request that they may enjoy the exemption which has been granted them. When in 1597, a year in which legislation against enclosures is in the air, the Earl of Huntingdon asks the burgesses of Leicester to return his nominee to Parliament, they refuse bluntly to do anything of the kind, on the ground that the candidate in question is “an encloser himself and therefore unlikely to redress that wrong in others.”715 The courts hear a large number of cases dealing with offences committed under the enclosing Statutes.716 Individuals obtain special permission, either by royal license or by Act of Parliament, to use as pasture land which, like undrained marshes, is obviously unsuitable for ploughing. No one who is reported as having taken part in the Parliamentary discussions of proposed legislation in the closing years of Elizabeth suggests that it must necessarily be a dead letter. The chief fear that seems to have been felt was lest it should prove too effective. In introducing two Bills against enclosure and depopulation in 1597, Bacon apologised to the great landlords for taking action which was likely to prejudice their interests. When the question of continuing the Act against depopulation, which was in force in 1601, was under consideration in the House of Commons, both the members who argued for continuance and those who argued for repeal, assumed that the law was being administered in practice, one speaker urging that it had the result of keeping so much land in tillage as to destroy the farmer’s profits by causing excessive supplies of grain to be placed on the market in any but the worst years; another that it pressed hardly on the small farmer, who could not easily find the capital needed to sow as much land as he was legally bound to plough.717 The ablest and most fully reported speech 718 which has come down to us is that of an anonymous member, who, while approving of the principle of the Bill, attacked it as too loosely drafted to meet the situation. His criticisms are those of a man who understands his subject, and are on just those points of detail which, though important in a measure which is to work, would not be worth considering at all if anything like effective interference were out of the question. After commending the clauses which excepted from the provisions of the Bill land lying temporarily fallow, and which punished the purchasers as well as the original converter of arable which was turned into pasture, he goes on to point out that loopholes have been left in the measure which are likely to stultify its effect. The exemption of Crown lands from its operation will encourage enclosing landlords to exchange properties with the Crown, and then take on lease as tenants the land which they have handed over, since by doing so, they will escape the risk of prosecution. The persistent lobbying of the interests affected—“the ears of our great sheepmasters do hang at the doors of this house”—has resulted in the fine for enclosing being placed as low as 10s. per acre, which is ridiculously disproportionate to the profits to be made by enclosures. The clause excluding from the reconversion prescribed in the Bill lands mown for hay plays into the hands of the enclosers by facilitating the winter feeding of their sheep. The failure to limit the acreage which a man may keep in his own hands will discourage the creation of small holdings. At a later date there is the same belief, both among those who approve, and among those who dislike, enclosure, that enclosing can be checked, at any rate, by the Government. In the keen controversy over enclosures which raged under the commonwealth the opponents of further restriction urged that the mere threat of legislation had resulted in checking agricultural enterprise.719 Harrington,720 a specialist, not to say a faddist, on agrarian policy, bases his interpretation of the history of the preceding century on the supposed success of the Tudors in keeping the small cultivator on the soil. Even in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the golden age of the enclosing landlord was just about to dawn, some dim memory of the earlier State policy seems in parts of England to have survived. “Why,” asked a foreign traveller,721 “do your farmers not keep separate closes under turnips to feed sheep in the new approved manner?” “Partly,” answer the peasants, “because there is a common rotation of crops which all must follow. But the principal reason of all is that on a common land no one has freedom to enclose his strips without a special permission and Act of Parliament.”

What weight is to be attached to this body of opinion that enclosure and conversion to pasture were in practice checked by the opposition of the Government, it is not easy to say. If it is hardly compatible with the view that interference was entirely ineffective, it nevertheless need not imply anything more than a temporary retardation of the movement on those special occasions and in those particular parts of the country that were the object of peculiar attention. The test of comparison with facts by which one would like to try it is difficult to apply. Our knowledge of the real extent of enclosure in the sixteenth century is too scanty to permit of our following with confidence the line of argument which has been ingeniously worked out by Miss Leonard,722 and which, starting from the indisputable fact that in those Midland counties where enclosure had been felt most acutely in the sixteenth century, there was still much land unenclosed in the seventeenth and eighteenth, suggests that the explanation is to be found in its temporary cessation under the authoritative pressure of the Tudor and Stuart Governments. Nevertheless, without going beyond our evidence, we may venture to put forward two propositions. The first is that it is extremely improbable that the anti-enclosing policy which we have traced succeeded in altering permanently or on a large scale the course of economic development. That suggestion is surely incredible in view of the continuance of the complaints against enclosure, and of what we know of the slack and biassed routine of rural administration. To expect the justices to stop enclosing, unless actually compelled to do so, was almost as Utopian as it was to expect them to administer the early Factory Acts two centuries later. The second is that the intervention of the Government certainly mitigated the hardships of the movement to the rural classes. The protection which the Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests offered to the equitable interests of tenants, while it could not turn the general course of events, tempered its harshness to individuals. A landlord who was determined to depopulate could hardly in the long run be prevented from succeeding in his object. But he might have to wait till leases or life tenancies had expired, instead of being able to clear his estate at one sweep. He might be compelled, as the St. Johns 723 were in the reign of Henry VIII., as Sir John Yorke in 1553, or Lloyd under Elizabeth, to bind himself to respect the titles of the existing generation of tenants. In the same way the occasional campaigns undertaken for the reconversion of pasture to arable, while they could not turn the tide, almost certainly slackened its course. There is no way of escaping from the positive evidence which we possess that in parts of the country houses which had been pulled down were rebuilt, and that land which had been turned from arable to pasture was turned back again, at the command of the Government, from pasture to arable. We have already described the doings of the justices under James I. Look for a moment at the similar agitation which was started in 1630. The agrarian policy of the Council is seen at its worst under Charles I., because the whole of it is smeared with the trail of finance. Some of the offenders were allowed to compound upon payment of a fine, and one’s first inclination is to believe that the Commissions of 1632, 1635, and 1636 were nothing but one of those odious financial engines, like the revival of forest claims and the exaction of fines for knighthood, by which Charles tried to dispense with Parliamentary taxation. That they were this among other things is certain. That they were nothing more than this must be denied, for we have clear evidence from enclosers themselves to the contrary. They do not only, like Lord Brudenell, write to the Council begging that their fines may be reduced from £1000 to £500, and explaining that “the enclosures made within man’s memory amount not to the decay of one farm.”724 They are not only haled before the Star Chamber to be rebuked by Laud.725 They beg to be allowed to pay a fine instead of being imprisoned. They reconvert pasture to arable. In Northamptonshire 726 a man turns thirty-five acres of arable into pasture. But he ploughs up ninety-five acres of ancient pasture to set off against it. From Nottinghamshire 727 comes a letter explaining that the petitioner has complied with the orders of the Commissioners of Depopulation to throw open all his enclosures, and apologising humbly for keeping hedges round three acres on the ground that they are necessary to mark the boundaries.

On the whole one is inclined to regard the Government’s intervention in this matter as resembling in its effects the attempts which were made at the same time to fix prices and wages. It retarded, though it could not check altogether, economic changes. It imposed a brake which somewhat eased the shock of sudden movements. But when the hand of authority was removed, when Commissions were called in and justices ceased to be admonished by the Council, affairs swung back into their original position. A rough attempt to illustrate the occasional retardation of pasture-farming by these spasmodic attacks upon it is given in the diagram opposite.

The figures are taken from a list of Final Concords as to land lying mainly in Staffordshire, but occasionally in other counties as well. The period selected is one in which there were two agitations among the peasants, two important Acts against depopulation, and a Royal Commission. It will be seen that while some of the fluctuations in the percentages of arable and pasture bear no relation to any known activity on the part of the Government, the repeal in 1593 of the Acts for the maintenance of tillage comes as a climax to a well-defined increase in the percentage of pasture, the passage of the two Acts of 1599 is followed by a similar though less marked rise in the percentage of arable, and the riots of 1607, which resulted in the appointment of a Royal Commission, appear to be accompanied by another increase in the area under the plough. Of course the acreage represented is absurdly small, and it is possible that the apparent correlation is a mere coincidence. Still, one is inclined to think that the fluctuations on the chart fit in very well with what we know from other sources of the temporary effect and subsequent ineffectiveness of these transient eruptions of governmental activity. The creation of social habits by continuous pressure, such as is exercised by modern states through their paid inspectorates, is quite foreign to the ideas of the age. The Government, when it is most active, never gets beyond making an example of a few notorious offenders whose sins are sufficiently black to bring in good round sums to the Exchequer, and having vindicated the majesty of the law and pocketed their fines, it leaves the small fry to wonder, and hastily set their house in order against the coming of the Judges of Assize, and then gradually to slide back into the ancient ways when the storm has blown over. After all, the fact that A was punished for enclosing last year is in itself sufficient to make it extremely probable that this year B will escape.

Such “occasional conformity” was, however, too much the rule in all economic matters that were the object of authoritative regulation—and few were not—to be by itself any cause for abandoning it. The real reason for the cessation of interference in the land question which we notice after 1640 is to be found, not in the fact that intervention had invariably proved too ineffective to be worth continuing, but in the change of policy caused by the unchecked domination of Parliament in domestic affairs. The victory of the Parliamentary forces over the Crown meant the triumph of the landed gentry over the only power which was strong enough to enforce the administration of unpopular Statutes in the teeth of their opposition. It prepared the way for the reign of the great landlord who regards himself as charged with a peculiar responsibility for promoting the needs of agriculture, which he alone is presumed to understand—and in fact, to do him justice, does sometimes understand very thoroughly—a weary Titan who pushes forward enclosure from a sheer sense of public duty. On the one hand there is a change in the standpoint from which agrarian policy is regarded. The aim of maintaining a prosperous peasantry becomes subordinate to that of obtaining the maximum output from the soil. This change materially affects the attitude adopted towards enclosure. The Tudor Governments had endeavoured to protect the rights of commoners, because commons were an indispensable adjunct to small-scale subsistence farming. The new view is that commons are waste lands which had much better be improved, and which are most likely to be improved if they pass into the control of men who have capital to spend upon them. Even under the Stuarts this doctrine begins to gather weight, and naturally so, for it both flattered their ambitious conception of the monarchy as a cornucopia whence all economic improvements should flow, and was in line with their general policy of trying to secure cheap food by regulating the supplies of grain. In 1623 Commissioners are busy improving Tiptree Heath, which squatters have occupied without any legal title.728 In 1637 the King is approached by an influential syndicate which asks for a concession permitting it to reclaim the heaths and barren commons belonging to the Crown, and which displays a glowing prospectus of the advantages which will accrue in the shape of increased supplies of food-stuffs.729 In 1629 the Commission of Sewers had engaged Vermuyden on his celebrated task of draining the great Level, and, in spite of the fierce opposition of the fenmen, the work was in 1637 adjudged to be completed.730 All this is quite in the vein of the eighteenth century. It is quite in that vein also for a strong line to be taken against the wastefulness of those who impede good farming, even though the farmer be a grazier, by sowing a few acres here and a few acres there, instead of cultivating a compact holding; in short, by the immemorial system of strip cultivation. The last but one of the Statutes against depopulation 731 was itself the first expressly to authorise that exchanging of holdings for the purposes of more business-like husbandry, which, as we have seen, had been going on informally from an early date. In 1606 we get what may be called the first Enclosure Act of the modern pattern, under which certain Herefordshire parishes are allowed to separate and enclose one-third of the land lying in common in each parish.732 In 1627 a case arising out of a dispute about fold-courses comes before the courts, and sound agricultural doctrine is laid down with a confidence of which Arthur Young himself might have approved. “This Court,” say the judges, “was now of opinion that the plowing and sowing of small quantities of land dispersedlye or disorderlye within ye shacks and winter feedinge of ye said ffouldcourses, and the refusal of a few wilfull persons to lett ye owners of ffouldcourses have their quillets of land (Llying intermixt in the places where ye sheep pasture is layd) upon indifferent exchange or other recompense for the same, are things very mischievous and will tend to ye overthrow of very many fould courses.”733 Their opinion is enforced with a judgment decreeing an exchange of lands.

When the whole question comes up again towards the close of the Commonwealth, the old attitude is maintained by the opponents of enclosure, who protest, with all the fervour of Latimer, against the greed of landlords and the pauperising of commoners. But its defenders have overhauled their arguments, and the lines on which the controversy will be fought out for the next century and a half are already obvious. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Restoration commoners are lewd people, who would be much better employed if at work for wages. All beneath the “nobility and gentry” are “the poor,” and the poor themselves (it is well known) are of two kinds, “the industrious poor,” who make a living by working for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who make a living by working for themselves. Christianity and patriotism require that the latter should enter some “productive employment,” and this can best be secured by excluding them from the commons on which their distressingly irregular livelihood depends. Even so Europeans to-day teach habits of industry to the African savage, by taxing him until he can no longer live upon the lands which Europeans desire to exploit. Moreover, the commercial spirit of the later seventeenth century is impatient of antiquated restrictions, and is already groping blindly after some formula which may prove them to be superfluous. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is best suited to produce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him a free hand to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim,” writes a pamphleteer, “that every one by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage. Whensoever corn bear a considerable rate, viz., wheat four or five shillings, and barley two shillings and sixpence, men may make more profit by ploughing their pasture, and consequently will plough for their own advantage.”734 Hales had said something like this a hundred years before. He had said it to show the need of special measures to divert agricultural enterprise into beneficial channels. Now an identity between the interests of landowners and those of the public is assumed as part of a pre-established harmony, which human intervention may disturb, but which it is neither needed nor competent to secure. Authoritative statecraft fades out in the dawn of reason and the light of nature. With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men are steering for uncharted waters.

While opinion on the subject of enclosing was beginning to change even before the Civil War, the final blow at the maintenance of the old policy was struck by the destruction of the Court of Requests and Court of Star Chamber. The abandonment by Governments of all attempts to protect the peasantry against oppression was an indirect consequence of the victory of the Common Law over the prerogative jurisdiction of the Crown. The interference in agrarian matters of the administrative courts of the Tudor monarchy had always been detested by the landed gentry for the very reasons which made it popular with the peasantry. They were the last resort of men who could not get what they considered justice elsewhere. One finds a defendant in whose favour the Common Law Courts have given three decisions being sued again before the Court of Requests.735 They were the only authority which could prevent a landlord from asserting his claims to a common or to a copyhold by means which the poorer classes found it impossible to resist. Complaints from aggrieved landowners that they are undermining the right of the lord of the manor to exercise jurisdiction over his own copyholders, by trying cases which ought to be heard in manorial courts, that they are interfering with the course of Common Law, that they make it impossible for a lord to “rule his lands” by the countenance which they lend to discontent, are not infrequent 736 in the sixteenth century, and both Wolsey and Somerset were in turn attacked by the upper classes for the favour which they showed to such unconstitutional interference with the rights of property. Such protests are the best proof that the Court of Requests and the Court of Star Chamber had exercised functions which were in some respects beneficial. The strictest constitutionalist will have some sympathy to spare for the address in which Lord Coventry in 1635 charges the Judges of Assize to “beware of the corruptions of sheriffs and their deputies, partiality of jurors, the bearing and siding with men of power and countenance in their country,” and to set on foot “strict inquiry after depopulation and enclosures, an oppression of a high nature and commonly done by the greatest persons that keep the juries under their awe, which was the cause there are no more presented and brought in question.”737 Such words paint the ideal of Government by prerogative, parcere subjectis et debellare superbos, which may have floated before the minds of a Bacon or a Strafford, and which had been partially realised under the Government of Elizabeth. When set side by side with the actual practice of the Council under Charles I. they are its final and self-recorded condemnation. For we look for them to be made good in action, and we look, save during a few years, in vain. If much may be forgiven those who boldly do wrong believing it to be right, there is no mercy for “the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin” of a body which, believing a certain system of government to be right, entangles its execution with sloth, and makes a sordid financial instrument out of the very prerogative which itself has declared to be the gift of God for the protection of the poor. The defence which the Council and its courts had offered to the peasantry against economic evils, though real, was too irregular to do more than slightly mitigate the verdict which history has passed upon their employment in the hands of Charles I. Whether the peasants regretted their disappearance we do not know. To those contemporaries whose opinion counted, the occasional onslaughts made by the Council and Star Chamber upon enclosing landlords were an aggravation, not an extenuation, of the indictment brought against them. Though the Grand Remonstrance, in which the Long Parliament sought to unite all classes with a recital of grievance accumulated upon grievance, taunted the Government with its failure to check the conversion of arable land to pasture,738 the authors of that tremendous indictment had no substitute to suggest for the interference by the Council with “freeholds, estates, suits, and actions,” which they denounced; and Laud, who, according to even a friendly critic, “did a little too much countenance the Commission for Depopulation,”739 lived to be reminded in the day of his ruin of the sharp words with which he had barbed the fine imposed by that body upon an enclosing landlord.740 The Court of Requests was never formally abolished, but from the closing decade of the sixteenth century it had been gradually stripped of its powers by prohibitions issued by the Common Law Judges, and forbidding plaintiffs to proceed with their cases before it, and after 1642 it quietly disappeared. With the destruction in 1641 of the Court of Star Chamber and the Councils of Wales and of the North, an end was put to the last administrative organs which could bridle the great landed proprietors. Clarendon, himself a relic of an age before the deluge, would seem to have added to his other offences by trying to revive the old policy in a world which would have none of it.741 But the royalist squirearchy who in 1660 streamed back to their plundered manors, were, when their property was at stake, as sound constitutionalists as Hampden himself, and after 1688 that absorption of the “State” by “Society” which Gneist, a worshipper of the eighteenth century régime, dates with curious perversity from 1832, was, in his sense of the words, complete. Henceforward there was to be no obstacle to enclosure, to evictions, to rack-renting, other than the shadowy protection of the Common Law; and for men who were very poor or easily intimidated, or in enjoyment of rights for which no clear legal title could be shown, the Common Law, with its expense, its packed juries, its strict rules of procedure, had little help. Thus the good side of the Absolute Monarchy was swept away with the bad. Its epitaph was written by Locke:742—“The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent.” But it was forgotten as soon as it was written. For to the upper classes in the eighteenth century the possession of landed property by a poor man seemed in itself a surprising impertinence which it was the duty of Parliament to correct, and Parliament responded to the call of its relatives outside the House with the pious zeal of family affection.[Next Chapter]

Footnotes

548 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials. Sir William Paget to the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549.

549 4 Henry VII., c. 19.

550 Journal of House of Commons, December 19, 1656. See Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Society, vol. xix.

551 e.g. Price, Observations on Reversionary Payments, 1773. See Levy, Large and Small Holdings, p. 41.

552 The general adoption of the “Test Workhouse” for the able-bodied, which dates from the Poor Law Reform Act of 1884, was the direct result of a one-sided reaction against the disastrous Speenhamland policy.

553 Camden Society, Clarke Papers, vol. ii. p. 217.

554 For Captain Pouch see Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii. For the other names Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. ii. p. 40.

555 Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 70, 1537. Examination of R. Leedes: “The rebels... were half inclined to go home. But Ralph Green... encouraged them to go forward, saying, ‘God’s blood, sirs, what will ye now do? Shall we go home and keep sheep? Nay, by God’s body, yet had I rather be hanged,’” and ibid.: “The said Trotter says the meaning of the plough borne in the banner was the encouraging of the husbandman.”

556 Ibid., vol. xii., Part I., 687, 1537. Confession of Barnarde Townleye, Clerk: “The beginners of the insurrection in Cumberland were the 4 captains of Penrith; Faith, Poverty, Pity and Charity, as the Vicar of Burgh proclaimed them at each meeting.... Conjectures that the intent was to destroy the gentlemen, that none should pay ingressums to his landlord, and little or no rent or tithe”; also ibid., Examination of Sir Robert Thompson, Vicar of Burgh: “On the Wednesday and Thursday the 4 captains followed examinand in procession with their swords drawn, and examinand said mass, which they called the Captains’ mass.”

557 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 687: “They of Kirkby Stephen plucked down the new intacks of enclosures, and sent to other Parishes to do the like, which was done at Burgh, 28th January.” For the Doncaster programme see below, p. 334. Aske said (L. and P., vol. xii., Part I., p. 901) that the new farmers of monastic estates “let and tavern out the farms of the same houses to other farmers for lucre.”

558 These particulars are taken from Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

559 Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii., which also gives an account of the Midland riot of 1607.

560 MSS. in possession of Charles E. Bradshaw Bowles, Esq., of Wirksworth, for a transcript of which I am indebted to Mr. Kolthammer. See below, pp. 327–329.

561 Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part VI., pp. 49–50.

562 The Humble Petition of thousands well affected persons inhabiting the city of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets, and places adjacent. In Bodleian Pamphlets, The Leveller’s Petition, c. 15, 3 Linc. See also Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 139–226.

563 Camden Society, Clarke Papers, vol. ii. pp. 215–217. Winstanley’s letter to Lord Fairfax and the Council of War begins: “That whereas we have begun to dig upon the Commons for livelihood, and have declared unto your excellency and the whole world our reasons, which are four. First, from the righteous law of creation that gives the earth freely to one as well as another, without respect of persons”; also Gooch, op. cit. The Owenite note may be more than a mere chance. Owen himself stated (“New View of Society”): “Any merit due for the discovery calculated to effect more substantial and permanent benefit to mankind than any ever yet contemplated by the human mind belongs exclusively to John Bellers.” Bellers published his College of Industry in 1696, and may easily have been acquainted with the story of the Diggers’ agitation.

564 Russell, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 8.

565 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 201, Examination of John Halom of Calkehill, yeoman.

566 Ibid., vol. xi., 1080.

567 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xi., 975.

568 Ibid., vol. xii., Part I., 163.

569 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 163. The Proclamation of the Commons; see also ibid., 138, the manifesto which says, “Ye shall have captains just and true, and not be stayed by the gentry in no wise.”

570 Russell, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, Introduction, p. 8. The advice of John Walker of Griston.

571 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, and Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684–696.

572 Coventry Leet Book, edited by M.D. Harris, vol. ii. 510 and passim.

573 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 380, The Examination of the Monk late of Louth Park: “Plummer and one James, a tailor, were the most quick and chiefest rulers of the company.... Melton, whom they named ‘Captain Cobbles,’ was the most chief and busy man among these commoners.... John Tailor, of Louth, webster, brought out of the house a great brand of fire, and the commons carried the books into the market-place.”

574 Hist. MSS. Com., Cd. 2319, p. 75, Copy of Letters Patent (28 May, 4 Ed. VI.) granting to Thomas Audeley... all that manor called Gunvyles Manor in Norfolk, parcel of the possessions of the said... Robert Ket, in consideration “boni, veri, fidelis, et magnanimi servitii in conflictu versus innaturales subditos nostros proditores ac nobis rebelles in Com. nostro Norf.... quorum... quidam Bobertus Kett existit capitanus et conductor.”

575 Sheep-driving in the sixteenth century was like cattle-driving in Ireland to-day; see Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., vol. xii., Part I., 201: “When they first went to York, they drove one Coppyndale’s sheep because he fled away, and sold them again to his deputy for £10,” and the behaviour of the Norfolk rebels in 1549.

576 Gairdner, L. and P., xi., II., 186, and Rutland MSS., p. 36, quoted by Leadam: “There is a great number of the commons up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir William Herbert’s Park that is about his new house... they say they will not have their common grounds to be enclosed and taken from them.”

577 Gairdner, L. and P., xii., I., 362: “Your rents and others cannot yet be collected.”

578 I take this story from a transcript kindly supplied me by Mr. Kolthammer of MSS. in the possession of Charles E. Bradshaw Bowles of Wirksworth.

579 Lodge, Illustrations, ii. p. 218.

580 Synge, The Playboy of the Western World.

581 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests (Leadam). Customary tenants of Bradford v. Francis: “The said stuard called... the... tenants of the manor to be sworn to enquire as they ought to doo, the which to do... the said tenants... obstinately and sturdily then and there refused, and said that unless the said defendent... wold grante them forthwith and immediatelye that they should have and enjoy the commodity of the said three matters... that they, nor any of them, wolde be sworn at that Court, but wolde depart.”

582 Leadam, E. H. R., pp. 684–696. The tenants at Thingden, in their proceedings against Mulsho, “calle commen Councelles... and make a commen purse among them, promising all of them to take parte with other, saying that xx. of them would spend xx. score pounds ayenet the said John Mulsho.” The tenants of Abbot’s Ripton “procured one common purse to be ordeyned together one common stock to thentent obstinately to defend their perverse and ffrowned appetitez.” As to Rents, see L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 154: “In many counties little or no ferms will they pay” (Darcy to Shrewsbury).

583 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 392.

584 Proclamation of July 22, 1549. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, who remarks that these village officers, “in the places where these risings were, had been the very ringleaders and procurers by their example and exhortation.”

585 Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), Appendix to Introduction, lviii.: “In dyvers places wher we were, and wher the people had just cause of Gryef, and have complayned a great many yeares without remedy, there have they byn very quiet, shewed themselves most humble and obedient subiectes taryenge the Kynges Maiesties Reformation.”

586 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1905, p. 2.

587 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1905, p. 22.

588 Ket refused the pardon offered on July 31st on the ground that the insurgents had committed no offence requiring to be pardoned, and fighting followed. On August 23rd a pardon was again offered. While it was being read by a herald, a boy standing by insulted him “with words as unseemly as his gesture was filthy” (Holinshed), and was shot by one of the herald’s retinue. Ket tried to pacify the anger of his followers at what they took to be treachery, but without effect.

589 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1905, p. 20.

590 Printed by Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, vol. ii. p. 40.

591 Gairdner, L. and P. of Henry VIII., xi. 1246.

592 Russell, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 48.

593 Some doubt has been expressed as to the interpretation of these words. They should probably be read in the light of what was said above (Part I. chap. iv.) as to enclosures made by the tenants themselves. The rebels point out that a considerable number of people have spent capital on hedging and ditching their lands for the better cultivation of saffron, and therefore ask that, while other enclosures may be pulled down, a special exception may be made in favour of this particular kind of enclosure.

594 Contrast the feeling in Protestant Norfolk with that of Cornwall and Devon in 1549, and of the North in 1536.

595 The grammar is bad, but the sense is clear enough. Lords must stop shifting on to tenants burdens which lords ought to bear.

596 Camden Society, Clarke Papers, vol. ii. p. 217. Letter addressed by the Diggers, December 8, 1649: “To my lord generall and his Councell of War.” The allusion to the usurping Normans occurs also (ibid., p. 215) in another letter in a statement of the reasons of the agitation: “Secondly by vertue of yours and our victory over the king, whereby the enslaved people of England have recovered themselves from under the Norman Conquest; though wee do not yet enjoy the benefit of our victories, nor cannot soe long as the use of the Common land is held from the younger brethren by the Lords of Mannours that yet sit in the Norman chair and uphold that tyranny as if the kingly power were in force still.”

597 Winstanley: “The curse and blessing that is in mankind,” quoted Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century.

598 A reference to the Levellers occurs in connection with the Midland Revolt of 1607, Lodge, Illustrations, iii. 320: “You cannot but have hearde what courses have been taken in Leicestershire and Warwickshire by the two Lord Lieutenants there, and by the gentlemen... and lastlie howe Sir Anth. Mildmay and Sir Edward Montacute repaired to Newton... where one thousand of these fellowes who term themselves levellers were busily digging, but weare furnished with many half-pikes, pyked staves, long bills, and bowes and arrows and stones... there were slaine some 40 or 50 of them and a verie great number hurt” (January 11, 1607, the Earl of Shrewsbury to Sir John Manners, Sir Francis Leake, and Sir John Harper). The name Diggers seems to have cropped up about the same time, v. Wit and Wisdom, edited by Halliwell for New Shakespeare Society, pp. 140–141, for a petition from “the Diggers of Warwickshire to all other diggers,” and signed “poore Delvers and Day Labourers for ye good of ye commonwealth till death” (quoted by Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii.)

599 See below, pp. 367–368.

600 Somers’ Tracts, vol. i., pp. 164–168: “For their tenantries, this conceit I have thought upon... that your Majesty, in every shire, should give instruction to some that are indeed trusty and religious gentlemen, that, whereas your Majesty is given to understand that divers popish landlords do hardly use some of your people and subjects,... you do constitute and appoint them to deal both with entreaty and authority, that such tenants, paying as others do, be not thrust out of their living, nor otherwise molested. This would greatly bind the commons’ hearts unto you, on whom indeed consisteth the power and strength of your realm, and it will make them less, or nothing at all, depend upon their landlords.”

601 For the manner in which the British army is recruited by starvation, see Mr. Cyril Jackson’s Report on Boy Labour to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, Cd. 4632, pp. 166–168.

602 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., chap. xxiv.

603 4 Henry VII., c. 19.

604 Gairdner, L. and P. Hen. VIII., xii., I. p. 595.

605 D’Ewes’ Journal, p. 674: “Mr. Secretary Cecil said, ‘... I think that whosoever doth not maintain the plough destroys this kingdom.... I am sure when warrants go from the Council for levying of men in the counties, and the certificates be returned unto us again, we find the greatest part of them to be ploughmen.’” See also on this point Appendix I., Nos. iv., v., vi., and viii.

606 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society (1909), p. 144.

607 Pauli, Drei volkswirthshaftliche Denkscriften, How to Reform the Realm in Setting Men to Work to restore Tillage: “The kynge and his lordes have nede to mynyster right ordre of common wele; or els they must needs destroy their own wealth by the very ordenaince of God, for they are upholden and borne upon the body. Yf they will be riche, they must first see all common people have riches.”

608 1 Eliz. cap. xxi. Prothero Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558–1625. Two subsidies of 1s. 8d. and 1s. were imposed on “every pound, as well in coin,... as also plate, stock of merchandises, all manner of corn and blades, household stuff, and of all other goods moveable,” and two subsidies of 2s. 8d. and 1s. 4d. on the “yearly profits” of land.

609 D’Ewes’ Journal, p. 633. “Sir Walter Raleigh said... ‘Call you this par iugum when a poor man pays as much as a rich, and peradventure his estate is no better than he is set at, or little better; when our estates, that be thirty or forty pounds in the queen’s books, are not the hundredth part of our wealth?’”

610 Fortescue, On the Governance of England, chap. xii.: “The reaume off Ffraunce givith never ffrely off thair owne good will any subsidie to thair prince, because the commons thereoff be so pouere.... But owre commons be riche, and therefore thai give to thair kynge as somme tymes quinsimes and dessimes, and ofte tymes other grete subsidies.”

611 Bacon, History of King Henry VII. (Pitt Press Series), pp. 70–71: “The more gentlemen, ever the lower book of subsidies.”

612 Fuller, The Holy and Profane State.

613 The Standard of Equality in Subsidiary Taxes and Payments, London, 1647.

614 S. P. D. Ed. VI., Addenda IV., p. 26: “Subsidies and duties must be levied on that border for your service, and they are loosed by oppression of your officers.”

615 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907, pp. 139–140.

616 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xi. 1244. See the remarks about Cromwell: “Item, the false flatterer says he will make the king the richest prince in Christendom.... I think he goes about to make him the poorest.”

617 See Appendix I., iv.

618 Letter to Mr. Cecill from Sir Anthony Auchar, quoted by Russell, Ket’s Rebellion, in Norfolk, p. 202.

619 Miss Leonard (Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series vol. xix.) quotes Coke, Institutes, Book III., p. 105 (1644 ed.), and S. P. D. Chas. I., clxxxvii., No. 95: “The decay of tillage and houses of husbandry are the undoubted causes and grounds of depopulation, and a crime against the Common Laws of this Realm, and every continuance thereof is a new crime.” But the words “against the Common Laws” are hardly to be interpreted strictly.

620 S. P. D. Eliz., vol. cclxxxvi., Nos. 19 and 20: “He is a great taker of advantages. He granted a lease to his brother, who dying a year past, he sued his brother’s wife to overthrow the lease to the undoing of her and her children.” For a strong expression of these views see Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part II., 1575, Nov. 20. Lord North to the Bishop of Ely: “My lord, it wilbe no pleasure for you to have hir Majestye and the Councell knowe howe wretchedly yowe live within and without your house, howe extremely covetous, how great a grazier, how marvellous a dayrye man, howe ritche a farmer, how grete an owner. It will not lyke yowe that the world knowe of your decayed houses,... of the leases you pull violently from many, of the copyeholdes that yowe lawlesslye enter into, of the fre land that yowe wrongfully posese.... Yowe suffer no man to live longer under yowe than yowe lyke him.”

621 Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue, p. 1: “Farmer, I have heard much evill of the profession, and to tell you my conceit plainly I think the same both evill and unprofitable... and oftentime you are the cause that men lose their land and sometimes they are abridged of such liberties as they have long used in mannors.”

622 Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.

623 Norden, op. cit.: “And is not every mannor a little commonwealth, whereof the tenants are the members, the land the body, and the lord the head?”

624 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 98, Instructions to the Duke of Norfolk.

625 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xxvii. p. 129. Letter from the Council to William Harman, Esq.

626 A useful list of these Acts, with a summary of their provisions, is given by Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, Appendix D.

627 4 Henry VII., c. 19. All occupiers of twenty acres and more which have been in tillage during three years preceding the Act to maintain tillage.

628 6 Henry VIII., c. 5, and 7 Henry VIII., c. 1. In parishes “whereof the more part was or were used and occupied to tillage and husbandry,” any person who “shall decay a town, a hamlet, a house of husbandry, or convert tillage into pasture,” and has not “within one yeere next after such wylfull decaye reedifyed and made ageyn mete and convenyent for people to dwell and inhabyte the same... and therein to exercyse husbandry and tillage,” forfeits one half of his land to the lord of the manor. Land converted to pasture must be tilled “after the maner and usage of the countrey where the seyd land lyeth.”

629 25 Henry VIII., c. 13.

630 5 and 6 Edward VI., c. 5.

631 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 2.

632 5 Elizabeth, c. 2.

633 31 Elizabeth, c. 7.

634 35 Elizabeth, c. 7.

635 39 Elizabeth, c. 1 and c. 2.

636 Hall’s Chronicle of Henry VIII., p. 585 (Edition 1809), quoted by Leadam, introduction to Select Cases in the Court of Requests (Selden Society).

637 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. III., chap. iv.

638 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xiii. pp. 91–92.

639 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xxx. pp. 36–37. A letter to the Council in the Marches of Wales, concerning the tenants of Aston in Montgomeryshire: “And if it be true, as they do inform us by their petitions, that examinations in a case concerning one of that Counsell should be taken by a kinsman of his owne and a clerk underneathe him, wee wyshe... that you would have taken a more indifferent course, especially in a matter of commons, which, concerning many persons, doth easily give occasion of offence and scandal.”

640 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, edited by Leadam, and Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684–696.

641 Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684–696.

642 Ibid.

643 Merriman, Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, vol. i. p. 273.

644 Ibid., vol. i. p. 413.

645 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii., I., 98 and 595.

646 Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xiii., I., 334 (see also 66, where an appeal is made January 11, 1536, to Cromwell to protect some tenants in Denbighshire.)

647 Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, vol. vii. p. 42: “The King’s pleasure was signified to John Dawney, Knight, that whereas he had turned certain persons in the Isle of Wight out of their farms, whereof they pretended to have leases, and had demised the same to others that minded not to dwell upon the same, he should take order that the old tenants might enjoy their leases until Michaelmas, come a twelve month, and that in the mean season the King’s Highness would see a direction taken in the matter.”

648 Ibid., vol. vii. pp. 225–226. July 30 and August 1, 1541.

649 Ibid., vol. vii. pp. 123–125. January 25, 1541.

650 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. i. pp. 5 and 9.

651 Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684–696.

652 Appendix to Miss Lamond’s edition of The Commonweal of this Realm of England, Hale’s defence, p. lviii.: “Whas ther not, longe before this Commyssyon was sent forthe, an insurrection in Hertfordshire for the comens at Northall and Cheshunt?”

653 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. ii. pp. 190–193, May 5, 1548: a complaint from “many poor men of the Parishes of Walton, Weybridge, East Molson, West Molson, Caverham, Esher, Byfiete, Temsditton... in the name of the whole parishes before rehearsed, that by reason of the making of the late chase of Hampton Court, forsomyche as their commons, pastures, and meadows be taken in, and that all the said parishes are overlaid with the deer now increasing daily upon them, very many households of the same parishes be let fall down, the families decayed, and the king’s liege people much diminished, the country thereabout in manner made desolate.”

654 See p. 294.

655 Published by the E. E. T. S.

656 The first sermon preached before King Edward the Sixth, March 8, 1549: “You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possession yearly too much. For that herebefore went for twenty or forty pounds by year... now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year.” See also Latimer, The Sermon of the Plough, January 18, 1548.

657 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

658 The proclamation appointing the Commission is printed by Strype, op. cit., vol. ii., Book I., chap. ii. The operative part of it runs: “And therefore, He... hath appointed, according to the said acts and proclamations, a view and inquiry to be made of all such as contrary to the said acts and godly ordinances have made enclosures and pasture of that which was arable ground, or let any house, tenement, or mease decay or fall down, or done anything contrary of the good and wholesome articles contained in the said acts.” In my account of the situation under Somerset I have followed the documents printed by Strype, and the appendix to Miss Lamond’s introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England.

659 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

660 For the pardon, see appendix to Miss Lamond’s introduction to The Commonweal, &c., p. lxi.; for the ploughing up of a park and division of farms, ibid., pp. xli. and lxi.-lxii.; for the Bills introduced by Hales, ibid., xl., xlv.-lii., lxii.-lxv. Strype’s account appears to be based on that of Hales.

661 For these facts, see Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

662 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials. Sir William Paget to the Lord Protector, July 7, 1549: “The king’s subjects are out of all discipline, out of all obedience, caring neither for Protector nor King. And what is the cause? Your own lenity... the foot taketh upon him the part of the head, and commons is become king, a king appointing conditions and laws to the governors, saying, ‘Grant this and that and we will go home.’... What then is the matter, troweth your grace?... By my faith, Sir, even that which I said to your grace.... Liberty, Liberty.... In Germany, when the very like tumult to this began first, it might have been appeased with the loss of 20 men, and after with the loss of 100 or 200. But it was thought nothing and might easily be appeased, and also some spiced consciences taking pity of the poor... thought it a sore matter to lose so many of their country folk, saying they were simple folk.... It cost, ere it was appeased, they say, 1000 or 2000 men.”

663 Appendix to Miss Lamond’s introduction to The Commonweal, &c., pp. xli. and lii. But of course there was no such thing as collective responsibility for policy in the sixteenth century.

664 Russel, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 202.

665 See p. 355.

666 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. ii. pp. 294–296.

667 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

668 Somerset’s execution took place on January 22, 1552, more than two years after he had been deposed from the Protectorate, for supposed complicity in a plot to overthrow the Government. The evidence for the existence of a conspiracy appears to be feeble. See Pollard, The Political History of England, 1547–1603, pp. 61–65.

669 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. iii. pp. 181–182 and 247 and 252. “Mr. Grenewaie was this day before the Counsaill and rebuked sore for his attemptate in causeng Raf Lees hedges to be broaken up; nevertheless considering his long service [as gentleman usher] he was borne withall, and for this tyme without further punishment he was commaunded to make up those hedges again.”

670 3 and 4 Edward VI. c. 3.

671 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xi. pp. 191–192. A letter to the Lord President of Wales that whereas upon complaints exhibited to their lordships by the tenants of the Forest of Fakenham against Sir John Throgmorton, and one Mr. William Bell his stuarde, concerning an inclosure by him made of certen commons... encroachment upon their copieholds... it was by them ordered that the suite against the tenants commenced at the Common Lawe in respect of their commons and copieholds should surcease and the matters in controversy abyde triall before their lordships... and untill the matter should be heard and determined they enjoyned to proceed no further in the inclosure of the said Common... forasmuch as the tenants do now again complaine that since their lordships’ said order Sir John and the said William Bell have inclosed more of the said common... but hath also caused Bell to proceed against the tenants by ejectione firmæ at the Common Lawe, he is therefore required... to will and command the said Sir John and William Bell to forbear their inclosures of the said Common... untill the same shall be... determined by their lordships according to their lordships’ form and order.”

672 Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xiii. pp. 91–92. A letter to the Justices of the County of Lincoln: “If they thinke it agreeable with equitie and justice that the poore man should be put in possession of the said Landes, that they give commandment unto the said Lacy to admit him thereunto.”

673 Ibid., vol. xiv. pp. 201–202.

674 Ibid., vol. xv. pp. 394–395.

675 See p. 373, n. 1, and Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, vol. xvii. p. 76. For a similar letter to the Council of the North, ibid., vol. xxvii. pp. 228–229.

676 Ibid., vol. xxii. p. 379.

677 Ibid., vol. xxii. pp. 360 and 370. Letters to the Master of the Rolls ordering retrial of case concerning enclosure of commons at Bath.

678 Ibid., vol. xvi. pp. 366–367. A letter to the Solicitor: “Whereas divers poor men, tenants of the manor of Chilton, have exhibited very grievous complaints unto their lordships against William Darrell, Esq., of divers and sundry misdemeanors committed by him in breach of her majestie’s peace”... the solicitor is to “cause a byll to be drawn into the Court of Star Chamber against Darrel,” and Camden Society 1886, Cases in the Court of Star Chamber and High Commission, pp. 44–45.

679 Holkham MSS., Sparham, Bdle. No. 5, 14th June, 34 Eliz: “In the matter in variance brought before the Queenes Majestie in her Maj^tie’s hon^ble Court of Requests at the suit of John Byrd against Christopher Saye and other defendants upon the motion of Mr. Edward Coke recorder of the City of London being of Councel with the said defendant.... For that it appeareth that the said Defendant hath had three verdicts and judgments at the Common Law, one of them against the said complainant himself.”... The defendant is awarded costs, “and the said complainant shall from henceforth forbear to put any sheepe upon the said ground, and suffer his sheepe to feede there.”

680 Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558–1625, pp. 370–371.

681 Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558–1625, pp. 470–472, and Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii.

682 Atkinson, North Riding Quarter Sessions, vol. i. pp. 106, 108, 111, 122. The last presentment runs: “Will Marwood of Busby, gentⁿ, for decaying of xxx acres of arable land or thereabouts, and converting of xxx acres of arable land or thereabouts, the same, from tillage into pasture or meadow, and tilled nothing in the same parish in lieu thereof, contrary, etc.”

683 Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.

684 Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.

685 Ingleby, Shakespeare and the Welcombe Enclosures.

686 S. P. D. J., I., vol. cxxiv., December 20, 1621, and S. P. D., Ch. i. cliii., October 2, 1623.

687 Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Society, vol. xix.

688 Ibid.

689 For the ploughing up of pasture, S. P. D., Ch. I. vol. cccciv. 142, and vol. cccclxxv. 72; for Lord Saye and Sele, vol. ccclxii. 60, 1637; order of Council that the Attorney-General should forthwith proceed by information in the Star Chamber against Viscount Saye and Sele for depopulation and conversion of houses and lands.

690 J. Moore, A Target for Tillage: “My purpose is not here to plead for... any other idle drones and wretched atheists.... All these I acknowledge to be the greatest wasters and spoylers of our country, worse by many degrees than any depopulators, oppressors, and decayors of villages.... All these I know abhorre the plough, and are enemies to the State; who yet (I confesse) in their high talke do justify tillage and will be ready no doubt to reforme the decay thereof with spade and pickaxe.” (The copy of this pamphlet which I have seen is dated 1611. I have ventured to assume that this is a misprint, and that it should be placed with John Moore’s other pamphlets on enclosure, 1653–1656.)

691 Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.

692 Hale’s defence in appendix to Miss Lamond’s introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England.

693 D’Ewes Journal, p. 674 (1601). Mr. Johnson said: “In the time of dearth, when we made this Statute, it was not considered that the hand of God was upon us; and now corn is cheap. If too cheap, the husbandman is undone.” See also Raleigh’s speech in the same debate.

694 e.g. in 1593 the clause in the Act of 1563 forbidding conversion of arable to pasture was repealed. In 1595 and 1596 bad harvests produced loud complaints of high prices, and in 1597 conversion to pasture was again prohibited.

695 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907, pp. 131 ff.

696 Moore’s Reports, p. 117, plea 262, Claypole’s case: “Le conseil de Reigne argue que... l’entent de Estatute fuit que le user sera accompt equivalent en tort al convcon.” Judgment was apparently given for the Queen. The decision was quoted as an authority in the debate in Parliament on the Bills introduced in 1597. Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part VII., pp. 541–543: “And 26 Eliz. in the Exchequer, in Claypole’s case, an information was exhibited upon the Statute of 4 Hen. VII. against a purchaser for converting of tillage into pasture, and adjudged good, though the purchaser were not the converter, but only a continuer of the first conversion. So as this new law tends but for an instruction and explanation of the old.”

697 Leadam, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. vi.

698 For Warwick, Herbert, and the St. Johns, see pp. 326, 368, and 362. For Darcy and disturbances in Westmoreland, Gairdner, L. and P. Henry VIII., xii. II., xii. I., 319, xi. 1080. For Paget and Rich, Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

699 Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.

700 Fisher, The Political History of England, 1485–1547, Appendix II.

701 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests (Leadam).

702 Hibbert, The Dissolution of the Monasteries, pp. 209–210.

703 Ibid., p. 210.

704 Hist. MSS. Com., C.D. 3218, pp. 322–323 (MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham Hall).

705 For Whitby and Washerne, see pp. 285 and 194. In 1545 the tenants of the manor of Egglesdon, formerly the property of the monastery of Sion, proceed against Palmer, the grantee, in the Court of Star Chamber for evicting tenants and other oppressions (Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684–696).

706 More, Utopia, p. 31 (Pitt Press edition): “Noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbotts, holy men no doubt... leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all to pasture.” For a case of claiming a bondman, see Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, Carter v. The Abbot of Malmesbury. For conversion of copyholds to tenancies at will, Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, Kent and other inhabitants of Abbot’s Ripton v. St. John. The change was alleged to have been made in 1471.

707 The opposite view is expressed by Gasquet, Henry the Eighth and the English Monasteries, chap. xxii. For a criticism of it see Savine, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i. pp. 263–267, and pp. 245–260 for facts as to lay administrators. Hibbert, op. cit., pp. 210–211, who writes of Staffordshire, supports Savine rather than Gasquet. The evidence of Aske cannot be quoted as though what was true of the northern houses were true of all. As a matter of fact, lay estates preserved the old conditions in the north long after the dissolution (see pp. 189–191). The hatred of the new landlords is proof that they were specially detestable, rather than that the monasteries had been above all ordinary economic considerations.

708 Quoted by Gasquet, op. cit., p. 464, from a document written about 1591.

709 e.g. Paget’s letter to Somerset, July 7, 1549 (Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials). Neville, De furoribus Norfolcensium Ketto Duce, 1575. The words put into the mouths of the landed gentry by Crowley in The Way to Wealth (E. E. T. S.) no doubt represent their attitude fairly: “Nowe if I should demand of the gredie cormoraunts what they thinke should be the cause of sedition, they would saie, ‘The paisent knaves be too welthy, provender pricketh them. They knowe no obedience, they regard no lawes, they would have no gentlemen, they would have all men like themselves, they would have all things commune. They would not have us master of that which is our owne. They will appoint us what rent we shall take for our grounds.... They will caste down our parkes and lay our pastures open.... They wyll compel the Kyng to graunt theyr requests.... We wyll tech them to know theyr betters, and because they would have all in common we will leave them nothing.’”

710 Appendix to Introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), p. lix.

711 Ibid., p. lxv.: “This was it that byt the mare by the thombe.”

712 For Norfolk and the West of England, Leonard, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix. For Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, S. P. D., Ch. I. vol. clxxxv. No. 86, and vol. ccvi. No. 71 (quoted in Appendix I.), and vol. clxxxv. No. 41. For Leicestershire, Privy Council Register, vi. 385, and Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, p. 165. For Yorkshire, see pp. 374–375. Professor Gonner (op. cit., p. 167) estimates that about six hundred persons were fined, the sums obtained from thirteen counties amounting to about £46,800.

713 Hearnshaw, Southampton Court Leet Records, 1550. Presentment of “the names of the Commoners which require redress of the Commons inclosed, as they saye, contrary to the King’s Majesty’s statutes, and that they may be laid abroad according to the said statutes.”

714 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907, p. 185.

715 Bateson, Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1509–1603, pp. 300–301.

716 Gay, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii.

717 For the debates of 1597 and 1601 see D’Ewes’ Journal, pp. 551 and 674 ff.: a special exemption from the operations of the Act was allowed to a landlord who had got letters patent authorising him to enclose 340 acres “too moist and soft and altogether unfit for tillage.”

718 Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Salisbury, Part. VII., pp. 541–543.

719 Pseudonismus, A Vindication of the Considerations concerning Common Fields and Enclosures, 1656: “The Statute of Tillage hath excited some and affrighted others that the land in each field is not and cannot be husbanded as it ought.” The “Statute” alluded to is the Bill introduced in this year which did not become law.

720 Harrington’s Works (1700 edition), pp. 388–389.

721 Kalm’s Account of his Visit to England on his Way to America in 1748, translated by Joseph Lucas, p. 282. I am indebted for this reference to Dr. Gilbert Slater. The exact words are: “Nor had they any turnip land to feed sheep upon. Therefore they were deprived of the advantage of getting to sell any fat sheep or other cattle. The reason they gave for all this was that their arable was common field, and thus came to lie every other year fallow, when one commoner always had to accommodate his crops to the others; but the principal reason of all was said to be that,” and so on as in text. I am not sure that I have interpreted the passage rightly in assuming that it alludes to the illegality of enclosure without Act of Parliament. It may merely mean that, without an Act of Parliament, the necessary agreement could not be obtained among all those interested. I follow Dr. Slater’s interpretation.

722 Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xix.

723 For the St. Johns, see pp. 362 and 380. For Sir John Yorke, pp. 285 and 381, and Selden Society, Court of Requests, Inhabitants of Whitby v. Yorke, 1553: “Be yt remembred that the cause brought before the Queen’s Counsaill in her Majestie’s Court of Requests.... Ys now ordered by the saide Councill by thagreement of the saide Syr John who hathe promised that the saide parties aforenamed, and every one of them, shall have and quietly eujoye theyr tenements and holdings during the yeres and termes in theyr leases and copies yet enduring, paying theyr Rentes and ffermes accustomed.” For Lloyd and the tenants of Hewlington in Denbighshire, see pp. 302–303.

724 S. P. D., Ch. I., cccxlii., No. 47.

725 Ibid., cccxiv., No. 29, and Appendix I., No. VIII.

726 Ibid., cccclxxv., No. 72.

727 Ibid., cccciv., No. 142.

728 S. P. D., Ch. I., cl., No. 7.

729 S. P. D., ccclxi., No. 15: “There are many thousand acres of heath and barren commons in England and Wales, not annually worth 6d. an acre, to which your Majesty has right of soil but no benefit thereby, which may be improved to a great value, cause plenty of provision, enrich many thousands, supply the poor.”

730 Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, Part I., pp. 112–119.

731 39 Eliz., c. 2.

732 4 James I., c. 11.

733 Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907, pp. 70–73.

734 Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656.

735 Holkham MSS., Sparham Bdle., No. 5, see back, p. 374.

736 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, Customarye Tenants of Bradford v. Fraunceys: “The seyd defendant seythe that the said bill of complaint... is mater... determinable at the comen land and not in this honourable court, whereunto he prayeth to be remitted.” Also Gairdner, L. & P. Henry VIII., i., 334, Earl of Derby to Cromwell; and Leadam, E. H. R., vol. viii. pp. 684–696. For attacks on Wolsey’s land policy see Herbert, History of King Henry VIII., pp. 297–298 (ed. of 1672): “Also the said Cardinal hath examined divers and many matters in the Chancery, after judgment thereof given at the Common Law, in subversion of your laws, and made some persons restore again to the other party condemned that they had in execution by virtue of the judgment in the Common Law.”

737 Gardiner, History of England, 1603–1642, vol. viii., p. 78. Compare the Instructions for the President and Council of the North, 1603 (Prothero, Statutes and Constitutional Documents, 1558–1625, pp. 363–378), Article XXVIII.: “Further our pleasure is that the said Lord P. and Council shall from time to time make diligent and effectual inquisition of the wrongful taking in of commons and other grounds and the decay of tillage and of towns or houses of husbandry contrary to the laws,... and leaving all respect and affection apart they shall take such order for redress of enormities used in the same as the poor people be not oppressed and forced to go begging... and... if they find any notorious malefactor in this behalf of any great wealth, cause the extremity of the law to be executed against him publicly.”

738 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, pp. 212–213, “Conversion of arable into pasture, continuance of pasture, under the name of depopulation, have driven many millions out of the subject’s purses, without any considerable profit to his Majesty.”

739 Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, I. 204, IV. 63. Clarendon’s account of the Grand Remonstrance suggests that the principal grievance was not depopulation, but the fines exacted for it; see the words “with the vexations upon pretence of nuisances in building... and of depopulation, that men might pay fines to continue the same misdemeanour.”

740 Appendix I., No. VIII.

741 I make this statement on the authority of Dr. Slater, Sociological Review, vol. iv., No. 4, p. 349, but I have been unable to trace his evidence. The only reference I can find bearing on the subject is contained in Article XIII. of the heads of the accusation against Lord Clarendon: “That he hath in an arbitrary way examined and drawn into question divers of his Majesty’s subjects concerning their lands, tenements, goods, chattells, and properties, determined thereof at the Council Table, and stopped proceedings at law by the order of the Council Table, and threatened some that pleaded the Statute of 17 Car. I.” (The proceedings in the House of Commons touching the impeachment of Edward, late Earl of Clarendon, 1700.)

742 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Book II., chap. xi.

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