Chapter I The Rural Population
(a) The Classes of Landholders
If an Englishman of ordinary intelligence had been asked in the reign of Henry VIII. to explain the foundations of national prosperity, he would probably have answered that the whole wealth53 of the country arises out of the labours of the common people, and that, of all who labour, it is by the work of those engaged in tillage that the State most certainly stands. True, it cannot dispense with handicraftsmen and merchants, for ours is an age of new buildings, new manufactures, new markets. The traders of Europe are already beginning to look west and east after the explorers; there are signs of an oceanic commerce arising out of the coastwise traffic of the Middle Ages; and Governments are increasingly exercised with keeping foreign ports open and English ports closed. But whether any particular artisan or trader is a profitable member of the commonwealth is an open question. Too many of the manufactures which men buy are luxurious54 trifles brought from abroad and paid for with good English cloth or wool or corn or tin, if not with gold itself—articles whose use sumptuary legislation would do well to repress. As for merchants,55 if like honest men they give their minds to navigation, well and good. But theirs is an occupation in which there is much room for “unlawful subtlety and sleight,” for eking out the legitimate profits earned by the labour of transport, with underhand gains filched from the necessitous by buying cheap and selling dear, for speculations perilously near the sin of the usurers who traffic in time itself. Outside the circle of a few statesmen and financiers, the men of the sixteenth century have not mastered the secret by which modern societies feed and clothe (with partial success) dense millions who have never seen wheat or wool, though London and Bristol and Southampton are beginning to grope towards it. Looking at the cornfields which are visible from the centre of even the largest cities, they see that a small harvest means poverty and a good harvest prosperity, and that a decrease of a few hundred acres in the area sown may make all the difference between scarcity and abundance. A shortage in grain, which would cause a modern State to throw open its ports and to revise its railway tariff, sets a sixteenth century town56 breaking up its pastures and extending the area under tillage. No man is so clearly a “productive labourer” as the husbandman, because no man so unmistakably adds to the most obvious and indispensable forms of wealth; and though, in the system of classes which makes up the State, there are some whose function is more honourable, there is none whose function is more necessary. In most ages there is some body of men to whom their countrymen look with pride as representing in a special degree the strength and virtues of the nation. In the sixteenth century that class consisted of the substantial yeoman. Men speak of them with the same swaggering affection as is given by later generations to the sea-dogs. The genius of England is a rural divinity and does not yet rule the waves; but the English yeomen have “in time past made all France afraid.”57 They absorb most of the attention of writers, both on the technique and on the social relations of agriculture. They are the feet58 upon which the body politic stands—the hands which, by ministering to its wants, leave the brain free to act and plan. Let us begin by trying to see how the landholding classes were composed.
The manorial documents supply us with much information about the landholders, and though we cannot say what proportion59 they formed of the population, we ought to be able to say with some certainty the relative numbers of different classes among them. In the surveys and rentals of the period persons holding land may usually be divided roughly according to the nature of their tenure into three groups—freeholders, customary tenants, and leaseholders. This classification60 of course is an elastic and tentative one, which raises almost as many questions as it settles. The customary tenure of one part of the country differs very much from the customary tenure of another part. Customary tenants include copyholders and the vast majority of tenants at will, who are holding customary land, and who are often entered under the latter heading merely because the surveyor did not trouble to set out their full description. But tenancy at will is sometimes used to describe the condition, not only of the holder of customary land, but also of men who are mere squatters on the waste or on the demesne, and who are not protected in their holdings by any manorial custom. Again, it is not always easy to draw a line between copyhold and leasehold. On a manor where the custom is least favourable to the tenants’ interests the former shades into the latter. There is not much difference, for example, between a lease for thirty-three years and a copyhold for life. Again, the classification is one of tenures not of tenants. In parts of England, it is true, it does divide individual tenants with almost complete exhaustiveness and precision. In most districts, for example, the free tenant usually holds freehold land and nothing else, the customary tenant customary land and no other. But in East Anglia there is no such simplicity of arrangement, no such permanence of tenurial compartments. Many free tenants hold land which is said to be bond or villein or customary land; many customary tenants hold free land; many of both have added to their holdings by leasing parts of the demesne or of the waste, and though in this respect the Eastern counties are exceptional, it is in them often impossible to say in what class any individual should be placed.
Nevertheless, in spite of many marginal cases, we may perhaps find in the surveyors’ classification a map of the broader features of the country through which we are to travel. Property holders, profit makers, and wage-earners are to-day inextricably confused, but to the economist who writes on our social problems 200 years hence it will not be altogether useless to know that his predecessors did in practice draw rough distinctions between these classes, and formed estimates of the numbers of each. Much of the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century turns on the question of the legal interest in their holdings enjoyed by different classes of tenants, and though we cannot hope to escape the pitfalls which await compilers of even the humblest census, a preliminary survey of their distribution in a few counties may not be altogether without value. The following figures are taken from the surveys and rentals of 118 manors.61 The majority were made in the reign of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth. There are included, however, three from the latter half of the fifteenth century and three from the years between 1630 and 1650. Under the heading of customary tenants are grouped copyholders and tenants at will, as well as those who are called customary tenants in the rentals and surveys.
Scanty as they are, these figures show that there is the very greatest variety in the distribution of different classes of tenants in different parts of the country, and remind us that we must be careful how we generalise from the conditions of one district to those of another. When all localities are handled together, customary tenants form nearly two-thirds of the whole landholding population, freeholders about one-fifth, leaseholders between one-eighth and one-ninth. But in parts of the Midlands and in parts of the West the leaseholders are much more numerous than they are elsewhere; in Leicestershire they form over one-fifth, and are almost as numerous as the freeholders, while if we isolate the five Somersetshire and Devonshire manors which above are combined with those of Wiltshire, we find that in them the leaseholders exceed the freeholders by nearly two to one. Again, in Northumberland the preponderance of customary tenants (where they form 91 per cent. of the landholding population) over the two other classes is much more marked than it is in Wiltshire, and in Wiltshire it is greater than it is in the three Midland counties and in East Anglia. That customary tenants should overwhelmingly preponderate in Northumberland is intelligible enough. If the single great manor of Rochdale be removed, they preponderate almost as much in Lancashire. In those two wild counties mediæval conditions survive long after they have begun elsewhere to disappear. There has been no growth of trade to bring mobile leasehold tenures in its train, or to accumulate the wealth which the peasants need to enfranchise their servile tenancies. But why should they be so much more numerous in the southern counties than they are in the twenty-two Midland villages, where one would suppose the conditions to be much the same? Here, as often hereafter, we raise a question only to leave it unanswered.
Table I
| Total | Freeholders | Customary Tenants | Leaseholders | Uncertain | |
| Northumberland, six manors | 474 | 26 | 436 | 12 | |
| Lancashire, seven manors, and lands belonging to Cockers and Abbey | 1280 | 217 | 451 | 33462 | 278 |
| Total | 1754 | 243 | 887 | 334 | 346 |
| (13.8%) | (50.5%) | (19.04%) | (15%) | ||
| Staffordshire, six manors | 356 | 44 | 272 | 23 | 17 |
| Leicestershire, nine manors | 618 | 134 | 311 | 124 | 49 |
| Northamptonshire, seven manors | 531 | 100 | 355 | 66 | 10 |
| Total | 1505 | 278 | 938 | 213 | 76 |
| (18.1%) | (62.3%) | (14.2%) | (5%) | ||
| Norfolk, twenty-five manors | 101163] | 316 | 596 | 53 | 50 |
| Suffolk, fourteen manors | 353 | 176 | 146 | 25 | 6 |
| Total | 136463 | 492 | 742 | 78 | 56 |
| (36%) | (54.3%) | (5.7%) | (4.1%) | ||
| Wiltshire, Somerset, and Devonshire, thirty-two manors | 1102 | 149 | 817 | 136 | |
| Hampshire, two manors | 259 | 8 | 251 | ||
| Ten other manors in the south of England | 219 | 43 | 158 | 12 | 6 |
| Total | 1580 | 200 | 1226 | 148 | 6 |
| (12.6%) | (77.2%) | (9.3%) | (0.3%) | ||
| Grand Total | 620363 | 1213 | 3793 | 785 | 416 |
| (19.5%) | (61.1%) | (12.6%) | (6.7%) |
Yet there is one point emerging from these figures of which the explanation can hardly be in doubt. It will be noticed that in Norfolk and Suffolk combined the proportion of freeholders is about double what it is in the country as a whole. In the former county they form more than one-third of all the landholders, and in the latter they are almost equal to the other two classes together. The number of peasant proprietors in Suffolk is indeed quite exceptional, and is one of the most remarkable facts revealed by the surveys, drawing an unmistakable line between the land tenure of the east and that of the south-west and the northern border. In Wiltshire and Northumberland it is not uncommon to find villages where no freeholders at all are recorded. In Norfolk and Lancashire it is the exception for them to be in a majority. But on half the Suffolk manors summarised above they are the largest class represented, and on some they stand to the other landholders in a proportion of two, three, and even four to one. Is it fanciful, one may ask, to turn from the sixteenth century to the dim beginnings of things, to that first and greatest survey in which the land of England was described so that not an ox or an acre escaped valuation, and in which, before freehold tenure had been hammered into any precise legal shape, Suffolk and Norfolk abounded more than all other counties in liberi homines and sochemanni? Though a longer time separates these documents from Domesday64 than separates them from us, perhaps it is not altogether fanciful. Rural life, except for one great catastrophe, has been very permanent. Unlike rural life to-day, it has been most permanent in its lower ranges. How ever often manors may have changed hands, there has been little to break the connection with the soil of peasants whose title is good, no change at all comparable to the buying out of small freeholders which took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It may well be that the main outlines of the social system which the Domesday commissioners found already laid in the east of England crop out again after the lapse of between four and five hundred years. It may well be that Suffolk is a county of small freeholders in the days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, because it was a county of free men and socmen in the days of William I.
(b) The Freeholders
In spite of the constant complaints of the sixteenth century writers that one effect of the agrarian changes was the decay of the yeomanry, we shall not in the following pages be much concerned with the freeholders. In our period the word “yeomen” was ceasing to be given the narrow semi-technical sense which it possessed in Acts of Parliament and legal documents, and was beginning to acquire the wide significance which it possesses at the present day. To the lawyer the yeoman meant a freeholder,65 “a man who may dispend of his own free lande in yerely revenue to the summe of 40s. sterling,” and if the word yeoman was used in its strict legal sense, the decay of the yeomanry ought to have meant a decline in the numbers of freeholders, such as occurred on a very large scale two and a half centuries later. But in this matter it seems that popular usage was more elastic than legal definition, and, except when the significance to be given it is defined by the context, the word itself is not an accurate guide to the legal position of those to whom it is applied. Writers on constitutional questions were careful to observe the stricter usage, because the 40s. freeholder occupied a position in the State, both as a voter and in serving on juries, from which persons who, though much wealthier, were not freeholders, were excluded. But the word yeoman was used, in speaking of agricultural conditions, to describe any well-to-do farmer beneath the rank of gentleman, even though he was not a freeholder. Thus Bacon66 writes quite vaguely of “the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition between gentlemen and cottagers or peasants.” Those who insisted that the military power of England depended on the yeomanry can hardly have meant to exclude well-to-do copyholders;67 not only copyholders but even villeins68 by blood were sometimes described as yeomen; and, in fact, even writers who, like Sir Thomas Smith,69 use the word most clearly in its strict legal sense on one page, allow themselves to slip into using it in its wider and more popular sense on the next, when the social importance of the class and not its legal status is uppermost in their minds.
Nor is there much evidence that the freeholders suffered generally from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. It is true that there are some complaints from freeholders as to the loss of rights of pasture through the encroachments of large farmers upon the commonable area, some cases of litigation between them and enclosing landlords. But, since their payments were fixed, there was no way of getting rid of them except by buying them out, and though this method, which was so important a cause of the decline of the small freeholder in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was occasionally employed to round off a great estate, it seems to have played a comparatively unimportant part in our period. There is no sign of any large diminution in their numbers, such as would have been expected if the movement had affected them in the same way as it did the customary tenants.
Indeed, if the accounts of contemporary writers may be trusted, it would appear that their position was actually improved in the course of the century. Though even among quite small men one occasionally finds a tenant by knight70 service, the vast majority of freeholders held in free socage, owing fealty and suit of court, and paying a money rent, sometimes combined with the old recognitions71 of dependent tenure, such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of cummin. But while on some manors some outward form of feudalism, such as homage and fealty, were still maintained, the decay of feudal relations in the middle order of society had combined with economic causes to better their condition, and the time was already not far distant when those who held by the more honourable tenure of knight service would insist on its being assimilated to the humbler and less onerous tenure of the socager. The agricultural services of the socage tenants had long disappeared. There are many instances of work on the demesne being done in the sixteenth century by copyholders; but there is in our records only one manor where it was exacted from the freeholders, and other obligations were tending to go the way of the vanished predial labour. Suits of court might be owing, and set down as owing in the surveys, but one may doubt very much whether they were often enforced. Owing to the fall in the value of money the fixed rent of the socager often yielded only a small income to the lord of the manor, and in a good many cases these payments had disappeared altogether before the end of the century, or were so unimportant as to be hardly worth the trouble of collecting. Surveyors for this reason were often little interested in them, and, while recording the acreage held by the customary tenants and leaseholders with scrupulous accuracy, did not always trouble to set out in detail the holdings of a class which was financially so insignificant, with the result that sometimes the freeholders shook themselves loose from all payments and services altogether. Nor, had the surveyors been as careful as the heads of the profession would have had them be, would they always have been successful in dealing with this very independent class. They may protest that “next72 under the king” the freeholders “may be said to be the lord’s,” but freehold lands have a way of getting mislaid73 to the despair of manorial officials, as copyhold lands do to-day. When escheats occur, the holding cannot be found; when rents are overdue, distraint is impossible, because the bailiff does not know on whom to distrain. The suggestion that, as long as rents are paid and services discharged, the lord has any interest in the property of his freehold tenants, rouses instant resentment, and it would seem that by our period, at any rate in the south of England, the connection of the freeholders with the manor was a matter rather of form and sentiment than of substance. In fact freehold has almost assumed its modern shape.
In assuming its modern shape it has made this particular strand in rural life harder to unravel. By escaping from the supervision of the manorial authorities the freeholders escape at the same time from the economic historian, and since the facts of their position go so often unrecorded, we can speak of it with much less confidence than we can about that of the leaseholders and customary tenants. Out of over one hundred manors which we have examined, there are only twenty-two where it is possible to ascertain with any accuracy the acreage held by the freeholders, and, even on these, one too often meets cases in which the extent of the holding is either unknown to the surveyor, or in which he does not think it worth while to record it. Our results, such as they are, are set out in the table on pages 32 and 33.74
Combining the information supplied by these figures with that obtained from other sources, we can form a rough idea of the agrarian conditions under which the freeholders live. They are, in the first place, a most heterogeneous class, including on the one hand men of considerable wealth and position, and on the other mere cottagers. If we could trust the statistics given above we should have to say that the latter enormously outnumbered the former. But our impression is that, though, no doubt, a large number of freeholders were extremely small men, the preponderance of the latter was not nearly so marked as is suggested by the table. For one thing, it is difficult to reconcile it with the accounts given us of the substantial yeomen by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For another thing, it is in dealing with the larger freeholders that the inclination of surveyors to omit any estimate of the extent of the land is strongest, because it is naturally in their case that an estimate is most difficult to form. Probably, therefore, if we could obtain for the freehold tenancies figures even as full as we can for those of the customary tenants, we should find that the proportion holding between twenty and forty acres was considerably larger than these partial statistics would suggest.
In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture, such as is often supplied for other classes of tenants, we may say with some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agricultural economy differed from that of the neighbouring copyholders,75 and that the backbone of their living, except when the plots were so small as merely to supply them with garden produce, was therefore in almost every case tillage. If in any way they departed from the practice of their neighbours who were not freeholders, they did so probably only in being somewhat more alert and enterprising, somewhat more ready to use their security to break with custom and to introduce innovations. It is clear that many of them were very far from being tied down to the stagnant routine which some writers would have us believe is inseparable from all small scale farming. Often, indeed, they had enough initiative to realise the advantages of improved methods of cultivation, and on several manors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the freeholders agreed with each other to survey their lands and separate them, so that they could be cultivated in severalty.76 In many cases, again, they extended their holdings, which were sometimes large and sometimes mere patches of a few acres, by acting as farmers for the lord of the manor and leasing77 the demesne or part of it. Above all they had nothing to fear from the agrarian changes which disturbed the copyholder and the small tenant farmer, and a good deal to gain; for the rise in prices increased their incomes; while, unlike many copyholders and the tenant farmers, they could not be forced to pay more for their lands.
Table II
Column Key
| A | Total Number of Tenants | K | 35 and under 40 Acres. | U | 85 and under 90 Acres. |
| B | Houses or Cottages only | L | 40 and under 45 Acres. | V | 90 and under 95 Acres. |
| C | Under 2½ Acres. | M | 45 and under 50Acres. | W | 95 and under 100 Acres. |
| D | 2½ and under 5 Acres. | N | 50 and under 55 Acres. | X | 100 and under 105 Acres. |
| E | 5 and under 10 Acres. | O | 55 and under 60 Acres. | Y | 105 and under 110 Acres. |
| F | 10 and under 15 Acres. | P | 60 and under 65 Acres. | Z | 110 and under 115 Acres. |
| G | 15 and under 20 Acres. | Q | 65 and under 70 Acres. | A’ | 115 and under 120 Acres. |
| H | 20 and under 25 Acres. | R | 70 and under 75 Acres. | B’ | 120 and over. |
| I | 25 and under 30 Acres. | S | 75 and under 80 Acres. | C’ | Uncertain. |
| J | 30 and under 35 Acres. | T | 80 and under 85 Acres. |
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z | A’ | B’ | C’ | |
| Norfolk, six manors | 139 | 25 | 33 | 12 | 17 | 9 | 10 | 2 | ... | 2 | 1 | 2 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 | 2 | ... | ... | ... | ... | 23 |
| Suffolk, four manors | 85 | 27 | 18 | 10 | 11 | 2 | ... | 1 | 1 | 3 | ... | ... | ... | 2 | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 8 |
| Staffordshire, three manors | 24 | 7 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 1 | ... | 1 | 2 | ... | 1 | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 2 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... |
| Lancashire, three manors | 9 | ... | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 |
| Northants, four manors | 116 | 10 | 11 | 4 | 13 | 9 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 2 | ... | ... | 3 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 3 | 45 |
| Wiltshire, one manor | 6 | ... | ... | ... | 2 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 | ... | 1 | ... | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 | ... |
| Leicestershire, one manor | 11 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | ... | 1 | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | 1 | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | ... | 2 |
| Total, twenty-two manors | 390 | 70 | 69 | 33 | 48 | 22 | 17 | 6 | 4 | 9 | 4 | 7 | 3 | 4 | 1 | 4 | ... | ... | ... | 1 | ... | ... | 1 | 4 | ... | ... | ... | 4 | 79 |
The apparent immunity of the freeholders in the face of movements which overwhelmed other groups of tenants suggests indeed that economic causes alone, which all classes, whatever the legal nature of their tenure, would have experienced equally, are not sufficient to explain the sufferings of the latter. The situation in our period is not like that which arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when widening markets throw all the advantages of increasing returns on the side of the large wheat farmer, and the yeomanry sell their holdings to try their fortunes in the rapidly growing towns. The struggle is not so much between the large scale and small scale production of corn as between corn growing and grazing. The small corn grower, provided he has security of tenure, can still make a very good living.78 From the point of view of the economist all the smaller men, whether freeholders, leaseholders, or customary tenants, are in much the same position. The decisive factor, which causes the fortunes of the former class to wax, and those of the two latter to wane, is to be found in the realm not of economics but of law. Leaseholders and many copyholders suffer, because they can be rack-rented and evicted. The freeholders stand firm, because their legal position is unassailable. Here, as so often elsewhere, not only in the investigation of the past but in the analysis of the present, the trail followed by the economist leads across a country whose boundaries and contours and lines of least resistance have been fashioned by the labour of lawyers. It is his wisdom to recognise that economic forces operate in a framework created by legal institutions, that to neglect those institutions in examining the causes of economic development or the distribution of wealth is as though a geographer should discuss the river system of a country without reference to its mountain ranges, and that, if lawyers have wrought in ignorance of economics, he must nevertheless consult their own art in order to unravel the effect of their operations.
From the larger standpoint of social and political organisation the freeholders constituted an element in society the very nature of which we can hardly understand, because our modern life offers no analogy to it. We tend to draw our social lines not between small properties and great, but between those who have property and those who have not, and to think of the men who stand between the very rich and the very poor, the men of whom our ancestors boasted as the “Commons of England,” as men who do not own but are employed by owners. Independence and the virtues which go with independence, energy, a sober, self-respecting forethought, public spirit, are apt to become identified in our minds with the possession of wealth, because so few except the comparatively wealthy have the means of climbing beyond the reach of the stream of impersonal economic pressure which whirls the mass of mankind this way and that with the violence of an irresponsible Titan.
The sixteenth century was poor with a poverty which no industrial community can understand, the poverty of the colonist and the peasant. It lived in terror of floods and bad harvests and disease, of plague, pestilence, and famine. If one may judge by its churchyards, it had an infantile mortality which might make even Lancashire blush under its soot. Yet (and we do not forget the black page of the early Poor Law) it was possible for men who by our standards would be called poor to exercise that control over the conditions of their lives which is of the essence of freedom, and which in most modern communities is too expensive a privilege to be enjoyed by more than comparatively few. Such men were the freeholders. They formed a class which had security and independence without having affluence, which spanned the gulf between the wealthy and the humble with a chain of estates ranging from the few acres of the peasant proprietor to the many manors of the noble, which was not too poor to be below public duties nor too rich to be above them, which could feel that “it is a quietness to a man’s mind to dwell upon his owne and to know his heire certaine.”79 Look for a moment at the jolly picture drawn by Fuller,80 who wrote at the very end of the period with which we are dealing:—
“The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore whom the next age may see refined, and is the most capable of genteel impressions when the Prince shall stamp.... France and Italy are like a die which has no points between cinque and ace, nobility and peasantry.... Indeed, Germany hath her boors like our yeomen; but by a tyrannical appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarify their blood. In England the temple of honour is closed to none who have passed through the temple of virtue.
“He wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket. He is the surest landmark whence foreigners may take aim of the ancient English customs, the gentry more floating after foreign fashions.
“In his house he is bountiful both to strangers and poor people. Some hold, when hospitality died, she gave her last groan among the yeomen of Kent. And still at our yeoman’s table you shall have as many joints as dishes; no meat disguised with strange sauce; no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass, but solid, substantial food.
“He hath a great stroke in the making of a knight of the Shire. Good reason, for he makes a whole line in the subsidy book, where, whatsoever he is rated, he payeth without regret, not caring how much his purse be let blood, so it be done by the advice of the physicians of the state.
“In his own country he is a main man on juries; where, if the Judge open his eyes on a matter of law, he needs not to be led by the nose in matters of fact.... Otherwise (though not mutinous in a jury) he cares not whom he displeaseth, so he pleaseth his own conscience.
“In a time of famine he is the Joseph of the country and keeps the poor from starving... and to his poor neighbour abateth somewhat of the high price of the market. The neighbour gentry court him for his acquaintance, which either he modestly waveth, or thankfully accepteth, but in no way greedily desireth.
“In war, though he serveth on foot, he is ever mounted on a high spirit, as being a slave to none, and subject only to his own Prince. Innocence and independence make a brave spirit, whereas otherwise one must ask his leave to be valiant on whom one depends. Therefore if a state run up all to noblemen and gentlemen, so that the husbandmen be only mere labourers or cottagers (which one calls but ‘housed beggars’), it may have good cavalry, but never good bands of foot.... Wherefore to make good infantry it requireth men bred not in a servile or indigent fashion, but in some free and plentiful manner.”
The ancestors of the yeomanry had suffered much in the anarchy of the fifteenth century, when the violent ejection of freeholders seems to have become almost as common81 as it had been in the evil days before the reforms of Henry II. But the Tudor monarchy had put an end to that nightmare of lawlessness, and in any society governed by law this body of small property-owners was bound to be a powerful element, even though they had no occasion for making any concerted use of their power, as during the greater part of our period they had not. One must not, of course, exaggerate their importance, or forget that, though a special dignity was attached by opinion to all freeholders, they included in reality men of various economic positions. Many of them must have been quite poor. In the eastern counties, where they are most numerous, they frequently own not more than three or four acres apiece, and can hardly, one would suppose, have supported themselves without working for wages in addition to tilling their holdings. Nevertheless the part which they played in the routine of rural life was an indispensable one, and the very diversity of the elements which they included made them a link between different ends of the social scale. It was from the more substantial among them that the government was most anxious to recruit the military forces. The obligation of serving the State as voters and upon juries fell upon the 40s. freeholders. The security of their tenure caused them to be the natural leaders of the peasantry in resisting pressure from above. No efforts of Elizabeth’s Government could induce the yeomanry of the North82 Riding to abandon the old religion; and when tenants and lords fall out over common rights and enclosures, it is often the freeholders—though on occasion they enclose themselves—who speak83 for the less independent classes and take the initiative in instituting legal proceedings. The upward movement which went on among this class in many parts of England meant a change in the distribution of material wealth which necessarily involved a corresponding change in the balance of social forces and in the control of political power. To Harrington,84 who sought in the seventeenth century to find in economic causes an explanation of the revolution through which the country had passed, it seemed that the seeds of the civil war had been sown by the Tudor kings themselves in the care which they showed for the small proprietor. In destroying feudalism to establish the monarchy, they had raised a power which was more dangerous to the monarchy than feudalism itself. They had snapped the bond between landlord and tenant by the Statute of Retainers. They had given the tenant security by forbidding depopulation. Most important of all, by encouraging alienation they had caused an enormous transference of property from the upper to the middle and lower middle classes. “The lands in possession of the Nobility and Clergy of England till Henry VII. cannot be estimated to have over-balanced those held by the People less than four to one. Whereas, in our days, the Clergy being destroyed, the Lands in possession of the People over-balance those held by the Nobility at least nine in ten.” But property is political power individualised and made visible. The destruction of the monarchy was only the political expression of an economic change which had begun in the reign of Henry VII. “He suffered the balance to fall into the power of the people.... But the balance being in the People, the Commonwealth (though they do not see it) is already in the nature of them.” We need not accept Harrington’s view in its entirety in order to appreciate the significance of the change which he describes. Certainly the yeomanry were growing in political power, and were strong in that spirit of self-respect and pride in their order, which, when, as too often, it is confined to a single class, means social oppression, but which, when widely diffused throughout society, is the mother of public spirit and political virtue. The long discipline of tiresome public duties which they had borne throughout the Middle Ages had formed them into a body which was alive to political issues and conscious of political influence, and which, when participation in public affairs became not only a duty but a right, would use their power to press urgent petitions from one county after another upon the King and upon the Parliament, or by riding up from Buckinghamshire to protect Hampden at Westminster in 1642, or by fighting behind Cromwell in Cambridgeshire, or by fighting for the King in the West. Compared with the bulk of the population, they were a privileged class and stood by their own; it was they who restored the franchise to the 40s. freeholders in 1654 and refused to extend it to the copyholders. But the tenure of much of the land of England by men with whom, however poor, no landlord or employer could interfere, set a limit to the power of wealth, and made rural society at once more alert and more stubborn, a field where great ideas could grow and great causes find adherents. Political and religious idealism flourish bravely in a stony soil. What makes them droop is not poverty, but the withering shadow cast by complete economic dependence.
From such degrading subservience the freeholders, “slaves to none,” were secure. As it was, they often left substantial fortunes to their children, and by the middle of the sixteenth century were already following the examples of their social superiors in entailing85 their lands. One can quite understand therefore that there is nothing inconsistent between the glowing accounts of their prosperity at the end of the century given by Harrison and his lamentation over the decline of the rural population, or between the well-attested sufferings of the small cultivator in the sixteenth century and his equally well-attested importance in the seventeenth and early eighteenth. The explanation is that the freeholders, though most important politically, did not form the larger proportion of those substantial yeomen whose decay was lamented. The day of their ruin was to come. But for the next two centuries they were safe enough, and, if anything, gained on the class immediately above them, whose lands they bought or leased, into whose families they married, and with whose children their own competed in the learned professions, laying, as the historian of Suffolk86 said, “such strong, sure and deep foundations that from thence in time are derived many noble and worthy families.” Nothing in the life of the period caused more pride than the prosperity of this solid body of small property-owners, and the contrast which it offered to the downtrodden peasantry of the Continent. No loss has been sustained by the modern world greater than their disappearance.
(c) The Customary Tenants
Important, however, as the freeholders were from a social and political standpoint, they were in most parts of England far inferior in point of numbers to those described as “customary tenants.” It is with the latter class that we are mainly concerned, and leaving the leaseholders on one side for examination later,87 we may summarise shortly certain features in their position. The number of customary tenants varied from one manor to another, according to the extent to which in different districts farmers holding by lease had been substituted for them, and on some by the middle of the sixteenth century there were none at all. But there are many indications that, down to the end of that century at any rate, and probably much longer, they formed over the great part of England the bulk of the landholding population. Of the revenues of 74 manors held by monastic88 houses in 1535, £116 came from free, and £1310 from customary, tenants. On 81 of the 118 manors analysed above they are the most numerous class. When all the different districts are grouped together, they amount to about 61 per cent. of all landholders, and even this figure does not give an adequate idea of their numerical importance. As we have seen, Norfolk and Suffolk are quite peculiar in the multitude of freeholders they embrace, while the large number of leaseholders on one extensive Lancashire manor unduly weights the figures for that county. On the Midland manors 62 per cent., in Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Somerset 77 per cent., in Northumberland 91 per cent. of all those holding land are customary tenants. No doubt the area of land held under lease was growing in the course of the sixteenth, and still more in the course of the seventeenth, century, and its growth is an extremely important movement, of which something will be said later. But it seems true to say that, down to the end of the sixteenth century, both in numbers and payments, though not in prestige and influence, the customary tenants, as distinct from the freeholders and leaseholders, were by far the most important class in the agricultural life of the country.
Among the customary tenants, however, there are certain important subdivisions. There are in the first place, differences of legal status. Though villeinage by blood had been disappearing rapidly for several generations, partly through manumission on payment of a fine to the lord, partly through the absorption of migrating villeins into the growing industries of the towns, a certain number of villeins by blood lingered on into the sixteenth century. Dr. Savine89 has estimated that there were at least as many as 500 villein families in 1485, and as many as 250 in the reign of Elizabeth; and the fact that they occur occasionally on our Norfolk90 manors, and rather more often on those in Wiltshire91 and Somersetshire, suggests that his list could be considerably extended on further investigation. Even in 1561 a borough surrenders an apprentice on the ground that he is a runaway villein.92 Even in 1568 it is worth while in leasing93 a manor to a farmer for the lord to reserve to himself the villeins upon it, together with other forms of property like quarries and advowsons.
One cannot, therefore, take the almost sanctimonious abhorrence of bondage expressed by the writers of the period quite at its face value. On the other hand, though villeinage by blood was still worth recording, since it offered an impecunious lord an opportunity for arbitrary taxation, and still sufficiently irksome for the rebels under Ket94 (influenced perhaps by some dim memory of the German peasants’ programme) to set its abolition among their demands, its practical importance was slight, and it was quite compatible with a good deal of prosperity on the part of those who were legally bondmen. How completely out of date it was by the middle of the sixteenth century is best shown by some of the cases in which attempts were made to enforce it. When the Earl of Bath95 seizes £400 from a family on the ground that the members are his villeins, and is pursued by them for nine years from one court to another, or when a lord96 of a manor is compelled by a royal commission appointed for the purpose of investigating the matter, to repay the value of the beast taken from a man who is proved by the court rolls to be his villein, and the latter, having received it back, declines to stop proceedings unless he be paid heavy compensation in addition, one must see rather a proof of the practical disappearance of villeinage than of its survival. Its occasional enforcement is clearly regarded as something outrageous; it is a freak of arbitrary despotism, which has hardly more historical significance than the seizure of the Derby winner as a copyhold heriot would have at the present day. Public opinion, even the opinion of those engaged in estate management, condemns such attempts unreservedly, and when they come to the ears of the authorities they strain the law on the side of the bondmen.
This change from servile to free labour, begun some two centuries before, and virtually completed in the reign of Elizabeth, is a high landmark in the development both of economic and political society. It is a long step towards modern industrialism on the one hand and the modern all-inclusive state on the other. By sapping the organisation of society on the basis of tenure, and thus making room for the more elastic relationships of the wage-contract, it prepared the way for new methods of production and for the growth of new centres of economic power. The refusal of the courts to allow that the lord of a manor had, qua lord, a theoretical right to dispose of the persons and chattels of his unfree tenants, meant the final triumph of the common law in regions with which for four centuries after the Norman Conquest it had not dared to interfere. Henceforward, while the German peasant is driven afield to gather snails and wild strawberries for his lord, is plundered and harried and tortured without hope of redress, his English brother is a member of a society in which there is, nominally at least, one law for all men. His liberty may be more in shadow than in substance, yet the shadow is itself an earnest of greater things. To us who know the misery of many of the poorer classes in the sixteenth century the boast that “if any slaves or bondmen come here from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they became so free of condition as their masters,” may read like a bitter mockery. But it is something that the boast should be made, and when England is confronted with the greatest moral issue of the modern world, that boast will stand her in good stead.97 She owes some acknowledgment to the nameless serfs who fled from farm and homestead, till villeinage, in spite of the law, bled gradually to death.
Having said so much we must hasten to guard ourselves, by adding that the final disappearance of serfdom in this country neither involved any radical conversion of opinion, nor prevented the classes who depended solely on their labour from being, on occasion, cruelly oppressed. It would be a mistake to see in the attitude of the governing classes towards villeinage a symptom of humanitarian feeling for the rights of a helpless class, such as prompted the emancipation movement of the last century. How little humanitarianism influenced economic policy in relation to those who were too powerless to be dangerous, is shown by the sanguinary statutes relating to the destitute, and in particular by the extraordinary legalisation of slavery in the Act98 of 1547, by which a confirmed vagrant might, when captured, be made a bondman for life. Nor must we think of the disappearance of legalised serfdom as effecting a great improvement in the lot of the ordinary wage-worker. Those who benefited by it were not so much the workers for wages, as the landholding peasants. The wage-labourer, who was tied to his parish by the Statute of Artificers almost as completely as the serf had been by the custom of the manor, can hardly have seen much difference between the restrictions on his movement imposed by the Justices of the Peace and those laid on him by the manorial authorities, except indeed that the latter, being limited to the area of a single village, had been more easy to evade.
Even if we confine our attention to the landholding peasants, to whom the advantage (for they were quick to seize it) was certainly real enough, we may doubt whether they did not lose almost as much by the intrusion into agriculture of competitive commercial forces as they gained by the final disappearance of a claim which had always been held in check by the custom of the manor, and which, since the ravages of the Great Plague, had been steadily circumscribed by commutation. The truth is that the sharp antithesis drawn by modern commercial societies between serfs and the free labourers on whose slowly straightening backs our civilisation is uneasily poised, and emphasised as though it marked a line between hopeless oppression and unqualified liberty, requires to be supplemented by categories derived from a wider and more tragic range of experience than was open to our forefathers. There are more ways of living “at the will of a lord” than were known to Glanvill and Bracton, and the utility of the contrast in the sphere of legal analysis does not save it from being but a thin abstraction of the countless forms of tyranny which spring from the world-old power of one human being to use another as his tool. That dependence on the uncontrolled caprice of a master whom one hates to obey and dare not abandon, which, by whatever draperies it may be veiled, is still the bitter core of serfdom,99 is compatible with the most diverse legal arrangements; with wage labour as with forced services, with tenure by a competitive money rent as well as with tenure by personal obligations, with freedom of contract as well as with inherited status, with protection by the national courts as well as with its absence.
When we turn over the pages in which the writers of the sixteenth century declare that bondage is contrary to “the Christian religion which maketh us all in Christ breathren, and in respect of God and Christ conservos,”100 and congratulate themselves on its disappearance, we must not doubt their sincerity, but we may envy their inexperience. We must remember that a condemnation of villeinage was quite compatible with a policy of great severity towards the wage-labourer, and was in fact not unconnected with it, since the latter had almost everywhere stepped into places and functions formally held by the bondman. Villeinage disappeared in England earlier than on the continent of Europe, not for the ethical reasons given by Fitzherbert and Smith and Norden, but because the growth of a commercial organisation of agriculture had made its maintenance both useless and impossible. The intellectual conversion did little more than follow on the economic change to make a virtue of necessity. The personal rightlessness of the villein and the hateful incidents of villeinage, such as chevage, merchet, and leyrwite, had had their utility in the fact that they kept him at the disposal of the manorial authorities as an instrument of agriculture. With the substitution of hired labour for the cultivation of the demesne by the services of bond tenants, their maintenance lost its attractiveness. No employer wants to retain a permanent staff, if there are “hands” whom he can take on and put off at pleasure. Villeinage ceases but the Poor Laws begin.
Much more important than this difference of legal status are differences in the tenure by which customary tenants hold their lands. Under the name of customary tenants are grouped together all holders of lands which pass by surrender and admission in the court of the manor, and which are subject to the custom of the manor as evidenced by the records of the court. But not all these lands are held by exactly the same title. Some are held by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor, on the terms set out on a copy of the entry of admission. Others are held without a documentary title, and are often said to be occupied at the will of the lord, or at the pleasure of the lord, or by grant or permission of the lord or of the court, their essential feature being that the tenant does not possess any instrument recording the transaction, but has, if necessary, to appeal to the records of the court or even to its mere memory.
One must hasten to add, however, that these classes are not mutually exclusive. A copyholder is a tenant at will, though qualified by the addition of the words “by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor.” It not seldom happens that in rentals and surveys he is simply described as a tenant at will, and that the fact that he has a copy is not recorded. A tenant at will is usually (though not always) a customary tenant, and, when he is, he can appeal to the custom with as good a right as a copyholder, though of course the fact that his title is not in his own keeping may prejudice him if the manorial authorities want to get rid of him. “All101 copyhold land,” it was said, “is commonly customary, but all customary land is not copyhold,” and one may accept the statement with the reservation that “commonly” must not be taken to mean “always,” for it is quite usual in parts of England for land which by no stretch of imagination can be called customary land, for example, part of the lord’s demesne, to be let by copy of court roll. The fact that “tenant at will” was sometimes used as a compendious phrase for “copyholder,” and that both are sometimes described simply as “customary tenants” without further definitions, makes it impossible to offer any accurate estimate of the relative number of those holding by copy and those holding at will. It may, however, be of interest to give an analysis of the entries as they appear in a group of manorial documents. It is as follows102:—
Table III
| Total | “Copyholders” | “Customary | “Tenants | |
| Tenants” | at Will” | |||
| Northumberland | 436 | 362 | 45 | 29 |
| Lancashire | 451 | 295 | 156 | ... |
| Staffordshire | 272 | 170 | ... | 102 |
| Leicestershire | 311 | 157 | ... | 154 |
| Northamptonshire | 355 | 253 | 93 | 9 |
| Norfolk | 596 | 536 | 45 | 15 |
| Suffolk | 146 | 53 | 82 | 11 |
| Wilts and Somerset | 817 | 786 | ... | 31 |
| Hampshire | 251 | 251 | ... | ... |
| Ten other manors in the south of England | 158 | 87 | 45 | 26 |
| Total | 3793 | 2950 | 466 | 377 |
These figures, one must repeat, are merely a summary of the entries in surveys and rentals. Probably they underestimate the number of copyholders, as we know that copyholders were sometimes entered as tenants at will or as customary tenants for the sake of brevity, while it is not probable that tenants at will who had not got copies were often written down as copyholders. One may suspect that this, rather than any difference of custom, is the explanation of the relatively small number of those who are returned as copyholders in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, and Suffolk. Still, these figures do show the enormous preponderance of copyholders among the customary tenants, and show it all the more certainly if the number of copyholders is to be taken, as is probable, as the minimum. And this agrees with what we know from the incidental references of the writers of the time. Of 1000 tenants on the great ecclesiastical manor of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire “the most part” were said by Archbishop103 Sandys in 1582 to be copyholders. Harrison104 in 1587 spoke of copyholders as those “by whom the greatest part of the realm doth stand and is maintained.” At the beginning of the seventeenth century Coke105 could say that the third part of England consisted of copyhold. Copyholders, it is true, are far from being all of one type; for the essence of their tenure is that it depends on the custom of the manor which varies from place to place, and when we come to consider how far they have security against eviction these differences are of crucial importance. Still, in spite of the varieties of copyhold tenure, it is useful to know that to the bulk of the population in the sixteenth century landholding meant holding by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor. No account of the agrarian changes can stand for a moment which does not give full weight to the fact that, in most parts of England, the copyholders greatly outnumber all other classes of tenants.
The numerical predominance of the customary tenants and among those of the copyholders, together with the disastrous effects upon them which are ascribed by most of our authorities to the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century, makes a somewhat detailed examination of their position essential. In particular it is important to try to bridge the gap between the agricultural system of the sixteenth and that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, out of which it emerged, and of which it continued to bear unmistakable traces. The problem is really a twofold one, partly legal and partly economic. First, what was the legal nature of copyhold tenure, and how did it arise out of mediæval villeinage? Secondly, there is the question, which for us is more important, of the type of agriculture which prevailed among the mass of the people. The economist wants to know whether the customary tenants were large cultivators or small, whether they included considerable capitalists and mere cottagers or whether their holdings were of a fairly uniform pattern, whether they farmed mainly for subsistence or for the market, whether they lived entirely by tillage or were pasture farmers as well, whether they were tied down by custom or showed any signs of being influenced by the agricultural innovations of our period.
Of these two questions the first has been investigated much more thoroughly than the second. We shall return to it later in considering how far the copyholder had security of tenure, and enjoyed legal protection against the lord who wished to evict him. But we may say at once that we accept in substance the argument of those who hold that most copyholders are the descendants of villeins holding villein land, that copyhold tenure is, in fact, villein tenure to which the courts from the end of the fourteenth century have gradually extended their protection, and that the puzzling differences between the position of one group of copyholders and another are due to differences in manorial custom which were followed and upheld by the courts. This not only is the traditional view, in the sense of being that which is implied in the insistence of contemporaries that copyhold originated in base tenure, and that copyholders were tenants “whom the favourable hand of time hath much enfranchised,”106 but also seems to be that which best fits the situation of the copyholder as we find it in the sixteenth century.
This line of development is suggested, though it is not proved, by the mere preponderance of copyholders. In looking for the antecedents of so numerous and widely spread a class we can only find them in the tenure of the mass of the people in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is in villein tenure. Further, we do not find in villein tenure any such fundamental distinction between customary tenure which was protected and base tenure which was not, as has been sometimes postulated as an explanation of the qualified legal security possessed by copyholders 200 years later. On the contrary, the tenure of the villeins is marked by the same variety of customary conditions as appears in that of the copyholders, with the difference that, when once copyhold has taken root, these customs are enforced by the courts. The same conclusion is borne out by the survival of ancient formulæ among the terms by which the conditions of the copyholders are recorded in the surveys. It is quite common for copyholders in the sixteenth century to be described as occupying “bond”107 or “native” land; sometimes one finds a whole list of them set down under the rubric “holding108 native lands by copy of court roll.” The last thing, of course, which occurred to the writer of these entries was any legal theory as to the origin of copyhold tenure. All he was concerned to do was to describe the holdings in the way which was most precise and left least room for possible disputes. Clearly, he must have had it in his mind that lands which in his day were let by copy of court roll were lands which were known generally in the village as bond lands, and which in earlier documents were described as being occupied in villeinage.
One may approach the question in another way, by looking at the circumstances of those exceptional manors on which the tenants at will are more numerous than the copyholders, and which are instructive just because they represent a variation from the general type. A case in point is the Manor of Knyghton in Wiltshire. On the majority of the manors held in that county by the Earl of Pembroke the copyholders are far the most numerous class, and on some they are the only class, among the customary tenants. At Knyghton,109 however, there are no copyholders; all the customary tenants hold at the will of the lord, and when one examines the position and methods of agriculture more closely, one finds that they display several signs of being in other respects more antiquated and conservative than is the case in other parts of the same country; for example, all the holdings are either virgates of twenty-four acres or some fraction and multiple of a virgate, which is not at all common on other Wiltshire manors, and implies an unusual approximation to the conditions of the peasantry two centuries before. Is it unreasonable to conclude that this is a case of arrested development, and that Knyghton is a manor on which the tenants at will have never turned into copyholders, because for one reason or another it has lain outside the main stream of agricultural development?
The connection with copyhold tenure of some of the characteristic obligations and disabilities of villeinage points in the same direction. In spite of the general commutation of services into money payments, which Mr. Page’s statistics show to have taken place before the middle of the fifteenth century, one still finds the attenuated records of labour rents surviving for many generations after the direct management of the demesne by manorial officials has been abandoned, and passing with the rest of the farm equipment to the farmer who takes it on lease. In Norfolk and Suffolk they seem indeed to have disappeared almost altogether, which is what one would expect in view of the fact that those counties were the Lancashire and West Riding of the period, and no doubt, even when labour services were still exacted, the farmer relied mainly upon hired labour. But it would be a mistake to regard the tenants’ works as everywhere so trifling as to be of no economic importance. Often, it is true, they are inconsiderable. At South Newton,110 for example, though the uncertainty which had been one of the marks of villeinage still survived among the copyholders in the shape of the duty of “gift carriage,” the transport of such timber as was wanted to the lord’s house at Wilton, the purely agricultural services were unimportant, and the tenants of every yardland had only to mow the farmer’s meadow and to carry his hay. At Cuxham,111 in Oxfordshire, on the other hand, the authorities were still getting twenty-eight boonworks in autumn from the copyholders at the end of the fifteenth century. On a Northumbrian112 manor belonging to Tynemouth Priory down to the dissolution of the monasteries “every tenant did lead to the castle in the prior’s time one load of hay, mow three several dayworks of hay, rake one daywork and sheare three severall dayworks in the corn in harvest every year.” At Washerne,113 in Wiltshire, the copyhold tenants’ labours were in 1568 still quite an important affair: each holder of one virgate of twenty acres “shall plough three half acres for the lord’s winter seed and shall harrow them, and also the aforesaid tenants shall wash and shear the lord’s sheep... and further each of them shall mow one acre of meadow... and gather hay thence and prepare it.... Each of the said tenants shall reap one acre of wheat and he must bind the crop and carry it. Also each of them shall reap one acre of barley.” On a Lancashire114 manor in 1628 every plough hand is obliged to do two days’ work in the year with a team on the demesne, and two days with a labourer. Such elaborate obligations as appears at Washerne are, it is true, the exception. But they show that in the middle of the sixteenth century there were still backwaters where the remnants of agricultural services were a not inconsiderable burden; and if their comparative lightness marks the progress from villeinage to a wage system, their survival as clearly shows that villeinage was the pit from which copyhold tenure was digged.
More striking still, perhaps, is the persistence of disabilities of another kind. The old marks of personal bondage, chevage, merchet, leyrwite, liability to tallage, and the rest have almost disappeared. But traces of them are still found clinging to the copyhold tenants. Copyholders pay a fixed sum to be free of tallages.115 They pay salt silver instead of the salt with which they had once been obliged to toil to the lord’s manor-house; they are forced to act as the lord’s reeve, and collect his rents, heriots, and strays. In one curious instance one finds something very like a tallage116 being taken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, though of course that is not what it is called. The tenants are simply collected and told that they must help the lord to pay for an estate which he has bought, by giving him three years’ rent apiece, that, if they do, no more gifts will be demanded during his lifetime, and that, if they do not, he will refuse to renew holdings as they fall in. Even merchet, the most hateful of all the incidents of villeinage, is something more than a mere memory. As late as 1620 the tenants of Holt117 in Denbighshire thought it worth while to point out to the crown surveyor that “they are freed from payment of any sum of money upon the marriage of their daughters,” and even in 1654 Leyrwite and childwite were still being paid by the heiresses of copyhold tenants on some of the Warwickshire118 manors.
It will not, therefore, be surprising to find that the humble origin of copyhold tenure has left marks upon it in other ways as well, and, in particular, that though the copyholder is not without legal protection when the lord tries to get rid of him, that protection is often of a somewhat shadowy and ineffective kind. His title is a customary one, and mighty as custom still is, it has for centuries been growing gradually weaker. Its weakening is at once an advantage and a disadvantage to the peasantry. It relieves them of odious obligations and leaves them greater room to push their fortunes. It lowers a protecting barrier and exposes them to the dissolving forces of competition.[Next Chapter]
Footnotes
53 Pauli, Drei volkswirthschaftliche Denkschriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England: How to reform the Realme in setting them to work, and to restore tillage. “The whole welth of the body of the realm riseth out of labours and workes of the common people.”
54 The Commonweal of this Realm of England (Lamond), p. 63: “And I marvell no man taketh heade unto it, what nombre first of trifles cometh hether from beyonde the seas, that we might either clene spare, or els make them within oure owne Realme, for the which we paie inestimable treasure every yeare, or els exchange substanciall wares and necessaries for them.” E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Part II., p. 84: “Craftys men and makers of tryfullys are too many.” Harrison in Elizebethan England (Withington), p. 15: “O how many trades and handicrafts are now in England whereof the Commonwealth hath no need!” &c.
55 e.g. the prayer for merchants in Edward VI.’s Book of Private Prayer: “So occupy their merchandise without fraud, guile, or deceit.”
56 Coventry Leet Book, Part III., pp. 679–680.
57 See Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I. c. 23: “These are they which in the old world got that honour to Englande... because they be so manie in number, so obedient at the Lorde’s call, so strong of bodie, so hard to endure paine, so courageous to adventure... these were the good archers in times past, and the stable troops of footmen that affaide all France that would rather die all, than once abandon the knight or gentleman their captaine,” and Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), pp. 11–13.
58 E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII., Starkey’s Dialogue, Part II., p. 49: “To the handes are resemblyd both craftysmen and warryarys.... To the fete the plowmen and tyllarys of the ground, beycause they, by theyr labour, susteyne and support the rest of the body.”
59 In this essay we are concerned only with the landholders, not with the wage workers. The relative number of persons holding land and of agricultural labourers without land is an important question on which it is not easy to get light. The surveys and rentals, a species of private census invaluable in giving information about the holders of property, tell us only the number of householders, and as the labourers employed in agriculture (like many of those employed in manufacturing industry) usually lived on the premises of their masters, they do not enable us to calculate the number of those living entirely by their labour. Still, since they include all tenants, whether holders of a cottage only or holders of land in addition, they enable us to say what proportion of heads of families held land, and what proportion had none, or none except a garden. This is of some importance. A tenant holding even as much as fifty acres can hardly have employed more than two or three agricultural labourers, and most tenants held less than this; so that in those places where the cottagers form a small proportion of the whole population we may conclude that a large proportion of the villagers were landholders (for the figures on this point see the tables given below).
Unfortunately, we do not possess for the sixteenth century even such a loose estimate as was made by Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth. In 1688 he calculated that there were 16,560 families of nobles and gentlemen, 60,000 families of yeomen, 150,000 of farmers—presumably on lease—400,000 cottagers and poor, 364,000 labouring people and out-servants, obviously a very rough calculation, the most remarkable feature of which is the large number of yeomen. Poll Tax returns might give us the kind of information we require, since they included, or were meant to include, the whole population above a certain age, irrespective of whether they held land or not, and sometimes divided them roughly into classes. Thus on sixteen manors in the Norfolk Hundred of Thingoe the return to the Poll Tax of 1381 showed a population of 870 male and female inhabitants over fifteen years of age, of whom 9 were set down as knights, 53 as farmers, 102 as artificers, 344 as “labourers” (laboratores), 362 as “servants” (servientes). If, as is not improbable, the first four classes held land (the labourers being serfs working on the demesne), and the last consisted of farm and household employees who did not, this would put the landholding classes on these manors at a little more than half the total population over the age of fifteen. But this return was probably falsified to escape the tax; see Powell, The East Anglian Rising, App. I., and Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381. The figures published by Dr. Savine (Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i., pp. 223–226) of the monastic population show that on the eve of the dissolution there were residing in 22 houses in Leicester, Warwick, and Sussex, 255 “hinds” and 76 “women servants,” presumably employed on the demesne farm, which gives an average to each farm of about 11 hinds and about 3 women servants. In the Kentish Nunnery of St. Sexburge, Sheppey, the demesne farm employed a carter, a carpenter, two cowherds, a thatcher, a horse keeper, a malter, three shepherds. Best, describing his farming arrangements in Yorkshire in 1641 (Surtees Society, vol. xxxiii.), states: “Wee kept constantly five plowes goinge, and milked fowerteene kine, wherefore wee had always fower men, two boyes to go with the oxeploughe, and two good lusty mayde-servants.” These were in each case only the permanent staff, and their comparatively small numbers suggest that much work must have been done by men who worked on their own land and only occasionally helped on the demesne, i.e. that the proportion of landholders to non-landholders was high. This conclusion agrees with the evidence of the surveys, which show that, especially in the East of England, many of both the free and the customary tenants’ holdings were so small that they could hardly have made a living out of them without working as wage-labourers as well, and also with other indications as to the classes in rural society; e.g. out of 3780 persons mentioned in Worcestershire recognizances, 1591–1643, as either “labourers,” “husbandmen,” or “yeomen,” 667 are entered as labourers, 1303 as husbandmen, 1810 as yeomen, the latter designation always, and the second usually, implying a holder of land (J.W. Willis Bund, Kalendar of the Sessions Rolls, 1591–1643, Part II.) On the other hand, conditions varied enormously from place to place. Where there was a considerable body of small landowners the number of hired labourers tended to be small, the work of cultivation being done by the holder and his family; e.g. we read of a manor in the seventeenth century where thirteen freeholders farmed 580 acres with the aid of only ten men-servants and shepherds before enclosure, and six or seven afterwards (Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure).
Some of the surveys supply us with extreme cases of the opposite kind, where the whole manor consists of two or three holdings or of even one great estate, and where almost the whole of the population must have been working for wages; these illustrate Harrison’s complaint that in many places “The land of the parish is gotten up into a few men’s hands; yea, sometimes, into the tenure of one or two or three, whereby the rest are compelled betimes to be hired servants unto the others, or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door” (Withington’s edition of Elizabethan England, p. 21). A protest made to the Council from Norfolk in 1631 against its policy of trying to keep down prices by insisting that all corn should be sold in the open market points out that in “the woodland and pasture part” of the country there are “a great many handicraftsmen which live by dressinge and combinge of wool, carding, spinning and weaving, etc., and the Townes there commonly very great consisting of such like people and other artificers with many poor, and none of them all ordinarilye having any corn but from the market.” As to the “champion part” of the county, the document divides the rural population into three classes: “1. Tilth masters that have corn of their own growing and sell it to others. 2. Labourers that buy it at an under-price of them unto whom they worke. 3. Poore people that are relieved by good orders in every towne” (Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archæological Society, 1907). But the case of Norfolk was exceptional, owing to its position as the chief seat of the textile industries.
On the whole I am inclined to think that though the process of commutation which went on from 1350 onwards can hardly be explained except on the supposition that there was a considerable population of persons who held little land and were ready to eke out a living by working for wages, yet in the sixteenth century even the wage-working heads of families usually held a certain amount of land (even if only a garden) as well. This agrees with what we are told by contemporaries of the scarcity of wage-earners (see below, pp. 99–102). One may add, that in view of this, the fixing of maximum wages bears a somewhat different colour from that often given it. It was only practicable, one is inclined to say, because so few persons depended entirely on wages for a living. The social problem in the sixteenth century was not a problem of wages, but of rents and fines, prices and usury, matters which concern the small-holder or the small master craftsman as much as the wage-earner. The “working classes” were largely small property holders and small traders.
60 The summary statement given above is liable to be misleading. The reader will find a fuller discussion of the questions arising in connection with it below in Part II., chap. iii.
61 They include also tenants on the lands belonging to Cockersand Abbey, lying in many different parts of Lancashire, in 1503. For the sources from which this table is constructed and its defects, see Appendix II..
62 The Lancashire figures are unduly weighted by those of the single large manor of Rochdale, where, in 1626, there were 612 tenants. If this manor be omitted, there remain only 19 leaseholders on the other Lancashire manors. Like Northumberland, Lancashire seems to be (as one would expect) a county of customary tenants.
63 There is an error of 4 in the Norfolk figures which I have been unable to trace and correct.
64 In Domesday Book 35 per cent. of all the tenants in Suffolk are liberi homines, 32 per cent. of all those in Norfolk are either liberi homines or sochemanni. See Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, note 24 to chap. iii. Book III. (p. 376); Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23; Seebohm, The English Village Community, map opposite p. 85. Domesday also gives a large number of liberi homines and sochemanni in Leicestershire. In the table given above the Leicestershire manors come after Suffolk and Norfolk as having the third largest proportion of freeholders, viz., 21.6 per cent. The return of freeholders supplied to the Government in 1561 (Lansdowne MSS. V., 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) appear to be considerably understated, probably because only the more substantial men were thought worth mentioning. They are as follows: Beds 282, Berks 166, Essex 880, Notts 189, Oxon. 198, Herts 363, York 787, Lincoln 444. The large number in Essex is noteworthy.
65 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib I., c. 23.
66 History of King Henry VII. (Lumley), pp. 70–72. He makes his meaning quite clear by saying “tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes.”
67 Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii. (Savine, “Bondmen under the Tudors”).
68 Ibid.
69 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, loc. cit.
70 MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham. Billingford and Bintry MSS. No. 9 (Manor of Foxley, 1568).
71 e.g. ibid., Sparham MSS. No. 5, a freeholder pays “a pounde of cumming seede and a gillyflower” (c. 1590). R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Portf. 6, No. 15: “nyne golden threads of vi.d.” (1568). R.O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182, fol. 1: a tenant “holds freely a cottage paying a red rose.”
72 Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue, Book I., pp. 4–5, to which the farmer answers: “Fie upon you. Will you bring us to be slaves? Neither lawe, nor reason, nor least of all religion, can allowe what you affirme.”
73 Op. cit., Book III. Here is a bitter cry from the bailiff of a manor (Merton Documents, No. 4381). “Good sir let me entreat you yf the Colledge determyne to make survey this spring of the lands at Kibworth and Barkly to send Mr. Kay or me word a month or 3 weeks before your coming that we may have Beare and other necessaries, and I desire you to gather up all evidences that may be needful for the Lordshipp, for all testimony will be little enough, the Colledge land is so mingled with Mr. Pochin’s freehold and others in our towne. There ys an awarde for keepinge in of the old wol (?) close in our fields for (from?) Mr. Pochin’s occupation, very needfulle for the ynhabitannts yf that awarde can be founde at the colledge where yt was loste.” (For the remainder of this letter see Appendix I.) The Crown suffered especially, see Norden, Speculum Britanniae, Part I., pp. xl.-xliii. of introduction (Camden Society): “In many of his Majesty’s manors, free holders, their rents, services, tenures and landes... become strange and unknown... and when escheates happen the lande that should redound to his Majesty cannot be found.” In the common entry in manorial surveys under the heading of freeholders of “certain lands” we should probably take the word “certain” to mean “uncertain.”
74 For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II..
75 See below, pp. 105–115.
76 See e.g. Northumberland County History, vol. ix. p. 327, below, pp. 157–158, and Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz. B, b. 1, 58, Ll. 10, 62.
77 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. I., c. 23: “These be for the most part fermors unto gentlemen.” Elizabethan England (Withington), p. 120. “Yeomen” frequently occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as lessees of the Merton Manors.
78 See below, pp. 105–115.
79 Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue.
80 Fuller, Holy and Profane State. The concluding paragraph is obviously copied from Bacon’s History of King Henry VII.
81 Paston Letters, I. 12, II. 248. Plummer’s edition of Fortescue, On the Governance of England, Intro., p. 21.
82 Atkinson’s Quarter Sessions of the North Riding of Yorkshire, lists of recusants.
83 e.g. Topographer and Genealogist, vol. iii. (quoted below, pp. 251–253), and Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber, vol. ii., Inhabitants of Thingden v. Mulsho; also Holkham MSS., Burnham Documents, Bdle. 5, No. 94 (quoted below, p. 245 n.).
84 Harrington’s works, 1700 edition, p. 69 (Oceana), pp. 388–389 (The Art of Law-giving). See also Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War, pp. 28–32.
85 It is stated by good authorities that between 12 Ed. IV., when the collusive action known as a common recovery used to evade the Statute de donis conditionalibus was confirmed by a judicial decision (Taltarum’s case), and the introduction into settlements of “Trustees to preserve contingent remainders” by Sir Orlando Bridgeman and Sir Geoffrey Palmer under the Commonwealth, the tieing up of lands in one family was impossible (e.g. Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, pp. 11–13). But in 1538 Starkey’s Dialogue speaks strongly of the practice of entailing lands. “This faute sprange of a certayn arrogancy, whereby, wyth the entaylyng of landys, every Jake would be a gentylman, and every gentylman a knight or a lord” (E. E. T. S., England in the Reign of Henry VIII., Part II. pp. 112–113, and pp. 195–196.)
86 Reyce, Breviary of Suffolk, p. 58, quoted Victoria County History, Suffolk.
87 See below, pp. 200–213 and 283–287.
88 Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, vol. i. Savine, English Monasteries on the Eve of the Dissolution, pp. 156–159.
89 Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii.
90 R.O. Misc. Bks. Land Rev., vol. 220, fol. 220, Brisingham (Norfolk) 1589: “Alice Bartram, the widow of W. Bartram, the lord’s villain by blood, took by surrender of said William for term of life on 4 Feby., remainder to Roger Bartram, lord’s villain by blood.” Holkham MSS., Titleshall Documents, Terrier of Godwick, 1508: “Also five roods of the Prior in the hands of Thomas Frend, native.”
91 Among the 742 customary tenants on the manors belonging to the Earl of Pembroke surveyed in 1568 there appears to be 7 nativi domini, i.e. villeins by blood, viz., 1 at Washerne (Wilts), 2 at Stooke Trister and Cucklington (Somerset), 4 at Chedeseye (Somerset), of whom one has been manumitted.
92 Selected Records of Norwich (Tingey), vol. vi. p. 180: “Robert Ryngwoode brought in a certain indenture wherein Lewis Lowth was [bound] to hym to serve as a prentys for seven years. And Mr. John Holdiche cam before the Mayor and other Justices and declared that the said Lewis is a bondman to my lord of Norfolk’s Grace, and further that he was brought up in husbandry untyl he was xx year old. Whereupon he was discharged of his service.”
Note the way in which Statute law is used to compel the agricultural labour which the vanishing jurisdiction of lord over serf is ceasing to be able to enforce.
93 Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke, Manor of Chilmerke: “Johannes Reve tenet per indenturam totum illud capitale messuagium excepta et omnino reservata omnia wardas, maritagia fines... nativos,” &c.
94 Russell, Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk, p. 49: “We pray that all bond men may be made free, for God made all free with his precious blood shedding.” The German peasants in the articles drawn up at Memmingen in 1525 demanded the abolition of serfdom “since Christ hath purchased and redeemed us all with his precious blood.” The Christian appeal is a common one; see below.
95 Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, John Burde and another v. The Earl of Bath. The quarrel dragged on from 1535 to 1544, when the plaintiff’s goods were restored. (In 1551, however, when all bad landlords were raising their heads, his house and cattle were again seized.)
96 Ibid., Netheway v. George, 1534. For other cases see Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Star Chamber. Carter v. Abbot of Malmesbury (vol. i., 1500), and Selby v. Middlemore (vol. ii., 1516–1522). Mr. Leadam’s remarks (int. cxxix.) show that a man who was legally a villein might be economically very prosperous: “Thomas Carter... was charged 40 marks for his enfranchisement. He kept a man-servant. He rode on horseback. He gave a feast to celebrate his freedom. He was even on friendly terms with the gentlemen of the Abbot’s household.” See also Savine, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii. Lord Stafford actually tried to seize the Mayor of Bristol and his brother as bondmen!
97 Hargreave’s speech in Somersett’s case (1771–1772, Howell, State Trials, xx.) is based largely on precedents drawn from villeinage: “Though villeinage itself is obsolete... those rules, by which the claim of it was regulated, are not yet buried in oblivion.... By a strange progress of human affairs the memory of slavery expired now furnishes one of the chief obstacles to slavery attempted to be revived.... The law of England, then, excludes every slavery not commencing in England, every slavery, though commencing there, not being ancient and immemorial. Villeinage is the only slavery which can possibly answer to such a description, and that has long expired by the death or emancipation of all those who were once the objects of it. Consequently there is now no slavery which can be lawful in England.”
98 1 Ed. VI., c. 3. Possibly, however, the penalty of bondage was regarded as a step towards greater leniency, as the punishment of “incorrigible rogues” had hitherto been death.
99 More’s remarks on the lot of the wage-workers of his day have a refreshing note of reality. The Utopians are “not to be wearied from earlie in the morning to late in the evenninge with continuall worke, like labouringe and toylinge beastes. For this is worse then the miserable and wretched condition of bondemen. Whiche nevertheless is almooste everywhere the lyfe of workemen and artificers, saving in Utopia” (More, Utopia, Pitt Press Edition, pp. 79–80).
100 Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib. III., ch. 8. See also Fitzherbert, Surveying (1539): “How be it, in some places the bondmen continue as yet, the which me seemeth is the greatest inconvenience that now is suffered by the law.” Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue (1608): “Which kinde of service and slavery, thanks be to God, is in most places of this Realme quite abolished and worne out of memory.... Truly I think it is a Christian parte so to do [i.e. manumit bondsmen], for seeing we be nowe all as the children of one father, the servants of one God, and the subjects of one king, it is very uncharitable to retain our brethren in bondage, sith, when we were all bond, Christ did make us free.”
101 Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue. He continues: “For in some places of this Realme Tennants have no copies at all of their lands or tenements, or anything to show for that they hold, but there is an entry made in the Court Books, and that is their evidence.”
102 See Appendix II.
103 Archbishop Sandys to Queen Elizabeth, Saturday 24 November to 4 December, 1582 (quoted by E. Arber, The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, pp. 61–64).
104 Harrison in Elizabethan England (Withington), p. 120.
105 Quoted by Nasse, The Land Community of the Middle Ages (Ouvry’s trans.). I have not been able to trace the reference.
106 Norden, The Surveyor’s Dialogue.
107 E.g., R.O. Rentals and Surveys Gen. Ser., Portf. 27, No. 32, Dunstall (Suffolk): “Bond land held by copy of court roll, 13s. 4d. Of holders of 3 bond pightells, 5s. 4d.” MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Tittleshall Books, No. 62, Langham Hall (Norfolk): “Redditus assissæ native tenentium.... John Rose per copiam, 4d.” R.O. Rentals and Surveys Gen. Ser. Portf. 14, No. 70, Barton (Staffs.): “T. Collinson 1 messuage 1/4 virgate land de bond... by copy 2 Hen. viii.”
108 MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham, Billingford and Bintry MSS., No. 9, Foxley: “Native tenentium per copiam rotuli curiæ.”
109 Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
110 Roxburghe Club, Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke.
111 Merton Documents, 5902.
112 Northumberland County History, vol. viii., p. 220 (one may add that in parts of Northumberland the labourers are still called “bondagers”; Mr. Clay tells me that in the Calder valley farmers still use “daywork” as a unit for measuring fields). See also Calendar of Proceedings in Chancery, temp. Eliz., D. d. 2, 44, for a suit by a farmer to recover services due from tenants.
113 Pembroke Surveys.
114 Chetham Society Miscellanies, vol. iii.
115 Pembroke Surveys, Estoverton and Phipheld: “Tenentes de Estoverton reddunt annuatim pro pannagio et tallagio... ivs.” For salt silver, ibid., South Newton. For liability to serve as Reeve, ibid., Paynton.
116 Chetham Society Miscellanies, vol. iii.: “I would wish you to call the tenants first all together and to signify unto them that my father and I have gone through with Mr. Ireland for Warrington, and the summe we are to give is above £7000; and this was done making no doubt that towards it every one of them being tenants would by their assistance enable us to finish it.... If they faile in this, they may provoke us to sharp courses, especially mee, who have had a purpose to take the third part of every living as it falls.”
117 Wrexham Free Library, Ancient Local Records, vol. ii. MS. transcript by A.N. Palmer, “Survey of the Town and Liberty of Holt.”
118 Savine, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xix.