The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 11

If, then, we ask what the custom means to the peasantry, we must think not of the "forbidding, stale, and meagre ways," which is what the word custom too often suggests in the twentieth century, but of the phrase "ancient customs and liberties," which is so common in the charters of Boroughs. The custom of the manor is a body of rules which regulates the rights and obligations of the peasants in their daily life. It is a kind of law. It is a kind of freedom. And since it is the custom which most concerns the ma.s.s of the peasantry, it is not the state, or the law, but the custom of the manor which forms their political environment and from which they draw their political ideas. They cannot conceive the state except as a very great manor. Their idea of good government is the enforcement of an idealised customary.[255]

[255] See below, pp. 338?-340.

Having said this we can say little more. There is no standard by which we can measure civilisation, and if we knew more than we do, the village life of the sixteenth century--and England is all villages--would still be a mystery to us. Yet, before returning to the humbler task of examining economic conditions, we may perhaps summarise the sort of impressions formed of the peasants by those who knew them in their own day, impressions no doubt as misleading as a traveller's sketches of modern England, yet, like a traveller's sketches, possessing a certain value, because they show the points which an intelligent outside opinion selects for emphasis.

One is encouraged in one's belief in the comparative prosperity of a large number of the peasantry in the earlier sixteenth century by the comments which the writers of the periods pa.s.s upon it, even after a decline has already begun. The picture we get is of an open-handed, turbulent, large-eating and deep-drinking people, much given to hospitality and to merriment both coa.r.s.e and refined; according to modern standards very ignorant, yet capable of swift enthusiasm, litigious, great sticklers for their rights, quick to use force in defence of them, proud of their independence, and free from the grosser forms of poverty which crush the spirit. The latter feature strikes everybody. Foreign visitors[256] notice with amazement the outward signs of wealth among the humbler cla.s.ses. English writers, though their tone becomes sadder and sadder as the century proceeds, are never tired of boasting of it. Even in the eighties of the sixteenth century, when many of the peasants are much worse off than they had been a hundred years before, Harrison, though he paints in dark colours the ruinous effects of the agrarian changes, describes their hearty life with good-humoured gusto. "Both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficiently liberal and very friendly at their tables, and when they meet they are so merry without malice, and plain without inward Italian or French craft and sublety, that it would do a man good to be in company among them....

Their food consisteth princ.i.p.ally of beef and such meat as the butcher selleth. That is to say, mutton, veal, lamb, pork. In feasting also the latter sort, I mean the husbandmen, do exceed after their manner, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such odd meetings, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one bringing such a dish, or so many with him, as his wife and he consult upon, but always with this consideration that the lesser friend shall have the better provision." The peasants themselves have a good conceit of their position, and all unmindful of the whirligig of time and its revenges, contrast it with that of their cla.s.s in France, where women labour like beasts in the fields, where men go in wooden shoes or no shoes at all, where the people drink water instead of ale, eat rye bread and little meat, and have not even the heart, like honest Englishmen, to rob the rich who oppress them, and that in the most fertile realm in all the world;[257] "Caytives and wretches, lyvyng in lyke thraldome as they dyd to the Romaynes, and gevynge tribute for theyr meat, drinke, brede, and salte, which for theyr wayke personayges and tymorous hartes I may compare to the pigmies who waged battayle against the Cranes, so that I dare let slip a hundred good yeomen of England against five hundred of such ribaldry."[258] Apart from the utterances of these good Jingoes, stray glimpses show us a people which not only is materially prosperous, but is also bold in action, and can produce men of high moral ardour. In the twentieth century the rural population is a bye-word for its docility. Its ancestors in the sixteenth were notorious for their restiveness. Hales, who knew and loved them, makes one of the characters in his dialogue[259] suggest that men at arms should be used to put down the disturbances made by them and by the unemployed weavers, only to answer, through the lips of another, that to call in the military will be the best way to make them riot all the more:--"Marie, I think that waye wold be rather occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be quenched, for the stomakes of Englishmen would never beare that, to suffer such injuries and reproaches as I knowe suche (_i.e._ the men at arms) use to do to the subjects of France."

[256] Harrison in _Elizabethan England_ (Withington), p. 114, quoting one of "the Spaniards in Queen Mary's days." "These English have their houses made of sticks and dirt, but they fare commonly so well as the king."

[257] Fortescue, _On the Governance of England_, chaps. iii. and xiii. The Scots, he thinks, are only one degree less faint-hearted than the French. "Thai ben often tymes hanged for larceny, and stelynge off good in the absence off the owner theroff. But ther hartes serve them not to take a manys G.o.de, while he is present, and woll defende it."

[258] c.o.ke, _Debate of Heralds_. See also the quotation, Froude's _Henry VIII._, vol. i. chap, i., from a State Paper of 1515: "What comyn folke in all this world may compare with the comyns of England, in riches, freedom, liberty, welfare, and all prosperity? What comyn folke is so mighty, so stronge in the felde, as the comyns of England?"

[259] _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_ (Lamond), p. 94.

These humble people have their idealisms. They produce martyrs for the new religion and for the old, Lollards who suffer persecution for upholding the Wycliffite tradition in the quiet villages of Buckinghams.h.i.+re, Catholics who follow Aske in that wonderful movement of northern England, the last of the crusades, in 1536, or fall in Devons.h.i.+re thirteen years later before the artillery of Herbert. Nor are they altogether cut off from the springs of learning. For at the beginning of the sixteenth century the upper cla.s.ses have not yet begun to covet education for themselves sufficiently to withhold it from the poor. Bequests[260] show that the sons of well-to-do peasants may have been among those G.o.dly yeomanry whom Latimer[261] described as once, in happier social conditions than those amid which he preached, frequenting the older universities, and the records of some sixteenth century grammar-schools tell a similar story. Among the first twenty-two names on the register of Repton[262] there are five gentlemen, four husbandmen, nine yeomen, two websters or weavers, a carpenter, and a tanner.

[260] _Victoria County History_, Berks.h.i.+re, ii., 208. In 1558 a yeoman leaves his son a portion of land worth 10 a year "for his keepinge and learninge in Oxford for five years nexte." On the same page there is a case of a man described as a "yeoman"

who is tenant by copy of Court Roll.

[261] Latimer's _Sermons_. The first sermon preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549 (Everyman Series, p. 86): "We have good statutes made for the commonwealth, as touching commoners and enclosures; many meetings and sessions; but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth. Well, well, this is one thing I will say unto you; from whence it cometh I know, even from the devil. I know his intent in it. For if ye bring it to pa.s.s that the yeomanry be not able to put their sons to school (as indeed universities do wondrously decay already); I say ye pluck salvation from the people and utterly destroy the realm. For by yeomen's sons the faith of Christ is and hath been maintained chiefly." See also _A Supplication of the Poor Commons_ (E. E.

T. S.): "This thing causeth that suche possessioners as heretofore were able and used to maintain their own children ...

to lernynge and suche other qualities as are necessary to be had in this Your Highness Royalme, are now of necessitie compelled to set theyr own children to labour, and al is lytle enough to pay the lorde's rent, and to take the house anew at the end of the yere." The children of yeomen had no doubt been educated mainly for the Church, and some attained high position (_Surtees Society_, vol. lxxix. pp. 263-?264, for the son of a yeoman becoming a Bishop, and vol. li. No. 53, the son of a yeoman becoming subdeacon of York, vol. lxxix. pp. 176?-177, for a yeoman's son sent to school for fifteen years). But in the fifteenth century this was not always so, v. Leach, _Educational Charters_, p. 41, for a school founded in Yorks.h.i.+re, a county which "produced many youths endowed with light and sharpness of ability, who do not all want to attain the dignity and elevation of the priesthood, that these may be better fitted for the mechanical arts and other concerns of this world." A case of hostility to the education of the poorer cla.s.ses based on the idea that education should be reserved for "gentlemen" is given _ibid._ p. 470, where the notorious Lord Rich and other gentlemen argue "as for husbandsmen's children, they were more meet ... for the plough and to be artificers than to occupy the place of the learned sort. So that they wished none else to be put to school, but only gentlemen's children." Cranmer retorted, "Poor men's children ... are commonly more apt to apply their study than is the gentleman's son delicately educated ... the poor man's son by painstaking will be learned, when the gentleman's son will not take the pains to get it, ... wherefore if the gentleman's son be apt to learning let him be admitted; if not apt, let the poor man's child being apt enter in his room."

[262] _Repton School Register_, 1564-?1910. One of the husbandmen kept his boy at school for ten years. The average school life of the sons of seven yeomen was between six and seven years; one stays for twelve years, going to school at five and staying till seventeen. If one may judge by the att.i.tude of most modern parents ("I went to the mill when I was ten, and why shouldn't Tommie?"), these men must have been pretty comfortably off.

But by that time much had changed, and for seventy years before these doc.u.ments begin the peasantry in many parts of England had had sterner things to think of than the schooling of their children.

CHAPTER IV

THE PEASANTRY (_continued_)

(e) _Signs of Change_

So far attention has been concentrated upon those phenomena which suggest that, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century begin, there has been a period--one may date it roughly from 1381 to 1489--of increasing prosperity for the small cultivator. We have emphasised the evidence of this upward movement which is given by the growth among the peasantry of a freer and more elastic economy. We have watched them shake off many of the restrictions imposed by villeinage and build up considerable properties. We have seen how the custom of the manor still acts as a d.y.k.e to defend them against encroachments, and to concentrate in their hands a large part of the fruits of economic progress. In the century from the Peasants' Revolt to the first Statute against Depopulation, in spite of the political anarchy which disfigures it, there is, as it seems to us an interval between one oppressive regime and another, between the leaden weight of villeinage and the stress and strain of the gathering power of compet.i.tion. In that happy balance between the forces of custom and the forces of economic enterprise, custom is powerful, yet not so powerful that men cannot evade it when evasion is desired; enterprise is growing, yet it has not grown to such lengths as to undermine the security which the small man finds in the established relations.h.i.+ps and immemorial routine of communal agriculture.

There is, however, we need hardly say, another side to the picture, and to that other side we must now turn. We must examine again from another point of view some of the ground over which we have already travelled, and we must modify the opinions which we have formed by bringing a fresh range of facts into perspective. The piecemeal changes which have been going on in the internal organisation of so many manors look forward as well as back, and are of significance as throwing light on the larger innovations of the later period. For one thing, they mean the appearance among the customary tenantry of persons who are in a small way capitalists, and who supply a link between the great farmer of the sixteenth century and the agricultural organisation of earlier periods.

The emergence out of the mediaeval peasantry of prosperous cultivators, occupying two or three times as much land as their grandfathers, is a proof that holdings of a considerable size can be managed successfully, and the farmers of the demesne are often drawn from among them. For another thing, the inequality which has appeared among the holdings of different tenants implies the growth of a state of things in which innovations in the customary methods of agriculture are much more likely to be made than they were when all the tenants were organised in fairly well-defined cla.s.ses. The smaller among them are still practising subsistence farming when the larger are producing on a considerable scale for the market, are acquiring capital, are extending their holdings, are even becoming landlords themselves. There arises therefore a divergence of agricultural methods and economic interests between them, which is quite compatible with the fact that both large and small tenants stand in the same legal relations.h.i.+p to the lord of whom they hold. The enterprise which the former show in their dealings with land and in encroaching on the routine of manorial cultivation cannot fail to have a powerful influence in preparing the way for the individualistic movement which sweeps over agriculture in the sixteenth century, and from which the peasants, as a cla.s.s, suffer so severely. The freedom with which parcels of land change hands must inevitably weaken the connection between the family and the holding, and result in leaving the least successful without any land at all. The difficulty of maintaining a peasant proprietary without restricting the alienation of land is one which is familiar to modern Governments, and there is clear evidence[263] that, even before the evictions of the sixteenth century began to attract attention, a decline in the number of customary tenants was brought about on a good many manors by the mere process of the well-to-do buying up the poorer men's holdings.

[263] I am inclined to think that an investigation of the manorial records of the fifteenth century would show a considerable decrease in the number of customary tenants, not as a result of evictions, but simply as a consequence of one man buying out another and forming one larger holding out of two or more smaller ones. The evidence for this is as follows: (1) When several holdings pa.s.s to one man there must be a diminution unless more land is brought under cultivation. Such an agglomeration of holdings has been shown to be very frequent.

(2) A comparison of fifteenth and sixteenth century surveys with those of an earlier date shows a marked diminution in the number of customary tenants (a) before complaints as to enclosure become loud, and on manors where there is no trace of enclosing by lords or large farmers; (b) on manors where more land is cultivated by the customary tenants than at an earlier date.

Thus at Haversham there were 52 tenants of all kinds in 1305, 35 in 1458, 14 in 1497 (_Victoria County History_, Gloucesters.h.i.+re, vol. ii. pp. 61?-62). On six Northumbrian manors, where there is no sign of evictions on a large scale, there were 82 customary tenants in 1294, and 37 in 1567, and where intermediate surveys enable one to narrow the limiting points, one finds that there has been a considerable diminution before the end of the fifteenth century. On the four t.i.things, of South Newton, Childhampton, Stovord, and Little Wishford, which made up the manor of South Newton, customary tenants numbered at the beginning of the fourteenth century 32, 7, 13, 13, and in 1567 10, 3, 7, 1, the average holding having grown from 10-1/2 to about 43 acres (Roxburghe Club, _Pembroke Surveys_). At Sutton Warblington there were in 1351, 28 customary tenants, and in 1568 there were 7, while the average acreage of each tenant's holding had increased enormously (_Crondal Records_, Baigent).

At Dippenhall and Swanthrop, two t.i.things of the manor of Crondal, the customary tenants numbered 40 in 1287, 24 in 1568, while the average size of their holdings had risen from between 18 and 19 to just under 35 acres. At Aldershot the number of customary tenants during the same period fell from 48 to 37 (_ibid._). Such figures are of course full of pitfalls. In the North border warfare reduced the population, and the effects of the Great Plague have to be considered. The great growth in the size of holdings does, however, suggest that a diminution in the number of customary tenants may have occurred without any encroachments being made by lords on the customary land, and merely through one tenant buying up the land of another.

Such movements prepare the way for greater changes: petty capitalism is naturally followed by capitalism on a larger scale. It is surely at first sight somewhat surprising that the noticeable upward movement in the condition of the rural population, which coincides with the disappearance of villeinage and the growth of copyhold tenure, should have been followed by the marked depression which all observers agree to have occurred in the following century. Why should a cla.s.s which has displayed such remarkable signs of vigour and enterprise find such difficulty in holding its own? An answer to this question cannot be given till after a consideration of the new causes at work in the sixteenth century. But may it not be that their position had to some extent been undermined by the very changes which at first improved it, and that the enterprise of the larger customary tenants, while it added to their prosperity as long as they led the way in it, tended to weaken the customary relations and the customary methods of agriculture which had protected the small man, and to leave him at the mercy of compet.i.tive forces which he could not control? Such an undulating line of development, in which the small producer gains temporarily from the expansion of markets and improved technical methods which ultimately rob him of his independence, can be paralleled from the later history both of agriculture[264] and of manufacturing industry. It seems to us to offer a thread which connects the capitalist farmer of the sixteenth century with the prosperous peasantry of the fifteenth. When there is much buying and selling of land among the peasantry, much colonising of new plots taken from the waste and the demesne, we should expect to see the influence of compet.i.tion beginning to override that of custom; we should expect to see the paring away of communal restrictions to make room for individual arrangements of a more elastic nature. In the remainder of this chapter we shall approach this problem by considering two movements--the growth at an early date of compet.i.tive rents on those parts of manors where custom was weakest, and the enclosing of land by customary tenants themselves. The former offers a precedent for the rack-rents and excessive fines of which so much is heard in the sixteenth century, the latter at once an a.n.a.logy and a contrast with the enclosures carried out by lords of manors and capitalist farmers, which we shall discuss in Part II.

[264] Thus the yeomen seem to have increased in prosperity at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century (though at the same time large cla.s.ses of agrarian workers were suffering terribly), because the rise in prices made corn-growing a gold-mine. The collapse came probably after 1815 (see Johnson, _The Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, chap.

vii.).

(f) _The Growth of Compet.i.tive Rents on New Allotments_

The development of compet.i.tive rents is a subject which must always possess a peculiar fascination for the historical economist, inasmuch as the distribution of wealth depends to no small degree upon the manner in which the surplus gains wrung from nature are shared between different cla.s.ses. The wealth which, under a regime of great estates and leasehold tenure, accrues to a tiny body of landlords, is, in a community of small freeholders, retained by the cultivating tenant, and, when the tenure of land is such that custom sets a barrier to a rise in rents, is divided between owner and occupier in a way which prevents the former from absorbing the whole advantage of superior sites, or the latter from being reduced to working for bare wages of management. The causes which determine the allocation of rents must always be of crucial importance for an understanding of economic conditions, and any change which augments them, diminishes them, or varies the degree to which different cla.s.ses partic.i.p.ate in them, is likely in time to produce a substantial alteration both in the economic configuration of society and in the possession of social privileges and political power. In modern times, it is true, the enormous area from which food-stuffs are drawn, and the relatively small s.p.a.ce upon which manufacturing industry can be concentrated, has made the differential payments accruing to the landowner from varieties of soil and situation almost trifling compared with the surpluses drawn from finance and manufacturing industry by the infra-marginal capitalist and entrepreneur. Such "quasi-rents" are, however, a comparatively modern phenomenon. In our period the basis of wealth was land, and a crucial question is that of the manner in which incomes drawn from land were determined. We have seen that in the sixteenth century custom still ruled the payments made by most of the copyhold tenants. But at that time there were many complaints of rack-renting, and though we must leave till later an inquiry into their justification, it will help us if we take a glance at the new forces, which, even in the Middle Ages, were beginning to operate on the margin of cultivation.

The gradual extension of cultivation over the waste lands surrounding the village fields, and the not infrequent addition of parts of the lord's demesne to the tenants' holdings, was obviously the occasion, as it took place, of a number of new agreements between the payer and receiver of rents, which might or might not repeat the conditions of existing contracts. When new land was broken up for tillage an attempt seems in some cases to have been made by the manorial authorities to a.s.similate its treatment, as far as payment was concerned, to that of the existing customary holdings. The basis of the rent paid was a comparison between the areas of the encroachments and the ordinary holding of a customary tenant; the payment was so many ploughlands'[265]

worth, and sometimes the corresponding services were extracted from them. On the other hand, the mere fact that the land was new land, which did not come into the original scheme of manorial finance and organisation, tended to make it the point from which new relations.h.i.+ps could spring. For one thing, it was the natural starting-point for the process of subst.i.tuting money rents for labour. When the customary holdings offered a sufficient supply of labour for the cultivation of the demesne, the manorial authorities naturally preferred to take the payments for additional land in the shape of money rather than in services of which they already had sufficient. Services are sometimes exacted for the new encroachments, but they are the exception; and the a.s.similation of the payments for these new holdings to those made for the customary holdings was either not seriously attempted or was unsuccessful. One can quite understand that, even if the lord wanted labour services from those parts of the waste which were broken up and added to the cultivated area, he might not be able to get the improvements made on the old terms. Quite apart, therefore, from the process of commutation, the growth of money rents developed as a natural accompaniment of the growth of population.

[265] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), p. 132?-133, Rental of 1287: "The same Hugh holds certain encroachments on payment of 3 ploughlands' worth, 3 hens, and 3d. at the said term." "Emma of Wyggeworthhall ... holds certain encroachments on payment therefor 11s. 6d. and one ploughland's worth." These doc.u.ments throw much light on the whole process of the extension of cultivation over the waste.

The second point is more important. It is that the rents paid for the new holdings taken from the waste differed from such money payments as were made for the customary holdings, in that they were not to the same extent dominated by custom, but were to a much greater extent influenced by compet.i.tion. This contrast is the tiny seed of great changes, and may be ill.u.s.trated by an example drawn from the south of England at a comparatively early date. At Yateleigh,[266] one of the t.i.things of the manor of Crondal, the absorption of the waste by the customary tenants went on with great rapidity even in the thirteenth century, and in the rental drawn up by the steward in 1287 we find the rents and services paid for the customary holdings and the rents paid for the encroachments set down side by side. The latter fall into a definite scheme which can be picked out at a glance. With a very few exceptions the rent charged for an acre of land taken from the waste is always 4d., and this is the basis for all other payments for the varying portions of waste occupied by the tenants. A two acre piece pays 8d. For a piece of 9-1/2 acres the payment is still about 4-1/4d. per acre, the awkward sum of 3s. 4-1/2d.

The rents and services of the customary holdings, however, cannot be reduced to any such simple and uniform plan of adjusting rent to acreage. In the first place all of them, whatever their size, are liable to an initial charge of 9-1/2d., called "Pondpany." In the second place there is only the roughest correspondence between the amount of land held by a tenant and the payment which he makes. A holding of 22 acres pays 2s. 10d., but so does a holding of 32 acres, while one of 29 acres pays 2s. 2d. Holdings of 12-1/2, of 16, and of 18-1/2 acres all make exactly the same payment of 2s. In short, though it would not be quite true to say that the payment made bears no relation to the size of the holding, the relation which it bears is not at all definite and precise.

It is a general relation applying rather to groups of holdings roughly marked off from others by broad differences in extent, not to individual holdings. There is no standard price per acre at all, such as appears in a modern land market, and such as exists for the land taken from the waste.

[266] _Crondal Records_ (Baigent), pp. 116?-120.

What is the reason of this remarkable contrast between the rents of pieces of land lying quite near to each other and held by the same tenants, which causes the payment for one set of holdings, the encroachments, to be adjusted uniformly to the area held, and the other, the customary holdings, to be rented apparently without any economic plan at all? The answer is that the payments for the encroachments and the payments for the customary holdings, if they are both to be called rents, are rents of very different kinds. The payments made for the customary holdings are not based directly on the economic value of the land, but on the value of commuted services, and all the holdings, though of unequal size, are liable to much the same services. All make a general payment of 9-1/2d., because that sum is the value of some payment in kind or service which they had made before the money payment took its place. Holdings of 32 acres and 22 acres, just as holdings of 12-1/2 and 18-1/2 acres, make the same payments, because the labour rents had been only very roughly adjusted to the size of the holdings, and these payments are commuted labour rents, not rents fixed by putting up an acre for leasing and taking what can be got for it. It is of course quite true that services and the size of holdings were connected, and that therefore the money rents which took the place of services and the size of holdings were connected also. But the connection is rough, arrived at by apportioning between holdings the labour services needed to cultivate the demesne, without distinguis.h.i.+ng precisely differences of a few acres in the size of different holdings, and the subsequent money rents are not adjusted to the acreage because they express the roughness of the original apportionment.

Now clearly these considerations did not apply to the rents paid for the encroachments which were taken from the waste. The greater part of them had never been liable to labour services at all. Each acre stood by itself, as it were, as simply a piece of cultivatable land of a certain area, not part of a complex on which certain obligations had been imposed. Each, therefore, gets a market value, based on what will be given for it, much sooner than does the land making up the customary holdings, which are not exposed to the levelling influence of the market because they are bound together by their place in the social organisation of the manor. Hence it is on this land, the land leased piecemeal from the waste by tenants who were prosperous enough to afford the extra outlay, that one gets the appearance of something like true compet.i.tive rents, because it is here that commercial influences have freest play and are least checked by their subordination to custom. In the same way, when the tenants at Brightwalton[267] do the full quota of work demanded, the rent of their customary holdings is abated accordingly. But not so the rent of the new land which was once part of the waste: in fixing its rent the lord is not checked by any collective sense on the part of the village community; he has a free hand and will make the best bargain he can.

[267] Camden Society, 1857. Rental and Custumal of the Manor of Brightwalton. Under the heading virgators it is said, "If they do the full day's work set out above each of them ought to have his rent reduced 12d." Under the heading of villeins holding a.s.sarted land it is said, "Be it known that no customary tenant shall have any reduction of rent of the lands which he holds by way of a.s.sart or in the common of Greeneholt for any office or work to be done for the lord."

Thus, at a very early date, a fringe of leasehold land forms itself round the manor in addition to the ordinary customary holdings. Because it is on the margin of cultivation the initial rent is low, and because the land is leased the rent can be raised. Exactly the same thing applies to the leasing of the demesne, and sometimes even to the land which one tenant hires from another, because here also the element of compet.i.tion enters to adjust rents in accordance with supply and demand and with little regard to the influence of custom. When the greater part of the demesne is still cultivated by the labour of villeins, and only small plots are leased to the tenants by way of experiment, the bailiff balances one method against the other, and recommends the resumption of the land which "would pay better in the hands of the lord."[268] On some manors, it is true, demesne land seems to have been merged inextricably in the customary holdings, and to have been held later, like them, by copy of court roll.[269] But the manorial authorities were anxious to keep it separate precisely because it was recognised that if kept separate it could be let at a compet.i.tive rent. Thus the charter which was granted to the little borough of Holt[270] in Denbighs.h.i.+re, in 1413, provided that the tenants should pay for "every burgage 12d., for every curtilage 12d., for every acre of land belonging to their free burgages 12d., and for every acre of land which was wont to be of the lord's demesne two s.h.i.+llings." And though, during the confusion of the following century, much of the rent appears not to have been collected, the Crown, of whom the burgesses hold, does not forget that a high rent was due from the demesne, and one hundred and fifty years later requires them to bring up their payments for it to the level fixed in 1413. At Castle Combe, in the middle of the fifteenth century, one finds the steward of the manor watching the land market with a view to getting the best price that he can for the demesne, and speculating whether "any man will ferme the parkis and the conyes at any better price above X marks than yt ys now."[271] The same tendency towards compet.i.tive rents can be seen equally well in the case of the land leased by one tenant from the holdings of others, which for one reason or another have been surrendered to the lord. Thus at Mildenhall,[272] in 1381, a villein pays for his land nearly 1s. 6d. an acre, a very high rent, which is at once explained when it is seen that his holding consists of pieces of land held on a ten years' lease from the holdings of five or more other tenants. Elsewhere one can almost see the bidding up of rents going on.

For what else can happen when the demesne lands of a manor are leased to four tenants who, in turn, make their profit by leasing them again to the other tenants,[273] or when a villein pays 6 to enter on two acres of arable land,[274] or when land is worth 3s. 6d. an acre after the rents and services have been discharged from it to the lord,[275] so that the holder who cares to sublet can reap a substantial profit on the difference?

[268] Camden Society, _Inquisition of the Manors of Glas...o...b..ry Abbey_, Brentmarsh, 1189. A tenant holds "1 acre de terra arabili in dominico, utilius esset quod esset in manu domini."

[269] _e.g._, on the Devons.h.i.+re, Somerset, and Cornwall manors surveyed by Humberstone _temp._ Phil, and Mary (_Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.).

[270] MS. Transcript by A.N. Palmer of the Survey of the Manor of Holt, 1620 (Wrexham Free Library, _Ancient Local Records_, vol. ii.).

[271] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, p. 258 (1440?-1550).

[272] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk. I quote the writer's remarks in full. "The bailiff's accounts for the manor begin in that very year [1381], and the one striking feature in them is the system of leases which appears to have gradually displaced other kinds of tenure since the time of the pestilence. A few are for forty years, but most are for ten or six years.... The land so leased is not mainly demesne land. It belongs largely to villein tenements that have fallen into the lord's hands, and the process of consolidation described had already taken place at Mildenhall. The land held by John Kelsynd on a ten years'

lease includes, for example, '3 acres of Frere's, Hayward's and Willway's tenement in Bradinhawfield, 1 acre of Holmes' tenement in Suttonfield, 5 acres of Zabulo's tenement in one piece at Lambwash,' and the rent of the whole 22 acres is 31s. 1d., or nearly 1s. 5d. an acre, an extremely high rent for land not stated to be meadow or pasture."

[273] Scrope, _History of the Manor and Barony of Castle Combe_, p. 203.

[274] Ma.s.singberd, _Ingoldmells Court Rolls_, Introduction, p.

x.x.x.

[275] _Ibid._

The truth is that, at any rate by the middle of the fifteenth century, the rents of different parts of a manor are being settled on quite different principles. They are not all customary rents, as they tended to be at an earlier date, nor are they all compet.i.tive rents, as they tend to be to-day. The latter are growing because of the improved economic position of the tenants, which enables them to hire or purchase land over and above their customary holdings, and their growth has been greatly accelerated by the enormously increased opportunities for land speculation which were offered when the Great Plague brought thousands of acres into the land market. It is in the demand put forward by the men of Ess.e.x in 1381,[276] "that no acre of land, which is held in villeinage or serfdom, may be had at a higher rent than 4d.," rather than in the reference to the already decaying labour services, that there is a warning of troubles to come. But long after that, as we have already seen, a great deal of land is still held by rents which are customary and little influenced as yet by the play of compet.i.tion. We have, in fact, what is almost an ill.u.s.tration of modern theories of rent, with this difference, that though the condition of compet.i.tive rents being charged appears as the margin of cultivation is lowered, custom at first prevents the owners of land from taking advantage of their position and asking the full compet.i.tive rents from the holders of the superior sites, so that part of the surplus is for a long time enjoyed by the tenants. Such a state of things is clearly a precarious one. When the tenements of Hugh and Thomas are being rack-rented there will obviously be a strong temptation to cause Walter's to follow suit, and if the custom is a barrier to a rise in rents, but not to a rise in fines, to make heavy fines do on the latter what high rents do on the former. If it had been given to our peasants to happen on some monstrous mediaeval Ricardo, would they not have wondered how long such an intermingling of payments fixed by custom and payments fixed by compet.i.tion was likely to continue, and have foreseen, what actually occurred in the sixteenth century, an attempt, though not always a successful attempt, to force up the payments for customary holdings to something like the maximum which the condition of agriculture would allow? They would have said:--"This fellow fears not G.o.d, neither regards he man. He is a usurer, a great taker of advantages, an oppressor of his neighbour. We will beat him, and put him in our stocks, and maim his cattle. Nevertheless in the bottom of his foul mind there is some glimmering of sense, and we will give heed to his warning. The devil brings it, but it may be that G.o.d sent it. The Court shall recite our good customs once more, and our young men shall look to their bows.

Weapon bodeth peace."[277]