The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 2

"My thynketh that as the wise husbandman makethe and maynteyneth his nursery of yonge trees to plante in the steede of the olde, when he seeth them begynne to fail, because he will be sure at all tymes of fruyte: so shulde politique governours (as the kynges maiestie and his councell mynde) provide for thencrease and mayntenance of people, so that at no tyme they maye lacke to serve his highnes and the commenwelthe."--_The defence of John Hales agenst certeyn sclaundres and false reaportes made of hym._

CHAPTER I

THE RURAL POPULATION

(a) _The Cla.s.ses 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 wealth[53] 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 luxurious[54] 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 town[56] 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s 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 feet[58] 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 cla.s.ses were composed.

[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."

The manorial doc.u.ments supply us with much information about the landholders, and though we cannot say what proportion[59] they formed of the population, we ought to be able to say with some certainty the relative numbers of different cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.sification[60] 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 cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.s any individual should be placed.

[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 n.o.bles 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 cla.s.ses. 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 Suss.e.x, 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. s.e.xburge, 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 Yorks.h.i.+re in 1641 (_Surtees Society_, vol. x.x.xiii.), 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 l.u.s.ty 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 cla.s.ses in rural society; _e.g._ out of 3780 persons mentioned in Worcesters.h.i.+re 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 doc.u.ment divides the rural population into three cla.s.ses: "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 Archaeological 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 cla.s.ses" 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.

Nevertheless, in spite of many marginal cases, we may perhaps find in the surveyors' cla.s.sification 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 cla.s.ses, 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 cla.s.ses 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.

[61] They include also tenants on the lands belonging to c.o.c.kersand Abbey, lying in many different parts of Lancas.h.i.+re, in 1503. For the sources from which this table is constructed and its defects, see Appendix II.

Scanty as they are, these figures show that there is the very greatest variety in the distribution of different cla.s.ses 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 Leicesters.h.i.+re they form over one-fifth, and are almost as numerous as the freeholders, while if we isolate the five Somersets.h.i.+re and Devons.h.i.+re manors which above are combined with those of Wilts.h.i.+re, 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 cla.s.ses is much more marked than it is in Wilts.h.i.+re, and in Wilts.h.i.+re 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 Lancas.h.i.+re. In those two wild counties mediaeval 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 acc.u.mulate 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. Free- Customary Lease- Uncertain. holders. Tenants. holders. --------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Northumberland, 474 26 436 12 six manors Lancas.h.i.+re, seven manors, and lands belonging to c.o.c.kersand Abbey 1280 217 451 334[62] 278 +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total 1754 243 887 346 278 (13.8%) (50.5%) (19.04%) (15%) Staffords.h.i.+re, 356 44 272 23 17 six manors Leicesters.h.i.+re, 618 134 311 124 49 nine manors Northamptons.h.i.+re, 531 100 355 66 10 seven manors +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total 1505 278 938 213 76 (18.1%) (62.3%) (14.2%) (5%) Norfolk, 1011[63] 316 596 53 50 twenty-five manors Suffolk, 353 176 146 25 6 fourteen manors +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total 1364[63] 492 742 78 56 (36%) (54.3%) (5.7%) (4.1%) Wilts.h.i.+re, Somerset, and Devons.h.i.+re, thirty-two manors 1102 149 817 136 Hamps.h.i.+re, 259 8 251 two manors Ten other manors in the south of of England 219 43 158 12 6 +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Total 1580 200 1226 148 6 (12.6%) (77.2%) (9.3%) (0.3%) +--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+ Grand total 6203[63] 1213 3793 785 416 (19.5%) (61.1%) (12.6%) (6.7%) --------------------------+--------+--------+---------+--------+----------+

[62] The Lancas.h.i.+re 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 Lancas.h.i.+re manors. Like Northumberland, Lancas.h.i.+re 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.

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 cla.s.ses 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 Wilts.h.i.+re and Northumberland it is not uncommon to find villages where no freeholders at all are recorded. In Norfolk and Lancas.h.i.+re it is the exception for them to be in a majority. But on half the Suffolk manors summarised above they are the largest cla.s.s 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 doc.u.ments from Domesday[64] 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 t.i.tle 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.

[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 Leicesters.h.i.+re. In the table given above the Leicesters.h.i.+re 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, Ess.e.x 880, Notts 189, Oxon. 198, Herts 363, York 787, Lincoln 444. The large number in Ess.e.x is noteworthy.

(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 doc.u.ments, 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 const.i.tutional 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 Bacon[66] 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 villeins[68] 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 cla.s.s and not its legal status is uppermost in their minds.

[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._

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 knight[70] 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 recognitions[71] of dependent tenure, such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of c.u.mmin. 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 a.s.similated 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. They may protest that "next[72] under the king"

the freeholders "may be said to be the lord's," but freehold lands have a way of getting mislaid[73] 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 a.s.sumed its modern shape.

[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 c.u.mming 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 Doc.u.ments, 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 Lords.h.i.+pp, 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."

In a.s.suming 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]