The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 20

Here one has a field divided into twenty-one strips. Of these strips eighteen had at one time been in the occupation of separate individuals.

The picture is just what we are accustomed to in mediaeval surveys. It is ill.u.s.trated sufficiently for our purpose by the map of part of Salford, on page 163. But some time before this survey of Walsingham was made a great change had taken place. The separate fragments had been taken out of the hands of the tenants and combined in the hands of the lord; the field is ready for conversion to pasture and for enclosure. How extremely profitable it might be to subst.i.tute a single large farm for a number of small holdings is proved by Manorial Rentals. Taking five manors in Wilts.h.i.+re in the year 1568, one finds that the rents paid by the farmer of the demesne work out at 1s. 6d., 7-3/4d., 1s. 5-3/4d., 1s.

1-3/4d., 1s. 5-1/2d. per acre; those paid by the customary tenants at 7-1/2d., 5d., 1s. 0-3/4d., 5-3/4d., 5-3/4d. per acre.[443]

[443] The manors are South Newton, Winterbourne Ba.s.set, Knyghton, Donnington, and Estoverton and Phipheld (Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_).

The difference is, in itself, enough to explain a decided movement towards an increase in the size of the unit of agriculture. But of course a powerful incentive to such procedure was supplied by the growth of pasture farming. In the days when the cultivation of the demesne depended on the labour of the tenants there was obviously bound to be a certain proportion between the land belonging to the former and the land held by the latter, a proportion which might be expressed by saying "no tenants, no demesne cultivation; no demesne cultivation, no income for the lord." But when tillage was replaced by pasture farming this economic rule of three ceased to work. On the one hand, the limit of size imposed on the demesne farm by considerations of management was removed or at any rate enormously extended, for many thousand sheep could be fed by two or three shepherds. On the other hand, the economic motive for preventing a decline in the number of small landholders was weakened, because there was little use for their labour on a pasture farm; while there was a great deal of use for their land, if only it could be cleared of existing rights and added to it. We have, in fact, an ordinary case of the depreciation of particular[444] kinds of human labour in comparison with capital, of the kind to which the modern world has become accustomed in the case of machinery--become accustomed and become callous.

[444] This, of course, is not inconsistent with a general appreciation, _i.e._ a general rise in wages and fall in the rate of interest.

We shall perhaps best give precision to our ideas of the sort of policy which landlords were inclined to adopt, by taking a single concrete instance, though of course conditions varied locally very much from place to place. It comes from Hartley[445] in Northumberland, where Robert Delavale was lord of the manor in the reign of Elizabeth. The narrator is his cousin, Joshua Delavale--

"Since which time" (_i.e._ 16 Eliz.), he says, "the said Robert Delavale purchased all the freeholder's lands and tenements, displaced the said tenants, defaced their tenements, converted their tillage to pasture, being 720 acres of arable ground or thereabouts, and made one demaine, whereon there is but three plows now kept by hinds and servants, besides the 720 acres. So that where there was then in Hartley 15 serviceable men furnished with sufficient horse and furniture, there is now not any, nor hath been these 20 years last past or thereabouts."

Here we get a complete example of the various steps which are taken to build up a great pasture farm. The freeholders are bought out; the other tenants are (it is to be inferred) evicted summarily; their houses are pulled down; their land is thrown into the demesne; the whole area is let down to pasture and managed by hired labourers, while the land-holding population is turned adrift. It is worth noticing that the word "enclosing" is not used. All the drastic changes that are usually ascribed to enclosure can on occasion take place without it. Indeed, the more drastic they are the less need is there to complete them by the erection of fences, for the smaller the population left to commit encroachments.

[445] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ix. p. 124. For a similar case of evictions by Delavale, showing how they were carried out, _ibid._, pp. 201-?202: "There was in Seaton Delavale towns.h.i.+p 12 tenements, whereon there dwelt 12 able men sufficiently furnished with horse and furniture to serve his Majestie ... who paid 46s. 8d. rent yearlie a piece or thereabouts. All the said tenants and their successors saving 5 the said Robert Delavale eyther thrust out of their fermholds or weried them by taking excessive fines, increasing of their rents unto 3 a piece, and withdrawing part of their best land and meadow from their tenements ... by taking their good land from them and compelling them to winne moorishe and heathe ground, and after their hedging heth ground to their great charge, and paying a great fine, and bestowing great reparation on building their tenements, he quite thrust them off in one yeare, refusing either to repay the fine or to repay the charge bestowed in diking or building.... The said seven fermholds displaced had to every one of them 60 acres of arable land, viz. 20 in every field at the least, as the tenants affirme, which amounteth to 480 acres of land yearlie or thereabouts, converted for the most part from tillage to pasture, and united to the demaine of the lords.h.i.+p of Seaton Delavale."

If such a process were general or even common, we should certainly have the materials of a social revolution. But was it? The much discussed question of the effect of the agrarian changes on the numbers of the rural population is one which it is not possible to answer with any approach to accuracy, owing to the difficulty of obtaining a sufficient number of continuous series of surveys and rentals. Those relating to single years tell mainly results, when what we want to see is a process.

Nevertheless even single surveys are not altogether without value. They show the distribution of land between different cla.s.ses at a given moment, and sometimes contain indications of the changes by which the existing distribution was reached. In particular they show us the relative areas of the demesne farm and of the land in the hands of all other cla.s.ses of tenants. And this has a certain interest. For since the demesne farm on a manor where conditions approximated most closely to those of the Middle Ages and had been least affected by more recent changes, rarely contained more than half the whole manorial territory and generally not so much, there is a _prima facie_ case for surmising concentration of holdings and evictions when one finds two-thirds, three-quarters, or even ninety per cent. of it in the hands of one large farmer. It is, however, a very tedious task calculating the acreage held by a number of different tenants, and this may perhaps excuse the small number of instances which are given below. They are as follows:--

TABLE XII

+-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+ (I.) (II.) Manor. Whole Area Area held Percentage Ascertainable. by Farmers of [446] of Demesnes. (II.) to (I.). +-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+ Donnyngton 1523-1/2 418 27.8 Salford 856 295 34.4 Estoverton and Phipheld 1160 484-3/4 41.0 Weedon Weston 715 301 42.0 South Newton 1365 632 46.3 Washerne 1249 707 (in 56.6 hands of lord) Knyghton 452 268 59.2 Bishopeston 1280 805 62.9 Gamlingay Merton 283-1/2 199-3/4 70.3 Winterborne Ba.s.set 708-1/2 532 75.1 Billingford 666 507 76.1 Gamlingay Avenells[447] 531-3/4 420-1/4 79.0 Domerham[448] 960-1/2 824-1/2 85.8 Ewerne 473 428 90.5 Burdonsball 190 190 100.0 Whadborough 469 469 100.0 +-----------------------+-----------------+-------------+---------------+

[446] In several cases the freeholders' lands are not stated in the survey, and are therefore not included in this table.

[447] A few acres described as "held without t.i.tle" are omitted.

[448] I am not sure that there are not other lands in Domerham not included in the survey or in the demesne. If this is so, the proportion of the latter to the rest of the manorial land would of course be reduced.

It will be seen that on eight of these sixteen manors more than two-thirds of the whole area, and on seven more than three-quarters, is in the hands of one individual, the farmer of the demesnes. These figures are at any rate not inconsistent with a considerable consolidation of tenancies and displacement of tenants, though we cannot say that they prove it.

Occasionally the surveys take us behind this presumptive evidence and enable us to trace the building up of large farms out of small holdings.

For example, at Ormesby,[449] in 1516, the lord of the manor held 219 acres "late in farm" of six tenants. At Domerham,[450] some time before 1568, enclosure of land in the open fields and conversion of arable to pasture had been carried out by the largest of the three farmers. The process had been accompanied by depopulation; for in 1568 his farm included pieces of land which had formerly belonged to four smaller tenants, and the two large farms which he held had formerly been in separate hands. It is probable that at Winterbourne Ba.s.set[451] somewhat the same movement had taken place. In 1436 two carucates of land were held by an unspecified number of tenants; in 1568 three customary tenants are still found there, but three-quarters of the manor is in the hands of a single farmer who has recently enclosed a field of 40 acres.

Elsewhere one can fill in the picture in somewhat greater detail. At Tughall,[452] in Northumberland, the surveyor tells us in 1567, the demesne lands had been let to a farmer, who acted as the lord's bailiff and collected the rents and services of the other tenants. He used his position to part.i.tion the manor so as to get rid of the intermingled holdings, and at the same time so hara.s.sed the smaller tenants that they were reduced from twenty-three to eight. At Cowpen[453] a similar concentration of land was going on at the end of the sixteenth century; first five tenancies were thrown into one, and then the whole manor pa.s.sed into the hands of one large farmer. At Newham,[454] near Alnwick, we are told that a hundred and forty men, women, and children were evicted simultaneously. At Seaton[455] Delavale, the Robert Delavale who had depopulated Hartly, turned adrift seven families out of twelve. The map of a Leicesters.h.i.+re manor which is reproduced opposite page 223 is more eloquent than many lamentations. In "the place where the town of Whadboroughe once stood" there was by 1620 not a single tenant left. The whole of it formed one great expanse of pasture.

[449] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 22, No. 18.

[450] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.

[451] _Ibid._, and h.o.a.re, _History of Wilts.h.i.+re_, Hundred of Ambresbury.

[452] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350.

[453] _Ibid._, vol. ix., Cowpen.

[454] _Ibid._, vol. i. p. 275.

[455] _Ibid._, vol. ix. pp. 201-202.

But these isolated instances are obviously worthless as a basis for generalisation. The most that can be said of them is that they prove that the writers who spoke of whole towns being depopulated were not romancing. Nor are the statistics offered by contemporaries of any practical help towards determining the social effects of enclosure.

Those who state, like Moore[456] (writing in the seventeenth century), that they have seen "in some townes fourteen, sixteen, and twenty tenants discharged of plowing," or, like the Dean of Durham,[457] that "500 ploughs have decayed in a few years" and "of 8000 acres lately in tillage now not 8 score are tilled," may have seen what they say. But these figures are suspiciously round, and the cases are obviously extreme ones, not samples. The one[458] writer who makes an estimate for the whole country, putting the number of persons of all ages displaced between 1485 and 1550 at 300,000, is rash enough to explain how his estimate was reached, and his explanation shows that it was not even a plausible guess.

[456] Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c.

[457] Cal. S. P. D. Eliz., 1595-1597 (p. 347), quoted Gay, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii.

[458] "Certayne Causes gathered together wherein is shewed the decaye of England only by the great mult.i.tude of shepe" (E. E.

T. S. date 1550-1553). "It is to understande ... that there is in England townes and villages to the number of fifty thousand and upward, and for every town and village ... there is one plough decayed since the fyrst year of the reign of King Henry VII.... The whiche 50,000 ploughs every plough was able to maintain 6 persons, and nowe they have nothing, but goeth about in England from dore to dore."

The returns collected for the Government seem at first to take us on to surer ground. Investigations were made by Royal Commissioners[459] in the years 1517-1519, 1548, 1566, 1607, 1632, 1635, and 1636. The returns collected for twenty-three counties by the Commission of 1517, for four counties by those of 1548-1566, and for six counties by that of 1607 have been printed. According to them, it would appear that between 1485 and 1517 about one-half per cent. of the total area of the counties investigated was enclosed, and 6931 persons displaced, the corresponding figures for the period 1578-1607 being 69,758 acres and 2232 evictions.

Both in the earlier, and in the later, period, the county which was affected most severely was Northamptons.h.i.+re, where 2.21 per cent. of the county was returned as enclosed in the years 1485-1517, and in the years 1578-1607 4.30 per cent., the numbers displaced being respectively 1405 and 1444. If we like, we may adopt the conjectural estimates of Professor Gay, and, a.s.suming that the pace of the movement was the same during the years for which we have not information as during those for which we have, may say with him that from 1455 to 1607 the agrarian changes affected about 2.76 of the whole area of twenty-four counties, and displaced something between 30,000 and 50,000 persons.

[459] For a discussion of the value of these reports see Leadam, _Domesday of Enclosures_, and _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. vi.; Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xiv. and vol. xviii.; Gay, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii. (1902-1903). A useful summary of the evidence, with a map ill.u.s.trating the probable geographical distribution of the movement, is given by Johnson, _The Disappearance of the Small Landowner_, pp. 42-54 and Map I.

The statistics which have been worked up by Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay from the inquiries of the Government are extremely valuable as showing the geographical distribution of the enclosing movement. It is most powerful in the Midland counties, which were in the sixteenth century the chief granary of the country, and its influence is least in the South-West and South-East. In Somersets.h.i.+re, Devons.h.i.+re, and Cornwall, Suffolk, Ess.e.x and Kent the small enclosures[460] described in Part I.

had probably often been carried out by the peasants themselves at an early date, with the result that those districts were, compared with the open field villages of the Midlands, little disturbed. Those parts of the country, in fact, where the peasantry have been most progressive, are relatively unaffected by the changes of our period. They have been inoculated and they are almost immune. On the other hand, one is inclined to say that the figures are not of much value for other purposes. In the nature of things they cannot be reliable, and, if they were reliable, they would not really answer the most important questions which are asked about the social results of the changes to which they refer. Let us remember the methods by which they were collected. They are taken from returns which are in the form of answers delivered to commissioners by juries of peasants, juries which we know from the most active of the commissioners to have been occasionally packed by the local proprietors, and often intimidated,[461] and to have been examined by the commissioners under the eyes of their landlords. It is hardly necessary to point out that no evidence of even approximate accuracy would be derived from an inquiry conducted in such a fas.h.i.+on at the present day. Is it probable that it was obtained any more satisfactorily in the sixteenth century?

[460] It is a question how far there had ever been an open field system in some of these counties, _e.g._ Cornwall and Kent.

There certainly were some open field villages of the ordinary pattern in Kent (see Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields_, p. 230). But Kent from an early date develops on its own lines, and does not go through the same stages of manorialism and commutation as other counties. Much of it seems to start at the point which they reach only in the sixteenth century. Cornwall again, though in the sixteenth century there were commons where the villagers pastured their cattle together (see accounts of Landress and Porpehan, _Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. i.), was largely a county of scattered homesteads and very early enclosure (for the "nucleated village" and "scattered homesteads," see Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 15-16), pointing to a different system of settlement from that of the counties where the open field system obtained. For enclosures in Devon and Somerset see Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, Modern Times, Part II., App. B: "A consideration of the cause in question before the lords touchinge depopulation," and Carlyle's _Cromwell_, Letter XXIV. "Lest we should engage our body of horse too far into that enclosed country."

[461] For intimidation see the case of Wootton Ba.s.set, quoted above, pp. 251-253, and below, pp. 302-304. Also Gay, _Trans.

Royal Hist. Soc._, New Series, vol. xviii.; and Hales' defence (appendix to Miss Lamond's introduction to _The Commonweal of this Realm of England_).

Nor, if accurate, could these statistics really be used as a means of disproving the accounts given by contemporary writers of the dislocation produced by enclosure. That those accounts were highly coloured, no one familiar with the methods which the age brought to the discussion of economic questions will doubt. Professor Gay does well to warn us against credulity. It is certainly a salutary discipline to turn from the burning words of Latimer or Crowley to these official calculations, and then, by a glance at the chapters of Dr. Slater and Professor Gonner on the enclosures of the eighteenth century, to realise that even in those parts of England where the cry against depopulation had arisen most bitterly two centuries before, there were still thousands of acres to be enclosed by some hundreds of Enclosure Acts. But if we must discount the protests of authors to whom all large economic changes seem to smell of the pit, we must not forget either that their views are formed by the conditions of their age, and that it is just in the conditions productive of this state of mind that even a moderate change is likely to work with the most disastrous effects. We who reckon in millions and count a year lost which does not see some new outburst of economic energy, must be very careful how we apply our statistics to measure the movements of an age where economic life differs not only in quant.i.ty but in quality, where most men have never seen more than a hundred separate individuals in the course of their whole lives, where most households live by tilling their great-grandfathers' fields with their great-grandfathers' plough. We must not be too clever--our ancestors would have said too wicked--for our subject. We must not accept an estimate of the amount of depopulation as an explanation of its effects; for the two things are not in _pari materia_. Certainly we must not argue that, because the returns collected by Royal Commissions show that in the counties affected most severely less than one-twentieth of the total area was enclosed, therefore the complaints of observers must be taken as a hysterical exaggeration of slow and unimportant changes. For one thing, summary tables are no measure of the distress caused by eviction, till we know how the tables are made up. The drifting away of one tenant from each of fifty manors, and the eviction of fifty tenants from one manor, yield precisely the same statistical results when the total displacement from a given county is being calculated. But the former would be scarcely noticeable; the latter might ruin a village. For another thing, the total area of a county is a mere spatial expression, which is important to no one except geographers. What mattered to the peasantry, and what matters to us, is not the proportion which the land enclosed bore to the whole area of the county, but the proportion which it bore to the whole area available for cultivation. This, which is of course not ascertainable, is clearly a very different thing.[462] It is no consolation to a family which has been evicted from a prosperous farm to be told that it can settle on a moor or a marsh, on Blackstone Edge or Deeping Fen. To argue that enclosing was of little consequence, because so small a proportion of the total land area was enclosed, is almost precisely similar to arguing that overcrowding is of little consequence, because the area of Great Britain divided by the population gives a quotient of about one and a half acres to every human being in the country. The evidence of a general trend of opinion during a century and a half--opinion by no means confined to the peasants, or to the peasants' champions like Hales, or to idealists like Sir Thomas More, or to the preachers of social righteousness like Latimer and Crowley, but shared by Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell in the earlier part of the century, Robert Cecil and Francis Bacon[463] at the end of it--to the effect that the agrarian changes caused extensive depopulation, is really a firmer basis for judging their effects than are statistics which, however carefully worked up, are necessarily unreliable, and which, when reliable, are not quite the statistics required. When that opinion is backed by doc.u.mentary proof that from one village thirty persons, from another fifty, from another the whole population, were displaced, though of course we cannot say that such displacement was general, we can say that it was not unknown, and that if contemporaries were guilty of exaggeration (as they probably were), their exaggeration took the form not of inventing extreme cases, but of suggesting that such extreme cases were the rule. On the whole, therefore, our conclusions as to the quant.i.tative measurement of depopulation caused in the sixteenth century must still, in spite of the researches of Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay, be a negative one. In the first place, we cannot say, even approximately, what proportion of the total landholding population was displaced. In the second place, such figures as we do possess are not of a kind to outweigh the direct evidence of contemporary observers that the movement was so extensive as in parts of England to cause serious suffering and disturbance.

[462] Professor Pollard has good remarks on this point (_Political History of England_, 1547-1603, p. 29).

[463] Wolsey was responsible for the Commission of 1517. For a letter of Cromwell to Henry VIII. on the subject of enclosure, and for the views of Cecil and Bacon, see below, pp. 273-274, 279, 343, 387.

(d) _The Agrarian Changes and the Poor Law_

The obscurity in which the statistics of depopulation are involved does not prevent us from seeing that it played an important part in providing an incentive to the organisation of relief on a national and secular basis, which was the most enduring achievement of the social legislation of sixteenth century statesmen. An influential theory of Poor Law History regards the admission finally made in 1601 that the dest.i.tute person has, not only a moral, but a legal, right to maintenance, as a last fatal legacy handed to the modern state by the expiring social order of the Middle Ages, a relic of villeinage which was given a statutory basis at the very moment when a little more patience would have shown that a national system of poor relief was not only unnecessary, but positively harmful, in the new mobile society which the expansion of commerce and industry was bringing into existence.

"Serfdom," says an eminent exponent of this view, "is itself a system of Poor Law. The Poor Law is not therefore a new device invented in the time of Elizabeth to meet a new disease. The very conception of a society based on status involves the conception of a Poor Law far more searching and rigid than the celebrated 43 Eng. cap. 2.... The collective provision is appropriate to the then expiring condition of status.... A wide diffusion of private property, not collective property, is the obvious and natural method by which the unable-bodied periods of life are to be met. With the disappearance of Feudalism we might have expected that there would have disappeared the custom which made the poor a charge upon the manor or parish of which they had formerly been serfs. This, however, did not happen, and a history of this survival of mediaeval custom is the history of the English Poor Law.... To sum the matter up:--In following the development of Poor Law legislation, we watch society struggling to free itself from the fetters of a primitive communism of poverty and subjection, a state of things possessing many 'plausible advantages.' Legislation for the management of the Poor often impeded, and only occasionally expedited, this beneficent process.... It proceeded from ignorance of the true nature of progress, and from a denial or neglect of the power of absorption possessed by a free society."[464] It is obvious that in this pa.s.sage Mr. Mackay uses his interpretation of Poor Law origins to make a very trenchant criticism upon the whole principle involved in the public maintenance of the dest.i.tute. That principle was not introduced because new conditions made its adoption indispensable. It survived from an older order of things into a world in which the only serious causes of dest.i.tution are personal and not economic, and in which therefore it is quite inappropriate. To tolerate it is to drag for ever a clanking chain, one end of which is fastened round the bleeding ankles of modern society, and the other anch.o.r.ed in the hideous provisions of the Statute of Labourers. Nor should we be wrong if we said that a similar theory, though less lucidly expressed, has had a considerable influence upon Poor Law practice. For the idea of a Poor Law as an anachronism which is quite out of place in a developed economic society is implied more than once in the celebrated report drafted by Senior and Chadwick in 1834, and has pa.s.sed from that brilliant piece of special pleading into the minds of three generations of administrators. "A person," they state, "who attributes pauperism to the inability to procure employment, will doubt the efficiency of the cause which we propose to remove it,"

whereas "whenever inquiries have been made as to the previous condition of the able-bodied individuals who live in such numbers on the town parishes, it has been found that the pauperism of the greater number has originated in indolence, improvidence, and vice, and might have been avoided by ordinary care and industry. The majority of the Statutes connected with the administration of public relief have created new evils, and aggravated those which they were intended to prevent."[465]

[464] Mackay, _History of the English Poor Law_, 1834-1898, pp.

10-11, 16-17.

[465] _Poor Law Commission Report of 1834_, pp. 264-277, 281.

A discussion of Poor Law theory and history falls outside the limits of this essay. But in forming an estimate of the effects of the agrarian changes which have been described above, it is perhaps not out of place to consider the minor question of the connection between them and the system of Poor Relief which took its final shape in the reign of Elizabeth. Since the distress which the relief inst.i.tutions of an age exist to meet stands to its general economic conditions in the relation of reverse to obverse, of effect to cause, of disease to environment, much light is thrown on the economic difficulties most characteristic of any period by ascertaining the type of distress with which relieving authorities are most generally confronted. Equally important, any student of Poor Law History, who is not the partisan of a theory, finds himself constantly driven to look for an explanation of Poor Law developments in regions which, at first sight, appear to lie far outside his immediate subject, but where, in reality, is grown the grim harvest which it is the duty of Poor Law authorities, often acting in complete ignorance of its origin, to reap. Much wild theorising and some tragic practical blunders might have been avoided, had it been more generally realised that, of all branches of administration, the treatment of persons in distress is that which can least bear to be left to the exclusive attention of Poor Law specialists, because it, most of all matters, depends for its success on being carefully adapted to the changing economic conditions, the organisation or disorganisation of industry, the stability or instability of trade, the diffusion or concentration of property, by which the nature and extent of the distress requiring treatment are determined.

When one turns to the age in which the Poor Law took shape, the first thing to strike one is that the need for it arises, according to the views expressed by most writers of the period, from that very development in commercial relations.h.i.+ps, that very increase in economic mobility, which Mr. Mackay seems to imply should have made it unnecessary. The special feature of sixteenth century pauperism is written large over all the doc.u.ments of the period--in Statutes, in Privy Council proceedings, in the records of Quarter Sessions. The new and terrible problem is the increase in vagrancy. The sixteenth century lives in terror of the tramp. He is denounced by moralists, a.n.a.lysed into species by the curious or scientific, scourged and buffeted by all men. The dest.i.tution of the aged and impotent, of fatherless children and widows, is familiar enough. It has been with the world from time immemorial. It has been for centuries the object of voluntary charitable effort; and when the dissolution of the monasteries dries up one great channel of provision, the Government intervenes with special arrangements[466] to take their place a whole generation before it can be brought to admit that there is any problem of the unemployed, other than the problem of the st.u.r.dy rogue. The distinction between the able-bodied unemployed and the impotent is one which is visible to the eye of sense. The distinction between the man who is unemployed because he cannot get work and the man who is unemployed because he does not want work, requires a modic.u.m of knowledge and reflection which even at the present day is not always forthcoming. The former distinction, therefore, is not supplemented by the latter until the beginning of the last quarter of the century.[467] In one respect, that of the Law of Settlement, the English Poor Law does show traces of a mediaeval origin.

In all other respects, so far from being a survival from the Middle Ages, it comes into existence just at the time when mediaeval economic conditions are disappearing. It is not accepted at once as a matter of course that the dest.i.tute shall be publicly relieved, still less that the able-bodied dest.i.tute deserve anything but punishment. Governments make desperate efforts for about one hundred years to evade their new obligations. They whip and brand and bore ears; they offer the vagrant as a slave to the man who seizes him; they appeal to charity; they introduce the parish clergy to put pressure on the uncharitable; they direct the bishops to reason with those who stop their ears against the parish clergy. When merely repressive measures and voluntary effort are finally discredited, they levy a compulsory charge rather as a fine for contumacy than as a rate, and slide reluctantly into obligatory a.s.sessments[468] only when all else has failed. And if we ask why the obligation of maintaining the dest.i.tute should have received national recognition first in the sixteenth century, we can only answer by pointing to that trend away from the stationary conditions of agriculture to the fluctuating conditions of trade, and in particular to that displacement of the rural population, which we have already seen was one result of enclosure. The national Poor Law is not a mediaeval anachronism. It is the outcome of conditions which seem to the men of the sixteenth century new and appalling. Of these conditions the most important are the agrarian changes.

[466] 27 Hen. VIII., c. 25. Under this Act city and county authorities are to relieve impotent beggars "by way of voluntary and charitable alms." They are also for the first time given power to apprentice vagrant children.