The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 9

[217] Customs like those of High Furness, together with the complaints as to the scarcity of agricultural labour, make one reflect on a fundamental question of economics, viz., the average age of marriage and its relation to the distribution of property and organisation of industry. It is well known that the age of marriage is influenced by (among other things) the age at which maximum earning power begins, _e.g._ to-day it is lower for the unskilled labourer than for the artisan, for the former reaches his prime earlier than the latter; lower for the artisan than for the professional man, because the latter takes longer than the former in getting together a practice or rising from a low initial salary. The difference is not primarily due to differences of thrift or foresight as between different cla.s.ses, but to the fact that the deferring of marriage, which is prudent in (say) a lawyer, who does not reach his full earning power till thirty-five or later, is imprudent in (say) an engineer who has all the experience he needs at twenty-six or twenty-seven, and still more imprudent in the labourer, who reaches his full earning power at twenty-one or twenty-two, and in whom it falls off rapidly after he has pa.s.sed the prime of life. When a large number of agricultural and industrial workers (in the sixteenth century probably a majority) were small landholders or small masters, did the fact that they had to wait for the death of a parent to succeed to their holding, or (in towns) for the permission of a guild to set up shop (_i.e._ to reach their maximum earning powers) tend to defer the age of marriage? If the possibility of this being the case is conceded, ought we to connect the slow growth of population between 1377 and 1500 (on which all historians seem to be agreed) with the wide distribution of property, and ought we to think of the considerable increase in the landless proletariate which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as tending in the opposite direction? In the absence of statistics we cannot answer these questions. But I am inclined to argue that they are at any rate worth investigation. (i) Contemporary opinion shows that in the eyes of sixteenth century writers the problem of population was a problem of underpopulation. The prevalent fear is "lack of men" for military purposes. Starkey's Dialogue speaks of it as "a consumption of the body politic," and suggests as remedies to allow priests to marry, to forbid gentlemen to employ more serving men than they are able to "set forward" to matrimony (on the ground that "men whych in service spend theyr lyfe never fynd means to marry"), to endow with a house and a portion of waste land at a nominal rent persons who marry, to exempt from taxation all persons who have five children and less than a hundred marks in goods, to tax bachelors 1s. in the pound, and give the proceeds to "them which have more children than they be wel abul to nurysch, and partely to the dote of poor damosellys and vyrgins" (Part II. p. 8).

Hales (p. lv. of Miss Lamond's introduction to _Commonweal of England_) speaks of depopulation in a similar strain, as also does Harrison forty years later. There are some complaints as to excess of population in 1620 (see below, pp. 278?-279), but these do not become general till the very end of the seventeenth century (see Defoe, _Giving alms no charity_). (ii) The position of a son who acquires a holding when his parent dies is a.n.a.logous to that of an apprentice who cannot set up as a master till given permission by the proper authorities. It is quite plain that in the eyes of the ordinary man in the sixteenth century one of the advantages of a system of compulsory apprentices.h.i.+p was that it prevented youths marrying at a very early age. _E.g._ an Act (2 & 3 Philip and Mary) forbids the admitting of any one to the freedom of the city of London before the age of twenty-four, and enacts that apprentices are not to be taken so young that they will come out of their time before they are twenty-four. The reason alleged for this rule is the distress in the city of which "one of the chief occasions is by reason of the overhasty marriages and over soon setting up of householdes by the young folke of the city ... be they never so young and unskilful." A pet.i.tion of weavers states (_Hist. MSS.

Com._, C.D. 784, p. 114): "Whereas by the former good laws of their trade no one could exercise the same until he had served an apprentices.h.i.+p for seven years and attained the age of twenty-four, now in these disordered times many apprentices having forsaken parents and masters ... refuse to serve out their time, but before they are eighteen or twenty years old betake themselves to marriage." One may contrast the extraordinary reduction in the age of marriage of the people of Lancas.h.i.+re brought about by the early factory system, with its armies of operatives who had nothing to look forward to but the wages earned immediately on reaching maturity (Gaskell, _Artisans and Machinery_, 1836, and _The Manufacturing Population of Great Britain_, 1833), and compare the results usually ascribed to the wide distribution of landed property in France. See also the remarks of Slater on the effect of the eighteenth century enclosing (_The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common Fields_, p. 256), and Hasbach, _History of the English Agricultural Labourer_, pp. 120 n. 138-?139, 178.

Young ascribed "a great multiplication of births" to the fact that "the labourer has no advancement to hope" (_Suffolk_, 1797, p. 260); Duncombe, "The practice of consolidating farms ...

tends to licentiousness of manners" (_Herefords.h.i.+re_, p. 33). A witness before the Select Committee on Emigration, 1827, stated, "The labourers no longer live in farm houses as they used to do, where they were better fed and had more comforts than they now get in a cottage, in consequence there was not the same inducement to early marriage" (_qu._ 3882). In the absence of direct statistical evidence all we can say is (i) that when persons look forward to entering on property or setting up as small masters their point of maximum earning power is later than it is when they can earn the standard rate of the trade at twenty-two or twenty-three; therefore (ii) that the average age of marriage is likely to be higher in a society composed largely of small property owners than in one composed largely of a propertyless proletariate.

In the second place, let us examine the use which the peasants make of their holdings. Modern writers tell us that among the conditions necessary to the prosperity of a cla.s.s of small holders the most important are a wise choice of the kind of farming to be pursued, a sound organisation of credit, cheap marketing, and rural bye-employments to back agriculture. Modern writers who are not English would probably add a tariff on imported agricultural produce. In our period the type of cultivation pursued by the large farmer was undergoing rapid changes.

That of the peasantry was hardly a matter of choice. It was dictated by the necessity, under which most villages still lay, of being largely self-supporting in the matter of corn supplies, a necessity recognised and crystallised in the customary routine of village husbandry. The preponderance of arable farming among the peasantry is ill.u.s.trated by the table[218] on page 107, which should be contrasted with that given on pages 225?-226.

The figures in this table do not pretend to complete accuracy. But they indicate the distribution of land between different uses with sufficient correctness to show the sort of agriculture followed by the small holder of our period. They prove unmistakably that his standby was the grain crops grown on the open fields.[219] Students of rural conditions will be quick to recognise the contrast which the picture offers to the economy of the modern small holder. In our own day the breaking up of large farms into smaller tenancies has proceeded furthest in those parts of the country which are most suitable for pasture. The occupier of a holding of less than 70 or 80 acres usually relies mainly on stock farming in one form or another, and on the growing of vegetables and fruit. Corn-growing he leaves to much larger men, and, when he does grow grain, he does so mainly to provide fodder and straw for his beasts. In the sixteenth century almost exactly the opposite was the case. In so far as the large farmer with 200 or 300 acres can be said to have had a specialty, it was not corn-growing but sheep and cattle grazing. The small man relied mainly, though not entirely, upon tillage, and though, even in his case, pasture farming a.s.sumed increased importance as the century went on, grazing was chiefly a supplement to arable farming. To this statement there are of course certain exceptions. Though villages where the customary tenants hold more pasture than arable are rare, they are not unknown, and occasionally one finds one where large numbers of tenants of the most diverse economic conditions, with pasture holdings ranging from 6 to 100 acres, have no arable at all. Sometimes such an arrangement is to be accounted for by the fact that a part of the demesne lands of the manor, which happens not to be suitable for tillage, has been divided up among the population of younger sons and labourers who have no holdings in the open fields. In the neighbourhood of considerable towns, again, there was a market[220] for vegetables and dairy produce which gave an impetus to this side of agriculture, and the home counties poured b.u.t.ter and cheese, fowls, eggs, and fruit into London, as France and the Channel Islands do at the present day. Still, to speak broadly, the small holder of the sixteenth century, unlike the small holder of the twentieth, was before all things interested in arable farming, and interested in rights of pasture chiefly as a necessary adjunct to it.

TABLE V

+-----------+---------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+ Manors (excluding houses, orchards, total area. arable. meadow. pasture. garths, _&c._). +-----------+---------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+ ac. ro. po. ac. ro. po. ac. ro. po. ac. ro. po. four in northumber- land and one in lancas.h.i.+re 1730 3 13-1/4 1533 2 32-3/4 98 1 6-1/8 98 3 14 seven in wilts.h.i.+re and one in dorset 3963 2 0 3636 3 0 124 3 0 202 (in close plus consid- erable rights of pasture not expressed in acres). four in midlands (bedford, leicester, northants, ac. ro. po. stafford) 2092 3 2 1670 2 17 167 3 32 254 0 33 +-----------+---------------+--------------+-------------+--------------+

[218] See Appendix II.

[219] It must be remembered, however, that there was pasture on the one field which every year lay fallow, and that the amount of this does not appear in the figures given below.

[220] Camden Society, Norden, Speculum Britanniae, Part I., Intro.: "And these commonly are so furnished with kyne that their wives twice or thrice a week conveyeth to London mylke and b.u.t.ter, cheese, apples, pears, frutmentye, hens and chickens, baken, and other country drugs ... and this yieldeth them a large comfort and relief."

Corn-growing in England has been for the last hundred years a branch of farming so completely surrendered to the large capitalist, that it is not easy to realise a state of things in which the typical corn-grower was a man with less than 60 acres, and a man who could make a good living from a holding of that size. To understand the economics of his position we must think away the conditions which have in the last century made it intolerable. Or rather we must think away all except one. That one was the perennial problem of agricultural credit. In this matter, certainly, the poorer among the peasantry suffered as their successors all over the world suffer to-day. They were apt to be in the grip of the moneylender. Cheap land, as the modern colonist knows, is of little avail to the man who has not the capital needed to stock it, and to carry over the interval between harvest and harvest, when his receipts fall off but his expenses continue. In the endless arguments which took place on the ethics of moneylending at a later date, it was a common complaint that village financiers drove a hard bargain with the peasants whom misfortune compelled to resort to them. In a backward village the only man with capital to lend might be the local corn-dealer, brewer, or maltster, the large farmer who held the lord's demesne, or the lord of the manor himself and his agent. Like an American farmer in the grip of an "elevator," the peasant who wanted money for his crops had often to sell them to a dealer[221] who gave a ridiculously low price for them, and then made an enormous profit by holding them till the price of corn rose, or by sending them to a market where there was a scarcity. Lords[222] of manors, it was said, helped their tenants out of temporary difficulties by advancing them small sums, and then used their advantage to screw extra labour on the demesne out of them. Manor courts[223] in the Middle Ages had fined villagers for usury, but one may suspect that these were capitalists too potent for them to control, and one does not wonder at the headshakings of the prudent Fitzherbert over the man whose method of farming compels him to be a borrower. The form which charity and co-operative effort took points in the same direction. Hospitals[224] and monasteries advance money to buy seed. Well-to-do men aid their relatives by stocking their farms for them. Gilds[225] make loans of cattle and sheep, and the last legacy of a philanthropic parson to his paris.h.i.+oners is money with which to buy a cow for the poor. How far the charitable and corporate organisation of loans succeeded in keeping the small cultivator out of the clutches of the usurer, and how far the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the Gild lands deteriorated their condition by placing them more at his mercy, are questions which deserve consideration but which we have not sufficient evidence to answer.[226] In forming any estimate, however, of rural conditions, the hand to mouth economy of the poorer peasants, and their consequent helplessness in the face of any unexpected catastrophe, such as an unusually bad harvest, a cattle plague, and (in the fifteenth century) the destruction of crops by civil disturbances, must not be forgotten.

In that age less capital was needed to stock a holding than in our own, but it was sc.r.a.ped together with even greater difficulty. On the very eve of the dissolution of the monasteries there were some remote manors where "Money was so scantie that coigned leather went bargaining between man and man,"[227] and where corn rents were subst.i.tuted for money because the tenants had no money in which rent could be paid.

[221] See _The Death of Usury or the Disgrace of Usurers_, 1594: "It is a common practice in this country, if a poore man come to borrow money of a maltster, he will not lend any, but tells him, if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of fore-hand buyers; the man being driven by distresse sells his corn far under foote, that when it comes to be delivered he loses halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value. I have heard many of these fore-hand sellers say that they had rather allow after 20 pounds in the hundred for money, than to sell their fore-hand bargaines of corn. These are most extreme usurers."

[222] _A Discourse upon Usurie_, by Thomas Wilson, 1584: "A lord doth lend his tenants money, with this condition that they shall plough his land, whether doth he commit usurie or no? I do answer that if he does not pay them for their labour, but will take the benefit of their labour for the use of his money, he is an usurer."

[223] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 2319, p. 27: "Juetta ... is a usuress, and sells at a dearer rate for accommodation."

[224] _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd. 7881, p. 129, St. Saviour's Hospital gives "20d to a poor man to buy seed for his land."

[225] _Victoria County History_, Suffolk, "Social and Economic History": "The gild let out in one year 8 cows and 4 neats at 19d. each." For the parson's cow, see _Hist. MSS. Com._, Cd.

784, p. 46.

[226] On the subject of the monasteries see Gasquet, _Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries_, chap. xxii., and _pa.s.sim_.

[227] For reference see below, p. 198, n. 2.

On the other hand, before the great agrarian changes of the sixteenth century began, and in those parts of the country which were least affected by them, the economic environment was in other respects favourable to the cla.s.s of which we have been speaking. As far as corn-growing is concerned, _pet.i.te culture_ flourishes most readily when the methods of production are primitive and trade little developed. It is not necessary to point out that, in the sphere of production, the conditions which have given its present tremendous advantage to large-scale corn-growing are the fruit of the last century, and that in our period there were neither machinery nor expensive manures to require the outlay of large capital, and to make arable farming almost a branch of factory industry. Moreover, there is reason to believe that the growth of prosperity among the peasants had been accompanied by an improvement in the technique of cultivation. Not to mention the part which they took in enclosures, of which we shall speak later, there were, at any rate by the beginning of the seventeenth century, certain exceptional parts of the country where it was said[228] that in good years from thirty-two to eighty bushels of grain were raised to an acre, instead of the ten which Walter of Henley had thought a fair return in the thirteenth. We may believe this or not as we like; probably we should discount it by at least one-half. But even the average peasant, who could not possibly make his land perform these prodigies, was b.u.t.tressed by the natural protection of unpa.s.sable roads, which tended to make every village, even almost every landholding family, more or less self-sufficing in the matter of food supplies. A highly organised corn trade is as unfavourable to the existence of small corn-growers as a wide market is to the small master-craftsman, because it sets a premium upon the qualities needed for business management--qualities often quite different from those needed for effective farming--and thus (in the absence of co-operation) plays into the hands of the capitalist, who buys and sells in bulk and can pick his market. To the ma.s.s of the peasantry in our period the commercial side of agriculture offered no problem, because for the ma.s.s of the peasantry it did not exist. The wealthier among them, it is true, did grow corn for the market, and sent their supplies far afield through the hands of middlemen, much further sometimes, if we may believe contemporaries, than Customs Officials should have allowed. In certain parts of England rudimentary industrial specialisation had made a regular corn trade a necessity. In Norfolk,[229] for example, where manufactures and agriculture had drawn apart to an extent unknown elsewhere, a rough local division of labour was concentrating the woollen industry in that part of the country most suitable for grazing, and was bringing together a huge population of wage-earners, who depended for their food supplies on the grain produced by the "tilth masters" in "the champion part of the country," and whose needs baffled the traditional policy of trying to prevent corners by checking the transport of corn. But down to the very end of the eighteenth century, and still more under the Tudors, there was a large body of small landholders who pursued their way undisturbed by market fluctuations because they grew wheat almost entirely for subsistence. To a foreign observer[230] English agriculture in the reign of Henry VII. seemed "not to be practised beyond what is required for the consumption of the people." Between the two extremes of capitalist farmer and hired labourer, the poles between which the needle of the Government's policy as to prices uneasily oscillates, there stands the man whose family consumes the product of his land, and who rarely puts his small supplies on the market, because, if he tries to do so, "he loseth[231] the labours of himself, his horse and carte, and husbandry at home," and "is in hazard to pay deare for a place to chamber it till the next market day." Such a man, if entirely occupied in tillage, did little more than supply the wants of his own household; if a sheep farmer as well, he worked up the wool in his own home in the manner enjoined on thrifty housewives by Fitzherbert. From the point of view of national welfare his security was purchased by the distress in which the difficulty of moving corn supplies involved the wage-earner.

The constant local famines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should remind us that the more self-sufficing a country's agricultural economy, the narrower the margin there is likely to be between the landless cla.s.ses and starvation. But with them for the present we are not concerned, and if we confine our attention to the landholding peasantry we can see that to them the backwardness of trade was a positive advantage. The risk of spoiling good farming by ineffective marketing was not one which faced the small holders of our period.

[228] Norden, _The Surveyor's Dialogue_. He is speaking of parts of Somersets.h.i.+re. "Now I say if this sweet country of Tandeane and the western part of Somersets.h.i.+re be not degenerated, surely, as their land is fruitful by nature, so doe they their best by art and industrie ... they take extraordinary pains in soyling, plowing, and dressing their land.... After the plough there goeth some 3 or 4 with mattocks to break the clods ...

they have sometimes and in some places foure, five, six, eight, yea tenne quarters in an ordinary acre." For Walter of Henley's figures see Maitland, _Domesday Book and Beyond_, pp. 437-438.

Gregory King at the end of the seventeenth century estimated the average yield "in a year of moderate plenty" at a little more than 11 bushels (Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, vol. v. pp. 92 and 783). I quote Norden not as giving what was general, but to show what it was thought could be done.

[229] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society_, 1907.

[230] Camden Society, 1857, _An Italian Narration of England_.

[231] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society_, 1907.

Moreover, in estimating the causes which in the fifteenth century favoured a growth in their prosperity, we should not overlook that it was a period in which commercial policy encouraged the corn-grower. In the series of compromises which were struck between the interests of the farmer and those of the consumer the scale during the greater part of it was tilted in the direction of the former, and when success had caused his holding to grow to a size which made trade in grain inevitable, he dealt in a market which the Government tried to turn in his favour. That section of the industry which supplied the market obviously gained by freedom of export and by import duties upon foreign wheat, though the fact that England was largely a corn exporting country made the latter less important than the former. From 1437 to 1491 free export of wheat was permitted, subject to the obligation to obtain an export licence when prices in the home market rose above a certain point. In 1463 the same policy was carried furthur, and an Act was pa.s.sed restricting its importation. Such a commercial[232] policy was no doubt adopted mainly in the interests of the great landed proprietors.

But that the prosperity of the small cultivators was to some extent bound up with the Government's encouragement of corn-growing can hardly be doubted. Competent observers in the sixteenth century gave its abandonment by the Tudors as one cause of the subsequent decline in the condition of the peasantry, and a return to it as one remedy for their distress.

[232] See below, p. 197.

If the peasantry were favoured in the fifteenth century by a state of things in which the small corn-grower's position was still unshaken, did they not also gain by the beginnings of industrial expansion and by the pasture farming that accompanied it? That a man who was mainly dependent upon tillage might also be a grazier upon a considerable scale, is shown by the following table of the animals kept by the customary tenants on six[233] manors in the south of England.

I. II. III. IV.

Manors. Customary Tenants. Sheep kept by Customary Other Beasts Tenants. (minimum).

6 112 7440 793

[233] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke_; _cf._ R.O. _Land Rev. Misc. Bks._, 182, fol. 1, Rental of the late Priory of Launde (Leicesters.h.i.+re, 1539), where there are tenants paying for common pasture for about 430 sheep.

One must not, of course, forget that a certain number of beasts were indispensable to arable farming. Perhaps one-third or one-half the cattle in column IV. should be written off as simply part of the corn-grower's necessary equipment. The sixteenth century small holder, who keeps plough beasts, is no more a grazier on that account than his twentieth century successor, who uses his grain for fodder, is a corn-grower. But, when this has been remembered, we may perhaps allow these figures to remind us that in the agriculture even of the small man there was room for considerable diversity, and that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was probably much more diversified than it had been two centuries before. So much is said in the writings of our period of the harm done by the great grazier, that we perhaps do not always sufficiently realise that the customary tenants both then and long before were often themselves graziers on a considerable scale. They raise stock, and are interested in the woollen trade as well as in the corn-growing. Ultimately, when time enough had elapsed for the profitableness of sheep farming to supply lords of manors with a motive for clearing away interests which interfered with the formation of sheep runs, the movement for laying down land to pasture did result in evictions and rack-renting. But, looking at the fifteenth century as a whole, may we not say with some confidence that the growth of the woollen industry must have brought increasing prosperity to many villages? Though it is not till almost the last decade that complaints of enclosing become sufficiently clamorous to attract the attention of the Government, the spread of woollen manufacturers into rural districts was going quietly on throughout the whole century, and benefited the peasants both by the lucrative bye-employment which they offered to both s.e.xes, and by the alternative to arable farming which the demand for wool supplied in the shape of sheep-grazing. The large number of sheep kept by the customary tenants of many manors in the south of England, and the increase in the complaints as to the over-stocking of commons contained in the Court Rolls of the fifteenth century, show that they were not slow to seize the opportunity, and that the great pasture farms, which aroused the indignation of More and Latimer, had their precedent in the small flocks of thirty or forty sheep which had long been run by the peasantry upon the common wastes or pastures. It would seem that, as so often happens, the new departure was first made on a small scale by small men, and chat it was not until some time had elapsed that its wholesale adoption by large capitalists plunged them in distress. The movement towards pasture-farming as a special branch of agriculture is one that proceeds gradually for a hundred years, before the demand for wool becomes sufficient to produce the body of capitalist graziers whose interests come into sharp collision with those of the peasantry.

But after all, the profits arising from favourable economic circ.u.mstances may be of very little advantage to the ma.s.s of cultivators. They may simply be handed on to the landlord in the shape of increased rents. At a time when, both in Ireland and Scotland, rents are being fixed by public tribunals, we are not likely to forget that the profitableness of agriculture has no necessary connection with the prosperity of tenants. Trade may be increasing, and the return from the land may be growing, and yet those things may profit the farmers and peasants very little, unless they have some security that they will not see them drained away in increased payments for their land. It is important, therefore, to consider how far rents were compet.i.tive and how far they were customary, how far the tenants held the surplus due to economic progress, and how far it pa.s.sed to the landlord.

Some light is thrown on the general situation by the following table[234]:--

TABLE VI

+---------------------+-------------------------------------------------+ Manor. Rents. +--------------------+--------------------------------------------------+ 1295-1308 1568 1. South Newton 13 19 3-1/2 14 4 8 1347 1421 1485 1628 2. Ingoldmells 61 9 4 71 10 3 72 6 8 73 17 2 1287 1567 3. Crondal 53 7 0 103 2 8-3/4 4. Sutton Warbling- ton 1351 1567 5 17 4-3/4 8 10 4 1295 1542 5. Aspley Guise 7 8 4 10 5 10 1248 1567 1585 6. Birling 9 2 6-1/2 14 9 4 14 9 4 1352 1478 1567 1580 7. Acklington 18 13 2 19 13 11 19 13 5 20 0 5 1483 1505 8. Cuxham 9 9 3 8 9 3 1483 1600 9. Ibstone 4 8 10 3 15 0-1/2 1498 1567 1585 1702 10. High Buston 3 12 0 3 12 0 3 12 0 12 0 0 1539 1608 11. Amble 22 14 6 16 0 5 "The reign of King Henry VII." 1529 12. Malden 4 9 10 4 6 7 1527 1588 1607 13. Kibworth 23 6 7 26 15 1 19 14 5 1304-5 1348-9 1373-4 1461 14. Standon 21 17 3 23 8 0 23 2 2-1/2 33 3 3-1/2 1317-8 1445-6 Henry VIII. 15. Feering 29 10 9-1/2 32 14 10 16 2 6-1/2 38-39 Henry VI. 1321 Henry VI. (1460) 16. Appledrum 7 0 11 10 11 6 13 14 10-1/2 1357 1501 17. Minchinhampton 41 14 4 41 19 9 (works) 4 18 0 1280 1441 1547 18. Langley Marish 20 16 5-1/2 24 0 0 45 3 5-3/4 Henry VI. 1521 James I. 19. Lewisham 8 11 7 23 1 6-1/2 90 3 3 20. Cuddington. For Edward III.(?) 15th century(?) James I. terms of Easter 6 4 2-3/4 and Michaelmas (for whole year) 12 8 5-1/2(?) 15 16 7 9 19 8-3/4 21. Isleworth 1314-15 1386-7 1484-5 (Michaelmas) 21 16 10 23 3 10-1/4 18 18 0 22. Wootton (free and customary 1207 1607 tenants) 9 11 2 13 19 0-1/2 1271-2 1547 23. Speen 6 13 9-3/4 17 4 2 1303-4 1314-15 1478-9 24. Schitlington 29 13 0-1/2 30 4 10 58 11 9 (exclusive of ferm of land and ferm of manor). 25. Cranfield (rent of vill including 1383-4 1474-5 1519-20 ferm of lands) 68 15 2 63 19 10-1/4 72 2 1-3/4 1325-6 1482-3 26. Holywell 12 18 2 22 7 8 1536 1803 27. Farleigh 4 9 9 4 15 5 +--------------------+--------------------------------------------------+

[234] For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II.

It will be seen that, in spite of some considerable increases, many rents were comparatively stationary during long periods of time.

Moreover, in all probability, they were more stationary than is suggested by the statistics given above. For at the earlier dates there were works the value of which usually does not appear among the money rents. As time went on, more land was brought under cultivation and the demesne was leased; and though an attempt has been made to exclude the latter factor, it is not always possible to do so with certainty. The later figures, therefore, are, if anything, a more exhaustive account of the tenants' burdens than the earlier, and the small difference which exists between them on several manors is for this reason all the more remarkable.

These figures, it will be said, if they prove anything, prove too much.

Do we not know that one of the grievances of the peasantry in the sixteenth century was the rack-renting of their holdings? Have we not the evidence of Fitzherbert, Latimer, and Hales to prove it? To these questions one must answer that it is certainly true that lords of manors did make a strenuous effort to get from their tenants increased payments for their holdings, and that the success which in many cases they achieved was one great cause of the decline in the condition of the peasantry. The matter, however, is not so simple as it appears. In respect of their liability to be compet.i.tively rented, some parts of the lands of a manor stood on a different footing from others; and again, fixed rents of customary lands were quite compatible with movable fines.

An attempt will be made in subsequent chapters[235] to ill.u.s.trate both the rack-renting of those parts of a manor where the rent was least controlled by custom, and the upward movement of the fines charged on the admission of tenants to their holdings. These figures of stationary or almost stationary rents must not, therefore, be taken as giving a full account of the relations between the customary tenants and the manorial authorities, as though there was no other way in which the latter could compensate themselves. Subject to this qualification, however, they do indicate that, at any rate on the customary holdings which formed the kernel of the manor, there is for a very long period little rack-renting. They suggest that the tenants' payments have a fixity which would make Arthur Young tear his hair. They fall in line with the statements of authorities like Fitzherbert and Norden as to the difficulty experienced by the manorial officials in forcing up rents of a.s.size, that "are as in the beginning, neither risen nor fallen, but doe continue always one and the same." And this fixity of rents is a factor in the prosperity of the peasantry which can hardly be over-estimated.

When not neutralised by exorbitant fines, it means that any surplus arising on the customary tenements as the result of growing trade, or of the fall in the value of money, or of improved methods of agriculture, anything in fact which is in the nature of economic rent, is retained by the tenants. Secured by the custom of the manor, as by a d.y.k.e, against the compet.i.tive pressure which under modern conditions transfers so much of the fruits of progress into the hands of the owners of land and capital, they enjoy an unearned increment which grows with every growth in economic prosperity, and have an interest in their holdings almost similar to that of a landlord who is burdened only with a fixed rent-charge like the English land tax. One of the best established generalisations of economics, ground into the English people by thirty years of misery, is that the effect of agrarian protection is to make a present to landlords. But agrarian protection itself wears a different complexion when the rise in rents which it produces is not transferred to a small and wealthy cla.s.s of absentee owners, but retained by thousands of men who are themselves cultivating the soil.

[235] See below, pp. 139-147 and 304-310.

Lest such a picture should seem to be drawn too much in the spirit of the economic theorist, let us make its meaning more precise by pointing out that the retention of the unearned increment by copyhold tenants was a fact of which the manorial authorities were perfectly well aware, and the results of which they were sometimes at pains to estimate arithmetically by setting side by side with the actual rent paid the rent which the holdings would fetch if put up to compet.i.tion. Four examples may be given. At Amble,[236] in 1608, the surveyor gives the rent of the customary tenants as 16, 0s. 5d., and "the annual value beyond rent" as 93, 4s. 4d. On the great manor of Hexham[237] in the same year the rents of the 314 copyhold tenants amounted to 126, 4s.

8-1/4d.; the "value above the oulde Rentes" was 624, 4s. 1d. In the various towns.h.i.+ps of the manor of Rochdale[238] part of the land was rack-rented. But a great deal of it was held at payments which left the tenant a substantial margin between the rent which he paid to the king and the letting value of the land, a margin which varied from 2d. an acre in parts of Wardleworth, to 6d. an acre in parts of Wardle, 8d. an acre in Walsden, and 10d. an acre in Castleton. On the manor of Barkby[239] in Leicesters.h.i.+re the difference was still more striking.

The rents paid by free and customary tenants together amounted in 1636 to 11, 8s. 7-1/2d.; the value of their holdings was put by the surveyor at 215, 1s. 6d. And, of course, the fact that these rentals come from the very end of the sixteenth, and the beginning of the seventeenth, centuries, makes the evidence which they offer of the inability of manorial authorities to insist on copyhold rents keeping pace with the rising value of land, when they had every motive to enforce such correspondence if they could, all the more significant. For a century they have been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up rents wherever they can, and here are tenants, who, as far as rents go, put 6d. in their own pockets for every 1d. they give to the landlord. Let us repeat that these figures, striking as they are, would, if taken by themselves, give a misleading impression of the position of the copyhold tenants. Even when the lord of a manor cannot break the barrier opposed by manorial custom to a rise in rents, he may be able to dip his fingers in the surplus by raising the fines charged on admission; he may be all the more exacting in s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the last penny out of those holdings where the rent is not fixed by custom. But though we must not forget the other side of the s.h.i.+eld, though the very fixity of rents on many manors should make us scrutinise other conditions very carefully, we must not forget either that a tenant whose rent is unaltered for 200 or 250 years, a tenant who, after a period of sweeping agrarian changes in which a bitter cry has gone up against the exactions of landlords, is paying a fifth, or a sixth, or even an eighteenth of what could be got for his holding in the open market, is a tenant whom most modern English farmers would envy.

Whatever his other disadvantages he has at any rate one condition of prosperity. He will not be eaten up by rack-renting. No wonder that such a man can acc.u.mulate capital and buy up land to add to his holding. No wonder that he can sublet parts of it at a profit. No wonder that in the day of agrarian oppression the wealthier peasantry stands stubbornly against it, that they can carry cases from one court to another, and that there are manors where they boast that "20[240] of them would spend 20 score pounds" in fighting an unpopular landlord. On the whole, the individual cases of enterprise and prosperity among the customary tenants of the fifteenth century do fit into the view that the economic environment was favourable to the peasantry. They may be regarded as symptoms, not exceptions.

[236] _Northumberland County History_, vol. ii.

[237] _Ibid._, vol. iii. pp. 86?-94. On this manor at the time of the survey, though the distinction between the old rent and the "cleare yearly value above the old rent" was noted, the latter seems to have been tapped by a rise in rents ("cleere improved rent above the ould rent").

[238] _Rochdale Manor Inquisition_, 1610, by H. Fishwick (_Trans. of the Rochdale Literary and Scientific Society_, vol.