THE
AGRARIAN PROBLEM
IN THE SIXTEENTH
CENTURY
BY
R.H. TAWNEY
R.H. TAWNEY
“And if the whole people be landlords, or hold the Lands so
divided among them, that no one Man, or number of Men,
within the Compass of the Few or Aristocracy, overbalance
them, the Empire (without the interposition of force) is a
Commonwealth.”—Harrington, Oceana.
WITH 6 MAPS
BURT FRANKLIN RESEARCH & SOURCE WORKS SERIES # 13
BURT FRANKLIN
New York 25, N.Y.
Published by
BURT FRANKLIN
514 West 113th Street
New York 25, N.Y.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN
LONDON—1912
Printed in U.S.A. by
SENTRY PRESS, INC.
New York 19, N.Y.
TO
WILLIAM TEMPLE and ALBERT MANSBRIDGE
PRESIDENT AND SECRETARY
OF THE
WORKERS' EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION
PREFACE
This book is an attempt to trace one strand in the economic life of England from the close of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Civil War. As originally planned, it included an account of the relations of the State to trade and manufacturing industry, the growth of which is the most pregnant economic phenomenon of the period. But I soon found that the material was too abundant to be treated satisfactorily in a single work, and I have therefore confined myself in the following pages to a study of agrarian conditions, whose transformation created so much distress, and aroused such searchings of heart among contemporaries. The subject is one upon which much light has been thrown by the researches of eminent scholars, notably Mr. Leadam, Professor Gay, Dr. Savine, and Professor Ashley, and its mediæval background has been firmly drawn in the great works of Maitland, Seebohm, and Professor Vinogradoff. The reader will see that I have availed myself freely of the results of their investigations. But I have tried, as far as the time at my disposal allowed, to base my picture on original authorities, both printed and manuscript.The supreme interest of economic history lies, it seems to me, in the clue which it offers to the development of those dimly conceived presuppositions as to social expediency which influence the actions not only of statesmen, but of humble individuals and classes, and influence, perhaps, most decisively those who are least conscious of any theoretical bias. On the economic ideas of the sixteenth century in their relation to agrarian conditions I have touched shortly in Part III. of the book, and I hope to treat the whole subject more fully on some future occasion. If in the present work I have given, as I am conscious that I have, undue space to the detailed illustration of particular changes, I must plead that one cannot have the dessert without the dinner, and that a firm foundation of fact, even though as tedious to read as to arrange, is a necessary preliminary to the higher and more philosophical task of analysing economic conceptions. The reader who desires to start with a bird’s-eye view of the subject is advised to turn first to the concluding chapter of Part III.
One word may be allowed in extenuation of the statistical tables, which will be found scattered at intervals through the following pages. In dealing with modern economic conditions it is increasingly recognised that analysis, to be effective, must be quantitative, and one of the disadvantages under which the student of all periods before the eighteenth century labours is that for large departments of life, such as population, foreign trade, and the occupations of the people, anything approaching satisfactory quantitative description is out of the question. The difficulty in the treatment of agrarian history is different. Certain classes of manorial documents offer material which can easily be reduced to a statistical shape. Indeed one difficulty is its very abundance. The first feeling of a person who sees a manuscript collection such as that at Holkham must be “If fifty maids with fifty mops—,” and a sad consciousness that the mop which he wields is a very feeble one. But historical statistics should be regarded with more than ordinary scepticism, inasmuch as they cannot easily be checked by comparison with other sources of information, and it may reasonably be asked whether it is possible to obtain figures that are sufficiently reliable to be used with any confidence. Often, no doubt, it is not possible. The strong point of surveyors was not always arithmetic. The forms in which their information has been cast are sometimes too various to permit of it being used for the purpose of a summary or a comparison. Even when figures are both accurate and comparable the student who works over considerable masses of material will be fortunate if he does not introduce some errors of his own. The tables printed below are marred by all these defects, and I have included them only after considerable hesitation. I have tried to prevent the reader from being misled by pointing out in an appendix what I consider to be their principal faults and ambiguities. But no doubt there are others which have escaped my notice.
It remains for me to express my gratitude to those whose kind assistance has made this work somewhat less imperfect than it would otherwise have been. I have to thank the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, the Senior Bursar of Merton College, the Clerk of the Peace for the County of Warwick, and the Earl of Leicester for permission to examine the manuscripts in their possession. The maps illustrating enclosure are taken from the beautiful maps of the All Souls estates; my thanks are due to the College for allowing me to use them, and to Mr. W. Tomlinson, of the Oxford Tutorial Class at Longton, for helping me to prepare them for reproduction. Circumstances preventing me from working in the Record Office, I was so fortunate as to secure the co-operation of Miss Niemeyer and Miss L. Drucker, who have transcribed for me a large number of surveys and rentals. How much I owe to their help will be apparent to any one who consults my footnotes and references. Among those who have aided me with advice and information I must mention Professor Vinogradoff, Professor Unwin, and Professor Powicke, the late Miss Toulmin Smith, Mr. Kenneth Leys, Mr. F.W. Kolthammer, Lieut.-Colonel Fishwick, Dr. G.H. Fowler, and the Hon. Gerard Collier. Especially great are my obligations to Mr. R.V. Lennard and Mr. H. Clay, who have read through the whole of the following pages in manuscript or in proof, and who have helped me with numberless criticisms and improvements.
In conclusion I owe two debts which are beyond acknowledgment. The first is to my wife, who has collaborated with me throughout, and without whose constant assistance this book could not have been completed. The second is to the members of the Tutorial Classes conducted by Oxford University, with whom for the last four years it has been my privilege to be a fellow-worker. The friendly smitings of weavers, potters, miners, and engineers, have taught me much about problems of political and economic science which cannot easily be learned from books.
R.H.T.
Manchester, April 1912.
THE AGRARIAN PROBLEM IN
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
INTRODUCTION
Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. The economist can watch the reaction of growing markets on the methods of subsistence farming, the development of competitive rents, the building up of the great estate, and the appearance, or at any rate the extension, of the tripartite division into landlord, capitalist farmer, and landless agricultural labourer, the peculiar feature of English rural society which has been given so much eulogy in the eighteenth century and so much criticism in our own. From a legal point of view the great feature of the period is the struggle between copyhold and leasehold, and the ground gained by the latter. Before the century begins, leases for years, though common enough on the demesne lands and on land taken from the waste, are the exception so far as concerns the land of the customary tenants. When the century closes, leasehold has won many obstinately resisted triumphs; much land that was formerly held by copy of court roll is held by lease; and copyhold tenure itself, through the weakening of manorial custom, has partially changed its character. The copyholders, though still a very numerous and important class, are already one against which the course of events has visibly begun to turn, and economic rent, long intercepted and shared, through the fixity of customary tenure, between tenant and landlord under the more elastic adjustments of leasehold and competitive fines, begins to drain itself into the pockets of the latter. Politically, one can see different views of the basis of wealth in conflict, that which measures it by the number of tenants “able to do service” contending with that which tests it by the maximum pecuniary returns to be got from an estate, and which treats the number of tenants as quite a subordinate consideration. The former is the ideal of philosophical conservatives, is supported, for military and social reasons, by the Government, and survives long in the North; the latter is that of the new landed proprietors, and wins in the South.
And its victory results in much more than a mere displacement of tenants. It means ultimately a change in the whole attitude towards landholding, in the doctrine of the place which it should occupy in the State, and in the standards by which the prosperity of agriculture is measured, drawing a line between modern English conceptions and those of the sixteenth century as distinct as that which exists between those of the Irish peasantry and Irish landlords, or between the standpoint of a French peasant and that of the agent of a great English estate. The decline of important classes alters the balance of rural society, though the Crown for a long time tries to maintain it, and the way is prepared both for the economic and political omnipotence which the great landed aristocracy will exercise over England as soon as the power of the Crown is broken, and for the triumph of the modern English conception of landownership, a conception so repugnant both to our ancestors and to the younger English communities,[1] as in the main a luxury of the richer classes. If it had not been for the undermining of the small farmer’s position in the sixteenth century, would the proposal[2] to enfranchise copyholders have been thrown out in 1654, and would the enclosures[3] of the eighteenth century have been carried out with such obstinate indifference to the vested interests of the weaker rural classes? Would England have been unique among European countries in the concentration of its landed property, and in the divorce of its peasantry from the soil?
From a wider point of view the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century may be regarded as a long step in the commercialising of English life. The growth of the textile industries is closely connected with the development of pasture farming, and it was the export of woollen cloth, that “prodigy of trade,$rdquot; which first brought England conspicuously into world-commerce, and was the motive for more than one of those early expeditions to discover new markets, out of which grew plantations, colonies, and empire. Dr. Cunningham[4] has shown that the system of fostering the corn trade, which was embodied in the Corn Bounty Act of 1689, and which was a principle of English policy long after the reason for it had disappeared, was adopted in a milder form in the reign of Elizabeth with the object of checking the decline in the rural population. Again, new agricultural methods were a powerful factor in the struggle between custom and competition, which colours so much of the economic life of the period, and, owing to this fact, they produced reactions which spread far beyond their immediate effect on the classes most closely concerned with them. The displacement of a considerable number of families from the soil accelerated, if it did not initiate, the transition from the mediæval wage problem, which consisted in the scarcity of labour, to the modern wage problem, which consists in its abundance. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries municipal[5] authorities were engaged in a prolonged struggle to enforce their exclusive economic privileges against the rural immigrant who had lost his customary means of livelihood and who overcrowded town dwellings and violated professional byelaws; while the Government prevented him from moving without a licence, and when he moved, straitened[6] his path between the Statute of Inmates on the one hand and the House of Correction on the other. Observers were agreed that the increase in pauperism[7] had one capital cause in the vagrancy produced by the new agrarian régime; and the English Poor Law system, or the peculiar part of it providing for relief of the able-bodied, which England was the first of European countries to adopt, came into existence partly as a form of social insurance against the effect of the rack rents and evictions, which England was the first of European countries to experience. Whatever uncertainty attaches to the causes and effects of the agrarian problem, there can be no doubt that those who were in the best position to judge thought it highly important. If it is not a watershed separating periods, it is at least a high range from which both events and ideas descend with added velocity and definiteness. To the economic historian the ideas are as important as the events. For though conceptions of social expediency are largely the product of economic conditions, they acquire a momentum which persists long after the circumstances which gave them birth have disappeared, and act as over-ruling forces to which, in the interval between one great change and another, events themselves tend to conform.
A consideration of these great movements naturally begins with those contemporary writers who described them. Though the books and pamphlets of the age contain much that is of interest in the development of economic theory, their writers rarely attempted to separate economic from other issues, and economic speculation usually took the form of discussions upon particular points of public policy, or of a casuistry prescribing rules for personal conduct in difficult cases. Such a difficult case, such a problem of public policy, was offered by the growth of competitive methods of agriculture. The moral objections felt to the new conditions caused them to be a favourite subject with writers of sermons and pamphlets, and made the sins of the encloser, like those of the usurer, one of the standbys of the sixteenth century preacher. There is, therefore, a considerable volume of writings dealing with the question from the point of view of the teacher of morality. At the same time the political significance of the movement, and the fact that the classes concerned were important enough to elicit attempts at protection on the part of the Government, called forth a crop of suggestions and comments like those of More, Starkey,[8] Forest,[9] the author of the Commonwealth[10] of England, and, at a later date, Powell[11] and Moore.[12] Further, the new agricultural methods were explained by persons interested in the economics of agriculture, such as Fitzherbert,[13] Tusser,[14] Clarkson,[15] who surveyed the manors of the Earl of Northumberland in 1567, Humberstone[16] who did the same for those of the Earl of Devonshire, and Norden.[17] The accounts of surveyors, a dull but indispensable tribe, are reliable, as they are usually statements of facts which have occurred within their own experience, or at any rate, generalised descriptions of such facts. The same may be said of the evidence of John Hales, who was employed by the Government in investigating the question, and who had to explain it in such a way as to convince opponents, and to get legislation on this subject through a bitterly hostile Parliament. The description given by writers like Latimer,[18] Crowley,[19] and Becon[20] are valuable as showing the way in which the movement was regarded by contemporaries; but they are mainly somewhat vague denunciations launched in an age when the pulpit was the best political platform, and their very positiveness warns one that they are one-sided and must be received with caution. Still, they mark out a field for inquiry, and one may begin by setting out the main characteristics of the agrarian changes as pictured in their writings.
The movement originates, they agree, through the covetousness[21] of lords of manors and large farmers, who have acquired capital in the shape of flocks of sheep, and who, by insisting on putting the land to the use most profitable to themselves, break through the customary methods of cultivation. The outward sign of this is enclosing, the cutting adrift of a piece of land from the common course of cultivation in use, by placing a hedge or paling round it, and utilising it according to the discretion of the individual encloser, usually with the object of pasturing sheep. This is accompanied by land speculation and rack-renting, which is intensified by the land-hunger which causes successful capitalists,[22] who have made money in trade, to buy up land as a profitable investment for their savings, and by the sale of corporate property which took place on the dissolution[23] of the monasteries and the confiscation of part of the gild estates. The consequence is, first, that there is a scarcity of agricultural produce and a rise[24] in prices, which is partly (it is supposed) attributable to the operations of the great graziers who control the supplies of wool, grain, and dairy produce, and secondly and more important that the small cultivator suffers in three ways. Agricultural employment is lessened. Small holdings are thrown[25] together and are managed by large capitalists, with the result that he is driven off the land, either by direct eviction, or by a rise in rents and fines, or by mere intimidation. At the same time the commonable[26] area, consisting of the common waste, meadow, and pasture of the manor is diminished, with the result that the tenants who are not evicted suffer through loss of the facilities which they had previously had for grazing beasts without payment. There is, in consequence, a drift into the towns and a general lowering in the standard of rural life, due to the decay of the class which formerly sent recruits to the learned professions, which was an important counterpoise to the power of the great landed proprietors, and which was the backbone of the military forces of the country.[27]
The picture drawn by the literary authorities suggests questions, some of which have been satisfactorily cleared up and some of which are still obscure. Dissertations as to method are usually more controversial than profitable, and we do not propose at this point to give any detailed account of the order in which these problems have been taken up by previous scholars, to pass any judgment upon the different kinds of evidence which they have used, or to offer any estimate of the value of their conclusions. If we are at all successful in our presentation of the subject, the reader will discover for himself the nature of the evidence upon which we have relied, and where we differ from and agree with the treatment of other writers. All we can attempt here is to give a short statement of some of the principal issues which demand attention, a statement which does not pretend to be exhaustive, but which may serve to indicate the more salient features of the ground over which we shall travel.
As to the counties mainly affected by the agrarian changes there is now substantial agreement. The work of Mr. Leadam[28] and Professor Gay[29] seems to have put the geographical distribution of the movement towards enclosure, or at least of those enclosures which produced hardships, upon a fairly firm basis. We can say with some confidence that it mainly affected the Midlands and eastern counties, from Berkshire and Oxfordshire in the south to Lincoln and Norfolk in the north-east, and that it was least important in the south-western counties of Cornwall and Devon, and in the south-eastern counties of Kent and Essex, much of which had been enclosed before the sixteenth century began, and in the northern counties of Lancashire, Westmoreland, Cumberland, Northumberland, and Durham, though, by the end of the sixteenth century, parts of the two latter counties, at any rate, were considerably affected by it. Again, the same authors have offered a statistical estimate of the extent of the movement which, while it is manifestly defective, and while it can only be used with great caution to support arguments as to the practical effect of enclosures, does offer some guide to the imagination, and is, at least, a valuable check on the conjectures made by contemporaries without any statistics at all and on a basis merely of their personal impressions. Finally, the difficult question of the security of copyhold tenants as against the landlords who desired to evict them seems to have been put in the right perspective by the evidence which Dr. Savine[30] has adduced to prove that, in the case of copyholds of inheritance, a plaintiff who could show a clear title could get legal redress.
On the other hand, certain points must still be pronounced highly obscure. The first is a simple one. The agrarian changes are usually summed up under the name of “Enclosure.” But what exactly did enclosing mean? Contemporary writers represent it as almost always being carried out by lords and large farmers against the interests of the smaller tenantry. But there is abundant proof that the tenants themselves enclosed; and as they can hardly be supposed to have been forward in initiating changes which damaged their own prospects, ought we not to begin by drawing a distinction between the piecemeal enclosures made by the peasantry, often after agreement between neighbours, from which they hoped to gain, and the great enclosures made by lords of manors from which the peasants obviously lost? Further, different authorities assign different degrees of importance to different aspects of the movement. Mr. Johnson[31] holds, for example, that the enclosure of the common waste, as distinct from the enclosure of the arable fields, was relatively unimportant. Such a view, however, is not easily reconciled with the constant complaints which relate clearly to the enclosing of common wastes and pastures and with the state of things depicted in the surveys.[32] Again, the writings of the period speak as though the movement were mainly one from arable to pasture farming. But this was questioned as long ago as the first thorough study of the question—that of Nasse[33]—and the doubts which he threw on their view of the problem are supported by Mr. Leadam by means of the statistics which he has drawn from the returns of the Commission of 1517, though his conclusions are in their turn disputed by Professor Gay. In fact no one who examines the picture given by the Commissions and by surveys and field maps can help feeling that the word “enclosing,” used by contemporaries as though it bore its explanation on its face, covered many different kinds of action and has a somewhat delusive appearance of simplicity.
Moreover, who gained and who suffered by the enclosures, and to what extent? If the movement deserves to be called an agrarian revolution, it was certainly one which left a great many holders of small landed property intact, and perhaps even improved their position. Otherwise we can hardly account for the optimistic description of them, or of some of them, which is given in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by writers like Harrison,[34] Norden,[35] and Fuller,[36] or for the part which this class played in the Civil War. Nor can we say with confidence how the statistical evidence derived by Mr. Leadam and Professor Gay from the reports of Royal Commissions should be interpreted. The comparative smallness of the percentage of land which the Commissioners returned as enclosed has led to the view[37] that the importance of the whole movement was grossly exaggerated by the writers of the period, who created a storm in a tea-cup over changes which really affected only an inconsiderable proportion of the whole country. If this is so, it is not easy to explain either the continuous attention which was paid to the question by the Government, or the revolts of the peasantry, or the strong views of reasonable and fair-minded men with first-hand knowledge, such as John Hales.
There is obscurity not only as to the details, but as to the outlines of the movement. Different views have been expressed as to its origin, duration, and points of maximum intensity. Professor Ashley[38] puts the period of most rapid change from about 1470 to 1530. But these dates cannot be taken as in any way fixed. The greatest popular outcry[39] against enclosing occurred about the middle of the sixteenth century, in the years 1548 to 1550. As Miss Leonard[40] has shown, there was much enclosing in the seventeenth century, and about 1650[41] there was a crop of pamphlets against it similar in tone to the protests which occurred almost exactly a century before. It is especially difficult to determine how far back the movement should be carried. The first statute[42] against it, that of 1489, is an obvious landmark. But has it not been too readily accepted as an earlier limit? Hales[43] said that most of the “destruction of towns" had taken place before the beginning of the reign of Henry VII. The allusion to enclosing in the Chancellor’s[44] speech to Parliament in 1483 shows that the movement must have already obtained considerable dimensions. Rous[45] had petitioned Parliament on the subject of depopulation in 1459, and in his History, which was published sometime between that date and 1486, he returned to the charge with a detailed account of the destruction of villages in his own county of Warwickshire. More convincing than either, the records of Manorial Courts[46] prove that the consolidation of holdings and collisions between the interests of commoners and sheep-farmers were quite common early in the fifteenth century. One may perhaps pause to remark that the question of the antecedent conditions, out of which the rapid agricultural changes of the sixteenth century arose, is a very important one, and the more important the more far-reaching those changes are thought to have been. It is surely incredible that the conversion of land to pasture, the growth of large pasture estates, and the eviction of customary tenants, should have occurred to the extent described, unless considerable minor changes preceded them, and without some premonitory rumblings to suggest the coming storm. In economic affairs new lines of organisation usually start on a small scale before they attain dimensions sufficiently striking to attract attention; and one would expect to be able to trace the leading motives of the agrarian changes of the Tudor period far back in the fifteenth century and even earlier, and that they would throw light on the nature of the subsequent movements. There is, further, some difference of opinion as to the causes which forced the agrarian problem to the front. Some contemporary authorities attribute it mainly to the growth of the woollen industry,[47] and in this they have been followed by most subsequent writers. On the other hand, the direct evidence supplied by price statistics seems to be not altogether reliable,[48] and in any case the woollen industry had been steadily growing for a hundred years before the complaints as to enclosure become general. This has led Dr. Hasbach[49] to argue that the change in agricultural methods was due less to the high price of wool than to the low price of grain, which was artificially reduced by the restrictions imposed on export under the Tudors, and which he holds to have produced such a fall in rent as to result in the adoption of pasture-farming. Other writers have emphasised the revolutionary effect of the general depreciation in the value of money[50] and the consequent growth of commercialism in the relations between landlord and tenant.
Finally, one may ask what was the effect of legislation against pasture-farming and evictions, and of the frequent administrative interference by which the Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to check them. On a first view, at any rate, the whole history of the policy pursued in this matter, with one short interval from the autumn of 1549 to 1553, constitutes surely one of the most remarkable attempts to control changing economic conditions by Government action which has ever been made. Whether successful or unsuccessful, it throws much light on the ideas of the period with regard to the place in the State which should be occupied by the landholding classes, on the relative advantages from a political standpoint of large and small farming, and on the administrative machinery of Government. The opinion generally[51] adopted seems to be that the Acts forbidding conversion were entirely ineffective, and that the Government, if sincere, was outmanœuvred by the Local Authorities, whose duty it was to administer the laws, and whose interest lay in preventing their administration. Much evidence may be cited in support of this view. On the other hand, we have clear proof of the Council interfering on some occasions with apparent success; and further, it seems necessary to discriminate between the policies of different periods. One cannot argue, for example, that because the statutes protecting the poorer classes were not carried out by the rapacious oligarchy of adventurers which governed England from the fall of Somerset to 1553, therefore they were never used effectively in the reigns of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, or of the first two Stuarts. Nor would one be right in assuming the existence in the sixteenth century of the identity of interest and policy between the great landlords and the Government which characterised the period from 1688 to 1832. One’s conclusion on the whole question must depend less on direct evidence as to the success of the particular measures, which, in the nature of things, is not easily obtainable, than on the opinion which one forms of the degree of importance which the statesmen of the period assigned to the class of small cultivators, and of the ability of the Central Government to get its policy executed.
Such are some of the questions which are suggested by even a cursory survey of the agrarian problem. There are others which are less susceptible of summary statement, but which involve issues that are of some importance for the interpretation of economic history. Granted that it was inevitable that the subsistence husbandry of the mediæval village should give way to capitalist agriculture, in what light are we to regard the changes by which that great transformation was brought about? Ought we to think of the open field system as altogether incompatible with any improvement in agricultural technique, as the miracle of squalid perversity which it has appeared to some writers both of our own and of earlier ages, and as requiring the bitter discipline of pasture farming and evictions to shake it out of its deep rut of custom, and to make room for more progressive methods? Or are we to view it as permitting a good deal of mobility, and as already slowly developing a less rigid and cumbrous organisation when it was partially overwhelmed by rapid, and for the mass of the peasantry disastrous, changes? What place ought the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century to be given in that transition from mediæval to modern conditions of agriculture which, starting in England, has spread eastwards through almost every European country, and which is beginning to-day even in India. How far does it compare and contrast with the enclosures of the period succeeding the fall of the Stuarts, and with the analogous developments which have taken place on the continent, and how far does it present special features peculiar to itself? What were the relations between it and other aspects of national life? Have the economic changes which took place in the world of agriculture any reflex in the social and political changes occurring in the century which divides the Reformation from the Civil War? How far did the redistribution of property which they effected contribute to the decline in the condition of the poorer classes which, according to most writers, took place in the sixteenth century, and to the creation of the commercial aristocracy whose influence becomes so pronounced after the Restoration? What was the result of these material developments in the realm of legal and economic ideas? Ought we to minimise the communalism of the mediæval village? Or should we think of the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century as really a new and decided movement in the direction of economic individualism, a long step towards the growth of modern ideas of land ownership and of the right of the individual to follow unfettered his own discretion in matters of economic enterprise, which gather weight at the end of the seventeenth, and come to their own at the end of the eighteenth, century?
We cannot pretend to answer these questions. We leave them as riddles for the reader, with the words which a sixteenth century economist prettily prefaces to his analysis of the chief economic problems of his age:—“And albeit ye might well saye that there be men of greater witte then I; yet fools (as the proverb is) speake some times to the purpose, and as many headdes, so many wittes ... and though eche of theise by them selves doe not make perfitte the thing, yet when every man bringeth in his guifte, a meane witted man maye of the whole (the best of everie mans devise beinge gathered together) make as it were a pleasant garland and perfitte.”[52]
In the following pages we shall deal with our subject in the following order: Chapter I. of Part I. will describe the chief classes of tenants as they are set out in rentals and surveys, and in particular the freeholders and customary tenants who formed the bulk of the landholders. Chapters II., III. and IV. will discuss in some detail the economic positions of the customary tenants both before and during the sixteenth century, the reasons for supposing that there had been a considerable growth in the prosperity of many of them before our period begins, and the gradual modification in the customary conditions of rural life, as illustrated both by the growth of competitive payments on those parts of the manor which were least controlled by custom, and by the attempts made by the peasantry themselves to overcome by enclosure the difficulties attaching to the methods of open field cultivation. Chapter I. of Part II. will examine the reason which led to more rapid changes in agricultural methods in the sixteenth century, and the growth of the large leasehold farms upon which these changes can be most easily traced. Chapters II. and III. will discuss the reaction of these changes upon the peasantry and the question of the nature and security of their tenure. Chapter I. of Part III. will explain their political and social importance and the policy of the State towards them. In Chapter II. we shall endeavour to offer a summary of our main conclusions.[Next Chapter]
CONTENTS
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40336/40336-h/40336-h.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment