The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century Part 31

In 1606 we get what may be called the first Enclosure Act of the modern pattern, under which certain Herefords.h.i.+re parishes are allowed to separate and enclose one-third of the land lying in common in each parish.[732] In 1627 a case arising out of a dispute about fold-courses comes before the courts, and sound agricultural doctrine is laid down with a confidence of which Arthur Young himself might have approved.

"This Court," say the judges, "was now of opinion that the plowing and sowing of small quant.i.ties of land dispersedlye or disorderlye within ye shacks and winter feedinge of ye said ffouldcourses, and the refusal of a few wilfull persons to lett ye owners of ffouldcourses have their quillets of land (Llying intermixt in the places where ye sheep pasture is layd) upon indifferent exchange or other recompense for the same, are things very mischievous and will tend to ye overthrow of very many fould courses."[733] Their opinion is enforced with a judgment decreeing an exchange of lands.

[728] _S. P. D._, Ch. I., cl., No. 7.

[729] _S. P. D._, ccclxi., No. 15: "There are many thousand acres of heath and barren commons in England and Wales, not annually worth 6d. an acre, to which your Majesty has right of soil but no benefit thereby, which may be improved to a great value, cause plenty of provision, enrich many thousands, supply the poor."

[730] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, Modern Times, Part I., pp. 112-119.

[731] 39 Eliz., c. 2.

[732] 4 James I., c. 11.

[733] _Original Papers of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society_, 1907, pp. 70-73.

When the whole question comes up again towards the close of the Commonwealth, the old att.i.tude is maintained by the opponents of enclosure, who protest, with all the fervour of Latimer, against the greed of landlords and the pauperising of commoners. But its defenders have overhauled their arguments, and the lines on which the controversy will be fought out for the next century and a half are already obvious.

In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Restoration commoners are lewd people, who would be much better employed if at work for wages. All beneath the "n.o.bility and gentry" are "the poor," and the poor themselves (it is well known) are of two kinds, "the industrious poor,"

who make a living by working for their betters, and "the idle poor," who make a living by working for themselves. Christianity and patriotism require that the latter should enter some "productive employment," and this can best be secured by excluding them from the commons on which their distressingly irregular livelihood depends. Even so Europeans to-day teach habits of industry to the African savage, by taxing him until he can no longer live upon the lands which Europeans desire to exploit. Moreover, the commercial spirit of the later seventeenth century is impatient of antiquated restrictions, and is already groping blindly after some formula which may prove them to be superfluous.

Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is best suited to produce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him a free hand to produce it. "It is an undeniable maxim," writes a pamphleteer, "that every one by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage.

Whensoever corn bear a considerable rate, viz., wheat four or five s.h.i.+llings, and barley two s.h.i.+llings and sixpence, men may make more profit by ploughing their pasture, and consequently will plough for their own advantage."[734] Hales had said something like this a hundred years before. He had said it to show the need of special measures to divert agricultural enterprise into beneficial channels. Now an ident.i.ty between the interests of landowners and those of the public is a.s.sumed as part of a pre-established harmony, which human intervention may disturb, but which it is neither needed nor competent to secure.

Authoritative statecraft fades out in the dawn of reason and the light of nature. With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men are steering for uncharted waters.

[734] Lee, _A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure_, 1656.

While opinion on the subject of enclosing was beginning to change even before the Civil War, the final blow at the maintenance of the old policy was struck by the destruction of the Court of Requests and Court of Star Chamber. The abandonment by Governments of all attempts to protect the peasantry against oppression was an indirect consequence of the victory of the Common Law over the prerogative jurisdiction of the Crown. The interference in agrarian matters of the administrative courts of the Tudor monarchy had always been detested by the landed gentry for the very reasons which made it popular with the peasantry. They were the last resort of men who could not get what they considered justice elsewhere. One finds a defendant in whose favour the Common Law Courts have given three decisions being sued again before the Court of Requests.[735] They were the only authority which could prevent a landlord from a.s.serting his claims to a common or to a copyhold by means which the poorer cla.s.ses found it impossible to resist. Complaints from aggrieved landowners that they are undermining the right of the lord of the manor to exercise jurisdiction over his own copyholders, by trying cases which ought to be heard in manorial courts, that they are interfering with the course of Common Law, that they make it impossible for a lord to "rule his lands" by the countenance which they lend to discontent, are not infrequent[736] in the sixteenth century, and both Wolsey and Somerset were in turn attacked by the upper cla.s.ses for the favour which they showed to such unconst.i.tutional interference with the rights of property. Such protests are the best proof that the Court of Requests and the Court of Star Chamber had exercised functions which were in some respects beneficial. The strictest const.i.tutionalist will have some sympathy to spare for the address in which Lord Coventry in 1635 charges the Judges of a.s.size to "beware of the corruptions of sheriffs and their deputies, partiality of jurors, the bearing and siding with men of power and countenance in their country," and to set on foot "strict inquiry after depopulation and enclosures, an oppression of a high nature and commonly done by the greatest persons that keep the juries under their awe, which was the cause there are no more presented and brought in question."[737] Such words paint the ideal of Government by prerogative, _parcere subjectis et debellare superbos_, which may have floated before the minds of a Bacon or a Strafford, and which had been partially realised under the Government of Elizabeth. When set side by side with the actual practice of the Council under Charles I. they are its final and self-recorded condemnation. For we look for them to be made good in action, and we look, save during a few years, in vain. If much may be forgiven those who boldly do wrong believing it to be right, there is no mercy for "the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin" of a body which, believing a certain system of government to be right, entangles its execution with sloth, and makes a sordid financial instrument out of the very prerogative which itself has declared to be the gift of G.o.d for the protection of the poor. The defence which the Council and its courts had offered to the peasantry against economic evils, though real, was too irregular to do more than slightly mitigate the verdict which history has pa.s.sed upon their employment in the hands of Charles I.

Whether the peasants regretted their disappearance we do not know. To those contemporaries whose opinion counted, the occasional onslaughts made by the Council and Star Chamber upon enclosing landlords were an aggravation, not an extenuation, of the indictment brought against them.

Though the Grand Remonstrance, in which the Long Parliament sought to unite all cla.s.ses with a recital of grievance acc.u.mulated upon grievance, taunted the Government with its failure to check the conversion of arable land to pasture,[738] the authors of that tremendous indictment had no subst.i.tute to suggest for the interference by the Council with "freeholds, estates, suits, and actions," which they denounced; and Laud, who, according to even a friendly critic, "did a little too much countenance the Commission for Depopulation,"[739] lived to be reminded in the day of his ruin of the sharp words with which he had barbed the fine imposed by that body upon an enclosing landlord.[740] The Court of Requests was never formally abolished, but from the closing decade of the sixteenth century it had been gradually stripped of its powers by prohibitions issued by the Common Law Judges, and forbidding plaintiffs to proceed with their cases before it, and after 1642 it quietly disappeared. With the destruction in 1641 of the Court of Star Chamber and the Councils of Wales and of the North, an end was put to the last administrative organs which could bridle the great landed proprietors. Clarendon, himself a relic of an age before the deluge, would seem to have added to his other offences by trying to revive the old policy in a world which would have none of it.[741] But the royalist squirearchy who in 1660 streamed back to their plundered manors, were, when their property was at stake, as sound const.i.tutionalists as Hampden himself, and after 1688 that absorption of the "State" by "Society" which Gneist, a wors.h.i.+pper of the eighteenth century regime, dates with curious perversity from 1832, was, in his sense of the words, complete. Henceforward there was to be no obstacle to enclosure, to evictions, to rack-renting, other than the shadowy protection of the Common Law; and for men who were very poor or easily intimidated, or in enjoyment of rights for which no clear legal t.i.tle could be shown, the Common Law, with its expense, its packed juries, its strict rules of procedure, had little help. Thus the good side of the Absolute Monarchy was swept away with the bad. Its epitaph was written by Locke:[742]--"The supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent." But it was forgotten as soon as it was written. For to the upper cla.s.ses in the eighteenth century the possession of landed property by a poor man seemed in itself a surprising impertinence which it was the duty of Parliament to correct, and Parliament responded to the call of its relatives outside the House with the pious zeal of family affection.

[735] Holkham MSS., Sparham Bdle., No. 5, see back, p. 374.

[736] Selden Society, _Select Cases in the Court of Requests_, Customarye Tenants of Bradford _v._ Fraunceys: "The seyd defendant seythe that the said bill of complaint ... is mater ... determinable at the comen land and not in this honourable court, whereunto he prayeth to be remitted." Also Gairdner, _L.

& P. Henry VIII._, i., 334, Earl of Derby to Cromwell; and Leadam, _E. H. R._, vol. viii. pp. 684-696. For attacks on Wolsey's land policy see Herbert, _History of King Henry VIII._, pp. 297-298 (ed. of 1672): "Also the said Cardinal hath examined divers and many matters in the Chancery, after judgment thereof given at the Common Law, in subversion of your laws, and made some persons restore again to the other party condemned that they had in execution by virtue of the judgment in the Common Law."

[737] Gardiner, _History of England_, 1603-1642, vol. viii., p.

78. Compare the Instructions for the President and Council of the North, 1603 (Prothero, _Statutes and Const.i.tutional Doc.u.ments_, 1558-1625, pp. 363-378), Article XXVIII.: "Further our pleasure is that the said Lord P. and Council shall from time to time make diligent and effectual inquisition of the wrongful taking in of commons and other grounds and the decay of tillage and of towns or houses of husbandry contrary to the laws,... and leaving all respect and affection apart they shall take such order for redress of enormities used in the same as the poor people be not oppressed and forced to go begging ...

and ... if they find any notorious malefactor in this behalf of any great wealth, cause the extremity of the law to be executed against him publicly."

[738] Gardiner, _Const.i.tutional Doc.u.ments of the Puritan Revolution_, 1625-1660, pp. 212-213, "Conversion of arable into pasture, continuance of pasture, under the name of depopulation, have driven many millions out of the subject's purses, without any considerable profit to his Majesty."

[739] Clarendon's _History of the Rebellion_, I. 204, IV. 63.

Clarendon's account of the Grand Remonstrance suggests that the princ.i.p.al grievance was not depopulation, but the fines exacted for it; see the words "with the vexations upon pretence of nuisances in building ... and of depopulation, that men might pay fines to continue the same misdemeanour."

[740] Appendix I., No. VIII.

[741] I make this statement on the authority of Dr. Slater, _Sociological Review_, vol. iv., No. 4, p. 349, but I have been unable to trace his evidence. The only reference I can find bearing on the subject is contained in Article XIII. of the heads of the accusation against Lord Clarendon: "That he hath in an arbitrary way examined and drawn into question divers of his Majesty's subjects concerning their lands, tenements, goods, chattells, and properties, determined thereof at the Council Table, and stopped proceedings at law by the order of the Council Table, and threatened some that pleaded the Statute of 17 Car. I." (The proceedings in the House of Commons touching the impeachment of Edward, late Earl of Clarendon, 1700.)

[742] Locke, _Two Treatises of Government_, Book II., chap. xi.

CHAPTER II

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

Those who have had the patience to follow the detailed changes in rural organisation which have been described above will naturally ask, "What is the upshot of it all? What are the main landmarks which stand out from the bewildering variety of scenery? How does the agrarian England which is sleepily hunting out old guns and older bows on the eve of the Civil War differ from the England which saw the first Tudor 'with general applause and joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted King?'"

At first sight it differs but little. To see our subject in its proper perspective we must emphasise the continuity of economic life between 1485 and 1642 as much as in the preceding pages we have emphasised the novelty of some of its experiments. We must turn from Fitzherbert and Hales to Arthur Young. We must set Latimer's lamentations over the decay of the yeomanry side by side with the figures of Gregory King and the boasts of Chamberlayne and Defoe. We must compare our sporadic enclosures with the two thousand six hundred Enclosure Acts which were pa.s.sed between 1702 and 1810. The outward appearance of many English villages at the Revolution would be quite unrecognisable to-day, but it can have been but little altered from what it had been at the time of the Peasants' Revolt. It could still be said that three-fifths of the cultivated land of England was unenclosed. And if Piers Plowman had dreamed for four centuries on Malvern Hills he might still have woken to plough his half acre between the balks of a still open field, like that "very wide field," with crooked ways b.u.t.ting upon it and a wicket-gate on its s.h.i.+ning horizon, through which Christian sped from Evangelist, crying "Life, Life, Eternal Life."

Ought we, then, to say that the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century was insignificant, and that it has been magnified into importance only by the rhetorical complaints of unskilful observers? The answer has been given by implication in the preceding pages. The fact that statistical evidence reveals no startling disturbance in area enclosed or population displaced, is no bar to the belief that, both in immediate consequences and in ultimate effects, the heavy blows dealt in that age at the traditional organisation of agriculture were an episode of the first importance in economic and social development. The barometer which registers climatic variations yields no clue to their influence on the human const.i.tution, and the quant.i.tative rule by which we measure economic changes bends in our hands when we use it to appraise their results. The difference between prosperity and distress, or enterprise and routine, or security and its opposite, is scarcely more susceptible of expression in figures than is the difference between civilisation and barbarism itself. In the infinite complexity of human relations.h.i.+ps, with their interplay of law with economics, and of economics with politics, and of all with the s.h.i.+fting hopes and fears, baseless antic.i.p.ations and futile regrets, of countless individuals, a change which to the statistician concerned with quant.i.ties seems insignificant, may turn a wheel whose motion sets a world of unseen forces grinding painfully round into a new equilibrium. Not only our estimate of the importance of social alterations, but their actual importance itself, depends upon what we are accustomed to and what we expect. Just as modern manufacturing nations groan over a reduction in exports, which in the reign of Henry VIII. would have pa.s.sed unnoticed, or are convulsed by a rise in general prices, which, when expressed in percentages, seems ridiculously small, so the stationary rural society of Tudor England may well have been shaken to its core by agrarian changes which, in a world where rural emigration is the rule, would appear almost too minute to be recorded. If contemporaries, to whom the very foundation of a healthy economic life seemed to be shattered, underestimated the capacity of society for readjustment, they were not mistaken in their supposition that the readjustment required would be so vast and painful as to involve the depression of important orders of men, and the recognition of new responsibilities by the State in the agony of transition. If we are busy planting small holders to-day, it is partly because sixteenth century Governments were so often busy with them in vain. The crude barbarities of tramp ward and workhouse were first struck out in an age when most of those who tramped and toiled, who sat in stocks and were whipped from town to town, were not the victims of trade depression or casual employment, but peasants thrown on the labour market by the agrarian revolution.

For, in truth, the change which was coming upon the world in the guise of mere technical improvements was vaster than in their highest hopes or their deepest despondency the men of the Tudor age could have foreseen, and its immediate effects on the technique of agriculture and the standard of rural prosperity were but the tiny beginnings of movements whose origins are overshadowed by their tremendous consequences. It is a shallow view which has no interest to spare for the rivulet because it is not yet a river. Though many tributaries from many sources must converge before economic society a.s.sumes a shape that is recognisable as modern, it is none the less true that in the sixteenth century we are among the hills from which great waters descend. By 1642 the channels which will carry some of them have been carved deep and sure. By that time the expansion of the woollen industry has made it certain that England will be a considerable manufacturing nation, and consequently that the ancient stable routine of subsistence farming will gradually give place to agricultural methods which swing this way and that, now towards pasture, now towards arable, according to the fluctuations of the market. It is certain that, sooner or later, the new and more profitable economy of enclosure will triumph. It is certain that the small holder will have a hard struggle to hold his own against the capitalist farmer. It is certain that, owing to the subst.i.tution of variable for fixed fines on admission to copyholds, and the conversion of many copyholds into leases for years, a great part of the fruits of economic progress will no longer be retained, as in the fifteenth century, by the ma.s.s of the peasants, but will pa.s.s, in the shape of increased payments for land, into the pockets of the great landed proprietors. It is almost certain that to any new developments which may be detrimental to them the peasants will be able to offer a much less effective resistance than they have in the past. For the security of many of their cla.s.s has been undermined; the gulf which separates them from the landed gentry, though still bridged by the existence of many prosperous freeholders, has been widened; and, above all, the destruction of the absolute monarchy has entrenched the great landlords inexpugnably at the heart of government, both central and local, and has made their power as great as their ambitions. Both from below and from above they are una.s.sailable. For a century and a half after the Revolution they have what power a Government can have to make and ruin England as they please.

If we cast our eye over the agrarian changes of our period, with a view to grouping their main elements under a few easily distinguishable categories, we do not find that they present themselves as a simple series of economic sequences. Behind them all there is, it is true, the fundamental economic fact of the decay of subsistence husbandry. The movement away from the strict communal organisation of the open field village was inevitable as soon as markets were sufficiently developed to make agricultural experiments profitable, because experiments could not easily be undertaken without to some extent individualising the methods of cultivation. In particular, the grand innovation of subst.i.tuting pasture-farming for tillage, whether carried out on a large scale or on a small, was only practicable if individuals were able to break away from the established course of agriculture. But the relaxation of village customs, which allowed a wider scope to individual initiative, did not necessarily involve that formation of large estates out of peasant holdings, which was the special note of the sixteenth century problem, and in fact the gradual nibbling away of customary restrictions went on to some degree among quite small men, long before the enclosure of land by great capitalists became a serious grievance. In the fourteenth century, and even earlier, holdings are becoming partible and unequal, and strips are being interchanged for the purpose of more convenient, because compacter, management. In the sixteenth century there is a good deal of enclosure by the peasants themselves with a view to better arable cultivation or to the more successful keeping of stock.

Nor must we forget the example of Kent, Ess.e.x, Devons.h.i.+re, Somersets.h.i.+re, and Cornwall. Without raising the question whether the predominance of small enclosures in the Western Counties is not partly to be ascribed to peculiarities in their original settlement, we may say without fear of contradiction that the early enclosures of Kent and Ess.e.x are the outcome of the spread of commercial forces in those seaboard counties at an earlier date than was possible in the inland districts. Even in the more conservative parts of the country, like the Midlands and Wilts.h.i.+re, whose geographical position made them the last to respond to the influence of trade its gradual extension was slowly, and in isolated villages, bringing the same departure from the rigid arrangements of mediaeval agriculture which in the East of England had developed much more swiftly. How far such enclosure by consent would have proceeded if no other forces had come into play we cannot say. It is not safe, however, to a.s.sume that, because in the eighteenth century many villages seemed to observers like Arthur Young to be living in a condition of organised torpor, therefore its effects in facilitating a more economical utilisation of the land are to be dismissed as negligible. Quite apart from the obvious bias given to Young's observations by his questionable doctrine that a high pecuniary return from the soil is the final criterion of successful agriculture, it may well be the case that the decline in the condition of the peasantry, which took place in the sixteenth century, discouraged initiative on the part of small men, and that, since one agent in that decline had been a movement which went by the name of enclosure, its effect was to make them cling all the more closely to the established routine in those parts of the country where they had not been violently shaken out of it.

On such conjectures, however, we need not enter. Even if the movement towards the rearrangement of holdings which has been traced among the peasants themselves was insignificant, and if the larger capitalists were the sole agents through whom a more alert and progressive agrarian regime could be introduced, it is none the less the case that the improvements in the technique of agriculture do not by themselves account for the special social consequences which flowed from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. The situation then is not at all similar to that which arose at a later date, when small landholders voluntarily threw up their holdings in order to engage in the more profitable urban industries, and when yeomen like the Peels of their own choice decided that the career of a cotton-spinner was more attractive than that of a farmer. In the period which we have been discussing men do not only leave the land; they are forced off it. Not only economic, but legal, issues are involved, and the latter give a decisive twist to the former. What made the new methods of agriculture not simply an important technical advance in the utilisation of the soil, but the beginning of a social revolution, was the insecurity of the tenure of large numbers of the peasantry, in the absence of which they might gradually have adapted themselves to the altered conditions, without any overwhelming shock to rural life such as was produced by the evictions and by the loss of rights of common. The way in which the economic movement towards enclosure and pasture-farming is crossed, and its consequences heightened, by the law of land tenure, is proved by the comparative immunity of the freeholders from the worst forms of agrarian oppression, by the fact that, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the purely economic conditions of much of England were by no means unfavourable to small scale farming, and by the anxiety of landlords to induce tenants who had estates of inheritance to surrender them for leases. We cannot therefore agree with those writers who regard the decline in the position of the smaller landed cla.s.ses, which took place in our period, as an inevitable step in economic progress, similar to the decay of one type of industry before the compet.i.tion of another.

If economic causes made a new system of farming profitable, it is none the less true that legal causes decided by whom the profits should be enjoyed. We have already pointed out that many customary tenants practised sheep-farming upon a considerable scale, and it is not easy to discover any economic reason why the cheap wool required for the development of the cloth-manufacturing industry should not have been supplied by the very peasants in whose cottages it was carded and spun and woven. The decisive factor, which ruled out this method of meeting the new situation created by the spread of pasture-farming, was the fact that the tenure of the vast majority of small cultivation left them free to be squeezed out by exorbitant fines, and to be evicted when the lives for which most of them held their copies came to an end. It was their misfortune that the protection given by the courts since the fifteenth century to copyholders did not extend to more than the enforcement of existing manorial customs. When, in our own day, the same causes which raised the cry of depopulation in sixteenth century England have operated in other countries, their influence has been circ.u.mscribed by governmental power, which has stepped ready armed into the field, and has turned customary t.i.tles into freeholds and cut back private jurisdictions with a heavy hand. To find a parallel to the sufferings of the English copyholders in the sixteenth century, we must turn to the sweeping invasion of tenant right which at one time made almost every Irishman into a Ket. But the comparison, incomplete in other respects, is most incomplete in this, that even if Tudor Governments, moved by considerations of national strength and order, would have helped the peasants if they could, they could hardly have helped them materially if they would, without a social and administrative revolution which was unthinkable, and which, if carried out, could only have meant political absolutism. Living, as they did, with the marks of villein tenure still upon them, the small cultivators of our period were fettered by the remnants of the legal rightlessness of the Middle Ages, without enjoying the practical security given by mediaeval custom, and felt the bitter breath of modern commercialism, undefended by the protection of the all-inclusive modern State which alone can make it tolerable.

For, indeed, it is as a link in the development of modern economic relations.h.i.+ps and modern conceptions of economic expediency, that the changes which we have been considering possess their greatest interest.

The department of economic life in which, both for good and evil, the modern spirit comes in the sixteenth century most irresistibly to its own, is not agriculture but foreign commerce, company promoting, and the money market, where the relations of man to man are already conceived of as the necessary parts of a vast and complicated mechanism, whose iron levers thrust the individual into actions for the consequences of which he is not responsible, and under whose pressure unknown is driven by unknown to do that which he did not intend. But if the intoxication with dreams of boundless material possibilities, the divorce of economic from moral considerations, the restless experiment and initiative and contempt for restrictions that fetter them, which are the marks of that spirit's operations, are never quite so victorious in agriculture as they are in finance, it is nevertheless in transforming agrarian conditions that its nature and characteristics are most impressively revealed, not because it is felt there first or proceeds there furthest, but because the material which it encounters is so dense, so firmly organised, so intractable, that changes, which in a more mobile environment pa.s.s unnoticed, are seen there in high relief against the stable society which they undermine. In truth the agrarian revolution is but a current in the wake of mightier movements. The new world, which is painfully rising in so many English villages, is a tiny mirror of the new world which, on a mightier stage, is ushering modern history in amid storms and convulsions. The spirit which revolts against authority, frames a science that will subdue nature to its service, and thrusts the walls of the universe asunder into s.p.a.ce, is the same--we must not hesitate to say it--as that which on the lips of grasping landlords and stubborn peasants wrangles over the respective merits of "several" and "common," weighs the profits of pasture in an economic scale against the profits of arable, batters down immemorial customs, and, regarding neither the honour of G.o.d nor the welfare of this realm of England, brings the livings of many into the hands of one. To the modern economist, who uses an ancient field map to trace the bewildering confusion of an open field village beneath the orderly lines of the dignified estate which lies upon it like a well written ma.n.u.script on the crabbed scrawl of a palimpsest, the wastefulness of the old regime, compared with the productiveness of the new, may well seem too obvious to leave room for any discussion of their relative advantages; and indeed the accession of material wealth which followed the first feeble approach towards the methods of modern agriculture is unquestionable.

But the difference between such a standpoint and that of our peasants is not one of methods only but of objects, not of means but of ends. We can imagine that to an exposition of the advantages of large scale farming and enclosure, such as many stewards must have made to the juries of many manors, they would have answered something after this fas.h.i.+on:--"True, our system is wasteful, and fruitful of many small disputes. True, a large estate can be managed more economically than a small one. True, pasture-farming yields higher profits than tillage.

Nevertheless, master steward, our wasteful husbandry feeds many households where your economical methods would feed few. In our ill-arranged fields and scrubby commons most families hold a share, though it be but a few roods. In our unenclosed village there are few rich, but there are few dest.i.tute, save when G.o.d sends a bad harvest, and we all starve together. We do not like your improvements which ruin half the honest men affected by them. We do not choose that the ancient customs of our village should be changed!" Such differences lie too deep to be settled by argument, whether they appear in the sixteenth century or in our own day.

APPENDIX I

(I)

[LETTER FROM A BAILIFF, ILl.u.s.tRATING THE RELATIONS BETWEEN FARMER AND LORD, AND DIFFICULTIES WITH FREEHOLDERS]

_Merton MSS., No. 4381_

Good Sir lett me intreat you yf the colledge determyne to make survay this springe of the lands at Kibworth and Barkby to send Mr. Kay or me word a month or 3 weeks before your coming that we may have Beare and other necessaries. And I desire you to gather up all evidences that may be needful for ye Lords.h.i.+pp, for all testimony will be little enough, the colledge land is soo mingled with Mr. Pochin's frehold and others in our towne. There is an awarde for the keepinge in of the old wol close in our ffields for [from?] Mr. Pochin's occupation, very needefulle for the ynhabitants yf that awarde can be founde at the colledge where yt was loste.

The composition betwixt Mr. Stanford and the towne wold we very gladly see, yt is for tythe willows and partinge gra.s.se, wee thinke that they challenge more than of right they should have. I pray you gather upp what evidence you can for the rents due to the college out of [?], for when some of them are denied I know not where to distraine for them.

I pray you also give order that the evidences may be sought up for the lands lyinge in Barkby Thorpend alias Thurmaston in our parish and parcell of our lords.h.i.+p of the rent per ann. 3/4d. as alsoe the evidences of Peppers frehold rent per annum 1d. This rent is denied and not paidd this 20 yeares, and I cannot learne where I should distraine for the same, neither will he pay it unlesse he may knowe for what he payeth the same; he is towards the land [?], and his frehold lyeth in Thurmaston ut supra. And soe with remembrance of my duty desiringe you to pardon my breach of promise for the lease at last Michaelmas, and I hope before this yeare be ended to be as good as my worde, yf it will please you and the company to spare me with your favours untill then, ffor G.o.d is my judge I did not breake my promise wilfully nor willingly, but necessity hath noe law. I have lost this sum~er 6 horses and was forced to buy in these for my carte. Day [?] groweth scant, therefore I must spare to write, only hoping and desiringe your favour at this tyme I humbly take my leave and rest as I have ever beene your wo{ps} at commandment. Henry Sayer.

Barkby, February 26{th}, 1608.

To the w{ll} his very singular ffriend Mr. Brent subwarden at Merton College in Oxon.

(II)