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 Harry Clowte. Gud conscience should them
move
Ther neighbours quietly to love,
And thus not for to wrynche
The commons styl for to pinch,
To take into their hande
That be other mennes land.

Jack. Thus do I, Jack of the Style,

Now subscrybe upon a tyle.
This I do and will do with all my myght,
For sclaundering me yet do I but right,
For common to common again I restore
Wherever it hath been yet common before.
If agayne they enclose it never so faste
Agayne asondre it shall be wraste.
They may be ware by that is paste
To make it agayne is but waste.”
To take into your hand what is other men’s land, that is the grievance.
To restore common to common again, that is the obvious remedy, a
remedy which is not seriously opposed to the agrarian policy of most
sixteenth century statesmen. But the more far-seeing of the peasants
realise what their followers do not, that these troubles which are
going on in so many different parts of England cannot be dealt with
by isolated bodies of villagers, however good their cause may be.
They require the intervention of the Government. How the
Government is to intervene they lay down in two documents which
are perhaps the only two popular programmes of agrarian reform ever
published in England since 1381. The first, contained in two of the
articles[591] drawn up at Doncaster in 1536, is short enough:—
“That the lands in Westmoreland, Cumberland, Kendall, Dent,
Sedbergh, Furness, and the abbey lands in Mashamshire, Kyrkbyshire,
Notherdale, may be by tenant right, and the lord to have, at every
change, 2 years' rent for gressum, according to the grant now made
by the lords to the commons there. This to be done by Act of
Parliament.
“The Statutes for Enclosures and Intacks to be put in execution, and
all enclosures and Intacks since the fourth year of Henry VII. to be
pulled down, except mountains, forests, and Parks" (a noticeable
exception which shows the composite character of the movement. In
the South of England the peasant did not spare parks).
The articles[592] signed by Ket, Aldryche, and Cod in 1549 are a much
more elaborate affair. Here are the most noteworthy of them:—
“We pray your grace that where it is enacted for enclosing, that it be
not hurtful to such as have enclosed saffren grounds, for they be
greatly chargeable to them, and that from henceforth no man shall
enclose any more.[593]
“We certify your grace that whereas the lords of the mannors hath
been charged with certe fre rent, the same lords hath sought means
to charge the freeholders to pay the same rent, contrary to right.
“We pray your grace that no lord of no manor shall comon uppon the
commons.
“We pray that priests from henceforth shall purchase no lande neither
free nor bondy, and the lands that they have in possession may be
letten to temporal men, as they were in the first year of the reign of
King Henry VII.[594]
“We pray that reed ground and meadow ground may be at such price
as they were in the first year of King Henry VII.

“We pray that the payments of castleward rent, and blanch ferm and
office lands, which hath been accustomed to be gathered of the
tenements, whereas we suppose the lords ought to pay the same to
their bailiffs for their rents gathering, and not the tenants.[595]
“We pray that no man under the degree of a knight or esquire keep a
dove house, except it hath been of an old ancient custom.
“We pray that all freeholders and copyholders may take the profits of
all commons, and there to common, and the lords not to common nor
to take profits of the same.
“We pray that no feudatory within your shires shall be a councellor to
any man in his office making, whereby the King may be truly served,
so that a man being of good conscience may be yearly chosen to the
same office by the commons of the same shire.

“We pray that copyhold land that is unreasonably rented may go as it

did in the first year of King Henry VII., and that at the death of a
tenant or of [at] a sale the same lands to be charged with an easy
fine, as a capon or a reasonable [sum] of money for a remembrance.

“We pray that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free
with his precious bloodshedding.
“We pray that rivers may be free and common to all men for fishing
and passage.

“We pray that the poor mariners or Fishermen may have the whole
profits of their fishings, as porpoises, grampuses, whales, or any great
fish, so it be not prejudicial to your Grace.
“We pray that it be not lawful to the lords of any manor to purchase
land freely, or [and] to let them out again by copy of court roll to their
great advancement and to the undoing of your poor subjects.

“We pray that no man under the degree of ... shall keep any conies
upon any of their freehold or copyhold, unless he pale them in, so
that it shall not be to the common nuisance.

“We pray that your Grace give license and authority by your gracious
commission under your Great Seal to such commissioners as your
poor commons hath chosen, or to as many of them as your Majesty
and your Council shall appoint and think meet, for to redress and
reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and all other your
proceedings, which hath been hidden by your justices of your peace,
shreves, escheators, and other your officers, from your poor
commons, since the first year of the reign of your noble grandfather,
King Henry VII.

“We pray that no lord, knight, esquire, nor gentleman, do graze nor
feed any bullocks or sheep, if he may spend forty pounds a year by
his lands, but only for the provision of his house.”
The programme of the peasants is partly political. The Northerners
insist that Parliament and the Crown must interfere, and the Norfolk
leaders ask for a permanent commission to do the work which the
county justices, who are interested in enclosing, have wilfully
neglected. But it is mainly economic. The State is to do no more than
restore the old usages, and the end of all is to be a sort of idealised
manorial customary enforced by a strong central Government
throughout the length of the land, free use of common lands, reduced
rents of meadow and marsh, reasonable fines for copyholds, free
fisheries, and the abolition of the lingering disability of personal
villeinage. The most striking thing about these demands is their
conservatism. Almost exactly a hundred years later agrarian reform
will be demanded as part of a new heaven and a new earth. Agrarian
agitation will be carried on in terms of theories as to the social
contract, of theories as to the origin of private property. Its leaders
will be appealing to Anglo-Saxon history to prove to the indifferent
ears of a Government which has saved them “from Charles, our
Norman oppressor,” that “England cannot be a free commonwealth,
unless the poore commoners have a use and benefit of the land.”[596]
They will appeal also to a more awful sanction than that of history. “At
this very day,” cries Winstanley,[597] “poor people are forced to work
for 4d. a day and corn is dear, and the tithing-priest stops their
mouths and tells them that 'inward satisfaction of mind' was meant by
the declaration 'the poor shall inherit the earth.' I tell you, the
scripture is to be really and materially fulfilled.... You jeer at the name
of Leveller. I tell you Jesus Christ is the head leveller." Such
communistic doctrines are always the ultimate fruit of the breakdown
of practical co-operation and brotherliness among men. To human
nature, as to other kinds of nature, a vacuum is abhorrent.
But as yet the soil has not been ploughed by a century of political and
religious controversy, and there is little sign of these high arguments
in the social disturbances of our period. The earliest levellers[598] get
their name because they raze not social inequalities but quickset
hedges and park palings. What communism there is in the movement
is not that of the saints or the theorists, but the spontaneous
doctrineless communism of the open field village, where men set out
their fields, and plough, and reap, laugh in the fine and curse in the
wet, with natural fellowship. The middle-class terror of the
appearance in England of the political theories of the German
Peasants' War, though it was forcibly expressed by Sir William
Paget[599] in remonstrating with Somerset's policy in 1549, and
though John Hales thought it worth while to repudiate it, is not
justified by any recorded utterances or programmes which have come
to us. There are, indeed, many verbal similarities between the articles
of Ket and those put out by the German peasants at Memmingen in
1525, which suggest that some refugee from Germany had carried
them with him to the most Protestant county in England. Both, for
example, demand a reduction in rents, the abolition of villeinage, and
free fisheries. But the contrasts are much more striking, and are due
not only to the fact that the onerous villein services which survived in
Germany had become almost nominal in England, but to the
difference in the spirit of their conception, which leads one to appeal
to the New Testament and the other to the customs of the first years
of Henry VII. There is, in fact, the same broad difference between the
peasant movements in England and Germany as there is between the
English and German Reformation. In Germany the ecclesiastical
changes spring from a widespread popular discontent, and are swept
forward on a wave of radical enthusiasm, which carries the peasants
(German Social Democrats are metaphysicians to this day) into the
revolutionary mysticism of Münzer. In England changes in Church
government are forced upon the people by the State, and outside the
South and East of England are regarded with abhorrence. It is not
until the later rise of Puritanism that either religious or economic
radicalism becomes a popular force. In the middle of the sixteenth
century the English peasants accepted the established system of
society with its hierarchy of authorities and division of class functions,
and they had a most pathetic confidence in the Crown. What they
wanted, in the first place, was fair conditions of land tenure, the
restoration of the customary relationships which had protected them
against the screw of commercial competition. When they went further,
they looked for an exercise of Royal Power to reduce to order the
petty tyranny of local magnates, and to carry out the intentions of a
Government which they were inclined to think meant them well, “to
redress and reform all such good laws, statutes, proclamations, and
all other your proceedings which hath been bidden by your justices of
your Peace ... from your poor commons.” Such movements are a
proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit. They are the
outcome of a society where the normal relations are healthy, where
men are attached to the established order, where they possess the
security and control over the management of their own lives which is
given by property, and, possessing this, possess the reality of freedom
even though they stand outside the political state. Happy the nation
whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.
The social disturbances caused by enclosure, with its accompaniments
of rack-renting and evictions, were one cause which compelled the
Governments of our period to give attention to the subject. Though
no direct concessions were made to them, their lessons were not
altogether wasted, because it is plain that they impressed on the
minds of statesmen the idea that to prevent disorder it was necessary
for the State to interfere in favour of tenants. Rural discontent, which
might have been insignificant in an age of greater political stability,
derived a factitious importance from the circumstances of the
sixteenth century, when it might be exploited by a rebellious minority,
which, for all that most men knew, might really be a majority of the
nation, by Yorkist Plotters under Henry VII., religious enthusiasts
under Henry VIII., restorers of a Catholic monarchy, supported by a
Spanish invasion or a Franco-Scottish alliance, under Elizabeth.
Governments so uncertain of their popularity as these had a strong
reason for protecting the class which would be the backbone of a
revolt. One way in which they could secure themselves against the
discontent of the disaffected nobility was to encourage the yeomanry,
who might act as a counterpoise. The way in which self-preservation
and a popular agrarian policy went hand in hand is illustrated by
Burleigh’s cynical advice to Elizabeth to make a practice of supporting
tenants in any quarrel which might arise between them and Catholic
landlords.[600]
But there were other causes as well working in the same direction. No
one who reads the writers by whom the agrarian problem is discussed
can fail to notice that the official view of the proper system of
agrarian relationships was on the whole favourable to the small man,
and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the
demands of the peasants themselves. Not, of course, that the
authorities had any intention of depressing landlords or raising
peasants, but that the whole established system of Government was
based on a certain organisation of social life, and that the
Government tended to maintain that organisation in maintaining itself
and carrying on the work of the State. For this attitude, which is in
striking contrast with the policy of the statesmen of the eighteenth
century when faced with an analogous problem, there were several
practical reasons which we shall do well to understand. In judging the
motives of economic policy in past ages we are even more apt to be
misled by modern analogies than we are in estimating its effects. We
see that in our own day most of the legislative protection accorded to
those who are economically weak has been produced by a
combination of two causes, the political enfranchisement of the wage-
earning classes and the spread of humanitarian sentiment. We know
that in the sixteenth century the first cause was absent and the
second was feeble. The Macchiavellis of that iron age were neither
democrats nor philanthropists; and when they avow a policy of
protecting the weaker classes in society against economic evils we are
inclined to think with Professor Thorold Rogers that they are merely
hypocritical. But this analogy is a false light. To be influenced by it is
to confuse political power with its symbols, and to forget that the
economic importance of a class may be a more effective claim to the
interest of Governments than the ballot-box. Under the Tudors there
were strong practical reasons for protecting the peasantry which are
not felt to the same extent to-day. The modern State has so
specialised its organs that its maintenance is quite compatible with
the existence of the extremes of poverty, not only among the
exceptionally unfortunate, but among those whose position is not
more insecure than that of their neighbours. They may be able
neither to fight, nor to take part in public duties, nor to contribute
much to the Exchequer. But if their incompetence is a menace, it is a
menace which is not felt till after the lapse of generations, a menace
the fulfilment of which no single life is long enough to behold. For the
State hires specialists to fight, and specialists to keep order; indeed,
the poorer they are, the more cheaply it can obtain their services.[601]
Its local government is conducted mainly by specialised officials, and
the concentration of wealth makes possible a concentration of
taxation. The extension of political power has been accompanied by a
subdivision of political functions, which has diminished the importance
of the individual citizen, and turned him, as far as the routine of
Government is concerned, into a sleeping partner, whose consent is
necessary, but whose active co-operation is superfluous.
Now we need not point out that this would be as fair a description of
large classes of persons in the sixteenth century as it is now, and that
the day labourer and handicraftsman who “are to be ruled and not to
rule”[602] were, as a class, far more completely beneath the
consideration of statesmen than they are at the present day. But we
are concerned with the landholding population, not with the landless
wage-earner, and in the slightly differentiated state of our period both
economic and political conditions made a decline in the standard of
life among a class so important as the peasantry a danger which
might cause the most authoritarian of Governments to be confronted
with very grave practical difficulties. It might find itself unable to raise
an effective military force. The States of Continental Europe had
introduced standing armies. But England relied mainly on the shire
levies, and the shire levies were recruited from the small farmers. Just
as the lord of a manor in the North of England, whose tenants held by
border service with horse and harness, was anxious to prevent the
decline in their numbers which landlords elsewhere were welcoming,
so the Government regarded with quite genuine dismay an agrarian
movement which seemed to threaten its military resources by
impoverishing the finest fighting material in the country. Shadow,
Feeble, and Wart may “fill a pit as well as better"; but to make good
infantry it requires not “housed beggars,” but “men bred in some free
and plentiful manner." One Depopulation Statute after another recites
how “the defence of this land against our enemies outward is
enfeebled and impaired.”[603] In the settlement of the North after the
Pilgrimage of Grace the Government took care to instruct its officials
to see that the Northumbrian tenants, on whom the defence of the
border depended, “should be put in comfort, that no more shall be
exacted with gyrsums and like charges, instead of which they shall be
ready with horse and harness when required.”[604] In 1601 Cecil[605]
crushed a proposal to repeal the acts then in force against
depopulation by pointing out that the majority of the militia levies
were ploughmen. And in the instructions for the choice of persons to
be enrolled in the trained bands which were issued by the
Government of Charles I., particular care was taken to emphasise that
they were not to be selected at haphazard, but were to be drawn
from the families of the gentry, freeholders, and substantial farmers.
[606]

This cogent reason for intervening to protect the peasantry was

supported by another which was not less convincing. The classes who
suffered most from enclosure were important from a fiscal, as well as
a military, point of view. In the simple economic life of that age the
connection between the output of wealth and the individual worker's
opportunities for production and standard of subsistence, if not more
important than to-day, was certainly more patent to observation. “The
hole welth of the body of the realm cometh out of the labours and
works of the common peple ... a riche welthy body of a realm maketh
a riche welthy king, and a poore feble body of a realm must needs
make a poore weak feble king.”[607] In our period “pauvre paysans
pauvre royaume, pauvre royaume pauvre roi" was a statement not of
any recondite theory, but of an obvious economic fact, and one can
hardly be mistaken in supposing that part of the favour which
sixteenth century Governments were inclined to show the small
farmer was due to the fact that the methods of taxation in use made
him important as a source of revenue. To a State which relies largely
for its supplies on a direct declaration of income, it is indifferent
whether the total assessable income is made up of a few large or
many small ones; indeed if the tax be a progressive one, most will be
got from the former. But look at the way in which taxation is raised in
the sixteenth century. The chief direct tax is the subsidy. A typical
subsidy, for example that of the first year of Elizabeth,[608] is
assessed partly on the capital value of property, including farm and
trade stock and household furniture, partly on the yearly profits of
land. When a village of small and fairly prosperous cultivators is wiped
out to make room for a large and sparsely populated estate, will the
Government get as large a revenue from direct taxation as before? A
modern reader may very well answer “Yes.” The motive of converting
land to pasture is to increase the profits of agriculture. If they are
increased, does not this mean a corresponding increase in the taxable
wealth of the country? Now to inquire how far one can assume in any
age that the personal interests of landlords will lead to land being put
to its most productive use would take us far beyond the scope of this
essay, and it is unnecessary for our present purpose. For, as far as our
period is concerned, the answer is certainly wrong. Apart from the
subtler reactions of the agrarian changes upon social welfare, there is
then no such identity between the economic interests of the landlord
and the economic interests of the State. Speaking broadly, the former
consist in securing the largest net income, the latter in securing the
largest gross product. And these two things are by no means
necessarily found together. If a pasture farm managed by a shepherd
and his dog is substituted by an enclosing proprietor for several score
of families living by tillage, the rent roll of the estate can hardly fail to
be increased, for the value of wool is so high, and the cost of sheep-
farming so low, that the net income from which rent can be paid is
large. But subsidies are assessed on property, not only on income;
and on personal as well as real property. A rise in rents is quite
compatible with a falling off in the gross produce of the land, and the
conversion of an estate from arable to pasture, by displacing tenants,
means a diminution in the farm stock and household property which
has hitherto contributed towards the revenue.
Lest such a view should seem unduly theoretical, let us hasten to add
that it is one which is endorsed by the authority of contemporaries.
When subsidies are being debated in the House of Commons
members complain that, while the wealthy are under-assessed, the
small men pay more than their share.[609] Political writers from
Fortescue[610] to Bacon[611] emphasise the fact that the ability of the
country to bear taxation depends on the maintenance of a high level
of prosperity among the yeomanry. The yeoman is a man who “makes
a whole line in the subsidy book.”[612] “The weight thereof,” says a
pamphleteer in 1647, “falls heavily ... especially upon the
yeomanry.”[613] The occasional glimpses which we get of harassed
collectors trying in vain to screw taxes out of small farmers, whom a
rise in rents or a bad season has plunged in distress, show the truth
of their accounts. In the reign of Edward VI. subsidies cannot be
collected on the northern border owing to the oppression to which
some of the tenants have been subjected.[614] From Norfolk in 1628
comes a still more melancholy tale. “The ffarmors and such as use
Husbandrye and tilth,” write the Commissioners of the subsidy to the
Government, “from whom in times past was accustomed to be
drawne the greatest part of ye money leviable by way of subsidye,
present unto us their pitiful estates, growen into decay through the
base price and noe vent in these later years for their corne ... that
some of them doo owe unto their landlordes two yeares rent, many of
them one years.... All which considered we much feare that the
collectors shall not gather in the monye soe speedily as they would or
we desire.”[615] The truth is that so much of the wealth of the country
had been in the hands of the more prosperous among the small
cultivators that any decline in their position was likely to place the
Governments of our period in financial straits. They regard it with the
self-interested apprehension which modern statesmen feel lest capital
should be “driven abroad.” Hence there was a strong fiscal motive for
protecting the rural classes. Rebels who pointed out that “A man can
have no more of a cat but the skin; that is the King can have no more
of us than we have, which in a manner he has already,”[616] or
tenants who urged the Crown to protect them on the ground that
“they paie your Majesty subsidies, fifteens, and loans,”[617] were
using language which the impecunious Government of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries could understand much better than
appeals to humanitarian sentiment. The military, financial, and
political importance of the yeomanry was, in fact, great enough to
make them one of the classes with whom the defence and order of
the country were identified, and therefore sufficient to make them an
object of solicitude to statesmen who were concerned with national
interests.
Economic policies are not to be explained in terms of economics
alone. When an old and strong society is challenged by a new
phenomenon, its response is torn from a living body of assumptions
as to the right conduct of human affairs, which feels that more than
material interests are menaced, and which braces itself anxiously
against the shock. The swift agrarian changes of the sixteenth
century differ from the swifter changes of the eighteenth, in that
enlightened opinion is, on the whole, against them, and that even the
technical experts feel misgivings. If the attitude of statesmen is to be
explained by the practical reasons which have already been given, the
opposition of men like More, Latimer, Crowley, Starkey, and Hales
seemed to themselves a plain matter of morals. In Germany Luther
denounced the revolting peasants. In England those who in
ecclesiastical matters were poles apart united in a plea for economic
conservatism. Leading reformers preach and write against enclosing;
and terrified landlords complain that “none ever spake so vilely as
these so-called commonwealths.”[618] Their understanding of the
technique of the agrarian changes is often deficient. Like the Carlyles
and Ruskins of a later age, they make Philistia merry with their sad
blunders over economic details. But it would be a mistake to regard
their views of the social effects of enclosing as abnormal or
sentimental. They are the last great literary expression of the appeal
to the average conscience which had been made by the old agrarian
order, the cry of a spirit which is departing, and which, in its agony,
utters words that are a shining light for all periods of change.
Several paths of argument lead to their position. There is the
traditional importance of tillage. It is a “foundation industry,” an
industry from which four-fifths of the people directly or indirectly get
their living. English Governments have always shown it special favour.
Its maintenance is almost part of the common law[619] of the land.
And it is right that it should be so. For the partition which separates
men from starvation is thin, and if tillage fails how shall the people be
fed? The Government insists on a certain minimum area being under
the plough for exactly the same reason that the city of Coventry,
when it is in the grip of a bad harvest, decides to break up part of its
common pastures for wheat. All men are agreed that the price of food
ought to be fixed by authority, and one cannot control prices unless
one can control supplies. There is the argument from social functions.
The State is a community of classes. Between classes there must be
inequality, for each has a different function, fighting, or merchandise,
or handicraft, or husbandry. Unless there is inequality between classes
no class can perform its duties or (strange thought) enjoy its rights.
But one class must not encroach upon the livelihood of another. If we
will not have villein blood on the Council, neither will we let
gentlemen take into their hands the holdings of their tenants. For this
means that one limb of the body politic drains nourishment from
another limb, and that men drop into a superfluous residuum from
which the State gets no profit. And within a class there should be
substantial equality. When one man has the livelihoods of two must
not another man go without any living at all? There is the argument
from economic morality. In every bargain there is the possibility of
oppression. The unscrupulous man makes the most of this. He
regards only his own profit. He is “a great taker of advantages.”[620]
This is the sin of the usurer, the bodger, and the tyrannous landlord,
and of this bad trinity the last is the worst. To oppress men by rack-
renting land is particularly detestable. For though in all contracts there
is certainly (if only it can be found!) an objective standard of value,
yet a man may with reason be in doubt as to what is fair price to
charge for an article the value of which has not been fixed by
authority. But he can hardly be in doubt as to what is a fair rent. The
fair rent is the usual rent; equity is custom. There is the argument
from the very nature of the bond between tenant and landlord.
Tenure is no longer as sacred a thing as once it was, and, even if it
were, men who are legally the descendants of right-less villeins could
not easily appeal to its sanctity. But opinion feels that there is
something despicably sordid in using this particular relation as a
financial engine. Though surveyors' economics are as notorious as
lawyers' justice,[621] even one of that detested class can preface his
business-like account of western manors with words idealising the
conditions which have “knit such a knot of colaterall amytie between
the Lords and the tenants that the lord tendered his tenants as his
childe, and the tenants again loved the lord as naturally as the childe
his father.”[622] The bond between landlord and tenant is perhaps,
indeed, the only economic relationship which has ever yet stirred the
affection of large masses of men. It has done so because it has been
in the past so much more than economic. The pitiful cry of that
nameless old man to whose care Shakespeare commits the blinded
Gloucester, “O my good lord, I have been your tenant, and your
father’s tenant, these fourscore years,” is the voice of an attachment
which once was real. In the sixteenth century the tie of tenure is still
the symbol of greater things, and the wrench which is given it by the
partial commercialising of agriculture seems to portend more ruinous
innovations. Most men make the State in the image of their own
village, or city, or business. It is perhaps not an unfair description of
one side of the social philosophy of our period to say that a manor is
still a “little commonwealth,”[623] the kingdom still the greatest of
manors. If the lord holds from the King, does not the tenant hold
from his lord by as good a right? If the tenant who encroaches on his
neighbour’s strips is checked by the manorial court, should not the
lord who depopulates half a village be checked by the King in his High
Court of Parliament? If gentlemen oppress yeomen, how can they
“live together as they be joined in one body politic under the
King?”[624]
It is true that it is just these ideas which in our period are on their
trial, and that if one were to seek the watershed where the mediæval
theory of land tenure, as something contingent on the fulfilment of
obligations, parts company from modern conceptions of ownership, as
conferring an unlimited right to unconditional disposal by the owner,
one would find it in the century and a half between 1500 and the final
abolition of feudal tenures in 1660. The combination of forces both
economic and political making for a change of attitude is
unmistakable; on the one hand the severance of the personal
relationship of tenure through the development of the great leasehold
farm, the breaking up of the customary routine of cultivation through
the increasing dependence of agriculture on the market, the general
revision of contracts brought about through the fall in the value of
money; on the other hand the enormous redistribution of landed
property through the confiscation of monastic and gild endowments,
the consequent creation of a new aristocracy ready to apply
commercial ideas to land tenure, the desire of proprietors to escape
from the obnoxious feudal incidents and of the Crown to find some
more lucrative substitute for them. But the decay of the older
conceptions goes on very slowly. The Government is on the whole on
the conservative side; for naturally it has to work on the material to
hand, and the best hope of maintaining order lies in the preservation
of fixed customary relationships between the different classes in
society. Its instinct is therefore still to treat the control and disposition
of land as to a special degree a question of public policy, in regard to
which landlords are bound “rather to consider what is agreeable ... to
the use of the state and for the good of the commonwealth, than to
seeke the utmost profit which a landlord for his particular advantage
may take among his tenants.”[625]

(b) Legislation and AdministrationToC

This was its instinct. But can we say more than this? Can we say that
the presumption in favour of protecting the small landholder was
translated into any definite policy, and that such a policy was carried
out in practice? The answer to these questions is by no means easily
given. There is the difficulty of making any generalisation which will
cover the century and a half during which, from time to time, the
agrarian problem claimed public attention. True, this difficulty is not
so serious as might at first sight appear, or as it would be in an age of
swiftly changing ideas. The political historian may treat the Tudors as
one period and the first two Stuarts as another. But the economist
finds much the same views on economic matters obtaining under
Charles I. as under Henry VIII., and much the same administrative
system to carry them out. There is in our period no marked change in
responsible opinion upon the enclosing movement. The Commission
which deals with the subject in 1607 shows the same attitude as the
Commission of 1517. Enclosers are fined in 1637 as they have been
fined in the reign of James I. But the opinion which counts is not
always responsible opinion. During the six years which intervene
between the death of Henry VIII. and the accession of Philip and
Mary the Government is in the hands of the great landlords,—
landlords who have built up their fortunes out of the spoils of the
monasteries, and whom no authority is strong enough to check. By a
curious chance the first head of the Government is a man who is an
agrarian reformer by conviction. But, when he falls, his colleagues
throw over his policy, and turn savagely to the work of crushing out
the very possibility of organised protest among the peasantry. These
years, the so-called reign of Edward VI., will be an exception to
whatever conclusions may be reached as to the policy of the State
under the Tudors and the first two Stuarts. Again, there is the
difficulty, the great difficulty, of saying how far the interference of
Governments is successful even when they honestly desire it to have
effect. The modern assumption, which is sometimes all too sanguine,
is that a Law is being carried out unless it is proved that it is not. For
the sixteenth century there are those who would say that we must
assume that a Law is not being administered unless it is proved that it
is, and, though scepticism is sometimes pushed to absurd lengths,
one certainly cannot build much on the letter of Acts of Parliament.
But how exacting are our tests of effective administration to be? All
will agree that in our period the mere enacting of a Statute causes
and cures very little, unless special efforts are applied to making it
work. But is a peremptory order from the Council to the Justices of
the Peace, or to the Council of the North, to redress this or that
grievance among tenants, a proof that the grievance will be
redressed? Or must we be content with nothing less than a record of
cases actually handled? If we decline to believe in the efficacy of any
economic legislation about which we have not a full list of decisions,
we shall have little left to rely on. The famous Statute of Artificers will
look shaky, and so will the legislation with regard to prices and
quality. Perhaps a reasonable view would be to look askance at mere
Acts of Parliament, but to accept action, or orders to take action, on
the part of the executive authorities, as a proof that the law is being
applied in practice.
Of the Statutes prohibiting the conversion of arable to pasture we
need not, then, say much. The long series of Acts[626] which were
passed between 1489 and 1597 show little originality. They were at
bottom simply a series of great manorial customaries framed to apply
to the whole country, or to all parts of the country which were not
expressly excepted from their operation, an attempt to maintain the
status quo obtaining at any time by laying down for the whole country
a common rule of cultivation of much the same kind as had been in
the past maintained by local customs. They did not prohibit enclosure
as such, but they proceeded on the assumption that a fixed
proportion of the land, usually the average of a certain number of
years preceding the Act, ought to be under the plough, and that the
small cultivator’s farm accommodation should be maintained or
renewed at the expense of the landlord. They differed only in the
methods used to achieve this end. The Statutes before 1550 usually
insisted merely on the reconversion of pasture land to tillage,[627] the
re-edification of decayed houses of husbandry,[628] and the limitation
to 2000 of the sheep to be kept by any one farmer.[629] They relied
on most unpromising machinery. Like the ancient Statute of
Mortmain, they tried to make the feudal contract the means for
enforcing the law, by empowering superior lords to take half the
profits of mesne lords and tenants who infringed it. The Statutes after
1550 were somewhat bolder in their experiments. The most important
departure was the provision, first introduced into the Statutes of
1552[630] and 1555,[631] for the creation of permanent bodies of
Commissioners to do the work which, when most landlords were
anxious to enclose, no landlord would undertake. Under the Statute of
1555, subsequently declared “too mild and gentle,” but on the face of
it a drastic measure, the Commissioners were empowered both to
bind over offenders to rebuild decayed houses, to plough up pasture
land, and to fix the judicial rents which had been demanded by the
peasantry and suggested by certain reformers. It was repealed
(together with the Statutes of 1536 and 1552) in 1563, the Act[632] of
that year confirming the earlier Acts passed in the reign of Henry
VIII., and requiring all land which had been under the plough for four
successive years since 1529 to be kept in tillage, on pain of a fine of
10s. per acre for all land converted to pasture contrary to the Act. In
1589[633] a Statute was passed for the protection of cottagers,
prohibiting the letting of cottages to agricultural labourers with less
than four acres of land attached. In 1593[634] it was thought that
sufficient land was in tillage to make the maintenance of legislation on
the subject unnecessary, and the clause in the Act of 1563, which
forbade conversion to pasture, was repealed. But the result seems to
have been a recrudescence of the movement for converting arable
land to pasture, with the result that in 1597[635] two more Acts were
passed, both of which adopted the expedient of setting up a special
authority, apart from the ordinary machinery of local government, to
enforce the Act, by empowering the Lord Chancellor to nominate
bodies of Commissioners. The first enacted that all houses of
husbandry decayed within seven years preceding the Act, and half of
those decayed within seven years before that, were to be rebuilt and
let, the former with not less than 40 acres, and the latter with not less
than 20 acres, of land. It also took the significant step of expressly
sanctioning the consolidation of intermixed holdings by way of
exchange between lord and tenants, or between one tenant and
another. The second applied only to twenty-five counties, where,
presumably, enclosing had proceeded furthest or was most disastrous
in its effects. It enacted that all land converted from tillage to pasture
since 1558 should be reconverted within three years, if it had been
under the plough for twelve years immediately preceding conversion,
and that land which had been in tillage for twelve years preceding the
Act should remain in tillage, the penalty for disobedience being a fine
of 20s. per acre. These two Acts escaped the general repeal of the
laws against depopulation which took place in 1624, and remained on
the Statute Book till the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863.
The Statutes are evidence of a state of opinion. To judge how far that
opinion wrote itself on the world of affairs we must look elsewhere.
Nor are they in themselves very interesting. The genius of sixteenth
century statesmanship lay in administration not in legislation. It dwelt
not in Parliament but in the Council, and in those administrative
courts, the Court of Star Chamber, the Court of Requests, the Council
of the North, the Council of Wales, which were the Privy Council’s
organs. In studying economic questions in the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, one is met at every turn by the apparatus of
special administrative jurisdictions, which was built up by the Tudors,
and which fell to pieces with the final rupture between the Crown and
Parliament. On the one hand, they supply the control and stimulus in
matters of detailed administration, without which all legislation
designed to regulate shifting economic relationships, or running
counter to the prejudices of a powerful class, is doomed to be
ineffective. Are the Justices of the Peace lax in carrying out the
Statutes for the relief of the poor and punishment of vagrants? The
Council will remonstrate. Have they omitted to assess wages and fix
prices? The Council will let them know that their neglect has been
noted at headquarters and that it must be corrected. Are capitalists in
the clothing counties dismissing workmen in times of trade
depression? The Council will direct the justices to read them a lesson
on the duty of employers to their operatives and to the State, and
threaten them with a summons to Whitehall unless they mend their
ways. A stream of correspondence pours into London from the
Government’s agents in the counties—returns as to the supplies of
wheat available for consumption, applications for permission to
license the export of food-stuffs, statistics as to prices, information as
to unemployment, information as to vagrancy based on a “day-count"
of vagabonds. The Council digests it, and sends out its mandates to
continue this and alter that, to raise wages or reduce prices, to
inspect granaries, punish middlemen, whip sturdy rogues, relieve the
poor. Bad means of communication, scanty and inaccurate
intelligence, incompetent local officials, prevent administration from
running smoothly; and as the Civil War approaches incompetence
becomes recalcitrance. Nevertheless the engine is a powerful one,
and up to a year or two before the meeting of the Long Parliament its
throb is felt throughout the country.
Such a system of centralised supervision, which can meet
emergencies with promptitude, and can adjust regulations to the
varying needs of different years and different localities, is a necessity
in any society where economic relationships are made the object of
authoritative control. Under the Tudors and first two Stuarts the
Council does much that is done to-day by several State departments—
the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Board of Education, the
Local Government Board, the Home Office, as well as much that is left
to Private Bill legislation. But the Council is, of course, much more
than an executive organ. It is also a court of law. It does not only
make rules, it punishes people for breaking them. Sometimes it
exercises jurisdiction itself. More often, at any rate in the cases arising
out of the economic questions with which we are chiefly concerned, it
issues an order, and leaves the punishment of breaches of it to the
Court of Star Chamber and the Court of Requests. Into the
controversy as to the constitutional position of these courts we need
not enter; we need only point out their extreme importance as
buttresses of the Government’s control over economic affairs. Both in
personnel and procedure they were admirably qualified to be the
instruments of a thorough system of State intervention in matters of
industry and agriculture. Both of them were committees of the
Council, and in both the governmental predominated over the judicial
element, the two judges who attended the Court of Star Chamber,
and the Masters of Requests who sat in the Court of Requests, being
in the position rather of legal advisers or assessors than of judicial
authorities. In theory the former court dealt with criminal, the latter
with civil cases. But in an age when the majority of the populace were
armed, a dispute was extremely likely to terminate in a riot, and in
practice there were subjects on which complaints came before either
court indifferently. They dispensed with a jury. They took account of
equitable considerations which had no place in the common law
courts. They were guided by reasons of State, not by the letter of the
law, and would punish behaviour as contrary to public policy. For the
execution of their rulings they used not only the ordinary officers of
the law, the Justices of the Peace, but also special bodies of
Commissioners.
Whatever may have been the abuses of this system of administrative
jurisdictions, one can easily understand that it was well fitted to deal
with the agrarian problem. It is seen at its worst in ecclesiastical
matters. It is seen at its best in protecting the poorer classes against
economic tyranny; and we shall fail to understand the popularity of
the Tudor Governments unless we lay as much emphasis on the good
side as on the bad. The Court of Requests in particular is a popular
court, a court which punishes the rich, a court which brings, in the
words of the aristocratic chronicler, “many an honest man to trouble
and vexacion,” a court to which the poor “compleyned without
number.”[636] The notorious difficulty of getting a verdict from a jury
of tenants who are liable to eviction means that a landlord can break
the law with impunity. Here are courts before which the intimidator
can be intimidated; courts which will handle him “on that sort, that
what courage soever he hath, his heart will fall to the grounde.”[637]
The enormous importance of manorial custom in determining the fate
of all classes of peasants, except the freeholders, makes it certain
that grave injustice will be done to vested interests by any court
which confines itself to the strict letter of the law. The Council will
direct that “such order be taken in the matter as in justyce and
equitie shall appertayn.”[638] The mere fact that its ruling is not
simply the verdict of a court but the command of the Government,
increases the probability that it will receive due attention from those
whose duty it is to enforce it. The landlord who has enclosed may be
the very man who hears the peasant's complaint. The Council will
interfere to insist on the local authorities taking “a more indifferent
course.”[639]
The activity of the Government in matters of land was not so
incessant as it was in the regulation of prices and the administration
of the Poor Laws; for its land policy was strongly opposed to the
interests of the country gentry who were its officials, and it had to
proceed with caution. If we except the first great Commission
appointed by Wolsey in 1517, the periods in which it was especially
energetic in dealing with the land question were three, the years
between 1536 and 1549, the years from 1607 to 1618, the years from
1630 to 1636; and on each of these three occasions there was some
temporary cause to explain its peculiar zeal—on the two first the
revolts of the peasantry, and on the last the rise in the price of grain,
which suggested that an unduly small proportion of the land was
under tillage. Nevertheless it handles individual cases with
considerable frequency throughout the whole period from 1517 to
1640. Usually it acts as a final court of appeal, which intervenes only
when other means of redress have broken down, and it is sometimes
at pains to explain to offended landlords that it does not intend to
debar them from asserting their rights at Common Law, if they can.
Its aim is to stop very gross cases of oppression, to prevent the
peasants being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation,
to induce landlords to take a larger view of their responsibilities, to
settle disputes by the use of common sense and moral pressure. It
steps in when the tenants are poor men who are being ruined by
vexatious lawsuits, or when enclosure is thought likely to produce
disorder, or to forbid a landlord to take action pending a decision by
the courts. It has to hear many cases touching copyholders and many
touching commons; for no one is quite certain as to the legal rights of
copyholders, and in the matter of commons there is a fearful gulf
between law and equity. Occasionally in the reign of Henry VIII., and
even in that of Elizabeth, it deals with cases of villeinage. But these,
though more numerous than might have been supposed, are
nevertheless rare, for the principal economic evils of the period
consist not in the revival of old claims, but in the new competitive
conditions of agriculture. The treatment of the latter is by no means a
simple matter—even the strong Governments of Henry VIII. and
Elizabeth will not lightly thrust forceful fingers into the mysterious
custom-bound recesses of the manor—and when we have said that
on the whole the bias of the Tudor and early Stuart statesmen is
against revolutionary changes that damage the peasants, we can say
little more without citing individual cases of interference.
Let us look shortly at the more striking among them. The famous
Commission upon enclosure appointed by Wolsey in 1517 set a
precedent to be followed in several subsequent inquiries, and has left
us an invaluable body of information as to the nature and extent of
the enclosing movement. It was, however, by no means the first
example of the Government intervening in the agrarian problem, and
the partial reconversion of pasture to arable, which seems to have
resulted from its labours, still left an urgent need for a continuous
supervision of the relations between landlord and tenant by some
tribunal sufficiently independent to do justice to the weaker party. In
1494 the earliest proceedings in the interminable case[640] of John
Mulsho v. the inhabitants of Thingden ended in the Court of Star
Chamber (the same court was dealing with the same matter in 1538)
with a decree in favour of the tenants. In 1510 the same body was
dealing with a quarrel between the Abbot and the copyholders of
Peterborough,[641] and in 1516 with a complaint from the inhabitants
of Draycote[642] and Stoke Gifford that the lord of the manor had
evicted copyholders, stopped up rights of way, and enclosed common
land. The policy of Wolsey is sufficiently indicated by the active
campaign which he set on foot against depopulation, and requires no
further illustration. But it is interesting to observe that his attitude
towards the agrarian question was not a mere personal idiosyncrasy,
and that it was the same in all essential particulars as that of his
successor. Thomas Cromwell must bear the blame for part of the
agrarian distress which prevailed during the closing years of Henry
VIII. and the reign of Edward VI.; for that distress was enhanced by
the wild land speculation which followed the secularisation of the
monastic estates. In that age, however, such indirect social reactions
of their policy were matters quite beneath the consideration of
statesmen, and the fact that the Government was responsible for
changes which operated most disastrously on the established order of
rural society did not prevent administrative interference to impede
agrarian innovations from going on to the end of the reign of Henry
VIII. Indeed the King, influenced no doubt by the fear that agrarian
agitation might add fuel to religious discontent, seems himself to have
taken some interest in the matter. In 1534 one finds Cromwell writing
to congratulate him on the passage through the House of Commons
of a Bill providing that no man shall keep more than 2000 sheep, and
that one-eighth of every farmer's land shall always remain in tillage,
“The most profitable and most benefycyall thing that ever was done
to this the commonwealthe of your realm”[643] and in the following
year there is a letter[644] from Cromwell to Rich directing him to
apprise the Duke of Suffolk of the King’s displeasure at the decay of
certain towns which the Duke had promised to repair. The agrarian
grievances expressed in the Pilgrimage of Grace were admitted, and
in the instructions issued to the officers who were appointed to
restore order in the disaffected counties special directions[645] were
included to throw open enclosures, and to reduce the excessive fines
charged to tenants on admission to their holdings. In the years
immediately following the same policy was pursued in other parts of
the country. In 1538 the Earl of Derby[646] writes to Cromwell
protesting against the pressure put upon him to reinstate seven
tenants whom he has turned out. In 1540 a landlord[647] in the Isle of
Wight is compelled to restore to their holdings some recently evicted
tenants. In 1541 several cases come before the Council. It appoints a
Commission to investigate the case of a Northamptonshire[648]
landlord who has prevented the tenants of Brigstock from feeding
their pigs, calves, and sheep, by cutting up part of a common wood
“into several pastures for his own private use and benefit.” It meets a
complaint from the borderers[649] of the Forest of Dartmoor that the
owner of the lands of the monastery of Buckfast is breaking the
statute which required the lands of dissolved abbeys to be farmed in
the traditional way, by excluding them from the common, with a
decision upholding the tenants' case and with the appointment of
Commissioners to carry out the award. It sets a certain choleric Sir
Nicholas Poyntz,[650] who has dared to procure the imprisonment of a
tenant for proceeding against him before the Council, to cool his
temper in the Fleet, and when he comes out compels him to grant his
victim a new farm in exchange for one which he has surrendered, to
reduce his rent from 20s. to 6s., and to pay him forty marks as
compensation for his “damages and travailles.” In 1543[651] the
tenants of Abbots Ripton lay a complaint in the Court of Requests
against Sir John St. John on the ground that, in addition to other acts
of oppression, he has entered forcibly on their holdings. Sir John
replies that they are not copyholders, but merely tenants at will, who
are unprotected by any immemorial custom, and after an examination
of the manor rolls the court holds that he is right. But the legal
insecurity of the tenants does not prevent them from getting
protection. The court requires their landlord to grant them leases for
years at reasonable rents, and orders that the property which he has
distrained shall be restored.
With the Protectorate of Somerset we enter upon a period of more
violent agitation and more drastic expedients. There was a large
difference between using the jurisdiction of the Council to redress
individual cases of hardship and a deliberate attempt to effect a
general settlement of the land question upon lines which would do
substantial justice to the peasants. The former course involved no
perilous assertion of principles, and could be pursued under the guise
of a purely conservative policy, merely by referring disputes between
landlords and tenants to the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests,
which, though in fact administrative and governmental bodies, were
none the less protected to some extent against criticism by wearing
the appearance of mere legal tribunals. The latter might, perhaps,
have been attempted with some faint hope of success, if statesmen
had been much more careful than they were to discriminate between
the different aspects of the problem with which they were confronted.
To us, who look back on the situation from a distance of three and a
half centuries, it seems that the one guiding thread, which might have
led some way through the welter of confusion, was offered by the
sharp distinction drawn by Hales between those enclosures which
were made by the exchange and consolidation of strips, with a view
to better husbandry, and those which had as their effect the
conversion of arable land to pasture, the monopolising of commons,
and the eviction of tenants. The arguments in favour of the first type
of enclosure were too cogent for any policy which condemned
enclosing in general to have the smallest prospect of success. The
only possibility of averting the ruin to the peasantry which
accompanied depopulation lay in encouraging them generally to
follow the example of their brothers in Kent, Essex, Devonshire, and
Cornwall, who had for centuries been substituting a more progressive
husbandry for the “mingle mangle" of the open fields, without the
disastrous consequences entailed by the spread of capitalist
agriculture in other parts of the South and Midlands. But such a frank
encouragement of certain kinds of enclosure for the sake of
repressing others implied an appreciation of the economics of the
problem to which comparatively few persons in our period had
attained, and was quite beyond the grasp of Governments, which, at
their worst, as under Warwick, were quite indifferent to the sufferings
of the poorer classes, and, at their best, conceived public interests to
be served best by a strict maintenance of customary conditions.
Somerset’s policy of deliberately restoring ancient relationships with a
strong hand could hardly even be begun without those who pursued it
taking sides in a bitter economic agitation, and essaying openly to
reverse the whole agrarian movement with which, in the course of the
past half century, the wealth of the middle and upper classes, at any
rate south of the Trent, had become inextricably identified. It involved
in fact a return to the policy of Wolsey, and a return to it under
conditions which made Wolsey’s policy doubly hard to carry out,
inasmuch as, on the one hand, the position of Somerset as temporary
head of a jealous aristocracy was far weaker than that of the
omnipotent Cardinal, and, on the other hand, the lapse of twenty
years had seen the growth of a generation to which enclosures were
a vested interest.
Yet it would be a mistake to think of the whole agrarian episode
between the death of Henry VIII. and the fall of Somerset as the
mere freak of a misguided doctrinaire. If we can see difficulties which
he did not, if we can smile at the thought of any Government at once
so incompetent, and but for Somerset himself, so entirely selfish,
carrying out a great conservative revolution in the teeth of the new
wealth and power of the country, we must also remember that he
was not alone in thinking the spoliation of the weaker rural classes
not only, as it certainly was, illegal, but also so patently unjust as to
amount to a national crime, and that in that age men overestimated
the ability of a Government fiat to modify economic habits almost as
much as they underestimated it two and a half centuries later.
Somerset can hardly have been ignorant of the tremendous risks
involved in his policy. But he may well have thought inaction not only
baser than, but almost as dangerous as, action. It was certain that,
unless the Government interfered to protect tenants, there would be a
series of peasants' revolts. The best answer to the charge of stirring
up class hatred, which was made against Somerset, as against all who
call attention to its causes, was that agrarian rioting had begun in
Hertfordshire[652] before the Commission on Enclosures was sent out,
that in those counties where it took its work seriously order was
maintained till the end of 1548, and that grave disturbances did not
take place until the following year, when it became evident that, both
in Parliament and on the Council, the Protector's policy had been
beaten by the opposition of the great landowners. Nor is there any
reason to doubt the sincerity of Somerset himself (though he, like
every one else, had speculated in monastic estates), however much
there may be to regret that his policy did not come into stronger
hands, or fall upon times which were, from a political point of view,
less hopelessly impracticable. An attempt was made to set a good
example on the Crown Estates. In 1548, in response to complaints
from the tenants at Walton, Weybridge, Esher, and Shepperton, that
the making of the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ruining them
through the loss of common rights which it entailed, an order[653]
was issued dechasing the Park, and throwing open the enclosed lands
to the commoners. In the following year Somerset secured the
passage through Parliament of a Private Act[654] conferring a good
title on those copyholders on his own manors to whom demesne
lands had been let, and who, as occupiers of other than customary
tenancies, could not claim the protection of manorial custom. It is
plain from the comparatively few complaints which came in the
sixteenth century from freeholders that, if such a course had been
generally pursued, the chief objection to the changes grouped
together under the name of enclosure would have been removed,
because the harsh disturbance of vested interests which they involved
would have been avoided. But that, of course, was quite outside the
bounds of political possibility.
The story of Somerset’s attempt to deal with the land question is soon
told. In 1548 agrarian discontent was at its height. Some time in that
year there must have come to the hands of the Government the small
tract on the effect of sheep-farming in Oxfordshire,
Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, which was
printed in 1551 under the name of “Certayne causes of the Present
Discontent.”[655] In spring and summer Latimer was thundering
against the “Step-lords”[656] at Paul's Cross. In autumn Crowley
published his “Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the
Poor Commons.”[657] Above all, the poor commons had earlier in the
year shown unmistakable signs of fending for themselves. The result
of Somerset’s own sympathy with the prevalent discontent was the
formation of something like a party, under the name of the
“Commonwealth men,” with Latimer as its prophet and Hales as its
man of action, which had a programme sufficiently definite to put
heart into the peasantry and to terrify the great landed proprietors.
On June 1st a Royal Commission[658] was appointed to inquire into
offences committed against the Acts forbidding conversion of arable
to pasture and depopulation. The Commission divided itself into
several committees to deal with different parts of the country. Only
one of them, however, consisting of John Hales and five of his
colleagues, got seriously to work. It had a large area to cover—the
counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire,
Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire—and one
which was the centre of the agitation against enclosure. It seems to
have interrupted its labours during autumn and winter, but it was
busy in June, July, and August 1548, and again in the summer of
1549, by which time, however, the anger of the landed gentry against
its proceedings, and of the peasants against the inactivity of the
Commission as a whole, had reached a point which made it hardly
possible for it to do more than collect information. Considering the
difficulties of its task, and the wide tract of country to be covered, its
behaviour appears to have been thorough and business-like. The
usual procedure was to empanel a jury of twelve in each place visited,
to whom Hales delivered an address explaining the objects and
methods of the inquiry, as set out in the instructions issued by the
Government to the Commissioners. These stated the Commission to
have been formed in particular “for the maintenance and keeping up
of houses of husbandry, for avoiding destruction and pulling down of
houses for enclosures and converting of arable land into pasture, for
limiting what number of sheep men should have and keep in their
possession at one time, against plurality and keeping together of
farms, and for maintenance of housekeeping, hospitality, and tillage
on the sites ... of such monasteries, priories, and religious houses as
were dissolved.”[659] Offenders were then presented by the jury, and
though, on Hales' advice, a pardon was granted them for their past
illegalities, their enclosures seem to have been thrown down, arable
which had been turned into pasture to have been ploughed up, and
farms which had been united to have been separated.[660]
In the meantime Somerset kept the general policy of agrarian reform
alive on the Council. In the autumn of 1548 Hales had returned to
London, and, as member for Preston, had prepared three Bills,
dealing partly with enclosures and partly with the high prices. The
first, requiring re-edification of decayed houses and the maintenance
of tillage, and the second, forbidding speculation in food-stuffs, were
introduced into the House of Lords. The third, which aimed at
encouraging cattle breeding as distinct from sheep grazing, was read
first in the House of Commons. Neither Bill came to anything, for
Parliament was as angry as the Council with Somerset’s policy. But in
May 1549 the Protector issued another proclamation against the
decay of houses and enclosure; in June he infuriated the upper
classes by a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law
into their own hands by pulling down hedges; and throughout the
whole period of his power he used the Court of Requests as an
instrument for protecting tenants against landlords.[661] The
Secretary[662] to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of
terror provided that the gentry began it, prophesied gloomily that the
German peasants' revolt was to be re-enacted in England, and
Warwick attacked Hales fiercely for venturing to discharge the duties
laid upon him by the Government, of which Warwick was a member.
[663] “Sir,” wrote a plaintive Norfolk gentleman to Cecil about the time
of Ket’s rebellion, “Be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the
pretence of simplicity and poverty there may not rest much mischief.
So do I fear there doth in these men called Commonwealths and their
adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as
well the greatest as the lowest) I assure you they are in such doubt
that almost they dare touch none of them, but for that some of them
have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that
Commonwealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.... I
may well gather some of them to be in jealousy of my Lord’s
friendship, yea and to be plain, think my Lord’s grace rather to will the
decay of the gentlemen than otherwise.”[664] Poor gentlemen! A
Government which holds that laws do not exist only to preserve the
rich in their possessions! Truly the mountains are removed.
Somerset’s Government had too short a life for us to judge how far, in
happier political circumstances, he might have succeeded, not in
checking agrarian changes, which would in any case have been
impossible, but in securing that reasonable consideration should be
given to the vested interests of the poorer classes. As Elizabethan
statesmen discovered[665] at the end of the century, there was room
for a policy which would prevent the wholesale displacement of
tenants, and nevertheless offer an encouragement to the formation of
the compact holdings out of the scattered strips and common
pastures, which the agricultural experts were unanimous in
condemning. There are faint indications of an understanding that a
fair middle course was possible in a remarkable case which comes
from the little Huntingdonshire town of Godmanchester.[666] At
Godmanchester there had been the usual changes of the preceding
half century. Rents had been raised, cottages pulled down, woods
destroyed and turned to pasture, while the meadows, which under
the Act of 1547 had been confiscated from the local gild, offered a
tempting prey to some enterprising speculator. On complaints coming
before the Council in the summer of 1549 a comprehensive scheme of
reorganisation was drawn up. All persons with more than one house
were to let at the customary rent that which they did not use
themselves. All persons who had pulled down houses or converted
them to other purposes than the accommodation of tenants were
either to rebuild them or to build new ones, and to let them to any
one offering the customary rent before Michaelmas 1549. The groves
of wood converted to pasture were to be enclosed, so as to prevent
the depredations made upon them by straying beasts, and, if
necessary, the land was to be sown with acorns. With the gild lands a
course was taken which, in the scramble for land which was going on
in the middle of the sixteenth century, was unfortunately highly
unusual. According to the Council’s directions they were to “be divided
among the inhabitants thereof in this manner; that is to say to every
ploughland five acres, and to every cottager and artificer there
dwelling, or which hereafter upon the houses to be now builded shall
dwell, one acre, and, if the number do not extend, then for every
ploughland four, and so for lack of the rate every ploughland three,
and the residue of the said acres falling after that rate to be divided
among the cottagers, paying for every of the said acres 3/4." This
case is the high water mark of administrative interference on behalf of
the tenants. The action taken embraces nearly all the expedients of
re-edifying decayed cottages, fixing fair rents, preventing common
land from passing into the control of a single individual, and making
equal allotment among the inhabitants, which had been demanded by
the peasants and suggested by their friends. It shows that the
enclosing of land hitherto used in common was not resented,
provided that the division was made in such a way as to give a fair
share to all the parties interested. It may perhaps be taken as a
specimen of the kind of policy which lay behind Somerset’s
expressions of sympathy with the peasantry, and which he would
have pursued if his colleagues on the Council had permitted. As it
was, he was not strong enough to carry out his programme. While the
failure of the Commission resulted in the revolts of 1549, his
reluctance to crush their authors, whom he believed to be men
goaded into rebellion by intolerable grievances, united the whole
weight of the greater property against him as a traitor to his order. In
the attack made upon him as by his colleagues, the actions which
evoked their special denunciation were those which embodied his
agrarian policy, the use of the Court of Requests to protect tenants,
the appointment of the Royal Commission to enforce the Acts against
enclosures, the pardon granted in June 1549 to the riotous peasants,
and the statements attributed to him that “the covetousness of the
gentlemen gave cause to the common people to rise," and that
“people had good cause to reform the things themselves," because
“the lords of Parliament were loathe to incline themselves to
reformation of enclosures and other things.”[667] To the last a popular
hero, the “good Duke" could expect no help from those whom he had
befriended, and no mercy from the sordid counter-revolution which he
had provoked. His epitaph was given by the sad cries of “Too true,”
with which the crowd about the scaffold greeted his dying declaration
that he had “ever been glad of the furtherance ... of the
commonwealth.”[668]
With the fall of Somerset in October 1549 the landowning classes had
their revenge, and, under the guidance of Warwick, the policy of the
Government swung violently in the opposite direction. The
intervention of the Council to protect tenants of course stopped at
once; in the two cases which are reported as having come before it in
the year 1550 and 1551 the line taken was that the presumption was
against the tenants who had broken open enclosures.[669] While, in
the absence of John Hales, who appears to have found it convenient
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