many as possible of their smaller tenants, so that, as Sir Thomas More tells us, "in this way it comes to pass that these miserable people, men, women, husbands, orphans, parents with little children are all forced to change their seats, without knowing where to go." 1 Then they raised the rents of the larger tenants, the yeomen and farmers, so that, as Latimer mentions, land for which his father had paid £3 or £4 a year, was in 1549 let at £16, almost to the ruin of the tenant.2 Thirdly, the large land-owners took from the poor their common lands by an unscrupulous system of enclosures.3 Wolsey had in vain endeavoured to stop their doing this, for he had sagacity enough to perceive how it would pauperize the labourers and others who had valuable rights in such land. But enclosures and evictions went on in spite of his enactments, with the inevitable result of the social disorders already alluded to.5 § 130. The Enclosures of the Sixteenth Century. In speaking of the enclosures made at this time it must be remembered that they were of three kinds. (1) There was the enclosing of the lord's demesne, which the lord had a perfect right to carry out if he thought it would improve his land, and of which no one could very well complain. There was also (2) the enclosing of those strips of land belonging to the lord of the manor which lay intermixed 1 Utopia, p. 64 (Morley's edn.): the whole of the first part of the Utopia is well worth reading for a description of the social and industrial troubles of the time. 2 Latimer, First Sermon before Edward VI. 3 Cf. Lever, Sermon in the Shroudes (Arber's edn.) 39; Russell, Ket's Rebellion, 50, 51; Fitzherbert, Surveyinge, ch. viii.; Strype, Eccles. Mem., ii. pt. ii. 360 (referring to 1548), and the evidence quoted below, pp. 214-217. • Decree in Chancery, July, 1518 (Brewer, Calendar of State Papers, ii. 1054, No. 3297). "The most important of these risings took place in Norfolk, where enclosures had been made upon a tremendous scale. Ket, a tanner of Norwich, took the lead (in 1549) of a large body of some 16,000 tenants and labourers, who demanded the abolition of the late enclosures and the reform of other local abuses. The Earl of Warwick defeated the petitioners in a battle, put down the rising, and hanged Ket at Norwich Castle. The farmers and peasantry were thus cowed into submission. Cf. full details in Froude, History, iv. 440-453. Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. p. 285. with the strips of the tenants in the open fields. To the enclosing of these was again no legal or moral objection to be made, if properly carried out, though it had always been the custom for them to lie alongside the others and share the common cultivation. The exceedingly scattered character of the several lands in the common fields of manors must have been a serious inconvenience to the landowner, especially if he was non-resident, since he had to employ, in addition to his own labour of supervision, the charge and risk of a collector of rents, and moreover often could not recover arrears unless the precise ground from which the rent issued was known and defined, which often was not accurately done.1 There was therefore considerable inducement to enclose strips and, if possible, to throw them together contiguously. But there was, in so doing, a considerable opportunity of taking a piece of a tenant's land at the same time, and there can be no doubt, from the nature of the complaints made, that this was frequently done.2 But it was (3) the third kind of enclosures that did the most harm and caused the bitterest outcry; that is, when the commons and even the tenants' own strips were taken from them. It is true that by the old statute of Merton 3 (1235-6) -a law passed by a parliament of landlords-landowners had been permitted to appropriate portions of the "waste over which the free, and even the villein, tenants had certain rights of pasturage and turbary, provided that the lord left a sufficient quantity" of common land for the use of the tenants. But since there was no precise rule as to what constituted a sufficient quantity, it is easy to see that enclosing landlords could do very much as they liked; and by this time the statute had been forgotten and was entirely neglected. Everywhere complaints are heard of the action of the landowners. But before giving some contemporary evidence upon the subject we will pause for 1 Rogers, Six Centuries, pp. 286, 287. 2 More, Utopia, p. 64 (Morley's edn.) says: "when an insatiable wretch resolves to enclose ground, the owners as well as the tenants are turned out of their possessions by tricks or by main force, or being wearied-out by ill-usage they are forced to sell them." The 20 Henry III., c. 4. a moment to notice which portion of rural England suffered most from these enclosures. 1 Professor Ashley 1 has given a very complete account of the enclosures which took place between 1470 and 1600 A.D., and from his investigations it seems that they may be divided into five classes, according to their magnitude in various counties-(1) A very large portion of Suffolk, Essex, and Kent was enclosed; almost two-thirds of Hertfordshire and Worcestershire, a third of Warwick (chiefly in the west of the county), and almost all of Durham, though this latter was enclosed after the Restoration. (2) The counties of Northampton, Shropshire, the southern half of Leicester, East Norfolk, and the Isle of Wight were enclosed to a large extent, but not quite so much as those first mentioned; and (3) sporadic or scattered enclosures were made in the rest of Norfolk, the south of Bedfordshire, and north of Wiltshire. (4) The remaining counties were hardly disturbed by the prevailing desire, i.e., the counties of Yorkshire, Oxford, Nottingham, South Wiltshire, and Buckingham. There remains (5) a group of counties about which not enough information is available (Surrey, Sussex, Hants, Dorset, Somerset, Stafford, Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland), and we may therefore conclude that enclosures did not take place there to any great extent. It will be seen that it was chiefly the Eastern and South-eastern counties where enclosures were made most largely, probably because they offered the greatest facilities for sheep-rearing and more careful agriculture. The progress of enclosures2 spreads itself over four centuries, and vitally changed the medieval rural economy; but it was most rapid in the two periods from 1470 to 1530 A.D., and, much later, from 1760 to 1830 A.D. About the former of these two periods we will now give some contemporary evidence. § 131. Evidence of the Results of Enclosing. Such evidence is found both in popular songs and parliamentary documents. An old ballad of the sixteenth century complains: 1 Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. p. 286. * Cf. Ashley, Econ. Hist., II. ii. pp. 285, 286. "The towns go down, the land decays, A sheep-cote in the church" ;1 and this points to the growth of sheep-farming, to which all other considerations had to give way. It led also to the "engrossing" of farms, or the occupying of a large number of farms merely for the purposes of pasture. A petition of 1536 complains of the "great and covetous misusages of farms within the realm, which misusages," it says, "hath not only been begun by divers gentlemen, but also by divers and many merchant adventurers, clothmakers, goldsmiths, butchers, tanners, and other artificers, and unreasonable, covetous persons which doth encroach daily many farms, more than they can occupy, in tilth of corn-ten, twelve, fourteen, or sixteen farms in one man's hands at once." 2 It goes on to say that "in time past there hath been in every farm a good house kept, and in some of them three, four, five, or six ploughs kept and daily occupied to the great comfort and relief of your subjects, poor and rich. But now, by reason of so many farms engrossed in one man's hands, which cannot till them, the ploughs be decayed, and the farmhouses and other dwellings, so that when there was in a town twenty or thirty dwelling-houses, they be now decayed, ploughs and all the people clean gone, and the churches down, and no more parishioners in many parishes, but a neatherd and a shepherd, instead of three score or four score of persons." The same complaint is made by Sir Thomas More, who speaks of the increase of pasture as "peculiar to England," by which "your sheep may be said now to devour men, and to unpeople not only villages but towns." Land-owners, and "even those holy men the abbots," he says, "stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches and enclosed grounds, that they may lodge their sheep in them." The result was a terrible increase of pauperism, for men "would willingly work, but 1 Now-a-dayes, a ballad (Ballad Society) lines 157-160. 2 Rolls House MS., miscellaneous, second series, 854 (Froude). can find none that will hire them, for there is no more occasion for country labour, to which they have been bred, when there is no arable ground left."1 In fact, the evils were so great that attempts were made to deal with them by legislation; but they were, of course, useless. "It remains certain," says Froude, speaking of Edward VI.'s reign, "that the absorption of the small farms, the enclosure system, and the increase of grazing farms, had assumed proportions mischievous and dangerous. Leases as they fell in could not obtain renewal; the copyholder, whose farm had been held by his forefathers so long that custom seemed to have made it his own, found his fines or his rent quadrupled, or himself without alternative expelled. The Act against the pulling down of farmhouses had been evaded by the repair of a room which might be occupied by a shepherd, or a single furrow would be driven across a meadow of a hundred acres, to prove that it was still under the plough. The great cattle-owners, in order to escape the sheep statutes, held their stock in the names of their sons or servants; the highways and villages were covered in consequence with forlorn and outcast families, now reduced to beggary, who had been the occupiers of comfortable holdings; and thousands of dispossessed tenants made their way to London, clamouring in the midst of their starving children at the doors of the courts of law for redress which they could not obtain." 3 A commission was appointed in 1548 to enquire into this distressing state of things, and it resulted in a petition which shows a gloomy picture of rural England. "The population was diminished, the farmer and labourer were impoverished, villages were 1 Utopia, p. 65. The preamble to the 25 Henry VIII., c. 13, recites all the evils here mentioned. 2 Cf. Act 7 Henry VIII., c. 1, for reconstruction of farm-buildings, and 27 Henry VIII., c. 22, on same subject; also 25 Henry VIII., c. 13, that no one shall keep more than 2000 sheep, or occupy more than two farms. 3 Froude, History, iv. p. 353, who quotes as authorities Becon's Jewel of Joy; Discourse of Bernard Gilpin in Strype's Memorials; Instructions to the Commissioners of Enclosures, Ibid; Address of Mr Hales, Ibid; and a Draft of an Act of Parliament presented to the House of Commons in 1548, MS. Domestic, Edward VI. State Paper Office; also Lever's Sermons in Strype's Memorials. |