Publications of the Univeksitv of PENNsvu^ANrA SEKIF.S IN Philoloi^y Literature and Archaeology' 'OL. IV. No. 2. SOCIAL CHAN T; 'N MN'GLA^ SIXTEENTH CENTURY AS REFLECTED IX CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PART I. RTjRAL CFiANGES '-nVVARD p. CHEYNIZ^ AS'^rSTANT PROFESF^OR OF HIi ) 1895 GINN & COMPANY Agents for United States, Canada \u(\ Engbnd 7-13 Tremont Place. Boston, ' '.-^.A. MAX Nl^MEYER Agent for the Continent i Fiirope Halle, a. -■>., lierii wv. WD • Co C5-3 THE GIFT OF 1 f ..Afc.i..o.2.o.fc..3 ■ ' •' 7^/f7 i^. .■'Tl DUE FEB 25 1353 ^ *PR10«53CT m 13 1953 CW MAYS 19I3DS ftfti' ^ J, MAR_^^J2£i^HP Cornell University Library HD594.6 .C53 Social changes in England In the sixteen nges in Englan oljn 3 1924 030 047 876 Publications of the University of Pennsylvania series in Philology Literature and Archaeology Vol. IV. No. 2. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND SIXTEENTH CENTURY AS REFLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE PART I. RURAL CHANGES EDWARD p. CHEYNEY, A.M. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 1895 GINN & COMPANY MAX NIEMEYER Agents for United States, Canada and England Agent for the Continent of Europe 7-13 Tremont Place, Boston, U.S.A. Halle, a,. S., Germany. I i( !:VV!I I' A. I 0Z0Q3 5r?^ The Papers of this Series, prepared by Professors and others connected with the University of Pennsylvania, will take the form of Monographs on the subjects of Philology, Literature, and Archaeology, whereof about 200 or 250 pages will form a volume. Each Monograph, however, is complete in itself. The price to subscribers to the Series will be $2.00 per volume ; to others than subscribers the numbers will be sold separately at the regular prices. It is the intention of the University to issue these Monographs from time to time as they shall be prepared. Each author assumes the responsibility of his own contribution. ^V,; TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. — THE OLD RfiGIME. Introduction . I. Concentrated Villages II. Open Field System III. Scattered Acres IV. Small Size of Farms V. Common Land .... VI. Fixity of Tenure . VII. The Manor Court VIII. Classes on the Manor . General Basis of Manorial Life PAGE I 7 8 9 12 12 • 13 14 • IS i8 CHAPTER IL — RURAL CHANGES. I. Increase of Sheep-Raising II. Inclosures .... III. Eviction of Tenants and Decay of Villages IV. Cessation of Grain-Raising and Depopulation V. Engrossing of Farms . .... VI. Rise of Rents ... . . VII. Migration of Townsmen to the Country VIII. Dissolution of the Monasteries IX. Theoretical Encouragement of Inclosures X. Inclosure for Parks ... XL Intervention of Government XII. Popular Resistance . ... Conclusion . ...... 21 25 31 37 43 44 54 62 71 77 81 94 105 B Cornell University S Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030047876 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. AS REFLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. PART I. — RURAL CHANGES. CHAPTER I. — THE OLD REGIME. The period which extended from the close of the fifteenth century through the whole of the sixteenth was a time of rapid change in many aspects of society. In the political and the intellectual world, in the domain of men's material and of their spiritual interests, there were new influences, new ideas, and new institutions. It was the transitional century from the Middle Ages to modern times. One of the most prominent characteristics of this period, and one which strikes us with a certain surprise, is the widespread and continued suffering of the great mass of the people. The contemporary literature, prose and poetry, sermons, pamphlets, private letters, court records, and statutes, reflect "the manifold complayntes of men, touchinge the decai^ of this Commonwealthe and Realme of England, that we be now in, moved more at this present then of long time hathe bene had, some imputinge it to one thinge, and some to an other." ^ We hear that " the state of England was never so miserable as it is at this present" ;2 and again, "England hath been 1 A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realme of England, p. 10. Lamond's ed., 1893. First printed 1581 and attributed to W. S., but recently shown to have been written in 1 549, probably by John Hales. 2 Thomas 'Becon, Jewel of Joy, Becon's Works, Parker Society ed., p. 435. 2 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. famous throughout all Christendome by the name of Merrie England ; but covetous Inclosers have taken this joy and mirth away ; so that it may be now called sighing or sorrowful England." ^ The most frequent complaints are from the country, but town life also was troubled. The town craftsman in the Dialogue says : " Therefore the citie which was heartofore well inhabited and wealthie (as ye knowe everie one of youe), is fallen for lacke of occupiers to great desolation and pov- ertie." ^ In still another dialogue, the querist asks, " For who can be so blynd or obstynate to deny the grete dekey, fautys, and mysordurys here of our commynwele ; other when he lokyth upon our cytes, castellys, and townys, of late days ruynate and fallen downe, wyth such pore inhabytans dwellyng therein ; or when he lokyth apon the ground, so rude and so wast, wych, by dylygence of pepul, hath byn before tyme occu- pyd and tyllyd, and might be yet agayn brought to some bettur profyt and use ; or yet, above al, when he lokyth unto the manerys of our pepul, and ordur of lyvyng, wych ys as ferre dystant from gud and perfayt cyvylyte, as gud from yl, and vyce from vertue and al honesty." ^ Some of these complaints are no doubt merely instances of the inveterate tendency of mankind to depreciate their own times. When we are told " The worlde is changed from what it hathe b.eene, Not to the bettre but to the warsse farre : * " 1 Francis Trigge, Humble Petition of Two Sisters ; the church and the co'nmon- •wealth ; for the restoring of their ancient commons and liberties which late Inclosure with depopulation^ uncharitably hath taken away. London, 1604. ''W. S., Discourse of the Common Weal, p. 16, 1549. 8 Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and TTiomas Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford, 1536 (?). Early English Text Society, ed. 1878, p. 70. * Sir William Forrest, Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise, 1548 (?) Chap. XIX, Stanza 27, Early English Text Society, ed. 1878. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 3 we recognize a familiar enough statement in any time and in any country, and one which represents rather the temperament of the writer than the characteristics of his times. But much of the contemporary testimony is not to be thus accounted for. Men who were closely connected with real life spoke of the sufferings of real men. Sir Thomas More, before whom as judge just such matters were likely to come ; Hugh Latimer, who could compare the rent of his father's farm in his boyhood with that in his later life ; John Hales, who was the principal royal commissioner in an investigation of the inclosures in 1 549 ; Robert Crowley, who printed and preached in the heart of London ; the nameless composers of popular ballads and scur- rilous pamphlets, — these and others rather as eyewitnesses spoke of what they had seen than as mere moralists bewailed the follies and the sufferings of mankind. Again, the changes that were in progress attracted the attention of the govern- ment, and a long series of statutes, ineffective, it is true, not- withstanding the authority of the Tudor monarchy, testify to the actual existence of those things of which the writers speak. Finally, the people gave the last proof that their injuries were real and their position intolerable, by rebellion. The very concreteness of the complaints, and the definiteness of the period in which they are heard distinguish them as real characteristics of the sixteenth century, not instances of the misfortunes which belong to all times. A certain disintegration of mediaeval society had been in progress certainly since the time of the Black Death, but the particular group of changes which were now bearing so hardly on the people seems to have begun in the latter part of the fifteenth century, to have increased almost steadily during the first half of the sixteenth, and to have subsided only late in the reign of Elizabeth. There are a few isolated earlier records, such as that mentioned in the Parliament Rolls in a petition of 1414. 4 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. " And also they seiden that there was made great waste in the same maner of Chesterton, of Housing, that is to say of Halles and of Chambers, and of other houses of office, that were necessary in the same Manor, and none housinge left standing therein, but gif it were a shepcote or a Berne or a Swynsty and a few houses beside to putte in bestes." ^ But this probably represents the shadow of the previous century of famine, pestilence and rebellion. The earliest undoubted mention ^ of a rising tide of change in the position of the lower classes of the country people is to be found in the speech of the chancellor at the opening of the first parliament of Richard III, in 1484, where he speaks of it as a matter of common report that " thys body fallethe yn decaye, as we see dayly hyt doothe by closures and enparkynge, by dryvynge a wey of tenauntes and lattyng down of tenauntries." ^ Somewhere between the years i486 and 1504 a letter was written to the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, " de- syryng and praying yowe in god tenderly to remember the wel- fare of owre cherch of Quynton, and the supportacion of oure poer towne qwch fallys fast in decay and nere to the poynt of destruccion except ye stand goud lord and turne more favora- ble to youre tenants, for youre howsynge gose downe, twenty marke wyl nott sett up ayeyn that ys fallyn within thys four yere." * Two statutes on the subject were passed in the reign 1 Rotuli Parliamentorum, IV, 60 b., referring to Chesterton, near Cambridge. 'John Ross, a Warwicltshire antiquary who died in 1491, in his History of the Kings of England, gives a long list of villages already gone to decay in his time, and speaks of his protest against the prevailing inclosures at the Parliament of Coventry in 1459. But his work in the form we have it is only as edited by Thomas Heame, in 1745, and it is possible that the editor, who is not always trustworthy, introduced some of these statements into Ross's manuscript. It is almost incredible that the movement had gone so far so early in the fifteenth century as Ross's testimony indicates. 2 Grants of Edward V, p. lii. Camden Society ed., 1854. * Letter of Vicar of Quintan, printed in Denton, England, in the fifteenth cen- tury, p. 318. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 5 of Henry VII. Early in the reign of Henry VIII, More, reserv- ing his universal irony for the second book, in the first book of the Utopia speaks plainly and definitely of the sufferings of the common people of England and their causes.^ During the same years 1514-1518, the government was making another effort to solve the new problems. Somewhat later in the same reign appeared the ballad "Now-a-Dayes,"^ and about 1536, Starkey's "Dialogue between Pole and Lupset," already quoted, while in 1533 and 1535, still a third group of statutes was passed on the same subject. In the later years of Henry VIII com- plaints became more numerous, as shown in the pamphlet and ballad literature, and in the scanty local records. But the greatest distress among the people, or at least the fullest testi- mony to it, falls in the short reign of Edward VI. Latimer and Lever, Becon and Gilpin, in their sermons, Crowley and Forrest in their doggerel verse, the Protector in proclamations and stat- utes, all dilate on the miseries of the people, and these finally reach their culmination in the rebellion of 1 549. From the reign of Mary no mention of the difficulties has come down, except in the statute-book, where an act of 1553 adjudged as felons those "who to the number of twelve should break down hedges, ditches, or other inclosure of any park or ground in- closed," and another of 1555 reenacted all the old laws against inclosures, yet it is evident that the same causes were still at work, and in Elizabeth's reign they assert themselves frequently in the literature, as in Parliament. .Midway in the reign, Har- rison refers to " so notable an inconvenience growing by incroching and joining of house to house, and laieng land to land, whereby the inhabitants of manie places of our countrie are devoured and eaten up and their houses either altogither pulled downe or suffered to decaie by litle and litle." ^ A few 1 See infra, p. 25. ^ See infra, pp. 27, 36. s Harrison, Description of England, Book II, Chap. XIII. New Shakspeare Society ed., VI, i, p. 259. 6 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. years later, Stubbes declares that "these inclosures be the causes why rich men eat up poore men, as beasts doo eat grasse. These, I say, are the caterpillars and devouring locustes that massacre the poore, and eat up the whole realme to the destruction of the same. The Lord remove them." ^ At the very close of the century Bastard's vigorous epigrams give evidence at once of the improvement in poetry and the continuance of the social changes. " To Queen Elizabeth. I knowe where is a thiefe and long hath beene, Which spoyleth every place where he resortes : He steales away both subjectes from the Queene And men from his owne country of all sortes. Houses by three, and seven, and ten he raseth To make the common gleabe his private land : Our country cities cruel he defaceth, The grasse grows greene where litle Troy did stand, The forlorne father hanging downe his head, His outcaste company drawne up and downe, The pining labourer doth begge his bread, The plowswayne seeks his dinner from the towne, O Prince, the wrong is thine, for understand, '■ Many such robbries will undoe thy land." ^ Even as late as 1604, in the first year of James I, a book already quoted sets out to prove of " Inclosure," that " (i) It decaieth Tillage, (2) It dispeopleth Townes, (3) It is against the Common-wealth of the Jews, (4) It is against the state of Christ's Church, (5) It is against Christian charitie, (6) It is against the Church and Commonwealth, and ancient liberties and customs of England, (7) Inclosure with depopulation is a 1 Philip Stubhes, Anatomie of Abuses, \^-x,. Part I, Chap. VII. New Shak- speare Society ed., VI, 6, p. 117. 2 Thomas Bastard, Chrestoleros ; Seven Bookes of Epigrames, 1598. Book III, Epigram 22. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 7 sinne whereof God shall make especiall inquiry at the day of judgment." ^ But these last complaints are almost isolated. Notwithstanding the increased bulk of literary production, mention of the most characteristic of the changes is more and more seldom found. The period of the movements here re- ferred to was evidently drawing to a close and giving place to a more settled condition of affairs for the masses of the people. That period was practically identical with the reign of the Tudor sovereigns, or can be said to fall pretty fairly into the century and a quarter between 1475 and 1600. From much direct and indirect testimony, then, it is evident that some radical social changes were in progress during this period ; that they bore with especial hardness on the lower classes of the people, and left a deep impress on the literature of the time. But in order to understand the nature of these changes, to appreciate the significance of much of the writing of the early sixteenth century, to see how and why so many people were suffering, it is necessary to gain some clear knowl- edge of the old English life by approaching it from the people's side, by recognizing its plain, everyday characteristics, before any great changes had occurred. For of all the group of con- temporary changes, in the material, political, and intellectual world, there was none more profound than that in the ordinary life of the ordinary people. In fact, the problem we have to study in this essay is the effect on the masses of the people of the influences of this period: the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation, of the decay of the old nobility and the growth of absolute monarchy, of the increase of wealth and the extension of commerce, of the growing prosperity of the prosperous and the utter misery of the poor. I. Mediaeval England was an agricultural country. It had of course its cities and towns, quite numerous, active, and wealthy, with their handicrafts and their commerce. These will come 1 Francis Trigge, Humble Petition, etc. o SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. under our examination later; but they were small at best, and the vast proportion of the people gained their support by agri- culture and knew only rural life. This farming country of the Middle Ages, however, and its population differed in many ways, even as late as the fifteenth century, from that with which we are familiar in modern England. The separate, isolated country house of the present time, whether gentleman's seat, farmhouse, or laborer's cottage, was almost unknown. The houses were all grouped into concen- trated villages like those of the continent of Europe at the present day. A village street or open green was closely lined by the farmhouses, with their barns and outbuildings, of the whole surrounding stretch of agricultural country; and even the church, the parsonage, and the manor house were seldom far detached from the other buildings. Long afterward, the new habit of building houses separate from others was spoken of as an abnormal and perhaps somewhat impious thing. "This community of dwelling, inclosers do sometimes take away in Christ's Church; for they will have no man almost dwell neare them. We may see many of their houses built alone, like ravens' nests, no birds building neere them." ^ II. Outside of the group of houses of the village the country lay as open as in the " Angelus " of Millet. No hedges or fences divided the fields : the arable land, meadows, commons, and patches of woods stretched away uninclosed, and apparently un- divided, till they reached the confines of another manor whose population was similarly gathered into a village surrounded by its open farming lands. From the farmhouses of the village men and women with their implements and cattle went out to work on their land, some of it perhaps a mile or more away, and returned to the village, on pathways which all converged, when their work was over. 1 Francis Trigge, Humble Petition, 1604. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 9 III. This open arable land was not divided up into farms in the modern sense, that is groups of fields, each field of . some acres in extent, and each surrounded by a fence, hedge, or wall. On the contrary, the whole of the land surrounding a village was plowed into some hundreds or even thousands of "acres," an acre as a piece of land being approximately four rods wide and forty rods long. In some cases the division was into half acres, or even into roods, all these strips being of the same length, but of one half or one quarter the width, respec- tively, of a full acre. It is on an open field thus divided, that Piers Plowman says : " I have an half acre to erye ^ • bi the heighe way, Hadde I eried this half acre • and sowen it after, I wolde wende with you • and the way teche." ^ These acre or half-acre strips were cultivated each for itself, and were separated from one another either by the mere rever- sal of the direction of the furrow in plowing, by narrow strips of unplowed turf, called "balks," or when the strips were on the side of a hill, by grassy banks known as "linches." The narrow balks or grassy strips separating the grain-covered acres were a conspicuous feature, and appear frequently in literature. They were the resting places where, " Between the acres of the rye. These pretty country folks would lye." ' Nicholas Breton makes his disconsolate lover say, " Upon some bushy bailee Full faine I was to walke." ^ And again, " Who can live in heart so glad. As the merrie country lad ? 1 Plow. 2 Passus VI, lines 4-6, Text B. Skeat's ed. Early English Text Society. ' Shakspeare, As You Like It, Act V, so. 3. * Toyes of an Idle Head, 1582, Chertsey Worthies Library. lO SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. Who upon a faire greene balke May at pleasure sit and walk ? " ^ A man's farm was simply a certain number of these pieces of land, usually scattered in different parts of the arable land of the village. He had no contiguous fields, but a piece here and a piece there, all over the manor, just as one finds the lands of the peasants scattered about in French or German villages to-day. The Husbandman in the Dialogue says, " our grounde lieth in the common feilds, intermingled one with a nother,"^ and the Doctor, " Every tenaunte had his landes, not all in one gobbet in everye feilde, but interlaced with his neighebours landes, so as heare should be three acres, and then his neighboure as manye ; and over that, he other three or four;, and so after the like rate be the most parte of the copie holdes that I doe knowe in this countrie."^ As the ^ The Passionate Shepheard, Pastor 3, 1604. Ibid. 2 W. S., Discourse of the Common Weal, 1549, Lamond's ed., p. 56. ' Ibid., p. 124. Description of Plate I. Part of the open fields and scattered acres of the village of Norters- hausen, near Coblentz, Germany, photographed in the summer of 1894, showing (i) the concentration of farmhouses and barns in the village, (2) the absence of inclosures, (3) the cultivation in long, nar- row strips in open "fields," and (4) the exclusion of cattle from the arable land. More land, similar in appearance, belonging to the same village, lies beyond and to the right. This arrangement is still charac- teristic of much of the agriculture of the Continent, as it formerly was of that of England. Each farmer in this village has several of these pieces, in different parts of the field visible in the foreground, or in that beyond. The woods to the left belong to the villagers in com- mon. The grain in the immediate foreground is growing on a strip in the open fields of the adjacent village of Oppenhausen. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. II nature of the land usually allowed of quite a group of acres being plowed parallel with one another, access to his own acres was obtained by each man from a lane on which the strips abutted or at least from a headland common to all the acres in any one group or "furlong." But as the adjacent acres on both sides of his belonged to other men there was frequent op- portunity for dispute. Gascoigne speaks of the plowmen who " set debate between their lords, By earing up the balks that part their bounds." * And long before, Avarice had been made to confess, " And if ich gede to the plouh, ■ ich pynched on his half-acre, That a fot londe other a forwe • fecchen ich wolde, Of my neyhgeboris next • nymen of hus erthe. And yf y repe, over reche • other gaf hem rede that repen To sese to me with here sykel • that ich sew nevere." " 1 The Steel Glasse, 1576. Arber Reprint, p. 78. '^ Piers Plowman, Passus VII, lines 267-271, Text C. Skeat's ed. Early English Text Society. Description of Plate II. A plan of the manor of Hayford Bridge, Oxfordshire, England, before^^ its inclosure. This survey was made in 1606, and is here photographed from a set of facsimile maps published by the University of Oxford in 1889. It shows the scattered acres, with the names of their holders and their measured areas, and the common pastures and meadows. The location of the village was in the northwestern corner. Lanes give access to most of the land. Certain inclosures are indicated near the eastern side, and what is apparently a cultivated knoll with linches is shown near the centre of the map. There seem to have been upward of a thousand divisions of land in the manor. 12 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. IV. The people were a nation of small farmers. Although there was a class of mere farm laborers, without land, they were comparatively few. Even the laborers commonly held one or two or more acres. At the other extreme, there cer- tainly were large farms of a more modern English type, but these again were few. They represented usually the old de- mesne or home farm, which had been cultivated in former times by the lord of the manor and only recently rented out to a farmer on lease. There was consequently only one, or at most two or three such large farms in each manor or town- ship. The typical farm of the fifteenth century consisted probably of some twenty or thirty or forty such scattered acres as have been described above. " For every fifty acres, forty acres, or thirty acres of land, one sufficient tenement mete for an honest man to dwell in," is the standard laid down in a later law.^ Many of the holdings were still smaller. A government report of 1607 connects fifteen houses, each able to maintain a plow, with 250 acres of arable land.^ Such a farm was worked almost entirely by the occupant and his family, but little hired labor being required, on the one hand, and the product being sufficient to support the farmer with- out his going out to service, on the other. The great 'Proportion of the country population thus held, on one form of tenure or another, land which they cultivated as if it was their own. These "yeomen" or small farmers emerge into literary recognition just as their numbers were about to be depleted by the changes of the sixteenth century; but in one form or another they had long existed in England, and still survived to play a part in the events of the seventeenth and even the eighteenth century. V. On every manor there was a considerable amount of land not divided into separate holdings but held more or less com- 1 27 Henry VIII, chap. 22. 2 Ms. Petty Bag, Depop. Ret. Cunningham, II, 52, n. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 1 3 pletely in common. Partly because population had never grown sufficiently to bring it into demand, partly because of its use- fulness as pasture 'land, there was always an expanse which was not cultivated but allowed to grow up in rough grass and under- brush. On this extensive "common" the holders of the arable land had customary rights of pasturage, and opportunities of obtaining fagots, turf, gravel, or other requirements. Moreover, in the mediaeval ignorance of any kinds of grass that would grow on dry uplands, the people were dependent on the natural meadows for making hay, and for purposes of pasture after the hay had been mown in midsummer. These meadows also lay open, though the portions which each tenant had a right to mow were probably marked. Finally, the pasture for cattle, horses, and sheep, in addition to that on the commons, and the stubble of the hay, was eked out by allowing them to feed on the portion of the arable land which was lying fallow or from which the crops had been removed. To make this feeding of the village cattle over the cultivated fields practicable, a compulsory rotation of crops existed, by which the holders of the strips in any one part of the open fields must all plant the same or a very similar crop so that it might be harvested from all the acres simultaneously, and thus leave the stubble and the grass on the balks available for feeding. Thus common rights in three forms, the "common," the meadows, and the plowed lands during their open period, played a large part in the agriculture and the social life of the group of village farmers. VI. The holding of an ordinary small farmer, consisting of his house and its appurtenances in the village, his acres in the open fields, and his rights of pasture on the commons, was occupied by him on what was practically a fixed tenure. Some of the yeomen were actually freeholders ; and however imperfect may have been the legal claim of others to the possession of the land, there was but little probability, during the Middle 14 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. Ages, of their being disturbed in its occupancy. In the sta- tionary condition of population, tenants were in demand, and lords with superior rights over the land were but little likely to exercise those rights in dispossessing the occupants who gave to the land its only value to them. Therefore custom, so much more present to the common people than law, had made them used to secure possession and free bequest of their farms so long as they made the payments required in their leases or defined by immemorial usage. VII. The close grouping of the houses, the system of open fields and scattered holdings, the common pasture, the small size of the farms, the permanence of tenure, must have com- bined to make the mediaeval manor to a great extent a single united body, separate from other organizations, but closely knit within. This union was strengthened by its usual ecclesiastical organization as a parish, and in the past had been still further embodied in the gathering of all the occupants of the manor periodically in the meetings of the manor court. This in its various forms of court-leet, court baron, and customary court, meeting at different intervals according to local custom, usually every three weeks, or in its more important meetings every six months, had brought together from time to time all the inhabitants of the manor. In these gatherings punishment of petty offenses, settlement of local disputes, interpretation and application of the "custom of the manor," drew the body of villagers constantly together, and perpetuated the fixed, in- variable character of personal status and personal relations. It is probably true that before the middle of the fifteenth cen- tury the manor courts were in a quite general decadence, that meetings were not generally so regular, the sphere of activity not so large, and the attendance of the villagers not so uni- versal. But even yet the local courts must in many cases have made a strong moral bond to hold the local community together, in addition to the economic bond of their agricultural system; SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 1 5 so^ that rural England might be looked upon as in a certain sense a league of some thousands of such manorial groups. VIII. During the Middle Ages, absolute individual owner- ship of land scarcely existed either in conception or in reality. The older communal possession and feudal theory alike ob- scured the definiteness of land ownership in the modern sense. It is, therefore, not unnatural that in the fifteenth century the exact legal relation of many of the people to the land was somewhat ill-defined. And yet it was upon this legal relation that the fortunes of a great portion of the rural population were destined to depend. The manor (in the greater number of cases identical with the township of earlier and the parish of later parlance) was the unit of legal and territorial as it was of agri- cultural organization. It was the estate of a so-called lord of the manor. The king himself had always been lord of the manor in a vast number of cases, and many manors were still directly in the possession of the crown. A great number of manors belonged to ecclesiastical bodies, — abbeys, bishoprics, colleges, and chantries ; others belonged to the nobility and gentry of all grades, from the duke or earl down to the lord of a single manor, who could seldom claim higher rank than the knighthood which belonged to all whose income from land rose to ;^20 a year. The direct possession of a considerable amount of land, known as the demesne, a superior claim to the remain- der, and many other rights on the manor belonged to the lord of the manor, whether this lord was the king, some great mon- astery, or baron with a hundred manors in possession, or the mere knight or esquire. In relation to the lord of the manor all its other occupants were tenants, that is to say persons holding from him. There were four principal classes of the so-called tenants of the manor. The freeholders were practically owners of their land. Some vague feudal relation between them and the lord still existed, and there were certain payments in recognition of i6 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. this supremacy, but otherwise they were free independent land- owners. They furnished a quite appreciable part of the yeo- manry. Leaseholders — those who held their land on payment of rent, with a lease for a term of years, for life, or for a series of lives — were the direct tenants either of the lord of the manor or of some freeholder of land 6n the manor. These were "farmers," properly so called, those who paid a farm, ferm, or firma for the use of their land for a certain period. 1 This class had had no existence in early times, but the economic development of the country had increased their numbers constantly. When the lords of manors had given up the cultivation of their demesne lands, these had been rented out as a whole or in parts to men who held them on lease, paying a money rent. Land escheating to the lord of the manor and land reclaimed from the woods or waste, when regranted, was usually treated as leasehold land. Some of this land was leased to large farmers and some of it was perhaps inclosed, but the greatest portion was in small farms of the type already described. But the largest proportion of the rural population consisted of the customary tenants ; those whose ancestors had held the same land from time immemorial, making customary payments in money or in kind at regular periods of the year, and on occasion of the sale or inheritance of their holdings. These were the villeins of earlier times, their personal services com- muted for money payments, their serfdom for the most part canceled, forgotten, or simply disused because of its unsuita- 1 Originally, of course, the word "farm " had no especial connection with agri- culture, referring indiscriminately to anything let out for a fixed payment. In sixteenth-century use in England it is just obtaining its especial reference to agri- cultural land. " Upon his owne lands or upon his ferme landes " (Proclamation of Protector, 1549)- "And though a man be but a farmer, and shall have his farm twenty years" (Fitzherbert, Husbandry, 1523), show successive steps in the restriction of its meaning. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 1 7 bility to existing social organization, the tenure of their lands to all appearance securely fixed in long unquestioned custom, and in its comparative profitableness to their landlords. Com- bined with these descendants of the villeins of the earlier Middle Ages, must have been another element, a considerable number of small holders who had obtained the land they tilled otherwise than by long inheritance, but in the absence of a formal lease from the lord of the manor, ranking not as lease- holders but as tenants by custom. These customary holders were in many ways in an unusually enviable position for a peasant population. Laborious as was their life, numerous as were the burdens they had to bear, still the payments they had to make were based on a valuation made long before, and were now extremely light; they had all privileges of commons and common fields, and the lands they occupied descended to their children subject only to the customary fines. Those custom- ary tenants, who had held their land from time immemorial, made up the class who were later generally known as copy- holders. The rolls kept in the manor court consisted largely of records of the descent of such lands in something like the following form : " Richard Bullocke died, seised in fee of one customary tenement, called Moises, holden by the rodde at the lord's will; and that Richard is his son and heire, and seven years old, who by Robert Fabian and John Fabian is admitted tenant, and paies to the lord, for a fine, twenty pence." ^ Below the customary tenants was a considerable population of laborers. Engaged for hire on the larger farms of freehold- ers, leaseholders, and even customary tenants, they were seldom perhaps without some land of their own also, if it were only a half-acre croft around their cottage, or a detached acre in the open fields ; and without legal claims to the use of the common, they probably exercised such rights by sufferance. 1 Extract from Court Rolls of Manor of Coggeshall, Essex, 2 Ed. IV, (1462). Dale, Annals of Coggeshall, p. 55. 1 8 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. In this description of the general organization of rural so- ciety in England about the middle of the fifteenth century, there are two or three restrictions to be made. The system of concentrated villages and open fields was not universal. As one approached the extreme western and northern portions of England, those which long retained their Celtic population, or those which had remained to late times heavily wooded, a somewhat different distribution of population was usual. As Harrison says, "It is so, that our soile being divided into champaine ground and woodland, the houses of the first lie uniformelie builded in everie towne togither, with streets and lanes; wheras in the woodland countries (except here and there in great market townes) they stand scattered abroad, each one dwelling in the midst of his owne occupieng." ^ But the organization described above was characteristic of by far the greatest area, of all the more advanced, more populous, and better known parts of England. Again, a systematic descrip- tion of customs and classes gives the impression of greater uniformity and homogeneity than ever existed in real life in the fifteenth or in any other century. There were undoubtedly houses detached from the villages, there were inclosures upon the arable fields and the meadows, there were large farms of a more modern type, there was competitive renting of land; yet all these things were exceptional, not the rule. Lastly, any advantages and superiorities over the organization of society in other times were relative, not absolute. All mediaeval life was laborious, subject to many vicissitudes, much privation, hard- ness, and brutality unknown to modern times. But there were also some advantages, and especially were there instances of a better relative position of certain classes to others than had existed in earlier times or has existed since. With these reservations, the preceding description will indi- 1 Harrison, Description of England, Book II, Chap. XIII. New Shakspeare Society ed,, p. 259. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 1 9 cate the framework in which the lives of the country people of England in the later Middle Ages were set. This social organization was marked by three general charac- teristics: first, the large corporate ,or cooperative element in the life of the people; secondly, the close connection of the whole population with the soil; and thirdly, the extent to which the whole structure rested upon custom, not upon either established law or written contract. As regards the first point, it is to be noticed that notwithstanding the shocks to mediaeval society following on the Black Death and other occurrences of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the tendency to local organization and system characteristic of that period still remained. Men were primarily not individuals but members of a group. There was but little freedom of indi- vidual action. A man was shut in on every side, and at the same time supported on every side by the requirements of common action of his group. In the rural village life, the nature and course of the crops, the times of harvesting, the method of cultivation, the treatment of cattle, had to be the same for all the sharers in the open fields and common pas- tures. As already pointed out, the proximity of the houses of the village, its separation from other settlements, the local administration still preserved by the village group, the assem- bly in the manor court, the very shading off of one class into another, made this village community a corporation, a close, firmly knit body which has no exact equivalent in the more individualistic modern world. Secondly, the connection and interest of practically the whole rural population with the land is manifest. There was a considerable number of small owners of land. There was a vast number of persons who occupied and tilled portions of the land by custom or on lease, as if it was their own. There were but very few persons, comparatively, who had no land at all in their occupancy. Small farms involve many 20 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. farmers.^ Therefore, whether a man was lord of the manor, a freeholder, a farmer on lease, a customary small tenant or copy- holder, or perhaps even a day laborer, he had certain roods or acres which interested him as being practically his own ; and he had still more unquestioned rights on land in the common possession of all. Finally, this system was held in equilibrium largely by custom, not by law. The agricultural rules that defined the times when the fields and meadows were closed for crops and when they were open for pasture, were customary only. The management of common property, the powers of local officials, the distribution of public burdens between the lord of the manor and the tenants, depended on local custom. Not only everyday matters, as the burdens and the perquisites of the tenants, payments to be made, and conditions of tenure, but the rules of bequest, and the petty justice applied in the manor court, were defined by custom. That great body of wider national custom which had been frequently defined and applied by the royal courts, and had come to be known as the Common Law, settled a great deal, but there was also a great deal left by it to each locality to settle for itself. The " custom of the manor" was just as likely to be referred to as a determining principle, even in royal courts, as the doctrines of the common law. Yet custom, though it was for the time very strong, was necessarily somewhat indefinite. Moreover, if times should change and custom be strained, it would have neither the permanence nor the authority of common or statute law. 1 The parish of Borley, in Essex, the figures of whose population happen to be forthcoming, in the fourteenth century had some 30 tenants who farmed their land, and only 10 who would rank as farm laborers. Of the latter all but 2 held some land in addition to their cottages. At present it has 3 farmers and 32 farm laborers, the latter either holding no land in addition to their cottages, or only a small fraction of an acre each. See Cunningham, History of English Industry and Commerce, vol. I, Appendix, for the mediaeval population ; also in a translation with notes in Annals of the American Academy, vol. IV, No. 2. The modern figures are from personal inquiry. CHAPTER II. — RURAL CHANGES. The most important social changes of the fifteenth and six- teenth centuries consisted in the destruction or extensive modification of those characteristics of mediaeval society which have been indicated at the close of the preceding chapter. The passage from corporate support to much greater individual freedom, the separation of a vast number of the people from their close connection with the land, the substitution of con- tract and law for status and custom, — these made the real significance to a great part of the population of the passage from mediaeval to later society. And it was the incapacity of the great mass of the people to conform to conditions so rapidly and so fundamentally changing that made this time of transi- tion so hard for the lower classes. Looking from the vantage- ground of long subsequent time we can now see what were the deep-lying influences producing change, reduce the varied phe- nomena of the time to some kind of unity, and judge of the ultimate results. But the men of that time saw only the details and the immediate processes ; it is therefore from their refer- ences to these concrete changes that our insight into the char- acter of that time must be gained. I. One of the great sources of complaint is the increase of sheep. Sir Thomas More, in 1516, complains that "your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up, and swallow downe the very men themselves."^ In a book already quoted, written in the 1 Utopia, Ralph Robinson's translation, 1556. Arber Reprint, p. 40. The Latin original of this passage is as follows : " Oves inquam vestrae quis tarn mites esse tamque exiguo sclent alt mine uti fertur tarn edaces atque indomitae esse coepe- runt lit homines devorent ipsos." Original edition, Louvain, 1516; not paged. 22 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. year 1549, the husbandman says: "Yea, those shepe is the cause of all these mischieves, for they have driven husbandrie oute of the countrie, by the which was encreased, before, all kynde of victual, and now altogether shepe, shepe." ^ A tract of the time, not dated, but evidently written somewhere be- tween 1547 and 1553, is entitled "Certayne causes gathered together, wherein is shewed the decaye of England, only by the great multitude of shepe, to the utter decay of houshold keping, etc."^ More than forty years afterward we still hear the same cry of complaint about the sheep. " Sheepe have eate up our medows and our downes, Our corne, our wood, whole villages and townes. Yea, they have eate up many wealthy men. Besides widows and orphane childeren; Besides our statutes and our iron lawes, Which they have swallowed down into their maws. Till now I thought the proverbe did but jest. Which said a black sheepe was a biting beast." ' Or again : " When the great Forests dwelhng was so wide, And careless wood grew fast by the fires side : Then dogs did want the shepherds field to keepe; Now we want Foxes to consume our sheepe." * Even foreigners noticed that near Oxford "such immense numbers of sheep are bred on it round about that it is aston- ishing," and near Cambridge "the countless numbers of sheep." ^ Sheep had, however, always been raised in England The peculiarity of this time consisted not in the introduction, but 1 W. S., Discourse of the Common Weal, Lamond's ed., p. 20. 2 Published by Early English Text Society, in Four Supplications, 1871. 3 Bastard, Chrestoleros, Book IV, Epigram 20. 1 Ibid., Book VII, Epigram 8. 6 Jacob Rathgeb, Narrative of Count MUmppelgart's Bathing Excursion to England, 1602. Quoted in New Shakspeare Society, VI, i, p. Ixxxi. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 23 in the wide and rapid extension of sheep-farming. The earlier sheep-raising had been in the main simply a constituent part of ordinary mixed agriculture, and on most farms there had been scarcely more sheep raised than enough to provide the meat and the wool for local consumption. The great wool export which had been a source of national income and an object of royal taxation for centuries, was mainly the product of the demesne lands of monasteries or of other lords of manors situ- ated in especially suitable parts of the country, increased by the occasional surplus of other farms. This, however, had made little or no impression on ordinary farming through the greater part of the country. A contemporary writer claims a divine authority for the earlier form of sheep-raising, which " conven- yently occupied so much wool and felles, as the housbond-men and fermours in England receyved of the gift of Godd yerly by werk of housbondry in a right order, wher Godd first gaff the leyrs ^ thereof, when no singularte was sought to have more plenty of wolle by men's wisdome, than God by his wisdome first ordenyed, that alle men by ther bodily werke schuld receyve of Goddes gift bothe mete and clothyng togeders, that is with the werke of housbondry to receyve the speciall gift of the fynes and goodness of the staple wolle, which Godd by his first day of everlastyng light by vertu of his holy spirit /aff into the erth for the comon welth of Englande." ^ But the sheep-raising which began to spread over England at the close of the fifteenth century was quite another thing. It was the substitution of sheep-raising for other forms of agri- culture. This change seems to have been the result of three causes. The older agriculture on farms large enough to require hired labor was unremunerative. Wages had been higher for a 1 Meadows. 2 Clement Armstrong, A treatise concerninge the Staple and the Commodities of this Realm, about 1540. Printed in Pauli's DreivolkswirthschaftlicheDenkschriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England, p. 15. 24 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. century, while there was no corresponding increase in the price of grain and other farm products. The system of farming on open fields was cumbrous, slovenly, and uneconomical; and the soil tended constantly to lose its fertility. Under such circum- stances, whatever the degree of satisfaction of the yeomanry with existing conditions, employing farmers and landowners might be very willing to introduce a new system. Secondly, there was a steady demand for English fine wool at good prices.^ Not only was there the permanent foreign demand for its use in the looms of Flanders, France, and Italy, but also a new home demand, due to an extension of the manufacture of wool in England, which had been growing steadily during the fifteenth century, until it had become, as it long remained, England's principal manufacture. The laborers required in attending to sheep were far fewer than in raising grain, and shepherds were paid less than any other class of country work- men. Sheep-farming, therefore, was attractive in proportion to the difficulties of the older agriculture. Lastly, capital unemployed and seeking investment was in existence in the towns, if not in the country, and could be applied, although with some difficulty, to farming processes. The nature and effect of this last clause will be spoken of in another connec- tion. It is evident, however, that the introduction of sheep- raising on an extensive scale was a very natural step in agricultural development, held in check only by the usual intense conservatism of rural custom and sentiment. And this conservatism might even yet have prevented any change. ■PRICES C )F WOOL. Date. Pek Tod. s. d. Date. Per Tod. s. d. Date. Per Tod. s. d. 1461-70 . 4 ii>^ 1501-10 . ■ 4 9A 1541-50 . . 20 8 1471-80 . • 5 4 15H-20 . ■ 6 ^% 1551-60 . . IS 8 1481-90 . . 4 8^ 1521-30 . ■ S 4'/ 1561-70 . . 16 1491-1500 . 6 0% 1531-40 . . 6 8U 1571-82 . . 17 Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, IV, 305, 306. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 2$ if the old manor system had been intact, but slow changes had undermined its strength, its equilibrium was now easily destroyed, and sheep-farming was evidently spreading. II. But sheep could not be raised in any large numbers in the open arable fields and common pastures which have been described in the previous pages. The sheep and cattle of the whole manor, in most farming districts, had been habitually pastured together under the charge of a village shepherd, cowherd, swineherd, or such official, or when they were fed separately it could only be in the narrow confines of the single acre or two, surrounded on all sides by the land of other men. If sheep in large numbers were to be introduced, considerable fields must in some way be inclosed, so that the owner could let them pasture at will, separately from those of other men, on a continuous stretch of ground, kept permanently in grass. Therefore three other processes followed immediately and necessarily : inclosures, the eviction of many of the previous holders of the small farms, and the substitution of pasture land for grain land. With these changes and some others which followed almost as closely, the whole literature of the time is ringing. It was here that sheep-raising became, for the time at least, a great social evil. It was these results of the introduction of sheep-farming which gave point to the oft-repeated figure of the sheep eating up men. To com- plete the quotation from the Utopia given above, the sheep not only swallow down men, "They consume destroye, and devoure whole fieldes, howses, and cities. For, looke in what partes of the realme doth growe the fynest, and, therfore dearest woll, there noble men, and gentlemen; yea and certeyn Abbottes, holy men no doubt, not contenting them selfes with the yearely revenues and profytes, that were wont to grow to theyr forefathers and predecessours of their landes, nor beyng content that they live in rest and pleasure nothinge profiting, yea much noyinge the weale publique : 26 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. leave no grounde for tillage, thei inclose al into pastures : thei throw doune houses : they plucke downe townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to be made a shepe- house. And as thoughe you loste no small quantity of grounde by forestes, chases, laundes, and parkes, those good holy men turne all dwellinge places and all glebeland into desolation and wildernes. Therefor that on covetous and unsatiable cor- maraunte and very plage of his natyve contrey maye compasse aboute and inclose many thousand akers of grounde to gether within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust owte of their owne, or els either by coveyne and fraude, or by violent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wronges and injuries thei be so weried, that they be compelled to sell all : by one meanes therfore or by other, either by hooke or crooke they must needes departe awaye, poore, selye, wretched soules, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherlesse children, widowes, wofull mothers, with their yonge babes, and their whole houshold smal in substance, and muche in numbre, as husbandrye requireth manye handes. Awaye thei trudge, I say, out of their knowen and accustomed houses, fyndynge no place to reste in. All their housholde stuff e, whiche is very litle worthe, thoughe it myght well abide the sale : yet beeynge sodainely thrust oute, they be constrayned to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abrode tyll that be spent, what can they then els doo but steale, and then justly pardy be hanged, or els go about a beggyng. And yet then also they be caste in prison as vagaboundes, because they go aboute and worke not : whom no man wyl set a worke, though thei never so willynygly profre themselves therto. For one Shephearde or Heardman is ynoughe to eate up that grounde with cattel, to the occupiyng wherof aboute husbandrye many handes were requisite." ^ 1 Sir Thomas More, Utopia, Ralph Robinson's translation, Arber Reprint, pp. 41 and 42. The original is, " ut homines devorent ipsos, agros, domos, oppida SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 2/ Shortly afterward, about 1520, apparently, appeared the ballad of "Now-a-Dayes." " Commons to close and kepe ; Poor folk for bred to cry and wepe ; Towns pulled down to pasture shepe: This ys the new gyse." ^ And some twenty years afterward, in another longer ballad, it is declared : " Soe many shepe-maisteres That of errabell grounde make pasteres, Are they that be thes wasteres That wyll undoe this Lande. * * i*r * * * * And whye the powre men wepe For stowring of such shepe vastent ac depopulent. Nempe abbates quibuscumque regni partibus nascit lana teiiuior, atque ideo pretiosior ibi nobiles at generosi atque adeo abbates aliquot sancti viri non his contenti reditibus, fructibusque annuis quae majoribus suis sole- bant ex praediis crescere, nee habentur satis, quod otiose ac laute viventes nihil in publicum praesint nisi et obsuit, arvo nihil relinquunt omnia claudunt pascuis, demoliunt demos, diruunt oppida, templo dumtaxat stabulandis ovibus relicto et tamquam parum soli perderent apud vos ferarum saltus ac vivaria illi boni viri habitationes omnes et quicquid usquam est culti, vertunt in solitudinem. Ergo ut unus helluo inexplebilis ac dira pestis, continuatis agris, aliquot millia jugera uno circumdet septo, ejiciuntur coloni quidam suis, etiam aut circumscriptis fraude, aut vi oppressi exeunt, aut fatigati injuriis adiguntur ad venditionem. Neque quoquo pacto emigrant miseri, viri, mulieres ; mariti, uxores, orbi, viduae, parentes cum parvis liberis, et numerosa magis quam divite familia, ut multis opus habet manibus res rustica; emigrant, inquam, e notis atque assuetis laribus, nee inveniunt quo se recipiant ; suppelectilem omnem haud magno vendibilem etiam si manere possint emptorem, quum extrudi necesse est, minimo venundant. Id quum brevi errando insumpserint, quid restat aliud denique quam uti furentur, et pendeant juste scilicet, aut vagentur atque mendicent. Quamquam tum quoque velut errones conjiciuntur in carcerem, quod otiose obambulent, quorum operam nemo est qui conducat, quum illi cupidissime offerant. Nam rusticae rei eui assueverunt, nihil est quod agatur, ubi nihil seritur. Siquidem unus opilio atque bubulcus suificit ei terrae depaseendae pecoribus, in eujus eultura ut sementi faciendae sufficeret, multae poscebantur manus.'' First three sentences from original Louvain ed., 1 516; remainder, London, 1777. 1 Ballads from Manuscripts, vol. I, p. 97, 11. 165-168, published by The Ballad Society. 28 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. For that soo many kepe Suche number and such stawre And never was seene before." ^ Inclosing, which is charged with so much evil in these quotations, meant the process of surrounding a portion of the common pasture or meadow, or a group of the acres on the open fields with a hawthorn hedge, so that the included por- tion might be retained for the separate use of its holder. This was inclosed or "several" as contrasted with its former con- dition of open, "champain," or uninclosed land. As Tusser says : " The champion differs from several much For want of partition, closure, and such." ^ In a word, inclosures were fields, in the modern sense of the word, cut off from the old common pasture or open arable land by hedges. To many of us England can only have become England when its hawthorn hedges, white in May and green all the rest of the year, came into existence. Yet in Shak- speare's time hedges in much of the country must have been a novelty and still unusual, compared with their modern extent. Moreover, they were unpopular. Trigge says : " I have hearde of an old prophesie that home and thorne shall make England forlorne. Inclosers verifie this by their sheape and hedges at this day." " May the cater pillars which God sent not many years since on thornes and hedges, which did eate off all the leaves of them in summer, may they not seeme to condemne Inclosers ?"^ In the preceding century, the blocking of the old open ways by hedges around the new inclosures was referred to as a source of moral as well as material difficulty : " Tunc equites, viri et mulieres, praecipue senes et debiles anguriantur 1 Vox fopuli, vox Dei. Ibid., p. 125, 11. 65-68, and p. 126, 11. 81-85. 2 Thomas Tusser, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, 1557, p. 2, ed. of 1672. ^ Francis Trigge, Petition of Two Sisters, 1604. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 29 et coguntur ab equis et jumentis suis descendere pro portarum aperitione ubi antea nulla obsistentia solebant procedere. Pedites etiam et quandocumque equites alias vias per ambages et longiores vias artantas transire antequam veniant in oppo- situm viae inclusae et in dubium, non sine multis malediction- ibus pro talibus inclusoribus imprecatis.^ The government report of 1517 mentions the hedges with the ditch which was usually dug inside: "Thomas Rowys armiger anno tredecimo Regis henrici septimi aput Clopton in comitatu praedicto cum sepibus et ffossis inclusit centum et viginti acras terre arrabilis de hereditate Johannis leighton armigeri et eas in pasturam convertit."^ And an observant French traveler, in 1558, notices these among other differences from his own country : " Le pais est fort convert et umbrageux ; car les terres sont toutes encloses de hayes, chesnes, et plusieurs autres sortes d'arbres, tellement que vous pauses en cheminant que vous soyes en un perpetuel boys : mais vous trouveres forces escaliers qui sont appeles en Anglois amphores, et par la les gens de pied vont par des petits sentiers, et entrent dedans les terres. Les gens de cheval n'y vont pas ; mais s'en vont par le grand chemin, entre arbres et buissons En ce pays la, il n'y a point de bergers qui manient ordinairement les moutons ; mais on les laisse ordinairement dedans les boys, soir et matin, et dedans les prayries communes." ^ But the foreigner must have judged from a small section of the country, for in Leland we find about as frequently such entries as, " From Walton to Sherburne village, about an eight miles, by Cham- paine Ground, fruteful of Grass and Corne, but little or no Wood," as "the most part of the Ground betwixt enclosid."* ^ John Ross, History of the Kings of England. 2 Inquisition of i^ij, ed. Leadam. Trans. Royal Hist. Soc, 1892, p. 182, n. 2 Estienne Perlin, Description des Royaulmes d'Angleterre et d'Ecosse, 1558, p. 25. Quoted in Introduction to Harrison's England, New Shakspeare Society, p. Ixxxi. * Itinerary, i, fol. 66; and 3, fol. 74. 30 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. His description, indeed, would not have been true for any con- siderable part of England until the present century. Sheep-raising, then, necessarily involved inclosing. It is true that there were considerable difficulties in the way of inclosing land which had always lain open. By statute law^ the common pasture could not be so completely inclosed as to deprive the tenants of enough pasturage for their cattle or of easy access to their scattered strips. According to almost universal custom, the arable fields must also be left open for pasture purposes during part of the year. The great propor- tion of the small yeomen with their apparently well-established hold on the land opposed inclosures, and government soon threw itself into the breach and tried to put a stop to the whole movement. Hedging and ditching was too expensive to be don^ for single acres, so groups of contiguous acres must in some way be constructed. Yet, notwithstanding these difficulties, inclo- sures went steadily on. The overcoming of the legal obstacles is too complicated and technical a subject to discuss here ; some of the means by which the practical difficulties were met will appear later. The main point is to see how deeply inclosures, or the division of the open lands into modern fields, affected the country population. Many of the inclosures were, as has been intimated, portions of the uncultivated common pasture. " Suffolk [Reads']. — Against the Duke of Suffolk, for enclosing the commons of Melford. How now, sir knave? 2d Petitioner. — Alas, sir, I am but a poor petitioner of our whole township." 2 This may have had but little effect, except where the common pasture was so much lessened as to stint the villagers of their habitual opportunities for feeding their cattle. But there 1 Statute of Merton, 20 Henry III. 2 Shakspeare, Henry VI, Pt. II, Act I, Sc. 3. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 3 1 evidently were such cases. "They take in and inclose com- mons, moores, heaths, and other common pastures, wher-out the poor commonaltie were wont to have all their forrage and feeding for their cattell, and (which is more) corne for them- selves to lyve uppon." ^ " Flow join they lordship to lordship, manor to manor, farm to farm, land to land, pasture to pasture, house to house and house for a vantage. How do the rich men and specially such as be sheepmongers, oppress the king's Hege people by devour- ing their common pastures with their sheep ; so that the poor people are not able to keep a cow for the comfort of them and of their poor family, but are like to starve and perish for hunger, if there be not provision made shortly ! What sheep- ground scapeth these caterpillars of the commonweal ? How swarm they with abundance of flocks of sheep ! " ^ This diminution of pasture land was a hardship for the vil- lagers. But when the inclosures were on the arable fields another class of effects followed, which bore still more hardly on the tenants. in. Occasionally one person, whether lord of the manor, freeholder, or other tenant, would chance to have several adja- cent acres which could readily be inclosed in one field. But where the acres were all intermingled, as was more usual, the only practicable way to get the land into compact pieces for purposes of inclosure seems to have been to deprive the small tenants of their farming land. These yeomen without land, having lost their usual occupation, and finding no other at hand, had soon to give up their cottages, to wander in search of work up and down the country, as More describes them.^ 1 Philip Stubbes, Anatomic of Abuses, Chap. VII. New Shakspeare Society, VI, 6, p. 116. 2 Thomas 'Ze.corv, Jewel of Joy, pub. by Parker Society, in Becon's Works, Catechism, etc., p. 432. The spelling In the Parker Society Reprints is, unfortu- nately, modernized throughout. ^ See above, p. 26. 32 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. Another writer about the middle of the century says, " And where that the sayde twelfscore persons were wont to have meate, drynke, rayment, and wages, payinge skot and lot to God and to our Kyng, now there is nothyng kept there, but onlye shepe. Now these twelfscore persons had nede to have living : — whether shal they go ? into Northamptonshyre ? and there is also the lyvinge of twelef score persons loste ; whether shal then they goo ? foorth from shyre to shyre, and to be scathered thus abrode, within the Kynges Majestyes Realme, where it shall please Almighty God ; and for lacke of maisters, by compulsion dryven, some of them to begge, and some to steale." 1 In many cases the removal was immediate, from both house and land. It was this eviction of tenants, direct and indirect, that awakened the wrath of the moralists of the time, as it cannot fail to appeal to our own sympathy. The curse of the old Hebrew prophet was invoked again and again upon those who inclosed and depopulated their lands. " Wo be unto you therefore, that do joyne house unto house, and couple one field to another, so longe as there is any grounde to be had. Thinke you that you shal dwel upon the earth alone .■' " ^ " Wo be unto you which joyne one howse to an- other, and bryng one land so nye unto another, tyl ye can get no more ground, will ye dwell upon the erth alone .■■ " ^ "Again, how do many of the temporal worldlings join farm to farm, office to office, lordship to lordship, pasture to pasture, land to land, house to house, and house for avantage ! that the vengeance of God threatened by the prophets may come upon them : ' Wo be unto you, that join house to house, and couple land to land, so nigh one to another, that the poor man can 1 Certayne Causes Gathered Together, etc., 1550-1553, published by Early English Text Society, Four Supplications, p. 98. 2 Robert Crowley, An Informacion and Petition agaynst the opjiressours of the pore Commons of this Realme, published by Early English Text Society, p. 161. 2 Henry Brinklow, Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, ab. 1559, published by Early English Text Society, p. 49. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 33 get no more ground ! Shall ye dwell alone upon the face of the earth?'"! "~ When the old yeoman tenants, or the laborers, left their farmhouses or cottages, these were seldom reoccupied. The new sheep farms were larger and carried on by a higher class of farmers. As has been already noted, a stretch of country which had required perhaps one hundred and fifty persons to cultivate it in grain crops, when transformed into sheep farms could be looked after by less than a dozen. Therefore but few laborers could be supported ; and as a consequence many of the little villages became absolutely, many more partially deserted. The houses were merely a timber framework filled in with rough plaster and thatched with straw. When unoccu- pied the walls were dissolved by the storms, the roofs dropped in, and that decay which always sets its seal so promptly on a deserted house soon left nothing but obscure hillocks to show where many a little English hamlet had stood. Sometimes the unoccupied houses were deliberately pulled down. So the inclosers and evictors were spoken of as " pullers down of towns," "wasters of houses and villages," and "decayers of towns." The earliest law against inclosures, in 1489, says : "The Kynge our Sovereyne Lorde, havyng a singuler pleisure above all thynge to avoyde suche enormytees and myschevons, as ben hurtfull and prejudiciall to the comon wele of this his londe and his subgettes of the same, Remembreth that amonge all other thynges grete inconveniences dayly do encrease by desolacion and pullyng downe and wylfull wast of houses and townes wythin this hys Reame, and leyng to pasture londes whyche custumably have ben used on tylthe, wherby ydlenesse, grounde and begynnyng of all myschevons, dayly dooth encrease. For where in some townes too hundred persones were occupyed and lyved by their lawfull labours, now ben there occupyed ij 1 Thomas Becon, Preface to the Fortress of the Faithful, ab. 1549, published by the Parker Society, Catechism, etc., p. 587. 34 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. or iij herdemen and the residue fall in ydlenes, the husbondrie whiche is one of the grettest comoditees of this Reame is gretly decayed, Chirches destroied, the servyce of God wythdrawen, the bodies there beried not prayed for, The Patrone and Curates wronged, the defense of this londe ayenst our enmyes outwarde febled and impeyred ; to the grete displeisure of God, to the subvercion of the policie and good rule of this londe, an remedy be not therfore hastyle purveyed." ^ The next statute on the subject is named "An Acte Concernyng Pulling Downe of Townes." ^ Just a century later, Francis Trigge speaks of " our cruell landlordes, our oppressors of their tenaunts, our pullers downe of townes, of whom as every age hath had some, so our age hath too manie." ^ Indeed, this testimony to the decay of the villages is to be found everywhere. "And further, yf you loke to the vyllagys of the countrey throughout thys lond, of them you schal fynd no smal nombur utturly dekeyd, and ther, wher as befor tyme hath byn nuryschyd much gud and Chrystyan pepul, now you schal fynd no thyng maynteynyd but wyld and brute bestys ; and ther, wher hath byn many housys and churchys, to the honoure of God, now you schal fynd no thyng but schypcotys and staballys, to the ruyne of man ; and thys ys not in one place or two, but gener- ally throughout thys reame."* Hales makes his Husbandman say, " So that I have known of late a docen plowes with in lesse compasse then six myles aboute me laide doune with in theise seven yeares ; and wheare forty persons had theire lyvinges, nowe one^nan and his shepard hathe all." ^ Or again, " For by your oppressors and extorcyoners, how be the townys and villagys decayed .' Where as were eight, ten, twelve, yea, 1 4 Henry VII, chap. 19, 1489. 2 6 Henry VIII, chap. 5, 1 514. ' A Defense of These our Days, 1 589. * Thomas Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, published by Early English Text Society, in England in Henry VIII'' s Time, p. 72. ^ W. S., Discourse of the Common Weal, p. 15. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 35 sixteen howsoldys and more, is now but a shepe house and two or three shepardys." ^ Latimer cries, " For I ful certifye you, extorcioners, violent opressers, ingrossers of tenementes and landes, throughe whose covetousness villages decaye and fall downe, the kinges leige people for lacke of sustinaunce are famished and decayed." ^ A contemporary of Latimer declares that " Satan, through Covetousness, doth so possess the hearts of many men, in these our days, that they do not only link house to house, but, when they have gotten many houses and tenements into their hands, yea, whole townships, they suffer the houses to fall into utter ruin and decay, so that by this means whole towns are become desolate, and like unto a wilderness, no man dwelling there, except it be the shepherd and his dog. " Truth it is. For I myself know many towns and villages sore decayed ; so that whereas in times past there were in some town an hundred households, there remain not now thirty ; in some fifty, there are not now ten ; yea (which is more to be lamented), I know towns so wholly decayed, that there is neither stick nor stone standing as they use to say. "Where many men had good livings, and maintained hospi- tality, able at all times to help the king in his wars, and to sustain other charges, able also to help their poor neighbours, and virtuously to bring up their children in godly letters and good sciences, now sheep and cowes devour altogether, no man inhabiting the aforesaid place. There beasts which were created of God for the nourishment of man do now devour man. The scripture saith that God made 'both sheep and oxen, with all the beasts of the field,' subject unto man, but now man is subject unto them. Where man was wont to bear rule, there they now bear rule. Where man was wont to have 1 Henry Brinklow, Comflaynt of Roderyck Mors, published by Early English Text Society, pp. 48 and 49. 2 Hugh Latimer, First Sermon before Edward VI, Arber Reprint, p. 33. 36 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. his living, there they now only live. Where man was wont to inhabit, there they now range and graze. "And the cause of all this wretchedness and beggary in the commonweal are the greedy gentlemen, which are sheepmongers and graziers." ^ We have not only general complaints like that just quoted, but the actual names, dates, and circumstances by which cer- tain villages lost their population. For instance, a last-century local historian with access to the manuscript records, gives the following plain unvarnished tale of the history of one little village, Stretton Baskerville, in Warwickshire: " Thomas Twyford, having begun the depopulation thereof, in 4 Henry VII (1489), decaying four messuages and three cottages, whereunto 160 acres of errable land belonged, sold it to Henry Smith, Gentleman. Which Henry following that exam- ple, in 9 Henry VII (1494), enclosed 640 acres of land more, whereby twelve messuages and four cottages fell to ruine, and 80 persons there inhabiting, being employed about tillage and husbandry, were constrained to depart thence and live miserably. By means whereof, the church grew to such ruine, that it was of no other use than for the shelter of cattle, being with the churchyard wretchedly prophaned, to the evil example of others, as are the words of the Inquisition." ^ The decay and the desecration of the churches and church- yards was an accompaniment of the depopulation of villages which was especially repulsive to the devout spirit of that age. It has already been more than once referred to in contemporary condemnations of in closures and their results.^ It appears again in the ballad of " Nowe-a-dayes " : " Envy waxith wonders strong, The Riche doth the poore wrong; 1 Thomas Becon, Jewel o//£'ji', published by Parker Society, Catechism, etc., P- 434- ^ Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1765, p. 36. ^ See pp. 26, 34. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 3/ God of his mercy suiferith long The devill his workes to worke. The townes go down, the land decayes; Off cornefeyldes, playne layes; Gret men makithe now a dayes A shepecott in the church. The places that we Right holy call Ordeyned ffor christyan buriall, Off them to make an ox stall Thes men be wonders wise." ^ A later historian, in describing the country seat of Townley in Lancashire, calls attention to the fact that it had been formerly, apparently, the site of a village and chapel, "both of which must have been destroyed to make room for the house, offices, and grounds of the opulent family which followed. The small close now partly included in the kitchen garden is still remem- bered as the Chapel Lea, and it is said that human bones have been found there." ^ IV. Sympathy with the sufferers by these evictions, and conservative dislike of innovation account for a great deal of the condemnation of sheep-farming and the resulting inclo- sures. But there were other more tangible evils asserted to follow, which attracted the attention of the government as well as of private men. These are well summed up in an address by John Hales in 1 548 : " Towns, villages, and parishes do daily decay in great numbers ; houses of husbandry and poor mens habitations be utterly destroyed everywhere, and in no smal number; husbandry and tillage, which is the very paunch of the commonwealth, that is that that nourisheth the whole body of the realm, greatly abated; and finally the king's sub- jects wonderfully diminished; as these can wel declare that confer the new books of the musters with the old or with the 1 Ballads from Manuscript, pub. Ballad Society, vol. I, p. 97, lines 153-164. 2 Whitaker, History of Whalley, II, 186. A license for inclosing this place exists, dated 6 Henry VII, 1491. 38 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. chronicles." ^ There stands out here conspicuously the asser- tion of two evils : the danger of loss from the cessation of grain- farming and the supposed diminution of population. " I condemn our covetous and new devised inclosures which convert champion and fruitfull soiles, being good arable ground, to pasture, casting halfe a cornefield to a sheepe's pasture. And so thereby diminish God's people, and depopulate townes. Secondly, I joine depopulation of towns and this new kind of inclosure together; because the one of them doth follow the other commonly, even as necessarily as the shadow doth the body." 2 "Ther ys no man but he seth the grete enclosyng in every parte of herabul ^ land ; and where as was corne and frute- ful tyllage, now nothyng ys but pasturys and playnys, by the reson wherof many villagys and townys are in few days ruynate and dekeyed."* Leland • complains, "But always the most part of enclosures be for pasturages." ^ The first statute of Henry VIII on the subject is especially directed against this pos- sible loss by the substitution of sheep-farming for tillage. " All suche townes vyllages boroughis & hamletts tythyng housys and other inhabitacions in ony parysshe or parisshis wythin this reame, wherof the more parte the fyrst daye of thys present parliament was or were usyd and occupyed to tyllage & hus- bondrye by the owner & owners therof for theyr owne synguler profytt avayle & lucre, wylfully be syth the seyd fyrst day or hereafter schall be suffrid or causyd to fall downe & decaye wherby the husbondry of the seyd townes . . . bene or here- after shalbe decayed & torned from the sayd use & occupacyon of husbondry and tyllage into pasture, shalbe by the seyd owner or owners their heires successours or assignes or other 1 John Hales, Charge at Assembly for Execution of Commission on Enclosures, Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, II, ii, 352. 2 Francis Trigge, The Humble Petition of Two Sisters, etc. ^ Arable. * Thomas Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, pp. 96, 97. 6 Itinerary, vol. V, fol. 84. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 39 for them wythin j yere next after suche wylfull decaye reede- fyed & made ageyn mete & convenyent for people to dwele & inhabyte in the same, and to have use & therin to exercyse husbondry & tyllage as att the seyd fyrst day of this present parliament or sythen was there usyd occupyed & had, after the maner & usage of the countrey where the seyd land lyeth."! Somewhat vaguely recognized in this condemnation was the fear that food would become more scarce, population less, and the established order subverted. Moreover, the men of the time felt instinctively that the passage from an arable to a sheep-raising husbandry was a step backward. And they were right ; all history teaches that a society based upon agri- culture is capable of a higher degree of civilization than is possible for a pastoral society. Whether there was an actual total diminution of population may well be questioned, though it seems to have been the almost unquestioned belief of the contemporary critics, at least down to the middle of the sixteenth century. About 1536, Starkey says, " Wherfor hyt ys not to be dowtyd, but that thys dekey, both of cytes and townys, and also of vyllagys, in the hole cuntrey, declaryth playnly a lake of pepul and skarsenes of men. Besyd this, the dekey of craftys in cytes and townys (wych we se manyfestly in every place) schowyth also, as me semyth, a plain lake of pepul. Moreover, the ground wich lyth in thys reame untyllyd and brought to no profyt nor use of man, but lyth as barren, or to the nuryschyng of wyld bestys, me thynkyth coud not ly long after such maner yf ther were not lake of pepul and skarsenes of men."^ And again : " For thys ys no doute, in tyme past many mo have byn nuryschyd therin, and the cuntrey hath byn more populos, then hyt ys now. And thys ys les doute, that other cuntreys in lyke space or les dothe susteyn much more pepul then ' Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, pp. 72, 73. •^ Il/id.,-p. 75, 40 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. dothe thys of ourys." ^ The summing up of the "sheep tract," referred to before, is as follows : " Furthermore, as we do thinke, this Realme doeth decaye by thys meanes : It is to understande and knowen, that there is in England, townes and villages to the nomber of fifty thou- sand & upward, & for every towne and village, — take them one with an other throughout all, — ■ there is one plowe decayed sens the fyrste yeare of the raigne of kynge Henry the Seventh. And in som townes and vyllages all the hole towne decayed sens that time ; and yf there be for every towne and village one plough decayed, sens the first yeare of the raygne of kyng Henry the Seventh, then is there decayed fifty thousande plowes and upwards. "Thewhiche fifty thousande plowes, euerye ploughe were able to mainteine vi. persons : that is to saye, the man, the wyfe, and fower other in his house, lesse and more. Fifty thousande plowes, six persons to euery plough, draweth to the nomber of thre hundred thousand persons were wont to have meate, drynke, and rayment, uprysing, and downe lying, paying skot and lot to God, and to the Kyng. And now they have nothyinge, but goeth about in England from dore to dore, and axe theyr almose for Goddes sake. And because they will not begge, some of them doeth steale, and then they be hanged, and thus the Realme doeth decay, and by none other wayes els, as we do thinke." ^ And Latimer's vigorous protest comes to the same thing : " Furder more, if the kinges honour (as sum men say) standeth in the great multitude of people. Then these grasiers, inclosers, and rente rearers, are hinderers of the kings honour. For where as have bene a greate many of householders and inhabitauntes, ther is nowe but a shepherd and his dogge." ^ Even in semi-official documents we find the 1 6 Henry VIII, chap. 5, 1514. 2 Cei-tayne causes gathered together, etc., about 1550, published by the Early English Text Society, in Four Supplications, pp. loi, 102. ' First Sermon before Edward VI, 1549, Arber Reprint, p. 40. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 4 1 same view taken : " Where there were in few years ten or twelve thousand people, there be now scarce four thousand ; where there were a thousand, now scarce three hundred, and in many places, where there were very many able to defend our country from landing of our enemies, now almost none. Sheep and cattle that were ordained to be eaten of men, hath eaten up the men." ^ Such a general depopulation was looked upon as a tangible danger. "And then, yf everie man should doe so (followinge the example of anie other), what should ensue therof but a mere solitude and utter dissolation to the whole Realme, furnished only with shepe and shepherdes in- stead of good men ; whearby it might be a pray to oure enymies that first would sett uppon it ; for then the shepe masters and theire shepheardes could make no resistaunce to the contrarie."^ Sir Francis Bacon in his History of King Hetiry VII, speaking of the first statute against inclosures, - says : " Another statute was made, of singular policy, for the population apparently, and, if it be thoroughly considered, for the soldiery and military forces of the realm. Inclosures at that time began to be more frequent, whereby arable land, which could not be manured without people and families, was turned into pasture which was easily rid by a few herdsmen ; and tenances for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes. This bred a decay of people."^ •' Yet notwithstanding this general testimony to a general ^depopulation, it is not at all certain that the total numbers "ixVere actually diminished. There was of course a considerable displacement of population ; certain parts of the country prob- ably had more people in the early fifteenth century than they 1 John Hales, Charge to Commissioners on Enclosures, 1 549, Strype, Ecclesi- astical Memorials, II, ii, 358, 359. 2 W. S., Discourse of the Common Weal, 1549, p. 52. 3 Bacon, History of King Henry VII, ed. London, 1819, vol. V, pp. 61, 62. 'Vi- 42 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. have ever had since. Nor is there any doubt as to the mass of disturbance of people, decay of towns, and consequent vaga- bondage and suffering. But on the other hand, nothing is more delusive than popular estimates of population at any time. Moreover, the inclosures and their resulting effects were by no means so extensive as we should infer had we no testimony other than the contemporary literature. Changes so funda- mental, so complete a breach with the past, made an ex- aggerated impression on the minds of men, and they gave exaggerated testimony. A man who had seen a little hamlet which he had known to remain unchanged from his boyhood, almost suddenly reduced to solitude, its houses falling to decay, its open fields and pastures inclosed -with hedges, sheep and cattle feeding in and out about the dismantled walls of its church and parsonage, and hearing in addition of similar troubles in other parts of the country, sprang naturally enough '/ to the conclusion that the whole country was being immedi- ately transformed. On the contrary, many parts of the country were almost untouched by the inclosures,^ the statutes for the reintroduction of tillage were to some extent effective, and the process of inclosure was gradual, extending, even for that part of the country which was affected, over more than a century. Thus new opportunities for gaining a livelihood may have arisen during the same period, to lessen the severity of the shock, and to make possible a continuance of the same or an increased population. In the absence of statistical sources of informa- tion the changes of total population are not really discoverable, and the most that can be asserted is that the conditions were not favorable to a rapid growth of population, as they became later in the reign of Elizabeth. Nor does the other charge of 1 See map in Ashley's English Economic History, vol. II, p. 304, and the sources from which the map is constructed in the previous references. But I am inclined to think this map somewhat fallacious, and the extent of the inclosures unduly minimized. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 43 a diminution of the food supply seem to be substantiated. The price of grain did not rise disproportionately to other articles during the sixteenth century, except in certain years of known scarcity. This could hardly have failed to occur if there had been any serious decrease of production. It is probable that there were improvements in agriculture which caused an equal production of grain, although from a smaller area; doubtless some land was being restored to tillage even while new land was still being converted to pasture; and finally the stationary population made the problem of raising enough food for the nation a comparatively easy one. The importance of the rural changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries lay in their influence on particular classes, on the relative positions of classes, and on the fundamental characteristics of social organi- zation, not on the total numbers of the population nor on the total creation of wealth in the community. V. One of the necessary results of inclosing the small groups of acres in the open fields and converting them into large sheep farms, was that there could be only a few large tenants where there were before many small ones. This resulted in a combination or consolidation of several small holdings into one larger one, and seemed like the willful dispos- session of several tenants for the benefit of one. Such an "engrossing of farms" was a great grievance. " Furthermore in Englande sum one man kepeth in his handes two or three fermes, and where hath ben six or eight persons in every ferme he keepeth oonly a shepparde or wretched heardman and his wyfe." ^ A petition to Henry VIII, dated 1514, speaks of " unreasonable, covitous persones, whiche doth encroche daily many ffermes more than they can be able to occupye or maynteyne with tilth for corne, as hath been used in tymes past, forasmoche as divers of them, hath obteyned and encroched into their handes, ten, twelve, fourteen, or sixteen 1 John Coke, Debate of the Heraldes, 1550. 44 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. fermes, in oon mannes hand attons, where in tymes past there hath been in every fferme of them a good house kept, and in some of them, three, four, five, or six ploughes kept, and daily occupied, to the great comforte and relief of your subjectes of your realme, pore and riche, for when every man was contented with oon fferme, and occupied that well, than was plentie and reasonable price of everything that belonged to mannes susti- naunce and relief, by reason of tillage," ^ and then proceeds to ask "that no maner of persone from hensforth shall have or kepe in his owne hands or possession any moo ffermes than oon." ^ Harrison says, " The ground of the parish is gotten up into a few men's hands, yea sometimes into the tenure of one, two, or three, whereby the rest are compelled, either to be hired servants unto the other, or else to beg their bread in miserie from doore to doore."^ In some verses of 1530, the husbandman says, " But nowe their ambitious suttlete Maketh one fearme of two or three, Ye, some tyme they bring six to one, Which to gentillmen they let in farmage, Or elles to ryche marcliauntes for avauntage. To the undoynge of husbandeman echone." ^ And again, in a ballad of about the same date, the complainant, after describing the destruction of farmhouses by the Abbeys which were landlords, answers the question : " Howe have the abbeys their payment? " " A newe waye they do invent Lettynge a dosen farmes under one, 1 Petition to Henry VIII, quoted in Ballads from MSS., Ballad Society, vol. I, p. loi. 2 Ibid., p. 102. 8 Harrison, Description of England, Book II, Chap. XIII, New Shakspeare Society ed., p. 260. * A Proper Dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and a Husbandman, 1530, quoted in Ballad Society, vol. I, p. 22. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 45 Which one or two ryche franklynges Occupyinge a dosen mens lyvinges Take all in their owne hondes a lone." i Resulting from this combination of farms, was of course a scarcity of holdings to be rented. "And one man shal have two or three such thyngs or more, in his handys, that a pore man scarcely have an hole to put in hys head for these gret extorcyonars." ^ "For now the poore tenante that lyved well in that golden world ys taught to singe unto his lord a new song, and the Landlords have learned the text of the damned disciple. Quid vtiltis mihi dare, et ego ilium vobis tradam. ; and nowe the world ys so altered with ye poore tenante that he standeth so in bodylie feare of his greedy neighbour — that two or three yeares eare his lease end, he must bowe to his Lorde for a newe lease, and must pinche yt out many yeares before to heape money together, so that in this age yt ys as easye for a poore tenante to marry two of his daughters to his neighboures sonnes, as to match himself to a good farme from his landlord." ^ VI. Closely connected with the consolidation of farms was the rise of rents and fines. Rents, whether for lands on lease or for customary holdings, had been practically stationary from time immemorial. The same was true of the fines, or sums paid to the landlord upon obtaining or renewing a lease, or upon the acquisition of a customary holding. But now both fines and rents rose rapidly, and this increase, which seemed to be an arbitrary extortion by the landlords, was condemned most violently. It must in truth have been one of the severest hardships to the yeomanry who were the principal sufferers 1 William Roy, Rede me and be nott wrothe. 2 Henry Brinklow, Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, ab. 1542, Early English Text Society, p. 49. = George Owen, Descriftion of Pembrokeshire, published in Cymmrodion Record Series, vol. I. 46 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. under the changes of the time, and it was correspondingly blamed by their sympathizers. Latimer, in preaching before the courtiers of Edward VI, declared : " You landelordes, you rentreisers, I maye saye you steplordes, you unnaturall lordes, you have for your possessions yerely to much. For that here- before went for twenty or forty pound by yere (which is an honest porcion to be had gratis in one Loordeshyp, of a nother mannes sweat and laboure) now is it let for fifty or a hundred pound by yeare." ^ And shortly afterward he proceeds, in a frequently quoted passage, to compare the rent paid by his father for his holding with its present rate : " My father was a Yoman, and had no landes of his owne, only he had a farme of three or four pound by yere at the uttermost, and here upon he tilled so much as kepte halfe a dosen men. He had walke for a hundred shepe, and my mother mylked thirty kyne. He was able and did find the king a harnesse, wyth hym selfe, and hys horsse, whyle he came to ye place that he should receyve the kynges wages. I can remembre, yat I buckled hys harnes, when he went unto Blacke heeath felde. He kept me to schole, or elles I had not bene able to have preached before the kinges majestic nowe. He maryed my systers with five pounde or twenty nobles a pece, so that he broughte them up in godlines, and feare of God. He kept hospitalitie for his pore neighbours. And sum almess he gave to the poore, and all thys did he of the sayd farme. Wher he that now hath it, paieth sixteen pounde by yere or more, and is not able to do any thing for his Prynce, for himselfe, nor for his children, or geve a cup of drincke to the pore." ^ The cry about higher rents became louder and louder, and in fact continued after all the ^other changes which we are discussing had come to an end. '" C.on- syder you, what a wickednes is comonly used thorow the realme unponysshed, in the inordinate inhansyng of rentys, 1 First Sermon before King Edward VI, Arber Reprint, pp. 38, 39. 2 Ibid., pp. 40, 41. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 4/ and takyng of unreasonable fynys, and every day worse than other." 1 " A manne that had landes, of tenne pounde by yere, Surveyed the same, and lette it out deare ; So that of tenne pounde he made well a score More poundes by the yere than other dyd before." ^ " So landlords make marchandise of their pore tenants, racking their rents, raising their fines and incommes, and setting them so straitely uppon the tenter hookes, as no man can lyve on them." ^ "The lande lordes for theyr partes, survey and make the uttermost peny of al their groundes, bysydys the unreasonable fynes and incomes, and he that wyll not or can not geve all that they demaunde, shall not enter, be he never so honest, or stande he in never so greate neede. Yea, though he have ben an honeste, true, faythfull and quiete tenant many yeres, yet at the vacation of his copie or indentur he must paye welmoste as muche as woulde purchayse so much grownde, or else voide in hast, though he, his wyfe and chyldrene, shoulde perishe for lacke of harbour. What a sea of mischifes hath flowed out of thys more then Turkyshe tyranie ! What honeste householders have ben made folowers of other not so honest men's tables ! What honeste matrones have ben brought to the needy rocke and cardes ! What men-childrene of good hope in the liberall sciences, and other honeste qualities (wherof this realme hath great lacke), have ben compelled to fal, some to handycrafts, 1 Henry Brinklow, Comflaynt of Roderyck Mors, 1542, published by Early English Text Society, p. 9. 2 Robert Crowley, Epigrams, Of Rente Raysers, 11., 1369-1376, published by Early English Text Society. 5 Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses, 1583, New Shakspeare Society, p. n6. 48 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. and some to daye labour, to sustayne theyr parents decrepet age and miserable povertie ! What frowarde and stoubourn children have hereby shaken of the yoke of godly chastisement, rennyng hedlonge into all kyndes of wickednes, and finaly garnyshed galowe trees ! What modeste, chaste, and womanly virgins have, for lacke of dourie, ben compelled, either to passe over the days of theyr youth in ungrate servitude, or else to marye to perpetual miserable povertie ! What immodeste and wanton gyrles have hereby ben made sisters of the Banck (the stumbling stock of all frayle youth) and finaly, moste miserable creatures, lyeing and dieynge in the stretes ful of all plages and penurie ! What universal destruction chaunceth to this noble realme by this outragious and unsatiable desyr of the surveiers of landes ! " ^ The rise of fines and rents was treated universally as a delib- erate and wicked exercise by the landlords of a cruel power which they happened to possess. Tyndale says, " Let Chris- tian landlords be content with their rent and old customs; not raising their rent or fines, and bringing up new customs to oppress their tenants; neither letting two or three tenantries unto one man. Let them not take in their commons, neither make parks nor pastures of whole parishes : for God gave the earth to man to inhabit; and not unto sheep and wild deer."^ " A pooreman whiche hathe bothe children and wief, Who (withe his parentes) uppon a poore cotte hathe theare manured^ manye a mannys Lief, And trulye payed bothe rente, scotte, and lotte : A Covetous Lorde who Conscience hathe notte, by rent enhauncynge or for more large fyne, Suche wone to caste owte : it goethe oute of lyne." ■* 1 Robert Crowley, An Informacion and Peticion, published by Early English Text Society, pp. 165, 166. '^ William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, Parker Society, spelling modernized, p. 201. ' Worked with his hands. * William Forrest, Pleasaunt Poesye of Princelie Practise, about 1548. Extract in England in Henry VIII's Time, Early English Text Society, p. Ixxxix. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 49 A later writer with true old-fashioned readiness to settle the ultimate destiny of opponents, describes the soliloquy of the rent-raising landlords in hell. "Then, said Dives, wo woorth these racke rentes and unreasonable fines that shall purchase such a kingdome ! I would to God I might chaunge my estate of that kingdome with the most vilest and basest cottage on the earth. When they come hyther, they will crie out and say, wo woorth the time that ever we rackt our tenants, or tooke such fines to impoverishe them." ^ Even the few advocates of inclosures were careful to explain that they did not approve of an arbitrary increase of rents. " But of one thyng, I pronounce and declare and take God to my recorde; that I make this boke onely to thentent that the lordes, the freeholders nor their heyres shuld nat be disheryt nor have their lands lost nor imbeselde nor encroched by one from another, and to non other entent. And for that I adver- tyse and exorte in Goddes behalfe all maner of persons as well lordes as other. That when the lord or freeholders knowe where their landes lye and what every pasture or parcell is worthe by the yere. That the lordes nor their owners thereof do not heyghten their rentes of their tenauntes or to cause them to pay more rent or a greter fyne than they have ben accustomed to do in tyme past. For as me seemeth a gretter charyte nor almes dede a man may not well do than upon his own tenauntes, for they dare not say nay nor yet complayne and therefore on their soules go it that so do and nat on myne." ^ But one will hardly now believe that the landlords of that particular time were more selfish, reckless, and wicked than before or after, or more immoral than other classes were at 1 Thomas Lupton, A Dreame of the Devil and Dives, 1584; quoted in New Shakspeare Society, VI, 6, p. 76. 2 Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, Book of Surveying and of Improvements, Prologue, about 1523. so SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. the time. It is true that the twilight of the old faith and the early dawn of the new was a period of especial moral obtuse- ness, but it is hardly likely that the nature of landlords was transformed. The fact that they raised their rents now while they had allowed them to remain constant for generations before must have arisen from an economic, not a moral cause. As a matter of fact, the rise of rents which fills so large a place in the complaints of the time, was in all probability a result of three quite natural concurrent influences. In the first place, there was an increase of currency in the country, partly natural, through the products of the American silver and gold mines, partly artificial through the debasement of the coinage by Henry VIII and Edward VI. This was claimed as the reason, even at that time, in the able Discourse of the Com- mon Weal, lately identified as having been written in the year 1549. The principal speaker, apparently representing Bishop Latimer, says : " And thus, to conclude, I thinke this alteration of the coyne to be the first originall cause that straungers first selles theire wares dearer to us ; and that makes all f ermors and tennauntes, that rerethe any commoditie, agayne to sell the same dearer; the dearthe therof makes the gentlemen to rayse theire rentes, and to take farmes -into their handes for the better provision, and consequently to inclose more groundes." ^ And the same idea is applied to other prices, though not to rents, in another contemporary piece, of far lower dignity: " the cowne ^ it ys soo skantt that every man dothe wantt, and some thynke not soo skarese, but even as much to basse. this coyne by alteracyon hathe brought this Desolacion." ^ 1 Lamond's ed., p. 104. ^ Coin. 8 Vox populi, vox Dei, lines 412-15, and 434-5, Ballads in MSS., vol. I, p. 136. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. J I The amount of silver in proportion to alloy in the standard coin was first reduced by Henry in the money issued from the mint in 1 543 ; it was still further diminished in 1 545, so that there were but six ounces of silver to six ounces of alloy; and again in 1 546 to four ounces of silver to eight ounces of alloy, this last being still further debased by coining a pound weight of the mixture into forty-eight shillings, instead of the old number of forty-five. Twice in the short reign of Edward VI debased coin was issued: in 1549 the silver being six ounces in twelve; in 1551, only three ounces in twelve, both issues being coined into seventy-two shillings to the pound in weight, the bullion value of the shilling of the last issue being only about one fifth of its nominal value. The proper fineness of the coin was not restored until the second year of Elizabeth's reign, 1560. An influx of gold and silver from America began early in the sixteenth century, but only became of importance when the silver mines of Mexico and Peru began to be worked by the Spaniards, and even then only made its way from Spain into the west of Europe very gradually. In as far, however, as either of these causes existed, an increase of all prices, rent included, might be expected. But they cannot have been the sole cause; since, in the first place, a rise of rent is complained of before either of these existed ;i and, in the second place, prices of many other things did not rise until long after the time of which we are speaking; as they should have done if the rise were due to the volume of currency. Secondly, larger rents were asked for by landlords because there was greater production by tenants. A well-known chapter in Fitzherbert's Book of Surveying is entitled, " Howe to make a townshippe that is worthe twenty marke a yeare worth twenty 1 Thomas Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, about 1538. "And an other ther ys wych few men observe : wych ys the inhaunsyng of rentys of late days inducyd," p. 175. 52 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. pound a yeare"; that is, to increase its rental by one half; and his receipt is simply inclosure. However disadvantageous sheep-farming may have been to those who clung to the old methods, and even to the nation at large, to the individual who practiced it it seems to have been immediately profitable. From him the landlord could therefore exact more rent than from his predecessor. Inclosure and sheep-farming meant also the addition of capital to agriculture, and persons who pos- sessed this capital, or who were able to lease the farms inclosed by the capital of the landlord, were willing to offer him an increased rent, as they expected to reimburse them- selves from the higher rate of profits obtained through this investment of capital. But, more than to any other influence, the increase was due to the gradual substitution of competitive for customary rents. In early times by far the greatest portion of the land had been paid for by its tenants by a customary amount of labor. The money payments which were substituted for this labor have the appearance of an ordinary money rent, but were evidently defined in amount, not by the production of the soil, but by the value of the labor they superseded. As land came to be granted out "on ferm," or simply for a money payment, this also, there can be little doubt, was largely influenced by com- parison with the amount paid by those whose rents came from a customary or labor source. Thus, until quite the close of the Middle Ages the rate of rent shared in the customary char- acter of so much of mediaeval life. But now this was all rapidly changing. New methods were being introduced, new capital invested, higher rent or a larger fine for entrance was being offered by a new class of farmers. " For, for to get your neyghbours ferme, ye wyll offer and desire them ^ to take bribes, fynes, and rentes more then they loke for, or then you your selves be wel able to pay. It is a wonderous thing to se gen- 1 I.e., the landlords. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 53 tlemen take so great rentes, fynes, and ingressaunce for covet- ousness to advaunce theyr owne landes. Howbeit it is a farre more wonderfull thyng to see husbande men offer and geve so greate fynes, rentes, incomes, yea and bribes for covetousnes to gette other mennes fermes." ^ It was natural enough, then, that landowners should begin to look upon their land merely as a source of income, to be valued at what it would bring. The completion of the fate of the Rent Rayser, spoken of above, is told as follows : " But when he was tolde whan daunger it was To oppresse his tenauntes, he sayed he did not passe. For thys thynge, he sayde, full certayne he wyste That wyth hys owne he myghte alwayes do as he lyste. But immediatlye, I trowe thys oppressoure fyl sicke Of a voyce that he harde, ' geve- accountes of thy baliwicke ! ' "^ Or, as Gilpin says, " As for turning poor men out of their holds, they take it for no offence, but say their land is their own." 2 In fact, a new conception of the ownership of land was rising by which it came to be looked upon, quite in contrast with the feudal or communal notion of the Middle Ages, as subject to the same completeness of control and use as any kind of personal property. This changing conception of land owner- 1 Thomas Lever, A Sermon Made in the Shroudes in Poules, 1 550. Arber Reprint, p. 37. 2 See p. 47, Robert Crowley, Epigrams, 1550, lines 1377-1388. Early English Text Society ed., p. 47. 3 Bernard Gilpin, Fifth Sermon before Edward VI, 1553. Printed in Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials, II, ii, 134. 54 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. ship is indicated by the passage of the Statute of Wills, in I S40>^ by which power was given to a landowner to dispose by will of all his lands held by a pecuniary tenure, and two thirds of his lands held by knight's service, a privilege which had been practically unknown for centuries in England. Thus it was again the breaking down of custom, not the especial wickedness of the landlords of that generation, that was the greatest cause of the rise of rents. Whether a man might do what he would with his own, was a question that had not called loudly for an answer during the Middle Ages, but now the landlords were answering it in their own way, and following up the answer, against the protests of tenants, preachers, and the government, by inclosures, evictions, and raising of rents to the highest terms that any man was willing to give. " And you surveighers of landes, that of lo.;^ land can make 20, you shall not be forgotten in the effucion of thys plage. For when you have multiplied your renttes to the higheste, so that ye have made all your tenantes your slaves, to labour, and toyle, and bringe to you all that may be plowen and digged out of youre groundes, then shal death sodaynly strike you, then shall God wythdrawe his comfortable grace from you, then shall your conscience prycke you, then shall you thynke with desparat Cain, that your sinne is greater then that it may be forgeven. For your owne conscience shall judge you worthye no mercye, because you have shewed no mercy." ^ VII. Among the various complaints of the time one of the most common was of the intrusion of merchants and handi- craftsmen into agriculture. A Petition to Henry VIII, in 15 14, attributes much of the evil of the time to this cause. " Whiche misusages, and the inconveniences therof, hath not only be begon and rysen by divers gentilmen of the same your Realme, 1 32 Henry VIII, chap. i. 2 Robert Crowley, An Informacion and Peticion agaynst the oppressours of the pore Commons of this Realme, Early English Text Society ed., p. 162. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. 55 but also by diverse and manye Merchauntes adventurers, Cloth- makers, Goldsmythes, Bochers, Tannars, and other Artificers, and unreasonable Covitous persones, whiche doth encroche daily many ffermes more than they can be able to occupye or mayn- teigne with Tilth for Corne, as hath been used in tymes past." ^ " Loke at the marchauntes of London, and ye shall se, when as by their honest vocation, and trade of marchandise god hath endowed them with great abundance of ryches, then can they not be content with the prosperous welth of that vocacion to satisfy theymselves, and to helpe other, but their riches must abrode in the countrey to bie fermes out of the handes of worshypfull gentlemen, honest yeomen, and pore laboring husbandes." ^ " If Marchauntes wold medle wyth marchaundice onely, And leave fermes to such men, as muste live thereby ; Then were they moste worthy to be had in price, As men that provide us of all kyndes marchaundice. But syth they take fermes, to let them out agayne, To such men as muste have them, though it be to theyr payn : And to leavye greate fines, or to over the rent, And do purchayse greate landes for the same intent : We must nedes cal them membres unprofitable As men that woulde make All the Realme miserable." * 1 Printed in Ballad Society Publications, vol. I, p. loi. 2 Thomas Lever, A Sermon made in the Shroudes in Foules, 1550, Arber Reprint, p. 29. 2 Robert Crowley, Epigrams, lines 1193-1210. \ $6 SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. The feeling of the time was • very clearly that each class should keep to its own occupation. " The landlord with his terme, the plowght man with his ferme, the kneght wyth his fare, the marchant with his ware, then showld increse the helth of yche comon welthe." ^ Even when the larger landlords took their farms into their own hands, and themselves entered the ranks of cultivators it was looked upon as a great evil, though it was but reverting to a custom of earlier times, when it had indeed been of great general advantage. Still, the feeling was that " it was never merie with poore craftes men since gentlemen became grasiers." ^ The knight defends his class by saying : " And suche of us as doe abyde in the countrie still can not with 200;£ a yeare kepe that house, that we might have done with 200 marks but six- teen yeares agoe. And therfore we are forced either to minyshe the third parte of our houshold, or to raise the thirde part of oure Revenues. And for that we can not so doe of our landes, that is alreadie in the hands of other men, many of us are forced either to kepe parte of their owne landes when they fall into theire owne possessions, or to purchase some ferme of other mens landes, and to store it with shepe or some other catall to helpe to make up the decaye of their revenues and to maintaine theire old estate with all."^ But for city merchants to come out into the country and buy up lands, either to rent out again or to occupy themselves as cultivators, seemed abso- lutely indefensible. " So sone as they have oughte to spare, Besyde theyr stocke that muste remayne, 1 Vox populi, vox Dei, lines 337-342, Ballad' Society Publications, vol. I, P' 133- 2 W. S., Discourse of the Common Weal, 1549, p. 18. 3 Ibid., p. 20. SOCIAL CHANGES IN ENGLAND. $/ To purchase landes is al theyre care And all the study of theyre brayne, Ther can be none unthrifty heyre, Whome they will not smel out anon, And handle him with wordes ful fayre, Tel al his landes is from him gone. The fermes, the woodes, and pasture grounds, That do lye round about London, Are hedged in within their mowndes. Or else shalbe ere they have done. They have their spies upon eche syde To se when ought is lyke to f al ; And as sone as ought can be spied. They are ready at the fyrst cal. For in the worlde ther can not be More greate abhomination. To thy Lorde God, then is in the Forsakeyng thy vocation." i " Merchaunt men travell the contre plowmen Dwell in the cyte. Which wyll Destroy the land shortly : That will be sene in hast ! " ^ " For the statte of all youre marchant men undo most parte of youre gentyll men, and wrape them in suche bandes that they have halle their lands." ^ "Therefore the devyll poysonynge all hys wyth greadye covetousness, wyll cause them ever to trust to their ovime provision, and never to be content wyth their owne vocacion, but beynge called of God to be marchaunt, gentleman, lawyer, or courtear yet to be readye at a becke of their father the devyl, besydes this their godly vocation devyllyshelye to proule 1 Robert Crowley, The Last Trumpet, The Marchauntes Lesson, lines 1065- 1080, and 1173-1176. 2 Ballad, N 7°. 7i. 82. Supplication of Commons, 69, 97. Tenants, 15. Tenure, 13, 15. Tillage, 37, 86, 93. Townsmen, 54, 58. Trigge, 2, 7, 8, 28, 34, 38, 82. Tusser, 28, 71. Tyndale, 48. Vagabondage, 26, 32, 70. Vox Populi, Vox Dei, 28, 50, 56, 65, 80, 98. W. S., 1, i, 10, 22, 34, 41, 50, 56, 74, 75. 89- Wool, 23, 25. 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