§ 10. The rural classes of medieval England.

Of land tenure in England before the 11th century we do not know very much. [Ashley, I p. 13.] [363]

The first detailed account of the economic condition of the country is contained in Domesday Book, in which William of Normandy embodied the results of an inquiry into the state of the kingdom he had secured.

"When Domesday Survey was compiled" says Cunningham, "every yard of English soil was as really, if not as definitely, subject to proprietary rights as it is now". [Cunningham, English Industry, I p. 95.] We do not, however, think that much importance has to be attached to this statement; for there was still much uncultivated land and, though the king claimed a right of property over this land, it was not yet held as property in the strict sense of the word, which means that all except the owner are excluded from its use. This appears from what took place in 1305, under Edward I. "By an adjustment of boundaries considerable portions of the Crown forest were given over to certain barons, who gained personally; but the position of the tenants was so much altered for the worse that their case obtained special attention in the Ordinance of the Forest, by which their rights of pasture and common were secured". [Cunningham, English Industry, I p. 251.] We see that these Crown forests had been open to the use of the peasants, so that practically there was still free land. And in this time of extensive tillage the common pasture played a great part in the rural economy. [Ochenkowski, p. 7.]

Accordingly, rent in the modern sense did not yet exist. The landlords had abundance of land; but the land was worth little if it was not provided with people to cultivate it. "The rent of the proprietor now is directly connected with the physical character of his estate, its productiveness and its situation. The income of the lord of a Domesday Manor depended on the tolls he received, and the payments of his dependents: and thus was based on the way in which his estates were stocked with meat and men, rather than on the physical condition of the land. His income was a very different thing from modern rent". [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 5.] Even in later centuries "a fertile estate would have yielded but little annual income, unless the necessary labour was attached to it". [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 407.]

In this time the whole of Central England was covered with [364] manors, and the mass of the rural population consisted of two classes: landlords and villeins; the latter were not all of the same condition, but none of them enjoyed entire personal freedom. [Ashley, I p. 13; Cunningham, 1.c. I pp. 95, 96.] Of those cultivators who are described as freemen, and socmen some could "sell their lands without leave asked or given, but others could only do so on obtaining licence from the lord". [Cunningham, 1. c. pp. 158,159.] Finally there were some slaves. [Ashley, I p. 17; Cunningham, 1.c. p. 160.] Every freeman was a landholder, therefore there was no class of free labourers. "The labourer, as a man who depended on some employer for the opportunity and means of doing his work, seems to have been almost unknown in the eleventh century". [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 5.]

All this agrees with our theory. All land had not yet practically been appropriated; therefore people could not be got to cultivate the land for the benefit of the landlords, unless they were deprived of personal freedom.

During the two following centuries population increased and land became more scarce. In the 13th century some lords already began to inclose portions of the waste, which had always been used for common pasturage, and "it was necessary to limit by the statute of Merton, in 1236, the lord's "right of approver" or improvement, by the condition that he should not take away so much as not to leave enough for the purpose of pasture". [Ashley, I p. 26.] Forests were often fenced off and the rights of common pasture restricted. [Ochenkowski, pp. 33, 34.] We have already mentioned an instance in which the condition of the peasants was much altered for the worse by such measures.

The changes which, during, the same period, took place in the condition of the rural classes, are grouped by Ashley under four heads:

"

1. the growth of a large class of free tenants;
2. the commutation of the week work for money or corn payments;
3. the commutation of the boon-days and other special services; and
4. the appearance of a class of men dependent wholly or in part on the wages they received for agricultural labour". [Ashley, I p. 20.]

In a passage quoted in the last paragraph Ashley states that [365] most of the "free tenants" were villeins who had commuted their labour services for a money or corn payment, and had been freed from the more servile "incidents" of their position, such as inability to sell a horse without the lord's consent. [Ashley, I p. 350.] Hence it follows that personal freedom, i. e. the right to leave the manor, was not regarded as characteristic of free tenure. Yet at the end of the 13th century every tenant was already permitted to sell his lands or parts of them. [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 253] This transition from personal to territorial obligations was certainly due to the increase of population and consequent enhanced value of land. In early times labour was scarce and therefore the landlord could not let a cultivator leave the manor. But now land, or at least some pieces of land, had already acquired so much value that there were always people to be found ready to cultivate them on condition of paying certain dues to the lord.

The principal cause of the commutation of labour dues for money was that the lord let portions of the demesne instead of cultivating it through his bailiff or reeve. He had now less need for the services of the villeins; for these services had consisted mainly in working on the demesne. [See Ashley, I. p. 27.] This change in the mode of cultivation was perhaps due partly to political circumstances (absence of the lord at court or in war), as in Germany it certainly was. But we think there were economic causes also at work. In early times, when land was abundant, it was necessary for the lord to keep the cultivators he wanted in personal subjection; he therefore made them work in his presence and under the supervision of his bailiff. But now the villeins had come to attach value to their holdings, they were no longer inclined to run away, for it would have been difficult for them to find land to live upon. The villein claimed an hereditary right to the land he cultivated, and the question as to whether he had any such right already began to be discussed by the lawyers. [Ashley, I. pp. 38-40.]

At the beginning of the 14th century most of the cultivators were still bound to the soil [Ashley, I. p. 37.], but the first germs of a thorough [366] change were already present. There were free tenants who could sell their lands; tenancies at will already occurred, though not frequently [Ashley, I. p. 29.]; and a class of free labourers arose. In Grossteste's rules, dating from 1240 or 1241, it is said that servants and retainers "are to do what they are bid immediately without any grumbling or contradiction; if they show any such disloyal spirit they must be dismissed, for many can be had to fill their places". [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 225.] And there were also agricultural labourers who, though holding small pieces of land, had not enough land to live upon, and were partially dependent on wages. Even where the peasants were still obliged to cultivate the demesne, they did not usually perform such work themselves, but hired labourers to do it; the usual phrase is that they have to "find" a man for the work. [Ashley, I p. 32.]

Here again our theory holds. Population had increased, land became scarce, and the transition from serfdom to freedom commenced. If the population of England had continued increasing, most of the villeins would probably have become freeholders or copyholders, whereas the lands that the lords had kept in their own hands would have been leased. And poor people who had neither land of their own nor capital enough to become farmers would have served for wages.

But an unexpected event entirely changed the economic condition of England. The Black Death, which made its first appearance in 1349, swept away a large part of the population. Whole villages were practically annihilated and large tracts of land went out of tillage. The economic consequences were such as we should expect. "As one immediate result there was great difficulty in getting labourers; the difficulty was aggravated in those cases where the tenants had died off and the lords were left with large holdings on their hands and no means of working them; while they lost the predial services of these deceased tenants on the home farm. There was consequently an immensely increased demand for hired labourers at the very time when their numbers were so much thinned, and it seemed as if the agriculture of the country was completely [367] ruined". [Cunningham, 1.c. p. 305.] Land was now again abundant, and so "instead of ousting tenants, lords of land found it hard enough to retain them even with lightened services". [Ashley, II p. 277.] And the natural consequence was that the landlords attempted to re-attach tenants and labourers to the soil. Whether, as Professor Thorold Rogers asserts, the customary tenants, who had commuted their labour dues for money, were forced back into the servile position of their ancestors, is not certain. [See Ashley, II pp. 264-267, and Ochenkowski, pp. 18-20.] At any rate "we may grant that, now that labour had become so costly, the lords would insist on the exact performance of such labour dues as had not yet been commuted, and on the punctual payment of all money rents. There is much reason to believe, moreover, that they abused their power of imposing "amercements" on their tenants in the manor courts for trivial breaches of duty". [Ashley, II p. 265.] This severe and unaccustomed pressure on the villeins, who were becoming comfortable copyholders, resulted in Wat Tyler's revolt of 1381. [Cunningham, 1. c. pp. 356, 357. On the Black Death and its effects, see also Thorold Rogers, Work and Wages, pp. 5-26 and The Economic Interpretation of History by the same author, pp. 24 sqq.]

Nor were the labourers any longer allowed to dispose freely of their labour power. "While the plague was actually raging parliament could not meet, but a proclamation was at once issued by the king with the advice of certain prelates and nobles, of which the preamble states that, "many seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants will not serve unless they get excessive wages", and that consequently the land can be scarcely tilled. Everyone, free or villan, who can work and has no other means of livelihood, is not to refuse to do so for anyone who offers the accustomed wages; each lord is to have the preference in hiring the men on his own estate, but none is to have too many men for his work; no labourer is to leave his employment before the specified time; nor to receive more rations or wages than he did in the twentieth year of the king and the common years before that; none are to give or take more wages in town or country". [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 306.] [368]

The depopulation of this time caused a reappearance of free land, i. e. of land which had practically no value, and so agricultural labourers were scarcely to be had. Therefore the lords to some extent reattached the cultivators to the soil.

These measures, however, were of little avail. It was not easy to prevent an employer from secretly giving more than the statutory wages. The penalties for infraction of the regulation were rendered more severe, the fines being replaced by imprisonment; yet the whole legislation proved a failure. [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 307, 308.]

And even if the statutes of labourers had been everywhere enforced, "many landowners would have been left in a position of great difficulty; if there was no one to do the work it did not much matter what they were to be paid, and in not a few villages scarcely any one was left to carry on the ordinary agricultural operations." Therefore new expedients had to be devised, of which the most general appears to have been the stock and land lease; "the new tenant took the land and the stock off the lord's hands and made in return a definite annual payment." These tenants "probably sprang from the class of free labourers, as the surviving villans who already had their own holdings, would not be so easily able to offer for a portion of the domain land which the lord desired to let". [Cunningham, 1. c. p. 355, 356.]

Here again we see the consequences of the abundance of land. The land alone could not fetch a reasonable price; stock and land had to be leased together.

As these leaseholders were taken from the labouring class, this measure, of course, still further diminished the supply of labour.

All these palliatives could not, indeed, better the postion of the landlords to any considerable extent. They had to wait for an increase of population which would render to the land the value that it had before the Black Death. As, however, the plague recurred several times, the population appears to have scarcely increased. [See Ochenkowski, p. 37.]

The landlords remained in this difficult position till about 1450 [This date is given by Ashley, II p. 264.], when a new and very efficacious remedy was suggested [369] to them: they applied a new mode of working their estates, which rendered them the practical command over the land, without need of a denser population. The extension of the wool trade and the dearth of labour made it far more profitable to keep large flocks of sheep than to grow corn. Consequently much land was laid down in pasture; there was a steady increase of sheep farming during the 15th century and a corresponding decrease of corn growing.[Cunningham, 1. c, p. 361.]

In our chapter on pastoral tribes it has been shown that the care of flocks and herds does not require much labour. We can, therefore, easily understand that after the rise of sheep farming there was far less need for agricultural labour than before. There had been scarcity of labour; now there was overpopulation and many people were thrown out of employment; for over-population exists, not only when there are more people than the land can support, but when there are more people dependent on wages than can be profitably employed by the owners of land and capital. [Lange (Die Arbeiterfrage, p. 241) also remarks that in England the transition from agriculture to sheep breeding engendered a relative overpopulation. On relative and absolute over-population, see further Oppenheimer, Das Bevölkerungsgesetz, etc., pp. 79-84.]

Sheep farming was introduced in the first place on the manorial demesnes, of which the lords had the free disposal. The demesne usually formed from one-third to a half of the whole arable area of a manor. Since the labour services of the villeins had been commuted, the tillage of the demesne had furnished employment to many small tenants and landless cottagers who, partly or entirely, depended on wages. The substitution of pasture for tillage on the demesne, therefore, brought many of them to ruin; for none but a few shepherds could thenceforth be employed. [Ashley, II p. 267.]

But far graver evils resulted from the appropriation by the lords of the commons and the land held by villeins or customary tenants.

The commons, i. e. the common pasture and waste, had always been used jointly by the lord and villeins. Whether the latter had any legal right to them is not certain; probably they had not; but they had always been accustomed to have the [370] free use of them. Now the lords began to inclose large parts of these commons for the formation of sheep runs. The consequence was that many of the customary tenants, who had relied on the commons for pasturing their cattle, could no longer keep the cattle necessary for the cultivation of their holding. Their farming became unprofitable, and they had to leave their lands, which were instantly occupied by the lords and laid down in pasture. [Ashley, II pp. 270-272; Cunningham, 1. c, p. 362.]

Even when the cultivator had not left his tenement, the lord sometimes appropriated and "inclosed" it.

The inclosures which took place, especially in the 16th century, are a fact of foremost importance in the history of English agriculture. The term "inclosure" has two different meanings. In medieval England the lands of the villeins, with those of the lord interspersed between them, lay scattered in a number of acre or half-acre strips, no two strips held by one man being contiguous. This system, dating from a time of extensive tillage, fell short of the exigencies of advanced culture, and had to be removed before any improvement in the mode of cultivation could be made. Therefore inclosures have often, especially in the reign of Elizabeth, been made with the common consent of all the landholders concerned, the result being that every tenant, instead of many scattered strips, obtained one or a few fields lying together. "But in the earlier part of the same movement, during the period which may be roughly defined as from 1450 to 1550, inclosure meant to a large extent the actual dispossession of the customary tenants by their manorial lords. This took place either in the form of the violent ousting of the sitting tenant, or of a refusal on the death of one tenant to admit the son who in earlier centuries would have been treated as his natural successor". [Ashley, II pp. 272, 275.] It was this latter kind of inclosure that was condemned by several writers of the 16th century, for instance by Hales, who by inclosure did not mean "where a man doth enclose and hedge in his own proper grounds where no man hath commons. For such enclosure is very benificial to the commonwealth; it is a cause of great encrease of wood; but it is meant thereby when any man hath taken away and enclosed any other men's [371] commons, or hath pulled down houses of husbandry and converted the lands from tillage to pasture". [Cunningham, 1. c, p. 474.]

Ashley, discussing the question as to whether the lords had a right to turn out the villeins, arrives at the conclusion that "during historical times and until comparatively modern days, the cultivators of the soil were always in a condition of dependence, and held their lands at the arbitrary will of their lords. For centuries the lord knew no other way of getting his land cultivated, and had no wish to get rid of a tenant; whenever he did so, it was altogether exceptional. But with the tendency to limitation and definition so characteristic of the feudal period, custom tended to harden into law, and it would seem to have been on the point of becoming law when a change in the economic situation, -- the increasing advantage of pasture over tillage, -- prompted the lords to fall back on their old rights. Then followed a struggle between a legal theory becoming obsolete, but backed by the influence of the landowners, and a custom on its way to become law, backed by public sentiment and by the policy of the government". [Ashley, II p. 281.]

This is in perfect keeping with our theory. In former times land was abundant, and therefore the lord "had no wish to get rid of a tenant," for he "knew no other way of getting his land cultivated". But now sheep farming made appropriation of the whole of the land possible, and so the lord was no longer in need of the villeins; he even went so far as to evict those whom his ancestors had attached to the soil. And even where the cultivators remained on the land, they often, and not always voluntarily, became leaseholders instead of copyholders; and "in many cases a lease was but a stepping-stone to tenure at will". [Ashley, II p. 284.] The lords no longer contented themselves with the customary payments; instead of villeins they wanted leaseholders, whose rents they could raise at the end of each term, according as the value of the land had increased. "Rents were raised with great rapidity as the tenant had to pay a sum equivalent to the utility of his holding as part of a large pasture farm.". [Cunningham, 1. c, p. 408.]

There was also far less need for agricultural labourers than [372] before. "The decay of tillage and lack of rural employment, during this century," says Professor Cunningham "rest on unimpeachable evidence". [Cunningham, 1. c, p. 393.] In the 14th century "the problem of the unemployed, as it now presents itself, had not yet arisen." But the agrarian changes "deprived great numbers of the agricultural labouring class, -- small customary tenants and cottagers, -- of the means of support in their old places of abode, and sent them wandering over the country". [Ashley, II pp. 336, 352.]

The appropriation of the whole of the land had thus given to the rural economy of England a new and essentially modern character: there were now leaseholders and tenants at will, labouring poor and unemployed. And the ancient institution of serfdom could not hold its own in the presence of such thorough changes. "The slow agricultural revolution which rendered their services less useful to the manorial lords, gradually set the villans free by removing the interest their masters had in retaining a hold upon them." "In some instances the exaction of predial services from villans by manorial lords can be traced as late as the time of Elizabeth; but though no change was made in the law, the lords seem to have found that it was not worth their while to assert their rights over the persons of their bondmen". [Cunningham, 1. c, pp. 361, 476.]

There were, however, many parts of England in which scarcely any inclosures took place. [See Ashley, II pp. 286-288.] Here the villeins remained on their lands and gradually became copyholders. They were still bound to services, which, however, were generally commuted for small money payments, so the conditions of their tenure were annoying rather than oppressive. Moreover, their obligations were no longer personal, but territorial; they were not astricted to the soil. And as they had an hereditary right to their holdings, they differed but little from freeholders. The "innocuous curiosities of copyhold," survivals of ancient serfdom, have lasted up to modern times. [See Gonner, Article "Bauernbefreiung in Grossbritannien" in Handwörterbuch, 2nd edition, II pp. 593, 594.]

 

Our theory can thus be of much use in accounting for the [373] changes which have taken place in the rural economy oi England. As long as there was still free land, i. e. land which, though sometimes claimed by an owner, could not fetch any reasonable price, the cultivators were astricted to the soil; but as soon as the proprietors had got the practical command over the whole of the land, many of the villeins were evicted and replaced by leaseholders or tenants at will or became such themselves; and the remainder became copyholders, i. e. proprietors obliged to some services or payments without being personally unfree.

We shall inquire now whether in Germany too the appropriation of the whole of the land coincided with the transition from serfdom to freedom.