THE MANORIAL SYSTEM OF FARMING
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The progress of farming is recorded in legal documents, in manorial accounts, in agricultural literature. But the story is also often preserved in the external aspect which the land, the villages, or the hedgerows bear in the twentieth century. Dry uplands, where the least labour told the most, were first occupied and cultivated; rich valleys, damp and filled with forest growth, remained uninhabited and untilled. In spite of difficulties of water-supply, light or sandy soils, or chalky highlands seem to have been the sites of the oldest villages. Patches of the lower slopes of downs were cleared of self-sown beech, and sheltered dips tilled for corn; the high ground behind was grazed by flocks and herds; the beech woods supplied mast for the swine. Salisbury Plain, a century ago, bore no sign of human life except the proverbial " thief or twain "--no contemporary mark of the hand of man but the gallows and their appendages. Yet here are to be found traces of numerous villages. Scored on the sides of the Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire, and Sussex downs, "Lynches," "Lynchets," or "Daisses,"--grass-grown terraces or benches, still run horizontally, one above the other, along the slopes. The "elf-furrows" of Scotland seem to record a similar occupation of hill sites. Local tradition attributes their formation to spade husbandry. Marshall, in 1797, suggested, but only to reject, the operation of the plough. Fifty years later, Poulett Scrope adopted a similar suggestion; more recently Seebohm revived the same theory. Whatever explanation of the formation of these terraces may be correct, they indelibly indicate the sites of the earliest settlements, and the nature of the soil first selected for tillage.
(Lynchets are to be found in many parts of the country other than on the chalk downs. The method and date of their formation is still in dispute. See The Countryman, Jan. 1936)
The most primitive form of agriculture is that known as "wild field-grass" husbandry. Joint occupation and joint tillage were probably its characteristics, as they afterwards were of tribal or village communities. The essential difference lies in this. In the open fields of the village, pasturage and tillage continue to be separated; grass-land always remains meadow or pasture; it is never broken up for tillage. Under the more primitive form of convertible husbandry, fresh tracts of grass were successively taken in, ploughed, and tilled for corn. As the soil became exhausted, they reverted to pasture. Such a practice may belong to some portions of the Celtic race, or to nomadic stages of civilisation. In 1804 Marshall thought that he could trace the "wild field-grass" system in a custom of the south-western counties. In some districts lords of the manor enjoyed rights of letting portions of the grass commons to be ploughed up, cultivated for corn, and after two years thrown back into pasture. Over the whole country, from the Tamar to the eastern border of Dorsetshire, he found that open commons, such as the wide expanse of Yarcombe and the hills above Bridport, which from time immemorial had never known the plough, were distinctly marked with the ridge and furrow. Other features of rural life, which a century ago were more peculiar to the south-west of England, suggest that arable tillage by village communities, if it ever prevailed in this district, was soon exchanged for a system of convertible husbandry better suited to a damp climate. The cultivated land is divided into little patches by the high Devonshire earthwork, or hedge; the large open-fields of the parish can rarely be traced; fewer of the inhabitants are collected into villages, more are scattered in single houses or tiny hamlets. Cornwall and parts of Devonshire, like Brittany, are a country of hedges, and of a Celtic race.
This "wild field-grass" husbandry was displaced in most parts of England by the permanent separation of arable from pasture land. The change indicates an advance towards a more settled state of society, but not necessarily an advance in agricultural practice. The fixed division of tillage and grass may have been introduced into this country by a people accustomed, like the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons, to a drier and less variable climate. If so, it was on this alien system that the agricultural organisation of the mediaeval manor was based. On it also were founded the essential features of those village communities which at one time tilled two-thirds of the cultivated soil of England, survived the criticism of Fitzherbert in the sixteenth century, outlived the onslaught of Arthur Young in the eighteenth century, clung to the land in spite of thousands of enclosure Acts, were carried to the New World by the Pilgrim Fathers, and linger to this day in, for instance, the Nottinghamshire village of Lexington, now Laxton, where half the land of the parish is tilled by an agricultural association of partners.
In the early stages of history, the law itself was powerless to protect individual independence or to safeguard individual rights. Agriculture, like other industries, was therefore organised on principles of graduated dependence and collective responsibility. Mediaeval manors, in fact, resembled trade guilds, and it would be difficult to frame an organisation which, given the weakness of law and the infancy of agriculture, was better calculated to effect the object of mutual help and protection. Communities grouped together in villages were less liable to attack than detached farmhouses and buildings; common methods of farming facilitated that continuous cultivation which otherwise might have been interrupted by the frequent absence of the able-bodied men on military expeditions; the observance of common rules of management may have hindered improvement, but, if strictly enforced, it also prevented deterioration. Thus the system was suitable to the times and their conditions.
The origin of the legal relation of manors to village communities lies outside the scope of the present enquiry. It concerns tenures rather than systems of cultivation. Two theories explain the rights of manorial lords and rights of common exercised over manorial lands. The legal theory, in its crudest form, is that the lord of the manor is the absolute owner of the soil of his manor, and that rights acquired over any part of it by freeholders and tenants are acquired against him, and originate in his grant or sufferance. The historical theory, stated baldly, is that self-governing, independent communities of freemen originally owned the land in common, and were gradually reduced to dependence by one of their members, or by a conqueror, who became the lord of the soil. There seems to be no doubt that individual ownership belongs to an earlier stage of civilisation than communal ownership. But if the second theory is correct, the legal position of the lord of the manor represents a series of encroachments, which transformed the Mark of freemen into the Mark of bondmen, and changed the rights of the villagers over the wastes of the district into customary rights of user over the lord's soil. Questions of the origin and antiquity of manors, and the extent to which they prevailed before the Norman Conquest, have been to a great degree reopened by recent studies. Seebohm, for example, practically supported the legal view by historical argument. He traced the feudal manor to the Roman villa, with the lord's estate as the centre round which clustered cultivators, who tilled the soil under servile or semi-servile conditions. This system, according to his view, was taken over by the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and the agrarian results of the Teutonic occupation may be summed up in the transfer of the Roman villa, with its servile labourers, to the conquerors. As a complete explanation of social development the legal theory, in spite of this historical support, seems inadequate. But whether the early stages of village communities reveal a movement from serfdom or originated in freedom, whether their relations to manors represent encroachments by the lord or advances by the serf, whether the rights of agrarian associations underlay, or were acquired against, the manorial rights of the feudal baron--whether, in other words, the land-law of the noble became the land-law of the people, or the reverse--is here immaterial. Roughly and generally speaking, the immediate lordship of the land farmed by a village community, including the wastes and commons, was, after the Norman Conquest, vested in the lord of the manor, subject to regulated rights enjoyed by its members.
On a manorial estate, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, only the church, the manor-house, and perhaps the mill, rose out conspicuously. There were no detached, isolated farm-houses; but the remaining buildings of the village, grouped together in a sort of street, were the homes of the peasantry, who occupied and cultivated the greater part of the land. At some little distance from the village stood the manor hall or grange, with its outbuildings, garden, and fishpond, surrounded by clay-built walls with thatched tops. The style and extent of the buildings depended on whether the house was the permanent or occasional residence of the lord; they also varied with the importance of the manor, and the wealth of its owner. The house itself was built either of timber and clay, or of stone, for brickmaking was still a forgotten art. It often consisted of a single hall, plastered inside, open to the roof, and earth-floored, which served as court of justice, diningroom, and bedchamber. At one end of the central room was a stable; at the other a chamber, kitchen, or larder. Below one part of the ground floor was a cellar; above another part was, perhaps, a "solar," or parlour, approached by an outside staircase. If the manor was sufficiently important, there were probably added a detached building for the farm servants, and a chamber for the bailiff. The outbuildings consisted of bake-house, stables, dairy, cattle and poultry houses, granary, and dove-cote. Some of the oldest specimens of domestic architecture are granaries, like Hazelton or Calcot in Gloucestershire, or the dove-cotes which still in country districts mark the former sites of manor-houses. Repairs of the walls and buildings of the manor-house were among the labour services of the tenantry, who dug, tempered, and daubed the clay, cut and carted the timber, and gathered the straw or reeds for thatching. Where technical skill was needed they were aided by craftsmen, who either held land in reward for their special services, or, on the smaller manors, were hired for the occasion.
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Tufts of trees, conspicuous in the hedgeless expanse of arable land by which they were surrounded, marked the sites of villages, as they still do in the high table-land of the Pays de Caux. Under their shelter clustered the homes of the peasantry, clay-walled, open-roofed, earth-floored, chimneyless sheds, covered in with straw or reeds or heather, and consisting of a single room. Here, divided by a hurdle or wattle partition, lived, not only the human inhabitants, but their cows, pigs, and poultry. Close by were the tofts and crofts of the open-field farmers, each with its miniature hay-rick and straw-stack; and the cottages and curtilages of the cottagers, "fencèd al aboute with stikkes." Here were the scanty gardens in which grew the vegetables, few but essential to the health of a population which lived almost entirely on salted meat and fish--often half-cured and half-putrid. These homesteads were in early times the only property held by members of the township in exclusive separate occupation. They were also, at first, the only permanent enclosures on the commonable land. But, as agriculture advanced, pasture paddocks ("gerstuns" or "garstons") for rearing stock, calves, or fattening beasts, or for the working oxen, which could not endure his "warke to labour all daye, and then to be put to the commons or before the herdsman," were enclosed in the immediate neighbourhood of the village. In these enclosures, or "happy garstons" as they were called at Aston Boges, were held the village merrymakings, the rush-bearings, the May games, the summerings at St. John's Eve, the public breakfasts, and the distribution of bread and ale in Rogation week.
The land comprised in a thirteenth century manor was generally divided into four main portions, and, speaking generally, was cultivated on co-operative principles; the demesne or "board" land, reserved for the lord's' personal use, surrounding the manorhouse, and forming the smaller portion of the whole; the free land occupied by freemen holding by military service, or by some form of fixed rent in money or in kind; the unfree land, occupied by various classes of bondmen, holding by produce-rents and labour services which varied with the custom of the manor; the common pastures and untilled wastes on which the tenants of the manor and the occupiers of certain cottages, in virtue of their holdings, fed their live stock. This right of pasture must be clearly distinguished from those rights which, at certain seasons of the year, were exercised by the associated partners over the cultivated arable and meadow lands of the village farm. Thus the lord's demesne, using the word in its narrower sense, might be kept in hand, or let on lease to free or unfree tenants, or thrown into the village farm, or dealt with as to portions in each of these three ways. But whether the land was treated as a compact whole, like a modern home-farm, or whether the landlord, as a shareholder in the village association, allowed it to be cut up into strips and intermixed with other holdings, the demesne was mainly cultivated by the labour services of the unfree peasantry. The rest of the land of the manor, forming the larger portion of the cultivated area, was farmed by village partners, whose rent chiefly consisted in the labour, more or less definite in amount, which they were obliged to perform on the lord's demesne.
In this method of cultivating a manorial estate there are many contrasts with the modern system. The three-fold division of the agricultural interests into landlord, tenant farmer, and wage-earning labourer was practically unknown. Landowner and tenant-labourer owned, occupied, and cultivated the soil, and the gradual relaxation of the labourer's tenure of the land, and the interposition of the tenant farmer between the two existing classes, sum up the early social history of English farming. In the thirteenth century, muscles were more essential to the prosperity of the landlord than money rents.
The cultivators of the soil grew their produce, not for sale, but for their own consumption. Each manor or village was isolated and self-sufficing. Only in the neighbourhood of towns was there any market for the produce of the farm. Few manufactured articles were bought. Salt, tar, iron (bought in four-pound bars), mill-stones, steel for tipping the edges of implements, canvas for the sails of the wind-mill, cloths for use in the dairy, in the malthouse, or in the grange, together with the dresses of the inhabitants of the hall, and a few vessels of brass, copper, or earthenware, satisfied the simple needs of the rural population. Hands were therefore more required than money on manorial estates. If the manor was well stocked with labour, the land paid; when the stock of labour shrank, the profits dwindled. It was in order to retain a sufficient supply of labour on the land that bondmen were restrained from leaving the manor to assume the tonsure of the clerk or the flat cap of the apprentice, to become soldiers or to work outside the manor. Even their marriages were carefully controlled by licences. It was, again, in order to exact and supervise the due performance of. labour services that the lord of the manor maintained his large official staff--his seneschal, if he owned several manors, his steward, his bailiff, and the various foremen of the labourers, such as the reeve, the hayward, the head-reaper, and the granger. But with the thirteenth century begins the practice of keeping estate accounts, in which the amount and cash values of the labour services are entered. Thus the uncertainty of villein-tenure was modified, and the means were prepared for commuting obligations to work into their money equivalents. Already the causes were operating which hastened the process, and changed agriculture from a self-sufficing industry into a commercial system of farming for profit. Population was increasing; trade was growing; urban classes, divorced from rural pursuits, were forming; means of communication were improving; money taxes took the place of personal services; the standard of living rose; coin was needed, not only to meet the demands of the government, but to buy the luxuries of more civilised life.
The obligations of the peasantry to cultivate the demesne varied, not only with local customs, but with the seasons. Their most important services were the autumnal, Lenten, and summer ploughings on the three fields, into which the arable land of the demesne was generally divided. The crops grown were, as winter seeds, wheat and rye, and, as spring seeds, oats, barley, beans, peas, or vetches. In smaller quantities, flax, hemp, and saffron were locally raised in separate plots. Roots, clover and artificial grasses were still unknown. Rotations of crops, as they are now understood, were therefore impossible. The soil was rested by fallowing the one-half, or the one-third, of the arable land required by the two or the three course system. Red rivet, or a lost white variety, was then recommended for wheat-sowing on light land, red or white pollard for heavy soils, "gray" wheat for clays. But on the tenants' land, rye was the chief grain crop. It is the hardiest, grows on the poorest soils, makes the toughest straw. Rye was then the bread-stuff of the English peasantry, as it still is in Northern Europe. The flour of wheat and rye were often mixed together, and bread made in this form was called "maslin." It retained its moisture longer than pure wheaten bread, and, as Fynes Moryson says in his Itinerary (1617), was used by labourers because it "abode longer in the stomach and was not so soon digested with their labour." Wheat and rye were sometimes sown together. But as rye was slower to ripen, the better practice was to sow it alone and earlier, lest, as Tusser (1557) writes, " rye tarry wheat, till it sheds as it stands." The mixed cultivation was, however, recommended as a cure for mildew, and for this reason prevailed in Yorkshire in 1797. Barley was the drink-corn, as rye was the bread-corn, of the Middle Ages. It was of two kinds. The head with two rows of grain seems to have been used exclusively for brewing ; the coarser four-rowed head, known as "drage," was used partly for brewing, partly for feeding pigs and poultry. Barley and oats were often sown together. In the North, oats were extensively cultivated; but they were grey-awned, thin, and poor. In the Midlands and South of England they were comparatively rare on tenants' land.
The fallows were three times ploughed in preparation for wheat and rye. The seed began to be sown after Lammas Day (August 12), and at latest was completed by Hallowmas (November 1). For oats, beans, and peas, the land was ploughed and the seed sown between the Feast of Purification (February 2) and Easter. Oats were said to be best sown in "the dust of March." "On St. Valentine's Day cast beans in clay. But on St. Chad sowe good or bad." That is to say, the time for sowing beans was between February 14 and March 2. Barley came last. The land was ploughed and sown between Hoke-tide (the third Tuesday after Easter) and Pentecost. The ploughings were performed, and the teams supplied and driven, partly by the servants of the demesne, partly by the tenants. Sometimes ploughmen seem to have been hired. The harrowings were similarly provided for, and the harrow, often a hawthorn tree, weighted on its upper side with logs, was supplied from the lord's waste. Here also harrowers seem to have been sometimes specially hired. In this case they possibly provided their own home-constructed implements with sharp points or teeth like the modern type of harrow. When the fallows were first broken up, as was then the practice, in March, or when the land was prepared for barley, the ground was often so hard that the clods had to be subsequently broken. For this purpose the ploughman, holding the principal hale of the plough in his left hand, carried in his right a "clotting beetle," or "maul," such as that which is depicted in the Cotton MSS. A "Dover-court beetle" was a necessary tool in the days of Tusser; and Plot, whose Natural History of Oxfordshire appeared in the seventeenth century, recommends its use after the land was harrowed.
The amount of wheat, rye, beans, and peas usually sown to the acre was only two bushels; and of oats and, strangely enough, of barley, four bushels. The yield of wheat rarely exceeded five-fold, or ten bushels to the acre ; that of the leguminous crops ranged from three- to six-fold, or from six to twelve bushels to the acre ; that of oats and barley varied from three- to four-fold, or from twelve to sixteen bushels to the acre. Considerable care was exercised in the choice and change of the seed-corn, which was often one of the produce-rents of the tenants. On the Berkeley Estates (1321) the seed was changed every second or third year; the upland corn being sown in the vale, and vice versa. Wheat rarely followed a spring grain crop. If it did, it may be supposed that it received the greater part of the manure mixed with earth, which the tenants carted from the demesne yard, and spread on the manor farm. From the point of view of manuring the land, the right of folding was a valuable privilege. Tenants, unless they purchased a licence to fold their sheep on the land they occupied, were often obliged to feed and fold their flocks on the lord's land for fallow or in his own fold. Sometimes the herbage of the lord's land for fallow was sold to a sheep-master to be depastured on the land. Lime was used on heavy clays, or to destroy moss. The value of marl in improving the texture of sandy soils and some kinds of clays was appreciated. On the Berkeley Estates it was first used in the fortieth year of Henry III. But the cost was excessive. "Marl," says Fitzherbert, "is an excellent manure, and . . . exceeding chargeable." Sea sand was used near the coast; soot and even street refuse were employed on home farms. Drainage, except in the form of ridging the surface of wet soils, was rarely practised. Sometimes, as Palladius recommends (Book VI. st. 6), shallow trenches filled with gravel, stones, or hollow alder stems, and turfed over, were cut, and, on the manors belonging to the Collegiate body of St. Paul's Cathedral, it was one of the labour services to clean out the ditches. But the science of deep drainage made little progress before the nineteenth century. Beans were often dibbed; but all other seed was sown broadcast. The actual labour of sowing was probably performed by the lord's bailiff, or the hayward, with his own hand, as, at the beginning of the last century, all seed was sown by the farmer himself. The hoeing and the weeding of the crops were among the labour services of the tenants. In cleaning land the maxim was ancient:
"Who weeds in May
Throws all away,"
and the crops were generally weeded in June or the first few days of July. Walter of Henley (thirteenth century) gives St. John's Day (June 24) as the earliest date for cleaning the land. "If," he says, "you cut thistles fifteen days or eight before St. John's Day, for each one will come two or three." On a Suffolk manor, in the fourteenth century, sixty "sarclers," or weeders, were employed in one day, armed, if the weather was dry, with a hook or forked stick, and, in wet weather, with nippers.
The meadows of the demesne were mown, and the hay made, carted, and put on the manorial ricks,
by the labour services of the tenants. They also reaped, bound, gathered, loaded, carted, and stacked the corn crops in the lord's grange. They also threshed the corn, and winnowed it, unless, as was sometimes the case, the duty of winnowing fell to the dairywoman, or "Daye." If any corn was sent for sale to the markets, it was carried there by the labour services of the tenants, in their carts drawn by their teams. Harvestings in the Middle Ages were picturesque scenes of bustle and of merriment among the thousands to whom they meant the return of plenty. On
The most important crops of the farm were the corn crops of wheat, rye, and barley, which were raised for human food and drink. Their consumption, especially if the lord of the manor lived on the estate, was enormous. Domestic households were considerable, and often only the bailiff was paid money wages. Rations were also allowed to tenants when performing many of their services. Though the manual and team work of the tenants provided most of the labour of the farm, the lord also employed a large permanent staff of agricultural servants, most of whom were occupied in the care of live-stock. Such were the horseman or waggoner, oxherd or ploughman, cowherd, shepherd, swineherd, warrener, and keepers of hawks and dogs, whose wages were mostly paid in kind. There were, besides, other servants in husbandry, hired for special occasions, whose food and drink formed a large portion of their payment. The granary was, therefore, rarely so full that any surplus remained for sale. For such ready-money as he needed, the lord looked mainly to the produce of his live-stock. For their consumption were grown the remaining crops--the hay, beans, peas, and oats; though oats were not only used for human food, but in some districts were brewed into inferior beer.
Horse-farms appear in some estate accounts; but they probably supplied the "great horse" used for military purposes. On an ordinary farm the horses used for farm-work were mostly home-bred, and were divided into cart-horses, and--under the names of stotts, "affers," or "avers"--plough-horses. Colts, not needed to keep up the supply, were sold. Plough-teams were seldom made up of horses only; if horses were used at all, they were mixed with oxen. But, as a rule, oxen were preferred to horses. Though horses worked more quickly, when the ploughman allowed them to do so, they pulled less steadily, and sudden strains severely tested the primitive plough-gear. On hard ground they did less work, and only when the land was stony had they any advantage, Economical reasons further explain the preference for oxen. From St. Luke's Day (October 18) to April, both horses and oxen were kept in the stalls. During these twenty-five weeks neither could graze, and Walter of Henley calculates that the winterkeep of a horse cost four times that of an ox. Horses needed more attendance; they required to be rubbed, curried, and dressed. Oxen were less liable to sickness than horses. The harness of the ox, mainly home-made from materials supplied on the estate, was cheaper to provide and repair. Shod only on the forefeet, the shoeing of the ox cost less than that of the horse. When either horse or ox was past work, the profit of the one lay in his hide; of the other, not only in his hide, but the larder: the ox was "mannes meat when dead, while the horse is carrion." Great care was taken both of horses and of oxen. In Seneschaucie (thirteenth century) the duties both of the waggoner and oxherd are carefully defined; each was expected to sleep every night with his charges.
Cattle were seldom fatted even for the tables of the rich; oxen were valued for their power of draught: cows for their milk. It may, indeed, be said that fresh butcher's meat was rarely eaten, and that, if it was, it was almost universally grass-fed. No winter-keep or feeding stuff was available; not even carrots or parsnips were known. The commons, generally unstinted, carried as much stock as could keep skin and bone together in the winter, and the lord could not only turn out on them his own sheep and cattle, but license strangers for money payments to do the same. Even if the commons were stinted, the margin was too bare to mean abundance. The best pastures were either in the lord's own hands, and were saved by him at the expense of the commons, or were let out to individuals in separate occupations. Even among these superior feeding-grounds, there were few enclosures which would fatten a bullock. At the wane of the summer, the cattle had the aftermath of the hay meadows, and the stubble and haulm of the arable lands. During this season they were at their best. They only survived the winter months in a state of semi-starvation on hay, straw, and tree-loppings. It was, therefore, the practice at the end of June to draft the aged cows, worn-out oxen, and toothless sheep, or "crones," prepare them as far as possible for the butcher, slaughter them in the autumn, and either eat them fresh or throw them into the powdering tub to be salted for winter consumption. "For Easter at Martilmas (November 11) hange up a biefe" is the advice of Tusser.
The dairy produce was a greater source of money revenue, though the home consumption of cheese must have been very large. But the management was necessarily controlled, like the management of the stock, by the winter scarcity. The yield of a cow during the twenty-four weeks from the middle of April to Michaelmas was estimated at four-fifths of her total annual yield. Six to ten ewes gave as much milk as one cow; but the best practice was to cease milking ewes at Lammas Day (August 12). Cheese-making formed an important part of the dairywoman's duties, and the purchase of the cloths and utensils used in its manufacture are a serious item in estate accounts. Cheese seems generally to have been made of skim-milk, though superior varieties were doubtless found on the lord's table. Most of the butter made in the summer months was either sold, or salted and preserved in pots and barrels for winter use. The butter-milk was either drunk, made into curds, or more rarely used to fatten pigs. The curds were eaten with wine or ale; the whey, under the name of "whig," made a cool and wholesome summer drink. During the winter months, milk fetched three times its summer price, and was generally sold. For this, among other reasons, calves were timed to fall before autumn. In the scarce months of winter, the price obtained for milk during eight weeks was supposed to be worth more than the calf. Small open-field farmers must usually have sold their calves as soon as possible. The same practice prevailed on the demesne. The total number of live-stock, including horses but not including sheep, sold from the manor of Forncett in thirteen years, between 1272 and 1306, was 152. Out of this total 99 were calves. The cows of the demesne were under the care of a cowherd, who was required to sleep every night with his charges in the sheds.
Sheep were the sheet anchor of farming. But it was not for their mutton, or for their milk, or even for their skins, that they were chiefly valued. Already the mediaeval agriculturist took his seat on the wool-sack. As a marketable commodity, both at home and abroad, English long wool always commanded a price. It was less perishable than corn, and more easily transported even on the worst of roads. To the Flemish weavers it was indispensable, for Spanish wool could not be used alone, and the supply from Saxony was not as yet developed. The washing and shearing of sheep were among the labour services of the tenantry. Certain districts, especially Shropshire, Leominster, and the Cotswolds, were from very early times famous for the excellence of their wool. So far as its quality depended on breed rather than on soil, some care, as evidenced by the higher prices paid for rams, was taken to improve the flocks. From Martinmas to Easter sheep were kept in houses, or in moveable folds of wooden hurdles, thatched at the sides and tops. During these months they were fed on coarse hay or peas-haulm, mixed with wheaten or oaten straw. For the rest of the year they browsed on the land for fallows, in woodland pastures, or on the sheep commons. But in the autumn they were not allowed to go on the ground, till the sun had purified the land from the "gelly or matty rime," which was supposed to engender scab. So also they were driven from the damp, low-lying grounds lest they should eat the white water-snails which our ancestors suspected of breeding the rot. These two diseases made sheep-farming, in spite of its profits, a risky venture. The scab does not seem to have attacked sheep before the latter end of the thirteenth century; but, from that time forward, the tar-box was essential to every shepherd. The rot is carefully treated by Walter of Henley, if he is the real author of the passage interpolated in the Bodleian manuscript of his work . The writer discusses the symptoms of the disease. White veins under the eyelids, wool that can be easily pulled away from the ribs, a skin that will not redden when rubbed, are signs of unsoundness. Another sign is when the November hoar-frost melts rapidly on the fleece, for the animal is then suffering from an unnatural heat. The losses of the flockmasters from the "murrain," to use the generic term for diseases employed by mediaeval writers, were so severe as to create another danger. The minute instructions against fraud given to the official staff show that shepherds not infrequently produced the skin, and explained the disappearance of the carcase by death from disease. "Let no sheep," says the author of Seneschaucie, "be flayn before it be seen and known for what fault it died." The value of the flock made the shepherd one of the most important of farm servants. He was required to be a patient man, "not overhasty," never to be absent without leave at "fairs, markets, wrestling-matches, wakes, or in the tavern," and always to sleep in the fold together with his dog. Later writers insist on the value of lameness in the shepherd, as a lame man was unlikely to overdrive his sheep.
Swine were the almost universal live-stock of rich and poor. As consumers of refuse and scavengers of the village, they would, on sanitary grounds, have repaid their keepers. But mediaeval pigs profited their owners much, and cost them little. It was a Gloucestershire saying
"A swine doth sooner than a cowe
Bring an ox to the plough."
In other words, a pig was more profitable than a cow. For the greater part of the year pigs were expected to pick up their own living. When the wastes and woodlands of a manor were extensive, they were, except during three months of the year, self-supporting. They developed the qualities necessary for taking care of themselves. The ordinary pigs of the Middle Ages were long, flat-sided, coarse-boned, lop-eared, omnivorous animals, whose agility was more valuable than their early maturity. Growth and flesh were the work of time: so also were thickened skin, developed muscles, and increased weight of bone. The styes were often built in the woods, whence the pigs were only brought to feed on the arable land after the crops were cleared, or, at times of exceptional frost, to subsist on the leavings of the threshing-floor. During most months of the year they ranged the woods for roots, wild pears, wild plums, crab apples, aloes, haws, beech-mast, and acorns. Only when the sows were farrowing, or when animals were being prepared for the rich man's table, were they specially fed. Pigs were fatted on inferior corn, especially coarse barley, peas, beans, skim- and butter-milk, or brewers' grains which were readily obtainable when nearly every household brewed its own barley beer. The amount consumed varied with the purpose intended to be served. The boar was fatted for the feast on ten times the grain bestowed in finishing ordinary animals for conversion into salted pork or smoke-dried bacon. Walter of Henley implies that some attention was given to breed, as he recommends the use of well-bred boars. But the only quality on which he insists is that the animal should be able to dig, or, in other words, support itself. Modern ideas of purchasing corn for fattening purposes, or of converting into pork or bacon farm-produce for which no ready market was available, scarcely entered into the heads of mediaeval farmers. On the contrary, they tell us that, if pigs were entirely dependent on the crops of the arable land, they could not be kept at a profit, when the wages of the swineherd, the cost of the grain consumed, and the damage done to growing crops had been taken into account. Some trade was, however, carried on in stores. This is proved by the records of Forncett manor (A Norfolk Manor, 1086-1565), which show that, in years when no pigs were kept, stores were bought and fatted for the larder.
The poultry yard was under the care of the dairywoman, who sometimes seems to have had the poultry to farm at so much a head. Ducks are not mentioned in any of the mediaeval treatises on farming, though they appear in the Berkeley accounts in 1321: guineafowl and turkeys were unknown. But the number of geese and fowls, and, on important estates, of peacocks and swans, was large, and it was swollen by the produce-rents which were often paid in poultry and eggs. The author of Hosebonderie gives minute instructions as to the produce for which the dairywoman ought to account. "Each goose ought to have five goslings a year:" each hen was to answer for 115 eggs and seven chickens, "three of which ought to be made capons, and, if there be too many hen chickens, let them be changed for cocks while they are young, so that each hen may answer for three capons and four hens a year. And for five geese you must have one gander, and for five hens one cock." Besides the poultry yard, the dove-cote or pigeon-house was a source of profit to the lord and of loss to the tenant. Prodigious numbers of pigeons were kept; not only were they eaten, but their dung was prized as the most valuable of all manures. The privilege of keeping a pigeon-house was confined to manorial lords and jealously guarded, and every manor had its dove-cote. The story of the French Revolution shows how bitterly the peasants resented the plunder of their hard-earned crops by the lord's pigeons. Doubtless many a British peasant in mediaeval times was stirred to the same hostility by the same nuisance.
To the produce of the crops and the live-stock of the demesne must be added game, rabbits from the "conygarth" or warren, cider from the apples, oil from the nuts, honey and wax from the bee-hives, and sometimes grapes from the vineyards. Bee-keeping was an important feature of agricultural industry. The ancient proverb says: "He that hath sheep, swine, and bees, sleep he, wake he, he may thrive." Honey, besides being the only sugar, was invaluable in the still-room, and in the arts of the apothecary, physician, and "chirurgeon." It was an ingredient in mead and metheglyn. It was used in embalming, in medicines, and in such decoctions as mulse water, oenomel, honey water, rodomel, or quintessence. Wax was not only necessary for the candles of the wealthy, but, like honey, was largely used in mediaeval medicine. Mixed with violets, it was a salve: it was also one of the ingredients of "playsters, oyntementes, suppositories, and such like." In some districts of England, vineyards formed part of the equipment of manors; one was made by Lord Berkeley towards the close of the reign of Edward III., and his biographer suggests that he learned the "husbandry . . . whilst hee was prisoner in ffrance or a Traveller in Spaine." Few great monasteries were without vineyards, which are mentioned thirty-eight times in Domesday Book. It is not necessary to explain the disappearance of the vine by a change of climate. Wine was then often sweetened with honey and flavoured with blackberries and spices. Unless it came from abroad, it was rarely drunk in its pure state. It would, therefore, be unsafe to found any theory of climatic change upon the production of a liquid which, in its natural state, may frequently have resembled vinegar.
Besides the produce of the live-stock and crops of his demesne, the lord of the manor had other sources of revenue. There were the fixed money or produce rents for their land paid by free tenants and bondmen, and the money payments which were sometimes accepted in lieu of labour services. Sales of timber and underwood, of turf, of herbage, licences to fold on the tenant's land, or licences to turn pigs into the lord's woods for beechmast or acorns, brought in varying sums of money. The mill at which the tenants ground their corn was his property. Whether the miller was his servant, or farmed the receipts, a considerable proportion of the tolls went into the landlord's purse, though the cost of repairs and upkeep diminished the net profits. On some manors the oven in which the bread was baked was also the property of the lord of the manor. The fees and fines levied and settled by the manorial courts in the course of a year were surprisingly large; besides their administrative work, they were at once the guardians and the interpreters of the customs of the manor. The range of business administered in these courts, to which the tenants, both free and bond, were summoned as jurors, therefore embraced the domestic and financial affairs of the manor. Here were paid the fees for permission to reside outside the manor, to send children to school, to enter minor orders, to apprentice a son to a trade, or to marry a daughter. Here too were imposed the fines for slovenly work at harvest, for selling cattle without the lord's leave, for appropriating commons and wastes, for moving a neighbour's landmark, for neglecting to repair a cottage, for failing to discharge labour dues. Here too were fixed the contributions of the tenantry in money or labour towards the maintenance of the by-roads within the manor, and the fines for neglect of the duty to keep their surfaces in repair, to provide for their proper drainage, and to remove obstructions. Here also crime was punished; offenders against life or property, as well as poachers, were mulcted; wrangling scolds and tavern-hunters were presented; idlers were deprived of their holdings, and, as a last resort, expelled from the manor. Here too were fixed and levied the necessary contributions for the repair of the stocks, the pillory, the ducking-stool, and the pound. Here the miller would be fined for mixing rubbish with his flour, the baker for selling short weight, the brewer who adulterated his beer, the ale-wife and tavern-keeper who used false measures or mixed the drink they sold with peony seed, salt or garlicky, the carrier for failing to deliver goods, the householder who harboured a stranger without a licence. Here also were received and entered the fees of tenants for admission to their holdings, and the payment of fines by sons who succeeded their fathers. Here, finally, on the sworn evidence of a body of jurors chosen from the tenants, were drawn up the surveys of the manor which recorded the exact condition of the estate--the total acreage of the demesne, and of each of the arable fields, of the meadows, the several pastures and the pasturage, and their annual values; the state of the woods and the coppices, how much could be cut, and what they were worth yearly; the acreage of the commons and the stock which they would carry; the number of the live-stock of various kinds; the holdings of the free tenants, and their rents or services; the holdings of the villeins, bordars, and cottagers, their services and money equivalents; the profits of fisheries, mills, and incidental manorial rights; the number of tenants who had finally commuted their services for fixed payments in cash, of those who, at the discretion of the lord, either rendered labour services or paid the money values, and of those who still discharged their personal obligations by actual work.
The remainder of the cultivated land of the manor was occupied by tenants who paid rents in the form of military or labour services, or money, or produce. Their farm practices, crops, and live-stock were the same as those of the demesne, though their difficulties in combating winter scarcity were greater. Free tenants, whose tenure was military service, or who had commuted the personal obligations for quit-rents, may sometimes have held land, like modern farmers, in their exclusive occupation for individual cultivation. But the area of free land was comparatively small, and, as often as not, it was thrown into the village farm, occupied and cultivated in common by an agrarian association of copartners, free and unfree.
The varieties of tenure were great. So also were the varieties of social condition, and of the obligations by which the grades of those social conditions were governed. The distinctions between freemen and bondmen and between freehold and bond tenure had been, in the eye of the law, broad and deep. But custom had gradually intervened, and, with endless variety of practice, mitigated the severity of legal theory. At law the bondman's position was subject to the lord's caprice. Unlike the freeman, he was tied to the manor; he could not leave it without licence from the lord, and payment of a fine. His services were uncertain in amount, and could be increased at the lord's pleasure. He paid a fine to marry his daughter, to send his son to school, to make him a priest or an apprentice. His lands and his goods and chattels might be seized by his lord, and when he died, his holding was given to whom the lord willed: his heir bought a licence to inherit even his moveables, and paid a fine when he was admitted to his father's tenancy. In the thirteenth century, some at least of these conditions had been modified. The bondman's services had become fixed; he could buy and sell, hold property, and dispose of his possessions by will. In theory he might still be at the mercy of the lord's will: but custom had so regulated the exercise of that will that it could no longer be capricious.
Speaking broadly, the mass of the occupiers of land were, in the eye of the law, unfree--bondmen who rented the shares in the land which they cultivated for themselves by labour services on the lord's demesne. It was the amount and certainty of their services which determined the rank of the unfree. Sometimes the service was for the autumn only, or for autumn and spring work, whether on specified days or at particular periods; sometimes of team work, sometimes of manual labour, sometimes of both; sometimes of week-work throughout the year, and either of one, two, or three days in each week. All their spare time was spent on their own holdings. Of this semi-servile class the villeins formed the aristocracy. The villein was neither a servant in husbandry nor a labourer for wages. He occupied land, and, like Chaucer's ploughman, had "catel" of his own. He was a partner in the village association, holding land of various amounts. In theory the size of his holding was based on the number of oxen which, in discharge of his share of the joint liability, he could contribute to the manorial plough-team. A "hide" of land, which Professor Maitland considers to have been " the land of a household," was treated as the area which a team of eight oxen could plough in a working year. Its extent may have varied. But, if the size was
Villeins of the higher grade were generally distinguished from inferior orders of the semi-servile classes of the peasantry by the size of their holdings in the village farm, by the certainty of their agricultural services on the demesne, and by the obligation to do team-work rather than manual labour. The smaller the holding, the vaguer the labour obligations, the more manual the work,the lower was the grade of the villein. Besides the villeins there were other orders of bondmen--such as the rural handicraftsmen who were specially provided with land, and the bordars and cottars, who rented particular cottages and garden ground, which often carried with them from two to five acres of arable land, together with common rights. The two latter classes, besides their obligatory manual services, probably eked out their subsistence either as hired labourers on the demesne or by supplying the labour for which their wealthier neighbours were responsible. At the bottom of the social ladder were the serfs, to whom strict law assigned no rights, though there were many varieties in their grades and position. Their chief badge of serfdom was the indeterminate character of their services--the obligation to labour in the manner, at the time, and for the wage, if any, which the lord directed. But the serf might occupy land, own cattle, and labour for himself. Thus, out of these various classes, free and unfree, sprang small landowners, tenant farmers, copyholders, and wage-earning labourers.
Round the village, or "town," in which were gathered the homesteads of the inhabitants, lay the open arable fields, which were cultivated in common by the associated partners. Here were grown the crops which Shakespeare enumerates. These were the lands "of Ceres":
"--thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and peas."
Here, at harvest time, the yellow of the corn crops alternated with the dark and light greens of beans or peas and the brown of the bare fallows. This cultivated area, which included the driest and soundest of the land, was hedgeless, open, and unenclosed, divided by turf-grown balks into fields--two, three, or, rarely, four in number. If the former, one field lay fallow, while the other was under tillage for corn, or beans, or peas. This dual system still prevailed near Gloucester in the nineteenth century, and existed at, Stogursey in Somersetshire in 1879. But from the Norman Conquest onward the three-field system was the most prevalent. Down to the middle of the reign of George III. the arable land received the unvarying triennial succession of wheat or rye, of spring crops such as barley, oats, beans, or peas, and of fallow. During these seven centuries a more scientific rotation was in some districts adopted. Thus at Aston Boges, in Oxfordshire, a fourth course was interposed. But, speaking generally, open-field husbandry rather retrograded than advanced, as the discipline of manorial officials relaxed.
Each of the three arable fields was subdivided into a number of shots, furlongs, or flats, separated from one another by unploughed bush-grown turf balks, varying in width from two to sixteen feet. These flats were in turn cut up into parallel acre, half-acre, or quarter-acre, strips coinciding with the arrangement of a ploughed field into ridges and furrows. If the strips were acre strips, they were a furlong in length (
The arable fields were fenced against the live-stock from seed-time to harvest, and the intermixed strips were cultivated for the separate use of individuals, subject to the compulsory rotation by which each of the three fields was cropped. On Lammas Day separate user ended, and common rights recommenced; hence fields occupied in this manner were, and are, called Lammas Lands or "half-year lands." After harvest the hayward removed the fences, and the live-stock of the community wandered over the fields before the common herdsman, shepherd, or swineherd. The herdsman, in the reign of Henry VIII., received 8d. a year for every head of cattle entrusted to his care, and the swineherd 4d. for every head of swine. When sheep were folded on the cultivated land, each farmer provided, during the winter months, his own fold and fodder for his flock. Richard Hooker, while he held the country living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, was found by two of his former pupils, "like humble and innocent Abel, tending his small allotment of sheep in a common field." That no occupier might find all his land fallow in the same year, every one had strips in each of the three arable fields. If the holding of the open-field farmer consisted of thirty acres, there would thus be ten acres in each field. In other words, he would have ten acres under wheat and rye, ten acres under spring crops, and ten acres fallow. The same care was taken to make the divisions equal in agricultural value, so that each man might have his fair proportion of the best and worst land. To divide equally the good and bad, well and ill situated soil, the bundle of strips allotted in each of the three fields did not lie together, but was intermixed and scattered.
In the lowest part of the land--if possible along a stream--lay the "ings," "carrs," "leazes," or meadows, annually cut up into lots or doles, and put up for hay. These doles were fenced off to be mown for the separate use of individuals either from Candlemas (February 2), or, more usually, from St. Gregory's Day (March 12) to Midsummer Day; from July to February, or later, they were open, common pasturage. Sometimes the plots, which varied in size from a half-acre downwards, went with the arable holdings, so that the same man annually received the same portion of meadow. Sometimes the plots were balloted for every year. Each lot was distinguished by a name, such as the cross, crane's foot, or peel, i.e. baker's shovel, which will often explain puzzling field-names.
Corresponding marks were thrown into a hat or bag and drawn by a boy. This balloting continued up to the last century in Somersetshire, and still continues at Yarnton in Oxfordshire. After the hay had been cut and carried, the meadows reverted to common occupation, and were grazed indiscriminately by the live-stock of the village, till they were again fenced off, allotted, and put up for hay.
On the outskirts of the arable fields nearest to the village lay one or more "hams" or stinted pastures, in which a regulated number of live-stock might graze, and therefore supplying superior feed. Brandersham, Smithsham, Wontnersham, Herdsham, Constable's Field, Dog Whipper's Land, Barber's Furlong, Tinker's Field, Sexton's Mead, suggest that sometimes special allotments were made to those who practised trades of such general utility as the stock-brander, the blacksmith, the mole-catcher, the cowherd, the constable, the barber, the tinker, and the sexton. The dog-whipper's usefulness is less obvious; but possibly he was employed to prevent the live-stock from being harried by dogs. Even the spiritual wants of the village were sometimes supplied in the same way. Parson's Close and Parson's Acre are not uncommon. It is significant that no schoolmasters seem to have been provided for by allotments of land.
Besides the open arable fields, the meadows, and the stinted hams, there were the common pastures, fringed by the untilled wastes which were left in their native wildness. These wastes provided fern and heather for litter, bedding, or thatching; small wood for hurdles; tree-loppings for winter browse of live-stock ; fuzre and turves for fuel; larger timber for fencing, implements, and building; mast, acorns, and other food for the swine. Most of these smaller rights were made the subject of fixed annual payments to the manorial lord ; but the right of cutting fuel was generally attached to the occupation, not only of arable land, but of cottages. The most important part of these lands were the common pastures, which were often the only grass that arable farmers could command for their live-stock. They therefore formed an integral and essential part of the village farm. No rights were exercised upon them by the general public. On the contrary, the commons were most jealously guarded by the privileged commoners against the intrusion or encroachments of strangers.
The agistment of strange cattle or sheep was strictly prohibited: commoners who turned out more stock than their proper share were "presented " at the manorial courts and fined; cottages erected on the commons were condemned to be pulled down; the area within which swine might feed was carefully limited, and the swine were to be ringed. Those who enjoyed the grazing rights were the occupiers of arable land, whose powers of turning out stock were, in theory, proportioned to the size of their arable holdings, and the occupiers of certain cottages, which commanded higher rents in consequence of the privilege. It was on these commons that the cattle and sheep of the village were fed. Every morning the cattle were collected, probably by the sound of a horn, and driven to the commons by the village herdsman along drift ways, which were enclosed on either side by moveable or permanent fences to keep the animals from straying on to the arable land. In the evening they were driven back, each animal returning to its own shelter, as the herd passed up the village street. Similarly, the sheep were driven by the village shepherd to the commons by day, and folded at night on the wheat fallows. Sheep were the manure carriers, and were prized as much for their folding quality as for their fleeces. In some districts they were kept almost entirely for their agricultural value to the arable land. Until the winter they were penned in the common fold on the fallows or the stubbles. After the fallows had been ploughed, and before the crops on the other fields were cleared, they had only the commons. During winter each commoner was obliged to find hay for his sheep and his own fold, the common shepherd penning and folding them so as gradually to cover the whole area.
The open-field system, thus briefly sketched with its arable, meadow, and permanent pasture land, prevailed at some time or other throughout England, except perhaps in the south-west. The following description of the crofters' holdings in Skye in 1750 might have been written, with but few alterations, of half the cultivated area of England in the eighteenth century: "A certain number of tacksmen formed a copartnery and held a tract of land, or township, for which they paid tribute to the chief, and each member was jointly and severally responsible. The grazing was in common. All the arable land was divided into ridges, assigned annually by lot among the partners. Each might have a dozen or more of these small ridges, and no two contiguous except by accident; the object being to give each. partner a portion of the better and inferior land. The copartner appears to have had cotters under him, for whose work he paid." The prevalence of the system may still be traced with more or less distinctness in rural England. The counties in which it was most firmly established are counties of villages, not of scattered farmsteads and hamlets. Turf balks and lynches record the time when "every rood of ground maintained its man." Irregular and regular fences, narrow lanes and wide highways, crooked and straight roads, respectively suggest the piecemeal or the wholesale enclosure of common fields. The waving ridges on thousands of acres of ancient pasture still represent the swerve of the cumbrous village plough with its team of eight oxen. The age of the hedgerow timber sometimes tells the date of the change. The pages appropriated to hedges by agricultural writers of the eighteenth century indicate the era of the abolition of open fields, and the minuteness of their instructions proves that the art of making hedges was still in its infancy. The scattered lands of ordinary farms, compared with the compact "court," "hall," or "manor" farm, recall the fact that the lord's demesne was once the only permanent enclosure. The crowding together of the rural population in villages betrays the agrarian partnership, as detached farmsteads and isolated labourers' dwellings indicate the system by which it has been supplanted.
Accurate comparison between the conditions of the rural population in the thirteenth and twentieth centuries seems impossible. Calculations based on the prices of commodities, involving, as they must, the translation of the purchasing power of mediaeval money into its modern equivalent, are necessarily guess-work. They are also to a great extent irrelevant, for few of the necessaries of life were ever bought by the cultivators of the soil, and whether the corn that they raised was fetching 3s. or 6s. the quarter in a distant market made little difference to the inhabitants of villages. They grew it for their own consumption. Owing to difficulties of communication, every village raised its own bread-supply. Hence a great extent of land, which from a farming point of view formed an excessive proportion of the total area, was tilled for corn, however unsuited it might be for arable cultivation.
As facilities of transport increased, this necessity became less and less paramount. Land best adapted
to pasture no longer required to be ploughed, but might be put to the use for which it was naturally fitted. Improvements in means of communication were thus among the changes which helped to extinguish village farms. But for the time, and so long as the open-field system prevailed, farming continued to be in the main a self-sufficing industry. Except for the payment of rent, little coin was needed or used in rural districts. Parishes till the middle of the eighteenth century remained what they were in the thirteenth century--isolated and self-supporting. The inhabitants had little need of communication even with their neighbours, still less with the outside world. The fields and the live-stock provided their necessary food and clothing. Whatever wood was required for building, fencing, and fuel was supplied from the wastes. Each village had its mill, and nearly every house had its oven and brewing kettle. Women spun and wove wool into coarse cloth, and hemp or nettles into linen; men tanned their own leather. The rough tools required for cultivation of the soil, and the rude household utensils needed for the comforts of daily life, were made at home. In the long winter evenings, farmers, their sons, and their servants carved the wooden spoons, the platters, and the beechen bowls. They fitted and riveted the bottoms to the horn mugs, or closed, in coarse fashion, the leaks in the leathern jugs. They plaited the osiers and reeds into baskets and into "wheels" for catching fish ; they fixed handles to the scythes, rakes, and other tools; cut the flails from holly or thorn, and fastened them with thongs to the staves; shaped the teeth for rakes and harrows from ash or willow, and hardened them in the fire; cut. out the wooden shovels for casting the corn in the granary; fashioned ox-yokes and bows, forks, racks, and rack-staves ; twisted willows into scythe-cradles, or into traces and other harness gear. Travelling carpenters, smiths, and tinkers visited detached farmhouses and smaller villages, at rare intervals, to perform those parts of the work which needed their professional skill. But every village of any size found employment for such trades as those of the smith and the carpenter, and the frequency with which "Smiths Ham" appears among field names suggests the value which the inhabitants attached to the forge and the anvil. Meanwhile the women plaited straw or reeds for neck-collars, stitched and stuffed sheepskin bags for cart-saddles, peeled rushes for wicks and made candles. Thread was often made from nettles. Spinning-wheels, distaffs, and needles were never idle. Homemade cloth and linen supplied all wants. Flaxen linen for boardcloths, sheets, shirts or smocks, and towels, as the napkins were called, on which, before the introduction of forks, the hands were wiped, was only found in wealthy houses and on special occasions. Hemp, in ordinary households, supplied the same necessary articles, and others, such as candlewicks, in coarser form. Shoe-thread, halters, stirrup-thongs, girths, bridles, and ropes were woven from the "carle" hemp; the finer kind, or "fimble" hemp, supplied the coarse linen for domestic use, and "hempen homespun" passed into a proverb for a countryman. Nettles were also extensively used in the manufacture of linen; sheets and tablecloths made from nettles were to be found in many homes at the end of the eighteenth century. The formation of words like spinster, webster, lyster, shepster, maltster, brewster, and barter indicated that the occupations were feminine, and show that women spun, wove, dyed, and cut out the cloth, as well as malted the barley, brewed the ale, and baked the bread for the family.
THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR. 1300-1485.
Changes in farming practices are always slow; without ocular demonstration of their superiority, and without experience of increased profits, new methods are rarely adopted. In the Middle Ages agriculture was a self-supporting industry rather than a profit-making business. The immediate neighbourhood of large towns created markets for the surplus produce that remained after satisfying the needs of the cultivators of the soil. But remoter villages contained neither buyers of produce nor pioneers of improvements. Edward I. was a gardener, and Edward II. a farmer, horsebreeder, and thatcher. These royal tastes may have set the fashion. Here and there great lay landowners, as well as great ecclesiastics, actively interested themselves in farming progress. Thomas, first Lord Berkeley, who held the family estates from 1281 to 1321, encouraged his tenants to improve their land by marling, or by taking earth from the green highways of the manors. Another famous farmer was his grandson, the third Lord (1326-61). Feudal barons are rarely represented as fumbling in the recesses of their armour for samples of corn. But "few or noe great faires or marketts were in those parts, whereat this lord was not himself, as at Wells, Gloucester, Winchcomb, Tetbury, and others; where also hee new bought or changed the severall grains that sowed his arrable lands." These mediaeval prototypes of "Farmer George," of "Turnip" Townshend, or of Coke of Norfolk were rare. Few of the baronial aristocracy verified the truth of the maxim that "the master's foot fats the soil." The strenuous idleness or the military ardour of youthful lords was generally absorbed in field sports and martial exercises--in tilting at the ring, in hawking, hunting the buck, or lying out for nights together to net the fox. Grown to man's estate, they congregated for a month at a time at "tylts, turnaments, or other hastiludes," or exchanged the mimicry of war for its realities in France, or on the borders of Scotland and Wales. Most of the lay barons rebelled against the minute and continuous labour of farming, and this contempt for bucolic life may be illustrated from heraldry. Its emblems are drawn from sport, war, mythology, or religion. Products and implements of husbandry are despised, unless, like the "garb" or sheaf of the Washbournes, the scythe of the Sneyds, or the hay-wains of the Hays, they had been ennobled by martial use.
Few landowners, except the wealthiest, had as yet built permanent residences on their distant estates. Content with temporary accommodation, they travelled with their households and retinues from manor to manor, and from farmhouse to farmhouse, in order to consume on the spot the produce of their fields and live-stock. It was the practice of the first Lord Berkeley to go "in progress from one of his Manor and farmehouses to an other scarce two miles a sunder, making his stay at each of them . . . and soe backe to his standinge houses where his wife and family remayned . . . sometymes at Berkeley Castle, at Wotton, at Bradley, at Awre, at Portbury, And usually in Lent at Wike by Arlingham, for his better and neerer provision of Fish." His example was followed by his successors. But in the frequent absences of manorial lords on military service at home or abroad, their wives played important parts in rural life. Joan, wife of the first Lord Berkeley, "at no tyme of her 42 yeares mariage ever travelled ten miles from the mansion houses of her husband in the Countyes of Gloucester and Somersett, much lesse humered herselfe with the vaine delights of London and other Cities." She spent much of her time in supervising her "dairy affairs," passing from farmhouse to farmhouse, taking account of the smallest details. The family tradition lingered long. The same housewifely courses were followed by the widowed Lady Berkeley, who administered the estates during her son's minority in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI., and died in 1564. At all her country houses she "would betimes in Winter and Somer mornings make her walkes to visit her stable, barnes, dayhouse, pultry, swinetroughs, and the like." Her daughter-in-law's tastes were different. She was a sportswoman, delighting in buck-hunting, skilled with the cross-bow, an expert archer, devoted to hawking, commonly keeping "a cast or two of merlins, which sometimes she mewed in her own chamber, which falconry cost her husband each yeare one or two gownes and kirtles spoiled by their mutings." Well might the elder lady "sweare, by God's blessed sacrament, this gay girle will begger my son Henry!"
Great ecclesiastics made their progresses from manor to manor like the lay barons, and for the same reason. But in many instances monks were resident landowners, and by them were initiated most of the improvements which were made in the practices of mediaeval farming. They studied agriculture in the light of the writings of Cato, Varro, and Columella: the quaintly rhymed English version of Palladius was probably the work of an inmate of a religious house at Colchester; the Rules for the management of a landed estate are reputed to be the work of one of the greatest of thirteenth century churchmen, Robert Grosteste, Bishop of Lincoln; Walter of Henley is said to have been a Dominican, and manuscripts of his work, either in the original Norman French or translated into English or Latin, found a place in many monastic libraries. Throughout the Middle Ages, both in England and France, it was mainly the influence of the monks which built roads and bridges, improved live-stock, drained marshes, cleared forests, reclaimed wastes, and brought barren land into cultivation.
Large improvements in the mediaeval methods of arable farming were impossible until farmers commanded the increased resources of more modern times. There was little to mitigate, either for men or beasts, the horrors of winter scarcity. Nothing is more characteristic of the infancy of farming than the violence of its alternations. On land which was inadequately manured, and on which neither field-turnips nor clovers were known till centuries later, there could be no middle course between the exhaustion of continuous cropping and the rest-cure of barrenness. The fallow was un véritable Dimanche accordé à la terre. As with the land, so with its products. Famine trod hard on the heels of feasting. It was not only that prices rose and fell with extraordinary rapidity; but both for men and beasts the absolute scarcity of winter always succeeded the relative plenty of autumn. Except in monastic granges no great quantities of grain were stored, and mediaeval legislators eyed corn-dealers with the same hostility with which modern engineers of wheat corners are regarded by their victims. The husbandman's golden rule must have been often forgotten--that at Candlemas half the fodder and all the corn must be untouched. Even the most prudent housekeepers found it difficult always to remember the proverbial wisdom of eating within the tether, or sparing at the brink instead of the bottom. Many, like Panurge, eat their corn in the blade. Equally violent were the alternations in the employment afforded by mediaeval farming. Weeks of feverish activity passed suddenly into months of comparative indolence. Winter was in fact a season to be dreaded alike by the husbandman and his cattle, and it is not without good cause that the joyousness of spring is the key-note of early English poetry.
Under the conditions which prevailed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, little advance in farming practices could be expected. During the greater part of the period, therefore, the history of agriculture centres round those economic, social, and political changes which shaped its future progress. Under the pressure of these influences the structure of feudal society was undermined. The social mould, in which the mediaeval world had been cast, crumbled to powder under a series of transformations, which, though they worked without combination or regularity, proved to be, from the latter half of the fourteenth century onwards, collectively and uniformly irresistible. From within, as well as from without, the manor as an organisation for regulating rural labour and administering local affairs was breaking up. As money grew more plentiful, it became more and more universally the basis on which services were regulated. Commerce, as it expanded, created new markets for the sale of the produce of the soil. Parliament assumed new duties; the Royal Courts of Justice extended their jurisdiction; and, as a consequence, manorial courts lost some of their importance in matters of local self-government. Land was beginning to be regarded as a source of income, not of military power. As landowning became a business and farming a trade, agricultural progress demanded less personal dependence, a freer hand, a larger scope for individual enterprise. The foundations of feudalism were thus shaken, though the Hundred Years' War maintained its superstructure intact. It is this contrast between reality and appearance which gives an air of hollowness and artificiality to the splendour of the reign of Edward III.
The break-up of the manorial system accompanied the transition from an age of graduated mutual dependence towards an age of greater individual independence. It meant the removal of restrictions to personal freedom, the encouragement of individual enterprise, the establishment of the principle of competition in determining both money rents and money wages. From another point of view the results were not entirely advantageous. Against the older system it might be urged that it created a lack of opportunity which caused local stagnation. In its favour might be pleaded that it maintained a certain level of equality among the households in village communities, presided over by the lord of the manor. Now, however, the struggle for life becomes intensified; the strong go to the front, the weak to the wall; for one man who rises in the social scale, five sink. Here, one prospers, laying field to field, adding herd to herd and flock to flock. Here, others sell their live-stock, yield their strips of land to their more enterprising neighbour, and become dependent upon him for employment and wages. From the fourteenth century onwards the agricultural problem of holding the balance even between the economic gain and social loss of agricultural progress has puzzled the wisest of legislators.
The manorial organisation of labour suffered no sudden or universal collapse, due to any improvements in the methods or alteration in the aims of farming. It rather underwent a gradual and local decay which originated in economic, social, and political causes, and proceeded most rapidly in the neighbourhood of trading centres or sea-ports. It would be inaccurate to attempt to divide this process into successive stages, because they always overlapped, were generally simultaneous, and were often almost complete on one manor before they had begun on another. But from one point of view, the movement increased the number of holdings which were separately occupied; in another aspect, it exchanged labour services for their cash values, and altered the relations between feudal lords and their retainers into those of employer and employed, and of the letter and the hirer of land; in another, it applied principles of competition to money rents and money wages; in another, it encouraged enterprising tenants to recognise that the best results of farming could only be obtained on compact holdings, large enough for the employment of money as well as of labour.
The tendency towards the separate occupation and individual management of land had already begun, though it was most marked on the new land which was brought into cultivation. On the ancient arable land it was checked by the rights of common which were enjoyed, not only over the waste, but over the open arable fields. In their origin these rights were arable and attached only to arable land. Each occupier of an arable holding was entitled to graze on the common pastures the horses and oxen required for his tillage operations, and to feed the sheep needed for manuring his cultivated land. Without this right the associated partners in the common venture of farming would have had no means of supporting their beasts after the crops were sown. Common rights of pasture were therefore integral portions of, and essential adjuncts to, the ancient tillage system. No rights of common of pasture could be claimed by the general public. The only persons by whom they could be acquired and enjoyed were the occupiers of arable holdings. It was as occupiers of portions of the tilled land, which was in fact or in theory attached to their homes, that cottagers claimed and exercised grazing privileges. On most manors three distinct kinds of common rights existed. The first kind is, in this connection, unimportant, though its creation marks an improvement in agricultural practices and a step towards the break-up of the early open-field system. It arose when the partners in a village farm agreed, with the sanction of the lord of the manor, to set aside a portion of their joint arable holdings for pasture, to be used in common in a "stinted" or regulated manner. "There is commonly," says Fitzherbert, "a common close taken in out of the common fields by tenants of the same towne, in which close every man is stinted and set to a certaintie how many beasts he shall have in common." The second class of common of pasture consisted of rights enjoyed by the partners of the agrarian association over the whole cultivated area of the village farm, both over the arable portion that lay fallow in rotation, and over all the other arable lands and meadows, after the crops had been cleared and before the land was again sown or put up for hay. The third kind of common of pasture consisted of rights over that part of the manor which was neither arable nor meadow, the outlying portions, which were left in their natural condition,--the pastures, moors, wastes, woods, and heaths, which had never been tilled. These rights were attached to the arable holdings of manorial tenants, and to the occupation of particular cottages on the manor, and, when the strictness of the ancient system relaxed, might also be acquired by neighbours and strangers who neither lived nor held land within the manor. "In these commons," says Fitzherbert, " the lord should not be stinted because the whole common is his own."
Rights of common of pasture over cultivated or commonable land, under the second heading, were enjoyed by the partners in the village farm, were exercised in virtue of their arable holdings, were limited to the extent of the farm, and could only be extinguished by the agreement of the co-partners. But if the lord of the manor, as a partner in the farm, had allowed portions of his demesne to be intermixed with the strips of his tenants, he could withdraw those portions at will, even though their withdrawal diminished the commonable area of cultivated land. With this exception, land subject to these rights of common could not be freed by any individual tenant, unless the main body of his farming partners assented.
Rights of common of pasture over the untilled land, under the third heading, were at first confined to the occupiers of arable holdings on the manor. In process of time, however, they were less narrowly limited. They could not be enjoyed by a landless public; but they might be exercised by persons living both within and without the manor. In the case of persons living within the manor, the enjoyment of common rights belonged to the occupation of arable holdings or of particular cottages to which arable land had been or was attached. In the case of persons living outside the manor, rights might be acquired by neighbours and strangers, either by direct grant from the lord of the manor, or, through his sufferance, by long usage. As a general rule, the number of livestock which each manorial tenant or freeholder could pasture on the wastes was fixed, or capable of being fixed, in proportion to his holding. Vaguer rights were acquired by neighbours and strangers, and it was in these cases mainly that the lord's right of enclosure was successfully resisted. At common law it seems that, against his own customary tenants, the lord of the manor could always enclose the wastes at pleasure. Whether before 1236 he had the same power at common law against the free tenants of the manor is disputed. Be this as it may, the Statute of Merton in that year empowered the lord of the manor to enclose against his free tenants, provided enough pasture was left to satisfy his previous grants of rights of common. Fifty years later, the Statute of Westminster (1285) extended the lord's right of enclosure to the case of those neighbours and strangers who had acquired grazing rights, subject to the same condition of sufficiency of pasture. Practically the existence of rights of common of pasture only prevented enclosures when the rights were enjoyed by the associated body of tenants over one another's cultivated and commonable land, or when general rights, vaguely expressed, had been acquired by strangers or neighbours over the untilled wastes of the lord of the manor. Unless a custom to the contrary could be established, an enclosure of untilled waste by the lord of the manor would be upheld in the law courts, provided that the number of live-stock which could be turned out by the commoners was certain or capable of being ascertained, and that enough pasture was left to satisfy the grazing rights.
As early as the end of the twelfth century, landlords had begun to withdraw their demesne lands from the village farm, to consolidate, enclose, and cultivate them in separate ownership. They had also pared the outskirts of their woods and chases, reclaimed and enclosed these "assart " lands, as they were called, and either added them to their demesnes or let them in several occupations. They had also begun to encourage partners in village farms to agree among themselves, to extinguish their mutual rights of common over the cultivated land which they occupied, to consolidate their holdings by exchange, and to till them as separate farms. The pace at which these enclosures proceeded, and the extent to which they were carried, varied with each county and almost with each manor. But by the end of the fifteenth century, though the great bulk of the village farms remained untouched, the area of land over which manorial tenants enjoyed rights of common was considerably diminished, partly by the a action of lords of the manors, partly by that of the tenants themselves. Portions of the untilled waste had been enclosed, reduced to cultivation, and let in separate farms to rent-paying leaseholders, and to copyholders, who were admitted to their tenancies in the Court Baron and entered as tenants on the court roll. "Many of the lordes," says Fitzherbert, "have enclosed a great part of their waste grounds, and straightened their tenants of their commons within." So also, by withdrawing those parts of the cultivated demesne which lay in the village fields, and letting them in small compact holdings, they had reduced the area of cultivated land over which common of pasture was enjoyed. Fitzherbert notes that "the mooste part of the lordes have enclosed their demeyn landes and medows, and kepe them in severaltie, so that theyr tenauntes have no comyn with them therein." Finally, the tenants themselves followed the example of their landlords. Wherever the custom of the manor permitted the practice, tenants and partners in the village farms accepted "licenses to enclose part of their arable land, and to take in new intakes or closes out of the commons," or agreed with their fellow-commoners to extinguish, temporarily or permanently, their mutual rights to graze each other's arable and meadow lands after the crops had been cleared.
At first the holdings, whether separate or associated, were, as has been previously described, rented by labour services or produce-rents. But from the latter half of the thirteenth century onwards a change had been taking place. Landowners, who were themselves exchanging their personal services for cash equivalents, needed money not only to make the purchases required by an advancing standard of living, but to satisfy the demands of the royal tax-collectors. In their land they found a new source of income. They still kept their demesnes in hand; but they preferred to cultivate these home farms by the contract services of hired men, whether servants in husbandry or day labourers, instead of relying on the compulsory labour of tenants, which it was difficult and expensive to supervise. They were, therefore, willing to commute for money payments the team dues, and, to a less extent, the manual dues, by which much of the manorial land was rented--whether in the whole or in part, whether temporarily or permanently. Those who owed the personal services were on their side eager to pay the cash equivalents. The money payments freed them from labour obligations which necessarily interfered with their own agricultural operations, and enabled them to devote themselves, continuously and exclusively, to the cultivation of their own holdings. Their places on the demesne land were taken by wage-earning farm-servants or hired labourers, recruited from the landless sons of tenants, or from cottagers who either had no holding at all or not enough to supply them with the necessaries of life. Thus there were hired farm-servants and day-labourers cultivating the demesne land for money wages; tenants paying money rents only for their holdings; others who still paid their whole rent in produce or in labour; others whose labour services had been partially commuted for money payments, either for a period or permanently.
The local and gradual break-up of the manorial organisation of agricultural labour was accelerated by the Black Death (1348-9). Entering England through the port of Weymouth in August, 1348, the plague spread to the north before it died out in the autumn of the following year. It had been preceded by several years of dearth and pestilence, and it was succeeded by four outbreaks of similar disease before the end of the century. During its ravages it destroyed from one-third to one-half of the population. Lords of manors suffered both as owners of land and as employers of labour. Whole families were swept away, and large quantities of land were thrown on the hands of landlords by the deaths of freeholders and customary tenants without heirs or descendants. Numbers of bondmen took advantage of the general confusion, threw up their holdings, escaped into the towns, or joined the ranks of free labourers. Their derelict holdings increased the mass of untenanted land, and their flight diminished the amount of resident labour available for the cultivation of the home farm. Those tenants who remained on the manor found in the landlord's difficulty their opportunity of demanding increased wages, of commuting labour services for money payments, of enlarging the size of their holdings, of establishing the principle of competitive rents. The "Great Death" in fact produced the natural results. There was a fall in rents and a rise in wages, because the supply of land exceeded the demand, and the demand for labour was greater than the supply.
Legislation came to the aid of landowners by endeavouring to maintain the supply of labour and to regulate the rise both of wages and of prices. The statutes clearly illustrate the difficulties of landlords and consumers. The crisis was so abnormal that unusual action seemed justifiable. In the plague years of 1348-9 agricultural labour was so scarce that panic wages were asked and paid. A similar rise in prices took place simultaneously. So exorbitant did the demands both of labourers and producers appear, following as they did on a previous rise in both wages and prices, that a royal proclamation was issued in 1349. It ordered all men and women, "bond or free,"--unless living on their own resources, tilling their own land, employed in merchandise, or exercising some craft,--to work on the land where they lived at the rate of wages current in 1346. Those who gave or took higher wages were fined treble or double the sums so given or received. The claim of lords of manors to the services of their own men was acknowledged. But their claim was no longer exclusive; they were not to employ more labour than they absolutely required. The king's proclamation was not universally obeyed. Employers had either to lose their crops or yield to "the proud and covetuous desires" of the men. They were indeed placed in a difficulty. On the one hand, men could not be hired under threepence to perform the same services which had been recently commuted for a half-penny. On the other hand, the strike was well-aimed and well-timed. It hit the most vulnerable points. The classes of agricultural labourers against whom the proclamation was specially directed were servants in husbandry, mowers, reapers, and harvesters. Servants in husbandry, boarding at the home-farm or the houses of the larger tenants, were the ploughmen, carters, cowherds, shepherds, milkmaids, and swineherds, who had the care of the live-stock. They, like the harvesters, were indispensable. If the crops were not harvested when ripe, they spoiled; if the live-stock were neglected, they died. To solve the difficulty Parliament itself intervened. The provisions of the proclamation were supplemented by the first Statute of Labourers (1349, 23 Ed. III.), and expanded by a series of Acts extending over the next 150 years. The stocks, imprisonment, outlawry, and branding were the punishments of those who refused to work, or absented themselves without licence from the hundred where they lived. Every boy or girl, who had served in husbandry up to the age of twelve "at the plough or cart," was bound to "abide at the same labour." Justices, either of the Peace or under a special commission, were sworn to enforce the Acts, and to fix the rates of wages at which labourers could be compelled to serve.
How far this legislation attained its immediate ends it is difficult to say; the repeated re-enactment of labour laws, the petitions of employers, and the preambles to successive statutes may seem to suggest that it failed. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence that the law was rigorously enforced, and this would naturally be inferred from the fact that its administration was entrusted to officials who were directly interested in compelling obedience to its provisions. The rise both in wages and prices was great. But the statutes undoubtedly prevented either from reaching famine height. Whether they were completely successful or not, they embittered the relations between employers and employed, and so prepared the ground for the Peasants' Rising of 1381. Confronted by a discontented peasantry, burdened with large tracts of land which threatened to pass out of cultivation, hampered by the scarcity and dearness of labour, landlords turned in new directions for relief. Here and there, where the climate favoured the expedient, they reduced their labour-bills by laying down tracts of arable land to pasture. Elsewhere the demesnes were let off in separate farms at money rents. Often, in order to secure tenants, the land was let on the "stock and land" system, similar to that of the métayer, the landlord finding the stock and implements. Sometimes the entire manor was leased to one or more tenants, who paid a fixed annual rent for the whole, and then sub-let portions of the land.
Two examples of this gradual transformation of the manorial system may be quoted. In the first instance--that of Castle Combe a in Wiltshire--the neighbourhood of a clothmaking industry may have made the process of change exceptionally rapid, even for the south of England. At the Domesday Survey the manor contained
The second instance, that of the vast estates of the Berkeleys, covers a wider area. The policy adopted by the family in the management of their manors in Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Essex, and elsewhere, was in one important respect consistent from 1189 to 1417. Throughout the whole period, successive lords aimed at increasing their enclosures. They began to withdraw those portions of the demesne which lay in "common fields, here one acre or ridge, and there an other, one man's intermixt with an other," to consolidate them, free them from common, and enclose. By exchange with free tenants, other lands were thrown together and similarly treated. The skirts of woods and chases were taken in hand, and hundreds of acres of "assart" land were enclosed. Sometimes these enclosures were made by agreement; sometimes without. Maurice de Berkeley (1243-81) had within his manor of Hame "a wood called whitclive wood, adioinynge whereunto were his Tenants' arrable and pasture grounds and likewise of divers freeholders. This hee fancieth to reduce into a parke; hee treateth with freeholder and tenant for buyinge or exchanginge of such of their lands lyeing neere the said wood as hee fancied: In which wood, also, many others had comon of pasture for theire cattle all tymes of the yeare, (for noe woods or grounds, in effect, till the Eve of this age, were inclosed or held in severalty:) with theis also hee treatieth for releases of their comon: After some labor spent, and not prevailinge to such effect as hee aymed at: hee remembered (as it seemeth) the Adage, multa non laudantur nisi pries peracta: many actions are not praisworthy till they bee done: Hee therefore on a sodaine resolutely incloseth soe much of each man's land unto his sayd wood as hee desired: maketh it a parke, placeth keepers, and storeth it with Deere, And called it, as to this day it is, Whitclyve parke. They seeing what was done, and this lord offeringe compositions and exchanges as before, most of them soone agreed, when there was noe remedy . . . . Those few that remayned obstinate fell after upon his sonne with suites, to theire small confort and less gaines."*
*Lives of the Berkeleys, vol. 1. pp. 140-1.
For the first 140 years of the period (1189-1417) the lords of Berkeley steadily pursued the plan of converting customary tenancies and tenancies of newly enclosed lands into freeholds of inheritance at fixed quit-rents which represented the rack-rents then current. They seem to have feared that in future years the income of their land would fall rather than rise. Robert de Berkeley began the policy (1189-1220); it was continued by his successor, Maurice; it culminated in the time of Thomas, first Lord Berkeley (1281-1321), who himself created 800 of these freeholds, many of which still remained when John Smyth wrote the history of the family in 1628. This family policy was, however, completely reversed by his grandson Thomas, third Lord Berkeley (1326-61). Many hundreds of the freeholds created by his predecessors were repurchased, and let at rack-rents. His example was, for the next half century, actively followed by his successors. But for this reversal of the family policy, Smyth calculates that three-quarters of the Berkeley Estates would have been freeholds of inheritance, paying fixed quit-rents of fourpence or sixpence an acre for land which in 1628 was worth twelve shillings.
At no time during the period (1189-1415) was any large proportion of the demesne lands divided and let on lease. The Berkeleys themselves farmed on a gigantic scale through their bailiffs and their reeves. Thus the third lord (1326-61) kept in his own hands the demesnes of upwards of 75 manors, stocking them with his own oxen, cows, sheep, and swine. On no manor did the flock of sheep number less than 300; on some it reached 1500. At Beverston in Gloucestershire, in the seventh year of Edward III., he sheared 5775 sheep. From these manors his supplies were drawn to feed each day at his "standing-house" 300 persons and 100 horses. Thence came every year geese, ducks, peacocks, capons, hens and chickens,--200 of each kind, many thousands of eggs and 1000 pigeons, coming from a single manor, stores of honey, wax, and nuts, an "uncredible" number of oxen, bullocks, calves, sheep and lambs, and vast quantities of wheat, rye, barley, oats, pease, beans, apples, and pears. All was accounted for with minute detail by the stewards, reeves, and bailiffs. Their accounts for the manors and for the household show what amount of corn remained in the granary from the previous year; how much was each year reaped and winnowed, sold at markets, shipped to sea; how much was consumed in the lord's house, in his stable, in his kennels, in the poultry yard, or in the falcons' mews; how much was malted; how much was given to the poor, to friars and other religious orders by way of yearly allowances.
The policy of repurchasing freeholds and of increasing enclosures was pursued by the fourth lord (1361-68) and by his son (1368-1417). But from 1385 onwards the practice of farming the demesne lands through the reeves was abandoned. "Then," says Smyth, "began the times to alter, and bee with them (much occasioned by the insurrection of Wat Tyler and generally of all the Comons in the land,) And then instead of manureing his demesnes in each manor with his own servants, oxen, kine, sheep, swine, poultry and the like, under the oversight of the Reeves of the manors. . . . This lord began to joyst and tack in other mens cattle into his pasture grounds by the week, month, and quarter: And to sell his meadow grounds by the acre; and so between wind and water (as it were) continued part in tillage, and part let out and joysted as aforesaid for the rest of that kings raigne. And after, in the time of Henry the fourth, let out by the year stil more and more by the acre as hee found chapmen and price to his likeing."* The landlord was ceasing to be a patriarchal farmer and becoming only a rent-receiver. The process went on with increasing rapidity. By the end of the reign of Edward IV. the greater part of the manors and demesnes had been let to tenants, either on rack-rents or at lesser rents with the reservation of a fine. The day-works due from the old customary tenants, in proportion to their holdings of yard-lands and "farrundells," together with their produce rents, were commuted into money equivalents and added to the new rents.
*Lives of the Berkeleys, Vol. ii, pp. 5-6.
The story of the Manor of Castle Combe and of the estates of the Berkeleys holds true, with many variations, of England generally. Everywhere the cultivation of demesnes by the labour services of manorial tenants was gradually abandoned, and the older system replaced by separate farms, let for money rents to individual occupiers. The change proceeded more rapidly in the south and south-west than in the north and east. But as the fifteenth century neared its close the relations between owners, occupiers, and cultivators of land had, in many parts of England, assumed a more modern aspect. There was a large increase in the number of freeholders, and of leaseholding or copyholding farmers renting land in individual occupation; there was also an increase in the number of free labourers whose only capital was their labour. The complete abolition of villeinage had been demanded by the people in the rising of 1381, and one of the principal objects of the rioters had been the destruction of the rolls of the manor courts, which were the evidence not only of their titles but of their disabilities. Possibly they may have hoped that, if the court rolls were destroyed, they would be left in undisturbed possession of their holdings. Possibly they may have expected to escape the payment of the vexatious fines and licences incidental to the tenure, and there is some suggestion that landlords were endeavouring to recoup themselves for the loss of income, which the commutation of labour services and the decrease of the manorial population had produced, by the stricter exaction of payments. Eighty years later the class of villeins, which once had included the great mass of the rural population, was fast disappearing. The more prosperous members of the class had retained their hold on the land, whether on the demesnes, the assart lands, or the village farms. Some had become freeholders; others rented their holdings at fixed money rents on leases for a term of years or for lives; others, whose rights were derived from ancient customs, were admitted as copyholders for lives and possibly of inheritance on the court roll of the manor. The uncertainty of villein tenure was gone, and its brand of personal servitude could not long continue when the old relation of feudal lord and dependent was exchanged for that of landlord and tenant or of employer and employed, and was expressed in cash instead of personal services. Even landless bondmen had for the most part gained their personal freedom. Some purchased freedom by money payments; on some the influence of the Church, or the pricking of conscience conferred it by a deathbed emancipation; the legal presumption of natural liberty and the decisions of the law courts bestowed it on others. Here a bondman escaped from the manor and was lost sight of; here a man took refuge in a town; another accepted the tawny livery of the Berkeleys or of some other great lord; a fourth received the tonsure, or took service in a monastery, as a lay brother; a fifth made freedom the condition on which he would take up land. In numerous cases the services were lost from neglect, because they ceased to be profitable when landlords abandoned farming and became only rent-receivers. In all these ways the ranks of freemen and free labourers were recruited. The numbers of villeins dwindled fast. But the tenure survived the Tudor period. Its abolition was demanded in the eastern counties during Kett's rebellion (1549), and all men who had not been legally emancipated lived throughout the reign of Elizabeth in peril that its incidents might be revived against them. Even the old personal services still lingered. Till the end of the eighteenth century, labour dues as part of the rent of land were enforced in the north-west of England. Half the county of Cumberland was still unenclosed in 1794. "By far the greatest part of this county was held under lords of manors, by that species of vassalage, called customary tenure; subject to the payment of fines and heriots, on alienation, death of the lord, or death of tenant, and the payment of certain annual rents, and performance of various services, called Boon-daya, such as getting and leading the lord's peats, plowing and harrowing his land, reaping his corn, hay-making, carrying letters, etc., etc., whenever summoned by the lord." *
*General View of the Agriculture of the County of Cumberland, by John Bailey and George Culley (1794), p. 11.
The, fifteenth century lies midway between two recognised periods of distress among the rural population. Agriculturally, its history is almost a blank. The silence has been interpreted in different ways. Some writers have considered it as a time of progress; others have read it as the reverse. There is evidence that the principal sufferers by the dynastic and aristocratic struggle of the Roses were the nobility and the soldiers, that country districts were not laid waste, and that villages and their populations were neither destroyed nor harried. If so, rural life may have advanced peacefully, profiting by the absorption of landowners in more exciting pursuits than the administration of their estates. When once the struggle was ended, a new world began to piece itself together. Accepting the spirit of the coming age, agriculture reorganised itself on a money basis, and two classes emerge into, prominence--capitalist tenant-farmers and free but landless labourers. Both had been slowly forming during the first three quarters of the century: both were equally essential to the changed conditions of farming. The tenant-farmer had risen in the social scale; the labourer, if the possession of land alone measured his position in society, had fallen. Mediaeval organisations of trade were undergoing a similar transformation. Guilds, like village farms, had maintained a certain equality of wealth and position among the master craftsmen, and apprentices and journeymen not only looked to become masters themselves, but shared in the advantages of membership of the organised crafts. At the close of the fifteenth century, the wealthier liveried masters began, like capitalist tenant-farmers, to form a higher rank within the guild, and to control and administer its policy. Below them in the scale a new class was coming into existence. Independent journeymen were increasing in number--hired artisans who derived no benefits from the guilds, enjoyed no prospect of becoming master-craftsmen, and depended for their livelihood, like the free labourer divorced from the soil, on employment and wages. For the rising classes, the fifteenth century may have been a period of prosperity; for the classes which were in some respects falling, it was probably a time of adversity. Only thus can the rose-coloured descriptions of writers like Sir John Fortescue be reconciled with the darker accounts which might be put together from other sources. It is not in the gay holiday scenes of a Chaucer, but in the grimly realistic pictures of a Langland that the features of rural life are most truly painted.
Leaseholders and copyholders in separate occupation of farms had increased rapidly in number as well as in importance. Their ranks were swollen by the tenants of the reclaimed wastes, by those among whom the demesne was now divided, and by holders of the "stock and land" leases who had saved sufficient capital to stand on their own feet; by men of capacity and enterprise, who realised the superior advantages of a separate holding, however small; by hundreds of the old customary tenants, who found that the rents for which their personal services had been commuted were higher than the competitive money rents which land could command when the supply was excessive. The terms for which leases ran grew longer. They advanced from a year to five years, then to seven years, then to ten years, then to twenty-one, then to lives, and often to fee farm. The increasingly prolonged term illustrates the greater confidence in the stability of the government. It also indicates, on the part of the farmer, a growing sense of the legal security which leases afforded; on the part of landowners, the wish to retain as long as possible their responsible tenants; and, among the more far-sighted of the tenantry, a desire to rid themselves of the imperfect ownership which customary tenure implied. Finally, farms were increasing in size. The word "farm" was itself changing its meaning from the stipulated rent to the area of land out of which the payment issued. In this transition another meaning of the word was lost. In many parts of England at that time, and in the north of England down to the last century, a farm meant that definite area of land which afforded a living to the occupier and his family. By the end of the fifteenth century it had acquired its modern sense of an indefinite area of land occupied by one tenant at one rent. Complaints of the practice of throwing together a number of men's "livings" into one holding in one man's occupation begin to be frequent, and are directed against the absorption of the small arable holdings of from ten to thirty acres. They occur in sermons, in Petitions to the King, in doggerel verse. The letter of the Vicar of Quinton in Gloucestershire, written to the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, at the close of the fifteenth century. breathes the spirit of the twentieth century. Magdalen College owned an estate in the parish of. Quinton, and the president hesitated whether the College should let the land as one farm, or, as we should now say, let it in small holdings. The vicar appeals on behalf of his parishioners. "Aftur my sympull reson," he writes, "it is mor meritory to support and succur a comynte [community] then one mane, yowre tenan[ts] rathere then a stronge man, the pore and the innocent for [instead of] a gentylman or a gentylman's man."
Whatever may have resulted from the vicar's appeal, circumstances generally favoured the multiplication of separate holdings and their increase to a size which rendered the employment of money as well as of labour remunerative. Practical agriculturists, like Fitzherbert, urge every man to "change fields with his neighbour, so that he may lay his lands together," keep more live-stock, improve the soil by their "compostynge," and rest his corn land when it becomes impoverished. The long wars with France were over; the civil strife between York and Lancaster was ended ; the central government under Henry VII. was firmly established; trade was beginning to expand; population, arrested in its increase since the death of Edward I., was once more growing. On the other hand, land had depreciated in value; rents had declined; farming had deteriorated; useful practices had beep discontinued; cattle were dwindling in size and weight; the common pastures had become infected with "murrain" ; the arable area of open-fields had grown less productive, and without manure its fertility could not be restored. Land was cheap to buy and cheap to rent. Enterprising purchasers and farmers could make it pay, if they realised the advantages of separate occupation, of employing money on the land, of reviving obsolete practices like marling, and, in certain climates, of adopting a convertible husbandry that adapted itself to fluctuating needs better than the open-field system, which rigidly regulated the cultivation of the soil and permanently separated arable land from pasture. The one obstacle to the success of the new tenant-farmer was the scarcity and dearness of labour. But sheep-grazing cut down labour bills, while legislation checked the natural rise of wages, and barred the outlet into towns against agricultural labourers and their sons. Even a high rate of wages often proved nominal rather than real, for, under the Statutes of Labourers, farmers had the option of paying their men in corn at the statutory price of 6s. 8d. a quarter when corn fell below that price, or in money when the price of corn approached or exceeded the statutory figure.
Two contemporary pictures have been painted of the lives of tenant-farmers, who were fathers of famous sons--one at the opening, the other at the close, of the fifteenth century. Each picture seems to be more or less typical of the farming class at the periods to which they belong. Clement Paston, at the beginning of the century, lived at the village of Paston, near Mundesley in Norfolk. "He was," says an anonymous writer who was no friend to the family, "a good plain husband(man), and lived upon his land that he had in Paston, and kept thereon a plough all times in the year, and sometimes in barlysell two ploughs. The saide Clement yede (went) at one plough both winter and summer, and he rode to mill on the bare horseback with his corn under him, and brought home meal again under him, and also drove his cart with divers corns to Wynterton to sell as a good husband(man) ought to do." He had at the most 100 or
For wage-earning landless labourers, the last 130 years of the period from 1200 to 1485 were probably, in some respects, unprosperous. They now were exposed to the fluctuations, not only of the price of necessaries, but of the labour market. Yet agricultural change had not affected them wholly for the worse. The bright side was the bondman's passage towards personal freedom; the darkest feature was his divorce from the soil. To some extent his severance from the land was the means and the price of his personal emancipation.
The surrender of the hold on the land was, at this period, mainly due to voluntary action by the villeins themselves; it was not caused by clearances for sheep farming. A landlord had no desire to lose them either as tenants or as labourers. Their flight threw more land on his hands, and at the same time increased the scarcity of labour for its cultivation. But villeins, whose holdings were small, had little inducement to retain them, and much to gain by escape. The sentimental objection to the tenure had been deepened and embittered by the teaching of wandering friars and "poor preachers." Freedom meant the rise out of a condition, the degradation of which they had begun to feel with a new acuteness. It meant also new possibilities. Beyond the limits of their own manor, they might, as freemen, acquire other holdings, or join the ranks of free labourers, or settle behind a city wall and practise some handicraft. After the "Black Death" the prospect of employment in towns was good. Hands were at a premium. The great scarcity of labour is proved by the fact that the severity of the Labour Statutes was relaxed in the case of immigrants into London, and, temporarily, into Norwich. That the chances of town life were in themselves sufficient inducements for flight from the manor is shown by the willingness of villeins to surrender their holdings, and purchase licences to live within the walls of cities. But very often another cause must have made the voluntary severance from the land a Hobson's choice. The yield of arable land on openfield farms was so small that farming scarcely provided necessaries. Throughout the closing years of the fifteenth century, successive outbreaks of murrain had killed numbers of cattle and sheep, swept off geese and poultry, and even destroyed the bees. If the results of similar outbreaks in the sixteenth century justify the conclusion, it may be supposed that it was the live-stock of open-field farmers which suffered most. Without stock small holders or cottagers found common rights valueless, and their few acres of arable land rather a burden than a profit. To such men the voluntary surrender of holdings, with or without flight, might well seem the choice of a lesser evil. For a time they may have prospered as labourers for hire. But when the conversion of tillage to pasture had begun, their daily employment and their harvest earnings were in peril. In such conditions it must have been useless, if not impossible, to enforce residence within the limits of the manor.
The possibility that the manor itself might not provide work for its inhabitants was recognised in the labour legislation of the period. Indirectly the Labour Statutes, though manifestly not passed in the interest of labourers, aided their progress towards freedom of movement and of contract. They broke down the exclusive right which lords of the manor claimed over the personal services of their manorial dependents. Hitherto no one could employ a villein from another manor without the risk that this superior claim might be asserted. Under the king's proclamation of 1349, the lord's right is recognised, preferentially, but not exclusively. He has the first claim, not the only claim, to the services. He may not employ more labour than he absolutely needs. When his requirements are satisfied, his villain may, and on demand must, work for other employers. In the statutes themselves the same principle is carried further. Servants in husbandry are bound to appear, tools in hand, in market towns to be publicly hired, as, five centuries later in many parts of England, they frequented the local statute fairs, or mops--cowmen with the hair of cows twisted in their button-holes, or carters and ploughmen with whip-cord in their hats. Thus the very legislation which was designed to maintain the supply of rural labour and check migration into towns, introduces that principle of freedom of movement which is essential to the modern relations of employer and employed. In another respect, also, the Labour Statutes loosened the dependence of bondmen on their manorial lords. The jurisdiction of the king's law courts was extended till it invaded the sacred precincts of the manor court, and settled disputes between the lord and his villeins. Wages even were no longer to be fixed as between a bondman and his feudal lord; they were to be controlled by Justices of the Peace acting as the king's agents. It is not suggested that the fifteenth century labourer benefited by a change which virtually transferred the right of fixing wages to an association of employers. But the transfer of authority was a not unimportant step towards the complete collapse of the manorial organisation, and towards free competition as the true basis of money wages.
FARMING FOR PROFIT: PASTURE AND SHEEP-GRAZING. 1485-1558
Out of wars at home and abroad, and pestilences destructive both to man and beast, emerged one great agricultural change which by 1485 was practically completed. Feudal landowners, instead of pursuing the patriarchal system of farming their own demesnes by the labour services of their dependents, had become receivers of rent. Home-farms and "assart" or reclaimed lands were cultivated, not by lords of the manor through bailiffs and labour-rents, but by freeholders, leaseholders, copyholders, and hired labourers. Further changes were close at hand. With the dawn of the Tudor period began the general movement which gradually transformed England into a mercantile country. The amount of money in actual use was increasing; men possessed more capital, could borrow it more easily, and lay it out to greater advantage. Commerce permeated national life. Feudalism was dead or dying, and trade was climbing to its throne. The Middle Ages were passing into modern times.
On the agricultural side, the spirit of trading competition gave fresh impulse to an old movement which, in spite of a storm of protest, continued in activity throughout the Tudor period, and, after a century and a half of silent progress, became once more the centre of literary controversy before it triumphed at the close of the reign of George III. That movement is described as enclosure, and it is generally treated as necessarily destructive to the old village farms. But the word includes various processes, some of which rather strengthened than weakened the open-field system. Some enclosures, such as closes for stock-feeding, intakes from the common for arable purposes, even the not uncommon practice of fencing portions of the open-fields for several occupation, whether temporarily or permanently, were really efforts to adapt village farms to changing needs. Another form of enclosure was the cultivation of new land obtained by clearing forests, approving portions of wastes, or draining fens. Here also village farms were not directly affected. Indirectly, indeed, these new enclosures produced a considerable effect. Much of the reclaimed land was tilled for corn; thus the ancient arable soil was relieved from the former necessity of bearing grain crops, and might not improbably be put to the use for which it was best adapted. A third process was the direct enclosure of open-fields and pasture commons. This form generally appeared in the neighbourhood of towns, where the demand for animal food and dairy produce was greatest and labour found a ready market, or in counties where some manufacturing industry prevailed and small grass holdings made a less exacting claim on the time of the handicraftsmen than tillage. But whatever form the enclosure took, the general drift of the movement was towards individual occupation of land. It was therefore always, and particularly in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, directly opposed to the open-field system of farming in common.
At both periods that special form of enclosure was prominent which meant the break-up of the mediaeval agrarian partnerships and the substitution of private enterprise for the collective efforts of village associations. But in details the earlier and the later movements were strongly contrasted. In the sixteenth century, the change was opposed and partially arrested by legislation; in the eighteenth century, it received from Parliament encouragement and support. Under Henry VIII., it was mainly inspired by commercial advantage; under George III., it was alleged to be enforced by necessity. In the sixteenth century some of the grass-land was undoubtedly used for grazing beasts. But it was mainly to supply the growing wool trade that Tudor husbandmen substituted pasture for tillage, sheep for corn. They took their seats on the woolsack, and maidens of all degrees were spinsters.
Hanoverian farmers reversed the process; they valued sheep for their mutton instead of their fleeces, and concentrated their energies on the production of bread and meat for the teeming populations of manufacturing cities. Dearth of bread was in Tudor times the most effective cry against enclosures; under George III. it was the unanswerable plea for their extension. At the opening of the sixteenth century, enclosure did not always mean improved farming; the conversion of arable land into inferior sheep-walk was rather retrogression than progress. At the close of the eighteenth century, it at least meant the opportunity for advance and for the introduction of better practices. To some extent, indeed, the different developments of the two movements measure the improvements in the methods and the increase in the resources of Hanoverian farmers. The Tudor husbandman might devote himself exclusively to the one or the other of the two branches of farming; but he had not mastered the secret of their union. If he changed from tillage to pasture, he did so completely. He could not, like his successor, combine the two, and by the introduction of new crops, at once grow more corn and, carry more stock.
Agriculturally, the period which opens with the Battle of Bosworth and ends with the early years of Elizabeth is one of transition towards the modern spirit and forms of land cultivation. Like all transition periods, it is full of suffering for those who were least able to adapt themselves to altered conditions. The ruin of noble families by the Wars of the Roses, the lavish expenditure which Henry VIII. made fashionable, the rise in prices, and the difficulty of raising rents, compelled many "unthrifty gentlemen" to sell their estates. The break-up of landed properties and their passage into new hands favoured the introduction of the commercial impulse. The landholders whose "unreasonable covetousness" is most loudly condemned were mainly speculators in land, men who had made money in business, had capital to invest, could afford the expense of enclosures, and were determined to make their estates pay. Such were "the Merchant Adventurers, Clothmakers, Goldsmiths, Butchers, Tanners, and other Artificers,"*--"the merchants of London" who "bie fermes out of the handes of worshypfull gentlemen, honeste yeomen, and pore laborynge husbandes."**
* Petition to Henry VIII. (1514), quoted by F. J. Furnivall in Ballads from MSS., p. 101 (Publications of the Ballad Society, vol. i.).
** Thomas Lever's Sermons (1680) ; Arber's Reprints, p. 29.
Translated into the language of to-day, the old landlords had been satisfied to draw from their estates certain advantages and a low percentage of profit; the new men required at the least a four per cent. return in money on their investments. Feudal barons had partly valued their land for the number of men-at-arms it furnished to their banners; Tudor landowners appraised its worth by the amount of rent it paid into their coffers. Mediaeval husbandmen had been content to extract from the soil the food which they needed for themselves and their families. Tudor farmers despised self-sufficing agriculture; they aspired to be sellers and not consumers only, to raise from their land profits as well as food. As trade expanded, and towns grew, and English wool made its way into continental cities, or was woven into cloth by English weavers, new markets were created for agricultural produce. Fresh incentives stimulated individual enterprise, and both landlords and tenants learned to look on the land they respectively owned or cultivated as a commercial asset.
Among the results of this conquest of agriculture by the new spirit of commercial competition three may be noticed--firstly, the clearer recognition of the advantages of farms held in individual occupation, large enough to make the employment of capital remunerative; secondly, the substitution of pasture for tillage, of sheep for corn, of wool for meat; thirdly, the attack upon the old agrarian partnerships in which lords of the manor, parsons, freeholders, leaseholding farmers, copyholders, and cottagers had hitherto associated to supply the wants of each village. Legislation failed to prevent a movement which harmonised and synchronised with the progressive development of the nation on commercial lines. But in its earlier stages, the consequences to the rural population were serious. Many tenants lost their holdings, many wage-earning labourers their employment, when landlords "turned graziers," and farmers cut down their labour-bills by converting tillage into pasture. It is impossible to doubt the reality of the distress. From 1487 onwards, literature, pamphlets, doggerel ballads, sermons, liturgies, petitions, preambles to statutes, Commissions of Enquiry, Acts of Parliament, bear witness to a considerable depopulation of country districts. In the numerous insurrections, which marked the sixteenth century and the early Years of the reign of James I., rural distress undoubtedly contributed its share. But zealous advocates of Roman Catholicism found it useful to ally agrarian discontent with religious reaction, and men like Protector Somerset thought it politic to attribute anti-Protestant risings entirely to agricultural causes.
There was no novelty in the withdrawal of demesne lands from the open-field farm and their partition into individual occupations; or in fencing off portions of the home-farm and of the reclaimed "assart" lands as separate plots; or in the appropriation of parts of the commonable waste for private use; or in the encouragement given to partners in the village association to throw their scattered strips together into one compact holding. Each of these processes had been for many years in progress; each had necessitated enclosures; none had required the decay of farm-houses and cottages, loss of employment, eviction of tenants, or rural depopulation. But from the Tudor enclosing movement these consequences did necessarily result, because its objects were the promotion of sheep-farming, the conversion of tillage into pasture, the consolidation and enlargement of grass holdings. If farmers had not yet at their disposal the means of realising the full truth of the maxim that "the foot of the sheep turns sand into gold," the new commercial aristocracy were quick to see that money was to be made, or at least to be saved, by the growth of wool. It is true that down to 1540 the prices of wool remained low; but some at least of the grass was taken up by the graziers, and the saving in labour effected by pasture farming was great. Sheep could not be herded with success on open commons, still less on the arable lands of village farms, and small holdings were incompatible with large flocks. It was these new elements which upset the calculations of agriculturists like Fitzherbert (1523), or Cardinal Pole in Starkey's Dialogue (1536), or Tusser (1557), or Standish (1611), who hoped that the economic advantages of enclosure might be secured without the social loss which the conversion of large tracts of arable land into wide pasture farms inflicted on the rural population.
If evidence which is rarely impartial may be implicitly trusted, considerable tracts of cultivated land were converted into wildernesses, traversed only by shepherds and their dogs; roofless granges and half-ruined churches alone marked the sites of former hamlets; the "deserted village" was a reality of the sixteenth century. Already anxious for the maintenance of the national supply of corn, men began to be alarmed at another result of the movement which became increasingly prominent. John Rous (1411-91), chantry priest of Guy's Cliffe and Warwickshire antiquary, was the first to protest against the decay of population caused in the midland counties by enclosures for pasture farming. To this rural exodus the attention of Parliament had been called by the Lord Chancellor in the first year of Richard III. (1484). Francis Bacon, writing of the opening years of the reign of Henry VII., says: "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." So formidable did the danger begin to appear, that in 1489 two Acts of Parliament were passed for its prevention. The first Act was local, dealing with the effects of enclosures in the Isle of Wight from the point of view of national defence; the second is general, directed "against the pulling down of tounes" (i.e. townships or villages). These Acts were the precursors of many others throughout the sixteenth century, forbidding the conversion of arable land into pasture, ordering newly laid pasture to be restored to tillage, directing enclosures to be thrown down, requiring decayed houses to be rebuilt, limiting the number of sheep and of farms which could legally be held by one man, and imposing severe penalties for disobedience to the new provisions.
No favour was shown by Parliament to enclosers, except perhaps in the case of deer-parks: On the contrary, strenuous efforts were repeatedly made to stop the process of enclosure. Nor was the Government satisfied with passing laws and imposing penalties. Wolsey personally interested himself in enforcing obedience to the laws against the decay of houses and farm-buildings and against the conversion of arable land to pasture. Active steps were taken to see that buildings were restored and enclosures and ditches levelled. In default, heavy penalties were exacted. A Commission was appointed in 1517, which enquired into all cases where farm-houses had been destroyed since 1485, or where ploughs had been put down by the increase of pasture farming. Similar enquiries were held in 1548, 1566, and 1607. No doubt these strenuous efforts checked the movement. But they failed to stop it altogether. In this respect they succeeded no better in encouraging tillage than the quaint pedantry of the law, which gave arable land precedence over other land, or conferred on beasts of the plough privileges that were denied to other animals. The new legislation seems to have been satisfied, or evaded, without serious difficulty; partly, because compositions for breaches of its provisions might be paid or exemptions purchased; partly, no doubt, because the administration of the law was often entrusted to those who were interested in making it a dead letter. The destruction of farm buildings was forbidden; but it was easy to keep within the statute by retaining a single room for the shepherd or the milkmaid; a solitary furrow driven across newly laid pasture satisfied the law that it should be restored to tillage; the number of sheep to be owned by one man was limited, but the ownership of flocks might be fathered on sons or servants. Down to the middle of the reign of Elizabeth the enclosing and grazing movement continued. At subsequent intervals it renewed its special activity throughout the seventeenth century, when dairying began to claim a larger share of the attention of farmers. It was restrained or encouraged rather by natural causes than by legislation. Fluctuations in the prices of wool or corn, the increased profits of improved methods of arable farming, and the restoration of the fertility of the ancient tilled land, which was brought back to the plough after an enforced rest from excessive cropping, gradually restored the preponderance of tillage over pasture.
The grievances of the rural population are to be gathered not only from legislation, proclamations, petitions, articles of complaint, the Returns of Commissioners, or the records of the law courts. They are also written large in More's Utopia, and in much of the ephemeral literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cry of the people is heard, often in exaggerated tones, in the sermons of popular preachers like Tyndale, Becon, and Latimer, in the pamphlets of such writers as Simon Fish, Henry Brinklow, or Philip Stubbes, or in the rhymes of versifiers like "Sir" William Forrest, Robert Crowley, and Thomas Bastard, or in such anonymous ballads as "Nowe-a-dayes":
"The townes go down, the land decayes;
Off cornefeyldes playne layes (grass-land);
Gret men makithe now a dayes
A shepecott in the church.
Commons to close and kepe;
Poor folk for bred to cry and wepe;
Towns pulled downe to pastur shepe;
This ys the new gyse!"
Throughout the burden is the same--enclosure of commons, conversion of plough-land into pasture, sheep-farming, excessive rents, exorbitant fines, consolidation of small holdings into large farms, decay of houses and farm-buildings, formation of deer-parks, and, more rarely, enclosure of open-field arable farms. Here are to be found fierce denunciations of the "caterpillars of the commonweal," who "join lordship to lordship, manor to manor, farm to farm, land to land, pasture to pasture," and gather many thousands of acres of ground "together within one pale or hedge"; or of the unchristian landlords, who "rack and stretch out the rents of their lands," taking "unreasonable fines," "setting their pore tenants so straitely uppon the tenter hookes as no man can lyve on them"; or of the insatiable "cormorants" who "let two or three tenantries unto one man," "take in their commons" till not so much as a garden ground is safe, and make "parks or pastures of whole parishes"; or of the " unreasonable covitous persones whiche doth encroche daily many ffermes more than they can be able to occupye or mainteyne with tilth for come as hath been used in tymes past, forasmoche as divers of them hath obteyned and encroched into their handes, X, XII, XIV, or XVI fermes in oon mannes hand attons"; or of the "ambicious suttletie" of those who make "one fearme of two or three," and even sometimes "bringe VI to one"; or of the greed of "step-lords," like the "rich franklings," who
"Occupyinge a dosen men's lyvyngis
Take all in their owne hondes alone."
Nor do the innocent causes of much of the trouble escape attack; sheep "that were wont to be so myke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saie, be become so greate devowerers, and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow down the very men themselfes," drive "husbandry" out of the country, and thrust "Christian labourers" off the land.
" 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 widowes and orphane children;
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 blacke sheepe was a biting beast."
Enclosers were condemned by preachers as "guilty before God of the sin in the text--'they have sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes.'" A playwright like Massinger did not draw entirely on his imagination, but expressed the feeling of the day when he painted his portrait of a Sir Giles Overreach, insensible to pity for his victims and justly called
"Extortioner, Tyrant, Cormorant, or Intruder
On my poor neighbour's right, or grand Incloser
Of what was common to my private use."
In the passion for sheep and hedges, which changed "merrie England" into "sighing or sorrowful England," men saw the fulfilment of the prophecy "Home and Thorne shall make England forlorne." Superstitions enforced the popular judgment, and legend doomed "emparkers," like Sir John Townley, to haunt the solitudes they had created, uttering bitter cries of unavailing remorse.
It was easy for popular preachers and pamphleteers to excite popular passion against the "greedy gulls" and "insatiable cormorants," who advocated and practised enclosures, and to denounce the agricultural tendencies of Tudor times as solely guided by selfish greed. But there are practical and broader sides to the question. When once land was regarded as an important asset in the wealth of the nation, national interests demanded that it should be utilised to the greatest possible advantage. Without enclosures, the soil could not be used for the purposes to which it was best adapted, or its resources fully developed. If money was to be made out of land, or if its full productive power was to be realised, it was individual enterprise alone that could make or realise either. Under the open-field system one man's idleness might cripple the industry of twenty: only on enclosed farms, separately occupied, could men secure the full fruit of their enterprise. This fact had slowly revealed itself during the last two centuries. To exchange intermixed lands, to consolidate compact holdings, and fence them off in separate occupation, had long been the aim both of landlords and tenant-farmers. Few practical men would have disputed the truth of Fuller's statement: "The poor man who is monarch of but one enclosed acre will receive more profit from it than from his share of many acres in common with others."
Tudor agriculturists went further in their zeal for farming progress. They saw that a small enclosed plot of
Agriculturists might with good reason plead that the changes which they advocated were justified, if not necessitated, by the progress of farming. They hoped that even open-field farmers might themselves recognise the advantages of enclosure, and would agree to consolidate their intermixed holdings and extinguish their reciprocal rights of common. Fitzherbert in his Book of Husbandry argues strongly in favour of enclosures, and especially insists on their advantages in keeping live-stock, which, he says, thrive best and cost least on enclosed land. If a farmer has only a twenty years' lease of his land, it will pay him to go to the expense of fencing off his land in separate parcels with hedges and ditches. Common-field farmers have to pay 2d. a quarter for each head of cattle, and 1d. a quarter for each head of swine, under the care of the common herdsman and swineherd. If they wish to thrive, each must keep a shepherd of his own. The hire of the herdsman and the swineherd, together with the wages and board of the shepherd, and the cost of hurdles and stakes put together, double the rent. If a farmer encloses, he may have to pay three times this annual cost in one year; but he has no further expense. "Than hathe he euery fyelde in seueraltie: and by the assente of the lordes and the tenauntes euery neyghbour may exchaunge landes with other. And than shall his farme be twyse so good in proffite to the tenaunte as it was before, and as muche lande kepte in tyllage, and than shall not the ryche man ouer-eate the poore man with his cattell, and the fourth parte of haye and strawe shall serue his cattell better in a pasture than foure tymes so muche will dooe in a house, and less attendaunce, and better the cattell shall lyke, and it is the chiefest sauegarde for corne bothe daye and nyght that may be." To the same effect wrote Tusser in the comparison between "champion" (or open-field) "and severall" (or enclosed) in his Five Hundreth Good Pointes of Good Husbandrie (1573).
"More profit is quieter found,
(Where pastures in severall bee);
Of one seelie aker of ground
Than champion maketh of three.
The t'one is commended for 'grain,
Yet bread made of beanes they doo eats;
The t'other for one loafe have twaine
Of mastlin, of rie, or of wheate."
But the agriculturists did not anticipate that one shepherd, with his dog, his crook, shears, and tar-box, might take the place of many ploughmen. They had not reckoned on the strength of the new commercial spirit, and of the impulse which it gave to large grazing farms. The area of land actually returned as enclosed and converted to pasture was relatively small. It has been calculated that, during a period of nearly two centuries,--that is, from 1455 to 1637, the total acreage enclosed and converted did not exceed
"We have shut away all cloisters,
But still we keep extortioners
We have taken their lands for their abuse,
But we have converted them to a worse use."
Voluntary agreements for the valuation and commutation of rights of common were often entered into between tenants and landowners, and bargains were struck on equitable terms. Instances like that given in the following extract from Kennet's Parochial Antiquities might be indefinitely multiplied: "The said Edmund Rede, Esquire granted and confirmed to Thomas Billyngdon one close in Adyngrave, in consideration whereof the said Thomas Billyngdon quitted and resigned his right to the free pasturage of four oxen to feed with the cattle of the said Edmund Rede and all right to any common in the said pasture or inlandys of the said Edmund." Here in 1437 was the principle of commutation of rights of common accepted and enforced by private contract. In other cases a semblance of agreement may have been secured by threats. But justice was not always perverted in the interests of landlords. Attempted acts of oppression were frequently checked by the courts of law. As an instance may be quoted the proposed enclosure of the commonfields at Welcombe, near Stratford-on- Avon. The example is the more interesting because it reveals one of the rare appearances of William Shakespeare in public life. In 1614 William Combe, of Stratford-on-Avon, the Crown tenant of the "College," wished to withdraw his arable land from the open-field farm of Welcombe, enclose it, and lay it down to pasture. He also wished to enclose so much of the ancient greensward or pasture as his rights of pasturage represented. To his scheme he had obtained the consent of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, as representative of the Crown, and the active co-operation of the Chancellor's steward. Shakespeare, however, was in a position to be a formidable opponent, for he not only owned land adjoining, but also held the unexpired term of a lease of half the tithes of the open-fields. But a deed, dated October 28 1614, secured him from any loss of tithe through the conversion of tillage into pasture, and his consent to the enclosure was obtained. Combe had now only to deal with the Corporation of Stratford, who offered a strenuous resistance. Strong language did not move them; in the Corporation MS. the witnesses are duly noted who heard him call them "Purtan knaves," "doggs and curres." Tempting offers were refused, though Combe proposed to compensate them in more than the value of the tithe, to undertake the perpetual repair of the highways passing over the land, and to increase the value of the rights of freeholders and tenants by waiving part of his claim to turn out sheep and cattle on the commons. Then Combe took matters into his own hands, and prepared to enclose his land by surrounding it with a ditch. This brought the dispute to a crisis. Not apparently without the knowledge of the Town Clerk, the townspeople filled in the ditch. A breach of the peace seemed imminent. The matter was, therefore, referred to the law-courts, and at Warwick Assizes, on March 27, 1615, Lord Chief Justice Coke made an order that "noe inclosure shalbe made within the parish of Stratforde." The Dingles, which formed part of the common-fields of Welcombe, remain uninclosed to this day.
Instances of the tyrannical use of power could also be quoted. The Tudor age was rough, and might was sometimes right. Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516) paints this side to the picture, when he speaks of "husbandmen . . . thrust owte of their owne, or els by coveyne and fraude or by vyolent oppression they be put besydes it, or by wronges and injuries they be so weried that they be compelled to sell all." If a small freeholder or copyholder proved obstinate, the proceedings of Sir Giles Overreach, in A New Way to Pay Old Debts (Act ii. Sc. 1), may illustrate the methods by which a Naboth's vineyard, even when it belonged to a manorial lord, might be appropriated by a wealthy capitalist
"I'll therefore buy some cottage near his manor,
Which done, I'll make my men break ope his fences,
Ride o'er his standing corn, and in the night
Set fire on his barns, or break his cattle's legs,
These trespasses draw on suits, and suits expenses
Which I can spare, but will soon beggar him.
When I have harried him thus two or three year,
Though he sue in formá pauperis, in spite
Of all his thrift and care he'll grow behindhand.
Then, with the favour of my man at law,
I will pretend some title: want will force him
To put it to arbitrement. Then if he sell
For half the value he shall have ready money,
And I possess his land."
Considerations of mutual advantage, equitable bargains, fair purchase, superior force, legal chicanery, threats and bullying, were all at work to hasten the change to the individual occupation of land, and the consolidation of separate holdings. If copyholders or commoners appealed to the law-courts, matters, no doubt, sometimes ended as they were friended. "Handy-dandy" was in the Middle Ages a proverbial expression for the covert bribe offered by a suitor, and the occasional perversion of justice is enshrined in the Latin jingle: Jus sine jure datur, si nummus in aure loquatur.
Illegal evictions are not included among the grievances alleged by the leaders in any of the risings of the peasantry which marked the Tudor period. Their absence from these lists justify the conclusion that open illegality was at least rare. But the law itself gave landowners abundant opportunities of regaining possession of the land. Leaseholders for a term of years or for lives had no legal claim to a renewal of their leases, when the term of years had expired or the last life had dropped. Rents might then be raised to an exorbitant sum or extravagant fines exacted, and, unless the tenant was prepared to pay the increased charge, he must surrender his holding. Cottagers or squatters on the waste could rarely show any legal claim to the occupation of land, and the tenancy of a cottage to which rights of common attached could be practically determined by enhancing the rent. Copyholders were, in all probability, almost equally insecure in their holdings. So long as they were in possession, the court roll was evidence of the incidents of their tenure. But the law was still vague as to rights of succession to copyholds. It may be doubted whether copyholds of inheritance were yet known, and it is reasonably certain that the normal copyhold was for a term of years or for lives. At the expiration of the term of years or of the last life, normal copyholders were at the mercy of the lord. Even if copyholds of inheritance were recognised by lawyers in the sixteenth century, they were still insecure. Their titles must often have been incapable of legal proof ; they might be forfeited by some real or technical breach of custom; their renewal was subject to the payment of fines on admittance, which might, where no manorial custom fixed the sum, be arbitrary in amount. It was not till the close of the eighteenth century that the law fixed the limits of a reasonable fine, and, if the fines were arbitrary, the landlord had a weapon with which even copyholds of inheritance, as understood by modern lawyers, might be determined. It is impossible to doubt that exorbitant rents and excessive fines, of which the peasant leaders, preachers, and pamphleteers so bitterly complain, were sometimes used to dispossess leaseholders and copyholders. The powers were legal; but their exercise often worked injustice. Yet it should be remembered, on the other side, that the raising of rents or the enhancing of fines, whenever the opportunity occurred, were the only means of adjusting the landlord's income to the great rise in the prices of agricultural produce. In the Compendious or Briefe Examination the Knight puts the landlord's case. "In all my life time," he says, "I looke not that the thirde part of my lande shall come to my dispocition that I may enhaunce the rent of the same, but it shalbe in mens holdinges either by lease or by copie graunted before my time . . . . We cannot rayse all our wares as youe maye yours." Rents, based on the commutation of labour services at a fixed annual sum in the fourteenth century did not represent the annual value of the land in 1550. Nor were fines for renewal or on admittance always excessive. Roger Wilbraham, of Delamere in Cheshire, about the middle of the seventeenth century, left behind him instructions for his heir: "It will be expected of my heir that he deale no worse with tenants than I have done. And for his directions I have set down ye yearly values according to which I deale and wold have him to deale with the tenants. My rule in leasing is to take for a fine from ancient tenants: 8 years' value for 3 lives, 5 years' value to add 2 lives to 1, 2 years' value to add 1 life to 2, 1 year's value to change a life, or more if there is any great disparity in years betwixt the lives." When, therefore, rents were raised or fines enhanced, the landlord was not always trying to dispossess his tenant. As often as not, he was claiming his proper share of the tenant's "unearned increment."
Against these weapons of the law the cultivators of the old home-farms and of the assart lands were practically defenceless. It is therefore natural to suppose that they were the principal sufferers by the enclosing movement. In their case enclosures did not of necessity involve any breach of the old or new law. Even the provisions of the Tudor legislation were not infringed, unless the land, thus cleared of its cultivators, was so used as to throw any number of holdings together into the hands of one man, to "decay" farm-buildings or houses, to convert tillage into pasture, and so put down ploughs, or to carry an illegal number of sheep. But open-field farmers were in a stronger position. The common rights, which each partner in the association enjoyed over the whole cultivated area of the village-farm, could only be extinguished by agreement, real or enforced, among the commoners. Nor was this consent the only obstacle to enclosure which the system presented. The intermixture of the strips is recognised as a protection against enclosure by the ablest of the sixteenth century writers on the subject. In the Compendious or Briefe Examination both the Doctor and the Husbandman agree as to the difficulties which these two features of the open-field system threw in the way of any general enclosure. The same points are insisted upon by eighteenth century writers. It is not, of course, asserted that the difficulties of enclosing open-field farms were insuperable. Ever since the thirteenth century, village farms had been broken up, both by large landowners and comparatively small freeholders But, before the enclosure acts of the eighteenth century, it was a slow and piecemeal process, by which the principal landlord, or some freeholder who was a partner in the farm, gradually consolidated in his own hands the whole or a part of the commonable cultivated land, enclosed it, and freed it from common rights. No doubt the enclosure of uncultivated wastes injured the tenants of village farms, because it restricted the area of rough pasture grazed by their live-stock. Enclosures of this kind, carried out without leaving a sufficiency of common pasture, were the chief grievance of the peasantry in Kett's rebellion in Norfolk. In this connection the re-enactment by Edward VI. of the statutes of Merton and Westminster, is significant. But the meaning is obscure. It may have been intended to increase the amount of tillage by bringing new land under the plough in exchange for that which had been laid down to grass. Except through the attack upon their pasture commons, it is reasonable to conclude that open-field farmers escaped the storm of sixteenth century enclosures more lightly than the less protected cultivators of demesnes and "assart" lands. This seems to have been the case. Bitter complaints were made against the enclosure of open-fields. But the outcry was practically confined to the corn-growing counties of the Midlands, which throughout the whole period were seething with discontent and insurrection. Yet even here, with the exception of Leicestershire, the enclosing movement cannot have, to any great extent, succeeded, since these are the very counties which, in the eighteenth century, still contained the largest proportion of "champion" or open land.
Advanced free-traders might agree with Raleigh that England, like Holland, could be wholly supplied with grain from abroad without troubling the people with tillage. Others of a less theoretical turn of mind looked no further than the immediate distress which the abandonment of tillage produced. If the enclosing movement had been accompanied by a large extension of arable farming, the market for agricultural labour might have been so enlarged as substantially to relieve agrarian distress. But the extension of pasture and the substitution of a shepherd and his dog for the ploughmen and their teams only increased the scarcity of employment. Tenant-farmers lost their leaseholds; copyholders were dispossessed of their holdings; squatters and cottagers, who had eked out their harvest earnings by the produce of the live-stock which they maintained on the commons, were ruined; servants in husbandry and labourers for weekly wages were thrown out of work. The high prices of necessaries, combined with the loss of commons, the ravages of the murrain, and a succession of dry summers, had driven many small cultivators over the narrow border-line which separated them from starvation. Rents rose exorbitantly till, for farmers at rack-rent, existence became a misery. There was an ominous growth of middlemen, "leasemongers, who take groundes by lease to the entente to lette them againe for double and tripple the rente," and battened on the land-hunger of the people. Legislators were bewildered by currency questions, and violent changes in the standard purity of the gold and silver coinage aggravated the distress by raising or lowering prices. As gold and silver poured into the Old World from America, prices rose throughout Europe. The rise was in England attributed to every cause other than the cheapening of the precious metals. While from one or the other of these causes the purchasing power of wages rapidly diminished, their nominal value remained stationary, and labourers were forced to accept the statutory rates.
It was on those agriculturists who were unwilling or unable to adapt themselves to the times that the blow fell with the greatest severity. The Husbandman in the Compendious Examination knew several of his neighbours who had "turned ether part or all theire arable grounde into pasture, and therby have wexed verie Rich men." These were the men of whom Harrison and Sir Thomas Smith speak as "coming to such wealth that they are able and do daily buy lands of unthrifty gentlemen and make . . . their sons gentlemen." But the Husbandman himself, having "enclosed litle or nothinge of my grownd, could never be able to make up my lorde's rent, weare it not for a litle brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese and hens." Hence it is that, while Latimer laments the degradation of small yeomen who, like his father, had farms of "three to four pounds a year at the uttermost," Harrison describes the rise of substantial farmers and of the middle classes, and their improved standard of living. The distribution of wealth was becoming more and more unequal; the problem of poverty was acquiring a new significance. In the growing struggle for existence it was possible for men, who were neither infirm nor idle, to lose their footing. Voluntary almsgiving was tried and proved inadequate. Gradually and cautiously the legislators of the reign of Elizabeth were forced to apply the principle of compulsory provision for the relief of the necessitous. Previous legislation, in dealing with the impotent poor, had outlined the systems of local liability and of settlement which were adopted in the later poor-laws; but it had been mainly concerned with the suppression of those persons who were styled idle rogues and vagabonds. The object explains, though to modern ideas it cannot justify, the harshness of the law. Able-bodied men and women, who were willing to work but had lost their livelihood, were unknown to the legislators who had sketched the first poor-laws for the relief of the impotent poor and the punishment of sturdy beggars (validi mendicantes ). Our ancestors did not discriminate closely between the different sources of poverty. To them, as is stated in the preamble to the statute of Henry VIII., "ydlenes" was the "mother and rote of all vyces." The "great and excessive nombres" of idle rogues and vagabonds were a crying evil. To this class belonged the men who committed "contynuall theftes, murders, and other haynous offences, which displeased God, damaged the King's subjects, and disturbed the common weal of the realm." Apart from the committal of serious crime, the mass of idle vagrants was in country districts a nuisance and a danger.
The kidnapping of children was not uncommon. Housewives were robbed of their linen, and their pots and pans, or terrified by threats of violence into parting with their money. Horses were stolen from their paddocks, or, still more easily, from the openfield balks on which they were tethered; pigs were taken from their styes, chickens and eggs from the henroosts. Men and women, as they returned from markets, were waylaid by sturdy ruffians. Shops, booths, and stalls were pilfered of their contents. Tippling-houses were converted into receivers' dens for stolen goods. The comparative leniency of the laws of Henry VII. had failed; therefore the evil must be stamped out with a severity which was not only unsentimental but ferocious.
Here the interesting point is whether the ranks of idle rogues were to any large extent swollen by agriculturists, driven to want and desperation by the loss of their holdings. The sturdy beggars, against whom Richard II. had legislated, had not the excuse of want of employment. They consisted, partly of disbanded soldiers who had so long followed the trade of war that they knew no other; partly of men who had suffered that general moral deterioration which often resulted from great catastrophes like the successive visitations of the "Black Death." In the fifteenth century, the close of the French war and of the Wars of the Roses again recruited the ranks of idle poverty and crime. To them were added, at a later date, the disbanded retinues of great nobles, "the great flock or train," to quote More's Utopia, "of idle and loitering serving-men, which never learned any craft whereby to get their living." Finally, the suppression of the monasteries displaced and threw upon the world a large number of dependents, many of whom, from inclination or necessity, joined the army of sturdy beggars. Disbanded soldiers, discharged serving-men, and dismissed dependents of monastic institutions account for a formidable total of unemployed labour, without the addition of clothiers out of work or displaced agriculturists. But the evidence of More's Utopia cannot be ignored. The passage is familiar in which he speaks of the husbandmen "thrust owte of their owne" by enclosures; compelled to "trudge out of their knouen and accustomed howses"; driven to a forced sale of their "housholde stuffe" and "constrayned to sell it for a thyng of nought." "And when they have, wanderynge about, sone spent that, what can they els do but steale, and then justelye, God wote, be hanged, or els go about a beggyng? And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagaboundes, because they go about and worke not; whom no man will set a worke, though they never so willingly offer them selfes therto." More's eloquent appeal may have produced effect. In the year after the publication of Utopia, the first and most important Commission was issued (1517-19) to enquire into the progress and results of enclosures in the twenty-four counties principally affected. The Returns of the Commissioners in Chancery are admittedly imperfect. But they justify the conclusion that More's picture, though true in particular instances, is as a general description of rural conditions too highly coloured. Dispossessed agriculturists undoubtedly contributed some proportion of the class which the Government grouped under the heading of idle rogues. Contemporary writers imply that the proportion was large: modern research, based on contemporary enquiries and returns, suggests that it was relatively small. The evidence seems insufficient for a decision. In coping with a real evil, the Government attempted no classification. The innocent suffered with the guilty, and men and women, whether many or few, who had lost their means of livelihood and were willing to work, were the victims of severe punishment designed for the class of professional vagabonds.
Something is known of the degrees, practices, and jargon of the Elizabethan fraternity of vagabonds. Awdelay and Harman describe the "Abraham man," or "poor Tom," bare-legged and bare-armed, pretending madness; the "Upright man" with his staff, and the "Ruffler" with his weapon; the "Fraters," Pedlars, and Tinkards; the "priggars of Prauncers," or horse-stealers, in their leather jerkins; the "Counterfet Cranke," feigning the falling sickness, with a piece of white soap in his mouth which made him foam like a boar: the "Palliards," with their patched cloaks, and self-inflicted sores or wounds; and many others of the twenty-three varieties, male and female, of the professional beggar. But even Harman seldom enquired into their previous life. Some, like the "Ruffler," had either "serued in the warres or bene a seruinge man"; others, like the "Uprights," have been "serueing men, artificers, and laboryng men traded up to husbandry." The "wild Roge" was a "begger by enheritance--his Grandfather was a begger, his father was one, and he must nedes be one by good reason." Few allusions can be gleaned from Shakespeare's writings to the agricultural changes which were taking place around him. But when we pass from the movement itself to some of the results which it helped to produce, his references are many and clear. The mass of "vagrom men" was a real social danger which exercised the wits of wiser men than Dogberry.
THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH
THE reign of Elizabeth marks a definite stage in English history. The mediaeval organisation of society, together with its trade guilds and manorial system of farming, had broken down. Out of the confusion order might be evolved by a paternal despotism. The Queen's advisers, with strong practical sagacity, set themselves to the task. They sate loosely to theories and rode no principles to death. But so firmly did they lay their foundations, that parts of their structure lasted until the nineteenth century. National control displaced local control. The central power gathered strength: it directed the economic interests of the nation; it regulated industrial relations; through its legislation and administration it fostered the development of national resources.
The restoration of the standard purity and weight of the coinage was resolutely taken in hand. Its debasement had been the cause of much of the economic distress in previous reigns; credit was ruined, and the treasury bankrupt. The debased, sweated, and clipped silver coinage was called in, and new coins were issued. As silver flowed into the country from the New World, the amount of money in circulation increased. More capital was available in a handy form, and, when legitimate interest ceased to be confused with usury, more people could borrow it on reasonable terms. The way was thus paved for a new era of commercial prosperity.
In mediaeval times the whole external trade of the country had been in the hands of foreigners. Elizabeth followed and developed the commercial policy of England, which first assumed a deliberate continuous shape under Henry VII. Foreign traders were discouraged, and English merchants favoured. The Hanseatic League lost the last of its privileges; the Venetian fleet came to England less and less frequently, and at last ceased altogether to fly its flag in the Channel. The import of manufactured goods was checked. The export of raw material and of English sheep was narrowly restricted, though long wool, as the staple of a great trade, was still sent abroad freely. The Government realised to the full all the abuses of patents and monopolies; but they did not hesitate to grant both privileges in order to stimulate native enterprise. Companies were formed with exclusive rights of trading in particular countries. The oldest and most powerful of these Companies, the Merchant Adventurers, obtained a royal charter in 1564. The Muscovite, Levant or Turkey, Eastland or Baltic, and Guinea or African Companies were formed to push English trade in foreign parts. In 1600 the East India Company was chartered. The mercantile marine was encouraged by fishery laws, which gave English fishermen a monopoly in the sale of fish. Men who argued that abstinence from meat at certain seasons was good for the soul's health risked the stake or the rack; but, for the sake of multiplying seamen, the Government did not hesitate to ordain fast-days on which only fish was to be eaten. (The rule of eating fish twice a week was continued from Catholic times; but a third day was added by Elizabeth from motives of "civile policy.") To foster the home manufacture of cloth, it was made a penal offence for any person over the age of six not to wear on Sundays and holy days a cap made of English cloth. Stimulated by such methods, trade throve apace, and English goods were carried in English-built ships, owned by Englishmen, and manned by English seamen. While foreign merchants were discouraged, foreign craftsmen, especially religious refugees from France or Flanders, were welcomed as settlers, bringing with them their skill in manufacturing paper, lace, silk, parchments, light woollens, hosiery, fustians, satins, thread, needles, and in other arts and industries.
The English wool trade was restored to more than its former prosperity. On it had long depended the commercial prosperity of the country. John Cole, "the rich clothier of Reading" at the end of the thirteenth century, was as famous as his fellow-craftsman, John Winchcomb, the warlike "Jack of Newbury," became in the days of Henry VIII. Wool was the chief source of the wealth of traders and of the revenues of the Crown. It controlled the foreign policy of England, supplied the sinews of our wars, built and adorned our churches and private houses. The foreign trade consisted partly in raw material, partly in semi-manufactured exports such as worsted yarns, partly in wholly manufactured broad-cloth. As the manufacture of worsted and cloth goods developed in this country, the demand and consumption rapidly increased at home. According to the purpose for which it was to be used, wool was divided into long and short. In England, long wool was employed mainly for worsted fabrics, but also to give strength and firmness to cloth. Abroad, it was eagerly bought in its raw state for both purposes. In long wool, or combing-wool, England had practically a monopoly of the markets, and to it the export trade of raw material was almost exclusively confined. Short wool, on the other hand, was used for broad-cloth. In its raw state it had a formidable rival abroad in the fleeces of the Spanish merino. Only in the manufactured state did it compete with Flemish and French fabrics on the Continent, and often found itself unable, owing to the excellence of merino wool and the skill of foreign weavers, to maintain its hold on the home market. Wool-staplers were the middlemen. They bought the wool from the breeder, sorted it according to its quality, and sold it to the manufacturer. Dyer, two centuries later (The Fleece (1757), bk. ii; II. 83-88 and 445-47), describes their work:
" Nimbly, with habitual speed,
They sever lock from lock, and long and short,
And soft, and rigid, pile in several heaps.
This the dusk hatter asks; another shines,
Tempting the clothier; that the hosier seeks;
The long bright look is apt for airy stuffs
If any wool, peculiar to our isle,
Is given by nature, 'tis the comber's lock,
The soft, the snow-white, and the long-grown flake."
In the long-wooled class Cotswold wool held the supremacy, with Cirencester as its centre, though the "lustres" of Lincolnshire always commanded their price. Among short-wools, Ryeland had the pre-eminence, with Leominster as the centre of its trade. "Lemster ore" was the equivalent of the "golden fleece" of the ancients, and poets compared the wool for its fineness to the web of the silk-worm, and for its softness to the cheek of a maiden.
During the Tudor period, a change was passing over the wool trade, which may have influenced the labour troubles of the period as well as the policy of land-holders. As enclosures multiplied, sheep were better fed, and the fleece increased in weight and length, though it lost something of the fineness of its quality. In other words, the wool was less adapted for the manufacture of broadcloth. The old pastures were also wearing out. During long and cold winters, if the sheep is half-starved, the fleece may retain its fineness, but it loses in strength. There also was a deterioration in the quality of short wool. How far these considerations may have influenced pasture-farming is necessarily uncertain. But it is at least a coincidence that, in spite of the increase in the number of sheep, there was, in the early years of the Tudor period, considerable distress in the clothing trade. As the reign of Elizabeth advanced, the great development of home manufactures provided a remedy. The newly established Merchant Companies opened up fresh markets abroad for English cloth. At the same time France and the Low Countries, distracted by civil or religious wars, ceased for the moment to be our rivals in the trade. English broadcloths were exported abroad in increasing quantities. The suspension of continental manufactures checked the exportation of English long wool. But again the religious troubles of the Continent relieved the situation. Foreign refugees settled in England, bringing with them secrets in the manufacture of worsted, light woollen stuffs, and hosiery, for all of which English wool was specially adapted.
Thus England was once more growing prosperous, and farming shared in the general prosperity. As the reign advanced, agricultural produce rose rapidly in price. The rise no longer depended on those fluctuations in the purity of the coinage, which had been so frequent that no man knew the real value of the coin in which he was paid. For a time the influx of silver had cheapened the precious metals, diminished their purchasing power, and so created dearness. But the great expansion of trade gradually absorbed the new supply of silver. The later rise in agricultural prices was due to the relative scarcity of produce, which was caused by the increased consumption consequent on revived prosperity, by a higher standard of living, and by a growing population. The necessary spur of profit was thus applied to farming energies. Leaseholders for a long term or for lives, and copyholders at fixed quit-rents had their golden opportunity, and many of them used it to become wealthy.
Of the general prosperity of the landowning and land-renting portion of the rural community, there is sufficient evidence. Every man, says Harrison,* turned builder, "pulled downe the old house and set up a new after his owne devise."
* Harrison, Description of England (1577), bk. ii. cc. vi. xii. xxii.
In ten years more oak was used for building than had been used in the previous hundred. Country manor-houses were built not of timber, but of brick or stone, and they were furnished with "great provision of tapistrie, Turkie work, pewter, brasse, fine linen and . . . costlie cupbords of plate." Ordinary diet had become less simple. "White-meats," --milk, butter, eggs, and cheese,--were despised by the wealthy, who preferred butcher's-meat, fish, and a "diversitie of wild and tame foules." The usual fare of the country gentleman was abundant, if not profuse. The dinner which Justice Shallow ordered for Falstaff might be quoted as an illustration. But more direct evidence may be produced. Harrison says that the everyday dinner of a country gentleman was "foure, five, or six dishes, when they have but small resort." Gervase Markham in his English Housewife gives directions for a "great feast," and for "a more humble feast, or an ordinary proportion which any good man may keep in his family, for the entertainment of his true and worthy friend." The "humble feast" includes "sixteen dishes of meat that are of substance and not emptie, or for shew." To these "sixteen full dishes," he adds "sallets, fricases, quelque choses, and devised paste, as many dishes more, which make the full service no lesse then two-and-thirtie dishes." In dress, also, the country gentry were growing more expensive, imitating the "diversities of jagges and changes of colours" of the Frenchman. Already, too, as Bishop Hall has described in his Satires, they were in the habit of deserting their country-houses for the gaiety of towns, and the "unthankful swallow" "built her circled nest" in
"The towered chimnies which should be
The windpipes of good hospitalitie."
Of the yeomen, who included not only farming owners, but lessees for lives and copyholders, Harrison says that they "commonlie live wealthilie, keepe good houses, and travell to get riches." Their houses were furnished with "costlie furniture," and they had "learned also to garnish their cupbords with plate, their joined beds with tapistrie and silke hangings, and their tables with carets and fine naperie." Though rents had risen and were still rising, "yet will the farmer thinke his gaines verie small toward the end of his terme if he have not six or seven yeares rent lieing by him, therewith to purchase a new lease, beside a faire garnish of pewter on his cupbord, three or foure featherbeds, so manie coverlids and carpets of tapistrie, a silver salt, a bowle for wine, and a dozzen of spoones to furnish up the sute." Old men noted these changes in luxurious habits--"the multitude of chimnies latelie erected," "the great amendment of lodging," and "the exchange of vessel as of treene platters into pewter and wodden spoones into silver or tin." Writing of the Cheshire yeomen in 1621, William Webb says: "In building and furniture of their houses, till of late years, they used the old manner of the Saxons; for they had their fire in the midst of the house against a hob of clay, and their oxen also under the same roof; but within these forty years it is altogether altered, so that they have built chimnies, and furnished other parts of their houses accordingly. . . . Touching their housekeeping it is bountiful and comparable with any shire in the realm. And that is to be seen at their weddings and burials, but chiefly at their wakes, which they yearly hold . . . for this is to be understood that they lay out seldom any money for any provision but have it of their own, as beef, mutton, veal, pork, capons, hens, wild fowl, and fish. They bake their own bread and brew their own drink. To conclude, I know divers men, who are but farmers, that in their housekeeping may compare with a lord or a baron in some countries beyond the seas. Yea, although I named a higher degree, I were able to justify it." In the Isle of Wight, Sir John Oglander compares the state of the country at the close of Elizabeth's reign with that at the outbreak of the Civil War. At the former period he says that "Money wase as plentiful in yeomens purses as nowe in ye beste of ye genterye, and all ye genterye full of monyes and owt of debt."
The small copyholder's house is described by Bishop Hall as being:
"Of one bay's breadth, God wot, a silly cote
Whose thatched spars are furred with sluttish soote
A whole inch thick, shining like blackmoor's brows
Through smoke that downe the headlesse barrel blows,
At his bed's feete feeden his stalled teame,
His swine beneath, his pullen o'er the beame."
The outside walls were made of timber uprights and cross-beams, forming raftered panels which were thickly daubed with clay. But the fare which the small copyholder enjoyed was at least as plentiful as that of landless labourers in modern times. In one of the Elizabethan pastoral poems a noble huntsman finds shelter under a shepherd's roof. The food, even if something is allowed for Arcadian licence, was good, though, in the language of the day, it consisted mainly of "white meat." The guest was supplied with the best his host could provide:
"Browne bread, whig, bacon, curds, and milks,
Were set him on the borde."
Fresh butcher's meat was rarely seen on the table. Of the "Martylmas beef," hung from the rafters and smoked, Andrew Borde thought little. If, he says, a man have a piece hanging by his side and another in his belly, the piece which hangs by his side does him more good, especially if it is rainy weather. Bacon, souse, and brawn were the peasant's meat. "Potage," Borde elsewhere writes, "is not so moch used in all Crystendom as it is used in England." It was part of the staple diet of the peasant, whether made of the liquor in which meat had been boiled, thickened with oatmeal, and flavoured with chopped herbs and salt, or made from beans or pease. Oatmeal, porridge, and "fyrmente," made of milk and wheat, were largely used. His bread was generally made of wheat and rye, often mixed, as Best states, with pease--a peck of pease to a bushel of rye, or two pecks of pease to the same quantity of rye and wheat. Even "horse-bread," as Borde calls it, made of pease and beans, was better than the mixture of acorns which Harrison says was eaten in times of dearth. Yet the husbandman had his feastings, such as "bridales, purifications of women and such od meetings, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent."
The prosperity of the rural community was not universal. For many of the smaller gentry, and for day-labourers for hire, times were hard. Landowners, whose income was more or less stationary, suffered from the rise in prices, accompanied, as it was, by a higher standard of luxury. When leases fell in, or lives were renewed, or copyholders were admitted, rents might be increased or fines enhanced. But in an extravagant age, when country gentlemen began to be attracted to London, such opportunities, if the tenants belonged to a healthy stock, might come too rarely or too late. Many owners were compelled to sell their estates. Land was often in the market. Thus two opposing tendencies characterised the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The division of church lands among grantees who already owned estates strengthened the landed aristocracy, while continual sales democratised the ownership of land. It is said that only 330 families can trace their titles to land beyond the dissolution of the monasteries. In the two centuries that followed, few of the gentry retained their hold on their estates, unless they were enriched by wealthy marriages, by trade, or by the practice of the law. The buyers generally belonged to the rising middle classes. Harrison, in his Description of England, says that yeomen, "for the most part farmers to gentlemen," by attention to their business "do come to great welth in somuch that manie of them are able and doo buie the lands of unthriftie gentlemen." Fynes Moryson, in his Itinerary (1617) notes that the English "doe . . daily sell their patrimonies, and the buyers (excepting Lawyers) are for the most part Citizens and vulgar Men." Sir Simon Degge (1669), a learned lawyer, declares that in Staffordshire, during the past sixty years, half the land had passed into the possession of new men. He attributes this change of ownership, partly to divine punishment for the sacrilege of those who were grantees of ecclesiastical property, partly to the extravagance of the country gentry who now took pleasure in spending their estates in London. He makes these comments on Erdeswick's Survey of Staffordshire, drawn up between 1593 and 1603, and goes on to say that there were then in the county only "three citizen owners" of land, and that now, in 1669, there were three Barons, four Baronets, and twenty calling themselves Esquires who had bought estates with money made in trade. Similar is the evidence of the compiler of Angliae Notitia (1669). "The English," he says, "especially the Gentry are so much given to Prodigality and Slothfulness that Estates are oftner spent and sold than in any other Countrey . . . whereby it comes to passe that Cooks, Vintners, Innkeepers, and such mean Fellows, enrich themselves and begger and insult over the Gentry . . . not only those but Taylors, Dancing Masters and such Trifling Fellows arrive to that Riches and Pride, as to ride in their Coaches, keep their Summer Houses, to be served in Plate, etc. an insolence insupportable in other well-govern'd Nations."
Another class, that of labourers, suffered from the dearness of agricultural produce, because their wages were fixed by law, and only by slow degrees followed the upward tendency of prices. In some respects the worst evils of the period 1485-1558 were passing away, or were modified by the expansion of trade. Enclosures still continued. Acts of Parliament were still passed against the decaying of towns and against the substitution of pasture for tillage, and one of the most vehement of protests against enclosures, was made by Francis Trigge, in 1604. But land was now more frequently enclosed for arable farming, and there was consequently less displacement of labour. The great extension of gardens attached to country houses provided new occupations. Industries like spinning, weaving, and rope-making, which were previously confined to particular towns by the craft-organisations of guilds, spread into rural districts, and employed villagers in supplying not merely their domestic wants but the needs of manufacturers. Agriculturally, a change was taking place in the labourer's condition. For the cultivation of the soil, farmers, except in the North and East, looked less to servants in husbandry and more to the day-labourers, whose wages assumed a new importance in the assessments of the Justices of the Peace. As the prices of agricultural produce rose, and as, here and there, the improvement of roads brought new markets within the reach of farmers, it was cheaper to pay wages to hired labourers than to board agricultural servants, especially if, as Tusser says, they required roast meat on Sundays and Thursdays. Free labour, sometimes, but not invariably, still associated with the occupation of land, was becoming in the southern and midland counties the chief agent in cultivating the soil. Where enclosures were fewest, the largest number of labourers supplemented their wages by the profits of their land, their rights of common, and their goose-runs. Where enclosures were most extensive, those labourers were most numerous who were dependent only on their labour-power. Apparently there was difficulty in lodging this increasing class of landless labourers, and an attempt was made to use existing cottages as tenement houses. The Government endeavoured to check these tendencies by legislation. Not more than one family was allowed to occupy each cottage, and to every cottage four acres of land were to be attached.
But the most important attempt to regulate the labour-market was the Statute of Apprentices (1563). This industrial code "touching divers orders for artificers, labourers, servants of husbandry, and apprentices" deals with labour in the towns as well as in the country. It was framed, partly as a consolidating Act, partly because, as the Preamble states, the allowances limited in previous legislation had, owing to the advance in prices, become too small. It was passed in the hope that its administration would "banish idleness, advance husbandry, and yield unto the hired person both in the time of scarcity and in the time of plenty a convenient proportion of wages." It proceeds on the old lines that men could be compelled to work. But it contemplates a minimum wage at the rates current in the district, establishes a working day for summer and winter, and endeavours to provide for technical instruction by a system of apprenticeship. Any person between the age of twelve and sixty, not excepted by the Statute, could be compelled to labour in husbandry. All engagements, except those for piecework, were to be for one year. Masters unduly dismissing servants were fined. Servants unduly leaving masters were imprisoned. No servant could leave the locality where he was last employed without a certificate of lawful departure. Hours of labour were twelve hours in the summer and during daylight in winter. Wages were to be annually fixed by the Justices of the Peace, after considering the circumstances, in consultation with "such grave and discreet persons as they shall think meet." No higher wages than those settled under the assessment were to be given, or received, under severe penalties. At harvest time, artificers and persons "meet to labour" might be compelled to serve at the mowing or "inning" of hay and corn. Persons over twelve and under eighteen might be taken as apprentices in husbandry and compelled to serve till the age of twenty-one. By agreement the age might be extended to twenty-four.
Under the provisions of this Statute agricultural labourers and servants were engaged annually. Shortly before Martinmas, the chief constable of the division sent out notices that he would sit at a certain town or village on a given day, and required the petty constables to attend with lists of the masters and servants in their districts. At the appointed place and time the chief constable met his subordinates and the masters: the servants also assembled, all "cladde," as Henry Best describes them (Rural Economy in Yorkshire in 1641, being the Farming and account Books of Henry Best), "in their best apparrell," in the market square, the churchyard, or some other public place. The chief constable took the lists, called each master in turn according to the entries, and asked him whether he was willing to set such and such a servant at liberty. If the master replied in the negative, the constable stated what were the wages fixed by the Justices, received a penny fee from the master, and bound the servant for a second term of a year. If the answer was in the affirmative, the constable received from the servant a fee of twopence, and gave him his certificate of lawful departure. Meanwhile masters who wished to hire labourers, whether men or women, walked about among the assembled crowd in order to choose likely-looking servants. When a master had made his choice, his first enquiry was whether the man was at liberty. If the servant had his ticket, the master took him aside, and asked where he was born, where he was last employed, and what he could do. Best once heard the answer:
"I can sowe,
I can mowe,
And I can stacke,
And I can doe
My master too,
When my master turner his backe."
If the last employer was present at the sitting, he was sought out, and asked whether the man-servant was "true and trustie . . . gentle and quiett . . . addicted to company-keepinge or noe," or whether the woman-servant was a good milker, not "of a sluggish and sleepie disposition for dainger of fire." Then followed the bargaining for wages. Sometimes the servant asked for a " godspenny " on striking the bargain, "or an old suite, a payre of breeches, an olde hatte, or a payre of shoes; and mayde servants to have an apron, smocke, or both." Sometimes it was a condition to have so many sheep wintered and summered with the master's flock, and to have the twopence which was paid for the certificate refunded before handing over the ticket to the new master. Once hired, the servant could not leave the master, nor the master dismiss the servant, without a quarter's warning. In Yorkshire a servant liked to come to a new place on Tuesday or Thursday. Monday was counted an unlucky day, and the proverb ran
"Monday flitte
Never sitte."
Farming annals are comparatively silent as to the conditions in which day-labourers for hire lived in the reign of Elizabeth. But in one respect, as has been said, they undoubtedly shared the general prosperity. Though their wages remained low, and only fitfully rose as the purchasing power of money declined, they were more secure of employment. In the increased demand for labour resulting from improved methods of agriculture lay their best hopes for the future. It is probable that the decay and ultimate dissolution of the monasteries had for the time inflicted a heavy blow on the development of agriculture as an art. To English farming in the early centuries the monks were what capitalist landlords became in the eighteenth century. They were the most scientific farmers of the day: they had access to the practical learning of the ancients; their intercourse with their brethren abroad gave them opportunities of benefiting by foreign experience which were denied to their lay contemporaries. Already, however, there were signs that their places as pioneers would be occupied. Throughout Europe agricultural literature was commencing, and writers were at work urging upon farmers the improved methods which enclosure revealed to them. In Italy Tarello and the translators of Crescentius, in the Low Countries Heresbach, in France Charles Estienne and Bernard Palissy, in England Fitzherbert and Tusser, wrote upon farming. It was not long before the gentry began to pay attention to agriculture. As Michel de l'Hôpital solaced his exile with a farm at Etampes, so Sir Richard Weston in the reign of Charles I., and Townshend in that of George II., occupied their leisure in farming, and in their retirement conferred greater benefits on the well-being of England than they had ever done by their political activities.
Up to the sixteenth century Walter of Henley's farming treatise had held the field. Now it was superseded. In 1523 appeared the Boke of Husbandrye, "compyled," as Berthelet says in his edition of 1534, "sometyme by mayster FitzHerbarde, of Charytie and good zele that he bare to the weale of this moost noble realme, whiche he dydde not in his youthe, but after he had exercysed husbandry with greate experyence XL yeres." In the same year was also printed, by the same author, the Boke of Surveyinge and Improvements. The Book of Husbandry is a minutely practical work on farming, written by a man familiar with the Peak of Derbyshire and by a horsebreeder on a large scale who possessed "60 mares or more." The Book of Surveying is a treatise on the relations of landlord and tenant and on the best methods of developing an estate. Only an experienced farmer could have written the first; the second required no greater acquaintance with law than might be acquired by a shrewd landowner in the administration of an estate. The authorship of the two books has been claimed for Anthony Fitzherbert, who was knighted in 1521-2 on becoming a Justice of the Common Pleas, and also for his elder brother John Fitzherbert. It is difficult to credit the Judge--immersed in judicial and political duties, and absorbed in the composition of legal works--with the practical knowledge of farming displayed in the Book of Husbandry. It is much less difficult to imagine that John Fitzherbert should combine minute experience of agricultural details with a sufficient knowledge of law to write the Book of Surveying. At any rate, the Book of Husbandry became, and for more than half a century remained, a standard work on English farming.
Thirty-four years later appeared Thomas Tusser's Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557). The work was afterwards expanded into Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie, united to as many Good Pointes of Huswifery (1573). Like Fitzherbert, Tusser was a champion of enclosures, and his evidence is the more valuable because he was not only an Essex man, a Suffolk and a Norfolk farmer, but began to write when the agitation against enclosures in the eastern counties was at its height. His own life proved the difficulty of combining practice with science, or farming with poetry. "He spread his bread," says Fuller, "with all sorts of butter, yet none would ever stick thereon." He was successively "a musician, schoolmaster, serving-man, husbandman, grazier, poet-more skilful in all than thriving in his vocation." To the present generation he is little more than a name. But his doggerel poems are a rich storehouse of proverbial wisdom, and of information respecting the rural life, domestic economy, and agricultural practices of our Elizabethan ancestors. His work was repeatedly reprinted. It is also often quoted by subsequent writers, as, for example, by Henry Best in his Farming Book (1641), by Walter Blith in his English Improver Improved (1649), and by Worlidge in the Systems Agriculturae (1668-9). The practical parts of the poem were edited in 1710 by David Hillman under the title of Tusser Redivivus, with a commentary which continually contrasts Elizabethan practices with those of farmers in the reign of Queen Anne. When Lord Molesworth in 1723 proposed the foundation of agricultural schools, he advised that Tusser's "Five hundred points of good husbandry" should be "taught to the boys to read, to copy and get by heart."
From the pages of Fitzherbert and Tusser may be gathered a picture of Tudor agriculture at the time when Elizabeth came to the throne. But even in this literature, which probably represents the most progressive theory and practice of farming, it is difficult to trace any important change, still less any distinct advance on thirteenth century methods. Here and there, on the contrary, there are signs that farmers had gone backwards instead of forwards. Agricultural implements remained unaltered. Ploughs were still the same heavy, cumbrous instruments, though several varieties are mentioned as adapted to the different soils of the country. But Fitzherbert was familiar with the same device for regulating the depth and breadth of furrows, which was one of the most notable improvements in the eighteenth century ploughs. Oxen were still preferred to horses for ploughing purposes by both Fitzherbert and Tusser. Iron was more used in the construction of ploughs; both share and coulter were more generally of iron, and the latter was well steeled. Iron also entered more largely into the building of waggons. Instead of the broad wheels made entirely of wood, Fitzherbert recommends narrower wheels, bound with iron, as more lasting and lighter in the draught. So long as artificial grasses and roots were unknown, the farmer's year necessarily remained the same--its calendar of seasonable operations regulated by the recurrence of saints' days and festivals, and controlled by a belief in planetary influences as unscientific as that of Old Moore or Zadkiel. Since the Middle Ages, the only addition to agricultural resources had been hops, introduced into the eastern counties from Flanders at the end of the fifteenth century. The date 1524, which is usually given for their introduction, is too late; so also is the rhyme, of which there are several variations
"Hops, reformation, bays, and beer,
Came into England all in one year."
Hops were apparently unknown in 1523 to Fitzherbert in Derbyshire; but in 1552 they were sufficiently important to be made the subject of special legislation by Edward VI. In Tusser's day they were extensively cultivated in Suffolk. On enclosed land their cultivation rapidly increased. Harrison (1577) questions whether any better are to be found than those grown in England. Reginald Scot, himself a man of Kent, published his Perfite Platforme of a Hoppe Garden in 1574, with minute instructions for the growing, picking, drying and packing of hops. The book was reprinted in 1575, and again in 1576. It was still the standard work in
Fitzherbert starts his Book of Husbandry with the month of January. But Tusser begins his farmer's year at Michaelmas as the usual date of entry. Both writers note that an open-field farmer entered by custom on his fallows on the preceding Lady-Day, in order that he might get or keep them in good heart for his autumn sowing. As the Julian Calendar was still in force, the dates are twelve days earlier than they would be under the present Gregorian Calendar. Even with this difference, few farmers of to-day would accept Tusser's advice to sow oats and barley in January; they would be more likely to agree with Fitzherbert that the beginning of March is soon enough. All wheat and rye were sown in the autumn,--from August onwards,--and the heaviest grain was selected for seed by means of the casting shovel. Neither of the writers speak of spring wheat, possibly because the preparation for it would not fit in with the rigid rules of open-field farming; but both mention other varieties in the three corn crops. Fitzherbert thinks that red wheat, sprot barley, and red oats are the best, and peck wheat, bere barley, and rough oats the worst varieties. Mixed crops were popular, such as dredge, or barley and oats; bolymong, or oats, pease, and vetches; and wheat and rye. As to the mixed sowing of wheat and rye, the authors differ. Probably their respective experiences in Derbyshire and Suffolk diverged. Fitzherbert advises that wheat and rye should be sown together, as the blend makes the safest crop and the best for the husbandman's household; but he recommends that white wheat be chosen because it is the quickest to arrive at maturity. He was therefore no believer in the slowness of rye to ripen. Tusser, on the other hand, condemns the practice of sowing the two corns together because of the slow maturity of rye as compared with the relative rapidity of wheat. If they are to be blended, he says, let it be done by the miller. The seed was to be covered in as soon as possible. On the time-honoured question whether rooks are greater malefactors than benefactors,--whether they prefer grubs and worms to grain,--neither writer has any doubt. Both give their verdict against the bird, in the spirit of the legislation of their day. As soon as the corn is in, says Fitzherbert, it should be harrowed, or "croues, doues, and other Byrdes wyll eate and beare away the cornes." Tusser advises that girls should be armed with slings, and boys with bows, "to scare away pigeon, the rook, and the crow." Both writers urge the preparation of a fine tilth for barley,--in rural phrase "as fine as an ant-hill,"--and advise that it should be rolled. Tusser recommends that wheat should also be rolled, if the land is sufficiently dry. For seeding, Fitzherbert adopts the mediaeval rule of two bushels of wheat and rye to the acre. All seeds were scattered broadcast by the hand from the hopper. Neither writer mentions the dibbing of beans, though that useful practice had been introduced by thirteenth century farmers. For barley, oats, and "codware," Fitzherbert recommends a thicker seeding than was practised in mediaeval farming. The best yield per acre is obtained from moderate or thin sowing. But it has been suggested that Elizabethan farmers more often allowed their land to become foul, and that crops were more thickly sown in the hope of saving them from being smothered. The suggestion is perhaps confirmed by the space which Fitzherbert devotes to weeds, and by his careful description of the most noxious plants. At harvest, wheat and rye were generally cut with the sickle, and barley and oats were mown with the scythe. Fitzherbert advises that corn ricks should be built on scaffolds and not on the ground. In the eighteenth century the advice was still given and still unheeded.
In their treatment of drainage and manure, neither author makes any advance on mediaeval practice. To prevent excessive wetness, both advise a water-furrow to be drawn across the ridges on the lowest part of the land; but neither describes the shallow drains, filled with stones, and covered in with turf, which were familiar to farmers in the Middle Ages. Mole-heaps, if carefully spread, are not an unmixed evil. But when Tusser champions the mole as a useful drainer of wet pastures, it is evident that the science of draining was yet unborn. In choice of manure, neither writer appears to command the resources of his ancestors. The want of fertilising agencies was then, and may even now prove to be, one of the obstacles to small holdings. At the present day the small cultivator can, if he has money enough, buy chemical manures, and, unlike his Elizabethan ancestor, he no longer uses his straw or the dung of his cattle as fuel. But when chemical manures were unknown, it was imperatively necessary to employ all natural fertilisers. Fitzherbert does indeed deplore the disappearance of the practice of marling. But Tusser does not mention the value of marl, lime, chalk, soot, or town refuse, all of which were used in the Middle Ages, and it is doubtful whether mediaeval farmers followed his practice of rotting straw in pits filled with water, or of carting manure on to the land and leaving it in heaps for a month before it was spread or ploughed in. One new practice, and that a miserable one, is recommended. It is suggested that buck-wheat should be sown and ploughed in, in order to enrich the soil. (Arthur Standish, writing in 1611, says that straw and dung were used as fuel (The Commons Complaint, p. 2), and Markham (Enrichment of the Weald of Kent ) shows the antiquity of the practice of marling by saying that trees of 200 or 300 years old may be seen in "innumerable" spent marl-pits.)
Both Tusser and Fitzherbert advise that on open-field land the sheep should be folded from May to early in September. But Fitzherbert believed that folding fostered the scab. Among the practical advantages of enclosures which he urges is the opportunity that they afforded to farmers of dispensing with the common fold, saving the fees to the common shepherd and the cost of hurdles and stakes, and keeping their flocks in better health. June was the month for shearing. Fitzherbert recommends that sheep should be carefully washed before they were shorn, "the which shall be to the owner greate profyte" in the sale of his wool. Probably the modern farmer has found that his unwashed wool at a greater weight but a lower price is worth as much as his washed wool at less weight and a higher price. Fitzherbert considers sheep to be "the most profitable cattle that any man can have." But, until the introduction of turnips, the true value of sheep on arable land could not be realised. Hence the two branches of farming, which are now combined with advantage to both the sheep farmer and the corn-grower, were entirely dissevered. Until clover, artificial grasses, turnips, swedes, mangolds took their place among the ordinary crops for which arable land was cultivated, no farmer experienced the full truth of the saying that the foot of the sheep turns sand into gold. The practice of milking ewes still continued. Fitzherbert condemns it; but Tusser, though he notices the injurious results, weakens the effect of his warning by promising that five ewes will give as much milk as one cow. Neither Fitzherbert nor Tusser has anything to say on the improvement of breeds of cattle for the special purposes that they serve. The "general utility" animal was still their ideal. Yet the root of the matter is in Fitzherbert, when he says that a man cannot thrive by corn unless he have live-stock, and that the man who tries to keep livestock without corn is either "a buyer, a borrower, or a beggar." If once the difficulty of winter keep could be solved, here was the secret of mixed husbandry realised, and the truth of the maxim verified that a full bullock yard makes a full stack-yard. On horses and horse-dealing Fitzherbert is full of shrewdness. He defines the horse-master, the "corser" and the "horse leche." "And whan these three be mette," he dryly observes, "if yeh adde a poty-carye to make the fourthe, ye myghte have suche foure, that it were harde to truste the best of them."
The times at which Fitzherbert and Tusser respectively wrote give special interest to their championship of enclosures. As has been already noticed, both wrote when the agitation against the progress of the movement was at its height, and Tusser was familiar with the eastern counties at the moment of Kett's insurrection in Norfolk. As practical farmers both writers insist on the evils of the open-field system; but it fell within the province of neither to criticise the tyrannical proceedings by which those evils were often remedied. They rather dwell on the superior yield of enclosed lands, and on the obstacles to successful farming presented by open-fields-the perpetual disputes, the damage to crops, the waste of land by the multitude of drift-ways, the cost of swineherds, cowherds, and shepherds who were employed as human fences to the corn and meadows. Incidentally also they reveal many practical difficulties of the open-field farmer in ploughing and draining. During the winter months, he was obliged to bring his live-stock in sooner, keep them longer, and feed them at greater cost, than his neighbour on enclosed land. For winter keep, when his hay and straw were running out, he had nothing to rely on but "browse" or treeloppings. In rearing live-stock he was heavily handicapped. Unless he had pasture of his own, he was forced to time his lambs to fall towards the middle of March. Hence the proverb
"At St. Luke's day (Oct. 18, Greg. Cal.)
Let tup have play."
Thus he risked losing lambs because the common shepherd had too much on his hands at once; his lambs lost a month on the meadow before it was put up for hay; and the owner missed the profits of an early sale at Helenmas (May 21), and had to sell, if he sold at all, at the same time as all other open-field farmers. The same restrictions hampered him in rearing calves. He could not afford to keep the cow and calf in the winter; therefore he was obliged to time the calf to come after Candlemas.
These and other disadvantages convinced practical agriculturists of the inferiority of the open-field system. Experience was in favour of enclosures. Fitzherbert points to the prosperity of Essex as an example of the advantage of enclosures. The author of the Compendious or Briefe Examination says that "the countries where most enclosures be are most wealthie, as Essex, Kent, Devenshire." So also Tusser compares " champion " (open) counties, like Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, with "enclosed" counties, like Essex and Suffolk and says that the latter have
"More plenty of mutton and biefe,
Come, butter, and cheese of the best,
More wealth anywhere, to be briefe
More people, more handsome and prest. . . ."
The proverbial expression "Suffolk stiles" seems to point to the early extinction of open-fields. Norden in his Essex Described (1594) calls the county the "Englishe Goshen, the fattest of the Lande; comparable to Palestina, that flowed with milke and hunnye." So "manie and sweete" were the "commodeties" of Essex, that they compensated for the "moste cruell quarterne fever" which he caught among its low-lying lands. Every practical argument that could be pleaded against open-field farms in the days of Henry VIII. or Elizabeth might be urged against the system with treble force from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, when farming had grown more scientific, when new crops had been introduced, when drainage had been reduced to a science, and when, under the pressure of a rapidly increasing population, farms were becoming factories of bread and meat.
Enclosures undoubtedly assisted farming progress. Before the end of the reign the effect of the movement, combined with increased facilities of communication, is distinctly visible. Under the spur which individual occupation and better markets gave to enterprise, "the soil," as Harrison says, "had growne to be more fruitful, and the countryman more painful, more careful, and more skilful for recompense of gain." Increased attention was paid to manuring. In Cornwall, farmers rode many miles for sand and brought it home on horseback; sea-weed was extensively used in South Wales; in Sussex, lime was fetched from a distance at heavy expense; in Hertfordshire, the sweepings of the streets were bought up for use on the land. The yield of corn per acre was rising. On the well-tilled and dressed acre, we are told that wheat now averaged twenty bushels, and that barley sometimes rose to thirty-two bushels, and oats and beans to forty bushels. The improvement of pastures is shown in the increased size and weight of live-stock. The average dead weight of sheep and cattle in 1500 probably did not exceed
"Some fill their pot full
Of good Lemster wool."
Drayton's Dowsabel had a "skin as soft as Lemster wool." Rabelais makes Panurge cheapen the flock of Ding-dong; and when the latter descants upon the fineness of their wool, the English translator (Motteux, 1717) compares them to the quality of "Lemynster wool." From the preamble to a statute of the reign of James I. (4 Jac. I. c. 2.) it would seem that Ryeland flocks were cotted all the year. The second price was fetched by Cotswold wool. The sheep that are kept on downs, heaths and commons produce the finest, though not the heaviest, fleeces. It was the experience of Virgil:
"Si tibi lanicium curse, . . . fuge pabula laeta."
In the same sense wrote Dyer
"On spacious airy downs, and gentle hills,
With grass and thyme o'erspread, and clover wild,
The fairest flocks rejoice!"
As the commons and wastes of England began to be extensively enclosed, the quality of the fleece deteriorated. Heavier animals--better suited to fat enclosed pastures, and producing coarser wool--were introduced. English wool lost its pre-eminence abroad; and, though still commanding high prices, was no longer indispensable for foreign weavers. The loss was to a great extent counterbalanced by increased consumption at home. But, at the time, the decrease in value was at least as influential in checking the conversion of arable land to pasture as were Acts of Parliament.
Open-field farms were not as yet such obstacles to agricultural progress as they became after the discovery of new resources and new rotations of crops which could only be utilised to full advantage on enclosed lands. But already these new sources of wealth were in sight. The great difficulties in the way of mediaeval and Tudor farmers were want of winter keep and lack of means to maintain or restore the fertility of exhausted soils. In the agricultural literature of Elizabeth the remedy for both is dimly suggested.
In 1577 appeared Foure Bookes of Husbandry, to which Barnaby Googe, a better poet than Tusser, gave his name. The work was a translation of Heresbach, with 16 additional pages by the translator. Googe mentions Fitzherbert or Tusser as writers worthy to be ranked with "Varro, Columella, and Palladius of Rome"; advises agriculturists to read "Maister Reynolde Scot's booke of Hoppe Gardens"; and quotes an imposing list of "Aucthors and Husbandes whose aucthorities and observations are used in this book." By this reference he does not necessarily mean that all the men whose names he mentions had written books on farming, but rather that he had consulted those who were reputed to be most skilful in its practice. In other words, there were already agriculturists, like "Capt. Byngham," "John Somer," "Richard Deeryng," "Henry Denys," or "William Pratte," whose methods were an object lesson to their less advanced neighbours. Googe's book has been despised because it was "made in Germany." But in this fact lies its chief value. The farming of the Low Countries was better than the farming of England, and Googe gives English agriculturists the benefit of foreign experience. He is the first writer to mention a reaping machine--"a lowe kinde of carre with a couple of wheeles and the frunt armed with sharpe syckles, whiche, forced by the beaste through the corne, did cut down al before it." He insists on the extreme importance of manure, and the value of marl, chalk, and ashes. But he does not consider that farmers can thrive by manure alone. On the contrary, he thinks that "the best doung for ground is the Maister's foot, and the best provender for the house the Maister's eye." He also gives a caution against the persistent use of chalk, because, in the end, it "brings the grounde to be starke nought, whereby the common people have a speache, that grounde enriched with chalke makes a riche father and a beggerly sonne." He mentions the use of rape in the Principality of Cleves, a valuable suggestion whether for green-manuring, for the oil in its seeds, or for use as fodder for sheep. He commends "Trefoil or Burgundian grass," which he believes to be of Moorish origin and Spanish introduction, for "there can be no better fodder devised for cattell." He says that turnips have been found in the Low Countries to be good for live-stock, and that, if sown at Midsummer, they will be ready for winter food. In English gardens turnips were already known. They appear under the name of " turnepez" among "Rotys for a gardyn" in a fifteenth century book of cookery recipes; Andrew Borde (Dietary, ch. xix.,1542) recommends them "boyled and eaten with flesshe"; William Turner, the herbalist, mentions that "the great round rape called a turnepe groweth in very great plenty in all Germany and more about London then in any other place of England": Tusser classes them among "roots to boil and to butter"; but Googe, though only as a translator, was the first writer to suggest that field cultivation of turnips which revolutionised English farming.
Another Elizabethan writer makes the first attempt to combi
FROM JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION (1603-1660) FARMING UNDER THE FIRST STEWARTS AND THE COMMONWEALTH
The beginning of the seventeenth century promised to usher in a new era of agricultural prosperity. During the first four decades of the period prospects steadily brightened. No general improvement in farming practices had been possible until a considerable area of land had been enclosed in one or other of the various forms which enclosures might assume. Under the Tudor sovereigns--in the midst of much agrarian suffering and discontent--this indispensable work had been begun, and it continued throughout the seventeenth century. Estates were consolidated; small farms were thrown together; open village farms in considerable numbers gave place to compact and separate freeholds or tenancies; agrarian partnerships, in which it was no man's interest to be energetic, made way, here and there, for that individual occupation which offered the strongest incentive to enterprise. Thus opportunities were afforded for the introduction of new crops, the application of land to its best use, and the adoption of improved methods. Dairying was extended in the vales of the West and South West; corn and meat found better and dearer markets; under the spur of increased profits arable farming again prospered, and the conversion of tillage to pasture was arrested. New materials for agricultural wealth were accumulating; turnips, already grown in English gardens, were recommended for field cultivation; twenty years later, potatoes were suggested as a farming crop; the value of clover and other artificial grasses had been recognised, and urged upon English farmers. Methods became less barbarous. An Act of Parliament was passed "agaynst plowynge by the taile," and the custom of "pulling off the wool yearly from living sheep" was declared illegal. Drainage was discussed with a sense and sagacity which were not rivalled till the nineteenth century. Increased care was given to manuring; new fertilising agencies were suggested; the merits of Peruvian guano were explained by G. de
Much of the land had changed hands during the preceding century, and the infusion of new blood into the ownership of the soil introduced a more enterprising and business-like spirit into farming. The increased wealth of landowners showed itself in the erection of Jacobean mansions; farmer owners, tenant-farmers for lives or long terms of years, copyholders at fixed quit-rents, made money. Only the agricultural labourer still suffered. His wages rose more slowly than the prices of the necessaries of life; his hold on the land was relaxing; his dependence upon his labour-power became more complete. He was more secure of employment; but in this respect alone was his lot altered for the better.
The promise of improvement was checked by the outbreak of the Civil War. Excepting those who were directly engaged in the struggle, men seemed to follow their ordinary business and their accustomed pursuits. The story that a crowd of country gentlemen followed the hounds across Marston Moor between the two armies drawn up in hostile array, may not be true; but it illustrates the temper of a large proportion of the inhabitants. It was the prevailing sense of insecurity, rather than the actual absorption of the whole population in the war, that caused the promise of agricultural progress to perish in the bud. In more settled times under the Commonwealth, farming prospects again brightened. But ractical progress was once more suspended by the social changes and political uncertainties of the last half of the seventeenth century. Agriculture languished, if it did not actually decline. It is a significant fact that between 1640 and 1670 not more than six patents were taken out for agricultural improvements. Country gentlemen ceased to interest themselves in farming pursuits. "Our gentry," notes Pepys, "are grown ignorant in everything of good husbandry." Without their initiative progress was almost impossible. Open-field farmers could not change their field-customs without the consent of the whole body of partners. Farmers in individual occupation of their holdings had not, as a general rule, the enterprise, the education, the capital, or the security of tenure, to conduct experiments or adopt improvements.
But the period was one of active preparation. A crowd of agricultural writers followed in the train of Fitzherbert, Tusser, and Googe. Leonard Mascall in his Booke of Cattell (1591) had instructed husbandmen in the more skilful "government" of horses, oxen, cattle, and sheep. Gervase Markham wrote on every variety of agricultural subjects, multiplying his treatises under different titles with a rapidity which gained for him the distinction of being the "first English hackwriter," and proved that books on farming found a sale. Horses were made the subject of special treatment. Blundeville's Fower chiefyst ofces belonging to Horsemanshippe (1565-6) was followed by such books as Markham's Discourse on Horsemanshippe (1593) and How to Chuse, Ride, Trayne,and Dyet both Hunting and Running Horses (1599), by Grymes's Honest and Plaine Dealing Farrier (1636), and by John Crawshey's Countryman's Instructor (1636). Then, as now, horsedealing was a trial of the sharpest wits, blunted by the fewest scruples. Crawshey, who describes himself as a "plaine Yorkshire man," warns his readers against being deceived when buying horses in the market, "for many men will protest and sweare that they are sound when they know the contrary, onely for their private gaine." Where so much is strange in farming matters, it is refreshing to find familiar features. The proper treatment of woodlands was discussed by Standish (1611). Rowland Vaughan (1610), struck by the sight of a streamlet issuing from a mole-heap in a bank, discussed new methods of irrigation, or "the summer and winter drowning" of meadows and pasture. Even the smaller profits of farming received attention. Numerous books were published on orchards, and on gardens, in which were now accumulating such future stores of agricultural riches as turnips, carrots, and potatoes. Mascall in 1581 had written on the "husbandlye Ordring of Poultry"; Sir Hugh Plat had instructed housewives in the art of fattening fowls for the table; and John Partridge published a treatise on the same subjects, in which he gives recipes for keeping their natural foes at bay. The following may be recommended to Hunt Secretaries, who are impoverished by demands on their poultry funds. "Rub your poultry," says Partridge, "with the juice of Rue or Herbe grasse and the wesels shall do them no hurt; if they eats the lungs or lights of a Foxe, the Foxes shall not eate them." Nor were bees neglected. Thomas Hill (1568), and Edmund Southerne (1593) had written on the "right ordering" of bees. But Charles Butler's Feminine Monarchie (1609), and John Levett's Orderinge of Bees (1634) became the standard authorities on the subject. Both books were known to Robert Child, author of the Large Letter on the deficiencies of English husbandry, published by Hartlib in 1651. He says that Butler "hath written so exactly, and upon his owne experience" that little remained to be added. Henry Best (1641), however, preferred Levett to any other writer on bee-keeping. "Hee is the best," he thinks, "that ever writte of this subjeckt."
During the same period men like Gabriel Plattes or Sir Richard Weston were suggesting new agricultural methods, or introducing new crops which were destined to change the face of English farming. Plattes (1638), who seems to have been of Flemish origin, urged that corn should be steeped before sowing, and not sown broadcast but set in regular rows. To those who adopted the suggestion of the "corn setter," he promised a yield of a hundred-fold, and he invented a drill to facilitate and cheapen the process. Plattes was on the verge of a great improvement. But men who looked for no larger return than six-fold or eight-fold on the grain sown, regarded his promise as the dream of a visionary who had not travelled beyond the sound of Bow Bells. Unfortunately, the career of Plattes confirmed the contempt with which practical farmers were ready to regard the theories of agricultural writers. Like Tusser, he failed in farming. As Tusser died (1580) in the debtor's prison of the Poultry Compter, so Plattes is said to have died starving and shirtless in the streets of London."
Sir Richard Weston could at least lay claim to thirty years experience in the successful improvement of his estates at Sutton in Surrey "by Fire and Water." He had enriched his heathy land by the process of paring and burning, "which wee call Devonshiring"; he had also adopted Vaughan's suggestion of irrigation, and proved its value on his own meadows. But the important change with which Weston's name will always be associated is the introduction of a new rotation of crops, founded on the field cultivation of roots and clover. As Brillat-Savarin valued a new dish above a new star, so Arthur Young regards Weston as "a greater benefactor than Newton." He did indeed offer bread and meat to millions. Whether Weston had visited Flanders before 1644 is uncertain. His attempt to make the Wey navigable by means of locks suggests that he was acquainted with the foreign system of canals. On the other hand, his treatise on agriculture implies that he paid his first visit to the country in that year as a refugee. A Royalist and a Catholic, Weston, at the outbreak of the Civil War, was driven into exile, and his estates were sequestrated. He took refuge in Flanders. There he studied the Flemish methods of agriculture, especially their use of flax, clover, and turnips. For the field cultivation of clover he advises that heathy ground should be pared, burned, limed, and well ploughed and harrowed; that the seed should be sown in April, or the end of March, at the rate of ten pounds of seed to the acre; that, once sown, the crop should be left for five years. The results of his observations, embodied in his Discours of the Husbandrie used in Brabant and Flanders, were written in 1645 and left to his sons as a "Legacie." The subsequent history of the "Legacie" is curious. Circulated in manuscript, an imperfect copy fell into the hands of Samuel Hartlib, who piratically published it in 1650, with an unctuous dedication "to the Right Honorable the Council of State." In the following year Hartlib seems to have learned the name of the author and to have obtained possession of a more perfect copy. He therefore wrote two letters to Weston, asking him to correct and enlarge his "Discourse." Receiving no answer, he republished the treatise in 1651. Eighteen years later, the Discours was again appropriated--this time by Gabriel Reeve, who, in 1670, reprinted it under the title of Directions left by a Gentleman to his Sons for the Improvement of Barren and Heathy Land in England and Wales.
Roots, clover, and artificial grasses subsequently revolutionised English farming; but it was more than a century before their use became at all general. Other crops were pressed by agricultural writers upon the attention of farmers--such as flax, hemp, hops, woad and madder for dyes, saffron, liquorice, rape, and coleseed. A more important suggestion was the field cultivation of potatoes which hitherto had been treated as exotics, rarely found except in the gardens of the rich. In 1664 John Forster (England's Happiness Increased, etc.) urged farmers to grow them in their fields. He distinguishes "Irish Potatoes" from Spanish, Canadian, or Virginian varieties, points to their success in Ireland, notices their introduction into Wales and the North of England, and recommends their trial in other parts of the country. It was not till the Napoleonic wars that the advice was taken to any general extent. None of these crops, it may be observed, could be introduced on an open-field farm, unless the whole body of agrarian partners agreed to alter their field customs.
Another noteworthy book is the Legacie (1651), which passes under the name of Samuel Hartlib, who has gained undeserved credit by his piracy of Weston's work. By birth a Pole, Hartlib had come to England in 1628. By his Reformation of Schooles (1642), translated from Comenius, he forced himself on the notice of Milton, who in 1644 curtly addressed to him his Tract Of Education. From Weston's Discours, Hartlib stole the title of the Legacie (1651), composed of letters from various writers on the defects of English agriculture, and their remedies. Five-sixths of the Legacie are taken up with "A Large Letter . . . written to M. Samuel Hartlib," signed (1655), by R. Child. It throws a clear light on some of the conditions of English farming in the middle of the seventeenth century.
In the "Large Letter" the cumbrousness of the English ploughs, carts, and waggons is noticed. Clumsy implements and bad practices were said to exist side by side with obvious improvements, which yet found no imitators. Some Kentish farmers used "4, 6, yea 12 horses and oxen" in their ploughs, and in Ireland farmers fastened their horses by the tails. Yet in Norfolk the practice was to plough with two horses only, while in Kent itself, a certain Colonel Blunt of Gravesend ploughed with one horse, and an ingenious yeoman had invented a double-furrow plough. Men who perplexed their brains about perpetual motion would, says the writer, have used their ingenuity to more effect if they had tried to improve the implements of agriculture. Cattle-breeding, except "in Lancashire and some few Northern Counties" was not studied; no attempt was made to improve the best breeds for milking or for fattening. Dairying needed attention ; butter might be "better sented and tasted; our cheeses were inferior to those of Italy, France, or Holland. Various remedies against the prevalence of smut and mildew in wheat are suggested, including lime, change of seed, early sowing, and the use of bearded wheat. Flax and hemp were unduly neglected, though both might be grown, it is suggested, with profit to agriculturists, and to the great increase of employment ; as a remedy against this persistent neglect, the author advocates compulsory legislation, to force farmers, "even like brutes, to understand their own good." Twenty-one natural substances are recommended as manures, the value of which had been proved by experience. Among them are chalk, marl, lime, farm-yard dung, if it is not too much exposed to the sun and rain; "snaggreet," or soil full of small shells taken out of rivers, and much used in Surrey; owse, from marshy ditches or foreshores; seaweed; sea-sand, as used in Cornwall ; "folding of sheepe after the Flaunders manner, (viz.) under a covert, in which earth is strawed about
The destruction of woods for fuel is condemned. For this consumption the glass furnaces ,of the South, the salt "wiches" of Cheshire, and, above all, the iron-works of Surrey, Sussex, and other counties, were responsible. The writer probably alludes to "Dud" Dudley's experiments, when he expresses the hope that the difficulties of using "sea-coal" for the smelting of iron might be overcome so as to save our timber. Experiments were not sufficiently tried, and a "Colledge of Experiments," already recommended by Gabriel Plattes, is once more suggested. Men do not know where to go if they want advice, or to obtain reliable seeds and plants. Some means was needed of bringing home to other husbandmen a knowledge of the improvements made by their more skilful brethren. Another deficiency in English husbandry was its insular repugnance to foreign methods and new-fangled crops. Men objected that the new seeds "will not grow here with us, for our forefathers never used them. To these I reply and ask them, how they know? have they tryed? Idlenesse never wants an excuse; and why might not our forefathers upon the same ground have held their hands in their pockets, and have said, that Wheat, and Barley, would not have grown amongst us?" The same complaint, it may be added, is made by Walter Blith in The English Improver Improved: "The fourth and last abuse is a calumniating and depraving every new Invention; of this most culpable are your mouldy old leavened husbandmen, who themselves and their forefathers have been accustomed to such a course of husbandry as they will practise, and no other; their resolution is so fixed, no issues or events whatsoever shall change them. If their neighbour hath as much corn of one Acre as they of two upon the same land, or if another plow the same land for strength and nature with two horses and one man as well as he, and have as good corn, as he hath been used with four horses and two men yet so he will continue. Or if an Improvement be discovered to him and all his neighbours, hee'l oppose it and degrade it. What forsooth saith he, who taught you more wit than your forefathers?" Seventeenth century farmers did not lack descendants in later generations. It took a heavy hammer and many blows to drive a nail through heart of oak.
It would be unjust to lay on agriculturists the whole blame for neglect of improvements. Much deserves to rest on the agricultural writers themselves. Their promises were often exaggerated beyond the bounds of belief; mixed with some useful suggestions were others which were either ridiculous or of doubtful value. Men actually and practically engaged in cultivating the soil were, therefore, justified in some distrust of book-farmers. Turnips were undoubtedly an invaluable addition to agricultural resources. But it was an exaggeration, to say with Adolphus Speed (Adam out of Eden,1659) that they were the only food for cattle, swine, and poultry, sovereign for conditioning "Hunting dogs," an admirable ingredient for bread, affording "two very good crops" each year, supplying "very good Syder" and "exceeding good Oyl." Nor was confidence in Speed's advice on other topics likely to be inspired by his promise that land, rented at £200 a year, might be made to realise a net annual profit of £2000 by keeping rabbits. Similarly the remedy which is suggested in Hartlib's Legacie (3rd edition, 1655) "against the Rot, and other diseases in Sheep and Horses" is enough to cast suspicion on the whole book: "Take Serpents or (which is better) Vipers," advises the writer, "cut their heads and tayls off and dry the rest to powder. Mingle this powder with salt, and give a few grains of it so mingled now and then to your Horses and Sheep." Other suggested remedies are, at least, more easy of application. "The colicke or pain in the belly (in oxen) is put away in the beholding of geese in the water, specially duckes."If a horse sickens from some mysterious ailment, "a piece of fern-root placed under his tongue will make him immediately voyde, upward and downward, whatsoever is in his body, and presently amende." Again, neither silkworms nor vineyards, though both are favourites with the Stewart theorists, commend themselves strongly as a safe livelihood to practical men who farmed under an English climate. Nor was it possible to take seriously the proposed introduction of "Black Foxes, Muske-cats, Sables, Martines," etc., suggested by Robert Child, the author of the principal tract in the Legacie, as an addition to the agricultural wealth of the country. He adds to his list "the Elephant, the greatest, wisest, and longest-lived of all beasts . . . very serviceable for carriage (15 men usually riding on his backe together)." It would have added variety to English rural life to see the partners in a village farm conveyed to their holdings on the back of a co-operative elephant, and dropping off as they arrived at their respective strips. But it is doubtful whether they would have found their four-footed omnibus "not chargeable to keepe." Literary and experimental agriculturists naturally gained a reputation similar to that of quack medicine vendors. In practice they often failed. Like ancient alchemists, they starved in the midst of their golden dreams. Tusser, teaching thrift, never throve. Gabriel Plattes, the corn setter, died for want of bread. Donaldson, the author of the first Scottish agricultural treatise, admits that he took to writing books because he could not succeed on the land. Even Arthur Young failed twice in farm management before he began his invaluable tours.
In the "Large Letter" on the defects of English farming, and their remedies, from which quotations have been already made, Child also notices the amount of land that lay waste from want of drainage. This was one of the crying needs of agriculture. Without extensive drainage, the introduction of new crops and improved practices was impossible. With the hour comes the man. The necessity and methods of drainage were ably discussed by Walter Blith. Writing as "a lover of Ingenuity," he published his English Improver in 1649. His treatise, interlarded with biblical quotations, was the first which dealt with draining. As the Puritans of the day sought Scriptural authority for their political constitution, so the Puritan farmer justifies his advocacy of drainage by references to the Bible. "Can the rush," he asks with Bildad, "grow without mire or the flagg without water?" In other ways also Blith's work is significant of the era of the Civil War. He himself beat his ploughshare into a sword, became a captain in the Roundhead army, dedicated his second edition under the title of The English Improver Improved (1652) "to the Right Honourable the Lord Generall Cromwell," adorns it with a portrait of himself arrayed in full military costume, and adds the legend 'Vive
Among the remedies which Blith suggests for the defects of English farming, he urges the employment of more capital; enclosures, with due regard to cottiers and labourers; the abolition of "slavish customs"; the removal of water-mills; the extinction of "vermine"; the recognition of tenant-right. It is an indication of agricultural progress that the question of tenants' improvements should be thus forcing itself to the front. Sir Richard Weston in his Discours called attention to the Flemish custom, unknown to him in England, of "taking a Farm upon Improvement." In Flanders leases for twenty-one years were taken on condition that "whatsoever four indifferent persons (whereof two to bee chosen by the one, and two by the other) should judg the Farm to bee improved at the end of his Leas, the Owner was to paie so much in value to the Tenant for his improving it." In the Preface to his Legacie, Hartlib had imitated Weston in urging the adoption of this custom in England. Blith, who also quotes the Flemish lease with approval, points out the injustice of the English law and the hindrance to all improvements which it created. "If," he says, "a Tenant be at never so great paines or cost for the improvement of his Land, he doth thereby but occasion a greater Rack upon himself, or else invests his Land-Lord into his cost and labour gratis, or at best lies at his Land-Lord's mercy for requital; which occasions a neglect of all good Husbandry. . . . Now this I humble conceive may be removed, if there were a Law Inacted, by which every Land-Lord should be obliged, either to give him reasonable allowance for his clear Improvement, or else suffer him or his to enjoy it so much longer as till he hath had a proportionable requitall." The question had not yet become acute; but, with the insecurity of tenure which then prevailed, it was not surprising that tenant-farmers were averse to improvements. Their experience was embodied in the proverbial saying current in Berkshire:
THE LATER STEWARTS AND THE REVOLUTION 1660-1700
The practical improvements, which had been suggested by "Rustick Authors" in the first sixty years of the seventeenth century, were collected by John Worlidge in his Systema Agriculturæ (1669). Five editions of this "first systematic treatise on farming" show that it was for some time regarded as a standard authority. Free from the extravagant promises of his predecessors, Worlidge summarises their most useful recommendations. Inordinate space is still allotted to such topics as trees, orchards, "garden tyllage," bees, and silkworms, which occupy 106 pages out of a total number of 217. On the side of stock-breeding and stock-rearing his book remains especially defective. For information on this subject he merely refers readers in a general way to other writers. Three pages only are devoted to the section "Of Beasts," in which the special qualities required for the different uses of horses, cattle, and sheep are wholly ignored; only in the case of dogs does Worlidge appear to recognise the variety of purposes for which animals are bred.
Even the most practical work on farming which was published in the seventeenth century is ill-balanced and defective. Yet it is remarkable how many of the triumphs of nineteenth century farming were anticipated by these early writers, a century and a half before the improvements were generally adopted. Already the germs of a proper rotation of crops had been implanted, and a few advanced husbandmen, familiar with the methods of the Low Countries, had realised that, in roots and clovers, they commanded the means, not only of keeping more stock, but of increasing the yield of corn. Already some of the drawbacks of broad-cast sowing had been pointed out, and the advantages of setting in regular rows suggested. Already the foreign use of oil-cake for cattle had been observed and recommended to English farmers. But, as Mortimer notices (The whole Art of Husbandry; or the Way of Managing and Improving of Land, 1707), Lincolnshire farmers, after pressing out the "oyl" from their coleseed, preferred to "burn the cakes to heat their Ovens." Already also the field-cultivation of potatoes had been suggested, and it is a coincidence that the suggestion was made only a few years after the drainage of those fens, on the clover-sick soil of which, two centuries and a half later, the adoption of the crop worked a revolution. Already the use of silos and of ensilage, the storage of water in tanks for dry districts, the value of coverings to rick-stands, even the utility of the incubator for rearing poultry--a box heated by a candle or a lamp--had been urged on Stewart agriculturists. In a tentative fashion the "Rustick Authors" were feeling after improved agricultural machinery. Googe's reaping car, the double-furrow plough of the "ingenious yeoman of Kent," Plattes' corn-setter, the corn drill depicted by Worlidge, which made the furrow, sowed the seed, and deposited the manure, were the ancestors of many useful inventions. Still more vaguely Stewart writers were looking for the aid of science. Its future benefits could not, of course, be foreseen. But the demand for an Agricultural College, the recognition of the work of the Royal Society, the study of such books as Willis' De fermentatione or Glauber's Miraculum Mundi, in which an attempt was made to analyse the elements that contribute to vegetation, show that expectations had been aroused. Already a Land Registry, by which land could be made to pass as freely as money, had been suggested by Andrew Yarranton. Already also the abolition of "slavish customs," and of "Ill Tenures as Copyhold, KnightService etc," which "much discourage Improvements and are (as I suppose) Badges of our Norman Slavery" was demanded. The Hares and Rabbits legislation had been foreshadowed in the outcry against the destruction of growing crops by "coneys," and hares which in 1696, according to Gregory Icing's minute calculation, numbered 24,000. The necessity for General Highway and Enclosure Acts had been urged on the country. The prelude to the long struggle for compensation for unexhausted improvements had been sounded. Even the twentieth century agitation for pure bread had been anticipated in the protest that "the corruption of the best aliments, as bread, and which are in most use with us, causeth the worst Epidemicall Diseases."
Here and there some changes in farming practices had been made for the better. But such progress was purely local, and rarely survived the individual by whom it was effected. Traditional methods were jealously guarded as agricultural heirlooms. Even ocular proof of the superior advantages derived from improvements failed to drive the John Trot geniuses of farming from the beaten track in which their ancestors had plodded. Circumstances combined to render the force of custom tyrannical. The agrarian partnerships on village farms opposed a natural obstacle to change. On open-fields, where the rotations of crops were fixed by immemorial usage, based on the common rights of the whole body of associated farmers, no individual could move hand or foot to effect improvements. Unless a large number of joint occupiers, often ignorant, suspicious, and prejudiced, agreed to forgo common rights and adopt turnips and clover, it was impossible to introduce their cultivation. The enterprise of twenty farmers might be checked by the apathy or caution of one. It was for this reason mainly that Worlidge addresses his treatise to the "gentry and yeomanry," and that he thinks the moment opportune for improvement, because so many farmers had been obliged to give up their holdings owing to "the great Plenty and Smallness of Value of the Ordinary Productions of the Earth," which left no profit to those who "exercised onely the Vulgar Methods of Agriculture." Even if the new materials for agricultural wealth were successfully introduced by some energetic landlord or tenant on an enclosed farm, the result of the experiment was rarely known beyond the immediate neighbourhood. Each village was at once isolated and self-sufficing. Communication was difficult; frequented roads were often impassable except for a well-mounted horseman or a coach, drawn by eight horses. Education had not spread to the class to which farmers generally belonged. Letters were rarely interchanged. Visits were seldom paid. The only form in which information could be disseminated was in books or pamphlets, and in remote villages buyers were few or none.
Newspapers had hardly begun to exist. The first attempt to found a scientific agricultural paper was made by John Houghton, whose Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade appeared in a weekly series from 1681 to 1683, and again from 1692 to 1703. It is improbable that the circulation could have been extensive even among the wealthiest of the country gentry. Rumours of the progress of the outside world scarcely penetrated to distant villages. Farmers of one district knew little more of the practices of the next than they did of those of Kamchatka. Beyond the limited range of their horizon, their neighbours were only
"Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders."
In this extreme isolation must be sought a fruitful cause for the slow diffusion of agricultural improvements. Another cause lay in the absence of any strong incentive to raise more produce from the soil than was requisite for the immediate wants of the producers. Markets were, in many parts of England, not only difficult of access but few in number. From vast and crowded haunts of labour and trade the cry of the artisan had not yet arisen for bread and meat. As soon as the farmer had satisfied the needs of himself, his family, and his rent, his work was done. Till a wider demand for agricultural produce had been created by the rapid growth of population which resulted from the development of manufacturing industries, and till the new markets had been brought to the farmer's door by improved means of communication, the supply was mainly regulated by the wants of the producer himself.
Another cause for the neglect of improvements has been already mentioned. A contempt for book-
farmers, which was not wholly unjustifiable, partially explains the slow adoption of new methods and new crops. Of this class of agricultural writers, Thomas Tryon affords an interesting example. Like most men of his kind, he was a "Jack of all trades." He was a voluminous writer on a miscellaneous variety of subjects--against drinking brandy and "smoaking tobacco," upon brewing ale and beer, upon medical topics, upon dreams and visions, on the benefit of clean beds on the generation of bugs, on the pain in the teeth. He also composed a "short discourse" of a Pythagorean and a mystic. His agricultural book, The Countryman's Companion (1681), is chiefly noticeable for its account of that "Monsterous, Mortifying Distemper, the Rot," and for the strange remedies which he suggests for the preservation of sheep from that disorder. Thomas Tryon is an admirable representative of the class of writers who brought the book-farmer into disrepute. But already true science was coming to the aid of agriculture. The Sylva (1664) and Terra (1676) of John Evelyn are known to all well-read agriculturists, and John Ray's Catalogus Plantarum Angliae (1670) marks an epoch in the history of botanical science.
All these conditions combined to raise formidable obstacles to the diffusion of improvements in farming. Agricultural writers scarcely expected that the changes they suggested would be adopted. Donaldson, for instance, says that people will probably answer him with "Away with your fool Notions; there are too many Bees in your Bonet-case. We will satisfie ourselves with such Measures as our Fathers have followed hitherto." Farmers, says Hartlib's Legacie, did not venture to attempt innovations lest they should be called "projectors." Bradley, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, complains in his Complete Body of Husbandry (1727), that if he were to advise farmers "about improvements, they will ask me whether I can hold a plough, for in that they think the whole mystery of husbandry consists." It was long before clover emerged "from the fields of gentlemen into common use"; it did not penetrate into Suffolk villages till the eighteenth century. In Worcestershire and adjoining districts the personal efforts of Andrew Yarranten in 1653-77 had for the time established its use. But "farmers," says Jethro Tull, writing in the reign of George II., "if advised to sow clover would certainly reply, 'Gentlemen might sow it if they pleased, but they (the farmers) must take care to pay their rents.'" Even more obstinate was the resistance to turnips. It was of little use that Worlidge in his Systema (1669) urged upon farmers the cultivation of roots; or that Reeve (1670) reprinted Weston's advice to use turnips as the best methods of improving "barren and heathy land"; or that Houghton (1684) described the benefits which had resulted in Norfolk and Essex from growing them as winter food for sheep. Even their advocates had not yet appreciated the full value of roots. Worlidge in 1683 had observed that " sheep fatten very well on turnips, which prove an excellent nourishment for them in hard winters, when fodder is scarce; for they will not only eat the greens, but feed on the roots in the ground, and scoop them hollow even to the very skin." Houghton in 1694 writes that "Some in Essex have their fallow after turneps, which feed their sheep in winter, by which means their turneps are scooped, and so made capable to hold dews and rain water which, by corrupting, imbibes the nitre of the air, and when the shell breaks, it runs about and fertilizes. By feeding the sheep, the land is dung'd as if it had been folded; and these turneps, tho' few or none be carried off for human use, are a very excellent improvement; nay, some reckon it so, tho' they only plough the turneps in, without feeding." They made but slow progress. Sir John Cullum, in his History of the Manor of Hawsted, preserves the name of Michael Houghton as the first man in that Suffolk parish, who about 1700 raised a crop of turnips on two acres of his land. "I introduced turnips into the field," says Tull, "in King William's reign; but the practice did not travel beyond the hedges of my estate till after the Peace of Utrecht" (1713). Potatoes were even less successful. John Forster (1664) had, as has been already noticed, urged their adoption as a field crop. Houghton notices that they had been brought from Ireland "to Lancashire, where they are very numerous, and now they begin to spread all the Kingdom over. They are a pleasant food boiled or roasted, and eaten with butter and sugar." But Mortimer (Whole Art of Husbandry, etc., 1707) despised them even in the garden as " very near the Nature of the Jerusalem Artichoak, which is not so good or wholesome. These are planted either of the Roots or Seeds, and may probably be propagated in great Quantities, and prove a good food for Swine." Neither clover nor turnips became general in England before the latter half of the eighteenth century, and potatoes were not extensively grown till fifty years later, when their value was urged on the country by the Board of Agriculture.
The widest differences existed between the farming of various districts. The general level was extremely low. But in individual cases a high standard was attained, and the best possible use made of such resources as agriculturists could command. In natural fertility the Vale of Taunton, which Norden calls the "Paradise of England," was pre-eminent. The best pastures, according to the same authority, were at Crediton and Welshpool. In arable farming, says Mascall, or his editor, Ruscam, the seasons for the operations of agriculture, as well as the choice of implements must depend on the character of the soil. Thus on the "stiffs clayes of Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire," on "mixt soils that are good and fruitful, as Northamptonshire, Hartfordshire, most parts of Kent, Essex, Barkshire," on "light and dry grounds which have also a certain natural fruitfulness in them as in Norfolk, Suffolk, most parts of Lincolnshire, Hampshire and Surrey"-- farmers will adapt themselves to circumstances. On "the barren and unfruitful earths, as in Devonshire, Cornwall, many parts of Wales, Darbyshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire," they must profit by experience." The best corn land in Europe," in the opinion of Gabriel Plattes, was the Vale of Belvoir. The best cheeses were made at Banbury, in Cheshire, or in the Chedder district. But the latter, says Hartlib's Legacie, were "seldom seen but at Noblemans tables or rich Vintners Sellars." In some places the new crops recommended by the Stewart writers had been tried. Liquorice was grown with success at Pontefract in Yorkshire and at "Godliman" in Surrey; saffron was established in Essex and Cambridgeshire; canary seed and caraways were tried in Kent and Oxfordshire; hops were not confined to Kent, but had spread into Suffolk, Essex, Surrey, and other counties; sainfoin had been tested at Cobham in Kent; weld, used for dyeing of "bright Yellows and Limon-colours," flourished near Canterbury; madder and woad had been proved to be profitable crops; the best flax and hemp were grown near Maidstone, where a thread factory had been recently established, at Bow and Stratford in Essex, and in Nottinghamshire. At a later date the district round Beccles in Suffolk was famous for its hemp; rape and coleseed were established in Kent, Lincolnshire, and elsewhere. Kent, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and the neighbourhood of London were famous for their apples, and as many as 200 varieties were collected in a single orchard. The cherries of Kent and the quinces of Essex were in chief repute. "There are now," writes William Hughes, (The Compleat Vineyard, 1665) "in Kent and other places of this Nation, such Vineyards and Wall-vines as produce great store of excellent good wine."
Increased attention was also being paid to live-stock, and the values of distinctive breeds of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs were discussed. If Gervase Markham's Cheape and good Husbandry (edition of 1631) is compared with Mortimer's Whole Art of Husbandry (1707), some idea may be formed of the views of the seventeenth century on stock-breeding.
On horses, Markham, in spite of the criticism of Child already quoted, was reputed an authority. "Now for the choyse of the best Horse," he writes, "it is divers according to the use for which you will imploy him." Of "Horses for the Warre," he says, " the courser of Naples is accounted the best, the Almaine, the Sardinian, or the French." "For a Prince's Seat, any supreame Magistrate, or for any great Lady of state," he recommends a "milkewhite" or "faire dapple gray" steed of English breed: failing that, a "Hungarian, Swethland, Poland, or Irish" horse. The best hunter he finds in "the English horse, bastardized with any of the former Races first spoake of." The finest race-horses are "the Arabian, Barbary, or his bastard-Jennets, but the Turkes are better." "For travaile or burthen" the best is the English horse, and "the best for ease is the Irish-hobby." "For portage, that is for the Packe or Hampers," and "for the Cart or Plough," he makes no selection. For coach horses, he chooses the large English gelding, or the Flemish mare, or the Flemish or Frisian horse. There were doubtless already distinctive breeds in England, such as the Yorkshire saddle-horses of the Cleveland district, the heavy Black Horse of the Midlands, the Suffolk Punch or the West-country packhorse; but they are not mentioned by Markham. Nor does Mortimer refer to any English breeds. He tells us, however, that Leicestershire was in his day one of the great horse-breeding counties, and that Hertfordshire farmers bought the colts as two-yearolds, and sold them "at about six Years old to Gentlemen at London for their Coaches."
Among cattle, the best breeds " for meat " were the long-horned cattle of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Staffordshire: The tall long-legged Lincolns, generally "pide," with more white than any other colour, were reckoned the best for "labour and draught." "Those in Somersetshire and Gloucestershire are generally of a blood-red colour, in all shapes like unto those in Lincolne-shire, and fittest for their uses." So far Markham. Mortimer adds other breeds. "A good hardy Sort for fatting on barren or middling Sort of Land are your Angleseys and Welch. The hardiest are the Scotch." The best breed for milking, in his opinion, was "the longlegged short-horn'd Cow of the Dutch breed," chiefly found in Lincolnshire and Kent.
Both Markham and Mortimer have much to say about sheep, which were reckoned as the most profitable of live-stock. Their manifold uses inspired Leonard Mascall (Government of Cattell, 1591) to rhyme in "praise of sheep":
"These cattle (sheep) among the rest,
Is counted for man one of the best,
No harmful beast, nor hurt at all;
His fleece of wool doth cloath us all,
Which keeps us all from extream cold;
His flesh doth feed both young and old
His tallow makes the candles white,
To burn and serve us day and night
His skin doth pleasure divers ways,
To write, to wear, at all assaies;
His guts, thereof we make wheel-strings;
They use his bones for other things;
His horns some shepherds will not lose,
Because therewith they patch their shooes ;
His dung is chief, I understand,
To help and dung the Plowman's land;
Therefore the Sheep among the rest,
He is for man a worthy beast."
But Mascall makes no attempt to distinguish varieties of breed. Like many of the Stewart writers, he would probably have answered as the Cumberland shepherd replied to the question--where he got his rough-legged, ill-formed sheep--"Lor', sir, they are sik as God set upon the land; we never change any." Markham, however, distinguishes the various breeds by the quality of their wool. The finest short wool came from the small black-faced Herefordshire sheep in the neighbourhood of Leominster, and in parts of Worcestershire and Shropshire. The Cotswold breed was heavier, but the wool was longer and straighter in the staple, and the fleece coarser. Parts of Warwickshire and Worcestershire, "all Leicestershire, Buckinghamshire, and part of Northamptonshire, and that part of Nottinghamshire which is exempt from Sherwood Forest" produced "a large-boned Sheep, of the best shape and deepest staple." These were pasture sheep, and their wool was coarse in quality. The Yorkshire breed was "of reasonable bigge bone, but of a staple rough and hairie." Welsh sheep were to be "praised only in the dish, for they are the sweetest mutton." The Lincolnshire salt marshes bore the largest animals; but "their legges and bellies are long and naked, and their staple is coarser than any other." Mortimer practically repeats Markham's list. But he adds one significant remark. Speaking of Lincolns and the coarseness of their wool, he says: "they are lately much amended in their Breed." Some local pioneer of Bakewell and his Leicesters was already attempting the improvement of Lincolns. Both Markham and Mortimer condemn horned sheep, and advise buyers to choose animals with plenty of bone. Both also repeat the warning of Fitzherbert and Tusser that on open-field farms lambs must be timed to fall in January.
Pigs naturally take a prominent place in the books of "Rustick Authors." They are, says Markham, "troublesome, noysome, unruly, and great ravenours," yet they are " the Husbandmans Best Scavenger, and the Huswifes most wholesome sinke," and, "in the dish, so lovely and so wholesome, that all other faults may be borne with." Mascall quotes as a proverb the common saying: "The hog is never good but when he is in the dish." The natural cleanliness of the animal is strongly urged by all the seventeenth century writers. As to breed, no English county could be said to have a better sort than any other. But Markham thinks the best pigs are raised in Leicestershire, some parts of Northamptonshire, and the clay countries bordering on Leicestershire. As to colour, he recommends white or "sanded," or black. But these last are said to be rare. Pied pigs he considers to be more subject to measles. Both he and Mortimer attribute the superiority of Leicestershire and the surrounding districts to the great quantities of beans and pulse which were raised in those counties, and Mortimer adds that the pigs from those parts of the country were mostly sold in London for use at sea.
At the Restoration, the greatest need of English farming was the leadership of practical men, possessed of the leisure, the education, and the capital, to test by experiments the value of a mass of theoretical advice, to adopt new crops, introduce new methods, improve the live-stock of the country. Such pioneers were found, at a later date, among the large landowners. In 1660 they were not forthcoming from that or from any other class, and this want of leadership to a great extent explains the reluctance of farmers to put in practice many of the improvements which not only bookfarmers but practical agriculturists were recommending. The state of society was still too unsettled, the title to land too insecure, to tempt expenditure. The number of men who could afford the necessary outlay was relatively few. Landed property in 1660 was distributed in smaller quantities among more numerous owners than it was a century later. The events of the Commonwealth period had further increased this wide distribution of ownership. Large quantities of land, confiscated by the Parliament, had been thrown on the market. Many estates had also been forfeited to the Government and sold, often in small parcels, because the royalist owners either refused or neglected to compound for their "delinquencies." Portions of other properties had been sold by their owners to pay the composition or the Decimation Tax. In all these cases, numbers of the purchasers were small men. At the Restoration, the estates of the Crown and of the Church, and the confiscated lands of eminent royalists were restored to their original owners, without compensation to purchasers who had bought under the authority of the Commonwealth Government. But no attempt was made to cancel the purchase of lands which had been sold under forfeitures to the Parliament, or under the pressure of the taxation imposed by the victorious Puritans on the vanquished royalists. All claims of this nature were barred by an Act, which disappointed Cavaliers condemned as an act of indemnity to the King's enemies and of oblivion to his friends. But whether the Republicans were deprived of their purchases, or confirmed in their possession, the example was not lost on their contemporaries. The nature of the compromise effected at the Restoration necessarily impaired the sense of security. When titles were precarious, outlay of capital seemed too speculative a risk. Moreover, many of the royalists who were fortunate enough to retain or regain possession of their estates, found themselves too impoverished to spend money on their improvement, or too formed in their habits to endure the tediousness of directing them. The generations which knew the Civil War, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, the rebellion of Monmouth, and the Revolution had passed away, before landowners, in widely different circumstances, assumed the lead in agricultural progress.
Changes were already at work which, within the next half century, not only restored the position of the landed gentry, but gave them an influence which they had never before possessed. Parliament gained control over the Government, and the House of Commons over Parliament. At the same time the jurisdiction of magistrates was greatly extended. Controlling the House of Commons through the county elections, administering local justice, allied with the Church as the bulwark of Protestantism, recruiting from its wealthiest members the order of the peerage, absorbing into its own ranks their younger sons, the landed gentry became the predominant class in the country. How great was the increase in their power may be illustrated by the difference in the attitude which Elizabethan and Hanoverian Parliaments assumed towards enclosures. Many of the seeds of this growth in the political and social ascendancy of the landed aristocracy were sown during the period under notice.
One of the first questions which came before the Restoration Parliament was that of finance. Some permanent provision had to be made for the ordinary charges of Government. A Committee was appointed which reported that the average yearly income of Charles I. for the period 1637-41 had been £900,000, but that of this sum £200,000 were derived from sources no longer available. Parliament decided to raise the annual income of the Crown to £1,200,000. In providing this sum the lines laid down by the Republican financiers were in the main followed. The cost of the Civil War and the subsequent expenses of the Commonwealth Government had been met by the old device of customs duties, and by the new expedients of monthly assessments on lands and goods, and of excise duties, borrowed from the Dutch financiers, on a large range of products which at one time included meat and salt. The old feudal dues, exacted by the Crown on all lands held by military tenure, had dwindled in importance and value, in spite of the attempts made by Henry VIII. and Charles I. to enforce them with greater rigour. To a large extent their place had been taken by parliamentary grants of subsidies on lands and goods. Those which remained in operation were comparatively unproductive; they were besides uneconomical, uncertain, and inconvenient. They were also not granted by Parliament, and thus provided the Crown with funds which were not under national control. Their abolition had been recommended in the reign of James I.; it had been carried by a resolution of both Houses of Parliament in 1645; it was one of the terms of the Treaty of Newport in 1648, when Charles I. agreed to surrender the dues for the payment of £100,000 a year; it had been demanded by Puritan agriculturists like Hartlib and Blith; finally, in 1656 the abolition had been passed into law with the consent of Cromwell. Technically speaking, the legislation of the Commonwealth was annulled by the Restoration; practically, however, the question was not whether the abolished dues should be continued, but whether they should be revived. Against this revival it was argued in 1660 that much land had changed hands in the previous fifteen years without any provision for the possible revival of the liability. The income voted for Charles II. had to be provided, the problem of ways and means to be solved. The Restoration Parliament might have abandoned the excise duty, or revived the feudal dues, or substituted for them a land tax. They retained the excise introduced by Republican financiers, but reduced it by a half; they confirmed Cromwell's abolition of the emoluments which the Crown had derived from lands held in chivalry; they declined by a majority of two votes to impose a land tax. At the same time the Crown surrendered its oppressive prerogatives of purveyance and pre-emption: No doubt the immediate result of these fiscal changes was that the landed aristocracy continued to be relieved from a burden, and that, from motives of self-interest, they refused to revive, either in its original or in a substituted form, a system of taxation which, before the Commonwealth, had once attached to land held in chivalry.
The abolition of military tenures reduced to some extent the necessary outgoings of many of the landed gentry. At the same time the commercial policy adopted by the Restoration Government maintained, if it did not swell, their incomes. The steady rise in the price of wool during the past century had begun to hamper the clothing trade. In order to lower prices for home manufacturers, an Act passed in 1647, and re-enacted in 1660, prohibited its exportation. Still further to stimulate the clothing industry, a series of Acts, from 1666 onwards, ordered the burial of the dead in woollen fabrics. Partly for revenue, partly in compensation for these concessions to manufacturing industries, partly to meet the claims of impoverished adherents, partly to maintain the balance between pasture and tillage, partly, no doubt, to make England self-supporting in its food supplies, important changes were made in the laws which regulated the trade in corn. In the reign of Philip and Mary, home-grown corn could not be exported if home-prices for wheat rose above 6s. 8d. per quarter, and for cheaper grains in proportion. This limit was raised by subsequent legislation. Thus the home price for wheat, at which exportation was prohibited, was raised in 1593 to 20s., in 1604 to 26s. 8d., in 1623 to 32s., in 1660 to 40s., in 1663 to 48s. In 1660 duties were also imposed on the importation of foreign wheat. These duties were at first nominal. Thus they started at 2s. per quarter on imported wheat, when home-prices exceeded 44s. In 1663 they were raised to 5s. 4d. per quarter, when home-grown wheat rose above 48s. In 1670 the corn laws became more frankly protective. No limit of price was fixed above which the exportation of home-grown corn was prohibited, and a heavy duty of 16s. a quarter was imposed on foreign wheat when home prices did not exceed 53s. 4d. per quarter. Similar duties were imposed on the importation of other foreign grain at proportionate prices. A further change was made in 1688. The Act of that year offered a bounty on the export of home-grown corn of 5s. per quarter of wheat, whenever the home-price fell below 48s. per quarter, and on other grain in proportion. On these two principles, namely a duty on the importation of foreign corn and a bounty on the exportation of home-grown corn, combined with frequent prohibitions of exports, the corn trade was regulated throughout the eighteenth century. Similar measures were adopted to encourage the raising of cattle, and importations from Ireland were prohibited. Legislation did not, however, raise prices; it only succeeded in maintaining them. Increased production at home counteracted the effect which the restriction of imports might otherwise have produced. England, says Sir William Petty, (Several Essays in Political Arithmetic, ed. 1755, pp. 150-169) "doeth so abound in Victuals as that it maketh Laws against the Importation of Cattle, Flesh and Fish from abroad ; and that the draining of Fens, improving of Forests, inclosing of Commons, Sowing of St. Foyne and Clover-grass be grumbled against by Landlords, as the Way to depress the price of Victuals." Elsewhere he adds: "it is manifest that the land in its present Condition is able to bear more Provision and Commodities, than it was forty years ago."
Throughout the period from the Restoration to the Revolution, except for one disastrous year of plague, fire, and war, the country prospered. The receipts from customs steadily advanced. Trade was expanding. As Amsterdam decayed, and Portuguese and Spanish Jews fled to England to escape the Inquisition, money flowed into the country. Other religious refugees brought with them useful arts and manufactures. The development of banking stimulated commercial undertakings. Between 1661 and 1687 the receipts from the customs duties more than doubled. Fortunes, made in the city were often invested in land, which now was beginning to confer on its possessors a new political and social influence. The landed gentry shared in the growing prosperity, either through its general effects on the country, or by wealthy marriages, or by sending their sons--as Rashleigh Osbaldistone was sent by Sir Hildebrand--into business. Between 1675 and 1700, said Sir William Temple "the first noble families married into the City." Latimer had preached against landlords becoming "graziers," and aldermen turning "colliers," and disquietude at this commercial tendency had influenced the legislation of Edward VI. But times had changed. Though Heralds still distinguished between "foreign Merchants" and retail shopkeepers, on the ground apparently that "Navigation was the only laudable part of all buying and selling," yet they* had solemnly decided that "if a Gentleman be bound an Apprentice to a Merchant, or other Trade, he hath not thereby lost his Degree of Gentility."
*(Logan's Treatise of Honor at the end of Gwillim's Display of Heraldry (ed. 1679), p. 155.)
Closely united with the nobility, the Church, and the merchant princes, sharing in the general prosperity, and, in virtue of their property, exercising new political and social powers, the landed gentry were beginning to acquire that predominant influence which was so marked a feature in the eighteenth century. The change necessarily added an artificial value to the ownership of land: it not only arrested the tendency towards its wider distribution, but encouraged its accumulation in fewer hands. Once acquired, estates were held together by the introduction of family settlements. On the eve of this change, it may be of interest to note a contemporary estimate of the agricultural population and wealth of the country at the close of the eighteenth century.
Gregory King, whose training and experience specially qualified him for the task, drew up a statistical account of the "State and Condition" of England and Wales in 1696. His estimates of the actual numbers of the population are the result of an investigation by a competent and careful observer, who made the fullest use of the information supplied by such figures as those contained in the Hearth-office, the assessments on Births, Marriages, and Burials, the Parish Registers, and Public Accounts. The substantial accuracy of this part of his work has stood the test of subsequent criticism, in spite of his prophecy that in 1900 the population would have risen to 7,350,000. For the rest of his estimates he mainly depended on guess-work. Confidence is scarcely created by his laborious calculation of the numbers of hares, rabbits, and wild fowl in the country. King's figures were largely used by Davenant in An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade, 1698, but his actual manuscript remained unpublished till 1801.
King estimated the total acreage of England and Wales at 39 million acres (the actual figure is 37,319,221); of which 11 million acres were arable, averaging a yearly rent per acre of 5s. 10d.; and 10 million were meadow or pasture, averaging 9s. an acre. Of the 11 million arable acres, ten million were under the plough for corn, pease, beans, and vetches ; one million acres were allotted to flax, hemp, saffron, woad and other dyeing weeds, etc. He goes on to calculate the live-stock of the country thus: "horses (and asses)," 600,000; cattle, 4½ million; sheep, 11 million; pigs, 2 million. The total population in 1696 is estimated at 5,500,000 persons, distributed into 1,400,000 urban, and 4,100,000 rural, inhabitants. The total yearly income of the nation in 1688 is calculated at £43,500,000. Of this total, coniderably more than half (£24,480,000) belonged to the following families .
Average
Yearly Income.
40,000 Freeholders* of the better sort £84 0 0
140,000 Freeholders of the lesser sort 50 0 0
150,000 Farmers 44 0 0
364,000 Labouring People and Out-servants 15 0 0
400,000 Cottagers and Paupers 6 10 0
*It should be noted that freeholders included not only
owners and occupying owners, but tenants for life and
lives, as well as copyholders.
King's estimates bring into strong relief the vast revolution which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced in the distribution of population and of wealth. The same point is illustrated from a different point of view by a comparison of the wealth of the different counties in 1696 and at the present day. Material for such a comparison is found in the frequent assessments which were made of the counties during the seventeenth century for various fiscal purposes. The central counties are the richest; then follow in order of wealth the south, the east, the west. Poorest of all is the north.
Throughout the whole period, Middlesex is the richest and Cumberland the poorest county. The most conspicuous change was that of Surrey, which rose from the eighteenth place in 1636 to the second in 1693. Excluding Middlesex, and excepting Surrey, the wealthiest district throughout the whole period was formed by a block of six agricultural counties north of the Thames--namely Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Northamptonshire. Their position illustrates the importance of London as a market for agricultural produce. Already its rapid growth was exciting alarm, lest "the Head" should become "too big for the Body." According to Gregory King, its population was 530,000 souls out of an urban population of 1,400,000, and a total population, urban and rural, of 5½ millions. Throughout the whole period, again, the seven poorest counties, though their order in the list varies, were Cheshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland. The assessment of the whole district north of the Humber, comprising one-fifth of the total area of England, was not greater than that of Wiltshire. In the latter half of the following century not only wealth but population migrated northwards, and the inhabitants of rural districts began to flow into the centres of trade and manufacture which crowded round the coal and iron fields and waterpower of the northern counties.
JETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHEND. 1700-1760
THE gigantic advance of agriculture in the nineteenth century dwarfs into insignificance any previous rate of progress. Yet the change between 1700 and 1800 was astonishing. England not only produced food for a population that had doubled itself, as well as grain for treble the number of horses, but during the first part of the period became, as M. de Lavergne has said, the granary of Europe. Population before 1760 grew so slowly that the soil, without any great increase in farming skill or in cultivated area, produced a surplus. Under the spur of the bounty, land which had been converted to pasture was again ploughed for corn, and proved by its yield that it had profited by the prolonged rest. The price of wheat, between the years 1713 and
The great changes which English agriculture witnessed as the eighteenth century advanced, and particularly after the accession of George III. (1760), are, broadly speaking, identified with Jethro Tull, Lord Townshend, Bakewell of Dishley, Arthur Young, and Coke of Norfolk. With their names are associated the chief characteristics in the farming progress of the period, which may be summed up in the adoption of improved methods of cultivation, the introduction of new crops, the reduction of stock-breeding to a science, the provision of increased facilities of communication and of transport, and the enterprise and outlay of capitalist landlords and tenant-farmers. The improvements which these pioneers initiated, taught, or exemplified, enabled England to meet the strain of the Napoleonic wars, to bear the burden of additional taxation, and to feed the vast centres of commercial industry which sprang up, as if by magic, at a time when food supplies could not have been provided from another country. Without the substitution of separate occupation for the ancient system of common cultivation, this agricultural progress was impossible. But in carrying out the necessary changes, rural society was convulsed, and its general conditions revolutionised. The divorce of the peasantry from the soil, and the extinction of commoners, open-field farmers, and eventually of small freeholders, were the heavy price which the nation ultimately paid for the supply of bread and meat to its manufacturing population.
Neither the reclamation of wastes, nor the break-up of open-field farms, nor the appropriation of commons, were novelties. For the last three centuries the three processes, which are generally spoken of as enclosures, had all been proceeding at varying rates of progress. But in the period from 1760 to 1815 each received an immense impetus, partly from the rise in the price of corn, partly from the consequent increase in rental values, partly from the pressure of a growing population, partly from the improved standard of agriculture. The literary struggle in advocacy or condemnation of enclosures still continued. But the advocates were gaining the upper hand. In the first half of the eighteenth century, there are at least two notable contributions to the literature of the subject by champions of enclosures, and only one of any importance by an opponent.
By the new writers, the unprofitable nature of the use of land under common tillage or common pasture is insisted upon. Thus Timothy Nourse, Gent., in his Campania Foelix; or Discourse of the Benefits and Improvements of Husbandry (1700), vigorously attacks commons as "Seminaries of a lazy Thieving sort of People." In his opinion their live-stock were as unprofitable to the community as the commoners themselves. Their sheep are described as "poor, tatter'd, and poyson'd with the Rot," their cattle "as starv'd, Tod-bellied Runts, neither fit for the Dairy nor the Yoke." So, also, an anonymous author in a short and pithy tract, An Old Almanack (with some considerations for improving commons) printed in 1710. With a Postscript (1734-5), suggests that, if the landowner and two-thirds, in number and value, of those interested in an open-field farm and common agreed to an enclosure, their consent should override the opposition of the minority. "Will the Commoners complain," he asks, "for want of their Commonage? This they can't do, for few of them have any Cattle, and whether they have or not, there is Recompence out of the Inclosures will more than treble their Loss? Will the Incumbents complain? What! for converting the dry Commons into Corn, and the Fenns into Hemp and Flax. Will the Ingrossers of Commons complain, who eat up their own Share and others too? This they dare not. But won't those honest Men complain who now live upon the Thefts of Common? And not with the least Reason, but then there will be Work for them." But the two important advocates of enclosures were the brothers John and Edward Laurence. In A New System of Agriculture (1726) a note is struck which sounded more loudly as towns grew, as, with their growth, the demand increased for meat, milk, and butter, as agriculture improved, as communication was facilitated. The author, the Rev. John Laurence, Rector of Bishops Wearmouth, treats open-field farms as obstacles to agricultural progress. He insists on enclosures and separate occupation as the best means of increasing produce and of raising rents. He dwells on the rapid progress which enclosures were then making, points out the great rise in rental value consequent on increased produce, and argues that so far from injuring the poor, enclosures will rather create a new demand for labour by the introduction of improved tillage and pasture-farming, will give employment in fencing and ditching, and remove the attractions of wastes and open spaces, which "draw to them the poor and necessitous only for the advantage of pilfering and stealing." In The Duty of a Steward to his Lord (1727) Edward Laurence, himself a land-surveyor, and apparently agent to the Duke of Buckingham, argues the case from the point of view of better and more economical management. A new skilled profession was growing up. It is prophetic of future changes that Laurence points out the evils of employing "countryAttorneys (not skilled in Husbandry)" in the management of landed property, and argues that the gentry should allow handsome salaries to their stewards, who could, if inadequately paid, adopt other means of enriching themselves. A champion of "engrossing," he insists on the advantages of consolidating small holdings in larger farms. He urges stewards to prevent piecemeal enclosures by individuals, to substitute leaseholds for copyholds, to buy up any freeholds on the estate which lie in intermixed strips, as necessary preliminaries to any successful and general scheme for the enclosure of open-fields and commons. The other side to the picture is vigorously painted by John Cowper in his Essay proving that Inclosing Commons and Common-Field-Lands is Contrary to the Interest of the Nation (1732). He answers the arguments of the two Laurences, arguing that enclosures necessarily injure the small freeholder and the poor, and pleading that, so far from encouraging labour, they depopulate the villages in which they have been carried out. Speaking of the small freeholder, he says that "none are more industrious, none toil and labour so hard . . . . I myself have seen within these 30 years, above 20 Lordships or parishes enclosed, and everyone of them has thereby been in a manner depopulated. If any one can shew me where an Inclosure has been made, and not at least half the inhabitants gone, I will throw up the argument."
In the passages quoted from these five books are outlined some of the principal points in the dispute which was fought out in the next eighty years. On the one side are pleaded the pernicious effects of commons on the inhabitants of the neighbourhood and their live-stock; the absence of any legal title to many of. the rights claimed over pasture commons, and their frequent abuse by commoners; the obstacles to farming improvement which were presented by open arable fields; the unprofitable use of land occupied in common; the commercial and productive advantages of enlarged, separate holdings. On the other side is urged the injury which the break-up of open-field farms and the partition of commons inflicted on small owners and occupiers of land. Much was to be said from both points of view. Many sweeping assertions were made, both by advocates and opponents, which were true of one district but untrue of another. Both socially and economically, the reclamation of wastes, the extinction of open-field farms, the appropriation of commons, might be justified by the urgent necessity of developing the productiveness of the soil, and of increasing to the fullest extent the food resources of the country. In favour of the first two changes, most agricultural writers are agreed; in dealing with the commons, it is at least doubtful whether the best possible course was always adopted.
From the productive point of view, the amount of waste land was a standing reproach to agriculture. The disappearance of the wild boar and the wolf in the reign of Charles II. suggests some diminution of the area in which those animals had harboured. But in 1696 Gregory King had estimated the heaths, moors, mountains, and barren lands of England and Wales at ten million acres, or more than a quarter of the total area. In all probability, the estimate is wholly inadequate. But, assuming the calculation to be approximately correct, it affords some measure of comparison with conditions at the close of the eighteenth century. In 1795 the Board of Agriculture stated that over 22 million acres in Great Britain were uncultivated, of which
It is possible that in 1700 at least half the arable land of the country was still cultivated on the open-field system--that is, in village farms by associations of agricultural partners who occupied intermixed strips, and cultivated the whole area under common rules of cropping. Out of 8,500 parishes, which in round numbers existed at the Reformation, 4,500 seem to have been still laid out, in whole or in part, on this ancient method. John Laurence in 1726 had calculated that a third of the cultivated area "is what we call Common Fields." The agricultural defects of the open-field system were obvious and numerous. So long as farming had been unprogressive, and population had remained stationary, the economic loss was comparatively unimportant. When improved methods and increased resources were commanded by farmers, and when the demand for food threatened to outstrip the supply, the need for change became imperative. Under the primitive system, the area under the plough was excessive, and much land, which might have been more profitably employed as pasture, was tilled for corn. A quantity of the arable land was wasted in innumerable balks and footpaths. All the occupiers were bound by rigid customary rules, compelled to treat all kinds of soil alike, obliged to keep exact time with one another in sowing and reaping their crops. Freeholders on open-field farms were only half-owners. No winter crops could be grown so long as the arable fields were subjected to common rights of pasture from August to February. It meant financial ruin, if any member of the community grew turnips, clover, or artificial grasses for the benefit of his neighbours. The strips of land occupied by each partner were too narrow to admit of cross-ploughing or cross-harrowing, and on heavy land this was a serious drawback. Drainage was practically impossible, for, if one man drained or water-furrowed his land, or scoured his courses, his neighbour might block his outfalls. It was to carry off the water that the arable land was heaped up into high ridges between two furrows. But the remedy was almost as bad as the disease. The richness of the soil was washed off the summit of the ridge into the trenches, which often, as Nathaniel Kent records (Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, 1776.), contained water three yards wide, dammed back at either end by the high-ridged head-lands. The cultivated fields were generally foul, if not from the fault of the occupier, from the slovenliness of his neighbours; the turf-balks harboured twitch; the triennial fallows left their heritage of crops of docks and thistles. The unsheltered, hedgeless open-fields were often hurtful to live-stock, though the absence of hedges was not without its advantages to the corn. The farm-buildings were gathered together in the village, often a mile or more from the land. As each man's strips lay scattered over each of the open-fields, he wasted his day in visiting the different parcels of his holding, and his expenses of manuring, reaping, carting, and horse-keeping were enormously increased by the remoteness of the different parts of his occupation. Vexatious rights interfered with proper cultivation. One man might have the right to turn his plough on another's strip, and the victim must either wait his neighbour's pleasure or risk the damage to his sown crops. "Travellers," as Joseph Lee remarked in 1656 (Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, p. 24), "know no highwaies in the common fields"; each avoided his predecessor's ruts, and cattle trespassed as they passed. For twenty yards on either side of the track the growing corn was often spoiled. The sheep were driven to the commons by day, and in the summer folded at night on the fallows. Otherwise the manure of the live-stock was wasted over the wide area, which the animals traversed to find their scanty food. Unable to provide winter keep, and fettered by the common rights of pasture which each of the partners enjoyed over the whole of the arable land, farmers reared lambs and calves under every disadvantage. During the summer months, when the horses and cattle were tethered on the unsheltered balks, they lost flesh and pined in the heat. Ill-fed all the year round, and half-starved in the winter, the live-stock dwindled in size. The promiscuous herding of sheep and cattle generated every sort of disorder. The common pasture was pimpled with mole-heaps and ant-hills, and, from want of drainage, pitted with wet patches where nothing grew but rushes. The scab was rarely absent from the crowded common-fold, or the rot from the ill-drained plough-land and pasture. No individual owner could attempt to improve his flock or his herd, when all the cattle and sheep of the village grazed together on the same commons.
The open-field system was proverbially the source of quarrels. Litigation was incessant. It was easy for men to plough up a portion of the common balks or headlands, to shift their neighbour's landmarks, or poach their land, by a turn of the plough, or filch their crops when reaping. Robert Mannyng in his Handlyng Synne (1303) had condemned the "fals husbandys" that "ere aweye falsly mennys landys," and William Langland in Piers Plowman (1369) had denounced the ploughman who "pynched on" the adjoining half-acre, and the reapers who reaped their neighbour's ground. Tusser repeats the complaint of the mediaeval moralists against the 'champion' or open-field farmer:--
" The Champion robbeth by night,
And prowleth and filcheth by day
Himself and his beasts out of sight,
Both spoileth and maketh away
Not only thy grass but thy corn,
Both after and o'er it be shorn."
Gaseoigne in The Steel Glasse (1676) condemns the open-field farmer who
". . . set debate between their lords
By earing up the balks that part their bounds."
Joseph Lee repeats the charge. "It is," he says, "a practice too common in the common fields, where men make nothing to pull up their neighbour's landmark, to plow up their land and mow their grasse that lyeth next to them." For open-field farmers the curse in the Commination Service had a real meaning. Edward Laurence in Duty of a Steward to his Lord, 1727, dwells on the temptations to dishonesty which the unfenced lands and precarious boundaries of open-fields offered to the needy, and the same point is repeatedly insisted upon by the Reporters to the Board of Agriculture at the end of the eighteenth century. Hence it was that open-field farmers agreed among themselves as little as "wasp doth with bee." Hence also came the numerous law-suits. "How many brawling contentions," says Lee, "are brought before the Judges every Assizes by the inhabitants of the common fields."
Speaking generally, enclosure meant the simultaneous processes of consolidating the intermixed strips of open-field farms and of dividing the commons attached to them as adjuncts of the arable holdings. But this was not universally the case. Sometimes the arable farm had been enclosed, and only the pasture common remained to be divided. Sometimes the reverse was the case; the common had gone, and only the arable land remained to be enclosed. Sometimes land, previously enclosed by agreement or piecemeal by individuals, was re-enclosed under a general scheme, probably for purposes of redistribution. Sometimes the acreage mentioned in Inclosure Acts, as tested by the awards, is exaggerated, more rarely under-estimated. All these differences make accurate calculations of the actual area affected by the appropriation of pasture-commons and the extinction of open-field farms extremely difficult, if not impossible. Now that the commons as adjuncts of arable farming have greatly contracted in area, their comparative disappearance is deplored on both economic and social grounds, in accordance with ideas which are of recent growth. It might have been possible to regulate their use to greater profit, or to preserve them as open spaces for recreation and as the lungs of large towns, or to divide them on methods which recognised more fully the minor, rights claimed by small commoners, and would thus have benefited a larger section of the community. But so long as the herbage of the commons, both in legal theory and historical origin, formed an essential part of the arable farm, and was subject to rights claimed against all the world by the privileged occupiers of the tillage land, there were practical difficulties in the way of each of these possible courses. Agriculturists scarcely looked beyond the undrained and impoverished condition of the pastures; lawyers held that rights of common, claimed apart from the tenure of arable land or ancient cottages, were in the nature of encroachments or trespass; economists condemned their occupation in common as a wasteful and unprofitable use of the land; social reformers pointed to the attractions which commons possessed for idlers, and deplored their influence on morals and industry. All these classes may have been, consciously or unconsciously, self-interested. There were few, certainly, who realised the full consequences of enclosures, or appreciated the strength of the impulse which the enclosing movement would give to capitalist farming, and the immediate success of the agricultural change removed the hesitation even of the most farseeing.
Custom in the course of centuries had dealt hardly with the commons. Many of them were unstinted, and were consequently overcharged with stock, which often belonged to jobbers and not to the commoners. Even in good seasons, there was barely enough grass to keep the cattle and sheep alive. In bad seasons, when the weather was cold or wet, and the grass late and scanty, many died from want of food. In other cases, while the main body of commoners were restricted in the number of their stock, one or more commoners, not always lords of adjacent manors, were restrained by no limit, and not only turned out as many of their own sheep and cattle as they could, but also took in those of strangers. The poorer the commoner, the less was the benefit he derived. If the commons were stinted, every commoner, who occupied other pasture land in severalty, saved his own grass till the last moment by keeping his sheep and cattle on the common, and the small man, who had no other refuge for his live-stock, was the sufferer. Where the commons, again, were stinted, the richer men frequently turned out more than the custom allowed, and the smaller commoners had lost the protection of the old Courts Baron, where the offenders, before the decay of those tribunals, would have been "presented." Monied men turned stock-jobbers or dealers, hired land at double rents on the edge of the commons, and so obtained grazing rights which they exercised by overstocking the land with their own sheep and cattle or by agisting the live-stock of strangers. It was thus that, in 1793, "an immense number of greyhound-like sheep, pitiful half-starved-looking animals, subject to rot," crowded Hounslow Heath, and that in 1804 the common of Cheshunt was grazed not by the poor but by a parcel of jobbers. The poverty of the pasture was often proved by the condition of the stock. "It is painful to observe the very wretched appearance of the animals," writes an anonymous author in The Farmer's Magazine for May, 1802, "who have no other dependence but upon the pasture of these commons, and who, in most instances bear a greater resemblance to living skeletons than anything else." "The stock," he continues, "turned out yearly into these commons consists of a motley mixture of all the different breeds of sheep and cattle at present known in the island; many of which are diseased, deformed, small, and in every respect unworthy of being bred from." In theory, the commons enabled the cottagers, who occupied at higher rents the ancient cottages which legally conferred the rights, to supplement their wages by keeping a cow or two. But the theory did not always agree with the practice. Often, if the cottager had money enough to buy a cow, the cow could barely find a living on land already overrun with sheep. The cottager's profits from the commons mainly consisted in the use or sale of turf, gorse, and brushwood which he cut for fuel, the run for a few geese and a "ragged shabby horse" or pony. In theory, again, the value of the commons to a small farmer, whose holding, whether freehold, copyhold, or leasehold, was mainly arable, was inestimable --provided that he was near enough to make good use of the grassland. But, in fact, the value was often minimised by distance, by the wretched condition of the undrained and over-stocked pasture, and by the risk of infection to the live-stock. There can be no question that, from an agricultural point of view, five acres of pasture, added in individual occupation to the arable holding of a small occupier, and placed near the rest of his land, would have been a greater boon than pasture rights over
Some of the practical evils of open-fields and their attendant pasture-commons might have been, with time, skill, and patience, mitigated. In some districts the village farms were better managed than in others. But even if the pressure of increasing population and the difficulties of a great war had not necessitated immediate action, the inherent defects of the system could not be cured. The general description which has been given of open-field farming applies to every part of the country. Scotland formed no exception to the rule. Scottish farmers, who are now reckoned among the most skilful, were, in 1700, inferior in their management of land to those of England, and their methods of raising crops had remained unchanged since the Battle of Bannockburn. Advocates of enclosure in England might legitimately argue that the rapid progress of Scottish farming dates from the General Enclosure Act for Scotland which was passed in 1695. The south-eastern counties were the first to be improved. Forty years before (1661), John Ray had painted an unfavourable picture of the condition of the inhabitants. "The men seem to be very lazy, and may be frequently observed to plow in their cloaks. .
. . They have neither good bread, cheese, or drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn. Their butter is very indifferent, and one would wonder how they could contrive to make it so bad. They use much pottage made of coal-wort, which they call keal, sometimes broth of decorticated barley. The ordinary country houses are pitiful cots, built of stone, and covered with turves, having in them but one room, many of them no chimneys, the windows very small holes, and not glazed." Alexander Garden of Troup describes the farming system which was followed in 1686. The land was divided into in-field and out-field. The in-field was kept "constantly under corne and bear, the husbandmen dunging it every thrie years, and, for his pains, if he reap the fourth come, he is satisfied." The out-field was allowed to grow green with weeds and thistles, and, after four or five years of this repose, was twice ploughed and sown with corn. Three crops were taken in succession; then, when the soil was too exhausted to repay seed and labour, it reverted to its weeds and thistles. Sir Archibald Grant, of Monymusk in Aberdeenshire, says that in 1716 turnips grown in fields by the Earl of Rothes and a few others were objects of wonder to the neighbourhood, that, except in East Lothian, no wheat was grown, that on his own estate there were no enclosures, no metalled roads, and no wheel-carriages. On the family property, when his father allowed him to undertake the management--"there was not one acre inclosed, nor any timber upon it, but a few elm, cycamore, and ash about a small kitchen garden adjoining to the house, and some stragling trees at some of the farm-yards, with a small copswood, not inclosed, and dwarfish, and broused by sheep and cattle. All the farmes ill disposed, and mixed; different persons having alternate ridges; not one wheel-carriage on the esteat, nor indeed any one road that would alow it. . . . The whole land raised and uneven, and full of stones, many of them very large, of a hard iron quality, and all the ridges crooked in shape of an S, and very high and full of noxious weeds, and poor, being worn out by culture, without proper manure or tillage. . . . The people poor, ignorant, and slothfull, and ingrained enimies to planting, enclosing, or any improvements or cleanness."
Neither in Scotland nor in England were open-field farmers, or tenants-at-will, or even leaseholders for lives, likely to initiate changes in the cultivation of the soil. It was almost equally idle to expect that small freeholders would attempt experiments on the agricultural methods of their forefathers, which, in a single season, might bring them to the verge of ruin. In both countries, it was the large landlords who took the lead in the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, and the larger farmers who were the first to adopt improvements. Both classes found that land was the most profitable investment for their capital. Their personal motives were probably, in the main, self-interested, and a rise in rental value or in the profits of their business was their reward. But though philanthropy and farming make a fractious mixture, the movement was of national value. When the sudden development of manufacturing industries created new markets for food-supplies, necessity demanded the conversion of the primitive self-sufficing village-farms into factories of bread and meat. For more than half a century the natural conservatism or caution of agriculturists resisted any extensive change. Down to 1760 the pressure of a growing population was scarcely felt. Nor were the commercial advantages of scientific husbandry so clearly established; even in 1790, as to convince the bulk of English landlords of the wisdom of adopting improved methods.
The comparatively slow progress of the movement is illustrated by the variations in the number of Enclosure Acts passed before and after 1760. But it must always be remembered that an Act of Parliament was not the only method of enclosure, and that counties had been enclosed, either entirely gr mainly, without their intervention. In Tudor times open-field arable lands and common pastures had been sometimes enclosed not only by agreement or purchase, but by force or fraud. Sometimes they had been extinguished, in whole or in part, by one individual freeholder, who had bought up the strips of his partners. Sometimes, where there was no other freeholder, they had been consolidated by the landlord, who allowed the leases to expire, and re-let the land in several occupation. Sometimes they had been enclosed piecemeal by a number of separate owners; sometimes all the partners had united in appointing commissioners, or arbitrators, who distributed the open-field in individual ownership. By these private arrangements large tracts of land had been enclosed without the intervention of the law, and some of these processes continued in active operation throughout the eighteenth century. But it was difficult to make a voluntary agreement universally binding.
Modifications of the open-field system, which were introduced without Parliamentary sanction, were liable to be set aside by subsequent action. Instances of breaches of voluntary agreements are quoted by the Reporters to the Board of Agriculture. Thus, in one Buckinghamshire parish, the inhabitants, who had obtained an Act of Parliament for the interchange and consolidation of intermixed holdings, but not for their enclosure, ploughed up the dividing balks, and grew clover. But, several years later, one of the farmers asserted his legal right to the herbage of the balks by turning his sheep into the clover crops which had taken their place. In another parish in the same county, the inhabitants agreed to exchange the dual system of one crop and a fallow for a three-year course of two crops and a fallow. But, after a few years, the agreement was broken by one of the farmers exercising his common rights over the fallows by feeding his sheep on the growing crops. Such breaches of voluntary arrangements could only be prevented by obtaining the sanction of Parliament, and so binding, not only dissentients, but those who were minors, possessed limited interests, or were under some other legal disability to give valid assent.
In the seventeenth century, it had to some extent become the practice to obtain confirmation of enclosing agreements from the Court of Chancery, or, where the Crown was concerned, the Royal sanction. There is some evidence that the threat of a Chancery suit was used as a means of obtaining consents, and that an attempt was made to represent the decision as a legal bar to claims of common by those who were not parties to the suit. After the Restoration a change of practice was made, which marks, perhaps, the growing desire to curb the power of the Crown. The jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery was at first supplemented, then ousted, by the private Act of Parliament. If four-fifths or sometimes a smaller proportion, in number and value, of the parties interested, together with the landowner and the tithe-owner, were agreed, the Enclosure Bill received Parliamentary sanction. Commissioners were appointed who proceeded to make an award, consolidating the intermixed lands of the open farm and dividing up the commons. Of these private Enclosing Acts the earliest instance occurs in the reign of James I. (4 Jac. I. c. 11). But it was not till the reign of Anne that they became the recognised method of proceeding. Even then the Acts were sometimes only confirmatory of arrangements already made between the parties. In the reigns of George I., George II., and George III., the number increased, at first slowly, then rapidly. Acts for enclosing only wastes, in which pasture commons were often included, must be distinguished from those Acts which dealt, not only with pasture-commons, but also with open arable fields and meadows, mown and grazed by the partners in common. Of the first class, there were, in the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, not more than 70 Acts, while from 1760 to 1815 there were upwards of 1000. Before 1760 the number of Acts dealing more specifically with the open-field system did not exceed 130. Between 1760 and 1815 the number rose to upwards of 1800. Of the area of waste, open-field and common, actually enclosed for the first time, it is impossible to speak with any certainty. The quantity of land is often not mentioned in the Enclosure Act, or can only be calculated from uncertain data. No record is available for the area enclosed by private arrangement or individual enterprise. It may, however, be safely estimated that not less than 4 million acres were enclosed in England and Wales within the period. Probably this figure was in reality considerably exceeded; possibly it might be, without exaggeration, increased by two-thirds.
Before
Since the last half of the fifteenth century the enclosing movement had been continuously in operation. Why, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was more land enclosed by Act of Parliament in some districts than in others? The answer depends on local circumstances or agricultural conditions. Disturbances on the northern and western borders were unfavourable to settled agriculture, and village farms and commons never throve extensively in the counties adjoining the borders of Scotland and Wales. In districts which abounded in fens, marshes, moorlands or hills, the space occupied by openfields was necessarily limited, although the inhabitants of the neighbourhood may have exercised over these waste tracts rights of goose-pasture, of cutting fuel, turf, or reeds, or, where possible, of grazing. But the land, when enclosed, was taken in from the wild, and was, from the first, cultivated in separate holdings. Other districts, which naturally were clothed with extensive woodlands or forest, were enclosed piecemeal by individual enterprise for individual occupation. After the end of the fourteenth century, it is unlikely that any cleared land would have been cultivated in common. Other districts, lastly, which were industrially developed by the neighbourhood of large towns, or by the existence of some manufacturing industry, were early enclosed, either because of the demand for animal food and dairy produce, or because of the scarcity of purely agricultural labour.
On these general principles, before the era of Parliamentary enclosure, may be partially explained the comparative absence or disappearance of open-fields and pasture commons in the border counties, in the Wealds of Surrey, Kent, Sussex, in the forest districts of Hampshire, Essex, Warwickshire, or Nottinghamshire, in the neighbourhood of London or Bristol, or in the clothing districts of Devon and Somerset, of Essex, and Suffolk, or of parts of Norfolk. No doubt enclosure of cultivated land by agreement was at this period chiefly made for grazing and dairying purposes. But at the same time a large addition was being continuously made to the arable area of the country, partly by the reconversion of grass-land to tillage after fertility had been restored by rest, partly by the reclamation and enclosure of new land well adapted for grain. "Consider," writes Blith in The English Improver, "the Wood-lands who before Enclosure were wont to be releeved by the Fieldon with Corn of all sorts, And now are grown as gallant Corn Countries as be in England." This addition to tillage necessarily affected the whole of the old corn-growing districts, where a large acreage, more fitted for pasture than for tillage, was kept under the plough by the open-field system. The effect was more and more felt when increasing facilities of communication enabled farmers to put their land to the best use by relieving them from the old uniform necessity of growing corn for the locality.
Elsewhere, the early or late enclosure of land was in the main determined by such agricultural reasons as climate or soil. Enclosure took place first, where it paid best agriculturally. In the moister climate of the South-west and West the rigid separation of arable from pasture was unnecessary. In some parts of the country the suitability of the land for hops or fruit necessitated early enclosure. Blith's reference to the plantation of the hedgerows with fruit-trees in "Worcestershire, Hereford, and Glostershire and great part of the county of Kent" points to separate occupation in the first half of the seventeenth century. In other parts, if corn-land was more adapted to pasture, it was, under the new conditions, enclosed and laid down to grass. It was thus that the grazing districts on the water-bearing pasture belt of the Midlands, or the dairying districts of Gloucestershire or Wiltshire came into separate occupation. So also, where the soil was of a quality to respond quickly to turnips, clover, and artificial grasses, it was enclosed in order that it might profit by the new discoveries. This was the case on the light soils of Norfolk, where, as Houghton noted, turnip husbandry had been introduced with success before the close of the seventeenth century. This early use of roots is confirmed by Defoe, (A Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain,2nd edition, 1738, vol. i.) who says of Norfolk; "This part of England is remarkable for being the first where the Feeding and Fattening of Cattle, both Sheep as well as black Cattle, with Turnips, was first practis'd in England."
THE STOCK-BREEDER'S ART AND ROBERT BAKEWELL (1725-95)
Necessity for improving the live-stock of the country; sheep valued for their wool, cattle for power of draught or yield of milk; beef and mutton the growing need: Robert Bakewell the agricultural opportunist; his experiments with the Black Horse, the Leicester Longhorns, and the New Leicesters; rapid progress of stock-breeding: sacrifice of wool to mutton.
Without the aid of turnips the mere support of live-stock had been in winter and spring a difficult problem; to fatten sheep and cattle for the market was in many districts a practical impossibility. The introduction, therefore, of the field cultivation of roots, clover, and artificial grasses proved the pivot of agricultural progress. It enabled farmers to carry more numerous, bigger, and heavier stock; more stock gave more manure; more manure raised larger crops; larger crops supported still larger flocks and herds. Thus to the hopeful enthusiasts of the close of the eighteenth century the agricultural circle seemed capable of almost indefinite and always profitable expansion.
But recent improvements in arable farming could not yield their full profits till the live-stock of the country was also improved. The necessary revolution in the breeding and rearing of stock was mainly the work of Robert Bakewell (1725-95), a Leicestershire farmer, living at Dishley, near Loughborough. Its results were even more remarkable than those which followed from the new methods of Tull and Townshend. Bakewell's improvements were also more immediately accepted by agriculturists. The slow adoption of improved practices in tillage was mainly due to caution; in some degree, also, it was due to the fact that the innovators were, if not amateurs, gentlemen-farmers.*
* In 1756 or 1787 Mr. Pringle, a retired army surgeon, introduced the drilling of turnips on his estate near Coldstream. in Berwickshire. . His crops were superior to those of the neighbouring farmers. But none followed his example. In
On the other hand, the improved principles of stock-breeding were more readily accepted, not only because their superiority was at once manifest to the eye, but because they emanated from the practical brain of a professional farmer. Yet for open-field farmers they were of little value. As sheep and cattle increased in size and weight, and were bred for more speedy conversion into mutton and beef, they needed better and more abundant food than village farms could supply. Thus the improvements of Bakewell, like those of Tull and Townshend, added a new impulse to the progress of enclosures.
Up to the middle of the eighteenth century sheep had been valued, agriculturally for their manure in the fold, commercially for their skins and, above all, for their wool. Wool was in fact the chief source of trading profit to English farmers. Other forms of agricultural produce were raised as much for home consumption as for sale. But the trade in raw or manufactured wool, both at home and abroad, had been for centuries the most important of English industries. To the golden fleece the carcase was sacrificed; the mutton as food was comparatively neglected. As wool-producing animals sheep were classified into short wools and long wools. Of these two classes, short-wooled sheep were by far the most numerous, and were scattered all over England. Small in frame, active, hardy, able to pick up a living on the scantiest food, patient of hunger, they were the sheep of open-field farmers; they were the breeds formed by centuries of far travelling, close feeding on scanty pasturage, and a starvation allowance of hay in winter. Such were the "heath-croppers" of Berkshire--small ill-shaped sheep which, however, produced "very sweet mutton." In some counties, as, for instance, Buckinghamshire, open-field farmers hired sheep, with or without a shepherd, for folding on their arable land. The flocks, hired from Bagshot Heath, were fed, partly on the commons, partly on the arable fallows, where they were folded every night from April to October. No money passed. The flockmaster was paid by the feed; the farmer by the folding. The one made his profit by the wool, the other by the manure. Sometimes small men who had rights of common, or had acquired them from commoners, drove their flocks from open-field to open-field, folding them on the fallow lands of the village farm and receiving from the occupiers of the fallows 1s. a week per score or leave to graze on the commons during some part of the winter. Nearly every breeding county in England had its local favourites, adapted to their environment of soil, climate, and geographical configuration. For fineness of wool, the Ryeland or Herefordshire sheep now held the first place in the manufacture of superfine broad-cloth, though in the fourteenth century the fleece of the Morfe Common sheep of Shropshire had commanded the highest prices. Sussex South Downs, inferior in size and shape to their present type, were also famed for the excellence of their soft, fire, curly wools. Dorsets, already prized for their early lambs, supplied Ilminster with the material for its second, or livery, cloths. West-country clothiers drew their supplies, partly from Wales, partly from the large, horned, and black-faced Wiltshires, from the Exmoors, Dartmoors, or Devonshire Notts, the Mendips of Somerset, the Dean Foresters of Gloucester, or the Ryelands of Herefordshire. The eastern counties had their native short-wooled Norfolk and Suffolk breeds. The North had its Cheviots, its Northumberland Muggs, its Lancashire Silverdales, its Cumberland Herdwicks, its Cheshire Delameres. Here and there, some local breed was especially famous for the quality of its mutton, like that of Banstead or of Bagshot in Surrey, of Portland in Dorsetshire if Clun Forest in Shropshire, or of the mountain sheep of Wale.. But, speaking generally, it was by their fleeces only that sheep were distinguished. The local varieties of short-wools differed widely from one another. In appearance the long-wools were more uniform in type; all were polled, whitefaced, and white-legged; all were large-framed, and, from more abundant food, heavier in carcase and in fleece; in all the wool was long, straight, and strong. Less widely distributed than the other class, they were also by far the least numerous. In the eighteenth century they probably did not exceed more than one-fourth of the total number of sheep in the country. But the superior weight of their fleeces made their produce more than one-third of the total clip. Among the long-wools the Cotswolds were, at this time, preeminent. Other varieties, better adapted to the special conditions of their respective counties, were the Lincolns, Leicesters, Devonshire Bamptons, and the Romney Marsh sheep of Kent.
With these different breeds, both short and long wools, there was abundant scope for experiment and improvement. Some effort had been made at the close of the seventeenth century, as has been already noticed, to improve the lustrous fleeces of Lincolns, and to remedy the bareness of their legs and bellies. But, from the grazier's point of view, no breeder had yet attempted to obtain a more profitable shape. If any care was shown in the selection of rams. and ewes, the choice was guided by fanciful points which possessed no practical value. Thus Wiltshire breeders demanded a horn which fell back so as to form a semicircle, beyond which the ear projected; Norfolk flockmasters valued the length and spiral form of the horn and the blackness of the face and legs; Dorsetshire shepherds staked everything on the horn projecting in front of the ear; champions of the South Downs
condemned all alike, and made their grand objects a speckled face and leg and no horn at all.
In cattle, again, no true standard of shape was recognised. Size was the only criterion of merit. "Nothing would please," wrote George Culley in 1786, "but Elephants or Giants." The qualities for which animals were valued were not propensity to fatten or early maturity, but their milking capacity or their power of draught. The pail and the plough set the standard; the butcher was ignored. Each breeding county, however, had its native varieties, classified into Middlehorns, prevailing in the South and West of England, in Wales and in Scotland; Long-horns, in the North-west of England and the Midlands; and Short-horns, in the North-east, Yorkshire, and Durham.
The Middle-horns in the South and West of England were red cattle of a uniform type; the North Devons, nimble and free of movement, were unrivalled in the yoke; the Herefords, not yet bred with white faces, were heavier animals which fattened to a greater weight; the Sussex breed came midway in size between the two. None of the three were remarkable for the quantity of their milk. Other middle-horned breeds were the black Pembrokes, like their Cornish relatives, excellent for the small farmer, and the Red Glamorgans, which in the eighteenth century were highly esteemed as an all-round breed. Every year thousands of the black Angleseys were swum across the Menai Straits to the mainland. Scotland had its West Highlanders; its Ayrshires, second to none as milkers; its Galloways and its Anguses, originally middle-horned but now becoming polled, which were driven southwards to the October and November fairs of Norfolk and Suffolk to be fattened for the London markets. On these imported Galloways were founded the Norfolk breed of polled cattle, and the Suffolk Duns once famous all over England for their milking qualities. The North-west of England and the Midlands were occupied by the Long-horns. Of these the most celebrated were the Lancashires, or Cravens, so called from their home in the corner of the West Riding of Yorkshire which borders on Lancashire and Westmoreland. To this breed some attention had, as is noticed in the Legacie, been paid in the seventeenth century. To the same stock belonged the brindled or grizzled Staffordshires, valued, like the Cravens, for the dairy and for meat. The North of Lincolnshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire, and Durham were famous for the enormous size of their shorthorned cattle, which were extraordinary milkers. The Holderness breed, as it was called before its establishment on the banks of the Tees, were "more like an ill-made black horse than an ox or cow:" The cattle were badly shaped, long-bodied, bulky in the coarser points, small in the prime parts. But they satisfied the taste of the eighteenth century grazier, because their gigantic frames offered plenty of bone on which to lay flesh. They were undoubtedly a breed of foreign origin. Tradition relates that, towards the end of the seventeenth century, a bull and some cows were introduced into the Holderness district from the Low Countries. But the introduction must have been of an earlier date. Lawson in his New Orchard (1618) says "The goodnesse of the soile in Howle, or Hollow-, derness in Yorkshire is well knowne to all that know the River Humber and the huge bulkes of their Cattell there." It is probably to this introduction of foreign blood that Child alludes in his Letter in Hartlib's Legacie (1651), when he says that little attention was paid to breeding except in the northwestern and north-eastern counties. To the same stock belonged the "long-legged short-horn'd Cow of the Dutch breed," which Mortimer (1707) selected as the best breed for milking. Probably, also, the famous "Lincolnshire Os" was one of these Holderness Dutch-crossed animals. This beast was exhibited, as the Advertisement sets out, "with great satisfaction, at the University of Cambridge," in the reign of Queen Anne. He was "Nineteen Hands High, and Four Yards Long from his Face to his Rump. The like Beast for Bigness was never seen in the World before. Vivat Regina!"
Stock-breeding, as applied to both cattle and sheep, was the haphazard union of nobody's son with everybody's daughter. On open-field farms parish bulls were only selected for the quality in which Mr. Shandy's pet, so strenuously denounced by Obadiah, was alleged to be wanting. When prizes were offered for the longest legs, it is not surprising that all over the country were scattered tall, raw-boned, wall-sided cattle, and lean, leggy, unthrifty sheep. Our ancestors, however, were not unwise in their generation. Length of leg was necessary, when animals had to traverse miry lanes and "foundrous" highways, and roam for miles in search of food. Size of bone served the ox in good stead when he had to draw a heavy plough through stiff soil. But a time was rapidly approaching when beef and mutton were to be more necessary than power of draught or fineness of wool. Bakewell was the agricultural opportunist who saw the impending change, and knew how it should be met. By providing meat for the million, he contributed as much to the wealth of the country as Arkwright or Watt. There is some foundation for the statement that many monuments have been reared in Westminster Abbey to the memory of men who less deserved the honour than Robert Bakewell.
Cart-horses also shared Bakewell's attention. Before his day principles of breeding had been little studied except in the interests of sport. In the reign of Richard II. the principal breeding counties had been Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, and the East and West Ridings of Yorkshire. Men in armour needed big weight-carrying horses. But in the fifteenth century, horses, like the rest of English live-stock, seem to have dwindled in size. The legislature was alarmed; Henry VIII. attempted to improve their height by the importation of the best foreign breeds, and by sumptuary laws which prescribed the number and height of the horses that were to be kept by various classes of his subjects. Elizabeth's introduction of coaches created a new need; if the invention of gunpowder and the disuse of armour displaced the "great horse" in war, he found a new place between the shafts. Shakespeare's plays illustrate some of the changes which approximated the Stewart standard of horse-flesh to modern ideals. The courser, which in time of war had endured "the shock of wrathful iron arms," and in peace was the "foot-cloth " horse, and three times stumbled under Lord Hastings, gives place to the "prince of palfreys" who "trots the air" and makes the earth sing as he touches it with his elastic tread. As highways improved, travellers journeyed more easily and more often. The ambling roadster, whose artificial gait was comparatively easy, was supplanted by the hack; the coach-horse and the waggon-horse began to dispute the monopoly of the lumbering "great horse" and the pack-horse. Sport was also adapting itself to the changing conditions of society. Racing and hunting became fashionable. Though Shakespeare had heard
"of riding wagers,
When horses have been nimbler than the sands
That run i' the clock's behalf."
and was aware that "switch and spur" were plied in a "wildgoose chase" on the Cotswold Hills, he knew nothing of the modern race-course. Races, then, were trials rather of endurance than of speed. Nor was pace much needed in Tudor hunting; a "good continuer," or, as we might say, a good stayer, was more necessary. In coursing the hare, only the greyhounds must be fleeter than "poor Wat." The red deer was followed by hounds "slow of pursuit" and by men armed with leaping-poles, except on those rare occasions when the great hart was hunted "at force." At hawkings, unless the long-winged peregrine flew down wind, horsemen were not pushed to the gallop; the short-winged goshawk exacted from his pursuers no turn of speed. But as agriculture advanced, the red deer's covert was destroyed, and his extermination demanded as an inveterate foe to the crops. So, too, the sport of falconry was doomed, when hedgerows and enclosures displaced the broad expanse of open-fields, and the partridge no longer cowered in the stubble by the edge of the turf-balk under the tinkling bells of the "towering" falcon. Another beast of the chase and other means of capture were needed. Shakespeare stood on "no quillets how to slay" a fox with snares and gins. But the fox was no foe to crops; hedgerows only added zest to his pursuit; the new sport satisfied the new conditions, and demanded the production of the modern hunter.
The seventeenth century saw some of the conditions created which have developed the various types in horses of today. James I. reduced racing to rules; Charles I. established races at Newmarket; Oliver Cromwell kept his stud; Charles II. introduced the "Royal Mares." Changes in the art of war demanded a lighter and more active cavalry. Foxhunting had become a passion with the country gentry. Coaches travelled more rapidly. Oxen were less used on the farm. During the same century, foreign breeds were extensively imported. Arabs were favourites of James I. But the authority of the Duke of Newcastle, who disliked the breed, was paramount in matters of horse-flesh. Barbs, or Turks were preferred till the Godolphin and Darley Arabians proved worthy rivals to the Byerly Turk. Other breeds were largely imported from Naples, Sardinia, Spain, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Flanders, and Libya. So great was the admixture of blood, that Bradley, writing in 1727, thinks the true-bred English horse hardly exists, "unless we may account the Horses to be such that are bred wild in some of our Forests and among the Mountains." Horses intended for "the Course, the Chase, War or Travel" were already carefully studied. But horses for farm use were as yet despised. De Grey in The Complete Horseman and Expert Ferrier, 1684, speaks with contempt of horses for the cart, the plough. the pack-saddle, and Bradley ignores them altogether.
It was with the heavy Black-horse of the Midland counties that Bakewell conducted his experiments. The breed had long been known, and had doubtless helped to supply mounts to mediaeval knights. Early in the eighteenth century the breed had been improved by the importation of six Zealand mares. But the long back and long thick hairy legs were still characteristic. Defoe speaks of the Leicestershire horse as the "largest in England, being generally the great black Coach-Horses and Dray-Horses, of which so great a Number are continually brought up to London." Bakewell's object was to correct the type to that which was best suited for draft. Strength and activity rather than height and weight were his aim. In his hands the Black Horse developed a thick short carcase on clean short legs. Marshall, who visited Dishley in 1784, grows enthusiastic over "the grandeur and symmetry of form" displayed in the stallion named K. "He was, in reality, the fancied war-horse of the German painters; who, in the luxuriance of imagination, never perhaps excelled the grandeur of this horse." The Midland horses were generally sold as two-year-olds to the farmers of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire, who broke them into harness, worked them lightly on the land, and sold them at five or six to London dealers. The practice may account for some of the extravagant plough-teams, which agricultural writers of the eighteenth century often notice and condemn.
Born in 1725, Bakewell was barely twenty when he began his experiments in stock-breeding. He succeeded to the sole management of his father's farm in 1760. Ten years later, when Arthur Young, armed with an introduction from the Marquis of Rockingham, visited Dishley, Bakewell must have somewhat resembled the typical English yeoman who figures on jugs of Staffordshire pottery: "a tall, broad-shouldered, stout man of brown-red complexion, clad in a loose brown coat, scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and top-boots." Visitors from all parts of the world assembled to see his farm--his water-canals, his plough-team of cows, his irrigated meadows on which mowers were busy from May to Christmas, and, above all, his live-stock--his famous black stallion, his bull "Two-penny," and his ram "Two-pounder." All who came were astonished at the results which they saw, at the docility of the animals, at the kindness with which they were treated. But, if they hoped to learn from Bakewell's lips the principles which are now the axioms of stock-breeding, they went away disappointed. He was a keen man of business. The secrets of his success were jealously guarded, except from the old shepherd to whom they were confided. So careful was he to keep the lead in his own hands that he adopted the practice of only letting his stallions, bulls, and rams by the season, and, when his best bred sheep were past service and fatted and sold to the butcher, he is said to have infected them with the rot in order to prevent their use for breeding purposes. So reports Arthur Young in his Farmers Tour through the East of England (1771), vol. i. p. 118. Round the hall of his house were arranged skeletons of his most celebrated animals; from the walls hung joints, preserved in pickle, which illustrated such points as smallness of bone or thickness of fat. As there was no inn in the village, he seems to have kept open house for his visitors. He was never married. In his kitchen he entertained Russian princes, French and German royal dukes, British peers, and sightseers of every degree. Yet he never altered the routine of his daily life. "Breakfast at eight; dinner at one; supper at nine; bed at eleven o'clock; at half-past ten, let who would be there, he knocked out his last pipe." Very large sums of money passed through his hands. Yet, if the entry in the Gentleman's Magazine of November, 1776, refers to him, he was bankrupt in 1776, and so lavish was his hospitality that he is said to have died in poverty .
In the treatment of live-stock for the butcher Bakewell's object was to breed animals which weighed heaviest in the best joints and most quickly repaid the cost of the food they consumed. He sought to discover the animal which was the best machine for turning food into money. "Small in size and great in value," or the Holkham toast of "Symmetry well covered," was the motto of his experiments. In his view the essentials were the valuable joints, and he swept away as non-essentials all the points on which fashion or prejudice had hitherto concentrated, such as head, neck, horn, leg, or colour. The points which he wished to develop and perpetuate were beauty combined with utility of form, quality of flesh, and propensity to fatness. To attain these objects he struck out a new line for himself. Crossing was then understood to mean the mixture of two alien breeds, one of which was relatively inferior. Bakewell adopted a different principle, because he regarded this form of crossing as an adulteration rather than as an improvement. He bred in-and-in, using not merely animals of the same native breed and line of descent, but of the same family. He thus secured the union of the finest specimens of the breed which he had chosen as the best, selected for the possession of the points which he wished to reproduce or strengthen.
It was with sheep that Bakewell achieved his greatest success. When he began his stock-breeding experiments, he selected his sheep from the best animals in the neighbourhood, and a guinea, or even half a guinea, secured him his choice from the fold. The breed from which they were chosen were the Leicestershire or Warwickshire long wools. The "true old Warwickshire ram" is thus described by Marshall in 1789: "His frame large, and remarkably loose. His bone, throughout, heavy. His legs long and thick, terminating in large splaw feet. His chine, as well as his rump, as sharp as a hatchet. His skin might be said to rattle upon his ribs . . . like a skeleton wrapped in parchment." Even this animal was handsomer than a ram of the "true old Leicestershire sort," which Marshall saw in 1784. "A naturalist," he says, "would have found some difficulty in classing him; and, seeing him on a mountain, might have deemed him a nondescript; a something between a sheep and a goat." Out of these unpromising materials Bakewell succeeded in creating a new variety. His "new Leicesters" became the most profitable sheep for arable farmers. As by degrees the compactness of form, smallness of bone, fattening propensities, and early maturity were perpetuated, the breed was established, and for a time swept all competitors before them. While other breeds required three or four years to fit them for market, the New Leicesters were prepared in two. Those who tried the Dishley sheep found that they throve where others pined, that while alive they were the hardiest, and when dead the heaviest. In 1750 Bakewell let rams for the season at 16s. or 17s. 6d. apiece. In 1789 he let none under 20 guineas, and received 3000 guineas for the total of that season's letting. The New Leicesters were the first breed of sheep which were scientifically treated in England, and though they were less adapted for the southern, eastern, and northern counties, their supremacy on enclosed land in their own Midland districts was undisputed.
Bakewell raised the New Leicesters to the highest perfection. But this was not all. His breed in weight of fleece could not compete with Lincolns, and was less suited to hills or mountains than for enclosed arable land. He had, however, shown the way in which other breeds might be improved; imitation was easy. In a less immediate sense he was the creator, not only of the New Leicesters, but of the improved Lincolns, South Downs and Cheviots. Before these breeds, fitted for the most fertile grasslands and plains as well as suited to hills and mountains, native races died away, like Red Indians before the civilised intruders. But gradually supporters rallied round other varieties. Bakewell's weapons were turned against himself. Native sheep of other districts, improved on his principles, began to hold their own, and, though on historical grounds precedence will always be given to the New Leicesters and the South Downs (improved by John Ellman of Glynde, 1753-1832), it may be questioned whether they have not been rivalled and surpassed by other breeds in the qualities for which they were once pre-eminent.
In cattle-breeding Bakewell was less successful. It was his material not his system which failed. He endeavoured to found his typical race on the Lancashires or Craven Longhorns, which were the favourite cattle in Leicestershire, and, in his opinion, the best breed in England. He based his improvements on the labours of two of his predecessors. Sir Thomas Gresley of Drakelow, near Burton-on-Trent, began about 1720 the formation of a herd of Longhorns. On this Drakelow blood Webster of Canley, near Coventry, worked, and to his breed all the improved Longhorns traced their descent. Bakewell founded his experiments on a Westmoreland bull and two heifers from the Canley herd. To them he applied the same principles which he followed in sheep-breeding, and with great success. As graziers' stock, the breed was greatly improved. But as milkers, the new Longhorns were deteriorated by their increased propensity to fatness. In a county like Leicestershire, which depended not only on feeding stock but on dairy produce, this poverty of milking quality was a fatal objection. Even in his Longhorns Bakewell did not long retain the lead. It soon passed away from him to Fowler of Rollright, in Oxfordshire. But the breed itself was beaten by one which possessed superior natural qualities. Almost throughout England the Durham Shorthorns, founded on the Holderness and Teeswater cattle, jumped into the first place, as the best rent-payers, both as milkers and meat-producers. The Ketton herd of Charles Colling became to cattle-breeders what Bakewell's Dishley flock of New Leicesters were to sheep-masters. It was as necessary for a superior Shorthorn to claim descent from Colling's bull "Hubback" as for a race-horse to boast the blood of the Godolphin Arabian. From "Hubback" was descended the famous Durham ox, which travelled through England in a specially constructed carriage from 1801 to 1810, exhibiting to the eyes of thousands of farmers a truer standard of shape than any their ancestors had conceived, and convincing them by personal interviews of the excellence of the improved breed. The example was followed in many parts of the country. Other breeds, notably the Herefords and North Devons, were similarly improved. The formation of herds became a favourite pursuit of wealthy landlords. Flora MacIvor herself might have lived to see the day, when country gentlemen could become breeders of cattle, without being "boorish two-legged steers like Killancureit."
Bakewell's success and the rapidly increasing demand for butcher's meat raised up a host of imitators. Breeders everywhere followed his example; his standard of excellence was gradually recognised. The foundation of the Smithfield Club in 1798 did much to promote the improvement of live-stock. Some idea of the effect produced may be gathered from the average weights of sheep and cattle sold at Smithfield Market in 1710 and in
ARTHUR YOUNG AND THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE. 1760-1800
The counties distinguished for the best farming: Hertfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Leicestershire: the low general standard; Arthur Young; his crusade against bad farming, and the hindrances to progress; waste land; the "Goths and Vandals " of open-field farmers: want of capital and education; insecurity of tenure; prejudices and traditional practices; impassable roads; rapid development of manufacture demands a change of agricultural front: Young's advocacy of capitalist landlords and large tenant-farmers.
During the first three quarters of the eighteenth century many advances had been made in the theory, and some in the practice, of agriculture. Alternations of crops and the management of livestock were better understood. But progress was still confined to localities, if not to individuals. Only in such counties as Hertfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Leicestershire was a fair standard of farming generally established. The superior enterprise of these favoured districts was due to various causes, and was displayed in different directions.
Without any special fertility of soil, Hertfordshire had for the last hundred years enjoyed the reputation of being the best corn county in England. To some extent it owed its superiority to the neighbourhood of London. But Middlesex, which shared the same advantage, was relatively backward. In Hertfordshire roads were above the average. In Middlesex turnpike roads, in spite of a large revenue from tolls, are described as "very bad." On the main road from Tyburn to Uxbridge, in the winter of 1797-8, there was but "one passable track, and that was less than six feet wide, and was eight inches deep in fluid mud. All the rest of the road was from a foot to eighteen inches deep in adhesive mud." Hertfordshire, which had been to a great extent covered with forest, contained, at the close of the eighteenth century, few open-field farms and an inconsiderable area of commons, which were practically confined to the chalk districts in the north of the county. In Middlesex, on the other hand,
Suffolk and Essex also afforded good examples of the best English farming as it was practised at the close of the eighteenth century. Both counties had, as a whole, been enclosed for many years. Only on the poor and chalky soil of the north-western district had openfields held their own. As early as 1618, East Suffolk and Mid Suffolk were enclosed, and only "the westerne parts ether wholly champion or neer." In both counties yeomanry abounded, and in Essex the class was in 1807 still increasing according to Authur Young (North-East Essex, vol. i, p. 40) "For twenty or thirty years past scarcely an estate is sold, if divided into lots of forty or fifty to two or three hundred a year but is purchased by farmers." Both counties were centres of manufacturing industries, and in addition enjoyed the advantage of access to a great market. Suffolk supplied London with butter, Essex with calves, for which it had been famous in the seventeenth century. In both counties large quantities of manure were now used on the land. Farmers were not always so energetic. Under a lease of
"Mocks the weak effort of the bending blade,
Or in the hog-trough rests in perfect spite,
Too big to swallow and too hard to bite."
As the eighteenth century drew to a close, it was to Norfolk and to Leicestershire that men had begun to look for the best examples of arable and pasture farming. In both counties progress had been largely due to the character of the farmers, and in Norfolk to the alertness and industry of the labourers. In Norfolk, Marshall (1787) says that farmers were "strongly marked by a liberality of thinking," that they were men who had "mixed with what is called the World, of which their leases render them independent . . occupying the same position in society as the clergy and smaller squires." Many of them had prospered enough to buy their holdings, and to add to them "numerous small estates of the yeomanry." Nor is this surprising in view of the productiveness of their land under the Norfolk system of husbandry. At the end of the eighteenth century the average annual number of live-stock sent from the county to Smithfield was 20,000 cattle and 30,000 sheep. It was also stated in 1795 that as much corn was exported from the four Norfolk ports of Yarmouth, Lynn, Wells, and Blakeney, as was sent abroad from the whole of the rest of England. In Leicestershire, again, "yeomanry of the higher class" abounded. "Men cultivating their own estates of two, three, four or five hundreds a year are thickly scattered over almost every part of the country"; they had "travelled much and mixed constantly with one another." In both Leicestershire and Norfolk the special branches of farming which were generally followed brought agriculturists into contact with their rivals, compelled them to be wide-awake, and sharpened their intelligence. Both were occupied in fattening stock for town markets, the Leicestershire men on pasture breeding their own stock, the Norfolk farmers on arable land buying their cattle from Scottish drovers. In one important respect there was a wide difference in their development. In Norfolk, great landowners, like Lord Townshend and, later, Coke of Norfolk, took the lead in improvement, tested for the benefit of their tenants the value of the new arable methods, encouraged them by long leases to follow their example, and by high rents made imitation compulsory. In Leicestershire, on the other hand, large landlords were few and had given no lead; the example was set by large tenan-tfarmers or substantial yeomen.
Other counties had adopted other useful practices which had scarcely spread beyond their borders. Thus Lancashire excelled in the cultivation of potatoes; Middlesex was celebrated for the art and practice of haymaking; Wiltshire for the irrigation and treatment of water-meadows; Cheshire for its management of dairy produce; Yorkshire farmers round Sheffield had tested the value of bone-dust, many years before the value of the manure was known in other districts. But there is some evidence that other counties had rather fallen back than advanced. This is especially true of Cambridgeshire, which enjoyed the reputation of being the worst cultivated county in England. It will probably be true to say that the country as a whole had made no general advance on the agriculture of the thirteenth century. The stagnation was mainly due to the prevalence of wastes, the system of open-field farming, the risk of loss of capital in improvements made under tenancies-at-will, the poverty and ignorance of hand-to-mouth farmers, the obstinacy of traditionary practices, the want of markets, and difficulties of communication. Till these obstacles were to some extent overcome, agricultural progress could not become general. It is with the removal of these hindrances that the name of Arthur Young is inseparably connected.
Born in London in 1741, Arthur Young was the younger son of the Rev. Arthur Young, who owned a small estate of
*A Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales (1768); A Six Months' Tour through the North of England (1770), 4 vols.; The Farmer's Tour through the East of England (1771), 4 vols.; Tour in Ireland, 1776-7-8 (1780), 2 vols.; Travels during the Years 1787, '88, '89 and 1790, undertaken more Particularly with a view of ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France (1792-4), 2 vols.
His careless ease of style, his racy forcible English, his gift of happy phrases, his quick observation, his wealth of miscellaneous detail, make him the first of English agricultural writers. Apart from the value of the facts which they contain, his tours, with their fresh word-pictures, their gossip, their personal incidents, and even their irrelevancies, have the charm of private diaries. His Ireland was described by Maria Edgeworth as "the first faithful portrait of the inhabitants," and his France was recognised by Tocqueville as a first-hand authority on the rural conditions of the country on the eve of the Revolution. In 1784 he began his Annals of Agriculture, a monthly publication to which George III., under the name of his shepherd at Windsor, "Ralph Robinson," occasionally contributed. The magazine was continued till 1809, when, owing to failing eyesight, Young discontinued its publication. He had written more than a quarter of the forty-six volumes himself.
Young had now succeeded, on the death of his mother in 1785, to the Bradfield estate, his elder brother having broken his neck in the hunting-field. His Travels in France show that he sympathised with the peasants in their early efforts to free themselves from the ancien régime. But the subsequent course of the Revolution filled him with horror. In 1793, he wrote an effective pamphlet on The Example of France a Warning to Great Britain, urged the formation of a "militia of property," and himself joined the Suffolk yeomanry. In the same year Pitt established the Board of Agriculture, with Sir John Sinclair as President. Arthur Young was appointed Secretary with a salary of £400 a year and, later, an official residence in Sackville Street, London. One of the first objects of the Board was to collect information respecting the agricultural conditions of each county. For this purpose Commissioners were appointed. They were not always wisely selected; but for this choice, against which Young protested, the President was responsible. Their Reports were severely criticised by William Marshall* (1745-1818), an embittered, disappointed man, who had himself originally suggested the establishment of the Board and the compilation of the surveys. But, with all their faults, the reporters collected a mass of valuable information on the state of farming from 1793 to 1813. Six of the surveys were by Young himself, and his Report on Oxfordshire was almost his last literary work.
* Marshall's General Survey . . of the Rural Economy of England has been frequently quoted. His valuable records fill twelve volumes published between 1787 and 1798, two volumes being allotted to each of the six departments into which he divides the country: (1) the Eastern: Norfolk, 2 vols. (1787); (2) the Northern: Yorkshire, 2 vols. (1788); (3) the West Central: Gloucestershire, North Wilts, and Herefordshire, 2 vols. (1789); (4) the Midland: Leicestershire, etc., 2 vols. (1790); (5) the Western: Devonshire and parts of Soersetshire, Dorsetshire, and Cornwall, 2 vols. (1796); (6) the Southern: Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire, 2 vols. (1798). Of the first ten volumes a second edition was published in
Marshall has none of the charm of Young. He is a heavy, didactic writer.But his system is better; his generalisations are more conclusive, and less contradictory; his facts are better arranged; he was, also, a better farmer. A zealous collector of "provincialisms" of speech, he gives lists of the local words which he found in use in the Northern, Midland, and West Central departments, and appends them, with a glossary, to the volumes to which they relate. Besides the Rural Economy, he published numerous other works, chiefly on agriculture.
Young was a man of strong prejudices. He was also wanting in power of generalisation. But he worked untiringly for what he believed to be the progress of good farming. On this object were concentrated the chief labours of his life--his enquiries, experiments, researches, his collections of statistics, his notes of useful practices, his observations on new methods. His eager face, with its keen eyes and aquiline features, expressed the vivacity of his temperament, just as his tall slender figure indicated the restless activity of his body. A gay and charming companion, his enthusiasms were infectious. He was the soul and inspiration of the progressive movement. To him, more than to any other individual, were due the dissemination of new ideas on farming, the diffusion of the latest results of observation and experiment, the creation of new agencies for the interchange of experiences, the establishment of farmers' clubs, ploughing matches, and agricultural societies and sows. His married life was not happy; but his wife was not entirely to blame. An affectionate father, his whole heart was given to his youngest daughter (Martha Ann, born 1783, died 1797) nicknamed "Bobbin." Versailles did not afford him so much pleasure as giving to the child a French doll. Her death broke down his health and spirits. Grief deepened into religious melancholy. His gloom was intensified by failing eyesight. In 1811 he became totally blind. Nine years later (1820), he died in London.
When Young began to write on agriculture, vast districts, which might have been profitably cultivated, still lay waste. Of the area already under tillage, a large proportion lay in open-fields. Under this system, whatever might be the differences or capacities of the soil, the whole of the land, with rare exceptions, was placed under the same unvarying rotation. It was this inability to put land to its best use which especially roused Young's indignation. When he made his Eastern Tour in 1770, he found nearly all the Vale of Aylesbury cultivated in arable open-fields, lying in broad, high, crooked ridges. The course of cropping was (1) Fallow, (2) Wheat or Barley, (3) Beans. The land was ploughed from two to four inches deep, and five horses were used to each plough. Beans were sown broadcast, and never hoed. Drainage was badly needed, for the ridge system had failed. But the lands were so intermixed that any other system was difficult, if not impossible. Even in June, only the tops of the ridges were dry, and, in the winter, most of the land, crops and all, were soaked with water. As a result, the products were as bad as the land was good. The Vale of Aylesbury farmers, whom Ellis (1733) describes as "one of the most obstinate bigotted sort," "reap bushels where they should reap quarters." Both in Buckinghamshire and in Northamptonshire, the cow-dung was collected from the fields, mixed with short straw, kneaded into lumps, daubed on the walls of buildings, and, when dry, used as fuel. "There cannot," says Young, "be such an application of manure anywhere but among the Hottentots." (It was no uncommon practice. Edward Laurence suggests [1727] that "Cow-dung not to be burnt for fuel " should be inserted as a restrictive covenant in all leases. He mentions Yorkshire and Lincolnshire as counties where dung was frequently used as fuel.) Naseby Field in 1770 consisted of
Other instances might be quoted to show the general condition of open-field farms. But the system had its champions, even among practical agriculturists, especially if they were flock-masters. It cannot, therefore, always have been characterised by the worst farming. No doubt lower depths might be reached. If severalty made a good farmer better, it also made a bad farmer worse. Nor was the system altogether incapable of improvement. Here and there Young or Marshall alludes to some useful practice adopted on village farms. For instance, Young speaks of the drainage of common pastures by very large ploughs belonging to the parish, cutting
Even when a tenant-farmer possessed both enterprise and capital, the method of land-tenure discouraged improvement. Without some security for his outlay, no tenant could venture to spend money on his land. At the same time he was often expected to make improvements which now are considered the duty of a landlord and parts of the necessary equipment of a farm. Yet the commonest forms of tenure were lettings from year to year, voidable on either side, as they then were, at six months' notice. In the eastern counties leases for terms of years, with covenants for management, were in the last half of the century becoming a usual form of letting. But elsewhere long leases were regarded with justifiable suspicion by both parties. Tenants objected to them, because they bound them to take land for a long period before they knew what the land would do, and to make fixed annual payments based on current prices which might not be maintained. Landlords also objected to them, because they deprived owners of the advantages of a rise in prices, and "told the farmer when he might begin systematically to exhaust the land." Where a good understanding existed between landlords and tenants, leases were not indispensable. Land was often farmed on verbal agreements. Ordinary tenancies-at-will secured Berkshire and Nottinghamshire farmers in their holdings from generation to generation. Under the same tenancy, on the Duke of Devonshire's estates in Derbyshire, tenants even carried out costly and permanent improvements. Often, however, the uncertainty of this form of tenure checked enterprise; because of it, also, tenants fell into the routine of the district and plodded along in the beaten track trodden by their ancestors. Sometimes the uncertainty was a real insecurity. Thus, in Yorkshire, in 1787, Marshall notices that confidence between landlord and tenant had been destroyed by successive rises in rents. "Good farming ceased, for fear the fields should look green and the rent be raised." Local rhymes expressed the popular belief that he "that havocs may sit," while the improving tenant must either pay increased rent or "flit." Leases for lives were common, especially in the south-western counties. They gave a fixity of tenure; but they were necessarily, both for tenant and landlord, somewhat of a gambling speculation. Fourteen years' purchase of the rental value was the usual price for a lease of three lives. The initial outlay crippled the first tenant, and, only if the lives proved good, was the purchase remunerative. On the other hand, the landlord was often obliged, as the third life drew towards its close, to put himself in as sub-tenant to save his land from exhaustion and his buildings from ruin. Leases for very short terms were not infrequent. On open-field farms in Bedfordshire and Huntingdon the term was three years, in Durham six years, corresponding to the completion of one or two courses of the ordinary three-shift routine. But in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, leases for 7, 14, and 21 years became more common. Even longer terms were often granted, as the enthusiasm for improvement extended. Tenants under long leases throve on rents fixed before the high prices during the Napoleonic war; but after 1813 the position was disastrously reversed. Prudent men had taken their money out. The sufferers were new men, who had enjoyed none of the advantages of the system; they were its victims, never its beneficiaries. Two of the difficulties by which the tenure is embarrassed were already becoming important, if not burning, questions--the compensation for unexhausted improvements, and the covenants imposed by landlords. Some of the restrictions imposed by leases were a bar to progress. Leicestershire graziers, for example, were crippled by the absolute prohibition of arable farming; they were forced either to sell off their stock at Michaelmas when it was cheapest, or to buy winter-keep from Hertfordshire. On the other hand, covenants of a reasonable nature proved invaluable in lifting the standard of a stationary agriculture, and raising farming to a higher level.
Other formidable obstacles to progress lay in the mass of local prejudices and the obstinate adherence to antiquated methods. All over the country there were men like the "round-frocked" farmers of Surrey, who prided themselves on preserving the practices and dress of their forefathers, men of "inflexible honesty," enemies equally to "improvements in agriculture" and to the commercial morality of a new generation. Reforming agriculturists no doubt were too ready to ignore the solid basis of sound sense and experience which often underlay practices that in theory were objectionable. In their excuse it may be urged that their patience was sorely tried. Traditional methods were treasured with jealous care as agricultural heirlooms; even ocular proof of the superiority of other systems failed to wean farmers from the routine of their ancestors. In 1768 turnips and clover were still unknown in many parts of the country; and their full use only appreciated in the eastern counties. In some districts, as in Essex (1808), clover had been adopted with such zeal that the land was already turning sick; in others it was scarcely tried. In Westmoreland, for instance, in 1794, "the prejudice that exists almost universally against clover and rye-grass" was said to be "a great obstacle to the improvement of the husbandry of the county." In Cumberland, where clover had been introduced in 1752, it was still rare in 1797. Turnips remained, at the close of the eighteenth century, an "alien crop" in many counties, such as Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Glamorganshire, and Worcestershire. Even where they were grown, they were generally sown broadcast, and seldom hoed. In
The backwardness of many agricultural counties was to some extent due to difficulties of communication. By the creation of Turnpike Trusts (1663 and onwards) portions of the great highways were placed in repair. Yet in the eighteen miles of turnpike road between Preston and Wigan, Young in 1770 measured ruts "four feet deep and floating with mud only from a wet summer," and passed three broken-down carts. "I know not in the whole range of language," he says, "terms sufficiently expressive to describe this infernal road. Let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally propose to travel this terrible country to avoid it as they would the devil, for a thousand to one they break their necks or their limbs, by overthrows or breakings down." The turnpike road to Newcastle from the south seems to have been equally dangerous. "A more dreadful road," he says, "cannot be imagined. I was obliged to hire two men at one place to support my chaise from overturning. Let me persuade all travellers to avoid this terrible country, which must either dislocate their bones with broken pavements, or bury them in muddy sand." The turnpike road from Chepstow to Newport was a rocky lane, "full of hugeous stones, as big as one's horse, and abominable holes." Marshall says that the Leicestershire roads, till about 1770, had been "in a state of almost total neglect since the days of the Mercians." The principal road from Tamworth to Ashby lay, in 1789, "in a state almost impassable several months in the year." Waggons were taken off their wheels and dragged on their bellies. Essex, in the time of Fitzherbert, was famous for the badness of its roads. In the eighteenth century it worthily maintained its reputation. "A mouse could barely pass a carriage in its narrow lanes," which were filled with bottomless ruts, and often choked by a string of chalk waggons, buried so deeply in the mire that they could only be extricated by thirty or forty horses. "Of all the cursed roads that ever disgraced this kingdom in the very age of barbarism none ever equalled that from Billericay to the 'King's Head' at Tilbury" was the suffering cry of Young in 1769. The roads of Herefordshire, says Marshall, twenty years later, were "such as you might expect to find in the marshes of Holland or the mountains of Switzerland." In Devonshire, which Marshall considered to be agriculturally the most benighted district of England, there was not in 1750 one single wheeled carriage; everything wan carried in sledges or on pack-horses. The latter were still in universal use in 1796. Crops were piled between willow "crooks," to which the load was bound; manure was carried in strong panniers, or "potts," the bottom of which was a sort of falling door; sand was slung in bags across the wooden packsaddle. Even where efforts were made to improve the highways, the attempt was often rendered useless by ignorance of the science of road-making. Some roads were convex and barrel-shaped. But the fall from the centre of the road to the sides was so rapid that carts could only travel in the centre with safety. Many roads were concave, constructed in the form of a trough, filled in with sand. In wet weather this deposit became porridge. On a road of this formation between Woodstock and Oxford, Marshall, in 1789, encountered labourers employed in "scooping out the batter." Yet in spite of the difficulty of communication, distant counties carried on a considerable trade in agricultural produce. Thus calves, bred in Northamptonshire, were sent to Essex to be reared. The animals travelled in carts with their legs tied together, were eight days on the road, and during the journey were fed with "gin-balls," i.e. flour and gin mixed together. Off the main lines of communication, highways were unmetalled tracks, which spread in width as vehicles deviated to avoid the ruts of their predecessors. By-roads were often zigzag lanes, engineered on the principle that one good or bad turn deserved another. In narrow ways the bells on the teams were not merely ornaments; they were warnings that the passage was barred by the entry of another vehicle. When rural districts were thus cut off from one another, their isolation was not only a formidable obstacle to agricultural progress, but made a uniform system of growing corn on every kind of land a practical necessity. Yet the days when Gloucester seemed "in the Orcades," and York a "Pindarick flight" from London had their advantages. In 1800 it required fifty-four hours, and favourable circumstances, for "a philosopher, six shirts, his genius, and his hat upon it," to reach London from Dublin.
Shut off from neighbours by impassable roads, impeded in their access to markets, not ambitious of raising from the soil anything beyond their own needs and the satisfaction of the local demand for bread, farmers felt no spur to improvement. Hitherto the slow increase of a rural population was the only effective incentive to increased production. But as the eighteenth century drew to its close, Watt, Hargreaves, Crompton, Arkwright, and other mechanical geniuses were beginning to change the face of society with the swiftness of a revolution. Population was shifting from the South to the North, and advancing by leaps and bounds in crowded manufacturing towns. Huge markets were springing up for agricultural produce. Hitherto there had been few divisions of employment because only the simplest implements of production were used; spinners, weavers, and cloth-workers, iron-workers, handicraftsmen, had combined much of their special industries with the tillage of the soil. But the rapid development of manufacture caused its complete separation from agriculture, and the application of machinery to manual industries completed the revolution in social arrangements. A division of labour became an economic necessity. Farmers and manufacturers grew mutually dependent. Self-sufficing farming was thrown out of date. Like manufacture, agriculture was ceasing to be a domestic industry. Both had to be organised on a commercial footing. The problem was, how could the inevitable changes be met best and most promptly? How could a country at war with Europe raise the most home-grown food for a rapidly growing population, concentrated in the coal and iron fields? How could agriculture supply the demand for artisan labour, and yet increase its own productiveness? Arthur Young was, at this period of his career, ready with an unhesitating answer--large farms, large capital, long leases, and the most improved methods of cultivation and stock-breeding. His object was to develop to the utmost the resources of the soil. To this end all social considerations must be subordinated. Every obstacle to good farming must be swept away--wastes reclaimed, commons divided, open-fields converted into individual occupations, antiquated methods abandoned, obsolete implements scrapped, improved practices uniformly adopted. "Where," he asks, with perfect truth, "is the little farmer to be found who will cover his whole farm with marl at the rate of 100 or 150 tons per acre? who will drain all his land at the expense of £2 or £3 an acre? who will pay a heavy price for the manure of towns, and convey it thirty miles by land carriage? who will float his meadows at the expense of £5 an acre? who, to improve the breed of his sheep, will give 1000 guineas for the use of a single ram for a single season? who will send across the Kingdom to distant provinces for new implements, and for men to use them? who will employ and pay men for residing in provinces where practices are found which they want to introduce into their farms?"
Young's spirited crusade against bad or poor farming would probably have fallen on deaf ears, if it had not been supported by the prospect of financial gain and by the impulse of industrial necessities. As he put the case, more produce from the land meant higher rents for the landlord, larger incomes for farmers, better wages for labourers, more home-grown food for the nation. Under the pressure of war-prices and of the gigantic growth of a manufacturing population, the system which he advocated made rapid progress. Years after his death, it was established with such completeness that men forgot not only the existence of any different conditions, but even the very name of the most active pioneer of the change. In the agricultural literature of the early and middle Victorian era, he is almost ignored. The article on English agriculture in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, for example, devotes only a few lines to his career. Recently his memory has been revived in England by the renewal under different circumstances of the struggle between large and small farmers. In France, on the other hand, where the contest between capitalist farmers and peasant proprietors was never decisively terminated, the discussion has always centred round his name. In the words of Lesage, his latest editor and translator, France has made an adopted child of Arthur Young.
LARGE FARMS AND CAPITALIST FARMERS 1780-1813
The enthusiasm for farming progress, which Arthur Young zealously promoted, spread with rapidity. A fashion was created which was more lasting, because less artificial and more practical, than it had been in the days of Pope. Great landlords took the lead in agricultural improvements. Their farming zeal did not escape criticism. Dr. Edwards' Plan of an Undertaking for the Improvement of Husbandry etc. in 1783 expressed a feeling which was prevalent two centuries before: "Gentlemen have no right to be farmers; and their entering upon agriculture to follow it as a business is perhaps a breach of their moral duty." But it was now that young men, heirs to landed estates as well as younger sons, began to go as pupils to farmers. George III. rejoiced in the title of "Farmer George," considered himself more indebted to Arthur Young than to any man in his dominions, carried the last volume of the Annals with him in his travelling carriage, kept his model farm at Windsor, formed his flock of merino sheep, and experimented in stock-breeding. The Duke of Bedford at Woburn, Lord Rockingham at Wentworth, Lord Egremont at Petworth, Coke at Holkham, and numerous other landlords, headed the reforming movement. Fox, even in the Louvre, was lost in consideration whether the weather was favourable to his turnips at St. Anne's Hill. Burke experimented in carrots as a field crop on his farm at Beaconsfield, though he pointed his sarcasms against the Duke of Bedford for his devotion to agriculture. Lord Althorp, in the nineteenth century, maintained the traditions of his official predecessors. During a serious crisis of affairs, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Grey of Dilston called upon him in Downing Street on political business. Lord Althorp's first question, eagerly asked, was "Have you been at Wiseton on your way up? Have you seen the cows?" The enthusiasm for farming began to be scientific as well as practical. No new book escaped the vigilance of agriculturists. Miss Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls (1802) had scarcely been published a week before it was ordered by the secretary of an agricultural society. Nor were the clergy less zealous. An archdeacon, finding a churchyard cultivated for turnips, rebuked the rector with the remark, "This must not occur again." The reply, "Oh no, Mr. Archdeacon, it will be barley next year," shows that, whatever were the shortcomings of the Church, the eighteenth century clergy were at least devoted to the rotation of crops.
Every department of agriculture was permeated by a new spirit of energy and enterprise. Rents rose, but profits outstripped the rise. New crops were cultivated; swedes, mangel-wurzel, kohl rabi, prickly comfrey were readily adopted by a new race of agriculturists. Breeders spent capital freely in improving live-stock. New implements were introduced. The economy and handiness of ploughs like the Norfolk, or the Rotherham ploughs as improved by James Small of Blackadder Mount, were gradually recognised, and the cumbrous mediaeval instruments with their extravagant teams superseded. Meikle's threshing machine (1784) began to drive out the flail by its economy of human labour. Numerous patents were taken out between 1788 and 1816 for drills, reaping, mowing, haymaking, and winnowing machines, as well as for horse-rakes, scarifiers, chaff-cutters, turnip-slicers, and other mechanical aids to agriculture. In the northern counties iron gates and fences began to be used. The uniformity of weights and measures was eagerly discussed and recommended. Cattle-shows, wool-fairs, ploughingmatches were held in various parts of the country. Counties, like Durham, Northumberland, Cheshire, and Leicestershire, started experimental farms. The short-lived Society of "Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture" had been formed in 1723. The Society for the "Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce" was instituted in London in 1754. Other associations, more exclusively agricultural, speedily followed The Bath and West of England Society was founded in 1777, the Highland Society m 1784, the Smithfield Club in 1798. The creation of the Board of Agriculture in 1793 has been already mentioned. The Farmers' Club was established in 1793. The first number of the Farmer's Magazine which appeared in January, 1800, rapidly passed through five editions. Provincial societies multiplied. At Lewes, in 1772, Lord Sheffield had established a Society for the "Encouragement of Agriculture, Manufacture and Industry"; but it does not seem to have survived the war with France and the United States. Few counties were without their organisations for the promotion of agricultural improvement. One of the first was established at Odiham in Hampshire. Kent had its agricultural society at Canterbury (1793) and the Kentish Society at Maidstone. In Cornwall (1793), Berkshire (1794), Shropshire (1790), at Shifnal and at Drayton in Leicestershire (1794), in Herefordshire (1797), provincial societies were founded. The West Riding of Yorkshire had its society at Sheffield, Lancashire at Manchester, Worcestershire at Evesham (1792), Huntingdonshire at Kimbolton. In Northamptonshire similar associations were formed at Peterborough, Wellingborough and Lamport. The list might be enlarged. But, though many of these societies were short-lived, their foundation illustrates the new spirit which animated farming at the close of the eighteenth century.
The period from 1780 to 1813 was one of exceptional activity in agricultural progress. Apart from the flowing tide of enthusiasm, landlords and farmers were spurred to fresh exertions and a great outlay of capital and labour by the large returns on their expenditure. All over the country new facilities of transport and communication began to bring markets to the gates of farmers; new tracts of land were reclaimed; open arable farms and pasture commons were broken up, enclosed, and brought into more profitable cultivation; vast sums of money were spent on buildings and improvement. In spite of increased production, prices rose higher and higher, and carried rents with them. "Corn," says Ricardo, "is not high because a rent is paid; but a rent is paid because corn is high." In certain circumstances--if the State is landlord, or if landowners could combine for the purpose--rents might raise prices. But the general truth of Ricardo's view was illustrated during the French War. From 1790 to 1813, rents rose with the rise in prices, until over a great part of Great Britain they were probably doubled. Even the larger yield from the land under improved methods of cultivation did not cheapen produce, reduce prices, and so cause lower rents. On the contrary, prices were not only maintained, but continued to rise.
This continuously upward tendency in prices was unprecedented. It cannot be attributed to the operation of the Corn Laws. Down to 1815 that legislation had scarcely affected prices at all, and therefore could not influence rents. The rise was rather due to a variety of causes, some of which were exceptional and temporary. A series of unprosperous seasons prevailed over the whole available corn-area of Northern Europe. In England deficient harvests, though the shortage was to some extent mitigated by the increased breadth under corn, reduced the home supply at a time when the growth of an artisan population increased the demand. The country throughout these years either stood, or thought that it stood, on the verge of famine. Prices were raised by panic-stricken competition. As the area of the war extended, foreign supplies became less and less available. The enormous increase in the war-charges for freight and insurance made Great Britain more and more dependent on her own produce. Necessity compelled the full development of her existing resources, as well as the resort to inferior land. Larger supplies of home-grown corn could only be obtained either by improved methods of cultivation or by bringing untilled land under the plough. The one method powerfully stimulated the progress of agriculture, which may be summed up in increasing the yield and lowering the cost of production; the other was the valid justification of the rapid enclosure of wastes, open-fields, and commons. Much of the land that now was sown with corn could only be tilled at a profit when prices were high, because the outlay on its tillage was greater, and the return from its cultivation was less, than on ordinary land. Yet, as prices then stood, even this inferior soil was able to bear a rent, and by each step towards the margin of cultivation, the rental value of land of better quality was enhanced. Thus Napoleon proved to be the Triptolemus or patron saint not only of farmers but of landlords.
Another cause of the high prices of the time was the state of the currency. When gold is cheap, commodities are dear. Any great increase in the production of gold for a time raises prices; the sovereign becomes of less relative value; it buys less than before, and more gold has to be paid for the same quantity. But this direct effect of gold discoveries was not then in operation; it had spent its force, and at the close of the eighteenth century did not materially affect prices. Similar results were, however, produced by the immense extension of that system of deferred payment which is called credit. Paper money was issued in excessive quantities, not only by the Bank of England but by the private banks all over the country. A new medium of exchange was created. This addition to the circulating medium raised prices in the same kind of way as an actual addition to the quantity of coin. But there was this important difference. Paper money is only a promise to pay; it is only representative money, and, unless it is convertible into gold, the credit which it creates is fictitious and may be excessive. The immense development of manufacturing industries and of the canal system, in the years 1785-92, required increased facilities for carrying on commercial transactions. But bankers, in their eagerness to create business, made advances on insufficient or inconvertible securities, discounted bills without regard to the actual value of the commodities on which the transactions were based, and issued notes far beyond the amount which their actual funds justified. In 1793 came the first crash. The Bank of England, warned by the fall of the exchanges and the outflow of gold, restricted their issue of notes. A panic followed. Out of 350 country banks in England and Wales, more than 100 stopped payment; their promises to pay were repudiated; and their paper was destroyed at the expense of the holder. The ruin and the loss of confidence were widespread; those who escaped the crash hoarded their money instead of making investments in mercantile undertakings. But the destruction of so much paper temporarily restored the proportion between the gold in the country and the paper by which it was represented.
In
Under the Bank Restriction Act of 1797, the Bank of England suspended payment in coin. In other words a paper currency was created which was not convertible into gold. The Act was originally a temporary expedient. But it was not till 1821 that the bank completely resumed payment in specie. No doubt the effect of the Act was to aggravate the tendency of prices to rise. Yet the measure was probably justified by the exceptional circumstances of the war and of trade. It supplied the Government with gold for the expenses of our own expeditionary forces, as well as for the payment of subsidies to our allies. It also enabled the country to carry on the one-sided system of trade to which we were gradually reduced by the Continental blockade. Our exports of manufactured goods were excluded from European ports. Consequently the materials which we imported were paid for in cash instead of in goods, and the vessels which conveyed them to our ports returned in ballast. There was thus a constant drain of gold from the country. So long as the power to issue inconvertible notes was sparingly used, the paper currency maintained its nominal value. But from 1808 onwards such large quantities of paper were issued, not only by the Bank of England but by country banks, that it rapidly depreciated as compared with gold. It is probable that from 1811 to 1813 one-fifth of the enormous prices of agricultural produce were due to the disordered state of the currency. In 1814, owing partly to the abundant harvest of the previous year, partly to the collapse of the Continental blockade, prices rapidly fell. A financial crash followed which caused even more widespread ruin in country districts than the paroxysm of 1793. Of the country banks, 240 stopped payment, and 89 became bankrupt. The result was a wholesale destruction of bank-paper, the reduction of thousands of families from wealth to destitution, and the gradual restoration of the equilibrium of the currency.
The seasons, the war, the growth of population, the disorders of the currency, combined to raise and maintain at a high level the prices of agricultural produce in Great Britain. At the same time the prohibitive cost of transport prevented such foreign supplies as were then available from reducing the prices of home-grown corn. Circumstances thus gave British agriculturists a monopoly, which, after 1815, they endeavoured to preserve by legislation. Land was not only a most profitable investment, but the fate of speculators had again and again convinced both landlords and tenants that land was the safest bank. Thus business caution, as well as business enterprise, prompted the outlay of capital on agricultural improvement. Economic ideas pointed in the same direction. The doctrine of John Locke, that high rents were a symptom of prosperity still prevailed among politicians. It was also maintained that high rents were a necessary spur to agricultural progress. So long as land remained cheap, farmers rested satisfied with antiquated practices; the dearer the land, the more energetic and enterprising they necessarily became. Young went so far as to say that the spendthrift, who frequented London club-houses and raised rents to pay his debts of honour, was a greater benefactor to agriculture than the stay-at-home squire who lived frugally in order to keep within his ancestral income. No economist of the day had conceived any other method of satisfying the wants of a growing population except by improving the existing practices of farmers or bringing fresh tracts of land under the plough. Advanced Free Traders like Porter* never imagined that a progressive country could become dependent on foreign nations for its daily food. It was to the continuous improvement in agricultural methods that he looked for the means of supplying a population, which, he calculated, would, at the end of the nineteenth century, exceed 40 millions. Nor did he entertain any doubt that, by the progress of skill and enterprise, the quantity raised in 1840 could be increased by the requisite 150 per cent.
* "To supply the United Kingdom with the single article of wheat would call for the employment of more than twice the amount of shipping which now annually enters our ports, if indeed it would be possible to procure the grain from other countries in sufficient quantity ; and to bring to our shores every article of agricultural produce in the abundance which we now enjoy, would probably give constant occupation to the mercantile navy of the whole world." (Progress of the Nation, ed. 1847, p. 136).
Encouraged by high profits, approved by economists, justified by necessity, agriculture advanced rapidly on the new lines of large farms and large capital. The change was one side of a wider movement. In the infancy of agriculture and of trade, self-supporting associations had been formed for mutual defence and protection. Manorial organisations like trade guilds had begun to break up, when the central power was firmly established. Now, once more, agriculture and manufacture were simultaneously reorganised. Division of labour had become a necessity. Domestic handicrafts were gathered into populous manufacturing centres, which were dependent for food on the labour of agriculturists. Farms ceased to be self-sufficing industries, and became factories of beef and mutton. The pressure of these conditions demanded the utmost development of the resources of the soil. The cultivation of additional land by the most improved methods grew more and more necessary.
Enclosures went on apace. Yet, even in favourable seasons, it was a struggle to keep pace with growing needs; scarcity, if not famine, resulted from deficiency. During part of the period, foreign supplies might be relied on to avert the worst. But throughout the Napoleonic wars this resource grew yearly more uncertain and more costly. The pace of enclosure was immensely accelerated. In the first 33 years of the reign of George III., there were 1355 Acts passed; in the 23 years of the wars with France (1793-1815) there were 1934. It is easy to attribute the great increase of enclosures during this last period solely to the greed of landlords, eager to profit by the high prices of agricultural produce. That the land would not have been brought into cultivation unless it paid to do so, may be admitted. But it must in justice be remembered that an addition to the cultivated area was, in existing circumstances, one of the two methods, which at that time were alone available, of increasing the supply of food, averting famine, and reducing prices. Economically, enclosures can be justified. But the processes by which they were sometimes carried out were often indefensible, and socially their effects were disastrous. On these points more will be said subsequently. Here it will be enough to reiterate the statement that enclosure meant not merely reclamation of waste ground, but partition of the commons and extinction of the open-field system. It has been suggested, on the authority of passages in his tract on Wastes, that Arthur Young learned to deplore his previous crusade against village farms, when he saw the effect of enclosures on rural life. What Young deplored was the loss of a golden opportunity of attaching land to the home of the cottager. But he never faltered in his conviction of the necessity of breaking up the open-fields and dividing the commons. In the tract on Wastes he emphatically asserts his wish to see all commons enclosed, and he was too great a master of his subject not to know that without pasture the arable village farms must inevitably perish.
The other method of increasing the food supplies of the country consisted of agricultural improvements. Here also the preparation of the ground involved changes which bore hardly on small occupiers of land. The new system of farming required large holdings, to which a new class of tenant of superior education and intelligence was attracted. It was on these holdings that capital could be expended to the greatest advantage, that meat and corn could be grown in the largest quantities, that most use could be made of those mechanical aids which cheapened production. Costly improvements could not be carried out by small hand-to-mouth occupiers, even if their obstinate adherence to antiquated methods would have allowed them to contemplate the possibility of change.
But this consolidation of holdings threw into the hands of one tenant land which had previously been occupied by several. If the land was laid down to grass, and in the case of heavy land, down to 1790, this was the most profitable form of enclosure, there was also a diminution in the demand for labour, and a consequent decrease in the population of the village. If, on the other hand, the land was cultivated as an arable farm, there was probably a greater demand for labour and possibly an increase in the numbers of the rural population. Arthur Young in Inquiry into the Propriety of applying Wastes to the Better Maintenance and Support of the Poor, 1801, shows that, out of 37 enclosed parishes in an arable county like Norfolk, population had risen in 24, fallen in 8, and remained stationary in 5. It cannot therefore be said that either enclosures, or the consolidation of holdings, necessarily depopulated country villages. Whether this result followed, or did not follow, depended on the use to which the land was put, though even on arable farms the gradual introduction of machinery, at present limited to the threshing machine, tended to diminish the demand for labour.
If the country was to be fed, more scientific methods of farming were necessary. The need was pressing, and both enclosures and the consolidation of large farms prepared the way for a new stage of agricultural progress. Hitherto bucolic life had been the pastime of a fashionable world, the relaxation of statesmen, the artificial inspiration of poets. But farmers had neither asked nor allowed scientific aid. The dawn of a new era, in which practical experience was to be combined with scientific knowledge, was marked by the lectures of Humphry Davy in
In Thomas Coke of Norfolk the new system of large farms and large capital found their most celebrated champion. In 1776, at the age of twenty-two, he came into his estate with "the King of Denmark" as "his nearest neighbour." Wealthy, devoted to field sports, and already Member of Parliament for Norfolk, it seemed improbable that he would find time for farming. But as an ardent Whig and a prominent supporter of Fox in the House of Commons, he was excluded by his politics from court life or political office. In 1778 the refusal of two tenants to accept leases at an increased rent threw a quantity of land on his hands. He determined to farm the land himself. From that time till his death in 1842, he stood at the head of the new agricultural movement. On his own estates his energy was richly rewarded. Dr. Rigby, writing in 1816, states that the annual rental of Holkham rose from £2,200 in 1776 to £20,000 in 1816.*
*The Pamphleteer, vol. xiii. pp. 469-70; Holkham and its Agriculture, 3rd edition, 1818, pp. 25, 28.
When Coke took his land in hand, not an acre of wheat was to be seen from Holkham to Lynn. The thin sandy soil produced but a scanty yield of rye. Naturally wanting in richness, it was still further impoverished by a barbarous system of cropping. No manure was purchased; a few Norfolk sheep with backs like rabbits, and, here and there, a few half-starved milch cows were the only live-stock; the little muck that was produced was miserably poor. Coke determined to grow wheat. He marled and clayed the land, purchased large quantities of manure, drilled his wheat and turnips, grew sainfoin and clover, trebled his live-stock. On the light drifty land in his neighbourhood the Flemish maxim held good: "Point de fourrage, point de bestiaux; sans bestiaux, aucun engrais; sans engrais, nulle recolte." "No keep, no livestock; without stock, no manure; without manure, no crops." It is, in fact, the Norfolk proverb, "Muck is the mother of money." In the last quarter of the eighteenth century the value of bones as fertilisers was realised. The discovery has been attributed to a Yorkshire fog-hunter who was cleaning out his kennels; others assign it to farmers in the neighbourhood of Sheffield, where refuse heaps were formed of the bones which were not available for the handles of cutlery. By the use of the new discovery Coke profited largely. He also introduced into the county the use of artificial foods like oil-cake, which, with roots, enabled Norfolk farms to carry increased stock. Under his example and advice stall-feeding was extensively practised. On Bullock's Hill near Norwich, during the great fair of St. Faith's, drovers assembled from all parts of the country, especially from Scotland, with herds of half-fed beasts which were bought up by Norfolk farmers to be fattened for London markets. The grass lands, on which the beef and mutton of our ancestors were raised, were deserted for the sands of the eastern counties, from which under the new farming practice, the metropolis drew its meat supplies. Numbers of animals fattened on nutritious food gave farmers the command of the richest manure, fertilised their land, and enabled them not only to grow wheat but to verify the maxim "never to sow a crop unless there is condition to grow it luxuriantly."
OPEN-FIELD FARMS AND PASTURE COMMONS (1793-1815)
It might perhaps be supposed that in 1793 the agricultural defects of the ancient system of open arable fields and common pasture had been remedied by experience; that open-field farmers had shared in the general progress of farming; that time alone was needed to raise them to the higher level of an improved standard; that, therefore, enclosures had ceased to be an economic necessity. In 1773, an important Act of Parliament had been passed, which attempted to help open-field farmers in adapting their inconvenient system of occupation to the improved practices of recent agriculture. Three-fourths of the partners in village-farms were empowered, with the consent of the landowner and the titheowner, to appoint field-reeves, and through them to regulate and improve the cultivation of the open arable fields. But any arrangement made under these powers was only to last six years, and, partly for this reason, the Act seems to have been from the first almost a dead letter. At Hunmanby, on the wolds of the East Riding of Yorkshire, the provisions of the Act were certainly put in force*, and it is possible that it was also applied at Wilburton in Cambridgeshire. With these exceptions, little, if any, use seems to have been made of a well-intentioned piece of legislation.
* Isaac Leatham's General View of the Agriculture of the East Riding of Yorkshire (1794), p. 45. Thomas Stone, in his Suggestions for Rendering the Inclosure of Common Fields and Waste Lands a source of Population and Riches (1787), says that he knew of no instance in which the Act had been put in force.
Small progress had in fact been made among the cultivators of open-fields. Here and there, the new spirit of agricultural enterprise had influenced the occupiers of village farms. In rare instances improved practices were introduced. But the demand for increased food supplies had become, as our ancestors were experiencing, too pressing for delay. Any continuous series of adverse seasons created a real scarcity of bread, and more than once during the Napoleonic wars, famine was at the door. Unless food could be produced at home, it could not be obtained elsewhere. An extension of the cultivated area was the quickest means of adding to production. Agriculturists at the close of the eighteenth century were convinced that no adequate increase in the produce of the soil could be obtained, unless open-field farms were broken up, and the commons brought into more profitable cultivation. If they were right in that belief, the great agricultural change was justified, which established the uniform system with which we rare familiar to-day. The point is one of the greatest importance. The uncritical praises lavished by sixteenth and seventeenth century travellers on open-field farming are of little value because they had no higher standard with which to compare its results. Such a standard had now been to some extent created. It may therefore be useful to illustrate, from the contemporary records supplied by the Reports to the Board of Agriculture, the condition of open arable land and of pasture-commons in the years 1793-1815. The material is arranged according to the four districts into which, for statistical purposes, the English counties are usually divided. The cumulative force of the evidence is great. But some of it relates to wastes which were not attached to village farms, although common of pasture and fuel was often claimed over the area by the inhabitants of the neighbourhood. As to the reliability of the whole evidence, it would be only fair to add that the Reporters were not likely to be prejudiced in favour of open-field farms or unappropriated commons.
Herefordshire (1794) contained a great number of open field farms, occupying some of "the best land of the county," and pursuing the "invariable rotation of (1) fallow, (2) wheat, (3) pease or oats, and then fallow again." Speaking of the waste lands at the foot of the Black Mountains above the Golden Valley, the Reporter says : "I do appeal to such gentlemen as have often served on Grand Juries in this county, whether they have not had more felons brought before them from that than from any other quarter of the county." He attributes this lawlessness to the right, which the cottager possessed in virtue of his arable holding, of turning out stock on the hills, and to the encouragement which this right afforded him of living by any means other than his labour.
Worcestershire (1794) contained from 10,000 to
In Gloucestershire (1794) common fields and common meadows still prevailed over extensive districts. Of the Cotswold district the Reporter says: "probably no part of the kingdom has been more improved within the last forty years than the Cotswold Hills. The first inclosures are about that standing; but the greater part are of a later date. Three parishes are now inclosing; and out of about thirteen, which still remain in the common field state, two, I understand, are taking the requisite measures for an inclosure: the advantages are great, rent more than doubled, the produce of every kind proportionably increased." Of the Vale of Gloucester he says: "I know one acre which is divided into eight lands, and spread over a large common field, so that a man must travel two or three miles to visit it all. But though this is a remarkable instance of minute division, yet, it takes place to such a degree, as very much to impede all the processes of husbandry. But this is not the worst; the lands shooting different ways, some serve as headlands to turn on in ploughing others; and frequently when the good manager has sown his corn, and it is come up, his slovenly neighbour turns upon it, and cuts up more for him, than his own is worth. It likewise makes one occupier subservient to another in cropping his land; and in water furrowing, one sloven may keep the water on, and poison the lands of two or three industrious neighbours." Lot meadows were numerous in the county, on which the herbage was common after haymaking. Several tracts such as Corse Lawn, Huntley and Gorsley Commons were practically wastes, "not only of very little real utility, but productive of one very great nuisance, that of the erection of cottages by idle and dissolute people, sometimes from the neighbourhood, and sometimes strangers. The chief building materials are store-poles, stolen from the neighbouring woods. These cottages are seldom or never the abode of honest industry, but serve for harbour to poachers and thieves of all descriptions." In the Vale of Tewkesbury the common fields were "very subject to rot. . . . Though it is reckoned they (farmers) lose their flocks once in three years on average, there is a considerable quantity kept, the farmers being persuaded they could not raise corn without them. The arable fields after harvest are stocked without stint. When spring seedtime commences, they are confined to the fallow quarter of the field, and stinted in proportion to the properties; they are folded every night, and kept so hard, that scarce a blade of grass or even a thistle escapes them; and this management is thought essentially necessary, especially on the stiff soils, to keep them in good order, such soils being too hard to plough in very dry weather, and, of course, not eligible in wet. The grass and weeds, without this expedient, would often get so much ahead as not to be afterwards conquered."
Another agricultural Report on Gloucestershire was presented in 1807. The Reporter mentions that, in the reign of George III., "more than seventy Acts have passed the Parliament for inclosing or laying into severalty." "By these proceedings, the landlord and occupier are benefited; the former in an advance of rent, the latter in the increase of crops. On the Cotswolds, many thousand acres are brought into cultivation, which before were productive of little more than furze and a few scanty blades of grass. In the Vale, by the inclosure of common fields, lands have been laid together, and rescued from the immemorial custom, or routine of crops-wheat, beans, and fallow; and the farmers have found, to their great advantage, that clover, vetches and turnips may be raised in the fallow year, which was before attended only with labour and expense." The Reporter enumerates five advantages resulting from enclosure of common field farms:--(1) an increase of crops and rent; (2) the commutation of tithes; (3) the drainage of the land; (4) the removal of the injury and cause of disputes occasioned by turning on the head- and fore-lands of neighbours; (6) the encouragement of population. Of the advantages of enclosing common pastures or wastes he is equally convinced; "the common or waste lands in the Vale are seldom stinted to a definite quantity of stock in proportion to the number of acres occupied; but the cottager claims by custom to stock equally with the largest landholder. It is justly questioned whether any profit accrues to either from the depasturing of sheep, since the waste commons, being under no agricultural management, are usually poisoned by stagnated water, which corrupts or renders unwholesome the herbage, producing rot, and other diseases in the miserable animals that are turned adrift to seek their food there." Since 1794 Corse Common had been enclosed. From the results the Reporter of 1807 illustrates some of the benefits of enclosure. "The supposed advantages derived by cottagers, in having food for a few sheep and geese on a neighbouring common, have usually been brought forward as objections to the enclosing system. This question was much agitated with regard to the inclosure of Corse Chace in this county ; but if the present state and appearance of it, since the inclosure in 1796, be contrasted to what it was before, or its present produce of corn to the sheep that used to run over it, little doubt can remain of the advantageous result in favour of the community;
In Somersetshire (1797) the two largest districts of waste land were the Brent Marsh and King's Sedgmoor. The Reporter describes the Brent Marsh as a country which had "been heretofore much neglected, probably on account of the stagnant waters, and unwholesome air. But of late many efforts have been made to improve the soil, by draining and enclosing, under a variety of Acts of Parliament. The benefit resulting therefrom has been astonishing." The total area was over
The Dorsetshire commons in 1794 were "generally overrun with furze and ant-hills," worth 8s. an acre unenclosed, but "highly proper to cultivate, and, if converted, would be worth from 18s. to 20s. an acre." A second Report on Dorsetshire was issued in 1812. The Reporter calls attention to the "half year meads." One person has the hay, and another person the "after-shear." These meadows were not near commonable fields, and the origin of the claim is not clear. Obviously, neither of the persons who shared the produce was likely to attempt to improve the herbage.
In Wiltshire (1794) the Reporter fixes on four disadvantages of open-field husbandry: (1) the obligation to plough and crop all soils alike; (2) the impossibility of improving sheep; (3) the difficulty of raising food for their winter keep; (4) the expense, trouble, and excessive number of horses required to cultivate detached dispersed lands. On the south-east side of the county lay a considerable tract of open-fields, and in the north-west, in the centre of the richest land of the district, were scattered numerous commons. The open arable fields are said to be in "a very bad state of husbandry," and the common pastures in a "very neglected unimproved" condition. "There are," says the Reporter, "numerous instances in which the common-field arable land lets for less than half the price of the inclosed arable adjoining; and the commons are very seldom reckoned worth anything, in valuing any estate that has a right on them." For the last half-century very little land had been enclosed, "although the improvement on the lands, heretofore inclosed, has been so very great." "The reason seems to have been the very great difficulty and expence of making new roads in a country naturally wet and deep, and where the old public roads were, till within the last few years, almost impassable." Good turnpike roads had now been introduced; villages were energetic in repairing the approaches to them; and "it is to be hoped that so great an improvement as that of inclosing and cultivating the commonable lands will no longer be neglected." The crying need was the want of drainage. The common pastures from Westbury to Cricklade were in a "wet rotten state," depastured by an "unprofitable kind of stock," but "wanting only inclosing and draining to make them as good pasture land as many of the surrounding inclosures." Some of the cold arable fields would have been much more valuable if turned to pasture, and, in their undrained state, even the driest were "not safe for sheep in a wet autumn."
3. From the South-Eastern and Midland District the evidence is the fullest, because the district was still in a great measure farmed on the open-field system.
In Berkshire (1794) there were
In Buckinghamshire (1794)
Oxfordshire in 1794 contained "upwards of an hundred uninclosed parishes or hamlets." The Reporter enumerates several advantages of enclosure. "The first of these is getting rid of the restrictions of the former course of husbandry, and appropriating each of the various sorts of land to that use to which it is best adapted. 2. The prevention of the loss of time, both as to labourers and cattle, in travelling . . . from one end of a parish to another; and also in fetching the horses from distant commons before they go to work. 3. There is a much better chance of escaping the distempers to which cattle of all kinds are liable from being mixed with those infected, particularly the scab in sheep. This circumstance, in common fields, must operate as a discouragement to the improvement of stock . . . . 5. The great benefit which arises from draining lands, which cannot so well, if at all, be done on single acres and half acres, and would effectually prevent the rot amongst sheep, so very common in open field land. 6. Lastly the preventing of constant quarrels, which happen as well from the trespasses of cattle, as by ploughing away from each others' land." Otmoor, near Islip, containing "about four thousand acres," is mentioned as the largest and most valuable tract of waste in the county. "This whole tract of land lies so extremely flat, that the water, in wet seasons, stands on it a long time together, and of course renders it very unwholesome to the cattle, as well as the neighbourhood. The sheep are thereby subject to the rot, and the larger cattle to a disease called the moor evil. The abuses here (as is the case of most commons where many parishes are concerned) are very great, there being no regular stint, but each neighbouring householder turns out upon the moor what number he pleases. There are flocks of geese likewise kept on this common, by which several people gain a livelihood."
In 1809, Arthur Young reported on Oxfordshire, where he found that, in proportion to its extent, more land had been enclosed since
In 1770, the South and East of Warwickshire had mainly consisted of open-fields. Now (1794) there still remained
Northamptonshire, in 1794, contained 89 parishes still in open-fields. There was, therefore, "above one third of the whole (county) by no means in the best state of cultivation of which it is susceptible." The commons did not " yield pasturage," "at the highest computation," which was worth more than "5s. an acre. Indeed, if the calculation was fairly made, the occupiers are not benefited to the extent of half that sum, as the stock which they send to depasture upon these commons is liable to so many diseases and accidents, as, one year with another, nearly counterbalances any advantages which can be derived from possessing this right. . . . By every information that could be procured, it appears that the stock is not kept with a view to any profit that can possibly arise from the sales, but merely as the means of cultivating and manuring the soil. Indeed, long experience has evinced, that no species of stock kept in these open fields can be carried to market on terms nearly so advantageous as the same articles raised by those farmers who occupy inclosed lands; nor is it to be supposed, considering the manner in which the stock is treated, that the owners will pay much attention to the improvement of the different breeds." As to the arable land, "the several occupiers must conform to the ancient mode of cultivation of each division or field in which their lands are respectively situated; from which it will appear that one obstinate tenant (and fortunate must that parish be accounted, where only one tenant of that description may be found) has it in his power to prevent the introduction of any improvement. . . . The tillage lands are divided into small lots of two or three old-fashioned, broad, crooked ridges (gathered very high towards the middle, or crown, being the only means of drainage that the manner in which the lands are occupied will admit of), and consequently the farmer possessing
In Leicestershire (1800) very little open-field land was left "not more than
In Middlesex (1794) many thousands of acres of wastes lay unenclosed--"an absolute nuisance to the public." The commons of Enfield, Edmonton, and Tottenham were frequently flooded; but no effort was made to keep the ditches scoured. In 1798 there were still 17,000 aqres of "common meadows, all capable of improvement, not producing to the community in their present state more than 4s. an acre." To the Reporter's eyes the commons were "a real injury to the public," partly because they tempted the poor man to settle on their borders, build a cottage out of the material they afforded, and trust to his pigs and poultry for a living; partly because they became "the constant rendezvous of gypseys, strollers and other loose persons . . . the resort of footpads and highwaymen." The arable land of the county is estimated at
In Hampshire (1813) the Reporter found the commons so overstocked as to produce little or no substantial benefit to those who enjoyed the grazing rights, and the surface "shamefully deteriorated" by the exercise of rights of turbary or paring turf for fuel. He hopes to see "every species of intercommonable rights extinguished," and, with them, "that nest and conservatory of sloth, idleness, and misery, which is uniformly to be witnessed in the vicinity of all commons, waste-lands, and forests throughout the kingdom."
Two-thirds of the county of Huntingdon in 1793 lay in openfields. Proprietors rarely had more than two or three acres contiguous. "The residue lies in acres and half acres quite disjointed, and tenants under the same land-owner cross each other continually in performing their necessary daily labour. . .. The sheep of the common fields and commons are of a very inferior sort, except in some few instances, and little if any care is taken either in the breeding, feeding or preserving them; and from the neglected state of the land on which they are depastured, and the scanty provision for their support in winter, and the consequent diseases to which they are liable, their wool is also of a very inferior quality."
On the uplands of Lincolnshire (1794) there were but few openfield farms. "The sheep of the common fields," says the Reporter, "I do not bring into this account from the circumstances of hardship, attending the scantiness of their food, the wetness of their layer, the neglect of a proper choice in their breed, their being overheated in being (where folded) dogged to their confinement, where they are often too much crowded; the scab, the rot, and every circumstance attend them, which can delay their being profitable; so that it may be reasonably concluded, that they are of less value than those bred in inclosures, from 10s. to 15s. per head, and their fleeces are equally unproductive." Five years later Arthur Young reported on this part of the county. He describes the true Lincolnshire cattle which he found on openfield farms as a "wretched" breed ; "they all run together on a pasture, without the least thought of selection." At three years old, they were worth little more than half what they fetched on enclosed land. Open-field farmers "breed four or five calves from a wretched cow before they sell it, so that a great quantity of food is sadly misapplied." It was from this "post-legged, square-buttocked breed of demi-elephants," to use Marshall's description, that the Navy beef of England was chiefly provided. The open-field sheep had not improved. "I never," says Young, apparently with surprise, "saw a fold in the county, except in a few open fields about Stamford; . . . but the sheep are miserably bad; in wool 8 or 9 to the tod." In the East Riding of Yorkshire (1794) the pasture commons varied "in extent from two hundred to two thousand five hundred acres, and all of them may be converted into useful land by drains, sub-divisions, plantations, and other improvements. . . . When commons are not stinted in proportion to the stock they are capable of keeping, very little benefit is derived from them. . . . It is not a little extraordinary to see a starving stock upon a common of five hundred acres soaked with water, when the expense of a few shillings for each right, prudently laid out in drains and bridges, would double its value. Such is the obstinacy of men, and so difficult is it to induce them to form the same opinion; though an union of sentiment would much more materially promote their interest."
Norfolk in 1796 contained
Bedfordshire in 1794 was famous for its backward farming. It still disputed with Cambridgeshire the reputation of being the Boeotia of agriculture. It contained
Out of
To the Eastern and North Midland districts mainly belonged the fen-lands. This vast tract of waterlogged land still included Peterborough Fen in Northamptonshire, embraced small portions of both Norfolk and Suffolk, and extended over a considerable part of Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Lincolnshire. At a moderate computation, the total area, which at the best was imperfectly drained, and lay to a great extent unenclosed, comprised
Peterborough Fen (1793) consisted of from 6,000 to
The Huntingdonshire fens contained (1793)
In Cambridgeshire (1794) there were "
These descriptions apply to commons under the best regulations. Deeping Fens may be taken as examples of the ordinary management of Lincolnshire commons in the fen districts. "They stand," thinks the Reporter of 1794, "very much in need of inclosing and draining, as the cattle and sheep depastured thereon are very unhealthy. The occupiers frequently, in one season, lose four fifths of their stock. These commons are without stint, and almost every cottage within the manors has a common right belonging to it. Every kind of depredation is made upon this land in cutting up the best of the turf for fuel; and the farmers in the neighbourhood, having common rights, availing themselves of a fine season, turn on 7 or 800 sheep each, to ease their inclosed land, whilst the mere cottager cannot get a bite for a cow; but yet the cottager, in his turn, in a colourable way, takes the stock of a foreigner as his own, who occasionally turns on immense quantities of stock in good seasons. The cattle and sheep, which are constantly depastured on this common, are of a very unthrifty ill-shapen kind, from being frequently starved, and no attention paid to their breed. Geese are the only animals which are at any time thrifty; and these frequently, when young, die of the cramp, or, when plucked, in consequence of the excessive bleakness and wetness of the commons. A goose pays annually from 1s. to 16d. by being 4 times plucked. These commons are the frequent resort of thieves, who convey the cattle into distant Counties for sale."
The North Fens round the Isle of Axholm formed in 1794 another large area (
The general impression left by this mass of evidence is that the agricultural defects of the intermixture of land under the open-field system were overwhelming and ineradicable; that as an instrument of land cultivation it had probably deteriorated since the thirteenth century; that no increased production or general adoption of improved practices could be expected under the ancient system. But the Reporters note exceptions, from which other conclusions may possibly be drawn. In some districts the customary rotations had been abandoned for independent cultivation, or modified so as to admit some variation of cropping. Thus, by agreement, in Berkshire a portion of the fields was "hitched," or, according to the Wiltshire equivalent, "hooked." In other words, common rights of pasture on the arable land were suspended so as to allow the cultivation of turnips, clover, or potatoes. Elsewhere, again, portions of the arable land were withdrawn from tillage to serve as cow-commons. Nor must it be supposed that enclosed land was always better cultivated than open-field farms. The Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire Reporters, for example, state that in certain cases enclosure had produced no improvement, and in Wiltshire the Reporter hints that open-field regulations at least prevented some abuses to which land held in severalty was liable. In some districts landlords imposed upon tenants of separate holdings the same restrictions and course of cropping by which they had been fettered as occupiers of land in open-fields. Without a large expenditure on equipment the agricultural conditions of enclosed land were often worsened, rather than bettered. Thus the Somersetshire Reporter quotes an example from the Mendip Hills, where, when land had been enclosed, the landlord refused to erect the necessary buildings. Similar cases might have been collected from many other parts of the country. In these respects, as well as in others, landlords had yet to be taught the business of owning and letting land. There were "Goths and Vandals," not only among tenants, but also among owners.
Before any accurate estimate can be formed of the agricultural advantages or defects of arable farming on intermixed strips of land subject to common grazing rights, and of stock breeding and rearing on pasture commons, it is necessary to allow for some possibilities of improvement by the cultivators of open-fields and for some neglected opportunities by landlords and tenants of enclosed land. But, when every reasonable allowance has been made, it is clear that the balance was overwhelmingly in favour of separate occupation. As an instrument of production the ancient system was inferior. Every advance in science made by agriculture, and every new resource which is adopted, only served to accentuate the relative disadvantages of open-field farming. Change was, in the circumstances, necessary. It was generally effected by obtaining Parliamentary sanction for an enclosure.
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