Here arable forms only 23 per cent. of the whole area, while pasture and meadow together form over 77 per cent. This swing of the pendulum from arable husbandry to pasture-farming will not surprise us, if we remember that at the time of the Domesday Survey, and, indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, the area of land under the plough had been, when considered in relation to the population, extraordinarily large. The economic justification of ploughing land which no modern farmer would touch had lain in the fact that the impossibility of moving food supplies had made it necessary for each village to be virtually self-supporting, and had thus prevented the specialisation of districts in different types of agriculture. When the development of trade under the Tudors had combined with the keen demand for wool to introduce a geographical division of labour, the change was naturally all the more violent, because there was, so to speak, so much lee-way to be made up, because so much land was in tillage which had no special suitability for the production of grain. Even so, between 1815 and 1846, the rich water meadows of Oxfordshire were being ploughed up for corn. Even so, after 1879, the collapse of corn-growing was all the more disastrous, because it had been so long delayed.

One would expect the growth of large farms side by side with the customary holdings, especially when the methods of agriculture employed were so different, to result in a powerful reaction of the new interests upon the old, and perhaps in a collision between them, even when no deliberate attempt was made to alter the position of the tenants. And this is what we are told in fact occurred. The customary tenants' holdings and the demesne both formed part of one area, subject to certain rights and privileges defined by the custom of the manor. Both, for example, would lie open to the village cattle after harvest; both were subject to the customary rotation of crops, and necessarily so when the demesne was not separate but mixed with the customary holdings in the open field; both had rights of common on the pasture or waste of the manor. Moreover, the whole organisation of the economic side of manorial life was based on the assumption that tillage was the most important element in it. For

example, the apportionment of rights over the waste, the "stint" of animals to be grazed, assumed that no one partner would require to graze more than a certain number, and broke down if he gave himself up to cattle-breeding or sheepfarming, and multiplied his beasts by five or ten. It would be natural, therefore, to look for a straining and shifting of those rights as a probable consequence of the existence side by side of two such different agricultural stages, and of such different types of property. Formerly the respective interests of the lord and the customary tenants had been harmonised by the fact that the labour of the latter supplied the chief means of cultivating the demesne, and that the demesne could hardly be a profitable concern if the number of tenants or their standard of living declined very largely, any more than a gold-mine can pay without gold-miners. But when the demesne was largely used for pasture this consideration of course did not apply, and in any case by the sixteenth century, although the services of the tenants were still part of the means by which the farmers found labour, they were probably an unimportant one. As is shown by the smallness of the holdings on many manors, which were quite insufficient by themselves to support a family, and by the evidence of contemporaries, the farmer had a growing, though still small, labour market into which to dip, and the rough agreement which had existed between the interests of the manorial estate and those of the tenants was therefore no longer existent. Thus a collision of interests, a weakening of communal restrictions before the enterprise of the capitalist farmer, the strengthening of some kinds of property and the weakening of others, and the growth of new sorts of social relations in the villages, were consequences to be expected from the increasing predominance of the large farm, and especially of the large pasture farm.

To sum up the arguments of the chapter. At the beginning of the sixteenth century forces both political-the restriction of the territorial sovereignty of the landlordsand economic-the growth in the demand for wool-were working to produce a change in the methods of agriculture; and at any rate by the middle of the century another powerful motive was added by the fall in the value of

money. The result was that there was a movement in the direction of converting arable land to pasture, and of enclosure, which affected all classes of landholders, but which was carried furthest by the large farmers who leased the demesne lands of manors, who could afford to make experiments, and who were under a strong incentive to turn the land to its most profitable use.

CHAPTER II

THE REACTION OF THE AGRARIAN CHANGES

ON THE PEASANTRY

(a) The Removing of Landmarks

THE history of the agrarian problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries- indeed its history ever since-is largely the story of the small cultivator's struggle to protect his interests against the changes caused by the growth of the great estate. In that struggle there is much that is detailed, tiresome, and obscure. The student hears very little about general principles, very much of technicalities about the nature of common appendant and common appurtenant, of stinted and unstinted pastures, of gressums and fines, of copyholds for years, for lives, or of inheritance, of land which is old enclosure that ought to stand, or new enclosure that ought to fall. But at the centre of this maze of dry and infinitely diverse details there is a real regrouping of social forces going on, and a rearrangement, at once rapid and profound, of economic and political ideas. We must no more picture the changes of our period as mere matters of the technique of agriculture, than we must think of the industrial revolution of two centuries later in terms of spinning-jennies and steam-power. On the contrary, these very details are the channel along which rural life is beginning to slip from one form of economic organisation to another, the seed-plot in which new conceptions of social expediency are being brought to maturity. In numberless English villages between 1500 and 1600 large issues are being decided which will profoundly modify the course of social development. Is the communal administration of meadow and wastes to survive (as it has survived in France and Belgium) or is it to dis

appear? Is England to be a country of large cultivators working with many hired labourers, or of small cultivators working with few? Is leasehold or copyhold to be the predominant form of land tenure? When the final transition to modern agriculture takes place, will England face the change with a population the bulk of which has been rooted in the soil since the Middle Ages, or will the middle classes in rural society have been already so far undermined that opinion turns spontaneously to the great landlord as the sole representative of agricultural progress? Of course the answer to these questions was not given by 1600 or even by 1700; we must not forget Arthur Young and the far more extensive enclosures of the eighteenth century. But in our period development certainly took a distinct bias away from one set of arrangements and in the direction of another. The best standpoint from which to examine its course is found by watching the reaction upon the tenants of the agricultural changes which we have tried to summarise in the preceding sections.

The economic effect of the policy pursued by the large farmer depended upon what proportion of the land he controlled, and in particular upon the part of the manor upon which enclosure was made. He might enclose only the land actually belonging to the demesne farm when he took it over; or he might enclose parts of the waste or meadow over which other tenants had rights of pasture; or he might enclose the holdings in the open arable fields belonging to other tenants, for this purpose evicting, or inducing the lord to evict, them. When only the demesne lands were enclosed the other interests were sometimes little disturbed, unless indeed the demesne had already been parcelled out among some of the smaller tenants, a contingency to be considered later. But, even when that was not the case, the conversion of the demesne to pasture and its enclosure had two consequences which were not unimportant. On the one hand, the wage-earning population of cottagers and younger sons, who had found employment as hired labourers when the demesne was used for tillage, were thrown out of work, and with the limited demand for labour offered by a sixteenth century village, were obliged, one