would suppose, to join the armies of tramps who figure so largely in the pages of the writers of the period. As the bailiff's accounts of some manors show, the demesne farm had sometimes employed a quite considerable staff of workmen of different kinds, and though no clear instance of a reduction of the number of employees, consequent on the transition to pasture farming, has come to light, one can occasionally compare the demand for labour under the old régime and under the new in a way which does something to substantiate the lamentations of contemporaries. It is this which gives point to their complaints as to the decay of "hospitality." Hospitality in the sixteenth century does not merely mean a general attitude of open-handed friendliness. When the Government intervenes to enjoin hospitality, we are not to think that, even in that age of grandmotherly legislation, it is going out of its way to insist that every man shall provide his neighbour with a glass of beer and a bed for the night. Hospitality has a quite precise meaning and a quite definite social importance. It is, in the most literal sense, housekeeping, and the household does not merely imply what we mean by "the family," a group of persons connected by blood but pursuing often quite separate occupations, and, except in the small number of cases where property owned by the head of the family supplies a financial basis for unity, possessing quite separate economic interests. It is, on the contrary, a miniature co-operative society, housed under one roof, dependent upon one industry, and including not only man and wife and children, but servants and labourers, ploughmen and threshers, cowherds and milkmaids, who live together, work together, and play together, just as one can see them doing in parts of Norway and Switzerland at the present day. When the economic foundations of this small organism are swept away by a change in the method of farming, the effect is not merely to ruin a family, it is to break up a business. It is analogous not to the unemployment of an individual householder, but to the bankruptcy of a firm.

1 The Shepe Book of Tittleshall Manor (Holkham MSS., Tittleshall Books, No. 19), shows flocks of 500 to 1000 sheep being managed by a single shepherd, 1543-1549.

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On the other hand, even when they lost nothing else, the rest of the landholding population was deprived of some of the rights of grazing which they had exercised on the enclosed arable after harvest. If the demesne formed a large proportion of the whole area of the village, or if there was little other pasture, their loss, as the frequent complaints of interference with "shack" prove, might be a very considerable one; for it meant that there might be no means of feeding some proportion of the village beasts. Moreover, the mere presence of a large capitalist who controlled a great part of the land, and converted it to pasture or retained it as arable according to the price of wool and wheat, prejudiced them in various indirect ways. The farmer of the demesne seems at an early date to have had a bad name for hard dealings. He was often a stranger, and therefore indifferent to the influence of local customs and personal relationships. Where the manoral officials had offered direct employment, he was a middleman with a high rent to pay, and, like most middlemen, a channel for pressure without responsibility. As the largest shareholder in the small agricultural community, he could disturb its arrangements by altering his course of cultivation, and, since he was the representative

1 e.g. Holkham MSS., Fulmordeston, Bdle. 6: "To the Right Honourable Sir Edward Cooke, Knight, Attorney General unto the King's Matie. Humblie sheweth unto your lordship yor poore and dayley orators . . . yor worshippes tenants of the Manor of Fulmordeston cum Croxton in the Duchie of Lancaster, and the moste parte of the tenants of the same manor that whereas your said orators in the Hillary Terme last commenced suite in the Duchie Courte against Thomas Odbert and Roger Salisbury, gent., who have enclosed their grounds contrary to the custom of the manor, wherby your wor. loseth your shack due out of the grounds, common lane or way for passengers is stopped up, and your worshipps' poore orators lose their accustomed shack in those grounds, and the said Roger Salisbury taketh also the whole benefit of theire common from them, keepinge there his sheepe in grazinge, and debarring them of their libertie there which for comon right belongeth unto them.' For the rest of this document see Appendix I., and compare the following defence to a charge of breaking open an enclosure: "The owners of the said tenements, from time whereof there is no memory to the contrary, have had a common of pasture for them. selves and their tenants in one close commonly called 'the new leasue,' in the lordship of Weston in the manner following; that is to say, when the field where the said 'leasue' doth lie, called Radnor field, lieth fallow, then through the whole year; and when the said field is sown with corn, then from the reaping and carrying away of the corn until the same be sown again... and the said Thomas Dodd further said that he did break open the said close. . . being fenced in such time as he ought to have common in the same, to the end that his cattle might take their pasture therein (William Salt Collection, New Series, vol. ix., Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. 8, No. 9).

of the lord, he could not easily be checked. Sometimes, indeed, a clause was inserted in his lease expressly providing that he should not disturb the neighbouring peasants.1 But there are many cases in which there is no mention of formal enclosing, and in which, nevertheless, it is complained that the farmer persistently molests and harries the customary tenants. It was the essence of the open field system of agriculture at once its strength and its weakness-that its maintenance reposed upon a common custom and tradition, not upon documentary records capable of precise construction. Its boundaries were often rather a question of the degree of conviction with which ancient inhabitants could be induced to affirm them, than visible to the mere eye of sense, and their indefiniteness made the way of the transgressor extremely easy. Even the lord of the manor sometimes found the large farmer too much for his vigilance. "John Langford and his ancesters," the College of All Souls petitioned in Chancery in 1637, "have for many yeares by vertue of several demises farmed and rented of your oratours their said messuage and lands, and used and occupied the same with their own lands, and during the time of such occupation have pulled up, destroyed and removed, the metes, mere londs, and boundaries of your oratours their said lands, and confounded the same so that the same cannot be set forth. . . . Mr. Langford's lands and grounds lying next adjoining unto the said oratours their grounds, . . . the said John Langford hath extended his said cottages, orchards, gardens, and curtilages thereunto belonging, to your oratours their said grounds, and hath made hedges, ditches, fences and mounds wherein and

For complaints of tenants against the exactions of farmers as early as 1413, see Victoria County History, Essex, vol. ii. p. 318. For a stipulation in the farmer's covenant, see the following: "Item a covenant conteyned in this lease that the said Thomas shall permit and suffer the customary Tenants peaceably to have and enjoy their estates, rights, grants, interests, and premises, without any lette, interruption, or contradiction of the said Thomas" (Roxburghe Club, Pembroke Surveys, Knyghton); and Northumberland County History, vol. v. p. 208, Buston: The tenants of this town at the beginning of summer have their oxen allway grazed in Shilbottel wood, or else they were not able to maintain their tenements. It is therefore requisite that his lordship or his heire should have respect unto the want of pasture, that in any lease made by his lordship or his heire to any person of the pasture, the said Shilbottel wood, there might be a proviso in the said lease that the said tenants should have their oxen ground there, as they have been accustomed." Instances of the harrying of the peasants by the large farmers are to be found, ibid., vol. i. p. 350 (Tughall), and p. 274 (Newham).

whereby he hath enclosed your oratours their said grounds unto his own cottages and land, . . . and intendeth so . . to keep from your orators all the said land so encroached and enclosed." When a farmer would thus calmly expropriate the lord of the manor, it is not surprising to find constant small disputes between him and the other tenants, on the ground of his entering upon their holdings, or "surcharging the fieldes by waye of intercommon and destroying the corn of greane by drifte of cattle over the common of fieldes and suche other."2 Often, no doubt, the sporadic encroachments which provoked quarrels with the other tenants appeared to the great grazier a natural exercise of his obvious rights. Who should say where one man's land began and another's ended? But it can hardly be doubted that such irregularities were sometimes a deliberate attempt to worry the weaker members of the village community into throwing up their lands, by making profitable cultivation impossible. "If any man do sow any ground," ran the direction given by a lord to the shepherd who looked after the demesne farm on a Suffolk manor, "and the stifts of the field are broken, and may not duly be taken and fed as heretofore they have been used, then the said Tillot to feed off the said corn and drive his sheep on that part of the ploughed land, and to forbid any particular man to sow his ground or any part thereof whereby the sheep-walks may be hindered." Such an order points to the difficulty of adjusting the different methods of cultivation pursued by the smaller tenants and on the demesne. Though the complaints of the former were often indefinite enough, it is probable that the very difficulty of defining what a large capitalist might or might not do was in itself a substantial grievance. The truth is that it was not easy for the great pasture farm, with its flocks of sheep, to subsist side by side with the smaller arable holdings of the other tenants, with

1 All Souls' Archives, vol. i. p. 203, No. 356.

2 Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i., Survey of Mudford and Hinton. In this case the aggressor was not the farmer of the demesne, but a freeholder owning a third of the manor. To escape his depredations the tenants proposed to enclose their common fieldes and to assign to Master Lyte and his tenants his third parte in every field by itself, and to extinguish his right of common in the rest."

3 Victoria County History, Suffolk, "Social and Economic History."

out a good deal of friction arising, even in those cases in which no deliberate attempt was made to evict the latter or to deprive them of their rights of common. The traditional organisation of agriculture was based on the assumption that much the same methods of utilising the land would be followed by all the tenants. When that assumption broke down with the growth of large-scale sheep-farming, there was naturally a collision of interests between the great men who made innovations and the small men who adhered to the customary rule.

(b) The Struggle for the Commons

But sporadic encroachments are not the worst which the small man has to fear. He may wake to find the path along which he drives his beasts to pasture blocked by a hedge. When he goes to renew his lease or buy the reversion of his copy, he may be told that his holding is to be merged in a pasture farm. The great estate is not always built up by the mere consolidation of pieces of land which are already united in ownership, though spatially they may be separate. If it were there would be few statutes and few riots; for the law looks with a favourable eye on such attempts at improved cultivation, and the peasants have long been doing on a small scale what the capitalist farmer does on a large. The great estate is formed in another and less innocent way, by throwing together holdings whose possession is separate, though spatially they may be contiguous. It is the result of addition, not simply of organisation; of addition in which the cyphers are the holdings of numerous small tenants. In such a process the opposition between the interests of the peasantry and those of the manorial authorities is brought to a head. If one man is to run a hedge round a pasture, the pasture must first be stripped of the rights of common which enmesh it. If sheep are to be fed on the sites of ruined cottages, their occupants must first be evicted. It is over the absorption of commons and the eviction of tenants that agrarian warfare-the expression is not too modern or too strong-is waged in the sixteenth century. Let us look at both these movements more closely.