documents from Domesday1 than separates them from us, perhaps it is not altogether fanciful. Rural life, except for one great catastrophe, has been very permanent. Unlike rural life to-day, it has been most permanent in its lower ranges. How ever often manors may have changed hands, there has been little to break the connection with the soil of peasants whose title is good, no change at all comparable to the buying out of small freeholders which took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It may well be that the main outlines of the social system which the Domesday commissioners found already laid in the east of England crop out again after the lapse of between four and five hundred years. It may well be that Suffolk is a county of small freeholders in the days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, because it was a county of free men and socmen in the days of

William I.

(b) The Freeholders

In spite of the constant complaints of the sixteenth century writers that one effect of the agrarian changes was the decay of the yeomanry, we shall not in the following pages be much concerned with the freeholders. In our period the word "yeomen" was ceasing to be given the narrow semi-technical sense which it possessed in Acts of Parliament and legal documents, and was beginning to acquire the wide significance which it possesses at the present day. To the lawyer the yeoman meant a freeholder, "a man who may dispend of his own free lande in yerely revenue to the summe of 40s. sterling," and if the word yeoman was used in its strict legal sense, the decay of the yeomanry ought to have meant a decline in the numbers of freeholders, such as

1 In Domesday Book 35 per cent. of all the tenants in Suffolk are liberi homines, 32 per cent. of all those in Norfolk are either liberi homines or sochemanni. See Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, note 24 to chap. iii. Book III. (p. 376); Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23; Seebohm, The English Village Community, map opposite p. 85. Domesday also gives a large number of liberi homines and sochemanni in Leicestershire. In the table given above the Leicestershire manors come after Suffolk and Norfolk as having the third largest proportion of freeholders, viz., 21-6 per cent. The return of freeholders supplied to the Government in 1561 (Lansdowne MSS. V., 8. 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) appear to be considerably understated, probably because only the more substantial men were thought worth mentioning. They are as follows: Beds 282, Berks 166, Essex 880, Notts 189, Oxon. 198, Herts 363, York 787, Lincoln 444. The large number in Essex is noteworthy. Smith, De Republica Anglorum, Lib I., c. 23.

2

oceurred on a very large scale two and a half centuries later. But in this matter it seems that popular usage was more elastic than legal definition, and, except when the significance to be given it is defined by the context, the word itself is not an accurate guide to the legal position of those to whom it is applied. Writers on constitutional questions were careful to observe the stricter usage, because the 40s. freeholder occupied a position in the State, both as a voter and in serving on juries, from which persons who, though much wealthier, were not freeholders, were excluded. But the word yeoman was used, in speaking of agricultural conditions, to describe any well-to-do farmer beneath the rank of gentleman, even though he was not a freeholder. Thus Bacon1 writes quite vaguely of "the yeomanry or middle people, of a condition. between gentlemen and cottagers or peasants." Those who insisted that the military power of England depended on the yeomanry can hardly have meant to exclude well-to-do copyholders; 2 not only copyholders but even villeins by blood were sometimes described as yeomen; and, in fact, even writers who, like Sir Thomas Smith,4 use the word most clearly in its strict legal sense on one page, allow themselves to slip into using it in its wider and more popular sense on the next, when the social importance of the class and not its legal status is uppermost in their minds.

3

Nor is there much evidence that the freeholders suffered generally from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. It is true that there are some complaints from freeholders as to the loss of rights of pasture through the encroachments of large farmers upon the commonable area, some cases of litigation between them and enclosing landlords. But, since their payments were fixed, there was no way of getting rid of them except by buying them out, and though this method, which was so important a cause of the decline of the small freeholder in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was occasionally employed to round off a great estate, it seems to have played a com

1 History of King Henry VII. (Lumley), pp. 70-72. He makes his meaning quite clear by saying "tenancies for years, lives, and at will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were turned into demesnes."

2 Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., vol. xvii. (Savine," Bondmen under the Tudors "). 3 Ibid.

Smith, De Republica Anglorum, loc. cit.

paratively unimportant part in our period. There is no sign of any large diminution in their numbers, such as would have been expected if the movement had affected them in the same way as it did the customary tenants.

2

Indeed, if the accounts of contemporary writers may be trusted, it would appear that their position was actually improved in the course of the century. Though even among quite small men one occasionally finds a tenant by knight1 service, the vast majority of freeholders held in free socage, owing fealty and suit of court, and paying a money rent, sometimes combined with the old recognitions of dependent tenure, such as a gillyflower, a red rose, a pound of pepper, or a pound of cummin. But while on some manors some outward form of feudalism, such as homage and fealty, were still maintained, the decay of feudal relations in the middle order of society had combined with economic causes to better their condition, and the time was already not far distant when those who held by the more honourable tenure of knight service would insist on its being assimilated to the humbler and less onerous tenure of the socager. The agricultural services of the socage tenants had long disappeared. There are many instances of work on the demesne being done in the sixteenth century by copyholders; but there is in our records only one manor where it was exacted from the freeholders, and other obligations were tending to go the way of the vanished predial labour. Suits of court might be owing, and set down as owing in the surveys, but one may doubt very much whether they were often enforced. Owing to the fall in the value of money the fixed rent of the socager often yielded only a small income to the lord of the manor, and in a good many cases these payments had disappeared altogether before the end of the century, or were so unimportant as to be hardly worth the trouble of collecting. Surveyors for this reason were often little interested in them, and, while recording the acreage held by the customary 1 MSS. of Earl of Leicester at Holkham. Billingford and Bintry MSS. No. 9 (Manor of Foxley, 1568).

2 e.g. ibid., Sparham MSS. No. 5, a freeholder pays "a pounde of cumming seede and a gillyflower" (c. 1590). R. O. Rentals and Surveys, Duchy of Lancaster, Portf. 6, No. 15: "nyne golden threads of vi.d." (1568). R. O. Land Rev. Misc. Bks., 182, fol. 1: a tenant "holds freely a cottage paying a red rose."

tenants and leaseholders with scrupulous accuracy, did not always trouble to set out in detail the holdings of a class which was financially so insignificant, with the result that sometimes the freeholders shook themselves loose from all payments and services altogether. Nor, had the surveyors been as careful as the heads of the profession would have had them be, would they always have been successful in dealing with this very independent class. They may protest that “next 1 under the king" the freeholders "may be said to be the lord's," but freehold lands have a way of getting mislaid to the despair of manorial officials, as copyhold lands do to-day. When escheats occur, the holding cannot be found; when rents are overdue, distraint is impossible, because the bailiff does not know on whom to distrain. The suggestion that, as long as rents are paid and services discharged, the lord has any interest in the property of his freehold tenants, rouses instant resentment, and it would seem that by our period, at any rate in the south of England, the connection of the freeholders with the manor was a matter rather of form and sentiment than of substance. In fact freehold has almost assumed its modern shape.

In assuming its modern shape it has made this particular strand in rural life harder to unravel. By escaping from the supervision of the manorial authorities the freeholders escape at the same time from the economic historian, and

1 Norden, The Surveyor's Dialogue, Book I., pp 4-5, to which the farmer answers: "Fie upon you. Will you bring us to be slaves? Neither lawe, nor reason, nor least of all religion, can allowe what you affirme."

2 Op. cit., Book III. Here is a bitter cry from the bailiff of a manor (Merton Documents, No. 4381). "Good sir let me entreat you yf the Colledge determyne to make survey this spring of the lands at Kibworth and Barkly to send Mr. Kay or me word a month or 3 weeks before your coming that we may have Beare and other necessaries, and I desire you to gather up all evidences that may be needful for the Lordshipp, for all testimony will be little enough, the Colledge land is so mingled with Mr. Pochin's freehold and others in our towne. There ys an awarde for keepinge in of the old wol (?) close in our fields for (from?) Mr. Pochin's occupation, very needfulle for the ynhabitannts yf that awarde can be founde at the colledge where yt was loste." (For the remainder of this letter see Appendix I.) The Crown suffered especially, see Norden, Speculum Britanniae, Part I., pp. xl.-xliii. of introduction (Camden Society): "In many of his Majesty's manors, free holders, their rents, services, tenures and landes . . . become strange and unknown . . . and when escheates happen the lande that should redound to his Majesty cannot be found." In the common entry in manorial surveys under the heading of freeholders of "certain lands" we should probably take the word "certain" to mean "uncertain."

since the facts of their position go so often unrecorded, we can speak of it with much less confidence than we can about that of the leaseholders and customary tenants. Out of over one hundred manors which we have examined, there are only twenty-two where it is possible to ascertain with any accuracy the acreage held by the freeholders, and, even on these, one too often meets cases in which the extent of the holding is either unknown to the surveyor, or in which he does not think it worth while to record it. Our results, such as they are, are set out in the table on pages 32 and 33.1

Combining the information supplied by these figures with that obtained from other sources, we can form a rough idea of the agrarian conditions under which the freeholders live. They are, in the first place, a most heterogeneous class, including on the one hand men of considerable wealth and position, and on the other mere cottagers. If we could trust the statistics given above we should have to say that the latter enormously outnumbered the former. But our impression is that, though, no doubt, a large number of freeholders were extremely small men, the preponderance of the latter was not nearly so marked as is suggested by the table. For one thing, it is difficult to reconcile it with the accounts given us of the substantial yeomen by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For another thing, it is in dealing with the larger freeholders that the inclination of surveyors to omit any estimate of the extent of the land is strongest, because it is naturally in their case that an estimate is most difficult to form. Probably, therefore, if we could obtain for the freehold tenancies figures even as full as we can for those of the customary tenants, we should find that the proportion holding between twenty and forty acres was considerably larger than these partial statistics would suggest.

In the second place, though we very rarely have direct information as to the proportion of their holdings used as arable, meadow, and pasture, such as is often supplied for other classes of tenants, we may say with some confidence that it is extremely improbable that their agricultural 1 For the sources and defects of this table see Appendix II.