THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE AGES

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CHAPTER III.

FARMING FOR PROFIT: PASTURE AND SHEEPGRAZING.

1485-1558.

The passing of the Middle Ages: enclosures in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries compared; the commercial impulse and its results; conversion of tillage to pasture: enclosures and depopulation: legislation against enclosures; literary attack on enclosures; the practical defence of enclosures: larger farms in separate occupation: loss of employment; enclosures equitably arranged, or enforced by tyranny; legal powers of landowners; open-field farmers not the chief sufferers by enclosures; scarcity of employment and rise in prices; the new problem of poverty: the ranks of vagrants; the Elizabethan fraternity of vagabonds.

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

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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

TUDOR AND HANOVERIAN ENCLOSURES

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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."2 Translated 1 Petition to Henry VIII. (1514), quoted by F. J. Furnivall in Ballads from MSS., p. 101 (Publications of the Ballad Society, vol. i.).

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2 Thomas Lever's Sermons (1550); Arber's Reprints, p. 29.

\ 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 selfsufficing 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

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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 1 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

1 In the Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Pole defends enclosures for pasture on the plea that cattle, as well as corn, were necessary for human food (England in the Reign of Henry VIII., ed. J. M. Cowper, E.E.T.S., extra series xxxii. 1878).