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   Great landlords as farmers: horrors of winter scarcity: gradual decay of the manorial system and the increased struggle for life: aspects of the change: common rights over cultivated and uncultivated land: tendency towards separate occupation: substitution of labour-rents for moneyrents; the Black Death; Labour legislation, and its effect; Manor of Castle Combe and Berkeley Estates; new relations of landlords and tenants substituted for old relations of feudal lords and dependents; tenantfarmers and free labourers; leases and larger farms; increase of separate occupations: William Paston and Hugh Latimer; wage-earning labourers; voluntary surrender of holdings; freedom of movement and of contract.

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 1200 acres under the plough. Of this arable land, 480 acres were in the lord's demesne, cultivated by 13 serfs and the team and manual labour of the manorial tenants. The remainder of the arable area (720 acres) was occupied by 5 villeins, 7 bordars, and 5 cottagers. There was a wood of a mile and half in length by three quarters of a mile in breadth. There were also three water mills. The whole population consisted of bondmen: none were, in the eye of the law, free. In 1340 the tenemental land had increased to nearly 1000 acres. There were ten freemen, holding between them 247 acres of arable land. Of these freemen, one of the three millers held an estate of inheritance to himself and his heirs, at a fixed quit-rent, subject to a heriot and attendance at the manorial courts. The nine remaining freemen, among whom were the other two millers, held their land at will at fixed money rents and similar services. The rest of the inhabitants were still bondmen. Fifteen customary tenants occupied for the term of two lives 540 arable acres, in holdings of from 60 to 30 acres, partly by money rents, partly by labour services. Eleven others held 15 acres each (165 acres) for two lives, paying their rent only by labour on the demesne; but in addition nine of them also held crofts, for which they paid annual money rents. All these classes, in virtue of their holdings, were protected against caprices of the lord's will by manorial customs. Many of them remained bondmen in status, but the condition of their tenure was raised. Eight "Monday-men" held cottages and crofts or curtilages by labour services only. These thirty-four bondmen, at the will of the lord, could buy themselves out of their labour obligations on payment of the cash values which are entered against their services in the steward's book. In this event substitutes were provided in the twelve cottagers, who paid a fixed money rent for their cottages. Immediately after the "Great Death" the final stage is reached. In 1352 the demesne was cut up into separate farms, and let on money rents. Labour services were therefore no longer needed, and were either merged in the copyhold rents or allowed to die out.

   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 120 acres of land, some of it copyhold, and a "little poor water-mill." He married a bondwoman. Their son William, who was kept at school, often on borrowed money, became a distinguished lawyer, a sergeant-at-law, in 1429 a Judge of the Common Pleas, and the founder of the Paston family. At the close of the same century, Hugh Latimer the father of the Bishop of Worcester, was a farmer in Leicestershire. Preaching before Edward VI., the son describes his father's circumstances. The elder Latimer rented some 200 acres of arable land with rights of common of pasture, employed half a dozen men on his farm besides women servants, ran 100 sheep, milked 30 cows, owned oxen for ploughing, and a horse for riding or for the king's service. He portioned his daughters with £50 or £60 apiece; and, besides teaching his son to "lay his body in the bow," sent him to school and college. He was hospitable to his neighbours and charitable to the needy. And this he did out of the profits of his farm.

   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.