Their signific ance. with half a virgate; in 1542 three tenants still occupied a half virgate, and there were one holder of thirty acres, two of sixty, and three of seventy-five. This is an excellent instance of the growth of large farms out of consolidated tenements, and on a Dorsetshire manor 1 we find one villein holding a hide and four others with half a hide each. But often the process of formation was more irregular, and the outlines of the original holding were completely obliterated. We can easily picture to ourselves the methods by nature and which capitalist enterprise was building up larger tenancies. The commutation of labour services destroyed the lord's interest in preserving the uniformity of the villein holding, and weakened irreparably the influences which had maintained practical equality among the members of the different strata of manorial population. Once seigniorial pressure was removed, the competitive instinct inherent in the human spirit reasserted itself with greater ease, commercial forces were brought into play, and the most varied economic conditions made their appearance. As an immediate consequence of the Black Death a large number of holdings had reverted to the lord of the manor, and in a great multitude of cases they must have been taken over by the surviving tenants. The alienation of the demesne and encroachment upon the waste afforded renewed opportunities to the enterprising farmer, and enabled well-to-do tenants to extend the size of their holdings. At the same time a land-market was developed among the village landholders themselves. The desire to combine unity of management with unity of ownership impelled many peasants to consolidate their strips, buy out the holdings of their impoverished neighbours, and amalgamate their new acquisitions with their old. Thus side by side with the disintegration of the manorial system went the gradual substitution of large farms for small, as the outcome of a tentative capitalist régime. The dissolving forces of commercialism relaxed the rigidity of mediaeval land tenures and opened 2 1 Vict. County Hist. Dorsetshire, ii. 232. 2 Cf. Tawney, op. cit. part i. c. 2; English Hist. Review, xvii. 781. the door to more elastic arrangements. Lath their precommodity which passed from hand to hand, could tion of and sold and exchanged. It is true that these tering the Consolidawere at work in earlier times. Already in the thite con- strips. century they had destroyed the uniformity of the freebest tenements, and were fast turning into a transparent fictiut the apparent uniformity of the villein tenements 1. As early as 1279 a tenant on the estates of St. Paul's, whose ancestor in 1222 occupied a single virgate, had accumulated eight or ten tenements 2, and on an Essex manor at the opening of the fourteenth century (1312) the villeins were enlarging and combining together two or more farms 3. But the movement gathered increasing momentum during the course of the fifteenth century, and it is impossible not to connect its progress with the great pestilence. Nothing less than some violent external shock would have sufficed to disturb the deep-rooted stability of mediaeval rural society However this may be, the net result of a century and a half of change seems to have been to accumulate land in fewer hands, to develop a class of prosperous tenants, and to produce a growing inequality in the disposition of landed estates. In place of the normal villein holding to which the average tenement had once conformed, appeared an endless variety ranging in size from a handful of acres to many scores. social equality originally impressed upon each manorial group, the virgaters, the semi-virgaters and the cottagers, was superseded by an ever-widening inequality. It was left for a subsequent generation, the men of the sixteenth century, to appreciate the full significance of these changes in the distribution of territorial property. The prosperous tenant who added one strip to another prepared the way for the large leasehold farmer, the capitalist entrepreneur, who amalgamated one holding with another. The piecemeal dealings of the primitive land-market afforded precedents for the conduct of transactions on a more extensive scale. Above all, the earlier movement facilitated the agrarian revolution by making a breach in the traditional arrangeHale, Domesday of St. Paul's, p. lv. English Hist. Review, xxvi. 333. 1 Supra, p. 14. The Th The 116 with half a half virgat tene he TON 117 ed became a endencies be bought teenth meaning of enclosure. OMIC HISTORY ndry, through which the flood-tide would one day swiftly pour with loosened the sanction of manorial thority of local law, it accustomed iolate the immemorial practices erved their interests to do so. that it opened the avenue to osperity, by taking from the could protect them in seasons at hand in which landlords were to ves willing and ready to turn the situation their own economic advantage, and the very causes which had promoted the welfare of the peasantry then proved the occasion of their undoing. เบ The growth of large farms was, however, only one aspect of the agrarian changes with whose history we are concerned in the present chapter. Even more important was the process of enclosure, for this involved nothing less than the extinction of the village community itself. The term enclosure has been the source of much confusion, and it will be as well to explain at the outset the variety of meanings which it appears to have covered. It was applied to four distinct processes, and denoted the abolition of the system of intermixed ownership as a result of (i.) the consolidation of scattered strips into compact properties of arable land permanently surrounded with hawthorn hedges, (ii) the conversion of arable into pasture, (iii.) the concentration (engrossing) of holdings, and (iv.) the occupation of the common waste which destroyed or diminished rights of common, and so would tend to facilitate the disappearance of the strip system. All four processes converged in one and the same direction, involving the partial or complete disintegration of the open field system and the emancipation of the individual farmer from communal control. But in other respects their effects were widely dissimilar; it was a matter of extreme moment whether the disappearance of the common fields was due to conversion of arable or improved husbandry, and whether the extinction of the commons was accompanied by adequate compensation to those whose interests were bound up with their preservation. tion of Of the movement towards large holdings during the Consolidafifteenth century we have already spoken 1; and the con- strips. version of arable into pasture at the same period can best be treated in the section devoted to its consideration 2. But at this point we may remark how the two remaining processes identified with the enclosing movement were also anticipated before the sixteenth century. Alike on the part of the lord3 and his tenants, a practice had been steadily growing from the thirteenth century by which the owner of a scattered farm surrendered his disjointed strips in exchange for those of his neighbours, and so built up a compact property disentangled from communal restrictions. On the manor of Gorleston in the time of Henry III. tenants were subletting many of their own ancestral plots of land, while they rented the strips of others. The quantity of land in the occupation of the tenant remained undiminished, but his farm had become more consolidated. About the same period a great landowner, Lord Berkeley, was setting a similar example, enclosing his land in severalty and freeing it from rights of common and the open fields. He "reduced great quantities of ground into enclosures and severalty, by procuring many releases of common from freeholders wherein he bestowed much labour, and the like in exchanges of grounds with them, some in greater, some in lesser quantities, some less than a quarter of an acre" 5. The industry of his successors, who also carried out " exchanges of land . . . casting convenient parcels together", raised the value of the land, as it was said, from fourpence and sixpence an acre to eighteenpence. In other cases, apparently, there was no redistribution of the strips or reallotment of the soil, but the owner of a tenement engaged 2 Infra, p. 126. " 1 Supra, p. 115. The view that the earlier enclosing movement" originated not on the side of the lord . . but on the side of the peasants (Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 165), seems to conflict (i.) with the example cited below of the Berkeley landowners, and (ii.) with the fact that the demesne was commonly more compact than the land held by tenants. 4 Vict. County Hist. Suffolk, i. 643. Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, i. 113. 6 Ibid. i. 160-161. Enclosure of the waste. with his neighbours that they should waive their rights of common over his land in consideration of an annual payment 1. It was natural that the shareholders in the common fields should enter into agreements to enclose their land, or to exchange their strips, or to exclude 'commonable' cattle from pasturing on their soil. An example of enclosure by mutual consent is that of Woodeaton in 1448, where the lord and his tenants agreed that each one should possess his own close and should hedge it at his own expense 2. 3 Even more familiar was the process by which portions of the common waste were enclosed, and held in separate and individual ownership. It was difficult under the best circumstances to interfere with the vested interests of the open field proprietors, and the waste constituted the reserve fund upon which the lord and the villagers could draw to satisfy the claims of a growing population and to meet the exigencies of a widening market. But the curtailment of the commons created a fertile source of controversy, and the Statute of Merton would seem to show that disputes over the approvement of the waste had already begun to unsettle the even tenor of village life. In a deed dated 1313 the lord of Irton gave licence to William de Irton to enclose forty acres of waste, promising in a significant clause to indemnify him if any one who had rights of common hindered the enclosure 4. The examples we have cited serve to show that even before the Black Death economic influences were already undermining the open field system. A process of integration was at work, consolidating the scattered strips, curtailing the common waste, diminishing the rights of common, disturbing the customary and immemorial routine of mediaeval husbandry. But the consequences entailed by the break-up of the old manorial régime during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries must have given an enormous impetus to the process of dissolution. For one thing, the displacement of the original tenantry enabled the lord, as occasion served, to throw the holdings together and build up a more compact estate. For 1 Examples given in Savine, English Monasteries, 186. 2 Eynsham Cartulary, ii. p. lxxiii. 4 Archæological Journal, xxix. (1872), 86. |