The character of English rural society

Earls Colne, 1550–1750

Henry French, Richard Hoyle, Richard Hoyle

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719051081
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847795199
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is a major study of the transformation of early modern English rural society. It begins by assessing the three major debates about the character of English society: the 'Brenner Debate'; the debate over English Individualism; and the long running debate over the disappearance of the small landowner. It then turns to the history of Earls Colne in Essex, which has never before been the subject of a full-length study despite it being one of the most discussed villages in England.

French and Hoyle's rounded account describes the arrival of a new landlord family, the Harlakendens, the tensions created by this change, and the gradual atrophy of their power. This account of change is backed up by a new and original analysis of landholding in the village, which depicts the land market in unprecedented detail, and explores the changing significance of landownership for ordinary people.

It is a key work for all those interested in how English rural society changed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

1
The character of rural change

In the years covered by this book, the English population grew from 2.5 million to 5.1 million. Of those people, about one in twenty lived in towns in the middle of sixteenth century; by 1750 the proportion had increased to about one in nine.¹ Although London was undeniably a great eighteenth-century European city, and a dozen or more English towns were significant urban centres in the European perspective, England remained predominantly rural. The majority of its people lived in the countryside, whether in villages or small towns: they lived and breathed the annual cycle of the seasons. Even those who lived in large towns and the metropolis were within walking distance of green fields and, in the case of London, extensive heathland. Within towns themselves, areas of gardens and pasture closes still survived. Men and women might move to towns after working in the countryside: some might return there, even annually to help with hay making or harvest, perhaps at the end of their lives to retire. Even those who turned their backs on the countryside must have felt its influence, season by season: by the foodstuffs available, by their price.

Historians divide up History for their convenience, whether by period or subject. Whilst all early modernists acknowledge the significance of the town as a developing sector, most early modern economic and social history is ultimately rural history. Not only did most people (and certainly the political elite) live in the countryside, but the dependence of town on countryside for its food was total. Hence no apologies are needed for offering a new account of a single English village between 1550 and 1750, especially one grounded in the classic debates over land, agriculture and the character of rural society. It is not only that early modern society was rooted in the land. The significance of these debates also rests on a long historiographical tradition, which argues for the peculiarity of English landholding arrangements and asserts that because of them, England was the first industrial nation. The notion that English agricultural practices and institutions were superior to those of France can be traced back at least as far as Arthur Young in the late 1770s. These same ideas were adapted and developed by Marx, and the comparison between England and France – one advanced, one backward – remains at the heart of debates over the transformative role of ‘agrarian class structure’.

The usual formulation of the argument is quite simple. At some point, and an extended period rather than a single moment is meant, England ceased to have a peasantry. Instead of a countryside dominated by landholders whose farming was primarily for the provision of their own households, a class of farmers emerged whose farming was on a much larger scale than any peasant’s and who farmed primarily to produce commodities for markets, which were usually urban and often distant. They rented the land they needed from landlords, brought working capital and technical knowledge to the land and employed labour in the quantities and combinations they required. By the time of the French Revolution, the classic tripartite division of English rural society between the landlord, the farmer and the hired wage labourer was well established. In the conventional historiography, the fifteenth century marked a transition between peasant and farmer, subsistence producer and commercial producer, custom and contract, communal and individualistic farming, medieval and modern. In France this transition was delayed until after the Revolution. Pre-Revolutionary French rural society remained a peasant economy, in which subsistence farming still predominated, often carried out within institutional frameworks such as sharecropping that the English found backward and oppressive. The key distinction was farm size. Large farms implied hired labour rather than family workforces. Large farms supplied distant markets: small farms served first to fill the stomachs of their peasant proprietors and their households, and only then to sell surpluses in the neighbouring towns.

It is obvious that neither England nor France conformed uniformly to these characteristics. If there were still areas in late eighteenth-century England in which farmers had some of the traits of peasants, equally there were parts of sixteenth-century France which were as economically and commercially developed as anywhere in England two centuries later. Yet there is a degree of truth in both caricatures. In southern and Midland England, and in East Anglia, there were substantial farms in existence by the late fifteenth century, but this was hardly typical of the British Isles as a whole. In some areas of France farms remained predominantly small, land continued to be traded in small fragments of strips, enclosure of open fields had barely begun and agriculture remained peasant even in 1800. The backwardness of agriculture, low productivity and localisation of marketing in France made for occasional famines even in the second half of the eighteenth century. But this was not the totality of the French experience.²

This book aims to explore these general questions of land, landlordism and agrarian capitalism. Through a detailed examination of a single village in north Essex, Earls Colne, it asks how rural society operated and how land was used in the two formative centuries after 1550. Before turning to that study, though, we wish to review three influential but contrasting explanations of change over those centuries. One, Marxist in its inspiration, was re-formulated most recently by the American historian Robert Brenner. The second, very different interpretation, is Alan Macfarlane’s hypothesis about English Individualism which explicitly rejects the idea of ‘the Great Transformation’. The third view, espoused by English rural historians over the past century, charts the decline of the small owner-occupying farmer between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.³

I

Brenner’s thesis was an attempt to adduce a single unifying explanation of the differential patterns of change in Europe in the key period between 1300 and 1800.⁴ By the latter date, England had broken through into agrarian capitalism, marked notably by the tripartite division in the countryside between landlords, tenants and labourers. France remained backward with strongly entrenched peasant property rights which acted as a brake on progress, whilst in Eastern Europe serfdom remained common or had been abolished only in the previous half-century. Brenner was therefore concerned to explain why the transition from feudalism to capitalism happened earlier in England than elsewhere in Europe. Inevitably, he expressed dissatisfaction with the prevailing orthodoxies – which he characterised as being theses employing commercialisation theories and demographic theories respectively – suggesting that none of them were capable of offering satisfactory all-embracing explanations. Indeed, Brenner’s strictures were particularly aimed at demographic explanations of change for, as he observed, apparently similar demographic histories after the Black Death produced quite different outcomes in England, France and Eastern Europe. There therefore had to be another variable that determined the outcome of the processes of change. For Brenner this was ‘agrarian class structure’.

… crudely stated, it is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-term trends in the distribution of income and economic growth – and not vice versa.⁵

And

Simply stated, it will be my contention that the breakthrough from ‘traditional economy’ to relatively self-sustained economic development was predicated upon the emergence of a specific set of class or social-property relations in the countryside – that is, capitalist class relations. This outcome depended, in turn, upon the previous success of a two-sided process of class development and class conflict: on the one hand, the destruction of serfdom; on the other, the short circuiting of the emerging predominance of small peasant property.⁶

Brenner therefore wished the explanatory tool of class relations to supersede demographic explanations of economic change in the same way as demographic explanations came to discredit older commercial explanations. Whilst Brenner criticised Postan and Le Roy Ladurie for ‘construct[ing] new models largely by substituting a different objective variable, population, for the old discredited one, commerce’, he is open to the same criticism, for seeking an exclusive explanation of change rather than acknowledging that a particular outcome could be due to the impact of a number of variables – including population, access to markets and the possibilities for agrarian capitalism, the balance of class and tenurial relations in the countryside and the attitude of the state to agrarian change.⁷ Such a view allows us to move away from the clumsy device of comparisons based on the experience of entire states (or the whole of an undefined East-Elbian Europe). It allows us to see, for example, that the conjunction of forces might be different in Atlantic as compared with Mediterranean France. It also allows us some hope of explaining why inheritable customary tenancies became established in eastern England but not in western England. If we see the outcome as being determined by interacting forces rather than a single ‘underlying’ force,⁸ then it also raises the possibility that the character of agrarian class relations might be determined by the character of agrarian capitalism rather than vice versa. This holds out the prospect of a micro-topography of rural change, which was alien to Brenner’s state-based approach (although, ironically, the state played a relatively small part in his thinking).

Criticism of Brenner’s thesis can proceed at several different levels. At the high theoretical such criticism functions as a part of the theology of Marxist thought. On its own terms, it can be disputed as a general explanatory theory of historical change in Europe. At the level of individual states, it can be argued that Brenner misspecified the character of change in each state. A proper empirical understanding of agrarian change is undoubtedly necessary because any theory has little explanatory force if it is not in tune with the historical evidence. On the other hand, arguments disputing Brenner’s account by reference to the history of a particular place are also to some degree beside the point. Brenner’s work is a study in comparative history. Even so, it has to be asked whether it is possible to write an account of English agrarian change in which the class dimension of agrarian history is the exclusive motor. With some reluctance, we conclude that it is not.

Brenner’s account of developments within England is as follows. Pre-Black Death medieval society was trapped in a cul-de-sac of economic development due to the weight of seigniorial extraction of rent. Postan is cited with approval for his estimate that as much as ‘fifty per cent of the unfree peasant’s total product was extracted by the lord. This was entirely unproductive profit, for hardly any of it was ploughed back into production: most was squandered in military expenditure and conspicuous consumption’.⁹ Lords were uninterested and peasants unable to invest or introduce new techniques to increase productivity (although as Brenner shows, some at least were available). Lords tended to increase their income by increasing the rent burden placed on their unfree tenants. This burden produced a crisis of peasant productivity: peasants were unable to afford adequate numbers of animals (and thus manure), which resulted in declining arable yields. ‘The crisis of productivity led to demographic crisis, pushing the population over the edge of subsistence’.¹⁰

After the disaster of the Black Death (which Brenner sees as arising out of the crisis of feudal society rather than being an autonomous factor), there was a struggle between lords and tenants – and not simply in England – over control of people and land. This turned on two elements: the lords’ ability to maintain serfdom, and the peasantry’s ability to secure hereditary property rights in their land. In the second half of the fourteenth century lords attempted to buttress their position by controlling peasant mobility and wages, but these strategies failed in the face of peasant truculence and revolt and by 1400 serfdom was in decline. This was a general outcome in Western Europe although achieved by different routes. Thereafter peasant property rights evolved in divergent ways in different areas. The position of the English peasantry in the mid-fifteenth century was apparently strong, but ultimately in Brenner’s analysis they failed to establish secure property rights in their land. Lords were able to claw back their position in one of two ways. First they could transfer vacant peasant tenements to their demesne (demesne in the sense of land the lord could lease out, rather than land he chose to farm directly). Second, they could expel those tenants who remained by demanding entry fines at levels they could not meet. These practices produced their own reaction by peasants in the early sixteenth century. In Brenner’s perspective, the revolts of 1536 (in the North) and 1549 (in East Anglia) were substantially about the ‘security of peasant tenure, in particular the question of arbitrary fines’.

With the peasant’s failure to establish essentially freehold control over the land, the landlords were able to engross, consolidate and enclose, to create large farms and lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capital investments. This [capital investment] was the indispensable precondition for significant agrarian advance …

Lords were therefore able to continue to nibble away at customary property rights so that by the end of the seventeenth century, English landlords ‘controlled an overwhelming proportion of the cultivable land – perhaps 70–75 per cent – and capitalist class relations were developing as no where else’.¹¹ The development of contractual tenurial arrangements allowed capitalist tenants to farm in partnership with their landlords: they were able to invest their capital without fear that landlords would confiscate their profits. Hence they had the confidence to engage in technical innovations of a kind necessary but unachievable in the early fourteenth-century world. With these investments and innovations, agrarian capitalists were able to achieve higher levels of productivity than the surviving smaller yeoman farmers could. In turn, the high levels of agrarian productivity achieved during the eighteenth century allowed England to support a high proportion of its population in non-agrarian occupations, to develop the domestic market for manufactured goods and to escape the cul-de-sac of early fourteenth-century developments.

By contrast, the French peasantry succeeded in establishing a freehold claim over their land. Moreover, they were supported in this by the French state, which competed with the French landowning classes for the profits of agriculture, the state drawing taxation revenue from them, the landowners rent. The success of the French peasantry was connected directly to the failure of French landlords who, Brenner believed, would have wished to expropriate the land of their peasant tenants (‘for this was the only way they could position themselves to raise rents from their land’) but who were prevented from doing so by peasant revolt.¹²

In the first version of his thesis, Brenner offered a clear-cut and exciting view of change and one, which if qualified in the subsequent ‘Brenner Debate’, remains central to his view of developments in England. Despite this, it must be questioned whether anything happened quite in the way he supposed.

First it is unlikely that recent historians would accept his account of the crisis of the fourteenth century. It can be argued that the English countryside h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of tables
• A note on Earls Colne sources
• A note on measurements
• Glossary
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 The character of rural change
• 2 Earls Colne
• 3 The lords of Earls Colne
• 4 The Harlakenden estate
• 5 The lord and his copyholders
• 6 The land market quantified
• 7 The land market anatomised
• 8 Subtenancy: the character of Earls Colne, 1722–50
• 9 Conclusion
• Index
• Footnote