Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After

Eric Kerridge

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136580642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

Presenting a full and precise description of all legal ties between landlord and tenant in early modern England, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After re-examines one of the key issues in English agrarian history - the question of the legal security of the copyholder.

Comparing historical records and literary evidence, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After reprints much of the important 1969 edition of the book, and asserts that:

* customary tenants enjoyed legal security in and before the sixteenth century

* enclosures proceeded legally, without oppression, and in much the same form (whether ratified in parliament or not) throughout the whole period

* depopulation was less extensive than sometimes supposed and that such depopulation as there was often proved economically profitable and not without social benefit.

When first published in 1969, this fascinating book represented a unique viewpoint that affected, and in some cases reversed, much accepted opinion. As a landmark work in a highly important area of English agrarian history, it still has considerable impact today.

PART I: AGRARIAN PROBLEMS

Introduction

What are usually regarded as the agrarian problems of the sixteenth century and after are the eviction of copyholders, the depopulation of the countryside, the enclosure movement, and the conversion of tillage to pasture. These problems, it is generally agreed, were inter-locked. Conversion to pasture is envisaged as taking place in enclosed fields and entailing depopulation largely by the eviction of unprotected copyholders.

The late Professor R. H. Tawney conjured up a picture of the career of a relentless and remorseless agrarian capitalism, which impiously rode down a wretched peasantry without any let or hindrance from the common law, as though there were one law for the rich and another for the poor. His denunciation of capitalism sought to convince us that we were face to face with giant manifestations of the exploitation of man by man. This may well be what he intended in The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century in 1912 and no less what he meant to convey in later life, for, despite his whimsical disparagement of it, this was always his most cherished work.

In Tawney, however, a harmful prejudice was all too evident. Tawney the politician barred the way to Tawney the scholar. Time which he might have given to studying history was devoted instead to the Fabian Society and the Labour Party, and he tended to see the world past and present in terms of socialist dogma. Hence his wholly untrue picture of early capitalism as cruel and greedy, destructive alike of social welfare and true spiritual values. No one would wish to deny that Tawney was a great man, but this greatness caused him to lead whole generations of history students into grievous error.

1

The Manor

IN law and in practice, the life of the countryside clustered around the manor. Lawyers and surveyors leave its definition clear and precise:¹

‘From whencesoever derived, a mannor is now that which hath therunto belonging messuages, lands, tenements, rents, services and heridita-ments; wherof part are demeasnes, being those which anciently and time out of minde, the lorde himselfe ever used, occupied and manured with the mannor house; the residue are freeholds, farmes and customarie or coppihold tenements; and these have commonly divers services besides their rents properly belonging thereunto ... There is, moreover, belonging to a mannor a court baron... Neither do those parts formerly named properly of themselves make a mannor; for should any man at this day alott and appoint out any competent quantitie of land, and divide the same into demeasnes and tenement lands, in-feoffing tenants in fee of some parts and granting others by copie of court roll, and perfecting the rest which before is said to belong unto a mannor, yet all this will not make a mannor, for that it is the office of time by long continuance to make and create the same.’

Although not primarily a territorial unit, ‘a mannor in substance is of lands, wood, meddow, pasture and arable: it is compounded of demeisns and services of long continuance.’²

The institution of new manors in the kingdom of England could not receive legal sanction; the power of creating them had been lost by the end of the thirteenth century.³ Individuals, endeavouring to evade their own tenurial obligations to legally constituted manors might try illegally to set up their own.⁴ Christopher Potticary’s attempts to do this at Stockton in 1627 were foiled by his tenants’ refusal to attend court and by searches which the true lord made in Domesday Book and elsewhere.⁵ In 1616 John Norden finds at Helmswell that⁶

‘Richard Bushop, an atturney ... hath longe strugled to make himselfe lorde of the manor and much and longe trowbled the tenantes to drawe them into a usurped court of his own establishynge, depriving the prince of all wayves, estrays, and all other royalties, and hath been twice overthrowne by the lawe and comitted to the Fleete for his contemptyous arrogance.’

In short, he who tries to set up a new manor ‘may have thereby a kind of seignory, a lordship or government in grosse over his tennants by contract or covenant, but no mannor.’⁷

Although new manors could not be created, old ones could be destroyed both in name and nature, by escheating the freeholds and copyholds, for without these there could be no suitors, and therefore no court and no manor, but only a seigniory, which could have no court baron at all.⁸ Many manors were thus dismembered⁹ in the early modern period, especially in the Midland Plain, the Cheese Country, and other farming countries undergoing enclosure.¹⁰ In many places, too, even when manors were not dismembered, their courts were neglected.¹¹

As long as copyholds continued, however, the discontinuance of courts was prejudicial to the customary tenants and, on their petition for a subpoena, might be countermanded by Chancery order. Francis Bacon, for instance, ordered the lords of Whitchurch manor to go on keeping courts.¹² As long as common fields persisted, too, township governments needed the sanction of manor courts for their bye-laws. In the Chalk Country, the dismemberment of Shrewton manor and the discontinuance of its courts threw the whole township into confusion until its government found some other way to enforce bye-laws. Similar results followed the dismemberment of other manors where common fields continued.¹³ Generally speaking, therefore, manors were dismembered only where husbandry bye-laws were no longer needed and the land could readily be sold to non-customary proprietors. Elsewhere manors were as strong as ever. Many, if not most, continued to function in the eighteenth century, and not a few in the nineteenth, in both common-field and severalty districts.¹⁴ So vital and beneficial an institution was the manor and so much reliance did the English place upon it, that after the final conquest of Ireland in 1650 and of Scotland in 1654, manorial courts were set up there under Acts of Parliament and exactly on the model of those in England.¹⁵

Manors could divide and unite. If a manor came into the hands of co-heirs, for instance, two courts could be held in place of one. The manor would then be divided, not by lands but by tenants, each lord taking half as his own. Two manors could become one, if one formerly held of the other and then escheated, or if the inferior manor decayed into a mere lordship, provided the lord wanted his tenants to do suit and service at the superior court, the tenants gave their consent, and long usage perfected the union.¹⁶ In earlier times the division of manors had been common, but was now far rarer than their union. Sub-manors were so numerous that mergers could hardly be avoided in the course of consolidating estates. By various changes of property in successive ages in Westbury, the manorial rights were subdivided into many portions. Then the Earl of Marlborough bought up both the great or hundredal manor of Westbury and its seven sub-manors, and all these merged again into the great manor from which they had sprung.¹⁷ Similar reunifications were made in Corsley, Amesbury, and Blythburgh. Wherever there were several manors to a single township, the tendency was now for them to be united.¹⁸

Sub-manors, however, remained extremely numerous. One manor might have as many as six or more sub-manors, some at some distance from the head.¹⁹ A sub-manor had sometimes formed around the lands of a distinct hamlet, but frequently had resulted from a division of the tenants of a single township, and these tenants might still have all their lands in the same common fields. Thus Corton ‘is no intyer lordshippe of ytselfe, but within the lordship of therle of Arundel’ and its lands are ‘intermedeled in the common feildes with the londes of the tenauntes of the erle ... And all paynes for good order in the common feilds and common meadowes have been alwaies assessed and levyed by the officers of the said erle and not in the lordes courte of this said mannor.’²⁰ For the head manor to sanction the bye-laws of the whole township was the usual arrangement.²¹ It is partly this that explains why not all manor court rolls record bye-laws (Doc. 4).

No map could ever plot the bounds of a manor, strictly speaking, though in common parlance the precinct of a manor was the boundary of its lands, or of the main block of them. Land that was part and parcel of the manor was sometimes described as being outside the manor bounds, which it could not have been, when what was meant was that it was separated from the main body.²² In any event, the lands of some manors were so dispersed that they could hardly be bounded. In upland districts, like the West Country, the lands of a single manor might be scattered over a radius of fifteen miles; and in great towns, like Worcester, they might be almost inextricably confused with those of other manors.²³ A manor’s lands were not always solely in the township or townships from which its name derived. A copyholder in Sevenhampton manor could have his holding in Marston township. Sometimes the lands of one manor were dispersed in several townships amongst lands pertaining to manors in those townships. Thus those of Bulbridge lay also in Chalke, Stoke Farthing, Knighton, Wilton, Avon and South Ugford, each of which had also its own local manor. Amesbury Earls manor comprehended freeholds in Whiteparish, Durnford, Netton, Salterton and Dean, and a farm near Maiden Bradley. Some lands in Clench and Wick were parcels of the manor of Bromham, nearly twenty miles away.²⁴ There were also hundredal manors, like Bishop’s Cannings, Bromfield and Yale, and Cartmel, that might embrace as many as sixteen sub-manors and sixty townships, while the manor of Taunton Deane covered four hundreds. In these, however, although the sub-manors were held of the lord paramount as of his head manor, the lands belonging to them could not be considered as part of the head manor. ‘Lands may be holden of a mannor by certain services, the service may be parcell of the mannor and yet the lands not.’²⁵ Much the same may be said of some other great manors, of which freeholds were held, often in townships at some distance from the head. Great manors were especially common in the Northdown Country, where many of them had foreign appurtenances in the Wealden Vales and Romney Marsh. Wye Royal was an outstanding example of such a great manor, for it had a huge rental of foreign freeholds. The most highly exaggerated of these great manors was that of East Greenwich, for freeholds all over the kingdom, and even lordships in North America, came to be held as of it.²⁶ Manors like these had more services than lands, but it should not be thought that these services were meaningless, for in the absence of an heir the freeholding itself might escheat to the lord of the manor. ‘Most mannors’, indeed, ‘consist of divers towneships or particular parts.’²⁷ Coincidence between township and manor was no more common than the lack of it. Townships were often divided between more than one manor, an especially frequent circumstance in High Suffolk, East Norfolk, and the Fen and West Countries.²⁸ Manors frequently embraced more than one township or parts of more than one. This, indeed, is evident from their very names, such as Chilmark and Ridge, Bootle with Linacre, and so on. Nor were these townships always contiguous.²⁹ Moreover, the combination of two or more townships under one manor is frequently concealed by the simple nomenclature of the latter. The manor of Idmiston contained the two tithings or members of Idmiston and Gomeldon. Bremhill manor consisted of the three tithings of Bremhill, Charlcote and Foxham.³⁰ If the manor extended to more than one township, the same court dealt with their bye-laws separately, and the courts themselves were sometimes held in one township and another by rotation.³¹ If there were two manors to a township, bye-laws could be promulgated in both courts or, more commonly, as at Corton, the sub-manor left the promulgation and enforcement of bye-laws to the other. This mean that the tenants of the two manors had to confer together to frame bye-laws, as they did at Wootton Wawen. When Nassington manor was divided into two, the tenants of both used to meet together to agree about husbandry regulations and stints.³² When form...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• General Introduction
• Preface
• Notes on Abbreviations
• Contents
• Part I Agrarian Problems
• Part II Selected Documents
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Glossary of Legal Terms
• Index of Places
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects