Читать книгу The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century - R. H. Tawney - Страница 14

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Important, however, as the freeholders were from a social and political standpoint, they were in most parts of England far inferior in point of numbers to those described as “customary tenants.” It is with the latter class that we are mainly concerned, and leaving the leaseholders on one side for examination later,[87] we may summarise shortly certain features in their position. The number of customary tenants varied from one manor to another, according to the extent to which in different districts farmers holding by lease had been substituted for them, and on some by the middle of the sixteenth century there were none at all. But there are many indications that, down to the end of that century at any rate, and probably much longer, they formed over the great part of England the bulk of the landholding population. Of the revenues of 74 manors held by monastic[88] houses in 1535, £116 came from free, and £1310 from customary, tenants. On 81 of the 118 manors analysed above they are the most numerous class. When all the different districts are grouped together, they amount to about 61 per cent. of all landholders, and even this figure does not give an adequate idea of their numerical importance. As we have seen, Norfolk and Suffolk are quite peculiar in the multitude of freeholders they embrace, while the large number of leaseholders on one extensive Lancashire manor unduly weights the figures for that county. On the Midland manors 62 per cent., in Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Somerset 77 per cent., in Northumberland 91 per cent. of all those holding land are customary tenants. No doubt the area of land held under lease was growing in the course of the sixteenth, and still more in the course of the seventeenth, century, and its growth is an extremely important movement, of which something will be said later. But it seems true to say that, down to the end of the sixteenth century, both in numbers and payments, though not in prestige and influence, the customary tenants, as distinct from the freeholders and leaseholders, were by far the most important class in the agricultural life of the country.

Among the customary tenants, however, there are certain important subdivisions. There are in the first place, differences of legal status. Though villeinage by blood had been disappearing rapidly for several generations, partly through manumission on payment of a fine to the lord, partly through the absorption of migrating villeins into the growing industries of the towns, a certain number of villeins by blood lingered on into the sixteenth century. Dr. Savine[89] has estimated that there were at least as many as 500 villein families in 1485, and as many as 250 in the reign of Elizabeth; and the fact that they occur occasionally on our Norfolk[90] manors, and rather more often on those in Wiltshire[91] and Somersetshire, suggests that his list could be considerably extended on further investigation. Even in 1561 a borough surrenders an apprentice on the ground that he is a runaway villein.[92] Even in 1568 it is worth while in leasing[93] a manor to a farmer for the lord to reserve to himself the villeins upon it, together with other forms of property like quarries and advowsons.

One cannot, therefore, take the almost sanctimonious abhorrence of bondage expressed by the writers of the period quite at its face value. On the other hand, though villeinage by blood was still worth recording, since it offered an impecunious lord an opportunity for arbitrary taxation, and still sufficiently irksome for the rebels under Ket[94] (influenced perhaps by some dim memory of the German peasants' programme) to set its abolition among their demands, its practical importance was slight, and it was quite compatible with a good deal of prosperity on the part of those who were legally bondmen. How completely out of date it was by the middle of the sixteenth century is best shown by some of the cases in which attempts were made to enforce it. When the Earl of Bath[95] seizes £400 from a family on the ground that the members are his villeins, and is pursued by them for nine years from one court to another, or when a lord[96] of a manor is compelled by a royal commission appointed for the purpose of investigating the matter, to repay the value of the beast taken from a man who is proved by the court rolls to be his villein, and the latter, having received it back, declines to stop proceedings unless he be paid heavy compensation in addition, one must see rather a proof of the practical disappearance of villeinage than of its survival. Its occasional enforcement is clearly regarded as something outrageous; it is a freak of arbitrary despotism, which has hardly more historical significance than the seizure of the Derby winner as a copyhold heriot would have at the present day. Public opinion, even the opinion of those engaged in estate management, condemns such attempts unreservedly, and when they come to the ears of the authorities they strain the law on the side of the bondmen.

This change from servile to free labour, begun some two centuries before, and virtually completed in the reign of Elizabeth, is a high landmark in the development both of economic and political society. It is a long step towards modern industrialism on the one hand and the modern all-inclusive state on the other. By sapping the organisation of society on the basis of tenure, and thus making room for the more elastic relationships of the wage-contract, it prepared the way for new methods of production and for the growth of new centres of economic power. The refusal of the courts to allow that the lord of a manor had, qua lord, a theoretical right to dispose of the persons and chattels of his unfree tenants, meant the final triumph of the common law in regions with which for four centuries after the Norman Conquest it had not dared to interfere. Henceforward, while the German peasant is driven afield to gather snails and wild strawberries for his lord, is plundered and harried and tortured without hope of redress, his English brother is a member of a society in which there is, nominally at least, one law for all men. His liberty may be more in shadow than in substance, yet the shadow is itself an earnest of greater things. To us who know the misery of many of the poorer classes in the sixteenth century the boast that “if any slaves or bondmen come here from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they became so free of condition as their masters,” may read like a bitter mockery. But it is something that the boast should be made, and when England is confronted with the greatest moral issue of the modern world, that boast will stand her in good stead.[97] She owes some acknowledgment to the nameless serfs who fled from farm and homestead, till villeinage, in spite of the law, bled gradually to death.

Having said so much we must hasten to guard ourselves, by adding that the final disappearance of serfdom in this country neither involved any radical conversion of opinion, nor prevented the classes who depended solely on their labour from being, on occasion, cruelly oppressed. It would be a mistake to see in the attitude of the governing classes towards villeinage a symptom of humanitarian feeling for the rights of a helpless class, such as prompted the emancipation movement of the last century. How little humanitarianism influenced economic policy in relation to those who were too powerless to be dangerous, is shown by the sanguinary statutes relating to the destitute, and in particular by the extraordinary legalisation of slavery in the Act[98] of 1547, by which a confirmed vagrant might, when captured, be made a bondman for life. Nor must we think of the disappearance of legalised serfdom as effecting a great improvement in the lot of the ordinary wage-worker. Those who benefited by it were not so much the workers for wages, as the landholding peasants. The wage-labourer, who was tied to his parish by the Statute of Artificers almost as completely as the serf had been by the custom of the manor, can hardly have seen much difference between the restrictions on his movement imposed by the Justices of the Peace and those laid on him by the manorial authorities, except indeed that the latter, being limited to the area of a single village, had been more easy to evade.

Even if we confine our attention to the landholding peasants, to whom the advantage (for they were quick to seize it) was certainly real enough, we may doubt whether they did not lose almost as much by the intrusion into agriculture of competitive commercial forces as they gained by the final disappearance of a claim which had always been held in check by the custom of the manor, and which, since the ravages of the Great Plague, had been steadily circumscribed by commutation. The truth is that the sharp antithesis drawn by modern commercial societies between serfs and the free labourers on whose slowly straightening backs our civilisation is uneasily poised, and emphasised as though it marked a line between hopeless oppression and unqualified liberty, requires to be supplemented by categories derived from a wider and more tragic range of experience than was open to our forefathers. There are more ways of living “at the will of a lord" than were known to Glanvill and Bracton, and the utility of the contrast in the sphere of legal analysis does not save it from being but a thin abstraction of the countless forms of tyranny which spring from the world-old power of one human being to use another as his tool. That dependence on the uncontrolled caprice of a master whom one hates to obey and dare not abandon, which, by whatever draperies it may be veiled, is still the bitter core of serfdom,[99] is compatible with the most diverse legal arrangements; with wage labour as with forced services, with tenure by a competitive money rent as well as with tenure by personal obligations, with freedom of contract as well as with inherited status, with protection by the national courts as well as with its absence.

When we turn over the pages in which the writers of the sixteenth century declare that bondage is contrary to “the Christian religion which maketh us all in Christ breathren, and in respect of God and Christ conservos,”[100] and congratulate themselves on its disappearance, we must not doubt their sincerity, but we may envy their inexperience. We must remember that a condemnation of villeinage was quite compatible with a policy of great severity towards the wage-labourer, and was in fact not unconnected with it, since the latter had almost everywhere stepped into places and functions formally held by the bondman. Villeinage disappeared in England earlier than on the continent of Europe, not for the ethical reasons given by Fitzherbert and Smith and Norden, but because the growth of a commercial organisation of agriculture had made its maintenance both useless and impossible. The intellectual conversion did little more than follow on the economic change to make a virtue of necessity. The personal rightlessness of the villein and the hateful incidents of villeinage, such as chevage, merchet, and leyrwite, had had their utility in the fact that they kept him at the disposal of the manorial authorities as an instrument of agriculture. With the substitution of hired labour for the cultivation of the demesne by the services of bond tenants, their maintenance lost its attractiveness. No employer wants to retain a permanent staff, if there are “hands” whom he can take on and put off at pleasure. Villeinage ceases but the Poor Laws begin.

Much more important than this difference of legal status are differences in the tenure by which customary tenants hold their lands. Under the name of customary tenants are grouped together all holders of lands which pass by surrender and admission in the court of the manor, and which are subject to the custom of the manor as evidenced by the records of the court. But not all these lands are held by exactly the same title. Some are held by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor, on the terms set out on a copy of the entry of admission. Others are held without a documentary title, and are often said to be occupied at the will of the lord, or at the pleasure of the lord, or by grant or permission of the lord or of the court, their essential feature being that the tenant does not possess any instrument recording the transaction, but has, if necessary, to appeal to the records of the court or even to its mere memory.

One must hasten to add, however, that these classes are not mutually exclusive. A copyholder is a tenant at will, though qualified by the addition of the words “by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor.” It not seldom happens that in rentals and surveys he is simply described as a tenant at will, and that the fact that he has a copy is not recorded. A tenant at will is usually (though not always) a customary tenant, and, when he is, he can appeal to the custom with as good a right as a copyholder, though of course the fact that his title is not in his own keeping may prejudice him if the manorial authorities want to get rid of him. “All[101] copyhold land,” it was said, “is commonly customary, but all customary land is not copyhold,” and one may accept the statement with the reservation that “commonly” must not be taken to mean “always,” for it is quite usual in parts of England for land which by no stretch of imagination can be called customary land, for example, part of the lord’s demesne, to be let by copy of court roll. The fact that “tenant at will” was sometimes used as a compendious phrase for “copyholder,” and that both are sometimes described simply as “customary tenants” without further definitions, makes it impossible to offer any accurate estimate of the relative number of those holding by copy and those holding at will. It may, however, be of interest to give an analysis of the entries as they appear in a group of manorial documents. It is as follows[102]:—