Читать книгу The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century - R. H. Tawney - Страница 15

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	Total	“Copyholders”	“Customary	“Tenants
			Tenants”	at Will”
Northumberland	436	362	45	29
Lancashire	451	295	156	...
Staffordshire	272	170	...	102
Leicestershire	311	157	...	154
Northamptonshire	355	253	93	9
Norfolk	596	536	45	15
Suffolk	146	53	82	11
Wilts and Somerset	817	786	...	31
Hampshire	251	251	...	...
Ten other manors in the south of England	158	87	45	26
Total	3793	2950	466	377

These figures, one must repeat, are merely a summary of the entries in surveys and rentals. Probably they underestimate the number of copyholders, as we know that copyholders were sometimes entered as tenants at will or as customary tenants for the sake of brevity, while it is not probable that tenants at will who had not got copies were often written down as copyholders. One may suspect that this, rather than any difference of custom, is the explanation of the relatively small number of those who are returned as copyholders in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Leicestershire, and Suffolk. Still, these figures do show the enormous preponderance of copyholders among the customary tenants, and show it all the more certainly if the number of copyholders is to be taken, as is probable, as the minimum. And this agrees with what we know from the incidental references of the writers of the time. Of 1000 tenants on the great ecclesiastical manor of Scrooby in Nottinghamshire “the most part” were said by Archbishop[103] Sandys in 1582 to be copyholders. Harrison[104] in 1587 spoke of copyholders as those “by whom the greatest part of the realm doth stand and is maintained.” At the beginning of the seventeenth century Coke[105] could say that the third part of England consisted of copyhold. Copyholders, it is true, are far from being all of one type; for the essence of their tenure is that it depends on the custom of the manor which varies from place to place, and when we come to consider how far they have security against eviction these differences are of crucial importance. Still, in spite of the varieties of copyhold tenure, it is useful to know that to the bulk of the population in the sixteenth century landholding meant holding by copy of court roll according to the custom of the manor. No account of the agrarian changes can stand for a moment which does not give full weight to the fact that, in most parts of England, the copyholders greatly outnumber all other classes of tenants.

The numerical predominance of the customary tenants and among those of the copyholders, together with the disastrous effects upon them which are ascribed by most of our authorities to the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century, makes a somewhat detailed examination of their position essential. In particular it is important to try to bridge the gap between the agricultural system of the sixteenth and that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, out of which it emerged, and of which it continued to bear unmistakable traces. The problem is really a twofold one, partly legal and partly economic. First, what was the legal nature of copyhold tenure, and how did it arise out of mediæval villeinage? Secondly, there is the question, which for us is more important, of the type of agriculture which prevailed among the mass of the people. The economist wants to know whether the customary tenants were large cultivators or small, whether they included considerable capitalists and mere cottagers or whether their holdings were of a fairly uniform pattern, whether they farmed mainly for subsistence or for the market, whether they lived entirely by tillage or were pasture farmers as well, whether they were tied down by custom or showed any signs of being influenced by the agricultural innovations of our period.

Of these two questions the first has been investigated much more thoroughly than the second. We shall return to it later in considering how far the copyholder had security of tenure, and enjoyed legal protection against the lord who wished to evict him. But we may say at once that we accept in substance the argument of those who hold that most copyholders are the descendants of villeins holding villein land, that copyhold tenure is, in fact, villein tenure to which the courts from the end of the fourteenth century have gradually extended their protection, and that the puzzling differences between the position of one group of copyholders and another are due to differences in manorial custom which were followed and upheld by the courts. This not only is the traditional view, in the sense of being that which is implied in the insistence of contemporaries that copyhold originated in base tenure, and that copyholders were tenants “whom the favourable hand of time hath much enfranchised,”[106] but also seems to be that which best fits the situation of the copyholder as we find it in the sixteenth century.

This line of development is suggested, though it is not proved, by the mere preponderance of copyholders. In looking for the antecedents of so numerous and widely spread a class we can only find them in the tenure of the mass of the people in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that is in villein tenure. Further, we do not find in villein tenure any such fundamental distinction between customary tenure which was protected and base tenure which was not, as has been sometimes postulated as an explanation of the qualified legal security possessed by copyholders 200 years later. On the contrary, the tenure of the villeins is marked by the same variety of customary conditions as appears in that of the copyholders, with the difference that, when once copyhold has taken root, these customs are enforced by the courts. The same conclusion is borne out by the survival of ancient formulæ among the terms by which the conditions of the copyholders are recorded in the surveys. It is quite common for copyholders in the sixteenth century to be described as occupying “bond”[107] or “native” land; sometimes one finds a whole list of them set down under the rubric “holding[108] native lands by copy of court roll.” The last thing, of course, which occurred to the writer of these entries was any legal theory as to the origin of copyhold tenure. All he was concerned to do was to describe the holdings in the way which was most precise and left least room for possible disputes. Clearly, he must have had it in his mind that lands which in his day were let by copy of court roll were lands which were known generally in the village as bond lands, and which in earlier documents were described as being occupied in villeinage.

One may approach the question in another way, by looking at the circumstances of those exceptional manors on which the tenants at will are more numerous than the copyholders, and which are instructive just because they represent a variation from the general type. A case in point is the Manor of Knyghton in Wiltshire. On the majority of the manors held in that county by the Earl of Pembroke the copyholders are far the most numerous class, and on some they are the only class, among the customary tenants. At Knyghton,[109] however, there are no copyholders; all the customary tenants hold at the will of the lord, and when one examines the position and methods of agriculture more closely, one finds that they display several signs of being in other respects more antiquated and conservative than is the case in other parts of the same country; for example, all the holdings are either virgates of twenty-four acres or some fraction and multiple of a virgate, which is not at all common on other Wiltshire manors, and implies an unusual approximation to the conditions of the peasantry two centuries before. Is it unreasonable to conclude that this is a case of arrested development, and that Knyghton is a manor on which the tenants at will have never turned into copyholders, because for one reason or another it has lain outside the main stream of agricultural development?

The connection with copyhold tenure of some of the characteristic obligations and disabilities of villeinage points in the same direction. In spite of the general commutation of services into money payments, which Mr. Page’s statistics show to have taken place before the middle of the fifteenth century, one still finds the attenuated records of labour rents surviving for many generations after the direct management of the demesne by manorial officials has been abandoned, and passing with the rest of the farm equipment to the farmer who takes it on lease. In Norfolk and Suffolk they seem indeed to have disappeared almost altogether, which is what one would expect in view of the fact that those counties were the Lancashire and West Riding of the period, and no doubt, even when labour services were still exacted, the farmer relied mainly upon hired labour. But it would be a mistake to regard the tenants' works as everywhere so trifling as to be of no economic importance. Often, it is true, they are inconsiderable. At South Newton,[110] for example, though the uncertainty which had been one of the marks of villeinage still survived among the copyholders in the shape of the duty of “gift carriage,” the transport of such timber as was wanted to the lord’s house at Wilton, the purely agricultural services were unimportant, and the tenants of every yardland had only to mow the farmer’s meadow and to carry his hay. At Cuxham,[111] in Oxfordshire, on the other hand, the authorities were still getting twenty-eight boonworks in autumn from the copyholders at the end of the fifteenth century. On a Northumbrian[112] manor belonging to Tynemouth Priory down to the dissolution of the monasteries “every tenant did lead to the castle in the prior’s time one load of hay, mow three several dayworks of hay, rake one daywork and sheare three severall dayworks in the corn in harvest every year.” At Washerne,[113] in Wiltshire, the copyhold tenants' labours were in 1568 still quite an important affair: each holder of one virgate of twenty acres “shall plough three half acres for the lord’s winter seed and shall harrow them, and also the aforesaid tenants shall wash and shear the lord’s sheep ... and further each of them shall mow one acre of meadow ... and gather hay thence and prepare it.... Each of the said tenants shall reap one acre of wheat and he must bind the crop and carry it. Also each of them shall reap one acre of barley.” On a Lancashire[114] manor in 1628 every plough hand is obliged to do two days' work in the year with a team on the demesne, and two days with a labourer. Such elaborate obligations as appears at Washerne are, it is true, the exception. But they show that in the middle of the sixteenth century there were still backwaters where the remnants of agricultural services were a not inconsiderable burden; and if their comparative lightness marks the progress from villeinage to a wage system, their survival as clearly shows that villeinage was the pit from which copyhold tenure was digged.

More striking still, perhaps, is the persistence of disabilities of another kind. The old marks of personal bondage, chevage, merchet, leyrwite, liability to tallage, and the rest have almost disappeared. But traces of them are still found clinging to the copyhold tenants. Copyholders pay a fixed sum to be free of tallages.[115] They pay salt silver instead of the salt with which they had once been obliged to toil to the lord’s manor-house; they are forced to act as the lord’s reeve, and collect his rents, heriots, and strays. In one curious instance one finds something very like a tallage[116] being taken at the beginning of the seventeenth century, though of course that is not what it is called. The tenants are simply collected and told that they must help the lord to pay for an estate which he has bought, by giving him three years' rent apiece, that, if they do, no more gifts will be demanded during his lifetime, and that, if they do not, he will refuse to renew holdings as they fall in. Even merchet, the most hateful of all the incidents of villeinage, is something more than a mere memory. As late as 1620 the tenants of Holt[117] in Denbighshire thought it worth while to point out to the crown surveyor that “they are freed from payment of any sum of money upon the marriage of their daughters,” and even in 1654 Leyrwite and childwite were still being paid by the heiresses of copyhold tenants on some of the Warwickshire[118] manors.

It will not, therefore, be surprising to find that the humble origin of copyhold tenure has left marks upon it in other ways as well, and, in particular, that though the copyholder is not without legal protection when the lord tries to get rid of him, that protection is often of a somewhat shadowy and ineffective kind. His title is a customary one, and mighty as custom still is, it has for centuries been growing gradually weaker. Its weakening is at once an advantage and a disadvantage to the peasantry. It relieves them of odious obligations and leaves them greater room to push their fortunes. It lowers a protecting barrier and exposes them to the dissolving forces of competition.[Next Chapter]