Читать книгу The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century - R. H. Tawney - Страница 9

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If an Englishman of ordinary intelligence had been asked in the reign of Henry VIII. to explain the foundations of national prosperity, he would probably have answered that the whole wealth[53] of the country arises out of the labours of the common people, and that, of all who labour, it is by the work of those engaged in tillage that the State most certainly stands. True, it cannot dispense with handicraftsmen and merchants, for ours is an age of new buildings, new manufactures, new markets. The traders of Europe are already beginning to look west and east after the explorers; there are signs of an oceanic commerce arising out of the coastwise traffic of the Middle Ages; and Governments are increasingly exercised with keeping foreign ports open and English ports closed. But whether any particular artisan or trader is a profitable member of the commonwealth is an open question. Too many of the manufactures which men buy are luxurious[54] trifles brought from abroad and paid for with good English cloth or wool or corn or tin, if not with gold itself—articles whose use sumptuary legislation would do well to repress. As for merchants,[55] if like honest men they give their minds to navigation, well and good. But theirs is an occupation in which there is much room for “unlawful subtlety and sleight,” for eking out the legitimate profits earned by the labour of transport, with underhand gains filched from the necessitous by buying cheap and selling dear, for speculations perilously near the sin of the usurers who traffic in time itself. Outside the circle of a few statesmen and financiers, the men of the sixteenth century have not mastered the secret by which modern societies feed and clothe (with partial success) dense millions who have never seen wheat or wool, though London and Bristol and Southampton are beginning to grope towards it. Looking at the cornfields which are visible from the centre of even the largest cities, they see that a small harvest means poverty and a good harvest prosperity, and that a decrease of a few hundred acres in the area sown may make all the difference between scarcity and abundance. A shortage in grain, which would cause a modern State to throw open its ports and to revise its railway tariff, sets a sixteenth century town[56] breaking up its pastures and extending the area under tillage. No man is so clearly a “productive labourer” as the husbandman, because no man so unmistakably adds to the most obvious and indispensable forms of wealth; and though, in the system of classes which makes up the State, there are some whose function is more honourable, there is none whose function is more necessary. In most ages there is some body of men to whom their countrymen look with pride as representing in a special degree the strength and virtues of the nation. In the sixteenth century that class consisted of the substantial yeoman. Men speak of them with the same swaggering affection as is given by later generations to the sea-dogs. The genius of England is a rural divinity and does not yet rule the waves; but the English yeomen have “in time past made all France afraid.”[57] They absorb most of the attention of writers, both on the technique and on the social relations of agriculture. They are the feet[58] upon which the body politic stands—the hands which, by ministering to its wants, leave the brain free to act and plan. Let us begin by trying to see how the landholding classes were composed.

The manorial documents supply us with much information about the landholders, and though we cannot say what proportion[59] they formed of the population, we ought to be able to say with some certainty the relative numbers of different classes among them. In the surveys and rentals of the period persons holding land may usually be divided roughly according to the nature of their tenure into three groups—freeholders, customary tenants, and leaseholders. This classification[60] of course is an elastic and tentative one, which raises almost as many questions as it settles. The customary tenure of one part of the country differs very much from the customary tenure of another part. Customary tenants include copyholders and the vast majority of tenants at will, who are holding customary land, and who are often entered under the latter heading merely because the surveyor did not trouble to set out their full description. But tenancy at will is sometimes used to describe the condition, not only of the holder of customary land, but also of men who are mere squatters on the waste or on the demesne, and who are not protected in their holdings by any manorial custom. Again, it is not always easy to draw a line between copyhold and leasehold. On a manor where the custom is least favourable to the tenants' interests the former shades into the latter. There is not much difference, for example, between a lease for thirty-three years and a copyhold for life. Again, the classification is one of tenures not of tenants. In parts of England, it is true, it does divide individual tenants with almost complete exhaustiveness and precision. In most districts, for example, the free tenant usually holds freehold land and nothing else, the customary tenant customary land and no other. But in East Anglia there is no such simplicity of arrangement, no such permanence of tenurial compartments. Many free tenants hold land which is said to be bond or villein or customary land; many customary tenants hold free land; many of both have added to their holdings by leasing parts of the demesne or of the waste, and though in this respect the Eastern counties are exceptional, it is in them often impossible to say in what class any individual should be placed.

Nevertheless, in spite of many marginal cases, we may perhaps find in the surveyors' classification a map of the broader features of the country through which we are to travel. Property holders, profit makers, and wage-earners are to-day inextricably confused, but to the economist who writes on our social problems 200 years hence it will not be altogether useless to know that his predecessors did in practice draw rough distinctions between these classes, and formed estimates of the numbers of each. Much of the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century turns on the question of the legal interest in their holdings enjoyed by different classes of tenants, and though we cannot hope to escape the pitfalls which await compilers of even the humblest census, a preliminary survey of their distribution in a few counties may not be altogether without value. The following figures are taken from the surveys and rentals of 118 manors.[61] The majority were made in the reign of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Elizabeth. There are included, however, three from the latter half of the fifteenth century and three from the years between 1630 and 1650. Under the heading of customary tenants are grouped copyholders and tenants at will, as well as those who are called customary tenants in the rentals and surveys.

Scanty as they are, these figures show that there is the very greatest variety in the distribution of different classes of tenants in different parts of the country, and remind us that we must be careful how we generalise from the conditions of one district to those of another. When all localities are handled together, customary tenants form nearly two-thirds of the whole landholding population, freeholders about one-fifth, leaseholders between one-eighth and one-ninth. But in parts of the Midlands and in parts of the West the leaseholders are much more numerous than they are elsewhere; in Leicestershire they form over one-fifth, and are almost as numerous as the freeholders, while if we isolate the five Somersetshire and Devonshire manors which above are combined with those of Wiltshire, we find that in them the leaseholders exceed the freeholders by nearly two to one. Again, in Northumberland the preponderance of customary tenants (where they form 91 per cent. of the landholding population) over the two other classes is much more marked than it is in Wiltshire, and in Wiltshire it is greater than it is in the three Midland counties and in East Anglia. That customary tenants should overwhelmingly preponderate in Northumberland is intelligible enough. If the single great manor of Rochdale be removed, they preponderate almost as much in Lancashire. In those two wild counties mediæval conditions survive long after they have begun elsewhere to disappear. There has been no growth of trade to bring mobile leasehold tenures in its train, or to accumulate the wealth which the peasants need to enfranchise their servile tenancies. But why should they be so much more numerous in the southern counties than they are in the twenty-two Midland villages, where one would suppose the conditions to be much the same? Here, as often hereafter, we raise a question only to leave it unanswered.