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ENGLISH FARMING PAST AND PRESENT
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PAST AND PRESENT
BY
ROWLAND E. PROTHERO., !@'_Baron
LATE FELLOW OF ALL SOULS COLLEGE, OXFORD
“‘Writing and ploughing are two different talents ; and he that writes well must have spent in his study that time which is necessary to be spent in the fields by him who will be master of the art of cultivating them.”
JETHRO TULL.
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA
1912
All rights reserved
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PREFACE
English Farming Past and Present is based on an article which appeared in the Quarterly Review for 1885. The article was subsequently expanded into a book, published in 1888 by Messrs. Longman under the title of The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming.
The book has been out of print for twenty years. Written with the confidence of comparative youth and inexperience, it expressed as certainties many opinions which might now be modified, if not withdrawn. But its motives were two convictions, which time has rather strengthened than weakened. One was, that the small number of persons who owned agricultural land might some day make England the forcing-bed of schemes for land-nationalisation, which countries, where the ownership of the soil rested on a more democratic basis, repudiated as destructive of all forms of private property. The other was, that a considerable increase in the number of peasant ownerships, in suitable hands, on suitable land, and in suitable localities, was socially, economically, and agriculturally advantageous.
Since 1888, the whole field of economic history has been so care- fully and skilfully cultivated, that another work on a branch of the subject might appear superfluous. But there still seemed to be room for a consecutive history of English agriculture, written from a practical point of view, and tracing the influence of the progress of the industry on the social conditions of those engaged in its pursuit. Great economic changes have resulted from small alterations in the details of manufacturing processes. Similar changes may often be explained by some little-noticed alterations in farming practice. The introduction of the field-cultivation of turnips, for example, was as truly the parent of a social revolution as the introduction of textile machinery. The main object of The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming, and, in greater
vi PREFACE
detail, of English Farming Past and Present, is to suggest that advances in agricultural skill, the adoption of new methods, the application of new resources, the invention of new implements, have been, under the pressure of national necessities. powerful instruments in breaking up older forms of rural society, and in mould- ing them into their present shape.
Students of economic and social questions—and at the present day most people are interested in these subjects—will decide whether the influence of these simple and natural causes has been greater or less than is suggested. Even those who consider that their importance is exaggerated, may find in the record of their progress a useful commentary on the political explanations which they themselves prefer to adopt. The book may still serve another purpose. It touches rural life at many different points and at many different stages. Dwellers in the country are surrounded by traces of older conditions of society. They may perhaps find, through English Farming Past and Present, a new interest in piecing together the fragments of an agricultural past, and in reconstructing, as in one of the fashionable occupations of the day, a picture of the Middle Ages or of the eighteenth century in the midst of their own familiar surroundings.
Now that the book is in print and on the eve of publication, I feel more acutely than ever the disadvantages under which it has been prepared. English Farming Past and Present is the by-product of a life occupied in other pursuits than those of literature. It has been impossible to work upon it for any continuous period of time. Written in odd half-hours, it has been often laid aside for weeks and even months. My thanks are therefore due, in more abundant measure, to Professor Ashley, Sir Ernest Clarke, and Mr. H. Trus- tram Eve, who have kindly read the proof-sheets and helped me with corrections, and above all to Mr. G. H. Holden, who has also verified the references and prepared the Index.
ROWLAND E. PROTHERO.
September 6, 1912.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. THE MANORIAL SYSTEM OF FARMING.
Virgin soils: traces of sites of early villages: “‘ wild field-grass *’ husbandry ; the permanent division of pasture from tillage ; manors and trade-guilds ; origin of manors; the thirteenth century manor and village; divisions of land according to differences of tenure; villages isolated and self- sufficing ; importance of labour-rents in the economy of a manor; the cultivation of the demesne; the crops grown; the live-stock; miscel- laneous produce; the manorial courts: the social grades among the villagers ; the system of open-field farming ; the arable land ; the meadows ; the hams; the pasture commons; the prevalence and permanence of the open-field system ; the domestic industries of the village. Pp. 1-30
CHAPTER II. THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR. 1300-1485.
Great landlords as farmers: horrors of winter scarcity: gradual decay of the manorial system and the increased struggle for life: aspects of the change : common rights over cultivated and uncultivated land : tendency towards separate occupation: substitution of labour-rents for money- rents; the Black Death; Labour legislation, and its effect; Manor of Castle Combe and Berkeley Estates; new relations of landlords and tenants substituted for old relations of feudal lords and dependents ; tenant-farmers and free labourers; leases and larger farms; increase of separate occupations : William Paston and Hugh Latimer; wage-earning labourers ; voluntary surrender of holdings; freedom of movement and of contract. Pp. 31-54
CHAPTER III.
FARMING FOR PROFIT: PASTURE AND SHEEP- GRAZING. 1485-1558.
The passing of the Middle Ages: enclosures in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries compared ; the commercial impulse and its results ; conversion
viii CONTENTS
of tillage to pasture: enclosures and depopulation: legislation against enclosures ; literary attack on enclosures; the practical defence of en- closures: larger farms in separate occupation: loss of employment ; enclosures equitably arranged, or enforced by tyranny; legal powers of landowners; open-field farmers not the chief sufferers by enclosures ; scarcity of employment and rise in prices; the new problem of poverty : the ranks of vagrants; the Elizabethan fraternity of vagabonds.
Pp. 55-77
CHAPTER IV. THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH.
Paternal despotism: restoration of the purity of the coinage; a definite commercial policy: revival of the wool trade: new era of prosperity among landed gentry and occupiers of land: a time of adversity for small landowners and wage-earning labourers: Statute of Apprentices; hiring fairs; growth of agricultural literature: Fitzherbert and Tusser: their picture of Tudor farming: defects of the open-field system : experience of the value of enclosures; improvement in farming: Barnaby Googe ; Sir Hugh Plat: progress in the art of gardening. Pp. 78-102
CHAPTER V.
FROM JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION. 1603-1660,
FARMING UNDER THE FIRST STEWARTS AND THE COMMONWEALTH.
Promise of agricultural progress checked by the Civil War: agricultural writers and their suggestions : Sir Richard Weston on turnips and clover : conservatism of English farmers; their dislike to book-farming not un- reasonable: unexhausted improvements discussed; Walter Blith on drainage: attempts to drain the fens in the eastern counties ; the resist- ance of the fenmen: new views on commons: Winstanley’s claims; enclosures advocated as a step towards agricultural improvement.
Pp. 103-129
CHAPTER VI.
THE LATER STEWARTS AND THE REVOLUTION. 1660-1700.
Worlidge’s Systema Agriculturae (1669): improvements suggested by agri- cultural writers ; tyranny of custom; contempt for book-farming ; slow progress in farming skill; general standard low; horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs in the seventeenth century ; want of leaders; growing influence
CONTENTS ix
of landowners; the finance of the Restoration, and the abolition of military tenures ; |legislation to promote agriculture; Gregory King on the State and Condition of England and Wales in 1696: the distribution of population and wealth. Pp. 130-147
CHAPTER VII. JETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHEND. 1700-1760.
Agricultural progress in the eighteenth century ; jenelosures necessary to advance ; vocates and opponents of the enclosing movement; area of uncultivated land and of land cultivated in open-fields ; defects of the open-field system as a method of farming ; pasture commons as adjuncts to open-field holdings; the necessary lead in agricultural progress given by large landowners and large farmers; procedure in enclosures by Act of Parliament: varying dates at which districts have been enclosed : influence of soil and climate in breaking up or maintaining the open-field system : the Hast Midland and North Eastern group of counties : improved methods and increased resources of farming; Jethro Tull the “ greatest individual improver ” ; Lord Townshend’s influence on Norfolk husbandry.
Pp. 148-175
CHAPTER VIII.
THE STOCK-BREEDER’S ART AND ROBERT BAKEWELL. 1725-1795.
Necessity for improving the live-stock of the country; sheep valued for their wool, cattle for power of draught or yield of milk; beef and mutton the growing need: Robert Bakewell the agricultural opportunist ; his experiments with the Black Horse, the Leicester Longhorns, and the New Leicesters ; rapid progress of stock-breeding: sacrifice of wool to mutton.
Pp. 176-189
CHAPTER IX.
ARTHUR YOUNG AND THE DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE. 1760-1800. '
The counties distinguished for the best farming : Hertfordshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Leicestershire: the low general standard ; Arthur Young; his crusade against bad farming, and the hindrances to progress; waste land ; the ‘‘ Goths and Vandals’ of open-field farmers: want of capital and education ; insecurity of tenure ; prejudices and traditional practices ; impassable roads; rapid development of manufacture demands a change of agricultural front: Young’s advocacy of capitalist landlords and large tenant-farmers. Pp. 190-206
x CONTENTS
CHAPTER X.
LARGE FARMS AND CAPITALIST FARMERS. 1780-1813.
Agricultural enthusiasm at the close of the eighteenth century ; high prices of agricultural produce ; the causes of the advance; increased demand and cessation of foreign supplies ; the state of the currency ; rapid advance of agriculture on the new lines of capitalist farming; impulse given to enclosing movement and the introduction of improved practices; Davy’s Lectures on Agricultural Chemistry ; the work of large landlords: Coke of Norfolk. Pp. 207-223
CHAPTER XI.
OPEN-FIELD FARMS AND PASTURE COMMONS 1793-1815.
Condition of open-field arable land and pasture commons as described by the Reporters to the Board of Agriculture, 1793-1815; (1) The North and North-Western District ; (2) West Midland and South-Western District (3) South-Eastern and Midland District; (4) Eastern and North-Eastern District ; (5) the Fens; the cumulative effect of the evidence ; procedure under private Enclosure Acts ; its defects and cost ; the General enclosure Act of 1801; the Inclosure Commissioners ; the new Board of Agriculture.
Pp. 224-252
CHAPTER XII. } THE ENGLISH CORN LAWS.
Difficulty in deciding on the good or bad influence of the Corn Laws ; restrie- tions on home as well as on foreign trade in corn ; gradual abandonment of the attempt to secure just prices by legislation ; means adopted to steady prices ; prohibition both of exports and of imports: the bounty on home- grown corn; the system-established in 1670 and 1689 lasts till 1815; its general effect ; influence of seasons from 1689 to 1764, and from 1765 to 1815; difficulty of obtaining foreign supplies during the Napoleonic wars ; practical monopoly in the home market: small margin of home supply owing to growth of population; exaggerated effect on prices of good or bad harvests; protection after 1815; demand by agriculturists for fair profits ; changed conditions of supply ; repeal of the Corn Laws, 1846.
Pp. 253-274
CONTENTS xi
CHAPTER XIII. HIGHWAYS.
Difficulties of communication; influence of natural waterways on inland trade; artificial waterways and canal construction; Roman roads ; mediaeval road-repair: roads in Tudor times; introduction of turnpikes at the Restoration; condition of eighteenth century roads; failure of statutory labour; rival theories of Telford and M‘Adam; extinction of turnpike trusts ; highway rates ; main roads. Pp. 275-289
V CHAPTER XIV. THE RURAL POPULATION. 1780-1813.
Effect of enclosures on the rural population ; no necessary reduction in the number of small owners, but rather an increase; consolidation of farms, either by purchase from small owners, or by throwing tenancies together ; the strict letter of the law; small occupiers become landless labourers ; depopulation of villages when tillage was abandoned for pasture: scarcity of employment in open-field villages ; the literary controversy ; the mate- rial injury inflicted upon the rural poor by the loss of the commons; no possible equivalent in cash-value: the moral injury; the simultaneous decay of domestic industries; the rapid rise after 1790 in the price of provisions ; a substantial advance in agricultural wages. Pp. 290-315
yCHAPTER XV. AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION AND THE POOR LAW. 1813-1837.
War taxation : peace and beggary : slow recovery of agriculture ; the harvest of 1813; reality and extent of distress; the fall of prices; bankruptcies of tenant-farmers; period of acute depression, 1814-36; ruin of small owners ; misery of agricultural labourers ; reduction in wages and scarcity of employment; allowances from the rates; general pauperisation : the new Poor Law, 1834, and its administration. Pp. 316-331
CHAPTER XVI. TITHES.
The incidence of tithes under the old law; the historical origin of tithes ; a free-will offering; a customary payment; the appeal to conscience ;
xii CONTENTS
ecclesiastical penalties for non-payment; a legal liability: tithes as parochia] endowments; the Reformation; the collection of tithes in kind unpopular and expensive to tithe-owners; substituted forms of payment; the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 ; its obiect and machinery.
Pp. 332-345
+ CHAPTER XVIL HIGH FARMING. 1837-1874.
Condition of agriculture in 1837; current explanation of the distress; pre-
paration for a new start in farming ; legislative changes ; development of
a railway system; live-stock in 1837; the general level of farming ;
foundation of the Royal Agricultural Society; uotable improvements,
1837-74; extension of drainage; purchase of feeding stufis; discovery
of artificial fertilisers ; mechanical improvements and inventions ; Repeal
of the Corn Laws; the golden age from 1853 to the end of 1862; rapid progress in the “ Fifties’’; pedigree mania in stock-breeding.
Pp. 346-373
CHAPTER XVITI. ADVERSITY. 1874-1912.
Industrial crisis; special difficulties of farmers; the weather, and foreign competition ; Richmond Commission, 1879-82; second agricultural crisis, 1891-99; Royal Commission of 1893; changes in farming; the day of small things; progress; the aid of science; management of dairy pro- duce; agricultural education; effects of present elementary education.
Pp. 374-392
CHAPTER XIX. CONCLUSION.
1888 and 1912: political agitation then and now; the situation contrasted and compared ; the position of landowners; of tithe-owners; of tenant- farmers; tenant-right as a defence against sales ; agricultural labourers, their slow progress between 1834 and 1884, and their Unions; their improved position in 1912. The problem of the future ; the reconstruction of village life: the necessity of an agricultural policy: the prospect of increased burdens on agricultural land. Pp. 393-418
APPENDICES.
APPENDIX I. Chronological list of Agricultural Writers down to 1700. Pp. 419-430
INS
CONTENTS xiii
APPENDIX II. The Poor Law from 1601 to 1834. Pp. 431-438
APPENDIX III. Pp. 439-452 THE CORN LAWS.
. Prices of Wheat, 1646-1911 (p. 440).
. The Principal Acts relating to the Corn Trade (p. 442). The Assize of Bread (p. 448).
. Exports and Imports of Corn, 1697-1801 (p. 452).
. Bounties paid on Exports of Corn, 1697-1765 (p. 452).
both -
APPENDIX IV. Tables of Estimates by Gregory King and Charles Davenant. Pp. 453-455
APPENDIX V. Estimates of Acreage and Cropping, 1808, 1827. P. 456
APPENDIX VI. Collection of Tithes. Pp. 457-459
APPENDIX VII.
The Agricultural Population according to Census Returns of 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901. Pp. 460-461
APPENDIX VIII. Imports of Food, 1866-1911. Pp. 462-463
: APPENDIX IX. Agricultural Statistics, 1866-1911. Pp. 464-467
APPENDIX X.
Agricultural Wages, 1768-70, 1824, 1837, 1850-1, 1860, 1869-70, 1882, 1892, 1898, 1910. Pp. 468-470
INDEX. Pp. 471-504.
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CHAPTER I.
THE MANORIAL SYSTEM OF FARMING.
Virgin soils: traces of sites of early villages: ‘“ wild field-grass”’ husbandry ; the permanent division of pasture from tillage; manors and trade-guilds ; origin of manors; the thirteenth century manor and village; divisions of land according to differences of tenure; villages isolated and self- sufficing ; importance of labour-rents in the economy of a manor; the cultivation of the demesne; the crops grown; the live-stock; miscel- laneous produce; the manorial courts: the social grades among the villagers ; the system of open-field farming ; the arable land ; the meadows ; the hams; the pasture commons; the prevalence and permanence of the open-field system ; the domestic industries of the village.
IMPROVEMENTS in the art and science of English agriculture were in its infancy dependent on the exhaustion of virgin soils. So long as land was abundant, and the people few or migratory, no rotation of crops was needed. Fresh land could be ploughed each year. It was only when numbers had increased and settlements became permanent, that farmers were driven to devise methods of cultivation which restored or maintained the fertility of their holdings.
The progress of farming is recorded in legal documents, in manorial accounts, in agricultural literature. But the story is also often preserved in the external aspect which the land, the villages, ‘or the hedgerows bear in the twentieth century. Dry uplands, where the least labour told the most, were first occupied and cultivated ; rich valleys, damp and filled with forest growth, remained unin- habited and untilled. In spite of difficulties of water-supply, light or sandy soils, or chalky highlands seem to have been the sites of the oldest villages. Patches of the lower slopes of downs were cleared of self-sown beech, and sheltered dips tilled for corn ; the high ground behind was grazed by flocks and herds ; the beech woods supplied mast for the swine. Salisbury Plain, a century
ago, bore no sign of human life except the proverbial ‘thief or A
2 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM
twain ’’—no contemporary mark of the hand of man but the gallows and their appendages. Yet here are to be found traces of numerous villages. Scored on the sides of the Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire, and Sussex downs, “ Lynches,” ‘ Lynchets,” or “* Daisses,”—grass-grown terraces or benches,—still run horizontally, one above the other, along the slopes. The “ elf-furrows ”’ of Scot- land seem to record a similar occupation of hill sites. Local tradition attributes their formation to spade husbandry. Marshall, in 1797, suggested, but only to reject, the operation of the plough. Fifty years later, Poulett Scrope adopted a similar suggestion ; more recently Seebohm revived the same theory. Whatever explanation of the formation of these terraces may be correct, they indelibly indicate the sites of the earliest settlements, and the nature of the soil first selected for tillage.
The most primitive form of agriculture is that known as “ wild field-grass ’’ husbandry. Joint occupation and joint tillage were probably its characteristics, as they afterwards were of tribal or village communities. The essential difference lies in this. In the open fields of the village, pasturage and tillage continue to be separated ; grass-land always remains meadow or pasture; it is never broken up for tillage. Under the more primitive form of convertible husbandry, fresh tracts of grass were successively taken in, ploughed, and tilled for corn. As the soil became ex- hausted, they reverted to pasture. Such a practice may belong to some portions of the Celtic race, or to nomadic stages of civilisa- tion. In 1804 Marshall thought that he could trace the “ wild field-grass ” system in a custom of the south-western counties. In some districts lords of the manor enjoyed rights of letting portions of the grass commons to be ploughed up, cultivated for corn, and after two years thrown back into pasture. Over the whole country, from the Tamar to the eastern border of Dorsetshire, he found that open commons, such as the wide expanse of Yarcombe and the hills above Bridport, which from time immemorial had never known the plough, were distinctly marked with the ridge and furrow. Other features of rural life, which a century ago were more peculiar to the south-west of England, suggest that arable tillage by village communities, if it ever prevailed in this district, was soon exchanged for a system of convertible husbandry better suited to a damp climate. The cultivated land is divided into little patches by the high Devonshire earthwork, or hedge; the
PERMANENT SEPARATION OF TILLAGE FROM GRASS 3
large open-fields of the parish can rarely be traced ; fewer of the inhabitants are collected into villages, more are scattered in single houses or tiny hamlets. Cornwall and parts of Devonshire, like Brittany, are a country of hedges, and of a Celtic race.
This “ wild field-grass ”’ husbandry was displaced in most parts of England by the permanent separation of arable from pasture land. The change indicates an advance towards a more settled state of society, but not necessarily an advance in agricultural practice. The fixed division of tillage and grass may have been introduced into this country by a people accustomed, like the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons, to a drier and less variable climate. If so, it was on this alien system that the agricultural organisation of the mediaeval manor was based. On it also were founded the essential features of those village communities which at one time tilled two-thirds of the cultivated soil of England, survived the criticism of Fitzherbert in the sixteenth century, outlived the onslaught of Arthur Young in the eighteenth century, clung to the land in spite of thousands of enclosure acts, were carried to the New World by the Pilgrim Fathers, and linger to this day in, for instance, the Nottinghamshire village of Lexington, where half the land of the parish is tilled by an agricultural association of partners.
In the early stages of history, the law itself was powerless to protect individual independence or to safeguard individual rights. Agriculture, like other industries, was therefore organised on prin- ciples of graduated dependence and collective responsibility. — Mediaeval manors, in fact, resembled trade guilds, and it would > be difficult to frame an organisation which, given the weakness of law and the infancy of agriculture, was better calculated to effect the object of mutual help and protection. Communities grouped together in villages were less liable to attack than detached farm- houses and buildings ; common methods of farming facilitated that continuous cultivation which otherwise might have been interrupted by the frequent absence of the able-bodied men on military expedi- tions ; the observance of common rules of management may have hindered improvement, but, if strictly enforced, it also prevented deterioration. Thus the system was suitable to the times and their conditions.
The origin of the legal relation of manors to village communities lies outside the scope of the present enquiry. It concerns tenures
4 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM
rather than systems of cultivation. Two theories explain the rights of manorial lords and rights of common exercised over manorial lands. The legal theory, in its crudest form, is that the lord of the manor is the absolute owner of the soil of his manor, and that rights acquired over any part of it by freeholders and tenants are acquired against him, and originate in his grant or sufferance. The historical ~ theory, stated baldly, is that self-governing, independent com- munities of freemen originally owned the land in common, and were gradually reduced to dependence by one of their members, or by a conqueror, who became the lord of the soil. There seems to be no doubt that individual ownership belongs to an earlier stage of civilisation than communal ownership. But if the second theory is correct, the legal position of the lord of the manor represents a series of encroachments, which transformed the Mark of freemen into the Mark of bondmen, and changed the rights of the villagers over the wastes of the district into customary rights of user over the lord’s soil. Questions of the origin and antiquity of manors, and the extent to which they prevailed before the Norman Conquest, have been to a great degree reopened by recent studies. Seebohm, for example, practically supported the legal view by historical argument. He traced the feudal manor to the Roman villa, with the lord’s estate as the centre round which clustered cultivators, who tilled the soil under servile or semi-servile conditions. This system, according to his view, was taken over by the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and the agrarian results of the Teutonic occupation may be summed up in the transfer of the Roman villa, with its servile labourers, to the conquerors. As a complete explanation of social development the legal theory, in spite of this historical support, seems inadequate. But whether the early stages of village com- munities reveal a movement from serfdom or originated in freedom, whether their relations to manors represent encroachments by the lord or advances by the serf, whether the rights of agrarian associa- tions underlay, or were acquired against, the manorial rights of the feudal baron—whether, in other words, the land-law of the noble became the land-law of the people, or the reverse—is here immaterial. Roughly and generally speaking, the immediate lordship of the land farmed by a village community, including the wastes and commons, was, after the Norman Conquest, vested in the lord of the manor, subject to regulated rights enjoyed by its members.
On a manorial estate, at the beginning of the thirteenth century,
THE MANORIAL BUILDINGS 5
only the church, the manor-house, and perhaps the mill, rose out conspicuously. There were no detached, isolated farm-houses ; but the remaining buildings of the village, grouped together in a sort of street, were the homes of the peasantry, who occupied and cultivated the greater part of the land. At some little distance from the village stood the manor hall or grange, with its out- buildings, garden, and fishpond, surrounded by clay-built walls with thatched tops. The style and extent of the buildings depended on whether the house was the permanent or occasional residence of the lord; they also varied with the importance of the manor, and the wealth of its owner. The house itself was built either of timber and clay, or of stone, for brickmaking was still a forgotten art. It often consisted of a single hall, plastered inside, open to the roof, and earth-floored, which served as court of justice, dining- room, and bedchamber. At one end of the central room was a stable; at the other a chamber, kitchen, or larder. Below one part of the ground floor was a cellar; above another part was, perhaps, a “ solar,’ or parlour, approached by an outside staircase. If the manor was sufficiently important, there were probably added a detached building for the farm servants, and a chamber for the bailiff. The outbuildings consisted of bake-house, stables, dairy, cattle and poultry houses, granary, and dove-cote. Some of the oldest specimens of domestic architecture are granaries, like Hazel- ton or Caleot in Gloucestershire, or the dove-cotes which still in country districts mark the former sites of manor-houses. Repairs of the walls and buildings of the manor-house were among the labour services of the tenantry, who dug, tempered, and daubed the clay, cut and carted the timber, and gathered the straw or reeds for thatching. Where technical skill was needed they were aided by craftsmen, who either held land in reward for their special services, or, on the smaller manors, were hired for the occasion. Tufts of trees, conspicuous in the hedgeless expanse of arable land by which they were surrounded, marked the sites of villages, as they still do in the high table-land of the Pays de Caux. Under their shelter clustered the homes of the peasantry, clay-walled, open-roofed, earth-floored, chimneyless sheds, covered in with straw or reeds or heather, and consisting of a single room. Here, divided by a hurdle or wattle partition, lived, not only the human inhabitants, but their cows, pigs, and poultry. Close by were the tofts and crofts of the open-field farmers, each with its miniature
6 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM
hay-rick and straw-stack ; and the cottages and curtilages of the cottagers, “‘fencéd al aboute with stikkes.”’ Here were the scanty gardens in which grew the vegetables, few but essential to the health of a population which lived almost entirely on salted meat and fish—often half-cured and half-putrid. These homesteads were in early times the only property held by members of the township in exclusive separate occupation. They were also, at first, the only permanent enclosures on the commonable land. But, as agri- culture advanced, pasture paddocks (“ gerstuns”’ or “‘ garstons ”’) for rearing stock, calves, or fattening beasts, or for the working oxen, which could not endure his “ warke to labour all daye, and then to be put to the commons or before the herdsman,” were enclosed in the immediate neighbourhood of the village. In these enclosures, or “happy garstons ”’ as they were called at Aston Boges, were held the village merrymakings, the rush-bearings, the May games, the summerings at St. John’s Eve, the public break- fasts, and the distribution of bread and ale in Rogation week. The land comprised in a thirteenth century manor was generally divided into four main portions, and, speaking generally, was cul- tivated on co-operative principles; the demesne or “ board” land, reserved for the lord’s personal use, surrounding the manor- house, and forming the smaller portion of the whole ; the free land, occupied by freemen holding by military service, or by some form of fixed rent in money or in kind ; the unfree land, occupied by various classes of bondmen, holding by produce-rents and labour services which varied with the custom of the manor; the common pastures and untilled wastes on which the tenants of the manor and the occupiers of certain cottages, in virtue of their holdings, fed their live stock. This right of pasture must be clearly distinguished from those rights which, at certain seasons of the year, were exercised by the associated partners over the cul- tivated arable and meadow lands of the village farm. Thus the lord’s demesne, using the word in its narrower sense, might be kept in hand, or let on lease to free or unfree tenants, or thrown
1 By “village farm ”’ is meant the land in the village which was occupied by an association of partners, who were bound by the same rules of cultiva- tion, held intermixed strips of arable land over which at certain seasons the whole body exercised common rights, annually received allotted portions of meadow for hay, and enjoyed, in virtue of their arable holdings, the right to turn out stock on the common pasture. This open-field system of farming is described pp. 23-27.
LABOUR MORE NEEDED THAN MONEY f!
into the village farm, or dealt with as to portions in each of these three ways. But whether the land was treated as a compact whole, like a modern home-farm, or whether the landlord, as a shareholder in the village association, allowed it to be cut up into strips and intermixed with other holdings, the demesne was mainly cultivated by the labour services of the unfree peasantry. The rest of the land of the manor, forming the larger portion of the cultivated area, was farmed by village partners, whose rent chiefly consisted in the labour, more or less definite in amount, which they were obliged to perform on the lord’s demesne.
In this method of cultivating a manorial estate there are many contrasts with the modern system. The three-fold division of the agricultural interests into landlord, tenant farmer, and wage- earning labourer was practically unknown. Landowner and tenant- labourer owned, occupied, and cultivated the soil, and the gradual relaxation of the labourer’s tenure of the land, and the inter- position of the tenant farmer between the two existing classes, sum up the early social history of English farming. In the thirteenth century, muscles were more essential to the prosperity of the land- lord than money rents. The cultivators of the soil grew their produce, not for sale, but for their own consumption. Each manor or village was isolated and self-sufficmg. Only in the neighbour- hood of towns was there any market for the produce of the farm. Few manufactured articles were bought. Salt, tar, iron (bought in four-pound bars), mill-stones, steel for tipping the edges of imple- ments, canvas for the sails of the wind-mill, cloths for use in the dairy, in the malthouse, or in the grange, together with the dresses of the inhabitants of the hall, and a few vessels of brass, copper, or earthenware, satisfied the simple needs of the rural population. Hands were therefore more required than money on manorial» estates. If the manor was well stocked with labour, the land paid ; when the stock of labour shrank, the profits dwindled. It was in order to retain a sufficient supply of labour on the land that bond- men were restrained from leaving the manor to assume the tonsure of the clerk or the flat cap of the apprentice, to become soldiers or to work outside the manor. Even their marriages were carefully controlled by licences. It was, again, in order to exact and super- vise the due performance of labour services that the lord of the manor maintained his large official staff—his seneschal, if he owned several manors, his steward, his bailiff, and the various foremen of
8 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM
the labourers, such as the reeve, the hayward, the head-reaper, and the granger. But with the thirteenth century begins the practice of keeping estate accounts, in which the amount and cash values of the labour services are entered. Thus the uncertainty of villein-tenure was modified, and the means were prepared for commuting obligations to work into their money equivalents. Already the causes were operating which hastened the process, and changed agriculture from a self-sufficing industry into a commercial system of farming for profit. Population was increasing; trade was growing; urban classes, divorced from rural pursuits, were forming ; means of communication were improving ; money taxes took the place of personal services; the standard of living rose ; coin was needed, not only to meet the demands of the government, but to buy the luxuries of more civilised life.
The obligations of the peasantry to cultivate the demesne varied,
cee dS neg oe rae
not only with local customs, but with the seasons. Their most important services were the autumnal, Lenten, and summer plough- ings on the three fields, into which the arable land of the demesne was generally divided. The crops grown were, as winter seeds, wheat and rye, and, as spring seeds, oats, barley, beans, peas, or vetches. In smaller quantities, flax, hemp, and saffron were locally raised in separate plots. Roots, clover and artificial grasses were still unknown. Rotations of crops, as they are now understood, were therefore impossible. The soil was rested by fallowing the one- half, or the one-third, of the arable land required by the two or the three course system. Red rivet, or a lost white variety, was then recommended for wheat-sowing on light land, red or white pollard for heavy soils, “ gray”? wheat for clays. But on the tenants’ land, rye was the chief grain crop. It is the hardiest, grows on the poorest soils, makes the toughest straw. Rye was then the bread-stuff of the English peasantry, as it still is in Northern Europe. The flour of wheat and rye were often mixed together, and bread made in this form was called “ maslin.”! It retained its moisture longer than pure wheaten bread, and, as Fynes Moryson
1 Lat. miatilio; ‘“‘mestilon,’’ anon. author of Hosebonderie (thirteenth century); “‘ miscellin,’’ Harrison (sixteenth century); “‘ massledine,’ Henry Best (1641); ‘‘ mashelson,’”? Yorkshire (1797). In The Compleat Farmer (1760) it is called ‘‘ maislen”’; but the writer says that it is “ ill husbandry to grow wheat and rye together.”’ Fitzherbert (1523) recommends rye and wheat to be sown together as the surest crop to grow and good for the husband- man’s household. But he does not believe in the slowness of rye in ripening.
THE THREE PLOUGHINGS 9
says in his Itinerary (1617), was used by labourers because it “‘ abode longer in the stomach and was not so soon digested with their labour.”” Wheat and rye were sometimes sown together. But as rye was slower to ripen, the better practice was to sow it alone and earlier, lest, as Tusser (1557) writes, ‘‘ rye tarry wheat, till it sheds as it stands.”’ The mixed cultivation was, however, recommended as a cure for mildew, and for this reason prevailed in Yorkshire in 1797. Barley was the drink-corn, as rye was the bread-corn, of the Middle Ages. It was of two kinds. The head with two rows of grain seems to have been used exclusively for brewing; the coarser four-rowed head, known as “ drage,’’ was used partly for brewing, partly for feeding pigs and poultry. Barley and oats were often sown together. In the North, oats were extensively cultivated ; but they were grey-awned, thin, and poor. In the Midlands and South of England they were comparatively rare on tenants’ land.
The fallows were three times ploughed in preparation for wheat and rye. The seed began to be sown after Lammas Day (August 12),1 and at latest was completed by Hallowmas (November 1). For oats, beans, and peas, the land was ploughed and the seed sown between the Feast of Purification (February 2) and Easter. Oats were said to be best sown in “the dust of March.” “On St. Valentine’s Day cast beans in clay. But on St. Chad sowe good or bad.”’ That is to say, the time for sowing beans was between February 14 and March 2. Barley came last. The land was ploughed and sown between Hoke-tide (the third Tuesday after Easter) and Pentecost. The ploughings were performed, and the teams supplied and driven, partly by the servants of the demesne, partly by the tenants. Sometimes ploughmen seem to have been hired. The harrowings were similarly provided for, and the harrow, often a hawthorn tree, weighted on its upper side with logs, was supplied from the lord’s waste. Here also harrowers seem to have been sometimes specially hired. In this case they possibly provided their own home-constructed implements with sharp points or teeth like the modern type of harrow. When the fallows were first broken up, as was then the practice, in March, or when the land was prepared for barley, the ground was often so hard that the clods had to be subsequently broken. For this
1The Julian calendar was in force. To make the dates correspond with those of the present Gregorian calendar, twelve days have to be added.
10 THE MANORIAL SYSTEM
purpose the ploughman, holding the principal hale of the plough in his left hand, carried in his right a “clotting beetle,” or ‘‘maul,” such as that which is depicted in the Cotton MSS. A “ Dover-court beetle”? was a necessary tool in the days of Tusser ; and Plot, whose Natural History of Oxfordshire appeared in the seventeenth century, recommends its use after the land was harrowed.
The amount of wheat, rye, beans, and peas usually sown to the acre was only two bushels; and of oats and, strangely enough, of barley, four bushels. The yield of wheat_rarely exceeded _five- fold, or ten bushels to the acre; that of the leguminous crops
ranged from three- t to six-fold, or oe six to twelve bushels to the acre; that of oats and barley varied from three- to four-fold, or isin, twelve to sixteen bushels to the acre. Considerable care was exercised in the choice and change of the seed-corn, which was often one of the produce-rents of the tenants. On the Berkeley Estates (1321) the seed v was changed every second or third year ; the upland_corn being sown in the vale, and vice versa. Wheat rarely followed a spring grain crop. If it did, it may be supposed that it received the greater part of the manure mixed with earth, which the tenants carted from the demesne yard, and spread on the manor farm. From the point of view of manuring the land, the right of folding was