The Agrarian Problem in the 16th Century

The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century

Any one who turns over the Statutes and State Papers of the sixteenth century will be aware that statesmen were much exercised with an agrarian problem, which they thought to be comparatively new, and any one who follows the matter further will find the problem to have an importance at once economic, legal, and political. The economist can watch the reaction of growing markets on the methods of subsistence farming, the development of competitive rents, the building up of the great estate, and the appearance, or at any rate the extension, of the tripartite division into landlord, capitalist farmer, and landless agricultural labourer, the peculiar feature of English rural society which has been given so much eulogy in the eighteenth century and so much criticism in our own. From a legal point of view the great feature of the period is the struggle between copyhold and leasehold, and the ground gained by the latter. Before the century begins, leases for years, though common enough on the demesne lands and on land taken from the waste, are the exception so far as concerns the land of the customary tenants. When the century closes, leasehold has won many obstinately resisted triumphs; much land that was formerly held by copy of court roll is held by lease; and copyhold tenure itself, through the weakening of manorial custom, has partially changed its character. The copyholders, though still a very numerous and important class, are already one against which the course of events has visibly begun to turn, and economic rent, long intercepted and shared, through the fixity of customary tenure, between tenant and landlord under the more elastic adjustments of leasehold and competitive fines, begins to drain itself into the pockets of the latter. Politically, one can see different views of the basis of wealth in conflict, that which measures it by the number of tenants able to do service contending with that which tests it by the maximum pecuniary returns to be got from an estate, and which treats the number of tenants as quite a subordinate consideration. The former is the ideal of philosophical conservatives, is supported, for military and social reasons, by the Government, and survives long in the North; the latter is that of the new landed proprietors, and wins in the South. And its victory results in much more than a mere displacement of tenants. It means ultimately a change in the whole attitude towards landholding, in the doctrine of the place which it should occupy in the State, and in the standards by which the prosperity of agriculture is measured, drawing a line between modern English conceptions and those of the sixteenth century as distinct as that which exists between those of the Irish peasantry and Irish landlords, or between the standpoint of a French peasant and that of the agent of a great English estate. The decline of important classes alters the balance of rural society, though the Crown for a long time tries to maintain it, and the way is prepared both for the economic and political omnipotence which the great landed aristocracy will exercise over England as soon as the power of the Crown is broken, and for the triumph of the modern English conception of landownership, a conception so repugnant both to our ancestors and to the younger English communities,[1] as in the main a luxury of the richer classes. If it had not been for the undermining of the small farmers position in the sixteenth century, would the proposal[2] to enfranchise copyholders have been thrown out in 1654, and would the enclosures[3] of the eighteenth century have been carried out with such obstinate indifference to the vested interests of the weaker rural classes? Would England have been unique among European countries in the concentration of its landed property, and in the divorce of its peasantry from the soil? From a wider point of view the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century may be regarded as a long step in the commercialising of English life. The growth of the textile industries is closely connected with the development of pasture farming, and it was the export of woollen cloth, that prodigy of trade,$rdquot; which first brought England conspicuously into world-commerce, and was the motive for more than one of those early expeditions to discover new markets, out of which grew plantations, colonies, and empire. Dr. Cunningham[4] has shown that the system of fostering the corn trade, which was embodied in the Corn Bounty Act of 1689, and which was a principle of English policy long after the reason for it had disappeared, was adopted in a milder form in the reign of Elizabeth with the object of checking the decline in the rural population. Again, new agricultural methods were a powerful factor in the struggle between custom and competition, which colours so much of the economic life of the period, and, owing to this fact, they produced reactions which spread far beyond their immediate effect on the classes most closely concerned with them. The displacement of a considerable number of families from the soil accelerated, if it did not initiate, the transition from the medival wage problem, which consisted in the scarcity of labour, to the modern wage problem, which consists in its abundance. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries municipal[5] authorities were engaged in a prolonged struggle to enforce their exclusive economic privileges against the rural immigrant who had lost his customary means of livelihood and who overcrowded town dwellings and violated professional byelaws; while the Government prevented him from moving without a licence, and when he moved, straitened[6] his path between the Statute of Inmates on the one hand and the House of Correction on the other. Observers were agreed that the increase in pauperism[7] had one capital cause in the vagrancy produced by the new agrarian rgime; and the English Poor Law system, or the peculiar part of it providing for relief of the able-bodied, which England was the first of European countries to adopt, came into existence partly as a form of social insurance against the effect of the rack rents and evictions, which England was the first of European countries to experience. Whatever uncertainty attaches to the causes and effects of the agrarian problem, there can be no doubt that those who were in the best position to judge thought it highly important. If it is not a watershed separating periods, it is at least a high range from which both events and ideas descend with added velocity and definiteness. To the economic historian the ideas are as important as the events. For though conceptions of social expediency are largely the product of economic conditions, they acquire a momentum which persists long after the circumstances which gave them birth have disappeared, and act as over-ruling forces to which, in the interval between one great change and another, events themselves tend to conform. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 40336
Author: Tawney, R. H. (Richard Henry)
Release Date: Jul 26, 2012
Format: eBook
Language: English