has been the practice in some-I believe in most-enclosures to extinguish the quit-rent in arranging the allotment of the parcels as between the freeholder and the lord. It is impossible to say in how many cases the quit-rents have been extinguished under the Enfranchisements Acts, but the number must be considerable. Finally, where there has been no special release of the quit-rents, as between the individual tenant and the lord, no general enclosure of the waste lands of the manor, and no enfranchisements, the quitrents are, I presume, payable still; and where this is the case they will be found roughly to represent the annual value of land in the middle ages-viz., a few pence per acre, more or less, according to circumstances.1

One other fact has yet to be mentioned before this history of the emancipation of the feudal tenants from their burdens will be complete.

The quit-rents, or fixed annual charges on the land, were not the only burdens to which it was subject. The payment in lieu of personal military service and the aids and subsidies levied for military purposes in times of war, whilst fixed in amount, were not necessarily fixed in number, as Parliament could grant as many subsidies as were needful. Thus as the value of money diminished, the number of subsidies was, as a matter of fact, increased to make up the amount; so that whilst land was relieved of its fixed annual rents by the causes described, it was not relieved by the same causes from Parliamentary taxation in support of the military expenses of the nation. How modern is the notion of absolute free ownership of land, in the sense that a man's ownership of Consols is absolute and free, is illustrated by the fact that, in lieu of the casual but oftenrepeated subsidies and charges upon land for military purposes, a land-tax of 3s. in the pound on an average was for long annually imposed until, by 38 Geo. III. c. 60, it was made perpetual! It was not till the landowner had redeemed his land-tax that he became in any strict sense the absolute owner of his land. And what, in plain English, was this operation but buying out his landlord's rightsbuying from the king or the State that which before the bargain was struck had been regarded as belonging to the State and not to himself?

This is the history of how, in England, lords of manors and freeholders got rid of their feudal burdens and quit-rents, and emerged into absolute commercial owners of their land.

I need not dwell long upon the special case of the copyholders, whose quit-rents and heriots had a history of their own. Their absolute ownership owes its completion, of course, to the Enfranchise

(1) Through the kindness of Mr. Hawkins I have been able to verify this as regards several freehold and copyhold quit-rents of Hertfordshire manors.

ment Acts; but its real basis, like that of the feudal tenants, was the fall in the value of money and rise in the value of land.

Nor need I dwell on the fact, so patent to every one, that the conversion by these means of all feudal tenures into commercial absolute ownership drove the manorial rights of lords of manors, so to speak, off the holdings of their feudal tenants, and restricted their ownership to their own demesne lands. They were thus, in fact, converted, not like their sub-tenants, simply from feudal tenants into absolute owners of their holdings, but from feudal tenants of their whole manors into commercial absolute owners only of a part, viz., their own demesne lands. I need not dwell upon this, save to point one moral to be drawn from it-viz., how unconsciously wise in their generation were the framers of our English land-laws in thus adopting a principle which secured that any natural rise in the value of the land should not fall into the pocket of the few manorial lords, but into the pocket of their many feudal tenants.

I conclude, from the foregoing history, that had there been no other economic causes at work to sever the connection of the people and the land than the fluctuations in the value of money and landhad England remained throughout a purely agricultural nation, and the peasantry held on to their holdings,-England would have probably come out of it a nation of free peasant proprietors. As it was, every class of English feudal tenants who held on to their holdings, so far as I can discover (unless it be the mere cottiers, as to whose fixity of tenure I have expressed a doubt), did emerge out of security of holding into absolute ownership; and if they have been severed from the land, this severance has been the result of economic causes which we have yet to examine, and not of any default of English land-law in the non-recognition of their rights.

I shall now proceed to trace historically what the economic causes were which have severed the people from the land.

The first great cause which set the stone rolling was the Black Death. In my articles in this Review on the Black Death I traced, in more detail than it would be possible for me to do here, its effect in severing from the land the labouring class, and the very small villein tenants, whose labour after its ravages became more productive of profit than their little holdings of land. I showed that, owing to the great advance in the woollen manufactures and increase of population—even before the Black Death-a stream of emigration had set in from the country manors to the towns. This tendency the Black Death enormously increased, and I traced the long struggle of landlords to check it, and the "strike" on the part of villein and free labourers to achieve their freedom-a strike which ended in the rebellion of Wat Tyler. The history of this struggle accounts for

two things (1) How it was that an immense number of the smallest villein-tenants and cottiers abandoned the land and went to swell the free labouring class. (2) How it was that the extension of sheepfarming itself the consequence in part of the high price of labour— at length worked a reaction, so complete that instead of the villeins abandoning the land, as at first, they were driven from it to make way for sheep. So that while the small villein-tenants and cottiers, whose living was their labour, loosened themselves from villein-tenure and became free labourers during the first process, they thereby prepared the way for their own wholesale ejection during the second process.

The Black Death had also a direct effect in severing the larger landowners from the land.

One of the inquiries in the "Extenta Manerii," with regard to the demesne lands of the lord of the manor, was "how much every acre is worth by the year to be let?" And a few pages earlier in the collection of statutes, in certain " Articles of the Office of Escheator," one of his duties is made to be to inquire as regards the demesne lands in royal manors, "if they be in such a state as they ought to be, or if they be delivered to ferm, whether they be demised according to the annual value of the same, and if the bailiffs or fermors have committed waste." So that it is evident that, long before the time of the Black Death, lords of manors were in the habit of sometimes not farming their own lands by bailiff, but letting them for their annual value to tenant-farmers.

Mr. Rogers has shown that one result of the Black Death was that bailiff-farming did not pay so well as it had done before, and that, therefore the colleges gradually gave it up, and let the demesne lands of their different manors to farming tenants. Now the farming tenants required some capital. It required as much—Mr. Rogers seems to think twice as much-capital per acre as the land was worth to farm it well. And the result was, according to Mr. Rogers, that as the freeholders and other tenants of the manor were the only tenants at hand, they became the farmers of it in addition to their own feudal holdings. And at first the farming capital, as well as the land, was let to them. They brought the labour and the power of management and farming skill, and the lord lent them the stock on the land with the land; until, in process of time, they saved out of their profits capital enough to buy the stock; and this the college accounts show they did in one or two generations, at least.

The practice of leasing land and stock together to farmers was continued, at all events in some instances, even down to Tudor times. For there is a case in the books, in Henry VIII.'s time, of a lease of land with the stock of sheep upon it at a specified rent. All (1) P. 239.

VOL. VII. N.S.

the sheep had died, and the point litigated was whether the whole rent was to be continued to be paid, or whether it ought to be apportioned.1

The habit of the freeholders farming land in addition to their holdings, also continued down to Tudor times. So much was this the case that Harrison, in 1577, speaks of the English yeoman of his day in the following terms:

"Our yeomen are those which by our lawyers are called legales homines, free men born English, and [who] may dispend of their own free land in yearly revenue to the sum of 40s. They are also for the most part farmers to

gentlemen."2

And so common was this practice of yeomen becoming farmers of land, that farmers were sometimes spoken of as yeomen though they were not 40s. freeholders. Thus Hugh Latimer could say, in the famous passage so often quoted:

"My father was a yeoman, and had no land of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, whereupon he tilled so much as kept half-a-dozen men. He had a walk for 100 sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able and did find the king a harness, with himself and his horse. I remember that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field."

So that, already in the time of Henry VII., the old freeholder was almost merged in the tenant-farmer. Even the military service which the freeholder used to give was passed on to the tenant-farmer. And because, I suppose, of his thus acting in the capacity of a military serving man, the word yeoman was applied to the landless, but thriving tenant of a farm like Latimer's, of say 200 acres.

Indeed, it was soon found that the tenant-farmers were, as a class, more thrifty than the landlords, and the commercial tenants than the feudal. The landlord began by letting to the farmer the land and the stock. The farmer ended sometimes in laying by capital enough not only to stock his farm himself, but even to buy the freehold. Harrison says, speaking of those who are "farmers to gentlemen,"

that

"With grazing, frequenting of markets, and keeping of servants (not idle servants as the gentleman doth, but such as get both their own and part of their master's living) do come to great wealth, insomuch that many of them are able and do buy the lands of unthrifty gentlemen.'

The fact was, the commercial tenant-farmer made more money than the gentleman landlord. And inasmuch as he farmed more land, and kept more sheep, and bought and sold on a larger scale than the mere feudal tenant of a small feudal holding could, the commercial tenant got the better in the race, not only of feudal landlords, but also of feudal tenants. The commercial farming of land on a large scale was, in fact, found more profitable than the (1) Reeve's "History of English Law," p. 371, vol. iii. (3) Fol. 105.

(2) Fol. 106.

feudal tenure of it on a small scale. With sheep farming in connection with the commercial market for wool, the commercial spirit worked its way more and more into the business of farming as years rolled on. The grazing farmer was half a manufacturer and half a merchant, and very little of the old husbandman. His mere labour counted little as an item in either his capital or profits. Harrison was loud, nay, even bitter and impatient, at the consequent tendency of lands to get into fewer and fewer hands. It is with ill-concealed disgust that he "leaves this lamentable discourse of so notable an inconvenience growing by encroaching and joining of house to house and land to land, whereby the inhabitants of any country are devoured and eat up." And the burden of his grief was, be it observed, not that the ownership of land was getting into few hands, but the farming of it. It was that small farms were giving way to large farms. Thus, speaking of country villages, he says:

"We find not often above forty or fifty households and 200 communicants, whereof the greatest part nevertheless are very poor folks, oftentimes without any manner of occupying, sith the ground of the parish is often gotten up into a few men's hands, yea, sometimes into the tenure of two or three, whereby the rest are compelled either to be hired servants unto the other, or else to beg their bread in misery from door to door. A great number complain of the increase of poverty, but few men do see the very root from whence it doth proceed. Yet the Romans found it out, when they flourished, and therefore prescribed limits to every man's tenure and occupying,"

2

And if any further evidence be needful to show that the evil tendency deplored in Tudor times was not towards large estates so much as large farms, the evidence is forthcoming. In 4 Henry VII. c. 16, on the depopulation of the Isle of Wight, the evil complained of in the preamble was that "many dwelling-places, farms, and farmholds have of late been taken into one man's hold," and the remedy provided in the statute was a prohibition against any person "taking any several farms more than one," above the annual value of ten marks, and the enactment that

"If any several leases afore this time have been made to any person or persons of divers and sundry farmholds, whereof the yearly value shall exceed that sum, then the said person shall choose one farmhold at his pleasure, and the remnant of his leases shall be utterly void."

And again, in 25 Henry VIII. c. 13, the same complaint is made in the preamble that "divers persons of abundance of movable substance" [i.e., farmers with large commercial capital] have accumulated together," as well great multitude of farms as great plenty of cattle;" and the remedy was the enactment that "no person shall keep on lands not their own inheritance more than 2,000 sheep," and that "no person shall occupy more than two farms."

There was another economic reason why these tenant-farmers were a thriving class, rapidly accumulating money in these Tudor times. (2) Fol. 83.

(1) Fol. 83.