466 ASPECT OF THE COUNTRY DISTRICTS. INCLOSURES. [1547 enumerated, in addition to those birds above recited, now almost unknown. In the last century, the crane had forsaken the island. In the time of Henry VIII., the eggs of the larger and smaller wild-fowl were not only destroyed, and the birds taken in unlawful nets, but the breeding-places had been partially obliterated by the progress of cultivation. When the marshes were made profitable in the neighbourhood of towns, the floors of houses ceased to be strewed with rushes. Still, there were thousands of acres of marsh land, and thousands of acres of heath. The statutes indicate the advance of man in subjecting the land to his use. One act of parliament encourages roads to be made through the Weald of Kent.* Another provides for the inclosure of 4293 acres of Hounslow Heath, extending not only over the districts that in recent times comprised Hounslow Heath, but to the parishes of Brentford, Isleworth, Twickenham, and Teddington. The barrenness and infertility thereof are ascribed to the want of diligence and industry of men.† In the inclosure of Hounslow Heath, commissioners were appointed to view the ground, and to allot certain portions of the same to the inhabitants of the various parishes, to be held in severalty as copyholds, and to be converted into tillage and pasture. What the king could do with Hounslow Heath, was done by the lords of manors throughout the country. There was in many cases a similar division of the lands of the suppressed monasteries. "A Bill concerning the houses, tenements, and lands lying in Walsingham, to be letten by Copy, which late were belonging to the Priory," recites that the town, formerly "populous, wealthy, and beautifully builded, is at the present time, by great decay, and by the withdrawing of the trades of merchandise there, and by divers other sundry occasions of late happened, like to fall to utter ruin, and to be barren, desolate, and unpeopled." The act therefore provides that all the lands and granges shall be declared Copyhold, and granted by the stewards of the manors to any persons, who would pay the rents, heriots, and fines prescribed. The town of Walsingham had fallen into decay, "by sundry occasions of late happened," when no pilgrims resorted thither; when the monks ceased to employ artisans about their house, labourers to dig, retailers to provide many comforts and luxuries, servants to wait upon them. The like process of inclosure of waste lands, and division of large feudal property, had been going on throughout the kingdom, from the time of Henry VII.; but the system proceeded much more rapidly and universally after the dissolution of the monasteries. So entire a revolution in the distribution of property never before occurred in England, and has never occurred since. That it was ultimately productive of incalculable benefit cannot be doubted; but it was also the cause of enormous misery, for a season, to the humblest classes of society. The attempts of the state to remedy or even control this inevitable evil were always futile; and it was aggravated by proceedings of the government, of which few saw the consequences, and which fewer dared to expose. The complaint against the conversion of arable land into pasture for the breeding of sheep, forty years before this period, has been fully noticed in a previous chapter.§ As the process went on, more land was demanded. 14 & 15 Hen. VIII. c. 6. 35 Henry VIII. c. 13. + 37 Hen. VIII. c. 2. § Ante, p. 248. 1547.] NEW DISTRIBUTION OF LAND. 467 The capital of the country sought employment in an extension of cultivation; and the extension came through the system of Inclosures. The general desire to invest capital in land and rural occupations, and the facilities now opened for its investment, also led to the quickest profitable employment of capital. The increasing population demanding increased clothing, and one of the greatest exports of native produce being wool, immense flocks of sheep were kept upon the newly inclosed lands, and upon many of the farms where the old cottier tenants had given place to a farmer or grazier who conducted his business upon a larger scale. The monastic houses had been invariably surrounded by small holders of church lands; and their own wants had required that they should have a due proportion of grass land and corn land. At the dissolution of Fountains Abbey, an inventory of their effects showed that the monks possessed 2356 horned cattle, 1326 sheep, 86 horses, 79 swine, 391 quarters of wheat, oats, rye, barley and malt, and 392 loads of hay. To conduct their various farming operations a large number of labourers were necessarily required. When the tenure of these great properties was wholly changed; when the monastic domains fell into the hands of those who only sought to obtain the best rents; there was a disturbance of the labouring population, of which we have ample evidence in the undoubted increase of pauperism and vagabondage. The effect of the dissolution of the abbeys upon this increase of misery, clamouring for aid, has been usually limited to the supposed absence of the relief which those houses afforded to the local poor, by doles out of their abundance. Upon this it has been argued that the monasteries encouraged idle and improvident habits; and that their suppression was a real benefit to the labourers. This was only true in part. There was many a small town and village that fell into decay, besides the town of Walsingham, when these large revenues were wholly diverted to other channels, and were applied, however in accordance with sound commercial principles, to the support of other modes of industry than those which had become habitual to many generations of herdsmen and earth-tillers. But in some cases the change was even more complete, and the results more grievous to the poor. Sir Arthur Darcy writes to Cromwell that he was present at the suppression of Jervaulx Abbey, and looked upon its fair meadows, and great demesne, and surrounding granges. Let the king, he says, take possession, and send his studs of mares here, to occupy the large and high grounds in the summer, and the woods and low grounds in the winter. The breed of men was to give place to the brood-mares.* It was not with the lands of all monastic houses, deserted by the ancient employers and servants, that the same sensible system was pursued as with the rich fields and substantial granges of Walsingham. The grantees of the abbey lands did not in general divide them amongst small copyholders. The lordly mansion often grew up, very commonly near the spot where the chapel and the cloister were soon mouldering into shapeless ruin-a ruin not then made beautiful by time. The sober refectory, with carved roof and lancet windows, was transformed into the tapestried banqueting hall. The pastures and the plough land were thrown together, and became the vast deer-park. The monks wandered about the country, asking the alms which they formerly bestowed. Their servants and * "Suppression," p. 158. 468 COMMON AND SEVERAL. [1547. labourers swelled the number of the roving population. Thus the system which was raising the middle class into "landed men," and adding largely to the possessions of the higher proprietors, went inexorably forward to embarrass the man who had no possession but his power of labour. The course of industry was changed, with serious damage to the living generation. The effects became more alarming when the growing system of inclosures dispossessed the irregular labourer of his hovel and his patch of waste; and flocks of sheep fed, where his half-starved cow had browsed upon the heath, and his scanty crop of cabbages and parsnips had eked out his miserable existence.* But the squatter upon the commons clung to this life of penury and freedom. When the system of inclosures forcibly applied the land to more profitable uses he became a vagabond and a thief. The miserable labourers who eked out a scanty subsistence upon a barren heath were not the only people who were necessarily hostile to inclosures. The ancient race of small farmers had a deep interest in the preservation of unallotted land. Latimer, who was perfectly acquainted with country affairs, tells us of the old time, in a well-known passage ;-" My father was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound by year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep; and my mother milked thirty kine." † The kine and the sheep fed on the common pastureland. In another passage he describes how a ploughman must have sheep to manure the ground. The turnip husbandry was then undreamt of. He must have hogs, and horses, and kine for milk and cheese. "These cattle must have pasture, which pasture if they lack the rest must needs fail them. And pasture they cannot have if the land be taken in, and inclosed from them." There is a proposal for a tax on sheep, in 1551, in which it is estimated that a million and a half are kept in the commons, and a million and a half in inclosed pastures. The extension of these inclosed pastures irritated the people. The protector Somerset appointed a commission in 1548, to inquire into the decay of tillage, and the excessive inclosure of land for pasturage; which system, it is alleged, has brought the land to a marvellous desolation. In the same year the government was issuing proclamations "against the assembling of lewd persons to pull down inclosures." § In 1549, the people of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset, Norfolk, and other counties were in rebellion for redress of this their grievance. But even then there was a sensible farmer who saw the evil of these common-lands, and the benefits of the improved cultivation which belonged to inclosures. Look at Essex and Suffolk, says Tusser, where inclosure is most. There, is most abundance; most work for the labourer; there, are the fewest beggars. The champion, that is, the dweller on commons, he says, robbeth by night and prowleth and filcheth by day. He is indignant at the outery against inclosures from those who will not "live by their work," and are banded together to do lawless acts without fear. He stands up boldly for the profit of "pastures in several;" of the superior comfort of the poor man who has even two acres of inclosed land, as compared with the "commoner." || See Harrison, in Holinshed, p. 193. + First Sermon before Edward VI. § Calendar of State Papers, p. 18. 1547.] THE STATUTE OF VAGABONDS. 469 Tusser was no doubt a better economist than Somerset or Latimer. But the statesman and the preacher had witnessed a terrible social convulsion, which manifested itself in a way which bewildered legislators, and which they attempted to control by one of the most savage laws that ever disgraced our statute book. The Statute of Vagabonds, of the first year of Edward VI., opens to our view a picture of society in England which was certainly an exceptional state, but was also a natural result of the momentous changes of that period of transition. We have already pointed to the significant fact, that the laws against beggars and vagabonds had been written in letters of blood, after the fifteenth century. During the hundred and forty-seven years which had elapsed from the seventh year of Richard II. (1384), to the twenty-second year of Henry VIII. (1531), vagabonds were put in the stocks. Then the whip was added to the stocks. In 1536, the whip was a mild punishment; to which mutilation and death were supplemented.* But even the cart's tail, the butcher's knife, and the hangman's noose, inspired no adequate dread; and were regarded by the government as feeble remedies when Edward VI. came to the throne. The system of terror had wholly failed; and so it was to be carried as much farther as the cruelty of man could devise. In 1548, one who was going about amongst the rural population says, "The people confess themselves most bound to God that he hath sent them such a king, in whose so tender age so much good is intended towards them; and have a great hope that the Iron world is now at an end, and the Golden is returning again." + Certainly those who a few years later had acquired the name of "the thriftless poor -those who ran "to and fro over all the realm, chiefly keeping the champain soils in summer to avoid the scorching heat, and the woodland grounds in winter to eschew the blustering winds." ―certainly this class could not think that the golden world was come for them. The king of "so tender age was taught to consider these unhappy people as weeds to be rooted out. He speaks of them as the "filth" of the body politic. "The vagabonds ought clearly to be banished." § And so, in 1547, there is no hesitation in passing "An Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds," of which the following are the chief provisions: All the former Acts against vagabonds and sturdy beggars being repealed, it is provided that every man or woman, not being prevented from working by old age, lameness, or disease, who shall be found loitering or wandering, and not seeking work, during three days, or who shall leave work when engaged, may be lawfully apprehended, and brought before two justices of the peace; who, upon confession, or on the proof of two witnesses, " shall immediately cause the said loiterer to be marked, with a hot iron in the breast, the mark of V, and adjudge the said person, living so idly, to his presentor, to be his Slave." The presentor, as he is called, is to have and hold the Slave for two years; and, only giving him bread and water and refuse food, to cause the said Slave to work, by beating, chaining, or otherwise, in such work and labour, how vile soever it be, as he shall put him unto." If the Slave, during the two years, shall run away, he is to be pursued; and any * Ante, p. 342. Harrison, chap. x. p. 182. John Hales to Somerset, Tytler, vol. i. p. 114. 470 THE STATUTE REPEALED. [1547. person detaining him is to be liable to a penalty of ten pounds. Convicted of running away, the justices shall cause such Slave to be marked on the forehead or ball of the cheek with a hot iron, with the sign of S.; and then adjudged to his master as a Slave for ever. If he run away a second time, he is to suffer death as a felon. The person to whom the Slave is adjudged, may put a ring of iron about his neck or on his limbs. If there is no man found who will take the loiterer as his Slave, he is to be sent to the place where he was born, to be kept in slavery on the public roads; or he may be let or sold to any private person who will chain, starve, and beat, according to the tenour of this statute. There is an especial provision for committing Clerks convict-Cler gymen convicted of offences-to limited periods of slavery. Infant beggars may be bound to the service of any person who will take them, to use their services till the males be twenty-four years of age, and the females twenty; and if they run away, they are to be brought back, and receive the discipline of slavery. This Statute of Vagabonds, in which the very revival of a name that had wholly fallen into disuse in England is sufficient proof of a most extraordinary condition of society, was repealed in little more than two years after its enactment. The insurrections of 1549 probably forced the government into the acknowledgment that "the extremity" of the penalties had prevented their execution. The legislature then went back to the comparatively mild provisions of the act of 1532; passing over the heavier inflictions contemplated by that of 1536. Of all these statutes it has been most truly observed that "each gradation in the scale of punishment was tried, abandoned, reestablished with added stringency, and again abandoned, with a lingering pertinacity which can only be accounted for by the struggle between experience and preconceived notions.”* The parishes were called upon to relieve the sick and aged; and the justices to punish strong beggars, according to the regulations of the first statute of Henry VIII. The time was approaching when a compulsory provision for the poor would place this great and difficult question upon the basis of all subsequent legislation; but for years vagabondage was the great evil of English society. The constant cry was against the "covetous man," who daily made beggars by "wiping many out of their occupyings, to turn the same into his private gains." The extraordinary provisions of the first statute of Edward VI., for making Slaves of unwilling labourers, offers a distinct proof that there was a demand for labour; but that the lowest of the rural population, who had been long accustomed to an unsettled and irregular industry, which had about it a sort of wild independence, would not work for the masters who pulled down their hovels, and made the waste lands profitable. It appears that "the wise and better-minded of these emigrated, and sought to live in other countries, as France, Germany, Barbary, India, Muscovy, and very Calicut; complaining of no room to be left for them at home." The extension of that commercial principle which drove these poor people to distant countries has provided profitable labour for five times the amount of the population that then derived a meagre subsistence from the land. It was the horrible fate of those who held to what they called their "liberty,"-to wander about, "under the * Sir G. Nicholls, "History of the English Poor-law," vol. i. p. 201. |