The Enclosures in England Part 4

This complaint was made on many manors belonging to the Bishop of Winchester in spite of the fact that if one may judge from the cost of the "Autumn Works" the meals were not very lavish, the average cost being 1 _d._ or 1-1/4 _d._ per head for each _Precaria_.... The complaint that the system was working at a loss comes also from Brightwaltham (Berks.h.i.+re), Hutton (Ess.e.x), and from Banstead (Surrey), as early as 1325, and is reflected in contemporary literature. "The work is not worth the breakfast"

(or the _reprisa_) occurs several times in the Winchester Pipe Rolls.... By 1376 the entry is considerably more frequent, and applies to ploughing as well as to harvest-work.[85] At Meon 64 acres of ploughing were excused _quia non fecerunt huiusmodi arrura causa reprisae_. A similar note occurs at Hambledon (_Ecclesia_) and at Fareham with the further information that the ploughing was there performed _ad cib.u.m domini_. At Overton four virgates were excused their ploughing _quia reprisa excedit valorem_.[86]

Miss Levett quotes these entries as an explanation for the tendency to excuse services, forgetting that the lord could usually demand a money equivalent for services not required for any reason. We have here the reason why so few services are demanded, but no explanation of the failure to require money instead. The fundamental cause of the worthlessness of the labor on the demesne is the fact which accounts for the absence of a money payment for the work not performed. The demesne land was worn out, and did not repay costs of cultivation; the bond land was worn out, and the villains were too poor to "buy" their labor.

The profits of cultivating this unproductive land were so small that a deficit arose when it was necessary to meet the cost of maintaining for a few days the men employed on it. It is not surprising that men who had families to support and were trying to make a living from the soil abandoned their worthless holdings and left the manor. The lord had only to meet the expense of food for the laborers during the few days when they were actually at work plowing the demesne or harvesting the crop. How could the villain support his whole family during the entire year on the produce of worse land more scantily manured? In this low productivity of the land is to be found the reason for the conversion of much of the demesne into pasture land, as soon as the supply of servile labor failed. It was, of course, impossible to pay the wages of free men from the produce of soil too exhausted to repay even the slight cost incidental to cultivating it with serf labor.

The bailiffs complained of the exorbitant wages demanded by servants in husbandry; these wages were exorbitant only because the produce of the land was so small that it was not worth the pains of tillage.

The most important of the many causes which were at work to undermine the manorial system in the fourteenth century is, therefore, plain.

The productivity of the soil had declined to a point where villain holdings would no longer support the families which cultivated them and where demesne land was sometimes not worth cultivation even by serf labor. Under these conditions, the very basis of the manor was destroyed. The poverty of the peasants, the difficulty with which tenants could be found for vacant holdings, even though the greatest pressure was brought to bear upon eligible villains, and even though the servile burdens were considerably reduced, and the frequency with which these serfs preferred the uncertainty and risk of deserting to the certain dest.i.tution and misery of land-holding, are facts which are intimately connected, and which are all due to the same cause. It had been impossible to maintain the productive capacity of the land at a level high enough to provide a living for the tillers of the soil.

Footnotes:

[39] E. J. Russell, _The Fertility of the Soil_, Cambridge, 1913, pp.

43-46.

[40] _Ibid._, pp. 48-52.

[41] _Political Science Quarterly_, vol. xxviii, p. 394.

[42] _Ibid._, p. 393.

[43] Levett and Ballard, _The Black Death_, p. 216.

[44] _Walter of Henley's Husbandry, together with an Anonymous Husbandry, etc._, ed. by Elizabeth Lamond (London, 1890), pp. 19, 71.

[45] Curtler, _Short History of English Agriculture_, p. 33.

[46] Davenport, _Econ. Dev. of a Norfolk Manor_ (Cambridge, 1906), p. 30.

[47] Rogers, _History of Agriculture, etc._, vol. i, pp. 38-44.

[48] Cullum, _Hawsted_, pp. 215-218.

[49] Unfortunately, the figures for the year 1299-1300 reveal an error which makes it impossible to use the test of the representativeness of Witney in a third season with accuracy. The acreage planted is obviously understated, and it is possible to make only a rough estimate of the correct acreage. The acceptance of the area given by Gras (82 acres) results in the conclusion that 22 bushels per acre was reaped. The suspicion that this result must be incorrect is confirmed when it is found, also, that 68-1/4 quarters of seed were sown--an amount sufficient for 270 acres at the average rate of 2 bushels per acre, or for 220 acres at the rate of 2-1/2 bushels per acre, which Ballard gives as the rate usual at Witney. (Levett and Ballard, _op.

cit._, p. 192.) In 1277 the acreage sown with wheat at Witney was 180 acres, and in 1278, 191. (_Ibid._, p. 190.) If 3 bushels per acre were sown in 1299, the area in this year also was 180 acres. If these estimates are used instead of the figure 82, as indicating the correct acreage, the yield for the year is found to be between 7 and 10 bushels per acre, in a season in which the average yield for the whole group of manors was 9 bushels per acre. The figures at Witney in the three seasons where a comparison with the general average for the group is possible deviate from it within limits narrow enough to indicate that conditions at Witney were roughly typical.

[50] Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, vol. i, p. 228.

[51] _Ibid._, vol. i, p. 234; vol. iv, p. 282.

[52] _Op. cit._, p. 19.

[53] Gras, _Evol. of the Eng. Corn Market_ (Cambridge, 1915), appendix A.

[54] Gras gives 1.35 quarters as the acre produce, or nearly 11 bushels. This figure is incorrect, as it is derived by dividing the total produce of 42 manors by the total acreage planted on only 38 manors. The produce of the four manors on which the acreage planted is unknown amounts to nearly 750 quarters, a large item in a total of only 4527 quarters for the whole group of manors. The ratio of produce to seed, however, is independent of the number of acres planted, and these four manors are included in the computation of this figure.

[55] Gras, _op. cit._, appendix A. These figures are given only for the manors for which the acreage planted in both periods is known--25 in the case of wheat, 4 in the case of the other grains.

[56] Gras, _op. cit._, appendix A; Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, pp.

190, 203.

[57] Smyth, _Lives of the Berkeleys_, vol. i, p. 113.

[58] Page, _End of Villainage_ (Publications of the American Economic a.s.sociation, Third Series, 1900, vol. i, pp. 289-387), at p. 324, note 2.

[59] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 83.

[60] Davenport, _op. cit._, p. 71.

[61] Page, _op. cit._, p. 345.

[62] _Ibid._, p. 340, note 1, and Levett, p. 85.

[63] _Ibid._, p. 340, note 1.

[64] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 85.

[65] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 85.

[66] Page, _op. cit._, p. 340.

[67] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 135.

[68] Page, _op. cit._, p. 344, note 2.

[69] Davenport, _Decay of Villainage_, p. 127. For further evidence of the voluntary relinquishment of land in this period, see Seebohm, _Eng. Village Community_ (London, 1890), p. 30, note 4, and Davenport, _Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor_, pp. 91, 71, 72.

[70] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, pp. 42-43.

[71] Davenport, _Economic Development of a Norfolk Manor_, p. 78, and Smyth, _op. cit._, vol. i, p. 113.

[72] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 157. "On many manors the majority of the services owed were simply dropped, neither sold nor commuted. They were evidently in many cases inefficient, expensive, and inelastic."

[73] _Ibid._, p. 89.

[74] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. v.

[75] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 199.

[76] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 108.

[77] _Ibid._, pp. 38, 115.

[78] Page, _op. cit._, p. 342, note 2.

[79] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 115.