by Gwyn, Peter
But why did Wolsey go for the owners if they were not in any real sense responsible? Probably he thought that a landlord was in a much better position than the Crown to ensure that the wrongs were remedied. Moreover, because most landlords were financially so little affected, they were less likely to try to deceive the courts and the more distinguished they were, the more they had to lose if they were found out doing so. What does emerge, even from a cursory look at the evidence, is a serious intention on the government’s part – and one sustained long after the initial inquiry – to achieve results. There is, first of all, the sheer scale of the administrative exercise begun in May 1517, seeking out information about thousands of acres of land and about the fates of countless properties and individuals. What is also striking is the altruistic nature of the exercise. With other national inquiries, including Wolsey’s own general proscription of 1522, the intention had usually been to establish royal rights and thus incur financial and political advantages. In this case the Crown would in theory make some slight financial gain – under the provision of the enclosure Acts it received half the income from land during the period that it had been wrongfully enclosed. However, this only applied where it could be shown that the land was held directly from the Crown; and furthermore the whole thrust of the government’s action was to provide every incentive for the enclosure to be brought to an end, thereby eliminating any possible financial claim by the Crown.
The whole question of intention will have to be looked at again, but for the moment the assumption will be that, when embarking upon the enclosure inquiry of 1517, Wolsey wanted to do something for the common weal, and to that end some 260 people are known to have been brought to court. This in itself is remarkable, when one remembers how rarely anybody appeared in court.14 It is even more remarkable that some 188 of the cases (and the actual figure was almost certainly greater) are known to have been brought to a conclusion. In addition, seventy-four people are known to have pleaded guilty and, as a consequence, entered into large recognizances to remedy the fault.15 On the face of it, all this unusually successful legal activity is yet more evidence of serious intent.
In 1518 and 1519 further commissions of inquiry were set up, while in 1523 the General Pardon, which traditionally brought a parliament to an end, contained an important provision designed to further the thrust of government policy on enclosure.16 In 1526 there was a new initiative. On 14 July a proclamation was issued in which it was admitted that despite the ‘industry and diligence’ of the government ‘to reform, remove and repress the aforesaid great enormities and inconveniences … very little reformation thereof as yet is had’.17 This may have been a deliberately pessimistic assessment designed to encourage more effort, but Wolsey was not content with mere words. New commissioners were sent out, and on 30 September one of them, John Longland, was reporting back to Wolsey that he had had no time to write earlier because he had been
so occupied in the view of these enclosures according unto the king’s commission … And tomorrow do ride to Northampton and all the week to be occupied in that part of the shire. And the week after that in Leicestershire and Rutland. My Lord Brudenell and Sir William Fitzwilliam hath taken great labour therein with as good a mind as any men might. And we most humbly beseech the king’s highness and your good grace to give us a further time for much part of it is so intricate and large it cannot be well done in little time. Our books will be far greater than hath been and much things will come to light that yet hath not been known.18
Then in November two Chancery decrees were issued ordering all those named by the commissioners to appear in court and make recognizances whereby they promised to remedy their errors on pain of considerable financial penalties.19 And the pressure continued. In May 1528 there was a further decree ordering all the king’s subjects
being relaters and furtherers of the commonwealth … that they by writing and bills secretly disclose unto the lord legate, his chancellor of England, the name of all such persons … who hath and keepeth in his hands and possession … any more farm than one; and moreover by the same bill to disclose to the same lord chancellor the names of such person as do enclose any grounds or pastures to the hurt of the commonwealth of this the king’s realm.
Two masters of chancery were deputed to receive the information and a promise was made that the names of the informers would be kept secret.20 In the following February it was further ordered that anyone obtaining profit from land enclosed
contrary to the statutes and law of the realm … that they and every of them, at this side the 15th of Easter next coming [11 April], without any further delay or contradiction, clearly break and cast down all and singular the said hedges, ditches and enclosures so made and enclosed as is aforesaid upon pain to them and every of them not following the king’s commandment to run into his high indignation and displeasure.21
If anybody dared to ignore such a warning, the sheriffs were instructed to tear down the enclosures themselves.22 And in the previous month Wolsey had ordered the sheriff of Northamptonshire to intervene in a long-running dispute between the inhabitants of Thingden (now Finedon) and the lord of the manor, to the point of destroying the hedges and ditches which the lord had apparently wrongfully erected. In none of this is there any evidence of a lack of determination on Wolsey’s part. Indeed, it has been argued, especially as regards the last episode, that he was verging on the over-zealous.23
So determination and effort there certainly were, but to what ends? The various statutes, proclamations, decrees and government instructions provide a number of answers, but in trying to make sense of them, it may be helpful to begin with a source less directly bound up with the propaganda requirements of government policy, Thomas More’s well-known analysis of the problem in Utopia. More’s literary skill and sharp intelligence must always command attention, but what is particularly relevant here is the timing. Published in December 1516, it appeared only six months before the setting up of the enclosure inquiry, just when More was entering royal service and coming into close contact with Wolsey. This does not mean that Wolsey would have read More’s book, but he could hardly have been ignorant of its contents, and to that extent, it may bring us as close to the workings of Wolsey’s mind on this and related economic and social concerns as it is possible to get.24 The effectiveness of More’s analysis derives in part from one striking passage in which, by reversing the expected order of things and making sheep devour human beings, he created an image that has been difficult to forget.25 It may also, however, have focused attention in the wrong place, that is, on the sheep.26 But for More, at any rate, there was no doubt that sheep were at the heart of the problem, and in the following way: sheep meant wool, wool meant cloth, and cloth, as England’s major export, meant profits, not just for the merchants but for the producers of the wool. The profitability of sheep farming encouraged farmers to convert from arable to pasture. This in turn encouraged enclosure because farmers would not want other people’s sheep grazing their pasture. It also encouraged an accompanying evil, legislated against in the enclosure Acts – that of engrossing the consolidation of two separate farming units into one, the consequent rationalization bringing with it the eviction of tenants and farm labourers and the destruction of property. In this way large sheep runs could be created, a form of farming that was profitable not only because the demand for wool was so great, but because it was far less labour-intensive than arable farming. If a farmer could not physically enclose or engross, he could, if powerful enough, eliminate or at any rate seek to limit, the right of others to graze their stock on the common fields.27
This, very simply, was More’s analysis, and much the same view was taken by other writers and social commentators in the sixteenth century and later.28 The most serious consequence for More was the enforced idleness that came from people being driven off the land. It led them into bad ways such as drinking and gaming, and these in turn led to crime. Indeed, it was his preoccupation with crime and what he saw
as the Crown’s failure to tackle its underlying causes that had led him to a discussion of enclosure. But other, more mundane, ills were mentioned. He blamed the obsession with sheep for the high price of food and raw materials, including wool. The overstocking of sheep resulted in disease and death and the breeding of cattle was neglected. More generally, prices had been kept artificially high by greedy farmers and middlemen combining to ensure that output always lagged behind demand. The result was large profits for the few but misery for the many.29
Clearly there was much more than economics involved in More’s analysis of the ills of early Tudor society, and if one turns to official pronouncements on enclosure this is, if anything, even more marked.30 For instance, many were concerned that the depopulation of the villages and the disappearance of the small tenant farmer or yeoman would seriously impair the Crown’s ability to raise an army. How far such men did provide the backbone of Henry VIII’s armies is a moot point, but certainly the perception was that they did. They were also thought to be vital to the stability and moral health of the kingdom, for as the instructions to the 1517 commissioners put it, ‘husbandry and householding’ were together ‘the stepmother of the virtues’.31 Moreover, depopulation resulted in dwindling or non-existent congregations, inadequate church services, deteriorating church buildings and disrespect for the dead: for to quote More, the only thing the churches were being used for was ‘to pen the sheep in’.32
Arguably, if there was no congregation but plenty of sheep, to use churches in this way made a lot of sense, which is but a flippant way of emphasizing the curious and not very happy pairing of economic realism with moral concern that was so characteristic of contemporary attitudes. But it probably only strikes historians as curious from a vantage point of supposed superiority, the assumption being that sixteenth-century man did not understand economics, hence his quaint tendency to get into an intellectual muddle. In fact, the muddle is alive and well in present-day Britain, what with the idle British worker and his cups of tea, the wicked property speculator, and most recently the yuppie, a character that More would have no difficulties in understanding – or inventing. But governments are always being faced with the need to reconcile the irreconcilable. A show of moral concern can be a useful tool here, and certainly to favour exclusively the economic interests of a particular group, even if powerful, can be politically unwise – which again may be too cynical. For what emerges from all the pronouncements on enclosure, whether by private individuals or by government, is a vision of an ideal commonwealth in which arable farming organized around the village community and the open field system played a central and time-honoured part. It provided the necessary food, especially corn for that staple commodity, bread. It provided settled employment. It provided the tenant farmer and labourer, as much as the landowner, with a stake in the land. Such people did not riot, nor were they likely to embark upon a life of crime. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Crown should have shown concern for them, and that insofar as it believed enclosure to threaten their existence, it worked to prevent this from happening.
Yet these same pronouncements also indicate that Tudor government was perfectly aware that there were many areas of England where the vision had little basis in reality; indeed, it was really only in parts of Norfolk and the Midland counties that it had.33 Neither can it have escaped its notice that pasture farming in general and sheep in particular played a vital part in the economy and that the export of wool and increasingly cloth was a major source of revenue. Moreover, if only on the evidence of the returns of the enclosure commissioners, the government would have been forced to accept that enclosure increased the value of the land, for the good reason that it resulted in more efficient farming practices. And that Wolsey understood this can be deduced from the proclamation of 1526 which stated that anyone who could prove that their enclosures were ‘not prejudicial, hurtful nor to the annoyance of the king’s subjects, nor contrary to the laws and commonwealth of his realm’ need not destroy them34 – and at least four people accepted the challenge.35 The fact that they lost does not invalidate the point being made that Wolsey and his colleagues were aware of the possibility that the common weal could be served by enclosure. It is not that they were visionaries determined to recapture some golden age in which the profit motive did not exist. Instead, in full awareness of the arguments for and against, they had concluded that any large-scale changes in agricultural practices would have harmful consequences for the many, whatever the benefits to the few. It is not so surprising that they took this view. Governments have usually been wary of economic innovation, knowing that it is likely to result in social unrest. Moreover, in this particular case there appeared to be no compensating financial or military advantage. It would not be appropriate, therefore, to conclude that idealism was the chief component in the resistance of Wolsey and his colleagues to enclosure, if it were not for the emotional language that they employed and the intensity with which they tackled the problem.
It could be, of course, that what they were exhibiting was not idealism but anxiety. Because enclosure touched upon so many nerve ends to do with law and order and the safety of the realm, its emotional charge was bound to be high – indeed, so high that as respectable a member of society as the high sheriff of Northamptonshire, Sir John Spencer, could be classified as one of More’s ‘insatiable gluttons’ and be ordered to remove all enclosures from his land.36 But here another difficulty looms, and one so serious that it threatens to undermine everything that has been said so far. Quite simply, recent work in this area points increasingly to the conclusion that in the twenty or so years before the setting up of the enclosure commissions very little enclosure had taken place, even in the Midlands, an area previously alleged to have been peculiarly sensitive to market forces and thus to enclosure. Furthermore, this same work suggests that those supposedly most threatened, far from suffering had probably ‘never had it so good’. Reduced rents, readily available land, rising wages, larger holdings, more stock, this, rather than the nightmare vision of More’s carnivorous sheep, now appears to be the true picture of rural life in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England.37 Nor, insofar as arable had been converted to pasture, had it been the consequent enclosure that had caused depopulation and ‘deserted villages’. Instead, it was the dramatic decline in population of the fourteenth century that was largely responsible for enclosure: with a reduced demand for corn and a shrinking labour market, farmers were more or less forced to look for an alternative to arable farming, or leave their land lying idle.38 This being so, it is hardly surprising that what was previously thought of as a late sixteenth-century phenomenon, the so-called ‘peasant enclosure’ whereby often quite humble people enclosed the open fields, has been discovered as early as the late fourteenth century.39 This points up a general consequence of all these findings, which is that the moral dimension begins to recede. Gone are the wicked entrepreneurs seeking to maximize the profits offered by large-scale sheep-farming, and in their place are a bunch of sleepy yokels sucking on straws and being pushed reluctantly to change their ways. Someone whose reputation has benefited from this seachange is the high sheriff of Northamptonshire. Undoubtedly John Spencer owned a lot of sheep, but it now looks as if he was not personally responsible for the widespread enclosure and decay of properties that the enclosure commissioners found on his estates and which was a prerequisite for the scale and success of his farming activities. Rather, what seems to have happened is that he and his uncle had deliberately acquired land already enclosed.40
But, if there were no villains, why the statutes and proclamations, why the commissioners and the court cases, and why the moral outrage? In facing up to the findings of recent research one is forced almost to conclude that Wolsey and his colleagues suffered from some kind of collective madness such as obviously does afflict groups of people from time to time, leading them to invent here a ‘popish plot’ or there a ‘world-wide Jewish conspiracy’. On the other hand, they have
not so far struck one as people likely to be afflicted in this way, and to believe that they were would require that the hundreds of entries in enclosure commissioners’ findings were a complete fabrication, and that the seventy-four people known to have pleaded guilty to offences contrary to the Acts of enclosure had thereby perjured themselves. One way and another, there is so much contradiction between what contemporaries thought was happening and what present-day historians would have us believe, that it is far from easy to see how best to reconcile the two views.
One relevant consideration may be that while statistics are known to lie, they may also anaesthetize. Two or three people and one or two acres may not show up as much of a percentage, but they nevertheless remain people who can weep and acres which once grew corn and then sustained sheep.41 Moreover, the fact that according to current estimation, between 1455 and 1607 only an additional 1.98 per cent of the twenty-four counties investigated by the enclosure commissioners was enclosed still means that well over 600,000 acres were affected.42 And what has always been recognized is that some areas were much more affected than others. In Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Warwickshire, the four counties that witnessed the greatest amount of enclosure, the percentage of land affected was as high as 8.95 (compared with the average of 1.98) and even within these counties it was only certain areas that bore the brunt. In Warwickshire, for instance, it has been estimated that between 1488 and 1517 one in five of the villages in the hundred of Kineton, lying in the so-called Felden area south-east of the River Avon, was seriously affected by enclosure, while other areas of the county escaped very lightly.43 And, though depopulation leading sometimes to a deserted village did usually take place over a long period and without any significant help from enclosure, it does seem that in some instances enclosure finished the process off, and occasionally played a larger role.44 For example, it has been calculated that in Leicestershire between 1485 and 1550 twenty-one villages were wholly enclosed. Of these only six witnessed a significant decline in population prior to enclosure, which is but another way of saying that fifteen were destroyed by it.45 So there do appear to be some villains after all.
