The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico)

by Gwyn, Peter

  In the 1480s the inhabitants of the village of Quinton in Warwickshire suffered from the activities of one John Salbrygge who, at least according to the vicar, was driving them off arable land that they had customarily occupied, and had ploughed up some of the common pasture for his own use. In this case, the villain may have got his come-uppance for in response to the vicar’s complaint the lord of the manor, the governing body of Magdalen College, Oxford, replaced Salbrygge with a group of lessees.46 Another Warwickshire villain was Sir Edward Belknap. Like John Spencer, he had attempted to defend himself in court on the grounds that enclosure was of benefit to the common weal. It was at one time thought that he had not been personally responsible for the land enclosed, but with the recent reopening of the file it now appears that he lied to to the commissioners and courts and that conversion and enclosure were carried out in 1496, when he first obtained full possession of his estate.47 What is interesting about Belknap’s case is the recent metamorphosis: from the innocent legatee of ineluctable forces to thrusting entrepreneur. He has become, in the process, just the kind of person whom the government said they were out to get, and so despite the general direction of modern research the moral dimension begins to creep back! And at this point it seems right to quote a little more from that letter of 26 September 1526 to Wolsey from Bishop Longland. The good bishop was extremely busy as a commissioner for some of the Midland counties – not that he minded, for as he explained,

  I assure your good grace there was never thing done in England for a more common weal than to redress these enormous decays of towns and making of these enclosures, for if your grace did at the eye see as 1 have now seen, your heart would mourn to see the towns, villages, hamlets and manor places in ruin and decay, the people gone, the ploughs laid down, the living of many honest husbandmen in one man’s hands, the breed of mannery [manors] by this means suppressed, few people there stirring, the commons in many places taken away from the poor people, whereby they are compelled to forsake their houses and so wearied out and wot not where to live, and so maketh their lamentation.48

  The apocalyptic vision returns, and from one who, though a conscientious bishop and royal servant, is not obviously to be associated with visions of any kind.

  If, therefore, Longland’s letter forces one to the conclusion that there was a real problem, nevertheless the emotional intensity still worries. Yes, there were some villains and some villages were depopulated by enclosure, but not, one would have thought, on a large enough scale to justify the degree of overdrive that Wolsey and his colleagues went into. And there are other difficulties. Despite the emotional reaction, very little seems to have been done for those supposedly made to depart in tears. Houses were to be rebuilt, enclosures were to be removed, land was to be restored to its former use as arable, but there was never any attempt to return the dispossessed to their former properties.49 It may be that such an exercise would have been administratively too complicated, or even legally impossible and, indeed, the accusation was never that anyone had been evicted illegally. Alternatively, it may be that there were very few people to be put back. At the very least, it seems to have been quite easy for people to find alternative accommodation for the evidence is that mobility and rapid changes in the composition of villages were a feature of late medieval rural life.50 It is also worth making the point that not all those affected by enclosure were poor. During the course of a law suit in 1496 it was deposed that when the village of Keythorpe had been ‘taken down’ and enclosed a certain Thomas Skeffington had physically transported his house and set it up on land he held elsewhere. Also, he had refused to sell to the encloser a piece of land he owned in Keythorpe and continued to pasture some of his cattle there. So had his grandson, and it was this that had led the owner of Keythorpe to go to law. Nowadays one associates the transporting of buildings more with wealthy Americans than with the poor and dispossessed, but then Skeffington cannot have been all that poor if he owned land elsewhere on which to put the house, and certainly the family suffered no mortal blow from the activities of the encloser of Keythorpe. The grandson was knighted for his services to the Crown and was, in fact, that Sir William Skeffington sent to Ireland as the king’s deputy in 1529.51 Of course, one cannot draw too many conclusions from one example; but the real point is that there should be many more examples of what happened to the dispossessed and almost none have come to light. Even Longland’s moving description has much more to do with property than with people.

  A better known difficulty is that there is no precise correlation between the peak period of enclosure and that of government intervention, and recent research has done nothing to improve it.52 Indeed, the more one emphasizes the long-term causes of the phenomenon, especially the drastic decline in population in the second half of the fourteenth century, the more difficult it is to explain the precise timing of the government intervention and in a study of Wolsey it is the question of timing that is of most concern. Put simply, the question that needs answering is why, if much more enclosure went on before 1489 than after, was any serious attempt to do anything about it delayed until 1517? We need to look for some crisis or new factor that could explain the sudden urgency in tackling the problem. An obvious area to look at first is the corn supply, for any shortfall there, leading to high bread prices would have immediate and serious repercussions. It would also focus attention on enclosure, since at this period it was nearly always accompanied by conversion to pasture, and if there is one thing in all this uncertainty that shines out it is that during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Midlands witnessed a significant increase in the amount of land put to pasture, for the raising of stock of all kind but especially sheep. Nobody would have minded this as long as corn stocks proved adequate, but if there was, for instance, a bad harvest – which had a nasty tendency to occur in sequences of three – or if the demand for corn increased, most obviously as a result of a rising population, then the apparent overreaction of Wolsey and colleagues becomes much more understandable. It is possible to argue that both these things occurred, and indeed the notion that rising population is the key to an understanding of contemporary attitudes towards enclosure is still something of an orthodoxy.53 And the strength of this orthodoxy is precisely that it does help to explain the discrepancy between reality and perception that is at the heart of the interpretative problem. The fact that very little enclosure took place at the relevant time no longer matters. What had activated the Crown’s concern was a new factor: an increase in population which meant that what had been acceptable when there were no people to fill the decaying properties or to work on the arable fields no longer was. Instead, demand for everything now rose, but especially for food, housing and jobs. And, since even the poorest families on the land usually owned some livestock, any increase in population led to an increase in the number of animals.54 More animals led to increased pressure on the common pastures and the serious likelihood of overgrazing. To cope with this the practice of stinting – that is, regulating the number of animals each person could graze on the common pasture – was more frequently employed; but inevitably there was a great temptation for the more powerful either to manipulate such regulation to their advantage or just to ignore it, even perhaps by unilaterally enclosing parts of the common land.55

  It goes without saying that there is a good deal of evidence in support of this orthodoxy; in particular trouble was caused by attempts to limit access to a town’s common fields, often by erecting hedges and ditches. For instance, ever since the 1460s there had been a running battle between the citizens of Coventry and certain local farmers concerning such access, culminating in the Lammas Day Conspiracy of 1525, and the government’s subsequent insistence that the citizens’ lawful access should be restored to them.56 Some years earlier none other than Sir Reginald Bray, a leading councillor of Henry VII, had apparently advised the tenants of Enfield, near London, forcibly to remove enclosures, which, given the deeply entrenched antipathy towards any riotou
s behaviour, is evidence of his great sympathy for their plight and a clue perhaps to Wolsey’s feelings.57 Be that as it may, it is by directing attention away from the physical act of enclosure and towards the more general consequences of population growth and the resulting pressure on resources, that this view of enclosure appears to make much more sense of the intensity of the Crown’s response. Its great weakness, as its proponents would readily admit,58 is that its statistical foundations are shaky. Lack of data makes population figures for the mediaeval and early modern periods largely guesswork. What is clear is that during the sixteenth century the population in England rose from somewhere in the region of two million to about four million.59 The real difficulty comes in deciding on the timing and it is perhaps better appreciated now that the rate of increase fluctuated quite markedly, both geographically and chronologically. Though it is hardly possible to talk of consensus on the question of when the rise began, there seems to be an increasing tendency to locate it in the 1520s rather than, say, the 1470s.60 If the former date is correct, a rise in population may help to explain why the Crown continued to be concerned about enclosure during the middle decades of the century. But it does not explain why Wolsey and his colleagues showed so much interest in it in 1517. What may do, though, are the bad harvests of 1511-13.

  Admittedly, these harvests were not as bad as those of 1527-9 or even those of 1519-21, and in Hoskins’s classification they are only considered ‘deficient’, when they might have been ‘bad’ or ‘dearth’.61 Nevertheless, prices did rise, and that of wheat quite dramatically: whereas in 1509 the index number for wheat stood at 69, in 1512 it had shot up to 144.62 And it is worth repeating that while it is possible to average out the figures so that they do not appear all that alarming, particular and often quite wild fluctuations must have posed considerable difficulties for the bulk of the population, operating as they did within financially very narrow margins. The estimate is that about 90 per cent of the poor’s income went on food and drink, making them extremely vulnerable to any rapid price increases.63 Nor would it have helped that, despite the political fluctuations, as regards economic indicators the second half of the fifteenth century was remarkably stable. In the 1510s prices did rise and were to continue to do so in 1520s using the price index, the figures are 100 for 1491-1500, 106 for 1501-10 and 116 for 1511-20.64 The reasons for government anxiety become apparent. The trigger, though, was not a rise in population, but the bad harvests of 1511-13, compounded by the even worse ones of 1519-21 and 1527-9.

  This switch from population growth to bad harvests as the underlying explanation for the timing of the government intervention, and even of its emotional nature, makes more sense. After all, the rise in population would only have had a gradual effect on scarcity and prices, and yet there was More in 1515 writing as if something cataclysmic had just taken place. If there was a good deal about high prices and scarcity in his account, just as there was in the statutes of 1515, in the instructions to the enclosure commissioners, and in all subsequent government pronouncements, the reason is that this was precisely what the bad harvests suddenly produced. This explanation also saves Wolsey and his colleagues from the charge of failing to realize that the population was rising, while at the same time making much more sense of contemporary comments that the country was under-populated.65 In addition, it would explain why so little help was offered to the dispossessed: they did not exist, or at least not in any significant numbers. What it does not solve, though, any more than the notion of rising population did, is why the poor encloser was singled out for blame. Wicked he may have been, but he was hardly responsible for the weather! Even if both phenomena affected the corn supply, and therefore its price, it is a little surprising that the two factors were apparently so confused. After all, it must have been obvious that harvests had a much more dramatic effect on prices than enclosure, and that in anything other than a bad year there was plenty of corn, and the harvests of 1514, 1516, 1517 and 1522-6 produced above-average yields. Moreover, though the removal of recent enclosures would have marginally increased the amount of corn available, even in a bad year, it would not have prevented the fluctuations in prices that were at the root of the problem.66

  What may have helped to bring about this confusion is that the years 1503-18 had seen a return to the situation in which the price of wool rose more sharply than that of grain. The differential was not as great as it had been between 1462 and 1486, but it may have been enough to encourage some farmers to make further enclosures, and would at least lend support to the notion that greedy farmers would be looking to sheep to secure their profits.67 It may help us to understand the confusion to take a brief look at when and how attitudes towards enclosure hardened.

  Apparently, two petitions against enclosure were presented to parliament as early as 1414,68 but it seems to have been the Warwickshire antiquarian, John Rous, who in 1459 first put forward the notion that enclosers were the number one public enemies, when he presented the first of a number petitions to parliament. Interestingly, these appear to have fallen upon stony ground, but he did not give up. In his Historia Regum Angliae, written at the beginning of Henry VII’s reign, he devoted a lengthy passage to denouncing ‘the lovers or inducers of avarice, … murderers of the poor, destroyers of human sustenance’, whom he accused of being responsible for the destruction, or at least the severe depopulation, of sixty-two villages within a twelve-mile radius of his home town, Warwick.69 This time he seems to have made more of an impact, or perhaps it was just that informed opinion was coming round to his point of view. In 1483, the lord chancellor, Bishop Russell, had intended to include in a general denunciation to parliament everyone who ‘severally studieth to his own singular avail, and the accomplishing of his own particular affection’, all those responsible for ‘closures and emparking’ and for the ‘driving away of tenants and letting down of tenantries’.70 In the event the speech was never delivered, but it was shortly afterwards, in 1488 and 1489, that the first statutes against enclosure were passed.71 It was only after a gap of twenty-five years that the issue was taken up again, with a proclamation in 1514 and two statutes in 1515. But for the next thirty years it was to remain at the top of the agenda of all those interested in the common weal.72

  The interesting thing about Rous’s reaction to enclosure is that it was strongly rooted in some kind of reality, or at least more so than, say, More’s. The area he wrote about is one that modern research confirms was seriously affected by enclosure. Admittedly, in some of the deserted villages he mentioned the rot had set in many years previously, but in others it may well have been as sudden and dramatic as his portrayal.73 Paradoxically, however, this greater reality may not have helped his cause. Truth is rarely palatable if it involves criticism of people whose interests one is inclined to identify with, and what, after all, Rous was trying to do was convince a House of Commons full of country gentry that some of their number were behaving badly. At the same time, since enclosure was such a localized phenomenon, it would have been difficult for even an impartial body of men to get too incensed about it, especially since the majority of those working on the land were prospering. Possibly, however, what Rous, and perhaps others unknown to us, did achieve was to provide a blueprint which, just because it did touch upon all those sensitive nerve ends discussed earlier, did not go away. Moreover, one characteristic of decaying properties is that they remain visible for a long time. The sight of the ruined houses helped to keep the blueprint in people’s minds.

  The bad harvests would have provided the occasion to return to it. Thus, Bishop Russell’s reference to the evils of enclosure, the first evidence that the Crown was taking the problem seriously, was made in the year following the exceptionally bad harvest and high prices of 1482.74 That harvest turned a localized problem caused by particular changes in farming practice in the Midlands into an issue of national proportions, or so, at least, it seemed to an increasing number of people. Rous’s rhetoric, with its talk of scarcity and h
igh prices and a countryside overrun with animals, made a good deal of sense. More importantly, it suggested a course of action. One could not legislate against bad harvests, but one could against enclosure. Thus, when bad harvests returned in 1511-13, so did more enclosure legislation. Still, legislation is one thing, but a nation-wide inquiry followed by sustained government action through the law courts is another – and perhaps it is at this point that Wolsey himself may begin to put in more of an appearance!

  The notion that in explaining events it is not so much the circumstances as people’s changing perception of them that needs to be taken into account is better understood now than it used to be. In the context of enclosures it has obvious attractions since it provides another explanation for the overreaction of Tudor government to a very limited problem. The new sensitivities of humanists such as More or ‘commonwealth men’ such as Hugh Latimer would not tolerate a level of social distress that had been accepted in the late fifteenth century – or so the argument runs – and such men were now in a position to influence government action.75 There is, admittedly, something worrying about a view that posits an ever-increasing sensitivity amongst the English ruling classes. Medieval man was quite capable of recognizing a social evil and, as the works of Langland and Chaucer show, he was even capable of writing about them! And to quote a historian of medieval responses to poverty, ‘a modern textbook on sociology will pose few fundamental problems that did not arise in one form or another in the theological Summa of Aquinas or in the canonistic Commentaria of Hostiensis’.76 At the same time there are always objections to be made against any kind of label, and historians have spilt an enormous amount of ink in trying to decide whether the subspecies ‘humanist’ ever existed. What is undeniable, however, is that from his intellectual and literary luggage More was able to fashion an attack on enclosure. Someone who shared some of the luggage is that other royal councillor of the 1520s whose views on enclosure have survived, John Longland. What about Wolsey? Or, to put it another way, has humanism got anything to do with his approach to enclosure?