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

by Gwyn, Peter

  The question has to be asked. The commissions of inquiry of 1517-19 and 1526 and the resulting legal action constitute an unusually ambitious exercise in social and economic policy. It seems therefore to require some novel ideological underpinning, and humanism is the obvious possibility.77 As already stated, there is no surviving evidence for Wolsey’s views on social and economic matters other than that which can be derived from government action during the period in which he held high office. The best that we have been able to do so far is to suggest that he would probably have been aware of More’s views on enclosure, but especially since it is possible that More’s concern itself had been prompted by government action – and the 1514 proclamation did predate his writing of Utopia – is does not dramatically advance our understanding! Moreover, whatever More’s standing as an intellectual at this time, he was very much a new man in government circles, and thus perhaps with only limited influence. So, though it was suggested earlier that, for want of anything better, More’s views provided a way in to Wolsey’s, what they do not do is provide a complete explanation for Wolsey’s decision to set up the 1517 inquiry. The general change in public opinion, for which More’s writing is part of the evidence, probably played a decisive part. And there was also Wolsey’s own experience in government. In 1516 the City of London authorities were pressing the government to do something about the shortage of corn, despite the fact that the 1514 harvest had been adequate and that of 1515 only just below average.78 Back in 1513 the task of providing large amounts of food and drink, not to mention men, for the military campaigns of that year would also have brought the problems of supply and scarcity to Wolsey’s attention, especially as in 1513 the harvest was bad and consequently prices were high. And it is worth recalling that one of the supposed evils of enclosure was that the resulting depopulation weakened the country’s ability to defend itself.79 Scarcity of corn, high prices, recruitment of men were, then, all matters which Wolsey was familiar with before he set up the 1517 inquiry. They may all have helped to focus his mind on the problem of enclosure, and at the very least have persuaded him of the need to discover its extent. Any disturbances arising from enclosure that came before Star Chamber would also have contributed, and in 1516 there was such a disturbance. The inhabitants of Draycott and Stoke Gifford were accused of riotously pulling down the lawful enclosures of their landlord, Sir John Rodney, and even of threatening his person. In defending themselves against this charge, they managed to accuse Sir John of almost every evil that the archetypal wicked encloser could possibly be guilty of: arbitary financial exactions, wrongful dispossessing of tenants, tampering with the legal evidence as regards tenure, misuse of his tenants’ horses and preventing them from defending their crops against the ravages of grazing deer. However, very much at the top of the list was the enclosure of Stoke Moor and a further 200 acres elsewhere. It has to be said that Rodney’s counter defence is not unconvincing and, as so often with Star Chamber cases, it is difficult to reach any firm conclusions about the rights and wrongs of the matter, nor is it possible to ascertain how much detailed knowledge of the episode – if any – Wolsey possessed. What is known is that in July 1516 a commission headed by Lord Fitzwarren and the abbot of Glastonbury was instructed to investigate; and it may be surmised that in a year just after the passing of two statutes against enclosure it would have taken very few such episodes to galvanize Wolsey into action.80

  The reason for saying this has nothing to do with any commitment Wolsey may have had to a particular set of beliefs, but with his personality, in particular with his enormous confidence in his own ability to get things done. In 1516, the year before the first enclosure inquiry, as the new lord chancellor he had declared his intention of imposing ‘indifferent justice’ upon the whole realm, and just one year later he determined to impose a legatine authority on the English Church the better to reform it. Then in 1522 he set in motion the general proscription in order to obtain an up-to-date assessment of England’s ability to wage war, and in 1527 he introduced the first nation-wide attempt to regulate corn supplies in an effort to cope with the severe shortages that yet another bad harvest threatened. The corn commissions will be looked at in more detail shortly, but the immediate point about all these major initiatives is their scale. Enormous amounts of information were collected from every corner of England, many sections of the community were roped in as commissioners or jurors, and a great many administrative actions resulted. It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the driving force behind much of this activity was Wolsey himself.

  A further point is worth making. This explanation fits a pattern that can be discerned in the build up to many other major government initiatives. It took at least fifty years to come about. It required the coming together of a whole number of often unconnected phenomena which certain assumptions mingled together in a potent mix. The way in which those decayed buildings, largely the result of the decimation of the population by plague in the second half of the fourteenth century, came to be taken as crucial evidence of the evil consequences of enclosure is a good example. A recent parallel is provided by the changing attitudes towards trade unions whereby since the Second World War trade unions have declined from their once accepted status as the fifth estate to almost, under the energetic direction of Mrs Thatcher, a proscribed organization. And like the enclosers of the sixteenth century, the trade unionists’ crime has been, allegedly, to sacrifice the nation’s interests in the selfish pursuit of their own. There may be some reality in this view, just as there was behind the sixteenth-century obsession. Yet, when all the other possible reasons for England’s recent decline are considered, it may come to seem as curious that, in an effort to arrest it, so much political energy was directed in this one particular direction as it now seems curious that so much energy was directed against enclosers.

  It remains to attempt some assessment of the effectiveness of Wolsey’s activity. In doing so we come up against the fundamental objection that if it was wrongly conceived in the first place it could never have been effective. It is a fair enough point, and will in part be accepted here, but first the exercise needs to be judged on its own terms, which is to ask the question: insofar as there was enclosure, was it fully brought to light by the commissioners, and were the enclosers themselves successfully brought to book and made to reverse what they had done? It has been estimated that for the twenty-four counties inquired into and for which records have survived, the commissioners reported that 101,293 acres of land had been adversely affected, 647 houses had either been destroyed or allowed to decay, and 6,931 people had been displaced. Even if this does not constitute a very high percentage of the acreage and population of those counties, it is an impressive administrative effort.81 What was also impressive, as we noted earlier, was the willingness of the courts, contrary to their usual practice, to reach a decision, not to mention their success in getting people to appear or be represented. There is other evidence of immense pains being taken. Properties were inspected more than once, sometimes by new juries, sometimes by the original jury returning to a site to check their original findings. At the same time considerable care was taken to check that defendants who had sworn that they had remedied all the wrongs they were accused of had in truth done so.

  Sir Richard Knightley was to find himself accused of all manner of misdemeanours in Northamptonshire involving the destruction of at least seventeen properties and the conversion to pasture of four hundred acres. The charges against him were the work of the commissions of both 1517 and 1518. While admitting the bulk of the charges, he defended himself against others, and apparently with some success. Still, this left him having to rebuild a good number of houses and to restore a great many acres to arable on pain of a recognizance of £100. This, according to the findings of one of the most active enclosure commissioners in the Midlands, Roger Wigston, he did, though it did not prevent him from being reported for further misdemeanours in 1526.82 It is a highly complicated story, but the impr
ession is certainly of a great deal of effort both to discover what precisely had taken place and then to put it to rights.

  The same can be said about the case of Thomas Haselrig of Noseley in Leicestershire, even though in the end there is an ambiguity about what happened that raises some worrying questions. Haselrig was one of that select band of four who had attempted to defend their enclosing on the grounds that it had been of benefit to the common weal. He subsequently decided to accept the charges, while pleading that in the meantime he had remedied everything – this in the court of Exchequer where the defendants in enclosure cases first appeared, after the findings of the commissioners had been processed in Chancery. What happened next is unclear, but by November 1526 he was in real trouble. Back before the barons of the Exchequer, he was forced to confess that, despite his earlier plea, he had not repaired or rebuilt the affected houses or restored the land to arable, and consequently he was committed to the Fleet.83 At first glance, this looks like a success for the lord chancellor and the legal and administrative machinery that he presided over: someone had tried to lie their way out of trouble, but had been found out. The worry derives from the fact that Haselrig seems to have been the only one found out. Of course, this could merely mean that the machinery was so effective that people did not dare to try to beat it, and certainly the Crown went to considerable lengths to confirm the truth. The question of whether or not buildings or land had been returned to their former condition, as Haselrig had claimed, was frequently the point at issue, and not just in those hundred cases in which the defendant pleaded that all had been put to rights.84 This was especially so after the General Pardon of 1523 allowed people to escape any prosecution if they could show that the land and buildings in question had indeed been restored.85 It also became, in effect, the issue in all those seventy or so cases in which the defendant had pleaded guilty and entered into a recognizance to put everything to rights, for all that was then required was some confirmation from a local source that this had happened.86 Sometimes the word of one person sufficed, usually one of the enclosure commissioners; more often the confirmation came from a panel of ‘trustworthy men’.

  Frequently, however, the Crown refused to accept the defendant’s plea, in which case he or she had to make good the claim before a formal jury, either in King’s Bench or at a local assize court. Formal juries would also frequently end up deciding those cases in which a defendant denied the validity of the charges brought against him. Sometimes this involved just a flat denial that the houses had ever been in disrepair or the land taken out of arable; sometimes it was claimed that the enclosure had occurred outside the period covered by the statutes and that therefore no offence had been committed. In other cases the defendant denied that he was the owner of the land, again with the consequence that no case could be brought against him.87 There were also one or two idiosyncratic pleas, such as that made by one Eusibius Isham that he had indeed destroyed a house, but only because it was already in such a terrible state of repair, and anyway it was far too isolated and the land was not up to much, either!88 However, the fact remains that whenever or however the Crown sought to show that a defendant was in the wrong, it never succeeded except, apparently, in the case of Haselrig. Even then it seems that the confession was brought about not so much by the Crown’s efforts, and certainly not because a jury found against him, but because for some unknown reason, perhaps to do with an impending Star Chamber case, he chose to admit that he had lied.89

  What conclusion can be drawn? Unless one posits a very elaborate conspiratorial theory in which all the juries were handpicked by the government, which, despite all appearances to the contrary, was happy to let all enclosers get off, it is difficult to blame the government machinery for the reluctance of juries to ferret out the truth. Instead, what seems to be at work is merely the perennial difficulty of having to achieve results with the means available. And in this instance it could well be that the jurymen and commissioners, having similar social backgrounds and economic interests to those whose actions they were investigating, were not the best people to achieve results. At the same time, even with the best will in the world, there were genuine difficulties in arriving at the truth.90 Juries were being asked to comment accurately on changing farming practices over a perod of thirty years – and these were not by any means fixed in some immemorial routine. One of the practices that must have considerably complicated the work of both commissioners and juries was the not infrequent one of convertible husbandry, whereby land was sometimes put down to pasture and sometimes ploughed for arable crops. Interestingly, and surely to the Crown’s credit, there is at least one case in which the fact of convertible husbandry was recognized and allowed to continue, though the defendant was asked to restore the houses.91

  Establishing the true facts was a difficult exercise and there is no doubt that on a number of occasions the government failed and may even have been seriously duped. Sir Edward Belknap’s deliberate lying about the origins of enclosure on his estates has already been mentioned.92 He may also have seriously misled the courts about the extent of the land enclosed;93 and, if so, he would not have been alone. The descendants of William Ashby appear to have convinced both commissioners and courts that he had only enclosed 120 acres of his lordship of Lowesby when in fact he had probably enclosed the whole, amounting to well over eight hundred acres.94 Then there is Haselrig who, though willing to admit that he had lied in some of his claims, was apparently more successful in bamboozling the courts into taking into account only half the amount of land he had enclosed!95 It is also the case that some estates in which large-scale enclosure took place were completely overlooked.96 What of the final total? Are the 260 or so people who were made to appear in court and the seventy-odd of these who pleaded guilty and entered into recognizsances to restore buildings and land to their former condition an impressive enough number to justify a successful verdict for Wolsey’s endeavour?97

  It has been suggested, and by someone who took a favourable view of what Wolsey was trying to do, that in the end the evidence permits him to be credited with the restoration of only ninety-seven houses, two barns and 3,260 acres.98 It is not a lot, but, then, as was argued earlier, there was probably never a lot to be restored anyway, so that these numbers may reflect the misguided purpose of the exercise more than any lack of efficiency. What has to be a comment on the latter, though, is the fate of those few large-scale enclosures such as occurred at Burton Dassett and Wormleighton in Warwickshire and Cotesbach and Lowesby in Leicestershire, of which the government had at least some knowledge. It was precisely these, quite often the work of successful livestock farmers and affecting whole communities, that the government’s policy was designed to put an end to. For a short time it may have succeeded, for if it did not, then none of the evidence can be trusted, not even those seventy or so recognizances by which defendants promised to put things to rights or else be liable to fines of up to £200. That said, however, it has proved nigh on impossible to find any instance where enclosure, once it had occurred on any scale, was reversed for any length of time. Certainly there was no reversal at Wormleighton, where the Spencers’ sheep continued to graze large areas of enclosed land for centuries to come, even if Althorp in Northamptonshire was to become their main residence. At Haselrig’s Noseley the story is no better, for by 1584 at the latest the whole lordship was enclosed.99 It looks more and more as if the conclusion must be that, even taken on its own terms, Wolsey’s policy was unsuccessful. If one then adds the suggestion that the policy may anyway have been misconceived, one is left with quite a lot of explaining to do if the cardinal is to be portrayed as a successful maintainer of the common weal.

  At this point the evidence becomes less important than the criteria used to judge it. Anyone with high expectations of the state’s ability to intervene successfully in economic and social affairs will be disappointed in Wolsey’s efforts to do something about enclosure. Anyone, who, like the present writer, is a sceptic in such
matters may, while ruing the attempt, be nevertheless quite impressed at the way in which Wolsey approached his task. The statistics can, on the face of it, be used to show that Wolsey’s policy was extremely successful. Precise figures for the rate of enclosure may not be worth very much, but the trend is not in doubt. During the middle decades of the century very little new enclosure took place: it has been suggested that of all the enclosure in Leicestershire between 1485 and 1607 (and it was one of the counties most affected) only 9 per cent occurred between 1530 and 1580.100 At first glance, therefore, it would appear that a policy started by Wolsey may almost have killed enclosure stone-dead. Alas, this is most unlikely. In the fifty-six years from 1462 to 1518 only sixteen saw grain prices rising more quickly than wool. In the fifty-five years from 1518 to 1573 there were only twelve in which wool prices rose faster than grain. Insofar as in this period enclosure was normally accompanied by conversion of arable to pasture much of the explanation for the dramatic decline in enclosure in the mid-century must be that the financial incentive to turn to pasture farming had disappeared. Moreover, when the rate of enclosure picked up – and this, until the bad harvests of 1594-7, with very little government disapproval – it seems to have been fuelled by the rapidly increasing demand and rising prices for all agricultural products but especially grain, with the result that enclosure no longer involved conversion to pasture on anything like the same scale.101