The economic advance of the squirearchy in the two generations before the Civil War

R. H. Tawney (1937)

Introduction

F. M. L. Thompson

Nobody today refers to Tawney’s 1937 Creighton Lecture, ‘The economic advance of the squirearchy in the two generations before the Civil War’, for the excellent reason that it was never published and no manuscript is known to survive. It is generally accepted, however, that this lecture, no doubt somewhat expanded and refined in the interval, resurfaced in 1941 as ‘The rise of the gentry, 1558–1640’.¹ The evidence for this supposition is suggestive rather than conclusive. In defending his 1941 article from criticism Tawney referred in his 1954 ‘Postscript’ to contemporary opinion ‘that the two generations before the Civil War saw an advance in the fortunes of the class described as the gentry’,² wording distinctly reminiscent of the title of his Creighton Lecture, save that at one time he had held that squirearchy and gentry were distinct social groups. Meanwhile in 1940, that is, a year before ‘The rise of the gentry’ appeared in print, Habakkuk had observed that ‘this notion of the rise of the squirearchy has become the organising conception of English social history between the Dissolution of the Monasteries and 1640’.³ There is a strong implication here that this had recently become the received view, and Tawney, his lectures at the London School of Economics and his Creighton Lecture, is its most likely source. Hence it seems reasonable to accept that ‘The economic advance of the squirearchy’ became ‘The rise of the gentry’.

The hundred years before the Civil War, 1540–1640, soon became known as ‘Tawney’s century’, the century whose distinctive social and political character he established in two dazzling articles in 1941: ‘The rise of the gentry’, and his Raleigh Lecture ‘Harrington’s interpretation of his age’.⁴ In splendid prose, itself reflecting Tawney’s affection for sixteenth-century literature, these articles told the story of the rise of a new class of gentry landowners profiting from the plundering of monastic and church lands, from the necessities of a crown obliged to sell lands, and at the expense of an extravagant, indebted and incompetent nobility. In 1656 James Harrington had contended, in Oceana, that political power was determined by the prevailing distribution of property in a community, and that since the time of Henry VII there had been a decisive shift in the balance of landownership away from the old nobility and in favour of the commons, which had resulted in the Civil War. Now in 1941 Tawney produced the economic history which confirmed that such a change in the distribution of landownership had indeed taken place, and in doing so provided an interpretation of the origins of the Civil War in terms of a conflict between gentry and aristocracy. For good measure Tawney attributed the expansion of the gentry class mainly to their adoption of new techniques of estate management and accountancy, pursuing efficiency and profit with a zeal beyond the comprehension or competence of the old nobility.

Although he allowed that the ranks of the gentry were swollen by some movement of mercantile fortunes into land, Tawney’s emphasis on new-fangled managerial and marketing methods as the key to the triumph of the gentry over an effete and old-fashioned aristocracy was readily interpreted as meaning that the gentry rose by embracing bourgeois values. The new gentry were clearly characterized as ‘agricultural capitalists’: ‘all watch markets closely; buy and sell in bulk; compare the costs and yields of different crops; charge the rent, when custom allows, which a farm will stand; keep careful accounts’.⁵ From this position it was only a short step, although not one taken by Tawney himself, to concluding that the Civil War and the English Revolution were essentially a conflict between decaying feudalism and rising capitalism, the result of a somewhat improbable combination of a bourgeois risen landed gentry and a genuinely urban financial and mercantile bourgeoisie challenging the old feudal order. That Geoffrey Elton was later to castigate Tawney for leading innocent young idealists astray into the false paths of Marxist determinism – he instanced Christopher Hill as his prime example – was grossly unfair and unjustified, but nevertheless understandable.⁶

Tawney’s ideas were hugely influential, but as with many excitingly novel historical theses they had a limited shelf life; in this instance, about thirty years at most. For a dozen years after 1941 rising gentry and declining aristocracy formed the accepted view of the economic and social setting of the Civil War. Rather unfortunately, as it turned out, Lawrence Stone decided to gild the lily by buttressing the Tawney case with a more thoroughly documented account of aristocratic decline. His 1948 article was promptly shredded by Hugh Trevor-Roper, who exposed the errors and misunderstandings of Stone’s hasty trawl of public records, and Stone’s partial retreat in 1952 did nothing to deter Trevor-Roper’s frontal attack on the entire Harrington-Tawney-Stone position in his 1953 article ‘The gentry, 1540–1640’.⁷ This proposed a radically different explanation of the rising gentry. Modernizing agricultural capitalism was out as the driving force behind the new gentry, and was replaced by the somewhat traditional crown and court patronage as the path trodden by the new men. The notion of any general crisis of the aristocracy as a social class was also dismissed: some large landowners fell out of favour or impoverished themselves, others prospered and enriched themselves. A court-country conflict replaced the new gentry-feudal aristocracy conflict as the context for the Civil War, and this became the new received wisdom for the next decade or so. News of this academic in-fighting spread beyond the world of disputatious dons and the readership of the Economic History Review with the appearance of J. H. Hexter’s ‘Storm over the gentry’, originally published in the intellectuals’ journal Encounter in 1958. Although not uncritical of Trevor-Roper’s version of social history Hexter pronounced a more emphatic dismissal of Tawney’s ‘Rise of the gentry’.⁸

Meanwhile the statistical foundations of the rise of the gentry, in changes in the ownership of manors in seven counties, had been weakened by J. P. Cooper’s 1956 article, ‘The counting of manors’, which also aimed a blow at Stone’s crisis in aristocratic landownership as being ‘an exceedingly dubious proposition’.⁹ Lawrence Stone’s retreat to Princeton may not have been entirely unconnected to these academic jousts in Oxford, and once there he devoted many years to preparing a definitive defence of the rise of the gentry by providing a conclusive demonstration of the complementary decline of the aristocracy. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 appeared in 1965, a formidable feat of historical scholarship which, however, despite its 841 pages and thirty-seven appendices and its fascinating accounts of the lives of the nobility, failed to convince that the aristocracy as a class experienced any general economic or financial crisis.¹⁰ In any case it appeared too late to halt the new wave of revisionists, gathering force from a group of studies of county communities and carrying all before it in the nineteen-seventies, sweeping away any idea that either gentry-aristocracy or court-country divisions had anything to do with the origins of the Civil War or with determining who became roundheads and who cavaliers. ‘The fag end, the long death, of the gentry controversy’ was marked by the appearance of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down and Lawrence Stone’s The Causes of the English Revolution in the early nineteen-seventies, which were themselves quickly swept into oblivion by the revisionist school headed by Conrad Russell.¹¹ All explanations of the Civil War in terms of preceding social changes were dismissed and consigned to the dustbin. In the revisionist high-political narrative constructed by Russell and buttressed by the work of Gerald Aylmer, Mark Kishlansky, Nicholas Tyacke, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others there was no place for rising gentry, court vs. country, or a crisis of the aristocracy: the ‘structural breakdown’ of royal finances emerged as the key to the events leading to Civil War.

Tawney’s ‘Rise of the gentry’ had given rise to a remarkable outpouring of research, controversy and publication, and suffered the not uncommon fate of being rendered obsolete by the volume and quality of the attention it had excited. It is political historians, however, who have decided that the state of the gentry is irrelevant for their purposes, and hence that there is no point in establishing whether the gentry were indeed rising or the large landowners were indeed declining. Economic and social historians, and particularly historians of landownership, have not found many occasions to address the question since Habakkuk’s conclusion in 1958 that ‘the principal importance [of the sales of monastic lands] lay in altering the balance of property, and possibly of power, between families who were already landowners before 1540, rather than in affording means for the founding of entirely new landed families’.¹² This is consistent with a view that sales of monastic lands, and probably by association sales of crown lands, enabled some established large landowners to enlarge their estates, and similarly some established gentry to enlarge their properties. It does not seem likely that gentry estates in aggregate grew at the expense of large, or aristocratic, estates, and quite probably the late seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century trend towards expansion of the overall share of large estates was already under way.¹³

The rise of the gentry, 1558–1640*

R. H. Tawney (1937)¹

The first French translator² of Locke’s Thoughts on Education introduced it with the remark that foreign readers, in order to appreciate it, must remember the audience to whom it was addressed. It was composed, he explained, for the edification of an element in society to which the Continent offered no exact analogy, but which had become in the last century the dominant force in English life. To M. Coste, in 1695, the triumphant ascent of the English gentry – neither a noblesse, nor a bureaucracy, but mere bons bourgeois – seemed proof of an insular dynamic of which France, with the aid of his translation, would do well to learn the secret. His compatriots, a century and a half later, hailed the effortless survival of the same class in an age which had seen seigneurs in flight from their castles, and even junkers cajoled into some semblance of concessions, as an example of social stability as eccentric as it was remarkable, and marvelled at the depth to which the tree had struck its roots. De Tocqueville in the forties, de Lavergne in the fifties, Taine in the sixties and seventies, wrote in a mood of reaction; but they had some excuse for opening their eyes.³ In spite of the influx in the interval of Scots, Nabobs, some merchants, a few bankers and an occasional industrialist, not less than one in every eight of the members sitting for English and Welsh seats in the last unreformed house of commons, and one in five of the house of lords, belonged to families which, two centuries before, had given representatives to the house of commons in the Long Parliament.⁴ Ten English counties had been blessed in 1640 with some sixty-two leading landowners, masters of six or more manors apiece. Of those in the whole ten one half, of those in five just under two-thirds, had descendants or kin who owned 3,000 acres or upwards in 1874.⁵

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The political role of this tenacious class has not lacked its eulogists. It has itself, however, a history which is not only political, but also economic; and the decisive period of that history is the two generations before the Civil War. ‘Could humanity ever attain happiness’, wrote Hume of that momentous half century, ‘the condition of the English gentry at this period might merit that appellation’. Contemporary opinion, if more conscious of the casualties of progress, would have been disposed, nevertheless, to endorse his verdict. Observers became conscious, in the later years of Elizabeth, of an alteration in the balance of social forces, and a stream of comment began which continued to swell, until, towards the close of the next century, a new equilibrium was seen to have been reached. Its theme was the changing composition, at once erosion and reconstruction, of the upper strata of the social pyramid. It was, in particular, since their pre-ponderance was not yet axiomatic, the increase in the wealth and influence of certain intermediate groups, compared with the nobility, the crown and the mass of small landholders. Of those groups the most important, ‘situated’, as one of its most brilliant members wrote, ‘neither in the lowest grounds . . . nor in the highest mountains . . . but in the valleys between both’,⁶ was the squirearchy and its connections.

Holding a position determined, not by legal distinctions, but by common estimation; kept few⁷ and tough by the ruthlessness of the English family system, which sacrificed the individual to the institution, and, if it did not drown all the kittens but one, threw all but one into the water; pouring the martyrs of that prudent egotism, their younger sons, not only into the learned professions, but into armies, English and foreign, exploration and colonization, and every branch of business enterprise; barred themselves by no rule as to dérogeance from supplementing their incomes from whatever source they pleased, yet never, as in Holland, wholly severed from their rural roots, the English gentry combined the local and popular attachments essential for a representative role with the aristocratic aroma of nobiles minores, and played each card in turn with tactful, but remorseless, realism. Satirists⁸ made merry with the homely dialect, strong liquor and horse-coping of the provincial squire; but, in spite of the Slenders and Shallows, the mere bumpkins of the class, for whom the French invented a special name, were not too distressingly conspicuous. Its failures, instead of, as on the Continent, hanging round its neck and helping to sink it, discreetly disappeared with the disappearance of their incomes. Its successes supplied the materials for a new nobility. They provided more than one.

Inconsistencies were inevitable in speaking of a class freely recruited from below, in a society where the lines of social stratification were drawn not, as in most parts of the Continent, by birth and legal privilege, but by gradations of wealth. The elasticity which such peculiarities conferred has often been applauded, but they were not favourable to precise classifications; nor was precision in demand. There were moments, it is true, when it was convenient to stand on a hereditary dignity, authentic or assumed; did not the arch-leveller of the age, free-born John himself, win one of the earliest of his famous collection of judicial scalps by refusing to plead to an indictment drawn against ‘John Lilburne, yeoman’?⁹ There were voices from the past which, when the crash came, hailed the fall of the monarchy as the inevitable nemesis of a general downward slide towards the abyss of social ‘parity’, and reproached the professional custodians of traditional proprieties with opening to fees doors which a prudent rigour would have locked.¹⁰ But agricultural, commercial and industrial interests were, in most parts of the country, inextricably intertwined. Mere caste had few admirers – fewer probably among the gentry militant of the early seventeenth century than among the gentry triumphant of the early eighteenth – and that note was rarely heard. Common sense endorsed the remark that ‘gentility is nothing but ancient riches’,¹¹ adding under its breath that they need not be very ancient. Sir Thomas Smith had said that a gentleman is a man who spends his money like a gentleman.¹² Of the theorists rash enough to attempt a definition, few succeeded in improving on that wise tautology.

In spite, nevertheless, of ambiguities, the group concerned was not difficult to identify. Its members varied widely in wealth;¹³ but, though ragged at its edges, it had a solid core. That core consisted of the landed proprietors, above the yeomanry, and below the peerage, together with a growing body of well-to-do farmers, sometimes tenants of their relatives, who had succeeded the humble peasants of the past as lessees of demesne farms; professional men, also rapidly increasing in number, such as the more eminent lawyers, divines and an occasional medical practitioner; and the wealthier merchants, who, if not, as many were, themselves sons of landed families, had received a similar education, moved in the same circles, and in England, unlike France, were commonly recognized to be socially indistinguishable from them. It was this upper layer of commoners, heterogeneous, but compact, whose rapid rise in wealth and power most impressed contemporaries. Literature celebrated its triumphs. Travelled intellectuals sought to polish its crudities. Manuals¹⁴ written for its edification laid the foundations of a flattering legend. Education, the professions, the arts, above all, architecture, reflected its influence. Nor were there wanting observers who discerned in a changing social order the herald of a new state.

Interrelations of the political breakdown of the age, of a kind which today would be called sociological, have commonly received short shrift from historians. The tougher breed which experienced it has some right to an opinion. It was disposed to take them seriously. Once thought has been stirred by a crisis, the attempt to pierce behind controversial externals to the hidden springs of the movement is in all periods common form. The influence in the second half of the century of doctrines which sought one of the dynamics of revolution in antecedent economic change is not, therefore, surprising. But the disturbance of the social equilibrium has excited the curiosity of a generation which could only guess at its political repercussions. Theories canvassed in the fifties in the Rota Club had faint fragmentary anticipations before Harrington had started on his travels, and when Neville was still a schoolboy.

The facts were plain enough. The ruin of famous families by personal extravagance and political ineptitude; the decline in the position of the yeomanry towards the turn of the century, when long leases fell in; the loss, not only of revenue, but of authority, by the monarchy, as crown lands melted; the mounting fortunes of the residuary legatee, a gentry whose aggregate income was put even in 1600 at some three times that of peers, bishops, deans and chapters, and richer yeomen together, and who steadily gathered into their hands estates slipping from the grasp of peasant, nobility, church and crown alike – such movements and their consequences were visible to all. Not only a precocious economist like Thomas Wilson the younger, the nephew of Elizabeth’s secretary of state, but men of greater eminence – Bacon; Cranfield; Selden; the shifty but not unintelligent Goodman; those artists in crying stinking fish, the Venetian embassy in London; Coke, most amiable and most futile of secretaries of state, who begs Buckingham, of all people, to save crown lands from the spoiler – wrote footnotes on the same theme.¹⁵

The man who saw deepest into the moral of it all was primarily neither a theorist nor a politician, though he had the gifts of both. He was a great man of action, perhaps the greatest of his age. The doctrine that political stability depends on the maintenance of that Balance of Property, which was later to become a term of art, was not, in essence, novel. It was implicit in the conception of society as an organism, requiring the maintenance of a due proportion between its different members, which was part of the medieval legacy. But it is one thing to repeat a formula, another to apply it. Raleigh’s dialogue, composed, it seems, in 1615, just after the central crisis of James’s reign, was the first attempt to state the relevance of that conception to the changing circumstances of his day, and to deduce from it the need, not for mere conservatism, but for reform. The argument with which his country gentleman confutes the noble parasite is no abstract disquisition on constitutional formalities. It is a deduction from social history. The centre of social gravity has shifted; political power is shifting with it. The earl who could once put a thousand horse into the field cannot now put twenty-five; if the greatest lord lifts a finger, he will be locked up by the next constable. The commons today command most of the wealth, and all the weapons. It is they, not the heirs of the feudal past, who hold the keys of the future. It is with them; with their natural leaders, the gentry; with the house of commons, which is their organ, that the monarchy, if it is wise, will hasten to makes its peace.¹⁶

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These hints of political deductions from the fact of social change must not now detain us. In considering the character of that change itself, the right point of departure is that which Raleigh suggests. To speak of the transition from a feudal to a bourgeois society is to decline upon a cliché. But a process difficult to epitomize in less hackneyed terms has left deep marks on the social systems of most parts of Europe. What a contemporary described in 1600 as the conversion of ‘a gentry addicted to war’ into ‘good husbands’, who ‘know as well how to improve their lands to the uttermost as the farmer or countryman’,¹⁷ may reasonably be regarded as an insular species of the same genus.

It was a precocious species which later, when its survival was assured, was to be the admiration of foreigners, but which for long found few imitators; nor was it accomplished without anguish. The movement passed through the three familiar stages of breakdown, reconstruction and stabilization. If one aspect of the first phase consisted in the political and legal reforms¹⁸ by which the Tudor state consolidated its power, another aspect was economic. Jolted sharply by the great depreciation; then squeezed by its masters to find the means for new styles in fashion and display; then pulled by expanding markets, when expedients adopted to stave off catastrophe were discovered, once systematized, to pay dividends beyond hope, agrarian society was everywhere under strain. The ability of nature to cause confusion with her silver is greatly inferior, we now know, to that of human art; and, in view of the dimensions of the movement, the lamentations provoked by it seem today overdone. But, in judging the effects of this most un-revolutionary of monetary revolutions, three truisms must be remembered. It broke on a world which had known within living memory something like a currency famine. The society which experienced it was crossed by lines of petrification, which make modern rigidities seem elastic. Except for brief intervals, the movement was continuous, on the Continent for some three generations, in England for nearly four. The wave of rising prices struck the dyke of customary obligations, static burdens, customary dues; rebounded; struck again; and then either broke it, or carved new channels which turned its flank.

More than one country had known a dreadful interlude, when anarchy was not remote. In most it was discovered, when the worst was over, that the land system which came out of the crisis was not that which had gone into it. The key, as usual, was finance. The items comprising the landowner’s revenue change their relative importance. The value of all customary and non-commercial payments tumbles down;¹⁹ that of the more elastic sources of income increases. Some groups can adapt themselves to the new tensions and opportunities; others cannot. The former rise; the latter sink. Examples of both are to be found in every stratum of society. There are grounds, nevertheless, for thinking that what Professor Bloch has called la crise des fortunes seigneuriales²⁰ was felt more acutely, and surmounted with greater difficulty, by the heirs of ancient wealth, with its complex and dispersed interests, and large public responsibilities, than by men of humbler position or more recent eminence. Contemporaries noted the turn of the wheel in their superb prose. ‘How many noble families have there been whose memory is utterly abolished! How many flourishing houses have we seen which oblivion hath now obfuscated . . . ! Time doth diminish and consume all.’²¹ But time was not the chief destroyer.

Such a family, inheriting great estates, often inherited trouble. Its standards of expenditure were those of one age, its income that of another. ‘Port’ – the display becoming in a great position – was a point of honour; who would wish to be thought, like Lord Dencourt, to ‘live like a hog’?²² ‘What by reason’, wrote a close observer, ‘of their magnificence and waste in expense, and what by reason of a desire to advance and make great their own families’,²³ the life of a considerable part of the aristocracy was apt to offer an example of what a modern economist has called ‘conspicuous waste’. Other regalities might have gone; what remained, and, indeed, increased, was a regal ostentation. The overheads of the noble landowner – a great establishment, and often more than one; troops of servants and retainers; stables fit for a regiment of cavalry; endless hospitality to neighbours and national notabilities; visits to court, at once ruinous and unavoidable; litigation descending, like an heirloom, from generation to generation – had always been enormous. Now, on the top of these traditional liabilities, came the demands of a new world of luxury and fashion. With the fortunes resulting from inflation and booming trade all standards are rising. London, rapidly advancing in financial and commercial importance, with a court that under James is a lottery of unearned fortunes, exercises a stronger pull. Town houses increase in number; visits to the capital are spun out; residential quarters are developed; to the delight of dressmakers, something like a season begins to emerge. Culture has demands to which homage must be paid. New and more costly styles of building; the maintenance of a troop of needy scholars and poets; collections of pictures; here and there – an extreme case – the avenues of posturing nudities which Bacon saluted at Arundel with ironical dismay – ‘the resurrection of the dead!’²⁴ – all have their votaries. Public duties, in some cases, complete what private prodigality has begun. They yielded some pickings; but, under Elizabeth and her two successors, more than one bearer of a famous name was brought near to ruin by the crowning catastrophe of a useful career.

So towering a superstructure required broad foundations. Too often they were lacking. The wealth of some of the nobility, and especially of the older families, was not infrequently more spectacular than substantial. It was locked up in frozen assets – in sumptuous appurtenances, at once splendid and unrealistic. More important, the whole structure and organization of their estates was often of a kind, which, once a pillar of the social system, was now obsolescent. Side by side with more lucrative possessions, their properties included majestic, but un-remunerative, franchises – hundreds, boroughs, fairs and markets; a multitude of knights’ fees, all honour and no profit; freeholds created in an age when falling, not rising, prices had been the great landowners’ problem, and fixed rents were an insurance; hundreds of prickly copyholds, whose occupants pocketed an unearned increment while the real income of their landlord fell. What was the use, a disconsolate peer expostulated with the queen, of pretending to relieve his necessities by the gift of a manor whose tenants were protected by law against an increase in rents, and by custom against an increase in fines?²⁵ That cheerless condition was to be expected in properties which Elizabeth thought suitable for peasants; but it was not, unfortunately, confined to them. The administrative machine which controlled a great estate had some of the vices of a miniature state department. It was cumbrous, conservative, difficult to divert from its traditional routine to new and speculative enterprises. The very magnitude and wide dispersion of the interests concerned – property of a dozen different kinds in a dozen different counties – made drastic reconstruction a formidable business, which it needed an exceptional personality to force through. It is not surprising that inherited opulence should sometimes have lacked the initiative to launch it.

Such difficulties confronted all conservative landowners, both peers and commoners, in proportion to the magnitude of their commitments and the rigidity of their incomes. The most that can be said is that the former usually carried more sail than the latter, and found it, when the wind changed, more difficult to tack. Mere majestic inertia, however, was an expensive luxury. As the tension tightened, something had to go. What went first was an aspect of life once of the first importance, but to which justice today is not easily done. The words ‘hospitality’ or ‘housekeeping’, its ordinary designation, were the description, not of a personal trait or a private habit, but of a semi-public institution, whose political dangers, once a menace to the state, were a thing of the past, but whose social significance had survived little abated. As the centre of a system of relations offering employment, succour, a humble, but recognized, niche to men helpless in isolation, the great household had performed somewhat the same role as was played, until yesterday, by the informal communism of the family system in China, and its break-up was attended by the same symptoms of disintegration as have followed in the Far East the shattering of ancient social cadres by Western industrialism. The stream of lamentations voiced by popular opinion, conservative moralists and the government itself, all strike the same note. Their burden is that, as expenses are cut down, staffs reduced and household economy put on a business footing, a cell of the social organism is ceasing to function. The plight of younger brothers, put off, like Orlando ‘with the stalling of an ox’, or compelled – to the public advantage, but to their own exasperation – to take ‘to letters or to arms’²⁶ is a footnote to the same story; it is not a chance that attacks on primogeniture become more vocal at the moment when once prosperous families are feeling the pinch. The social dislocation, if exaggerated, was not a trifle; but the relief to the landowner was not proportionate to it. Since his real income, in default of other measures, continued to decline, it was, at best, only a respite.

The materials for generalization have hardly yet been put together; but to say that many noble families – though not they alone – encountered, in the two generations before the Civil War, a financial crisis is probably not an overstatement. The fate of the conservative aristocrat was, in fact, an unhappy one. Reduced to living ‘like a rich beggar, in perpetual want’,²⁷ he sees his influence, popularity and property all melt together. Some, like Lord Howard of Effingham and the earl of Sussex, part with their estates to their creditors, or sell outlying portions to save the remainder. Some resort to half-obsolete claims on their tenants, with which, as a Lancashire landlord remarked, the victims comply, ‘if not for love, then for fear’;²⁸ claims resembling, in their pedantic and exasperating legality, those most criticized in the crown, but which – so merciful is history to the victors – are commonly ignored in the case of private landowners. Some, like the Berkeleys, do both. The sixth earl,²⁹ for whom his admiring biographer – a lover of honorific titles – could find no more appropriate name than Lord Henry the Harmless, combined with the style and establishment of a medieval potentate the sporting tastes of a country gentleman; periodical plunges into the world of fashion in London; the maintenance of a salon as a concession to culture; and an heirloom in the shape of a lawsuit, which when he inherited it had already lasted a century, and which in 1609, four years before his death, he steered at last, with cries of self congratulation, to a disastrous victory. While continuing to manage his Gloucestershire estates with a conservatism as agreeable to his tenants as it was fatal to himself, he sinks ever deeper into debt to tradesmen, to scriveners, to merchant bankers; sells land outside the county to the value of £60,000; and ends his life in a maze of financial expedients, charged with a slightly exotic odour, as of the Seine rather than the Severn – collecting an aid from his freeholders to knight his eldest son, releasing his customary tenants from irksome obligations that had elsewhere long vanished, and raising a benevolence to pay for the ruinous results of his triumphs as a litigant. Other landowners again – Lord Compton, Lord Noel, Lord Willoughby, the earl of Holderness – restore their fortunes by marrying City money.³⁰ Others, with a pull in the right quarter, plant themselves on the preposterous pension list of the crown, angle – an odious business – for ‘concealed lands’, or intrigue, with a kind of amateurish greed, for patents and monopolies.

Whether their embarrassments were increasing it is impossible to say; some debts, it is fair to remember, represented reproductive expenditure on development and improvements. But soundings, wherever taken, show much water in the hold. The correspondence of Burleigh,³¹ in the last decade of Elizabeth, reads like the report of a receiver in bankruptcy to the nobility and gentry. A few years later, when, with the opening of the great boom which began in 1606, things should have been better, Cranfield, no financial leviathan, had a score of them in his books, while, to judge by stray references, Hicks the silk-man and banker – later Lord Campden – and Herriott, the goldsmith, may well have had more. Rubens, no stranger to the costly futilities of courts, still retained sufficient naïveté to lift his eyebrows at the orgy of extravagance and peculation – ‘business, public and private, sold cash down, over the counter’³² – which distinguished that of James. Clarendon’s³³ account of the notabilities of his day is a catalogue of splendid spendthrifts. When, in 1642, all went into the melting pot, the debts owed to the City by royalists alone were put, in a financial memorandum, at not less than £2,000,000.³⁴ Of the commercial magnates who, a few years later, scrambled for confiscated estates, not a few, as Dr. Chesney³⁵ has shown, were creditors entering on properties long mortgaged to them. It was discovered, not for the last time, that as a method of foreclosure war was cheaper than litigation.

***

For, if the new world had its victims, it had also its conquerors. That ‘the wanton bringing up and ignorance of the nobility force the prince to advance new men that can serve, which . . . subvert the noble houses to have their rooms themselves’,³⁶ had been noted with uneasiness in the early years of Elizabeth, when suggestions were considered for redressing the balance. Half a century later, the consequences of the movement were visible to all, and there could be no question of reversing it. ‘The age was one’, writes Miss Wake in her account of Northamptonshire under James, ‘which had recently seen the rise of the solid middle class of lesser landowning gentry on the ruins of the ancient aristocracy. The families were few which … managed to survive the turbulent end of the middle ages … Many of the knights and squires belonged to families of local and extraneous origin who had made money early in the previous century by the law, trade, or sheep-farming.’³⁷ That picture is true of more counties than one. The conditions which depressed some incomes inflated others; and, while one group of landowners bumped heavily along the bottom, another, which was quicker to catch the tide when it turned, was floated to fortune. The process of readjustment was complex; but two broad movements can be observed, affecting respectively the technique of land management and the ownership of landed property.

While the crisis of depreciation was not confined to one country, the English response to it had a character of its own. Partly for economic reasons, partly owing to the political and military conditions of a frontier region, parts of eastern Europe had met the emergency by a servile reaction which gave villeinage a new life. In East Prussia, in particular, the great estate, half farm, half fortress, swollen by the holdings of evicted peasants, and worked by its owner with the aid of corvées, became the dominant institution, against which the reforming monarchy, when it took the matter up – not to mention its successors – would for long struggle in vain. France had felt the same tightening of the screw, but the French escape from the impasse – if it was an escape – took the opposite direction. Precluded by law from evicting the censitaires – the customary tenants – French landowners had been thrown back on the policy of a more remorseless exaction of customary dues, of which the last desperate gamble, when the clock had almost struck, was to be denounced under the name of the feudal reaction, but which in fact, other avenues being blocked, had gone on piecemeal for centuries. In England, as elsewhere, it was necessary for landlords, if ruin was to be averted, to play to the score; but the tune called by English conditions was neither the despotism of the junker nor the half-abdication of the seigneur. English agriculture had as its setting a commercial, increasingly individualistic society, in process of an industrialization that was more than merely local. Landowners learned – when they did learn – from their environment, and cured their wounds with a hair of the dog that bit them. Fixed incomes falling, and profits rising, who could question that the way of salvation was to contract interests as a rentier, and expand them as an entrepreneur? The experts, at any rate, felt no doubts on the subject. Business is booming. They cry with one accord, ‘Go into business and prosper’.

Business methods and modernization, the fashionable specific, have different meanings in different ages. The stage at which matters stood under the early Stuarts was that, not of crops and rotations, but of marketing, management, tenures, the arrangement of holdings, and reclamation. If modern analogies are sought, they are to be found in the sphere, not of cultivation and breeding, but of rationalizing the administration of estates and improving their layout. The problem was, in the first place, a financial one. Certain sources of income were drying up; a substitute must be found for them. Several lines of attack were possible, but the most characteristic were four. First, customary payments dwindling, the landlord could revise the terms on which his property was held, get rid of the unprofitable copyholders when lives ran out, buy out small freeholders, and throw the land so secured into larger farms to be let on lease. Rent at this period is an ambiguous category; but leasehold rents were certainly rising – on the view of Thorold Rogers³⁸ six-fold in half a century, on the estimate of a contemporary³⁹ five-fold in rather less, on the evidence of some estate documents about three- to four-fold. Second, instead of, or in addition to, letting, he could expand his own business activities, run his home farm, not to supply his household, but as a commercial concern, enlarge his demesnes, and enclose for the purpose of carrying more stock or increasing his output of grain. Third, if he had the means, he could invest capital in bringing new land into cultivation, clearing woodlands, breaking up waste, draining marshes. Finally, he could supplement his agricultural income by other types of enterprise, going into the timber trade, exploiting coal, iron and lead, speculating in urban ground rents. Naturally, none of these departures was without abundant precedents. Naturally, again, the particular policy, or combination of policies, adopted depended both on local circumstances and on individual resources. But the tendency of all was the same. In each case, whatever the particular expedient used, the emphasis of the up-to-date landowner is increasingly thrown on the business side of land management. He relies for his income on the rents or profits derived from it.

The situation confronting the landed classes in the half century before the Civil War resembled in miniature that of 1850–70. Not only were prices rising, but, with the progress of internal unification, the development of specialized semi-industrial areas and the growth of urban markets, demand was expanding. The advice to put estate management on a business footing was, in such circumstances, sound; but not everyone could take it, and not all who could would. Then, as now, rationalization might look easy on paper, but was, in fact, no simple matter. Then, as now, therefore, what appeared at first sight a mere pedestrian improvement in methods of administration set in motion, as it developed, subtle social changes. It was to be expected that men with the resources and ambition to play the part of pioneers should gain at the expense of groups, whether below them or above, less qualified by means and traditions to adapt themselves to a new climate. The well-to-do yeoman, the kulak of the day, might maintain, or even improve, his position; but the extension of demesne farms, the upward movement of rents and fines, and encroachments on the commons, combined in parts of the country to tilt the scales against the humbler peasants. To that chapter of the story, whose local diversities still remain to be worked out, but of which the outlines are known, must be added another, of which historians have said less, but by which contemporaries were impressed. There was a struggle for survival, not only between large landowners and small, but between different categories among the former.

It was primarily a struggle between economies of different types, which corresponded more closely with regional peculiarities than with social divisions. There are plenty of gentry who stagnate or go downhill. It would be easy to find noble landowners who move with the times, and make the most of their properties; the sheep farming of Lord Spencer; the enclosures of Lords Brudenell, Huntingdon and Saye and Sele; the coal mines of the earl of Northumberland and the earl of Wemyss; above all the grandiose reconstruction carried through by the Russells, are cases in point. The smaller the part, nevertheless, played by passive property, as compared with active enterprise, the larger the opportunities of rising; and the increased rewards to be reaped by the improving landlord favoured classes still ascending the ladder compared with those already at the summit. The charms of established wealth might be represented by an earl of Newcastle, with a rent-roll of £22,000, or an earl of Pembroke, with the ninety-three manors, four boroughs and estates scattered over ten counties from Middlesex to Yorkshire, which gave him, at his death in 1630, the reputation of one of the richest peers in England.⁴⁰ But, when experiment and innovation were the order of the day, the cards were in other hands. They were all on the side of the enterprising country gentleman.

Professor Kosminsky has described the owners of ‘small and medium sized estates’ in the thirteenth century as ‘all people less intimately involved in the economic system of feudalism, and early subject to capitalist transformation’.⁴¹ It is the representatives of much the same indeterminate middle class, with interests large enough to offer a secure base for manoeuvre, but not so large as to be top heavy, who, three centuries later, are quickest, when the wind shifts, to trim their sails. Such a man was not tempted by great possessions into the somnolence of the rentier; was less loaded than most noble landowners with heavy overhead charges in the shape of great establishments; did his work for himself, instead of relying on a cumbrous machine to do it for him; owned, in short, his property, instead of being owned by it. Usually, unless one of the minority of active administrators, he was freer from public duties in his county, and more immune to the blandishments of London. The problem confronting him, if he undertook reconstruction or development, was of manageable dimensions. It demanded practical experience of farming, common sense, attention to detail, not the rarer gifts of the business strategist.

Under the pressure of an environment in motion, several types emerge. Some strike no roots; others survive and become fixed. There is the gentleman farmer, leasing land, till he makes money, without owning it, and not infrequently – since the thing is his profession – running several farms at once. There is the man who works his land as a commercial undertaking – a John Toke in Kent, buying Welsh and Scottish runts to finish on Romney marsh for the London market; a Robert Loder in Berkshire, all piety and profits; a Sir Thoman Tresham in Northamptonshire, selling everything, from rabbits supplied on contract to a poulterer in Gracechurch Street, to wool to the value of £1,000 a year, whose dual role as a leader of the Catholic cause in England and the most hated encloser in his much disturbed county is a point on the side of those who dismiss as a mare’s nest the alleged affinities of economic and religious radicalism; a Sir John Wynn in North Wales, cattle breeder, tribal chieftain, land grabber, scholar and prospector for minerals unknown to science, with the vanity of a savage and the credulity of his beloved alchemists, whose dealings with his tenants were too much for his own class, and cost him his seat on the council of Wales. There are families like the Pelhams and Twysdens, living mainly on rents, but doing on the side a useful trade in grain, hops, wool and iron in local markets and in London.⁴² Each type has its own idiosyncrasies, but none is in land for its health. All watch markets closely; buy and sell in bulk; compare the costs and yields of different crops; charge the rent, when custom allows, which a farm will stand; keep careful accounts. Fussell’s⁴³ description of one of them – ‘before all things a business man’ – is true of all.

It was agricultural capitalists of this type who were making the pace, and to whom the future belonged. Nor, if land supplied the base from which they started, were their interests confined to it. The lament that ‘it is impossible for the mere country gentleman ever to grow rich or raise his house, he must have some other profession’⁴⁴ was uttered at a moment when pessimism was pardonable, and was too pessimistic. It is true, however, that many of the class, whether of necessity or by choice, were up to the eyes in other branches of business. Naturally, they turned first to the industries native to their own districts – iron in Sussex and the Forest of Dean; tin in Cornwall; lead in Derbyshire and North Wales; coal in Nottinghamshire, Durham and Northumberland; textiles in a dozen counties. But their business connections were not merely local. The habit of investment was spreading rapidly among the upper classes, and the starry host of notabilities, who lent lustre to the Virginia and East India Companies, contributed less to its development than did the web woven by the humbler ventures of hundreds of obscure squires. Some of them, too, held shares in those much advertised undertakings. More had relations in the City, and sent their sons into business. An increasing number – for the current did not run only one way – had been in business themselves.

‘See’, wrote Cobden to Bright, ‘how every successful trader buys an estate!’⁴⁵ The remark might have been made with equal truth under James I. The movement from trade into land had long been an old story. Each successive generation made its bow to the proprieties by affecting surprise at it. It was not so long, indeed, since a statesman, alarmed at the crumbling of the social pyramid, had proposed to shore it up, by fixing a legal maximum to the real property which vulgar persons, like mere merchants, might buy.⁴⁶ Thirty years later that pose had worn thin. The government of the first two Stuarts continued, on a more majestic scale, the Elizabethan policy of turning crown estates into cash. So far from deprecating the acquisition of land by the business world, it threw land at its head. It was not surprising that a successful merchant, who had made his pile in trade, should prefer to the risks of commerce the decorous stability of what was regarded as a gilt-edged investment. By the middle years of James, if not, indeed, earlier, it is difficult to find a prominent London capitalist who is not also a substantial landowner; even such dubious cosmopolitans as Van Lore and Burlamachi, like Pallavicino before them, feel obliged to astonish the natives by setting up as country gentlemen. Fortunes made in law went the same way. Whether it is true or not, as was alleged, that leading barristers⁴⁷ were making, in the later years of Elizabeth, £20,000 to £30,000 a year, there was general agreement that their emoluments were not trifling. Their profession had taught them what, properly handled, land could be made to yield; naturally, they used their knowledge. Popham, who speculated heavily in crown lands; Ellesmere, who left his son £12,000 a year; the odious, but indispensable, Coke, were all substantial landowners; the last, indeed, with his fifty odd manors, was well up in the first flight. In the twenties, the inroads of the London plutocracy on the home counties gave rise to complaints; and what was true of the neighbourhood of London was hardly less true of the environs of other growing cities, for example Bristol.⁴⁸ In such conditions, the social categories used to distinguish the landed and trading classes, which in France and Germany remained terms with a legal significance, lost in England any claim to precision which they may once have possessed. The landowner living on the profits and rents of commercial farming, and the merchant or banker who was also a landowner, represented, not two classes, but one. Patrician and parvenu both owed their ascent to causes of the same order. Judged by the source of their incomes, both were equally bourgeois.

***

The advance of the classes representing a more business-like agriculture was accompanied by a second movement, which at once reflected its influence and consolidated its results. That movement was the heightened rapidity with which land was changing hands. The land market deals in a form of capital, and, in many societies, the most important form. The article which it handles is not merely a commodity, but an instrument of social prestige and political power. It is most active, therefore, when a rise in incomes swells the surplus for investment, and when wealth, in addition to increasing, is passing into new hands. Commercial expansion, industrial progress, discovery and invention, but also financial recklessness, revolution and war, have all at different times set the wheel spinning with heightened speed. In the age of Elizabeth and her two successors, economic and political conditions combined to mobilize real property, while the hostility of the courts to entails gave both forces free play.⁴⁹ The former, apart from occasional severe depressions, acted continuously, and with increasing force, to augment the demand for it. The latter, by periodically bringing fresh blocks of land into the market, supplied recurrent opportunities for profitable speculation.

The economic causes which lent property wings need no lengthy explanation. By depreciating fixed incomes, and inflating profits, rising prices sapped the reluctance of conservative owners to sell, and heightened both the eagerness and the ability of the business classes, whether agriculturalists or merchants, to buy. The very customary arrangements – fixed freehold and copyhold rents, and, sometimes fixed fines – which, if maintained, threatened ruin, could be turned by a bold policy of innovation from a liability to an asset. Involving, as they did, the existence of a wide margin between the actual receipts from a property and its potential yield, they offered, like an old-fashioned company which has survived into a boom, a golden opportunity for a remunerative reconstruction. Given a knowledge of the ropes, manors could be refloated as easily as mills, with results as agreeable to those who got in on the ground floor, and equally unpleasant to everyone else. To the purchaser with the capital and capacity to undertake it, modernization was as profitable as it was unpopular with his tenants. If himself a farmer, he sold his produce in a rising market. If he dealt in land as a speculation, he could count on reselling at a profit. If he bought to hold, he could feel a reasonable confidence that he would leave to his heirs an estate appreciating in value. In the event, many bought for a committee of enemies at Goldsmiths Hall. But none foresaw the war.

Our first formal accounts of the land market seem to be subsequent to the Restoration.⁵⁰ The picture then drawn is of a stream of mortgages and sales in London, which, owing to its financial resources, had the bulk of the business, even from the remotest counties, in its hands. Before the end of the previous century, however, it had been realized that the increased volume of transactions raised some awkward problems. The later seventies and early eighties appear to have been a period of exceptional activity. There were complaints of malpractices, and legislation was passed to check them. An act of 1585 voided fraudulent conveyances, imposed heavy penalties on the guilty parties, and required all mortgages to be entered with the clerks of recognizances, who were to keep a record, which intending purchasers could inspect on payment of a small fee.⁵¹ The last provision appears to have remained a dead letter, but the issue raised did not die down. The unorganized condition of the market was thought to depress prices, and a patent was granted in 1611 for the establishment of a public office, which was to have as part of its business the provision of facilities for dealing in real property and the recording of transactions. Copyholds – it was an advantage to set against their inconveniences – were transferred publicly in the court of the manor, so that encumbrances on them could not be concealed. It was natural that it should be asked whether the purchaser of a freehold could not be given similar security. Registration of title, advocated and opposed on the same grounds as today, was being urged from the left by the forties, and found later a place in the abortive programmes of land reform prepared during the Interregnum.⁵²

Long before that date, a second unpleasant symptom of the increased scale of the business had attracted general comment. Lawyers were not beloved by laymen; ‘Peace and law’, wrote an indignant country gentleman, who had seen much of the tribe, ‘hath beggared us all’.⁵³ The portentous inflation of the legal profession – the figures of men called to the bar at Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn rose⁵⁴ by almost two-thirds between 1591–1600 and 1631– 40 – was ascribed largely to the new opportunities open to the conveyancer. Nor, perhaps, is it without significance that it was in 1612, towards the end of the greatest orgy of speculation seen since the Reformation, that another body of practitioners which handled the same business, the growing trade of scriveners, applied for a charter of incorporation.⁵⁵ ‘Sell not thy land; … rather feed on bread and water than be the confusion of thy house’,⁵⁶ might be the motto of parents. Things were in the saddle and rode their sons. The earliest version of ‘clogs to clogs in three generations’ was applied, not to Lancashire mills, but to Lancashire land.⁵⁷ The rapid absorption by absentee aliens of estates in Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire was noted with disfavour under James I, and much the same statement as to properties in Berkshire was made half a century later by Fuller; while nearly two-thirds of the gentry owning land in Bedfordshire in 1620 were said to have sold it and left the county by 1668. The oft-quoted remark that half the properties in conservative Staffordshire had changed hands in sixty years does not, in the light of such evidence, appear too implausible.⁵⁸ The passing of familiar names, the break-up of patriarchal households, the unpleasantness of the parvenus who rose on their ruins, provided dramatists with materials for satire and moralists for sermons. If Sir Petronel Flash and Sir Giles Overreach were successful as parodies, it was that the nauseous reality was not too grossly caricatured.

Lamentations that the oaks are shedding their leaves are a piece of sentimental common form, too fashionable in all ages to throw much light on any one of them. Rising classes, like crowned heads, have always known how to grab and weep at once; nor, once in possession of the title deeds, are they at a loss for a pedigree. In reality, the Bladesovers of England, repeatedly submerged beneath a flood of new wealth, have been refloated not less often, with undiminished buoyancy, as wealth has found a way to make novelty venerable. The statistical evidence of the dimensions of the movement has not yet been put together, nor is it often in the form most instructive to posterity. Contemporaries commonly thought in terms, not of acreage, but of manors; they spoke of a man owning manors, or selling them, much as today he might be said to hold, or to dispose of, large investments, in order to convey an impression, not to record precise facts. The category, needless to say, is a highly ambiguous one, embracing estates varying widely in magnitude, value and organization. At best, it covers only one species of real property, and that not the most marketable. In the two generations before the Long Parliament such property seems, nevertheless, for what the fact is worth, to have changed hands with fair rapidity. Of 2,500 odd manors in seven counties, whose owners can be traced, just under one in three were sold once in the forty years between 1561 and 1600, and rather more than one in three between 1601 and 1640. In the case of the 600 odd in Hertfordshire and Surrey, which felt the wash of the London whirlpool, the figure in the second period was over forty per cent.⁵⁹

The only continuous register of sales of smaller parcels of land, which naturally came into the market more often, seems to be that supplied by the records of the office of alienations.⁶⁰ The land which it handled, being subject to awkward financial obligations to the crown, was not attractive to purchasers. But the average sales per decade described a rising curve, in rough correspondence with the movement of foreign trade, which helped to determine the surplus available for investment. In the expansion of the seventies and early eighties the figure bounded up; declined with the slump which began on the eve of the Armada; rose again with the beginning of recovery at the turn of the century; reached the highest point yet attained in the boom of 1606–16; and fell sharply with the depression of the early twenties. It ended at a level which, from 1630 to 1639, stood well above twice that at which it had started. It is not, perhaps, an exaggeration to say that for two generations there was an intermittent real estate boom. Naturally land values bounded up. An observer who stated in the later years of Elizabeth that they had risen ten-fold⁶¹ within living memory overstated his case; but there was general agreement that the rise had been impressive. Not much weight can be attached to the fact that under James I some crown land was sold at the fantastic price of forty-five⁶² years purchase, for such land – it was one of its attractions – was notoriously under-rented. Twenty-eight⁶³ years purchase, however, was quoted in the later twenties as the price at which some estates were then changing hands.

This mobilization of property, the result of commercial expansion and inflation combined, was not peculiar to England. As Professor Bloch and M. Raveau have shown, a similar reshuffling of possessions was occurring at the same time in France.⁶⁴ But in England the results of an accelerated economic tempo were heightened by adventitious causes. The state threw its weight into the scales, and permanently depressed them. Intending to buttress its own foundations, it released currents which, in the end, carried them and it away.

Periodical redistributions of land by acts of public policy, to the gain or loss now of this class, now of that, are not the astonishing departure from pre-established harmonies which they appear to their victims. In one form or another, they are a recurrent feature of European history, whose repeated appearance lends colour to the view which sees in them, not an accident, but the prelude to a new era. The decorous story of England is no exception to that rule. In the century and a half between the Reformation and Restoration, such a redistribution took place on a scale not seen since the Conquest. There were two immense confiscations, the result of revolution and civil war, and a steady alienation, under financial duress, of estates formerly used to provide a revenue for public purposes.

The opening act of the drama is not here in place. But the story which had begun with the Dissolution had not ended with it. Like taxation, the fruits of confiscation do not always rest where they first light. It is an error to suppose that, when James skipped happily on to his throne of thorns, the results of that great transaction were already ancient history. Property producing a gross income equal to about half the then yield of the customs had been cut adrift from its moorings, and added to the acreage available for acquisition by influence or enterprise. When the first fever of speculation was over, it had continued to float from hand to hand in the ordinary way of business, coming at intervals to anchor only again to resume its exciting voyages. Nor had the crown’s interest in the matter ceased with the mere act of confiscation and the sales which followed it. For one thing, though it had disposed within a decade of the greater part of the spoils, those which it retained remained substantial. For another, part of the land with which it parted had not been sold outright, but had been leased for terms of years, and ultimately returned to it. In the third place, part of that which it sold came back to it later through escheats and confiscations. Two generations later, therefore, it still owned, as a result of the Dissolution, a great mass of property, which could be leased, mortgaged or sold, and which, when the court of augmentations was wound up in 1554, had continued to be administered by the augmentations office of the exchequer. A vast deal in chantry lands brought temporary relief to the financial embarrassments of the early years of James. His son was disposing of monastic estates within a decade of the Long Parliament.

The continued redistribution of monastic property in the century following the Reformation was as momentous, therefore, as that which accompanied it. The transference to lay hands of part of the land owned by bishops and by deans and chapters – ‘their wings … well clipt of late by courtiers and noblemen, and some quite cut away’⁶⁵ – has been studied in detail only during the Interregnum, but the statements of contemporaries suggest that the scale on which it took place under Elizabeth was not inconsiderable. Nor was it only ecclesiastical property which came into the market in large blocks. Few rulers have acted more remorselessly than the early Tudors on the maxim that the foundations of political authority are economic. They had made the augmentation of the royal demesnes one of the keystones of their policy.⁶⁶ They had enjoyed, as a consequence, not only a large revenue from land, but the extensive economic patronage which great estates conferred, and had been powerful as kings partly because unrivalled as landowners. A shrewd foreigner remarked, as he watched in the next century the headlong plunge downhill of the crown finances, that the Stuarts were on the way to be overshadowed in wealth by their subjects before they were overthrown by them.⁶⁷ There was some substance in the view, hinted more than once under James, that the New Monarchy was undermined by reversing for three generations the financial policy which had helped to establish it. Each of the three great crises of Elizabeth’s reign carried its own block of crown estates away; she sold in her forty-five years land to the value, in all, of some £817,000. Her two successors inherited the nemesis of living on capital, as well as of rising prices and of their own characters. They sold in thirty years nearly twice as much. In spite of half-hearted attempts to tie his hands, alienations of property under James reached about £775,000, and those of Charles I, in the first decade of his reign, over £650,000.⁶⁸ The estates remaining to the crown, when the Long Parliament met, were still, of course, substantial; but how ruinously they had been dilapidated can be shown by a comparison. Between 1558 and 1635 crown lands to the value of some £2,240,000 had been thrown on the market. When, in the crisis of the Civil War, the remains were swept together and put up to auction, the sum realized, it seems, was under £2,000,000.⁶⁹

***

What, if any, were the social consequences of these portentous landslides? Did they, while changing, or reflecting a change in, the fortunes of individuals, leave unaltered the distribution of property between different groups? Or was the set of social forces such that some classes gained, while others lost? Is there truth in the suggestion of a later political theorist that ‘two parts in ten of all those vast estates’ of the nobility, ‘by the luxury and folly of their owners, have … been purchased by the lesser gentry and commons’, and that ‘the crown-lands, that is the public patrimony, are come to make up the interest of the commons’?⁷⁰

As to the tendency of private transactions, little can at present be said. Some great estates can be seen disintegrating, and others being formed. A comparison of the distribution at different dates of certain categories of property reveals the results. But the threads in the intricate skein leading from the first stage to the last can rarely be unravelled.⁷¹ The dealings in monastic and crown lands left a trail which is easier to follow. Much is still obscure; but enough is known to suggest certain provisional conclusions.

The natural starting point, in considering the former, is the classification of grantees made, some thirty years ago, by Dr. Savine.⁷² His figures suggest that the lion’s share of the spoils had passed, in the first instance, to two categories of persons. The first, the peers, received the largest individual grants; the second, the gentry and their connections, the largest aggregate share. What is known of the subsequent history of the land in question suggests that the second of these groups had the greater survival value. Properties dispersed, like the acquisitions of some noble grantees, over half a dozen different counties, were more readily sold than smaller and more compact estates, to which their owners were bound by strong local attachments. The squirearchy was less exposed to the vicissitudes which ruined some aristocratic families; while, keen farmers and businessmen as many of them were, they were in a better position to reap the fruits of commercial progress and improved methods of agriculture. Hence while, as a class, they had gained most by the Dissolution, they not only succeeded in retaining their acquisitions, but continued to add to them in the course of the next century.

‘As the Gibeonites’, wrote Fuller, ‘though by their mouldy bread and clouted shoes pretending to a long peregrination, were but of the vicinage; so most of those gentry [sc., in the later years of Henry VIII], notwithstanding their specious claims to antiquity, will be found to be … low enough in themselves, did they not stand on the vantage ground heightened on the rubbish of the ruins of monasteries’.⁷³ The settlement of monastic estates into the hands of the most progressive element in rural society may be illustrated by the course of events in one small corner of the country. In Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire about 317 manors, together with a mass of miscellaneous property – tithes, rectories and land in different places – appear to have changed hands at the Dissolution.⁷⁴ Of the manors, which are more easily traced than the smaller acquisitions, between 250 and 260 passed into the ownership of individuals, the remainder being attained by bishops, deans and chapters, colleges and other corporations. The nobility had done fairly, though not immoderately, well; twenty-six⁷⁵ peers had acquired monastic property of some kind, and seventeen had secured just over forty manors. Crown officials, like Sadler and Kingston, the two largest grantees of Gloucestershire estates; big business, in the persons of Gresham, Sharington and Stump; and a ubiquitous group of professional speculators, had all got their share; while a number of smaller men picked up crumbs from the cake. The bulk of the property had gone, however, not to influential aliens, but to well-known local families. In Gloucestershire the beneficiaries had included Chamberlains, Poynzs, Thynnes, Throckmortons, Tracies, Dennises, Porters, Comptons and Botelers; in Northamptonshire Montagues, Knightleys, Kirkhams, Cecils and Fermors; in Warwickshire Knightleys, Aglionbys and Throckmortons. Precision is impossible; but it is probably not an exaggeration to say that from one half to two-thirds of the property acquired by individuals had passed to men of this type and to humbler members of the same class. In so far as there had been competition between national notabilities and tenacious local interests, local interests had won.

Their victory became steadily more decisive in the course of the next century. Compared with the adventurers who dealt in properties that they had never seen, the local gentry were a settled population confronting mere marauders. As the revolution receded, and its first turmoil died down, their strategic advantage – the advantage of a settled base – asserted itself with ever increasing force. Political convulsions shook down the estates of one group of absentees; financial embarrassments sapped the staying power of another. As each over-rigged vessel went on the rocks, the patient watchers on the shore brought home fresh flotsam from the wreck. Long after the last monk had died, they were adding to their abbey lands, and, if not admitted on the ground floor, became shareholders at one remove. In Gloucestershire the estates of Cromwell, Northumberland and the Seymours drifted, some quickly, some gradually, into the hands of the Duttons, Winstons, Dorringtons and Chamberlains. The property of the earl of Pembroke, who browsed juicier pastures elsewhere, passed, soon after its acquisition, to the Dennises and Comptons. The lands of Sir Thomas Gresham came by marriage to the Thynnes, and those of Lord Clinton and Sir Robert Tyrwitt to the Heydons; while, of the eight manors secured by Sir Anthony Kingston, more than half had passed by 1608 to other families, in particular the Baynhams and Sandys. Sir Ralph Sadler’s descendants continued to be considerable landowners in the county; but the property acquired by him from the abbey of Winchcombe, and four of the six manors taken from the college of Westbury-on-Trim, had left them by that date, some passing to the Actons and Bridges, others to less well-known families. In Northamptonshire, of the property acquired by peers at the Dissolution, some, by the beginning of the next century, had returned to the crown; most of it had come to Kirkhams, Hattons, Spencers, Andrews, Stanhopes, Cradocks, Griffins and Ishams. In Warwickshire, the families who gained most by later reshuffles were the Leighs, Dilkes, Throckmortons and Spencers. The general result in these counties, in spite of the reputation of Northamptonshire as the Dukeries of the age, was that, of the forty odd manors which had gone to peers at the Reformation, those remaining to them two generations later numbered only six, while the remainder swelled the fortunes of rising middle-class families. Something between two-thirds and three-quarters of the manors secured by private persons had gone originally to the squirearchy. By the early years of the next century, the proportion in their hands was over nine-tenths. Thus the ultimate consequences of the Dissolution, if similar in kind to its immediate effects, were different in degree. In this part of England, at any rate, it did not so much endow an existing nobility, as lay the foundations of a new nobility to arise in the next century.

‘It is owing’, writes Dr. Chambers in his study of Nottinghamshire, ‘to the elimination of these factors, the monasteries, the copyholders, the Crown, and the Church, as rivals to the gentry, that Thoroton is enabled to place them on the pedestal of unchallenged local supremacy’.⁷⁶ The full effects of the dismemberment of crown estates before the Civil War still remain to be worked out; but enough is known to suggest that it is not of one county alone that his statement is true. The individuals into whose hands the land in question passed fell, between 1600 and 1640, into three main categories. Part of it was acquired by the peasants on crown estates; part, in the first instance, by syndicates of speculators, who bought land in large blocks, subdivided and resold it; part by well-to-do landowners and businessmen. The government’s dealings with the first class in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire have been described by Dr. Tupling.⁷⁷ Their social effects were not without interest; but, as a solution of the financial problem, that method of disposing of crown property was of worse than dubious value. It involved prolonged higgling with obstinate copyholders; years of surveying, hearings before commissions and litigation; the extraction from thousands of petty transactions of sums which, in the end, were liable to be unimpressive. What the government wanted was to get large tracts of land taken off its hands for prompt and substantial payments. If it was to secure that result, it must clearly look elsewhere than to the cautious avidity of impecunious peasants.

These reasons caused the best market for crown property to be found, not among the smaller cultivators, but in the classes who could afford to deal on a large scale. Many well-to-do families had been interested in particular estates long before they came to be offered for sale. Among the lessees of crown lands in the first decade of Elizabeth appear, side by side with humble members of the royal household, distinguished civil servants and statesmen, like Smith and Cecil, judges and law officers of the crown, and leading country gentlemen.⁷⁸ Down to, and after, the beginning of the century, much of the property in question was notoriously underrented.⁷⁹ As a consequence, a would-be purchaser could offer a figure which appeared on paper impressive, but which in fact, especially if he bought to reconstruct, was money in his pocket. In such circumstances, it was natural that prosperous landowners, who already held crown land on lease, should welcome the prospects of acquiring the freehold. The Irish war had brought one great opportunity. The accession of James was the occasion of a second. The great deals in crown property were financed largely on credit;⁸⁰ one leading speculator professed to have raised £80,000 in the City, and to have burned his fingers. The boom in trade, which began with the peace of 1605, meant easy money. With a debt which by Michaelmas 1606 was over £550,000, and showed signs of mounting, fresh spoils were in the offing. As usual, it was complained that Scots got more than their fair share; but there is no sign that the higher civilization was backward in the scramble. ‘At court’, wrote a future secretary of state, shocked – not for the last time – by the magnitude of the depredations, ‘every man findeth way for his own ends’.⁸¹ Coke was not alone in thinking that the thing threatened to become a ramp.

The dimensions of the business, and the anxiety of the government to realize without delay, prompted the adoption of a technique which, if not new in principle, was now practised on a novel scale. The traditional expedient of sale through special commissions brought in, between 1603 and 1614, just over £180,000. What was done, in addition, was to use the financial machinery of the City. The procedure was somewhat analogous to the underwriting of a government loan today by a group of issuing houses, except that what was involved was an actual transference of property. Instead of itself dealing with prospective purchasers, the crown disposed of land wholesale to financial syndicates, who paid cash down, retained as much as they wanted for themselves, and peddled the remainder over a period of years. One group, for example, took over in 1605–6, and again in 1611, a mass of tithes, priory lands and chantry lands; a second just over 400 crown mills, with the land attached to them; several others different blocks of property. The ‘contractors’, as they were called, included, in addition to certain guinea pigs in the shape of courtiers and officials, the leading business magnates of the day, such as Garway and Jones, two farmers of the customs; Hicks, the silk merchant and banker; the masters and prominent members of certain City companies; and – the man who plunged most heavily, being engaged in seven separate deals to the value of £137,055 – Arthur Ingram, the controller of the customs. The separate bargains made with these syndicates between 1605 and 1614 numbered seventeen, and the sum thus obtained – apart from sales direct to individuals – amounted to just under half a million.⁸²

The capitalists concerned bought primarily, of course, not to hold, but as a speculation, unloading partly on subsidiary rings of middlemen, whose names also are known, partly on the public, at the best price they could get. It was complained in the House in 1614 they made 100 per cent, and skinned purchasers alive.⁸³ The procedure adopted masked the personalities of the ultimate beneficiaries; but, wherever the latter can be traced, while part of the land goes in small lots to obscure peasants or craftsmen in Devonshire, the Isle of Wight and elsewhere, the bulk of it is seen passing, as would be expected, to people of substance, such as leading lawyers, country gentlemen and business men.⁸⁴ The same tendency can be traced in greater detail in the transactions of the next reign. The most imposing deals were two. In the first place, a commission⁸⁵ was set to work, which, between 1625 and 1634, disposed of property to the value of £247,597. In the second place, with a view to settling outstanding debts and to raising a further loan, the crown transferred to the City Corporation land valued at £349,897.⁸⁶ The City marketed it gradually during the next twelve years, using the proceeds to pay the crown’s creditors.

The purchasers concerned in the first of these transactions numbered 218, and the value of the land which can be traced £234,437. The comment of a foreigner – that most of the property went to courtiers who had secured promises for it in advance – exaggerated the part played by influence, as distinct from money; but, in emphasizing that the sales of crown land under Charles, when the financial system of the monarchy was tottering to its fall, were, to an even greater extent than under his predecessors, a deal between crown, big business and the richer country gentry, he put his finger on a vital point. For obvious reasons of speed and economy, the policy of the commission was to sell in large blocks. Lots of £1,000 and upwards, accounting for four-fifths of the land sold, went to less than one third of the purchasers. The scale of the transactions naturally narrowed the market. Five merchants got one tenth of the total; twenty-seven peers between one quarter and one third; a group of 133 knights, esquires and gentlemen rather more than half. The second and larger deal, in which the City was the auctioneer, differed from the first only in the fact that the business world had a larger hand in it, and the nobility a smaller, the latter acquiring about one tenth of the land and the former one quarter. But the bulk of it went in the same direction as before. Among the 350 odd purchasers the squirearchy and its dependants formed the largest group, and acquired well over half the total. It is not an exaggeration, in fact, to say that, apart from purchases affected through other channels, these two transactions alone had the effect that, in the course of something over fifteen years, several hundred families of country gentry added to their possessions land to the value of £350,000 to £400,000. Nor is that the whole story. Much of the property was sold as undeveloped land to men who, when the time came, would seize the chance to develop it. If an exasperated official, who put the difference in value between the two at twenty-fold,⁸⁷ overstated his case, we know from other sources – for example, the margin between old rents and improved rents on private estates – that the difference sometimes ran into hundreds per cent. It was this margin – not merely the price at which crown land was transferred, but the prospective increment of rack rents, enclosure, exploitation of timber and minerals – which must be considered in estimating the gains accruing to its purchasers.

To complete the picture of property passing from the crown to its wealthier subjects, it would be necessary, in the first place, to take account of further less obtrusive changes, which went on side by side with these grandiose deals. The process of piecemeal disintegration associated with the dubious business of ‘concealed lands’, and with gifts and grants, such as the concessions of ‘drowned lands’ to persons willing to reclaim them, still awaits its historian. Even the famous matter of the forests made little noise till near the end, when it made too much. The de facto transference of possessions involved in the absorption by neighbouring landowners of the last alone would seem not to have been a trifle. ‘The King loseth daily by intrusions and encroachments’; ‘wholly converted to the private benefits of the officers and private men’; ‘[private] claims do swallow up the whole forest, not allowing his Majesty the breadth of one foot’⁸⁸ – such lamentations, though uttered before the question entered politics, may sound like the voice of official pessimism; but the routine returns of encroachments contained in the records of some forest courts make them appear not implausible. It would be necessary, in the second place, for the purpose of obtaining a comprehensive view, to compare the course of events in England with the history of those parts of the Continent where matters went a different way. Leaving these further questions, however, on one side, what significance, if any, it may be asked, is to be attached to the movement of which the dull transactions described above are specimens?

***

Its financial consequences are obvious; they were those which led Hobbes to make his comment on the futility of attempting to support a state by endowing it with property subject to alienation.⁸⁹ The effect on the peasants of recurrent orgies of land speculation, if less conspicuous, is equally certain. In the third place, such figures as we possess suggest that the tendency of an active land market was, on the whole, to increase the number of medium-sized properties, while diminishing that of the largest.⁹⁰ Mr. Habakkuk has shown in a striking article⁹¹ that ‘the general drift of property in the sixty years after 1690 was in favour of the large estate and the great lord’, and has explained the causes of that movement. During the preceding century and a half the current, as he points out, appears to have flowed in the opposite direction, with the result that, as the number of great properties was levelled down, and that of properties of moderate size levelled up, the upper ranges of English society came to resemble less a chain of high peaks than an undulating table-land. Is it too incautious, in the fourth place, to regard as one symptom of the change in the distribution of wealth the acquisition of new dignities by members of the class which gained most from it? Of 135 peers in the house of lords in 1642, over half had obtained their titles since 1603. They included some lawyers and merchants, but the majority of them were well-to-do country gentlemen. The creation by the Stuarts of a parvenu nobility, like the sale of baronetcies to knights and esquires with an income from land of £1,000 a year, if politically a blunder, showed some insight into economic realities. It owed such fiscal utility as it possessed to the existence of a social situation which such expedients could exploit.

Nor, finally, were political attitudes unaffected by the same influences. With the growth of speculative dealings in land, the depreciation of the capital value of certain categories of real property by the antiquated form of land taxation known as the feudal incidents became doubly intolerable. The more intimately an industry – agriculture or any other – depends on the market, the more closely is it affected by the policy of governments, and the more determined do those engaged in it become to control policy. The fact that entrepreneur predominated over rentier interests in the house of commons, was, therefore, a point of some importance. The revolt against the regulation by authority of the internal trade in agricultural produce, like the demand for the prohibition of Irish cattle imports and a stiffer tariff on grain, was natural when farming was so thoroughly commercialized that it could be said that the fall in wool prices alone in the depression of 1621 had reduced rents by over £800,000 a year. The freezing reception given by the Long Parliament to petitions from the peasants for the redress of agrarian grievances is hardly surprising, when it is remembered that one in every two of the members returned, up to the end of 1640, for the five midland counties which were the disturbed area of the day, either themselves had been recently fined for depopulation or belonged to families which had been.⁹² The economic reality behind the famous battle over the forests was the struggle between more extensive and more intensive methods of land utilization, to which the increased profitableness of capitalist farming lent a new ferocity. Most of the attitudes and measures, in fact, which were to triumph at the Restoration can be seen taking shape between the death of Elizabeth and the opening of the Civil War.

To attempt an answer which went beyond these commonplaces would, perhaps, be rash. But it is not presumptuous to address the question to contemporaries; and some of them have left us in little doubt as to their opinion. Mr. Russell Smith,⁹³ in his interesting study of Harrington, has suggested that the thesis as to the political repercussion of changes in the distribution of landed property, which is the central doctrine of the Oceana, if partly inspired by a study of Roman history, derived its actuality from the English confiscations in Ireland under the act of 1642 and the Diggers’ movement in England. In reality, it was needless for Harrington to look so far afield as the first, or in spheres so humble as the second. In so far as he was in debt to previous writers, his master was Machiavelli; but the process from which he generalized had been taking place beneath his eyes. His own relatives had been engaged in it.⁹⁴

Had he shared the modern taste for figures, he would have found little difficulty in supporting his doctrine by some casual scraps of statistical evidence. He would have observed, for example, had he taken as a sample some 3,300 manors in ten counties, that out of 730 held by the crown and the peerage in 1561, some 430 had left them (if new creations⁹⁵ are ignored) by 1640, while an additional 400 had been acquired by the gentry. He would have discovered that, as a consequence, the crown, which in 1561 owned just one tenth (nine per cent) of the total, owned in 1640 one fiftieth (two per cent); that the peers held one eighth (12.6 per cent) at the first date, and (ignoring new creations) one sixteenth (6.7 per cent) at the second; and that the share of the gentry had risen from two-thirds (sixty-seven per cent), when the period began, to four-fifths (eighty per cent) at the end of it. His remarks on the social changes which caused the house of commons ‘to raise that head which since hath been so high and formidable unto their princes that they have looked pale upon those assemblies’, and his celebrated paradox, ‘Wherefore the dissolution of this Government caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this Government’,⁹⁶ were based on his argument as to the significance of a ‘balance’ of property; and that argument took its point from his belief that in his own day the balance had been altered. To the sceptic who questioned its historical foundations, he would probably have replied – for he was an obstinate person – by inviting him either to submit rebutting evidence, or to agree that there was some prima facie reason, at least, for supposing that, in the counties in question, the landed property of the crown had diminished under Parthenia, Morpheus and his successor by three-quarters (seventy-six per cent), and that of the older nobility by approximately half (47.1 per cent), while that of the gentry had increased by not much less than one fifth (17.8 per cent).⁹⁷

In reality, however, as far as this side of his doctrines was concerned, there were few sceptics to challenge him. To regard Harrington as an isolated doctrinaire is an error. In spite of its thin dress of fancy, his work was not a Utopia, but partly a social history, partly a programme based upon it. Contemporaries who abhorred the second were not indisposed to agree with the first, for it accorded with their own experience. The political effect of the transference of property appeared as obvious to authors on the right, like Sir Edward Walker, whose book appeared three years before the Oceana, as to Ludlow, to that formidable bluestocking, Mrs. Hutchinson, and to Neville, on the left.⁹⁸ If, in 1600, it could be said⁹⁹ that the richer gentry had the incomes of an earl, and in 1628 that the house of commons could buy the house of lords three times over,¹⁰⁰ the argument advanced in some quarters in 1659 that, since the peers, who once held two-thirds of the land, now held less than one twelfth, the day for a house of lords was passed, was not, perhaps, surprising.¹⁰¹ It overstated its case; but a case existed.

The next generation, while repudiating Harrington’s conclusions, rarely disputed his premises. Dryden was not the only person to see political significance in the fact that

The power for property allowed

Is mischievously seated in the crowd.

Thorndike complained that ‘so great a part of the gentry as have shared with the Crown in the spoils of the monasteries think it in their interest to hold up that which … would justify their title in point of conscience’; that the result had been ‘a sort of mongrel clergy of lecturers’; and that ‘it is visible that the late war hath had its rise here’. Temple defended the plutocratic composition of his proposed new council with the remark that ‘authority is observed much to follow land’. Burnet wrote that the crown had never recovered from the sales of land by James I, not merely for the reason of their effect on the revenue, but because they snapped the links which had kept the tenants of the crown ‘in a dependence’ upon it; Sidney that the nobility, having sacrificed ‘the command of men’ to the appetite for money, retained ‘neither the interest nor the estates’ necessary to political leadership, and that, as a consequence, ‘all things have been brought into the hands of the Crown and the commons’, with ‘nothing left to cement them and to maintain their union’; an author – possibly Defoe – with the nom de plume of Richard Harley, that the ‘second and less observed cause’ of the troubles of his youth was ‘the passage of land from its former possessors into the hands of a numerous gentry and commonalty’; Davenant that the case for a resumption, at any rate of recent grants, was overwhelming, though it would be prudent to try it, in the first place, in Ireland.¹⁰²

The moral for governments desirous of stability was drawn by a writer¹⁰³ who borrowed Burnet’s name, and whose father – if the ordinary ascription is correct – had had much to say half a century before on the effects of the transference of land in his own county of Gloucestershire. He condemned the book of Harrington – ‘calculated wholly for the meridian of a Commonwealth’ – but quoted its doctrines, and propounded a policy, which, but for his republicanism, Harrington himself might have endorsed. The cause of all the trouble, he wrote, had been the reckless alienation of the estates of the crown and nobility. Salvation was to be found by reversing the process. The crown should by purchase gradually build up a new demesne, which should remain inalienable; and – ‘since a monarchy cannot subsist without a nobility’ – should confine new peerages to persons with estates worth at least £6,000 a year and entailed on their heirs. Of these proposals, the first had long been impracticable, the second was superfluous.

____________

¹ R. H. Tawney, ‘The rise of the gentry, 1558–1640’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xi (1941), repr. in Essays in Economic History, i, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (1954), pp. 173–206.

² R. H. Tawney, ‘The rise of the gentry: a postscript’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., vii (1954), 91–7, repr. in Carus-Wilson, pp. 206–14.

³ H. J. Habakkuk, ‘English landownership, 1680–1740’, Econ. Hist. Rev., x (1940), 2.

⁴ R. H. Tawney, ‘Harrington’s interpretation of his age’, Proc. British Academy, xxvii (1941).

⁵ See below, p. 99.

⁶ Elton, in History, Society, and the Churches, ed. D. Beales (1985).

⁷ L. Stone, ‘The anatomy of the Elizabethan aristocracy’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xviii (1948); H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy: an anatomy atomized’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., iii (1951); L. Stone, ‘The Elizabethan aristocracy – a restatement’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., iv (1952); H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The gentry, 1540–1640’, Econ. Hist. Rev., supplement, no. 1 (Cambridge, 1953).

⁸ J. H. Hexter, ‘Storm over the gentry’, Encounter, x (1958); repr. with footnotes in J. H. Hexter, Reappraisals in History (1961).

⁹ J. P. Cooper, ‘The counting of manors’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., viii (1956).

¹⁰ L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965); and see the review article by D. C. Coleman, ‘The gentry controversy and the aristocracy in crisis, 1558–1641’, History, li (1966).

¹¹ T. Cogswell, R. Cust and P. Lake, Revisionism and its Legacies: the Work of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002), introduction, pp. 1–17.

¹² H. J. Habakkuk, ‘The market for monastic property, 1539–1603’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., x (1958), 380.

¹³ The general, and somewhat speculative, surveys of the distribution of land in England over the long term by F. M. L. Thompson, ‘The social distribution of landed property in England since the 16th century’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xix (1966) and J. P. Cooper, ‘The social distribution of land and men in England, 1436–1700’, Econ. Hist. Rev., xx (1967) are consistent with this view

* This article was first published in the Economic History Review, xi (1941). F. M. L. Thompson argues in his introduction (pp. 81–5) that it was derived from Tawney’s 1937 Creighton Lecture. The editors are grateful to Wiley-Blackwell for permission to reproduce it here.

¹ The omission of some references, which should have been inserted, and the incompleteness of some others, require an apology. They are due to circumstances which, since the article was written, have made it difficult to consult some of the sources used.

² Pierre Coste, De l’éducation des enfants (1695).

³ Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime (trans. H. Reeves), pp. 15, 72, 77, 85; L. de Lavergne, The Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland (trans. 1855), chs. ix and x; H. Taine, Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872).

⁴ Official Return of Members of the House of Commons (1878).

⁵ The counties concerned are Herts., Beds., Bucks., Surrey, Hants., N. Riding of Yorks., Worcs., Glos., Warwicks. and Northants. The facts for the first seven in 1640 are taken from the lists of manors and their owners given in the V.C.H., and for the last three from Sir Robert Atkyns, The ancient and present state of Gloucestershire; William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire; John Bridges, History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire. Those for 1874 are taken from John Bateman, The Acreocracy of England, a list of all owners of three thousand acres and upwards … from the Modern Domesday Book.

⁶ Sir Walter Raleigh, Concerning the Causes of the Magnificency and Opulency of Cities (1657).

⁷ Thomas Wilson, The State of England Anno Dom. 1600, ed. F. J. Fisher (Camden Miscellany, xvi, 1936), p. 23, put the number of gentlemen at ‘16,000 or thereabouts’, plus some 500 knights. For the purposes of this article, no distinction is drawn between knights and gentry.

⁸ Samuel Butler, Characters and Passages from Notebooks, ed. A. R. Waller; and John Earle, Micro-Cosmographie (1628). See G. Davies, The Early Stuarts, 1603–60 (Oxford, 1937), pp. 264–72.

⁹ The Examination and Confession of Captain Lilbourne (British Library, E.130/33). I owe this reference to P. Gregg.

¹⁰ See, for the tendency towards a ‘parity’, Sir Edward Walker, Historical Discourses upon Several Occasions (1705), and, for the laxity of heralds, the same writer’s Observations upon the Inconveniences that have attended the frequent Promotions to Titles of Honour and Dignity since King James came to the Crown of England (1653).

¹¹ Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland MSS., ix. 5.

¹² De Republica Anglorum, ed. L. Alston (1906), pp. 39–40: ‘and, to be shorte, who can live idly and without manuall labour, and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he shall be … taken for a gentleman.’

¹³ Wilson, The State of England, pp. 23–4, gives £650–£1,000 a year as the income of a gentleman in London and the home counties, and £300–£400 as the figure for the remoter provinces. He describes knights as men of £1,000–£2,000 a year, but cites some with incomes of £5,000–£7,000.

¹⁴ E.g. Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman (1622); Richard Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (1633).

¹⁵ Wilson, The State of England, pp. 18–24; Francis Bacon, ‘Certain observations upon a libel published this present year 1592’, in Works, i, ed. Bohn, p. 385; G. Goodman, The Court of King James I, ed. J. Brewer (2 vols., 1839), i. 311, 290–1, 322–3; John Selden, Table Talk, under ‘Land’ (see also under ‘Knight Service’); Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1603–7, no. 729; Cal. S.P. Ven. 1617–19, no. 658; Cal. S.P. Ven. 1621–3, no. 603; Cal. S.P. Ven. 1629–32, no. 374; Hist. MSS. Comm., Cowper MSS., i. 129.

¹⁶ The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, Knt., ed. T. Birch (1751), i. 9 (where the metaphor of a scales is used) and pp. 206–7.

¹⁷ Wilson, The State of England, p. 18.

¹⁸ See the admirable article by H. M. Cam, ‘The decline and fall of English feudalism’, History, xxv (1940); and R. R. Reid, ‘The rebellion of the earls, 1569’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., new ser., xx (1906).

¹⁹ For the fall in the value of one item, profits of courts, see Cottoni Posthuma (1651 edn.), p. 180, where it is stated that on crown estates ‘the casual profits of courts never paid to the present officers their fees and expenses’, and that in 44 Eliz. the costs of collection exceeded the receipts by £8,000. For a similar condition on a private property, see Bedford MSS., ‘Answere to my L. Treasurer’s demands, and what may growe to the payment of my late lordes debts’, 20 Apr. 1586, ‘the profyttes of Courtes will not be much moare than to answer the stuerdes and officers’ fees, and in some places the same will not be discharged with their profyttes’. I am indebted to G. Scott Thomson for a transcript of this document.

²⁰ M. Bloch, Les caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (1931).

²¹ The Harleian Miscellany, ed. William Oldys (8 vols., 1744–6), ii. 515 et seq.; ‘The Mirror of Worldly Fame’ (1603), ch. iii.

²² Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in Ireland, vi. 58.

²³ Francis Bacon, ‘Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain’, in Works, i, ed. Bohn, p. 507.

²⁴ L. Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of King James I (2 vols., 1822), p. 300.

²⁵ Hist. MSS. Comm., Bedford MSS., ‘Reasons to move her Mats gracious consideration towards the Erle of Bedf.’, Feb. 1579. I am indebted to G. Scott Thomson for a transcript of this document.

²⁶ Wilson, The State of England, p. 24.

²⁷ Hist. MSS. Comm., Portland MSS., ix. 5.

²⁸ Chetham Miscellanies, iii. 6–7, ‘Some Instructions given by William Booth to his stewards …’.

²⁹ John Smyth, The Berkeley MSS., ii: the Lives of the Berkeleys, ed. J. Maclean (3 vols., Gloucester, 1883–5), pp. 265–417; and Smyth Papers in the Gloucestershire Archives.

³⁰ Lord Compton married the daughter of Sir John Spencer, lord mayor in 1594, who died worth £300,000 (some said £800,000) (Goodman, ii. 127–32); Lord Noel a daughter of Sir Baptist Hicks, mercer (The Court and Times of Charles I, ed. T. Birch (2 vols., 1838), ii. 355); Lord Willoughby a daughter of Alderman Cockayne, ‘who brought him £10,000 in money … £1,000 a year pension out of the Exchequer, and a house very richly furnished’ (Birch, Court and Times, ii. 220); the earl of Holderness another daughter of Cockayne, with £10,000 as portion (Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1623–5, p. 54).

³¹ See Hist. MSS. Comm., Salisbury MSS., passim. Some references to the indebtedness of the nobility will be found in Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury, introduction, pp. 31–42.

³² M. Roose and C. Ruelens, Correspondence de Rubens et Documents Epistolaires, v. 116: ‘moltri altri, signori e ministri … sono sforzati a buscari la vita come possono, e per cio qui si vendono gli negoci publici e privati a dinari contanti’.

³³ E.g., Clarendon, i. 131–6, 115–26, 131, 167, 170; iii. 27, 93, 95, 283.

³⁴ State Papers Domestic, Charles I, ccccxcvii, no. 59, March 1642–3.

³⁵ H. E. Chesney, ‘The transference of lands in England, 1640–60’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 4th ser., xv (1932), 181–210.

³⁶ Hist. MSS. Comm., Salisbury MSS., i. 162–5.

³⁷ The Montagu Musters Book, 1602–23, ed. J. Wake (Northamptonshire Record Soc., vii, Peterborough, 1935), introduction, pp. xiv–xv.

³⁸ T. Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, 1259–1793 (7 vols., Oxford, 1866–1902), v. 812.

³⁹ Harleian Miscellany, iii. 552 et seq., ‘The present state of England’, by Walter Carey (1627).

⁴⁰ Margaret, duchess of Newcastle, Life of the Duke of Newcastle (Everyman edn.), pp. 98– 100; Abstract of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire Post-Mortem Inquisitions (1893–7), pp. 97–101; Clarendon, i. 120–6.

⁴¹ E. A. Kosminsky. ‘Services and money rents in the 13th century’, Econ. Hist. Rev., v (1935).

⁴² The Account-Book of a Kentish Estate, 1616–1704, ed. E. C. Lodge (1927); Robert Loder’s Farm-Accounts, 1610–20, ed. G. E. Fussell (Camden, 3rd ser., liii, 1936); British Library, Additional MS. 39836, and Hist. MSS. Comm., Report on MSS. in Various Collections, iii (1904; Tresham papers); National Library of Wales, Wynn Papers, and published Calendar of Wynn (of Gwydir) Papers, 1515–1690 (Aberystwyth, 1926); Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 33142 (agricultural accounts of the Pelhams) and Add. MS. 33154 (accounts relating to iron); Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34167–77 (Twysden papers).

⁴³ Robert Loder’s Farm-Accounts, introduction.

⁴⁴ A Royalist’s Note-book, the Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander of Nunwell, 1622–52, ed. F. Bamford (1936), p. 75.

⁴⁵ Quoted by O. F. Christie, The Transition to Democracy, 1867–1914 (1934), pp. 147–8.

⁴⁶ Hist. MSS Comm., Salisbury MSS., i. 162–3, ‘Considerations delivered to the Parliament, 1559’. See, for earlier complaints, King Edward VI’s Remains, ‘Discourse Concerning the Reformation of many Abuses’; and F. J. Fisher, ‘Commercial trends and policy in 16th-century England’, Econ. Hist. Rev., x (1940), 110.

⁴⁷ Wilson, The State of England, p. 25.

⁴⁸ State Papers Domestic, James I, xxii, no. 63, contains complaints of the purchase of Suffolk manors by Londoners. For Bristol, see State Papers Domestic, Charles I, xxxv, no. 43, 8 Sept. 1626; and W. B. Willcox, Gloucestershire: a Study in Local Government 1590–1640 (1940), p. 105.

⁴⁹ The attitude of the courts is well summarized in H. J. Habbakuk’s article, ‘English landownership 1680–1740’, Econ. Hist. Rev., x (1940).

⁵⁰ Harleian Miscellany, vii. 488–93, ‘Reasons and Proposals for a Registry … of all Deeds and Incumbrances of Real Estate etc.’, by Nicholas Philpott (1671); Harleian Miscellany, vii. 493–501, ‘A Treatise concerning Registers … of Estates, Bonds, Bills, etc., with Reasons against such Registers’, by William Pierrepoint.

⁵¹ 27 Eliz., c iv. An earlier act requiring the enrolment of sales of land had been passed in 1536. For an example of enrolments under it in one county, see Somerset Enrolled Deeds, ed. S. W. B. Harbin (Somerset Record Soc., li, 1937).

⁵² Harleian Miscellany, vi. 72, ‘A word for the Army and two words for the Kingdom’, by Hugh Peters (1647); Harleian Miscellany, vii. 25–35, ‘A Rod for the Lawyers’, by William Cole (1659).

⁵³ A Royalist’s Note-Book, p. 14. An earlier complaint on the same subject is contained in Wilson, The State of England, pp. 24–5.

⁵⁴ For Gray’s Inn, see Brit. Libr., Harleian MS. 1912, no. 16, fo. 207b; and for Lincoln’s Inn, The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn: the Black Books, ed. W. P. Baildon (5 vols., 1897–1902), ii.

⁵⁵ Cal. S.P. Dom., Charles I, p. 87, 20 June 1631.

⁵⁶ A Royalist’s Note-Book, p. 212.

⁵⁷ The Dr. Farmer Chetham MSS. (Chetham Soc., 1873), pp. 122–3.

⁵⁸ Hist. MSS Comm., Buccleuch MSS., iii. 182 (Northants.); J. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the 18th Century: a Study of Life and Labour under the Squirearchy (1932), pp. 6–7; T. Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1840 edn.), i. 140; The Visitations of Bedfordshire, ed. F. A. Blaydes (Harleian Soc., xix, 1884), pp. 206–8; Sir Simon Degge in Sampson Erdeswicke’s Survey of Staffordshire.

⁵⁹ The counties concerned are Surrey, Herts., Beds., Bucks., Hants., Worcs. and N. Riding of Yorks. The figures, which I owe to the kindness of F. J. Fisher, are taken from the lists of manors and their owners given in the V.C.H. They exclude transfers of leases, and transfers due to marriage, gift, inheritance, forfeiture or other non-commercial transactions.

⁶⁰ Exchequer accounts, alienations office, Entries of Licenses and Pardons for Alienations.

⁶¹ Brit. Libr., Cotton MS. Otho E X, no. 10, fos. 64–78 (c.1590).

⁶² Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MSS., vol. 169, art. 51, fo. 110, contract made with Sir Baptist Hicks and others, 19 Dec., 18 Jas. I (by which land with an annual value of £1,000 was sold for £45,000).

⁶³ State Papers Domestic, Charles I, cix, no. 44, quoted by W. R. Scott, The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 1910– 12), i. 192. As Professor Scott points out, the price of land reflected not only the annual rent, but casualties, such as fines.

⁶⁴ Bloch, pp. 140–5; P. Raveau, L’agriculture et les classes paysannes: la transformation de la propriété dans le Haut-Poitou au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1926), esp. ch. ii.

⁶⁵ Wilson, The State of England, pp. 22–3.

⁶⁶ F. C. Dietz, English Government Finance, 1485–1558 (Urbana, Ill., 1920).

⁶⁷ Cal. S.P. Ven., 1603–7, no. 709; Cal. S.P. Ven., 1617–19, no. 658; Cal. S.P. Ven., 1621–3, no. 603; Cal. S.P. Ven., 1629–32, no. 374.

⁶⁸ For sales of crown land under Elizabeth, see State Papers Domestic, James I, xlvii, nos. 99, 100, 101, and S. J. Madge, The Domesday of Crown Lands (1938), pp. 41–2; under James, Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MSS., vol. 169, art. 51; under Charles I, Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 18705 fos. 2–22, and State Papers Domestic, Charles I, cxxiv, no. 51; and under the two last, and 1649–56, Madge, pp. 47–64.

⁶⁹ Madge, p. 256.

⁷⁰ Henry Neville, Plato Redivivus (1763 edn.), p. 39.

⁷¹ One example may be given. John Smythe (Lives of the Berkeleys, ii. 356–61) gives particulars of property sold by Lord Henry Berkeley between 1561 and 1613 to the value of approximately £42,000. Sales of 25 manors and of the lease of one manor, realizing £39,279 odd, were made to 13 persons (seven knights or baronets, five esquires and the trustees of a peer), the remainder, to the value of £2,789, going to 25 other persons of unspecified condition. Thus i) 38 owners succeeded one; ii) over nine-tenths of the property sold was acquired by purchasers relatively high in the social scale.

⁷² Dr. Savine’s figures are printed in H. A. L. Fisher, The History of England: from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of Henry VIII (1485–1547) (1910), app. ii, pp. 497–9.

⁷³ Fuller, i. 60.

⁷⁴ The following account of the fate of monastic property in three counties does not pretend to complete accuracy. It is based mainly on Sir Robert Atkyns, The Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire, and Men and Armour in Gloucestershire in 1608 (1902), a list compiled by John Smythe from the musters roll of 1608; Bridges, History and Antiquities of Northamptonshire; and Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire.

⁷⁵ I.e., eliminating duplication arising from the fact that several peers acquired monastic property in more than one of the three counties in question.

⁷⁶ Chambers, p. 4.

⁷⁷ G. H. Tupling, The Economic History of Rossendale (Chetham Soc., new ser., lxxxvi, 1927).

⁷⁸ The source of this statement is a list of lessees of crown land 1–12 Eliz., contained (I think) in State Papers Domestic, Eliz., clxvi, but the reference has been mislaid. The list includes among others, Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, Anthony Brown (justice of the common pleas), David Lewis (judge of the court of admiralty), Sir Francis Knollys, Sir Maurice Berkeley, Sir Henry Jernigan, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Gervase Clifton, Richard Hampden, etc.

⁷⁹ Francis Bacon, ‘Discourse in the Praise of his Sovereign’, in Works, i, ed. Bohn, p. 371. For statistical evidence of under-renting, see Madge, pp. 55–6.

⁸⁰ This was so, e.g., in the case of Lionel Cranfield’s speculation of 1609. His ledger shows that he and his partners borrowed £529 from Sir John Spencer, £427 from Lady Slanye and £209 from Thomas Mun. I am indebted to Lord Sackville and Professor A. P. Newton for permission to examine the Cranfield papers.

⁸¹ Hist. MSS. Comm., Cowper MSS., i. 50.

⁸² A summary of these transactions, with the names of the principal contractors, is contained in Brit. Libr., Lansdowne MSS., vol. 169, art. 51, fo. 110. State Papers Domestic, James I, xl–lxxv, contain many references to the subject.

⁸³ Commons Journal, 18 Apr. 1614, speech of Mr. Hoskyns.

⁸⁴ I take these particulars from the Cranfield MSS. For the deal in which he was specially engaged, see State Papers Domestic, James I, xlv, no. 159 (articles between the commissioners for the sale and demise of crown lands and John Eldred and others, contractors for purchase of the same).

⁸⁵ Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 18795 fos. 2–22.

⁸⁶ Cal. S.P. Dom., 1628–9, cxxiv, no. 51. The sale of land to the City was the result of a contract made in 1628 with Edw. Ditchfield and other trustees acting on behalf of the corporation. Particulars as to the subsequent sale by the City of the properties concerned are contained in the royal contract deeds in the Guildhall.

⁸⁷ Cal. S.P. Dom., James I, no. 80, 15 Dec. 1619, Sir T. Wilson to master of rolls: ‘The King was greatly deceived in the Chantry lands which he granted to discharge that debt, for he passed the lands with £5,000 or £6,000 a year at the old rents, which are now worth 20 times as much … The whole affair was a cozenage’.

⁸⁸ Cranfield MS. 8236 (1622), Selwood forest; Cranfield MS. 8328 (1622), crown forests in general, parts of Whittlewood, Barnwood and Sherwood being specially mentioned; State Papers Domestic, James I, lxxxiv, no. 46, Norden’s survey of Kingswood forest.

⁸⁹ Leviathan, ch. xxiv.

⁹⁰ The following figures, which I owe to the kindness of F. J. Fisher, are based on the lists of manors and their owners contained in the V.C.H. They relate to manors whose ownership is known at all the four dates given below in the seven counties of Herts., Beds., Bucks., Surrey, Worcs., Hants. and the N. Riding of Yorks.

⁹¹ Habbakuk, p. 2.

⁹² Chancery Petty Bag., Miscellaneous Rolls, no. 20, gives the names of persons fined for depopulation 1635–8. The five counties in question are Leicester, Northants., Notts., Hunts. and Lincs., which accounted for 506 out of 589 individuals fined and for £39,208 out of £44,054 collected. The names of M.P.s are taken from the Official Return of Members of the House of Commons (1878).

⁹³ H. F. Russell Smith, Harrington and his Oceana (Cambridge, 1914), ch. iii.

⁹⁴ J. Wright, History and Antiquities of Rutland (1684), p. 135; E. J. Benger, Memoirs of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia (1825), pp. 68, 285; H. Grove, Alienated Tithes in Appropriated and Impropriated Parishes (1896), under Leicestershire, parishes of Bitteswell, Laund, Loddington, Melbourne and Owston; Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 18795, pp. 2–22, which shows Sir William Harrington and a partner buying crown lands between Dec. 1626 and Feb. 1627.

⁹⁵ Several of the families concerned had acquired peerages under James or Charles.

⁹⁶ James Harrington, Oceana, ed. S. B. Liljegren (Lund, 1924), pp. 49–50.

⁹⁷ The figures in this paragraph relate to the counties of Herts., Beds., Bucks., Surrey, Hants., Worcs., N. Riding of Yorks., Glos., Warwicks. and Northants. For those of the first seven counties I am indebted, as before, to F. J. Fisher.

⁹⁸ Sir Edward Walker, Observations upon the Inconveniences (1653), especially his remarks on the effect of granting monastic lands to ‘mean families’; Edmund Ludlow, The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. C. H. Firth (2 vols., Oxford, 1894), ii. 59; Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (Everyman edn.), pp. 59–60.

⁹⁹ Wilson, The State of England, p. 23.

¹⁰⁰ Birch, Court and Times, i. 331.

¹⁰¹ Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., iii. 408. See, on the whole subject, C. H. Firth, The House of Lords During the Civil War (1910), pp. 21–32.

¹⁰² John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, pt. i, 777; Herbert Thorndike, Theological Works, v. 440–2, 337–9, 371–3; Sir W. Temple, Miscellaneous Writings, pt. iii, p. 16; Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of his own Times (4 vols., 1815 edn.), i. 12; Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1750 edn.), pp. 311–13; John Somers, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, xiii. 679, Richard Harley, ‘Faults on both Sides’; Charles Davenant, A Discourse upon Grants and Resumptions. See also P. Larkin, Property in the 18th Century (1930), pp. 35–57.

¹⁰³ A Memorial Offered to Her Royal Highness the Princess Sophia (1815). Foxcroft (A Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (2 vols., Cambridge, 1907), ii, app. ii, p. 556) ascribes the work to George Smythe of North Nibley.