The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (117 page)

Clearly there was much more than economics involved in More’s analysis of the ills of early Tudor society, and if one turns to official pronouncements on enclosure this is, if anything, even more marked.
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For instance, many were concerned that the depopulation of the villages and the disappearance of the small tenant farmer or yeoman would seriously impair the Crown’s ability to raise an army. How far such men did provide the backbone of Henry
VIII
’s armies is a moot point, but certainly the perception was that they did. They were also thought to be vital to the stability and moral health of the kingdom, for as the instructions to the 1517 commissioners put it, ‘husbandry and householding’ were together ‘the stepmother of the virtues’.
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Moreover, depopulation resulted in dwindling or non-existent congregations, inadequate church services, deteriorating church buildings and disrespect for the dead: for to quote More, the only thing the churches were being used for was ‘to pen the sheep in’.
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Arguably, if there was no congregation but plenty of sheep, to use churches in this way made a lot of sense, which is but a flippant way of emphasizing the curious and not very happy pairing of economic realism with moral concern that was so
characteristic of contemporary attitudes. But it probably only strikes historians as curious from a vantage point of supposed superiority, the assumption being that sixteenth-century man did not understand economics, hence his quaint tendency to get into an intellectual muddle. In fact, the muddle is alive and well in present-day Britain, what with the idle British worker and his cups of tea, the wicked property speculator, and most recently the yuppie, a character that More would have no difficulties in understanding – or inventing. But governments are always being faced with the need to reconcile the irreconcilable. A show of moral concern can be a useful tool here, and certainly to favour exclusively the economic interests of a particular group, even if powerful, can be politically unwise – which again may be too cynical. For what emerges from all the pronouncements on enclosure, whether by private individuals or by government, is a vision of an ideal commonwealth in which arable farming organized around the village community and the open field system played a central and time-honoured part. It provided the necessary food, especially corn for that staple commodity, bread. It provided settled employment. It provided the tenant farmer and labourer, as much as the landowner, with a stake in the land. Such people did not riot, nor were they likely to embark upon a life of crime. It is not, therefore, surprising that the Crown should have shown concern for them, and that insofar as it believed enclosure to threaten their existence, it worked to prevent this from happening.

Yet these same pronouncements also indicate that Tudor government was perfectly aware that there were many areas of England where the vision had little basis in reality; indeed, it was really only in parts of Norfolk and the Midland counties that it had.
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Neither can it have escaped its notice that pasture farming in general and sheep in particular played a vital part in the economy and that the export of wool and increasingly cloth was a major source of revenue. Moreover, if only on the evidence of the returns of the enclosure commissioners, the government would have been forced to accept that enclosure increased the value of the land, for the good reason that it resulted in more efficient farming practices. And that Wolsey understood this can be deduced from the proclamation of 1526 which stated that anyone who could prove that their enclosures were ‘not prejudicial, hurtful nor to the annoyance of the king’s subjects, nor contrary to the laws and commonwealth of his realm’ need not destroy them
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– and at least four people accepted the challenge.
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The fact that they lost does not invalidate the point being made that Wolsey and his colleagues were aware of the possibility that the common weal could be served by enclosure. It is not that they were visionaries determined to recapture some golden age in which the profit motive did not exist. Instead, in full awareness of the arguments for and against, they had concluded that any large-scale changes in agricultural practices would have harmful consequences for the many, whatever the benefits to the few. It is not so surprising that they took this view. Governments have usually been wary of economic innovation, knowing that it is likely to result in social unrest. Moreover, in this particular case there appeared to be no compensating financial or military advantage. It would not be appropriate,
therefore, to conclude that idealism was the chief component in the resistance of Wolsey and his colleagues to enclosure, if it were not for the emotional language that they employed and the intensity with which they tackled the problem.

It could be, of course, that what they were exhibiting was not idealism but anxiety. Because enclosure touched upon so many nerve ends to do with law and order and the safety of the realm, its emotional charge was bound to be high – indeed, so high that as respectable a member of society as the high sheriff of Northamptonshire, Sir John Spencer, could be classified as one of More’s ‘insatiable gluttons’ and be ordered to remove all enclosures from his land.
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But here another difficulty looms, and one so serious that it threatens to undermine everything that has been said so far. Quite simply, recent work in this area points increasingly to the conclusion that in the twenty or so years before the setting up of the enclosure commissions very little enclosure had taken place, even in the Midlands, an area previously alleged to have been peculiarly sensitive to market forces and thus to enclosure. Furthermore, this same work suggests that those supposedly most threatened, far from suffering had probably ‘never had it so good’. Reduced rents, readily available land, rising wages, larger holdings, more stock, this, rather than the nightmare vision of More’s carnivorous sheep, now appears to be the true picture of rural life in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England.
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Nor, insofar as arable had been converted to pasture, had it been the consequent enclosure that had caused depopulation and ‘deserted villages’. Instead, it was the dramatic decline in population of the fourteenth century that was largely responsible for enclosure: with a reduced demand for corn and a shrinking labour market, farmers were more or less forced to look for an alternative to arable farming, or leave their land lying idle.
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This being so, it is hardly surprising that what was previously thought of as a late sixteenth-century phenomenon, the so-called ‘peasant enclosure’ whereby often quite humble people enclosed the open fields, has been discovered as early as the late fourteenth century.
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This points up a general consequence of all these findings, which is that the moral dimension begins to recede. Gone are the wicked entrepreneurs seeking to maximize the profits offered by large-scale sheep-farming, and in their place are a bunch of sleepy yokels sucking on straws and being pushed reluctantly to change their ways. Someone whose reputation has benefited from this seachange is the high sheriff of Northamptonshire. Undoubtedly John Spencer owned a lot of sheep, but it now looks as if he was not personally responsible for the widespread enclosure and decay of properties that the enclosure commissioners found on his estates and which was a prerequisite for the scale and success of his farming activities. Rather, what seems to have happened is that he and his uncle had deliberately acquired land already enclosed.
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But, if there were no villains, why the statutes and proclamations, why the commissioners and the court cases, and why the moral outrage? In facing up to the findings of recent research one is forced almost to conclude that Wolsey and his
colleagues suffered from some kind of collective madness such as obviously does afflict groups of people from time to time, leading them to invent here a ‘popish plot’ or there a ‘world-wide Jewish conspiracy’. On the other hand, they have not so far struck one as people likely to be afflicted in this way, and to believe that they were would require that the hundreds of entries in enclosure commissioners’ findings were a complete fabrication, and that the seventy-four people known to have pleaded guilty to offences contrary to the Acts of enclosure had thereby perjured themselves. One way and another, there is so much contradiction between what contemporaries thought was happening and what present-day historians would have us believe, that it is far from easy to see how best to reconcile the two views.

One relevant consideration may be that while statistics are known to lie, they may also anaesthetize. Two or three people and one or two acres may not show up as much of a percentage, but they nevertheless remain people who can weep and acres which once grew corn and then sustained sheep.
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Moreover, the fact that according to current estimation, between 1455 and 1607 only an additional 1.98 per cent of the twenty-four counties investigated by the enclosure commissioners was enclosed still means that well over 600,000 acres were affected.
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And what has always been recognized is that some areas were much more affected than others. In Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Rutland and Warwickshire, the four counties that witnessed the greatest amount of enclosure, the percentage of land affected was as high as 8.95 (compared with the average of 1.98) and even within these counties it was only certain areas that bore the brunt. In Warwickshire, for instance, it has been estimated that between 1488 and 1517 one in five of the villages in the hundred of Kineton, lying in the so-called Felden area south-east of the River Avon, was seriously affected by enclosure, while other areas of the county escaped very lightly.
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And, though depopulation leading sometimes to a deserted village did usually take place over a long period and without any significant help from enclosure, it does seem that in some instances enclosure finished the process off, and occasionally played a larger role.
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For example, it has been calculated that in Leicestershire between 1485 and 1550 twenty-one villages were wholly enclosed. Of these only six witnessed a significant decline in population prior to enclosure, which is but another way of saying that fifteen were destroyed by it.
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So there do appear to be some villains after all.

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

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

If, therefore, Longland’s letter forces one to the conclusion that there was a real problem, nevertheless the emotional intensity still worries. Yes, there were some villains and some villages were depopulated by enclosure, but not, one would have thought, on a large enough scale to justify the degree of overdrive that Wolsey and his colleagues went into. And there are other difficulties. Despite the emotional reaction, very little seems to have been done for those supposedly made to depart in tears. Houses were to be rebuilt, enclosures were to be removed, land was to be restored to its former use as arable, but there was never any attempt to return the dispossessed to their former properties.
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It may be that such an exercise would have been administratively too complicated, or even legally impossible and, indeed, the accusation was never that anyone had been evicted illegally. Alternatively, it may be that there were very few people to be put back. At the very least, it seems to have been quite easy for people to find alternative accommodation for the evidence is that mobility and rapid changes in the composition of villages were a feature of late medieval rural life.
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It is also worth making the point that not all those affected by
enclosure were poor. During the course of a law suit in 1496 it was deposed that when the village of Keythorpe had been ‘taken down’ and enclosed a certain Thomas Skeffington had physically transported his house and set it up on land he held elsewhere. Also, he had refused to sell to the encloser a piece of land he owned in Keythorpe and continued to pasture some of his cattle there. So had his grandson, and it was this that had led the owner of Keythorpe to go to law. Nowadays one associates the transporting of buildings more with wealthy Americans than with the poor and dispossessed, but then Skeffington cannot have been all that poor if he owned land elsewhere on which to put the house, and certainly the family suffered no mortal blow from the activities of the encloser of Keythorpe. The grandson was knighted for his services to the Crown and was, in fact, that Sir William Skeffington sent to Ireland as the king’s deputy in 1529.
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Of course, one cannot draw too many conclusions from one example; but the real point is that there should be many more examples of what happened to the dispossessed and almost none have come to light. Even Longland’s moving description has much more to do with property than with people.