Those who have had the patience to follow the detailed changes in rural organisation which have been described above will naturally ask, “What is the upshot of it all? What are the main landmarks which stand out from the bewildering variety of scenery? How does the agrarian England which is sleepily hunting out old guns and older bows on the eve of the Civil War differ from the England which saw the first Tudor 'with general applause and joy, in a kind of military election or recognition, saluted King?'”

At first sight it differs but little. To see our subject in its proper perspective we must emphasise the continuity of economic life between 1485 and 1642 as much as in the preceding pages we have emphasised the novelty of some of its experiments. We must turn from Fitzherbert and Hales to Arthur Young. We must set Latimer’s lamentations over the decay of the yeomanry side by side with the figures of Gregory King and the boasts of Chamberlayne and Defoe. We must compare our sporadic enclosures with the two thousand six hundred Enclosure Acts which were passed between 1702 and 1810. The outward appearance of many English villages at the Revolution would be quite unrecognisable to-day, but it can have been but little altered from what it had been at the time of the Peasants' Revolt. It could still be said that three-fifths of the cultivated land of England was unenclosed. And if Piers Plowman had dreamed for four centuries on Malvern Hills he might still have woken to plough his half acre between the balks of a still open field, like that “very wide field,” with crooked ways butting upon it and a wicket-gate on its shining horizon, through which Christian sped from Evangelist, crying “Life, Life, Eternal Life.”

Ought we, then, to say that the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century was insignificant, and that it has been magnified into importance only by the rhetorical complaints of unskilful observers? The answer has been given by implication in the preceding pages. The fact that statistical evidence reveals no startling disturbance in area enclosed or population displaced, is no bar to the belief that, both in immediate consequences and in ultimate effects, the heavy blows dealt in that age at the traditional organisation of agriculture were an episode of the first importance in economic and social development. The barometer which registers climatic variations yields no clue to their influence on the human constitution, and the quantitative rule by which we measure economic changes bends in our hands when we use it to appraise their results. The difference between prosperity and distress, or enterprise and routine, or security and its opposite, is scarcely more susceptible of expression in figures than is the difference between civilisation and barbarism itself. In the infinite complexity of human relationships, with their interplay of law with economics, and of economics with politics, and of all with the shifting hopes and fears, baseless anticipations and futile regrets, of countless individuals, a change which to the statistician concerned with quantities seems insignificant, may turn a wheel whose motion sets a world of unseen forces grinding painfully round into a new equilibrium. Not only our estimate of the importance of social alterations, but their actual importance itself, depends upon what we are accustomed to and what we expect. Just as modern manufacturing nations groan over a reduction in exports, which in the reign of Henry VIII. would have passed unnoticed, or are convulsed by a rise in general prices, which, when expressed in percentages, seems ridiculously small, so the stationary rural society of Tudor England may well have been shaken to its core by agrarian changes which, in a world where rural emigration is the rule, would appear almost too minute to be recorded. If contemporaries, to whom the very foundation of a healthy economic life seemed to be shattered, underestimated the capacity of society for readjustment, they were not mistaken in their supposition that the readjustment required would be so vast and painful as to involve the depression of important orders of men, and the recognition of new responsibilities by the State in the agony of transition. If we are busy planting small holders to-day, it is partly because sixteenth century Governments were so often busy with them in vain. The crude barbarities of tramp ward and workhouse were first struck out in an age when most of those who tramped and toiled, who sat in stocks and were whipped from town to town, were not the victims of trade depression or casual employment, but peasants thrown on the labour market by the agrarian revolution.

For, in truth, the change which was coming upon the world in the guise of mere technical improvements was vaster than in their highest hopes or their deepest despondency the men of the Tudor age could have foreseen, and its immediate effects on the technique of agriculture and the standard of rural prosperity were but the tiny beginnings of movements whose origins are overshadowed by their tremendous consequences. It is a shallow view which has no interest to spare for the rivulet because it is not yet a river. Though many tributaries from many sources must converge before economic society assumes a shape that is recognisable as modern, it is none the less true that in the sixteenth century we are among the hills from which great waters descend. By 1642 the channels which will carry some of them have been carved deep and sure. By that time the expansion of the woollen industry has made it certain that England will be a considerable manufacturing nation, and consequently that the ancient stable routine of subsistence farming will gradually give place to agricultural methods which swing this way and that, now towards pasture, now towards arable, according to the fluctuations of the market. It is certain that, sooner or later, the new and more profitable economy of enclosure will triumph. It is certain that the small holder will have a hard struggle to hold his own against the capitalist farmer. It is certain that, owing to the substitution of variable for fixed fines on admission to copyholds, and the conversion of many copyholds into leases for years, a great part of the fruits of economic progress will no longer be retained, as in the fifteenth century, by the mass of the peasants, but will pass, in the shape of increased payments for land, into the pockets of the great landed proprietors. It is almost certain that to any new developments which may be detrimental to them the peasants will be able to offer a much less effective resistance than they have in the past. For the security of many of their class has been undermined; the gulf which separates them from the landed gentry, though still bridged by the existence of many prosperous freeholders, has been widened; and, above all, the destruction of the absolute monarchy has entrenched the great landlords inexpugnably at the heart of government, both central and local, and has made their power as great as their ambitions. Both from below and from above they are unassailable. For a century and a half after the Revolution they have what power a Government can have to make and ruin England as they please.

If we cast our eye over the agrarian changes of our period, with a view to grouping their main elements under a few easily distinguishable categories, we do not find that they present themselves as a simple series of economic sequences. Behind them all there is, it is true, the fundamental economic fact of the decay of subsistence husbandry. The movement away from the strict communal organisation of the open field village was inevitable as soon as markets were sufficiently developed to make agricultural experiments profitable, because experiments could not easily be undertaken without to some extent individualising the methods of cultivation. In particular, the grand innovation of substituting pasture-farming for tillage, whether carried out on a large scale or on a small, was only practicable if individuals were able to break away from the established course of agriculture. But the relaxation of village customs, which allowed a wider scope to individual initiative, did not necessarily involve that formation of large estates out of peasant holdings, which was the special note of the sixteenth century problem, and in fact the gradual nibbling away of customary restrictions went on to some degree among quite small men, long before the enclosure of land by great capitalists became a serious grievance. In the fourteenth century, and even earlier, holdings are becoming partible and unequal, and strips are being interchanged for the purpose of more convenient, because compacter, management. In the sixteenth century there is a good deal of enclosure by the peasants themselves with a view to better arable cultivation or to the more successful keeping of stock. Nor must we forget the example of Kent, Essex, Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Cornwall. Without raising the question whether the predominance of small enclosures in the Western Counties is not partly to be ascribed to peculiarities in their original settlement, we may say without fear of contradiction that the early enclosures of Kent and Essex are the outcome of the spread of commercial forces in those seaboard counties at an earlier date than was possible in the inland districts. Even in the more conservative parts of the country, like the Midlands and Wiltshire, whose geographical position made them the last to respond to the influence of trade its gradual extension was slowly, and in isolated villages, bringing the same departure from the rigid arrangements of mediÆval agriculture which in the East of England had developed much more swiftly. How far such enclosure by consent would have proceeded if no other forces had come into play we cannot say. It is not safe, however, to assume that, because in the eighteenth century many villages seemed to observers like Arthur Young to be living in a condition of organised torpor, therefore its effects in facilitating a more economical utilisation of the land are to be dismissed as negligible. Quite apart from the obvious bias given to Young's observations by his questionable doctrine that a high pecuniary return from the soil is the final criterion of successful agriculture, it may well be the case that the decline in the condition of the peasantry, which took place in the sixteenth century, discouraged initiative on the part of small men, and that, since one agent in that decline had been a movement which went by the name of enclosure, its effect was to make them cling all the more closely to the established routine in those parts of the country where they had not been violently shaken out of it.

On such conjectures, however, we need not enter. Even if the movement towards the rearrangement of holdings which has been traced among the peasants themselves was insignificant, and if the larger capitalists were the sole agents through whom a more alert and progressive agrarian rÉgime could be introduced, it is none the less the case that the improvements in the technique of agriculture do not by themselves account for the special social consequences which flowed from the agrarian changes of the sixteenth century. The situation then is not at all similar to that which arose at a later date, when small landholders voluntarily threw up their holdings in order to engage in the more profitable urban industries, and when yeomen like the Peels of their own choice decided that the career of a cotton-spinner was more attractive than that of a farmer. In the period which we have been discussing men do not only leave the land; they are forced off it. Not only economic, but legal, issues are involved, and the latter give a decisive twist to the former. What made the new methods of agriculture not simply an important technical advance in the utilisation of the soil, but the beginning of a social revolution, was the insecurity of the tenure of large numbers of the peasantry, in the absence of which they might gradually have adapted themselves to the altered conditions, without any overwhelming shock to rural life such as was produced by the evictions and by the loss of rights of common. The way in which the economic movement towards enclosure and pasture-farming is crossed, and its consequences heightened, by the law of land tenure, is proved by the comparative immunity of the freeholders from the worst forms of agrarian oppression, by the fact that, even in the middle of the eighteenth century, the purely economic conditions of much of England were by no means unfavourable to small scale farming, and by the anxiety of landlords to induce tenants who had estates of inheritance to surrender them for leases. We cannot therefore agree with those writers who regard the decline in the position of the smaller landed classes, which took place in our period, as an inevitable step in economic progress, similar to the decay of one type of industry before the competition of another. If economic causes made a new system of farming profitable, it is none the less true that legal causes decided by whom the profits should be enjoyed. We have already pointed out that many customary tenants practised sheep-farming upon a considerable scale, and it is not easy to discover any economic reason why the cheap wool required for the development of the cloth-manufacturing industry should not have been supplied by the very peasants in whose cottages it was carded and spun and woven. The decisive factor, which ruled out this method of meeting the new situation created by the spread of pasture-farming, was the fact that the tenure of the vast majority of small cultivation left them free to be squeezed out by exorbitant fines, and to be evicted when the lives for which most of them held their copies came to an end. It was their misfortune that the protection given by the courts since the fifteenth century to copyholders did not extend to more than the enforcement of existing manorial customs. When, in our own day, the same causes which raised the cry of depopulation in sixteenth century England have operated in other countries, their influence has been circumscribed by governmental power, which has stepped ready armed into the field, and has turned customary titles into freeholds and cut back private jurisdictions with a heavy hand. To find a parallel to the sufferings of the English copyholders in the sixteenth century, we must turn to the sweeping invasion of tenant right which at one time made almost every Irishman into a Ket. But the comparison, incomplete in other respects, is most incomplete in this, that even if Tudor Governments, moved by considerations of national strength and order, would have helped the peasants if they could, they could hardly have helped them materially if they would, without a social and administrative revolution which was unthinkable, and which, if carried out, could only have meant political absolutism. Living, as they did, with the marks of villein tenure still upon them, the small cultivators of our period were fettered by the remnants of the legal rightlessness of the Middle Ages, without enjoying the practical security given by mediÆval custom, and felt the bitter breath of modern commercialism, undefended by the protection of the all-inclusive modern State which alone can make it tolerable.

For, indeed, it is as a link in the development of modern economic relationships and modern conceptions of economic expediency, that the changes which we have been considering possess their greatest interest. The department of economic life in which, both for good and evil, the modern spirit comes in the sixteenth century most irresistibly to its own, is not agriculture but foreign commerce, company promoting, and the money market, where the relations of man to man are already conceived of as the necessary parts of a vast and complicated mechanism, whose iron levers thrust the individual into actions for the consequences of which he is not responsible, and under whose pressure unknown is driven by unknown to do that which he did not intend. But if the intoxication with dreams of boundless material possibilities, the divorce of economic from moral considerations, the restless experiment and initiative and contempt for restrictions that fetter them, which are the marks of that spirit’s operations, are never quite so victorious in agriculture as they are in finance, it is nevertheless in transforming agrarian conditions that its nature and characteristics are most impressively revealed, not because it is felt there first or proceeds there furthest, but because the material which it encounters is so dense, so firmly organised, so intractable, that changes, which in a more mobile environment pass unnoticed, are seen there in high relief against the stable society which they undermine. In truth the agrarian revolution is but a current in the wake of mightier movements. The new world, which is painfully rising in so many English villages, is a tiny mirror of the new world which, on a mightier stage, is ushering modern history in amid storms and convulsions. The spirit which revolts against authority, frames a science that will subdue nature to its service, and thrusts the walls of the universe asunder into space, is the same—we must not hesitate to say it—as that which on the lips of grasping landlords and stubborn peasants wrangles over the respective merits of “several” and “common,” weighs the profits of pasture in an economic scale against the profits of arable, batters down immemorial customs, and, regarding neither the honour of God nor the welfare of this realm of England, brings the livings of many into the hands of one. To the modern economist, who uses an ancient field map to trace the bewildering confusion of an open field village beneath the orderly lines of the dignified estate which lies upon it like a well written manuscript on the crabbed scrawl of a palimpsest, the wastefulness of the old rÉgime, compared with the productiveness of the new, may well seem too obvious to leave room for any discussion of their relative advantages; and indeed the accession of material wealth which followed the first feeble approach towards the methods of modern agriculture is unquestionable. But the difference between such a standpoint and that of our peasants is not one of methods only but of objects, not of means but of ends. We can imagine that to an exposition of the advantages of large scale farming and enclosure, such as many stewards must have made to the juries of many manors, they would have answered something after this fashion:—“True, our system is wasteful, and fruitful of many small disputes. True, a large estate can be managed more economically than a small one. True, pasture-farming yields higher profits than tillage. Nevertheless, master steward, our wasteful husbandry feeds many households where your economical methods would feed few. In our ill-arranged fields and scrubby commons most families hold a share, though it be but a few roods. In our unenclosed village there are few rich, but there are few destitute, save when God sends a bad harvest, and we all starve together. We do not like your improvements which ruin half the honest men affected by them. We do not choose that the ancient customs of our village should be changed!" Such differences lie too deep to be settled by argument, whether they appear in the sixteenth century or in our own day.