Decay of Villeinage

At the same time that the Wars of the Roses were completing the downfall of feudalism, bondage also was passing away. This was not due to the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, or the Wars of the Roses. The last-named conflict, except as it led to the ravaging and impoverishing of the country, probably had but little influence upon the condition of the peasantry. The decay of villeinage was due to the fact that the old wasteful methods of agriculture were too uneconomical to exist under the new conditions of industry and commerce. By 1450 the old manorial system had almost completely broken down. Some of the villeins had been manumitted by their lords; others had deserted the manors and had taken service in the army or navy, had attached themselves as retainers to the great barons, or had gone to the towns to become apprentices, to join the crews of merchant ships, or to become beggars and tramps.

More important than these changes were those which had taken place upon the manors themselves. The lords, finding the old forms of cultivation unprofitable, had been giving up the direct control of their lands. They had been letting them out to their bailiffs or others to manage as they liked, paying the lord, now become a landlord a fixed sum as rent. With this change had gone another. The villeins, ceasing to do actual work on the lords' land, paid a small amount of money instead. The tenant who had held his land "in villeinage, according to the custom of the manor," now gradually became a copyholder, holding his land according to the terms written on the court roll of the manor. A copyholder was, therefore, simply a villein who knew exactly what were the terms on which he held his land, and who did little or no labor service. He might still bear some of the marks of his villein origin. He might be bound to the soil and be liable to pay chevage, merchet, heriot,' and the like; but with the exception of heriot, these payments were enforced less and less as time went on, until they gradually disappeared altogether. This process was hastened by the breaking down of the judicial power of the lords by acts of parliament. Many of the rights which the lords had exercised in their courts were transferred at this time to justices of the peace, who were royal officers, and the power of the lords to punish petty offences and impose fines was reduced to a minimum. Thus arose a class of men, practically free, holding land of a manor, paying a fixed rent and a heriot, and receiving their land according to old mediaeval forms in the court baron. This remained the status of copyholders into the nineteenth century, when the old forms were all done away with.

FARM-HOUSE AT OLD SARUM, NEAR SALISBURY.

Enclosures

Thus we see that while the great feudal families were destroying themselves in the Wars of the Roses, the social and agricultural revolution, which had begun among the lower classes a century before, was going steadily on. The lords were becoming landlords, the villeins copyholders, and the manorial courts were being deprived of their powers. But this process took on a new form when, after 1450, in many of the counties, the old open fields were broken up, and the lands which had been hitherto divided into narrow acre strips were thrown together and hedged in. Even before 1450 some of the lords had begun to enclose their demesne lands and the meadows and waste lands in the interest of better farming methods. But after that time began the enclosing of the commons and of the lands occupied by the villeins.

At first this was for the purpose of carrying on farming on a large scale. But soon landlords discovered that sheep raising was more profitable than agriculture. Then they began to convert their arable land into pasture, and to turn great numbers of the customary tenants or villeins out of their tenements. This process had only just begun in 1485, when Henry of Richmond became king, but it continued during the next century; and though, as we shall see, attempts were made to check it on account of the great discontent and misery that it caused, it went on, in Kent, Essex, Hertford, Suffolk, and Worcester, into Elizabeth's reign. In other counties, enclosing for pasture did not go very far during this period, land still remained under tillage, and agriculture and corn-raising continued to prevail. In the reign of Edward VI the far-reaching effects of this agrarian revolution were to become evident.