Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 174

Like Shakespeare leaving his second-best bed to his wife, the great R. H. Tawney left to his closest academic companions, agrarian historians, his second-most famous book. But his Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912), whose centenary this volume marks, has probably aged rather better than the more well-known Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). The issues it raised: the relationship between landlords and tenants, the impact of inflation, the importance of enclosure, and the rise of the market economy, are ones which rural and agrarian historians are still picking over, and despite over a century of scholarship since, we still have more questions than answers, hence the success of this volume.

Centenaries do not always make for good scholarly publications since the issues they cover have often become rather stale. Not here, however, for there is still so much we do not know about the changes that swept over the countryside in the period we still sometimes call ‘Tawney’s Century’. As a result, the studies here manage to be uniformly interesting, and in some cases present some genuinely important findings.

There are, broadly, two types of chapter. Firstly, there is the overarching survey of knowledge in a particular area of Tawney’s interest. In this mould, Whittle’s interesting opening chapter looks at the preparation and reception of the book, from its initial plaudits to the stinging rebukes by Geoffrey Elton and Eric Kerridge after Tawney’s death, and to the rekindling of interest in the wake of arguments by Robert Brenner. Christopher Dyer follows by summarizing research into the rural history of the later fifteenth century, reminding us of the economic dynamism of the period, and pointing out how much Tawney got right about it. Julian Goodare then searches for a Scottish ‘agrarian problem’ and suggests that similar issues were at play north of the Border. Landlords were becoming more assertive, customary inheritances being attacked, and small tenant farmers were suffering. David Ormrod, meanwhile, in the book’s final chapter, describes theoretical models of economic change and the development of capitalism from Tawney through to the twenty-first century.

Two of the most useful broad contributions deal with legal aspects of land tenure, a subject not always especially accessible to agrarian historians. Harold Garrett-Goodyear’s article is particularly interesting, looking at it does to the process by which common-law courts started to regulate copyhold in the early sixteenth century. He makes the point that, however advantageous the protection of common law might have turned out to copyholders, the initial suits were launched by manorial lords. Christopher Brooks, meanwhile, highlights the considerable security enjoyed by copyholders by the time of the Civil War.

The other type of chapter comes in the form of the detailed local study, a genre of agrarian history that has developed immeasurably since Tawney’s day. These cover issues – essentially enclosure and tenurial change – that were dear to Tawney’s heart, but through the microscopic approach of scientific local history. Taking those which deal with commons and enclosure first, Briony McDonagh describes an enclosure dispute from Henrician south Yorkshire which pitted a manorial lessor against his tenants, and which was fought out in the common-law, equity, and prerogative courts as well as on the ground. The level of organization and skill deployed by the tenantry was impressive: they managed to bring 18 or 19 ploughs to an organized mass-ploughing, and were careful in the legal complaints to use the language of depopulation – smart politics indeed. Heather Falvey’s chapter then dissects an intriguing dispute over a piece of herbage in Derbyshire, showing that those farmers involved in disorder were not necessarily the ‘rude multitude’, as the government insinuated, but came from many levels of society, and included some of high status. Andy Wood, meanwhile, dips into an intriguing dispute over common rights in Malmesbury, arguing that the possession of common rights was not merely an economic convenience, but represented ‘shared entitlements’ and ‘a kind of social contract’. Grazing a cow, as such, ‘combined material need, common interest, memory, community, meaning and agency’. William Shannon, finally, discusses wasteland enclosure in lowland Lancashire, showing that the benefits to landlords from larger schemes were significant and risk-free; those to the tenants could be considerable, but they were not quite as certain. The surprisingly slow pace of wasteland enclosure in the region – given the benefits to lords in particular – is put down to a lack of willing tenants.

As with the chapters on law, the local studies of land tenure place emphasis on the strength of customary tenures, in almost total contrast to Tawney’s view. Jean Morrin’s study of the estates of the Dean and Chapter of Durham, however, does show tenant-right holdings gradually being converted to leaseholds, though it also tracks the eventual emergence of mutually beneficial relationships between estate and tenantry. Jennifer Holt’s chapter on the Hornby Castle estate in the North West, meanwhile, shows clearly that rising land values from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries benefited customary tenants vastly more than the estate itself. Tenants held by tenant-right, which gave the lord the opportunity to exploit two irregular fines: one on the death or alienation of the tenant (like copyhold) and one on any change of lord. But even given this advantage they were only able to retain about 11 per cent of the market value of the land in rents: the rest was accrued to the tenants. Indeed, says Elizabeth Griffiths, it is in the context of these difficult economic circumstances – not the ‘anti-landlordism’ of Tawney’s day – that we should understand the position of his ‘villains’, the landlords themselves. And her study of estate improvement in Norfolk has them as behaving in a manner we should see as ‘reasonably fair’ and ‘perfectly sensible’.

This, then, is an impressive collection: it is learned, detailed, and based on deep archival research. It will be useful to students, and essential reading for rural historians. Perhaps the most salient conclusion is that, though we still find ourselves interested in many of the same things Tawney was, our view of the politics of the period, of the winners and losers, and of the social roots of entrepreneurialism, has shifted down the social scale. We no longer accept that this was necessarily the great age of the capitalist landlord. Instead, we emphasize the political, legal, and economic strength of the yeomanry: largely, of course, the self-same copyholders that Tawney saw being squeezed and exploited. Many landlords themselves were suffering an ‘agrarian problem’, in that – where their tenants held the lands on secure copyholds – they struggled to keep their income up with inflation. Importantly, the question that is starting to be asked is whether the real victims of exploitation were not, rather, the subtenants on copyhold land, holding by insecure, annual leases at market rates. Should we, then, be looking for political strife not so much between landlords and copyholders, but between copyholders and their own poor, exploited tenants?