CHAPTER XXVII. 



THE CONDITION OF THE TENANT FARMER, 1583-1702. 



DURING the greater part of the period before me, many 

 among that very numerous body of small freeholders, who 

 had been purchasers during the aristocratic Civil War of 

 the fifteenth century, survived through the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth. The nobles of the Dissolution acquiesced in the 

 spoliation, partly because Henry pitted his new creations 

 against the survivors of the old families, most because he 

 bribed both new and old to repletion with the spoils of 

 the regular clergy. But much of the Church property 

 was bought by private persons or speculators, as a cursory 

 inspection of Dugdale would prove, and at market prices, 

 greatly depressed, no doubt, by the prodigious quantity of 

 land which the wastril king threw on the market. The 

 old free- and copy-holders remained, though, as Norden's 

 dialogues on the Surveyor's Office show, exorbitant fines 

 on alienation and descent in copyholds and sharp practice 

 with regard to freeholders on fee farm rents had not yet 

 been restrained. 



From the earliest information of a positive character which 

 we have about tenancies, it is clear that there were always 

 tenant-farmers on leases, generally of short, but sometimes 

 long, terms. In my earlier volumes I have pointed out that 

 besides the tenant on lease, who cultivated land with his own 

 stock, there were numerous stock and land leases, especially 

 of monastic lands, and that this system lasted till the 



