50 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MAJS^OR 



as long as possible their responsible tenants ; and, among the more 

 far-sighted of the tenantry, a desire to rid themselves of the imper- 

 fect ownership which customary tenure implied. Finally, farms were 

 increasing in size. The word " farm " was itself changing its mean- 

 ing from the stipulated rent to the area of land out of which the 

 payment issued. In this transition another meaning of the word 

 was lost. In many parts of England at that time, and in the north 

 of England down to the last century, a farm meant that definite 

 area of land which afforded a hving to the occupier and his family .^ 

 By the end of the fifteenth century it had acquired its modem 

 sense of an indefinite area of land occupied by one tenant at one 

 rent. Complaints of the practice of throwing together a number 

 of men's " hvings " into one holding in one man's occupation begin 

 to be frequent, and are directed against the absorption of the small 

 arable holdings of from ten to thirty acres. They occur in sermons, 

 in Petitions to the King, in doggerel verse. The letter of the Vicar 

 of Quinton in Gloucestershire, written to the President of Magdalen 

 College, Oxford,^ at the close of the fifteenth century, breathes the 

 spirit of the twentieth century. Magdalen College owned an estate in 

 the parish of Quinton, and the president hesitated whether the 

 College should let the land as one farm, or, as we should now say, 

 let it in small holdings. The vicar appeals on behalf of his parish- 

 ioners. " Aftur my sjonpuU reson," he writes, "it is mor meritory 

 to support and succur a comynte [community] then one mane, 

 yowre tenan[ts] rathere then a stronge man, the pore and the 

 innocent for [instead of] a gentylman or a gentylman's man." 



Whatever may have resulted from the vicar's appeal, circum- 

 stances generally favoured the multipHcation of separate holdings 

 and their increase to a size which rendered the emplojnnent of 

 money as well as of labour remunerative. Practical agriculturists, 

 hke Fitzherbert, urge every man to " change fields with his neigh- 

 bour, so that he may lay his lands together," keep more five-stock, 

 improve the soil by their " compostynge," and rest his corn land 

 when it becomes impoverished. The long wars with France were 

 over ; the civil strife between York and Lancaster was ended ; 

 the central government under Henry VII. was firmly estab fished ; 

 trade was beginning to expand ; population, arrested in its increase 

 since the death of Edward I., was once more growing. On the 



^ The Ancient Farms of Northumberland, by F. W. Dendy (1893), pp. 11-19. 

 ^England in the Fifteenth Century, by the Rev. W. Denton (1888), p. 318. 



