vii] The Tenants and their Land, 1400 — 1575. 79 



In general rents were high in Forncett^ and from 1376 to 1378, 

 and from 1400 to 141 3, they were considerably higher than from 

 1422-1500. 



There are a number of indications that the first fifteen or twenty 

 years of the fifteenth century, together with the latter years of the 

 fourteenth century, form a distinct economic period. Within this 

 period came the Peasants' Revolt. It was a time of social and 

 economic disturbance. Not only the high rental of land, but also 

 the large number of conveyances entered in the rolls of the early 

 fifteenth century point to an unusually active land market^ Within 



^ This conclusion is based on a comparison of P'orncett rents with the statements of 

 economic historians as to the average rental of arable in the fifteenth century. A few 

 quotations will suffice to show that in regard to the value of land in the latter fourteenth and 

 in the fifteenth centuries, the statements of different historians harmonize neither with one 

 another nor with the conclusions arrived at in the text : — 



Rogers, Agric. and Prices, iv. 128, It is certain that at this time [i455-i53o] the 

 rental of average arable land did not exceed, as it did not in the fourteenth century, sixpence 

 an acre. It is probable that it might be even less, for the cost of labour was certainly greater 

 in the fifteenth than it was in the fourteenth century. 



W. Denton, Englattd in the Fifteenth Century, 153. At the end of the fifteenth 

 century... the fertility of the arable land of England was well-nigh exhausted.... The rent 

 of corn land was scarcely more than nominal. The average rental of an acre of arable land 

 throughout England was less indeed than one day's wages of a carpenter or mason. In many 

 places it did not exceed the wage paid for half a day's work. P. 153, n. 4. Carpenters and 

 masons were then receiving fourpence for a day's work, in country places twopence or 

 threepence ; fair land was then letting at fourpence per acre, and inferior land at not more 

 than half the sum. [At P'orncett, in 1376-8 and in 1433, the wages of a carpenter were 4^. 

 See above, p. 56, n. 2.] 



Cunningham, op. cit. (4th ed.), i. 462. Rents in the fourteenth and earlier part of the 

 fifteenth centuiy were exceedingly low. [In note, reference to Rogers, Agric. and Prices^ 

 IV. 63, 128, and Denton, Fifteenth Century, 147.] 



Denton, op. cit., p. 147. In the latter part of the thirteenth, and at the beginning of the 

 following century, much corn land had been let at sixpence an acre and occasionally as high 

 as eightpence or even ninepence for the acre.... During the hundred years from 1350 to 1450, 

 we meet with comparatively few notices of so high a rental as this, and when we take into 

 account the decline in the purchasing power of money, this implies a large reduction in the 

 rental of farms. In the latter half of the fifteenth century rents rose again, and were 

 nominally, at least, as high as in 1300, though in reality they were still much lower than in 

 the thirteenth century. 



Rogers, Work and Wages, 287. During the fifteenth century... the value of land rose 

 rapidly. In the fourteenth century it was constantly obtained for ten years' purchase, the 

 amount of land in the market being probably so abundant, and the competition for its 

 purchase so slight, that it easily changed hands at such a rate. There was also no purchasing 

 as yet on the part of the small proprietors.,.. Land was valued at twenty years' purchase in 

 the middle of the fifteenth century. 



2 A table showing so far as possible the number of conveyances entered on the extant 

 rolls in each year from 1400-1500 and from 1550-1565, is given in Appendix XII. 



Although the number of conveyances annually recorded in the rolls was greater in the 

 early fifteenth century than later, yet the amount of land acquired by single purchases was 

 on the average greater in the sixteenth century than in the fifteenth. Thus in the five years. 



