48 THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR 



take up land. In numerous cases the services were lost from 

 neglect, because they ceased to be profitable when landlords aban- 

 doned farming and became only rent-receivers. In all these ways 

 the ranks of freemen and free labourers were recruited. The 

 numbers of villeins dwindled fast. But the tenure survived the 

 Tudor period. Its abolition was demanded in the eastern counties 

 during Kett's rebellion (1549), and all men who had not been 

 legally emancipated lived throughout the reign of Elizabeth in 

 peril that its incidents might be revived against them. Even the 

 old personal services still lingered. Till the end of the eighteenth 

 century, labour dues as part of the rent of land were enforced in 

 the north-west of England. Half the county of Cumberland was 

 still unenclosed in 1794. " By far the greatest part of this county 

 was held under lords of manors, by that species of vassalage, called 

 customary tenure ; subject to the payment of fines and heriots, on 

 alienation, death of the lord, or death of tenant, and the payment 

 of certain annual rents, and performance of various services, called 

 Boon-days, such as getting and leading the lord's peats, plowing 

 and harrowing his land, reaping his corn, hay-making, carrying 

 letters, etc., etc., whenever summoned by the lord." l 



The fifteenth century lies midway between two recognised periods 

 of distress among the rural population. Agriculturally, its history 

 is almost a blank. The silence has been interpreted in different 

 ways. Some writers have considered it as a time of progress ; 

 others have read it as the reverse. There is evidence that the 

 principal sufferers by the dynastic and aristocratic struggle of the 

 Roses were the nobility and the soldiers, that country districts 

 were not laid waste, and that villages and their populations were 

 neither destroyed nor harried. If so, rural life may have advanced 

 peacefully, profiting by the absorption of landowners in more 

 exciting pursuits than the administration of their estates. When 

 once the struggle was ended, a new world began to piece itself 

 together. Accepting the spirit of the coming age, agriculture 

 reorganised itself on a money basis, and two classes emerge into 

 prominence capitalist tenant-farmers and free but landless 

 labourers. Both had been slowly forming during the first three 

 quarters of the century : both were equally essential to the changed 

 conditions of farming. The tenant-farmer had risen in the social 



1 General View of the Agriculture of the County of Cumberland, by John 

 Bailey and George Culley (1794), p. 11. 



