CHAPTER V 



THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR.— SPREAD OF LEASES.— 

 THE PEASANTS' REVOLT. — FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO 

 REGULATE WAGES. — A HARVEST HOME. — BEGINNING 

 OF THE CORN LAWS.— SOME SURREY MANORS 



We have seen that the landlords* profits were seriously 

 diminished by the Black Death, and they cast about them for 

 new ways of increasing their incomes. Arable land had been 

 until now largely in excess of pasture, the cultivation of corn 

 was the chief object of agriculture, bread forming a much larger 

 proportion of men's diet than now. This began to change. 

 Much of the land was laid down to grass, and there was a 

 steady increase in sheep farming ; thus commenced that revo- 

 lution in farming which in the sixteenth century led Harrison 

 to say that England was mainly a stock-raising country. The 

 lords also let a considerable amount of their demesne land 

 on leases for years. ' Then began the times to alter,' says 

 Smyth of the Lord Berkeley of the end of the fourteenth 

 century, 'and hee with them, and he began to tack other 

 men's cattle on his pasture by the week, month, and quarter, 

 and to sell his meadow grounds by the acre. And in the 

 time of Henry IV still more and more was let, and in succeed- 

 ing times. As for the days' works of the copyhold tenants, 

 they also were turned into money.' ^ Such leases had been 

 used long before this, but this is the date of their great 

 increase. In the thirteenth century a lease of % acres of 



* Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys, ii. 5. There is no doubt the lease 

 system was growing in the thirteenth century. About 1240 the writ 

 Quare ejecit infra terminuni protected the person of a tenant for a term 

 of years, who formerly had been regarded as having no more than 

 a personal right enforceable by an action of covenant. Vinogradoff, 

 Villeinage in England, p. 330 ; but leases for lives and not for years seem 

 the rule at that date. 



