by Gwyn, Peter
The picture is getting worse. Not only does Wolsey appear to have tried to slay a dragon that hardly existed, but any wisp of smoke it may have left behind was blown away, not by Wolsey’s intervention but by a few Midland farmers responding to market forces! Perhaps, but it would be wrong, and grossly unfair to Wolsey, to leave it there. For one thing, whatever the final verdict, the general impression that an enormous amount of effort was taken by him to get results is only strengthened by some of the supposed shortfalls. For instance, that the commissioners came up with different findings for the same properties is surely more to their credit than otherwise? Their willingness to look again suggests that they were trying to get at the truth, and the later inquiries usually did discover more. Moreover, if some enclosure was overlooked, it does not look as if much was. In Leicestershire, the one county for which a detailed study exists, only six large-scale enclosures appear to have been missed, four of which probably took place too early to have come within the commissioners’ terms of reference. To have missed only two, in a county which saw more enclosure than most, seems to be rather to the government’s credit.102
And by and large, the detail is convincing. In the autumn of 1519 a Robert Lee appeared in Chancery, in order to show that everything in Fleet Marston in Buckinghamshire had been put to rights: a hundred acres had been sown with beans, he had built a new barn, and the only hedges that remained were those that had been there forty years or more.103 Another Lee was involved, though only as a tenant, in a case to do with a house called Clarks Place in Thorpacre, Leicestershire, which had been allowed to fall into disrepair, with twenty-four of its acres having been converted to pasture. Two points about this case are worthy of comment. Firstly, the owner, the abbot of Garendon, was sufficiently frightened by the activities of the first commission of inquiry immediately to order his tenant to rebuild the house and restore the land to arable. The second point is that the government did not believe the abbot and forced him to prove his case at the assize court.104 In the case of William Willington of Barcheston (now Barston) in Warwickshire, Chancery was informed that some of the jury sitting at Kenilworth in September 1518 had made an on-site inspection to confirm the truth of the inquisition.105 The abbot of Thame had his recognizance cancelled when he persuaded Wolsey that a rebuilding programme in the village of Odington, Oxfordshire, had provided better housing for the villagers than the house that he was accused of destroying.106 On 20 October 1520 in Wolsey’s presence, Robert Wighthill swore that he had rebuilt a house and barn on his property in Wighthill, Oxfordshire, but that the land had never been taken out of arable as the findings of the inquiry had stated. There was John Godwin who, having first tried to escape any legal consequences of enclosure by claiming that the forty acres in question in Woburn, Buckinghamshire, were owned by the bishop of Lincoln, then maintained that ‘since time out of mind’ the land had never been out of arable. As for the house involved, it was only left empty because, since every winter it was flooded for up to four or five days and to a depth of a yard, nobody wanted to live in it – which seems reasonable enough!107
Finally in this survey, there is the case of Catherine, countess of Devon’s property in Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire. On 10 October 1517 the enclosure commissioners found that two of her houses had been destroyed and some seventy acres had been converted to pasture. This she subsequently denied, and the assize jury agreed with her. Admittedly, one of the houses had been accidentally destroyed by fire, but it had been rebuilt, as had the other. They also found that, just as the countess had maintained, all the land was down to arable and no distress had been caused.108 A victory for the truth? It is diffcult to say, but, as in the other cases, the detail probably suggests that it was. What is a little worrying is that the houses were only rebuilt in the month prior to inquiry taking place, creating the impression of a rushed job, the only purpose of which was to escape prosecution – but then it was the results rather than how they were achieved that seem to have been the government’s chief concern. It is this that probably explains the government’s decision to include a clause in the General Pardon of 1523, whereby enclosers could escape any financial penalty if they could show that they had put matters to rights by a certain date. This has been seen as a quid pro quo by which Wolsey secured the support of the landowners in the House of Commons for a large subsidy in return for an easing of the government’s attack on enclosure, and certainly the Crown would stand to lose what little money accrued to it from enclosure prosecutions.109 But, if producing results was what mattered, it made a lot of sense. Instead of the courts getting bogged down in the details of ownership and farming practices of the previous thirty years, only the current situation was at issue. The object of the exercise was thereby achieved with the minimum amount of time and money being expended.
Some support for the view that results were Wolsey’s chief concern is provided by his correspondence with the bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox, in the late autumn of 1518. Apparently the bishop’s lawyers had just appeared before Wolsey in Chancery to swear that the findings of the enclosure commissioners concerning one of the bishop’s estates were ‘all and every of them untrue’, and they had promised to produce evidence to support their contention. However, Wolsey had then declared that by reason of his ‘old accustomed favour’ towards Fox he was willing to accept his written assurances, and it was these that the bishop’s letter was seeking to provide. Fox admitted that he had ‘not been personally present upon the grounds and lands surmized to be enclosed’, but he felt able to give Wolsey the assurances he had asked for because he believed that his officials’ word could always be relied on.110 One question that immediately arises is whether the assurances of a soon to be blind and deaf old bishop were worth very much. Estate officials were notorious for deceiving their masters, and Fox looks like a potentially easy target, even if he had once been one of Henry VII’s outstanding ministers. Of more interest is Wolsey’s willingness to make the approach. Is it, perhaps, evidence, if not exactly of an old boy network, at least of two prominent members of the establishment getting together to ensure that, whatever the outcome, their convenience and interests would take priority? Or is it, even worse, an indication that the whole exercise was a put up job in which the Crown staged an elaborate charade of appearing to further the common weal by hauling ‘the great and the good’ before the courts, while working behind the scenes to ensure no real harm would come to them? In other words, was it all either a fix or a conspiracy? A third possibility is that Wolsey wrote to Fox because he believed it to be the most effective way of getting at the truth.
It is surely the last possibility that is the most likely. In part, of course, this is so because of the view of these two men, especially of Wolsey, that this book has sought to establish: namely, that they were both genuinely concerned to promote the common weal. There is, admittedly, a circularity about such an argument which will not help to convince the sceptic. Neither, perhaps, will that defence against all conspiracy theories: that they are just too complicated to carry great conviction. Still, the tone of Fox’s letter gives no hint of a conspiracy, and to what end would such an exercise be directed, anyway? Although enclosure did normally increase the value of land,111 any increase would be unlikely to filter through to the landlord, who did not benefit from the increased production for some considerable time; and with an annual revenue of well over £3,000, a bishop of Winchester had no great need to lie about a possible increase in rent from a property worth only £5 a year. At this point it is worth recalling that for the comparatively few important people who were at all affected by the government’s efforts, the consequences were marginal in the extreme, rarely amounting to much more than it cost to hire a lawyer. The only people who might have suffered financial hardship were those, such as the Spencers of Wormleighton, heavily committed to livestock farming; and it is interesting that it was they who, rather than disputing the facts, tried in the first instance to rest their defence on the merits of enclosure
. Still, the relevant point here is that these people were neither numerous nor powerful enough for it to have been necessary or expedient for Wolsey to indulge in any kind of charade or conspiracy. The conclusion here is that Wolsey was trying to do what the official pronouncements declared, and for roughly the reasons given. The problem was that the intentions were, in part, misguided. It is difficult to see, for instance, how making John Spencer give up sheep-farming would have solved any of the problems that the government maintained it would.
But there is another kind of reality that politicians have to grapple with. To call it public opinion has obvious dangers; there were no Gallup polls in the 1520s and no newspapers. On the other hand, people did have opinions, and there were forums, including parliaments, which had passed anti-enclosure legislation, in which those opinions were expressed. To repeat here that what Wolsey had done in 1517 was to put himself at the head of a growing body of opinion that saw enclosure as an evil, is not to imply that he only took the issue up because it was popular, though successful politicians have a happy knack of taking such issues and making them their own, hence the frequent accusations of opportunism. In Wolsey’s case the evidence hardly permits much speculation into his motives, but an entirely cynical explanation seems unlikely, if only for the reason that it is very difficult to see how he could have sustained his efforts without a degree of genuine commitment. There is no reason to suppose that Wolsey did not believe a good deal at least of the propaganda that he was orchestrating. It is true that a public concern for enclosure would do the Crown no harm at all, especially since enclosure appeared to threaten the livelihood of the yeomen of England. That such a body of men are not just a romantic fiction is suggested by the words of the sober mid-Tudor royal servant, Sir Thomas Smith, who in his De Republica Anglorum wrote that
those whom we call yeomen next unto the nobility, the knights and squires, have the greatest charge and doings in the commonwealth, or rather are more travailed to serve in it than all the rest… these tend their own business, come not to meddle in public matters and judgments, but when they are called, and glad when they are delivered of it, are obedient to the gentlemen and rulers, and in war can abide travail and labour as men used to it, wish it soon at an end that they might come home and live of their own… These were they which in the old world got that honour to England.112
Such men were worth taking a good deal of trouble about, and it is this that may provide the chief explanation, as well as the chief justification, for Wolsey’s determination to grapple with enclosure.
In comparison with the government’s response to enclosure, its other interventions into economic and social matters have a distinct air of déjà vu. Statutes were passed and proclamations issued laying down maximum wages, compelling all those out of work to take up whatever jobs were offered; confirming the usual rates for Thames watermen; insisting that Venetian merchants brought in a certain proportion of bowstaffs with any other merchandise imported; providing victuals for London; regulating the kind of games people could play; prohibiting the use of crossbows and handguns; issuing new coins and so on.113 Not surprisingly, many Acts and proclamations had to do with England’s most important exports, wool and cloth, and with the maintenance of standards and the defence of English merchants from foreign competition.114 One such Act was concerned to ensure that the clothmakers of Great Yarmouth and Lynn observed the regulations, because the making of worsteds ‘hath much increased and been multiplied in the city of Norwich and divers towns and places in the county of Norfolk’.115 Another Act allowed the cordwainers of London to resume the selling of shoes on a Sunday.116 Both Acts are a reminder that much legislation was promoted, as it is now, by sectional interests, whether a particular craft or town. Many other Acts dealt with purely private concerns. But economic regulation did not depend wholly on statutes and proclamations; letters patent from the king granting licences and so forth were commonly used, though not as commonly as at the end of the century when the practice of granting monopolies in this way became a political issue. Still, contrary to existing regulations, towns, as well as favoured courtiers, were receiving export licences on quite a large scale. In 1517 Sir William Compton was granted a licence to export eight hundred ‘weys’ of beans and peas,117 and in 1526 Sir Thomas More was licensed to export one thousand cloths.118 In 1523 the city of York, with Wolsey’s active support, received a licence to export wool and fells from various parts of Yorkshire, thereby escaping the staplers’ monopoly.119 But such licences were no innovation, and indeed there was nothing new about the mix of statute, proclamation and letters patent, or about the matters that they dealt with.
An area of people’s lives that the government legislated for had to do with the clothes that people of different status could wear and the food they could eat.120 In these more egalitarian times when informality in dress and the free interchange of fashion between social groups is now quite accepted, this concern may come as some surprise and, as will emerge, I have some difficulty in understanding it!121 One striking feature was the obsession with detail. Not only were the types of material prescribed but also the precise fashion, so that, for instance, in 1515 it was stated that only knights and their superiors could wear ‘guarded or pinched shirts’. In 1517 the exact number of dishes of food permitted at any meal to each category of person from a cardinal downwards was set out. The result was that, in theory at any rate, the Tudor nanny controlled every aspect of what a person wore or ate, and not only in public. But in fact ever since the late thirteenth century sumptuary legislation had been passed throughout Western Europe. The first English Act was in 1337 and from then on they were passed with some regularity. Perhaps the most comprehensive came in 1463, but this did not prevent two more appearing in 1483 and 1510, before those of 1515, which were by no means the last. Moreover, between 1516 and 1593 there were no fewer than nineteen proclamations. And to what end? The Acts of 1510 and 1515 claimed ‘great and costly array and apparel … hath been the occasion of great impoverishing of divers of the king’s subjects, and provoked many of them to rob and do extortion and other unlawful deeds to maintain thereby their costly array’122 – which brings us back, as did enclosure, to that obsession of Tudor government with law and order. Another way in which this expenditure on luxuries impoverished not so much the individual but the country as a whole, was in its adverse effect on the balance of payments: so many luxury goods, those ‘Apes and japes and marmusettes tailed, / Nifles and trifles that little availed’ of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye,123 came from abroad and English exports were not sufficient to pay for them, or so it was alleged. But it is another contemporary obsession that is usually seen as the motor behinds these Acts and proclamations. There were many names for it, ‘degree’, ‘order’, ‘place’, ‘rank’. Considered an essential ingredient both of heaven and earth, of the natural world and civil society, it came in many shapes and guises, but what was certain was that without it there was only hell and chaos.124
My suspicion is that we have become so familiar with the popular wisdom on this subject that we may have some difficulty in imaginatively comprehending it, but it is easy, though, to see how dress comes into this, for nothing more easily distinguishes different ‘orders’ of men, whether religious, chivalric, or whatever. Wolsey’s alleged defence of the outward signs of office, his ‘pillars and pollaxes’, that they were necessary ‘to maintain the commonwealth’,125 is of some relevance here, but more so are the words of someone who worked under him, Sir Thomas Elyot:
Apparel may be well a part of majesty. For as there hath been ever a discrepance in vesture of youth and age, men and women, and as our Lord God ordained the apparel of priests distinct from seculars, as it appeareth in Holy Scripture, also the Gentiles had of ancient times sundry apparel to sundry estates, as to the senate and dignitaries called magistrates. And what enormity should it now be thought, and a thing to laugh at, to see a judge or sergeant at law in a short coat, garded and pounced after the galyard fa
shion, or an apprentice of the law or pleader come to the bar with a Milan bonnet or French hat on his head, set full of plumes, powdered with spangles. So is the apparel comely to every estate and degree and that which exceedeth or lacketh, procureth reproach, in noblemen specially. For apparel simple or scanty reproveth him of avarice. If it be always exceeding precious, and oftentimes changed, as well into charge as strange and new fashions, it causeth him to be noted dissolute of manners.126
But laughter or reproach is one thing, elaborate legislation is another, and in trying to understand the reasons for it we are again faced with the problem which dominated the discussion of enclosure: the wild overreaction on the part of government to a problem which at this distance in time hardly seems to have existed.