A Brief History of the Tudor Age by Jasper Ridley

Author:Jasper Ridley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781472107954
Publisher: Robinson
Published: 2013-04-24T13:02:40+00:00

Title-page of the first edition of a best-seller of the Tudor age, published probably in 1523.

Edward VI’s Parliament passed a more drastic Act in 1552, which enacted that by 25 March 1553 every parish must have as much land in tillage as it had in any year since the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign in 1509, and that such land must be kept in tillage for the next four years. But the Act proved to be unenforceable.

The legislation did not prevent the continued predominance of the sheep in agriculture. In 1555 Parliament tried to encourage dairy farming by enacting that any farmer who owned more than 120 sheep must keep one cow for every sixty sheep that he owned; but by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the decline of tillage was alarming the government more than ever, and an Act was passed in 1597 which applied to the twenty-five counties where the situation was most serious. All land which had been converted to pasture since the Queen’s accession on 17 November 1558, after having been in tillage for twelve years, was to be reconverted to tillage before 1 May 1599; and in future no land which had been in tillage for twelve years was ever to be converted to any other use.

From the beginning of the Tudor Age, the government was concerned about the shortage of the cheap labour which was needed in husbandry. Until the fourteenth century the land had been cultivated by serfs, or bondmen, but by the beginning of the Tudor Age serfdom had very largely disappeared in England. It lingered on in a few isolated pockets. Several monasteries owned bondmen, but they were manumitted and set free when the monasteries were dissolved, though as late as 1538 the Earl of Arundel refused to manumit a bondman at Cromwell’s request, on the grounds that it would diminish the value of his lands for his heirs; and the man had to remain a serf. But by the beginning of the sixteenth century there were only a few thousand serfs remaining in England. All the other husbandmen worked for their employer, who was sometimes a country gentleman and sometimes a yeoman or man of lower rank, in return for wages paid either wholly in money, or partly in money and partly in clothing, food and drink.

After serfdom began to disappear in the fourteenth century, Parliament on several occasions passed a Statute of Labourers which fixed the maximum wage which could be paid to husbandmen and other workmen and artisans, and made it a criminal offence for any employer to pay, or for any employee to receive, a higher wage, though the employer was free to pay a lower wage and the employee to accept it, if they could agree to this by bargaining. At the beginning of the Tudor Age, the law was regulated by the Act of 1444, but a new statute was passed in 1496. It fixed the maximum annual wage that could be paid to a bailiff in charge of a farm at 26s.

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