The other day, as I sat in my office unable to write, read or do
anything, I saw R.H Tawney's 1912 classic, *The Agrarian Problem
in the Sixteenth Century*, staring at me from a pile of books in the
corner floor of my office. I bought this book three years ago and
knew I would read it at some point, if only 'cause of its reputation.
What I did not know is that this book is STILL better than most
books since. I have always found B and W unclear, even confusing
in their study of the English peasantry. R. H. Hilton clarified much
for me but not beyond the medieval period. The word around was
that Tawney was a passionate writer, one who had an intimate,
deeply felt admiration for the English peasantry, but whose work
had been left behind by "more objective and more statistical"
studies. For example, while Tawney saw the 16th century as the
century of enclosures, we now know that this century only saw an
additional two percent of the arable enclosed. But Tawney's book is
great precisely because it outlives such statistical errors. He truly
clarifies who were the main peasant groups in England at the time.
What little talk there's in W on the "yeomen", "copyholders",
"customary peasants", "freeholders", "leasholders" and "tenant
farmers" is too interchangeable. We are left asking too many
questions: what were tenant farmers doing before they leased land
from the lords? Did lords lease land to the yeomen? the
copyholders, the freeholders? How can one say that leasehold
tenures were "imposed" on well-to-do yeomen? Or well-to-do
copyholders? Were they not themselves seeking more land to
rent? Logically, leaseholds could have been imposed on
"customary" peasants, if we say that their land was taken away
from them and enclosed; but were they the ones who rented the
land taken from them? What about the land that was already
"enclosed" before the supposed landlord-led enclosure began in the
16th? Was not this "enclosed" land owned by "freeholders" who
living outside the customary fields?
