Sixteenth-Century Farming

Abstract

T-SHE sixteenth century is commonly depicted as the century during which the modern world emerged from the medieval. Those who divide history into stages of economic growth have usually found themselves in agreement, on this point, with those who divide it into periods of social and political change. According to this view the dissolution of feudal ties, the renunciation of allegiance to an oecumenical church, and the termination of a time-honoured method of expropriating the surplus value of labour made room for the emergence, in the course of the sixteenth century, of systems of thought and modes of action, in politics and administration, in production and distribution, in religion, science, and the arts, which settled the way in which things would develop until now. The sixteenth century has been regarded for so long as the natural frontier between medieval and modern in English history that it takes an effort of thought to realize that it is in fact no longer the frontier it was. Paradoxically enough, the weakening of this established division owes much to the work done by historians of sixteenth-century affairs whose intention was to strengthen it. So provocative were the claims they made for sixteenth-century developments that they roused the indignant opposition of historians who had been placidly content, hitherto, to ruminate in pastures which were unquestionably medieval without troubling themselves in the least with thoughts which went beyond the bounds of their normal interests. Having asked for trouble, they got it. They found themselves being challenged on their own ground with the result that familiar landmarks are fast disappearing from the historical landscape, and a frontier which was once so firmly established is now, at last, on the move. If we hear no more of the New Monarchy for the future that will be part of the debt we owe to the late K. B. McFarlane and to those who have followed where he led.' If we hear less than we did of the enormous accession of prestige and even of power that accrued to Parliament as a result of the use that Tudor monarchs made of it, we owe it to Prof. Roskell that we now see that the real break in the history of Parliament occurred very much later than the sixteenth century and in circumstances very different from those that prevailed then.2 And if the administrative changes made by Thomas Cromwell have now lost the fresh gloss of novelty and modernity that they once had that is surely because medievalists such as Mr Harriss have shown that when all Cromwell's reforms had been accom-