The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey (Pimlico) (120 page)

It has been suggested, and by someone who took a favourable view of what Wolsey was trying to do, that in the end the evidence permits him to be credited with the restoration of only ninety-seven houses, two barns and 3,260 acres.
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It is not a lot, but, then, as was argued earlier, there was probably never a lot to be restored anyway, so that these numbers may reflect the misguided purpose of the exercise more than any lack of efficiency. What has to be a comment on the latter, though, is the fate of those few large-scale enclosures such as occurred at Burton Dassett and Wormleighton in Warwickshire and Cotesbach and Lowesby in
Leicestershire, of which the government had at least some knowledge. It was precisely these, quite often the work of successful livestock farmers and affecting whole communities, that the government’s policy was designed to put an end to. For a short time it may have succeeded, for if it did not, then none of the evidence can be trusted, not even those seventy or so recognizances by which defendants promised to put things to rights or else be liable to fines of up to £200. That said, however, it has proved nigh on impossible to find any instance where enclosure, once it had occurred on any scale, was reversed for any length of time. Certainly there was no reversal at Wormleighton, where the Spencers’ sheep continued to graze large areas of enclosed land for centuries to come, even if Althorp in Northamptonshire was to become their main residence. At Haselrig’s Noseley the story is no better, for by 1584 at the latest the whole lordship was enclosed.
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It looks more and more as if the conclusion must be that, even taken on its own terms, Wolsey’s policy was unsuccessful. If one then adds the suggestion that the policy may anyway have been misconceived, one is left with quite a lot of explaining to do if the cardinal is to be portrayed as a successful maintainer of the common weal.

At this point the evidence becomes less important than the criteria used to judge it. Anyone with high expectations of the state’s ability to intervene successfully in economic and social affairs will be disappointed in Wolsey’s efforts to do something about enclosure. Anyone, who, like the present writer, is a sceptic in such matters may, while ruing the attempt, be nevertheless quite impressed at the way in which Wolsey approached his task. The statistics can, on the face of it, be used to show that Wolsey’s policy was extremely successful. Precise figures for the rate of enclosure may not be worth very much, but the trend is not in doubt. During the middle decades of the century very little new enclosure took place: it has been suggested that of all the enclosure in Leicestershire between 1485 and 1607 (and it was one of the counties most affected) only 9 per cent occurred between 1530 and 1580.
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At first glance, therefore, it would appear that a policy started by Wolsey may almost have killed enclosure stone-dead. Alas, this is most unlikely. In the fifty-six years from 1462 to 1518 only sixteen saw grain prices rising more quickly than wool. In the fifty-five years from 1518 to 1573 there were only twelve in which wool prices rose faster than grain. Insofar as in this period enclosure was normally accompanied by conversion of arable to pasture much of the explanation for the dramatic decline in enclosure in the mid-century must be that the financial incentive to turn to pasture farming had disappeared. Moreover, when the rate of enclosure picked up – and this, until the bad harvests of 1594-7, with very little government disapproval – it seems to have been fuelled by the rapidly increasing demand and rising prices for all agricultural products but especially grain, with the result that enclosure no longer involved conversion to pasture on anything like the same scale.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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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