A century after its publication, R. H. Tawney's The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century remains as imaginative, spirited and passionate as ever. For a long time, the book was neglected by early modern historians. The dismissal of The Agrarian Problem, often by those unacquainted with it, grew from Eric Kerridge's denunciation of it in 1969. Adopting a schoolmasterly tone, Kerridge chided Tawney for spending too little time in the archives (‘Time which he might have given to studying history was devoted instead to the Fabian Society and the Labour Party’) and condemned The Agrarian Problem as mere socialist propaganda. More recently, the tables have turned. The last twenty years have seen a flowering of work on customary law, much of it conducted under the influence of E. P. Thompson's 1991 book Customs in Common. This work has recaptured some of the qualities of The Agrarian Problem, most notably its recognition of the political characteristics of custom. Tawney characterised the politics of custom as follows:

In The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, R. H. Tawney described a wide range of possible constraints that customary tenure might impose upon lords and tenants. He noted that customary rents were normally fixed, and that during a period of rising land values lords could seek to increase their share of income from the land in a limited number of ways. They might overturn custom and persuade the tenantry to convert to leasehold, or retrieve the situation through increased fines ‘so as to get in a lump sum what he could not get by yearly instalments’. This last statement suggests that it was possible to increase fines to keep pace with the rise in market rents and that such increases could allow transfers from tenant to lord which would equate to the ‘lost’ rents. This chapter uses a detailed study of a tenant right estate in north-west England to demonstrate a number of points which have a more general application for other forms of customary tenure. It examines two aspects of the power struggle between lords and customary tenants on the Hornby Castle estates in north Lancashire. First, it identifies the potential income from the customary lands and quantifies the relative shares accruing to lord and tenants. This demonstrates how substantial the benefits were for manorial tenants who defeated their lords' attempts to raise rents and fines, and retained their tenures on customary terms.

Among the numerous examples of ‘aggressive landlordism’ that R. H. Tawney cited in The Agrarian Problem are the nefarious activities of Godfrey Bradshaw in Chinley (Derbyshire) in 1569, which had first been brought to light in an article published in the Derbyshire Archaeological Journal in 1899. Tawney's discussion of the unrest provoked by Bradshaw's estate management is based exclusively on the Star Chamber interrogatories issued on Bradshaw's behalf, sources which, by their very nature, present a partisan and adversarial version of the episodes. Tawney nonetheless assumed the veracity of the narrative implied by Bradshaw's attorneys and explained the story as a series of attempts by dispossessed inhabitants to regain ‘the rights of pasture which they had hitherto enjoyed’. He also drew attention to a particularly tantalising aspect of the alleged events at Chinley: local men were said to have conferred with the mysterious ‘Master Bircles of the Countye of Chester’ and consulted ‘bookes of prophesie’ – the latter far more politically dangerous than mere enclosure rioting. Keith Thomas further explored this aspect of the events at Chinley, identifying ‘Master Bircles’ as John Birtles, who in about 1584 was one of those involved in an alleged conspiracy against the queen, he being found in possession of ‘a certain old book of prophecy … [which] sheweth when this realm of England shall be subverted’.

Early in my undergraduate career, my Cambridge supervisor in Economic History set two of us an essay on the agrarian problem of the sixteenth century: ‘was it less a problem of enclosures than of rents?’ (a good question). In trying to answer it we were not required to read Tawney's great book. We read about Tawney; not Tawney himself. That did not matter, because we were advised that Tawney was ‘an old sentimentalist’ who had failed to recognise that England was already a ruthless and competitive contract society in the sixteenth century, a society of which our supervisor clearly approved. Much later, I learned from another Cambridge economic historian that the trouble with Tawney was that, along with other ‘reformist’ economic historians, he suffered from ‘middle-class guilt’. Worse, he wrote ‘Mandarin’ prose.

When I actually read Tawney's Agrarian Problem for myself, shamefully late, I expected to find it a work with which I would have some sympathy, but which would inevitably be dated in both content and style. What a surprise, then, to find that Tawney's tone was predominantly cool, authoritative, and not at all sentimental; I thought him rather tough-minded. His purplish passages were justified in context and seemed to spring from indignation rather than guilt. His dominant manner was a sustained effort to explain, in a multi-faceted and at times distinctly distanced way, a set of profound and complex changes. If his sympathies were clearly with the losers in that process, he did not wallow in the celebration of victimhood.

This chapter turns attention to Tawney's villains of the piece: the improving landlords and their role in the transition to a fully commercial and capitalist agriculture. The period covers the first half of the seventeenth century, the end of Tawney's long sixteenth century which ran from 1485 to 1642, and focuses on the activities of three Norfolk gentry families engaged in raising rental incomes and modernising their estates. These families, the Windhams of Felbrigg, Hobarts of Blickling and Le Stranges of Hunstanton, commended in the eighteenth century for the excellence of their estate management, faced a range of difficult issues in the early seventeenth century and responded in distinctive ways. The Windhams, having acquired a notorious reputation for litigation with their tenants in the late sixteenth century, simplified their methods and concentrated on demesne farming, while the newly enriched Hobarts, in their purchase of a great estate, avoided complicated holdings and the potential for disputes as far as possible. The Le Stranges, embedded on their ancient estate in north-west Norfolk, faced the most complex task, needing to implement far-reaching reforms within existing constraints. The Hobarts and Le Stranges, the newcomers and the financially embarrassed, have been identified as the most likely to behave badly, but in reality how did they fare? Do they deserve Tawney's description of a ‘blind, selfish, indomitable, aristocracy of county families which made the British Empire and ruined a considerable proportion of the English nation’?