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Presidential Address: The Rise and Fall of English Landed Families, 1600–1800: III. Did the Gentry Rise?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

John Habakkuk
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Extract

I want first to consider some of the statistical evidence that there was an increase in activity in the land market during the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth. It has long been known that there was a substantial increase in fines levied during this period, i.e. in the fictitious suits which were, in substance, conveyances of land. Mr. Meeking observed in his introduction to the Surrey Feet of Fines for the period 1509–1558 that ‘the average number of Fines levies each Term rose so steeply that the number of Surrey Fines levied in the years 4 & 5 Ph & M (1557–8) is more than five times as great as those levied during an average year of the period 1509–1530’. Professor Stone's calculations based upon the fines for three counties suggest that the number more than doubled between 1560 and 1620. A rough count for the country as a whole shows as one would expect a more moderate but still considerable increase; the annual number in the 1580s was under 3,000; in the 1590s it was over 3,000; and by the early seventeenth century it has risen to over 4,000. Besides the evidence of the fines, some information can be derived, though for a shorter period, from the returns of the income received by the Receiver-General of the Alienation Fines; this consisted of the fees payable on the writs which initiated the fictitious suit and also on licences and pardons connected with the alienation of property held in capite. This income bore a relation to the value of the property; though the value for this purpose was not the true value, the income gives some clue to the fluctuations in the aggregate value of transactions, and not merely in their number.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 31 , December 1981 , pp. 195 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1981

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References

1 Abstracts of Surrey Feet of Fines, 1509–1558, ed. Meekings, C. A. F., Surrey Rec. Soc, xix, 1946Google Scholar.

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3 The termly accounts of the Receiver-General of the Alienation Fines for the seventeenth century are in P.R.O., E 101. The income is specified under three heads: the fees paid on writs of covenant, the writ most commonly used to initiate the fictitious legal suit; fees paid on writs of entry for lands not held in chief; income from licences to alienate (and pardons for alienation without licence) and writs of entry for lands held in chief. The receipts are total receipts, i.e. before the payment to the Hanaper of the rents reserved under the leases to the Lord Treasurer from 1590 onwards.

4 For examples of their use, see Calendar of Antrobus Deeds before 1625, ed. Pugh, R. B. (Wiltshire Archaeological Soc., iii, 1947), pp. xlvii–xlviiiGoogle Scholar; Stone, , Crisis, pp. 36–67Google Scholar. See also the exchange between Russell, Conrad and Stone, Lawrence on feet of fines and licences to alienate in Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xxv (1972), 117–23Google Scholar.

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6 The popularity of fines was enhanced by the two Statutes of Fines, 4 Henry VII (1488–9), c. 24, and 32 Henry VIII (1540), c. 36, which provided certain safeguards.

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16 The attempt to sell a large amount of Crown land in 1599 and in 1601 gradually depressed the price of this property, and further investigation may show that these sales also affected the private land market (Outhwaite, R. B., ‘The Price of Crown Land at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., xx (1967), 229–40)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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44 The sustained fall in the number of fines did not occur until about the Restoration. It took place mainly in two stages, in the 1660s and in the 1710s. The annual average between 1654 and 1663 was 4,815; there was then a sharp fall, for between 1664 and 1673 the average was 3,738; between 1684 and 1693 (excluding 1688 for which the figures are defective) it was 3,489 p.a. In 1696 the number for the first time fell below 3,000 and (though the number in that year, viz. 2,363, was exceptionally low and in the four immediately following years the annual average was 3,311) in the eighteenth century it was almost invariably below 3,000, and no trend is apparent. This fall of forty per cent in forty years exaggerates the long-term change, since the figures were unusually high around 1660; but there clearly was some long-term change which requires explanation. It is, however, difficult to attribute the fall in the 1710s to diminished activity in the land market, because (a) it occurs at a time when the evidence of private acts suggests that, at least so far as estates are concerned, there was an increase of sales, and (b) it is not easily reconcilable with evidence for some geographical extension of the land market. In Lancashire, if the change in the composition of the gentry is a guide, the land market in the sixteenth century was inactive and became much livelier in the later seventeenth century; for between 1665 and 1695 more families entered and left the gentry than at any other time in the century (Blackwood, , Lancashire Gentry, p. 161)Google Scholar.

45 Between 1783 and 1787 (the year in which the post-war fall in interest rates finally occurred) the income of the Receiver-General of the Alienations rose from £4,501 6s. 8d. to £6,239, the highest figure for any year between the years investigated, 1731 to 1793 (P.R.O., E 105/2). See also the figures of receipts from auction duties cited in Thompson, F.M. L., ‘The Land Market in the Nineteenth Century’, Oxford Economic Papers, 9 (3) (1957), p. 288CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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