57o Constitutional History. [chap.
knights were a pertinacious minority, never really strong
enough to carry their measure through its first stages.
importance 480. Next after the gentry, in respect of that political weight
man class, which depends on the ownership of land, was ranked the great
body of freeholders, the yeomanry of the middle ages, a body
which, in antiquity of possession and purity of extraction, was
probably superior to the classes that looked down upon it as
ignoble. It was from the younger brothers of the yeoman
families that the households of the great lords were recruited :
they furnished men-at-arms, archers and hobelers, to the royal
force at home and abroad, and, settling down as tradesmen in
the cities, formed one of the links that bound the urban to the
rural population.
Permanent As we descend in the scale of social rank the differences
Iowmranks between medieval and modern life rapidly diminish ; the habits
of a modern nobleman differ from those of his fifteenth-century
ancestor far more widely than those of the peasantry of to-day
from those of the middle ages, even when the increase of comfort
and culture has been fairly equal throughout. But to counter-
balance this tendency to permanence in the lower ranks of
society, comes in the ever-varying influence arising from the
changes of ownership ; the classes of nobility, gentry and yeo-
manry, having their common factor in the possession of land,
Changein expand and contract their limits from age to age. When
of landown- personal extravagance is the rule at court, the noble class, and
the gentry in its wake, gradually lose their hold on the land ;
great estates are broken up ; the rich merchant takes the place
of the old noble, the city tradesman buys the manor of the im-
Transmu- poverished squire ; and in the next generation the merchant
dasse‰°f has become a squire, the tradesman has become a freeholder ;
both, by acquiring land, have returned to strengthen the class
from which they sprang. On the other hand, when the greed
for territorial acquisition is strong in the higher class, the
yeoman has little chance against his lordly neighbour : if he is
not overwhelmed with legal procedure, ordered to show title for
lands which his fathers have owned before title-deeds were
invented, driven or enticed into debt, or simply uprooted with
XXI.]
Tenant Farmers,
57x
the strong hand, he is always liable to be bought out by the
baron who takes advantage of his simplicity and offers him
ready money. So in many cases the freeholder sinks into the
tenant farmer, and the new nobles make up their great estates.
This rule of expansion and contraction was in the middle Check ar⅛-
. ..... ., ingfromthe
ages somewhat restricted in its operation by the difficulty of restraints on
alienating land : but the ingenuity of lawyers seldom failed to tioɪɪ of land,
overcome that difficulty when might or money was concerned in
the overruling of it. As the freeholding class possessed in
itself greater elements of permanence than either the nobility
or the gentry, was less dependent on personal accomplishments
and less liable to be affected by the storms of political life, the
balance of strength turned in the long run in favour of the
yeomanry. There are traces amply sufficient to prove their Freeholder
. , „ 1 . -r-r -rτ _ recognised
importance from the reign of Henry 11 onwards, but the recog- astheeiec-
.∙ 1 . .-in toral body in
nιtιon of their political right grows more distinct as the middle the counties,
ages advance ; and the election act of 1430, whatever its other
characteristics may have been, establishes the point that the
freeholders possessing land to the annual value of forty shil-
lings were the true constituents of the ‘ Communitas comitatus,’
the men who elected the knights of the shire. They were the
men who served on juries, who chose the coroner and the
verderer, who attended the markets and the three-weeks court
of the sheriff, who constituted the manorial courts, and who
assembled, with the arms for which they were responsible, in
the muster of the forces of the shire.
After the economical changes which marked the early years Growth of
of the fifteenth century, the yeoman class was strengthened by tenant
the addition of the body of tenant farmers, whose interests were
very much the same as those of the smaller freeholders, and
who shared with them the common name of yeoman. These
tenant farmers, succeeding to the work of the local bailiffs who
had farmed the land of the lords and of the monasteries in the
interest of their masters, were of course less absolutely de-
pendent on the will of the landlord than their predecessors
had been on the will of the master : they had their own capital,
such as it was, and, when their rent was paid, were account-