Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/865

 LAND-TENURE

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LAND-TENURE

feudal conception, was simply the owner of a very large number of estates and of the royal domain (that is the forests and other pubUc land). It was his busi- ness to administer the State out of his revenues as a wealthy private gentleman — far the wealthiest private gentleman of the whole realm. But as civilization in- creased in complexity he could not do this. The functions of the State increased, the king must come for aids to his underlords, who were bound to give aids by the personal tie of loyalty. It became an intoler- able burden; such mere feudal aids must be supple- mented by taxation falling upon all. The Crown was coming back by the mere force of things towards what it had Ijeen under Roman rule, before feudalism and tenure were heard of. Meanwhile, the link between the underlord and the overlord was growing as weak as the link between the villein and his lord, or the king and his direct feudal tenants. It was against the interest of the royal courts to allow the overlords to grow strong; that interest would in all countries tend to support a man with one manor who might be fight- ing an action to prevent that manor escheating, on some technical ground, to a wealthier local man who was his feudal superior. And, side by side with all this, increasing commercial activity, by making land more and more a matter of contract, barter, and sale, broke up the old personal tie upon which the ethical conception of feudalism reposed.

The dislocation of tenure, its reversion towards ownership, was only part of the universal European movement back towards the high civilization of the Empire which was imdertaken in the spring of the eleventh century, and which is approaching its climax in our time — for the story of the life of Europe is like the story of the life of a comet following its orbit; and in that metaphor one may call the ninth century the point of its course most distant from its centre of activity. The lireaking-point between the fundamen- tal and indestructible sense of ownership and the feudal conception which had overlain it for a time came, like the Ijreaking-point of so many other strains, with the Renaissance. But the ownership of land did not go through a revolution, as did so many other institutions of that time; did not change abruptly, as did plastic art, nor suffer a catastrophe, as did religion. The forms of tenure were preserved, as they were used to mask what was now no longer tenure but owner- ship.

Now, from the violent action under feudal forms whereby Henry VIII acquired the land of the Church, and granted it again for ready money to a herd of adventurers, down to our own time there has been no break in the accepted social fact of absolute ownership in land. Tenure, for all practical purposes, disap- peared with the sixteenth century. Throughout the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nineteenth cen- turies land has been owned, not held, as a social fact, though in some provinces of Europe (as notably in Britain) legal and technical language has continued to draft conve\'ances in terms of tenure rather than of ownership. In this revolution, however, a social fact of perhaps more consequence to Christendom than any other of the material kind appeared. It did not concern the relation between the lord of the manor and his overlords; it concerned the condition of the mass of the people.

For the fate of the villein or peasant began from the sixteenth century onward to differ profoundly in two types of communities. In those communities which had broken off from the unity of civilization, and were soon to be grouped as Protestant, the lord of the manor tended to become the owner of the land, and in those which remained within the unity of the Catholic Church the villein tended to become the owner of the land.

This general formula is the capital historic truth upon which all those interested in the economic

development of modern Europe should fix their eyes. Outside the old limits of the Roman Empire fortunes varied. The scanty population of Scandinavia, for instance, drifted away from the Faith; Norway, which had never been feudal, became a sort of republic of owning farmers, while Sweden developed a landed ari.stocracy. Northern and Protestant Germany as a whole, though not entirely, destroyed the ownership of the villein; he was swallowed up by the lord. In Holland, and Denmark, and Switzerland (until the effect of the French Revolution was felt), a process of accretion of power to the lord, a process of diminution of power in the villein — of economic power, that is — appeared. But if we contrast the two main contigu- ous provinces of the old Roman Empire — Britain, which had taken one lord, Gaul, which, when it sud- denly emerged from the Huguenot assault, had taken another — we shall easily see how true the formula is.

In Britain the Crown was rapidly impoverished, un- til, by the end of the seventeenth century, all feudal links, even nominal, between it and the lords of villages disappeared, save in the tenure known as "sergeant ry" and one or two other quaint archaisms. But the link between the villein and the lord was retained in so far as it advantaged the lord. The owner of an estate grew greater at the expen.se of his tenants. As time went on the common lands were closed, no boimdary of custom defended the freeholder, the poor remnants of villein tenure (now called "copyholders", because they held by right of the copy of the roll of the manor) dwindled as a class, and when the industrial revolution had come in to complete the business, it is just to regard agricultural England generally — with many exceptions and many qualifications due to the com- plexity of a large societj- — as a congeries of large estates, each of several thousand acres, and posse.s.sed by a cla.ss of anything between (lOilO and 'JO, 01)0 fami- lies. More than this, the great towns in their expan- sion were compelled to expand over the agricultur.al estates of these great landlords, who were careful not to sell; no central government existed to restrain their appetites, for the nominal power of the Crown was now but a servant, salaried (and most insufficiently salaried) by a landed oligarchy. The peasant had disappeared.

If an historical origin be sought for this vast change it may best be found in the Civil Wars which were in their effect the conquest of the small landed class over the executive power of the monarch. In Gaul a pre- cisely opposite development took place. The peasant increased his holding and increased his security in it. Communal rights were in social fact more and more his and less and less the lord's. The executive power of the Crown became greater than ever it had been be- fore, and the nobility, the descendants of tlic old feudal lords of manors, while preserving intact, and even increasing, their social distinction, were im- poverished in every way, losing their political power to the monarch, their land to the peasantry', retaining only the fossils of their old communal jurisdiction. Their impoverishment compelled them to use those fossil rights with harshness; the economic independ- ence of the peasant made their continued usage of such rights more and more difficult, until at last the strain resolved itself in the outburst of the Revolution. In that explosion European society again discovered its original elements. Tenure, even as a fiction, dis- appeared; the conception of absolute ownership was restored; the control of public lands by public authori- ties became as absolute as it had been under the Roman Empire, and the orbit of change was com- pleted.

It need not be added that the Revolutionary Wars resulted in an extension of these conceptions to the whole of Western Europe.

The industrial development of the towns and the