The Extent of the Decline

Abstract

NO exact or even very approximate answer to the first of our questions can be given because the essential information required for such an answer does not exist. We are driven back to more or less impressionistic guesses derived from the estimates of Gregory King and the imperfect government statistics of the nineteenth century. We may be fairly sure, however, that the extent of the decline in the 150 years before 1900 was much less than was believed by the earlier historians, who were misled by the supposed severe effects of the enclosure movement and technical developments in farming, and by the polemics of eighteenth-century pamphleteers. They may have been misled also, as Clapham suggested, by some narrowing in the early nineteenth-century use of the term ‘yeoman’: this was then coming more nearly to coincide with the historians’ limited sense of ‘owner-occupier’, and this was occurring at a time when the holders of such obsolete tenures as leases for lives and copyholds of inheritance (formerly included among the yeomen) had recently been, or were still being, bought out by their landlords and their tenancies exchanged for annual agreements or leases for terms of years.¹