Evidence in support of this conclusion is not difficult to adduce.The first fact which arouses our interest is that at the conclusion of the seventeenth century it was estimated by Gregory King that there were 180,000 freeholders in England,and that,less than a hundred years later,the pamphleteers of the time,and even careful writers like Arthur Young,speak of the small freeholders as practically gone.The bare statement of this contrast is in itself most impressive.A person ignorant of our history during the intervening period might surmise that a great exterminatory war had taken place,or a violent social revolution which had caused a transfer of the property of one class to another.But though the surmise in this particular form would be incorrect,we are nevertheless justified in saying that a revolution of incalculable importance had taken place,-a revolution,though so silent,of as great importance as the political revolution of 1831.'The able and substantial freeholders,'described by Whitelock,'the freeholders and freeholders'sons,well armed within with the satisfaction of their own good consciences,and without by iron arms,who stood firmly and charged desperately,'-this devoted class,who had broken the power of the king and the squires in the Civil Wars,were themselves,within a hundred years from that time,being broken,dispersed,and driven off the land.Numerous and prosperous in the fifteenth century,they had suffered something by the enclosures of the sixteenth;but though complaints are from time to time made in the seventeenth of the laying together of farms,there is no evidence to show that their number underwent any great diminution during that time.In the picture of country life which we find in the literature of the first years of the eighteenth century,the small freeholder is still a prominent figure.Sir Roger de Coverley,in riding to Quarter Sessions,points to the two yeomen who are riding in front of him,and Defoe,in his admirable Tour through England,first published a few years later,describes with satisfaction the number and prosperity of the Grey-coats of Kent (as they were called from their home-spun garments),whose political power forced the gentlemen to treat them with circumspection and deference.'Of the freeholders of England,'says Chamberlayne,in the State of Great Britain,first published towards the close of the seventeenth century,'there are more in number and richer than in any country of the like extent in Europe.*40 or *50 a year is very ordinary,*100 or *200 in some counties is not rare;sometimes in Kent,and in the Weald of Sussex,*500 or *600 per annum,and *3000 or *4000 stock.'The evidence is conclusive that up to the Revolution of 1688 the freeholders were in most parts of the country an important feature in social life.
If,however,we ask whether they had possessed,as a class,any political initiative,we must answer in the negative.In the lists of the Eastern Counties'Association,formed in the Civil War (the eastern counties were the districts,perhaps,where the freeholders were strongest),we find no name which has not appended to it the title of gentleman or esquire.The small landed proprietor,though courageous and independent in personal character,was ignorant,and incapable himself of taking the lead.There was little to stimulate his mind in his country life;in agriculture he pursued the same methods as his forefathers,was full of prejudices,and difficult to move.The majority of this class had never travelled beyond their native village or homestead and the neighbouring market-town.In some districts those freeholders were also artisans,especially in the eastern counties,which were still the richest part of the country,and the most subject to foreign influence.But,on the whole,if we may judge from the accounts of rather later times,the yeomen,though thriving in good seasons,often lived very hard lives,and remained stationary in their habits and ways of thinking from generation to generation.They were capable in the Civil War,under good leadership,of proving themselves the most powerful body in the kingdom;but after constitutional government had been secured,and the great landowners were independent of their support,they sank into political insignificance.The Revolution of 1688,which brought to a conclusion the constitutional struggle of the seventeenth century,was accomplished without their aid,and paved the way for their extinction.A revolution in agricultural life was the price paid for political liberty.
At first,however,the absorption of the small freeholders went on slowly.The process of disappearance has been continuous from about 1700 to the present day,but it is not true to say,as Karl Marx does,that the yeomanry had disappeared by the middle of the eighteenth century.It was not till the very period which we are considering,that is to say about 1760,that the process of extinction became rapid.There is conclusive evidence that many were still to be found about 1770.There were at that time still 9000 freeholders in Kent.
