the ground over which we have already travelled, and we
must modify the opinions which we have formed by bring-
ing a fresh range of facts into perspective. The piecemeal
changes which have been going on in the internal organisa-
tion of so many manors look forward as well as back, and
are of significance as throwing light on the larger innovations
of the later period. For one thing, they mean the appear-
ance among the customary tenantry of persons who are in
a small way capitalists, and who supply a link between
great farmer of the sixteenth century and the agricultural
organisation of earlier periods. The emergence out of the
mediæval peasantry of prosperous cultivators, occupying two
or three times as much land as their grandfathers, is a proof
that holdings of a considerable size can be managed success-
fully, and the farmers of the demesne are often drawn from
among them. For another thing, the inequality which has
appeared among the holdings of different tenants implies the
growth of a state of things in which innovations in the
customary methods of agriculture are much more likely to
be made than they were when all the tenants were organ-
ised in fairly well-defined classes. The smaller among them
are still practising subsistence farming when the larger are
producing on a considerable scale for the market, are acquir-
ing capital, are extending their holdings, are even becoming
landlords themselves. There arises therefore a divergence
of agricultural methods and economic interests between them,
which is quite compatible with the fact that both large and
small tenants stand in the same legal relationship to the lord
of whom they hold. The enterprise which the former show
in their dealings with land and in encroaching on the routine
of manorial cultivation cannot fail to have a powerful influ-
ence in preparing the way for the individualistic movement
which sweeps over agriculture in the sixteenth century, and
from which the peasants, as a class, suffer so severely. The
freedom with which parcels of land change hands must in-
evitably weaken the connection between the family and the
holding, and result in leaving the least successful without
any land at all. The difficulty of maintaining a peasant
proprietary without restricting the alienation of land is one
which is familiar to modern Governments, and there is clear

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