Introduction

The main objective of this chapter is to examine the social and economic events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from the tenants' view-point. Tenant society in western Berkshire was the dynamic element in the process of change. These were the people who took up the tenancies, paid the rents and entry fines, worked the land, and traded across most of southern England, and as far away as Calais and Antwerp in some instances. They also operated within the more general, and often restrictive, economic conditions of the period. Nevertheless, we will argue that they remained the proactive force in shaping the nature of change in a locality.

We noted previously how a number of generalisations have been made about changes in society between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that require examining in the light of detailed case studies now and present the evidence from western Berkshire. We need to establish whether, in the words of J. E.Thorold Rogers, ‘The fifteenth century, and the early years of the sixteenth, were the golden age of the English husbandman, the artisan, and the labourer’. To what extent were tenants free to innovate and can we observe the activities of entrepreneurs? Furthermore, did conditions deteriorate for the small farmer over the sixteenth century? Was access to land reduced, and can we discern a rise in wage labour? By 1600 were there fundamental differences in society from what had gone before?