SOURCE: Scott, William O. “Landholding, Leasing, and Inheritance in Richard II.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42, no. 2 (spring 2002): 275-92.

[In the following essay, Scott contends that Shakespeare situated Richard II's divine right position within a complicated economic system of landholding and leasing, concluding that Richard's misuse of the realm compromises his hereditary claim to the monarchy.]

A recent description of the rules of succession to the throne in modern Britain states that “under the common law, the Crown descends on the same basis as the inheritance of land.”¹ It is evident that Richard II takes for granted an analogy between succession to the kingship and succession to at least the lands and titles of nobility. As Shakespeare presents the situation, the duke of York warns Richard that if he seizes John of Gaunt's lands and title, he will “take from Time / His charters and his customary rights”² and will “Be not thyself; for how art thou a king / But by fair sequence and succession?” (II.i.198-9); and likewise Bolingbroke argues, returning to claim that inheritance, “If that my cousin king be King in England, / It must be granted I am Duke of Lancaster” (II.iii.123-4). The point now is to strengthen the material content of the play's discourse about property and kingship by paying attention to the practices of humbler land transactions as well. The noblemen's critique of Richard's conduct is expressed not only through this argument about succession or inheritance but also through an analogy with forms of property ownership and use that applied among commoners. Some of these had great urgency, for landowners and tenants both, in the economy of Shakespeare's own time.

Principles of landholding shape the language of the arguments over the fiscal prerogatives of kingship, and therefore over the king's power and status; and in turn Richard's behavior is measured against these. Gaunt complains that England “Is now leased out … Like to a tenement or pelting farm” (II.i.59-60) and admonishes Richard:

                                                  wert thou regent of the world,
It were a shame to let this land by lease;
But, for thy world enjoying but this land,
Is it not more than shame to shame it so?
Landlord of England art thou now, not king.
Thy state of law is bondslave to the law.

(II.i.109-14)

One question here is just what Gaunt is comparing to the leasing of land. Though Shakespeare does not specify the object of comparison, for Gaunt the leasing of property seems to resemble Richard's means of raising cash by farming out the privilege of tax collection to his supporters. Details of such a transaction are given in the anonymous play Woodstock, in which Richard signs a document of tax farming that provides that “These gentlemen here … all jointly here stand bound to pay your majesty, or your deputy, wherever you remain, seven thousand pounds a month for this your kingdom; for which your grace, by these writings, surrenders to their hands: all your crown lands, lordships: manors, rents: taxes, subsidies … and all other duties that do, shall, or may appertain to the king or crown's revenues.”³ Although Richard is still nominal owner of the realm, he has leased out the use of it to the tax farmers, who function as tenants (perhaps with the people as subtenants). Commenting similarly on Shakespeare's lines, Andrew Gurr says, “A ‘tenement’ was a tenancy, a property used but not owned … Gaunt is fusing the concept of tax farming with debasement of landownership.”⁴ Yes, and just what sort of debasement this would be is a matter for further question.

In any case, for Gaunt this misuse of the national property compromises Richard's tenure as hereditary monarch; just before this, he declares:

O, had thy grandsire with a prophet's eye
Seen how his son's son should destroy his sons,
From forth thy reach he would have laid thy shame,
Deposing thee before thou wert possessed,
Which art possessed now to depose thyself.

(II.i.104-8)

Abuses of what the king possesses—both property and kingship—threaten the status of kingship itself. The latter is true in two senses: although the second quoted line could apply to Richard's murder of Woodstock (in which case both uses of “his” would refer to the grandsire Edward III), another accepted meaning (taking the second “his” to refer to Richard) is that Richard is depriving his posterity of their patrimony by abusing the realm. Either way, the practices of leasing and other land transactions, then, bear on the power and status of the king, whose actions against either the life or livelihood of his kinsmen may unsettle his own possessions and position.

The serious charge that Richard is leasing out the nation like a tenement should be understood within landholding practices of the time. The varieties of ownership or possession of land in medieval and early modern England fall in a range within which different sorts of leasehold are among the weaker ones.⁵ High on the social scale, feudal principles are evident in the theory that lords hold their lands from the king or overlord in return for knight service or cash fees (some of the latter surviving into the sixteenth century), along with homage, and that others in turn would hold from the lords in return for homage and rent. Though these lands could be seized by the crown in case of treason, they would be vested, largely outright, as freeholds or frank tenancies, with the right (sometimes restricted) to designate an heir.

But most property was held only in customary tenancy, usually on the basis of a copy of a statement of customary ownership made from the manor records, i.e., by copyhold (which was claimed to be ancient but was formalized only in the fifteenth century); and such ownership was enforceable, at first, only in the manor court rather than directly in royal courts under common law. Though the lord still had the freehold, the tenant had a kind of contractual possession that was confirmed by the custom of the manor, and he paid a fixed customary rent. This customary right was not as strong as a freehold, and it could sometimes be disputed whether a particular individual's tenancy was actually ratified by custom. The terms of this tenancy and the degree of control over inheritance could vary, and in some situations the land could revert to the lord, who could collect a fee on a tenant's entry into possession and at other times. (Such fines were an important leverage, and source of income, for lords.)⁶ The strongest forms of copyhold carried the right of inheritance without limit, and to that extent were almost as good as freeholds; others allowed inheritance for specified persons and a limited number of lives (usually up to three); and still others gave possession for a term of years (from 1540 onward, usually no more than seven, fourteen, or twenty-one). Still weaker copyholds lasted only a year, or at the will of the lord. Although there were actually more legal protections than this brief summary suggests, the forms of landholding shaded into copyhold arrangements that seem by modern standards more like mere rental.

On the other side, there were leases whose length matched some of the copyholds: up to three lives, or twenty-one years. Others, though, were shorter. Clearly the terms were all-important: besides its length, a lease for more than one life would also, advantageously, allow the tenant some control over inheritance. A tenant might further find it appealing that, once having paid an entry fine, he had a low rent for the term of the lease. From the landlord's viewpoint, the lump-sum payment of the entry fine was desirable, and eventually there was value in calling in the lease after its term ended and negotiating a new, more favorable, arrangement with either the same or another tenant. Thus there may have seemed to be an immediate benefit for both sides in a lease, though eventually it proved illusory for tenants. In a leasehold, overall, there was not necessarily the same expectation of an ongoing relationship between lord and tenant as in customary tenure.⁷ The lessee might have a right to name an heir, and at some points could be protected from high rents and high entry fines (insofar as custom could influence the outcome of negotiations); but there would not be the same security of tenure that even copyhold would afford.

These technicalities of land possession—especially the differences in security between copyholds and leases—figured in large social and economic changes. One of the major transformations in English agriculture from the later Middle Ages through the sixteenth century, a change which could give an ironic (if seemingly almost incidental) bite for Shakespeare's audience to the words of even the aristocratic Gaunt, was the conversion of copyholds into such less secure leases. Although this development must have seemed of little importance as long as there was a shortage of tenants (a consequence, at least partly, of the Black Death), a growing market for land and growing profitability of farming in the last half of the sixteenth century made the terms of tenancy suddenly critical for the tenant's security and made obvious the reasons for keeping a copyhold, if possible, and rejecting a lease.⁸ (Copyholds granted to one's heirs without limit would be especially valuable to tenants.) From the point of view of a landlord who sought more profit, it may well have been true already that “The breaking of a line of inheritance [i.e., the failure of a tenant to produce an heir] was seen as releasing the grip of custom, and enabling payments more in line with the true market value to be exacted.”⁹ Though this quotation describes a time before conversion to leaseholds became prevalent as they did in the sixteenth century, it expresses well how a traditionalist viewpoint could be supplanted by a capitalist one, and how the replacement of copyholds by leases could facilitate the development of agrarian market capitalism and the breaking of inheritance among small copyhold farmers. Landlords became increasingly bolder in taking advantage of opportunities to convert to leases. By the later sixteenth century, then, bargaining over leaseholds gave landowners considerable power.¹⁰ And this power in turn enabled one of the even better known changes in the agrarian economy, enclosure of both common and demesne land, with displacement of families who might once have possessed copyholds.¹¹ For these reasons, the very idea of leasing might well have aroused controversial associations, quite apart from what Gaunt makes of it.¹²

Both the sale and the leasing of lands in the royal demesne (a closer analogue to Gaunt's complaint) were sensitive matters as well in Shakespeare's time. Queen Elizabeth made extensive sales of crown lands (often through agents who soaked up much of the profit), especially to finance military activity in the 1590s.¹³ Yet she herself became so concerned about uncontrolled and unrecorded leases and other transactions, under her signature or affixed with the Great Seal, that she commanded the lord keeper “to charge the Chancery clerks and others,” among other things, “not to presume to write or refer to the Great Seal any bill under her hand, brought from the Commissioners for leases [of crown lands] … nor suffer [the clerks] to pass the Great Seal, except by warrant under the Privy Seal.”¹⁴ As in Richard's case, royal power is at issue; but Elizabeth used it here to tighten administrative operations, such as grants of leases, through greater control over the Great Seal. Here too is a contemporary sting in Gaunt's remonstrances against leases.

Of course Gaunt's actual complaint against Richard's tax farming is not that he is exercising too much power but the contrary, that such a transaction gives undue influence to the lessees. And Gaunt, the wealthiest man in England after the king, is hardly an advocate for tenant farmers. Rather, he and especially his brother York speak for the legitimating value of custom (which figures in York's language as a right of time and thereby of the nobility);¹⁵ and custom can cut many ways.¹⁶ Customary rents and fines limited the profits of landlords and gave an economic windfall to tenants with rising crop prices, until the very restraints of custom moved landlords to press for conversion to leases; but insofar as custom still remained effective, it helped tenants in their resistance to such conversion. On the level at which Gaunt and York argue, custom could have varied results too. It would assert the right of inheritance for the nobility against royal interference, but on the basis of equal protection for royal legitimacy. The separation, through tax farming, of ownership of the realm from its use, connected in this reasoning with the breach of custom in leasing, would also be an abuse of royal power that ultimately weakens and discredits the customary basis of kingship. Custom is supposed to moderate the contests of power, whether of king against nobles or arguably of tax farmers (who should not have power at all, or even exist) against king. In the view that the noblemen try to present, then, self-discipline by respect for custom would preserve power by inhibiting transactions that would be ultimately ruinous to that power.

Gaunt nostalgically views England's past as devoid of struggles. In his idealized version, the description of England as an “other Eden” and “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm,” and as “This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings” (II.i.42, 51) suggests a fecundity, both agrarian and human, that seems to have no need for tillage, calculation, or struggles for ownership (a situation quite unlike the historical one described above). As James E. Berg says, the speech expresses “the values of an agrarian economy,” portraying the land as “real” in a vividly particular (as well as legalistic) sense.¹⁷

For all his idealization of the status of kingship, even Richard sometimes thinks in property terms, to Bolingbroke's disparagement. In recounting Bolingbroke's “courtship to the common people” (I.iv.24), his kneeling and doffing his bonnet to draymen and oyster wenches, Richard thinks of him as conducting himself “As were our England in reversion his” (line 36). The OED defines “in reversion” as “conditional upon the expiray of a grant or the death of a person” and the single word as “The return of an estate to the donor or grantor, or his heirs, after the expiry of the grant”;¹⁸ and B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, citing this passage, mention metaphorical usages “concerned with anticipated or conditional possession.”¹⁹ Richard thinks of his kingship as a firm possession rather than such a conditional grant, even if for life—despite the irony, at the end of the play, that first his estate expires and then his life.

Richard's suspicion that Bolingbroke anticipates taking possession figures implicitly in an earlier scene too. Not long after Bolingbroke has accused Mowbray of plotting the duke of Gloucester's death, with an obvious but covert implication that Richard is involved, the king finds an extravagant way of professing to Mowbray that he is impartial despite his blood tie to Bolingbroke:

Were he my brother, nay, my kingdom's heir,
As he is but my father's brother's son,
Now, by my scepter's awe I make a vow,
Such neighbor nearness to our sacred blood
Should nothing privilege him nor partialize
The unstooping firmness of my upright soul.

(I.i.116-21)

In incidentally broaching the topic of the heir to the kingdom, Richard may be noting obliquely that he perceives Bolingbroke's dangerous accusation as a sign of royal aspirations, which he of course tries to diminish by firmly describing the collateral status of a cousin.

James R. Siemon has pointed out the continuing emphasis on property in the middle and later parts of the play: the “insistent economic inflections” of the rebels' complaints;²⁰ the assurance that Bolingbroke is coming “But for his own” (II.iii.149)—where “own” means “property assumed as absolute, self-evident possession, not the reciprocal issue of kinship alliance or the dependent creature of ‘royalties,’ ‘tenure,’ or any such feudal or monarchical grant and qualification”;²¹ and Bolingbroke's offers of patronage rewards to his followers and even some opponents.²² In contrast, Richard himself mainly dwells rather on figurative and symbolic aspects of possession, as when he salutes the earth and expends pathos on the wounds it sustains from the rebels' war horses; and he makes much of kingship as his God-given due.²³ But at two points in the deposition scene his words allow of a property-law reading, as well as the other meanings they bear. Of these, the latter is the simpler. When Bolingbroke commands: “Go some of you, convey him to the Tower,” Richard answers, “O, good! ‘Convey’? Conveyers are you all, / That rise thus nimbly by a true king's fall” (IV.i.317-9). Gurr says of this that “Richard develops the principal sense of ‘convey’ as ‘to escort’ with its two other meanings, ‘to transfer the title to property’, and ‘to steal.’”²⁴ Richard juxtaposes these meanings in an effective comment on the emptiness of the formal abdication in which he has just been forced to participate.

His other equivocal legalism is at once more elusive and more sweeping in its implications. When told that he must resign, he asks for the crown and first enacts a ritual of his own:

                                                            Here, cousin, seize the crown.
Here, cousin,
On this side my hand, and on that side thine.
Now is this golden crown like a deep well
That owes two buckets, filling one another,
The emptier ever dancing in the air,
The other down, unseen, and full of water.
That bucket down and full of tears am I,
Drinking my griefs, whilst you mount up on high.

(IV.i.182-90)

He has two token victories in this playlet, when he characterizes Bolingbroke as an empty bucket, and before that when he says three words: “seize the crown,” that are among the ones that Bolingbroke would least want to hear made explicit. (Of course, Richard immediately endows them with an “innocent” meaning.) In a technical reading of his language, the word “seize” had legal associations through its cognate term “seisin.” Two of the senses of the latter word are marked by the OED as primarily fifteenth century and as having shaded into meanings of “seize”: “To invest with the seisin of property; to put in possession,” and “To confiscate (property).”²⁵ A. W. B. Simpson's explanation of “seisin” gets at the ironies of Richard's usage: “Titles are better or worse according to the age of the seisin upon which they are based, and even a very recent (and perhaps transparently wrongful) seisin is to some extent protected. Thus any person who is seised of land has a protected interest in that land, good against all but those who have a title based on an older seisin.”²⁶ With no other choice, Richard invites a transparently wrongful seisin, against which he tacitly can place his older claim.

But the connections alike with possession and confiscation make a harder notion for modern interpreters of earlier legal thinking. Describing the conditions under early feudalism, J. H. Baker says that “seisin,” or “possession as a feudal tenant,” “originally was associated with the act of homage which clinched the lord's acceptance of his man”; further, if the lord somehow received two men's homage for the same land, one of them had a right to some other land of like value, but “the claim was essentially contractual: there was no question of upsetting seisin by reference to some more abstract notion of title”; and finally, “The tenant was seised of the land, and the lord was seised of the tenant's services, but neither of them ‘owned’ the land in any absolute sense.”²⁷

These severe qualifications of ownership certainly do not answer to Richard's strong view of the rightness of his title. But in the question of “seising” or “seizing” the crown, they may correspond to a strangely almost schizophrenic attitude that Richard seems to have toward de facto possession. He expresses this attitude in his self-pitying before the abdication:

God save the King! Will no man say amen?
Am I both priest and clerk? Well then, amen.
God save the King, although I be not he;
And yet, amen, if heaven do think him me.

(IV.i. 173-6)

Yet he is more critical of himself afterward:

                    if I turn mine eyes upon myself,
I find myself a traitor with the rest;
For I have given here my soul's consent
T' undeck the pompous body of a king,
Made glory base and sovereignty a slave,
Proud majesty a subject, state a peasant.

(IV.i. 248-53)

He has colluded in an abdication that is dead contrary to his absolutist beliefs about kingship, indeed has obliged Bolingbroke by making the offer unasked. In part his absolutism actually promotes his renunciation, inasmuch as, when forced to confront the realities of power, he yields to their stark divergence from his idealization. Likewise the practice of seisin, while bracketing the question of absolute right, grants an advantage to the power realities of possession. And by this point in the play, Richard's double vision of the politico-juridical situation pertains greatly to an audience's divided vision of the Realpolitik of unrightful possession of the throne, and therefore to self-divisions within the subjects. Throughout, absolutist doctrine thus comes up against the obstacle of the de facto, the opposing or limiting force. In abdicating, Richard washes away with his own tears the anointing balm that he had said not all the water in the rough rude sea could remove.

On his deathbed, Gaunt complains in the language of property of the damage to England in Richard's rule:

A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head,
And yet, encagèd in so small a verge,
The waste is no whit lesser than thy land.

(II.i.100-3)

Gurr describes “waste” as, among other things, “a legal term for prejudicial damage to property by a tenant,”²⁸ and Jack Benoit Gohn says that “Waste is used here in its legal sense, meaning destruction of the value of real property by those whose use of the land adversely affects the rights of others with presently vested interests in the land … In this elaborate metaphor, King Richard's flatterers, and by implication Richard himself, are liable for waste because their rule has destroyed the ‘land.’”²⁹ This legalism is even more challenging to absolutism, for Gaunt uses a concept that applies only to tenants, not freeholders, and he seems to require their accountability to the whole nation as if to their lords. Moreover, as Dennis R. Klinck points out, “the penalty for waste is the loss of the thing wasted,” a sanction that is hinted in Gaunt's following admonition (quoted earlier) that Richard is possessed to depose himself.³⁰ The criticism is softened a bit, though, in that it is unclear (as reflected in Gohn's wording) whether Gaunt is still blaming the flatterers, or whether he has turned more directly on Richard. But he certainly qualifies rights with responsibilities, a message that is not at all welcome to the possessive Richard.

The gardener and his men, lamenting the state of the land that they tend without the interest of ownership, grieve, in language reminiscent of Gaunt's, for the errors of “the wasteful King,” whose crown “waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down” (III.iv.55, 66). The property-law sense of “waste” might have some oblique application to “hours” besides the more usual meaning of wasting time: as one maintains land by cutting or rooting out some of what grows on it, one would maintain or make best use of time by suitable, sometimes indeed destructive, activity.³¹

Richard himself acknowledges his waste of hours as king when he reflects in prison on his past. Now a critic of out-of-time music, he admits that “for the concord of [his] state and time” he had not had the same ear: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” (by forcing him to expend tears, V.v.47, 49). The property-law sense of “waste” would be questionable here, but perhaps still the active quality of its meaning is pertinent: one could read something like “to destroy; to ruin; to desolate; to wear away” for both uses of the word in the line, giving a symmetry of meaning (with also the usual meaning of “squander” for the waste of time).³² Richard achieves a truer perception, then, if he recognizes outright that he was destructive enough, as York warned, to “take from Time / His charters and his customary rights” (II.i.195-6).

Such attention as this play gives to the legal status of property is rare; probably Shakespeare owes it to the details of tax farming in Woodstock. But the secure landholding of Alexander Iden, “an esquire of Kent” (2 Henry VI, IV.x.42), who likely owns his land in fee simple, as it seems to the fugitive rebel Jack Cade, embodies a tradition of stable social relations until challenged by insurrection:

This small inheritance my father left me
Contenteth me, and worth a monarchy.
I seek not to wax great by others' waning,
Or gather wealth, I care not with what envy.
Sufficeth that I have maintains my state
And sends the poor well pleasèd from my gate.(33)

The charity that Iden professes makes a careful justification of his position through its obligations, and it is repeated in his initial reluctance to fight Cade (who assumes that he can only gain sustenance by taking for himself).³⁴ A peaceful complaint against less well-intentioned use of property, the duke of Suffolk's act of enclosure comes to naught, though, when Suffolk intercepts the petition.³⁵

Otherwise, the dramatic treatments in Shakespeare's time of popular uprisings, where they go into realistic detail at all, gloss over serious issues of property and customary rights. According to Raphael Holinshed, the rebellion of 1381 included complaints by the commons “that they were sore oppressed (as they tooke the matter) by their land-lords, that demanded of them their ancient customes and seruices”;³⁶ and “they purposed to burne and destroie all records, euidences, court-rolles, and other minuments, that the remembrance of ancient matters being remooued out of mind, their landlords might not haue whereby to chalenge anie right at their hands.”³⁷ In The Life and Death of Jack Straw, however, this explanation is left out; Parson Ball merely complains in passing against landlords' rent and lawyers' fees in his egalitarian urgings, and without further explanation Tom Miller burns “Bonds and Indentures and Obligations.”³⁸ In Cade's rebellion, the 1450 Bills of Complaint (printed in John Stow's Chronicles of England, 1580) objected to “untrew clayms enfeffements.”³⁹ Shakespeare omits this cause of unrest; and the famous resolution “The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers”⁴⁰ actually contradicts one assertion in the Bills of Complaint that the rebels “blame not … alle men of lawe … but such as maye be ffounde gilty.”⁴¹ The causes of rebellions may be too sensitive to stage; and without those causes, the portrayal of the rebels leaves them all the more open to censure.⁴²

Abdications, or divisions of the kingdom because of impending death, could also have called for special provisions about property; but typically there are no details, as in Gorbuduc, King Leir, and Locrine, or in Edward II's forced abdication. Shakespeare's Lear does, however, mention the ownership and revenues that he is giving up, and the fool pointedly reminds him.⁴³ Henry VI, trying to justify his title to the duke of York, treats the kingship the same as ordinary property in asking, “may not a king adopt an heir?”⁴⁴ and asserting that Richard did so in favor of Bolingbroke; York disallows this gift as having been made under duress, but ironically he accepts just such an offer for himself and his heirs made after Henry had been briefly surrounded by armed men.

Though this reading of Richard II has taken as its model the arguably materialistic operations of land law, such restrictiveness alone could be too limiting: there may be analogies between attitudes toward real property and toward other possessions or less tangible advantages in which people have valid and vested interests. Citing cases in which monopolies given by Queen Elizabeth deprived other persons of the use of their property or the practice of their trade or craft, and the injured sued and won, J. H. Hexter concludes that “a man's occupation is his property by inheritance or lawful acquisition” and that, in the belief of many, “the law favored property against mere power, that it supported men's right to hold what custom and their labor made their own”; and in this context he mentions copyhold tenure of land, which was eventually given common-law protection.⁴⁵ Thus perhaps the controversial notion of selfhood can be carefully defined for the sixteenth century through one's inherited or lawfully acquired status, possessions, and skills; at least, inversely, Richard feels that the loss of his title and possessions amounts to a loss of selfhood, indeed of a face in the mirror.

Even within the received doctrine that legitimate kingly rule is God-given, the terms and practice of property law and ownership or possession help to define contesting views in Richard II of the fertile ground of England and of its kingly nurturing. Though Richard pushes to the utmost the notion of absolute right as sanctioned by God, the peculiarities of law that allow for severance of judgments about possession and right correspond to the remarkable passiveness with which he confronts that severance in his own loss of rule. Gaunt, for all his deference to God's position as sole judge of kings and his insistence that the king should be above the law, treats royal possession as distinctly conditional: it confers obligations on the king (like the ones laid on a tenant not to commit waste on the land). Gaunt even imagines a kingly forebear judging the present one. Yet he indulges too in an obviously idealized vision of a past without power struggles. York speaks for the moderating force of customary possession and obligation but cannot invoke it successfully now to mediate contests. Even the statements of the ideal in the play smack of contention. For the audience, then, who knew of other contests of ownership and power in their own time, the play renews questions of struggle and its customary modulation.

Notes

1. Vernon Bogdanor, The Monarchy and the Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 42. This means that male heirs have priority over females, and that primogeniture rules among males; Bogdanor contrasts the Salic law, which barred succession by females in France, and the modern Swedish situation, which treats females and males equally.

2. William Shakespeare, Richard II, in The Complete Works, ed. David Bevington, updated 4th edn. (New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 721-62, 737, II.i.195-6. All subsequent citations from the play will appear parenthetically within the text according to act, scene, and line number.

3. Woodstock: A Moral History, ed. A. P. Rossiter (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), IV.i.180-90; see also Rossiter's comment (p. 227) identifying this type of agreement with both Gaunt's words about Richard's “state of law” (Richard II, II.i.114) and his allusion to “rotten parchment bonds” (II.i.64). The use of blank charters to create forced loans, which is sometimes read into Gaunt's various complaints, is properly separate: thus Richard first announces that he is farming the realm, but then that “If that come short” for his revenue needs he will resort to the blank charters (I.iv.46).

4. Andrew Gurr, ed., Richard II (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), p. 87. This meaning of “tenement” accords with the legal terminology of Richard's time, according to W. F. Bolton (“Ricardian Law Reports and Richard II,” ShakS [Shakespeare Studies] 20 [1988]: 53-66, 62). See also Dennis R. Klinck, “Shakespeare's Richard II as Landlord and Wasting Tenant,” CollL [College Literature] 25, 1 (Winter 1998): 21-34, 27. H. R. Coursen's The Leasing Out of England: Shakespeare's Second Henriad (Washington DC: Univ. Press of America, 1982) is thematically relevant to the topic of this essay; however, it does not go into the technical detail that seems needed.

5. Most of what follows—a highly condensed version of a complex subject—comes from Eric Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), pp. 32-64. See also R. W. Hoyle, “Tenure and the Land Market in Early Modern England: or a Late Contribution to the Brenner Debate,” Economic History Review, 2d s., 43, 1 (February 1990): 1-20; E. B. Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England, c.1380-c.1525 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); and B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol, Shakespeare's Legal Language: A Dictionary (London: Athlone Press, 2000), esp. s.v. “Lease” and “Copy.” (I would not contest the Sokols' statement that Shakespeare does not refer directly to copyhold.)

6. One of the nastier deeds of which landlords were suspected in the 1590s was to send tenants off to war in hopes that, if they were killed, the lords could collect entry fines upon replacing them. See I. A. A. Thompson, “The Impact of War,” in The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 261-84, 276.

7. Of the lease for term of years, as contrasted with life tenancy, A. W. B. Simpson says, “a lease for years was not conceived of as creating a tenurial relationship between lessor and lessee at all” (A History of the Land Law, 2d edn. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986], p. 73). Likewise J. H. Baker states: “Whereas the unit of feudal ownership was the holding for life, and the hereditary fee was of perpetual or indeterminate duration, the letting for years began not as a family interest but as a temporary financial interest. Its principal use was to secure a loan of money” (An Introduction to English Legal History, 3d edn. [London: Butterworths, 1990], p. 338). See also Sokol and Sokol, p. 202.

8. Hoyle, “Tenure and the Land Market,” pp. 8-10; he also provides the suggestions about perceived advantages of such conversions for both parties, under earlier economic conditions (see previous paragraph, above). The “Brenner debate,” named for its originator Robert Brenner, concerned whether these conversions and other developments, viewed as preparing the development of capitalism in agriculture, were brought about by application of the superior power of landlords as a social class (Brenner, with Marxist assumptions), by demographic forces (various neo-Malthusian historians), or by economic forces (John E. Martin, with a Marxist economic model; Hoyle, “Tenure and the Land Market,” and Fryde, empirically). See The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985); John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (Basingstoke UK: Macmillan, 1983; corr. rprt. 1986); and Fryde, pp. 227-41, 272-3.

9. John Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment,” Past and Present 90 (February 1981): 3-39, 18. Hatcher is describing a rationale, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for conversion of customary tenancy into leaseholds on failure of inheritance.

10. See Fryde, pp. 272-3. Annabel Patterson cites William Harrison's Description of England on “the dailie oppression of copiholders,” pretexts for forfeiting their tenures, pressure to shorten terms, and increases in rents and fines to use up all their income (Reading Holinshed's Chronicles [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994], pp. 82-4, 82).

11. On these changes as facilitating evictions and enclosures, see Fryde, pp. 197, 272-3. Enclosure is discussed in relation to Richard II by James R. Siemon, “Landlord Not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 17-33. The contribution of sixteenth-century inflation to enclosure is related to the play by James E. Berg in “‘This Dear, Dear Land’: ‘Dearth’ and the Fantasy of the Land-Grab in Richard II and Henry IV,” ELR [English Literary Renaissance] 29, 2 (Spring 1999): 225-45. Berg says that land is increasingly “a tool of narrowly economic production” (p. 232).

12. Shakespeare himself, and his relatives, had experience at various times with both copyholds and freeholds. On ancestral property dealings, see Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1961), pp. 7-9, 16-7; and B. Roland Lewis, The Shakespeare Documents: Facsimiles, Transliterations, Translations, and Commentary, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1940), 1:20-1, 85-6, 89 (copyhold bequeathed). On the legal title to the “Birthplace,” see variously Lewis, 1:111 (document on p. 112); J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 8th edn., 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1889), 1:378; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930, rprt. 1966), 2:32; and Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press and Scolar Press, 1975), pp. 14-5. Shakespeare's own property dealings included both freeholds and copyholds, and in 1605 he even became a local tax farmer, buying a share of the collection of tithes in Stratford for the school and the poor (see Lewis, 1:237-8, 2:330-3 [freehold], 2:348 [copyhold], and 2:374-81 [tithes]). In turn these tithes, though not any of his land, could have been affected by a proposal for enclosure in 1614 that the Corporation of Stratford opposed; Shakespeare, who had ties of past business and family friendship with one of the enclosers, made an agreement with another of them to protect himself from financial harm, but otherwise his involvement (though not altogether clear) seems not to have been great, see Eccles, pp. 119, 136-7; Schoenbaum, pp. 230-4; and Lewis, 2:451-66.

13. The Estates of the English Crown, 1558-1640, ed. Hoyle (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992). On extent of sales and on military uses, see pp. 15-6, 77-8, 116; on concerns raised in 1576 that such sales eroded the revenue base, see p. 21.

14. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic (1591-94), 1592, no. 73 (dated February).

15. Ironically, the historical John of Gaunt owed much of his wealth and aspiration not to ancient custom but to his first two marriages (great wealth from Blanche of Lancaster, and a claim to the Castilian throne from Constance of Castile). See Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272-1377 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980; rprt. Routledge, 1993), p. 281. Historical irony is tempting, but Shakespeare did alter Gaunt's character greatly from history in other ways.

16. E. P. Thompson makes a general argument for the economic and social force of custom in protecting the position of smallholders and other persons of modest status (Customs in Common [London: Merlin Press, 1991], pp. 97-184). But one can also turn the argument another way, specifically in relation to customs such as inheritance of copyhold land as presided over by the manorial courts: “Manorial customs tied the lord's hands very considerably, and most lords probably submitted to the restraint, just as kings submitted to their own law; their power was more secure for being regularised” (Baker, p. 263). At the same time, though, in using the word “charters” (II.i.196), York invokes a more securely entrenched power: the word is associated with freeholds, in contrast to copyholds (Berg, p. 236).

17. Berg, p. 239.

18. OED, s.v. “in reversion,” I, 1c; “reversion,” I, 1a.

19. Sokol and Sokol, s.v. “reversion.”

20. Siemon, “‘Subjected Thus’: Utterance, Character, and Richard II,” ShJb [Shakespeare Jahrbuch] 126 (1990): 65-80, 75.

21. Siemon, “‘Subjected Thus,’” p. 76.

22. Siemon, “‘Subjected Thus,’” pp. 77-8.

23. For Divine Designation as one of the historical bases for claiming the throne, see Jack Benoit Gohn, “Richard II: Shakespeare's Legal Brief on the Royal Prerogative and the Succession to the Throne,” Georgetown Law Journal 70, 3 (February 1982): 943-73, 949, and his references.

24. Gurr, p. 149.

25. OED, s.v. “seisin,” 2, 3.

26. Simpson, p. 88.

27. Baker, pp. 262-3.

28. Gurr, p. 89.

29. Gohn, p. 957.

30. Klinck, p. 27.

31. Klinck gives the instance of the felling of trees on leasehold property as a form of waste (p. 30). One ought to contrast the beneficial trimming advocated by the gardeners.

32. These meanings are taken from Alexander Schmidt's Shakespeare-Lexikon, 3d edn. rev. by Gregor Sarrazin (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902; rprt. New York: Dover Publications, 1971), s.v. “waste,” vb. 1a and b, p. 1336. He cites the line for both meanings without giving details; presumably he means “squander” for the first and “destroy,” etc., for the second. For this passage as continuing the charges by York, Gaunt, and the gardener, see Robert L. Montgomery Jr., “The Dimensions of Time in Richard II,” ShakS 4 (1968): 73-85, 78-9.

33. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, in Complete Works, pp. 540-83, 577, IV.x.18-23.

34. William C. Carroll describes this portrayal of Iden as “the virtuous contrast to the usual rural oppressors, the greedy cormorants who rapaciously enclose or raise rents” and “a Horatian figure, an ideal of the landowner protecting his property” (“‘The Nursery of Beggary’: Enclosure, Vagrancy, and Sedition in the Tudor-Stuart Period,” in Enclosure Acts, pp. 34-47, 43). He notes that the Folio adds several lines (including the last four quoted here) to the version in The First Part of the Contention so as to strengthen this idealization. In contrast, Thomas Cartelli argues that Jack Cade knows nothing of any such hospitable landowners, that Iden's response to Cade's hostility soon nullifies his charitable claims, and that their conflict actually results in Iden's gain at Cade's expense (“Jack Cade in the Garden: Class Consciousness and Class Conflict in 2 Henry VI,” in Enclosure Acts, pp. 48-67, 49-52).

35. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, I.iii.23-39.

36. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson et al., 1807), 2:735.

37. Holinshed, 2:737. Thomas Walsingham gives a similar report, as translated by R. B. Dobson in The Peasants' Revolt of 1381, 2d edn. (London: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 133-4. See also Christopher Dyer, “The Social and Economic Background to the Rural Revolt of 1381,” in The English Rising of 1381, ed. R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 9-42, 27 (landlords wanted records of changes), 41; Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Temple Smith, 1973), p. 169 (short leases supplanted customary tenure); Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), p. 60 (landlords increasingly exacted duties from tenants); and Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), pp. 35-6 (villeins became increasingly exposed to “documentary culture”).

38. The Life and Death of Jack Straw, ed. Kenneth Muir and F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Malone Society, 1957), lines 87, 781. Walter Cohen notes a tendency of plays that deal with “interclass relations” either to overlook class struggles or to look down on rebellion (Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985], p. 223). Interestingly, the rebel Falconbridge in Thomas Heywood's 1 Edward IV denies such economic causes of rebellion (instanced in the uprisings by “Tyler, Cade, and Straw”) as “mending measures or the price of corne” or “some common in the wield of Kent / Thats by some greedy cormorant enclos'd,” asserting rather the claim of the House of Lancaster but really dreaming of power over the mint and other sources of wealth (Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, 6 vols. [New York: Russell and Russell, 1964], 1:3-90, 9). Another rebellion, the one put down by Sir Thomas More, being urban in nature and causes, did not involve tenant complaints. However, the instructions of Edmund Tilney, censoring the manuscript of The Booke of Sir Thomas Moore as Master of the Revels, that the cause of the insurrection must be omitted, are revealing of official anxieties. See Simon Hunt, “‘Leaving Out the Insurrection’: Carnival Rebellion, English History Plays, and a Hermeneutics of Advocacy,” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Hunt (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 299-314. Hunt observes, in support of his thesis that carnivalization displaces a serious treatment of the causes of rebellion, that in Jack Straw Miller is identified as a clown (p. 302). For comparison with actual rebellions in Tudor times (always a dangerous analogy for playwrights and audiences, as the history of Richard II attests), there were economic stresses such as inflation that caused landlords “to increase dues traditionally regarded as fixed (whether by changing copyholds to leases, or by increasing the amount or frequency of entry fines)” (C. S. L. Davies, “The Pilgrimage of Grace Reconsidered,” in Rebellion, Popular Protest, and the Social Order in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Slack [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984], pp. 16-38, 19). As Slack points out in his introduction, however, economic grievances were mingled with other causes of revolt (pp. 1-15, 6-7).

39. I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade's Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 187. The complaint against enfeoffment may refer to the practice of “enfeoffment to use,” the delegation of estate management to feoffees or trustees, who might not be well supervised. See W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327-1377 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990), p. 113.

40. Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI, IV.ii.74.

41. Harvey, p. 190. But, as reported by Walsingham, in the 1381 revolt Wat Tyler did want the heads of all lawyers (Alan Harding, “The Revolt against the Justices,” in The English Rising of 1381, pp. 165-93, 165); Dobson, p. 133.

42. Patterson insists that the obvious faults in Cade's behavior must be read against the legitimate popular protests conveyed by Salisbury (2 Henry VI, III.ii.243-69) and by the petitioners against Suffolk's action of enclosure (see Shakespeare and the Popular Voice [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989], pp. 47-8.)

43. Shakespeare, King Lear, in Complete Works, pp. 1167-1218, 1180, I.iv.132-3, I.i.50 [Folio only].

44. Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, in Complete Works, pp. 584-627, 588, I.i.135.

45. J. H. Hexter, “Property, Monopoly, and Shakespeare's Richard II,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 1-24, 15-6. Examples of such monopolies are sale of playing cards, registration of insurance policies, and manufacture of salt (in which case real property, land with salt pits, is made useless).