740 ON THE PROFITS OF AGRICULTURE. 



on renewals for terms or for lives. Nor do I conceive that the 

 grantees of the monastic lands could obtain much better terms 

 from the tenants of the dissolved monasteries than the old 

 landlords did. The same causes or influences were at work 

 here, new tenants could not be extemporised, and it is reason- 

 able to think that the custom of sheep-farming may have been 

 quite as much stimulated by the fact that the new grantees had 

 not the stock which the monasteries possessed, and therefore 

 the opportunity of making a profitable bargain with the occu- 

 pants, as by the price of wool and by foreign demand for it. 

 In one direction certainly the landowner, i.e. the lord of the 

 manor, could improve his position. He could inclose commons 

 at the expense of the tenants, freehold and occupying, and it is 

 manifest that he did so. 



The position of the small freeholders and of the occupier had 

 been greatly bettered during the long epoch of prosperity and 

 good seasons, which continued without a break and with scarcely 

 an alteration through the fifteenth century and the early part 

 of the sixteenth, and this although prices were low and wages 

 were high. The proof of this is to be found in the remarkable 

 rise in the value of land, which was sold for at least twenty 

 years' purchase, and in the occupation or purchase of base 

 tenures by persons of opulence and social rank l . Such light 

 as is shed by contemporaneous testimony, for instance that from 

 Fortescue's work, on the social condition of England in the 

 fifteenth century, exhibits an independence and energy which 

 could have only been the outcome of continued prosperity. 



The rent of land in the immediate neighbourhood of London 

 is illustrated by the record of the rents paid to the Nunnery of 

 Barking for land in close proximity to the Convent. It will 

 be noticed that the whole is general grass land, which always 

 bore a far higher rate than arable 2 . An enclosure of eleven 



1 The last chivage (capitagium) of which I have found an entry is under the year 

 1530. The word properly means the head-money paid by non-resident serfs. In this 

 case it is probably no more than the small sum which every tenant paid the steward on 

 the occasions when a manor court was held. 



3 ' If a juror in civil causes, 'then a witness as well as a judge of facts, 'be convicted by 



