742 ON THE PROFITS OP AGRICULTURE. 



that while the price of such labour as was employed was low, 

 little labour was actually employed, and that therefore the 

 economy of lessened wages would not appear manifestly in the 

 reckoning of the occupier. This will be referred to more fully 

 in the next chapter. 



Still, difficult as it was to raise rent directly, I cannot but 

 think that the profits of the agriculturist were sensibly increased 

 after the rise in prices, and that he would have been indirectly 

 compellable to admit the landowner to a share in his growing 

 gains, had it not been that there was some process going on 

 which as sensibly lessened his advantages. And this I conclude 

 was the practice of enclosures. The right of common pasture 

 must, in such a condition of agriculture as that in which the 

 husbandman was ignorant of the advantages of winter roots, 

 artificial pasture and deep ploughing, have been of extreme value. 

 We have seen indeed (p. 50) how highly Fitzherbert estimates 

 the advantage of possessing enclosed meadows, and makes the 

 best success of sheep-breeding depend upon such kinds of pro- 

 perty. That the prospect of such advantage stimulated enclosure 

 is plain, that the cattle and sheep of the wealthier landowners 

 kept the common pasture closely cropped is asserted expressly 

 by Fitzherbert, but the eagerness with which the conveniences 

 of such pasture were appropriated is proof of how great the 

 advantage was, and how much by implication was lost to the 

 poorer husbandman when these rights of common were cur- 

 tailed, When Coke says that the landlord enclosed a mile 

 round his home, and thereby impoverished his poorer neighbours, 

 he is thinking of much more than a goose common, or such 

 similarly scanty fragments as a century and a half of continual 

 enclosures has left from the great open spaces on which the 

 cattle and sheep of all the villagers wandered. 



I do not however doubt that during the reign of Elizabeth 

 the yeomanry became numerous, and, relatively speaking, rich, 

 or that the numerous freeholders whom we read of in the next 

 century had, if not their beginning, their first settlement on the 

 soil at that time. We know indeed next to nothing of the manner 



