174 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



real social effects of the change. Their vision was too restricted, 

 too prejudiced, too jaundiced. And moderns who, misled by them, 

 could assert that by 1607 "in the greater part of England the 

 inevitable change (from arable to pasture) had been already accom- 

 plished," l must not only be unmindful of the social pessimism and 

 the habit of loose statement common at the time, but must close 

 their eyes to such facts as the comparatively steady range of grain 

 prices during the century and the existence much later of great 

 areas of still uninclosed open field. The dispeopling of the 

 countryside by covetous inclosers was one of the great bugbears 

 of the period ; but, apart from the indirect evidence of grain 

 prices and eighteenth-century agricultural surveys, an examination 

 of the contemporary inquisitions of depopulation tends to divest 

 this specter of its terrifying proportions. 



If we are to sum up the broader conclusions of such an exam- 

 ination, this shrinkage which it necessitates in the estimate of 

 magnitude of the inclosure movement would be the first thing to 

 be noted. An agricultural change affecting 2.76 per cent, or even 

 5 per cent, of the total land area of twenty-four counties in a 

 century and a half is surely nothing very alarming. The gradual 

 displacing of the agricultural population from their customary 

 employment at the rate of 7000, or even 10,000, every thirty 

 years, would doubtless cause a certain distress in a body politic 

 of England's dimensions in the sixteenth century. With the 

 ignorance and hidebound conservatism of the English peasant, 

 such a change would be more bitterly resented, the ill effects of 

 such an uprooting more pronounced, than a similar social adjust- 

 ment in the much more fluid industrial population of to-day. Yet 

 the friction from inclosures, though thus relatively great, seems, 

 nevertheless, in .reality to have been confined to a comparatively 

 small section of the people, and the shifting of population to have 

 gone on gradually through successive generations. It might be 

 urged that, in so far as it was effective, this mobilizing of the 

 population, though its beginnings at the time would be felt as a 

 social evil, was actually a national blessing in disguise, a nec- 

 essary first step towards England's later industrial supremacy. 



1 S. R. Gardiner, History of England, edition of 1893, Vol. I, pp. 354, 355. 



