44 Beginning of Modern Farming 



hostile attack. As soon as the danger of invasion became less men 

 began to live more for other objects. The chief of these was the 

 increase of their wealth. This work of adding to their possessions 

 was so different from that of defending them that it required an 

 entirely different form of organization. Experience had proved that 

 the safety of life and property could best be secured by a highly 

 organized, communal effort. The manor, like every part of a 

 military organization, was communal and bureaucratic. In making 

 fortunes for themselves men discovered that the best and easiest 

 method was as far as possible to follow their own private courses. 



For farmers the aim was to increase their crops of corn, their 

 flocks and herds, and the first step towards this was to obtain not 

 only more land but more complete control over it. From early 

 times they had busied themselves in attempts to accomplish this. 

 Magna Carta, as it was revised in 1217, had a provision against 

 the indiscriminate sale of land by one freeholder to another, in 

 order that the services or dues payable from it might not be 

 lost. The Statute of Merton in 1236 provided that lords of 

 manors might enclose portions of the common pastures or wastes, 

 so long as they left sufficient pasture along with ' free and 

 sufficient entry and issue ' to the freeholders. This legislation shows 

 that enclosures and consolidation of holdings were taking place. 



The movement away from the manorial system, from the strip 

 holdings cultivated in common, became more rapid as time 

 went on, and towards the end of the fifteenth century and during 

 the whole of the sixteenth, it was great enough to cause the 

 Government very serious trouble. It took several forms. Free- 

 holders and villains bought and exchanged strips so that they 

 might regroup them in compact blocks which they could work 

 individually with their own teams. In many places they enlarged 

 these blocks by breaking in and adding to them portions of the 

 common pasture. A constant incentive to this process of enclosure 

 and consolidation was the desire to render cultivation easier and 



