Beginning of Modern Farming 45 



to increase production. This reason operated whatever system 

 of farming men wished to pursue. 



There was a special stimulus towards this course in the great 

 and steady growth of the wool trade and in the large profits 

 which it offered to growers of wool. As early as 1193 the ransom 

 of Richard I was paid largely out of money got from wool. 

 A century later Edward I developed a habit of seizing wool from 

 the merchants when he wanted money to pay for his wars. In 

 1337 Parliament gave Edward III a subsidy for the French war 

 by allowing him to act as a wool broker, and buy and sell 20,000 

 sacks of wool. The farmers got .3 a sack, the king got 10, 

 while the merchants could get 20 in the markets of Brabant. 

 Not only was the raw wool sought after by the Flemings in 

 Brabant, and by the Italians in Lombardy, Englishmen them- 

 selves became manufacturers on a large scale. Norfolk, Suffolk, 

 Wiltshire, and other counties in the south became centres of the 

 textile industry, and the competition of home and foreign buyers 

 made wool the most profitable article grown by farmers in the 

 sixteenth century. There was also a large trade in leather and 

 undressed skins, and this helped to increase the demand for 

 grazing farms on which these things could be produced. 



Besides the profits from wool the difficulty with labour and 

 wages turned the landlords and farmers towards grazing. The 

 experience they had gained in the methods of enclosure on a 

 small scale during many generations made them ready to adopt 

 it on a large scale, and a movement swept over a great part of 

 the country which wiped out the open, arable fields and cast 

 adrift the population which had lived by their cultivation. Few 

 movements have produced so great an outcry while they were 

 proceeding, or have left such a legacy of controversy to posterity. 

 There were protests or criticism of an extreme kind from men 

 like Sir Thomas More and Hugh Latimer, of a moderate and 

 restrained character from Francis Bacon, Robert Cecil, and in 



