vi PREFACE 



Mr. Montague Fordham sympathetically weaves his 

 historical narrative. He pictures for us first the 

 ancient self-governing village communities with their 

 carefully partitioned open arable fields, their moots, 

 their reeves and their haywards ; then the feudal 

 conditions of Norman times, based upon military 

 organization, with their manors, demesnes, incidents of 

 tenure and communal rights ; the restlessness and 

 misery of the XlVth century, with its Black Death 

 and Peasant Revolt ; the growing commercialism of the 

 XVth and succeeding centuries, with its concomitant 

 transition from customary tenants and bondsmen to 

 tenant farmers and labourers : the continuous policy 

 and process of enclosures, so fruitful in the economic 

 development of England's agriculture, so fateful to 

 the social development of England's peasantry ; the 

 growth of Puritanism in the XVIIth century and 

 with it the disappearance of seasonal merrymaking 

 and gaiety from the villages, and their replacement 

 by religious rivalry and discord ; the spread of sheep 

 farming for cloth manufacture in the XVth and XVIth 

 centuries, and that of more enlightened and economic 

 methods of arable cultivation in the XVIIth and 

 XVIIIth, the latter associated with the honoured 

 names of Jethro lull, " Turnip Townshend," Bakewell, 

 Colling, Arthur Young and " Coke of Norfolk," when 

 England was self-contained in the matter of her food 



