82 ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 



The XVth century had brought from the towns 

 to the country a large number of new landlords, en- 

 riched lawyers and merchants. This influx continued 

 and increased, especially in the later years of the 

 century, when these men were better able 

 interests to secure land, since the law of entail had, 



and sheep by a w a i decision known as Taltarum's 

 farming 



case, 1 been so broken down that the land- 

 holders of the old families were more easily able to sell 

 their estates. There was also, at that time, (an increas- 

 ing number of big sheep farmers of the true agricul- 

 tural class!\ All these men made common cause with 

 the more enterprising lords of the manors to develop 

 the land on new money-making lines. It was this that 

 turned the tide against the peasantry towards the end 

 of the XVth century. The fact is that the demand for 

 English wool was increasing and, as a result, profits 

 from sheep walks must have been high. The bigger 

 men seem to have been determined to take advantage of 

 this position. To such men, the old-fashioned farmer 

 with his strips in the open arable fields, his common rights 

 and the manorial customs for which he stood, under 

 which the lord and the great landholders were limited 

 in the number of sheep that they could turn on to the 

 common, must have seemed an intolerable obstacle to 

 progress. So not only were the down and other lands 

 suitable to sheep farming appropriated and stocked with 

 large flocks, but, as Sir Thomas More, writing in 1515, 

 says : " The farmers were got rid of by force or fraud, 

 or tired out with repeated wrongs into parting with 

 their property." As a result, the ploughman was 

 replaced by the shepherd in many districts in England, 

 and the peasants were often cleared completely off the 

 1 Taltarum's case was decided in the year 1473. 



