62 FARMING FOR PROFIT 



popular preachers like Tyndale, Becon, and Latimer, in the para- 

 phlets of such writers as Simon Fish, Henry Brinklow, or Philip 

 Stubbes, or in the rhymes of versifiers hke " Sir " Wilham Forrest, 

 Robert Crowley, and Thomas Bastard, or in such anonymous 

 ballads as " Nowe-a-dayes " : ^ 



" The townes go down, the land decayes ; 

 Off comefeyldes, playne layes (grass-land) ; 

 Gret men makithe now a dayes 

 A shepecott in the church. 



Commons to close and kepe ; 

 Poor folk for bred to cry and wepe ; 

 Towns pulled downe to pastur shape ; 

 This ys the new gyse !" 



Throughout the burden is the same — enclosure of commons, con- 

 version of plough-land into pasture, sheep-farming, excessive rents, 

 exorbitant fines, consoHdation of small holdings into large farms, 

 decay of houses and farm -buildings, formation of deer-parks, and, 

 more rarely, enclosure of open-field arable farms. Here are to be 

 found fierce denunciations of the " caterpillars of the common- 

 weal," 2 who " join lordship to lordship, manor to manor, farm to 

 farm, land to land, pasture to pasture," and gather many thousands 

 of acres of ground " together within one pale or hedge " ; or of the 

 unchristian landlords, who " rack and stretch out the rents of 

 their lands," taking " unreasonable fines," " setting their pore 

 tenants so straitely uppon the tenter hookes as no man can lyve 

 on them " ; ^ or of the insatiable " cormorants " who " let two or 

 three tenantries unto one man," " take in their commons " till not 

 so much as a garden ground is safe, and make " parks or pastures 

 of whole parishes " ; ^ or of the " unreasonable covitous persones 

 whiche doth encroche daily many ffermes more than they can be 

 able to occupye or mainteyne with tilth for corne as hath been used 

 in tymes past, forasmoche as divers of them hath obteyned and 

 encroched into their handes, X, XII, XIV, or XVI fermes in oon 

 mannes hand attons " ;^ or of the " ambicious suttletie " of those 



1 " Nowe-a-dayes," Ballads from MSS., ed. F. J. Furnivall (Publications of 

 the Ballad Society, vol. i. p. 97, 1868). 



^ Thomas Becon, Jewel of Joy (Parker Society, Becon s Works, p. 432). 



'Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (1583), (New Shakespeare Society, 

 p. 116). 



* WilUam Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises (Parker Society, p. 201). 



^ Petition to Henry VIII., quoted in Ballads from MSS., vol. i. p. 101. 



