18 FAEMING FOE PEOFIT 



confused did the two portions become that on the estates 

 of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's three acres could 

 not be found by the land registrars. For this reason 

 Fitzherbert, in his ' Book of Surveying,' impresses on the 

 surveyor the need of accuracy, lest ' any parcell be loste, 

 or imbeselde, or encroached by one from the other.' But 

 between 1450 and 1560 an agricultural revolution was 

 accomplished, which may be briefly described as a change 

 from self-sufficing to profit-gaining agriculture, from com- 

 mon to individual ownership. 



The first steps in this change were taken when lords of 

 manors enclosed their wastes, or withdrew their demesne 

 lands from the agrarian partnership, or when the partners 

 of village communities agreed among themselves to extin- 

 guish their own common rights over the arable fields. On 

 most manors three distinct rights of common pasture were 

 enjoyed. ' There is commonly,' says Fitzherbert, ' a com- 

 mon close taken in out of the common fields by tenants of 

 the same towne, in which close every man is stinted and 

 set to a certaintie how many beasts he shall have in the 

 same.' This enclosure of land that it might be common 

 belongs to a later date, and is comparatively unimportant. 

 Secondly, common rights were exercised over the lord's 

 wastes, outwoods, moors, and heaths, ' which were never 

 arable land,' and the soil of which was vested in the lord 

 of the manor. Thirdly, rights of common were enjoyed 

 over the land that laj^ fallow in rotation and over the com- 

 mon arable lands from harvest to seed-time, ' the plain 

 champaign countrie,' to quote the words of Fitzherbert, 

 ' where their cattle lie daily before the herdsmen.' 



These are the rights of ' parcours ' and ' vaine pature,' 

 which, in France, remained for centuries insuperable obsta- 

 cles to agricultural progress. Upon the second and third 



