8 AN AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



Henry VIII. forbade, for three years, the killing of calves 

 between January ist and May ist, because so many had 

 been killed by " covetous persons/' l But the economic 

 progress of English agriculture pursued its course, and 

 possibly might have pursued much the same course had 

 the Legislature left it alone. By the Black Death and 

 by recurrent pestilences, attended by bad seasons, the 

 manorial system, as a semi-servile, semi-communal 

 organisation for cultivating the land received its death- 

 blow, though it was, like Charles II., an unconscionably 

 long time a-dying, and its outward form was visible over 

 wide areas of the country until the completion of the 

 Inclosures, in the early part of last century. 



From the middle of the fourteenth to the latter part 

 of the sixteenth century were troublous times for the 

 countryside. In 1455 the thirty years' War of the Roses 

 began, and even allowing for the view that the bulk of 

 the people took no part in the fighting, it seems clear that 

 the ravages of the combatants, in the days when the 

 rule of war was to live on the country, must have ruined 

 many an agriculturist. It is said that a tenth of the 

 whole population were killed in battle or died of wounds 

 or disease during the war. Later, the dissolution of the 

 monasteries was a severe blow to agriculture, for, by 

 general consent, the monks were good landlords and 

 farmers. But the main cause of tribulation was the 

 wholesale inclosure and conversion of arable land to 

 grass. 



On the subject of inclosure there is a whole library 

 of literature most of it polemical. It is hardly necessary 

 to say that inclosure in the sense of apportioning the 

 land in compact holdings for exclusive occupation is 

 inevitable in all settled countries if agriculture is to be 

 pursued as a commercial undertaking. The old communal 

 cultivation was possible only to a self-contained com- 

 munity which mainly aimed at growing sufficient for its 

 1 Curtler, " Short History of English Agriculture," p. 86. 



