57 



farmers reversed the process ; they valued sheep for their mutton 

 instead of their fleeces, and concentrated their energies on the 

 production of bread and meat for the teeming populations of 

 manufacturing cities. Dearth of bread was in Tudor times the 

 most effective cry against enclosures ; under George III. it was 

 the unanswerable plea for their extension. At the opening of the 

 sixteenth century, enclosure did not always mean improved farm- 

 ing ; the conversion of arable land into inferior sheep-walk was 

 rather retrogression than progress. At the close of the eighteenth 

 century, it at least meant the opportunity for advance and for the 

 introduction of better practices. To some extent, indeed, the 

 different developments of the two movements measure the improve- 

 ments in the methods and the increase in the resources of Hanoverian 

 farmers. The Tudor husbandman might devote himself exclusively 

 to the one or the other of the two branches of farming ; but he had 

 not mastered the secret of their union. If he changed from tillage 

 to pasture, he did so completely. He could not, like his successor, 

 combine the two, and by the introduction of new crops, at once 

 grow more corn and carry more stock. 



Agriculturally, the period which opens with the Battle of Bos- 

 worth and ends with the early years of Elizabeth is one of transition 

 towards the modern spirit and forms of land cultivation. Like all 

 transition periods, it is full of suffering for those who were least 

 able to adapt themselves to altered conditions. The ruin of noble 

 families by the Wars of the Roses, the lavish expenditure which 

 Henry VIII. made fashionable, the rise in prices, and the difficulty 

 of raising rents, compelled many " unthrifty gentlemen " to sell 

 their estates. The break-up of landed properties and their passage 

 into new hands favoured the introduction of the commercial impulse. 

 The landholders whose " unreasonable covetousness " is most 

 loudly condemned were mainly speculators in land, men who had 

 made money in business, had capital to invest, could afford the 

 expense of enclosures, and were determined to make their estates 

 pay. Such were " the Merchant Adventurers, Clothmakers, Gold- 

 smiths, Butchers, Tanners, and other Artificers," 1 " the merchants 

 of London" who "bie fermes out of the handes of worshypfull gentle- 

 men, honeste yeomen, and pore laborynge husbandes." 2 Translated 



Petition to Henry VIII. (1514), quoted by F. J. Furnivall in Ballad* 

 from MSS., p. 101 (Publications of the Ballad Society, vol. i.). 

 8 Thomas Lever's Sermons (1550) ; Arber's Reprints, p. 29. 



