66 FARMING FOR PROFIT 



in tyllage, and than shall not the ryche man ouer-eate the poore 

 man with his cattell, and the fourth parte of haye and strawe shall 

 seme his cattell better in a pasture than foure tymes so muche 

 will dooe in a house, and less attendaunce, and better the cattell 

 shall lyke, and it is the chiefest sauegarde for corne bothe daye 

 and nyght that may be." To the same effect wrote Tusser in the 

 comparison between " champion " (or open-field) " and severall " 

 (or enclosed) in his Five Hundreth Good Pointes of Good Husbandrie 



(1573). 



" More profit is quieter found, 



(Where pastures in severall bee); 

 Of one seelie aker of ground 



Than champion maketh of three. 



The t'one is commended for grain, 



Yet bread made of beanes they doo eate ; 



The t'other for one loafe have twaine 

 Of mastlin, of rie, or of wheate." 



But the agriculturists did not anticipate that one shepherd, with 

 his dog, his crook, shears, and tar-box, might take the place of 

 many ploughmen. They had not reckoned on the strength of the 

 new commercial spirit, and of the impulse which it gave to large 

 grazing farms. The area of land actually returned as enclosed and 

 converted to pasture was relatively small. It has been calculated 

 that, during a period of nearly two centuries, that is, from 1455 

 to 1637, the total acreage enclosed and converted did not exceed 

 750,000 acres, and that the total number of persons thrown out of 

 work was not greater than 35,000.* At the present day, four 

 million acres of arable land may in fifteen years be converted into 

 pasture without calling the serious attention of a single statesman 



1 Mr. Gay's estimate of the total area affected between the years 1455 and 

 1607 is 516,673 acres (" Inclosures in England " in Quarterly Journal of 

 Economics, vol. xvii. pp. 576-97). He admits that this is probably an under- 

 estimate. The figure given in the text is the calculation made by the Rev. 

 A. H. Johnson in The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (1909), pp. 48, 58. 



On the other hand, a contemporary writer (Certayne causes gathered 

 together, Four Supplications, E.E.T.S. extra series xiii.,pp. 101-2) estimates that 

 at that time (1551) 50,000 ploughs had been put down, and that each plough 

 not only maintained six persons, but provided food in addition for 7| persons. 

 In other words, upwards of 650,000 persons lost their means of support. This 

 is an obvious exaggeration. 



More than two-thirds of the area affected lay in the Midland counties 

 (" in umbelico regni," as Rous writes), and especially in Northamptonshire, 

 Oxfordshire, Bucks, Warwick, Berkshire, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, and 

 Huntingdonshire. The northern and southern counties were almost untouched. 

 In the west, Gloucestershire, and in the east, Norfolk, were the only districts 

 seriously affected. 



