22 THE ENCLOSURES IN ENGLAND • [lyg 



petition for holdings was no temporary thing, due to the 

 high mortahty of the years 1348- 13 50, but was chronic, and 

 was based upon the worthlessness of the land. The vacant 

 tenements of the fourteenth century, the reduction in the 

 area of demesne land planted, the complaints that no profit 

 could be made from tillage, the reduction of rents on account 

 of the poverty of whole villages, all point in the same direc- 

 tion. These matters will be taken up more fully in a later 

 chapter. Here it need only be pointed out that the with- 

 drawal of land from cultivation was under way because 

 tillage was unprofitable. 



If tillage was unprofitable in the fourteenth century, so 

 unprofitable that heirs were anxious to buy themselves free 

 of the obligation to enter upon their inheritance, while estab- 

 lished landholders deserted their tenements, the enclosure of 

 arable land for pasture in the fifteenth century is seen in a 

 new light. When there was no question of desiring the land 

 for sheep pasture, it was voluntarily abandoned by cultiva- 

 tors. Displacement of tillage due to an internal cause pre-^ 

 cedes displacement of tillage for sheep pasture. The pro- 

 cess of withdrawing land from cultivation began independ- 

 ently of the scarcity of labor caused by the Black Death and 

 independently of any change in the price of wool ; the con- 

 tinuation of this process in the fifteenth century is not likely 

 to depend entirely upon a rise in the price of wool. That 

 the enclosures of the fifteenth century were in reality merely 

 a further step in the readjustments under way in the four-^ 

 teenth century cannot be doubted. And that the whole pro- 

 cess was independent of the especial external influence upon 

 agriculture exerted in the fourteenth century by the Black 

 Death and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the 

 growth of the woollen industry is shown in the case of a 

 group of manors where the essential features of the enclosure 

 movement appeared in the thirteenth century. More than 



