1^9] THE PRICE OF WOOL 23 



a hundred years before the Black Death the Lord of Berkeley 

 found it impossible to obtain tenants for bond land at the '^ 

 accustomed rents. Villains were giving up their holdings j 

 because they could not pay the rent and perform the ser- j 

 vices. The land which had in earlier times been sufficient 

 for the maintenance of a villain and his family and had 

 produced a surplus for rent had lost its fertility, and the 

 holdings fell vacant. The land which reverted to the lord 

 on this account was split up and leased at nominal rents, 

 when leaseholders could be found, just as so much land 

 was leased at reduced rents by landowners generally in the 

 fourteenth century. Moreover, some of the land was imfit 

 for cultivation at all and was converted to pasture under 

 the direction of the lord.^ 



If the disintegration of manorial organization observed 

 in the fourteenth century and earlier was not due to the 

 Black Death; if this disintegration was under way before 

 the pestilence reduced the population, and was not checked 

 when the ravages of the plague had been made good: if till- 

 age was already unprofitable before the fifteenth century with 

 its growth of the woollen industry; and if land was being 

 converted to pasture at a time when neither the price of 

 wool nor the Black Death can be offered as the explanation 

 of this conversion; then there is suggested the possibility 

 that the whole enclosure movement can be sufficiently ac- 

 counted for without especial reference to the prices of wool 

 and grain. If the enclosure movement began before the 

 fifteenth century and originated in causes other than the 

 Black Death, the discovery of these original causes may 

 also furnish the explanation of the continuance of the move- 

 ment in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The amount , 

 of land under cultivation was being reduced before the date 



1 Smyth, Lives of the Berkeleys (Gloucester, 1883), vol. i, pp. 1 13-160. 



