34 THE ENCLOSURES IN ENGLAND [190 



dom of export, and partly because the home demand was in- 

 creasing on account of the growth of the population. 

 Graziers were as willing to convert pastures to corn-fields for 

 the sake of greater profits as their predecessors had been to 

 carry out the contrary process. The deciding factor in the 

 situation, according to the orthodox account, was the relative 

 price of wool and grain. When the price of wool rose more 

 rapidly than that of grain, arable land was enclosed and used 

 for grazing. When the price of grain rose more rapidly 

 than that of wool, pastures were plowed up and cultivated. 

 Up to this point, the account is consistent. If the price of 

 wool was rising more rapidly than that of grain during the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (in spite of the statistical 

 evidence to the contrary) it is reasonable that the dif- 

 ferential advantage in grazing should finally come to an 

 end when a new balance between tillage and grazing 

 was established. It is not even surprising that the con- 

 version of arable to pasture should have continued be- 

 yond the proper point, and that a contrary movement 

 should set in. Bacon, in 1592, remarked that men had 

 of late been enticed by the good yield of corn and the in- 

 creased freedom of export to '' break up more ground and 

 convert it to tillage than all the penal laws for that purpose 

 made and enacted could ever by compulsion effect," ^ In 

 1650 Lord Monson plowed up 100 acres of Grafton Park, 

 which had formerly been pasture, and there are many other 

 records showing a tendency to convert pasture to arable in 

 the seventeenth century.^ It is true that men were able to 

 make a profit from agriculture by. the end of the sixteenth 

 century. But there is one difficulty which has been over- 



^ Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern 

 Times, 1903, part i, p. loi. 



^I^ennard, Rural Northamptonshire (Oxford, 1916), p. 87. For 

 other examples, cf. infra, pp, 84, 99-101. 



