36 THE ENCLOSURES IN ENGLAND [192 



were laid to grass. ^ In 1630 the Countess of Westmore- 

 land enclosed and converted arable, but tilled other land in- 

 stead.^ The enclosure movement, then, did not end at the 

 time when it is usually thought to have ended. Since it is 

 difficult to suppose that the price of wool could have been ad- 

 vancing constantly throughout two centuries, without caus- 

 ing such a readjustment in the use of land that no further 

 withdrawal of land from tillage for pasture would be neces- 

 sary, the continuance of the conversion of arable to pasture 

 in the seventeenth century throws suspicion upon the whole 

 explanation of the enclosure movement as due to the in- 

 creased demand for wool. 



Miss Leonard, indeed, advances the hypothesis that the 

 price of wool ceased to be the cause of enclosure during the 

 seventeenth century, but that other price changes had the 

 same effect : 



The increase in pasture in the sixteenth century was rendere4 

 profitable by the rapid increase in the price of wool, but, in the 

 seventeenth century, this cause ceases to operate. The change 

 to pasture, however, continued, partly owing to a great rise in 

 the price of cattle, and partly because the increase in wages' 

 made it less profitable to employ the greater number of men 

 necessary for tilling the fields.^ 



The assumption that wages and the price of cattle advanced 

 sufficiently in the seventeenth century to account for the 

 change to pasture are no better justified than the assumption 

 of the rapid rise in the price of wool in the sixteenth century. 

 If the price of meat and dairy products rose in the seven- 

 teenth century, so did the price of grain and other foods. 



^Tawney, Agrarian Probkm in the Sixteenth Cen. (London, 1912), 

 P- 391. 

 2 Royal Hist. Soc. Trans. (1905), vol. xix, note i, p. 113. 

 ^ Ibid., pp. 116-117. 



