38 THE ENCLOSURES IN ENGLAND [194 



usually stated that the withdrawal of land from cultivation 

 which took place in the fourteenth century was due to the 

 scarcity of labor caused by the Black Death. In the fifteenth 

 century population was reduced by the Wars of the Roses; 

 and throughout the period under consideration, agriculture 

 had to meet the competition of the growing town industries 

 for labor. Is it not possible that these influences caused an 

 exorbitant rise in wages which would alone account for the 

 substitution of sheep- farming for tillage? 



The obvious character of the enclosure movement makes it 

 impossible to accept this hypothesis. The conversion of 

 arable land to pasture was caused by no demand for higher] 

 wages, which made tillage unprofitable. The unemploy- 

 ment and pauperism caused by the enclosure of the open 

 fields are notorious, and it is to these features of the en- 

 closure movement that we owe the mass of literature on 

 the subject. Enclosures called forth a storm of protest, 

 because they took away the living of poor husbandry fami- 

 lies. The acute distress undergone by those who were 

 evicted from their holdings is sufficient indication of the 

 difficulty of finding employment, and it is impossible that 

 wages could remain at an exorbitant level when the en- 

 closure of the lands of one open-field township made enough 

 men homeless to supply any existing dearth of labor in all 

 of the surrounding villages. If agriculture was unprofitable," 

 it was not because laborers demanded excessive wages, but 

 because of the low productivity of the land. The signi- 

 ficance of contemporary complaints of high wages is missed 

 if they are interpreted as an indication of an exorbitant 

 increase in wages. The facts are, rather, that Jaml was so 

 unproductive that farmers could not afford to pay even a 

 low wage. 



If it were necessary to argue the point further, it could 

 be pointed out that wages even in industry were not subject 



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