42 THE ENCLOSURES IN ENGLAND [198 



aliquando seminatur, aliqiuindo iacet ad pasturam." ^ The 

 motives of this ahernating use of the land would be clear 

 enough, even though they were not explicitly stated by con- 

 temporaries; Q arable land which would produce only scant 

 crops unless heavily manured made good pasture, and after 

 a longer or shorter period under grass, was so improved by 

 the manure of the sheep pasturing on it and by the heavy 

 sod which formed that it could be tilled profitably, and was 

 therefore restored to tillaggl 



The fact of two opposite but simultaneous conversion 

 movements is unaccountable under the accepted hypothesis 

 of the causes of the enclosure movement, which turns upon 

 assumptions as to the relative prices of grain and wool 

 or cattle or wages. The authorities for this theory have 

 necessarily neglected the evidence that pasture land was con- 

 verted to arable in the sixteenth century and that arable land 

 was converted to pasture in the seventeenth, and have separ- 

 ated in time two tendencies which were simultaneous. They 

 have described the increase in pasturage at the expense of 

 arable in the early period, and the increase of arable at the 

 expense of pasture in the later period, and have explained 

 a difference between the two periods which did not exist by 

 a change in the ratio between the prices of wool and grain 

 for which no proof is given. 



It has been shown in this chapter that the conversion of 

 arable to pasture in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 

 cannot have been caused by increased demand for wool, since 

 the price of wool relatively to that of grain fell, and the ex- 

 tension of tillage rather than of pasture would have taken 

 place had price movements been the chief factor influencing 

 the conversion of land from one use to the other. It has 



1 Tawney, op. cit., p. 220, note i. 

 ^ Infra, p. 78, 81, 98-9. 



