231] THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE OPEN FIELDS 75 



one should be willing to pay the accustomed services and 

 let the vacant lands at the best rents obtainable. Free- 

 holders, and villains whose land was but lightly burdened, 

 and those who by superior management had been able to 

 make both ends meet, were now able to increase their hold- 

 ings by adding a few acres of land which had been a part 

 of the demesne or of a vacated holding. The case of the 

 man at Sutton, who took up three virgates and a cotland, 

 has already been mentioned. Another case of " engrossing," 

 as it was called, dated from 1347- 1348 at Meon, where 

 John Blackman paid fines for one messuage with ten acres 

 of land, two other messuages with a virgate of land each, 

 one parcel of four acres, and another holding whose nature 

 is not specified.^ 



Legislators who observed this tendency issued edicts 

 against it. No attempt was made to discover the underlying 

 cause of which it was merely a symptom. The first agrarian 

 statutes were of a characteristically restrictive nature, and 

 no constructive policy was attempted by the government 

 until after a century of futile attempts to deal with the 

 separate evils of engrossing, enclosure, conversion to pas- 

 ture, destruction of houses and rural depopulation. The 

 first remedy these evils suggested was limitation of the 

 amount of land which one man should be allowed to hold.* 

 In 1489 the statutes begin to prohibit the occupation of 



1 Levett and Ballard, op. cit., p. 49, note. 



' A speech on enclosures commending bills proposed in 1597 contrasts 

 the constructive character of that legislation with the earlier laws: 

 " Where the gentleman that framed this bill hath dealt like a most skil- 

 ful chirugien, not clapping on a plaster to cover the sore that it spread 

 no further, but searching into the very depths of the wound that the 

 life and strength which hath so long been in decay by the wasting of 

 towns and countries may at length again be quickened and repaired.** 

 Bland, Brown & Tawney, Eng. Econ. History— Select Documents, pp. 

 271-272. 



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