253] ENCLOSURE FOR SHEEP PASTURE 97. 



closure were serious, but they are not seen in their proper 

 perspective when one imagines the condition of the evicted 

 tenants to have been fairly good before they were dispos- 

 sessed. The cause lying back of the enclosure movement 

 was bringing about the gradual sinking of family after ; 

 family, even when no evictions were made. (To attribute j 

 the poverty and misery of the rural population to the en- j 

 closure movement is to overlook the unhappy condition of ! 

 the peasants, even where no enclosures had been made) En- 

 closures had been forbidden in the fields of royal manors 

 in Northamptonshire, but this did not protect the peasantry 

 from destitution. The manor of Grafton, for instance, was 

 surveyed in 1526 and a note was made at the end of the 

 survey that the revenue drawn from the lordship had lately 

 been increased, but " there can no ferther enprovementei 

 there be made and to kepe the tenantries standyng. Item 

 the tenauntriez there be in sore decaye." The surveyor of 

 Hartwell also notes that the " tenements there be in decay.'* ^ 

 The economic basis of the unfortunate social changes 

 which were associated with the process of enclosure came 

 gradually to be -recognized. It was evidently futile to en- \ 

 act laws requiring the cultivation of land " wasted and ' 

 worn with continual plowing and thereby made bare, barren 

 and very unfruitfull." * Merely restrictive and prohibitory 

 legislation was followed by the suggestion of constructive 

 measures. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, laws 

 were made in the attempt to put a stop to the conversion of 

 arable land to pasture under any conditions, and required 

 that land which had been under cultivation should be plowed 

 in the future. In the act of 1552, however, an attitude 

 somewhat more reasonable is to be seen. It was provided 



1 Lennard, Rural Northamptonshire, pp. 73-4. 



' The reason stated in the preamble of many of the Ehirham decrees 

 granting enclosure permits (Leonard, op. cit., p. 117). 



