Estate Economy. 307 



of his foreign brothers, ralKed 1(j,00() men to armed resistance 

 under a similar pretext in England. Mixed up with these mun- 

 dane causes of insurrection was, in both cases, that of religious 

 grievance. Luther and other Protestants had succeeded in 

 freeing the popular conscience, and the Reformation had stirred 

 up a desire for liberty in things secular as well as sacred. The 

 result was that the German and English peasantry refused to 

 release the grasp they still retained on the soil unless at the 

 same time emancipated from seignorial jurisdiction. Both 

 risings proved abortive, probably because in each case the 

 leading agriculturalists of the villeinage had come to recognise 

 that the common field system was inimical to the interests of 

 good husbandry. The Norfolk labourers however, for at least 

 a century after, claimed the right to throw open all field gates 

 on Lammas day, and unless compensated in some other way, to 

 depasture their livestock on any or every enclosure in the town- 

 ship. But the pioneers of the movement in England recognised 

 that henceforth the old seignorial rights over the people had 

 become obsolete, and as soon as the enclosure system had begun 

 to replace the common field economy, men like Norden and 

 Hartlib set about picking holes in the seignorial economy 

 and thus helped forward for the final abolition of serfdom. 

 But at this early stage of the enclosure movement men were 

 content to confine the controversy to the best means of amelio- 

 rating husbandry. Fitzherbert, who wrote nearest to the times 

 of Ket's rebellion, sets himself to the task of replying to argu- 

 ments against the separate farming system. Besides the lower 

 grades of the villeinage, educated champions of the old economy, 

 like Spriggs, asserted that the enclosure would ruin tillage and 

 depopulate England. To such, Fitzherbert in answer asserts, 

 that "one several close" as he terms it, for the arable land, 

 another for his " leyse," a third for his portion of common 

 pasture, and a fourth for meadow, would enable a farmer to 

 treat his land more generously and use it all through the year 

 instead of at those short periods when it was not common 

 pasturage.^ Beasts that grew thin-haired and unhealthy in 



' I am speaking of the Lammas day arrangement already described in 

 a former chapter. 



