72 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



business, is somewhat exaggerated. No doubt, the mass of 

 Englishmen, as in the civil war of the seventeenth century, 

 preferred to ' sit still ', as Clarendon said, but the business of 

 many must have been very much upset. The various armies 

 were compelled to obtain their supplies from the country, and 

 with the lawless habits of the times plundered friend and foe 

 alike, as Cavalier and Roundhead did afterwards ; and many 

 a farmer must have seen all his stock driven off and his grain 

 seized to feed the combatants. For instance, it was 

 said before the battle called Easter Day Field that all the 

 tenants of Abbot's Ripton in Huntingdonshire were copy- 

 holders of the Abbot of Ramsey, and the northern army lay 

 there so long that they impoverished the country and the 

 tenants had to give up their copyholds through poverty. 1 

 The loss of life, too, must have told heavily on a country 

 already suffering from frequent pestilence. It is calculated 

 that about one-tenth of the whole population of the country 

 were killed in battle or died of wounds and disease during the 

 war ; and as these must have been nearly all men in the prime 

 of life, it is difficult to understand how the effect on the labour 

 market was not more marked. The enclosing of land for 

 pasture farms, which we shall next have to consider, was pro- 

 bably in many cases an absolute necessity, for the number of 

 men left to till the soil must have been seriously diminished. 



1 Cunningham, op. cit. i. 456. 



