ENCLOSURE 77 



depopulated ; many of the labourers were also thrown out of 

 employment, for there was no need in enclosed fields of the 

 swineherd and shepherd and oxherd who had tended the 

 common flocks of the villagers in the old unfenced fields. 

 But much of the opposition was founded on ignorance and^ 

 hatred of change ; England had been for ages mainly a corn- 

 growing land, and, many thought, ought to remain so. As a 

 matter of fact, what much of the arable land wanted was] 

 laying down to grass ; it was worn out and needed a rest. The l 

 common field system was wasteful ; the land, for instance, could 

 never be properly ploughed, for the long narrow strips could 

 not be cross-ploughed, and much of it must have suffered griev- 

 ously from want of manure at a time when hardly any stock 

 was kept in the winter to make manure. The beneficial effect 

 of the rest is shown by the fact that at the end of the sixteenth 

 century, when some of the land came to be broken up, the 

 produce per acre of wheat had gone up largely. 1 Marling and 

 liming the land, too, which had been the salvation of much of 

 it for centuries, had gone out partly because of insecurity of 

 tenure, partly because in the unsettled state of England men 

 knew not if they could reap any benefit therefrom ; and partly 

 because, says Fitzherbert, men were lazier than their fathers. 

 There can be no doubt that enclosures were often accompanied \ 

 with great hardships and injustice. Dugdale, speaking of 

 Stretton in Warwickshire. 2 says that in Henry VII's time 

 Thomas Twyford, having begun the depopulation thereof, de- 

 caying four messuages and three cottages whereunto 1 60 acres 

 of ' errable ' land belonged, sold it to Henry Smith ; which 

 Henry, following that example, enclosed 640 acres of land 

 more, whereby twelve messuages and four cottages fell to 

 ruins and eighty persons there inhabiting, being employed 

 about tillage and husbandry, were constrained to depart thence 

 and live miserably. By means whereof the church grew to 



1 Gisborne, Agricultural Essays, pp. 1 86-9. 



2 Antiquities of Warwickshire, 2nd ed., p. 51. 



