INCLOSURES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 165 



and the date of such offense, the acreage of the land affected, 

 and other details, such as the number of persons evicted and the 

 number of plows laid down, which did not fall strictly within 

 the scope of their inquiry. The intention was to gather the 

 information necessary for prosecution under the Husbandry Act 

 of 1490 (4 Henry VH. C. 19) and the subsequent similar statutes ; 

 and while at times, notably in the case of large and heinous 

 inclosures, more detail is given than the law required, as a rule 

 less is given than the modern student of Tudor social history 

 would desire, sometimes, it must be added, too little for the legal 

 purposes of statutes which even contemporary lawyers found 

 obscure and labyrinthine. Recourse must be had, therefore, to 

 interpretation and inference. A considerable number of the 

 entries, for instance, present simply the decay of a house .of 

 husbandry possessing twenty or more acres of land, the specific 

 offence under the Act of 1490, no mention being made of an 

 inclosure or of conversion to pasture. But there can be little 

 doubt, both from the words of the statutes, from the evidence of 

 subsequent legal proceedings initiated under these presentments, 

 and from contemporary complaint that this destruction of farm- 

 houses, as a rule, tacitly implied an accompanying inclosure of the 

 farmhold for grazing purposes. It would probably, however, be 

 too sweeping an inference to treat all such entries as cases of 

 inclosure and conversion. A certain limited proportion of the 

 presentments are doubtless to be taken as meaning what they say 

 with no further implication, simply that a farmhouse has been 

 emptied of its husbandmen, and the land usually held with it has 

 been " severed" from its house, a word usual in the inquisition 

 of 1607, and consolidated with other holdings in the unchanged 

 open fields. But the combined process, the emptying the house 

 of its farming tenants, the consolidation and hedging in severalty 

 of its appurtenant acres, and the laying down of this land to grass, 

 was no doubt the "decay" aimed at by popular outcry and 

 legislative action. Interpretation of the inquisitions in this sense 

 seems, therefore, in the main justifiable. Yet it is not only 

 conceivably possible, but probable, that the different steps in this 

 process were occasionally separated in practice. As has just been 



