INCLOSURES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 175 



And it might be argued that the social effects of the exchange in 

 some districts of grain for grass were to a certain extent offset by 

 the quiet growth during the century of that movement towards 

 the reclamation for arable of waste land, which became more 

 marked in the two following centuries. But it is not difficult to 

 realize how this tradition-defying change would lend itself to 

 exaggeration in the imagination of the time. The eviction of 

 husbandmen with their families, 



The forlorne father hanging downe his head, 

 His outcast company drawne up and downe,^ 



the sight of the deserted homes and ruined churches,'^ perhaps as 

 much as anything the tales of misery, losing nothing in repetition, 

 which were spread abroad by the beggars swarming over the 

 country and representing themselves, as they doubtless sometimes 

 were, as the victims of landlord oppression,^ all this would be 

 magnified into a menacing social evil, a national calamity respon- 

 sible for dearth and distress, and calling for drastic legislative 

 remedy. But, freed from contemporary hysterics, the specific 

 inclosure movement of the period reveals itself as one of com- 

 paratively small beginnings, gradually gaining force through the 

 sixteenth century and continuing with probably little check 

 throughout the seventeenth century, until it was' absorbed in the 

 wider inclosure activity of the eighteenth century. If the general 

 breaking up of the old three-field husbandry by this inclosure is to 

 be called an "agrarian revolution," it was one which spread over 

 three centuries of slow development, and found its real climax 



^ Thomas Bastard, Chrestoleros, 1 598, lib. iii, epig. 22, ed. Grosart, 1880. 

 2 Joseph Hall, Virgedemiarum, ed. 1825, lib. v, sat. i. 



Would it not vexe thee where thy syres did keepe, 

 To see the dunged foldes of dag-tayled sheepe, 

 And ruined house where holy things were said. 



^ " Question many of our Beggers, that goe from dore to dore, with wife and 

 children after them, where they dwell, and why they go begging. Alas master 

 (say they) we were forced out of such a town when it was inclosed, and since 

 we have continued a generation of Beggers " (John Moore, " The Crying Sin of 

 England," 1653, p. 8). An answer to Moore pertinently suggests: "Whether 

 all they tell him in that kind to be true, or no, hee maye doe well to enquire, 

 and not take it upon trust." "Considerations concerning Common Fields," 

 1654, p. 17. 



