INCLOSURES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 177 



The Tillage Act of 1555 recognized that certain parts of England 

 were not affected in such a manner as to require legislative inter- 

 ference. Elizabeth's Act of 1597, with more precision, named 

 these comparatively untouched counties as lying in the north- 

 west, east, and south. John Hales, about 1549, laid the scene of 

 his dialogue at Coventry, in the center of England ; ^ and a cen- 

 tury later Halhead wrote against the same depopulating inclosures 

 for sheep-farming from the same county of Warwickshire.'^ Practi- 

 cally all the contemporary indications and the list of references 

 could easily be extended point in the same direction, to the 

 Midland district. 



1 A. Hasbach, Die englischen Landarbeiter und die Einhegungen, 1894, p. 20. 



2 Inclosure cases under Act 5 Eliz. c. 2 (Exch. Mem., King's Remembrancer) : 



* Northamptonshire, 34 places and 40.25 per cent of the total acreage. 



8 J. Rossi, Historia Regtim Angliae, ed. 1745. He names (pp. 122-124) some 

 fifty-four places which within a circuit of thirteen miles about Warwick had 

 been wholly or partially depopulated before about i486. He seems (p. 116) 

 to be aware that the movement is confined " in umbelico regni." The letter 

 of the Vicar of Quinton to President Mayhew of Magdalen College is printed 

 in abstract in Hist. MSS. Com., 1881, Vol. VIII, Pt I, p. 263, and in full in 

 W. Denton's "England in the Fifteenth Century," 1888, pp. 318-320. 



* Armstrong, Treatise concerning the Staple, ed. Pauli, p. 26. 



5 " Certayne Causes, 1 550-1 553," in " Four Supplications," E. E. T. S. : E. S. 

 Vol. XIII, p. 96. 



* [John Hales] Discourse of the Common Weal, ed. Elizabeth Lamond, 

 1893. P- IS- 



^ Henry Halhead, Inclosure Thrown Open, 1650. 



