SHEEP-FARMING 59 



found it useful to ally agrarian discontent with religious reaction, 

 and men like Protector Somerset thought it politic to attribute 

 anti-Protestant risings entirely to agricultural causes. 



There was no novelty in the withdrawal of demesne lands from 

 the open-field farm and their partition into individual occupations ; 

 or in fencing off portions of the home-farm and of the reclaimed 

 " assart " lands as separate plots ; or in the appropriation of parts 

 of the commonable waste for private use ; or hi the encouragement 

 given to partners in the village association to throw their scattered 

 strips together into one compact holding. Each of these processes 

 had been for many years in progress ; each had necessitated 

 enclosures ; none had required the decay of farm-houses and 

 cottages, loss of employment, eviction of tenants, or rural depopula- 

 tion. But from the Tudor enclosing movement these consequences 

 did necessarily result, because its objects were the promotion of 

 sheep-farming, the conversion of tillage into pasture, the con- 

 solidation and enlargement of grass holdings. If farmers had not 

 yet at their disposal the means of realising the full truth of the 

 maxim that " the foot of the sheep turns sand into gold," the new 

 commercial aristocracy were quick to see that money was to be 

 made, or at least to be saved, by the growth of wool. It is true 

 that down to 1540 the prices of wool remained low ; but some at 

 least of the grass was taken up by the graziers, and the saving in 

 labour effected by pasture farming was great. Sheep could not be 

 herded with success on open commons, still less on the arable lands 

 of village farms, and small holdings were incompatible with large 

 flocks. It was these new elements which upset the calculations of 

 agriculturists like Fitzherbert (1523), or Cardinal Pole l in Starkey's 

 Dialogue (1536), or Tusser (1557), or Standish (1611), who hoped 

 that the economic advantages of enclosure might be secured without 

 the social loss which the conversion of large tracts of arable land 

 into wide pasture farms inflicted on the rural population. 



If evidence which is rarely impartial may be implicitly trusted, 

 considerable tracts of cultivated land were converted into wilder- 

 nesses, traversed only by shepherds and their dogs ; roofless 

 granges and half -ruined churches alone marked the sites of former 

 hamlets ; the " deserted village " was a reality of the sixteenth 



1 In the Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Pole defends 

 enclosures for pasture on the plea that cattle, as well as corn, were necessary 

 for human food (England in the Reign of Henry VIII., ed. J. M. Cowper, 

 E.E.T.S., extra series xxxii. 1878). 



