72 FARMING FOR PROFIT 



But, before the enclosure acts of the eighteenth century, it was a 

 slow and piecemeal process, by which the principal landlord, or 

 some freeholder who was a partner in the farm, gradually con- 

 solidated in his own hands the whole or a part of the commonable 

 cultivated land, enclosed it, and freed it from common rights. No 

 doubt the enclosure of uncultivated wastes injured the tenants 

 of village farms, because it restricted the area of rough pasture 

 grazed by their live-stock. Enclosures of this kind, carried out 

 without leaving a sufficiency of common pasture, were the chief 

 grievance of the peasantry in Kett's rebellion in Norfolk. In 

 this connection the re-enactment by Edward VI. of the statutes 

 of Merton and Westminster, 1 is significant. But the meaning is 

 obscure. It may have been intended to increase the amount of 

 tillage by bringing new land under the plough in exchange for that 

 which had been laid down to grass. Except through the attack 

 upon their pasture commons, it is reasonable to conclude that open- 

 field farmers escaped the storm of sixteenth century enclosures 

 more lightly than the less protected cultivators of demesnes and 

 " assart " lands. This seems to have been the case. Bitter com- 

 plaints were made against the enclosure of open-fields. But the 

 outcry was practically confined to the corn-growing counties of the 

 Midlands, which throughout the whole period were seething with 

 discontent and insurrection. Yet even here, with the exception of 

 Leicestershire, the enclosing movement cannot have, to any great 

 extent, succeeded, since these are the very counties which, in the 

 eighteenth century, still contained the largest proportion of " cham- 

 pion " or open land. 



Advanced free-traders might agree with Raleigh that England, 

 like Holland, could be wholly supplied with grain from abroad 

 without troubling the people with tillage. Others of a less theo- 

 retical turn of mind looked no further than the immediate distress 

 which the abandonment of tillage produced. If the enclosing 

 movement had been accompanied by a large extension of arable 

 farming, the market for agricultural labour might have been so 

 enlarged as substantially to relieve agrarian distress. But the 

 extension of pasture and the substitution of a shepherd and his 

 dog for the ploughmen and their teams only increased the scarcity 

 of employment. Tenant-farmers lost their leaseholds ; copy- 

 holders were dispossessed of their holdings ; squatters and cottagers, 

 1 3 and 4 Edward VI. c. 3. (See p. 38.) 



