ENCLOSURE 8i 



who evicted the tenants and lived on the profits of sheep farm- 

 ing.^ For the dissolution of the monasteries was now taking 

 place,'* and the best landowners in England, some of whom 

 farmed their own land long after most of the lay landlords had 

 given it up or turned it into grass, and whose lands are said to 

 have fetched a higher rent than any others, were robbed and 

 ruined. Including the dissolution of the monasteries and the 

 confiscation of the chantry lands in 1549 by Edward VI, about 

 one-fifteenth of the land of England changed hands at this time. 

 The transfer of the abbey lands to Henry's favourites was 

 very prejudicial to farming ; it was a source of serious disloca- 

 tion of agricultural industry, marked by all the inconvenience, 

 injustice, and loss that attends a violent transfer of property. 

 It is probable also that many of the monastic lands were let 

 on stock and land leases ; and the stock was confiscated, with 

 inevitable ruin to the tenant as well as the landlord.^ And 

 not only was a serious injury wrought to agriculture by the 

 spoliation of a large number of landlords generally noted for 

 their generosity and good farming, but with the religious 

 houses disappeared a large number of consumers of country 

 produce, the amount of which may be gathered from the 

 following list of stores of the great Abbey of Fountains at the 

 dissolution: 2,356 horned cattle, 1,326 sheep, 86 horses, 

 79 swine, and large quantities of wheat, oats, rye, and malt, 

 with 392 loads of hay.* It must indeed have seemed to many 

 as if the poor farmer was never to have any rest ; no sooner 

 were the long wars over and pestilences in some sense dimin- 

 ished, than the evils of enclosure and the dissolution of the 

 monasteries came upon him. Many ills were popularly 

 ascribed to the fall of the monasteries ; in an old ballad in 

 Percy's Reliques one of the characters says, in western 

 dialect : — 



^ Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, i. 489. 



* Dissolution of small monasteries, 1536; of greater, 1539-40. 

 ' Thorold Rogers, History 0/ Agriculture and Prices, iv. 129. 



* Dugdale, Monasticon, v. 291. 



