150 Rents, Wages, and Profits in Agriculture 



by this method, and the farmer also be 

 able to save a certain amount of wages 

 of labour. The superior profit of such 

 enclosed land was also extolled by Tusser 

 in his famous poem, 1573, entitled " Five 

 Hundred Points of Good Husbandry"; he 

 specially insists on the advantage of the 

 several or enclosed farms over the champion 

 or open field husbandry. In a tract pub- 

 lished about 1630 it is complained that 

 there were in Oxfordshire forty ploughs 

 fewer than there were twenty years before, 

 and the writer calculates that there were 

 twelve score less people employed than 

 under the old system. 



Enclosures, however, for convertible 

 husbandry would not have anything like 

 the same effect in diminishing the rural 

 population as the enclosures for sheep and 

 the creation of sheep-runs on a large scale. 



At the beginning of the sixteenth century 



