904 



The Enclosure of Open-Field Faems. 



the soil. The onl}^ remedy lay in the restoration of the fertility 

 of the exhausted arable land by conversion to pasture. The 

 legislature endeavoured to cope with the situation by a series of 

 Acts of Parliament directed against engrossing and enclosing. 

 Engrossing meant the accumulation of holdings in the hands 

 of one man. The law attempted to check an economic process 

 which was the inevitable answer to exhausted fertility by pre- 

 venting any individual from holding more than one farm. The 

 word " farm," which originally meant the stipulated rent for 

 an area of land, had not 3"et acquired its present meaning of the 

 area of land out of which the rent issues. It was in the transition 

 stage of meaning the definite area of land which afforded a 

 living to a man and his family. Tt is in this sense that the word 

 is used by Tudor legislators. The caution is necessary, because 

 engrossing in the 16th century had a different meaning from 

 that which it might now bear. The practice, with v.'hich we 

 were unfortunately so familiar thirty years ago, of throwing 

 several farms together, amounting in the aggregate to several 

 hundred acres, might be called engrossing. But nothing on 

 that scale was in the minds of Tudor legislators. They meant 

 the additional occupation by one individual of the 10, 15 or 30 

 arable acres which had once afforded a living to another partner 

 in the open-field farm. They did not inquire whether the area 

 v>^ould still have afforded a living. They clapped a plaster to 

 the sore, instead of attempting to remedy the sore itself, which 

 was the exhausted fertility. In a similar way they dealt with 

 enclosing. It was easy to pass an Act of Parliament that the 

 open-field system must be maintained, and that the arable land 

 must be retained under the plough. But, if the land did not 

 return a living under tillage, the Act was a dead letter. At 

 the time it was a frequent complaint that the legislation proved 

 ineffective to check the progress of enclosures. One of the 

 principal reasons vrby so little attention was paid to the law 

 was that it provided no remedy for the evil it proposed to prevent. 

 It was therefore as powerless as a Pope's Bull against a comet. 

 It was not imtil the close of the 16th century that this fact 

 was officially recognised. Alderman Box, in 1576. wrote a 

 remarkable memorial to Lord Burleigh, in which he urges the 

 folly of attempting to force men to continue to grow corn on 

 exhausted arable.' Twenty years later the principle found legal 

 sanction. A statute at- the end of the reign of Elizabeth (1597) 

 recognises the agricultural difficulty. Men were relieved from 

 the penalties attv-h^^d to tii? conversion of tillage to grass if 



