1920.] 



The Enclosure of Open-Field Farms. 



839 



pasture made its way into the area hitherto devoted to the 

 plough. None of these remedies, though each entailed 

 enclosure, broke up the framework of the agrarian partnerships. 

 They were rather devices to adapt the old system to changing 

 needs, and were extensively practised in the fourteenth and 

 fifteenth centuries. 



Enclosures of these types aroused no storm of criticism. 

 But they did not meet the real difficulty. That difficulty was, 

 as has been said, the falling productivity of the arable land. 

 With this decline the majority of the partners in open fields 

 were, individually and collectively, too poor to grapple. The 

 more substantial men might have met it by agreeing to such 

 a rearrangement of the arable and pasture land as would enable 

 them to lay down the ploughland to grass, and bring the grass 

 under the plough. But their poorer neighbours could not have 

 borne the cost of the readjustment. The decline, therefore, 

 continued, and was accentuated by the effects of social and 

 political changes. The feudal system was breaking up, and 

 labour services were being exchanged for money rents. So 

 feeble was the demand for land that the occupiers were able 

 to drive hard bargains. Substantial men profited by the change; 

 but it was otherw^ise with those who were less well off. The 

 poorest tenant might pay his rent by work on the lord's lands ; 

 but if he had to pay in money, he mijiilit have to sacrifice stock, 

 and so set his foot on the slippery slope which leads to 

 destitution. 



The long French Wars of the fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries, followed by the Wars of the Eoses, were not a 

 period when agriculture was likely to thrive. There is direct 

 evidence that farming was actually deteriorating in its methods. 

 Fitzherbert notices that several useful farming practices had 

 fallen into disuse. One is that of marling or liming, the value 

 of which was well known to mediaeval farmers at a very early 

 period. His comparative silence on the subject of drainage 

 indirectly points towards the same deterioration. Neither he 

 nor Tusser mention the shallow drains, filled with stones and 

 turfed over, which were familiar to the farmers of the 

 fourteenth century. To the impoverished occupiers the cost of 

 draining or manuring had become prohibitive, and perhaps, 

 in these and other details of management, the relaxation of the 

 minute supervision of manorial officials was telling its tale. 

 Even without this deterioration in farming practices, the loss 

 of fertility was becoming sufficiently serious. If soil exhaustion 



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