to which, as we have seen, commons were essential. In some
counties, indeed, inclosures had, by the Tudor period, made greater
progress than in others. T. Tusser, in his eulogium on inclosed farming,
cites Suffolk and Essex as inclosed counties by way of contrast to
Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, where the open or "champion"
(champain) system prevailed. The Statutes of Merton and Westminster may
have had something to do with the progress of inclosed farming; but it
is probable that their chief operation lay in furnishing the lord of the
manor with a farm on the new system, side by side with the common
fields, or with a deer park.

The Black Death.

The first event which really endangered the village system was the
coming of the Black Death. This scourge is said to have swept away half
the population of the country. The disappearance, by no means uncommon,
of a whole family gave the over-lord of the vill the opportunity of
appropriating, by way of escheat, the holding of the household in the
common fields. The land-holding population of the townships and the
persons interested in the commons were thus sensibly diminished.

During the Wars of the Roses the small cultivator is thought to have
again made headway. But his diminished numbers, and the larger interest
which the lords had acquired in the lands of each vill, no doubt
facilitated the determined attack on the common-field system which
marked the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI.

The Tudor agrarian revolution.

This attack, which had for its chief object the conversion of arable
land into pasture for the sake of sheep-breeding, was the outcome of
many causes. It was no longer of importance to a territorial magnate to
possess a large body of followers pledged to his interests by their
connexion with the land. On the other hand, wool commanded a high price,
and the growth of towns and of foreign commerce supplied abundant
markets. At the same time the confiscation of the monastic possessions
introduced a race of new over-lords--not bound to their territories by
any family traditions, and also tended to spread the view that the
strong hand was its own justification. In order to keep large flocks
and send many bales of wool to market, each landowner strove to increase
his range of pasture, and with this view to convert the arable fields of
his vill into grass land. There is abundant evidence both from the
complaints of writers such as Lati