all lay open, sheep must either be fed with those of other men on
the common pasture, or must be kept in small groups by shepherds
within the confines of the various acres or other small strips of the
sheep-raiser's holding. No large number could of course be kept in
this way, so the first thing to be done by the sheep-raiser was to get
enough strips together in one place to make it worth while to put a
hedge or other fence around them, or else to separate off in the same
way a part or the whole of the open pastures or meadows. This was the
process known as enclosing. Separate enclosed fields, which had
existed only occasionally in mediaeval farming, became numerous in this
time, as they have become practically universal in modern farming in
English-speaking countries.

But it was ordinarily impracticable to obtain groups of adjacent acres
or sufficiently extensive rights on the common pasture for enclosing
without getting rid of some of the other tenants. In this way
enclosing led to evictions. Either the lord of the manor or some one
or more of the tenants enclosed the lands which they had formerly held
and also those which were formerly occupied by some other holders, who
were evicted from their land for this purpose.

Some of the tenants must have been protected in their holdings by the
law. As early as 1468 Chief Justice Bryan had declared that "tenant by
the custom is as well inheritor to have his land according to the
custom as he which hath a freehold at the common law." Again, in 1484,
another chief justice declared that a tenant by custom who continued
to pay his service could not be ejected by the lord of the manor. Such
tenants came to be known as copyholders, because the proof of their
customary tenure was found in the manor court rolls, from which a copy
was taken to serve as a title. Subsequently copyhold became one of
the most generally recognized forms of land tenure in England, and
gave practically as secure title as did a freehold. At this time,
however, notwithstanding the statements just given, the law was
probably not very definite or not very well understood, and customary
tenants may have had but little practical protection of the law
against eviction. Moreover, the great body of the small tenants were
probably no longer genuine customary tenants. The great proportion of
small farms had probably not been inherited by a long line of tenants,
but had repeatedly gone back into the hands of the lord