d even there it
had begun to yield.[102]

At Westwick, Whorlton, Bolam and Willington in Durham, and at Welford,
Northamptonshire, a similar transformation had taken place.[103]

This land was obviously withdrawn from cultivation not because the
tenants preferred grass land, or because grass land was more valuable
than arable, but because it could be plowed only at a loss. Where, as
at Greens Norton, arable and leas are valued separately in the survey,
the grass land is shown to be of less value than the land still under
cultivation.[104] The land craved rest, (to use Tusser's phrase), and
the grass which grew on it was of but little value. Here we have no
capitalist systematically buying up land for grazing, but a withdrawal
of land from cultivation by the tenants themselves, even though they
were in no position to prepare it properly for grazing purposes. The
importance of this fact cannot be over-emphasized. It is true that
pasture, properly enclosed and stocked, was profitable, and that men
who were able to carry out this process became notorious among their
contemporaries on account of their gains. But it is also true that the
land which was converted to pasture by these enclosers was fit for
nothing else. Husbandmen had had to withdraw much of their open-field
ground from tillage simply because it was so unproductive that they
could not count on a bare return of seed if they planted it. The
pasturage for an additional horse or cow which these plots furnished
was pure gain, and was not the object of the conversion to grass. The
unproductive strips would have been left untilled even though no
alternative use had been possible. They were unfit for cultivation.

The advantage of holding this lea land did not end, however, with the
fact that a few additional horses or cows could be kept on the grass
which sprang up. This was undoubtedly of some value, but the greatest
advantage lay in the fact that this land gradually recovered its
strength. When the strips which were kept under cultivation finally
produced in their turn so little that they had to be abandoned, the
tenant who had access to land which had been laid to grass years
before could plow this instead, for it had regained its fertility and
had improved in physical quality. Fitzherbert recommends a regular
interchange between "Reyst" ground and arable land which had become
exhausted. When the grass strips become mossy and make poor pasture,
plow them up a