nclosures
which had been made by the tenants were of a few acres here and there.
The fields for the most part were still open and subject to common,
and consisted in part of poor pasture land. We do know also that many
landlords took matters into their own hands, dispossessed the tenants,
and enclosed a part or all of the land for sheep pastures. The date at
which this step was made, and the thoroughness with which it was
carried out, depended very much upon the character and needs of the
landlord, as well as upon local circumstances affecting the condition
of the soil and the degree of poverty suffered by the tenants. The
tendency for landlords to lose patience with the process which was
gradually eliminating the poorer men and concentrating their land in
the hands of the more prosperous is not characteristic of any one
century. It began as early as the middle of the fourteenth century,
and it extended well into the seventeenth. By 1402 clergy were being
indicted as _depopulatores agrorum_.[113] In the fifteenth century
statutes against enclosure and depopulation were beginning to be
passed, and Rous gives a list of fifty-four places near Warwick which
had been wholly or partially depopulated before about 1486.[114] For
the sixteenth century, we have the evidence of numerous statutes, the
returns of the commissions, doggerel verse, popular insurrections,
sermons, _etc._ Miss Leonard's study of the seventeenth-century
enclosures is confirmed by additional evidence presented by Gonner
that the movement was unchecked in this period. In 1692, for instance,
Houghton was attacking the "common notion that enclosure always leads
to grass," by pointing out a few exceptions.[115] In 1695 Gibson spoke
of the change from tillage to pasture, which had been largely within
living memory.[116]

There is no reason to believe that the landowners who carried out this
process were unusually mercenary and heartless. The need for putting
their land to some remunerative use was imperative, and it is
surprising that the enclosure movement was of such a piece-meal
character and extended over so many years, rather than that it took
place at all.

There was little rent to be had from land which lay for the most part
in open fields, tilled by men who had no capital at their command for
improving the condition of the soil, or for utilizing profitably the
portion of the land which was so impoverished that it could not be
cultivated.

Poor tena