nts are unprofitable tenants; it is difficult to collect rent
from them and impossible to raise their rent, and they attempt to save
by exploiting the land, leaving it in worse condition than when they
received it. Contemporary references to the poverty of these
open-field tenants all confirm the impression given by Hales:

They that be husbandmen now haue but a scant lyvinge therby.[117]
I that haue enclosed litle or nothinge of my grond could (never
be able) to make vp my lordes rent weare it not for a little
brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese and hens that I doe rere vpon
my ground: whereof, because the price is sumwhat round, I make
more cleare proffitt than I doe of all my corne and yet I haue
but a bare liuinge.[118]

Harrison, at the end of the century, writes of the open-field tenants:

They were scarce able to liue and paie their rents at their daies
without selling of a cow or an horsse, or more, although they
paid but foure poundes at the vttermost by the yeare.[119]

The tenant who could not pay this rent without selling stock was, of
course, one of those who would soon have to give up his land
altogether, if the landlord continued to demand rent. If he sold his
horses and oxen to raise the rent one year, he was less able to work
his land properly the next year, and the crop, too small in the first
place to enable him to cover expenses, diminished still more. When
the current income was ordinarily too small to cover current expenses,
no relief was to be found by reducing the capital. A time came when
these men must be either turned away, and their land leased to others,
or else allowed to stay and make what poor living they could from the
soil, without paying even the nominal rent which was to be expected of
them.

Lord North's comment on the enclosure movement as he saw it in the
seventeenth century is suggestive of the state of affairs which led to
the eviction of these husbandmen:

Gentlemen of late years have taken up an humor of destroying
their tenements and cottages, whereby they make it impossible
that mankind should inhabit their estates. This is done sometimes
barefaced because they harbour poor that are a charge to the
parish, and sometimes because the charge of repairing is great,
and if an house be ruinous they will not be at the cost of
rebuilding and repairing it, and cast their lands into very great