by customary tenants 5 3/4 5 3/4

The differences in these rents are sufficient to be tempting to the
lord who was seeking his own interest. The large holders were able to
expend the capital necessary for enclosing and converting the part of
the land which could not be profitably cultivated because of its bad
condition. The capital necessary for this process itself was
considerable, and besides, it was necessary to wait several years
before there was a return on the investment, while the sod was
forming, to say nothing of the large expenditure necessary for the
purchase of the sheep. The land when so treated, however, enabled the
investor to pay higher rents than the open-field husbandmen who
"rubbed forth their estate in the poorest plight."[128]

A lord who was willing to consider only pecuniary advantage had
everything to gain by clearing the land entirely of small holders, and
putting it in the hands of men with capital. It is, therefore, to the
credit of these landowners that there are so few authentic cases of
the depopulation of entire villages and the conversion of all of the
arable land into sheep runs. These cases made the lords who were
responsible notorious and were, no doubt, exceptional. Nearly fifteen
hundred places were covered by the reports of the commissions of 1517
and 1607, and Professor Gay has found among these "but a round dozen
villages or hamlets which were all enclosed and emptied of their
inhabitants, the full half of them in Northamptonshire."[129] For the
most part, the enclosures reported under the inquisitions as well as
those indicated on the maps and surveys of the period involved only
small areas, and point to a process of piece-meal enclosure. The
landowners seem to have been reluctant to cause hardship and to have
left the open-field tenants undisturbed as far as possible, contenting
themselves with the enclosure and conversion of small plots of land.

The social consequences of so-called depopulating enclosure were
serious, but they are not seen in their proper perspective when one
imagines the condition of the evicted tenants to have been fairly good
before they were dispossessed. The cause lying back of the enclosure
movement was bringing about the gradual sinking of family after
family, even when no evictions were made. To attribute the poverty and
misery of the rural population to the enclosure movement is to
overlook the unhappy condition of the peasants,