Commonwealth and profite to each man in his private.[138]

John Hales had protested against depopulating enclosures, in 1549, by
appealing to the public spirit of landowners. They increased their
profits by converting arable land to pasture, but, he argued,

It may not be liefull for euery man to vse his owne as hym
lysteth, but eueyre man must vse that he hath to the most
benefyte of his countrie. Ther must be somethynge deuysed to
quenche this insatiable thirst of greedynes of men.[139]

But now it was no longer necessary to persuade the owners of this same
land to forgo their own interests for the sake of the public good.
Those whose land had been used as pasture for a great number of years
were finding it valuable arable, because of its long period of rest
and regeneration. Land which had been converted to pasture was being
put under the plow because of the greater profit of tillage.

So great was the profit of cultivating these pastures that landlords
who were opposed to having pastures broken up by leaseholders had
difficulty in preventing it. Towards the end of the sixteenth century
at Hawsted, and in the beginning of the seventeenth, a number of
leases contained the express provision that no pastures were to be
broken up. In 1620 and the years following, some of the leases
permitted cultivation of pasture, on the condition that the land was
to be laid to grass again five years before the expiration of the
lease.[140]

There is no doubt of the fact that much land was being converted from
pasture to arable in this period. Evidence of this tendency multiplies
as the century advances. In 1656 Joseph Lee gave a list of fifteen
towns where arable land hitherto converted to pasture had been plowed
up again within thirty years.[141]

Barren and insufficiently manured land did not produce good crops
merely because other land had been given an opportunity to recover its
strength. The conversion of open-field arable to pasture went on
unchecked in the seventeenth century because it had not yet had the
benefit of the prolonged rest which made agriculture profitable, and
without which it had become impossible to make a living from the soil.
The lands which have been "heretofore converted from errable to
pasture.... have sithence gotten heart, strength and fruitfulnesse,"
and are therefore being plowed again; but the land which has escaped
conversion, and has been tied to the "perpetual bondage a