ney economy was due to the
gradual integration of the economic system, the establishment of local
markets where small land holders could sell their produce for money.
Until this condition was present, it was impossible to offer money
instead of labor in payment of the customary dues; as soon as this
condition was present, the greater convenience of the use of money
made the commutation of services inevitable. In practise money
payments came gradually to replace the performance of services through
the system of "selling" works long before any formal commutation of
the services took place. But, whatever the explanation of the spread
of the money economy in England during this period, it is not the
prosperity of the villains, for, at the moment when the formal change
from payments in labor to money payments was made, the poverty and
destitution of the landholders were conspicuous. That this poverty was
due to declining fertility of the soil cannot be doubted. Land in
demesne as well as virgate land was showing the effects of centuries
of cultivation with insufficient manure, and returned so scant a crop
that much of it was withdrawn from cultivation, even when serf labor
with which to cultivate it was available. Exhaustion of the soil was
the cause of the pauperism of the fourteenth century, as it was also
of the enclosure and conversion to pasture of arable land in the
fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Systematic enclosure
for the purpose of sheep-farming on a large scale was but the final
step in a process of progressively less intense cultivation which had
been going on for centuries. The attention of some historians has been
devoted too exclusively to the covetous sheep-master, against whom
contemporary invective was directed, and the process which was going
on in fields where no encloser was at work has escaped their notice.
The three-field system was breaking down as it became necessary to
withdraw this or that exhausted plot from cultivation entirely for a
number of years. The periodic fallow had proved incapable of keeping
the land in proper condition for bearing crops even two years out of
three, and everywhere strips of uncultivated land began to appear in
the common fields. This lea land--waste land in the midst of the
arable--was a common feature of sixteenth and seventeenth century
husbandry. The strips kept under cultivation gave a bare return for
seed, and the profit of sheep-raising need not ha