ve been
extraordinarily high to induce landowners to abandon cultivation
entirely under these conditions. A great part of the arable fields lay
waste, and could be put to no profitable use unless the whole was
enclosed and stocked with sheep. The high profit made from
sheep-raising cannot be explained by fluctuations in the price of
wool. The price of wool fell in the fifteenth century. Sheep-farming
was comparatively profitable because the soil of the ancient fields
was too barren to repay the costs of tillage. Land which was in part
already abandoned, was turned into pasture. The barrenness and low
productivity of the common fields is explicitly recognised by
contemporaries, and is given as the reason for the conversion of
arable to pasture. Its use as pasture for a long period of years gave
it the needed rest and restored its fertility, and pasture land which
could bear crops was being brought again under cultivation during the
centuries in which the enclosure movement was most marked.

Footnotes:

[112] Lamond, _op. cit._, p. 49.

[113] 4 H. 4, c. 2. Miss Leonard calls attention to this statute.
"Inclosure of Common Land in the Seventeenth Century." _Royal Hist.
Soc. Trans._, New Series, vol. xix, p. 101, note 2.

[114] _Cf. supra_, p. 27.

[115] Gonner, _Common Land and Inclosure_, p. 162.

[116] Leonard, _op. cit._, p. 140, note 2.

[117] Lamond, _op. cit._, p. 90.

[118] _Ibid._, pp. 56-57.

[119] _Description of Britain_ (_Holinshed Chronicles_, London, 1586), p.
189.

[120] Leonard, _op. cit._, vol. xix, p. 120.

[121] _Surveyinge_, ch. 28.

[122] _Ibid._, ch. 32.

[123] Denton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 150.

[124] "Rome's Fall Reconsidered," _Political Science Quarterly_, vol.
xxxi, pp. 217, 220.

[125] Lamond, _Common Weal of this Realm of England_, pp. 19-20.

[126] Tawney, _Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century_, pp. 254-255.

[127] Tawney, _op. cit._, p. 256.

[128] Carew, as quoted by Leonard, _op. cit._, vol. xix, p. 137.

[129] "Enclosures in England," _Quarterly Journal of Ec._, vol. xvii, p.
595.

[130] Lennard, _Rural Northamptonshire_, pp. 73-4.

[131] The reason stated in the preamble of many of the Durham decrees
granting enclosure permits (Leonard, _op. cit._, p. 117).

[132] 5 & 6 Ed. 6, c. 5. Re-enacted by 5 El., c. 2.

[133] Memorandum addressed by Alderman Box to Lord Burleigh in 1576,
Gonner, _op. cit._, p. 157.

[134] 39 El., ch. 2, provi