cation of the
difficulty of finding employment, and it is impossible that wages
could remain at an exorbitant level when the enclosure of the lands of
one open-field township made enough men homeless to supply any
existing dearth of labor in all of the surrounding villages. If
agriculture was unprofitable, it was not because laborers demanded
excessive wages, but because of the low productivity of the land. The
significance of contemporary complaints of high wages is missed if
they are interpreted as an indication of an exorbitant increase in
wages. The facts are, rather, that land was so unproductive that
farmers could not afford to pay even a low wage.

If it were necessary to argue the point further, it could be pointed
out that wages even in industry were not subject to that steady rise
which would have to be assumed, if high wages are to furnish the
explanation of the substitution of pasture for tillage from the
thirteenth century to the eighteenth. The statistical data on this
subject are fragmentary, but Thorold Rogers' calculations for the
period 1540-1582 are significant. In this period wages rose 60 per
cent above the average of the previous century and a half; but the
market prices of farm produce rose 170 per cent.[33] The rise in wages
was far from keeping pace with the rise in selling prices, and the
displacement of agriculture for grazing at this time must be due to
some cause other than the greater number of laborers needed in
agriculture. If, during certain periods within the four centuries
under consideration wages advanced more rapidly than the prices of
produce (statistical information on this subject is lacking) the
continuous withdrawal of land from tillage during periods when wages
fell remains to be explained by some cause other than high wages. Nor
can high wages account for the conversion of tilled land to pasture
simultaneously with the conversion of pasture land to tillage in the
seventeenth century.

If wages were exorbitantly high in the seventeenth century, and if
this is the reason for the laying to pasture of so much arable, how
could farmers afford to cultivate the large amount of fresh land which
they were bringing under the plow? Is this accounted for not by any
expectation of profit from this land but by the statutory requirement
that no arable should be laid to pasture unless an equal amount of
grass land were plowed in its stead? Pasture in excess of the legal
requirements was p