The Enclosures in England Part 8

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 and servitude of being ever tilled," is "faint and feeble-hearted," and is being laid to gra.s.s, for pasture is the only use for which it is suited. The cause of the conversion of arable fields to pasture is the same as that which caused the same change on other lands at an earlier date--so low a level of productivity that the land was not worth cultivating. Lands whose fertility had been restored were put under cultivation and plowed until they were again in need of rest.

Thus the final result was about the same whether an enclosing landlord cut across the gradual process of readjustment of land-holding among the tenants, and converted the whole into pasture, or whether the process was allowed to go on until none but large holders remained in the village. In both cases the tendency was towards a system of husbandry in which the fertility of the soil was maintained by periodically withdrawing portions of it from cultivation and laying it to gra.s.s. In the one case, cultivation was completely suspended for a number of years, but was gradually reintroduced as it became evident that the land had recovered its strength while used as pasture. In the other, the grazing of sheep and cattle was introduced as a by-industry, for the sake of utilizing the land which had been set aside to recover its strength, while the better land was kept under the plow. Whether enclosures were made for better agriculture, then, as Mr. Leadam contends, or for pasture, as is argued by Professor Gay,[142] the arable enclosures were used as pasture for a part of the time and the enclosed pastures came later to be used for tillage part of the time, and the two things amount to the same thing in the end.

This end, however, had still not been reached in a great number of open-field villages by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and we should expect to find that the history of the land in this century was but a repet.i.tion of what had gone before, in so far as the fields which had not hitherto been enclosed are concerned.

But, during the seventeenth century, an agricultural revolution was taking place. Experiments were being made with new forage crops. For one thing, it was found that turnips could be grown in the fields and that they made excellent winter forage; and gra.s.s seeding was introduced. The gra.s.ses and clovers which were brought from Holland not only made excellent hay, but improved the soil rapidly. The possibility of increasing the amount of hay at will put an end to the absolute scarcity of manure--the limiting factor in English agriculture from the beginning. And the comparative ease with which the artificial gra.s.ses could be made to grow did away with the need of waiting ten or fifteen years, or perhaps half a century, for natural gra.s.s to cover the fields and restore their productiveness.

Only with the introduction of gra.s.s seeding did it become possible to keep a sufficient amount of stock, not only to maintain the fertility of the soil, but to improve it steadily.

The soil instead of being taxed year after year under the heavy strain of grain crops was being renovated by the legumes that gathered nitrogen from the air and stored it on tubercles attached to their roots. The deep roots of the clover penetrated the soil, that no plow ever touched. Legumes like alfalfa, producing pound by pound more nutritious fodder than meadow gra.s.s, produced acre by acre two and three times the amount, and when such a field was turned under to make place for a grain crop, the deep and heavy sod, the ma.s.s of decaying roots, offered the farmer "virgin" soil, where previously even five bushels of wheat could not be gathered.[143]

As the value of these new crops became generally recognized, some effort was made to introduce them into the regular rotation of crops in the fields which were still held in common, but, for the most part, these efforts were unsuccessful, and new vigor was given to the enclosure movement. Frequently persons having no arable land of their own had right of common over the stubble and fallow which could not be exercised when turnips and clover were planted; for reasons of this sort, it was difficult to change the ancient course of crops in the open fields. For example, late in the eighteenth century (1793) at Stiffkey and Morston, the improvements due to enclosure are said to have been great, for:

being half-year land before, they could raise no turnips except by agreement, nor cultivate their land to the best advantage.[144]

At Heacham the common fields were enclosed by act in 1780, and Young notes:

Before the enclosure they were in no regular s.h.i.+fts and the field badly managed; now in regular five-s.h.i.+ft Norfolk management.[145]

At Northwald, about 3,000 acres of open-field land were enclosed in 1796 and clover was introduced. The comment made is that "the crops bear quite a new face." The common field of Brancaster before enclosure in 1755 "was in an open, rude bad state; now in five or six regular s.h.i.+fts."[146]

Hitherto there had been only one way of restoring fertility to land; converting it to pasture and leaving it under gra.s.s for a prolonged period. Now it could be speedily improved and used intensively. Arthur Young describes the modern method of improvement in his account of the changes made in Norfolk husbandry before 1771:

From forty to fifty years ago, all the northern and western and a great part of the eastern tracts of the county were sheep walks, let so low as from 6 _d._ to 1_s._ 6 _d._ and 2 _s._ an acre.

Much of it was in this condition only thirty years ago. The improvements have been made by the following circ.u.mstances.

First. By enclosing without the a.s.sistance of Parliament.

Second. By a spirited use of marl and clay.

Third. By the introduction of an excellent course of crops.

Fourth. By the introduction of turnips well hand-hoed.

Fifth. By the culture of clover and ray-gra.s.s.

Sixth. By the lords granting long leases.

Seventh. By the country being divided chiefly into large farms.[147]

The evidence which has been examined in this monograph reveals the far-reaching influence of soil exhaustion in English agrarian history in the centuries before the introduction of these new crops. As the yield of the soil declined, the ancient arable holdings proved incapable of supporting their cultivators, and a readjustment had to be made. The pressure upon subsistence was felt while villainage was still in force, and the terms upon which serfdom dissolved were influenced by this fact to an extent which has. .h.i.therto not been recognized. The economic crisis involved in the spread of the money economy threw into relief the dest.i.tution of the villains; and the easy terms of the cash payments which were subst.i.tuted for services formerly due, the difficulty with which holders for land could be obtained on any terms, the explicit references to the poverty of whole communities at the time of the commutation of their customary services, necessitate the abandonment of the commonly accepted view that growing prosperity and the desire for better social status explain the subst.i.tution of money payments for labor services in the fourteenth century. The spread of the money 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 dest.i.tution 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 have 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.

x.x.xi, 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 Northamptons.h.i.+re_, 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.