CHAPTER IV ENCLOSURE FOR SHEEP PASTURE 86 Enclosure by small tenants difficult--Open-field tenants unprofitable--Low rents--Neglect of land--High cost of living--Enclosure even of demesne a hardship to small holders--Intermixture of holdings a reason for dispossessing tenants--Higher rents from enclosed land another reason--Poverty of tenants where no enclosures were made--Exhaustion of open fields recognised by Parliament--Restoration of fertility and reconversion to tillage--New forage crops in eighteenth century--Recapitulation and conclusion. INDEX 109 INTRODUCTION The enclosure movement--the process by which the common-field system was broken down and replaced by a system of unrestricted private use--involved economic and social changes which make it one of the important subjects in English economic history. When it began, the arable fields of a community lay divided in a multitude of strips separated from each other only by borders of unplowed turf. Each landholder was in possession of a number of these strips, widely separated from each other, and scattered all over the open fields, so that he had a share in each of the various grades of land.[1] But his private use of the land was restricted to the period when it was being prepared for crop or was under crop. After harvest the land was grazed in common by the village flocks; and each year a half or a third of the land was not plowed at all, but lay fallow and formed part of the common pasture. Under this system there was no opportunity for individual initiative in varying the rotation of crops or the dates of plowing and seed time; the use of the land in common for a part of the time restricted its use even during the time when it was not in common. The process by which this system was replaced by modern private ownership with unrestricted individual use is called the enclosure movement, because it involved the rearrangement of holdings into separate, compact plots, divided from each other by enclosing hedges and ditches. The most notable feature of this process is the conversion of the open fields into sheep pasture. This involved the eviction of the tenants who had been engaged in cultivating these fields and the amalgamation of many holdings of arable to form a few large enclosures for sheep. The enclosure movement was not merely the displacement of one system of tillage by another system of tillage; it involved the temporary displacement of tillage itself in favor of grazing.