It is to the unfortunate social consequences of enclosure that we owe the abundance of historical material on this subject. Undoubtedly much land was converted to pasture in a piece-meal fashion, as small holders saw the possibility of making the change quietly, and without disturbing the rest of the community. If enclosure had taken no other form than this, no storm of public protest would have risen, to express itself in pamphlets, sermons, statutes and government reports. Enclosure on a large scale involved dispossession of the inhabitants, and a complete break with traditional usage. For this reason the literature of the subject is abundant. When, however, the process was reversed, and the land again brought under cultivation, there was involved no interference with the rights of common holders. It was to the interest of no one to oppose this change, and no protest was made to call the attention of the historian to what was being done. References to the process are numerous enough only to prove that reconversion of land formerly laid to grass took place during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries--to an extent of which not even an approximate estimate can be made. Imperfect as the evidence is from some points of view, it is nevertheless complete for the purposes of this monograph. It would be impossible, with the material at hand, to reconstruct the progress of the enclosure movement, decade by decade, and county by county, throughout England. My intention, however, is not so much to describe the movement in detail as it is to give a consistent account of its nature and causes. Even a few sixteenth-century instances of the plowing up of pasture land should be enough to arrest the attention of historians who believe that the conversion of arable land to pasture during this period is sufficiently explained by an assertion that the price of wool was high. What especial circumstances made it advantageous to cultivate land which had been under grass, while other land was being withdrawn from cultivation? Contemporary writers speak of the need of worn land for rest for a long period of years, and remark that it will bear well again at the end of the period. Evidence such as this is significant without the further information which would enable us to estimate the amount of land affected. For our purposes, also, the notice of enclosure of arable land for pasture on one group of manors in the early thirteenth century is important as an indication that the fundamental cause of the enclosure movement was at work long before the Black Death, which is usually taken as the event in which the movement had its beginning. Low rents, pauperism, and abandonment of land are facts which indicate declining productivity of the soil, and statistical records of the harvests reaped are not needed when statutes, proclamations, and books of husbandry describe the exhausted condition of the common fields. The fact that the