For the most part, however, there had been no revolutionary change in the system of husbandry. The framework remained. The whole community still possessed claims extending over most of the land. The village flocks pastured on the stubble and the fallows of the open fields. The advantages which could in theory be derived from the control of several adjacent strips of land were reduced to a minimum by the necessity of maintaining old boundaries to mark off from each other lands of differing status. Even where the consolidation of holdings had proceeded to some extent, the tenants who had acquired the most compact holdings in comparison with the majority still possessed scattered plots of land separated from each other by the holdings of other men, and some of the smaller holders had no two strips which touched each other. When the tenants had been left to themselves, all of the changes which took place before the eighteenth century, numerous as they were, usually left the fields in a state resembling more their condition in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than that of the nineteenth century. FOOTNOTES: [87] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, p. 49, note. [88] A speech on enclosures commending bills proposed in 1597 contrasts the constructive character of that legislation with the earlier laws: "Where the gentleman that framed this bill hath dealt like a most skilful chirugien, not clapping on a plaster to cover the sore that it spread no further, but searching into the very depths of the wound that the life and strength which hath so long been in decay by the wasting of towns and countries may at length again be quickened and repaired." Bland, Brown & Tawney, _Eng. Econ. History--Select Documents_, pp. 271-272. [89] 4 H. 7, c. 16, as quoted by Pollard, _Reign of Henry VII_, p. 237. [90] Leadam, _Domesday of Inclosures_ (London, 1897), p. 7 [91] 25 H. 8, c. 13. [92] Gray, _English Field Systems_ (Cambridge, 1915), pp. 95-96. [93] "Midland Revolt," _R. H. S. Trans._, New Series, vol. xviii, p. 230. [94] Tawney, _Agrarian Problem_, pp. 164-165. [95] Levett and Ballard, _op. cit._, pp. 52-53. [96] _Husbandry_ (ed. English Dialect Society, 1882), p. 77. [97] 39 El., c. i, vi. [98] _Surveying_ (2nd ed., 1567), ch. 24. [99] Corbett, "Elizabethan Village Surveys," _Royal Hist. Soc. Trans._, New Series, vol. ii, pp. 67-87. [100] _Surveyinge_, ch. 41. [101] _Five Hundred Points_ (London, 1812). [102] Gray, _op. cit._, pp. 106-107. [103] Gray, _op. cit._, pp. 35, 106-107. [104] Lennard, _Rural Northamptonshire_, pp. 100-101. [105] Fitzherbert, _Surveyinge_, chs. 27 and 28. [106] See p. 79. Another reference to this process is made in October's _Husbandry_, vol. 22, ch. 17. [107] Tusser, January's _Husbandry_, vol. 47, ch. 32. [108] _A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England_, ed. by Elizabeth Lamond, Cambridge, 1893. [109] Smyth, _Lives of the Berkeleys_, vol. ii, pp. 159-160.