They that be husbandmen now haue but a scant lyvinge therby.[117] I that haue enclosed litle or nothinge of my grond could (never be able) to make vp my lordes rent weare it not for a little brede of neate, shepe, swine, gese and hens that I doe rere vpon my ground: whereof, because the price is sumwhat round, I make more cleare proffitt than I doe of all my corne and yet I haue but a bare liuinge.[118] Harrison, at the end of the century, writes of the open-field tenants: They were scarce able to liue and paie their rents at their daies without selling of a cow or an horsse, or more, although they paid but foure poundes at the vttermost by the yeare.[119] The tenant who could not pay this rent without selling stock was, of course, one of those who would soon have to give up his land altogether, if the landlord continued to demand rent. If he sold his horses and oxen to raise the rent one year, he was less able to work his land properly the next year, and the crop, too small in the first place to enable him to cover expenses, diminished still more. When the current income was ordinarily too small to cover current expenses, no relief was to be found by reducing the capital. A time came when these men must be either turned away, and their land leased to others, or else allowed to stay and make what poor living they could from the soil, without paying even the nominal rent which was to be expected of them. Lord North's comment on the enclosure movement as he saw it in the seventeenth century is suggestive of the state of affairs which led to the eviction of these husbandmen: Gentlemen of late years have taken up an humor of destroying their tenements and cottages, whereby they make it impossible that mankind should inhabit their estates. This is done sometimes barefaced because they harbour poor that are a charge to the parish, and sometimes because the charge of repairing is great, and if an house be ruinous they will not be at the cost of rebuilding and repairing it, and cast their lands into very great farms which are managed with less housing: and oftimes for improvement as it is called which is done by buying in all freeholds, copyholds, and tenements that have common and which harboured very many husbandry and labouring families and then enclosing the commons and fields, turning the managry from tillage to grasing.[120]