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. xxxi, 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.