Chancellor’s[44] speech to Parliament in 1483 shows that the movement must have already obtained considerable dimensions. Rous[45] had petitioned Parliament on the subject of depopulation in 1459, and in his History, which was published sometime between that date and 1486, he returned to the charge with a detailed account of the destruction of villages in his own county of Warwickshire. More convincing than either, the records of Manorial Courts[46] prove that the consolidation of holdings and collisions between the interests of commoners and sheep-farmers were quite common early in the fifteenth century. One may perhaps pause to remark that the question of the antecedent conditions, out of which the rapid agricultural changes of the sixteenth century arose, is a very important one, and the more important the more far-reaching those changes are thought to have been. It is surely incredible that the conversion of land to pasture, the growth of large pasture estates, and the eviction of customary tenants, should have occurred to the extent described, unless considerable minor changes preceded them, and without some premonitory rumblings to suggest the coming storm. In economic affairs new lines of organisation usually start on a small scale before they attain dimensions sufficiently striking to attract attention; and one would expect to be able to trace the leading motives of the agrarian changes of the Tudor period far back in the fifteenth century and even earlier, and that they would throw light on the nature of the subsequent movements. There is, further, some difference of opinion as to the causes which forced the agrarian problem to the front. Some contemporary authorities attribute it mainly to the growth of the woollen industry,[47] and in this they have been followed by most subsequent writers. On the other hand, the direct evidence supplied by price statistics seems to be not altogether reliable,[48] and in any case the woollen industry had been steadily growing for a hundred years before the complaints as to enclosure become general. This has led Dr. Hasbach[49] to argue that the change in agricultural methods was due less to the high price of wool than to the low price of grain, which was artificially reduced by the restrictions imposed on export under the Tudors, and which he holds to have produced such a fall in rent as to result in the adoption of pasture-farming. Other writers have emphasised the revolutionary effect of the general depreciation in the value of money[50] and the consequent growth of commercialism in the relations between landlord and tenant.

Finally, one may ask what was the effect of legislation against pasture-farming and evictions, and of the frequent administrative interference by which the Governments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tried to check them. On a first view, at any rate, the whole history of the policy pursued in this matter, with one short interval from the autumn of 1549 to 1553, constitutes surely one of the most remarkable attempts to control changing economic conditions by Government action which has ever been made. Whether successful or unsuccessful, it throws much light on the ideas of the period with regard to the place in the State which should be occupied by the landholding classes, on the relative advantages from a political standpoint of large and small farming, and on the administrative machinery of Government. The opinion generally[51] adopted seems to be that the Acts forbidding conversion were entirely ineffective, and that the Government, if sincere, was outmanœuvred by the Local Authorities, whose duty it was to administer the laws, and whose interest lay in preventing their administration. Much evidence may be cited in support of this view. On the other hand, we have clear proof of the Council interfering on some occasions with apparent success; and further, it seems necessary to discriminate between the policies of different periods. One cannot argue, for example, that because the statutes protecting the poorer classes were not carried out by the rapacious oligarchy of adventurers which governed England from the fall of Somerset to 1553, therefore they were never used effectively in the reigns of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, or of the first two Stuarts. Nor would one be right in assuming the existence in the sixteenth century of the identity of interest and policy between the great landlords and the Government which characterised the period from 1688 to 1832. One’s conclusion on the whole question must depend less on direct evidence as to the success of the particular measures, which, in the nature of things, is not easily obtainable, than on the opinion which one forms of the degree of importance which the statesmen of the period assigned to the class of small cultivators, and of the ability of the Central Government to get its policy executed.

Such are some of the questions which are suggested by even a cursory survey of the agrarian problem. There are others which are less susceptible of summary statement, but which involve issues that are of some importance for the interpretation of economic history. Granted that it was inevitable that the subsistence husbandry of the mediæval village should give way to capitalist agriculture, in what light are we to regard the changes by which that great transformation was brought about? Ought we to think of the open field system as altogether incompatible with any improvement in agricultural technique, as the miracle of squalid perversity which it has appeared to some writers both of our own and of earlier ages, and as requiring the bitter discipline of pasture farming and evictions to shake it out of its deep rut of custom, and to make room for more progressive methods? Or are we to view it as permitting a good deal of mobility, and as already slowly developing a less rigid and cumbrous organisation when it was partially overwhelmed by rapid, and for the mass of the peasantry disastrous, changes? What place ought the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century to be given in that transition from mediæval to modern conditions of agriculture which, starting in England, has spread eastwards through almost every European country, and which is beginning to-day even in India. How far does it compare and contrast with the enclosures of the period succeeding the fall of the Stuarts, and with the analogous developments which have taken place on the continent,