Where houses had decayed within the previous seven years, they are to be rebuilt; and if previously they had less than 40 acres of land, they must now at least have 20 acres; if previously they had 40 acres or more, they must now have at least 40 acres.
The penalty for not rebuilding the farmhouse, was £10 per house per annum; for not assigning the prescribed quantity of land, 10s. per acre per annum. One third of the penalty went to the Queen, one third to the parish, one third to the informer.
It is also enacted that it shall be lawful for any lord of the manor to make exchanges of lands, whether arable, pasture or meadow, with his tenants, and for the tenants, with the consent of the lord, to make exchanges with one another, for the sake of more convenient occupation and husbandry. In other words the re-arrangement of the intermixed holdings in common arable fields and common meadows is expressly sanctioned.
39 Elizabeth (1597), c. 2.
The preamble states that from the 7th year of Henry VII.’s reign to the 35th year of the current reign there had always been in force some Act for the maintenance of tillage, but in the latter year all such laws were discontinued; and that in consequence in the period 1593–1597 “there have growen many more Depopulacions by turning Tillage into Pasture than at any time for the like number of years heretofore.”
It is enacted that lands converted from tillage to pasture shall be re-converted within three years, and that lands now in tillage shall remain so, under a penalty of 20s. per acre per annum. The Act applies to the counties of Bedford, Berkshire, Buckingham, Cambridge, Derby, Dorset, Durham, Gloucester, Hampshire, Hereford, Huntingdon, Leicester, Lincoln, Northampton, Northumberland, Nottingham, Oxford, Rutland, Somerset, Warwick, Wiltshire, Worcester, Yorkshire, with the Isle of Wight, and Pembroke in South Wales.
It did not apply to Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumberland, Devon, Essex, Hertford, Kent, Lancashire, Middlesex, Monmouth, Norfolk, Shropshire, Stafford, Suffolk, Surrey, Sussex and Westmoreland.
This Act remained on the Statute Book for 266 years. The earlier Depopulation Acts were repealed by 21 James I., c. 28, but this Act remained theoretically part of the law of the land until repealed by the Statute Law Revision Act of 1863. This was the last of the Depopulation Acts.