The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction

by Harriett Bradley Fitt

So great was the profit of cultivating these pastures that landlords who were opposed to having pastures broken up by leaseholders had difficulty in preventing it. Towards the end of the sixteenth century at Hawsted, and in the beginning of the seventeenth, a number of leases contained the express provision that no pastures were to be broken up. In 1620 and the years following, some of the leases permitted cultivation of pasture, on the condition that the land was to be laid to grass again five years before the expiration of the lease.[[140]]

There is no doubt of the fact that much land was being converted from pasture to arable in this period. Evidence of this tendency multiplies as the century advances. In 1656 Joseph Lee gave a list of fifteen towns where arable land hitherto converted to pasture had been plowed up again within thirty years.[[141]]

Barren and insufficiently manured land did not produce good crops merely because other land had been given an opportunity to recover its strength. The conversion of open-field arable to pasture went on unchecked in the seventeenth century because it had not yet had the benefit of the prolonged rest which made agriculture profitable, and without which it had become impossible to make a living from the soil. The lands which have been "heretofore converted from errable to pasture.... have sithence gotten heart, strength and fruitfulnesse," and are therefore being plowed again; but the land which has escaped conversion, and has been tied to the "perpetual bondage and servitude of being ever tilled," is "faint and feeble-hearted," and is being laid to grass, for pasture is the only use for which it is suited. The cause of the conversion of arable fields to pasture is the same as that which caused the same change on other lands at an earlier date—so low a level of productivity that the land was not worth cultivating. Lands whose fertility had been restored were put under cultivation and plowed until they were again in need of rest.

Thus the final result was about the same whether an enclosing landlord cut across the gradual process of readjustment of land-holding among the tenants, and converted the whole into pasture, or whether the process was allowed to go on until none but large holders remained in the village. In both cases the tendency was towards a system of husbandry in which the fertility of the soil was maintained by periodically withdrawing portions of it from cultivation and laying it to grass. In the one case, cultivation was completely suspended for a number of years, but was gradually reintroduced as it became evident that the land had recovered its strength while used as pasture. In the other, the grazing of sheep and cattle was introduced as a by-industry, for the sake of utilizing the land which had been set aside to recover its strength, while the better land was kept under the plow. Whether enclosures were made for better agriculture, then, as Mr. Leadam contends, or for pasture, as is argued by Professor Gay,[[142]] the arable enclosures were used as pasture for a part of the time and the enclosed pastures came later to be used for tillage part of the time, and the two things amount to the same thing in the end.

This end, however, had still not been reached in a great number of open-field villages by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and we should expect to find that the history of the land in this century was but a repetition of what had gone before, in so far as the fields which had not hitherto been enclosed are concerned.

But, during the seventeenth century, an agricultural revolution was taking place. Experiments were being made with new forage crops. For one thing, it was found that turnips could be grown in the fields and that they made excellent winter forage; and grass seeding was introduced. The grasses and clovers which were brought from Holland not only made excellent hay, but improved the soil rapidly. The possibility of increasing the amount of hay at will put an end to the absolute scarcity of manure—the limiting factor in English agriculture from the beginning. And the comparative ease with which the artificial grasses could be made to grow did away with the need of waiting ten or fifteen years, or perhaps half a century, for natural grass to cover the fields and restore their productiveness.

Only with the introduction of grass seeding did it become possible to keep a sufficient amount of stock, not only to maintain the fertility of the soil, but to improve it steadily. The soil instead of being taxed year after year under the heavy strain of grain crops was being renovated by the legumes that gathered nitrogen from the air and stored it on tubercles attached to their roots. The deep roots of the clover penetrated the soil, that no plow ever touched. Legumes like alfalfa, producing pound by pound more nutritious fodder than meadow grass, produced acre by acre two and three times the amount, and when such a field was turned under to make place for a grain crop, the deep and heavy sod, the mass of decaying roots, offered the farmer "virgin" soil, where previously even five bushels of wheat could not be gathered.[[143]]

As the value of these new crops became generally recognized, some effort was made to introduce them into the regular rotation of crops in the fields which were still held in common, but, for the most part, these efforts were unsuccessful, and new vigor was given to the enclosure movement. Frequently persons having no arable land of their own had right of common over the stubble and fallow which could not be exercised when turnips and clover were planted; for reasons of this sort, it was difficult to change the ancient course of crops in the open fields. For example, late in the eighteenth century (1793) at Stiffkey and Morston, the improvements due to enclosure are said to have been great, for:

being half-year land before, they could raise no turnips except by agreement, nor cultivate their land to the best advantage.[[144]]