The activity of the Government in matters of land was not so incessant as it was in the regulation of prices and the administration of the Poor Laws; for its land policy was strongly opposed to the interests of the country gentry who were its officials, and it had to proceed with caution. If we except the first great Commission appointed by Wolsey in 1517, the periods in which it was especially energetic in dealing with the land question were three, the years between 1536 and 1549, the years from 1607 to 1618, the years from 1630 to 1636; and on each of these three occasions there was some temporary cause to explain its peculiar zeal—on the two first the revolts of the peasantry, and on the last the rise in the price of grain, which suggested that an unduly small proportion of the land was under tillage. Nevertheless it handles individual cases with considerable frequency throughout the whole period from 1517 to 1640. Usually it acts as a final court of appeal, which intervenes only when other means of redress have broken down, and it is sometimes at pains to explain to offended landlords that it does not intend to debar them from asserting their rights at Common Law, if they can. Its aim is to stop very gross cases of oppression, to prevent the peasants being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to induce landlords to take a larger view of their responsibilities, to settle disputes by the use of common sense and moral pressure. It steps in when the tenants are poor men who are being ruined by vexatious lawsuits, or when enclosure is thought likely to produce disorder, or to forbid a landlord to take action pending a decision by the courts. It has to hear many cases touching copyholders and many touching commons; for no one is quite certain as to the legal rights of copyholders, and in the matter of commons there is a fearful gulf between law and equity. Occasionally in the reign of Henry VIII., and even in that of Elizabeth, it deals with cases of villeinage. But these, though more numerous than might have been supposed, are nevertheless rare, for the principal economic evils of the period consist not in the revival of old claims, but in the new competitive conditions of agriculture. The treatment of the latter is by no means a simple matter—even the strong Governments of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth will not lightly thrust forceful fingers into the mysterious custom-bound recesses of the manor—and when we have said that on the whole the bias of the Tudor and early Stuart statesmen is against revolutionary changes that damage the peasants, we can say little more without citing individual cases of interference.
Let us look shortly at the more striking among them. The famous Commission upon enclosure appointed by Wolsey in 1517 set a precedent to be followed in several subsequent inquiries, and has left us an invaluable body of information as to the nature and extent of the enclosing movement. It was, however, by no means the first example of the Government intervening in the agrarian problem, and the partial reconversion of pasture to arable, which seems to have resulted from its labours, still left an urgent need for a continuous supervision of the relations between landlord and tenant by some tribunal sufficiently independent to do justice to the weaker party. In 1494 the earliest proceedings in the interminable case[640] of John Mulsho v. the inhabitants of Thingden ended in the Court of Star Chamber (the same court was dealing with the same matter in 1538) with a decree in favour of the tenants. In 1510 the same body was dealing with a quarrel between the Abbot and the copyholders of Peterborough,[641] and in 1516 with a complaint from the inhabitants of Draycote[642] and Stoke Gifford that the lord of the manor had evicted copyholders, stopped up rights of way, and enclosed common land. The policy of Wolsey is sufficiently indicated by the active campaign which he set on foot against depopulation, and requires no further illustration. But it is interesting to observe that his attitude towards the agrarian question was not a mere personal idiosyncrasy, and that it was the same in all essential particulars as that of his successor. Thomas Cromwell must bear the blame for part of the agrarian distress which prevailed during the closing years of Henry VIII. and the reign of Edward VI.; for that distress was enhanced by the wild land speculation which followed the secularisation of the monastic estates. In that age, however, such indirect social reactions of their policy were matters quite beneath the consideration of statesmen, and the fact that the Government was responsible for changes which operated most disastrously on the established order of rural society did not prevent administrative interference to impede agrarian innovations from going on to the end of the reign of Henry VIII. Indeed the King, influenced no doubt by the fear that agrarian agitation might add fuel to religious discontent, seems himself to have taken some interest in the matter. In 1534 one finds Cromwell writing to congratulate him on the passage through the House of Commons of a Bill providing that no man shall keep more than 2000 sheep, and that one-eighth of every farmer's land shall always remain in tillage, “The most profitable and most benefycyall thing that ever was done to this the commonwealthe of your realm”[643] and in the following year there is a letter[644] from Cromwell to Rich directing him to apprise the Duke of Suffolk of the King’s displeasure at the decay of certain towns which the Duke had promised to repair. The agrarian grievances expressed in the Pilgrimage of Grace were admitted, and in the instructions issued to the officers who were appointed to restore order in the disaffected counties special directions[645] were included to throw open enclosures, and to reduce the excessive fines charged to tenants on admission to their holdings. In the years immediately following the same policy was pursued in other parts of the country. In 1538 the Earl of Derby[646] writes to Cromwell protesting against the pressure put upon him to reinstate seven tenants whom he has turned out. In 1540 a landlord[647] in the Isle of Wight is compelled to restore to their holdings some recently evicted tenants. In 1541 several cases come before the Council. It appoints a Commission to investigate the case of a Northamptonshire[648] landlord who has prevented the tenants of Brigstock from feeding their pigs, calves, and sheep, by cutting up part of a common wood “into several pastures for his own private use and benefit.” It meets a complaint from the borderers[649] of the Forest of Dartmoor that the owner of the lands of the monastery of Buckfast is breaking the statute which required the lands of dissolved abbeys to be farmed in the traditional way, by excluding them from the common, with a decision upholding the tenants' case and with the appointment of Commissioners to carry out the award. It sets a certain choleric Sir Nicholas Poyntz,[650] who has dared to procure the imprisonment of a tenant for proceeding against him before the Council, to cool his temper in the Fleet, and when he comes out compels him to grant his victim a new farm in exchange for one which he has surrendered, to reduce his rent from 20s. to 6s., and to pay him forty marks as compensation for his “damages and travailles.” In 1543[651] the tenants of Abbots Ripton lay a complaint in the Court of Requests against Sir John St. John on the ground that, in addition to other acts of oppression, he has entered forcibly on their holdings. Sir John replies that they are not copyholders, but merely tenants at will, who are unprotected by any immemorial custom, and after an examination of the manor rolls the court holds that he is right. But the legal insecurity of the tenants does not prevent them from getting protection. The court requires their landlord to grant them leases for years at reasonable rents, and orders that the property which he has distrained shall be restored.
With the Protectorate of Somerset we enter upon a period of more violent agitation and more drastic expedients. There was a large difference between using the jurisdiction of the Council to redress individual cases of hardship and a deliberate attempt to effect a general settlement of the land question upon lines which would do substantial justice to the peasants. The former course involved no perilous assertion of principles, and could be pursued under the guise of a purely conservative policy, merely by referring disputes between landlords and tenants to the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests, which, though in fact administrative and governmental bodies, were none the less protected to some extent against criticism by wearing the appearance of mere legal tribunals. The latter might, perhaps, have been attempted with some faint hope of success, if statesmen had been much more careful than they were to discriminate between the different aspects of the problem with which they were confronted. To us, who look back on the situation from a distance of three and a half centuries, it seems that the one guiding thread, which might have led some way through the welter of confusion, was offered by the sharp distinction drawn by Hales between those enclosures which were made by the exchange and consolidation of strips, with a view to better husbandry, and those which had as their effect the conversion of arable land to pasture, the monopolising of commons, and the eviction of tenants. The arguments in favour of the first type of enclosure were too cogent for any policy which condemned enclosing in general to have the smallest prospect of success. The only possibility of averting the ruin to the peasantry which accompanied depopulation lay in encouraging them generally to follow the example of their brothers in Kent, Essex, Devonshire, and Cornwall, who had for centuries been substituting a more progressive husbandry for the “mingle mangle" of the open fields, without the disastrous consequences entailed by the spread of capitalist agriculture in other parts of the South and Midlands. But such a frank encouragement of certain kinds of enclosure for the sake of repressing others implied an appreciation of the economics of the problem to which comparatively few persons in our period had attained, and was quite beyond the grasp of Governments, which, at their worst, as under Warwick, were quite indifferent to the sufferings of the poorer classes, and, at their best, conceived public interests to be served best by a strict maintenance of customary conditions. Somerset’s policy of deliberately restoring ancient relationships with a strong hand could hardly even be begun without those who pursued it taking sides in a bitter economic agitation, and essaying openly to reverse the whole agrarian movement with which, in the course of the past half century, the wealth of the middle and upper classes, at any rate south of the Trent, had become inextricably identified. It involved in fact a return to the policy of Wolsey, and a return to it under conditions which made Wolsey’s policy doubly hard to carry out, inasmuch as, on the one hand, the position of Somerset as temporary head of a jealous aristocracy was far weaker than that of the omnipotent Cardinal, and, on the other hand, the lapse of twenty years had seen the growth of a generation to which enclosures were a vested interest.
Yet it would be a mistake to think of the whole agrarian episode between the death of Henry VIII. and the fall of Somerset as the mere freak of a misguided doctrinaire. If we can see difficulties which he did not, if we can smile at the thought of any Government at once so incompetent, and but for Somerset himself, so entirely selfish, carrying out a great conservative revolution in the teeth of the new wealth and power of the country, we must also remember that he was not alone in thinking the spoliation of the weaker rural classes not only, as it certainly was, illegal, but also so patently unjust as to amount to a national crime, and that in that age men overestimated the ability of a Government fiat to modify economic habits almost as much as they underestimated it two and a half centuries later. Somerset can hardly have been ignorant of the tremendous risks involved in his policy. But he may well have thought inaction not only baser than, but almost as dangerous as, action. It was certain that, unless the Government interfered to protect tenants, there would be a series of peasants' revolts. The best answer to the charge of stirring up class hatred, which was made against Somerset, as against all who call attention to its causes, was that agrarian rioting had begun in Hertfordshire[652] before the Commission on Enclosures was sent out, that in those counties where it took its work seriously order was maintained till the end of 1548, and that grave disturbances did not take place until the following year, when it became evident that, both in Parliament and on the Council, the Protector's policy had been beaten by the opposition of the great landowners. Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Somerset himself (though he, like every one else, had speculated in monastic estates), however much there may be to regret that his policy did not come into stronger hands, or fall upon times which were, from a political point of view, less hopelessly impracticable. An attempt was made to set a good example on the Crown Estates. In 1548, in response to complaints from the tenants at Walton, Weybridge, Esher, and Shepperton, that the making of the royal deer park at Hampton Court was ruining them through the loss of common rights which it entailed, an order[653] was issued dechasing the Park, and throwing open the enclosed lands to the commoners. In the following year Somerset secured the passage through Parliament of a Private Act[654] conferring a good title on those copyholders on his own manors to whom demesne lands had been let, and who, as occupiers of other than customary tenancies, could not claim the protection of manorial custom. It is plain from the comparatively few complaints which came in the sixteenth century from freeholders that, if such a course had been generally pursued, the chief objection to the changes grouped together under the name of enclosure would have been removed, because the harsh disturbance of vested interests which they involved would have been avoided. But that, of course, was quite outside the bounds of political possibility.
The story of Somerset’s attempt to deal with the land question is soon told. In 1548 agrarian discontent was at its height. Some time in that year there must have come to the hands of the Government the small tract on the effect of sheep-farming in Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, and Berkshire, which was printed in 1551 under the name of “Certayne causes of the Present Discontent.”[655] In spring and summer Latimer was thundering against the “Step-lords”[656] at Paul's Cross. In autumn Crowley published his “Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons.”[657] Above all, the poor commons had earlier in the year shown unmistakable signs of fending for themselves. The result of Somerset’s own sympathy with the prevalent discontent was the formation of something like a party, under the name of the “Commonwealth men,” with Latimer as its prophet and Hales as its man of action, which had a programme sufficiently definite to put heart into the peasantry and to terrify the great landed proprietors. On June 1st a Royal Commission[658] was appointed to inquire into offences committed against the Acts forbidding conversion of arable to pasture and depopulation. The Commission divided itself into several committees to deal with different parts of the country. Only one of them, however, consisting of John Hales and five of his colleagues, got seriously to work. It had a large area to cover—the counties of Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire—and one which was the centre of the agitation against enclosure. It seems to have interrupted its labours during autumn and winter, but it was busy in June, July, and August 1548, and again in the summer of 1549, by which time, however, the anger of the landed gentry against its proceedings, and of the peasants against the inactivity of the Commission as a whole, had reached a point which made it hardly possible for it to do more than collect information. Considering the difficulties of its task, and the wide tract of country to be covered, its behaviour appears to have been thorough and business-like. The usual procedure was to empanel a jury of twelve in each place visited, to whom Hales delivered an address explaining the objects and methods of the inquiry, as set out in the instructions issued by the Government to the Commissioners. These stated the Commission to have been formed in particular “for the maintenance and keeping up of houses of husbandry, for avoiding destruction and pulling down of houses for enclosures and converting of arable land into pasture, for limiting what number of sheep men should have and keep in their possession at one time, against plurality and keeping together of farms, and for maintenance of housekeeping, hospitality, and tillage on the sites ... of such monasteries, priories, and religious houses as were dissolved.”[659] Offenders were then presented by the jury, and though, on Hales' advice, a pardon was granted them for their past illegalities, their enclosures seem to have been thrown down, arable which had been turned into pasture to have been ploughed up, and farms which had been united to have been separated.[660]
In the meantime Somerset kept the general policy of agrarian reform alive on the Council. In the autumn of 1548 Hales had returned to London, and, as member for Preston, had prepared three Bills, dealing partly with enclosures and partly with the high prices. The first, requiring re-edification of decayed houses and the maintenance of tillage, and the second, forbidding speculation in food-stuffs, were introduced into the House of Lords. The third, which aimed at encouraging cattle breeding as distinct from sheep grazing, was read first in the House of Commons. Neither Bill came to anything, for Parliament was as angry as the Council with Somerset’s policy. But in May 1549 the Protector issued another proclamation against the decay of houses and enclosure; in June he infuriated the upper classes by a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges; and throughout the whole period of his power he used the Court of Requests as an instrument for protecting tenants against landlords.[661] The Secretary[662] to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror provided that the gentry began it, prophesied gloomily that the German peasants' revolt was to be re-enacted in England, and Warwick attacked Hales fiercely for venturing to discharge the duties laid upon him by the Government, of which Warwick was a member.[663] “Sir,” wrote a plaintive Norfolk gentleman to Cecil about the time of Ket’s rebellion, “Be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretence of simplicity and poverty there may not rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Commonwealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest) I assure you they are in such doubt that almost they dare touch none of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and that Commonwealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.... I may well gather some of them to be in jealousy of my Lord’s friendship, yea and to be plain, think my Lord’s grace rather to will the decay of the gentlemen than otherwise.”[664] Poor gentlemen! A Government which holds that laws do not exist only to preserve the rich in their possessions! Truly the mountains are removed.
Somerset’s Government had too short a life for us to judge how far, in happier political circumstances, he might have succeeded, not in checking agrarian changes, which would in any case have been impossible, but in securing that reasonable consideration should be given to the vested interests of the poorer classes. As Elizabethan statesmen discovered[665] at the end of the century, there was room for a policy which would prevent the wholesale displacement of tenants, and nevertheless offer an encouragement to the formation of the compact holdings out of the scattered strips and common pastures, which the agricultural experts were unanimous in condemning. There are faint indications of an understanding that a fair middle course was possible in a remarkable case which comes from the little Huntingdonshire town of Godmanchester.[666] At Godmanchester there had been the usual changes of the preceding half century. Rents had been raised, cottages pulled down, woods destroyed and turned to pasture, while the meadows, which under the Act of 1547 had been confiscated from the local gild, offered a tempting prey to some enterprising speculator. On complaints coming before the Council in the summer of 1549 a comprehensive scheme of reorganisation was drawn up. All persons with more than one house were to let at the customary rent that which they did not use themselves. All persons who had pulled down houses or converted them to other purposes than the accommodation of tenants were either to rebuild them or to build new ones, and to let them to any one offering the customary rent before Michaelmas 1549. The groves of wood converted to pasture were to be enclosed, so as to prevent the depredations made upon them by straying beasts, and, if necessary, the land was to be sown with acorns. With the gild lands a course was taken which, in the scramble for land which was going on in the middle of the sixteenth century, was unfortunately highly unusual. According to the Council’s directions they were to “be divided among the inhabitants thereof in this manner; that is to say to every ploughland five acres, and to every cottager and artificer there dwelling, or which hereafter upon the houses to be now builded shall dwell, one acre, and, if the number do not extend, then for every ploughland four, and so for lack of the rate every ploughland three, and the residue of the said acres falling after that rate to be divided among the cottagers, paying for every of the said acres 3/4." This case is the high water mark of administrative interference on behalf of the tenants. The action taken embraces nearly all the expedients of re-edifying decayed cottages, fixing fair rents, preventing common land from passing into the control of a single individual, and making equal allotment among the inhabitants, which had been demanded by the peasants and suggested by their friends. It shows that the enclosing of land hitherto used in common was not resented, provided that the division was made in such a way as to give a fair share to all the parties interested. It may perhaps be taken as a specimen of the kind of policy which lay behind Somerset’s expressions of sympathy with the peasantry, and which he would have pursued if his colleagues on the Council had permitted. As it was, he was not strong enough to carry out his programme. While the failure of the Commission resulted in the revolts of 1549, his reluctance to crush their authors, whom he believed to be men goaded into rebellion by intolerable grievances, united the whole weight of the greater property against him as a traitor to his order. In the attack made upon him as by his colleagues, the actions which evoked their special denunciation were those which embodied his agrarian policy, the use of the Court of Requests to protect tenants, the appointment of the Royal Commission to enforce the Acts against enclosures, the pardon granted in June 1549 to the riotous peasants, and the statements attributed to him that “the covetousness of the gentlemen gave cause to the common people to rise," and that “people had good cause to reform the things themselves," because “the lords of Parliament were loathe to incline themselves to reformation of enclosures and other things.”[667] To the last a popular hero, the “good Duke" could expect no help from those whom he had befriended, and no mercy from the sordid counter-revolution which he had provoked. His epitaph was given by the sad cries of “Too true,” with which the crowd about the scaffold greeted his dying declaration that he had “ever been glad of the furtherance ... of the commonwealth.”[668]
With the fall of Somerset in October 1549 the landowning classes had their revenge, and, under the guidance of Warwick, the policy of the Government swung violently in the opposite direction. The intervention of the Council to protect tenants of course stopped at once; in the two cases which are reported as having come before it in the year 1550 and 1551 the line taken was that the presumption was against the tenants who had broken open enclosures.[669] While, in the absence of John Hales, who appears to have found it convenient to leave the country, the Reports of the Royal Commission were allowed to slumber, the Government, by way of reducing opportunities for undesirable meetings, instructed the Bishop of London to prevent unseasonable preaching in his diocese, and set itself to establish the new agrarian régime by law. The ways in which men seek liberty are infinite in number, but the methods of tyranny are everywhere the same; and the nearest parallel to the behaviour of Somerset’s successors is the attitude of the panic-stricken aristocracy of the early nineteenth century towards trade unions. Under an Act of 1550 all meetings of the peasantry were treated as a sort of “illegal conspiracy.” Any forty of them who assembled to break down an enclosure might be condemned as traitors. Any twelve who assembled for the same purpose were guilty of felony, as also were those who summoned such a meeting, or who combined to reduce rents or the price of corn. Even the rusty legislation of the thirteenth century was revived by the re-enactment of the Statute of Merton of 1235,[670] which permitted lords to enclose as much as they pleased, provided that “sufficient” remained over for the tenants, with the significant improvement that the latter qualification was swept away by a clause declaring that enclosures might be made “notwithstanding their gainsaying and contradiction.” The tyranny of the oligarchy which ruled from 1549 to 1553 has been obscured by the more dramatic events which preceded and succeeded it. But it marks the bottom point in the condition of the sixteenth century peasantry. It indicates how the new agrarian régime will develop when the political forces impeding it are removed. More had asked, What is Government? and had answered that it is “a certein conspiracy of riche men procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title of a Common Wealth.” His immortal definition does less than justice to the cynicism of the generation which succeeded his own. Mary executed Protestants for reasons of religion, as Elizabeth executed Catholics for reasons of State. But Warwick, a hypocrite in religion, was at least guiltless of the hypocrisy of sheltering his land policy “under the name and title of the Common Wealth.” It was exactly what it seemed to be, a straightforward attempt to prevent the poor from protesting when their possessions were taken from them by the rich.
The general policy of the Government during the reign of Elizabeth and the first half of the seventeenth century shows neither the desire of Somerset to undo the agrarian revelation, nor the complete indifference to the interests of the poorer classes of the party which succeeded him. During the reign of Elizabeth there was little agrarian agitation. It is possible that the limits of profitable pasture-farming had been reached. It is possible that the policy of encouraging the export of corn, which had been suggested by Hales, and which was adopted in 1563 and extended in 1571, reacted favourably on arable farming. It is possible, again, that Warwick’s measures had had their effect, and that the peasantry had been cowed into silence. Though, on the whole, the Government maintained the traditional attitude, it did not interfere except in circumstances of special hardship, or when there was danger of serious disturbance. Cases of this nature came before it fairly frequently in the reigns of Elizabeth, Charles, and James. One finds it intervening on the ground that the poverty of tenants makes it impossible for them to go to law, or that the offenders concerned are so powerful as to be able to disregard inferior authorities, or that the local authorities themselves have been unfairly biassed, or to prevent disturbances by hearing tenants' grievances, or to compel a great noble, like the Earl of Shrewsbury, to reinstate tenants whom it thinks to have been wrongfully evicted, or to stop action being taken by a landlord pending a decision by the courts in his favour. In 1579 the Council writes to the Lord President of Wales ordering him to take proceedings against two persons who have been enclosing part of the Forest of Fakenham, and have disturbed the copyholders; he is to prevent any further enclosures being made until the whole matter has been considered by the Government.[671] In 1581 it interferes to protect a copyholder who has been kept out of his holding by the Dean and Chapter of Peterborough.[672] In 1586 it directs the Cambridgeshire justices to inquire into the complaint of some tenants who claim that a piece of common pasture has been let over their heads, and to see that both parties to the dispute come before the Justices of Assize.[673] The Justices of Assize in Norfolk are to take action in the matter of a common at Kettlestone which two of the tenants allege to have been overstocked with sheep.[674] Several letters are addressed to the Council of the Marches of Wales ordering them to prevent the eviction of copyholders.[675] A landlord is requested to attend the Council and prove that his tenants' fines are uncertain, and not, as they allege, fixed.[676] The Court of Chancery has dismissed a case arising out of the enclosure of commons at Bath, and the Council orders a retrial.[677] Occasionally it cites offenders into the Court of Star Chamber,[678] and in 1592, just when the Court of Requests was beginning to be attacked by the common lawyers, we find a case as to fold-courses coming before the Court of Requests.[679] More often it appoints special Commissioners to act as arbitrators, or refers petitioners to the Justices of Assize in their county, with a request to take local evidence and inform the Council what they advise. Throughout the reigns of James and Charles we get glimpses of administrative activity which show that the traditional policy was, perhaps fitfully, maintained. In 1603 the Council of the North[680] were instructed to make “from time to time diligent and effectual inquisition of the wrongful taking in of commons and other grounds, and the decay of tillage and of towns or houses of husbandry,” and to correct offenders with “some notable punishment.” The rebellion in the Midlands in 1607 produced special measures, the chief offenders being summoned before the Council and bound over to rebuild houses which had fallen into decay, while in the following years two Commissions were appointed to compound with enclosers.[681] In Yorkshire the justices are evidently fairly active in 1607 and 1608. A Richmond freeholder who owns two-thirds of the manor is presented “for decaying five husbandries, and also for converting 30 acres of tillage ground to meadow and pasture,” and similar presentments are made at Malton, Thirsk, and Helmsley.[682] A Justice of Assize writes about the same time from the western counties to the effect that twenty-six houses of husbandry have been rebuilt and the offenders punished.[683] In 1614 the justices of Norfolk inform the Council that in accordance with its directions they have examined the enclosures made in the last two years, and have ordered the hedging and ditching of lands to be stopped till further notice.[684] In the following year one William Combe was negotiating with the corporation of Stratford for their consent to the enclosure and conversion to pasture of his freehold lands lying in the common fields at Welcombe; in 1615 an order made at Warwick Assizes was confirmed by the Chief Justice restraining him from doing so on the ground that it was “against the laws of the realm,” and in the following year a peremptory letter was addressed to him by the Council directing his compliance.[685] In 1619 there was a temporary reaction owing to the low price of grain, which led to the appointment of a Commission to grant pardons for breaches of the Acts forbidding enclosure, and in 1624 all the Statutes except the two passed in 1597 were repealed. But this did not stop administrative interference. In 1621 the Justices of Assize for Bedfordshire are directed to check encroachments on a common, and in 1623 a Commission is appointed to remove grievances arising in connection with enclosures at Cheshunt.[686] The rise in corn prices which occurred from 1629 to 1631 produced another burst of activity, which is to be attributed partly to a genuine desire to protect the poorer classes, and partly to the hope that the fines imposed upon enclosers might squeeze a few drops into the Government’s ever thirsty Exchequer. In 1630 directions were issued by the Council to the justices of five Midland counties to remove all enclosures made in the last two years on the ground that they led to depopulation and were particularly harmful in time of dearth.[687] In 1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed, and special instructions to enforce the Statutes against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize.[688] That the inquiry was not a mere formality is proved by the State Papers of the period. In part of the country, at any rate, land which had been pasture was ploughed[689] up in obedience to the Government’s orders, and a list of offenders, including—the Government must have seen his name with grim satisfaction—Lord Saye and Sele, was returned to the Council, some of whom were still being prosecuted in the Court of Star Chamber as late as 1639. This is the last occasion on which we can trace the administration of this part of the Tudor State policy. The agitation against enclosures was carried on under the Commonwealth. The diggers under Winstanley came into prominence for a moment, only to be disclaimed by the respectable[690] opponents of enclosure and to be instantly suppressed by the Government, and there was a crop of pamphlets in the years between 1650 and 1660 which dealt with the evils of depopulation in quite the old manner. But the traditional doctrine as to the importance of the peasantry had decayed, and the central machinery for forcing the justices to take action had been destroyed in 1641. The last Bill to regulate enclosures was introduced into the House of Commons in 1656, and was rejected on the second reading.[691]