Page:Landholding in England.djvu/109



UDGING from my own ideas before I closely studied the subject, I believe the general notion is that the English peasant, since the Reformation, has drifted casually off the land, for one reason or other—inability to make a living out of a small allotment being the first cause; next, dislike to the dulness of a country life, compared with the attractions of the town; and the temptation of higher wages. And it is quite true that as time went on the lot of the husbandman became harder, and that when there opened out to him the prospect of good wages in factories, he flocked into the great manufacturing towns. But this was much later. Long before he left the land, the land had left him. He did not drift off—he was first wrenched off, then weeded off. Wrenched off in the great clearing of the sixteenth century, when the great landowners became great sheep- masters, and when the abbey lands changed hands. Weeded off more slowly, but quite as surely, by the gradual process of enclosure, during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

I will now try to give a slight sketch of this gradual enclosure of public lands.

It proceeded in an irregular fashion. Sometimes, for long periods, we hear little except the stock complaints that tillage and husbandry are declining, to the injury of