appear? Is England to be a country of large cultivators
working with many hired labourers, or of small cultivators
working with few? Is leasehold or copyhold to be the pre-
dominant form of land tenure? When the final transition
to modern agriculture takes place, will England face the
change with a population the bulk of which has been rooted
in the soil since the Middle Ages, or will the middle classes
in rural society have been already so far undermined that
opinion turns spontaneously to the great landlord as the
sole representative of agricultural progress? Of course the
answer to these questions was not given by 1600 or even
by 1700; we must not forget Arthur Young and the far
more extensive enclosures of the eighteenth century. But
in our period development certainly took a distinct bias
away from one set of arrangements and in the direction of
another. The best standpoint from which to examine its
course is found by watching the reaction upon the tenants of
the agricultural changes which we have tried to summarise
in the preceding sections.

The economic effect of the policy pursued by the large
farmer depended upon what proportion of the land he
controlled, and in particular upon the part of the manor
upon which enclosure was made. He might enclose only
the land actually belonging to the demesne farm when he
took it over; or he might enclose parts of the waste or
meadow over which other tenants had rights of pasture;
or he might enclose the holdings in the open arable fields
belonging to other tenants, for this purpose evicting, or induc-
ing the lord to evict, them. When only the demesne lands
were enclosed the other interests were sometimes little dis-
turbed, unless indeed the demesne had already been par-
celled out among some of the smaller tenants, a contingency
to be considered later. But, even when that was not the
case, the conversion of the demesne to pasture and its
enclosure had two consequences which were not unimpor-
tant. On the one hand, the wage-earning population of
cottagers and younger sons, who had found employment as
hired labourers when the demesne was used for tillage, were
thrown out of work, and with the limited demand for labour
offered by a sixteenth century village, were obliged, one

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