THE history of the agrarian problem in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries -- indeed its history ever since -- is
largely the story of the small cultivator's struggle to protect
his interests against the changes caused by the growth of the
great estate. In that struggle there is much that is detailed,
tiresome, and obscure. The student hears very little about
general principles, very much of technicalities about the
nature of common appendant and common appurtenant,
of stinted and unstinted pastures, of gressums and fines, of
copyholds for years, for lives, or of inheritance, of land which
is old enclosure that ought to stand, or new enclosure that
ought to fall. But at the centre of this maze of dry and in-
finitely diverse details there is a real regrouping of social forces
going on, and a rearrangement, at once rapid and profound,
of economic and political ideas. We must no more picture
the changes of our period as mere matters of the technique
of agriculture, than we must think of the industrial revolu-
tion of two centuries later in terms of spinning-jennies and
steam-power. On the contrary, these very details are the
channel along which rural life is beginning to slip from one
form of economic organisation to another, the seed-plot in
which new conceptions of social expediency are being brought
to maturity. In numberless English villages between 1500
and 1600 large issues are being decided which will pro-
foundly modify the course of social development. Is the
communal administration of meadow and wastes to survive
(as it has survived in France and Belgium) or is it to dis-

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