e food, the abundance of stale fish eaten, and the scanty
supply of vegetables predisposed rural and town population to
disease.'

[178] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 448.

[179] McCulloch, _Commercial Dictionary_ (1852), p. 412. In 1449
Parliament had decided that all foreign merchants importing corn
should spend the money so obtained on English goods to prevent it
leaving the country.--McPherson, _Annals of Commerce_, i. 655.

[180] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 191.

[181] Much of the weaving, however, was done in rural districts.

[182] See 3 Edw. IV, c. 5; _Rot. Parl._ v. 105; 22 Edw. IV, c. 1.

[183] Cunningham, _op. cit._ i. 456.

CHAPTER VII

ENCLOSURE

We have now reached a time when the enclosure question was becoming of
paramount importance,[184] and began to cause constant anxiety to
legislators, while the writers of the day are full of it. Enclosure
was of four kinds:

1. Enclosing the common arable fields for grazing, generally
in large tracts.

2. Enclosing the same by dividing them into smaller fields,
generally of arable.

3. Enclosing the common pasture, for grazing or tillage.

4. Enclosing the common meadows or mowing grounds.

It is the first mainly, and to a less degree the third of these, which
were so frequent a source of complaint in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries; for the first, besides displacing the small holder, threw
out of employment a large number of people who had hitherto gained
their livelihood by the various work connected with tillage, and the
third deprived a large number of their common rights.

The first Enclosure Act was the Statute of Merton, passed in 1235, 20
Henry III, c. 4, which permitted lords of manors to add to their
demesnes such parts of the waste pasture and woods as were beyond the
needs of the tenants. There is evidence, however, that enclosure,
probably of waste land, was going on before this statute, as the
charter of John, by which all Devonshire except Dartmoor and Exmoor
was deforested, expressly forbids the making of hedges, a proof of
enclosure, in those two forests.[185] We may be sure that the needs of
the tenants were by an arbitrary lord estimated at a very low figure.
At the same time many proceeded in due legal form. Thomas, Lord
Berkeley, about the period of the Act reduced great quantities of
ground into enclosures by procuring many releases of common land from
freeholders.[186]