w sold would yield treble and in some
cases six times the money they were sold for fifty years ago'.[267]
Davenant puts land at twelve years' purchase in 1600, at eighteen
years in 1688.[268] In 1729 the price of land was said to be
twenty-seven years' purchased.[269]

The legislation against laying down tillage to grass was continued
until the end of the sixteenth century. The statute 39 Eliz., c. 1,
repealed 4 Hen. VII, c. 19, and all other Acts against pulling down
houses, and provided that a house of husbandry should be a house that
hath or hath had 20 acres of arable land. All such houses which had
been destroyed during the last seven years were to be rebuilt, and if
destroyed more than seven years only one-half was to be rebuilt; but
to each of them at least 40 acres of land were to be attached.

The next statute, 39 Eliz., c. 2, sets forth once more the advantages
of tillage, viz. the increase and multiplying of people for service in
the wars, and in time of peace the employment of a greater number of
people, the keeping of people from poverty, the dispersal of the
wealth of the kingdom in many hands, and 'the standing of this realm
upon itself without depending upon foreign countries'[270]; and
therefore enacts that lands converted from tillage to pasture shall be
restored to tillage within three years, and lands then in tillage
should be so continued; but this was only to extend to twenty-three
counties, and omitted most of those in the south-west. At the
beginning of the seventeenth century a reaction set in; the price of
corn had risen immensely and continued to do so, the price of wool
remained stationary, and tillage was as profitable as grass. In 1620
Coke speaks of the man who only kept a shepherd and a dog as one who
never prospered. In 1624 several of the tillage laws were
repealed.[271]

As an example of the unenclosed fields, at the end of the sixteenth
century, we may take the common fields at Daventry, which were three
in number, containing respectively 368, 383, and 524 acres, divided
into furlongs, a term which had now a very wide signification, each of
which was subdivided into lands nearly always half an acre in extent,
several of these lands when adjoining being often held now by the same
owner. One furlong may be taken as an example. It was 37 acres 1 rood
in extent, and contained ninety-six lands, owned by seventeen people.
The meadows were divided still more minutely, some of the smaller