hich had been quite thickly populated with small farmers or
domestic manufacturers now lost the greater part of their occupants by
migration to the newer manufacturing districts or to America. As in
the sixteenth century, some villages disappeared entirely. Goldsmith
in the _Deserted Village_ described changes that really occurred,
however opposed to the facts may have been his description of the
earlier idyllic life whose destruction he deplored.

The existence of unenclosed commons and common fields had been
accompanied by very poor farming, very thriftless and shiftless
habits. The improvement of agriculture, the application of capital to
that occupation, the disappearance of the domestic system of industry,
and other changes made the enclosure of common land and the
accompanying changes inevitable. None the less it was a relatively
sudden and complete interference with the established character of
rural life, and not only was the process accompanied with much
suffering, but the form which took its place was marked by some
serious disadvantages. This form was brought about through the rapid
culmination of old familiar tendencies. The classes connected with the
land came to be quite clearly distinguished into three groups: the
landlords, the tenant farmers, and the farm laborers. The landlord
class was a comparatively small body of nobility and gentry, a few
thousand persons, who owned by far the greater portion of the land of
the country. Their estates were for the most part divided up into
farms, to the keeping of which in productive condition they
contributed the greater part of the expense, to the administration of
which trained stewards applied themselves, and in the improvement of
which their owners often took a keen and enlightened interest. They
received high rents, possessed unlimited local influence, and were the
favored governing class of the country. The class of farmers were men
of some capital, and frequently of intelligence and enterprise, though
rarely of education, who held on lease from the landlords farms of
some one, two, or three or more hundred acres, paying relatively large
rents, and yet by the excellence of their farming making for
themselves a liberal income. The farm laborers were the residuum of
the changes which have been traced in the history of landholding; a
large class living for the most part miserably in cottages grouped in
villages, holding no land, and receiving day wages for worki