his system it was impossible to introduce individualism. Each man had
to plow and sow when the village decided it should be done. And the
commons and woodlands were free for all, with certain regulations.[2]

[Sidenote: Medieval farming methods]

The art of farming was not quite primitive, but it had changed less
since the dawn of history than it has changed since 1600. Instead of
great steam-plows and all sorts of machinery for harrowing and
harvesting, small plows were pulled by oxen, and hoes and rakes were
plied by hand. Lime, marl and manure were used for fertilizing, but
scantily. The cattle were {543} small and thin, and after a hard
winter were sometimes so weak that they had to be dragged out to
pasture. Sheep were more profitable, and in the summer season good
returns were secured from chickens, geese, swine and bees. Diseases of
cattle were rife and deadly. The principles of breeding were hardly
understood. Fitzherbert, who wrote on husbandry in the early sixteenth
century, along with some sensible advice makes remarks, on the
influence of the moon on horse-breeding, worthy of Hesiod. Indeed, the
matter was left almost to itself until a statute of Henry VIII provided
that no stallions above two years old and under fifteen hands high be
allowed to run loose on the commons, and no mares of less than thirteen
hands, lest the breed of horses deteriorate. It was to meet the same
situation that the habit of castrating horses arose and became common
about 1580.

[Sidenote: Capitalistic change]

The capitalistic attack on communistic agriculture took two principal
forms. In some countries, like Germany, it was the consequence of the
change from natural economy to money economy. The new commercial men
bought up the estates of the nobles and subjected them to a more
intense cultivation, at the same time using all the resources of law
and government to make them as lucrative as possible.

[Sidenote: Inclosures]

But in two countries, England and Spain, and to some small extent in
others, a profitable opportunity for investment was found in
sheep-farming on a large scale. In England this manifested itself in
"inclosures," by which was primarily meant the fencing in for private
use of the commons, but secondarily came to be applied to the
conversion of arable land into pasture[3] and the substitution of large
holdings for small. The cause of the movement was the demand for wool
in cloth-weaving, larg