ely for export trade.

{544} [Sidenote: Complaint against inclosures]

Contemporaries noticed with much alarm the operations of this economic
change. A cry went up that sheep were eating men, that England was
being turned into one great pasture to satisfy the greed of the rich,
while the land needed for grain was abandoned and tenants forcibly
ejected. The outcry became loudest about the years 1516-8, when a
commission was appointed to investigate the "evil" of inclosures. It
was found that in the past thirty years the amount of land in the eight
counties most affected was 22,500 acres. This was not all for grazing;
in Yorkshire it was largely for sport, in the Midlands for plowing, in
the south for pasture.

The acreage would seem extremely small to account for the complaint it
excited. Doubtless it was only the chief and most typical of the
hardships caused to a certain class by the introduction of new methods.
One is reminded of the bitter hostility to the introduction of
machinery in the nineteenth century, when the vast gain in wealth to
the community as a whole, being indirect, seemed cruelly purchased at
the cost of the sufferings of those laborers who could not adapt
themselves to the novel methods. Evolution is always hard on a certain
class and the sufferers quite naturally vociferate their woes without
regard to the real causes of the change or to the larger interests of
society.

Certain it is that inclosures went on uninterrupted throughout the
century, in spite of legislative attempts to stop them. Indeed, they
could hardly help continuing, when they were so immensely profitable.
Land that was inclosed for pasture brought five pounds for every three
pounds it had paid under the plow. Sheep multiplied accordingly. The
law of 1534 spoke of some men owning as many as 24,000 sheep, and
unwittingly gave, in the form of a complaint, the cause thereof, {545}
namely that the price of wool had recently doubled. The law limited
the number of sheep allowed to one man to 2000. The people arose and
slaughtered sheep wholesale in one of those unwise and blind, but not
unnatural, outbursts of sabotage by which the proletariat now and then
seeks to destroy the wealth that accentuates their poverty. Then as
always, the only causes for unwelcome alterations of their manner of
life seen by them was the greed and heartlessness of a ring of men, or
of the government. The deeper economic forces escaped detectio