d, or, as was most usual, an enormous fine (i.e., fee)
exacted for renewal of the lease.

The revolution was facilitated by, if it did not in part consist of,
the acquisition of the land by the new commercial class, resulting in
increased productivity. New and better methods of tillage were
introduced. The scattered thirty acres of the peasant were
consolidated into three ten-acre fields, henceforth to be used as the
owner thought best. One year a field would be under a cereal crop; the
next year converted into pasture. This improved method, known as
"convertible husbandry" practiced in England and to a lesser extent on
the Continent, was a big step in the direction of scientific
agriculture. Regular rotation of crops {547} was hardly a common
practice before the eighteenth century, but there was something like it
in places where hemp and flax would be alternated with cereals.
Capitalists in the Netherlands built dykes, drained marshes and dug
expensive canals. Elsewhere also swamps were drained and irrigation
begun. But perhaps no single improvement in technique accounted for
the greater yield of the land so much as the careful and watchful
self-interest of the private owner, as against the previous
semi-communistic carelessness. Several popular proverbs then gained
currency in the sense that there is no fertilizer of the glebe like
that put on by the master himself. Harrison's statement, in
Elizabeth's reign, that an inclosed acre yielded as much as an acre and
a half of common, is borne out by the English statistics of the grain
trade. From 1500 to 1534, while the process of inclosure was at its
height, the export of corn more than doubled; it then diminished until
it almost ceased in 1563, after which it rapidly increased until 1600.
During the whole century the population was growing, and it is
therefore reasonable to suppose that the yield of the soil was
considerably greater in 1600 than it was in 1500.

[Sidenote: Export of grain after 1559]

It must, however, be admitted that the increase in exports was in part
caused by and in part symptomatic of a change in the policy of the
government. When commerce became king he looked out for his own
interests first, and identified these interests with the dividends of
small groups of his chief ministers. Trade was regulated, by tariff
and bounty, no longer in the interests of the consumer but in those of
the manufacturer and merchant. The corn-laws of nin