ll point in the same direction.
These matters will be taken up more fully in a later chapter. Here it
need only be pointed out that the withdrawal of land from cultivation
was under way because tillage was unprofitable.

If tillage was unprofitable in the fourteenth century, so unprofitable
that heirs were anxious to buy themselves free of the obligation to
enter upon their inheritance, while established landholders deserted
their tenements, the enclosure of arable land for pasture in the
fifteenth century is seen in a new light. When there was no question
of desiring the land for sheep pasture, it was voluntarily abandoned
by cultivators. Displacement of tillage due to an internal cause
precedes displacement of tillage for sheep pasture. The process of
withdrawing land from cultivation began independently of the scarcity
of labor caused by the Black Death and independently of any change in
the price of wool; the continuation of this process in the fifteenth
century is not likely to depend entirely upon a rise in the price of
wool. That the enclosures of the fifteenth century were in reality
merely a further step in the readjustments under way in the fourteenth
century cannot be doubted. And that the whole process was independent
of the especial external influence upon agriculture exerted in the
fourteenth century by the Black Death and in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries by the growth of the woollen industry is shown in
the case of a group of manors where the essential features of the
enclosure movement appeared in the thirteenth century. More than a
hundred years before the Black Death the Lord of Berkeley found it
impossible to obtain tenants for bond land at the accustomed rents.
Villains were giving up their holdings because they could not pay the
rent and perform the services. The land which had in earlier times
been sufficient for the maintenance of a villain and his family and
had produced a surplus for rent had lost its fertility, and the
holdings fell vacant. The land which reverted to the lord on this
account was split up and leased at nominal rents, when leaseholders
could be found, just as so much land was leased at reduced rents by
landowners generally in the fourteenth century. Moreover, some of the
land was unfit for cultivation at all and was converted to pasture
under the direction of the lord.[13]

If the disintegration of manorial organization observed in the
fourteenth century and earlier was