not due to the Black Death; if this
disintegration was under way before the pestilence reduced the
population, and was not checked when the ravages of the plague had
been made good; if tillage was already unprofitable before the
fifteenth century with its growth of the woollen industry; and if land
was being converted to pasture at a time when neither the price of
wool nor the Black Death can be offered as the explanation of this
conversion; then there is suggested the possibility that the whole
enclosure movement can be sufficiently accounted for without especial
reference to the prices of wool and grain. If the enclosure movement
began before the fifteenth century and originated in causes other than
the Black Death, the discovery of these original causes may also
furnish the explanation of the continuance of the movement in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The amount of land under
cultivation was being reduced before the date at which the price of
wool is supposed to have risen sufficiently to displace agriculture
for the sake of wool growing, and this early reduction in the arable
cannot, clearly, be accounted for by reference to the prices of wool
and grain. But it also happens that, in the very period when an
increase in the demand for wool is usually alleged as the cause of the
enclosures, the price of wool fell relatively to that of grain. The
increase in sheep-farming in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
together with the fact that the domestic cloth manufacture was being
improved at this time, has been the basis of the assumption that the
price of wool was rising. The causal sequence has been supposed to be:
(1) an increase in the manufacture of woollens; (2) an increase in the
demand for wool; (3) an increase in the price of wool; (4) an increase
in wool-growing at the expense of tillage, and the enclosure of common
lands. If, as a matter of fact, the price of wool fell during this
period, the causal sequence is reversed. If the price of wool fell,
the increase in the manufacture of woollens has no relation to the
enclosure movement, unless it is its result, and we are forced to look
elsewhere for the cause of the increase of sheep-farming.

The accompanying tables and chart, showing the changes in the price of
wool and of wheat from the middle of the thirteenth century through
the first quarter of the sixteenth century, have been prepared from
the materials given by Thorold Rogers in his _History