verage in each succeeding decade, while the price of wool
wavered about an average which rose very slowly until 1535. The
entries on which these wool averages are based are few, and greater
uncertainty therefore attaches to their representativeness than in the
case of the prices of earlier decades, but the evidence, such as it
is, points to a more rapid rise in the price of wheat than in the
price of wool. Between 1500 and 1540 the average price of wheat was
nearly 24 per cent above that of the previous forty years, but the
average price of wool rose only ten per cent. There are only nine
entries of wool prices for the forty-six years after 1536, but these
are enough to show that the price of wool, like that of wheat and all
other commodities, was rising rapidly at this time. The lack of
material upon which to base a comparison of the actual rate of
increase of price for the two commodities makes further statistical
analysis impossible, but a knowledge of prices after the date at which
the material ceases would add nothing to the evidence on the subject
under consideration.

Sir Thomas More's _Utopia_ was written in 1516, with its well-known
passage describing contemporary enclosures in terms similar to those
used in the statutes of thirty years before, and complaining that the
sheep

that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now,
as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that
they eate up, and swallow downe the very men them selfes. They
consume, destroye, and devoure whole fields, howses, and cities.
For looke in what partes of the realme doth growe the fynest, and
therfore dearest woll, there noblemen, and gentlemen: yea and
certeyn Abbottes ... leave no grounde for tillage, thei inclose
al into pastures: thei throw doune houses: they plucke downe
townes, and leave nothing standynge, but only the churche to be
made a shepe-howse.[20]

These enclosures were not caused by an advance in the price of wool
relatively to that of wheat, as the rise in the price of wool in the
decade 1510-1520 was no greater than that of corn. Nor does sheep
farming seem to have been especially profitable at this time, as More
himself attributes the high price of wool in part to a "pestiferous
morrein." Again, the complaint is also made that unemployment was
caused, showing that scarcity of labor was not the reason for the
conversion of arable to pastur