d
as extensively as when wages were low, or when serf labor was
available. If this is the whole case, it is difficult to account for
the conversion to arable of land already pasture. Other factors than
the supposed scarcity of labor were involved; land in good condition,
such as the plots of pasture at Holway, repaid cultivation, but the
yield was too low on land exhausted by centuries of cultivation to
make tillage profitable.

In the sixteenth century, also, the restoration of cultivation on land
which had formerly been converted from arable to pasture was going on.
Fitzherbert devotes several chapters of his treatise on surveying to a
discussion of the methods of amending "ley grounde, the whiche hath
ben errable lande of late," (ch. 27) and "bushy ground and mossy that
hath ben errable lande of olde time" (ch. 28). This land should be
plowed and sown, and it will produce much grain, "with littell
dongynge, and sow it no lengar tha it will beare plentye of corne,
withoute donge", and then lay it down to grass again. Tusser also
describes this use of land alternately as pasture and arable.[36] A
farmer on one of the manors of William, First Earl of Pembroke, had an
enclosed field in 1567, which afforded pasture for 900 sheep as well
as an unspecified number of cattle, "_qui aliquando seminatur,
aliquando iacet ad pasturam_."[37] The motives of this alternating use
of the land would be clear enough, even though they were not
explicitly stated by contemporaries; arable land which would produce
only scant crops unless heavily manured made good pasture, and after a
longer or shorter period under grass, was so improved by the manure of
the sheep pasturing on it and by the heavy sod which formed that it
could be tilled profitably, and was therefore restored to tillage.

The fact of two opposite but simultaneous conversion movements is
unaccountable under the accepted hypothesis of the causes of the
enclosure movement, which turns upon assumptions as to the relative
prices of grain and wool or cattle or wages. The authorities for this
theory have necessarily neglected the evidence that pasture land was
converted to arable in the sixteenth century and that arable land was
converted to pasture in the seventeenth, and have separated in time
two tendencies which were simultaneous. They have described the
increase in pasturage at the expense of arable in the early period,
and the increase of arable at the expense of pasture in