The cost to the community was potential
rather than actual; common lands which are now worth millions were
appropriated by landlords in defiance of the law. This illegality was
remedied in 1549, not by stopping the inclosures but by making them
legal, provided that "sufficient" commons were left; if the incloser
considered his leavings enough, the gainsaying of the tenants was to be
ignored, or punished as treason or felony in case of persistence.
England, however, was still fairly big for its three or four millions
of souls, and an Act of Queen Elizabeth provided that every new cottage
built should stand in four acres of its own. This anticipation of the
demand for three acres and a cow did something to check excessive
specialization; for the tenants of these cottages added a little
cultivation on their own account to their occupations as hired
labourers or village artisans. In the seventeenth century the land-
hunger of the landlords was generally sated by schemes for draining and
embanking; and vast tracts of fen and marsh, such as Hatfield Chase and
Bedford Level, were thus brought under cultivation.
Commerce rather than industrialism or agriculture is the distinctive
feature of English economy during the seventeenth and first half of the
eighteenth century. By means of newly developed trade-routes, the East
and the West were tapped for such products as tobacco, tea, coffee,
cocoa, sugar, rum, spices, oranges, lemons, raisins, currants, silks,
cotton, rice, and others with which England had previously somehow or
other dispensed; and the principal bone of contention was the carrying
trade of the world.
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