[51] e.g. by Hasbach, _op. cit._ p. 37. Gay, _Trans. Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xviii. Contrast Miss Leonard, Trans. _Royal Hist. Soc._, vol. xix. On the subject of the policy of the State towards the agrarian problem, see below, Part III., chap. i.
Such are some of the questions which are suggested by even a cursory survey of the agrarian problem. There are others which are less susceptible of summary statement, but which involve issues that are of some importance for the interpretation of economic history. Granted that it was inevitable that the subsistence husbandry of the mediæval village should give way to capitalist agriculture, in what light are we to regard the changes by which that great transformation was brought about? Ought we to think of the open field system as altogether incompatible with any improvement in agricultural technique, as the miracle of squalid perversity which it has appeared to some writers both of our own and of earlier ages, and as requiring the bitter discipline of pasture farming and evictions to shake it out of its deep rut of custom, and to make room for more progressive methods? Or are we to view it as permitting a good deal of mobility, and as already slowly developing a less rigid and cumbrous organisation when it was partially overwhelmed by rapid, and for the mass of the peasantry disastrous, changes? What place ought the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century to be given in that transition from mediæval to modern conditions of agriculture which, starting in England, has spread eastwards through almost every European country, and which is beginning to-day even in India. How far does it compare and contrast with the enclosures of the period succeeding the fall of the Stuarts, and with the analogous developments which have taken place on the continent, and how far does it present special features peculiar to itself? What were the relations between it and other aspects of national life? Have the economic changes which took place in the world of agriculture any reflex in the social and political changes occurring in the century which divides the Reformation from the Civil War? How far did the redistribution of property which they effected contribute to the decline in the condition of the poorer classes which, according to most writers, took place in the sixteenth century, and to the creation of the commercial aristocracy whose influence becomes so pronounced after the Restoration? What was the result of these material developments in the realm of legal and economic ideas? Ought we to minimise the communalism of the mediæval village? Or should we think of the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century as really a new and decided movement in the direction of economic individualism, a long step towards the growth of modern ideas of land ownership and of the right of the individual to follow unfettered his own discretion in matters of economic enterprise, which gather weight at the end of the seventeenth, and come to their own at the end of the eighteenth, century?