[4] Cunningham, _Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times_, Part i. pp. 85-88, 101-107, 540-543.
[5] See _e.g. Records of the Borough of Reading_, vol ii. pp. 36, 94, 156; vol. iii., 131, and those of Leicester, Norwich, Nottingham, and Southampton, _passim_; also below, pp. 275-277.
[6] "Mr. Secretary Cecil said, ... If we debar tillage, we give scope to the Depopulator, and then, if the poor being thrust out of their houses go to dwell with others, straight we catch them with the Statute of Inmates; if they wander abroad, they are within the danger of the Statute of the Poor to be whipt" (D'Ewes' _Journal of the House of Commons_, 1601, pp. 674-675).
A consideration of these great movements naturally begins with those contemporary writers who described them. Though the books and pamphlets of the age contain much that is of interest in the development of economic theory, their writers rarely attempted to separate economic from other issues, and economic speculation usually took the form of discussions upon particular points of public policy, or of a casuistry prescribing rules for personal conduct in difficult cases. Such a difficult case, such a problem of public policy, was offered by the growth of competitive methods of agriculture. The moral objections felt to the new conditions caused them to be a favourite subject with writers of sermons and pamphlets, and made the sins of the encloser, like those of the usurer, one of the standbys of the sixteenth century preacher. There is, therefore, a considerable volume of writings dealing with the question from the point of view of the teacher of morality. At the same time the political significance of the movement, and the fact that the classes concerned were important enough to elicit attempts at protection on the part of the Government, called forth a crop of suggestions and comments like those of More, Starkey,[8] Forest,[9] the author of the Commonwealth[10] of England, and, at a later date, Powell[11] and Moore.[12] Further, the new agricultural methods were explained by persons interested in the economics of agriculture, such as Fitzherbert,[13] Tusser,[14] Clarkson,[15] who surveyed the manors of the Earl of Northumberland in 1567, Humberstone[16] who did the same for those of the Earl of Devonshire, and Norden.[17] The accounts of surveyors, a dull but indispensable tribe, are reliable, as they are usually statements of facts which have occurred within their own experience, or at any rate, generalised descriptions of such facts. The same may be said of the evidence of John Hales, who was employed by the Government in investigating the question, and who had to explain it in such a way as to convince opponents, and to get legislation on this subject through a bitterly hostile Parliament. The description given by writers like Latimer,[18] Crowley,[19] and Becon[20] are valuable as showing the way in which the movement was regarded by contemporaries; but they are mainly somewhat vague denunciations launched in an age when the pulpit was the best political platform, and their very positiveness warns one that they are one-sided and must be received with caution. Still, they mark out a field for inquiry, and one may begin by setting out the main characteristics of the agrarian changes as pictured in their writings.
