[449] R.O. Rentals and Surveys, Gen. Ser., Portf. 22, No. 18.
[450] Roxburghe Club, _Surveys of Pembroke Manors_.
[451] _Ibid._, and Hoare, _History of Wiltshire_, Hundred of Ambresbury.
[452] _Northumberland County History_, vol. i. p. 350.
But these isolated instances are obviously worthless as a basis for generalisation. The most that can be said of them is that they prove that the writers who spoke of whole towns being depopulated were not romancing. Nor are the statistics offered by contemporaries of any practical help towards determining the social effects of enclosure. Those who state, like Moore[456] (writing in the seventeenth century), that they have seen "in some townes fourteen, sixteen, and twenty tenants discharged of plowing," or, like the Dean of Durham,[457] that "500 ploughs have decayed in a few years" and "of 8000 acres lately in tillage now not 8 score are tilled," may have seen what they say. But these figures are suspiciously round, and the cases are obviously extreme ones, not samples. The one[458] writer who makes an estimate for the whole country, putting the number of persons of all ages displaced between 1485 and 1550 at 300,000, is rash enough to explain how his estimate was reached, and his explanation shows that it was not even a plausible guess.
[456] Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c.
[457] Cal. S. P. D. Eliz., 1595-1597 (p. 347), quoted Gay, _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, vol. xvii.
[458] "Certayne Causes gathered together wherein is shewed the decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (E. E. T. S. date 1550-1553). "It is to understande ... that there is in England townes and villages to the number of fifty thousand and upward, and for every town and village ... there is one plough decayed since the fyrst year of the reign of King Henry VII.... The whiche 50,000 ploughs every plough was able to maintain 6 persons, and nowe they have nothing, but goeth about in England from dore to dore."
The returns collected for the Government seem at first to take us on to surer ground. Investigations were made by Royal Commissioners[459] in the years 1517-1519, 1548, 1566, 1607, 1632, 1635, and 1636. The returns collected for twenty-three counties by the Commission of 1517, for four counties by those of 1548-1566, and for six counties by that of 1607 have been printed. According to them, it would appear that between 1485 and 1517 about one-half per cent. of the total area of the counties investigated was enclosed, and 6931 persons displaced, the corresponding figures for the period 1578-1607 being 69,758 acres and 2232 evictions. Both in the earlier, and in the later, period, the county which was affected most severely was Northamptonshire, where 2.21 per cent. of the county was returned as enclosed in the years 1485-1517, and in the years 1578-1607 4.30 per cent., the numbers displaced being respectively 1405 and 1444. If we like, we may adopt the conjectural estimates of Professor Gay, and, assuming that the pace of the movement was the same during the years for which we have not information as during those for which we have, may say with him that from 1455 to 1607 the agrarian changes affected about 2.76 of the whole area of twenty-four counties, and displaced something between 30,000 and 50,000 persons.