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exclusively into pastures for sheep. The smaller and less prosperous villages were especially vulnerable, as were those with few free tenants, who were much harder to displace than villeins. Vulnerable also were villages whose landlords, whether old feudatories or new men of wealth, had connections in the wool trade, or merely intelligently acquisitive appetites.28 Where enclosure struck, families packed up their belongings, drove their animals ahead of them, and departed the village. Behind them their wattle-and-daub houses tumbled into ruins, the ditches that marked their crofts were filled in by erosion, the fences tottered, and the lanes and footpaths tramped by the feet of so many men and animals disappeared in weeds. The manor house often survived, with the shepherds sleeping in the bailiff’s old quarters.

In maps showing the two phenomena, a clear correlation between the belt of open field agriculture and the distribution of the deserted villages can be seen, and a further correlation becomes apparent in comparing the two with a map showing enclosures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.29

“Within a century and a half of the Black Death, ten percent of the settlements of rural England had been erased from the landscape,” says one historian, possibly with exaggeration.30 By the year 1600 over thirty villages in Huntingdonshire had been deserted, leaving behind sometimes the ruin of a church, sometimes the site of a manor house, sometimes nothing but plow marks discernible from the air.31

The old feudal landlord class was dealt a devastating blow from an unexpected source with Henry VIII’s famous “Dissolution” of the monastic orders beginning in 1536. The king, embroiled with the Church over his divorce problems—and, like so many kings, needing money—violently suppressed all the great monasteries and seized their manors, which he then sold off at an ultimate profit of a million and a half pounds. Among the suppressed monasteries was Ramsey Abbey. A Huntingdonshire chronicler, Edmund Gibson, observed, “Most of the County being Abbey-land…many new purchasers planted themselves therein.”32 The new purchasers were entrepreneurs out to make money, and not surprisingly many of them saw the merits of sheep farming.

The enclosure movement appeared on the Continent too, but nowhere on the same scale as in England, where petty incidents of resistance multiplied without slowing the progress of the sheep, who, it was said, now devoured men instead of the men devouring sheep. The process “produced much controversy, many pamphlets, a number of government inquiries, some ineffective acts of Parliament, and a revolt in the Midlands in 1607,” summarizes Alan R. H. Baker.33 Yet many of the old villages

Relics of the Dissolution: ruins of Glastonbury Abbey (above) and Whitby Abbey. Of Ramsey Abbey, nothing medieval survives.

survived, some even gaining new population and character as numbers of craftsmen quit the cities, in part to escape guild regulation, and took their weaving, dyeing, tanning, and other skills to the now freer village environment. Some villages became primarily industrial. The village of Birmingham in the sixteenth century became a burgeoning town of 1,500, specializing in tanning and clothmaking.34

At the same time cereal crop agriculture made belated progress. Yields improved, if slowly, in the seventeenth century, reaching a general average in England of seven to one.35 Famine became largely a threat of the past. “Starvation…cannot be shown to have been an omnipresent menace to the poor in Stuart times,” says Peter Laslett.36

In 1610 a Herefordshire husbandman named Rowland Vaughan solved the problem of meadow and hay shortage that had vexed medieval lord and villager by devising an irrigation technique.37 This and other improvements in agricultural technology made possible the servicing of a rapidly expanding market for English produce in Britain, on the Continent, and in English colonies overseas. The market gave scope for the ambitious, the industrious, the competent, and the fortunate, creating