ABSTRACT
The history of the English cultivated landscape in the years between 1400 and 1700 is one of enormous and complex changes which considerably altered the appearance of the countryside. During the fifteenth century, however, strips in the open fields, called 'leys', were increasingly set aside specifically for use as pasture and temporarily put down to grass. The major movement by landlords to enclose cultivated land and put it down to grass for sheep farming occurred from about 1440 to 1520. In south-east Cambridgeshire, for example, saffron was being grown in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in small plots and gardens and hemp and flax were becoming increasingly common in the Midlands both in the open fields and on enclosed farms. This accelerating progress in agricultural specialisation and, more particularly, the impetus to improve agricultural output in the traditional arable and pastoral areas of the country were to gather momentum in the succeeding century.
