ABSTRACT
The poor husbandman, ploughing the stubborn glebe more fit for pasture, could neither bargain effectively with his landlord for a lower rent, nor compete with the capital and the energy of the enclosing landlords and the enterprising farmers who were lending fertility to waste places. The lend support to one of Richard Baxter main points, which lies in an unfavourable comparison of the poor husbandman’s position with that of the craftsman. “The case of their servants,” says Baxter, “could they but continue so and contain them from marriage, is far easier than that of the poor tenants that are their masters. From the Restoration to the Revolution the price of wheat was in the main falling, and in the four years before Baxter wrote his pamphlet the average was 28s. 2d. But rents, which had been raised along with prices, though not to the full extent, would not readily fall with them.
