ABSTRACT
Sixteenth-century England was and remained a predominantly agrarian country. Nine-tenths of the people earned their living on the land, and the remaining tenth retained some connection with it. The changes in the practice of farming, whether better husbandry or concentration on stock, could only be carried out efficiently by profoundly altering the distribution of land among the people. It is in this—the changes in land-tenure and the structure of the countryside—that the real agricultural revolution of the century lies. The price revolution assisted enterprise and luck; a man who acquired capital, either in farming, or in the law, or even in marriage or the exploitation of an office under the crown, would wish to buy land both because it alone gave social standing and because it was a sound economic investment. The substitution of direct farming for letting to rent, and the acquisition of fresh property constituted two ways in which the hardpressed upper classes could make ends meet.
