their hands they raised the price.  The corn-dealers of the time were looked upon with dislike by every one; many of the dearths then so frequent, and nearly always caused by bad seasons, were ascribed to ’engrossers buying of corn and witholding it for sale’.  By a statute of 1552 the freedom of internal corn trade was entirely suppressed, and no one could carry corn from one part of England to another without a licence, and any one who bought corn to sell it again was liable to two months’ imprisonment and forfeited his corn.  Although we shall see that this policy was reversed in the next century, the feeling against corn-dealers survived for many years and was loudly expressed during the Napoleonic war; indeed, we may doubt if it is extinct to-day.

Many of the fruits and garden produce, which had been neglected since the first Edward, had by now come into use again, ’not onlie among the poor commons, I meane of melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirets (probably a sort of carrot), parsneps, carrots, cabbages, navewes (turnip radishes (?)), turnips,[219] and all kinds of salad herbes, but also at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobilitie.’[220]

’Also we have most delicate apples, plummes, pears, walnuts, filberts, &c., and those of sundrie sorts, planted within fortie years past, in comparison of which most of the old trees are nothing worth:  so have we no less store of strange fruite, as abricotes, almonds, peaches, figges, cornetrees (probably cornels) in noblemen’s orchards.  I have seen capers, orenges, and lemmons, and heard of wild olives growing here, besides other strange trees.’[221]

As a proof of the growth of grass in proportion to tillage between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Eden gives several examples,[222] of which the following are significant:—­

Arable.      Grass.
acres.      acres.

1339. 18 messuages in Norfolk had 160 60 1354. a Norfolk manor 300 59 1395. 2 messuages in Warwickshire 400 60 1560. 2 messuages in Warwickshire 600 660 1567. a Norfolk estate 200 400 1569. " manor 60 60

’Our sheepe are very excellent for sweetness of flesh, and our woolles are preferred before those of Milesia and other places.’[223] So thought Harrison and many English landowners and farmers too, so that legislation was powerless to stop the spread of sheep farming.  In 1517 a commission of inquiry instigated by Wolsey held inquisition on enclosures and the decay of tillage, and it seems to have been the only honest effort to stop the evil.  It was to inquire what decays, conversions, and park enclosures had been made since 1489, but the result even of this attempt was small.  In 1535 a fresh statute, 27 Hen.  VIII, c. 22, stated that the Act limiting the number of sheep to be kept had only been observed