yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no
good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the
course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the
churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As
if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those
worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes; for when
an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose
many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned
out of their possessions by trick or by main force, or, being wearied out
by ill usage, they are forced to sell them; by which means those
miserable people, both men and women, married and unmarried, old and
young, with their poor but numerous families (since country business
requires many hands), are all forced to change their seats, not knowing
whither to go; and they must sell, almost for nothing, their household
stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might stay
for a buyer. When that little money is at an end (for it will be soon
spent), what is left for them to do but either to steal, and so to be
hanged (God knows how justly!), or to go about and beg? and if they do
this they are put in prison as idle vagabonds, while they would willingly
work but can find none that will hire them; for there is no more occasion
for country labour, to which they have been bred, when there is no arable
ground left. One shepherd can look after a flock, which will stock an
extent of ground that would require many hands if it were to be ploughed
and reaped. This, likewise, in many places raises the price of corn. The
price of wool is also so risen that the poor people, who were wont to
make cloth, are no more able to buy it; and this, likewise, makes many of
them idle: for since the increase of pasture God has punished the avarice
of the owners by a rot among the sheep, which has destroyed vast numbers
of them--to us it might have seemed more just had it fell on the owners
themselves. But, suppose the sheep should increase ever so much, their