being perfectly well aware that England was not at all secure of keeping the upper hand in such contests. But Burgundy was a source of danger to his dynasty by reason of its Yorkist connection; so Henry fought England and Burgundy, which practically meant the Low Burgundy. Countries, by commercial pressure. The most valuable industry of the Low Countries was the cloth trade, which depended for its raw material on the supplies of English wool. To stop the export of English wool to the Netherlands would hit the English wool-growers hard, but it would hit the Netherlands cloth-makers much harder. When Burgundy took up the cause of the pretender, Perkin Warbeck, Henry struck. England suffered, but Flanders and Brabant were brought within measurable distance of financial ruin. Perkin had to be dismissed to find other friends, and the commercial war was closed by a commercial treaty known as the Magnus Intercursus, the great intercourse,' which practically established free trade between England and the Netherlands, very much to the advantage of both. Some years later an accident brought the Duke of Burgundy into the king's clutches, and Henry used his opportunity to extort another treaty, under which the English got all the privileges and the Netherlanders all the disabilities. In fact this treaty, which was nicknamed the Malus Intercursus by way of contrast, was so destructive to its victims that Henry was obliged to modify it lest the Netherlands market for English goods should perish. The development of this policy by Henry VII. shows that an important turning-point had been reached. Successful commercial war can be waged only by the country which is the less dependent on the supplies derived from its rival. In the contest with the Netherlands, England lost a market for her own produce, but she deprived herself of nothing which she could not spare; whereas the Flemings not only lost a market for their own goods, but were deprived of English produce, of which they stood in absolute necessity. In the past the dependence of the foreigner on English trade had been less than the dependence Retaliation. Trade. of the Englishmen on foreign traders. Consequently within certain limits the foreign traders had been able to procure privileges in England. The time was now arriving when the Englishmen were turning the tables, and could afford to curtail the foreigner's privileges, and to insist for themselves upon privileges which hitherto they had been unable effectively to claim. Thus, Navigation Acts had been a dead letter because the English shipping was not sufficiently The Carrying developed to absorb the carrying trade. Actual restriction of imports to English ships would practically have meant the exclusion of imports altogether, so the carrying trade remained in the hands of the foreign shippers. But now English shipping was making its own way. Venice had hitherto held a virtual monopoly of the carrying trade from the Mediterranean. But the English began to underbid them, carrying the wines, for which there was a large demand in England, at much lower rates. The Venetians sought to stop this by imposing a corresponding export duty on the wines embarked in foreign ships. Henry replied by making a commercial treaty with Florence, constituting that city instead of Venice the mart of English goods in Italy. When this proved insufficient as a method of pressure on Venice, an import duty was imposed upon wines brought to England in foreign vessels. Venice suffered more from the loss of its market than England suffered from the closing of its market, and in the long-run Venice found it better to withdraw the obnoxious tariff. This whole series of events effectively illustrates the nature of the principle of Retaliation. Precisely like war, it is an exceedingly wasteful method of settling disputes by a trial of strength. The victory lies with the country which is able to do most damage to its rival. But it is always necessary to reckon carefully what are the chances of victory, and whether the reward of victory will be adequate compensation for the wastage of war. The fact of historical interest to be noted is that England had reached a stage of commercial strength at which she could enter upon such wars with reasonable prospects of a successful issue. CHAPTER XI THE TUDOR ENCLOSURES The Black After. THE Black Death in the fourteenth century, with the depopulation and disorganisation attending upon it, was the cause of a social upheaval which culminated in the Peasant Rebellion. So far as the ends of that rebellion were practical and definitely agrarian, it was sought only to hasten a process which had been steadily going on certainly for a century, and perhaps for much longer, before the great pestilence turned agrarian affairs upside down. This process was the emancipation of the agriculturist from forced service, which was being replaced on the one hand by quit-rents, and on the other by wages for labour. It is matter of dispute whether the process was actually retarded or not by the Black Death, since there is evidence both of attempts to reinforce compulsory service where commutations had not been legally secured, and of successful insistence on commutations where they had been resisted hitherto. The Revolt, on the other hand, almost certainly had a retarding effect, because its suppression placed the reactionaries in the ascendent. But with the gradual recovery of the population, the normal economic forces recovered their efficacy, and the process of emancipation continued on its normal course, accompanied also by a practical emancipation of the villein from the personal subjection which technically separates serfdom from freedom. This was the nature of the change that was taking place in the late centuries of what we call the Middle Ages. But incidentally the Black Death was responsible for setting in motion another change which was to revolutionise, Sheepfarming. not the status of the serf, but the conditions of agriculture. It started the development of sheep-farming, which was made profitable by the simultaneous development of the cloth-making industry in England; and the development of sheep-farming led up to the substitution of enclosed fields for the old open field system, and of individual for communal working of the land. This change was worked out in two periods with a long interval between them, the first corresponding roughly to the period of the Yorkist and Tudor monarchies, while the second stage is deferred for a couple of centuries. In the early Middle Ages we have dwelt upon the general lack of the commercial spirit in England. As a general Farming for principle, men did not seek out new methods of Subsistence. acquiring wealth. That does not mean that no one was greedy or avaricious, or tried to profit at his neighbour's expense by trickery and oppression as opportunity might offer; but evidently men did not habitually labour with the avowed intent of growing rich. The nobleman sought to accumulate estates for the sake of power, not of wealth. The pursuit of wealth inevitably develops the distinct and separate class of traders who are primarily distributors rather than producers, and we have seen that a mercantile class was only beginning to have a separate existence in the reign of Edward I. But that class developed during the fourteenth century, and became exceedingly prominent during the fifteenth. The direct pursuit of personal gain grew up among the traders, but it gradually extended itself to the landowners. Still treating the Black Death as a convenient landmark, we can say that before it, what the rural community aimed at was subsistence, profusion of eatables and drinkables, means sufficient in the case of the big proprietors for maintaining a large supply of retainers off the produce of their estates. These requirements being met, the landowner was not moved to turn the produce to further commercial account. Until the thirteenth century was well advanced, money still played a comparatively small part in the rural economy; but its rapidly increasing use from that time, the demands of royal officials for payment in coin instead of Farming in kind, the substitution of payment in coin for for Wealth. personal services of every description, all tended to arouse the desire to accumulate treasure, as distinguished from a constant supply of agricultural produce however profuse. Then came the Black Death, rendering the supply of agricultural produce not at all profuse, and increasing the demand for money wages. To meet the demand the landowners wanted money themselves, and they began to realise that more money was to be made out of sheep-farming than out of tillage. The movement began as an endeavour on the part of the landlords to extricate themselves from the difficulties and embarrassments into which they had been plunged by the Black Death. Even after the accession of Edward IV. we have seen how the agricultural interest still deemed itself to be in such straits that a parliament consisting mainly of landowners passed the Corn Law of 1463, prohibiting the importation of corn when the home price was less than six and eightpence. But a stage usually arrives when an industry feels itself in straits,' if it is dissatisfied with the magnitude of its profits. Extension. By the time that Edward IV. was firmly established on the throne, the development of pasturage was ceasing to be a remedy for depression, and was becoming a Pasture source of wealth. With the reign of Henry VII., wool-growing assumed what we may call its aggressively commercial aspect. At first arable land, which had fallen out of tillage owing to the shortage of labour, had been brought into use again as pasture. Then here and there, the enterprising or self-regarding landowner enlarged his sheep-runs at the expense of land actually under tillage. But now a spirit of enterprise seized the landowners broadcast, and they began zealously to convert tillage into pasture, to breed sheep where hitherto they had grown corn. The first obvious and immediate result was a diminution |