1921 SHORT NOTICES 617 near Rochester. Students of medieval trade will find interesting details of cargoes and prices in the many entries relating to the payment of customs duties, and the arrest and de-arrest of foreign ships. The use of Rewley Abbey as a hostel for Cistercian students at Oxford may be noted (p. 17). Mr. Bird's abstracts are made, as far as we can judge, with great care. He notes more than one error in Rymer's transcripts. We should have expected on rather than of in the London inn sign ' the Sword of the Hoop ' (p. 130). The index, which is the work of Mr. J. T. Morris, is also well done, with a very satisfactory proportion of subject entries, especially under the headings of Law and Administration, Taxation, Tenures, and Trades and Occupations. One of two mentions of Cotton (p. 436) is overlooked. J. T. The aims of Mr. W. H. R. Curtler in The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1920) are to furnish the general reader with an approach to the study of the enclosures by a sketch of the earlier history based on recognized authorities and to cast some fresh light on several points in the later history, such as the expense of enclosing ; the renting of commons ; and the concessions made to small-holders in enclosure acts. He provides a useful resume of the county reports of the Board of Agriculture, 1793-1815, and gives an account of the later general enclosure acts down to 1876, and of the allotment movement and the small holdings acts. Mr. Curtler's desire 'to do tardy justice to the fast vanishing class ' of great landholders does not prevent him from stating the case with moderation and detachment. His introductory chapters have the merit of presenting to the general reader some of the results of scholarship which were not available- when Mr. Johnson published his Ford Lectures ; but the authorities whom he cites would probably demur to the statement that there is little fresh to be discovered. The unexplored material for the history of enclosures from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries is very great and most of the current generalizations will have to be revised. The foremost^of these is that the enclosures were due to the expansion of sheep-farming caused by the Black Death and by Edward Ill's encouragement of the cloth industry. The export in 1273 of wool was already 32,743 sacks, which implies nearly six million sheep (apart from the wool consumed at home), and these sheep fed on rough pasture already covered a great part of the land. The export never greatly exceeded this amount. Edward III did not encourage either the wool or the cloth trade ; he taxed both. The cloth industry flourished before his time and the increased export of cloth in the fifteenth century does not, in view of the diminished export of wool, imply an increase in sheep-farming. The statistics published by Professor Gras in his Evolution of the English Corn Market show an increase in the export of corn from 1460 to 1585. It cannot be doubted that in the sixteenth century sheep pasture was in many places displacing tillage and population, and that this caused much misery and discontent ; but, apart from the great improvement in tillage wrought by mixed farming, there was probably going on, at the same time, much reclamation of waste for tillage, and it is unlikely that there was a decrease of the agricultural population as a whole. ' Depopulation '
