I want to open my discussion by citing J. D. Chambers' famous article of 1953, which was reprinted on a number of occasions, and has had a pervasive influence on agrarian historiography. It contributed perhaps above all else to the re-appraisal of the picture presented by the Hammonds, in the Village Labourer, of the social consequences of enclosure, and his arguments have now become a virtual orthodoxy, frequently repeated in stronger language than he initially laid down. There was first his stress on the role of ‘natural’ causes, especially population growth, in the formation of a wage-dependent labour force, rather than ‘institutional’ causes. ‘Sources of growth operated silently and perhaps we may say organically’, he wrote, ‘they were not the direct or indirect product of compulsion; and for that reason there is a danger that they may be overlooked … a proletariat was coming into being by the natural increase of the peasant population.’ In his article he was concerned less with ‘the institutional origin of the proletariat, but [with] whether enclosure is the relevant institution’. He denied that it could have had such an effect.