caused by the desire of land-owning lords to raise sheep instead of crops, lowering the needed workforce and unemploying thousands of poor former-farmers; the lords fenced off the their great quantities of land from the mid to late 1500's forcing many farmers out and into the cities, leading many of them to hire themselves as indentured servants for payment of passage into the New World, and therefore supporting many of the needs of the labor-thirsty plantation owners of the New World.