Historians have disagreed about the impact of enclosure: early accounts saw the destruction of common land as a devastating blow to small farmers and the poor, while the revisionist claims that followed asserted that poverty had always plagued rural families and that, in some places, the enclosure acts alleviated it by increasing the profitability of agriculture. More recent scholarship has tended to see these latter claims as an over-correction, though disagreement remains. It is probably fair to say that the Enclosure Acts had a significant though not exclusive impact on the massive shift to an industrial, urban society in which agricultural workers lost whatever measure of economic independence they had possessed