He held this land on the second of March 1489 when those
                messuages were laid waste and thrown down, and lands formerly
                used for arable he turned over to pasture for animals,
                so three ploughs are now out of use there, and eighteen
                people who used to work on that land and earn their living
                there and who dwelled in the houses have gone away to take
                to the roads in their misery, and to seek their bread elsewhere
                and so are led into idleness.

                From Cardinal Wolsey's Commission of Inquiry -- 1517

Building New Forest in Hampshire depopulated a number of villages; establishing the Marcher Castles on the Welsh border also destroyed a few villages. In the 12th and 13th c. as the population rose and more land was brought under the plough; many new villages were established but could not survive and were somewhat later abandoned.

In the 14th c. raids by Scottish bands destroyed a number of villages in the North; indeed, Thixendale -- a neighboring village to Wharram Percy -- was burned by Scottish raiders but Wharram was left untouched. Also, in the 14th c. it was long thought that if any villages had been depopulated it was the Black Death that did so. As a matter of fact, very few villages were destroyed by that plague.

So, what was it that depopulated the villages?

 In a word --sheep!

 By the 15th c. economic conditions had changed to the point where landlords could make more money by turning previously ploughed land into pasture for sheep. Those living on the land were driven from it. It was doubted in the early part of this century that there were any "deserted" villages. Research -- begun at Wharram Percy -- has shown, however, that well over 3000 villages were depopulated!

 There are some powerful contemporary statements about what was happening to English peasants driven from their homes to wander the roads looking for shelter and work. One of the most powerful of these statements comes in Book I of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:

                "Your sheep which are usually so tame and so cheaply fed,
                begin now, according to report, to be so greedy and wild
                that they devour human beings themselves and devastate
                and depopulate fields, houses, and towns. In all those parts
                of  the realm where the finest and therefore costliest wool is
                produced, there are noblemen, gentlemen, and even some abbots,
                though otherwise holy men, who are not satisfied with the annual
                revenues and profits which their predecessors used to derive from 
                their estates. They are not content, by leading and idle and
                sumptuous life, to do no good to their country; they must also
                do it positive harm. They leave no ground to be tilled; they enclose
                every bit of land for pasture; they pull down houses and destroy
                towns, leaving only a church to pen the sheep in. And, as if enough
                English land were not wasted on ranges and preserves of game, 
                those good fellows turn all human habitations and all cultivated land
                into a wilderness.

                Consequently, in order that one insatiable glutton and accursed
                plague of his native land may join field to field and surround many
                thousand acres with one fence, tenants are evicted. Some of them,
                either circumvented by fraud or overwhelmed by violence, are 
                stripped even of their own property, or else wearied by unjust acts,
                are driven to sell. By hook or by crook the poor wretches are compelled
                to leave their homes -- men and women, husbands and wives, orphans
                and widows, parents with little children and a household not rich but
                numerous, since farm work requires many hands. Away they must go, I
                say, from the only homes familiar and known to them, and they find
                no shelter to go to. All their household goods which would not fetch
                a great price if could wait for a purchaser, since they must be thrust
                out, they sell for a trifle.

                After they have soon spent that trifle in wandering from place to place
                what remains for them but to steal and be hanged -- justly, you may
                say! -- or to wander and beg. And yet even in the latter case they are
                cast into prison as vagrants for going about idle when, though they
                most eagerly offer their labor, there is no one to hire them. For there
                is no farm work, to which they have been trained, to be had, when there
                is no land for plowing left. A single shepherd or herdsman is sufficient
                for grazing livestock on that land for whose cultivation many hands were
                once required to make it raise crops.

• The increasing importance of sheep to the detriment of humans occupying the land.
• The greed of the landlords.
• What happened to the villages.
• What happened to the villagers particularly the rise in crime.
• The resulting employment of a single shepherd where once dozens labored.

                Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones:
                I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as
                a whale. A' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry
                before him, and at last devours them all in a mouthful;
                such whales have I heard on i' the land, who never leave
                gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church,
                steeple, bells and all.

                Pericles, Act II, 1, 31-38

                Great inconveniencies daily doth increase by desolation and pulling down
                and wilfull waste of houses and Towns within his [i.e., the King's] realm, and
                laying to pasture lands which customarily have been used in tillage, whereby
                idleness -- ground and beginning of all mischiefs -- daily doth increase, for
                where in some Towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by
                their lawful labours, now be there occupied 2 or 3 herdsmen and the residue
                fallen in idleness; the husbandry, which is one of the greatest commodities
                of this realm, is greatly decayed; churches destroyed; the service of God
                withdrawn; the bodies there buried not prayed for; the patron and curate
                wronged; the defense of this land against our enemies outwards feebled
                and impaired; to the great displeasure of God, to the subversion of policy
                and good rule of this land.

Goldsmith attacks the landowners as being blind to the poverty they are creating:

                The man of wealth and pride,
                Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
                Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds,
                Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds;
                That robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth
                Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth;
                His seat, where solitary sports are seen,
                Indignant spurns the cottage from the green.

                                * * * * * *
                Where then, ah where, shall Poverty reside,
                To 'scape the pressure of contiguous Pride?
                If to some common's fenceless limits strayed,
                He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,
                Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
                And even the bare-worn common is denied.
                  If to the city sped -- What waits him there?
                To see the profusion that he must not share;
                To see ten thousand baneful arts combined
                To pamper luxury, and thin mankind;
                To see those joys the sons of pleasure know,
                Extorted from his fellow creature's woe.
                Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade,
                There the pale artist plies the sickly trade;
                Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display,
                There the black gibbet glooms beside the way.
                The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign,
                Here, richly decked admits the gorgeous train;
                Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square,
                The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.
                Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy!
                Sure these denote one universal joy!
                Are these thy serious thoughts? -- Ah, turn thine eyes
                Where the poor houseless shivering female lies.
                She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest,
                Has wept at tales of innocence distressed;
                Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
                Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;
                Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,
                Near her betrayer's door she lays her head,
                And pinced with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
                With heavy heart deplores the luckless hour,
                When idly first, ambitious of the town,
                She left her wheel and robes of country brown.

Finally, to return to Wharram Percy. It was finally depopulated completely in the early decades of the 16th century. What was once a thriving village of 150 people was reduced to a shepherd family living in the valley in a small house just north of the church. The only other person living there would have been the parish priest.