THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS

Studies in Economics and Political Science

Edited by H. J. Mackinder, M.A., Director of the
London School of Economics

No. 14.

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY
AND THE
ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY
AND THE ENCLOSURE OF
COMMON FIELDS

BY
GILBERT SLATER, M.A., D.Sc.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
THE EARL OF CARRINGTON, K.G., G.C.M.G., Etc.
President of the Board of Agriculture

LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. Ltd.
1907

BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS,
LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.

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The investigations embodied in this book were begun in 1894, on the suggestion of Mr. Graham Wallas, and at the request of Mr. J. A. Spender. They were continued in subsequent years, in conjunction with the London School of Economics, and the results were summarised in a thesis entitled “The Enclosure of Common Fields in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” which was submitted to the University of London in 1904, and approved as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Science in Economics. That thesis consisted in the first place of a series of maps, partially reproduced in this volume through the kind assistance of the Royal Geographical Society; and in the second place of manuscript matter which has been revised for publication in the form of this volume and under the present title. The original maps are in the custody of the London School of Economics, and can be seen by those who desire to examine them. They include a series of county maps, on which parishes in which common fields have been enclosed by Act of Parliament are coloured and marked according to the date of enclosure, and maps illustrating the process of Parliamentary enclosure, and the working of the common field system. Those who are interested in the enclosure history of any particular county may also be recommended to consult the Victoria County History.

It is my pleasant duty here to gratefully acknowledge my obligations to the two gentlemen above mentioned for the original impulse to study the process of the destruction and decay of English village communities; to the London School of Economics; and in particular to its first Director, Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, its present Director, Mr. H. J. Mackinder, and Mr. Hubert Hall,vi for assistance, encouragement, and advice; to many labourers, farmers, clergymen, and other rural residents, for information and personal kindness; to the Royal Geographical Society for defraying the cost of the production of the blocks of the illustrative maps herewith published; and to Earl Carrington, the President of the Board of Agriculture, for reading the book in proof, and recommending it to those who are willing to study rural history because they desire to improve rural conditions of life.

In writing this book I have deemed it a matter of conscience to preserve the attitude of mind of the student of history, pure and simple. I have felt, and feel, that historical investigation can only be rightly carried on when all motives except the simple desire to know the truth are excluded from the investigator’s mind. Yet the investigation undertaken having been thus far completed, and its results placed on record, I cannot refrain from attempting to read out of them some lessons for the present and the future.

My conclusions have been in large measure expressed for me by Lord Carrington’s Introduction. The policy of the legislature and of the Central Government, expressed in the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though it claimed, and on the whole rightly claimed, that it effected an immediate and great increase in the country’s output of agricultural produce, and an improvement in the breeds of sheep and cattle, was nevertheless essentially a policy directed towards the enhancement of agricultural rents, the building up of large and compact landed estates, the establishment of capitalist farming, the uprooting of peasant proprietors and of small holdings together with the communal use of land, and the multiplication of the class of landless agricultural labourers. There is need in the twentieth century for a new agricultural policy. As I read the economic signs of the time, industrial conditions are beginning to favour a great agricultural revival in the British Isles. A wise programme of rural reform is necessary both in order that the possible agricultural prosperity may be secured, and in order that the nation mayvii reap in full its possible fruits of physical and moral well-being for the people.

In all times the fading memories and traditions of the past have contributed to form in men’s minds the ideals of a possible better future state of society which are the inspiration of progress. The memories and traditions of the English village community, together with its visible relics in the form of commons, commonable meadows, and (rarely) common fields, have had their influence on the formation of the ideals of the Labour and Democratic movement of our country from the time of Cobbett onwards. Through historical research the past may become more definitely suggestive.

The suggestions borne into my mind for the agricultural policy of the twentieth century may be summed up in the phrase, British agriculture must be democratised. By this I mean that the principle of collective ownership of the soil must be established or re-established; that agricultural co-operation must be revived in new forms suitable to modern conditions; that the ancient right of independent access to the soil for every tiller of it must be restored; that a career of industrial advance in agriculture must be made possible for the competent worker. On one important side of the life of the old English village community I have not touched at all in this book, viz., its social and recreative side. In this respect also the losses of the past will probably be recovered spontaneously if the nation aims in its agricultural policy at the three essentials of wholesome, hopeful, human work, as opposed to dehumanised toil, Freedom, Training and Mutual Aid.

GILBERT SLATER.

January 10th, 1907.

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The enclosure of common fields, and the passing away of the English Village Community to make room for the agricultural organisation prevailing to-day, is a subject not merely of historical interest, but one which touches very closely some of the most vital national problems of the twentieth century.

During the past five generations mechanical, industrial, and commercial progress, with the consequent creation of great towns and cities, has so occupied the national activities, and has made us to such an extent a nation of town-dwellers, that there has been a tendency to overlook rural life and rural industries. But in recent years social reformers have come to see that the solution of many of the problems of the town is to be found in the country, and increasing attention is being paid to the causes of the rural exodus and the best means by which it can be arrested. No industry can be in a healthy condition which does not provide an opportunity for the small man to improve his position; and consequently such questions as the provision of allotments and small holdings, agricultural co-operation, the preservation of the independence of spirit of the agricultural labourer, and the securing for him the prospect of a continually advancing career on the land are recognised as matters of urgent national importance.

xii

In this book Dr. Slater shows that the movement for the enclosure of arable open and common fields has been a movement for the sweeping away of small holdings and small properties; that the “Village Community” which any Enclosure Act of this character abolished was essentially an organisation for agricultural co-operation. He shows that at least in certain parts of the country even in comparatively recent times enclosure has produced rural depopulation, and has converted the villager from “a peasant with a mediæval status to an agricultural labourer entirely dependent on a weekly wage.” He further makes us doubt whether these little village revolutions, while they temporarily stimulated agricultural progress by facilitating improved stock-breeding and the economy of labour, did not also to a certain extent destroy the opportunities of future progress by separating farmer from labourer by a gulf difficult to cross, and thus cutting off the supply of new recruits to the farming class.

At the same time, whatever reasons there may be for regretting the enclosure of our Common Fields, and for wishing that the interests of the humbler tillers of the soil had been more sedulously guarded on enclosure, in the main the process was inevitable. Common field Agriculture was a survival of customs and institutions which had grown up when each village lived its life to a great extent in isolation. It was necessary that the villager should almost forget that he was a Little Pedlingtonian to realise that he was an Englishman. Village patriotism had to die down temporarily to make way for national patriotism; and when the spirit died out of the Village Community its form could not be preserved.

Now and in the future there is need that local patriotism, pride in the local community, and willingness to serve it, whether it be village or city, should be kindled again to its old vigour.xiii With the revival of the spirit will come a revival of some of the old forms of village common life, and a creation of new forms in place of those which will remain among the forgotten facts of the past. The Village Community is a hope of the future as well as a memory of the past, and therefore those who are interested in the movement for reviving British Agriculture on democratic lines and for improving the social and economic conditions of our villages have reason to welcome Dr. Slater’s attempt to describe existing and recent survivals of the English Village Community, and to ascertain the circumstances, causes, and consequences of its gradual extinction.

CARRINGTON.

28th November, 1906.

THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS.

CHAPTER I.
ENCLOSURE IN GENERAL.

The internal history of our villages is a more obscure, but not less important a part of English history, than the internal history of our towns. It is, indeed, more fundamental. A town is ordinarily by origin an overgrown village, which never loses the marks of its origin. And it was by agricultural and social changes in the villages that the way was prepared for the great industrial revolution, or more properly, evolution, which is the underlying fact of the history of English towns, especially during the last two centuries.

The central fact in the history of any English village since the Middle Ages, is expressed in the word “enclosure.” Primarily “enclosure” means surrounding a piece of land with hedges, ditches, or other barriers to the free passage of men and animals. Agriculturally, enclosure of arable land in the midst of unenclosed arable land is a preliminary step to its conversion into pasture, the hedge is erected to keep animals in; enclosure of land in the midst of open common pasture is a preliminary step to tillage, the hedge keeps animals out. But in either2 case the hedge is the mark and sign of exclusive ownership and occupation in the land which is hedged. Hence by enclosure collective use, usually accompanied by some degree of community of ownership, of the piece of land enclosed, is abolished, and superseded by individual ownership and separate occupation.

The form of enclosure which is familiar to our minds is the enclosure of land previously uncultivated; in the legal phrase, “enclosure of waste of a manor,” in the ordinary phrase, “enclosure of commons.” Enclosure in this sense has been, and is still, a matter of very vital interest to the urban population, a fact which might be brought vividly to our minds by a recital of the commons within London and its immediate neighbourhood which have been lost or preserved with difficulty. It is sufficient to refer to Epping Forest, Hadley Wood, Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common, Hayes and Keston Commons, Bostall Heath and Plumstead Common.

Far more important from a broad national point of view, is the enclosure of common fields—the enclosure, that is, of land previously cultivated according to a system which did not involve the separation of one holding from another by any tangible barrier. Enclosure of this sort, when suddenly effected, as by a Private Act of Enclosure, is rightly termed the extinction of a village community. In the following chapters it will be shown in detail from existing and recent survivals, what was the nature of the system of cultivation in open and common fields in different parts of England, up to the time of enclosure; the question when and how enclosure was brought about in different counties will be discussed; and light will be thrown upon the result of the transition from the medieval to the modern system of village life upon the material and moral condition of the villagers, the peasants, farmers or labourers, who underwent the change. In these chapters facts drawn directly from observations and inquiries in the villages themselves, from the observations of agricultural writers who speak from direct and intimate knowledge, and from the Enclosure Acts, will be left in the main to tell their own story. But a generalised statement will perhaps make that story clearer.

3Here is a typical Enclosure Act of the type which encloses common fields, taken at random, and a good example of the 2565 Acts of its class enumerated in the Appendix, by which about 3000 parishes were enclosed. It was passed in 1795 (c. 43) and begins:—“Whereas there are in the parish of Henlow, in the County of Bedford, divers Open and Common Fields, Meadows, Pastures, Waste Lands, and other Commonable Lands and Grounds, containing by estimation, Two Thousand Acres, or thereabouts.... And whereas the said Open and Common Fields, Lands, Grounds, Meadows and Pastures, lie intermixed, and are inconveniently situated, and are in their present state incapable of Improvement, and the several Proprietors thereof and Persons interested therein are desirous that the same may be divided and enclosed, and specific Shares thereof set out and allotted in Lieu and in Proportion to their several and respective Estates, Rights, and Interests therein; but such Division and Inclosure cannot be effected without the Aid and Authority of Parliament. May it therefore please your Majesty——.”

The total area of the parish of Henlow is 2450 acres, and it has a large park. It appears, therefore, that when the Act was passed practically the whole of the arable, meadow, and pasture land in the parish lay entirely open, and was commonable. The more remote and least cultivable parts of the parish were, no doubt, common pastures; on these the villagers kept flocks and herds according to some recognised rule based on the sizes of their holdings in the arable fields. A drift would lead from the common to the village, passing through the arable fields, and fenced or hedged off from them. Immediately behind the cottages, clustering together to form the village, there would be small closes for gardens or paddocks; beyond these all round the village would stretch the open, common, arable fields, in area probably considerably more than half the parish. These were probably divided into three or four approximately equal portions, and cultivated according to a three or four year course, imposed rigidly on all occupiers by a mutual agreement sanctioned by custom. The holdings would be of various sizes, from three or four acres of arable land upwards, but all small; and a4 holding of, say, twenty acres of arable land would consist of about thirty separate strips of land of from half an acre to an acre each, scattered over all the three or four arable fields, but approximately equally divided between each field, so that each year the occupier would have, for example, about five acres under wheat, five under barley, five under pulse, and five fallow, provided that were the customary course of husbandry. Right through the year the fallow land would be used as common pasture, and the land under crops would become commonable after the crops were carried.

Along the streams flowing into the river Ivel would be the open commonable meadows. These would be divided into a number of plots, half-acres, quarter-acres, or even smaller, marked by pegs driven in the ground, or stones; and a certain number of these plots were assigned to each holding, in proportion to the amount of arable land. During the spring, while the cattle were on the common pasture, the meadow would be let grow for hay; when the time for hay harvest came, each peasant cut his own plots, and the meadow became commonable during the rest of the summer. Some of the peasant occupiers would be small freeholders, some probably copyholders, others legally annual tenants. All would meet together on certain occasions to settle questions of common interest.

We might say, though the expression must not be too rigidly interpreted, that under the common field system the parish, township, or hamlet formed one farm, occupied and cultivated by a group of partners holding varying numbers of shares. It may well be imagined what a village cataclysm took place when an Act for the enclosure of the parish was passed, and commissioners descended upon the village, valued every property and every common right, and carved out the whole parish into rectangles, instituting the modern system of separate exclusive ownership and individual cultivation. We shall see that ordinarily the holdings on enclosure became fewer and larger, that very many of the peasants were in consequence driven from the village, or became landless, pauperised agricultural labourers. We shall see also that the traditions of the common field system where5 they have perished as distinct memories, have survived in the form of aspirations for agricultural reform. In fact, the great rural question for the twentieth century to determine, is whether there were not beneath the inconvenient and uneconomical methods of the common field system, a vital principle essential to true rural prosperity, which has to be re-discovered and re-established in forms suitable to the present environment.

It is not intended in this book to go into the vexed question of the origin of the common field system, or of the English village community. It will be noticed that the researches upon which this book is based do not as a rule go further back than Leland’s Itinerary in 1536 and following years. From such materials only hypotheses can be obtained, which require to be tested by all the evidence from earlier records. A hypothesis, however, has a certain value as a mental thread by which the facts can be connected and more clearly conceived.

Judging entirely from eighteenth and nineteenth century evidence, one is in the first place driven to accept most unhesitatingly the prevailing theory that the English common field system was based on co-aration. But one is tempted to very summarily dismiss the theory of Roman origin. Rather one is inclined to say that as long as a considerable portion of the villagers of the parish were accustomed to yoke their oxen or harness their horses to a common plough, the system was a living one, capable of growth and modification according to the ideas of the people who worked it. It became, as it were, fossilised and dead, incapable of other than decaying change, when each occupier cultivated his own set of strips of land by his own plough or his own spade. One is therefore inclined to suppose that the introduction of each new element in the population of a village—Saxon, Angle, Dane, and in a less degree, Norman—profoundly modified earlier customs, and that in each part of Britain a local type of village community resulted from the blending of different racial traditions.

This hypothesis is directly suggested by the evidence of recent survivals. The most familiar type of village community is characteristic of the Midlands; I have termed it the Mercian6 type. It is most easily conceived as a compound of the pure Keltic system, known in the Highlands and Ireland as Run-rig or Rundale, and the North German system traditional among the Angles, in which the two elements in equal strength are very perfectly blended together. In the South of England we find a different type, here termed the Wessex type, in which the influence of Keltic tradition is more strongly seen. The village community in Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk shows some remarkable special features, traces of which are found in adjoining counties, but which appear to be easily accounted for as the result of the later intrusion of Scandinavian traditions. Further, throughout the West of England, from Cumberland to Devon and Cornwall, we find evidence that the primitive type of village community approximated very closely to the Keltic Run-rig.

Enclosure of the common fields, meadows and pastures, of any particular village may have taken place in the following ways:—

(1) By Act of Parliament, viz., (a) by a private Act, (b) under the authority of the General Enclosure Acts of 1830 and 1836, (c) by the Enclosure Commissioners and their successors, the Board of Agriculture, under the General Enclosure Act of 1845 and its amending Acts.

(2) By common agreement of all the collective owners.

(3) By the purchase on the part of one owner of all conflicting rights.

(4) By special licence of the Tudor monarchs.

(5) By various forms of force and fraud.

Commonable waste may have been enclosed in any of the above ways, and also under the Statutes of Merton and Winchester (1235 and 1285), which give Lords of the Manor the right of enclosing commons provided proof is given that the tenants of the manor are left sufficient pasture.

Enquiry into the history of Enclosure naturally begins with an examination of the Enclosure Acts.

The first fact elicited by this examination is that there is a7 perfect legal similarity between Acts for enclosing commonable waste, which may be termed Acts for extending cultivation, and Acts such as that for Henlow, for enclosing all the open and common arable and other lands of a parish or parishes, which may be termed Acts for extinguishing village communities. About one-third of the Enclosure Acts belong to the former variety, about two-thirds to the latter. As from the economic and social points of view, the two classes of Enclosure Acts are as widely different as they are legally similar, no statistical summaries of the Acts can have much value until the two classes are sorted out. To do this involved a separate examination of all the Acts accessible.

Appendix A contains a statistical summary of the Acts for enclosing commonable waste passed between 1727 and 1845; Appendix B contains a list of Acts for enclosing common arable fields with or without other commonable lands passed between 1727 and 1900.

8

Perhaps the best surviving example of an open field parish is that of Laxton, or Lexington, in Nottinghamshire, about ten miles from Newark and Southwell. It lies remote from railways and high roads, and is only to be reached by bye roads. From whatever quarter one approaches the village, one enters the parish through a gate. The village is in the centre of the parish, and is surrounded by enclosed fields. Other enclosures are to be found on the most remote parts of the parish, in some cases representing, apparently, old woodland which has been converted into tillage or pasture; in other cases portions of the arable fields. But nearly half the area of the parish remains in the form of two great arable fields, and two smaller ones which are treated as two parts of the third field. The different holdings, whether small freeholds or farms rented from the Lord of the Manor, who owns nearly all the parish, consist, in part, of strips of land scattered all over these fields, in a manner which can best be understood by reference to the map. Within these arable fields cultivation is not carried on according to the discretion of the individual farmer, but by strict rules of great antiquity. In each of the fields a three year course is rigidly adhered to.

First year, wheat.

Second year, spring corn (i.e. barley, oats, peas, beans, vetches, tares, &c.).

Third year, fallow.

If, therefore, Laxton be visited early in June, the following description of the appearance of the parish will be found correct. The traveller passes through the boundary gate. He finds his road leads him through the “Spring corn” field, which lies9 open on either side of the road. A phrase which is continually used by old farmers when attempting to describe common fields will probably occur to him in this field: “It is like allotments.” But it is like an allotment field with many differences.

All the great field is divided up into oblong patches, each patch growing its own crop, but with no more division or boundary between one crop and the next than a mere furrow.

If, then, the traveller looks again at a strip of land growing, say, beans, he will find that this strip consists of one, two, or more ridges, locally termed “lands.” A “land” in Laxton has a pretty uniform width of 5½ yards, and a normal length of one furlong; but by the necessity of the case the length varies considerably. Owing to this variation in length the various strips of land which make up the different holdings in the common fields, when their area is expressed in acres, roods, or poles, seem to have no common measure.

Because the soil of Laxton is a heavy clay it is customary to plough each “land” every year in the same manner, beginning at the edges, and turning the sod towards the centre of the “land.” Hence each “land” forms a long narrow ridge, heaped up in the middle, and the lie of the “lands” or ridges was at some unknown date so well contrived for the proper drainage of the land, that it is probable that if the whole of a field were let to a single farmer, he would still plough so as to maintain the old ridges.

The same ridges are to be found on the other two fields, one of which is a stretch of waving wheat; while the third, or fallow field, is being leisurely ploughed, a number of sheep getting a difficult living from the thistles and other weeds in the still unploughed portions, and on the “sicks,” i.e. certain grassy parts of the field which are defined by boundary marks, and are never allowed to be ploughed. In one extreme corner of the parish is Laxton Heath, a somewhat swampy common covered with coarse grass. Here, too, sheep are grazed in common, according to a “stint” somewhat recently determined upon. Before the stint was agreed to, every commoner had the right of turning out as many sheep as he could feed in winter, the result10 being that the common was overstocked, and the sheep nearly starved. The stint regulates the number of sheep each commoner may graze upon the common according to the number he can feed on his other land in the parish. It was not adopted without opposition on the part of those whose privileges it restricted.

This brings us to the question, Who are the commoners? There are two sorts of claim by which a man may be entitled to common rights, and to a voice in such deliberations as those by which a stint is agreed to. One is by a holding in the common open fields, the other is by the occupation of a “toft-head.” A “toft” is not very easy to define. One may say that it either is, or represents, an ancient house or cottage in the village; but that immediately suggests the question, How ancient? It is well known in the village which cottages are “tofts” and which are not. Those which are, command a rent about £2 a year higher in consequence. It is to be noted that if the house or cottage which is the visible sign of “toft-head” be pulled down, and a new one erected on the same spot, the new house has the same rights attached to it. One is naturally led to the hypothesis that up to a certain date[1] all cottages erected11 in Laxton carried common rights, but that after that date no new common rights could be created. There are, therefore, two classes of commoners: the farmers who hold land in the common fields, and the labourers who occupy the privileged cottages. A farmer may possess a number of common rights in respect of (1) his farmhouse, if it be a “toft,” (2) his arable holding, and (3) any toft cottages he may own or rent and sub-let to labourers, retaining their common rights. The labourer has but one common right. Each common right entitles the holder to one vote, and to one share in the division of the money revenues drawn from the commonable lands, besides the right of feeding an indefinite number of sheep on the fallow field, and the regulated number on the common. The money revenue that comes from the commonable fields is obtained as follows: The grass lands (“sicks”) in the two common fields which are under crops cannot be grazed upon conveniently, because any animals would be liable to stray into the crops. They are, therefore, mown for hay, and the right to mow them is sold by auction to one of the commoners, and the price realised is divided. Recently this has worked out at about 14s. per common right. Each commoner also has the right of pasturing animals upon the two fields that are under crops, directly the harvest has been carried.

The exercise of this right, which appears to be most keenly valued, as it is found to persist in many parishes after all other traces of the common field system have died away, obviously opens the door to quarrels. It is not to be expected that all farmers should finish carrying their crops on the same day; and the position of the man who is behind all his neighbours, and so is standing between the commoners and their right of pasture, is not an enviable one. But a constitutional system of government exists for the purpose of dealing with these and other difficulties. A “Foreman of the Fields” and a “Field Jury” are elected:12 the field jury settles all disputes between individuals, while the duties of the foreman include that of issuing notices to declare when the fields are open for pasturing; on which day all the gates, by which, as I have previously mentioned, the parish is entered, must be closed, while all the gates of the farmyards are thrown open, and a varied crowd of animals winds along the drifts and spreads over the fields.

It will be noticed that the commonable lands of Laxton include only arable fields and common pasture. The commonable meadows which the parish once had, have been partitioned and enclosed at a date beyond the recollection of the oldest inhabitant. The neighbouring parish of Eakring still has commonable meadows. In this respect Eakring is a more perfect example of the open field parish than Laxton, though its common arable fields have been much more encroached upon; and have, in fact, been reduced to scattered fragments, so that the rector was unable to tell me whether there were five, six, or more of them. The villagers, however, say simply “Three: the wheat field, the bean field, and the fallow field.” The commonable meadows are, like the common fields, held in scattered strips intermingled; and are commonable after hay harvest. The rule in Eakring is that if one man only has any hay left on the meadows, the other commoners can turn in their cattle and relieve him of it; but if he can get a neighbour to leave but one haycock also, he is protected.

The constitution of Eakring differs somewhat from that of Laxton. There are regularly four toft meetings every year, presided over by the steward of the lord of the manor, at which all questions relating to the commonable lands are settled. Further, all toft holders have an equal right to feed an indefinite number of sheep on the fallow field, and the other fields when available, but the exercise of the right is regulated by a species of auction. The number of sheep that can be pastured with advantage is agreed upon, and since the total number of sheep which the assembled toft holders desire to put on is sure to exceed that number, a price to be charged per sheep is by degrees fixed by mutual bargaining, till the numbers of sheep13 for which their owners are willing to pay is reduced to the number that the pasture can bear. The cottager and toft holder, therefore, who though not holding an acre of land in the parish, has yet enterprise enough to bid for the right of keeping a flock of sixty sheep on the common fields, is therefore heartily welcomed by that section of the toft holders who have no desire to bid against him, because he forces up the value of their rights.

Up till 1898 an even better example of an open-field parish could be seen in Northamptonshire. In that year was completed the enclosure of Castor and Ailesworth, two hamlets forming part of the parish of Castor, situated three miles from Peterborough on the road to Northampton. In 1892, when application was made to the Board of Agriculture, which now represents the Enclosure Commissioners of the General Enclosure Act of 1845, there were in the two hamlets, out of a total area of 4976 acres, 2,425 acres of common arable fields, 815 acres of common pastures and meadows, and 370 acres of commonable waste, and only about 1300 acres enclosed. In Laxton the commonable land is less than half the area of the parish. The greater amount of old enclosure in Laxton has had its effect on the distribution of the population. There are some, though very few, outlying farmhouses. In Castor and Ailesworth all the habitations and buildings, except a watermill and a railway station, are clustered together in the two hamlets, which form one continuous village. At present very nearly all the land of Laxton and Eakring is in the ownership of the respective lords of the two manors; in Castor and Ailesworth the Ecclesiastical Commissioners are the largest landowners; but nearly as much land is the property of Earl Fitzwilliam, and there are besides a number of small landowners. Before enclosure all these properties were intermixed all over the area of the two hamlets, the two chief properties coming very frequently in alternate strips.

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Though the area of commonable land in Castor was so much greater than in Laxton, those customs of village communal life which we have described had retained much less vigour; and to the decay of the power of harmonious self-government the recent enclosure was mainly attributable. The customary method of cultivation in Castor and Ailesworth was a three-field system, but a different three-field system to that described above. The succession of crops was:—First year, wheat; second year, barley; third year, a “fallow crop,” or as locally pronounced, “follow crop.” Each year in the spring the farmers and toft-holders of Castor, and similarly of Ailesworth, would meet to decide the crop to be sown on the fallow field. One farmer, who held the position—though not the title—of “Foreman of the Fields,” kept a “stint book,” a list of all the villagers owning common rights, and the number of rights belonging to each. The number of votes that could be cast by each villager depended upon the number of his common rights. The fallow crop might be pulse or turnips or other roots or anything else that seemed advisable; but it was essential to the farmers’ interests that they should agree upon some crop. For a tradition existed in the village that unless the farmers were agreed as to the crop to be sown on the fallow field, that field could be treated as though it really were fallow. It could be pastured on all the year by all the toft-holders, and any crop which any farmer might sow would be at the mercy of his neighbours’ cattle and sheep. I could not find that this had ever happened. On the other hand, the farmers being agreed about the crop, they could also determine the date when the fallow field should become commonable.[2] The wheat-field and barley-field became commonable after harvest; the meadows and pastures were commonable between August 12th and February 14th.

The reason why the medieval three-field system was retained in Laxton, but was altered in Castor to an improved three-field system, is to be found in the nature of the soil. That of Laxton15 is a heavy clay, growing wheat of noted quality; that of the Northamptonshire parish is lighter, in parts very shallow and stony. Another result of the difference of soil was a different system of ploughing. The Castor method was that technically known as “Gathering and Splitting,” viz., alternately to plough each strip from the margin inwards, turning the sod inwards, and the reverse way, turning the sod outwards, so that the general level of the field was not broken into a series of ridges. In Castor, as in Laxton, no grassy “balk” divided one man’s “land” from his neighbour’s, the furrow only had to serve as boundary, and sometimes the boundary was bitterly disputed. Before the enclosure there was one spot in the common fields where two neighbours kept a plough each continually, and as fast as one ploughed certain furrows into his land, the other ploughed them back into his.

Another difficulty occasionally arose when high winds prevailed at harvest time. The great extent of the open fields, and the slightness of any opposition to the sweep of the wind, at such times allowed the corn to be blown from one man’s land, and scattered over his neighbours’. Indeed it recently happened that one year when peas had been chosen as the fallow crop, that a storm carried the whole crop to the hedge bordering the field, and so mixed together in inextricable confusion the produce belonging to thirty or forty different farmers.

Another source of dispute was one that has been a prolific cause of trouble in common fields for centuries. Where the extremities of a series of adjoining “lands” abut on a land belonging to another series at a right angle, the land so abutted on is termed a “head-land,” and the occupiers of the lands that abut on it have the right of turning their ploughs on the headland, and taking the plough from one strip to another along it. The occupier of the headland therefore has to defer ploughing it till all his neighbours have finished, and often chafes at the delay. Recently a farmer in the unenclosed parish of Elmstone Hardwick, near Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, attempted to find a remedy for this inconvenience. He ploughed his headland at the time that suited his convenience, and then sued his neigh16bours for trespass when they turned their ploughs in his land. Needless to say he lost more by his action than by the trespass.

In Castor quarrelsome farmers were wise enough to avoid the law courts. Instead, they wrote appealing against their neighbours to their respective landlords, but the landowners were unable to restore harmony. The death of a farmer who had won the highest respect of his neighbours, and who had continually used his great influence to allay ill-feeling and promote harmony, brought on a state of tension that gradually became unbearable; and the appointment by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners of a new agent, who could not understand and had no patience with the peculiarities of common-field farming, led to steps being taken for enclosure.

The first step necessary was to obtain the agreement of the great majority of the people interested. The agent in question, assisted energetically by the leading farmer in Ailesworth, succeeded in doing this without much difficulty. In 1892, application was made for an order to the Board of Agriculture, whose inspector reported warmly commending the project. The simple statement of the farmers with regard to their farms, e.g., “I hold 175 acres in 192 separate parcels,” would convince him that a change was necessary. The figures for holdings are not given by the enclosure award, but a summary of the facts with regard to some of the smaller properties gives the following:—

The glebe consisted of—

making a total of 165 outlying parcels of land, scattered far and wide over a parish of five thousand acres in extent, and yet17 amounting, with some small closes near the village, only to 118 acres in area. Further—

Parliamentary enclosure, however, is not to be obtained without conditions. That reckless disregard of the wider public interests both of the locality and of the nation at large in the land to be enclosed of which the administration of the General Enclosure Act from 1845 to 1874 has been accused, has been dispelled by the vigorous and ably-conducted agitation to which we owe the preservation of Epping Forest, Hampstead Heath, and many other priceless commons. In the enclosure of Castor and Ailesworth, in the first place, Ailesworth Heath, which occupies the highest and most remote corner of the parish, was excluded from the operation of the Enclosure Act. It is a wild little common which, beyond feeding a few sheep and furnishing a quarry, seems to be fit for nothing but picnics and blackberrying. Situated at the distance of about five miles from Peterborough, which again stands on the margin of the fen country, it will probably come to be valued by the townsmen for its unprofitable wildness.

Next, the parish boasts its antiquities, the remains of a part of the ancient Roman road from London to York, and certain blocks of stone, locally known as Robin Hood and Little John. The Enclosure Act provides for the preservation of these.

A bathing place in the River Nen, which bounds the parish18 on the south, selected at the most convenient spot, and three recreation grounds of 6 acres each, and one of 14 acres, are handed over to the safe keeping of the parish councils of Castor and Ailesworth, besides four pieces of land, making 42 acres in all, for allotments and field gardens. The farmers mournfully point out that these 76 acres thus reserved for the common use and benefit of the villagers are some of the best land and the most conveniently situated. The recreation grounds in particular they scorn as foolishness. Possibly, however, because the village prides itself on its prowess in the football field, the indignation against this supposed fad of the central government is mild compared with that expressed by some of the thrifty people of Upton St. Leonards, near Gloucester, which was being enclosed at the same time. Here the recreation ground was dubbed by some the “ruination ground,” enticing as it did the young lads from digging in their fathers’ allotments to cricket and football, and so subverting the very foundation of good morals.

Subject to these deductions, the whole of the open commonable lands and many of the old enclosures, after being surveyed and valued, and after roads, where necessary, had been diverted or newly set out, were redistributed among the old proprietors so as to give each his proportional share, as far as possible in the most convenient manner. This was both a lengthy and a delicate task, but it was finally completed in 1898, six years after the matter first came before the Board of Agriculture. Each several proprietor was then required to fence his allotment in the manner prescribed by the commissioners who make the survey and award. The cost of the survey and allotment usually works out at about £1 per acre; the cost of fencing may be a great deal more. Though the Parliamentary expenses are now trifling, the total cost of abolishing the “system of mingle-mangle,” as Carew called it in 1600, in any parish where it still exists, is not to be lightly faced in times of agricultural depression.

19

Dorchester is bounded on the south by Fordington Field. The parish of Fordington, up to the year 1875, was unenclosed; it lay almost entirely open, and was divided into about eighty copyholds, intermixed and intercommonable, the manor belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. But in 1875 the Duchy authorities bought out the copyholders, and the old system disappeared.

About three or four miles from Dorchester, along the road to Maiden Newton and Yeovil, are the two adjoining villages of Stratton and Grimstone, forming together the Prebend of Stratton, belonging till recently to the See of Sarum, which have only been enclosed since 1900. The enclosure was effected without any Parliamentary sanction; it was brought about, I am told by the present lord of the two manors, by the refusal of the copyholders, who held by a tenure of lives, to “re-life.” In consequence, all the copyholds, except a few cottages, have fallen into the hands of the lord of the manor; all Grimstone has been let to a single farmer, and Stratton divided into three or four farms.

Besides the very late survival of the common field system in these two manors, there are two other features which make them specially notable. In the first place they are, agriculturally, thoroughly characteristic of the Wessex type of open field village, the type that prevailed over Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. In the second place, the manorial system of village government survived with equal vigour; the proceedings of the manorial courts and the customs of tillage and pasturage forming manifestly only two aspects of one and the20 same organisation. It is fortunate that the court-rolls for the last two hundred years have been preserved, and that they are in the safe custody of the present lord of the manor.

On the south-west the lands of Stratton and Grimstone are bounded by a stream, the River Frome, flowing towards Dorchester, from which Stratton Mill has the right of taking a defined amount of water. Between the stream and the villages are the commonable meadows; on the north-east of the villages the arable fields, tapering somewhat, stretch up the hill slope to Stratton and Grimstone Downs. The whole arrangement is shown very clearly in the tithe commutation map, dated 1839. The two manor farms were separate and enclosed, and lay side by side along the boundary between the two manors, in each case comprising about one-third of the cultivated land. The remaining arable land in each manor formed, so far as fences were concerned, one open field, divided into three oblong strips, known respectively in Stratton as the East, Middle, and West Field; in Grimstone as Brewer’s Ash Field, Rick Field, and Langford Field. The rotation of crops was: (1), wheat; (2), barley; (3), fallow. The lower part of the fallow field was sown with clover, and was known as the “hatching ground”—a term we find elsewhere in the forms “hitch-land” and “hook-land”—the upper part was a bare fallow. More recently an improved method of cultivation was adopted. The barley crop every third year was maintained, but after it was carried Italian rye grass was sown in the upper part of the barley field (instead of a bare fallow). This was fed off with sheep in the spring, and then put into turnips; the following year barley was sown again. The lower part, however, continued to be sown with clover in the fallow year, this was fed off with sheep, and wheat followed.

The arable fields consisted of “lands” or “lawns,”[3] each supposed to be 40 “yards” (i.e. poles) long, and one, two or four “yards” broad—hence supposed to be quarter acres, half acres, or acres. Half acres were the more common; but21 whatever the area in theory it was somewhat less in actual fact.

The West Field in Stratton was somewhat smaller than the other two in consequence of the extreme portion—that next the down and farthest from the village—being enclosed. These enclosures in shape and arrangement exactly resemble the lands in the open field; they are about one acre each. They are called “The Doles.” Further there are a series of small square enclosures taken out of the down, called “The New Closes.” All the Doles and New Closes were in grass.

A remarkable fact is that all the “lands” were scrupulously separated from one another by meres or balks of turf, which, however, were not known by these names. Among the people they were, and are, known as “walls,” but in the court-rolls one finds the term “lanchetts,” which one connects with “lynches,” and “land-shares,” which seems to explain the term “launchers” which I have found in Devonshire. In the level parts of the fields the “walls” were mere strips of turf about a foot wide; but in the sloping parts they formed steep banks, sometimes several feet high, and the successive “lands” formed terraces one above the other.

All the cultivators, except the tenants of the two manor farms, were copyholders, holding for a tenancy of three lives, the widow of the holder having the right to continue the holding during the period of her widowhood. By the custom of the manor the lessee of the manor had at any time (even though his lease had but a day to run) the right to grant a copyholder two lives, i.e., to accept a fine and substitute two new names for those of dead or dying persons on the “copy.”

The copyholds, when not “cotes” or simply cottages with common rights, were either “half-livings,” “livings,” or, in one or two cases, other fractions of a living. A half-living consisted of four or five nominal acres in each of the common fields, and common rights upon the meadow, common fields and common down, in Stratton, for one horse, two cows, and forty sheep. A whole living consisted of a share about twice as large in the field and meadow, and a common right for two horses, four22 cows, and eighty sheep. But each copyhold, whether a whole or half-living, included one dole and one new close. There were three whole livings and twelve half-livings in Stratton, and five “cotes,” i.e., cottages with one or two strips of land in the arable fields attached to them. In Grimstone there were four whole livings, six half-livings, one three-quarters living, and one whole and a-quarter living. In either manor, therefore, if we reckon two half-livings as equal to one whole, there were nine whole livings in all; those of Stratton being normally held by fifteen copyholders, those of Grimstone by twelve, though the number might happen in practice to be less. Thus at the time of the tithe commutation (1838) there was in each manor one copyholder who had two half-livings. In all formal documents a “living” is termed a “place,” and a half-living a “half-place.” The common rights attached to a living in Grimstone were slightly different from those in Stratton. They are further explained below.

Once a year, at about Christmas, the tenants of each manor met, the steward presiding; the elected officials submitted their accounts, and resigned their offices, and their successors were re-elected. The most important of these were two “viewers of the fields and tellers of the cattle,” commonly known simply as the “viewers.” There was also a “hayward,” and two “chimney peepers” (described in the Court-rolls as “inspectors of chimnies”). The inspectors of chimneys do not appear in the rolls of the eighteenth century; instead are the more important officials the “constabul” (sic) and “tythingman,” who ceased to be appointed presumably after the establishment of the county police and the commutation of the tithes.

The duty of the “chimney peepers” was, as their name implies, to see that chimneys were kept properly swept so as not to endanger a neighbour’s thatched roof. The hayward was in charge of the pound; he was entitled to charge 4d. a head for all stray beasts impounded if they belonged to the manor, and 8d. a head for outsiders.

The “viewers” had more varied duties. In the first place they had to appoint one villager as 23“Lacy’s Bridge man.” “Lacy’s Bridge” is a structure of loose stones at a place where the stream, which for the most part bounds Stratton meadow, crosses it; and the duty of the bridge man is to keep it in sufficient repair to enable sheep to cross. The viewers used to appoint the cottagers in turn, going down one side of the road to the end of the village and up the other side.

Next the viewers provided the manor bull. They bought the bull, they charged a fee for his services, and made all necessary regulations. The breed favoured varied from year to year, and the viewers were never known to please everybody with their choice.

Then the viewers appointed the common shepherd, in whose charge were the sheep of the whole manor almost all through the year. And in general they had to enforce all the decisions of the court with regard to the times when sheep or cows should be allowed in the meadow, when the sheep should come into the “hatching ground,” how and where horses should be tethered, and particularly to see that each tenant sowed his clover properly. And when the hay in the meadow was ripe, they marked out to each tenant the plots which fell to his share that year. It was usual to re-elect one of the viewers, so that though there was an annual election, each viewer held office for two years, being for the first year the junior viewer, for the second the senior.

There is much that is interesting in the management of the sheep flock. From April 6th to September 18th the sheep fed by day on the down, and were folded by night on the fallow field. The fold began at the top of the field, and gradually worked downwards, covering about half-an-acre every night, and so manuring the whole. There being no other water supply on the downs, all the tenants had to take turns to carry up water to fill the water-troughs, and the viewers saw that they did so. On September 18th the sheep came into the “hatching ground,” on which, as we have seen, clover had been sown; and it is noticeable that this crop, sown individually by each copyholder on his own lands, was fed off by the common flock under the24 supervision of the common shepherd. In winter the sheep belonging to each tenant had to be folded separately; and the doles and new closes were used for wintering the sheep. Some made it a practice to sell off their flock when feed became scanty, and to buy again the next spring; but the traditional custom was to keep the sheep till they were four or five years old, at which age they became fat, perhaps by superior cunning; meanwhile, of course, they had been yielding wool and manure. In later years, though every half living was entitled to forty sheep, by a common agreement the number was limited to twenty-five in spring, and later in the year to thirty-five, when the lambs reached the age at which they were counted as sheep in the calculation of common rights.

Perhaps the most curious feature in the local system of agriculture was the management of the common meadow. Sheep were allowed in it from March 1st to April 6th (it would only bear ten or eleven), then they had to come out and join the common flock, and the grass was let grow to hay. At hay time the viewers went out and by the help of some almost imperceptible ridges in the soil, and certain pegs driven into the river banks, they marked out to each tenant the plots on which he was allowed to cut and gather the hay. There were forty-seven of these little plots; twenty-seven of them were definite parts of particular copyholds, but nineteen were “changeable allotments,” each of which belonged one year to one holding, the next year to another, according to certain rules; while the remaining allotment, a little three-cornered plot in the middle called “100 Acres,” amounting perhaps to five perches in area, was divided among the holders of the adjacent “Long lands.” On July 6th, the hay having been carried, the cows came in, and grazed in the meadow till November 23rd, and then the meadow was watered.

I have before me the map of the meadow, now somewhat tattered, being drawn upon a half sheet of thin foolscap, and a little notebook recording particulars of the different plots in the meadow, and in the case of the changeable allotments, who were entitled to them each year from 1882 to about 1905, which the25 viewers used in partitioning the meadow. The map I reproduce. The notebook reads[4]:—

26

The first part of the Three Patches in the Great Horse Shoe is the “Mill Bars Patch,” containing about 26 perches.

27

The second part is the narrow strip next to Mr. Channen’s—17 perches.

The third part is the lower patch adjoining Mr. Channen’s—1 rood 10 perches.

Total, 2 roods 13 perches.

28

Narrow strip, 16 perches.
Patch round the corner, 1 rood 22 perches.

The small strip of land called “Hundred Acres” is a part of the Long Lands and is divided amongst the half-acres.

The nine Cantons under the Parks Hedge are about 10 perches each.

About the agricultural merits of the whole system of managing common fields, down and meadow, there is naturally a difference of opinion. An old labourer says that before the old customs began to decay “they made the most of everything,” that the crops are not so good now, and “you can’t get the butter or the cheese” which used to be produced. The butter nowadays goes rancid immediately, and the cheese has no taste. On the other hand, the enterprising young farmer who now holds the manor farm at Stratton, who has himself been a “viewer,” says: “They always had two crops,” i.e., the corn crops had to struggle with couch grass, which partly for want of sufficient ploughing, and partly because it had a secure foothold in the “walls,” was never properly got rid of.

That the life of the old system was gradually dying out before it was ended by the extinction of the copyholds appears from two circumstances: the old habit of mutual help in ploughing, one tenant lending his horse to another, had died out; and the viewers had difficulty in getting their expenses refunded. The wonder is that its vitality was so persistent.

The history of the manors can be pretty fully traced by means of the Court rolls, from 1649, when a Parliamentary survey was held, to the present day. In 1649 Stratton had one copyhold tenant holding a place and a-half, four holding one place each, and ten holding half a place each, making 10½ “places” or29 “livings” altogether. There were, besides, 12 copyholders who each held a “customary cottage with thappurtenances.” During the next two hundred years (from 1649 to 1838) the number of “livings” diminished from 10½ to 9; the actual number of holders of livings or half-livings diminished only from 15 to 14; but the twelve “customary cottages with thappurtenances,” which included one or two acres of arable land and corresponding common rights, diminished to five “cotes.” The other cottagers, however, retained the right of cutting as much furze on certain “sleights” on the down, at any one time, as they could carry home on their head and shoulders; and the total number of cottagers was just two less in 1838 than in 1649.

The Court rolls contain, besides declarations of rights of the manor to water from the stream, and to the allegiance of certain residents outside, and a record of the changes in the tenantry, the names of the officers elected, and regulations agreed upon for the management of the land. Thus, there is usually some regulation as to the length of the rope by which a horse may be tethered in the common fields; mares are continually being prohibited from being kept in common or common field; pigs must not be allowed to stray; cow dung must not be removed from the meadow, nor certain thorny bushes in the meadow be cut, nor may ducks or geese be fed in it. The penalty for each of these offences is a fine of 5s. or 10s. The neglect to carry water up to the down for the sheep is another punishable offence. In 1748 it was found that the sheep pond needed to be mended; the viewers accordingly had to see to its repair, and penalties were agreed upon for refusing to pay the proper share of the cost.

Previous to 1765 the dates for, e.g., turning cows into the meadow or sheep into the “hatching ground” varied from year to year; but the settlement then arrived at was maintained for a succession of years. The jury

“Present that the Common Meadow be broke with horses on November 22nd,[6] that it be laid up on January 5th and30 continue unfed till February 5th, then be broke and fed with sheep.

“That the Hatching Ground be laid up on January 5th, and not be fed again till September 19th.

“That the Cow leaze must not be fed with sheep in time of sheep shearing, nor with horses or mares at winnowing time.”

The year 1789 was a comparatively important date in the agricultural history of Stratton during the eighteenth century. At the Court held on October 9th, it was agreed that “the tenants shall meet in the West Field on the 14th inst. between 9 and 10 in the morning, to bound out the several lands, and afterwards each shall leave a lanchett of a furrow between his and the adjoining land under penalty of a fine of 20s. And no tenant shall turn his plough on his neighbour’s land after the 21st of November.” It would appear that the scrupulous observance of the “walls” dividing one man’s land from another, which was such an exceptional feature of Stratton and Grimstone Common Fields, dates from this meeting.

Fordington parish, until the extinction of the copyholds, had many features which compare curiously with those of Stratton and Grimstone. It is very much larger; for whereas Stratton and Grimstone together have an area of only about 1200 acres, the area of Fordington is 2749 acres, of which, up to 1876, nearly 1800 acres was common field and common meadow, and 618 acres commons adjoining the common field. Fordington is also peculiarly divided into three portions: the arable field and common pastures lying immediately south of Dorchester, the meadows forming a detached area by the side of the River Frome, and the village itself a third detached area.

The copyholds in Fordington were known, some as “whole-places,” “half-places,” as in Stratton and Grimstone, but others as “farthing holds.” One cannot help asking what were the original meanings of these terms, and how they are related to the “virgates” of Domesday, and to the “yardlands” of the Midlands, and the “broad” and “narrow oxgangs” of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Concerning these terms it appears to be established that a “yardland” or “virgate” was31 originally one quarter of a “carucate,” or ploughland, i.e., the amount of arable land (about 120 acres in average soil) which a plough team of eight oxen could plough in a year, together with its due share of meadow and common pasture. A broad oxgang was about 24 acres of arable land, and therefore apparently the northern representative of a yardland or virgate; and a narrow oxgang was about 12 acres of arable, or half a broad oxgang.

In Stratton, as we have seen, every “whole place” or “whole living” had common rights for two horses, four cows, and eighty sheep; every half-place common rights for one horse, two cows, and forty sheep. The areas of land attached to the three whole places were respectively 18 a. 3 r. 35 p., 19 a. 2 r. 3 p., 22 a. 0 r. 11 p., averaging just 20 acres; the half-places varied from 9 a. 0 r. 19 p. to 13 a. 2 r. 25 p., the smaller half-places having an advantage in quality of soil, and the average being almost exactly 11 acres.

In Grimstone the common rights as well as the area of land belonging to particular whole or half-places varied somewhat. The half-places consisted respectively of—

The “whole and a-quarter place” had 26 a. 0 r. 13 p. of land and rights for three horses, five cows, and 120 sheep, and the “three-quarter place” 16 a. 1 r. 2 p., with rights for32 one horse, five cows, and eighty sheep. If these be added together and divided by two we arrive at two whole places of 21 a. 0 r. 27 p., with the common rights for two horses, five cows, and 100 sheep. This may be taken as the typical whole place, and the half-place is just a little more than the mathematical half of a whole place. The fact that the common rights attached to a given unit were more extensive in Grimstone than in Stratton is the natural consequence of the fact that Grimstone had 244 acres of down and 35 acres of cow-common, Stratton only 190 acres of down and 26 acres of cow-common.

But when we compare these with the whole places, half-places, and farthing holds of Fordington, we find rather a puzzling discrepancy. In the latter parish the fourteen whole places each had, in 1841, the date of the Tithe Commutation, rights for four horses, three cows, and 120 sheep, except one, which had no common rights at all, but, apparently by compensation, had 66 acres of arable land, eleven more than any of the others. The smallest of the others had 42 a. 3 r., the largest 55 a. 0 r. 22 p., the average being about 48 acres; in other words, in Fordington a whole place had more than twice as much arable land as in Stratton or Grimstone, and carried a common right for four horses instead of for two.

Each of the twenty-one half-places in Fordington had common rights for three horses, two cows, and sixty-six sheep—which more closely approximates to three-quarters than to a half of the rights of a whole place. The area of land attached to a half-place is, however, on the average somewhat less than half that attached to a whole place, the largest having 25 a. 1 r. 6 p., the smallest 15 a. 1 r. 36 p., the average being just under 21 acres. It happens curiously that the largest “farthing holds” had more land than the smallest half-places, as their areas range from 11 a. 1 r. 7 p. to 17 a. 3 r. 35 p. There were nineteen of them, and their average area was 14½ acres. Each had a common right for two horses, two cows, and forty sheep.

The following tentative hypothesis may be suggested as an explanation. It is based on the presumption that the names33 represent a more ancient set of circumstances than the actual facts recorded in the tithe apportionment.

I think it, on the whole, more probable that these units of holdings are based upon ploughing by horses than upon ploughing by oxen. In other words, I think that the system of co-aration persisted unimpaired in these particular villages after horses had superseded oxen for ploughing purposes, which might have happened at a very early date. This seems plainly indicated by the fact that during the 190 years from 1649 to 1839 the majority of the copyholders in Stratton and Grimstone had only one horse apiece, therefore they must have combined to work even a two-horse plough; and, as I have said above, the practice of helping one another with horses for ploughing only died out in very recent years.

I think further, that in all three manors, a “whole place” or “whole living” meant the land cultivated by one plough, but that in Stratton and Grimstone the plough was a light and shallow one drawn by two horses only, and in Fordington a heavier plough drawn by four horses. The soil in Stratton and Grimstone is very thin and stony, and would not bear deep ploughing; that of Fordington is much deeper and heavier. Further, Stratton and Grimstone fields lie on the steep slopes descending from the downs; Fordington field is gently undulating. Therefore, a four-horse plough in Fordington would plough more than twice as much land as a two-horse plough in the other villages. A whole place then in Fordington naturally would have common rights for four horses; in Stratton and Grimstone for two horses only.

A half-place in Stratton and Grimstone was, therefore, the holding allotted to the tenant who had one horse, and it carried a common right for one horse. Though a half-place in Fordington carried in 1841 a common right for three horses, I am inclined to believe that it originally was the holding of a tenant who had two horses, i.e., half a plough team, and originally had a common right for two horses only; and, similarly, though a farthing hold in 1841 had a common right for two horses, I am inclined to think it originally was the share of the man who had34 one horse only, and only carried a common right for one horse. That is to say, I think the names here a better guide than the nineteenth century common rights. If one were to adopt the opposite view on this point, one would infer that a “half-place” was a misnomer for a “three-quarter place,” and was the allotment of the man who had three horses, and that a “farthing hold” should properly be called a half-place. But on this assumption it would be hard to explain the fact that the arable land attached to a half-place is, on the average, a little less than half that attached to a whole place, and that attached to a farthing hold only a little more than one quarter.

It seems quite probable that when in the course of the gradual improvement of horses and ploughs in Fordington, the stage was reached at which three horses were sufficient for a plough, the holders of half-places already possessing two horses each endeavoured to emancipate themselves from the necessity of joint-ploughing, by obtaining an additional horse; and that when they had generally succeeded in this they obtained the right of pasturing three horses each on the commons and common-field; and when a two-horse plough had come into general use, the holders of farthing holds would naturally take similar steps, and so acquire common rights for two horses each.

There is one other noteworthy fact with regard to Fordington revealed by the Tithe Apportionment. Certain lands scattered over the fields of a total area of 4 a. 2 r. 20 p. were the property of the parish constable for the time being; the churchwardens similarly held 1 r. 7 p., the parish hayward 1 a. 3 r. 18 p., and the parish reeve 3 a. 0 r. 17 p. These ancient village offices were therefore in Fordington not entirely unremunerated.[7]

In its main features the common-field system of Stratton and Grimstone appears to be typical of that prevailing before35 enclosure in the counties of Dorset, Wilts, Hants, Berks, Oxfordshire, and Gloucestershire.

The report of the Select Committee on Commons Enclosure gives a map of a “rotation meadow,” in which each strip was held in rotation by different occupiers, in Shilton, Berkshire; and one of a “lot meadow,” in which the rotation was not by rule, but by lot, in Bestmoor, Oxfordshire.

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A “Return of the Acreage of Waste Lands subject to Rights of Common and of Common Field Lands in each Parish of England and Wales, in which the Tithes have been commuted under the Tithe Commutation Acts, so far as the same can be ascertained from the Maps, Agreements, Awards, and Apportionments relating to the Commutation of Tithes in the custody of the Tithe Commissioners for England and Wales, deducting any lands inclosed under the General Enclosure Acts since the Commutation; also the estimated Total Acreage of such lands in the remaining Parishes of each county,” dated 27th November, 1873, ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, April 13th, 1874, gives us the following results:—

Totals.

We have therefore the assurance of the Copyhold, Inclosure and Tithe Commission that in the year 1873 common fields existed in 905 parishes of England and Wales, of a total area of 166,953 acres, and that there was reasonable ground for inferring the existence of 97,354 acres of common field land, scattered presumably over some four or five hundred more parishes; in other words, that about one parish in every ten in England and Wales presented an example of the medieval system of land holding and cultivation similar, though as a rule on a smaller scale, to the survivals described above.

The statement is amazing, and would be received with incredulity by anyone familiar with the rural districts of any39 county of England, so far as it relates to that county. The Commission invites our suspicion of its statistics. The main purpose of the return was to give the acreage of surviving commons; these are estimated at 2,368,465 acres. As late as 1871, however, the Commission had declared, on the basis of an estimate made in 1843, that 8,000,000 acres of commons still existed, and 1,000,000 acres of common field or meadow. A little scrutiny of some details confirms one’s suspicions.

Thus, to take a single county, Kent has from the early days of the enclosure controversy been famous as a well enclosed county. The author of the “Discourse of the Common weal of this Realm of England” mentions “those countries that be most inclosed, as essex, kent, devenshire” (1549). Skipping two and a-half centuries, we find the reporter of the Board of Agriculture in 1793 declaring that such a thing as a common field did not exist in Kent.[8] We are confirmed in our acceptance of this statement by finding that there have been no enclosures in Kent of common fields by Act of Parliament, either before 1793 or since. Yet the return gives Kent twenty-one parishes having common fields of an ascertained area of about 4183 acres. It therefore is necessary to criticise the methods by which the figures in the return were arrived at.

They are based on the tithe maps, the Commissioners remarking that “the common field lands are generally distinguishable by the particular manner in which they are marked on the Tithe maps, and their area has been estimated from those maps.” The Tithe Commission was appointed in 1836 (6 & 7 Will. IV. c. 71), and the tithe maps and apportionments were made mostly before 1850; we are told “the total area embraced by the Tithe Documents is 28,195,903 acres. The total area of the remaining parishes is 8,961,270 acres.”

In order, therefore, for the Commission to have obtained a correct result, it was necessary—

(a) that the common field lands should have been rightly distinguished from other lands;

40

(b) that their area should have been rightly estimated;

(c) that due allowance should have been made for enclosures between the date of the tithe apportionment and the date of the return;

(d) that the area of common field in the parishes for which there are no tithe maps should have been estimated on correct principles.

Not one of these conditions was satisfied.

(d) Taking these in reverse order, it is assumed in calculating the area of common fields in parishes that have no tithe maps, that they have the same ratio of common field to other land as those which have tithe maps. This principle is entirely wrong for two reasons: (1) because Private Enclosure Acts usually arranged for tithe commutation, so that parishes enclosed by such Acts before 1830 are ordinarily among those without tithe maps—and equally among those without common fields; and (2) the existence of unenclosed common fields would be a reason for demanding a commutation of tithe. The importance of this may be shown by taking Bedfordshire as a test case. For sixty-eight Bedfordshire parishes there are no tithe maps, and the Commission estimates that these sixty-eight parishes have 12,925 acres of common fields. But sixty-six out of these sixty-eight parishes were enclosed by Private Acts, leaving two parishes only, of a combined area of 3578 acres, in which a survival of common field might reasonably be deemed possible, though even in these extremely improbable. Instead of 12,925 acres of common field for this part of the county, the only reasonable estimate would be 0.

Similar statements might be made with regard to any other county which was mainly enclosed by Act of Parliament, as Northampton, to which 13,446 acres of common field are attributed to the non-tithe map parishes; Lincoln, to which 10,823 acres are similarly attributed; Berkshire, with 2705 acres; Buckingham, with 2365 acres; Cambridge, with 2678 acres; Huntingdon, with 2336 acres; Nottingham, with 6617 acres; Oxford, with 4839 acres; Rutland, with 5726 acres, and the East Riding of Yorkshire, with 7359 acres. For this cause41 alone by far the greater part of the 97,354 acres added on to the total estimated from tithe maps must be rejected, and of course any error of over-statement that we find with regard to parishes which have tithe maps will still further reduce the remainder.

(c) Due allowance has not been made for enclosure between the date of the tithe apportionment and the date of the return. It is of course very difficult to say how this could have been done without an elaborate and expensive local enquiry, so far as relates to enclosure without Parliamentary authority. As a matter of fact, no allowance at all has been made for this sort of enclosure. This is justifiable; but at least a general statement should have been made to the effect that a very large deduction had to be made on this account in order to obtain a correct idea of the position. Further, great carelessness was shown even in allowing for Parliamentary enclosures subsequent to the tithe apportionment. Thus, to take one glaring instance, 1500 acres of common field are credited to Beddington and Wallington, near Croydon, in Surrey. These common fields were enclosed by an Act dated 1850, and the award, dated 1853, was at the time of the return deposited with the Copyhold, Inclosure, and Tithe Commission.

(a) and (b) But it is in distinguishing the common fields and in estimating their area from the tithe maps that the worst mistakes have been made. The Commission says that “the common fields are generally distinguishable by the particular manner in which they are marked on the tithe maps.” From a comparison of a good many tithe maps with the figures given in the return, I infer that those to whom the duty of distinguishing the common fields was entrusted, were told that areas divided into sub-divisions on the maps by means of dotted lines were common fields. These dotted lines indicate a division of ownership marked by some slight boundary and not by a hedge. They might indicate allotments, for example, or a number of other local circumstances, besides common fields. The statements that 4183 acres of common field were to be found in Kent, and 13,439 acres in Wales, being specially in direct contradiction of all other evidence that I had collected, I tested these by two42 instances. In Kent 1400 acres were assigned to the parish of Northbourne. By a close examination of the tithe map I could find nothing indicating any common field at all; the only excuse for the statement was a few dotted lines, which by a reference to the Award were proved to indicate only that some fields were inadequately hedged. For Wales, I got out the map and award for Llanerlyl, in Montgomery, credited with 1675 acres of common field. Here there was something to be found on the map looking exactly like common field, but the Award showed that these dotted strips of land were “turbaries.”

We have seen that the open field parish in its perfection, as Castor and Ailesworth before enclosure, possessed common arable fields, common meadows, common pasture, and frequently commonable waste, like Ailesworth Heath. Where the parish as a whole becomes enclosed without an Act of Parliament, particularly if the enclosure is gradual, the waste frequently remains common. Thus we have the numerous commons of Kent, Surrey, and other counties. Less frequently, but still in a considerable number of cases, the common meadows remain open commonable and unenclosed. Port Meadow at Oxford is a familiar instance. These common meadows are included in the return under consideration among the common fields. Thus, for instance, the surprise with which one receives the information that Tottenham, in 1873, had 300 acres of common fields, disappears when it is perceived that the marshes along the River Lea are meant.

It will also be noticed later on that in parishes where the common field system has disappeared for generations, there are frequently still remaining in the midst of enclosed fields strips of land of different ownership from the rest of the field, but let to the same farmer, and without any visible demarcation. Such fields in Wales and the north-west of England are called “quilleted fields.” The tithe map records, with its dotted lines, the area and position of the “quillets.” Such fields are included under “common fields” in this return.

In at least the great majority of cases where the supposed common fields are small, it is probable that nothing more notable43 than quilleted fields existed at the time the tithe map was made; and even this survival would, in most cases, have disappeared since. Out of the 905 alleged cases of common fields, in 670 cases the areas given are under 100 acres.

In fine, this return of commons and common fields, which gives such a fair promise of numerous surviving common fields, in reality gives little assistance, because there is but the remotest probability in any particular case that those common fields exist. The probability is sufficient in some cases to encourage one to make local enquiries, but these enquiries nearly always end in disappointment. The following cases in which common arable fields theoretically survive, are chiefly interesting as illustrating the phenomena of the decay of the common field system in villages where it has not died a sudden death through enclosure. I omit the case of Hitchin, made famous by Mr. F. Seebohm.

Clothall is a parish lying on the north slope of the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, just off the Great North Road, which passes through the adjoining parish of Baldock. Approaching it from the south, one gradually ascends the long slope from Hertford, and suddenly at the summit has before one a far-stretching view over the flat country of Bedfordshire and adjoining counties. The road descends steeply and passes through the Clothall common fields. At the time of my visit the harvest (of barley) was being gathered in; the arrangement of the field was clearly visible. The long, narrow strips of stubble, never quite straight, and never quite of uniform width, were divided by “balks” of grass, grown tall and gone to seed. Each balk was reduced to as narrow dimensions as it could be, without endangering its continued existence, for the sake of separating one strip from another. A view of this field is shown in Mr. Seebohm’s “English Village Community.”

But there is in Clothall the husk only, and no surviving kernel of the English village community. The whole of the field, estimated at about 600 acres, is let to a single farmer,44 who cultivates it on modern principles, but who is bound to preserve the balks. There are but three owners of land in the field. Fifty-six acres are glebe, the remainder belongs in alternate strips to the lord of the manor (the Marquis of Salisbury) and to a gentleman to whom possession passed by marriage, from a family which had been engaged in brewing. The land is famous for barley, and the owner of a local brewery in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century gradually bought up nearly all the land in the common field that did not belong to the lord of the manor. Application was made in 1885 to the Board of Agriculture for enclosure, the manorial authorities and the vicar both desiring it, but the other owner objected.

It is interesting to find that the villagers still hold to the tradition that they have rights of common upon the balks, a tradition which is probably well founded. But they dare not attempt to exercise those rights. An enclosure here, accompanied by the provision of ground for allotments and recreation, would be a boon for the villagers; and it would probably pay the landowners to get rid of those balks, which are as great a nuisance agriculturally as they are interesting from an antiquarian point of view.

The counties of Hertford and Bedford have been, in recent years, particularly rich in survivals of common field, for the enclosure of Totternhoe (p. 63) was only completed in 1891; Yelden had a common field of about 600 acres up till about the year 1881, when the chief proprietor, by buying out or compensating all the other proprietors or owners of common rights, obtained exclusive ownership of the unenclosed land; and at Studham and Renhold similar voluntary enclosures were carried out under the pressure of the chief landowners within the memory of old inhabitants. Fragments of commonable pasture in three different parts of Renhold parish, and a common of about 60 acres in Studham, remain as memorials.

Beneath the long sloping hillside of Clothall lies the little town of Baldock, adjoining Letchworth and the “Garden City”;45 and on the other side of Baldock is the parish of Bygrave; which is, like Clothall, still unenclosed, and for the same reason; the Marquis of Salisbury being here again the lord of the manor, and the other Clothall proprietor the next largest landowner. But in Bygrave the farms, as well as the properties, are very much intermixed. Here and there there are grassy balks between adjacent properties; and in places the growth of bushes on these has almost made them into hedges, but as a rule there is no boundary between strips belonging to different holdings and different properties. A road through the open fields at one point cuts off the end of a strip of land belonging to Lord Salisbury from the rest of that strip; it forms a triangular plot too small to repay the trouble of bringing the plough across the road to plough it; and the men who hold the adjoining land revere the rights of property too much to touch it; it therefore remains a refuge for all manner of weeds.

As in Clothall, no common rights are exercised over the common fields of Bygrave by the poor of the parish, nor could I hear of any tradition of rights belonging to the poor or to cottagers. But the different occupiers of land in the common fields have, and exercise, the right of shackage, i.e., of grazing cattle after harvest, over one another’s holdings. And the lord of the manor has a special right of “sheep-walk” over the whole, for a month, from the first week in May and October. This right is let with one of the farms. It is not actually exercised, because the other occupiers of lands in the open field buy exemption.

The hamlet of Luffenhall, also near Clothall, has “shack lands” held under similar conditions.

The next parish to Clothall on the east, Wallington, is also unenclosed. It has a small common on which cottagers have the right to keep a cow and a calf, but so far as the rest of the parish is concerned, the only surviving feature of the externals of the common field system is the wide, breezy stretch of open land, under wheat, roots and grass; and of the spirit of the “village community” there is nothing. There are but two farms; the wages paid are only 10s. to 12s. per week. Such46 wages, so near London, naturally fail to keep the labourers in the village; and the population is now (1903) less than 100, though the church has seats for 260. As the men go, more and more land is laid down in grass, and machinery is more and more used; the absence of hedges of course facilitates the use of certain kinds of agricultural machinery. The unenclosed parish of Wallington, in fact, represents in an extreme degree the triumph of all those tendencies against which the opponents of enclosure waged war—great farms, absolute dependence of the labourer, low wages, rural depopulation.

The parish of Castor, or Caister, includes, besides the hamlets of Castor and Ailesworth, the enclosure of which has been described, the townships of Sutton and Upton. Sutton had not at the time of the enclosure of Castor and Ailesworth been legally enclosed, and the parish is described from the tithe map as consisting of 450 acres of common field and 150 acres of common, out of a total of 888 acres. The vicar, who had bought nearly all the land in the parish, and also the manorial rights, in 1899 applied for an Act of Enclosure, which he obtained in 1901. There were in Sutton certain lands belonging to the township, intermixed with those in private ownership. The rents of these were paid with the poor rates. Up till 1880 the two farmers who between them occupied nearly the whole of the cultivated land, used to confer every year and agree upon their course of tillage. They were then persuaded by the vicar to disentangle their farms, and cultivate them in the ordinary way. At that time there ceased to be in Sutton any visible sign of any exceptional features in the system of landownership. The lands belonging to the township are recorded in the tithe map, and their measurement in the tithe award, but no balks to mark them are preserved.

I am indebted to the vicar of Sutton for the following illustration of the possible evils of the common field system. It occurred in a parish where he had formerly been resident, which he did not name.

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In this parish two adjacent strips of land were occupied respectively by a farmer and a shoemaker. The farmer, who was a careful and diligent cultivator, having well manured and laboured his strip, sowed it with wheat, and as harvest approached saw the prospect of an exceptionally good crop. The shoemaker left his strip entirely untouched. But when the farmer was about to begin to reap, the shoemaker intervened, and claimed that the strip which was cultivated was his, and the untilled strip belonged to the farmer. The field jury was summoned, and the extreme positiveness and assurance of the shoemaker carried the day, and the shoemaker reaped the wheat. The farmer then begged his successful adversary for some compensation for his lost labour and expense, but was told that he might consider himself lucky not to be prosecuted for trespass. The farmer then proceeded to make the best of his bad bargain, and set to work to plough up the weeds and thistles that covered the strip of land awarded him. But as he ploughed he continually turned up pieces of leather, corners wasted in cutting out “uppers,” and other refuse of a shoemaker’s workshop. These he collected and brought before the field jury. The previous decision was then reversed and the shoemaker was compelled to make restitution to the man he had wronged.

Elmstone Hardwicke is an extremely interesting example of the common field system in a state of natural decay. Very nearly the whole parish belongs to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, but the holdings are intermixed and in small parcels, over a large part, perhaps 1000 acres, of the parish, the farms having been granted on leases of three lives. The farmers would be glad to consolidate their holdings and enclose, but the Ecclesiastical Commissioners effectually discourage this, as I was told, by exorbitant demands for increase of rent. On the other hand, I was informed that the Commissioners themselves desired to enclose, but did not care for the expense of proceeding by Act of Parliament, and they were endeavouring to48 obtain their object by refusing to “re-life,” in order that the leases might fall in, and be converted into leases for short terms that might be made to terminate simultaneously. Thus an old farmer who had a lease of 60 acres in 100 different parcels scattered over the common fields, informed me of the negotiations that had been entered into with him. He was by no means disposed to readily part with his lease, as he had two good lives remaining, both being his nephews, one aged 40 and the other 50. “They’ll both mak’ ’ighty,” he said, that being his own age, though he looked a score of years younger.

This one farmer still (in 1899) followed what had been the customary course of cultivation for the parish—a four years course of wheat, beans, wheat, fallow; this being a modification of a still earlier course of wheat, beans, barley, fallow, the soil being more suitable to wheat than to barley. The other farmers followed no fixed rule, each one cultivating his farm as he chose, subject, however, to the right that was still recognised and exercised, that each occupier could turn horses, cattle and sheep on to the common fields after harvest until the first of November. In consequence of the abandonment of the traditional course of cultivation the common use of the fallow-field has been dropped by general consent, for the last forty or fifty years. The institution of the field jury has also disappeared; though the above-mentioned old farmer still posts the notices declaring the fields open or closed, and so may be said to fill the post of “foreman of the fields,” he does so by right of inheritance rather than of election, in succession to his father.

Various controversies have arisen recently in Elmstone Hardwicke with regard to the rights of various persons interested. I have referred above to the case of the farmer who, in the spring of 1899, occupying a “headland” in the common fields on which various strips belonging to his neighbours abutted, instead of following the customary practice and waiting to plough till the last, ploughed his headland before the abutting lands were ploughed, and then sued for damages when his neighbours turned their ploughs on his land.

Another farmer who occupied a very small holding in Elmstone49 Hardwicke, and a much larger holding in an adjoining parish, made a practice of turning great numbers of sheep on the Elmstone Hardwicke common fields in the open time, which he was able to keep in the close time on his other land. The question arose whether this unfair procedure was lawful. The coming into force of the Parish Councils Act of 1894 also had the effect of suggesting enquiries into the claims of labourers to share in common-right privileges.

The vicar, the Rev. George Bayfield Roberts, accordingly obtained the opinion of Sir Walter Phillimore on the subject. It was as follows:—

“As far as I can gather from the facts laid before me, I think that every freeholder and copyholder has a right to turn cattle upon every part of the common field, and that the right is not confined to the particular field or part of the common field in which he holds land.

“This right passes to the tenant or occupier under each freeholder or copyholder. The tenant, or occupier, has it, not in his own right but merely as claiming under his landlord.

“I know of no rule of law which would give this right to farmers as such, and deny it to cottagers as such, if the latter have holdings on which they can keep their beasts during close time. But the right to turn on to Lammas lands (as this common field is) can only be exercised in respect of beasts used in the cultivation or manuring of the holding in respect of which the claim is made (Baylis v. Tyssen-Amhurst, Law Reports 6 Ch. D. p. 500).

“As the cottagers are said to be tenants of the farmers, the latter can make it clear in all future lettings that they do not let with the cottages the right to pasture in the common field.

“(2) The tenant of the Barn farm should keep his land unenclosed during open time, and anyone who has a right to turn on cattle can sue him if he obstructs (Stoneham v. London and Brighton Railway Co., Law Reports 7 Q. B. p. 1), or can pull down the fencing (Arlett v. Ellis, 7 B. & C. p. 346).

“(2a). I do not think it would be wise to pull down a whole fence, or sue for the damage caused by the fence, if substantial50 and easy openings were made during open time. But there is some authority for saying that the whole fence must be removed (Arlett v. Ellis, cited above).

“(3) The only locus standi for the Parish Meeting is, if it has been given by the County Council all the powers of a Parish Council under section 19, sub-section 10, of the Local Government Act, 1894 (56 & 57 Vict. c. 73), to apply to the Board of Agriculture under section 9 of the Commons Act, 1876 (39 & 40 Vict. c. 56).

“This power is given to Parish Councils by section 8, sub-section c, of the Local Government Act, 1894.

“Section 9 of the Commons Act, 1876, enables the Inclosure Commissioners (whose place is now taken by the Board of Agriculture) to give information and direction ‘upon application’ in order to bring about ‘the regulation of Commons’; and for this purpose Lammas lands are included as Commons, as they also came under the Inclosure Acts.

“By section 3 a Provisional Order made by the Board for ‘regulation’ may provide for the ‘adjustment of rights,’ and section 4 shows how much can be done upon such an adjustment.”

This opinion was given in March, 1897. The very significant passage which pointed out that since the cottagers held their cottages from the farmers, they could not effectively claim any rights which the farmers did not choose to grant them, threw cold water on the agitation.

Elmstone Hardwicke is apparently another case in which something would be gained and nothing lost by an Act of Enclosure.

Rather more than half this parish, near Wallingford, is legally in the condition of open common fields, and there is besides a very extensive “cow-common” on which is a golf course. The neighbouring parishes of Bensington[9] and Berwick51 Salome had until 1852 common fields which were in part intermixed with those of Ewelme, and there were commons commonable to all three parishes. In 1852 an Act was passed which was carried into effect in 1863 for the enclosure of Bensington and Berwick Salome, and the parts of Ewelme which were intermixed with these. Ewelme is owned by a number of small proprietors who chiefly farm their own land. These made a voluntary division,[10] but they still enjoy certain rights of common and of shooting over one another’s land. No labourers enjoy rights of common.

There are two significant facts about this parish.

In the first place, one particular farm enjoys a special right of pasturing sheep on the cow-common, not shared by other farms. This is significant when taken into consideration with the facts for Cambridgeshire and elsewhere related below.

Secondly, this gives a typical instance of the effect of enclosure of commonable waste on the poor. One of the commons enclosed was known as the “Furze Common,” and it supplied the poor of the neighbourhood with their fuel, for every inhabitant had the right of cutting furze on it. After enclosure the Furze Common was allotted to one man, who allowed no trespass on it, and the owners of cottages were awarded allotments of land in consideration of rights which the cottagers had exercised. The lands so allotted became part of ordinary farms, and the poor simply lost their supply of fuel without any compensation whatever. This was done under the sanction, not of an Enclosure Act rushed through Parliament before 1845, but of the Enclosure Commissioners, appointed expressly to prevent any injury to the class least able to guard its own interests, as well as to facilitate enclosure.

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To catch the spirit of the common field system, to see that system no mere historical survival, but developing in harmony with modern needs, one must go to the Isle of Axholme. Starting from Doncaster eastwards, through somewhat devious roads, one descends gradually to a wide belt of reclaimed fen. Between this fen on the west, and the river Trent with more fen on the east, is a ridge of low hills, comprising the four large parishes of Haxey, Epworth, Belton and Owston. These constitute the Isle of Axholme—an island, indeed, up to the time of the great drainage operations of Vermuyden in the reign of James I. It was, no doubt, a very ancient home of fishermen and fowlers, who gradually brought the island itself into cultivation, using the plough as a subsidiary means of subsistence. The strenuous opposition offered by the people of Axholme to the work of the Dutch engineer is well known. Even after they were beaten, and the greatest drainage scheme of the seventeenth century was carried through, the four Axholme parishes retained extensive fens, used as common pastures.

When in the eighteenth century the great trade of driving Scotch cattle to the London market, in which Sir Walter Scott’s grandfather was a pioneer, sprang up, the route followed diverged from the great north road in Yorkshire, in order to avoid turnpikes, and the cattle, grazing as they slowly plodded southwards, and fattening on the roadsides, came through Selby, Snaith and the Isle of Axholme. To protect their fields the islanders hedged them along the roadsides, leaving only narrow thoroughfares; then, to make these thoroughfares passable for themselves, they laid down for footpath a stone pavement which still exists for twenty miles. But the old hedges have in many places53 disappeared, so that the fields lie open to the road; and in particular, the gates which then guarded every entrance to the fields are now generally represented by gaps.

At the end of the eighteenth century by far the greater part of the island proper was in the condition of open arable fields, with properties and holdings intermixed, as in the open fields of Laxton; though near each village there were enclosed gardens, and closes of pasture. It would appear that the original system of cultivation was a four-year course of husbandry, so that one-fourth of the arable land was at any time fallow, and used as common pasture, and common rights were exercised on two of the other three-fourths after harvest; one-fourth probably being under turnips. On the margin of the hill there were perhaps commonable meadows, though I cannot trace them. Beyond, the common fens and marshes, used mainly for grazing horned cattle, extended over an area of about 14,000 acres.

Arthur Young visited the island at this time, and thus describes it:

“In respect of property, I know nothing more singular respecting it (the County of Lincoln), than its great division in the Isle of Axholm. In most of the towns there, for it is not quite general, there is much resemblance of some rich parts of France and Flanders. The inhabitants are collected in villages and hamlets; and almost every house you see, except very poor cottages on the borders of commons, is inhabited by a farmer, the proprietor of his farm, of from four or five, and even fewer, to 20, 40, and more acres, scattered about the open fields, and cultivated with all that minutiae of care and anxiety, by the hands of the family, which are found abroad, in the countries mentioned. They are very poor respecting money, but very happy respecting their mode of existence. Contrivance, mutual assistance, by barter and hire, enable them to manage these little farms, though they break all rules of rural proportion. A man will keep a pair of horses that has but 3 or 4 acres by means of vast commons and working for hire.

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“The enclosure of these commons will lessen their numbers and vastly increase the quantity of products at market. Their cultivated land being of uncommon fertility, a farm of 20 acres supports a family very well, as they have, generally speaking, no fallows, but an endless succession of corn, potatoes, flax, beans, etc. They do nearly all their work themselves, and are passionately fond of buying a bit of land. Though I have said they are happy, yet I should note that it was remarked to me, that the little proprietors work like Negroes, and do not live so well as the inhabitants of the poor-house; but all is made amends for by possessing land.”[11]

In 1795 the chief landowners took steps to obtain an Act for enclosing all four parishes. There were stronger reasons for enclosing than in the majority of the East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire parishes all around, in which Parliamentary enclosure was being pushed furiously on, for the fens were capable of enormous improvement. But in the Isle of Axholme it was not possible for the chief landowners to overbear the opposition of the villagers. One peculiar feature of the locality was that every cottage had a common right, and there were no rights attached to land apart from cottages. This fact, and the peculiarly wide distribution of property, caused the decision to rest with the peasantry. They raised no objection to the division and drainage of the marshes, perceiving that their allotments would be far more valuable after drainage than their common rights before; so this part of the scheme was generally agreed to. But on the question of the enclosure of the arable fields they were not complacent. They saw that the expense of hedging a small allotment would be heavy, and the injury done by the hedge to a small plot, of say 1 or 2 acres, by shading the land and sheltering it from the wind would more than counterbalance the advantage of having that holding in one piece instead of in two or three, to say nothing of the loss of the space given up to hedges. They also probably feared that the arable land, if enclosed, would largely be laid down to grass, and so the benefit of an increased demand for labour and higher wages promised by the enclosure of the marshes would be lost, at least in some55 degree, through the enclosure of the fields. Accordingly the necessary consent of a “three-fourths majority in number and value” of the owners was not obtained, and the proposal to enclose was defeated. It would appear that all the educated, intelligent, and influential people did their best to overcome this “ignorant prejudice.” But on the other hand there were the votes of all those cottagers who did not as yet possess strips in the common fields, but who hoped to be able to purchase them. They saw that while thousands of acres of land lay immediately round the villages in acre, half-acre, and rood strips, there was a chance of buying one, and so taking the first upward step from the rank of the landless labourer. On enclosure those strips would give place to closes of at least several acres each, and the closes would be quite out of their reach. Blind, obstinate, wilful, and prejudiced as the villagers seemed to their betters, the event shows that they were entirely accurate in their view of the situation.

Arthur Young’s account of these proceedings is as follows: “In the Isle of Axholm there is an immense inclosure on the point of beginning, the Act and survey having been passed of no less than 12,000 acres of commons in the four parishes of Haxey, Hepworth, Belton, and Owston. I passed these commons in various quarters, and rode purposely to view some parts; they are in a wretched and unprofitable state, but valued, if inclosed, in the ideas of the islanders at 10s. or 11s. an acre.

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“Cottage rights are claims, but lands without a cottage have none. It was a barbarous omission that when the Act was procured they resisted a clause to divide the open arable fields subject to rights of common. But they have here, by a custom, a right of inclosure which is singular; every man that pleases may enclose his own open field land notwithstanding the rights of common upon it while open; and accordingly many do it when, by purchase, they get five or six acres together, of which I saw many examples.” (“Agricultural Survey of Lincolnshire,” p. 79.)

Somewhat later a second attempt was made in the parish of Owston to obtain an enclosure with partial success. Three of the four fields were divided and enclosed: but the same motives which prevented the enclosure of the four parishes at the previous attempt were strong enough to secure that one field should remain open. It was in 1811, I was locally informed, that the Owston Enclosure took place. I can find no record of the Act.

As we saw above, the old system (probably a four-field course) of cultivation had dropped into disuse even before the beginning of the nineteenth century, but still, up to about the year 1850, the custom remained that on one of the four fields, that under wheat, after the crops had been carried, the “Pindar” gave notice that “the fields are to be broken,” and over that field common rights of pasture were exercised for about a month, from some day in October to Martinmas (November 23rd). Then the Pindar kept watch over the grazing animals night and day, and by night built up enormous bonfires, with all the boys of the village clustering round and roasting potatoes.

But about 1850 even this custom disappeared, and now every holder of lands in the open fields cultivates them as he chooses, but they must be under some form of tillage as long as they remain open. But the tendency, observed by Arthur Young, for the larger owners of lands in the common fields to buy, sell and exchange strips with other owners with the object of getting some half-dozen acres in one continuous piece and then enclosing them, has continued up to the present day. Such enclosures are laid down in grass, and in this way the area of the open fields has gradually been reduced.

The strips of land in the open fields are known as “selions,” the auctioneers’ notices of a sale reading, “All that selion piece of land,” etc. They are also known as “acres,” “half-acres,” “roods,” etc., but these terms must not be taken as exactly defining their area. A nominal acre varies in area from a minimum of about half an acre to a maximum of an acre and a57 half. As the half-acres and roods similarly vary, it follows that the largest “half-acres” are bigger than the smallest “acres.”

The general aspect of the fields is well shown in the photograph taken for me by Mr. Newbit, of Epworth. I asked in a bar-parlour in Haxey, “Are these allotments both sides of the road?” A labourer answered, “Yes, but there are seven miles of these allotments.” But the publican corrected him. “Well, it’s not allotments exactly, it’s a very old system, that’s what it is.” Further conversation with one man and another gave me a strong impression that the people of Axholme are proud of their “very old system.” That they have some reason to be proud of it Mr. Rider Haggard bears witness:

“The Isle of Axholme is one of the few places I have visited in England which may be called, at any rate in my opinion, truly prosperous in an agricultural sense, the low price of produce notwithstanding, chiefly because of its assiduous cultivation of the potato.”[12]

Axholme may be described as a district of allotments, cultivated, and in great part owned, by a working peasantry. The “assiduous cultivation of the potato” is rather an indication of the real strength of Axholme agriculture, than a true explanation of it. At the time of Arthur Young’s visit, the isle was noted for the cultivation of flax and hemp; and this continued to be a feature of the local agriculture till about thirty or forty years ago, when the “assiduous cultivation of the potato” succeeded it. Now, as Mr. Rider Haggard notices, experiments are carried on with celery. The small holders, I was assured on all sides, cultivate the land much more thoroughly than large farmers do their farms, and the very look of the crops confirmed this eloquently, even to my unskilled observation. Mr. Rider Haggard quotes a local expert, Mr. William Standring, as saying, “Wheat crops in the isle averaged seven quarters (56 bushels) an acre, the oats nine or ten quarters, the clover hay, which grew luxuriantly, two or three tons an acre, and the roots were splendid.” He continues, 58“That Mr. William Standring did not exaggerate the capacities of the isle, I can testify, as the crops I saw there were wonderfully fine throughout, particularly the potatoes, which are perhaps its mainstay.”[13]

The secret of the agricultural success of Axholme is clearly la carrière ouverte aux talens, which is secured to agricultural labourers by the open fields. The spirited and successful cultivation of varying crops follows naturally.

How the upward ladder is used, was well explained by a Mr. John Standring, himself a holder of ten acres, before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Small Holdings in 1889.

It is first to be noticed, however, that the general level of wage is exceptionally high for a purely agricultural district at a considerable distance from any considerable town. The customary wage, I was informed in 1903, was 3s. per day. Mr. Rider Haggard, in 1901, found it “2s. 9d. a day for day men, 18s. a week for horsemen, and 16s. a week, with cottage, for garth-men. Men living in the house with foremen and owners receive about £24 per annum and food, and horsemen £30 per annum and food.”

But when the labourer who has been living in marries and takes a cottage, he also takes up a holding in the fields. He begins with one “land,” then takes a second, a third, and so on. The following table, showing the way in which land is held in the parish of Epworth, was submitted to the Select Committee[14] by Mr. J. Standring:—

The eighty holders occupying from half an acre to two acres would all be men in regular employment, as a rule, agricultural59 labourers. A body of these sent their deposition to the Select Committee in the following form:—

“We, the undersigned, being agricultural labourers at Epworth, are in occupation of allotments or small holdings, varying from 2 roods to 3 acres, willingly testify to the great benefit we find from our holdings. Where we have sufficient quantity of land to grow 2 roods each of wheat, barley and potatoes, we have bread, bacon, and potatoes for a great part of the year, enabling us to face a long winter without the dread of hunger or pauperism staring us in the face.”

But the more enterprising of these labourers do not rest content with so small a holding, and these pass into the next class, those who hold up to 10 acres. “Many such,” says Mr. J. Standring, “keep a horse and a cow and a few pigs. And on some of the stronger land two or three of these will yoke their horses together and work their own land, and also land belonging to other men similarly situated who do not keep horses. As a rule they have done very well—I scarcely know a failure.” The payment for horse-hire is usually made in labour.

The most successful of these again recruit the ranks of the larger farmers. “I do not believe there is one in ten in my parish, and in the adjoining parish, among those who are renting from 50 to 100 acres, but what, in my time, has been an agricultural labourer or an agricultural servant before he was married; and each of them, to my own knowledge, has commenced with two or three acres, and in some cases not more than one acre ... one man who is now occupying 200 acres was a labourer in his early days.”

These bigger farmers sometimes move elsewhere, and take larger farms, or bring up their sons in other occupations than farming, so that the farm of 150 to 200 acres becomes again available for division into small holdings. Thus, in spite of the continual growth of the holding occupied by individual men at different stages in their career, the average size of holdings does not show any tendency to increase. This is well shown by the figures given for Epworth, respectively, by Arthur Young and Mr. J. Standring, at about an interval of a hundred years.60 There were only 236 claimants of allotments in the Epworth commons at the end of the eighteenth century; in 1889 there were 291 occupiers of the 5741 acres in the parish, occupying therefore, on an average, less than 20 acres each.

The same eagerness to own land which Arthur Young noticed has also continued to prevail. Land is bought on the building society principle, money for the purpose being borrowed usually at 5 per cent. per annum, very frequently through the lawyer who conducts the sale. In the days of agricultural prosperity land in the open fields of Haxey, Epworth, and Belton was sold at £130 per acre; land in the one remaining open field of Owston as high as £140 per acre. Even now, in spite of the tremendous fall in price of agricultural produce, the ordinary price is about £70 to £75 per acre; which is about twenty-five years’ purchase of the rent.

It is obvious that a man who borrows money at 5 per cent. to buy land which can only be let at 4 per cent. on the purchase price embarks on a speculation which from the purely commercial point of view, can only be profitable provided the land is appreciating in value. There were naturally cases of men who, at the time when prices were falling most rapidly, were unable to keep up their payments of interest and instalments of principal, and who had in consequence, after a severe struggle, to forfeit their partially won property. At this time the Isle of Axholme won the evil repute of being “the paradise of lawyers.” But it would, I believe, be fair to say that the peasantry on the whole stood the strain of agricultural depression exceptionally well, and that their prosperity, with steadier prices, revived exceptionally quickly.

The Isle of Axholme has been singularly successful in preserving the spirit of the common field system—social equality, mutual helpfulness, and an industrial aim directed rather towards the maximum gross produce of food than towards the maximum net profit; while at the same time it has discarded those features of the system which would have been obstacles to agricultural progress. The “barbarous omission” to enclose the open arable fields has been abundantly justified.

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The parish of Soham, in Cambridgeshire, is another example of a great development of small holdings in connection with the persistence of open arable fields. This parish, unlike most Cambridgeshire parishes, has never been enclosed by Act of Parliament, and the tithe map indicates the survival of about 1100 acres of common field and 456 acres of common in a total of 12,706 acres. Since the tithe commutation the area of common has shrunk to about 236 acres, but from the Ordnance map it appears that there is still a very large area of open field land in four large fields, known as North Field, Clipsatt Field, No Ditch Field, and Down Field; and a smaller one, Bancroft Field. Mr. Charles Bidwell gave the Special Committee on Small Holdings (1889) the following account of holdings in this parish:—

(Appendix, p. 501.)

Thus the total area of the parish is held by 457 occupiers, who therefore hold, on an average, 28 acres each. In this case it is stated that the occupiers of the smallest holdings derive considerable benefit from the common. A German enquirer who visited Soham as an example of an unenclosed parish, found it less poverty stricken than the other parishes in the neighbourhood, on account, he was told, of the existence of the common pastures. (W. Hasbach, Die englischen Landarbeiter, 1894.)

The idea occurs to one, whether it would not have been possible to secure by an Act of Enclosure for a common field,62 the abolition of common rights which hindered each farmer or peasant from cultivating his holding to the best of his ability, and the laying together of the scattered strips which formed each holding, without ruining the small proprietors and small farmers, or encouraging the laying down of tilled land under pasture.

We find one example of such an attempt. The parish of Weston Zoyland, in Somerset, in 1797 enclosed 644 acres of commonable pasture, and at that time and in that neighbourhood the enclosure of Sedgemoor was being rapidly pushed on, as rapidly, in fact, as the local farmers could be induced to take up the land. Perhaps in consequence of this quenching of the land hunger of the farmers with capital, when in 1830 it was resolved to deal with the common fields, the Act took the form of one for dividing and allotting, but not enclosing, Weston Field. The consequence is that this great field of 500 acres still remains open and unenclosed; the land is specially fertile, there are an exceptionally large number of small properties in it, and it is all kept under tillage. I am informed that one of the first acts of the Weston Zoyland Parish Council, when, on coming into existence, it took over the custody of the parish maps and documents, was to re-define the roads that passed through the field, in accordance with the Commissioners’ map and award.

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This enclosure took place at the same time as that of Castor and Ailesworth, and was completed in 1899. The common fields consisted of 1120 strips of arable land, total area 520 acres, and the “balks” or “meres” separating the strips were estimated at 14 acres. There were more than eighty owners.

No recognised course of husbandry had been followed for about sixty years previously. It is believed that before that time a four-year course obtained, but when mangel wurzels were introduced to the neighbourhood the recurring fallow was discontinued. The right of common after harvest was, however, still maintained. If any cultivator chose he might grow turnips, but he did so at his own risk, and had to keep a boy to guard them from the opening of the fields to the time they could be pulled. Old mere stones are found in the meadows of this parish, and various local traditions remain belonging, apparently, to a period when the village customs resembled those described for Stratton and Grimstone.

The Enclosure Act was passed in 1886, and the award is dated 1891. Before enclosure Totternhoe was a typical open-field parish; there were only 370 acres of old enclosure, to 1797 acres of common field arable, and 193 acres of common. The situation of Totternhoe is like that of Clothall, on the steep northern slope of the Hertfordshire chalk hills, which here have an almost mountainous appearance. The greater part of the parish was in the ownership of the lord of the manor, but there were forty64 owners of land altogether, the others being chiefly yeomen. The movement for enclosure came from these yeomen. They took this step in order to protect themselves against the tenants of the lord of the manor, who, whether from ignorance or otherwise, endeavoured to prevent the exercise of well-known rights of common over land in their occupation. The hill top was saved as an open space, and is a favourite picnic resort for the people of Dunstable. Recreation grounds and land for allotments were also set out, as has been the rule since the passing of the Commons Act of 1876. I asked one of the yeomen, who had taken a leading part in bringing about the enclosure, whether it had benefited the parish. He said undoubtedly it had done so, but “the parish has not recovered from it yet.” Questioned as to how this could be, he gave me to understand that the actual increase to the cultivators in annual value was not equal to the interest on the capital expended on carrying out the enclosure; that the assessment had gone up, and the burden of rates and taxes was consequently increased. The land allotted to the lord of the manor still, in the summer of 1900, was mainly unenclosed, and one could get something of the impression of the “champion” country, an impression of great open fields sweeping up to bare downs.

The first steps towards the enclosure of these three parishes were made immediately after the passing of the 1876 Act; the Enclosure Act was passed in 1878, and the awards were made in 1881 and 1882. Out of 5480 acres in the three parishes, 4800 were common-field arable, a heath claimed by both Barrowden and South Luffenham occupied 390 acres, and much of the remainder was commonable meadow and pasture. Two systems of cultivation obtained. Part of the land being heavy clay was on a three years’ course of wheat, beans, etc., and fallow, as at Laxton and Eakring; the lighter land was under a six years’ course. The report of the Enclosure Commissioners says of Barrowden that the 1240 acres of arable land 65“is divided in 2790 strips, some not more than 12 feet wide, each divided from its neighbour by a green balk, which is a nursery of weeds.” Old farmers, however, assured me that the balks were mostly gone before enclosure. Field reeves were elected, and they settled any dispute that arose in consequence of the absence of balks, and individual farmers quickly detected, by pacing across their strips, if a furrow had been appropriated by a neighbour.

Here, again, I asked whether the enclosure had been a benefit, and I was told that the labourers had benefited by the allotments and recreation grounds; that the lord of the manor of South Luffenham had benefited, because he got the disputed moor, but that farmers, as farmers, had gained nothing, and as common-right owners they had lost through the enclosure of the moor.

Enclosure in this case originated in what may be called the normal way, i.e., on the initiative of the lords of the manors. It was the doubtful ownership of the Barrowden and Luffenham moor which had until 1876 prevented enclosure; then the respective lords agreed to combine to obtain an enclosure of all three parishes, and let the Commissioners determine to which parish the moor belonged. It was awarded to Luffenham, but the Luffenham freeholders lost it just as much as those of Barrowden; it is now the private property of the lord of the manor.

A curious case of enclosure by Act of Parliament unconnected with the General Enclosure Acts is that of Ham Field by the “Richmond, Petersham and Ham Open Spaces Act, 1902” (2 Edward VII., c. ccliii.). It is entitled, “An Act to confirm agreements for vesting common and other land in the local authorities of the districts of Richmond and Ham, and the Surrey County Council as public open spaces, and for other purposes.” But while it does incidentally confirm these agreements, the “other purposes” comprise the main object of the bill, which is to allow the owners of Ham Common, of whom66 the Earl of Dysart is the principal, to enclose Ham Common Field, and convert it into building land.

The preamble is similarly misleading. The first sentence runs, “Whereas the prospect from Richmond Hill over the valley of the Thames is of great natural beauty, and agreements have been entered into with a view to preventing building on certain lands hereinafter mentioned”—a sentence admirably framed to disguise the fact that the effect of the Act is to extinguish the common rights over Ham Field which had previously prevented building, and so to convert the middle distance of the famous view from Richmond Hill into an expanse of roofs, perhaps of villa-residences, and perhaps——!

The agreements recited in the Act represent the consideration for which the public authorities mentioned bartered away the beauty of the view. Kingston Corporation gets nine acres for a cricket field; Richmond Corporation is confirmed in the ownership of Petersham Meadows, which was formerly a subject of dispute, and acquires a strip of land along the river; and the Surrey County Council acquires 45 acres of riverside land. The meadows and riverside land in each case are to be maintained as open spaces by the authorities. Ham itself merely gets the freehold of Ham Common, which means, in effect, that what slight danger there might have been of the enclosure of this part of the open and commonable land of the parish is removed.

The Earl of Dysart, at the cost of a sacrifice that is probably apparent rather than real, obtains by this Act the right to convert some 200 acres of arable common field into a valuable building estate; the smaller owners acquire a similar right without any compensating sacrifice at all; and the only losers by this profitable transaction are the people of London, who were not consulted in the matter.

The parish of Merrow, adjoining Guildford on the east, is stated in the return of 1873 to have had 350 acres of common67 field. The land in question covers the lower slopes of the chalk hill, the higher portion of which is Merrow Down; beneath it is Clandon Park, the seat of Lord Onslow. Up to about the year 1873 this common field did exist; the properties of Lord Onslow, the chief proprietor, were very much intermixed with those of smaller proprietors; the farm holdings were similarly intermixed with one another, and with a number of strips of land occupied by labourers and cultivated as allotments. But no common rights were exercised over these lands, either by the occupiers over one another’s lands, or by the villagers, within living memory; nor, except that the whole of the field was in tillage, was there any common rule for its cultivation. The existence of a great extent of common is in itself a sufficient explanation of the disappearance of common rights over the tilled land.

In 1870 the present Lord Onslow came into the property, and when a year or two later he attained his majority, he proceeded to consolidate his property in Merrow Field, by buying out the other proprietors, or giving them land elsewhere in exchange. The field is still bare of hedges, and under tillage; but enclosure, in the technical sense, has been completely carried without an Act of Parliament.

Since the enclosure the allotments, which had been numerous, have generally been given up; but the labourers do not attribute this to the enclosure, but to the industrial evolution. “There are no farmers nowadays, only land spoilers. They’ve turned market gardeners, and they sell milk” (with intense scorn). “The land ought to grow beef, and barley to make good beer, that’s what Englishmen want,—yes, and wheat to make bread. But now they all grow garden stuff, what’s the good of an allotment to a man? If you have anything to sell, you can’t sell it. It’s no good growing any more than you can eat.”

It may be added that along the river Wey, from Guildford down to Byfleet, there are some very extensive lammas meadows, known by such names as Broad Mead and Hook Mead. The holdings in these are intermixed, individual pieces sometimes not exceeding an acre.

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That part of Berkshire which lies between the valley of the Kennet and the Thames would appear, from the return of 1873, to be specially rich in surviving open fields. The Blue Book assigns to

As Brightwell was enclosed in 1811, and East Hendred in 1801, the statement with regard to these two parishes plainly is incredible; but in view of the undeniable fact that Steventon, which lies almost in the centre of this district, was not enclosed till 1883, there seemed so much possibility of survivals in the other parishes that in July, 1904, I traversed the whole district in search of such survivals. But the search was entirely unsuccessful; it was plain that Steventon was at the time of its enclosure the last remaining example of the old system in this part.

Here, as in the Hertfordshire district described above, and in the Wiltshire district dealt with in Chapter X., “Enclosure and Depopulation,” enclosure is one aspect of a change of which the most vital aspects are the engrossing of farms and the consolidation of properties. In each parish this movement proceeds along the line of least resistance; in one parish all impediments in the way of the most profitable management of estates are swept away by the drastic remedy of an Enclosure Act; in others they are removed gradually.

The latter method I was enabled, by the help of Mr. Bridges, to trace in detail in the case of Yattenden. The Board of Agriculture return, as we have seen, assigns 252 acres of common field to Yattenden. The tithe map, dated 1845, on69 which this is based, shows in one corner of “Yattenden Great Field” about 20 acres of intermixed ownership and occupation, forming part of one “furlong,” remaining in the characteristic common-field arrangement; the rest of the so-called “Yattenden Great Field” and “Everington Field” were in part divided into hedged fields, and in part into compact stretches of about 20 acres each, still unhedged, with here and there single acres detached in the midst of them; many of these single acres being glebe.

An older manorial map, dated 1773, showed that at that date nearly half the parish was open; the eastern part was already divided into closes, except for a small stretch of lammas meadow, divided into small intermixed holdings, by the river Pang; but the western part, Yattenden and Everington fields, were almost entirely open, and divided in furlongs, and the furlongs in acre and half-acre strips. These strips on the map are all marked with the letters of the alphabet, to indicate whether they are held by the lord of the manor, by his tenants, or by other owners.

In other words, the process of gradual enclosure, which began before 1773, was continued afterwards, and was nearly complete in 1845. The end came about the year 1858, when Frilsham Common, in an adjoining parish, was enclosed. About half of the intermixed strips in Yattenden Great Field belonged to a yeoman, who was, his brother told me, “a great man for defining his boundaries.” The enclosure of Frilsham Common gave the slight stimulus to the mind of Yattenden necessary to overcome its mental inertia, and make change possible, so the yeoman in question was able to effect the exchanges he desired, and others following his example, the lay properties were all separated. But still the glebe consists in part of an acre here and an acre there in the midst of lands belonging to laymen. These are let with the lands in which they lie; they have no mark to distinguish them, nor boundaries to limit them; the tithe map and award preserve the record of them, and the vicar receives their rent.

This circumstance of the glebe lying in part in separate70 unfenced strips scattered over the parish, let with the lands in which they lie, and so not influencing the agriculture of the parish, though testifying to the past system, is by no means uncommon in the parishes not enclosed by Act of Parliament.[15]

In general the results of the two different methods of enclosure in this district are practically identical. Superficially the characteristic features of the “champaign” or “champion” country remain. The population is concentrated in the villages; the sites of which appear to have been originally selected for convenience of water supply; outside the villages are the long sweeps of open fields of barley, wheat or beans, lying generally open to the roads, and to one another, and to the open down, though one notices a tendency to an increased use of wire fencing. The monotony is broken by the beautiful curves of the hill slopes, and by clumps of trees; here and there, on steeper inclines, lynches are clearly visible, and occasionally what looks like an inconsequent hedge, beginning and ending in the middle of the field—an old “mere” or “balk” on which bushes happened to grow.

On the other hand, the farms run generally from 200 to over 1000 acres each; machinery is extensively used; the supply of labour, though not so superabundant as a generation or two ago, is still sufficient, the customary wage being 2s. per day. The men themselves struck me as being of finer physique than the agricultural labourers I have seen in any other part of the South or Midlands of England; but they appear to be as completely shut out from any rights over the land, from any enterprise of their own upon the land, or from any opportunities for rising into the farmers’ class as can well be conceived. Only one man whom I met could remember a different condition. He, a labourer of seventy-three, said that in North Moreton before the enclosure (completed in 1849) every villager who could get a cow could keep it in the open fields, and all the villagers also had rights of cutting fuel. Under the Enclosure Act some71 moneys were set aside to provide the poor with fuel in compensation for these rights, but latterly the amount provided had much diminished.

Steventon, which lies in the centre of this district, is to some extent exceptional. The manor has always been in ecclesiastical hands, from the first time when the village was founded as a settlement from the Abbey of Bec in Normandy to the present day, when it is held by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. In the intervening period it belonged to Westminster Abbey.

No doubt it was in consequence of this that through the greater part of the nineteenth century, while all the other parishes passed into their present condition of large farms, the farms and properties in Steventon remained small. Up to about 1874 there were some eighteen yeomen farmers in the parish, which comprises 2,382 acres, fully three-quarters at that time being arable. In addition, the lands belonging to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were divided into small holdings, and all these were intermixed. The system of cultivation was very simple. The arable land was divided into two fields, one known as the “white corn field,” growing wheat or barley, the other as the “black corn field,” growing pulse or some other crop.

In the severe agricultural depression that followed 1874, culminating in 1879, the yeomen were obliged to borrow in order to continue farming, and they mortgaged their lands to certain gentlemen in the neighbourhood who had money to invest. As one bad season followed another, loan had to be added to loan, till the security was exhausted, and the land passed into the possession of the mortgagee. In this way the number of landowners was reduced to five. Then enclosure, which had been proposed and rejected in the forties, was resolved upon. The Act was obtained in 1880, and the award was made in 1883.

There was considerable disappointment among those who carried out the enclosure at the results. They were surprised and disgusted at the amount of land reserved for allotments and recreation ground; they were also surprised at the expense, which amounted, I was told, to nearly £10,000. Some were72 unable to meet the calls upon them, and went bankrupt. But a large portion of the cost was for road-making, and when this had been paid for, the chief advantage which had been gained by the whole proceeding, economy in horse labour, was realised. Where previously it had taken three horses to get a load of manure to a given spot in the open fields, along the tracks assigned for that purpose, one horse could draw the same load to the nearest point on the metalled roadway, and a second horse hitched in front would enable it to reach its destination.

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A glance at the accompanying Enclosure Map of England will indicate the importance of common fields in the social life of rural England at certain dates. It was prepared in the following manner: On the Ordnance County diagrams each parish which had an Enclosure Act by which common field arable was enclosed was coloured; if the Act was passed between 1700 and 1801 it was coloured yellow; if passed after the general Enclosure Act of 1801 and before that of 1845, it was coloured green; if after 1845, purple. A map of England was drawn summarising the results of the county maps. On this at least all purple patches showed parishes which possessed open field arable in 1845; at least all the green and purple area combined indicated parishes which had open field arable in 1802; at least all the coloured area had open field arable in 1700. In the printed map these colours are represented by three forms of shading. Of the unshaded area one can simply say that the Enclosure Acts throw no light upon its agricultural history so far as the land under tillage is concerned. To a very great extent it was undoubtedly being enclosed otherwise than by Act of Parliament simultaneously with the progress of Parliamentary enclosure, but to a still greater extent it either never passed through the common field system or was enclosed before 1700. This statement raises questions which are dealt with below. For the present I have to deal with the general history of those parishes which did pass through the common field system.

The original Board of Agriculture, which was an association on similar lines to those of the Royal Agricultural Society, but74 enjoying a grant from the Treasury, was founded in 1793, with Arthur Young as secretary and Sir John Sinclair as president. It immediately took in hand the work of making an agricultural survey of Great Britain, county by county. Some counties were surveyed several times, but the original survey of England was completed in the years 1793 and 1794. William Marshall, the ablest agricultural writer of the time, single-handed accomplished an agricultural survey of England, ignoring county divisions and dividing the country according to natural divisions marked by similarity of soil, crops and agricultural methods. The two surveys together give us ample information on the different methods of cultivating open or common fields at the end of the eighteenth century.

On the whole, the most general system, particularly in the midland counties where common fields remained most numerous, was the following form of the three-field system:—

“One part” (or one of the three fields) “is annually fallowed, a moiety of which is folded with sheep and sown with wheat; another moiety is dunged and sown with barley in the succeeding spring. The part which produces wheat is broken up and sown with oats, and the part which produces barley is at the same time generally sown with peas or beans, and then it comes in routine to be again fallowed the third year.”[16] This gives us the following rotation of crops: (1), wheat; (2), oats; (3), fallow; (4), barley; (5), peas or beans; (6), fallow. This was the system prevailing in Huntingdon.

The same system prevailed in the heavy clay lands of Bedfordshire, but in the lighter lands sometimes a four-field course was adopted, sometimes the half of the nominally fallow field that had the previous year given crops of wheat and oats was sown with turnips, and clover was sown with barley the succeeding year.[17]

The commonest four-field course is that described for Isleham, Cambridgeshire: (1), wheat; (2), barley; (3), pulse or oats; (4), fallow; the fallow field being dunged or folded with sheep.75 At Castle Camps, also in Cambridge, a two-field course of alternate crop and fallow obtained.[18]

Coming further south for Hertfordshire, we are told that the “common fields are mostly by agreement among the owners and occupiers cultivated nearly in the same way as in the enclosed state.”[19] In Buckinghamshire the regular three-fields course was followed in some parts, but in Upton, Eton, Dorney, Datchett, Maysbury and Horton, “the occupiers have exploded entirely the old usage of two crops and a fallow, and now have a crop every year.”

Two Buckinghamshire parishes underwent experiences which have been wrongly cited as typical of the inconveniences of common fields, whereas they are rather instances of the lawless conduct of village bullies. Steeple Claydon had 2500 acres of common field, on which the customary course was one crop and a fallow. “About fourteen years ago” (i.e., about 1779) “the proprietors came to an agreement to have two crops and a fallow, but before the expiration of ten years one of the farmers broke through the agreement, and turned in his cattle upon the crops of beans, oats and barley, in which plan he was soon followed by the rest.”[20] The agreement, if that of a three-fourths majority (see below), was legally binding on all owners and occupiers, and the first farmer was liable to the same pains and penalties as if he had turned his cattle into crops standing on enclosed fields belonging to another farm. Possibly, however, the crops were a failure, and feeding them off with cattle was as good a way of dealing with them as another.

A still more difficult case to understand is that of Wendon (3000 acres common field). It is reported as follows:—76“About fourteen years ago the parishioners came to an agreement and obtained an Act to lay the small pieces of land together.... When the division took place, the balks were of necessity ploughed up, by which a great portion of the sheep pasture was destroyed.[21] It then became expedient, and it was agreed upon at public vestry, to sow clover and turnips as a succedaneum for the balks. Two years since, one of the farmers, occupying 16 acres of these common fields, procured in the month of May a large flock of lean sheep, which he turned on the clover crops; being then nearly in bloom, the greater part of which they devoured.”

Of Oxfordshire we are told “the present course of husbandry is so various, particularly in the open fields, that to treat of all the different ways of management would render this report too voluminous. It may suffice generally to remark that some fields are in the course of one crop and fallow, others of two, and a few of three crops and a fallow. In divers unenclosed parishes the same rotation prevails over the whole of the open fields; but in others, the more homeward or bettermost land is oftener cropped, or sometimes cropped every year.”[22] Where one crop and a fallow was the custom the crop might be wheat, barley or oats; and sometimes tares were sown on the fallow field and cut green. The three and four-field systems prevalent were those described above.

In Berkshire a six-year course, evidently evolved from an older three-years course, was found:—(1), wheat; (2), barley; (3), oats, with seeds; (4), clover, mowed, and then grazed upon in common; (5), oats or barley; (6), fallow.

An agreement to withhold turning out stock during the time in which a field was commonable by ancient custom, in order that turnips, vetches, etc., might be grown, was practised, and termed “hitching the fields.”[23] We get the same expression for Wiltshire, where a part of a field set aside for vetches, peas, beans, turnips, or potatoes was called a “hookland” or “hitchland” field.[24] In Wiltshire customs similar to these described as surviving recently in Stratton and Grimstone were prevalent;77 clover was generally substituted for fallow, and was partly mowed for the individual benefit of particular occupiers, and partly fed upon by the village flock. The following systems are reported:—

(a) First, wheat; second, barley with clover; third, clover part mowed, part fed.

(b) First, wheat; second, barley; third, oats with clover; fourth, clover part mowed, part fed.

(c) First, wheat; second, barley with clover; third, clover mowed; fourth, clover fed (one-third or a quarter of this field being “hitchland”).[25]

Turning northwards again from the centre of England, in Rutland the old three-year course of two crops and a fallow was universal in the unenclosed parishes;[26] in Lincoln two, three and four-field systems were practised;[27] the two-field course was also prevalent in Yorkshire.[28]

A singular practice was followed in the East Riding Wolds. “The greater part of the Wold townships which lie open have a great quantity of out-field in leyland, i.e., land from which they take a crop every third, fourth, fifth, or sixth year, according to the custom of the township.”[29]

In contrast we may mention the Battersea common fields, which were “sown with one uniform round of grain without intermission and consequently without fallowing.”[30]

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When we come to Norfolk we find hints at so many special features that Norfolk agriculture demands separate treatment. The preamble of a Norfolk Enclosure Act is remarkably different from those for the rest of the country. A typical one is 1795, c. 67:

“Whereas there are in the parish of Sedgeford in the county of Norfolk divers lands and grounds, called whole-year lands, brecks, common fields, half-year or shack lands, commons and waste grounds.... And whereas there are certain rights of sheep-walk, shackage and common, over the said brecks, half-year or shack land, commons and waste grounds. And great part of the said whole-year lands, as well as the brecks, common fields, and half-year or shack lands, are inconveniently situated,” etc.

Or again 1804, c. 24:

“Whereas there are in the parish of Waborne in the county of Norfolk divers lands and grounds called whole-year lands, common fields, doles, half-year or shack lands, commons and waste grounds.”

“Whereas the said common fields, doles, half-year lands, shack lands, commons and waste grounds, are subject to certain rights of sheep-walk, shackage and common, and great part of the said whole-year lands, common fields, and half-year or shack lands are inconveniently situated for the various owners and proprietors thereof....”

Other Norfolk acts mention doles, ings, carrs, and buscallys. Buscallys we may take to mean woods in which rights of common for fuel were practised. Dr. Murray’s Dictionary gives us bushaile or buscayle, from Old French boschaille, Low Latin boscalia, shrubberies, thickets, etc. “Dole,” is79 connected etymologically both with “deal” and with the word “run-dale,” concerning which see below. The word is frequently found elsewhere, as in the “dolemeads” at Bristol and Bath, and usually means meadows, the ownership of which is intermixed in small parcels, which are commonable after hay harvest, but sometimes the word is used of arable land (see below). The Act for Earsham, Ditchingham and Hedenham (Norfolk, 1812, c. 17) has the sentence, “The said dole meadow lands lie intermixed and dispersed.” The “ings” and “carrs” are best understood by the help of the old Ordnance Survey map for Norfolk. The carrs are the lowest, swampiest part of the common pastures which reach down to the rivers; the ings, while also low-lying, are separated from the rivers by the carrs, and intervene between the carrs and the tilled lands.

There remain the expressions whole-year lands, half-year or shack lands, and brecks, to interpret.

Half-year lands obviously means lands commonable for half the year, i.e., after the crop has been carried. They are also “shack” lands, or lands on which right of “shackage” exists. “Shack” is connected with “shake,” and right of shackage appears to be the right to carry off the gleanings after the crop has been carried and the fields are thrown open. It is, however, to be noticed that half-year or shack lands are mentioned as something distinct from common fields. The distinction is said to be that common rights on shack lands can be exercised only by the owners or occupiers of those lands. Shack lands may be termed common fields, but the term common field may be reserved for those fields over which cottagers or toft holders or others also possess rights of common.

“Brecks” are asserted by William Marshall (“Rural Economy of Norfolk,” Vol. I., p. 376) to be “large new-made enclosures,” but as is seen from the wording of the Acts quoted, they are enclosures still “subject to certain rights of shackage, sheep-walk, and common.”[31] Lastly, what are “whole-year lands”?

80

Since half-year lands are lands which for half the year are common, and for half the year are in individual ownership and use, one would argue that whole-year lands must be lands which are in individual ownership and use the whole year; for if they were common the whole year they would be termed simply “commons.” We get further light by comparing the preambles of other Norfolk Acts. Some instead of whole-year lands mention every-year lands, others speak of “whole-year or every-year lands,” while finally Icklingham in Suffolk (1813, c. 29) gives us “every year lands or Infields.”

Now “infields” is a familiar expression in Scottish agriculture. Even in the Lothians, up to the middle of the eighteenth century the cultivated land was divided into infield and outfield. The outfield, like the outfield on the Yorkshire Wolds, only bore occasional crops, and was never manured, all the manure being reserved for the infield, which was made to bear a crop every year. In Haddington the customary course was: (1) pease; (2) wheat; (3) barley; (4) oats; and then the land was dunged and planted with pease again; and leases stipulated for “the preservation and regular dunging of the mucked land shotts.”[32] Such lands might obviously be described as every-year lands, and since this method of cultivation implies that immediately one crop is carried preparation must be made for the next, and therefore is not easily consistent with common rights, so these lands are also “whole-year lands.” It may be noted that the Norfolk preambles (as in the Sedgeford example, quoted above), while stating that the “whole-year lands,” as well as the brecks, common fields and half-year lands are inconveniently situated, i.e., are intermixed, by implication give us to understand that they are not subject to rights of shackage, sheep-walk, and common.

It is the more curious to find that Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk followed a traditional method of cultivation in this respect similar to that of the East of Scotland, because there81 are so few traces of anything similar in the intervening counties. I find infields mentioned twice in Northumberland, once in Lincoln, whole-year lands once in Huntingdon. There is also mention of half-year lands in Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire. The Wessex custom of “hitching the fields,” or “cropping the homeward or bettermost part of the common fields every year” is not the same thing, because there, as we saw in the case of Stratton and Grimstone, the extra crop was raised for common, not for individual, benefit. Battersea common fields were worked as every-year lands, and so are the Axholme fields to-day; but in these cases the custom was locally derived from some other form of cultivation; whereas in Norfolk and Suffolk the peculiar customs must have been indigenous and ancient.

One is also tempted to ask whether it is a coincidence that Norfolk farmers in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and Lothian farmers in the nineteenth, enjoyed and deserved an extremely high reputation for scientific, enterprising, and skilful agriculture. The ancient custom of raising crops every year from the same land must have necessitated the gradual accumulation of knowledge on the best ways of preventing exhaustion of the soil, by marling, manuring, deep ploughing, and various rotations of crops. When turnip culture was introduced into England, it was to Norfolk that the new idea was brought. There was no obstacle to growing turnips on the Norfolk whole-year lands, such as would have arisen if toft holders had the right to turn horses, cattle and sheep on to the lands at Lammas; and the intervention of a new crop which gave an opportunity for getting the land clean of weeds, and increased its fertility for grain crops, was a far more obvious boon there than on lands subject to a periodic fallow.

But to return to the typical Norfolk Enclosure Act preamble. We have only half explained the problem suggested by the four different names, each evidently with a distinct meaning, but all meaning arable land in which ownership is intermixed as in an ordinary common field, viz., whole-year lands, half-year lands or shack lands, brecks and common fields. The rest of the82 explanation is, I think, to be looked for in the direction suggested by the prominence given to the statement, “They are subject to rights of sheep-walk.” Elsewhere one finds a close connection between sheep and common fields. Thus we have seen that at Eakring certain common right owners make a speciality of pasturing sheep on the common fields. The Swedish traveller Kaln, whose account of his visit to England has recently been translated into English, observed the same thing on the open field parishes of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire in the year 1748 (p. 302). But in 1793 where there were open chalky downs in open field parishes the right of pasturing sheep on the downs and of having the combined flock of the village folded over the arable in the common field was valued too highly by every occupier to be ceded to an individual speculator (Davies, “Wiltshire,” pp. 8, 15, 61, 80). In these cases right of common for sheep has been democratically shared.

But this is not universal. The Enclosure Commissioners, in their thirty-eighth report (1883), record the application for an Enclosure Act for Hildersham, Cambridgeshire. In this parish the two manor farms had the right of turning their sheep every sixth year on to the stubbles of the other farms. Similarly, I am told by Major Barnard, of Cheltenham, that in the Cambridgeshire parish of Bartlow, where he was born, which was enclosed with Shudy Camps and Castle Camps in 1863, that the right of feeding sheep on the common fields belonged to the lord of the manor only. These Cambridgeshire parishes are close to the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the following passage from Tusser’s “Champion and Several” (date 1573) suggests the same rule as applying to Norfolk and the “champion” (i.e., open field) part of Suffolk:—

If it be urged that the two italicised lines are not necessarily to be read together, in view of the other topics touched on in the intermediate lines, the argument is not much affected, for Tusser shows no knowledge of any “champion” counties other than Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk, and elsewhere in the poem he deals with the special evils afflicting the two former counties.

I may also refer to the Act, 25 Henry VIII. c. 13, to limit the number of sheep which may be possessed by a single owner, in which occurs the passage:—

X. Be it also further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That no manner of Person or Persons, of what Degree soever he or they be, being Lord or Lords, Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers, of or in any Liberty of Fold Courses within any Town, Tything, Village or Hamlet within any of the Counties of Norfolk or Suffolk, from and after the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord God next coming, shall take in farm, for term of years or otherwise, any Quillets of Lands or Pastures, that is to say, any number of Acres of Land or Pasture appertaining to any other Person or Persons, lying and being within the limit Extent or Precinct of the said Liberty of the said Fold Courses; but that they shall permit and suffer the said Persons, having or being, for the time, Owner or Owners, Lessee or Lessees of the said Quillets, to manure and pasture the said Quillets; and84 also to suffer sheep of the said Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers of the said Quillets, after the Rate of the said Quillets, to go with the Flock of the Owner, Farmer or Occupier of the said Liberty or Liberties of the said Fold Courses, paying the customary charge for the same, after the Rate and Use of the Country, there commonly used, without any interruption therein to be made by the said Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers, or Occupiers of the said Liberties, upon pain of forfeiture for 3s. 4d. for each offence.

“XI. Provided ... it shall not ... be available to any tenant Owner or Occupier of any such Quillet or Quillets to claim, have or use hereafter any such pasture, or Feeding of his sheep, in or with any such Fold Courses, but only where the tenants, Owners and Occupiers of any such Quillets have had, or might have had heretofore of Right and Duty, or used to have Pasture and Feeding in the said Fold Courses, by reason of their tenures, and Occupations of the said Quillet and Quillets, and none otherwise; and where they have not used, nor ought to have any Sheep fed or kept within such Fold Courses, by reason of the said tenures, that the Owners or Occupiers of such Fold Courses may take such Quillets, lying within their Fold Courses, in Farm, agreeing with the Owners or Occupiers of the said Quillets for the same.”

It would appear from these clauses that there had been in still earlier times generally throughout Norfolk and Suffolk a right pertaining to the Lord of the Manor of feeding flocks of sheep over the whole manor, that this right, in the reign of Henry VIII. was frequently sold or leased under the denomination “A Liberty of Fold Courses”; secondly that the exercise of this right was apt to interfere with the cultivation of peasants’ holdings in the common fields; thirdly that it was customary for the sheep belonging to the peasants to be pastured and folded with the flock of the Lord of the Manor for a fixed customary fee.

There is yet another respect in which Norfolk agriculture shows a difference, but of degree, not kind, from other common-85field agriculture. Complete enclosure of common-field arable involves three processes—

(1) The laying together of scattered properties, and consequent abolition of intermixture of properties and holdings;

(2) The abolition of common rights;

(3) The hedging and ditching of the separate properties. This third process is the actual “enclosing” which gives its name to a series of processes which it completes.

But sometimes the hedging and ditching takes place independently of the other two processes, and strips of an acre, two or more acres, and even half-an-acre are enclosed in the middle of the common-fields, and, what is more remarkable, the little enclosed strips are sometimes the property of several individuals. In the collection of maps of open field parishes belonging to certain Oxford Colleges, published by Mr. J. L. G. Mowat, several such instances may be noticed.

Such enclosures were at first commonable; but common rights were of course exercised over them with greater difficulty than over the open parts of the enclosed fields, a fact on which the above quoted opinion on the Barn farm at Elmstone Hardwicke incidentally throws some light. The maintenance of these common rights is a sort of test of the democratic vigour of the village, and it may be noticed that old enclosures subject to common rights were particularly numerous in Yorkshire.

Norfolk was remarkable for the extent to which actual hedging and ditching preceded legal enclosure. The Board of Agriculture reporter says, “for notwithstanding common rights for great cattle exist in all of them,[33] and even sheep-walk privileges in many, yet the natural industry of the people is such, that wherever a person can get four or five acres together, he plants a white-thorn hedge round it, and sets an oak at every rod distance, which is consented to by a kind of general courtesy from one neighbour to another.”[34]

Two Acts incidentally show to what an extent such hedges86 enclosed lands belonging to two or more proprietors. One Norfolk Act has the provision, “All enclosures where two or more proprietors are connected and where the property is not separated by a hedge or ditch shall be deemed to be Common Field.” The same clause differently expressed occurs in the Act for Ormesby and Scratby (1842, c. 9): “All old enclosures within the said parishes in which there are lands belonging to different proprietors, shall be deemed to be open Fields.”

A brief account of a surviving Norfolk open field parish is given in Appendix E., p. 331.

87

One of the most striking and interesting features of the open field village life is the existence of a self-governing constitution for the settlement of disputes, and the most profitable use of the village lands—the annual meetings of farmers and common-right owners; the institution of field reeves and field juries; the division among commoners of the profits of the common property. One cannot but look upon this as the survival of an ancient village communal life, which must have been much stronger and more vigorous in earlier days, when each village was more of a self-contained and isolated economic unit; and particularly while the co-operative ploughing persisted, from which the intermixture of lands in common field arable is admitted to have originated. Even in its degenerate state, when co-operative ploughing has been extinct for generations, the open field parish involves a certain partnership among the cultivators, necessitating some recognised rules, mutual consultation, and organised combination: how much more binding the necessity must have been in the Middle Ages? Hence from the very necessity of the case, there must have been a bond between the village workers, such as is conveyed by the words “village community,” which probably preceded, and underlay as a foundation, the better known manorial and parochial institutions, the manorial organisation arising from the contact between the village community and the Central Government, or outside enemies, the parochial from its contact with the Church.

But while these features of common-field management in general are survivals of “the village community,” it is possible in any particular village that such institutions and customs were the creation of the legislature since the latter part of the88 eighteenth century. For in the year 1773 a noteworthy Act was passed for the better regulation of the culture of common arable fields. It enacts that “where there are open or common field lands, all the Tillage or Arable lands lying in the said open or Common Fields, shall be ordered, fenced, cultivated or improved, in such manner as three-fourths in number and value of the occupiers shall agree, with consent of the owner and tithe-owner.”

Such agreements were to be binding for six years, or two rounds, “according to the ancient and established course of each parish or place”; i.e., presumably, in a parish where the ancient customary course had been one crop and a fallow, the agreement was binding for four years; where it had been three crops and a fallow, for eight years. Further, every year between the 21st and 24th of May a field reeve or field reeves were to be elected. These field reeves, acting under the instructions of a three-fourths majority in number and value, might delay the opening of the common fields, might give permission for any balks, slades or meers (those words are synonyms) to be ploughed up, an equivalent piece of land being laid down in common, and boundary stones being put down instead. Since this Act was designed in the interest of better cultivation, and for the advantage of the proprietors and large occupiers, special provision is made that if the cottagers owning common rights feel themselves prejudiced, they may claim to have a separate piece of land set out as a common for them.

The effect of the Act was to enable the common-field system to be adjusted to the new agriculture of the eighteenth century, which was marked by the introduction of turnips, artificial grasses, and the abandonment of frequent fallowing. A precise account of the adoption of a scheme under the Act is given us by the prime mover.

In the township of Hunmanby, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, the cultivators had fallen into one of the besetting temptations to which “champion” farmers were liable. They had gradually extended the arable fields at the expense of the common pasture, till the manure produced by the latter was89 insufficient for the needs of the former, and the land was losing its fertility. Isaac Leatham got his brother farmers to agree to abandon the old (three-year) course of husbandry, and to substitute the following six-year course:—

The grass seed sown with the barley was bought in common, and paid for proportionately. From the time the barley was carried until it was time to plough for the wheat crop, one gathers that the grass, which had been sown with the barley, was being fed with sheep; therefore, at any particular time after the course was established, half the common field area was feeding sheep, or growing turnips for sheep, and half was growing grain or pulse. The sheep flock was managed in common; each occupier was allowed to contribute sheep to it in proportion to his holding; the whole was under the care of two shepherds, who folded the sheep nightly upon different strips of land in succession, so that all occupiers received equal benefit. Field reeves were appointed.

“Thus,” says Isaac Leatham, “an open field is enjoyed in as beneficial a manner as if it were enclosed ... two persons are fully sufficient to attend the sheep-stock, instead of many ... the precarious rearing of fences is avoided, and the immense expense of continually repairing them saved.”[35]

I take it that Isaac Leatham, who, by the way, was a strong advocate of enclosure in general, meant that the open field was, on the whole, enjoyed in as beneficial a manner as if it were enclosed, because there still remained the great disadvantage that each occupier had his lands in widely scattered strips, and had to waste much time and labour in cultivating them; cross-ploughing, which might, or might not have been desirable, was90 any way impossible; the village lands had to be treated as one whole, so no enterprising and original man was able to experiment with new ideas, nor could any further improvement be adopted without the consent of a three-fourths majority; and, perhaps, the keeping of sheep in a common flock put obstacles in the way of improving the breed.

I may add that an Act for the enclosure of Hunmanby was passed in the year 1800, so that Isaac Leatham’s course was abandoned just seven years after he wrote about it so triumphantly.

The Act of 1773, therefore, was, perhaps, not a brilliant success in Hunmanby; perhaps, on the other hand, improved agriculture excited an appetite for further improvement, and one novelty having been accepted, the stiff conservatism which might have postponed enclosure, was broken down. But, as a glance at the map for the East Riding will show, the whole countryside was subject to a rage for enclosure, and the famine prices for grain of 1796, doomed to recur again in 1800–1, in 1812, and 1817, were acting as a powerful solvent to all old agricultural customs.

It is quite obvious that the Act of 1773 was an endeavour to select out of the customs and traditions prevailing in different villages those which were most in harmony with advanced agriculture, to further amend these, and to make them universal.

So far as I know, Hunmanby is the only place where it has been recorded as having been put into execution, and it has been doubted whether it was not practically a dead letter. My own impression is that the distribution of the “sicks” at Laxton was consciously arranged in accordance with the provisions of the Act, that originally the method of choosing the fallow crops in Castor and Ailesworth was an application of it, and also the six years’ course used for part of the fields of Barrowden and Luffenham, but I can bring no evidence to support this view. If, however, it is correct, the Act may have been of considerable use to many other parishes also by clearly defining methods of procedure which otherwise would be determined by custom only.

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The very word “enclosure” to a historical student suggests “depopulation.” The two words are almost treated as synonyms in Acts of Parliament, tracts, and official documents of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century we find the proverbs, “Horn and thorn shall make England forlorn,” “Inclosures make fat beasts and lean poor people,” while the superstition grew up that inclosed land was cursed, and must within three generations pass away from the families of “these madded and irreligious depopulators,” these “dispeoplers of towns, ruiners of commonwealths, occasioners of beggary ... cruell inclosiers.”

After the Restoration, the literary attack on enclosure becomes more feeble, the defence more powerful. W. Wales in 1781, the Rev. J. Howlett in 1786, published statistics to show that enclosure had the effect of increasing the population, the latter tract being widely quoted; there ceased to be any opposition from the Central Government to enclosure, and private Acts were passed in continually increasing numbers; finally the one practical measure carried through by the Board of Agriculture was the General Enclosure Act of 1801, to simplify and cheapen Parliamentary proceedings. Dr. Cunningham sums up the case as follows: 92“He (Joseph Massie) was aware that enclosing had meant rural depopulation in the sixteenth century, and he too hastily assumed that the enclosing which had been proceeding in the eighteenth century was attended with similar results; but the conditions of the time were entirely changed. Despite the reiterated allegation,[36] it is impossible to believe that enclosing in the eighteenth century implied either more pasture farming or less employment for labour. The prohibition of export kept down the price of wool; the bounty on exportation gave direct encouragement to corn-growing; the improved agriculture gave more employment to labour than the old.”[37]

Taken in one sense, I must admit the substantial accuracy of this opinion. On the other hand I am disposed to maintain the general accuracy of the statements with regard to depopulation made by the opponents of enclosure, (a) provided these statements are understood in the sense in which they are meant, and (b) statements only with regard to the part of the country the writer is familiar with are regarded, and his inferences with regard to other parts are neglected.

For it must be remembered that side by side with the movement for the enclosure of arable fields, there was going on a movement for the enclosure of wastes. From Appendix A. it will be seen that 577 Acts for enclosing wastes and common pastures were passed between 1702 and 1802, and over 800,000 acres were so added to the cultivated area of England and Wales. There were besides enclosures occasionally on a large scale by landed proprietors of wastes on which either common rights were not exercised, or on which they were too feebly maintained to necessitate an Act. The Board of Agriculture report for Notts records that 10,666 acres had recently been so enclosed from Sherwood Forest alone.[38] Lastly there was the continual pushing forward of cultivation by farmers, squatters, etc. It is impossible to do more than form a vague guess as to the quantity of land so enclosed, but reasons will be given later for the belief that it was far greater than the area of commons and waste enclosed by Act of Parliament.

Now the opponents of enclosure of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries almost without exception opposed simply the enclosure of arable common fields; they usually expressly approve the enclosure of waste, as increasing the means of subsistence of the people. The advocates of enclosure on the other hand are equally concerned in advocating both93 kinds of enclosure. Hence we have statements to the effect that the enclosure of arable fields in the “champion” districts of England (i.e., the part much shaded on the map) caused rural depopulation, met by statistics and arguments to prove that all kinds of enclosure proceeding over all parts of England and Wales, on the whole, tended to increase population, urban and rural. Through looseness of wording on both sides, the controversialists seem to be contradicting one another; whereas, in reality, both might equally be right.

At the present day this particular issue is dead, though a similar question, the question whether by means of the modern representative of the open field, viz., the allotment field, and modern representative of the ancient co-operative ploughing, viz., co-operative purchase of machines, manures and seeds, borrowing of capital, sale of produce, and perhaps co-operative stockbreeding, the decay of the agricultural population can be arrested, is a living issue. Nor is there any period of the nineteenth century in which any serious rural depopulation as a result of enclosure, and consequent laying down in pasture, of common fields, could be asserted. Since Free Trade began to seriously affect the prices of British grain—and that was not for a good many years after 1846—the common fields have been too few, and the other forces tending towards rural depopulation too great, for this particular force to be felt. And if it were felt, no one would seriously urge that the hardly pressed farmer should be compelled to cultivate the land in a manner wasteful of labour, in order that more labourers might be employed. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century war, protection and a rapidly growing wealth and population so effectively encouraged tillage that attempted prohibition of conversion of arable to grass would have been superfluous.

Yet much, I think, can be learnt on the historical question from the present aspect of the country, even by anyone who merely travels by express train through the Midlands. Having spent a day in traversing the length and breadth of the great fields of Castor and Ailesworth, yellow with wheat and barley or recently cut stubble, I went straight through the county of94 Northamptonshire, seeing on either side scarcely anything but permanent pasture. From Northampton to Leicester was the same thing; again from Leicester to Uppingham. Just beyond Uppingham the cornfields become far more extensive; what were the Rutlandshire common fields till 1881 are still mainly under tillage. All this country of permanent pasture was mainly enclosed during the eighteenth century. Very frequently one can see on heavy land the old ridges piled up in the middle, ending in the middle of one field, crossing hedges, and showing plainly that very little, if any, ploughing has been done since the enclosure was effected.[39] The impression made on my mind by this apparent confirmation of all that the denouncers of “cruell Inclosiers” alleged was a very powerful one.

Before examining the evidence for and against rural depopulation in particular parts of England as the result of the extinction of common fields, it is well to consider the a priori arguments put forward by Dr. Cunningham.

It is urged, in the first place, that owing to the relatively high price of corn and low price of wool, there was no motive for lay-down arable as pasture. Dr. Cunningham seems to ignore the fact that sheep and cattle produce mutton, beef, milk, butter, cheese, and hides, as well as wool, and it is by the profit to be derived from all of these products together, and not from any one of them, that the question of laying down in pasture will be determined. That laying down arable in pasture was profitable is indicated by the surprise Arthur Young expressed in 1768 that landlords did not enclose, and put the land to grass, on passing through Bedfordshire,[40] and by Adam Smith’s reference in “The Wealth of Nations” to the exceptional rent commanded by enclosed pasture.[41] We have, further, the clear statement of the Board of Agriculture: 95“Whereas the price of corn from 1760 to 1794 was almost stationary, the products of grass land have risen greatly throughout nearly the whole of that period.”[42] William Pitt, again, in a pamphlet published by the Board in 1812 on the “Food Produced from Arable and Grass Land,” says that through the “increased luxury of the times more beef and mutton and butter are used than formerly, even by equal numbers, and consequently more inducement to throw all the best corn to grass” (p. 35). William Culley adds in a footnote that “In the Northern Counties more rent per acre is given for ploughing than for grazing farms ... more rent is given for grazing than for arable farms in the Southern Counties.” If this was so when famine prices were paid for wheat, how much more in normal times?

It is said, in the second place, that “the new agriculture gave more employment to labour than the old.” No doubt such an improvement as the substitution of well-hoed turnips for a fallow, the sowing of grass seeds with barley so as to produce a second crop, or feed for cattle after the barley was carried, both gave increased employment to labour, and tended to increased prosperity for the labouring as well as other classes. But these changes, as we have seen, and as Dr. Cunningham himself points out, might take place independently of enclosure, and might not follow if enclosure did take place. Whether they usually did follow upon enclosure is a question that has to be settled by an appeal to contemporary evidence. In taking this evidence reference must always be carefully made to the time and the place.

The Board of Agriculture’s General Report on Enclosures (1808) quotes with approval an anonymous pamphlet published in 1772: “The advantages and disadvantages of enclosing waste lands and common fields,” by “A Country Gentleman.” This tract appears to be a very able and impartial attempt to estimate the effects of enclosure on all the classes interested. The way in which Acts then originated, and the manner in which proposals were received, is described thus:—

96

“The landowner, seeing the great increase of rent made by his neighbour, conceives a desire of following his example; the village is alarmed; the great farmer dreads an increase of rent, and being constrained to a system of agriculture which neither his experience nor his inclination tempt him into; the small farmer, that his farm will be taken from him and consolidated with the larger; the cottager not only expects to lose his commons, but the inheritable consequence of the diminution of labour, the being obliged to quit his native place in search of work; the inhabitants of the larger towns, a scarcity of provisions; and the Kingdom in general, the loss of inhabitants” (p. 1).

The general conclusion seems to be that all these anticipations and fears, with the exception of the last two—a scarcity of provisions for large towns, and a general loss of inhabitants for the kingdom, are well founded. With regard to the landowner and tithe-owner:—

“There can be no dispute that it is the landowners’ interest to promote inclosures; but I verily believe, the improprietor of tithes reaps the greatest proportional benefit, whilst the small freeholder, from his expenses increasing inversely to the smallness of his allotment, undoubtedly receives the least” (p. 25).[43]

Of the small farmer:—“Indeed I doubt it is too true, he must of necessity give over farming, and betake himself to labour for the support of his family” (p. 31).

With regard to the increase or diminution of employment for labourers, he gives the following statistical table, an estimate based on his observation:—

97

It will be seen that his observation is that enclosed arable employs 16¼ families per 1000 acres, open field arable 20 families per 1000 acres; that common pastures, heaths, wastes, etc., employ only 1 family per 2000 acres; but enclosed pasture employs 5 families per 1000 acres. It will also be seen that his observation is that after enclosure rich land becomes pasture, inferior land arable.[44]

With regard to the effect of this on population, he names in one passage[45] Northamptonshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire perhaps, as containing “an infinitely greater proportion of common fields, while Northumberland, Westmoreland and Yorkshire exceed in moors, heaths and commons,” and in another he mentions Oxfordshire, Buckingham, Northamptonshire and part of Leicester as counties in which rich arable land would be the main subject of an Enclosure Act. A typical parish in this district might include 1000 acres of rich arable land, 500 acres of inferior arable, 500 acres of stinted common, with no heath or waste. Before enclosure it would provide employment for 30¼ labouring families according to the table, after enclosure to 15⅝. If eight such parishes were enclosed, 117 families would be sent adrift—families of poor and ignorant labourers, looking for new homes under all the disabilities and difficulties springing from Acts of Settlement, and a Poor Law administration based on the assumption that those who wander from their native place are all that is implied in the words “vagrants” and “vagabonds.” Not eight, but a hundred and twenty-six Acts for enclosing common fields were passed for the four counties he names in the ten years 1762–1772, immediately98 preceding the publication of this pamphlet. Assuming the accuracy of the “Country Gentleman’s” statement, this would mean that some 1800 odd families, comprising about 9000 individuals, would, in consequence of enclosure, be sent adrift in that short period in the four counties. The quotations given below from three other authors, indicate that even this was an under-statement. The process continued without intermission for many years afterwards.

A specially interesting tract, published in 1786, entitled “Thoughts on Inclosures, by a Country Farmer,” gives a detailed account of the results of one case of enclosure. The locality is not named, but it is pretty clear that it was within this Midland country in which enclosure was attended by the conversion of arable to pasture.

On the general question the writer says:—“To obtain an Act of Parliament to inclose a common field, two witnesses are produced, to swear that the lands thereof, in their present state, are not worth occupying, though at the same time they are lands of the best soil in the kingdom, and produce corn in the greatest abundance, and of the best quality. And by inclosing such lands, they are generally prevented from producing any corn at all, as the landowner converts twenty small farms into about four large ones, and at the same time the tenants of those large farms are tied down in their leases not to plough any of the premises, so lett to farm,[46] by which means of several hundred villages, that forty years ago contained between four and five hundred inhabitants, very few will now be found to exceed eighty, and some not half that number; nay some contain only one poor decripid man or woman, housed by the occupiers of lands who live in another parish, to prevent them being obliged to pay towards the support of the poor who live in the next parish” (p. 2).

The profit of enclosing, he maintains, was dependent upon simultaneous conversion into pasture, for 99“In some places the lands inclosed do not answer the ends of pasturage, and in that case tillage is still to be pursued; because the rents cannot be raised so high as in respect of pasturage, therefore the landowner has not the advantage as in case the land turns out fit for pasturage, and is oftener the loser by that proceeding than the gainer.”[46]

The particular enclosure he cites is that of a parish enclosed about forty years previously. Before enclosure it contained eighty-two houses, of which twenty were small farms and forty-two were cottages with common rights. It had 1800 acres of common field arable, 200 acres of rich common cow pasture, and 200 acres of meadow, commonable after hay harvest. The common pasture fed two hundred milch cows and sixty dry ones till hay harvest, at which time they were turned into the meadows, and their place taken by about one hundred horses. Twelve hundred sheep were fed on the stubbles.

The gross produce of the parish before enclosure he values as follows:—

The quantities estimated are eminently reasonable, and in harmony with other statements available with regard to the produce of the common fields of the Midlands; the prices also are clearly not over-stated.

100

As the result of enclosure the twenty farms were consolidated into four, the whole area was devoted to grazing, sixty cottages were pulled down or otherwise disappeared, and the necessary work was done by four herds (one for each farm) at £25 a year each, board included, and eight maidservants at £18 a year each, board included.

The gross produce of the parish after enclosure was:—

But while the gross produce was thus reduced by about one-third, the gross rent was raised from £1137 17s. 0d. to £1801 12s. 2d.[47]

Though unfortunately the parish is not identified, and the witness is anonymous, the whole statement appears to have been carefully and exactly made. In this case we have no fewer than sixty families of small farmers or agricultural labourers expelled from their homes in a single parish of about 2300 acres.

An even more striking example of local depopulation caused by enclosure is supplied by the Rev. John Howlett, one of the strongest advocates of enclosure. He quotes from a private correspondent: 101“As to Inclosure, I can mention two villages in this County (Leicestershire) within two miles of each other, Wistow and Foston,[48] which formerly contained thirty-four or thirty-five dwellings, but by enclosure Foston is reduced to three habitations: the parsonage house accommodates one family, and the two other buildings are occupied by shepherds, who manage the stock for their different renters, as the whole of the parish belongs to one person. And as to Wistow, the thirty-four mansions have vanished in a very few years, and no dwelling remains but the late Sir Charles Halford’s hall house, who owns the lordship; and these are called improvements, for double or treble rents ensue.” (“Enclosures and Depopulation,” p. 12.)

What became of these farmers and labourers? The “Country Farmer” says: “Many of the small farmers who have been deprived of their livelihood have sold their stock-in-trade and have raised from £50 to £100, with which they have procured themselves, their families, and money, a passage to America.”

John Wedge, the Board of Agriculture reporter for Warwick, says seven years later: “About forty years ago the southern and eastern parts of this county consisted mostly of open fields. There are still about 50,000 acres of open field land, which in a few years will probably all be inclosed.... These lands being now grazed want much fewer hands to manage them than they did in the former open state. Upon all enclosures of open fields the farms have generally been made much larger; from these causes the hardy yeomanry of country villages have been driven for employment to Birmingham, Coventry, and other manufacturing towns.”[49] Such information, given by the representative of an enclosure-advocating corporation, circulated among the members for correction before final adoption, is unimpeachable evidence for the particular time and place.

The rising industries of Birmingham and other Midland towns found employment, no doubt, for many of the exiles from the villages. On the whole, the ruling opinion seems to have found all this very satisfactory. The gross produce of food by these Midland parishes might be diminished on enclosure, but the net produce, as was shown by the increase of rent, certainly102 increased, and an abundant supply of labour was furnished for those metal working industries which were of the greatest importance in times of war.[50] When we think of the horrible sanitary conditions of English towns during the eighteenth century, of Fielding’s description of the London lodging-houses, of Colquhoun’s attempts at a statistical account of London thieves, of Hogarth’s pictures, which interpret for us the meaning of the terrible fact that right through the eighteenth century the deaths “within the bills of mortality” regularly far exceeded the births, we feel that there was another side to the shield, though possibly the sanitary and social condition of Midland towns was less terrible than that of London.

The connection between enclosure of common fields and rising poor rates in the eighteenth century is illustrated repeatedly in Eden’s “Condition of the Poor.”

In Buckinghamshire we find the two neighbouring parishes of Maids Morton and Winslow. The former contained 30 acres of old enclosure, 60 to 70 acres of commons, and the rest of the parish, about 800 acres, was common field. The poor-rates in the years 1792 to 1795 were 3s. 6d., 3s., 3s., 3s. 6d. There were “several roundsmen.” Wages were nominally 1s. to 1s. 2d. per day, but piecework was general, and 1s. 3d. to 1s. 6d. was generally earned. The rent of farms varied from £17 to £90 per farm, and from 18s. to 20s. per acre.

Winslow contained 1400 acres, and was entirely enclosed in 1744 and 1766. Only 200 acres remained arable. The farms varied from £60 to £400 per annum each, the wages were 6s. to 7s. per week, “most of the labourers are on rounds,” and the poor rates from 1792 to 1795 were 5s. 8d., 4s., 5s., and 6s. “The rise of the Rates is chiefly ascribed to the Enclosure of common fields; which it is said has lessened the number of farms, and from the conversion of arable into pasture, has much reduced the demand for labourers. An old man of the parish says, before the enclosures took place, land did not let for 10s. per acre.” (Vol. II., pp. 27–33.)

103

In judging the rise of poor rate, it must not be forgotten that where the rent rises at the same time as the nominal rate, the sum of money actually raised for Poor Law purposes is increased in a greater ratio than the nominal poor rate. If, for example, by enclosure the rental of a parish is increased 50 per cent., but the poor rate doubled, the yield of the poor rate is increased threefold. And if a considerable number of labourers are driven elsewhere, the amount of destitution produced by the change is far greater even than that indicated by a threefold increase in the amount of relief given.

The latter side of the process is illustrated in the case of Deddington in Oxfordshire. Here, “the high rates in this parish are ascribed to the common field of which the land principally consists; whereas the neighbouring parishes have been enclosed many years, and many small farms in them have been consolidated; so that many small farmers with little capitals have been obliged, either to turn labourers or to procure small farms in Deddington, or other parishes that possess common fields. Besides this, the neighbouring parishes are, many of them, possessed by a few individuals, who are cautious in permitting new comers to obtain a settlement.” (Vol. II., p. 891.)

In Leicestershire the complaint is naturally more loud and general. In the account of Kibworth Beauchamp we read as follows:—

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“No account of the Rates in any of the divisions, previous to the enclosure of the common fields, can be obtained; but it is said that they were not one-third of what they are at present; and the people attribute the rise to the enclosures; for they say ‘That before the fields were enclosed, they were solely applied to the production of corn; that the poor had then plenty of employment in weeding, reaping, threshing, etc., and could also collect a great quantity of corn by gleaning; but that the fields being now in pasturage, the farmers have little occasion for labourers, and the poor being thereby thrown out of employment, must of course be employed by the parish.’ There is some truth in these observations: one-third or perhaps one-fourth of the number of hands which were required twenty years ago, would now be sufficient, according to the present system of agriculture, to perform all the farming work of the parish.”

He adds that if it were not for the fact that many labourers were getting employment in canal cutting, the rates would be much higher still, and “the tradesmen, small farmers, and labourers are very loud in their complaints against those whom they call monopolising farmers and graziers, an evil which, they say, increases every year.” (Vol. II., p. 383.)

In Northamptonshire we find the case of Brixworth, enclosed in 1780, a parish of 3300 acres. Before enclosure it consisted almost entirely of common fields. At the time of Eden’s writing, sixteen years later, only one-third remained arable. The expenditure on the poor in 1776, before the enclosure, was £121 6s., in the six years 1787 to 1792 it averaged £325 (Vol. II., p. 529). Again, with regard to local urban opinion, he notes that “the lands round Kettering are chiefly open field: they produce rich crops of corn. The people of the town seem averse to enclosures, which they think will raise the price of provisions, from these lands being all turned to pasture, when inclosed, as was the case in Leicestershire, which was a great corn country, and is now, almost entirely, converted into pasture.”

Arthur Young, a little more than twenty years previously (in “Political Arithmetic,” published in 1774), while arguing in favour of enclosure on the depopulation count, makes an admission against it with regard to pauperism. “Very many of the labouring poor have become chargeable to their parishes, but this has nothing to do with depopulation; on the contrary, the constantly seeing such vast sums distributed in this way, must be an inducement to marriage among all the idle poor—and certainly has proved so.” (Pp. 75, 76.)

As a general rule it may be said that where after enclosure pasturage was increased at the expense of tillage, rural depopulation resulted; where the amount of land under tillage was increased the rural population increased. Further, that enclosure in the northern and western parts of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increased the area105 under tillage; that the balance between the production of bread and meat for the whole country, so disturbed, was maintained by the conversion into pasture, on enclosure, of much of the “champion” corn growing land, particularly in those midland counties nearest to the northern and western ones in which the complementary change was taking place. By means of the Enclosure Acts, interpreted by the light of the above statements, we can trace these two compensating movements through the eighteenth century.

The following passage in Arthur Young’s “Political Arithmetic,” published in 1774, at the time, that is, when he was an eager advocate not only of enclosure of all sorts, but also of the engrossing of farms and the raising of rents, sums up the two movements:—

“The fact is this: in the central counties of the kingdom, particularly Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and parts of Warwick, Huntingdonshire, and Buckinghamshire, there have been within thirty years large tracts of the open field arable under that vile course, 1. fallow, 2. wheat, 3. spring corn, inclosed and laid down to grass, being much more suited to the wetness of the soil than corn.” Here he admits local depopulation takes place, though he claims that a greater net produce is, as the result of enclosure, supplied by such districts to the rest of the kingdom. But then, he asks with regard to the opponents of such enclosure, 106“What will they say to the inclosures in Norfolk, Suffolk, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and all the northern counties? What say they to the sands of Norfolk, Suffolk and Nottinghamshire, which yield corn and mutton from the force of Inclosure alone? What say they to the Wolds of York and Lincoln, which from barren heaths at 1s. per acre, are by Inclosure alone rendered profitable farms? Ask Sir Cecil Wray if without Inclosure he could advance his heaths by sainfoine from 1s. to 20s. an acre:—What say they to the vast tracts in the peak of Derby which by Inclosure alone are changed from black regions of ling to fertile fields covered with cattle? What say they to the improvements of moors in the northern counties, where Inclosures alone have made these countries smile with culture which before were black as night?”

He then proceeds to ridicule the view of his opponents, that the enclosure of waste, though desirable in itself, should as far as possible be so conducted as to create small farms and small properties, a view with which in later years, and after his tour in France, he very much sympathised. Into the merits of this controversy we need not go; what we have to note here is Arthur Young’s evidence to the fact that from about 1744 to 1774 there was simultaneously proceeding a rapid enclosure of waste in Norfolk, Suffolk, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire and the northern counties, by which the acreage under tillage was vastly increased, and a compensating enclosure of arable common fields in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Huntingdonshire and Buckinghamshire, involving the conversion of arable to pasture, of small farms into much larger ones, and of the peasantry into urban labourers.

It only remains to be added that the former movement, if it was on at all as great a scale as Arthur Young gives us to understand (and I don’t see why one should doubt this) must have proceeded largely, if not mainly, without the intervention of Parliament. This is in the first place antecedently probable. Secondly, whereas between 1727 and 1774 there were 273 common field parishes enclosed by Acts of Parliament in the five counties of Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Warwick, Huntingdonshire and Buckinghamshire, the commons, fens, moors, etc., attached to only 109 parishes in Norfolk, Suffolk, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland were so enclosed. Unless the area of about 100,000 acres thus enclosed in these 109 parishes was merely a fraction of the total area of waste enclosed by all sorts of methods in this latter group of counties, Arthur Young was misleading his readers, for he certainly intends to give the impression that the enclosure of arable fields in the Midlands was on a much smaller scale than the reclamation of heaths, moors and fens in the northern and eastern counties. Thirdly,107 with regard to Norfolk, Arthur Young specifies enclosure without Acts of Parliament as one of the causes of the great agricultural improvement in parts of Norfolk (“Eastern Tour,” 1771, Vol. II., p. 150):—“From forty to sixty years ago, all the Northern and Western and a great part of the Eastern tracts of the country were sheep-walks, let so low as from 6d. to 1s. 6d. and 2s. an acre. Much of it was in this condition only thirty years ago. The great improvements have been made by reason of the following circumstances:—(1) By inclosing without assistance of Parliament.”

Six other reasons follow, then the remark: “Parliamentary enclosures are scarcely ever so complete and general as in Norfolk,” i.e., as the enclosures without the assistance of Parliament in Norfolk. I have only been able to find eleven Acts of Enclosure for Norfolk before 1771; seven of these were for the enclosure of common field parishes, and four for the enclosure of waste. In other words, the Parliamentary enclosure of these sheep-walks at the time when Arthur Young wrote had proceeded to a merely trifling extent.

We have, then, by Arthur Young’s confession, in the five counties of Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Huntingdon, and Buckingham enclosure admittedly accompanied by decay of tillage and rural depopulation. From “A Country Gentleman’s” list we can add Oxfordshire and parts of Lincolnshire. That the same prevailing economic motive operated in Bedfordshire can be shown from Arthur Young’s “Tour through the North of England.” The country in June, 1768, from St. Neots to Kimbolton was in general open—“the open fields let at 7s. and 7s. 6d. per acre, and the inclosed pastures about 17s. Hence we find a profit of 10s. an acre by inclosing and laying to grass.” He might here ask, as he does with regard to the district in Buckinghamshire between Aylesbury and Buckingham, which he found in 1771 in the condition of open field arable, under a course of fallow, wheat, beans, fallow, barley, beans. 108“As to the landlords, what in the name of wonder can be the reason of their not inclosing! All this vale would make as fine meadows as any in the world.”

As for Gloucestershire, William Marshall (“Rural Economy of Gloucestershire,” 1789, p. 21), estimates the rents in the Vale of Evesham at 10s. to 15s. per acre for common field arable, 10s. to 20s. per acre for enclosed arable, and 20s. to 50s. per acre for enclosed pasture. Here again there can be no doubt that enclosure implied laying down at least all the good land in grass.

A Select Committee of the House of Commons appointed to consider the high prices of food in December, 1800 (1800 and 1801 being famine years), made enquiry, by the help of the parish clergy, into the increase or decrease of land under different crops, and of cattle, sheep, and pigs in the districts which had been enclosed in the previous 45 years by private Acts (i.e., since 1755). The total result showed a net gain in area under wheat in 1,767,651 acres enclosed of 10,625 acres; the area under wheat being before enclosure 155,572 acres; after, 165,837 acres. But these figures included all sorts of enclosure. The Board of Agriculture (“Gen. Report,” pp. 39 and 232), by leaving out cases where waste only was enclosed, obtained the following result for cases of enclosure of all commonable lands, under Acts passed between 1761 and 1799, in parishes where commonable arable was included. Taking the counties in groups we have:—

110

In estimating the significance of these figures it must be borne in mind that the figures for acreage in wheat after enclosure were collected at a time of famine prices for wheat. Probably many thousands of acres of old arable common field, which had been enclosed and laid down in grass, in each of these counties, were again ploughed under the stimulus of wheat prices exceeding 100s. per quarter.

So much with regard to the connexion between depopulation and enclosure in the second half of the eighteenth century. With regard to the first half, the following account is supplied by a certain John Cowper, “Inclosing Commons and Common field lands is contrary to the interest of the Nation” (1732):—

“When these commons come to be inclosed and converted into pasture, the Ruin of the Poor is a natural consequence; they being bought out by the lord of the Manor, or some other person of substance.

“In most open field parishes there are at a medium 40 farmers and 80 cottagers who hold their lands in common, and have right of commonage one with another. Suppose each person employs 6 labourers, we have in all 660 persons, men, women and children, who besides their Employment in Husbandry, carry on large branches of the Woollen and Linnen Manufactures.”

With regard to the plea that hedging and ditching will employ many hands, he says: 111“This is so contrary to constant experience, that it hardly deserves to be taken notice of. I myself, within these 30 years past, have seen above 20 Lordships or Parishes inclosed, and everyone of them has been in a manner depopulated. If we take all the inclosed Parishes one with another, we shall find hardly ten inhabitants remaining, where there were an hundred before Inclosures were made. And in some parishes 120 families of Farmers and Cottagers, have in a few years been reduced to four, to two, aye, and sometimes to but one family. And if this practice of inclosing continues much longer, we may expect to see all the great estates ingrossed by a few Hands, and the industrious Farmers and Cottagers almost intirely rooted out of the kingdom. Raising Hedges and sinking ditches may indeed employ several hands for a year, or hardly so long, but when that is once over, the work is at an end.... Owners of inclosed Lands, if they have but a little corn to get in, are already forced to send several miles to open field parishes for Harvest men.”

Six open field farms, averaging 150 acres each, and the little holdings of twelve cottagers, would be let together, after enclosure, as one grazing farm, and the total rent thus be raised from £300 to £600. But whereas one acre of arable land would previously have produced 20 bushels at 3s. per bushel, a gross return of £3; after enclosure it would contribute to the fattening of a bullock to the extent of 25s. The gross produce is decreased; but the net produce is increased. Of the £3 produced by the acre of common field under wheat, 50s. would go in expenses, leaving 6s. 8d. to the landlord and 3s. 4d. to the tenant. Of the 25s. produced by the same acre enclosed under grass, 13s. 4d. would go to the landlord, 11s. 8d. to the grazier.

It is interesting in passing to note the association of common field agriculture with manufacture in the domestic stage indicated by this passage.

We have also direct evidence of the same movements in the seventeenth century. On the one hand Walter Blyth (“The English Improver,” 1649, p. 40) has the passage:—“Consider but the Woodlands, who before Enclosure, were wont to be relieved by the Fieldon, with corne of all sorts. And now growne as gallant Corne Countries as be in England, as the Western part of Warwickshire, and the northern parts of Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and all the countries thereabouts.” On the other hand, from the controversy between the two John Moores on the one hand, and Joseph Lee and an anonymous controversialist on the other, we can pick out certain statements of matters of fact that passed uncontradicted.

This controversy arose out of the enclosure of Catthorp, a parish in the extreme south-west corner of Leicestershire, bordering on Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. Lee was the parish priest of Catthorp, and a party to the enclosure. In his “Vindication of Regulated Inclosure,” he gives a list of fifteen parishes within three miles of Catthorp which had been112 enclosed. He also gives a list of nineteen parishes, enclosed from twenty to fifty years, in which depopulation had not yet taken place. This second list, as John Moore remarks, “they were forced to fish up out of the counties of Leicester, Warwick, Northampton, etc.,” and it is significant that two only of the fifteen parishes enclosed near Catthorp are asserted by Lee not to have been attended by depopulation. If we go a little earlier we find in 1607 an insurrection against enclosures, followed by a searching enquiry by James I.’s government, and no doubt by renewed vigilance, for a while, in the enforcement of the Depopulation Acts. It may be regarded as axiomatic that in a corn-growing country,[51] enclosure which does not diminish tillage, does not provoke riot and insurrection.

While, however, enclosure which does not diminish the land under tillage does not, as a rule, cause rural depopulation, it is a rule not altogether without exception. One of the most striking passages in Cobbett’s “Rural Rides” is that written in August, 1826, in which he describes the valley of the Wiltshire Avon:—

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“It is manifest enough, that the population of this valley was, at one time, many times over what it is now; for, in the first place, what were the twenty-nine churches built for? The population of the twenty-nine parishes is now but little more than one-half of the single parish of Kensington,[52] and there are several of the churches bigger than the church at Kensington.... In three instances, Fifield, Milston, and Roach-Fen, the church porches would hold all the inhabitants, even down to the bedridden and the babies. What then, will any man believe that these churches were built for such little knots of people?... But, in fact, you plainly see all the traces of a great ancient population. The churches were almost all large, and built in the best manner. Many of them are very fine edifices; very costly in the building; and, in the cases where the body of the church has been altered in the repairing of it, so as to make it smaller, the tower, which everywhere defies the hostility of time, shows you what the church must formerly have been.... There are now no less than nine of the parishes out of the twenty-nine, that have either no parsonage houses or have such as are in such a state that a parson will not, or cannot, live in them.... The land remains, and the crops and the sheep come as abundantly as ever; but they are now sent almost wholly away.... In the distance of about thirty miles, there stood fifty mansion houses. Where are they now? I believe there are but eight, that are at all worthy of the name of mansion houses.... In taking my leave of this beautiful vale I have to express my deep shame, as an Englishman, at beholding the general extreme poverty of those who cause this vale to produce such quantities of food and raiment. This is, I verily believe it, the worst-used labouring population upon the face of the earth.”[53]

When Cobbett wrote, the process of Enclosure for this corner of Wiltshire was practically complete. Thomas Davis, whose account of the agriculture of Wiltshire is the most interesting of the whole series of county surveys, wrote when the process was in its early stage, and wrote predicting depopulation. He says, “The greater part of this country was formerly, and at no very remote period, in the hands of great proprietors. Almost every manor had its resident lord, who held part of the lands in demesne, and granted out the rest by copy or lease to under tenants, usually for three lives renewable. A state of commonage, and particularly of open common fields, was particularly favourable to this tenure.... The north-west of Wiltshire being much better adapted to inclosures and to sub-division of property, than the rest, was inclosed first; while the south-east, or Down district, has undergone few inclosures and still fewer sub-divisions.”[54]

The common field system was called “tenantry.”[55] The tenants ordinarily were occupiers of single “yardlands,” rented114 at about £20 a year each. A typical yardland consisted,[56] besides the homestead, of 2 acres of meadow, 18 acres in the arable fields, usually in 18 to 20 pieces, a right on the common meadows, common fields, and downs for forty sheep, and as many cattle as the tenant could winter with the fodder he grew.[57] His forty sheep were kept with those of his neighbours, in the common flock of the manor, in charge of the common shepherd. They were taken every day to the downs, and brought back every night to be folded on the arable fields, the usual rule being to fold one thousand sheep on a “tenantry” acre (but ¾ of a statute acre) per night. In breeding sheep regard was had to what may be termed folding quality (i.e., the propensity to drop manure only after being folded at night) as much as to quality or quantity of wool or meat.[58]

On the enclosure of such a manor the common flock was broken up, and the position of the small farmer became untenable. It is true, says our author, that he has the convenience of having his arable land in fewer pieces; but if he has his 18 acres all in one piece instead of in 20, he cannot plough them with fewer than the three horses he previously ploughed with. Then he has no enclosure to put his horses in; he no longer has the common to turn them on. His right on the down would entitle him to an allotment of sheepdown of about 20 acres, perhaps two miles from home. This is too small for him to be able to take it up, so he accepts instead an increase of arable land. But now he has no down on which to feed his sheep, no common shepherd to take charge of his sheep, which are too few to enable him individually to employ a shepherd. He, therefore, must part with his flock and then has no sheep to manure his land; further, having no cow-common, and very little pasture land,115 he cannot keep cows to make dung with his straw. Lastly, the arable land being in general entirely unsuited to turn to grass, he is prevented from enclosing his allotment, and laying it down in pasture.[59] Obviously in such circumstances the small farmer, after for a few years raising diminishing crops from his impoverished arable land, must succumb, and in some cases help as a labourer to till his fields for another man, in other cases drift to the towns or enlist.

The contemporaneous decay of rural manufacturing industry,[60] of course, greatly aggravated the depopulating effects of enclosure. It may even have precipitated enclosure by weakening the position of the small farmer during the period of the French wars: during a time, that is, in which a combination of causes, apart from enclosure, was favouring the extension of large farms at the expense of small farms.[61]

In the south-east of Wiltshire, then, enclosure was followed by no increase of pasture farming, but it was followed by local depopulation. Whether the depopulation was merely local, or national as well, would depend upon whether, after enclosure, the total production of food of the parish were increased or diminished. Thomas Davis tells us that in many cases it was diminished, the reason, no doubt, being that there was a lack of farmers with sufficient enterprise and control of capital to absorb the small farms, as their occupiers began to drift towards bankruptcy. That such a result as this was felt to be an impending danger is shown by his statement:—116“In some late inclosures allotments of arable land to small farmers have been set out adjoining to each other, directing the same to remain in an uninclosed state with a common right of sheep-feed over the whole, and a common allotment of down land and another of water-meadows, and some inclosed pasture to each if necessary.”

In this district, consisting of open downs, stretching for miles along the summits and higher slopes of the chalk hills; intersected by winding rivers bordered by flat alluvial land of naturally rich pasture, but converted by irrigation into the famous Wiltshire water meadows, the long lower slopes of the hills, as it were, decreed by nature to be noble corn fields, cultivation had to be on a large scale; the unit of cultivation had to be a piece of land of reasonable width, stretching from the river to the summit of the downs. Hence small farms could not exist without some degree of organised mutual help. When that organisation, which in this district was furnished by the common field system, was terminated by Enclosure Acts, consolidation of farms became necessary.

Nowhere else are these conditions present in quite so fully developed a degree as in Wiltshire, which contains the central hub from which radiate the three great belts of chalk down, the South Downs, the North Downs, and the range containing the Chilterns, the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, the Gog-Magogs of Cambridgeshire, and their continuation into Norfolk. But the most essential feature of Wiltshire agriculture, viz., the combination of sheep down and arable field, may be said to be characteristic of all this country. This is the country from which in the sixteenth century came the great indignant outcry against enclosure, which in More’s “Utopia” enters into the classic literature of our country. When it is remembered that the economic motive of enclosure then was the high price of wool, that private individuals are stated to have owned flocks of ten thousand, twenty thousand, and even of twenty-four thousand sheep[62], it is easy to conceive of whole parishes being converted into great sheep runs.

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“The Poor at Enclosure do Grutch
Because of abuses that fall.”

Tusser, “Champion and Several.”

During the nineteenth century the controversy with regard to enclosure did not turn upon the question whether it did or did not injure the mass of the rural poor of the locality, in their capacity of agricultural labourers, by depriving them of employment; but whether it injured them by depriving them without compensation of rights which they had enjoyed before enclosure, but which could not be legally established; and whether poor owners of common rights have received compensation: the question, in fact, whether the poor are justified in “Grutching at Enclosure,” because of real abuses in the method of carrying it out. On this question no distinction need be drawn between the two classes of Enclosure Acts.

I do not think that much complaint can be made with regard to the administration of the Enclosure Acts since 1876 by the Board of Agriculture. By the provision of adequate allotment grounds and recreation grounds compensation is made to those villagers who can claim no specific rights of common; and though no doubt many of the owners of single common rights are dissatisfied with the plots of land assigned to them, there seems to be no reason for doubting that the Commissioners appointed have endeavoured to deal with rich and poor with equal fairness. Further, a great deal of the work of the Board in its capacity of Enclosure Commissioners has been the regulation of commons; and to a certain degree they have become a body for preserving instead of destroying commons. They may even be described as the most potent force for the preservation118 of existing common-fields, simply by insisting on a certain method in the division and allotment, which may be too expensive.

But this verdict of “Not guilty” only applies to the enclosure authority since it was chastened and corrected by the movement for the preservation of commons. All the early reports of the Enclosure Commissioners, or the Enclosure, Tithe and Copyhold Commissioners give abundant evidence of the hard, legal spirit in which the claims of cottagers were considered, and the slight reasons which were considered good enough for refusing recreation grounds and allotments. The twenty-seventh annual report—the apologia of the Commissioners—pleads, as we have seen above, that 8,000,000 acres of commons, and 1,000,000 acres of commonable arable fields or meadows still existed, which was absurdly inaccurate, and that “of all modes of tenure in a fully peopled country there is none more prejudicial to improved culture than that of holding in common.” Again, the thirty-second report makes a great deal of the fact that the 590,000 acres of common and commonable land dealt with since the Act of 1845 had been distributed among 26,000 separate owners; which, however, only proved that the number of people who owned rights over unenclosed land had been greater than the number of owners of a corresponding area of enclosed land—but whether that was because commons and common fields favoured the creation or preservation of small properties (as it certainly does in many cases), or whether because a multiplicity of owners favours the preservation of commons and common fields (which is always the case), no credit was due to the General Enclosure Act, or to the body administering it.

We find that between 1845 and 1875, out of a total area of 590,000 acres divided and allotted, just 1758 acres were set aside for recreation grounds, and 2195 acres for field gardens and allotments. The administration of the Act since 1877 is, therefore, a very severe condemnation of its administration in the earlier period.

We have seen in the case of Ewelme and the neighbouring parishes, how the cottagers were injured on enclosure, by losing119 their source of fuel, without getting any compensation. I am indebted to Mr. John Swain for the following description of the effects of enclosure of a Welsh mountain.

“The parish of ——, in the county of Montgomeryshire, is about five miles long by two miles broad. It consists for the most part of a hill, lying between a river and one of its tributaries. The hill rises to about 900 feet above sea level, and contains no unenclosed land. We have, therefore, in this parish, two strips of low-lying meadow land, land of a moderate quality on the hill slopes, and rough pasture land near the summit. On this hill most of the cottage holdings are to be found, usually in some sheltered hollow near a spring or a running stream....

“Previous to the Enclosure Act, passed early in the nineteenth century, the greater part of the hill was open. The farms occupied the bottom lands, and the foot of the hill, up which they crept, their boundary fences forming an irregular line on the hillside, being higher or lower as the nature and quality of the land tempted enclosure. The unenclosed portion of the hill was used as a common pasture by all the farmers whose land adjoined it, and the amount of stock each one was allowed to feed on it was roughly regulated by the size of his holding.

“About 120 years ago a number of the poorer peasantry began settling on this common land. There was a general understanding that if a house was raised during the night so that the builders were able to cause smoke to issue from the chimney by sunrise, they thereby established a right of possession which none could gainsay. Timber in the neighbouring woods was abundant and cheap, so an intending squatter had little difficulty in procuring the material for building his cottage. With the help of his friends he procured sufficient wood for the framework, and then selected a convenient site in a sheltered spot with a southern aspect, and marked down the foundations of his future dwelling. When all preparations were made he gathered together all the help he could, and in the dusk of the evening had all his materials conveyed to the selected spot. Rough stonework was laid to form the foundations and chimney end of the cottage, and then the framework was quickly set up.120 The panels were interwoven with stout laths, and covered with clay, over which was smeared a coating of lime-plaster, while a roof of thatch completed the edifice. Windows were not for a time considered necessary, but the entrance was carefully secured by a stout door. Then just as the dawn was breaking, a fire was kindled on the hearth, and the curl of smoke above the rude chimney told the workers that they could now relax their efforts....

“A dwelling-house having been erected, the next step was to appropriate a few acres of land surrounding it.... The difficulty of obtaining sufficient land for the keep of a cow was no more than the labour of enclosing and reclaiming it.

“In this way some thirty or forty families were settled in cottages built by themselves, around which were three or four fields, where for many years they lived in undisturbed possession. By patient labour the gorse and fern were got rid of, trees were planted round the cottage, or allowed to grow where they sprang up in suitable places in the hedgerows; by cultivation and manuring the herbage was improved.

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“With the Enclosure Act there came a disturbance of this state of affairs. The partition of the unappropriated land seems to have been carried out fairly, by adding to each farm a quantity of land in proportion to the amount of pasturage the occupier enjoyed on the common.... When, however, we come to consider the case of the cottager, his treatment was by no means fair. Enclosures of over twenty-one years’ standing were not interfered with, and their owners were left in undisturbed possession, but such as had been enclosed for a shorter period were claimed by the Lord of the Manor, who lived some twelve miles away, and possessed little or no land in the parish. He advanced his claim cautiously, asking only a nominal rent, and as unlettered peasants felt the inequality of a contest in the matter, this rent was paid. Consequently more than half the cottage holdings fell into his hands, and the poor occupiers were deprived of the ownership of the dwellings they had erected, and of all the improvements they had put into the land they had enclosed. None of them had to leave their holdings, and the rent at first charged was trifling; but except in cases where life-leases were granted, the cottagers had lost all their rights, and they and their holdings were left entirely in the hands of a large landowner.”

The Enclosure Act, of course, prevented the creation of any more cottage holdings. The fertility of the soil in these small holdings, Mr. Swain says, is enormously greater than that of the land, naturally similar, on the other side of the hedge. Usually the cottager gets a neighbouring farmer to plough half an acre of his holding for him, paying for this service in labour at harvest time; and keeps the rest, except the garden plot, under grass. The average size of the holding is about six acres; which is found sufficient for two cows, a heifer, a calf, several pigs, thirty fowls, and a dozen ducks. The produce supplies all the vegetables, fruit, milk, butter, eggs and bacon consumed by the family, and brings in the following money returns, on Mr. Swain’s calculations:—

As Mr. Swain writes from an intimate personal knowledge, I have no hesitation in accepting his statement as approximately accurate.

The injury to the cottagers does not end with the prevention of the creation of fresh holdings, and the transfer of the ownership of most of those already existing to the lord of the manor. For the landlord, managing his estate in the ordinary way, through the intermediaries of steward and agent, is almost invariably led into merging such small holdings into larger122 farms, in spite of the high rents which would often be gladly paid.

It will be seen that these two cases are in the nature of things typical. Similar hardships may be regarded as the almost inevitable effect of any enclosure which included any considerable quantity of waste land; and if the enclosure is necessary or highly desirable, some compensating advantages ought to be provided for the inhabitants as such. The smallness of such provision between 1845 and 1875 is very significant. And it makes one seriously doubt whether in their zeal for furthering improved culture, the Commissioners were as considerate as was desirable to the cottager who had a legal common right. But on that point we can apply no statistical test.

If we turn from enclosures since 1845 to enclosures before, we have a verdict from the old Board of Agriculture in its General Report on Enclosures published in 1808, which, so far as it is biassed, is biassed entirely in favour of enclosure. It says: “The benefit (of enclosure) in this case (to the poor) is by no means unmixed.”

The loss of fuel is declared to be the chief injury; and besides, “In some cases many cows had been kept without a legal right, and nothing had been given for the practice.”

“In other cases, where allotments were assigned, the cottagers could not pay the expense of the measure, and were forced to sell their allotments.”

“In others they kept cows by right of hiring their cottages, or common rights, and the land going, of course, to their proprietor, was added to the farms, and the poor sold their cows. This is a very common case.”[63]

The results are given of an investigation into the results of sixty-eight Enclosure Acts, chiefly in the Eastern Counties; testimony having been obtained from the clergy and others considered to be impartial witnesses. In fifteen cases it is asserted that the poor were not injured by the enclosure; in fifty-three cases123 that they were. The general tenour of the statement in these cases is to the effect that the condition of the poor has become very much worse, that they have lost all their cows,[64] and they no longer are able to buy milk for their children. Here are a few of the more striking descriptions:—

Ackworth, Yorkshire. The parish belonged to near 200 owners; nearly the whole of whom have come to the parish since the enclosure, or changed the quantity of their lands.

Todenham, Gloucester. Nothing increased but the poor. Eight farmhouses filled with them.

Tingewick, Bucks. Milk to be had at 1d. a quart before; not to be had now at any rate.

Passenham, Northamptonshire. (The poor) deprived of their cows, and great sufferers by the loss of their hogs.

Tulvy, Bedfordshire. Cows lessened from 110 to 40.

Letcomb, Berkshire. The poor can no longer keep a cow, and they are therefore now maintained by the parish.[65]

Alconbury, Huntingdon. (1791, c. 70.) Several who kept cows before were, upon enclosure, forced to part with them, and have kept none since. The cottage allotments going to the landlords were thrown together, and the inhabitants left without cows or land. Those who had allotments given in lieu of their rights, not being able to enclose them,[66] were forced to sell, and became as the rest in this respect. Before enclosure milk could readily be bought, poor people could lay out a half-penny or a penny every day, but nothing of the sort could be got since.[67]

With regard to Buckingham in general, we have the following statement from a later survey for the Board of the County:—

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“The poor and persons with little capital (such as butchers, common shepherds, etc.) derive benefit from open fields and commons, by being enabled to keep horses, cows, and sheep.... It will be difficult to prove that in any case the poor have been benefited (by enclosure). No instances of benefit on this score have been stated to me. On the contrary, an increase of poor (i.e., of paupers) has been the general complaint.”

Similar evidence is given by two professional Enclosure Commissioners. Mr. Forster, of Norwich, “lamented that he had been accessory to injuring 2000 poor people, at the rate of twenty families per parish. Numbers in the practice of feeding the commons cannot prove their right; and many, indeed most who have allotments, have not more than one acre, which being insufficient for the man’s cow, both the cow and land are usually sold to opulent farmers. The right sold before the allotment produced much less than the allotment after it, but the money is dissipated, doing them no good when they cannot vest it in stock.”[68]

Mr. Ewen, another Commissioner, “observed that in most of the enclosures he has known the poor man’s allotment and cow are sold five times in six before the award is signed.” A third Commissioner, Mr. Algar, declared that he made it a practice to give an allotment whenever a cottager could merely prove that he had been in the practice of cutting turf. But one wonders whether Mr. Algar did not find this custom of his prejudicial to the demand for his professional services.

In estimating the weight of this evidence, both as to depopulation and as to injury to the poor, it must be borne in mind that it is taken almost entirely from the mouths of advocates, and mostly very enthusiastic advocates, of enclosure. They are admissions of men who feel that the general case in favour of enclosure is so strong that they may well candidly admit the existence of some drawbacks. Of course, some advocates of enclosure are not disposed to make any admissions at all. Many urge the moral evils engendered by waste lands, as: 125“Where wastes and commons are most extensive, there I have perceived the Cottagers are the most wretched and worthless; accustomed to relie on a precarious and vagabond subsistence from land in a state of nature, when that fails they recur to pilfering, and thereby become a nuisance to their honest and industrious neighbours; and if the father of a family of this sort is withdrawn from society for his crimes, his children become burthensome to the parish. It may truly be said that for cottagers of this description the game is preserved, and by them destroyed; they are mostly beneath the law and out of reach of detection; and while they can earn four or five shillings, and sometimes more, in a night, by poaching, they will not be satisfied with 10d. or 1s. a day for honest labour.”[69] A not unusual style of argument is the following:—

“To deprive the poor of that benefit, which, in their present state, they derive from the waste lands, must no doubt, at first view, sound harsh. But it ought to be remembered that in this wealthy county, where there is so much work to be done, and so few hands comparatively to do it, there are few poor that do not deserve to be so. Those persons who are disqualified to provide for the calls of human nature by the feebleness of infancy, the crushing hand of disease, or the infirmities of old age, cannot be said to be poor, because all the landed property, situate within their respective parishes, is always liable to be charged with their maintenance.”[70]

After reading of the good fortune of these Herefordshire labourers, so much in demand in a wealthy county that the benefits derived from wastes and commons are of little concern to them, one naturally inquires, what were their wages? Day labourers earned in summer, “6s. a week and a gallon of drink to each man”;[71] in winter, 5s. a week and three quarts; in harvest, 14d. a day and meat and drink: the hours of labour being in harvest time and in winter as early and as late as they could see; in summer, not harvest, from 6 to 6. Leaving out the cider, this works out at a penny an hour, and a penny in 1794 would not buy very much more of the ultimate necessaries of life in Herefordshire than it will to-day.

There seems, underlying John Clark’s words, a notion that if any injury is done to the poor by enclosure, proper and sufficient126 compensation will be made in the ordinary course to the persons injured out of the poor-rates. The logical deduction is that the profits of enclosure should contribute to the poor-rates, and I have noted thirteen enclosures of wastes and commons in which this was done. Another logical deduction was that the poor rate in parishes in which waste was enclosed was, in part at least, a species of common property belonging to the poor; and to deprive them of this property was robbery, unless the commons were restored. This view was vigorously expressed by Cobbett in his “Political Register,” at the time of the introduction of the Poor Law of 1834, and from him became part of the traditional stock of political ideas handed down through the Chartists to the Labour movement of recent times.

Arthur Young, in a pamphlet published in 1801,[72] not only insists upon the injury to the poor from Enclosure Acts as ordinarily drawn and put into execution, but pleads for enclosure on methods which would tend to the social elevation of the labourer. His proposals, which strike one as, for the time, wise and statesmanlike, though they ignore some considerations which would be of great importance to-day, were:

(1) That in the case of small commons in the midst of an enclosed country, labourers should be allowed to absorb the whole by gradual encroachments, thus building up small properties for themselves.

(2) In the case of extensive wastes, procedure must be by Act of Parliament, but all Acts should secure enough land for every cottager to keep a cow both summer and winter, such land to be inalienable from the cottage, and the ownership to be vested in the parish.

I have found one Act which realises Arthur Young’s ideal of an Enclosure Act. It was passed in 1824 for Pottern in Wiltshire, and though it was an Act for the enclosure of a common only, no commonable meadow or common field being included, I give its provisions here on account of its intrinsic interest.

The ownership of the whole common was vested in the Bishop127 of Salisbury, who was lord of the manor, the vicar and churchwardens, in trust for the parish. The trustees were required to lease it in small holdings, with or without rent, to poor, honest, and industrious persons, who had not, except in cases of accident or illness, availed themselves of Poor Law relief.

The following Acts, all (except that for Earsham) for “extinguishing village communities,” i.e., for enclosing all the commonable lands of the parishes or townships, which in each case include commonable arable fields, have special provisions to safeguard the interests of the poor:—

1757, c. 53. Wimeswould, Leicestershire. Cottagers who have no land are to have a share together within one fence, which they may afterwards separately enclose if they like. This is specially interesting as anticipating the modern practice of providing allotments for such cottagers.

1767, c. 49. Carlton in Lindrick, Nottingham. Three acres (out of a total of 2492 acres) are to be set aside for building cottages for the benefit of the poor.

1779, c. 89. Evenley or Bury Manor, Northampton. Lands to the value of £10 per annum (out of £1200) are to be set aside for the most deserving poor not receiving poor-relief.

1785, c. 56. Eight parishes in Wiltshire enclosed by one Act. Not more than ten acres in each parish is to be set aside, free of taxes, for fuel for the poor.

1805, c. 19. Palling, Norfolk. One-twentieth of the whole area is to be vested in the lord of the manor, vicar, and overseers, in trust for the poor, for common of pasture and fuel.

1807, c. 18. Herringswell, Suffolk. An allotment is to be made for fuel for the poor.

1809, c. 7. Barton Turf, Norfolk. Thirty acres is to be reserved for common for the poor.

1810, c. 55. Great Sheepey, Leicestershire. Every cottage to have not less than 3 acres allotted to it.

1812, c. 3. Little Brandon, Norfolk. Ten acres to be set aside for the benefit of the poor, partly to be used as common for fuel, or to be leased to pay for fuel; another part to provide a common pasture for the poor inhabitants; while the remainder128 (how much? one wonders) was to be leased in aid of the poor-rates.

1812, c. 17. Earsham, Norfolk. Five acres to be set aside to be leased to buy fuel for the poor.

Also in the Acts for Northwold, Norfolk (1796, c. 14), Lower Wilbraham, Cambridge (1797, c. 89), and Barnady, Suffolk, allotments were made inalienable from the cottages for which they were assigned. At Northwold land capable of supplying annually 12,000 turves per annum was reserved as a common turbary for the poorer owners of common rights.[73]

This list of Acts containing special provisions for the benefit of the poor is not a complete one, but if it were it would not, I believe, include more than one per cent. of the Enclosure Acts passed prior to 1845. Arthur Young did not over-state the case when he wrote: “By nineteen Enclosure Acts out of twenty, the poor are injured, in some grossly injured.... The poor in these parishes may say, and with truth, Parliament may be tender of property, all I know is, I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me.”[74]

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That the poor were not always the only sufferers from an Enclosure Act, is shown by the account given by the General Report on Enclosures of the way in which farmers were affected. After referring to the idea that opposition from farmers is usually to be ascribed to ignorant prejudice, the report proceeds:—

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“In many instances they have suffered considerably for four, five, or six years. From the first starting the project of an Enclosure Act to the final award, has, in numerous cases, taken two, three, four, and even five or six years; their management is deranged; not knowing where their future lands will be allotted, they save all their dung till much of it is good for little; they perform all the operations of tillage with inferior attention; perhaps the fields are cross-cropped and exhausted, and not well recovered under a course of years. Rents are greatly raised and too soon; so that if they do not absolutely lose five years they at least suffer a great check. In point of profit, comparing the old with the new system, attention must be paid to their capitals; open field land is managed (notwithstanding the inconvenience of its pieces) usually with a less capital than enclosures; and though the general profit of the latter exceeds that of the former, yet this will entirely depend on the capital being adequate. In cases where the new enclosures are laid down to grass, all this becomes of tenfold force; to stock rich grass lands demands a far greater sum than open field arable; the farmer may not possess it; this has often happened, and drove them to seek other investments, giving way to new-comers more able to undertake the new system introduced; and if profit be measured by a percentage on the capital employed, the old system might, at the old rents, exceed the profits of the new; and this is certainly the farmers’ view of the comparison. He also who had given the attention of a life to the regular routine of open field arable, without 10 acres of grass ever having been in his occupation, may find himself much at a loss in the regular purchase and sale of live stock, the profit of which depends so much on habitual skill. Add to all this the previous circumstance of laying down to grass, the business of all others of which farmers know the least, of which I have many times seen in new enclosures striking instances; and if all these points be duly considered, we shall not find much reason to be surprised at the repugnance shown by many farmers to the idea of enclosing.” (Pp. 31, 32.)

While the whole of this description of the ordeal that the farmers had to pass through is interesting, the point I desire here to emphasize is the need of a larger capital after enclosure. Those who had the requisite skill, knowledge, energy and capital survived the crisis; they were able to take up the farms which their weaker neighbours were compelled to relinquish; to send, in almost every case, a larger surplus of food from the lands of the parish to maintain the state and power of England, and to pay higher rents. In perhaps the majority of cases they raised a larger gross produce, and provided maintenance and employment for a larger population than before. In some cases even (though these were rare exceptions) the labouring population gained in material prosperity as well as in numbers. But in any case the relationship between employer and employed was notably altered.

In the open field village the entirely landless labourer was scarcely to be found. The division of holdings into numerous scattered pieces, many of which were of minute size, made it easy for a labourer to obtain what were in effect allotments in the common fields. If he had no holding, he still might have a common right; if no acknowledged common right, he might enjoy the advantage of one in a greater or less degree. From the poorest labourer to the richest farmer, there was, in the typical open field village, a gradation of rank. There was no131 perceptible social gap between the cottager who worked the greater part of his time for others, and for the smaller part of his time on his own holding, who is therefore properly termed a labourer, and his neighbour who reversed that distribution of time, and is therefore to be deemed a farmer. It was easy for the efficient or fortunate man to rise on such a social ladder; equally easy for the inefficient or unlucky to slip downwards.

After enclosure the comparatively few surviving farmers, enriched, elevated intellectually as well as socially by the successful struggle with a new environment, faced, across a deep social gulf, the labourers who had now only their labour to depend upon. In the early part of the nineteenth century, at any rate, it was almost impossible for a labourer to cross that gulf; on his side the farmer henceforward, instead of easily becoming a farm labourer if bankrupt, would rather try his fortune in the growing industrial towns.

Our “Country Farmer” gives us a vivid picture of one side of the social change (“Thoughts on Enclosure,” p. 21). Of the farmer after enclosure he says:

“Their entertainments are as expensive as they are elegant, for it is no uncommon thing for one of these new created farmers to spend ten or twelve pounds at one entertainment; and to wash down delicate food, must have the most expensive wines, and these the best of their kind; and to set off the entertainment in the greatest splendour, an elegant sideboard of plate is provided in the newest fashion. As to dress no one that was not personally acquainted with the opulent farmer’s daughter can distinguish her from the daughter of a Duke by her dress, both equally wishing to imitate something, but they know not what.

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“View the farmer before the land was inclosed, and you will find him entertaining his friends with a part of a hog of his own feeding, and a draught of ale brewed from his own malt presented in a brown jug, or a glass, if it would bear it, which was the utmost of his extravagance: in those happy days you might view the farmer in a coat of the growth of his flock; and spun by his industrious wife and daughters, and his stockings produced from the same quarter of his industry, and his wife and daughters clad from their own hands of industry and their own flock.”

As for the other side of this social change, the labourer’s side, it seemed so serious an evil to many even of the progressive landlords and agriculturists who strongly advocated enclosure, that they busied themselves to find a remedy.

In 1897 the Board of Agriculture drew the attention of its members to a typical case. Mr. Thomas Bernard communicated an “Account of a Cottage and Garden near Tadcaster.” The cottager had held two acres of land and a common right at Poppleton for nine years, and there had lived comfortably and brought up six children. The enclosure of the parish turned him adrift, but he prevailed upon a landlord to let him have a piece of roadside waste for a garden, saying, “I will show you the fashions on it.” The landlord was so delighted afterwards with the way in which this garden was cultivated, that he offered the man to let him have it rent free. Particular attention was directed to the man’s reply:—“Now, sir, you have a pleasure in seeing my cottage and garden neat: and why should not other squires have the same pleasure in seeing the cottages and gardens nice about them? The poor would then be happy and would love them and the place where they lived; but now every nook of land is let to the great farmers; and nothing left for the poor but to go to the parish.” (“Communications to the Board,” Vol. I. p. 404.)

It was by “going to the parish” that the labourer could bring home to the landlord the idea that the spirit of ambition and self-reliance fostered by the possession of two acres and a common right was of value to the nation. The national emergency due to the famine prices of food during the French War, which produced the complete change in the spirit of the administration of the Poor Law associated with the “Speenhamland Act of Parliament,” also forced into public attention the desirability of both providing agricultural labourers with some other supplement to their wages, and of encouraging them to avoid pauperism.133 We accordingly find the Board of Agriculture offering for 1800 three gold medals:—

“To the person who shall build on his estate the most cottages for labouring families, and assign to each a proper portion of land, for the support of not less than a cow, a hog, and a sufficient garden—the Gold Medal.”

“To the person who shall produce the most satisfactory account of the best means of supporting cows on poor land in a method applicable to cottagers—the Gold Medal,” (doubts having been raised with regard to the practicability of cottagers keeping cows except on rich soil).

“The Board having received information that the labouring poor of Rutland and Lincolnshire, having land for one or two cows, and a sufficiency of potatoes, have not applied, in the present scarcity, for any poor law relief; and it appearing to be a great national object to spread so beneficial a system, the Board will give to the person who shall explain, in the most satisfactory manner, the best means for rendering this practice as general through the kingdom as circumstances will admit—the Gold Medal.” (“Communications,” Vol. II.)

Each of these medals was again offered in subsequent years.

The question appears to have been first brought before the Board of Agriculture by the Earl of Winchilsea, in a conversation at the Farmers’ Club with Sir John Sinclair, President of the Board, in 1795. At Sir John Sinclair’s request, the Earl of Winchilsea put his views in writing, and they were submitted to the Board, in the form of a letter, dated Jan. 4th, 1796. This letter is a convincing statement in favour of the case for “three acres and a cow,” and deserves the attention of politicians of to-day.

Beginning by stating that he has made further enquiries, since the conversation with Sir John Sinclair, into the practice of agricultural labourers keeping cows, he continues:—134“I am more and more confirmed in the opinion I have long had, that nothing is so beneficial, both to them and to the landowners, as their having land to be occupied either for the keeping of cows, or as gardens, according to circumstances. By means of these advantages, the labourers and their families live better, and are consequently more fit to endure labour; and it makes them more contented, and gives them a sort of independence, which makes them set a higher value on their character.... When a labourer has obtained a cow, and land sufficient to maintain her, the first thing he has thought of has been how he could save money enough to buy another; ... there are from 70 to 80 labourers upon my estate in Rutland, who keep from 1 to 4 cows each.... I am informed that those who manage well clear about 20d. per week, or £4 6s. 8d. per ann. by each cow.”[75]

If the cow died, it was, he says, a great misfortune for the labourer, but he contrived to beg or borrow the money necessary to obtain another cow—“I scarcely ever knew a cow-gait given up for want of ability to obtain a cow, except in the case of old and infirm women.”

He classifies the situation of labourers, in order of felicity, as follows:—

(1) Those who have a sufficient quantity of grass enclosed land to enable them to keep one or more cows winter and summer, and a garden near their house; a grass field allotted to a certain number being as advantageous, or nearly so, as separate small enclosures.

(2) Those who have a summer pasture for their cow, and some arable land, on which they grow the winter provision. This is slightly less advantageous than (1), because tilling the arable land takes up more time.

(3) Those who have a right of common for the summer keep of the cow, and a meadow, or arable ground, or the share of a meadow in common, for the winter provision. If it were not that commons are usually over-stocked, this would be equivalent to (1) or (2).

(4) Those who have a right of common, but no cow, and a garden. In this case geese and pigs can be kept.

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(5) Those who have a right of common and no garden. In this case the value of the right of common depends upon whether fuel is obtained from the common or not.

(6) Those who have several acres of arable land, and no summer pasture for a cow. This, he maintains, is of little value, because of the large expenditure of labour necessary for cultivating the land, but he admits that many would differ from him on this point.

(7) Those who have a garden near the house.

(8) Those who have no land whatever. “This is a very bad situation for a labourer to be placed in, both for his comfort and the education of his children.”

Then he continues, in words which seem in general as true and weighty now as when written or as at any time within the last hundred years:—“In countries where it has never been the custom for labourers to keep cows, it would be very difficult to introduce it; but where no gardens have been annexed to the cottages it is sufficient to give the ground, and the labourer is sure to know what to do with it, and will reap an immediate benefit from it ... there should be as much as will produce all the garden stuff the family consumes, and enough, with the addition of a little meal, for a pig. I think they ought to pay the same rent that a farmer would pay for the land, and no more. I am persuaded that it frequently happens that a labourer lives in a house at 20s. a year rent, which he is unable to pay, to which, if a garden of a rood was added, for which he would have to pay five or ten shillings a year more, that he would be enabled, by the profit he would derive from the garden, to pay the rent of the house, etc., with great advantage to himself.

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“As I before mentioned, some difficulties may occur in establishing the custom of labourers keeping cows in those parts of the country where no such custom has existed; wherever it has or does exist it ought by all means to be encouraged, and not suffered to fall into disuse, as has been the case to a great degree in the midland counties, one of the causes of which I apprehend to be, the dislike the generality of farmers have to seeing the labourers rent any land. Perhaps one of their reasons for disliking this is, that the land, if not occupied by the labourers, would fall to their share; and another, I am afraid, is, that they rather wish to have the labourers more dependent upon them, for which reasons they are always desirous of hiring the house and land occupied by a labourer, under pretence, that by that means the landlord will be secure of his rent, and that they will keep the house in repair. This the agents of estates are too apt to give in to, as they find it much less trouble to meet six than sixty tenants at a rent day, and by this means avoid the being sometimes obliged to hear the wants and complaints of the poor.” ... The landlord naturally yields to this pressure ... “and it is in this manner that the labourers have been dispossessed of their cow-pastures in various parts of the midland counties. The moment the farmer obtains his wish, he takes every particle of the land to himself, and relets the house to the labourer, who by this means is rendered miserable, the poors rate increased, the value of the estate to the landlord diminished, and the house suffered to go to decay.... Whoever travels through the midland counties, and will take the trouble of enquiring, will generally receive the answer, that formerly there were a great many cottagers who kept cows, but that the land is now thrown to the farmers; and if he enquires still further, he will find that in those parishes the poors rates have increased in an amazing degree, more than according to the average rise throughout England.”

Sir John Sinclair,[76] President of the Board of Agriculture, did not agree that a plot of a few acres of arable land was, by itself, of little value to the agricultural labourer. He estimates that two cows can be kept on 3¼ acres of arable land, and that the net produce, valuing milk at 1d. per quart, would amount to £21 per annum, about as much as the man’s wages. He advocated spade labour, and recommended that the cottager should rather hire men to dig for him, than get the land ploughed. In confirmation of this opinion Sir Henry Vavasour cited an example of a cottager holding 3 acres who kept two cows and two pigs. The137 butter alone paid the rent, and the gross produce was estimated at £54 per annum, exclusive of milk and vegetables consumed at home.

It is of course practically impossible to calculate how much effect this landowners’ agitation for the policy of “Three acres and a cow” had on the number of such cottage holdings. Lord Brownlow[77] writes: “In all open field lordships there have always been pastures in which the cottagers have had their share of benefit; but the practice of enabling cottagers to keep cows in inclosed parishes, is in my neighbourhood rare, and of recent date.” Accounts are sent of cottage holdings provided by the Earl of Carrington, and of large allotments provided by Mr. Thomas Estcourt; but I cannot say how extensively their example was followed.

Mr. W. E. Bear’s report to the recent Labour Commission, on the agricultural labourers of the Southwell Union, contains the following passage, in which we probably see some fruits of the Earl of Winchilsea’s movement:—“Small holdings, of three to ten acres commonly, are let with cottages in a few parishes, and called ‘cottagers.’ This custom appears to be a very old one, dating back far beyond the time when the term ‘three acres and a cow’ was invented. In Ossington, Mr. Richardson told me, it was 50 years old or more; but he said it was falling into disuse. I found some ‘cottagers’ in Averham, Ossington and Hockerton, and heard of them in another parish or two. They usually consist of grass land, and are best so, as the labourer can leave his wife to manage the cow or two kept on them, and work for wages regularly. In Averham some of these small holdings have been given up, apparently because they were partly arable, and occupiers found that they could not keep regular places and also attend to their land. But where the land is all pasture, they are excellent institutions, providing families with milk, and adding to the incomes by means of milk or butter, poultry, eggs and pork sold. These little holdings are let from £2 10s. to £3 an acre, including the cottage” (par. 51 A).

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The same Commissioner found in Leicestershire a system of common cow-runs for cottagers which also probably dates from the eighteenth century, being in some way a survival from the common field system. He describes it as follows:—

“There are cow plots let with cottages in several parishes. Some have already been referred to as existing on the Earl of Dysart’s estate. One example is to be found at Saxby, where cow runs of 6 a. 3 r. 12 p., each in common, are let with a cottage and garden at £10 per annum. At Grimston I visited some which are let by Mr. Wright or Mr. Reckitts, who appear to be somehow connected on the same estate.... Some of these cow-plots are 3½ acres in extent, and their holders are allowed to keep only one cow, as three or more of them occupy a pasture in common, having a portion of their 3½ acres each year to mow and another portion to feed. The rent, including cottage and garden, is £10. There are some other cow plots of 8 acres on which two or three cows are kept, the rent being £15. In these cases, too, the pasture is common to several holders, each one having a piece to mow, while they run their cows together on the portion devoted to grazing. As an example of the advantage which a cow plot may sometimes be to a labourer and his family, I may mention the case of a widow who has 3½ acres and a very good cottage for £10 per annum. Last year she had an exceptionally good cow, and she sold milk at the rate of 6d. a gallon, amounting to £15 10s., fattening a calf which sold at £4 10s.; altogether the return was £20, besides what milk was consumed in the cottage.”

Another probable survival of the Earl of Winchilsea’s movement is thus described by Mr. Rider Haggard:—

“The system of cottage holdings was introduced about a hundred years ago on the Burley estate” (Rutlandshire) 139“and was copied by the late Lord Tollemache, who was brother-in-law of the late Mr. Finch. It is in force in the parishes of Burley, Egleton, Hambleton and Greetham. In 1901 there lived in those parishes forty-three small occupiers, whose acreage varied from 5 acres to 40 acres, the holdings being all grass. Originally there were many more, the Hambleton cow pasture, which is 102 acres in estate, being divided into 80 cow commons. Some of the holders occupy two or more small fields, but the general custom has been for tenants to graze large fields in common, and to have separate small fields reserved for mowing hay in the winter. In the fields which are grazed in common, five roods have been taken as sufficient to keep a cow.” (“Rural England,” Vol. II. p. 260.)

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In this table the cross-heading A includes Acts up to and including the year 1801, in which year a general Act facilitating enclosure was passed; cross-heading B, Acts from 1802–1845; cross-heading C, enclosures under the General Enclosure Act of 1845 and subsequent amending Acts. No Act or enclosure is included unless the enclosure was partly of arable common field, but in some few cases, as will be seen from the Appendix giving the chief particulars of each Act, the arable land formed only a trifling part of the area dealt with.

Where the area enclosed is not stated, and cannot even be approximately inferred from the wording of the Act, it is estimated on the assumption that the average area per Act where the area is not stated, is the same as for Acts relating to the same county where the area affected is stated, enclosures under the Act of 1845 being left out of account. This method, I believe, gives more satisfactory results than any other would; but it must be confessed that in the case of Norfolk the Acts in which the area is not stated are so many, and those in which it is stated are so few, that the average obtained is not trustworthy. In this case I believe the figure arrived at is too large. The counties are arranged in order of prevalence of Parliamentary enclosures.