improvements of lands formerly waste; but now many of the persons who sold have, with their servants, "ousted" petitioners, and tried to destroy enclosures and fences, in spite of five several orders of the House, by which the "riots" have been in some degree prevented for a time. But in May, "Jeffrey Boyce and others, to the number of 100," in defiance of an appeal from a justice, threw down the division dykes, etc., and continued till "the Parliament troops, under Sir John Palgrave," lying at Wisbech, marched and dispersed them. There follows the counter-petition "of some of the poor inhabitants" of Whittlesea, "in the name of themselves and many others." They say that they quietly submitted to the order of the House—that the earls and all claiming under them should quietly hold possession of the manors and divisions of tenants until good cause shown to the contrary ; but since this order, "Mr George Glapthorne[1] and others have already enclosed above a thousand acres of ground, which formerly lay open, and which petitioners have time out of mind enjoyed as common, and are proceeding to enclose more, to the great impoverishing of petitioners," who obtain their chief livelihood from commons.
Most of the petitions and counter-petitions are after these patterns—the lords of the manors profess to have come to an agreement with the tenants, and charge the tenants with violating it; and the tenants reply that the lords have enclosed more than was agreed upon. In the case of the Crown lands of Launceston, there was an actual plan to defraud.
It appears that marsh, pasture, waste, coppice, and woods were now the chief objects of enclosers; the enclosure of woods, in particular, caused much suffering to the small people, by making firewood hard to come by. Probably the enclosure of the "open field" slumbered between 1607 and the middle of the century. But whether of wood, or marsh, or common, enclosure crept on, and there was to be nothing whatever in the great upheaval now close at hand to stay, or even to check it. Rather did it receive a new impetus under the "Free" Commonwealth.
- ↑ Glapthorne was a J. P.—perhaps the one who "appealed." The rioters destroyed the fences, houses and crops, threatened Glapthorne with a pitchfork, and told him he was no justice, for he was against the King and for the Parliament.
