about to do it. Our lives are a burden to us. … Rich men's hearts are hardened; they will not give us if we beg at their doors. If we steal, the law will end our lives. Divers of the poor are starved to death already; and it were better for us that are living to die by the sword than by the famine. And now we consider that the earth is our mother; and that God hath given it to the children of men; and that the common and waste grounds belong to the poor. Therefore we have begun to bestow our righteous [i.e. 'honest'] labor upon it. … And truly we have great comfort already through the goodness of our God, that some of those rich men amongst us that have had the greatest profit upon the common have freely given us their share in it … and the country farmers have preferred divers of them, to give us seed to sow it."[1]
The poor fellows hoped that some who approved "would but spread this Declaration before the great Council of the Land." But when the Council of State read it, they wrote to Mr Justice Pentlow, a J. P. for the county of Northampton, approving his proceedings against "the levellers"; adding that they doubted not that he was sensible "of the mischief those designs tend to, and of the necessity to proceed effectually against them"; and desiring him to let the Council know if any "that ought to be instrumental to bring them to punishment, fail in their duty."
And when Cromwell returned victorious from Ireland, he made short work of the political levellers, shooting them down in Burford churchyard, and at York and Norwich, sending John Lilburne to the Tower, and observing a Day of Thanksgiving as for a great deliverance.
And now enclosure went merrily on, and instead of the poor recovering the commons, they lost much of the "open field"—the arable land, theirs from time immemorial. The following quotation from one of the many contemporary pamphlets gives a complete and intelligible picture of what was done, and how it was done. The pamphlet is entitled "The Crying Sin of England in not caring for
- ↑ From a Broadsheet declaring "the Grounds or Reasons why we, the poor inhabitants of Wellinborrow have begun … to dig up manure and sow corn upon the Commons and Waste Ground called Bareshanks, belonging to the inhabitants of Wellinborrow, by those that have subscribed and hundreds more that give consent."
