"The natural industry of the people is such that wherever a person can get four or five acres together, he plants a whitethorn hedge around it, and sets an oak at every rod distance, which is consented to by a kind of general courtesy from one neighbour to another. ... In this way many of the common fields of East Norfolk appear to have been enclosed."
But in many counties—Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, the chief part of Bedfordshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, the south of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire — there were open fields up to about 1794.
Nothing was easier than to get an Act. A pamphlet[1] published in 1786 says that to obtain an Act to enclose 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 land of the best soil in the kingdom, and produce corn in the greatest abundance and of the best quality. And by enclosing 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 let to farm, by which means, of several hundred villages, that forty years ago contained between four or five hundred inhabitants, very few will now be found to exceed eighty, and some not half that number; nay, some contain only one poor decrepit 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).
An earlier pamphlet[2] makes the result of enclosure bad
- ↑ "Thoughts on Enclosure, by a Country Farmer." Mr Slater quotes this tract in his admirable work on Enclosure, but I was unable to find it at the British Museum. No locality is named, but Mr Slater thinks it was in that part of the Midlands, where enclosure was attended by the conversion of arable to pasture. The "Country Farmer" gives tables showing that the process resulted in a large reduction in the value of the produce, but in a large rise in rent. See note at end of chapter.
- ↑ "The Advantages and Disadvantages of enclosing Waste Lands and Common Fields. By a Country Gentleman, 1772." This is quoted with approval by the Board of Agriculture in the report of 1808.
