THE VILLAGE BEFORE ENCLOSURE
To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for
those who are interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix
containing the history, and tolerably full particulars, of twelve
separate enclosures. These instances have not been chosen on any
plan. They are taken from different parts of the country, and are of
various dates; some are enclosures of common fields, some enclosures
of commons and waste, and some include enclosures of both kinds.
At the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in the main a
country of commons and of common fields[6]; at the time of the Reform
Bill, England was in the main a country of individualist agriculture
and of large enclosed farms. There has probably been no change in
Europe in the last two centuries comparable to this in importance of
which so little is known to-day, or of which so little is to be learnt
from the general histories of the time. The accepted view is that this
change marks a great national advance, and that the hardships which
incidentally followed could not have been avoided: that it meant a
vast increase in the food resources of England in comparison with
which the sufferings of individuals counted for little: and that the
great estates which then came into existence were rather the gift of
economic forces than the deliberate acquisitions of powerful men. We
are not concerned to corroborate or to dispute the contention that
enclosure made England more productive,[7] or to discuss the merits of
enclosure itself as a public policy or a means to agricultural progress
in the eighteenth century. Our business is with the changes that the
enclosures caused in the social structure of England, from the manner
in which they were in practice carried out. We propose, therefore, to
describe the actual operations by which society passed through this
revolution, the old village vanished, and rural life assumed its modern
form and character.
It is difficult for us, who think of a common as a wild sweep of
heather and beauty and freedom, saved for the enjoyment of the world
in the midst of guarded parks and forbidden meadows, to realise that
the commons that disappeared from so many an English village in the
eighteenth century belonged to a very elaborate, complex, and ancient
economy. The antiquity of that elaborate economy has been the subject
of fierce contention, and the controversies that rage round the
nursery of the English village recall the controversies that raged
round the nursery of Homer. The main subject of contention has been
this. Was the manor or the township, or whatever name we like to give
to the primitive unit of agricultural life, an organisation imposed
by a despotic landowner on his dependents, or was it created by the
co-operation of a group of free tribesmen, afterwards dominated by a
military overlord? Did it owe more to Roman tradition or to Teutonic
tendencies? Professor Vinogradoff, the latest historian, inclines to
a compromise between these conflicting theories. He thinks that it
is impossible to trace the open-field system of cultivation to any
exclusive right of ownership or to the power of coercion, and that
the communal organisation of the peasantry, a village community of
shareholders who cultivated the land on the open-field system and
treated the other requisites of rural life as appendant to it, is
more ancient than the manorial order. It derives, in his view, from
the old English society. The manor itself, an institution which
partakes at once of the character of an estate and of a unit of local
government, was produced by the needs of government and the development
of individualist husbandry, side by side with this communal village.
These conditions lead to the creation of lordships, and after the
Conquest they take form in the manor. The manorial element, in fact,
is superimposed on the communal, and is not the foundation of it: the
mediæval village is a free village gradually feudalised. Fortunately it
is not incumbent on us to do more than touch on this fascinating study,
as it is enough for our purposes to note that the greater part of
England in cultivation at the beginning of the eighteenth century was
cultivated on a system which, with certain local variations, belonged
to a common type, representing this common ancestry.
The term ‘common’ was used of three kinds of land in the
eighteenth-century village, and the three were intimately connected
with each other. There were (1) the arable fields, (2) the common
meadowland, and (3) the common or waste. The arable fields were divided
into strips, with different owners, some of whom owned few strips,
and some many. The various strips that belonged to a particular owner
were scattered among the fields. Strips were divided from each other,
sometimes by a grass band called a balk, sometimes by a furrow. They
were cultivated on a uniform system by agreement, and after harvest
they were thrown open to pasturage. The common meadow land was divided
up by lot, pegged out, and distributed among the owners of the strips;
after the hay was carried, these meadows, like the arable fields, were
used for pasture. The common or waste, which was used as a common
pasture at all times of the year, consisted sometimes of woodland,
sometimes of roadside strips, and sometimes of commons in the modern
sense.[8]
Such, roughly, was the map of the old English village. What were the
classes that lived in it, and what were their several rights? In a
normal village there would be (1) a Lord of the Manor, (2) Freeholders,
some of whom might be large proprietors, and many small, both classes
going by the general name of Yeomanry, (3) Copyholders, (4) Tenant
Farmers, holding by various sorts of tenure, from tenants at will to
farmers with leases for three lives, (5) Cottagers, (6) Squatters, and
(7) Farm Servants, living in their employers’ houses. The proportions
of these classes varied greatly, no doubt, in different villages,
but we have an estimate of the total agricultural population in the
table prepared by Gregory King in 1688, from which it appears that in
addition to the Esquires and Gentlemen, there were 40,000 families of
freeholders of the better sort, 120,000 families of freeholders of the
lesser sort, and 150,000 farmers. Adam Smith, it will be remembered,
writing nearly a century later, said that the large number of yeomen
was at once the strength and the distinction of English agriculture.
Let us now describe rather more fully the different people represented
in these different categories, and the different rights that they
enjoyed. We have seen in the first chapter that the manorial courts
had lost many of their powers by this time, and that part of the
jurisdiction that the Lord of the Manor had originally exercised had
passed to the Justice of the Peace. No such change had taken place
in his relation to the economic life of the village. He might or he
might not still own a demesne land. So far as the common arable or
common meadow was concerned, he was in the same position as any other
proprietor: he might own many strips or few strips or no strips at all.
His position with regard to the waste was different, the difference
being expressed by Blackstone ‘in those waste grounds, which are
usually called commons, the property of the soil is generally in the
Lord of the Manor, as in the common fields it is in the particular
tenant.’ The feudal lawyers had developed a doctrine that the soil of
the waste was vested in the Lord of the Manor, and that originally it
had all belonged to him. But feudal law acknowledged certain definite
limitations to his rights over the waste. The Statute of Merton, 1235,
allowed him to make enclosures on the waste, but only on certain terms;
he was obliged to leave enough of the waste for the needs of his
tenants. Moreover, his powers were limited, not only by the concurrent
rights of freeholders and copyholders thus recognised by this ancient
law, but also by certain common rights of pasture and turbary enjoyed
by persons who were neither freeholders nor copyholders, namely
cottagers. These rights were explained by the lawyers of the time as
being concessions made by the Lord of the Manor in remote antiquity.
The Lord of the Manor was regarded as the owner of the waste, subject
to these common rights: that is, he was regarded as owning the minerals
and the surface rights (sand and gravel) as well as sporting rights.
Every grade of property and status was represented in the ranks of the
freeholders, the copyholders and the tenant farmers, from the man who
employed others to work for him to the man who was sometimes employed
in working for others. No distinct line, in fact, can be drawn between
the small farmer, whether freeholder, copyholder or tenant, and the
cottager, for the cottager might either own or rent a few strips; the
best dividing-line can be drawn between those who made their living
mainly as farmers, and those who made their living mainly as labourers.
It is important to remember that no farmer, however large his holdings
or property, or however important his social position, was at liberty
to cultivate his strips as he pleased. The system of cultivation would
be settled for him by the Jury of the Manor Court, a court that had
different names in different places. By the eighteenth century the
various courts of the manorial jurisdiction had been merged in a single
court, called indifferently the View of Frankpledge, the Court Leet,
the Court Baron, the Great Court or the Little Court, which transacted
so much of the business hitherto confided to various courts as had
not been assigned to the Justices of the Peace.[9] Most of the men of
the village, freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders, or cottagers,
attended the court, but the constitution of the Jury or Homage seems
to have varied in different manors. Sometimes the tenants of the manor
were taken haphazard in rotation: sometimes the steward controlled
the choice, sometimes a nominee of the steward or a nominee of the
tenants selected the Jury: sometimes the steward took no part in the
selection at all. The chief part of the business of these courts in the
eighteenth century was the management of the common fields and common
pastures, and the appointment of the village officers. These courts
decided which seed should be sown in the different fields, and the
dates at which they were to be opened and closed to common pasture.
Under the most primitive system of rotation the arable land was divided
into three fields, of which one was sown with wheat, another with
spring corn, and the third lay fallow: but by the end of the eighteenth
century there was a great variety of cultivation, and we find a
nine years’ course at Great Tew in Oxfordshire, a six years’ course
in Berkshire, while the Battersea common fields were sown with one
uniform round of grain without intermission, and consequently without
fallowing.[10]
By Sir Richard Sutton’s Act[11] for the cultivation of common fields,
passed in 1773, a majority of three-fourths in number and value of the
occupiers, with the consent of the owner and titheholder, was empowered
to decide on the course of husbandry, to regulate stinted commons, and,
with the consent of the Lord of the Manor, to let off a twelfth of the
common, applying the rent to draining or improving the rest of it.[12]
Before this Act, a universal consent to any change of system was
necessary.[13] The cultivation of strips in the arable fields carried
with it rights of common over the waste and also over the common
fields when they were thrown open. These rights were known as ‘common
appendant’ and they are thus defined by Blackstone: ‘Common appendant
is a right belonging to the owners or occupiers of arable land to put
commonable beasts upon the Lord’s waste and upon the lands of other
persons within the same manor.’
The classes making their living mainly as labourers were the cottagers,
farm servants, and squatters. The cottagers either owned or occupied
cottages and had rights of common on the waste, and in some cases
over the common fields. These rights were of various kinds: they
generally included the right to pasture certain animals, to cut turf
and to get fuel. The cottagers, as we have already said, often owned
or rented land. This is spoken of as a common practice by Addington,
who knew the Midland counties well; Arthur Young gives instances from
Lincolnshire and Oxfordshire, and Eden from Leicestershire and Surrey.
The squatters or borderers were, by origin, a separate class, though
in time they merged into the cottagers. They were settlers who built
themselves huts and cleared a piece of land in the commons or woods,
at some distance from the village. These encroachments were generally
sanctioned. A common rule in one part of the country was that the right
was established if the settler could build his cottage in the night
and send out smoke from his chimney in the morning.[14] The squatters
also often went out as day labourers. The farm servants were usually
the children of the small farmers or cottagers; they lived in their
masters’ houses until they had saved enough money to marry and take a
cottage of their own.
Were there any day labourers without either land or common rights in
the old village? It is difficult to suppose that there were many.[15]
Blackstone said of common appurtenant that it was not a general right
‘but can only be claimed by special grant or by prescription, which the
law esteems sufficient proof of a special grant or agreement for this
purpose.’ Prescription covers a multitude of encroachments. Indeed, it
was only by the ingenuity of the feudal lawyers that these rights did
not attach to the inhabitants of the village at large. These lawyers
had decided in Gateward’s case, 1603, that ‘inhabitants’ were too
vague a body to enjoy a right, and on this ground they had deprived
the inhabitants of the village of Stixswold in Lincolnshire of their
customary right of turning out cattle on the waste.[16] From that time
a charter of incorporation was necessary to enable the inhabitants at
large to prove a legal claim to common rights. But rights that were
enjoyed by the occupiers of small holdings or of cottages by long
prescription, or by encroachments tacitly sanctioned, must have been
very widely scattered.
Such were the classes inhabiting the eighteenth-century village. As
the holdings in the common fields could be sold, the property might
change hands, though it remained subject to common rights and to the
general regulations of the manor court. Consequently the villages
exhibited great varieties of character. In one village it might happen
that strip after strip had been bought up by the Lord of the Manor or
some proprietor, until the greater part of the arable fields had come
into the possession of a single owner. In such cases, however, the land
so purchased was still let out as a rule to a number of small men,
for the engrossing of farms as a practice comes into fashion after
enclosure. Sometimes such purchase was a preliminary to enclosure. The
Bedfordshire reporter gives an example in the village of Bolnhurst, in
that county. Three land speculators bought up as much of the land as
they could with a view to enclosing the common fields and then selling
at a large profit. But the land turned out to be much less valuable
than they had supposed, and they could not get it off their hands: all
improvements were at a standstill, for the speculators only let from
year to year, hoping still to find a market.[17] In other villages,
land might have changed hands in just the opposite direction. The Lord
of the Manor might sell his property in the common fields, and sell it
not to some capitalist or merchant, but to a number of small farmers.
We learn from the evidence of the Committee of 1844 on enclosures that
sometimes the Lord of the Manor sold his property in the waste to the
commoners. Thus there were villages with few owners, as there were
villages with many owners. The writer of the _Report on Middlesex_,
which was published in 1798 says, ‘I have known thirty landlords in
a field of 200 acres, and the property of each so divided as to lie
in ten or twenty places, containing from an acre or two downwards to
fifteen perches; and in a field of 300 acres I have met with patches
of arable land, containing eight perches each. In this instance the
average size of all the pieces in the field was under an acre. In all
cases they lie in long, narrow, winding or worm-like slips.’[18]
The same writer states that at the time his book was written (1798)
20,000 out of the 23,000 arable acres in Middlesex were cultivated on
the common-field system.[19] Perhaps the parish of Stanwell, of which
we describe the enclosure in detail elsewhere, may be taken as a fair
example of an eighteenth-century village. In this parish there were,
according to the enclosure award, four large proprietors, twenty-four
moderate proprietors, twenty-four small proprietors, and sixty-six
cottagers with common rights.
The most important social fact about this system is that it provided
opportunities for the humblest and poorest labourer to rise in the
village. Population seems to have moved slowly, and thus there was no
feverish competition for land. The farm servant could save up his wages
and begin his married life by hiring a cottage which carried rights of
common, and gradually buy or hire strips of land. Every village, as
Hasbach has put it, had its ladder, and nobody was doomed to stay on
the lowest rung. This is the distinguishing mark of the old village. It
would be easy, looking only at this feature, to idealise the society
that we have described, and to paint this age as an age of gold. But
no reader of Fielding or of Richardson would fall into this mistake,
or persuade himself that this community was a society of free and
equal men, in which tyranny was impossible. The old village was under
the shadow of the squire and the parson, and there were many ways in
which these powers controlled and hampered its pleasures and habits:
there were quarrels, too, between farmers and cottagers, and there are
many complaints that the farmers tried to take the lion’s share of the
commons: but, whatever the pressure outside and whatever the bickerings
within, it remains true that the common-field system formed a world in
which the villagers lived their own lives and cultivated the soil on a
basis of independence.
It was this community that now passed under the unqualified rule of
the oligarchy. Under that rule it was to disappear. Enclosure was
no new menace to the poor. English literature before the eighteenth
century echoes the dismay and lamentations of preachers and prophets
who witnessed the havoc that it spread. Stubbes had written in 1553 his
bitter protest against the enclosures which enabled rich men to eat up
poor men, and twenty years later a writer had given a sombre landscape
of the new farming: ‘We may see many of their houses built alone like
ravens’ nests, no birds building near them.’ The Midlands had been
the chief scene of these changes, and there the conversion of arable
land into pasture had swallowed up great tracts of common agriculture,
provoking in some cases an armed resistance. The enclosures of this
century were the second and the greater of two waves.[20] In one
respect enclosure was in form more difficult now than in earlier
periods, for it was generally understood at this time that an Act
of Parliament was necessary. In reality there was less check on the
process. For hitherto the enclosing class had had to reckon with the
occasional panic or ill-temper of the Crown. No English king, it is
true, had intervened in the interests of the poor so dramatically as
did the earlier and unspoilt Louis XIV., who restored to the French
village assemblies the public lands they had alienated within a certain
period. But the Crown had not altogether overlooked the interests of
the classes who were ruined by enclosure, and in different ways it
had tried to modify the worst consequences of this policy. From 1490
to 1601 there were various Acts and proclamations designed for this
purpose. Charles I. had actually annulled the enclosures of two years
in certain midland counties, several Commissions had been issued, and
the Star Chamber had instituted proceedings against enclosures on the
ground that depopulation was an offence against the Common Law. Mr.
Firth holds that Cromwell’s influence in the eastern counties was due
to his championship of the commoners in the fens. Throughout this time,
however ineffectual the intervention of the Crown, the interests of the
classes to whom enclosures brought wealth and power were not allowed to
obliterate all other considerations.
From the beginning of the eighteenth century the reins are thrown to
the enclosure movement, and the policy of enclosure is emancipated from
all these checks and afterthoughts. One interest is supreme throughout
England, supreme in Parliament, supreme in the country; the Crown
follows, the nation obeys.
The agricultural community which was taken to pieces in the eighteenth
century and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator
reconstructs a free government, was threatened from many points. It was
not killed by avarice alone. Cobbett used to attribute the enclosure
movement entirely to the greed of the landowners, but, if greed was a
sufficient motive, greed was in this case clothed and almost enveloped
in public spirit. Let us remember what this community looked like to
men with the mind of the landlord class. The English landowners have
always believed that order would be resolved into its original chaos,
if they ceased to control the lives and destinies of their neighbours.
‘A great responsibility rests on us landlords; if we go, the whole
thing goes.’ So says the landlord in Mr. Galsworthy’s novel, and so
said the landlords in the eighteenth century. The English aristocracy
always thinking of this class as the pillars of society, as the
Atlas that bears the burden of the world, very naturally concluded
that this old peasant community, with its troublesome rights, was a
public encumbrance. This view received a special impetus from all the
circumstances of the age. The landlord class was constantly being
recruited from the ranks of the manufacturers, and the new landlords,
bringing into this charmed circle an energy of their own, caught at
once its taste for power, for direction, for authority, for imposing
its will. Readers of _Shirley_ will remember that when Robert Moore
pictures to himself a future of usefulness and success, he says that
he will obtain an Act for enclosing Nunnely Common, that his brother
will be put on the bench, and that between them they will dominate the
parish. The book ends in this dream of triumph. Signorial position
owes its special lustre for English minds to the association of social
distinction with power over the life and ways of groups of men and
women. When Bagehot sneered at the sudden millionaires of his day, who
hoped to disguise their social defects by buying old places and hiding
among aristocratic furniture, he was remarking on a feature of English
life that was very far from being peculiar to his time. Did not Adam
Smith observe that merchants were very commonly ambitious of becoming
country gentlemen? This kind of ambition was the form that public
spirit often took in successful Englishmen, and it was a very powerful
menace to the old village and its traditions of collective life.
Now this passion received at this time a special momentum from the
condition of agriculture. A dictatorship lends itself more readily
than any other form of government to the quick introduction of
revolutionary ideas, and new ideas were in the air. Thus, in addition
to the desire for social power, there was behind the enclosure
movement a zeal for economic progress seconding and almost concealing
the direct inspiration of self-interest. Many an enclosing landlord
thought only of the satisfaction of doubling or trebling his rent:
that is unquestionable. If we are to trust so warm a champion of
enclosure as William Marshall, this was the state of mind of the great
majority. But there were many whose eyes glistened as they thought of
the prosperity they were to bring to English agriculture, applying
to a wider and wider domain the lessons that were to be learnt from
the processes of scientific farming. A man who had caught the large
ideas of a Coke, or mastered the discoveries of a Bakewell, chafed
under the restraints that the system of common agriculture placed on
improvement and experiment. It was maddening to have to set your pace
by the slow bucolic temperament of small farmers, nursed in a simple
and old-fashioned routine, who looked with suspicion on any proposal
that was strange to them. In this tiresome partnership the swift were
put between the shafts with the slow, and the temptation to think that
what was wanted was to get rid of the partnership altogether, was
almost irresistible. From such a state the mind passed rapidly and
naturally to the conclusion that the wider the sphere brought into the
absolute possession of the enlightened class, the greater would be the
public gain. The spirit in which the Board of Agriculture approached
the subject found appropriate expression in Sir John Sinclair’s
high-sounding language. ‘The idea of having lands in common, it has
been justly remarked, is to be derived from that barbarous state of
society, when men were strangers to any higher occupation than those
of hunters or shepherds, or had only just tasted the advantages to
be reaped from the cultivation of the earth.’[21] Arthur Young[22]
compared the open-field system, with its inconveniences ‘which the
barbarity of their ancestors had neither knowledge to discover nor
government to remedy’ to the Tartar policy of the shepherd state.
It is not surprising that men under the influence of these set ideas
could find no virtue at all in the old system, and that they soon
began to persuade themselves that that system was at the bottom of
all the evils of society. It was harmful to the morals and useless to
the pockets of the poor. ‘The benefit,’ wrote Arbuthnot,[23] ‘which
they are supposed to reap from commons, in their present state, I
know to be merely nominal; nay, indeed, what is worse, I know, that,
in many instances, it is an essential injury to them, by being made
a plea for their idleness; for, some few excepted, if you offer them
work, they will tell you, that they must go to look up their sheep,
cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or, perhaps, say they must
take their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race or
cricket-match.’ Lord Sheffield, in the course of one of the debates in
Parliament, described the commoners as a ‘nuisance,’ and most people of
his class thought of them as something worse. Mr. John Billingsley, who
wrote the _Report on Somerset_ for the Board of Agriculture in 1795,
describes in some detail the enervating atmosphere of the commoners’
life. ‘Besides, moral effects of an injurious tendency accrue to the
cottager, from a reliance on the imaginary benefits of stocking a
common. The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese,
naturally exalts the peasant, in his own conception, above his brethren
in the same rank of society. It inspires some degree of confidence in
a property, inadequate to his support. In sauntering after his cattle,
he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally
whole days are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting;
the aversion increases by indulgence; and at length the sale of a
half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to
idleness.’[24] Mr. Bishton, who wrote the _Report on Shropshire_ in
1794, gives a still more interesting glimpse into the mind of the
enclosing class: ‘The use of common land by labourers operates upon the
mind as a sort of independence.’ When the commons are enclosed ‘the
labourers will work every day in the year, their children will be put
out to labour early,’ and ‘that subordination of the lower ranks of
society which in the present times is so much wanted, would be thereby
considerably secured.’
A similar view was taken of the moral effects of commons by Middleton,
the writer of the _Report on Middlesex_.[25] ‘On the other hand, they
are, in many instances, of real injury to the public; by holding out
a lure to the poor man--I mean of materials wherewith to build his
cottage, and ground to erect it upon: together with firing and the
run of his poultry and pigs for nothing. This is of course temptation
sufficient to induce a great number of poor persons to settle upon the
borders of such commons. But the mischief does not end here: for having
gained these trifling advantages, through the neglect or connivance of
the lord of the manor, it unfortunately gives their minds an improper
bias, and inculcates a desire to live, from that time forward, without
labour, or at least with as little as possible.’
One of the witnesses before the Select Committee on Commons Inclosure
in 1844 was Mr. Carus Wilson, who is interesting as the original of
the character of Mr. Brocklehurst in _Jane Eyre_. We know how that
zealous Christian would regard the commoners from the speech in which
he reproved Miss Temple for giving the pupils at Lowood a lunch of
bread and cheese on one occasion when their meagre breakfast had been
uneatable. ‘Oh, madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt
porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile
bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!’ We
are not surprised to learn that Mr. Carus Wilson found the commoners
‘hardened and unpromising,’ and that he was obliged to inform the
committee that the misconduct which the system encouraged ‘hardens the
heart, and causes a good deal of mischief, and at the same time puts
the person in an unfavourable position for the approach of what might
be serviceable to him in a moral and religious point of view.’[26]
It is interesting, after reading all these confident generalisations
about the influence of this kind of life upon the character of the
poor, to learn what the commoners themselves thought of its moral
atmosphere. This we can do from such a petition as that sent by the
small proprietors and persons entitled to rights of common at Raunds,
in Northamptonshire. These unfortunate people lost their rights by
an Enclosure Act in 1797, and during the progress of the Bill they
petitioned Parliament against it, in these terms: ‘That the Petitioners
beg Leave to represent to the House that, under Pretence of improving
Lands in the said Parish, the Cottagers and other Persons entitled to
Right of Common on the Lands intended to be inclosed, will be deprived
of an inestimable Privilege, which they now enjoy, of turning a certain
Number of their Cows, Calves, and Sheep, on and over the said Lands; a
Privilege that enables them not only to maintain themselves and their
Families in the Depth of Winter, when they cannot, even for their
Money, obtain from the Occupiers of other Lands the smallest Portion of
Milk or Whey for such necessary Purpose, but, in addition to this, they
can now supply the Grazier with young or lean Stock at a reasonable
Price, to fatten and bring to Market at a more moderate Rate for
general Consumption, which they conceive to be the most rational and
effectual Way of establishing Public Plenty and Cheapness of Provision;
and they further conceive, that a more ruinous Effect of this Inclosure
will be the almost total Depopulation of their Town, now filled with
bold and hardy Husbandmen, from among whom, and the Inhabitants of
other open Parishes, the Nation has hitherto derived its greatest
Strength and Glory, in the Supply of its Fleets and Armies, and
driving them, from Necessity and Want of Employ, in vast Crowds, into
manufacturing Towns, where the very Nature of their Employment, over
the Loom or the Forge, soon may waste their Strength, and consequently
debilitate their Posterity, and by imperceptible Degrees obliterate
that great Principle of Obedience to the Laws of God and their Country,
which forms the Character of the simple and artless Villagers, more
equally distributed through the Open Countries, and on which so much
depends the good Order and Government of the State: These are some of
the Injuries to themselves as Individuals, and of the ill Consequences
to the Public, which the Petitioners conceive will follow from this,
as they have already done from many Inclosures, but which they did not
think they were entitled to lay before the House (the Constitutional
Patron and Protector of the Poor) until it unhappily came to their own
Lot to be exposed to them through the Bill now pending.’[27]
When we remember that the enterprise of the age was under the spell
of the most seductive economic teaching of the time, and that the old
peasant society, wearing as it did the look of confusion and weakness,
had to fear not only the simplifying appetites of the landlords, but
the simplifying philosophy, in England of an Adam Smith, in France of
the Physiocrats, we can realise that a ruling class has seldom found so
plausible an atmosphere for the free play of its interests and ideas.
_Des crimes sont flattés d’être présidés d’une vertu._ Bentham himself
thought the spectacle of an enclosure one of the most reassuring of all
the evidences of improvement and happiness. Indeed, all the elements
seemed to have conspired against the peasant, for æsthetic taste,
which might at other times have restrained, in the eighteenth century
encouraged the destruction of the commons and their rough beauty. The
rage for order and symmetry and neat cultivation was universal. It
found expression in Burnet, who said of the Alps and Appenines that
they had neither form nor beauty, neither shape nor order, any more
than the clouds of the air: in Johnson, who said of the Highlands that
‘the uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the
traveller’: and in Cobbett, who said of the Cotswolds, ‘this is a sort
of country having less to please the eye than any other that I have
ever seen, always save and except the heaths like those of Bagshot
and Hindhead.’ The enjoyment of wild nature was a lost sense, to be
rediscovered one day by the Romanticists and the Revolution, but too
late to help the English village. In France, owing to various causes,
part economic, part political, on which we shall touch later, the
peasant persisted in his ancient and ridiculous tenure, and survived to
become the envy of English observers: it was only in England that he
lost his footing, and that his ancient patrimony slipped away from him.
We are not concerned at this juncture to inquire into the truth of the
view that the sweeping policy of enclosure increased the productivity
and resources of the State: we are concerned only to inquire into
the way in which the aristocracy gave shape and effect to it. This
movement, assumed by the enlightened opinion of the day to be
beneficent and progressive, was none the less a gigantic disturbance;
it broke up the old village life; it transferred a great body of
property; it touched a vast mass of interests at a hundred points. A
governing class that cared for its reputation for justice would clearly
regard it as of sovereign importance that this delicate network of
rights and claims should not be roughly disentangled by the sheer power
of the stronger: a governing class that recognised its responsibility
for the happiness and order of the State would clearly regard it as
of sovereign importance that this ancient community should not be
dissolved in such a manner as to plunge great numbers of contented men
into permanent poverty and despair. To decide how far the aristocracy
that presided over these changes displayed insight or foresight,
sympathy or imagination, and how far it acted with a controlling
sense of integrity and public spirit, we must analyse the methods and
procedure of Parliamentary enclosure.
Before entering on a discussion of the methods by which Parliamentary
enclosure was effected, it is necessary to realise the extent of its
operations. Precise statistics, of course, are not to be had, but
there are various estimates based on careful study of such evidence as
we possess. Mr. Levy says that between 1702 and 1760 there were only
246 Acts, affecting about 400,000 acres, and that in the next fifty
years the Acts had reached a total of 2438, affecting almost five
million acres.[28] Mr. Johnson gives the following table for the years
1700-1844, founded on Dr. Slater’s detailed estimate[29]--
+-----------+-----------------------+-----------------------+
| | Common Field and | Waste only. |
| | some Waste. | |
| Years. +---------+-------------+---------+-------------+
| | Acts. | Acreage. | Acts. | Acreage. |
+-----------+---------+-------------+---------+-------------+
| 1700-1760 | 152 | 237,845 | 56 | 74,518 |
| | | | | |
| 1761-1801 | 1,479 | 2,428,721 | 521 | 752,150 |
| | | | | |
| 1802-1844 | 1,075 | 1,610,302 | 808 | 939,043 |
+-----------+---------+-------------+---------+-------------+
| Total, | 2,706 | 4,276,868 | 1,385 | 1,765,711 |
+-----------+---------+-------------+---------+-------------+
This roughly corresponds with the estimate given before the Select
Committee on Enclosures in 1844, that there were some one thousand
seven hundred private Acts before 1800, and some two thousand between
1800 and 1844. The General Report of the Board of Agriculture on
Enclosures gives the acreage enclosed from the time of Queen Anne
down to 1805 as 4,187,056. Mr. Johnson’s conclusion is that nearly 20
per cent. of the total acreage of England has been enclosed during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though Mr. Prothero puts the
percentage still higher. But we should miss the significance of these
proportions if we were to look at England at the beginning of the
eighteenth century as a map of which a large block was already shaded,
and of which another block, say a fifth or a sixth part, was to be
shaded by the enclosure of this period. The truth is that the life of
the common-field system was still the normal village life of England,
and that the land which was already enclosed consisted largely of old
enclosures or the lord’s demesne land lying side by side with the
open fields. This was put quite clearly by the Bishop of St. Davids
in the House of Lords in 1781. ‘Parishes of any considerable extent
consisted partly of old inclosures and partly of common fields.’[30] If
a village living on the common-field system contained old enclosures,
effected some time or other without Act of Parliament, it suffered
just as violent a catastrophe when the common fields or the waste were
enclosed, as if there had been no previous enclosure in the parish.
The number of Acts passed in this period varies of course with the
different counties,[31] but speaking generally, we may say that the
events described in the next two chapters are not confined to any
one part of the country, and that they mark a national revolution,
making sweeping and profound changes in the form and the character of
agricultural society throughout England.[32]
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Gregory King and Davenant estimated that the whole of the
cultivated land in England in 1685 did not amount to much more than
half the total area, and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was
still farmed on the old common-field system.
[7] For a full discussion, in which the ordinary view is vigorously
combated in an interesting analysis, see Hasbach, _History of the
Agricultural Labourer_: on the other side, Levy, _Large and Small
Holdings_.
[8] This was the general structure of the village that was dissolved
in the eighteenth century. It is distinguished from the Keltic type
of communal agriculture, known as run-rig, in two important respects.
In the run-rig village the soil is periodically redivided, and the
tenant’s holding is compact. Dr. Slater (_Geographical Journal_, Jan.
1907) has shown that in those parts of England where the Keltic type
predominated, _e.g._ in Devon and Cornwall, enclosure took place
early, and he argues with good reason that it was easier to enclose by
voluntary agreement where the holdings were compact than it was where
they were scattered in strips. But gradual enclosure by voluntary
agreement had a different effect from the cataclysm-like enclosure of
the eighteenth century, as is evident from the large number of small
farmers in Devonshire.
[9] See Webb, _Manor and Borough_, vol. i. p. 66 _seq._
[10] Slater, _The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common
Fields_, p. 77.
[11] 13 George III. c. 81.
[12] This was done at Barnes Common; see for whole subject, _Annals of
Agriculture_, vol. xvii. p. 516.
[13] For cases where changes in the system of cultivation of common
fields had been made, see _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xvi. p. 606:
‘To Peterborough, crossing an open field, but sown by agreement with
turnips.’ Cf. _Report on Bedfordshire_: ‘Clover is sown in some of
the open clay-fields by common consent’ (p. 339), and ‘Turnips are
sometimes cultivated, both on the sands and gravels, by mutual consent’
(p. 340).
[14] Slater, p. 119.
[15] Dr. Slater’s conclusion is that ‘in the open field village the
entirely landless labourer was scarcely to be found,’ p. 130.
[16] See _Commons, Forests, and Footpaths_, by Lord Eversley, p. 11.
[17] _Bedfordshire Report_, 1808, p. 223, quoting from Arthur Young.
[18] P. 114.
[19] P. 138.
[20] See on this point, Levy, _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 1.
[21] _Report of Select Committee on Waste Lands_, 1795, p. 15, Appendix
B.
[22] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. i. p. 72.
[23] _An Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of
Provisions and the Size of Farms_, 1773, p. 81.
[24] _Report on Somerset_, reprinted 1797, p. 52; compare Report on
Commons in Brecknock, _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxii. p. 632,
where commons are denounced as ‘hurtful to society by holding forth a
temptation to idleness, that fell parent to vice and immorality’; also
compare _Ibid._, vol. xx. p. 145, where they are said to encourage the
commoners to be ‘hedge breakers, pilferers, nightly trespassers ...
poultry and rabbit stealers, or such like.’
[25] P. 103.
[26] _Committee on Inclosures_, 1844, p. 135.
[27] _House of Commons Journal_, June 19, 1797.
[28] _Large and Small Holdings_, p. 24.
[29] _Disappearance of Small Landowner_, p. 90; Slater’s _English
Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields_, Appendix B.
[30] _Parliamentary Register_, March 30, 1781.
[31] See Dr. Slater’s detailed estimate.
[32] There were probably many enclosures that had not the authority
either of a special Act or of the Act of 1756, particularly in the more
distant counties. The evidence of Mr. Carus Wilson upon the committee
of 1844 shows that the stronger classes interpreted their rights and
powers in a liberal spirit. Mr. Carus Wilson had arranged with the
other large proprietors to let out the only common which remained
open in the thirteen parishes in which his father was interested as a
large landowner, and to pay the rent into the poor rates. Some members
of the committee asked whether the minority who dissented from this
arrangement could be excluded, and Mr. Wilson explained that he and his
confederates believed that the minority were bound by their action,
and that by this simple plan they could shut out all cattle from the
common, except the cattle of their joint tenants.--_Committee on
Inclosures_, 1844, p. 127.