THE VILLAGE AFTER ENCLOSURE
THE governing class continued its policy of extinguishing the old
village life and all the relationships and interests attached to it,
with unsparing and unhesitating hand; and as its policy progressed
there were displayed all the consequences predicted by its critics.
Agriculture was revolutionised: rents leapt up: England seemed to be
triumphing over the difficulties of a war with half the world. But it
had one great permanent result which the rulers of England ignored. The
anchorage of the poor was gone.
For enclosure was fatal to three classes: the small farmer, the
cottager, and the squatter. To all of these classes their common rights
were worth more than anything they received in return. Their position
was just the opposite of that of the lord of the manor. The lord of the
manor was given a certain quantity of land (the conventional proportion
was one-sixteenth[123]) in lieu of his surface rights, and that compact
allotment was infinitely more valuable than the rights so compensated.
Similarly the tithe-owner stood to gain with the increased rent. The
large farmer’s interests were also in enclosure, which gave him a wider
field for his capital and enterprise. The other classes stood to lose.
For even if the small farmer received strict justice in the division
of the common fields, his share in the legal costs and the additional
expense of fencing his own allotments often overwhelmed him, and he
was obliged to sell his property.[124] The expenses were always very
heavy, and in some cases amounted to £5 an acre.[125] The lord of the
manor and the tithe-owner could afford to bear their share, because
they were enriched by enclosure: the classes that were impoverished by
enclosure were ruined when they had to pay for the very proceeding that
had made them the poorer. The promoter of the General Enclosure Bill of
1796, it will be remembered, had proposed to exempt the poor from the
expense of fencing, but the Select Committee disapproved, and the only
persons exempted in the cases we have examined were the lords of the
manor or tithe-owners.
If these expenses still left the small farmer on his feet, he found
himself deprived of the use of the fallow and stubble pasture, which
had been almost as indispensable to him as the land he cultivated.
‘Strip the small farms of the benefit of the commons,’ said one
observer, ‘and they are all at one stroke levelled to the ground.’[126]
It was a common clause in Enclosure Acts that no sheep were to be
depastured on allotments for seven years.[127] The small farmer either
emigrated to America or to an industrial town, or became a day
labourer. His fate in the last resort may perhaps be illustrated by
the account given by the historian of _Oxfordshire_ of the enclosure
of Merton. ‘About the middle of last century a very considerable
alteration was produced in the relative situation of different classes
in the village. The Act of Parliament for the inclosure of the fields
having annulled all leases, and the inclosure itself facilitated the
plan of throwing several small farms into a few large bargains,[128]
the holders of the farms who had heretofore lived in comparative
plenty, became suddenly reduced to the situation of labourers, and in
a few years were necessitated to throw themselves and their families
upon the parish. The overgrown farmers who had fattened upon this
alteration, feeling the pressure of the new burden, determined if
possible to free themselves: they accordingly decided upon reducing
the allowance of these poor to the lowest ratio,[129] and resolved
to have no more servants so that their parishioners might experience
no further increase from that source. In a few years the numbers of
the poor rapidly declined: the more aged sank into their graves, and
the youth, warned by their parents’ sufferings, sought a settlement
elsewhere. The farmers, rejoicing in the success of their scheme,
procured the demolition of the cottages, and thus endeavoured to secure
themselves and their successors from the future expenses of supporting
an increased population, so that in 1821 the parish numbered only
thirty houses inhabited by thirty-four families.’[130] Another writer
gave an account of the results of a Norfolk enclosure. ‘In passing
through a village near Swaffham, in the County of Norfolk a few years
ago, to my great mortification I beheld the houses tumbling into ruins,
and the common fields all enclosed; upon enquiring into the cause of
this melancholy alteration, I was informed that a gentleman of Lynn had
bought that township and the next adjoining to it: that he had thrown
the one into three, and the other into four farms; which before the
enclosure were in about twenty farms: and upon my further enquiring
what was becoming of the farmers who were turned out, the answer was
that some of them were dead and the rest were become labourers.’[131]
The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying that before
enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he
was a labourer without land. The economic basis of his independence
was destroyed. In the first place, he lost a great many rights for
which he received no compensation. There were, for instance, the cases
mentioned by Mr. Henry Homer (1719-1791), Rector of Birdingbury and
Chaplain to Lord Leigh, in the pamphlet he published in 1769,[132]
where the cottagers lost the privileges of cutting furze and turf on
the common land, the proprietor contending that they had no right to
these privileges, but only enjoyed them by his indulgence. In every
other case, Mr. Homer urged, uninterrupted, immemorial usage gives a
legal sanction even to encroachments. ‘Why should the poor, as poor,
be excluded from the benefit of this general Indulgence; or why should
any set of proprietors avail themselves of the inability of the poor to
contend with them, to get possession of more than they enjoyed?’[133]
Another right that was often lost was the prescriptive right of keeping
a cow. The _General Report on Enclosures_ (p. 12) records the results
of a careful inquiry made in a journey of 1600 miles, which showed that
before enclosure cottagers often kept cows without a legal right, and
that nothing was given them for the practice. Other cottagers kept cows
by right of hiring their cottages and common rights, and on enclosure
the land was thrown into a farm, and the cottager had to sell his
cow. Two examples taken from the _Bedfordshire Report_ illustrate the
consequences of enclosure to the small man. One is from Maulden:[134]
‘The common was very extensive. I conversed with a farmer, and several
cottagers. One of them said, enclosing would ruin England; it was worse
than ten wars. Why, my friend, what have you lost by it? _I kept four
cows before the parish was enclosed, and now I don’t keep so much as
a goose; and you ask me what I lose by it!_’[135] The other is from
Sandy:[136] ‘This parish was very peculiarly circumstanced; it abounds
with gardeners, many cultivating their little freeholds, so that on
the enclosure, there were found to be sixty-three proprietors, though
nine-tenths, perhaps, of the whole belonged to Sir P. Monoux and Mr.
Pym. These men kept cows on the boggy common, and cut fern for litter
on the warren, by which means they were enabled to raise manure for
their gardens, besides fuel in plenty: the small allotment of an
acre and a half, however good the land, has been no compensation for
what they were deprived of. They complain heavily, and know not how
they will now manage to raise manure. This was no reason to preserve
the deserts in their old state, but an ample one for giving a full
compensation.’
Lord Winchilsea stated in his letter to the Board of Agriculture in
1796: ‘Whoever travels through the Midland Counties and will take the
trouble of inquiring, will generally receive for 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 inquires still further, he will
find that in those parishes the Poor Rates have increased in an amazing
degree more than according to the average rise throughout England.’
These cottagers often received nothing at all for the right they had
lost, the compensation going to the owner of the cottage only. But even
those cottagers who owned their cottage received in return for their
common right something infinitely less valuable. For a tiny allotment
was worth much less than a common right, especially if the allotment
was at a distance from their cottage, and though the Haute Huntre Act
binds the commissioners to give Lord FitzWilliam an allotment near
his gardens, there was nothing in any Act that we have seen to oblige
the commissioners to give the cottager an allotment at his door. And
the cottagers had to fence their allotments or forfeit them. Anybody
who glances at an award will understand what this meant. It is easy,
for example, to imagine what happened under this provision to the
following cottagers at Stanwell: Edmund Jordan (1-1/2 acres) J. and
F. Ride (each 1-1/4 acres) T. L. Rogers (1-1/4 acres) Brooker Derby
(1-1/4) Mary Gulliver (1-1/4 acres) Anne Higgs (1-1/4) H. Isherwood
(1-1/4) William Kent (1-1/4) Elizabeth Carr (1 acre) Thomas Nash (1
acre) R. Ride (just under 1 acre) William Robinson (just under 1 acre)
William Cox (3/4 acre) John Carter (3/4 acre) William Porter (3/4 acre)
Thomas King (1/2 acre) John Hetherington (under 1/2 an acre) J. Trout
(1/4 acre and 4 perches) and Charles Burkhead (12 perches). It would be
interesting to know how many of these small parcels of land found their
way into the hands of Sir William Gibbons and Mr. Edmund Hill.
The Louth award is still more interesting from this point of view.
J. Trout and Charles Burkhead passing rich, the one on 1/4 acre and
4 perches, the other on 12 perches, had only to pay their share of
the expenses of the enclosure, and for their own fencing. Sir William
Gibbons was too magnanimous a man to ask them to fence his 500 acres
as well. But at Louth the tithe-owners, who took more than a third of
the whole, were excused their share of the costs, and also had their
fencing done for them by the other proprietors. The prebendary and the
vicar charged the expenses of fencing their 600 acres on persons like
Elizabeth Bryan who went off with 39 perches, Ann Dunn (35 perches),
Naomi Hodgson, widow (35 perches), John Betts (34 perches), Elizabeth
Atkins (32 perches), Will Boswell (31 perches), Elizabeth Eycon (28
perches), Ann Hubbard, widow (15 perches), and Ann Metcalf, whose share
of the spoil was 14 perches. The award shows that there were 67 persons
who received an acre or less. Cottagers who received such allotments
and had to fence them had no alternative but to sell, and little to do
with the money but to drink it. This is the testimony of the _General
Report on Enclosures_.[137]
The squatters, though they are often spoken of as cottagers, must be
distinguished from the cottager in regard to their legal and historical
position. They were in a sense outside the original village economy.
The cottager was, so to speak, an aboriginal poor man: the squatter a
poor alien. He settled on a waste, built a cottage, and got together
a few geese or sheep, perhaps even a horse or a cow, and proceeded to
cultivate the ground.
The treatment of encroachments seems to have varied very greatly, as
the cases analysed in the Appendix show, and there was no settled
rule. Squatters of less than twenty years’ standing seldom received
any consideration beyond the privilege of buying their encroachment.
Squatters of more than twenty or forty years’ standing, as the case
might be, were often allowed to keep their encroachments, and in some
cases were treated like cottagers, with a claim to an allotment. But,
of course, like the cottagers, they lost their common rights.
Lastly, enclosure swept away the bureaucracy of the old village:
the viewers of fields and letters of the cattle, who had general
supervision of the arrangements for pasturing sheep or cows in the
common meadow, the common shepherd, the chimney peepers who saw that
the chimneys were kept properly, the hayward, or pinder, who looked
after the pound. Most of these little officials of the village court
had been paid either in land or by fees. When it was proposed to
abolish Parliamentary Enclosure, and to substitute a General Enclosure
Bill, the Parliamentary officials, who made large sums out of fees from
Enclosure Bills, were to receive compensation; but there was no talk of
compensation for the stolen livelihood of a pinder or a chimney peeper,
as there had been for the lost pickings of the officials of Parliament,
or as there was whenever an unhappy aristocrat was made to surrender
one of his sinecures. George Selwyn, who had been Paymaster of the
Works for twenty-seven years at the time that Burke’s Act of 1782
deprived him of that profitable title, was not allowed to languish very
long on the two sinecures that were left to him. In 1784 Pitt consoled
him with the lucrative name of Surveyor-General of Crown Lands. The
pinder and the viewer received a different kind of justice. For the
rich there is compensation, as the weaver said in Disraeli’s _Sybil_,
but ‘sympathy is the solace of the poor.’ In this case, if the truth be
told, even this solace was not administered with too liberal a hand.
All these classes and interests were scattered by enclosure, but it
was not one generation alone that was struck down by the blow. For
the commons were the patrimony of the poor. The commoner’s child,
however needy, was born with a spoon in his mouth. He came into a world
in which he had a share and a place. The civilisation which was now
submerged had spelt a sort of independence for the obscure lineage of
the village. It had represented, too, the importance of the interest of
the community in its soil, and in this aspect also the robbery of the
present was less important than the robbery of the future. For one act
of confiscation blotted out a principle of permanent value to the State.
The immediate consequences of this policy were only partially visible
to the governing or the cultivated classes. The rulers of England
took it for granted that the losses of individuals were the gains of
the State, and that the distresses of the poor were the condition of
permanent advance. Modern apologists have adopted the same view; and
the popular resistance to enclosure is often compared to the wild and
passionate fury that broke against the spinning and weaving machines,
the symbols and engines of the Industrial Revolution. History has drawn
a curtain over those days of exile and suffering, when cottages were
pulled down as if by an invader’s hand, and families that had lived
for centuries in their dales or on their small farms and commons were
driven before the torrent, losing
‘Estate and house ... and all their sheep,
A pretty flock, and which for aught I know
Had clothed the Ewbanks for a thousand years.’
Ancient possessions and ancient families disappeared. But the first
consequence was not the worst consequence: so far from compensating
for this misery, the ultimate result was still more disastrous. The
governing class killed by this policy the spirit of a race. The
petitions that are buried with their brief and unavailing pathos in
the _Journals_ of the House of Commons are the last voice of village
independence, and the unnamed commoners who braved the dangers of
resistance to send their doomed protests to the House of Commons that
obeyed their lords, were the last of the English peasants. These were
the men, it is not unreasonable to believe, whom Gray had in mind when
he wrote:--
‘Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood.’
* * * * *
As we read the descriptions of the state of France before the
Revolution, there is one fact that comforts the imagination and braces
the heart. We read of the intolerable services of the peasant, of
his forced labour, his confiscated harvests, his crushing burdens,
his painful and humiliating tasks, including in some cases even the
duty of protecting the sleep of the seigneur from the croaking of
the neighbouring marshes. The mind of Arthur Young was filled with
this impression of unsupportable servitude. But a more discerning eye
might have perceived a truth that escaped the English traveller. It
is contained in an entry that often greets us in the official reports
on the state of the provinces: _ce seigneur litige avec ses vassaux_.
Those few words flash like a gleam of the dawn across this sombre
and melancholy page. The peasant may be overwhelmed by the dîme,
the taille, the corvée, the hundred and one services that knit his
tenure to the caprice of a lord: he may be wretched, brutal, ignorant,
ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-housed: but he has not lost his status:
he is not a casual figure in a drifting proletariat: he belongs to a
community that can withstand the seigneur, dispute his claims at law,
resume its rights, recover its possessions, and establish, one day, its
independence.
In England the aristocracy destroyed the promise of such a development
when it broke the back of the peasant community. The enclosures
created a new organisation of classes. The peasant with rights and a
status, with a share in the fortunes and government of his village,
standing in rags, but standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer
with no corporate rights to defend, no corporate power to invoke, no
property to cherish, no ambition to pursue, bent beneath the fear of
his masters, and the weight of a future without hope. No class in the
world has so beaten and crouching a history, and if the blazing ricks
in 1830 once threatened his rulers with the anguish of his despair, in
no chapter of that history could it have been written, ‘This parish is
at law with its squire.’ For the parish was no longer the community
that offered the labourer friendship and sheltered his freedom: it was
merely the shadow of his poverty, his helplessness, and his shame.
‘Go to an ale-house kitchen of an old enclosed country, and there you
will see the origin of poverty and poor-rates. For whom are they to be
sober? For whom are they to save? For the parish? If I am diligent,
shall I have leave to build a cottage? If I am sober, shall I have
land for a cow? If I am frugal, shall I have half an acre of potatoes?
You offer no motives; you have nothing but a parish officer and a
workhouse!--Bring me another pot--.’[138]
FOOTNOTES:
[123] See the Evidence of Witnesses before the Committee on Commons
Inclosure of 1844. (Baily, land-agent): ‘General custom to give the
Lord of Manor 1/16th as compensation for his rights exclusive of the
value of minerals and of his rights as a common right owner.’ Another
witness (Coulson, a solicitor) defined the surface rights as ‘game and
stockage,’ and said that the proportion determined upon was the result
of a bargain beforehand.
[124] ‘Many small proprietors have been seriously injured by being
obliged in pursuance of ill-framed private bills to enclose lands which
never repaid the expense.’ Marshall, _The Appropriation and Enclosure
of Commonable and Intermixed Lands_, 1801, p. 52.
[125] COST OF ENCLOSURE.--The expenses of particular Acts varied very
much. Billingsley in his _Report on Somerset_ (p. 57) gives £3 an acre
as the cost of enclosing a lowland parish, £2, 10s. for an upland
parish. The enclosure of the 12,000 acre King’s Sedgmoor (_Ibid._, p.
196) came (with the subdivisions) to no less than £59,624, 4s. 8d.,
or nearly £5 an acre. Stanwell Enclosure, on the other hand, came to
about 23s. an acre, and various instances given in the _Report for
Bedfordshire_ work out at about the same figure. When the allotments
to the tithe-owners and the lord of the manor were exempted, the sum
per acre would of course fall more heavily on the other allottees,
_e.g._ of Louth, where more than a third of the 1701 acres enclosed
were exempt. In many cases, of course, land was sold to cover expenses.
The cost of fencing allotments would also vary in different localities.
In Somerset, from 7s. 7d. to 8s. 7d. for 20 feet of quickset hedge was
calculated, in Bedfordshire, 10s. 6d. per pole. See also for expense
Hasbach, pp. 64, 65, and _General Report on Enclosures_, Appendix xvii.
Main Items:--
1. Country solicitor’s fees for drawing up Bill and attending in town;
2. Attendance of witnesses at House of Commons and House of Lords to
prove that Standing Orders had been complied with;
3. Expenses of persons to get signatures of consents and afterwards to
attend at House of Commons to swear to them (it once cost from £70 to
£80 to get consent of principal proprietor);
4. Expense of Parliamentary solicitor, 20 gs., but more if opposition;
5. Expense of counsel if there was opposition;
6. Parliamentary fees, see p. 76.
[126] _Inquiry into the Advantages and Disadvantages resulting from
Bills of Enclosure_, 1780, p. 14.
[127] Cf. Ashelworth, Cheshunt, Knaresborough.
[128] Previous to enclosure there were twenty-five farmers: the land is
now divided among five or six persons only.
[129] It was then confidently said that several poor persons actually
perished from want, and so great was the outcry that some of the
farmers were hissed in the public market at Bicester.
[130] Dunkin’s _Oxfordshire_, pp. 2 and 3.
[131] F. Moore, _Considerations on the Exorbitant Price of
Proprietors_, 1773, p. 22; quoted by Levy, p. 27.
[132] _Essay on the Nature and Method of ascertaining the specific
Share of Proprietors upon the Inclosure of Common fields, with
observations on the inconveniences of common fields, etc._, p. 22.
[133] The Kirton, Sutterton and Wigtoft (Lincs) Acts prescribed a
penalty for taking turf or sod after the passing of the Act, of £10,
and in default of payment imprisonment in the House of Correction with
hard labour for three months.
[134] P. 235.
[135] The only provision for the poor in the Maulden Act, (36 Geo. III.
c. 65) was a fuel allotment as a compensation for the ancient usage
of cutting peat or moor turf. The trustees (rector, churchwarden and
overseers) were to distribute the turf to poor families, and were to
pay any surplus from the rent of the herbage to the poor rates.
[136] P. 240.
[137] At St. Neots a gentleman complained to Arthur Young in 1791 that
in the enclosure which took place sixteen years before, ‘the poor were
ill-treated by having about half a rood given them in lieu of a _cow
keep_, the inclosure of which land costing more than they could afford,
they sold the lots at £5, the money was drank out at the ale-house,
and the men, spoiled by the habit, came, with their families to the
parish.’--_Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xvi. p. 482.
[138] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxxvi. p. 508.