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Studies in Economics and Political Science
──────────────────────────────────────────
Edited by H. J. MACKINDER, M.A., Director of the
London School of Economics
No. 14.
THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY
AND THE
ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS
[Illustration: OPEN FIELDS AT EPWORTH, ISLE OF AXHOLME.
_Frontispiece._]
THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY
AND THE ENCLOSURE OF
COMMON FIELDS
BY
GILBERT SLATER, M.A., D.Sc.
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
THE EARL OF CARRINGTON, K.G., G.C.M.G., Etc._
_President of the Board of Agriculture_
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO. LTD.
1907
BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS,
LONDON AND TONBRIDGE.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE.
The investigations embodied in this book were begun in 1894, on the
suggestion of Mr. Graham Wallas, and at the request of Mr. J. A.
Spender. They were continued in subsequent years, in conjunction
with the London School of Economics, and the results were summarised
in a thesis entitled “The Enclosure of Common Fields in England in
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” which was submitted to
the University of London in 1904, and approved as a thesis for the
degree of Doctor of Science in Economics. That thesis consisted in the
first place of a series of maps, partially reproduced in this volume
through the kind assistance of the Royal Geographical Society; and
in the second place of manuscript matter which has been revised for
publication in the form of this volume and under the present title. The
original maps are in the custody of the London School of Economics, and
can be seen by those who desire to examine them. They include a series
of county maps, on which parishes in which common fields have been
enclosed by Act of Parliament are coloured and marked according to the
date of enclosure, and maps illustrating the process of Parliamentary
enclosure, and the working of the common field system. Those who are
interested in the enclosure history of any particular county may also
be recommended to consult the Victoria County History.
It is my pleasant duty here to gratefully acknowledge my obligations
to the two gentlemen above mentioned for the original impulse to
study the process of the destruction and decay of English village
communities; to the London School of Economics; and in particular to
its first Director, Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, its present Director, Mr.
H. J. Mackinder, and Mr. Hubert Hall, for assistance, encouragement,
and advice; to many labourers, farmers, clergymen, and other rural
residents, for information and personal kindness; to the Royal
Geographical Society for defraying the cost of the production of
the blocks of the illustrative maps herewith published; and to Earl
Carrington, the President of the Board of Agriculture, for reading the
book in proof, and recommending it to those who are willing to study
rural history because they desire to improve rural conditions of life.
In writing this book I have deemed it a matter of conscience to
preserve the attitude of mind of the student of history, pure and
simple. I have felt, and feel, that historical investigation can only
be rightly carried on when all motives except the simple desire to
know the truth are excluded from the investigator’s mind. Yet the
investigation undertaken having been thus far completed, and its
results placed on record, I cannot refrain from attempting to read out
of them some lessons for the present and the future.
My conclusions have been in large measure expressed for me by Lord
Carrington’s Introduction. The policy of the legislature and of the
Central Government, expressed in the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, though it claimed, and on the whole rightly
claimed, that it effected an immediate and great increase in the
country’s output of agricultural produce, and an improvement in the
breeds of sheep and cattle, was nevertheless essentially a policy
directed towards the enhancement of agricultural rents, the building up
of large and compact landed estates, the establishment of capitalist
farming, the uprooting of peasant proprietors and of small holdings
together with the communal use of land, and the multiplication of
the class of landless agricultural labourers. There is need in the
twentieth century for a new agricultural policy. As I read the economic
signs of the time, industrial conditions are beginning to favour a
great agricultural revival in the British Isles. A wise programme of
rural reform is necessary both in order that the possible agricultural
prosperity may be secured, and in order that the nation may reap in
full its possible fruits of physical and moral well-being for the
people.
In all times the fading memories and traditions of the past have
contributed to form in men’s minds the ideals of a possible better
future state of society which are the inspiration of progress. The
memories and traditions of the English village community, together with
its visible relics in the form of commons, commonable meadows, and
(rarely) common fields, have had their influence on the formation of
the ideals of the Labour and Democratic movement of our country from
the time of Cobbett onwards. Through historical research the past may
become more definitely suggestive.
The suggestions borne into my mind for the agricultural policy of the
twentieth century may be summed up in the phrase, British agriculture
must be democratised. By this I mean that the principle of collective
ownership of the soil must be established or re-established; that
agricultural co-operation must be revived in new forms suitable to
modern conditions; that the ancient right of independent access to
the soil for every tiller of it must be restored; that a career of
industrial advance in agriculture must be made possible for the
competent worker. On one important side of the life of the old English
village community I have not touched at all in this book, viz., its
social and recreative side. In this respect also the losses of the
past will probably be recovered spontaneously if the nation aims in
its agricultural policy at the three essentials of wholesome, hopeful,
human work, as opposed to dehumanised toil, Freedom, Training and
Mutual Aid.
GILBERT SLATER.
_January 10th, 1907._
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. ENCLOSURE IN GENERAL 1
II. THE MERCIAN TYPE OF VILLAGE COMMUNITY 8
III. THE WESSEX TYPE OF VILLAGE COMMUNITY 19
IV. EXTENT OF EXISTING COMMON FIELDS 36
V. THE ISLE OF AXHOLME 52
VI. SOME RECENT ENCLOSURES 63
VII. AGRICULTURE IN OPEN FIELD PARISHES A HUNDRED YEARS AGO 73
VIII. NORFOLK AGRICULTURE 78
IX. 13 GEO. III. C. 81 87
X. ENCLOSURE AND DEPOPULATION 91
XI. ENCLOSURE AND THE POOR 117
XII. THREE ACRES AND A COW 129
XIII. STATISTICAL SUMMARY OF ENCLOSURE BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT 140
XIV. ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS WITHOUT PARLIAMENTARY SANCTION 148
XV. RUN-RIG AND COMMON FIELD 164
XVI. COMMON FIELDS IN NEW ENGLAND 183
XVII. THE PROGRESS OF ENCLOSURE WITHOUT PARLIAMENTARY SANCTION 187
XVIII. THE RESULTS OF ENCLOSURE 261
* * * * *
APPENDIX A. STATISTICAL SUMMARY OF ACTS ENCLOSING WASTE 267
APPENDIX B. PRIVATE ACTS ENCLOSING COMMON FIELDS 268
APPENDIX C. LELAND’S ITINERARY 314
APPENDIX D. GENERAL ACTS AFFECTING ENCLOSURE 322
APPENDIX E. A NORFOLK OPEN FIELD PARISH 331
INDEX 333
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
VIEW OF OPEN FIELD IN EPWORTH, AXHOLME _Frontispiece._
MAPS:--
LAXTON, WEST FIELD, AND PART OF MILL FIELD _To face_ 8
STRATTON MEADOW ″ 25
ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS BY ACT OF PARLIAMENT ″ 73
LELAND’S ITINERARY ″ 161
EAST MIDLANDS. SECTION I. ″ 196
EAST MIDLANDS. SECTION II. ″ 197
HAMPSHIRE, SURREY, AND SUSSEX ″ 233
PART OF BRAUNTON GREAT FIELD ″ 250
INTRODUCTION.
THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS.
The enclosure of common fields, and the passing away of the English
Village Community to make room for the agricultural organisation
prevailing to-day, is a subject not merely of historical interest, but
one which touches very closely some of the most vital national problems
of the twentieth century.
During the past five generations mechanical, industrial, and
commercial progress, with the consequent creation of great towns and
cities, has so occupied the national activities, and has made us
to such an extent a nation of town-dwellers, that there has been a
tendency to overlook rural life and rural industries. But in recent
years social reformers have come to see that the solution of many of
the problems of the town is to be found in the country, and increasing
attention is being paid to the causes of the rural exodus and the
best means by which it can be arrested. No industry can be in a
healthy condition which does not provide an opportunity for the small
man to improve his position; and consequently such questions as the
provision of allotments and small holdings, agricultural co-operation,
the preservation of the independence of spirit of the agricultural
labourer, and the securing for him the prospect of a continually
advancing career on the land are recognised as matters of urgent
national importance.
In this book Dr. Slater shows that the movement for the enclosure of
arable open and common fields has been a movement for the sweeping
away of small holdings and small properties; that the “Village
Community” which any Enclosure Act of this character abolished was
essentially an organisation for agricultural co-operation. He shows
that at least in certain parts of the country even in comparatively
recent times enclosure has produced rural depopulation, and has
converted the villager from “a peasant with a mediæval status to an
agricultural labourer entirely dependent on a weekly wage.” He further
makes us doubt whether these little village revolutions, while they
temporarily stimulated agricultural progress by facilitating improved
stock-breeding and the economy of labour, did not also to a certain
extent destroy the opportunities of future progress by separating
farmer from labourer by a gulf difficult to cross, and thus cutting off
the supply of new recruits to the farming class.
At the same time, whatever reasons there may be for regretting the
enclosure of our Common Fields, and for wishing that the interests
of the humbler tillers of the soil had been more sedulously guarded
on enclosure, in the main the process was inevitable. Common field
Agriculture was a survival of customs and institutions which had grown
up when each village lived its life to a great extent in isolation.
It was necessary that the villager should almost forget that he was
a Little Pedlingtonian to realise that he was an Englishman. Village
patriotism had to die down temporarily to make way for national
patriotism; and when the spirit died out of the Village Community its
form could not be preserved.
Now and in the future there is need that local patriotism, pride
in the local community, and willingness to serve it, whether it be
village or city, should be kindled again to its old vigour. With the
revival of the spirit will come a revival of some of the old forms of
village common life, and a creation of new forms in place of those
which will remain among the forgotten facts of the past. The Village
Community is a hope of the future as well as a memory of the past,
and therefore those who are interested in the movement for reviving
British Agriculture on democratic lines and for improving the social
and economic conditions of our villages have reason to welcome Dr.
Slater’s attempt to describe existing and recent survivals of the
English Village Community, and to ascertain the circumstances, causes,
and consequences of its gradual extinction.
CARRINGTON.
_28th November, 1906._
THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY AND THE ENCLOSURE OF COMMON FIELDS.
CHAPTER I.
ENCLOSURE IN GENERAL.
The internal history of our villages is a more obscure, but not less
important a part of English history, than the internal history of our
towns. It is, indeed, more fundamental. A town is ordinarily by origin
an overgrown village, which never loses the marks of its origin. And
it was by agricultural and social changes in the villages that the way
was prepared for the great industrial revolution, or more properly,
evolution, which is the underlying fact of the history of English
towns, especially during the last two centuries.
The central fact in the history of any English village since
the Middle Ages, is expressed in the word “enclosure.” Primarily
“enclosure” means surrounding a piece of land with hedges, ditches, or
other barriers to the free passage of men and animals. Agriculturally,
enclosure of arable land in the midst of unenclosed arable land is
a preliminary step to its conversion into pasture, the hedge is
erected to keep animals in; enclosure of land in the midst of open
common pasture is a preliminary step to tillage, the hedge keeps
animals out. But in either case the hedge is the mark and sign of
exclusive ownership and occupation in the land which is hedged. Hence
by enclosure collective use, usually accompanied by some degree of
community of ownership, of the piece of land enclosed, is abolished,
and superseded by individual ownership and separate occupation.
The form of enclosure which is familiar to our minds is the enclosure
of land previously uncultivated; in the legal phrase, “enclosure of
waste of a manor,” in the ordinary phrase, “enclosure of commons.”
Enclosure in this sense has been, and is still, a matter of very
vital interest to the urban population, a fact which might be brought
vividly to our minds by a recital of the commons within London and
its immediate neighbourhood which have been lost or preserved with
difficulty. It is sufficient to refer to Epping Forest, Hadley Wood,
Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common, Hayes and Keston Commons, Bostall
Heath and Plumstead Common.
Far more important from a broad national point of view, is the
enclosure of common fields--the enclosure, that is, of land previously
cultivated according to a system which did not involve the separation
of one holding from another by any tangible barrier. Enclosure of this
sort, when suddenly effected, as by a Private Act of Enclosure, is
rightly termed the extinction of a village community. In the following
chapters it will be shown in detail from existing and recent survivals,
what was the nature of the system of cultivation in open and common
fields in different parts of England, up to the time of enclosure;
the question when and how enclosure was brought about in different
counties will be discussed; and light will be thrown upon the result
of the transition from the medieval to the modern system of village
life upon the material and moral condition of the villagers, the
peasants, farmers or labourers, who underwent the change. In these
chapters facts drawn directly from observations and inquiries in the
villages themselves, from the observations of agricultural writers who
speak from direct and intimate knowledge, and from the Enclosure Acts,
will be left in the main to tell their own story. But a generalised
statement will perhaps make that story clearer.
Here is a typical Enclosure Act of the type which encloses common
fields, taken at random, and a good example of the 2565 Acts of its
class enumerated in the Appendix, by which about 3000 parishes were
enclosed. It was passed in 1795 (c. 43) and begins:--“Whereas there
are in the parish of Henlow, in the County of Bedford, divers Open and
Common Fields, Meadows, Pastures, Waste Lands, and other Commonable
Lands and Grounds, containing by estimation, Two Thousand Acres, or
thereabouts.... And whereas the said Open and Common Fields, Lands,
Grounds, Meadows and Pastures, lie intermixed, and are inconveniently
situated, and are in their present state incapable of Improvement,
and the several Proprietors thereof and Persons interested therein
are desirous that the same may be divided and enclosed, and specific
Shares thereof set out and allotted in Lieu and in Proportion to their
several and respective Estates, Rights, and Interests therein; but such
Division and Inclosure cannot be effected without the Aid and Authority
of Parliament. May it therefore please your Majesty----.”
The total area of the parish of Henlow is 2450 acres, and it has
a large park. It appears, therefore, that when the Act was passed
practically the whole of the arable, meadow, and pasture land in the
parish lay entirely open, and was commonable. The more remote and least
cultivable parts of the parish were, no doubt, common pastures; on
these the villagers kept flocks and herds according to some recognised
rule based on the sizes of their holdings in the arable fields. A
drift would lead from the common to the village, passing through
the arable fields, and fenced or hedged off from them. Immediately
behind the cottages, clustering together to form the village, there
would be small closes for gardens or paddocks; beyond these all round
the village would stretch the open, common, arable fields, in area
probably considerably more than half the parish. These were probably
divided into three or four approximately equal portions, and cultivated
according to a three or four year course, imposed rigidly on all
occupiers by a mutual agreement sanctioned by custom. The holdings
would be of various sizes, from three or four acres of arable land
upwards, but all small; and a holding of, say, twenty acres of arable
land would consist of about thirty separate strips of land of from half
an acre to an acre each, scattered over all the three or four arable
fields, but approximately equally divided between each field, so that
each year the occupier would have, for example, about five acres under
wheat, five under barley, five under pulse, and five fallow, provided
that were the customary course of husbandry. Right through the year the
fallow land would be used as common pasture, and the land under crops
would become commonable after the crops were carried.
Along the streams flowing into the river Ivel would be the open
commonable meadows. These would be divided into a number of plots,
half-acres, quarter-acres, or even smaller, marked by pegs driven
in the ground, or stones; and a certain number of these plots were
assigned to each holding, in proportion to the amount of arable land.
During the spring, while the cattle were on the common pasture, the
meadow would be let grow for hay; when the time for hay harvest came,
each peasant cut his own plots, and the meadow became commonable during
the rest of the summer. Some of the peasant occupiers would be small
freeholders, some probably copyholders, others legally annual tenants.
All would meet together on certain occasions to settle questions of
common interest.
We might say, though the expression must not be too rigidly
interpreted, that under the common field system the parish, township,
or hamlet formed one farm, occupied and cultivated by a group of
partners holding varying numbers of shares. It may well be imagined
what a village cataclysm took place when an Act for the enclosure of
the parish was passed, and commissioners descended upon the village,
valued every property and every common right, and carved out the whole
parish into rectangles, instituting the modern system of separate
exclusive ownership and individual cultivation. We shall see that
ordinarily the holdings on enclosure became fewer and larger, that
very many of the peasants were in consequence driven from the village,
or became landless, pauperised agricultural labourers. We shall see
also that the traditions of the common field system where they have
perished as distinct memories, have survived in the form of aspirations
for agricultural reform. In fact, the great rural question for the
twentieth century to determine, is whether there were not beneath the
inconvenient and uneconomical methods of the common field system, a
vital principle essential to true rural prosperity, which has to be
re-discovered and re-established in forms suitable to the present
environment.
It is not intended in this book to go into the vexed question of the
origin of the common field system, or of the English village community.
It will be noticed that the researches upon which this book is based
do not as a rule go further back than Leland’s Itinerary in 1536 and
following years. From such materials only hypotheses can be obtained,
which require to be tested by all the evidence from earlier records. A
hypothesis, however, has a certain value as a mental thread by which
the facts can be connected and more clearly conceived.
Judging entirely from eighteenth and nineteenth century evidence,
one is in the first place driven to accept most unhesitatingly the
prevailing theory that the English common field system was based on
co-aration. But one is tempted to very summarily dismiss the theory
of Roman origin. Rather one is inclined to say that as long as a
considerable portion of the villagers of the parish were accustomed to
yoke their oxen or harness their horses to a common plough, the system
was a living one, capable of growth and modification according to the
ideas of the people who worked it. It became, as it were, fossilised
and dead, incapable of other than decaying change, when each occupier
cultivated his own set of strips of land by his own plough or his own
spade. One is therefore inclined to suppose that the introduction of
each new element in the population of a village--Saxon, Angle, Dane,
and in a less degree, Norman--profoundly modified earlier customs, and
that in each part of Britain a local type of village community resulted
from the blending of different racial traditions.
This hypothesis is directly suggested by the evidence of recent
survivals. The most familiar type of village community is
characteristic of the Midlands; I have termed it the Mercian type.
It is most easily conceived as a compound of the pure Keltic system,
known in the Highlands and Ireland as Run-rig or Rundale, and the North
German system traditional among the Angles, in which the two elements
in equal strength are very perfectly blended together. In the South of
England we find a different type, here termed the Wessex type, in which
the influence of Keltic tradition is more strongly seen. The village
community in Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk shows some
remarkable special features, traces of which are found in adjoining
counties, but which appear to be easily accounted for as the result of
the later intrusion of Scandinavian traditions. Further, throughout
the West of England, from Cumberland to Devon and Cornwall, we find
evidence that the primitive type of village community approximated very
closely to the Keltic Run-rig.
Enclosure of the common fields, meadows and pastures, of any particular
village may have taken place in the following ways:--
(1) By Act of Parliament, viz., (_a_) by a private Act, (_b_) under the
authority of the General Enclosure Acts of 1830 and 1836, (_c_) by the
Enclosure Commissioners and their successors, the Board of Agriculture,
under the General Enclosure Act of 1845 and its amending Acts.
(2) By common agreement of all the collective owners.
(3) By the purchase on the part of one owner of all conflicting rights.
(4) By special licence of the Tudor monarchs.
(5) By various forms of force and fraud.
Commonable waste may have been enclosed in any of the above ways, and
also under the Statutes of Merton and Winchester (1235 and 1285), which
give Lords of the Manor the right of enclosing commons provided proof
is given that the tenants of the manor are left sufficient pasture.
Enquiry into the history of Enclosure naturally begins with an
examination of the Enclosure Acts.
The first fact elicited by this examination is that there is a perfect
_legal_ similarity between Acts for enclosing commonable waste, which
may be termed _Acts for extending cultivation_, and Acts such as
that for Henlow, for enclosing all the open and common arable and
other lands of a parish or parishes, which may be termed _Acts for
extinguishing village communities_. About one-third of the Enclosure
Acts belong to the former variety, about two-thirds to the latter.
As from the economic and social points of view, the two classes of
Enclosure Acts are as widely different as they are legally similar, no
statistical summaries of the Acts can have much value until the two
classes are sorted out. To do this involved a separate examination of
all the Acts accessible.
Appendix A contains a statistical summary of the Acts for enclosing
commonable waste passed between 1727 and 1845; Appendix B contains a
list of Acts for enclosing common arable fields with or without other
commonable lands passed between 1727 and 1900.