A CHAPTER OF AGRICULTURAL HISTORY.*
"rue history of the Inclosure of the Commons of England is a history of errors. Let us quote two pertinent passages which briefly sum up the causes of these errors —" The Common-Law .prefers arable laud before all others," says Lord Coke. This was the doctrine which, interpreted by landlords and gross-minded economists, made war against all open spaces. Copy holders, said Lord Denman, " received permission to cultivate for their own benefit, and, on certain conditions of service, certain portions of the lord's land. That compact included the right of common on the lord's land." This was the historical theory or fiction which hallowed the war of extermination. The lord of the manor had given and the lord of the manor took, and the objects of his generosity could not complain if he withdrew his beneficence. the was the major and primitive interest, the root from which all the others sprang. The commoners were the creatures of his bounty, and it was not for them, said the landlord, • Six Ramo on Comma' Pretervation. London: Sampson Loss.
and the law, here his organs, to quarrel even if the rights of the commoners returned to their original nothingness. IIow much reason rather for thankfulness that they, once his serfs or vassals, should ever have shared in his dominions 1 The magnitude of the operations effected in virtue of a bad polity and ignorauce of history is at last beginning to be appreciated. Perhaps when it is fully conceived, it will be seen that there have been at work in all English history few deeper and more searching influences than this. The Conquest itself has been scarcely more important as a social force than these inclosures. Indeed, it was felt chiefly in so far as it facilitated them. The Reformation left the grosser part of the people intact ; the spiritually-minded alone were deeply affected. The Statutes of Merton and Westminster may count for more than the Bill of Rights in a history of English society ; and the rapid inclosures seriously begun in the reign of George II., and absorbing 7,660,413 statute acres between 1710 and 1867, made dints in the face of the country such as are surpassed by the effects of no other social agency with which we are acquainted. The liquidation or dissolution of the primitive agri- cultural communities of this country is not completed, and we may hope that the remnant of the work will be accomplished less ruthlessly. Do what Parliament may, however, it cannot retrieve the past. Precious servitudes of the poor have been bartered away. There are towns to breathe pure air within five miles of which one must plunge deeply into trespasses ; the royal parks but partially fill the gap ; and the English land system has received a bad sot, out of which only a strong wrench can bring it. We might not all have been living in " power, peace, pleasantness, or length of days," had the commons been spared or more wisely divided ; but there might have been less pauperism and a population less dense.
We do not pass a pound of theory off with a pennyworth of fact. We but recapitulate that which reflection and inquiry confirm. Before the commons were parcelled out, there existed potent and well-understood checks on the overgrowth of popula- tion. Most of the rural poor were then proprietors, not, indeed, of the directum dominium, but of a substantial uses. This truth is too often forgotten. How rarely is it recollected that it is only in very modern times that England came to be peopled by persons totally devoid of proprietorial rights ! Our present condition is chiefly the work of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Our present artificial state—artificial, whether Lord Derby or Mr. Bright is right as to the number of landowners—is most modern. Long after the destruction of the bulk of our yeomen, and the diminution of small holdings during the French wars, the mass of the people were to all intents and purposes pro- prietors. If they did not own the entire dominium, neither did the lord of the manor. If they were not the owners of the fee-simple, still they were possessed of some claims over the land. The pertinent circumstance is, that far into the eighteenth century and into this century England was inhabited by persons who, whether freeholders, or copyholders, or cotters, or resi- dents in towns possessing rights of common, owned proprie- torial rights over the soil, and that the present homeless character of the bulk of the people came to pass within living memory. Even if the labourers were not really occupiers of the soil with fixity of tenure, estover, turbary, pasturage, rights of common appurtenant, appendant, or in gross, were valuable and substan- tial qualities, and the ownership of some or any of them—and we know that some of them might be held without connection with any land—severed the hind of those days as much from the hind of our day as he is severed from a tiller of the Pays du Waes. In the light of a sound polity, this partnership was
often a salutary circumstance. All the partners had a plain intelligible standard whereby to regulate their lives. Families
must be shaped to fit the laud or uses at their disposal. Too
many for the land, too many to live. No part in the agricultural communities, no part in life. The sequence was direct and most clear. All could understand that pitiless logic. Now, it is a matter of history that countries the population of which has been greatly dependent for sustenance on the soil have been rarely troubled with pauperism, and a
fortiori, this would hold good of smaller communities the precise means of which were still more visible. But all cannot under-
stand the dependence of wages on capita], an abstraction about the extent and nature of which even experts, not to say the unin- itiated, are interminably disputing. Then, too, the prudence of one in such a situation told most speedily and visibly to his individual benefit. Now, a man's individual hand is palsied by the thought that labour as he may, the imprudence of others may efface all traces of his forethought. Telling a labourer to contract the
size of his family is telling hitn to swim hard in order that another man, not necessarily he, may reach the shore. If there were then no historical evidence, we should unhesitatingly conclude that a system which indicated in figures the exact number of vacancies or berths could not but be a salutary check on population. In- deed, Tusser, in his rhymed arguments for inclosures, expressly states that a leading recommendation of inclosures was their tendency to augment population. When the "monetary economy" set in, there was no longer the same motive for employing many labourers. There was, with the change from pasture to arable land, a great release of manual labour. It is painfully perceptible in the literature and statistics of the times. An Act of the reign of Henry II. put the matter in a striking point of view. " Where, formerly, two hundred men supported themselves by honest labour are now only to be seen two or three shepherds." Throughout the reign of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. Parliament and the pulpit thundered against inclosers, graziers, and rent-raisers." Some of Latimer's sermons are stinging leading articles against in- closures. The amount of net profit had become the chief object of landlords, no longer caring to support a train of retainers. It was, therefore, immaterial whether or not there was grown a large quantity of corn. Enough for them if their profits or rents yielded them a larger income than formerly. But what was im- material to the landlord was most vital to the tiller of the soil. Wheat rose in price. Starvation ensued. It cannot but strike one that the cry for inclosures is always accompanied by com- plaints of distress and sharp outbreaks of poverty. They go hand in hand. Parliament cannot understand the perennial nature of the evil. Taking in the waste land is freely resorted to as a care of distress. While the commons were being greedily absorbed by the lords of the manor, between 1750 and 1834 there were sixty-four Parliamentary inquiries respecting the high price of corn and the poor laws. In an interesting table contributed several years ago to the Journal of the Statistical Society, it was clearly revealed that the growth of pauperism and inclosures went abreast. Always Parliament sought to stanch the wound by apply- ing the remedy of inclosure. Always it rebled. Nor do we confound cause with effect. Nesse thinks the complaints of the sixteenth cen- tury exaggerated, because wheat was cheap. Yet low prices are compatible with misery ; the labourer had not wherewith to buy. The truth is that there was an enormous and sudden dispensing with manual labour, the work of which was executed by fixed capital. This gave a cruel wrench to the masses, such as we often see taking place on a smaller scalp when machinery is introduced too rapidly into a trade.
in justice to the English Parliament, which approved of the iinclosures, it must be admitted that all this would not have come to pass, if there had not been drawn across the eyes of lords and lawyers a deceitful veil. We feel sure that if the more recent opinions respecting the historical position of the lords of the manor had existed at an earlier date, there would not have been so much appropriation akin to spoliation. A historical fiction working in combination with a wrong economical theory produced the mischief now deplored. Educated people begin to divest themselves of the idea that at the Conquest the land system was wholly renovated. The so-called Saxon period, educated men now know, overlapped and blended with the Norman period. Historical cataclysms or catastrophes will go the way of geological cataclysms, and men will soon cease to believe that William said, " Let a new land system be," and it was made. Yet legal theories still presume there was then such an upheaval.. The English law student's text-book of conveyancing contains some striking statements on this head scarcely verified by recent research. The legal talk found in many a judgment about certain kinds of common lying in " grant " is founded on a fiction. There is no historical warrant for believing that all these common-rights were created by donations of the lords of the manors. In regard to lemmas and stint-laud, the contrary is to all intents and purposes demonstrated. Some contend that the commons were the old foie-
land, or wastes, lying round the marks. Others, like Sir Henry Maine, allege that they are the remains of the laud of the primi- tive agricultural communities, which once extended from the Ganges to the Atlantic. The great fact, however, which is sus- tained by all investigators, is that there never was a time when the present landowners possessed absolute rights over all the
Commons.
It is matter of history that the legal mode of " approving" or improving created or sanctioned by the Statutes of Merton and Westminster was rarely effectual. But in Scotland there has been in operation for nearly two centuries a well-understood action of division, by means of which a common or " coramouty "
may be readily divided ; and indeed the right to insist on a, division or sale of a common-property would appear to have been part and parcel of the common-law of Scotland. The Court of Session apportioned the land among the adjacent proprietors. At this moment, no common-ground is appropriated in Scotland to recreation or allotments for the poor. The landowners get all, and in certain instances the owner of the barony once received a bonus of one-fourth. The results of that system have been ruthless, as may be guessed. The present writer recollects listening to a Scotch farmer pouring forth his treasured wrath at the spoliation of what he held to be his birthright. Bleak was the hill to which he pointed with indignation, and little to be prized, thought the on-looker, were the saffron-coloured swamps which hung on the hill flanks, or the thin, rugged, seamy soil through which the rocks protruded. But his father's cattle had fed there, and he perhaps had cut turf in the few green dells, and it had in the past been "our hill," and it was a loss to him not measured by guinea's to be obliged to look over a wire fence or a whinstoue dyke at what had once been virtually his. And thus it always is. The common people, with their pertinacious memory for great wrongs, would never believe that the lords were the entire owners of the commons. In 1519 they revolted, in order to overthrow the fences set up by these " unmerciful men," those Ahabs, as Bernard Gilpin called the inclosers of his time. And now the feeling lingers. The fences at Wandsworth are thrown down by people who are law- less in regard to nothing else.
In brief, the winding up of these primitive agricultural com- munities has been bungled. We sacrificed the Bengal land system to an alien, uncongenial English system. We tried to force Ireland into the same fetters, and at an earlier date England herself was sacrificed to the Roman law, almost unacquainted with a mode of tenure in which the sioniiiiiima of the soil was lodged in no cue being. We ploughed in " the peasant's park" and left the lord's lawn intact. We compelled the landlords to resort to Parliament, and yet we took no true cognizance of the rights of the public. The Inclosure Act of '45, though conceived, no doubt, with the best intentions, was framed in oblivion of the fact that the King or State had always claimed the discharge of the trinod necessitas; that evidence of this ought to have appeared in the records of the division ; that if the copyholders could claim prescriptive rights, so could the public at large ; that if no legal mode of expressing their rights could be found, it argued a defect in the law ; and that the miserable allotments given by the Act of 1819 were sorry compensation. But "our laud system is the result of natural and inevitable causes," say Lord Derby and many others. Yes, " natural and inevitable causes," assisted by about 5,000 Acts of Parliament. There was blunder- ing, we repeat, in winding up these primitive agricultural com- munities, and ill may come of it. Our fathers in this instance knew not how to give good gifts to their children.
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