THE ENCLOSURE OF THE LAND.* MORE prejudice, more false pleading,
and more ignorant argu- ments have been applied to the enclosure of the land than to almost any other subject. It is the great merit of Mr. Curtler's book that he gives a perfectly calm and judicial survey of the whole question. He draws upon the work of Sir Paul Vinogradoff, Professor Ashley, Messrs. Seebohm, Slater, Tawney, Gray, and others, and though on the main question he has told us nothing that is strictly new he has presented us with a summary as
• The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land. By W. li. B. Curtler. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press. [10s. ilet.)
compact and interesting as we could wish for. In the latter part of his book, however, his own researches have thrown fresh light on several details : on the expense of enclosure, the renting of commons, the overwhelming evidence of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that commons did more harm than good, the money concessions made in enclosure Acts to the small- holder, and the fact that it was the largo landowners who, by granting allotments, tried to remedy the hardships inflicted on many poor people through the loss of the commons. Some of our more misleading historians have invited us to believe that there was an elysian period in England when the people, owning the land in the truest sense, were all free to gather the fruits of the earth ; and that this elysian period was ended by the wickedness of a comparatively few powerful men who grabbed the land from its rightful owners and enclosed it to make large private farms, hunting grounds, deer parks, and so forth.
We need not go into the whole complicated question of the various systems of land tenure which owing to successive foreign invasions existed in England. No serious student has neglected the fascinating pages of Maitland upon this subject. Enough to say that the common field system was characteristic of what has been regarded as an elysian period. Mr. Curtler describes the appearance of one of the great fields which were commonly owned and commonly farmed. Such a field might be 400 or 500 acres in extent. It was marked out by innumerable strips of turf which separated the plots of the various cultivators. While it was being cultivated it was divided by temporary fences, but these disappeared after harvest. Such rotation of crops as was known had its highest form in what is known as the three- field system, a system which grew out of the successive stages of a one-field system and a two-field system. Roots were un- known in early days, and under the three-field system one field was always fallowed. As the houses of the cultivators were grouped together and the plots lay in different fields the oulti- vator might have to go considerable distances in a day to work on his plots. When the harvest had been got in everybody had a right to graze his cattle over the land held in common. Generally precise dates were fixed when beasts might be turned on to the land, and this meant that the harvest had to be got in whether it was ready or not if the small farmer did not want his crops to be devoured by roaming cattle.
As can be imagined, the standard of farming under such conditions was extremely low. The mingling of the animals caused an extraordinary amount of disease. The whole thing was what a writer in Tudor times called a " mingle-mangle " plan. It must be obvious to anybody who has an even rudi- mentary knowledge of farming that English agriculture could not develop in this way. No man could improve the breed of his stock and keep the land clean, sweet, and productive so long as he was at the mercy of his neighbours. As a matter of fact, the system bore most hardly on the poor and weak because a richer man with a heavier head of stock tended to crowd out the smaller men. The mere process of saving a man from being at the mercy of his neighbours meant enclosure. There was no other solution. It must not be forgotten, however, that the growth of private ownership and individual enterprise in farming were enormously aided by the circulation of money. Money was the most destructive solvent of seignorial power and of the giving of services. Arable farming is the best and most scientific of all forms of farming, and without enclosure it would have remained impossible in any serious sense. But arable farming on a wide scale did not steadily prosper as a result of enclosure, as according to human expectation it ought to have prospered. In the middle of the fourteenth century there was a great set- back. There was a tragic reason.
That tragic reason was the terrible visitation of 1348-9 known as the " Black Death." The population of England at that time must have been something between three million and five million persons, and it is possible that the "Black Death" wiped out one-third or even half of this population. The immediate sequel to the paralysis of agricultural labour was that England became chiefly a sheep-farming country. Although enclosure is essential to arable farming and must lead to arable farming wherever agriculture is most thriving, amble farming was impossible with a scarcity of labour. After the " Black Death " land which had been ploughed was laid down to grass. This,
however, did not affect the continued practice of enclosure, and throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there was a distinct effort on the part of the peasantry to get land into their own hands in order to escape compulsory co-operation with the lazy- and shiftless :- "Enclosure usually took the form of individual enclosures of strips in the common fields, and sporadic encroachments on the common pasture or waste ; though there were instances of a formal agreement on the part of townships to abandon the old system and adopt the new one of compact enclosed holdings. And these methods are to be contrasted with the enclosures of the manorial authorities at the same time, which were on a large scale, and generally for conversion of arable into pasture, whereas the smaller men generally continued arable farming after enclo- sure. In the sixteenth century enclosure by the tenants was, according to Mr. Tawney, more generally of the pasture and meadows than of the arable strips, though there was a constant tendency to gather these into compact blocks, and even on the demesne the agent, through whom enclosure was usually carried out, was the large farmer to whom the demesne had been let. And it is to be noticed that there was no compulsion on the customary tenants, or on the leaseholders of the demonic, to make them enclose ; theirs was a purely spontaneous movement prompted by a desire to escape obsolete restrictions. There was also another motive—the need of self-protection. The growth of large grazing farms, and the consequent over-stocking of the penurious, led the small men to enclose as the only way to keep some of the pasture for their own use ; for not only had they to feed their working oxen, but also their sheep, as many customary tenants were sheep farmers also on a considerable scale, and many now kept horses and cows in larger. quantities than before."
It may be asked how it happened that if the history of enclosure was as we have stated there were so many complaints against the rapacity of powerful grabbers. Undoubtedly some rich and unscrupulous men did enrich themselves at the expense of their fellows, but the many complaints which have been quoted from writings of the fifteenth and especially of the sixteenth centuries are capable of an explanation rather different from that which has been too often placed upon them. The sixteenth century was the transitional century from the middle ages to modern times, and the first half of it saw widespread suffering among the people. Competition had begun in earnest and the weakest went to the wall. There must have been suffer- ing in any case. It is not to be wondered at that a cottager who found that his rights to take loppings and clippings for fuel, and to turn his pigs out anywhere he pleased, were severely restricted laid the blame on some powerful enemy. Such a cottager might not be a regular cultivator at all, and to him enclosure did mean a real deprivation. He got all the bad and none of the good of enclosure.
" Besides the farmers,' says one of their advocates, ' there are other village people, such as the cottager, the mechanic, and inferior shopkeeper, to whom common rights are an incite- ment to industry. Their children, sent out to yearly service amongst the farmers, manage in time to scrape together £20 or £30, marry young women possessed of an equal sum, obtain a- cottage, and purchase cows, calves, sheep, hogs, and poultry. Then while the husband hires himself out as a day labourer, the wife stops at home and herds the live stock on the common. Out of the former's wages the rent of cottage, orchard, and two or three acres of meadow ground is paid, which, save for the rights of common, would be insufficient to support the beasts and poultry of which his property consists. When winter sets in the more prudent of these small tenants board their sheep with farmers at the rate of 2s. to 2s. .6d. per score per week, and part of each Sunday is employed by the cottagers in a visit to their sheep. The number of each man's cows is apportioned to the size of his haystack which supplies them with fodder in the winter. How would this class be provided for if the commons were ploughed up t' "
Such complaints as these were more social than economic, for if the good of the majority be held superior to the good of the individual it must be admitted, as has been said, that nothing but enclosures could have saved English farming. Nor can the loudness of the outcry be justified by the figures of enclosure so far as they have been investigated for particular periods.
" The total area declared to have been enclosed by the inquisitions of 1517-19, and 1607 is only 171,061 acres, out of a total acreage of nineteen millions or 0.90 per cent., and Dr. Gay, allowing for imperfections in the returns, and adding a hypothetical increase for the years not covered by, and for the counties not included in, the commissions, calculates that the total amount enclosed from 1455 to 1607 comes to 616,673 acres, or less than two per cent. of the total area of England ; no very large proportion."
Of course there has been considerable controversy over these figures, but even if they ought to be raised appreciably we should still be far from any proof of a conspiracy of landlordism. Within the law hardship was undoubtedly inflicted ; land speculators were as careless of the public interest as they are now ; and the nouveaux riche', of Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart times offended the comity of rural life as much as their successors offend it to-day. But when all has been said enclosure had to come.
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