A curious case of enclosure by Act of Parliament unconnected with the General Enclosure Acts is that of Ham Field by the “Richmond, Petersham and Ham Open Spaces Act, 1902” (2 Edward VII., c. ccliii.). It is entitled, “An Act to confirm agreements for vesting common and other land in the local authorities of the districts of Richmond and Ham, and the Surrey County Council as public open spaces, and for other purposes.” But while it does incidentally confirm these agreements, the “other purposes” comprise the main object of the bill, which is to allow the owners of Ham Common, of whom the Earl of Dysart is the principal, to enclose Ham Common Field, and convert it into building land.
The preamble is similarly misleading. The first sentence runs, “Whereas the prospect from Richmond Hill over the valley of the Thames is of great natural beauty, and agreements have been entered into with a view to preventing building on certain lands hereinafter mentioned”—a sentence admirably framed to disguise the fact that the effect of the Act is to extinguish the common rights over Ham Field which had previously prevented building, and so to convert the middle distance of the famous view from Richmond Hill into an expanse of roofs, perhaps of villa-residences, and perhaps——!
The agreements recited in the Act represent the consideration for which the public authorities mentioned bartered away the beauty of the view. Kingston Corporation gets nine acres for a cricket field; Richmond Corporation is confirmed in the ownership of Petersham Meadows, which was formerly a subject of dispute, and acquires a strip of land along the river; and the Surrey County Council acquires 45 acres of riverside land. The meadows and riverside land in each case are to be maintained as open spaces by the authorities. Ham itself merely gets the freehold of Ham Common, which means, in effect, that what slight danger there might have been of the enclosure of this part of the open and commonable land of the parish is removed.
The Earl of Dysart, at the cost of a sacrifice that is probably apparent rather than real, obtains by this Act the right to convert some 200 acres of arable common field into a valuable building estate; the smaller owners acquire a similar right without any compensating sacrifice at all; and the only losers by this profitable transaction are the people of London, who were not consulted in the matter.
Merrow.
The parish of Merrow, adjoining Guildford on the east, is stated in the return of 1873 to have had 350 acres of common field. The land in question covers the lower slopes of the chalk hill, the higher portion of which is Merrow Down; beneath it is Clandon Park, the seat of Lord Onslow. Up to about the year 1873 this common field did exist; the properties of Lord Onslow, the chief proprietor, were very much intermixed with those of smaller proprietors; the farm holdings were similarly intermixed with one another, and with a number of strips of land occupied by labourers and cultivated as allotments. But no common rights were exercised over these lands, either by the occupiers over one another’s lands, or by the villagers, within living memory; nor, except that the whole of the field was in tillage, was there any common rule for its cultivation. The existence of a great extent of common is in itself a sufficient explanation of the disappearance of common rights over the tilled land.
In 1870 the present Lord Onslow came into the property, and when a year or two later he attained his majority, he proceeded to consolidate his property in Merrow Field, by buying out the other proprietors, or giving them land elsewhere in exchange. The field is still bare of hedges, and under tillage; but enclosure, in the technical sense, has been completely carried without an Act of Parliament.
Since the enclosure the allotments, which had been numerous, have generally been given up; but the labourers do not attribute this to the enclosure, but to the industrial evolution. “There are no farmers nowadays, only land spoilers. They’ve turned market gardeners, and they sell milk” (with intense scorn). “The land ought to grow beef, and barley to make good beer, that’s what Englishmen want,—yes, and wheat to make bread. But now they all grow garden stuff, what’s the good of an allotment to a man? If you have anything to sell, you can’t sell it. It’s no good growing any more than you can eat.”
It may be added that along the river Wey, from Guildford down to Byfleet, there are some very extensive lammas meadows, known by such names as Broad Mead and Hook Mead. The holdings in these are intermixed, individual pieces sometimes not exceeding an acre.