I may also refer to the Act, 25 Henry VIII. c. 13, to limit the number of sheep which may be possessed by a single owner, in which occurs the passage:—
X. Be it also further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That no manner of Person or Persons, of what Degree soever he or they be, being Lord or Lords, Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers, of or in any Liberty of Fold Courses within any Town, Tything, Village or Hamlet within any of the Counties of Norfolk or Suffolk, from and after the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord God next coming, shall take in farm, for term of years or otherwise, any Quillets of Lands or Pastures, that is to say, any number of Acres of Land or Pasture appertaining to any other Person or Persons, lying and being within the limit Extent or Precinct of the said Liberty of the said Fold Courses; but that they shall permit and suffer the said Persons, having or being, for the time, Owner or Owners, Lessee or Lessees of the said Quillets, to manure and pasture the said Quillets; and also to suffer sheep of the said Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers of the said Quillets, after the Rate of the said Quillets, to go with the Flock of the Owner, Farmer or Occupier of the said Liberty or Liberties of the said Fold Courses, paying the customary charge for the same, after the Rate and Use of the Country, there commonly used, without any interruption therein to be made by the said Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers, or Occupiers of the said Liberties, upon pain of forfeiture for 3s. 4d. for each offence.
“XI. Provided ... it shall not ... be available to any tenant Owner or Occupier of any such Quillet or Quillets to claim, have or use hereafter any such pasture, or Feeding of his sheep, in or with any such Fold Courses, but only where the tenants, Owners and Occupiers of any such Quillets have had, or might have had heretofore of Right and Duty, or used to have Pasture and Feeding in the said Fold Courses, by reason of their tenures, and Occupations of the said Quillet and Quillets, and none otherwise; and where they have not used, nor ought to have any Sheep fed or kept within such Fold Courses, by reason of the said tenures, that the Owners or Occupiers of such Fold Courses may take such Quillets, lying within their Fold Courses, in Farm, agreeing with the Owners or Occupiers of the said Quillets for the same.”
It would appear from these clauses that there had been in still earlier times generally throughout Norfolk and Suffolk a right pertaining to the Lord of the Manor of feeding flocks of sheep over the whole manor, that this right, in the reign of Henry VIII. was frequently sold or leased under the denomination “A Liberty of Fold Courses”; secondly that the exercise of this right was apt to interfere with the cultivation of peasants’ holdings in the common fields; thirdly that it was customary for the sheep belonging to the peasants to be pastured and folded with the flock of the Lord of the Manor for a fixed customary fee.
There is yet another respect in which Norfolk agriculture shows a difference, but of degree, not kind, from other common-field agriculture. Complete enclosure of common-field arable involves three processes—
(1) The laying together of scattered properties, and consequent abolition of intermixture of properties and holdings;
(2) The abolition of common rights;
(3) The hedging and ditching of the separate properties. This third process is the actual “enclosing” which gives its name to a series of processes which it completes.
But sometimes the hedging and ditching takes place independently of the other two processes, and strips of an acre, two or more acres, and even half-an-acre are enclosed in the middle of the common-fields, and, what is more remarkable, the little enclosed strips are sometimes the property of several individuals. In the collection of maps of open field parishes belonging to certain Oxford Colleges, published by Mr. J. L. G. Mowat, several such instances may be noticed.
Such enclosures were at first commonable; but common rights were of course exercised over them with greater difficulty than over the open parts of the enclosed fields, a fact on which the above quoted opinion on the Barn farm at Elmstone Hardwicke incidentally throws some light. The maintenance of these common rights is a sort of test of the democratic vigour of the village, and it may be noticed that old enclosures subject to common rights were particularly numerous in Yorkshire.