“In most open field parishes there are at a medium 40 farmers and 80 cottagers who hold their lands in common, and have right of commonage one with another. Suppose each person employs 6 labourers, we have in all 660 persons, men, women and children, who besides their Employment in Husbandry, carry on large branches of the Woollen and Linnen Manufactures.”

With regard to the plea that hedging and ditching will employ many hands, he says: “This is so contrary to constant experience, that it hardly deserves to be taken notice of. I myself, within these 30 years past, have seen above 20 Lordships or Parishes inclosed, and everyone of them has been in a manner depopulated. If we take all the inclosed Parishes one with another, we shall find hardly ten inhabitants remaining, where there were an hundred before Inclosures were made. And in some parishes 120 families of Farmers and Cottagers, have in a few years been reduced to four, to two, aye, and sometimes to but one family. And if this practice of inclosing continues much longer, we may expect to see all the great estates ingrossed by a few Hands, and the industrious Farmers and Cottagers almost intirely rooted out of the kingdom. Raising Hedges and sinking ditches may indeed employ several hands for a year, or hardly so long, but when that is once over, the work is at an end.... Owners of inclosed Lands, if they have but a little corn to get in, are already forced to send several miles to open field parishes for Harvest men.”

Six open field farms, averaging 150 acres each, and the little holdings of twelve cottagers, would be let together, after enclosure, as one grazing farm, and the total rent thus be raised from £300 to £600. But whereas one acre of arable land would previously have produced 20 bushels at 3s. per bushel, a gross return of £3; after enclosure it would contribute to the fattening of a bullock to the extent of 25s. The gross produce is decreased; but the net produce is increased. Of the £3 produced by the acre of common field under wheat, 50s. would go in expenses, leaving 6s. 8d. to the landlord and 3s. 4d. to the tenant. Of the 25s. produced by the same acre enclosed under grass, 13s. 4d. would go to the landlord, 11s. 8d. to the grazier.

It is interesting in passing to note the association of common field agriculture with manufacture in the domestic stage indicated by this passage.

We have also direct evidence of the same movements in the seventeenth century. On the one hand Walter Blyth (“The English Improver,” 1649, p. 40) has the passage:—“Consider but the Woodlands, who before Enclosure, were wont to be relieved by the Fieldon, with corne of all sorts. And now growne as gallant Corne Countries as be in England, as the Western part of Warwickshire, and the northern parts of Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and all the countries thereabouts.” On the other hand, from the controversy between the two John Moores on the one hand, and Joseph Lee and an anonymous controversialist on the other, we can pick out certain statements of matters of fact that passed uncontradicted.

This controversy arose out of the enclosure of Catthorp, a parish in the extreme south-west corner of Leicestershire, bordering on Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. Lee was the parish priest of Catthorp, and a party to the enclosure. In his “Vindication of Regulated Inclosure,” he gives a list of fifteen parishes within three miles of Catthorp which had been enclosed. He also gives a list of nineteen parishes, enclosed from twenty to fifty years, in which depopulation had not yet taken place. This second list, as John Moore remarks, “they were forced to fish up out of the counties of Leicester, Warwick, Northampton, etc.,” and it is significant that two only of the fifteen parishes enclosed near Catthorp are asserted by Lee not to have been attended by depopulation. If we go a little earlier we find in 1607 an insurrection against enclosures, followed by a searching enquiry by James I.’s government, and no doubt by renewed vigilance, for a while, in the enforcement of the Depopulation Acts. It may be regarded as axiomatic that in a corn-growing country,[51] enclosure which does not diminish tillage, does not provoke riot and insurrection.

While, however, enclosure which does not diminish the land under tillage does not, as a rule, cause rural depopulation, it is a rule not altogether without exception. One of the most striking passages in Cobbett’s “Rural Rides” is that written in August, 1826, in which he describes the valley of the Wiltshire Avon:—

“It is manifest enough, that the population of this valley was, at one time, many times over what it is now; for, in the first place, what were the twenty-nine churches built for? The population of the twenty-nine parishes is now but little more than one-half of the single parish of Kensington,[52] and there are several of the churches bigger than the church at Kensington.... In three instances, Fifield, Milston, and Roach-Fen, the church porches would hold all the inhabitants, even down to the bedridden and the babies. What then, will any man believe that these churches were built for such little knots of people?... But, in fact, you plainly see all the traces of a great ancient population. The churches were almost all large, and built in the best manner. Many of them are very fine edifices; very costly in the building; and, in the cases where the body of the church has been altered in the repairing of it, so as to make it smaller, the tower, which everywhere defies the hostility of time, shows you what the church must formerly have been.... There are now no less than nine of the parishes out of the twenty-nine, that have either no parsonage houses or have such as are in such a state that a parson will not, or cannot, live in them.... The land remains, and the crops and the sheep come as abundantly as ever; but they are now sent almost wholly away.... In the distance of about thirty miles, there stood fifty mansion houses. Where are they now? I believe there are but eight, that are at all worthy of the name of mansion houses.... In taking my leave of this beautiful vale I have to express my deep shame, as an Englishman, at beholding the general extreme poverty of those who cause this vale to produce such quantities of food and raiment. This is, I verily believe it, the worst-used labouring population upon the face of the earth.”[53]