With regard to Buckingham in general, we have the following statement from a later survey for the Board of the County:—
“The poor and persons with little capital (such as butchers, common shepherds, etc.) derive benefit from open fields and commons, by being enabled to keep horses, cows, and sheep.... It will be difficult to prove that in any case the poor have been benefited (by enclosure). No instances of benefit on this score have been stated to me. On the contrary, an increase of poor (i.e., of paupers) has been the general complaint.”
Similar evidence is given by two professional Enclosure Commissioners. Mr. Forster, of Norwich, “lamented that he had been accessory to injuring 2000 poor people, at the rate of twenty families per parish. Numbers in the practice of feeding the commons cannot prove their right; and many, indeed most who have allotments, have not more than one acre, which being insufficient for the man’s cow, both the cow and land are usually sold to opulent farmers. The right sold before the allotment produced much less than the allotment after it, but the money is dissipated, doing them no good when they cannot vest it in stock.”[68]
- [68] “General Report,” p. 157.
Mr. Ewen, another Commissioner, “observed that in most of the enclosures he has known the poor man’s allotment and cow are sold five times in six before the award is signed.” A third Commissioner, Mr. Algar, declared that he made it a practice to give an allotment whenever a cottager could merely prove that he had been in the practice of cutting turf. But one wonders whether Mr. Algar did not find this custom of his prejudicial to the demand for his professional services.
In estimating the weight of this evidence, both as to depopulation and as to injury to the poor, it must be borne in mind that it is taken almost entirely from the mouths of advocates, and mostly very enthusiastic advocates, of enclosure. They are admissions of men who feel that the general case in favour of enclosure is so strong that they may well candidly admit the existence of some drawbacks. Of course, some advocates of enclosure are not disposed to make any admissions at all. Many urge the moral evils engendered by waste lands, as: “Where wastes and commons are most extensive, there I have perceived the Cottagers are the most wretched and worthless; accustomed to relie on a precarious and vagabond subsistence from land in a state of nature, when that fails they recur to pilfering, and thereby become a nuisance to their honest and industrious neighbours; and if the father of a family of this sort is withdrawn from society for his crimes, his children become burthensome to the parish. It may truly be said that for cottagers of this description the game is preserved, and by them destroyed; they are mostly beneath the law and out of reach of detection; and while they can earn four or five shillings, and sometimes more, in a night, by poaching, they will not be satisfied with 10d. or 1s. a day for honest labour.”[69] A not unusual style of argument is the following:—
- [69] D. Walker, “Hertfordshire” (1794), p. 53.
“To deprive the poor of that benefit, which, in their present state, they derive from the waste lands, must no doubt, at first view, sound harsh. But it ought to be remembered that in this wealthy county, where there is so much work to be done, and so few hands comparatively to do it, there are few poor that do not deserve to be so. Those persons who are disqualified to provide for the calls of human nature by the feebleness of infancy, the crushing hand of disease, or the infirmities of old age, cannot be said to be poor, because all the landed property, situate within their respective parishes, is always liable to be charged with their maintenance.”[70]