For the first part of this period there is further evidence of the progress of enclosure in John Houghton’s “Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade.” In repeated issues he strongly advocates Enclosure; in that for September 8, 1681, he says: “Oh that I had sufficient influence to put it” (i.e., a General Enclosure Act) “to the trial, if it did not succeed I’d be content not to be drunk this seven years” ... “Witness the many enclosures that have of late been made, and that people are daily on gog on making” (pp. 15, 16). It will be remembered that a General Enclosure Act for Scotland was passed in 1695.
To sum up, it is clear that the Parliamentary enclosure of a given parish indicates that the lord of the manor, or principal landlord, had not secured such a complete or preponderating influence over the parish as to enable him to effect an enclosure without an Act of Parliament.
Enclosure by Yeomen.
And yet, on the other hand, it does not appear that the absence of any lord of the manor, or of any single landowner superior in wealth to the others in the parish was favourable, through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the continuance of common fields, except where many of the properties were extremely small.
We have seen that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, in Elmstone Hardwicke, while desiring themselves to enclose the parish, discourage enclosure by the tenants on their own account, by raising the rents to a prohibitive extent. Similarly Edward Lawrence in 1727, while urging, as we have seen, the steward to procure a general enclosure of his lord’s manor, declares that it is the duty of the steward, particularly if his lord is the owner of the Great Tithe, to prevent gradual enclosure by yeomen—“He should be ever on his watch to prevent (if possible) the Freeholders inclosing any part of their land in the common fields (Article xxiv. ).” “Partial enclosure should never be permitted without a general agreement to do the whole.”
The objection of the Tithe Owner to enclosures in the common fields was that by increasing the pasture, and decreasing the arable area, they diminished the produce of grain and so diminished the tithe. John Houghton (September 16, 1681, p. 16) also refers to the objection of the tithe owning clergy to enclosure. And this objection was probably one of the strongest forces against enclosure at that time.
Again, going back a century and a quarter, John Norden’s “Book of Surveying,” published about 1600, in one place recommends general enclosure, on the ground that “one acre enclosed is woorth one and a half in Common, if the ground be fitting thereto” ([Book III.], p. 97), in another declares “Also enclosures of common fields, or meddowes in part, by such as are most powerful and mighty, without the Lord’s licence, and the Tenants’ assents, is more than may be permitted” ([ibid.], p. 96).
The reason of course is, firstly, that the holder of lands in common fields or common meadows, who fenced his holding, or parts of it, thereby prevented the other holders from exercising their rights of pasturing their cattle upon the fenced portions, without giving up his recognised right to pasture cattle on his neighbours’ holdings, very likely indeed turning out all the more cattle in the summer and autumn, because better supplied with winter feed; and, secondly, because the shade of his hedges, if he set quickset hedges, injured his neighbours’ crops. In “Select pleas in the Manorial Courts” we find numerous cases of complaints against manorial tenants for attempting to make hedges, banks, or such barriers.
At Bledlow, in Northamptonshire, “it is presented that John Le Pee has unlawfully thrown up a bank” in 1275 (p. 23). In Hemingford (Huntingdon) that “William Thomas Son has planted willows in the bank unlawfully” in 1278 (p. 90), and in the same manor “Elias Carpenter has wrongfully planted trees on a boundary” (p. 92). In Weedon Beck (Northamptonshire) in 1296 “Walter Mill complains of John Brockhole and says that he has raised a wall and hedge between their tenements to his damage.”