Thirdly, there was, during one period in the sixteenth century, a law specially guarding the corn-growing districts from enclosure, from which other districts were exempt.
The Statute 7 Henry VIII., c. 1, was the Depopulation Act in force for the 20 years 1516–1536. It derives special importance from the Inquisition into Enclosures which followed its enactment, in 1517. It applies only to parishes “Whereof the more part was or were used and occupied to tillage and husbandrie”; and it required the land to be tilled “after the maner and usage of the countrey where the seyd land lyeth.” This restriction drops out of the next Depopulation Act, 27 Henry VIII., c. 22, passed in the year 1536.
In the year 1536 Leland, the King’s Antiquary, began his Itinerary, which lasted till 1542. Whether in consequence of special instructions or not, he almost everywhere notes the condition of the country he traverses with regard to enclosure. A summary of his observations is shown in the form of a map; Devon, Cornwall, West Somerset, South Wales, Hereford, Worcester, the north-west of Warwick, South Lancashire, the country round Southampton, and near Hampton Court, with parts of Yorkshire, are shown to be the most enclosed districts which are described; and the districts described by Leland as champaign are those which were later largely enclosed by Act of Parliament.
The general movement of agricultural progress, it may safely be assumed, up to Leland’s time, was from the south-east of England northwards and westwards. The extreme south-east corner was certainly very early enclosed, as one would naturally expect, but we also find remote western districts, where one would naturally expect to find old customs linger comparatively late, precede the central districts in the abandonment of the “village community,” by many years.[84]
- [84] How long the enclosure of certain western counties preceded the enclosure of the east midlands, is shown by comparing the two following extracts. Of the former, Joseph Lee, in “A Plea for Regulated Inclosure,” published 1656, asks, “Are not many places in England, Essex, Hereford, Devonshire, Shropshire, Worcester, wholly enclosed?” (p. 31). Of the latter the “General Report on Enclosures,” published 152 years later, “A village of farmers and labourers surrounding a church and environed by three or four and in a few cases by five open fields, form the spectacle of Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Northampton shires, as much as on the Loire and on the plains of Moscow” (p. 25).
Whether much of the enclosure which Leland saw in 1536 had been the work of the previous twenty years, it is of course impossible to say; but making any reasonable allowance for progress in hedging and ditching in the western counties where agriculture was mainly pastoral during those twenty years, and assuming that the Act of 1516 had effectually stopped enclosure in that period in the corn-growing districts, one can hardly resist coming to the conclusion that if Leland had made his journey in 1516 he would then also have found enclosure most advanced in those districts which were most enclosed in 1536.
What we have, then, to ask is whether the priority of enclosure in the western counties is to be attributed entirely to the fact of their being devoted more to grass and less to tillage, or whether there was some difference in the primitive village community of the west which caused cultivated land to pass more easily into the condition of exclusive ownership and separate use. Obviously we must look for the answer to this question beyond the boundaries of England. To understand the differences between the village life of those parts of England which were once the Danelagh, Mercia and Wessex, from those which were then West Wales and Strathclyde, which may be regarded as at least semi-Celtic, we must examine the purely Celtic type of village community.
But it must also be noticed that there is one characteristic feature of the typical English village community, namely the importance attached to the right of common pasturage on the fallow field, and in the other arable fields after harvest, which would probably never have developed in any part of the country where only a small proportion of the land was ploughed. There would be too little profit and too much inconvenience attached to the exercise of the right for it to have a chance of being established, or if established, of persisting.
Lastly, it seems to me impossible to account for the perfect definition of the two boundaries between parishes early enclosed, without special Acts, and parishes enclosed late by special Acts, the one in the south-east, passing through Suffolk, Essex, and between Surrey and Kent, and the other in the south-west, passing through Somerset and Dorset, except on the assumption that the enclosure movement beginning in these two corners of England, was suddenly checked when it had reached the limits indicated, by the Tudor series of Depopulation Acts, and by the Inquisitions and other measures taken to enforce them. These Acts specially stipulated for the continuance of the ancient customary methods of tillage. A summary of their provisions which affect enclosure will be found in [Appendix D].