Pickwell, he says, was enclosed in 1628, Shenton in 1646, and Laughton in 1665.

Here, again, in interpreting these statements, we are confronted with the difficulty of determining what antiquity is implied by the term “old enclosure,” and also by the difficulty of estimating what proportion of the parishes described merely as “enclosed” belonged to any particular epoch of enclosure.

On the one hand, we note (1) that one-third of the open field parishes known to Monk were enclosed without Acts in the following half-century, (2) that he gives the date of enclosure of fifteen other parishes for which we have no Acts, which were enclosed in the previous half-century. It would therefore appear that a very considerable amount of enclosure was going on, without Acts of Parliament, during the period in which Parliamentary enclosure was proceeding rapidly.

On the other hand, the fact that he can give seventeenth-century dates for the enclosure of three parishes suggests that probably a very large proportion of his “old enclosure parishes” and a fair proportion of his enclosed parishes were enclosed in the seventeenth century.[93]

Pursuing the inquiry backwards, we find our next source of information in Celia Fiennes, a lady of Newtontony, who made a series of rides in the last few years of the seventeenth century. Newtontony is three miles east of Amesbury, amid the open chalk hills, or, as she describes it, in the midst of “a fine open champion country”, and she usually describes the aspect of the country she passes through. She travelled westwards to Land’s End, eastwards to Kent, northwards to the Border, and she gives some information with regard to the state of enclosure of most of the English counties. She went through both Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire, but with regard to those two counties gives no information as to their condition of enclosure. As she is more apt to notice the presence than the absence of hedges, this, so far as it goes, confirms our conclusions with regard to Bedfordshire; and, with regard to Northamptonshire, this small piece of negative evidence tends to the conclusion that that county also was almost entirely open in the beginning of the eighteenth century.

“Leicestershire,” she says, “is a very Rich Country—Red land, good corn of all sorts and grass, both fields and inclosures. You see a great way upon their hills the bottoms full of Enclosures, woods, and different sorts of manureing and herbage” (p. 133).

It is evident that enclosure had considerably advanced; but it must be noted that “fields” with Celia Fiennes means common fields. It is further to be noted that her description of the enclosures creeping up the hills implies a process of gradual enclosure. Of the neighbourhood of Bosworth (in the west of Leicestershire) she says, “this is a great flatt full of good Enclosures.” The western side of Leicestershire was therefore mainly enclosed before 1700, while the north-east was all open till 1760.

But though enclosure was so far advanced in Leicestershire, “their fewell,” Celia Fiennes says, “is but cowdung or Coale.” The use of cowdung for fuel supplied to advocates of enclosure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one of their chief arguments. Either the hedges of Leicestershire were not yet able to supply enough wood for fuel, or the old custom continued although it was as unnecessary as objectionable. In either case the natural inference is that much of the enclosure of Leicestershire which Celia Fiennes observed, was then recent.[94]