The particular obstacle on which the scheme split was a fraudulent irregularity: the Bill submitted for signature to the inhabitants differing seriously (in twenty particulars) from the Bill presented to Parliament. Selwyn clearly attached no importance at all to the Petitions that were received against the Bill, or to the evidence of its local unpopularity. It is clear too, that it was very rare for a scheme like this to miscarry, for, speaking of his becoming Chairman of the Committee, he adds, ‘I thought it was a matter of form only.’ Further with a little care this project would have weathered the discovery of the fraud of which the authors were guilty. ‘I begged last night as for alms that they would meet us to settle the Votes. I have, since I have been in Parliament, been of twenty at least of these meetings, and always brought numbers down by these means. But my advice was slighted, and twenty people were walking about the streets who could have carried this point.’ In other words, the Bill would have been carried, all its iniquities notwithstanding, if only Bully’s friends had taken Selwyn’s advice and put themselves out to go down to Westminster. So little impression did this piece of trickery make on the mind of the Chairman of the Committee, that he intended to the last, by collecting his friends, to carry the Bill, for the fairness and good order of which he was responsible, through the House of Commons. This glimpse into the operations of the Committee enables us to picture the groups of comrades who sauntered down from Almack’s of an afternoon to carve up a manor in Committee of the House of Commons. We can see Bully’s friends meeting round the table in their solemn character of judges and legislators, to give a score of villages to Bully, and a dozen to Stavordale, much as Artaxerxes gave Magnesia to Themistocles for his bread, Myus for his meat and Lampsacus for his wine. And if those friends happened to be Bully’s creditors as well, it would perhaps not be unjust to suppose that their action was not altogether free from the kind of gratitude that inspired the bounty of the great king.[86]
CHAPTER IV
ENCLOSURE (2)
In the year 1774, Lord North’s Government, which had already received a bad bruise or two in the course of its quarrels with printers and authors, got very much the worst of it in an encounter that a little prudence would have sufficed to avert altogether. The affair has become famous on account of the actors, and because it was the turning point in a very important career. The cause of the quarrel has passed into the background, but students of the enclosure movement will find more to interest them in its beginning than in its circumstances and development.
Mr. De Grey, Member for Norfolk, and Lord of the Manor of Tollington in that county, had a dispute of long standing with Mr. William Tooke of Purley, a landowner in Tollington, who had resisted Mr. De Grey’s encroachments on the common. An action on this subject was impending, but Mr. De Grey, who held, as Sir George Trevelyan puts it, ‘that the law’s delay was not intended for Members of Parliament’ got another Member of Parliament to introduce a petition for a Bill for the enclosure of Tollington. As it happened, Mr. Tooke was a friend of one of the clerks in the House of Commons, and this friend told him on 6th January that a petition from De Grey was about to be presented. A fortnight later Mr. Tooke received from this clerk a copy of Mr. De Grey’s petition, in which the Lord Chief Justice, brother of Mr. De Grey was included. Mr. Tooke hurried to London and prepared a counter petition, and Sir Edward Astley, the member for the constituency, undertook to present that petition together with the petition from Mr. De Grey. There were some further negotiations, with the result that both sides revised their respective petitions, and it was arranged that they should be presented on 4th February. On that day the Speaker said the House was not full enough, and the petitions must be presented on the 7th. Accordingly Sir Edward Astley brought up both petitions on the 7th, but the Speaker said it was very extraordinary to present two contrary petitions at the same time. ‘Bring the first petition first.’ When members began to say ‘Hear, hear,’ the Speaker remarked, ‘It is only a common petition for a common enclosure,’ and the Members fell into general conversation, paying no heed to the proceedings at the Table. In the midst of this the petition was read, and the Speaker asked for ‘Ayes and Noes,’ and declared that the Ayes had it. The petition asking for the Bill had thus been surreptitiously carried without the House being made aware that there was a contrary petition to be presented, the contrary petition asking for delay. The second petition was then read and ordered to lie on the Table.
In ordinary circumstances nothing more would have been heard of the opposition to Mr. De Grey’s Bill. Hundreds of petitions may have been so stifled without the world being any the wiser. But Mr. Tooke, who would never have known of Mr. De Grey’s intention if he had not had a friend among the clerks of the House of Commons, happened to have another friend who was able to help him in a very different way in his predicament. This was Horne, who was now living in a cottage at Purley, reading law, on the desperate chance that a man, who was a clergyman against his will, would be admitted to the bar. Flushed rather than spent by his public quarrel with Wilkes, which was just dying down, Horne saw in Mr. Tooke’s wrongs an admirable opportunity for a champion of freedom, whose earlier exploits had been a little tarnished by his subsequent feuds with his comrades. Accordingly he responded very promptly, and published in the Public Advertiser of 11th February, an anonymous indictment of the Speaker, Sir Fletcher Norton, based on his unjust treatment of these petitions. This letter scandalised the House of Commons and drew the unwary Government into a quarrel from which Horne emerged triumphant; for the Government, having been led on to proceed against Horne, was unable to prove his authorship of the letter. The incident had consequences of great importance for many persons. It was the making of Horne, for he became Horne Tooke, with £8000 from his friend and a reputation as an intrepid and vigilant champion of popular liberty that he retained to the day of his death. It was also the making of Fox, for it was this youth of twenty-five who had led the Government into its scrape, and the king could not forgive him. His temerity on this occasion provoked the famous letter from North. ‘Sir, His Majesty has thought proper to order a new Commission of the Treasury to be made out, in which I do not see your name.’ Fox left the court party to lend his impetuous courage henceforth to very different causes. But for social students the incident is chiefly interesting because it was the cause of the introduction of Standing Orders on Enclosure Bills. It had shown what might happen to rich men under the present system. Accordingly the House of Commons set to work to construct a series of Standing Orders to regulate the proceedings on Enclosure Bills.
Most of these Standing Orders have already been mentioned in the previous chapter, but we propose to recapitulate their main provisions in order to show that the gross unfairness of the procedure, described in the last chapter, as between the rich and the poor, made no impression at all upon Parliament. The first Standing Orders dealing with Enclosure Bills were passed in 1774, and they were revised in 1775, 1781, 1799, 1800 and 1801. These Standing Orders prevented a secret application to Parliament by obliging promoters to publish a notice on the church door; they introduced some control over the extortions of commissioners, and laid down that the Bill presented to Parliament should contain the names of the commissioners and a description of the compensation to be given to the lord of the manor and the impropriator of tithes. But they contained no safeguard at all against robbery of the small proprietors or the commoners. Until 1801 there was no restriction on the choice of a commissioner, and it was only in that year that Parliament adopted the Standing Order providing that no lord of the manor, or steward, or bailiff of any lord or lady or proprietor should be allowed to act as commissioner in an enclosure in which he was an interested party.[87] In one respect Parliament deliberately withdrew a rule introduced to give greater regularity and publicity to the proceedings of committees. Under the Standing Orders of 1774, the Chairman of a Committee had to report not only whether the Standing Orders had been complied with, but also what evidence had been submitted to show that all the necessary formalities had been observed; but in the following year the House of Commons struck out this second provision. A Committee of the House of Commons suggested in 1799 that no petition should be admitted for a Parliamentary Bill unless a fourth part of the proprietors in number and value signed the application, but this suggestion was rejected.
The poor then found no kind of shelter in the Standing Orders. The legislation of this period, from first to last, shows just as great an indifference to the injustice to which they were exposed. The first public Act of the time deals not with enclosures for growing corn, but with enclosures for growing wood. The Act of 1756 states in its preamble that the Acts of Henry VIII., Charles II. and William III. for encouraging the growth of timber had been obstructed by the resistance of the commoners, and Parliament therefore found it necessary to enact that any owner of waste could enclose for the purpose of growing timber with the approval of the majority in number and value of those who had common rights, and any majority of those who had common rights could enclose with the approval of the owner of the waste. Any person or persons who thought themselves aggrieved could appeal to Quarter Sessions, within six months after the agreement had been registered. We hear very little of this Act, and the enclosures that concern us are enclosures of a different kind. In the final years of the century there was a succession of General Enclosure Bills introduced and debated in Parliament, under the stimulus of the fear of famine. These Bills were promoted by the Board of Agriculture, established in 1793 with Sir John Sinclair as President, and Arthur Young as secretary. This Board of Agriculture was not a State department in the modern sense, but a kind of Royal Society receiving, not too regularly, a subsidy from Parliament.[88] As a result of its efforts two Parliamentary Committees were appointed to report on the enclosure of waste lands, and the Reports of these Committees, which agreed in recommending a General Enclosure Bill, were presented in 1795 and 1799. Bills were introduced in 1795, 1796, 1797 and 1800, but it was not until 1801 that any Act was passed.
The first Bills presented to Parliament were General Enclosure Bills, that is to say, they were Bills for prescribing conditions on which enclosure could be carried out without application to Parliament. The Board of Agriculture was set on this policy partly, as we have seen, in the interest of agricultural expansion, partly as the only way of guaranteeing a supply of food during the French war. But these were not the only considerations in the mind of Parliament, and we are able in this case to see what happened to a disinterested proposal when it had to pass through the sieve of a Parliament of owners of land and tithes. For we have in the Annals of Agriculture[89] the form of the General Enclosure Bill of 1796 as it was presented to the Government by that expert body, the Board of Agriculture, and we have among the Parliamentary Bills in the British Museum (1) the form in which this Bill left a Select Committee, and (2) the form in which it left a second Select Committee of Knights of the Shire and Gentlemen of the Long Robe. We are thus able to see in what spirit the lords of the manor who sat in Parliament regarded, in a moment of great national urgency, the policy put before it by the Board of Agriculture. We come at once upon a fact of great importance. In the first version it is recognised that Parliament has to consider the future as well as the present, that it is dealing not only with the claims of a certain number of living cottagers, whose rights and property may be valued by the commissioners at a five pound note, but with the necessities of generations still to be born, and that the most liberal recognition of the right to pasture a cow, in the form of a cash payment to an individual, cannot compensate for the calamities that a society suffers in the permanent alienation of all its soil. The Bill as drafted in the Board of Agriculture enacted that in view of the probable increase of population, a portion of the waste should be set aside, and vested in a corporate body (composed of the lord of the manor, the rector, the vicar, the churchwardens and the overseers), for allotments for ever. Any labourer over twenty-one, with a settlement in the parish, could claim a portion and hold it for fifty years, rent free, on condition of building a cottage and fencing it. When the fifty years were over, the cottages, with their parcels of land, were to be let on leases of twenty-one years and over at reasonable rents, half the rent to go to the owner of the soil, and half to the poor rates. The land was never to be alienated from the cottage. All these far-sighted clauses vanish absolutely under the sifting statesmanship of the Parliament, of which Burke said in all sincerity, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, that ‘our representation has been found perfectly adequate to all the purposes for which a representation of the people can be desired or devised.’
There was another respect in which the Board of Agriculture was considered to be too generous to the poor by the lords of the manor, who made the laws of England. In version 1 of the Bill, not only those entitled to such right but also those who have enjoyed or exercised the right of getting fuel are to have special and inalienable fuel allotments made to them: in version 2 only those who are entitled to such rights are to have a fuel allotment, and in version 3, this compensation is restricted to those who have possessed fuel rights for ten years. Again in version 1, the cost of enclosing and fencing small allotments, where the owners are unable to pay, is to be borne by the other owners: in version 2, the small owners are to be allowed to mortgage their allotments in order to cover the cost. The importance of the proposal thus rejected by the Parliamentary Committee will appear when we come to consider the practical effects of Enclosure Acts. The only people who got their fencing done for them under most Acts were the tithe-owners, a class neither so poor nor so powerless in Parliament.
However this Bill shared the fate of all other General Enclosure Bills at this time. There were many obstacles to a General Enclosure Bill. Certain Members of Parliament resisted them on the ground that if it were made legal for a majority to coerce a minority into enclosure without coming to Parliament, such protection as the smaller commoners derived from the possibility of Parliamentary discussion would disappear. Powis quarrelled with the Bill of 1796 on this ground, and he was supported by Fox and Grey, but his objections were overruled. However a more formidable opposition came from other quarters. Enclosure Acts furnished Parliamentary officials with a harvest of fees,[90] and the Church thought it dangerous that enclosure, affecting tithe-owners, should be carried through without the bishops being given an opportunity of interfering. These and other forces were powerful enough to destroy this and all General Enclosure Bills, intended to make application to Parliament unnecessary.