The Board of Agriculture accordingly changed its plans. In 1800 the Board abandoned its design of a General Enclosure Bill, and presented instead a consolidating Bill, which was to cheapen procedure. Hitherto there had been great diversities of form and every Bill was an expensive little work of art of its own. The Act of 1801 was designed to save promoters of enclosure some of this trouble and expense. It took some forty clauses that were commonly found in Enclosure Bills and provided that they could be incorporated by reference in private Bills, thus cheapening legal procedure. Further, it allowed affidavits to be accepted as evidence, thus relieving the promoters from the obligation of bringing witnesses before the Committee to swear to every signature. All the recognition that was given to the difficulties and the claims of the poor was comprised in sections 12 and 13, which allow small allotments to be laid together and depastured in common, and instruct the commissioners to have particular regard to the convenience of the owners or proprietors of the smallest estates. In 1813, the idea of a General Bill was revived once more, and a Bill passed the House of Commons which gave a majority of three-fifths in value the right to petition Quarter Sessions for an enclosure. The Bill was rejected in the Lords. In 1836 a General Enclosure Bill was passed, permitting enclosure when two-thirds in number and value desired it, and in 1845 Parliament appointed central Commissioners with a view to preventing local injustice.

It is unfortunate that the Parliamentary Reports of the debates on General Enclosure Bills in the unreformed Parliament are almost as meagre as the debates on particular Enclosure Bills. We can gather from various indications that the rights of the clergy received a good deal of notice, and Lord Grenville made an indignant speech to vindicate his zeal in the cause of the Church, which had been questioned by opponents. The cause of the poor does not often ruffle the surface of discussion. This we can collect not only from negative evidence but also from a statement by Mr. Lechmere, Member for Worcester. Lechmere, whose loss of his seat in 1796 deprived the poor of one of their very few champions in Parliament, drew attention more than once during the discussions on scarcity and the high price of corn to the lamentable consequences of the disappearances of the small farms, and recommended drastic steps to arrest the process. Philip Francis gave him some support. The general temper of Parliament can be divined from his complaint that when these subjects were under discussion it was very difficult to make a House.

It must not be supposed that the apathy of the aristocracy was part of a universal blindness or anæsthesia, and that the method and procedure of enclosure were accepted as just and inevitable, without challenge or protest from any quarter. The poor were of course bitterly hostile. This appears not only from the petitions presented to Parliament, but from the echoes that have reached us of actual violence. It was naturally easier for the threatened commoners to riot in places where a single enclosure scheme affected a wide district, and most of the records of popular disturbances that have come down to us are connected with attempts to enclose moors that were common to several parishes. An interesting example is afforded by the history of the enclosure of Haute Huntre Fen in Lincolnshire. This enclosure, which affected eleven parishes, was sanctioned by Parliament in 1767, but three years later the Enclosure Commissioners had to come to Parliament to explain that the posts and rails that they had set up had been destroyed ‘by malicious persons, in order to hinder the execution of the said Act,’ and to ask for permission to make ditches instead of fences.[91] An example of disturbances in a single village is given by the Bedfordshire reporter for the Board of Agriculture, who says that when Maulden was enclosed it was found necessary to send for troops from Coventry to quell the riots:[92] and another in the Annual Register for 1799[93] describing the resistance of the commoners at Wilbarston in Northamptonshire, and the employment of two troops of yeomanry to coerce them. The general hatred of the poor for enclosures is evident from the language of Eden, and from statements of contributors to the Annals of Agriculture. Eden had included a question about commons and enclosures in the questions he put to his correspondents, and he says in his preface that he had been disappointed that so few of his correspondents had given an answer to this question. He then proceeds to give this explanation: ‘This question, like most others, that can now be touched upon, has its popular and its unpopular sides: and where no immediate self-interest, or other partial leaning, interferes to bias the judgment, a good-natured man cannot but wish to think with the multitudes; stunned as his ears must daily be, with the oft-repeated assertion, that, to condemn commons, is to determine on depopulating the country.’[94] The writer of the Bedfordshire Report in 1808 says that ‘it appears that the poor have invariably been inimical to enclosures, as they certainly remain to the present day.’[95] Dr. Wilkinson, writing in the Annals of Agriculture[96] in favour of a General Enclosure Bill says, ‘the grand objection to the inclosure of commons arises from the unpopularity which gentlemen who are active in the cause expose themselves to in their own neighbourhood, from the discontent of the poor when any such question is agitated.’ Arthur Young makes a similar statement.[97] ‘A general inclosure has been long ago proposed to administration, but particular ones have been so unpopular in some cases that government were afraid of the measure.’

The popular feeling, though quite unrepresented in Parliament, was not unrepresented in contemporary literature. During the last years of the eighteenth century there was a sharp war of pamphlets on the merits of enclosure, and it is noticeable that both supporters and opponents denounced the methods on which the governing class acted. There is, among others, a very interesting anonymous pamphlet, published in 1781 under the title of An Inquiry into the Advantages and Disadvantages resulting from Bills of Inclosure, in which the existing practice is reviewed and some excellent suggestions are made for reform. The writer proposed that the preliminary to a Bill should be not the fixing of a notice to the church door, but the holding of a public meeting, that there should be six commissioners, that they should be elected by the commoners by ballot, that no decision should be valid that was not unanimous, and that an appeal from that decision should lie not to Quarter Sessions, but to Judges of Assize. The same writer proposed that no enclosure should be sanctioned which did not allot one acre to each cottage.

These proposals came from an opponent of enclosure, but the most distinguished supporters of enclosure were also discontented with the procedure. Who are the writers on eighteenth-century agriculture whose names and publications are known and remembered? They are, first of all, Arthur Young (1741–1820), who, though he failed as a merchant and failed as a farmer, and never ceased to regret his father’s mistake in neglecting to put him into the soft lap of a living in the Church, made for himself, by the simple process of observing and recording, a European reputation as an expert adviser in the art which he had practised with so little success. A scarcely less important authority was William Marshall (1745–1818), who began by trading in the West Indies, afterwards farmed in Surrey, and then became agent in Norfolk to Sir Harbord Harbord. It was Marshall who suggested the creation of a Board of Rural Affairs, and the preparation of Surveys and Minutes. Though he never held an official position, it was from his own choice, for he preferred to publish his own Minutes and Surveys rather than to write them for the Board. He was interested in philology as well as in agriculture; he published a vocabulary of the Yorkshire dialect and he was a friend of Johnson, whom he rather scandalised by condoning Sunday labour in agriculture under special circumstances. Nathaniel Kent (1737–1810) studied husbandry in the Austrian Netherlands, where he had been secretary to an ambassador, and on his return to England in 1766 he was employed as an estate agent and land valuer. He wrote a well-known book Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, and he had considerable influence in improving the management of various estates. He was, for a short time, bailiff of George III.’s farm at Windsor.

All of these writers, though they are very far from taking the view which found expression in the riots in the Lincolnshire fens, or in the anonymous pamphlet already mentioned, addressed some very important criticisms and recommendations to the class that was enclosing the English commons. Both Marshall and Young complained of the injustice of the method of choosing commissioners. Marshall, ardent champion of enclosure as he was, and no sentimentalist on the subject of the commoners, wrote a most bitter account of the motives of the enclosers. ‘At this juncture, it is true, the owners of manors and tithes, whether clergy or laity, men of ministry or men of opposition, are equally on the alert: not however pressing forward with offerings and sacrifices to relieve the present distresses of the country, but searching for vantage ground to aid them in the scramble.’[98] Holding this view, he was not unnaturally ill-content with the plan of letting the big landlords nominate the commissioners, and proposed that the lord of the soil and the owner or owners of tithes should choose one commissioner each, that the owner or owners of pasturage should choose two, and that the four should choose a fifth. Arthur Young proposed that the small proprietors should have a share in the nomination of commissioners either by a union of votes or otherwise, as might be determined.

The general engrossing of farms was arraigned by Thomas Stone, the author of an important pamphlet, Suggestions for rendering the inclosure of common fields and waste lands a source of population and of riches, 1787, who proposed that in future enclosures farms should be let out in different sizes from £40 to £200 a year. He thought further that Parliament should consider the advisability of forbidding the alienation of cottagers’ property, in order to stop the frittering away of cottagers’ estates which was general under enclosure. Kent, a passionate enthusiast for enclosing, was not less critical of the practice of throwing farms together, a practice which had raised the price of provisions to the labourer, and he appealed to landlords to aid the distressed poor by reducing the size of their farms, as well as by raising wages. Arbuthnot, the author of a pamphlet on An Inquiry into the Connection between the present Price of Provisions and the Size of Farms, by a Farmer, 1773, who had defended the large-farm system against Dr. Price, wrote, ‘My plan is to allot to each cottage three or four acres which should be annexed to it without power or alienation and without rent while under the covenant of being kept in grass.’

So much for writers on agriculture. But the eighteenth century produced two authoritative writers on social conditions. Any student of social history who wishes to understand this period would first turn to the three great volumes of Eden’s State of the Poor, published in 1797, as a storehouse of cold facts. Davies, who wrote The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, published in 1795, is less famous than he deserves to be, if we are to judge from the fact that the Dictionary of National Biography only knows about him that he was Rector of Barkham in Berkshire, and a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, that he received a D.D. degree in 1800, that he is the author of this book, and that he died, perhaps, in the year 1809. But Davies’ book, which contains the result of most careful and patient investigation, made a profound impression on contemporary observers. Howlett called it ‘incomparable,’ and it is impossible for the modern reader to resist its atmosphere of reality and truth. This country parson gives us a simple, faithful and sincere picture of the facts, seen without illusion or prejudice, and free from all the conventional affectations of the time: a priceless legacy to those who are impatient of the generalisations with which the rich dismiss the poor. Now both of these writers warned their contemporaries of the danger of the uncontrolled tendencies of the age. Eden proposed that in every enclosure a certain quantity of land should be reserved for cottagers and labourers, to be vested in the whole district. He spoke in favour of the crofters in Scotland, and declared that provision of this kind was made for the labouring classes in the first settled townships of New England. Davies was still more emphatic in calling upon England to settle cottagers and to arrest the process of engrossing farms.[99]

Thus of all the remembered writers of the period who had any practical knowledge of agriculture or of the poor, there is not one who did not try to teach the governing class the need for reform, and the dangers of the state into which they were allowing rural society to drift. Parliament was assailed on all sides with criticisms and recommendations, and its refusal to alter its ways was deliberate.