Of the protests of the time the most important and significant came from Arthur Young. No man had been so impatient of objections to enclosure: no man had taken so severe and disciplinary a view of the labourer: no man had dismissed so lightly the appeals for the preservation of the fragmentary possessions of the poor. He had taught a very simple philosophy, that the more the landowner pressed the farmer, and the more the farmer pressed the labourer, the better it was for agriculture. He had believed as implicitly as Sinclair himself, and with apparently as little effort to master the facts, that the cottagers were certain to benefit by enclosure. All this gives pathos, as well as force, to his remarkable paper, published under the title An Inquiry into the Propriety of applying Wastes to the better Maintenance and Support of the Poor.
The origin of this document is interesting. It was written in 1801, a few years after the Speenhamland system had begun to fix itself on the villages. The growth of the poor rates was troubling the minds of the upper and middle classes. Arthur Young, in the course of his travels at this time, stumbled on the discovery that in those parishes where the cottagers had been able to keep together a tiny patch of property, they had shown a Spartan determination to refuse the refuge of the Poor Law. When once he had observed this, he made further investigations which only confirmed his first impressions. This opened his eyes to the consequences of enclosure as it had been carried out, and he began to examine the history of these operations in a new spirit. He then found that enclosure had destroyed with the property of the poor one of the great incentives to industry and self-respect, and that his view that the benefit of the commons to the poor was ‘perfectly contemptible,’ and ‘when it tempts them to become owners of cattle or sheep usually ruinous,’[100] was fundamentally wrong. Before the enclosures, the despised commons had enabled the cottager to keep a cow, and this, so far from bringing ruin, had meant in very many cases all the difference between independence and pauperism. His scrutiny of the Acts convinced him that in respect of this they had been unjust. ‘By nineteen out of twenty Inclosure Bills the poor are injured, and some grossly injured.... Mr. Forster of Norwich, after giving me an account of twenty inclosures in which he had acted as Commissioner, stated his opinion on their general effect on the poor, and lamented that he had been accessory to the injuring of 2000 poor people, at the rate of twenty families per parish.... The poor in these parishes may say, and with truth, “Parliament may be tender of property: all I know is that I had a cow and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me.”’
This paper appeared on the eve of the Enclosure Act of 1801, the Act to facilitate and cheapen procedure, which Young and Sinclair had worked hard to secure. It was therefore an opportune moment for trying to temper enclosure to the difficulties of the poor. Arthur Young made a passionate appeal to the upper classes to remember these difficulties. ‘To pass Acts beneficial to every other class in the State and hurtful to the lowest class only, when the smallest alteration would prevent it, is a conduct against which reason, justice and humanity equally plead.’ He then proceeded to outline a constructive scheme. He proposed that twenty millions should be spent in setting up half a million families with allotments and cottages: the fee-simple of the cottage and land to be vested in the parish, and possession granted under an Act of Parliament, on condition that if the father or his family became chargeable to the rates, the cottage and land should revert to the parish. The parishes were to carry out the scheme, borrowing the necessary money on the security of the rates.[101] ‘A man,’ he told the landlords, in a passage touched perhaps with remorse as well as with compassion, ‘will love his country the better even for a pig.’ ‘At a moment,’ so he concludes, ‘when a General Inclosure of Wastes is before Parliament, to allow such a measure to be carried into execution in conformity with the practice hitherto, without entering one voice, however feeble, in defence of the interests of the poor, would have been a wound to the feelings of any man not lost to humanity who had viewed the scenes which I have visited.’
The appeal broke against a dense mass of class prejudice, and so far as any effect on the Consolidating Act of 1801 is concerned, Arthur Young might never have written a line. This is perhaps not surprising, for we know from Young’s autobiography (p. 350) that he did not even carry the Board of Agriculture with him, and that Lord Carrington, who was then President, only allowed him to print his appeal on the understanding that it was not published as an official document, and that the Board was in no way identified with it. Sinclair, who shared Young’s conversion, had ceased to be President in 1798. The compunction he tried to awaken did affect an Act here and there. A witness before the Allotments Committee of 1843 described the arrangements he contrived to introduce into an Enclosure Act. The witness was Mr. Demainbray, an admirable and most public-spirited parson, Rector of Broad Somerford in Wiltshire. Mr. Demainbray explained that when the Enclosure Act for his parish was prepared in 1806, he had been pressed to accept land in lieu of tithes, and that he took the opportunity to stipulate for some provision for the poor. As a consequence of his efforts, half an acre was attached to each cottage on the waste, the land being vested in the rector, churchwardens and overseers for the time being, and eight acres were reserved for the villagers for allotment and reallotment every Easter. This arrangement, which had excellent results, ‘every man looking forward to becoming a man of property,’ was copied in several of the neighbouring parishes. Dr. Slater has collected some other examples. One Act, passed in 1824 for Pottern in Wiltshire, vested the ownership of the enclosed common in the Bishop of Salisbury, who was lord of the manor, the vicar, and the churchwardens, in trust for the parish. The trustees were required to lease it in small holdings to poor, honest and industrious persons, who had not, except in cases of accident or sickness, availed themselves of Poor Law Relief.[102] Thomas Stone’s proposal for making inalienable allotments to cottagers was adopted in two or three Acts in the eastern counties, but the Acts that made some provision for the poor do not amount, in Dr. Slater’s opinion, to more than one per cent. of the Enclosure Acts passed before 1845,[103] and this view is corroborated by the great stress laid in the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, upon a few cases where the poor were considered, and by a statement made by Mr. Demainbray in a pamphlet published in 1831.[104] In this pamphlet Mr. Demainbray quotes what Davies had said nearly forty years earlier about the effect of enclosures in robbing the poor, and then adds: ‘Since that time many hundred enclosures have taken place, but in how few of them has any reserve been made for the privileges which the poor man and his ancestors had for centuries enjoyed?’
Some interesting provisions are contained in certain of the Acts analysed in the Appendix. At Stanwell the commissioners were to set aside such parcel as they thought proper not exceeding thirty acres, to be let out and the rents and profits were to be given for the benefit of such occupiers and inhabitants as did not receive parochial relief or occupy lands and tenements of more than £5 a year, and had not received any allotment under the Act. Middleton, the writer of the Report on Middlesex, says that the land produced £30 a year,[105] and he remarks that this is a much better way of helping the poor than leaving them land for their use. We may doubt whether the arrangement seemed equally attractive to the poor. It could not have been much compensation to John Carter, who owned a cottage, to receive three roods, twenty-six perches in lieu of his rights of common, which is his allotment in the award, for three-quarters of an acre is obviously insufficient for the pasture of a cow, but it was perhaps still less satisfactory for James Carter to know that one acre and seven perches were allotted to the ‘lawful owner or owners’ of the cottage and land which he occupied, and that his own compensation for the loss of his cow or sheep or geese was the cold hope that if he kept off the rates, Sir William Gibbons, the vicar, and the parish officers might give him a dole. The Laleham Commissioners were evidently men of a rather grim humour, for, in setting aside thirteen acres for the poor, they authorised the churchwardens and overseers to encourage the poor, if they were so minded, by letting this plot for sixty years and using the money so received to build a workhouse. A much more liberal provision was made at Cheshunt, where the poor were allowed 100 acres. At Knaresborough and Louth, the poor got nothing at all.
Before we proceed to describe the results of enclosure on village life, we may remark one curious fact. In 1795 and 1796 there was some discussion in the House of Commons of the condition of the agricultural labourers, arising out of the proposal of Whitbread’s to enable the magistrates to fix a minimum wage. Pitt made a long speech in reply, and promised to introduce a scheme of his own for correcting evils that were too conspicuous to be ignored. This promise he kept next year in the ill-fated Poor Law Bill, which died, almost at its birth, of general hostility. That Bill will be considered elsewhere. All that we are concerned to notice here is that neither speech nor Bill, though they cover a wide range of topics, and though Pitt said that they represented the results of long and careful inquiry, hint at this cause of social disturbance, or at the importance of safe-guarding the interests of the poor in future enclosure schemes: this in spite of the fact that, as we have seen, there was scarcely any contemporary writer or observer who had not pointed out that the way in which the governing class was conducting these revolutions was not only unjust to the poor but perilous to the State.
It is interesting, in the light of the failure to grasp and retrieve an error in national policy which marks the progress of these transactions, to glance at the contemporary history of France. The Legislative Assembly, under the influence of the ideas of the economists, decreed the division of the land of the communes in 1792. The following year this decree was modified. Certain provincial assemblies had asked for division, but many of the villages were inexorably hostile. The new decree of June 1793 tried to do justice to these conflicting wishes by making division optional. At the same time it insisted on an equitable division in cases where partition took place. But this policy of division was found to have done such damage to the interests of the poor that there was strenuous opposition, with the result that in 1796 the process was suspended, and in the following year it was forbidden.[106] Can any one suppose that if the English legislature had had as swift and ready a sense for things going wrong, the policy of enclosure would have been pursued after 1801 with the same reckless disregard for its social consequences?
We have given in the last chapter the history of an enclosure project for the light it throws on the play of motive in the enclosing class. We propose now to give in some detail the history of an enclosure project that succeeded for the light it throws on the attention which Parliament paid to local opinion, and on the generally received views as to the rights of the small commoners. Our readers will observe that this enclosure took place after the criticisms and appeals which we have described had all been published.
Otmoor is described in Dunkin’s History of Oxfordshire,[107] as a ‘dreary and extensive common.’ Tradition said that the tract of land was the gift of some mysterious lady ‘who gave as much ground as she could ride round while an oat-sheaf was burning, to the inhabitants of its vicinity for a public common,’ and hence came its name of Oatmoor, corrupted into Otmoor. Whatever the real origin of the name, which more prosaic persons connected with ‘Oc’, a Celtic word for ‘water,’ this tract of land had been used as a ‘public common without stint ... from remote antiquity.’ Lord Abingdon, indeed, as Lord of the Manor of Beckley, claimed and exercised the right of appointing a moor-driver, who at certain seasons drove all the cattle into Beckley, where those which were unidentified became Lord Abingdon’s property. Lord Abingdon also claimed rights of soil and of sport: these, like his other claim, were founded on prescription only, as there was no trace of any grant from the Crown.