For even if the small farmer received strict justice in the division of the common fields, his share in the legal costs and the additional expense of fencing his own allotments often overwhelmed him, and he was obliged to sell his property.[124] The expenses were always very heavy, and in some cases amounted to £5 an acre.[125] The lord of the manor and the tithe-owner could afford to bear their share, because they were enriched by enclosure: the classes that were impoverished by enclosure were ruined when they had to pay for the very proceeding that had made them the poorer. The promoter of the General Enclosure Bill of 1796, it will be remembered, had proposed to exempt the poor from the expense of fencing, but the Select Committee disapproved, and the only persons exempted in the cases we have examined were the lords of the manor or tithe-owners.
If these expenses still left the small farmer on his feet, he found himself deprived of the use of the fallow and stubble pasture, which had been almost as indispensable to him as the land he cultivated. ‘Strip the small farms of the benefit of the commons,’ said one observer, ‘and they are all at one stroke levelled to the ground.’[126] It was a common clause in Enclosure Acts that no sheep were to be depastured on allotments for seven years.[127] The small farmer either emigrated to America or to an industrial town, or became a day labourer. His fate in the last resort may perhaps be illustrated by the account given by the historian of Oxfordshire of the enclosure of Merton. ‘About the middle of last century a very considerable alteration was produced in the relative situation of different classes in the village. The Act of Parliament for the inclosure of the fields having annulled all leases, and the inclosure itself facilitated the plan of throwing several small farms into a few large bargains,[128] the holders of the farms who had heretofore lived in comparative plenty, became suddenly reduced to the situation of labourers, and in a few years were necessitated to throw themselves and their families upon the parish. The overgrown farmers who had fattened upon this alteration, feeling the pressure of the new burden, determined if possible to free themselves: they accordingly decided upon reducing the allowance of these poor to the lowest ratio,[129] and resolved to have no more servants so that their parishioners might experience no further increase from that source. In a few years the numbers of the poor rapidly declined: the more aged sank into their graves, and the youth, warned by their parents’ sufferings, sought a settlement elsewhere. The farmers, rejoicing in the success of their scheme, procured the demolition of the cottages, and thus endeavoured to secure themselves and their successors from the future expenses of supporting an increased population, so that in 1821 the parish numbered only thirty houses inhabited by thirty-four families.’[130] Another writer gave an account of the results of a Norfolk enclosure. ‘In passing through a village near Swaffham, in the County of Norfolk a few years ago, to my great mortification I beheld the houses tumbling into ruins, and the common fields all enclosed; upon enquiring into the cause of this melancholy alteration, I was informed that a gentleman of Lynn had bought that township and the next adjoining to it: that he had thrown the one into three, and the other into four farms; which before the enclosure were in about twenty farms: and upon my further enquiring what was becoming of the farmers who were turned out, the answer was that some of them were dead and the rest were become labourers.’[131]
The effect on the cottager can best be described by saying that before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he was a labourer without land. The economic basis of his independence was destroyed. In the first place, he lost a great many rights for which he received no compensation. There were, for instance, the cases mentioned by Mr. Henry Homer (1719–1791), Rector of Birdingbury and Chaplain to Lord Leigh, in the pamphlet he published in 1769,[132] where the cottagers lost the privileges of cutting furze and turf on the common land, the proprietor contending that they had no right to these privileges, but only enjoyed them by his indulgence. In every other case, Mr. Homer urged, uninterrupted, immemorial usage gives a legal sanction even to encroachments. ‘Why should the poor, as poor, be excluded from the benefit of this general Indulgence; or why should any set of proprietors avail themselves of the inability of the poor to contend with them, to get possession of more than they enjoyed?’[133]
Another right that was often lost was the prescriptive right of keeping a cow. The General Report on Enclosures (p. 12) records the results of a careful inquiry made in a journey of 1600 miles, which showed that before enclosure cottagers often kept cows without a legal right, and that nothing was given them for the practice. Other cottagers kept cows by right of hiring their cottages and common rights, and on enclosure the land was thrown into a farm, and the cottager had to sell his cow. Two examples taken from the Bedfordshire Report illustrate the consequences of enclosure to the small man. One is from Maulden:[134] ‘The common was very extensive. I conversed with a farmer, and several cottagers. One of them said, enclosing would ruin England; it was worse than ten wars. Why, my friend, what have you lost by it? I kept four cows before the parish was enclosed, and now I don’t keep so much as a goose; and you ask me what I lose by it!’[135] The other is from Sandy:[136] ‘This parish was very peculiarly circumstanced; it abounds with gardeners, many cultivating their little freeholds, so that on the enclosure, there were found to be sixty-three proprietors, though nine-tenths, perhaps, of the whole belonged to Sir P. Monoux and Mr. Pym. These men kept cows on the boggy common, and cut fern for litter on the warren, by which means they were enabled to raise manure for their gardens, besides fuel in plenty: the small allotment of an acre and a half, however good the land, has been no compensation for what they were deprived of. They complain heavily, and know not how they will now manage to raise manure. This was no reason to preserve the deserts in their old state, but an ample one for giving a full compensation.’
Lord Winchilsea stated in his letter to the Board of Agriculture in 1796: ‘Whoever travels through the Midland Counties and will take the trouble of inquiring, will generally receive for answer that formerly there were a great many cottagers who kept cows, but that the land is now thrown to the farmers, and if he inquires still further, he will find that in those parishes the Poor Rates have increased in an amazing degree more than according to the average rise throughout England.’
These cottagers often received nothing at all for the right they had lost, the compensation going to the owner of the cottage only. But even those cottagers who owned their cottage received in return for their common right something infinitely less valuable. For a tiny allotment was worth much less than a common right, especially if the allotment was at a distance from their cottage, and though the Haute Huntre Act binds the commissioners to give Lord FitzWilliam an allotment near his gardens, there was nothing in any Act that we have seen to oblige the commissioners to give the cottager an allotment at his door. And the cottagers had to fence their allotments or forfeit them. Anybody who glances at an award will understand what this meant. It is easy, for example, to imagine what happened under this provision to the following cottagers at Stanwell: Edmund Jordan (1½ acres) J. and F. Ride (each 1¼ acres) T. L. Rogers (1¼ acres) Brooker Derby (1¼) Mary Gulliver (1¼ acres) Anne Higgs (1¼) H. Isherwood (1¼) William Kent (1¼) Elizabeth Carr (1 acre) Thomas Nash (1 acre) R. Ride (just under 1 acre) William Robinson (just under 1 acre) William Cox (¾ acre) John Carter (¾ acre) William Porter (¾ acre) Thomas King (½ acre) John Hetherington (under ½ an acre) J. Trout (¼ acre and 4 perches) and Charles Burkhead (12 perches). It would be interesting to know how many of these small parcels of land found their way into the hands of Sir William Gibbons and Mr. Edmund Hill.
The Louth award is still more interesting from this point of view. J. Trout and Charles Burkhead passing rich, the one on ¼ acre and 4 perches, the other on 12 perches, had only to pay their share of the expenses of the enclosure, and for their own fencing. Sir William Gibbons was too magnanimous a man to ask them to fence his 500 acres as well. But at Louth the tithe-owners, who took more than a third of the whole, were excused their share of the costs, and also had their fencing done for them by the other proprietors. The prebendary and the vicar charged the expenses of fencing their 600 acres on persons like Elizabeth Bryan who went off with 39 perches, Ann Dunn (35 perches), Naomi Hodgson, widow (35 perches), John Betts (34 perches), Elizabeth Atkins (32 perches), Will Boswell (31 perches), Elizabeth Eycon (28 perches), Ann Hubbard, widow (15 perches), and Ann Metcalf, whose share of the spoil was 14 perches. The award shows that there were 67 persons who received an acre or less. Cottagers who received such allotments and had to fence them had no alternative but to sell, and little to do with the money but to drink it. This is the testimony of the General Report on Enclosures.[137]
The squatters, though they are often spoken of as cottagers, must be distinguished from the cottager in regard to their legal and historical position. They were in a sense outside the original village economy. The cottager was, so to speak, an aboriginal poor man: the squatter a poor alien. He settled on a waste, built a cottage, and got together a few geese or sheep, perhaps even a horse or a cow, and proceeded to cultivate the ground.
The treatment of encroachments seems to have varied very greatly, as the cases analysed in the Appendix show, and there was no settled rule. Squatters of less than twenty years’ standing seldom received any consideration beyond the privilege of buying their encroachment. Squatters of more than twenty or forty years’ standing, as the case might be, were often allowed to keep their encroachments, and in some cases were treated like cottagers, with a claim to an allotment. But, of course, like the cottagers, they lost their common rights.
Lastly, enclosure swept away the bureaucracy of the old village: the viewers of fields and letters of the cattle, who had general supervision of the arrangements for pasturing sheep or cows in the common meadow, the common shepherd, the chimney peepers who saw that the chimneys were kept properly, the hayward, or pinder, who looked after the pound. Most of these little officials of the village court had been paid either in land or by fees. When it was proposed to abolish Parliamentary Enclosure, and to substitute a General Enclosure Bill, the Parliamentary officials, who made large sums out of fees from Enclosure Bills, were to receive compensation; but there was no talk of compensation for the stolen livelihood of a pinder or a chimney peeper, as there had been for the lost pickings of the officials of Parliament, or as there was whenever an unhappy aristocrat was made to surrender one of his sinecures. George Selwyn, who had been Paymaster of the Works for twenty-seven years at the time that Burke’s Act of 1782 deprived him of that profitable title, was not allowed to languish very long on the two sinecures that were left to him. In 1784 Pitt consoled him with the lucrative name of Surveyor-General of Crown Lands. The pinder and the viewer received a different kind of justice. For the rich there is compensation, as the weaver said in Disraeli’s Sybil, but ‘sympathy is the solace of the poor.’ In this case, if the truth be told, even this solace was not administered with too liberal a hand.