[455] Ibid., vol. ix. pp. 201–202.
[456] Moore, The Crying Sin of England, &c.
[457] Cal. S. P. D. Eliz., 1595–1597 (p. 347), quoted Gay, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii.
[458] “Certayne Causes gathered together wherein is shewed the decaye of England only by the great multitude of shepe" (E. E. T. S. date 1550–1553). “It is to understande ... that there is in England townes and villages to the number of fifty thousand and upward, and for every town and village ... there is one plough decayed since the fyrst year of the reign of King Henry VII.... The whiche 50,000 ploughs every plough was able to maintain 6 persons, and nowe they have nothing, but goeth about in England from dore to dore.”
[459] For a discussion of the value of these reports see Leadam, Domesday of Enclosures, and Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. vi.; Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xiv. and vol. xviii.; Gay, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. xvii. (1902–1903). A useful summary of the evidence, with a map illustrating the probable geographical distribution of the movement, is given by Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, pp. 42–54 and Map I.
[460] It is a question how far there had ever been an open field system in some of these counties, e.g. Cornwall and Kent. There certainly were some open field villages of the ordinary pattern in Kent (see Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, p. 230). But Kent from an early date develops on its own lines, and does not go through the same stages of manorialism and commutation as other counties. Much of it seems to start at the point which they reach only in the sixteenth century. Cornwall again, though in the sixteenth century there were commons where the villagers pastured their cattle together (see accounts of Landress and Porpehan, Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.), was largely a county of scattered homesteads and very early enclosure (for the “nucleated village" and “scattered homesteads,” see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 15–16), pointing to a different system of settlement from that of the counties where the open field system obtained. For enclosures in Devon and Somerset see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, Part II., App. B: “A consideration of the cause in question before the lords touchinge depopulation," and Carlyle’s Cromwell, Letter XXIV. “Lest we should engage our body of horse too far into that enclosed country.”
[461] For intimidation see the case of Wootton Basset, quoted above, pp. 251–253, and below, pp. 302–304. Also Gay, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., New Series, vol. xviii.; and Hales' defence (appendix to Miss Lamond’s introduction to The Commonweal of this Realm of England).
[462] Professor Pollard has good remarks on this point (Political History of England, 1547–1603, p. 29).
[463] Wolsey was responsible for the Commission of 1517. For a letter of Cromwell to Henry VIII. on the subject of enclosure, and for the views of Cecil and Bacon, see below, pp. 273–274, 279, 343, 387.
[464] Mackay, History of the English Poor Law, 1834–1898, pp. 10–11, 16–17.