A Short History of English Agriculture

by W. H. R. Curtler

In a pamphlet called The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, 1795, the Rev. David Davies said, 'by enclosure an amazing number of people have been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of mere hirelings, who when out of work immediately come on the parish.' It has often been said that the poor were robbed of their share in the land by the landowners; but as a matter of fact it was the expense of securing the compensation allowed them, much greater in proportion on small holdings than on large, which went into the pockets of surveyors and lawyers, that did this. It was also often through the farmer that the labourer was deprived of his land when he had retained an acre or two after enclosure. Wishing to make the labourer dependent on him, he persuaded the agent to let the cottages with the farm, and the agent in order to avoid collecting a number of small rents consented. As soon as the farmer had the cottages he took the land from them and added it to his own. The peasant's losses engaged the serious attention of many landlords; near Tewkesbury, in 1773, the lord of the manor on enclosure, besides reserving 25 acres for the use of the poor, allowed land to each cottage sufficient to keep a horse or a cow, often added a small building, and gave stocks for raising orchards. Even some of the idlest were thereby made industrious, poor rates sank to 4d. in the £, though the population increased, and the labourer always had for sale some poultry, or the produce of his cow, or some fruit.[570]

In 1800 the Board of Agriculture, composed almost entirely of landowners, noticing that the poor of Rutland and Lincolnshire, who had land for one or two cows and some potatoes, had not applied for poor relief, offered a gold medal for the most satisfactory account of the best means of supporting cows on poor land, in a method applicable to cottagers.[571] Young recommended that in the case of extensive wastes every cottage on enclosure should be secured sufficient land on which to keep a cow, the land to be inalienable from the cottage and the ownership vested in the parish.

Lord Winchelsea[572] urged that a good garden should always go with a cottage, and set the example himself, one which has been generally followed in England by the greater landlords with much success. As may be imagined, these schemes or others similar to them were put into effect by the conscientious and energetic, but not by the apathetic and careless. Further, an Act was passed in the fifty-ninth year of George III, which enabled parishes to lease or buy 20 acres of land for the employment of their poor.

In many cases, it must be allowed, the grazing of the commons was often worth very little. Let one man, it was said in 1795, put a cow on a common in spring for nothing, and let another pay a farmer 1s. 6d. a week to keep a cow of equal value on enclosed land. When both are driven to market at Michaelmas the extra weight of the latter will more than repay the cost of the keep, while her flow of milk meanwhile has been much superior.

The Committee on Waste Lands of 1795 attributed the great increase in the weight of cattle not only to the improved methods of breeding, but to their being fed on good enclosed lands instead of wastes and commons.[573] Even when commons were stinted they were in general overstocked, while disease was always being spread with enormous loss to the commoners. The larger holders, too, who had common rights, often crowded out the smaller.

There were often, as we have seen, a large number of 'squatters' on commons who had seized and occupied land without any legal title. As a rule, if these people had been in possession twenty-one years their title was respected; if not, no regard was very justly paid to them on enclosure, and they were deprived of what they had seized.

Eden wrote when enclosure was at its height; he was a competent and accurate observer, and this is his picture of the 'commoner':[574] 'The advantages which cottagers and poor people derive from commons and wastes are rather apparent than real; instead of sticking regularly to labour they waste their time in picking up a few dry sticks or in grubbing on some bleak moor. Their starved pig or two, together with a few wandering goslings, besides involving them in perpetual altercations with their neighbours, are dearly paid for in care, time, and bought food. There are thousands and thousands of acres in the kingdom, now the sorry pastures of geese, hogs, asses, half-grown horses, and half-starved cattle, which want but to be enclosed to be as rich as any land now in tillage.'

Enclosure worked an important social revolution. Before it the entirely landless labourer was rare: he nearly always had some holding in the common field or a right on the common pasture. With enclosure his holding or right had generally disappeared, and he deteriorated socially. It was very unfortunate, too, that when enclosure was most active domestic industries, such as weaving, decayed, and deprived the labourer and his family of a badly needed addition to his scanty income.

In its physical and moral effects the system of domestic manufactures was immensely preferable to that of the crowded factory, while economically it enabled the tillers of the soil to exist on farms which could not support them by agriculture alone.

This uprooting of a great part of the agricultural population from the soil by irresistible economic causes brought with it grave moral evils, and created divisions and antagonisms of interest from which we are suffering to-day.[575] If some such scheme as that of Arthur Young or Lord Winchelsea had been universally adopted, this blot on an inevitable movement might have been removed, and a healthy rural population planted on English soil. Another result followed, the labourer no longer boarded as a rule in his employer's house, where the farmer worked and lived with his men; the tie of mutual interest was loosened, and he worked for this or that master indifferently. One advantage, however, arose, in that, having to find a home of his own, he married early, but this was vitiated by his knowledge that the parish would support his children, on which knowledge he was induced to rely.