A Short History of English Agriculture

by W. H. R. Curtler

We have now reached a time when the enclosure question was becoming of paramount importance,[184] and began to cause constant anxiety to legislators, while the writers of the day are full of it. Enclosure was of four kinds:

1. Enclosing the common arable fields for grazing, generally in large tracts.
2. Enclosing the same by dividing them into smaller fields, generally of arable.
3. Enclosing the common pasture, for grazing or tillage.
4. Enclosing the common meadows or mowing grounds.

It is the first mainly, and to a less degree the third of these, which were so frequent a source of complaint in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for the first, besides displacing the small holder, threw out of employment a large number of people who had hitherto gained their livelihood by the various work connected with tillage, and the third deprived a large number of their common rights.

The first Enclosure Act was the Statute of Merton, passed in 1235, 20 Henry III, c. 4, which permitted lords of manors to add to their demesnes such parts of the waste pasture and woods as were beyond the needs of the tenants. There is evidence, however, that enclosure, probably of waste land, was going on before this statute, as the charter of John, by which all Devonshire except Dartmoor and Exmoor was deforested, expressly forbids the making of hedges, a proof of enclosure, in those two forests.[185] We may be sure that the needs of the tenants were by an arbitrary lord estimated at a very low figure. At the same time many proceeded in due legal form. Thomas, Lord Berkeley, about the period of the Act reduced great quantities of ground into enclosures by procuring many releases of common land from freeholders.[186] His successor, Lord Maurice, was not so observant of legality. He had a wood wherein many of his tenants and freeholders had right of pasture. He wished to make this into a park, and treated with them for that purpose; but things not going smoothly, he made the wood into a park without their leave, and then treated with his tenants, most of whom perforce fell in with his highhanded plan; those who did not 'fell after upon his sonne with suits, in their small comfort and less gaines.'[187] Sometimes the rich made the law aid their covetousness, as did Roger Mortimer the paramour of the 'She Wolf of France'. Some men had common of pasture in King's Norton Wood, Worcestershire, who, when Mortimer enclosed part of their common land with a dike, filled the dike up, for they were deprived of their inheritance. Thereupon Mortimer brought an action of trespass against them 'by means of jurors dwelling far from the said land', who were put on the panel by his steward, who was also sheriff of the county, and the commoners were convicted and cast in damages of £300, not daring to appear at the time for fear of assault, or even death.[188] Neither dared they say a word about the matter till Mortimer was dead, when it is satisfactory to learn that Edward III gave them all their money back save 20 marks. We are told that Lord Maurice Berkeley consolidated much of his demesne lands, throwing together the scattered strips and exchanging those that lay far apart from the manor houses for those that lay near; trying evidently to get the home farms into a ring fence as we should term it.[189] In this policy he was followed by his successor Thomas the Second, who during his ownership of the estate from 1281 to 1320, to the great profit of his tenants and himself, encouraged them to make exchanges, so as to make their lands lie in convenient parcels instead of scattered strips, by which he raised the rent of an acre from 4d. and 6d. to 1s. 6d.[190] There is a deed of enclosure made in the year 1250, preserved, by which the free men of North Dichton 'appropriated and divided between them and so kept for ever in fee all that place called Sywyneland, with the moor,' and they were to have licence to appropriate that place, which was common pasture (the boundaries of which are given), 'save, however, to the grantor William de Ros and his heirs' common of pasture in a portion thereof named by bounds, with entry and exit for beasts after the wheat is carried. The men of North Dichton were also to have all the wood called Rouhowthwicke, and to do what they liked with it.[191] In return they gave the lord 10 marks of silver and a concession as regards a certain wood. It has been noticed that the Black Death, besides causing many of the landlords to let their demesnes, also made them turn much tillage into grass to save labour, which had grown so dear. We have also seen that the statutes regulating wages were of little effect, and they went on rising, so that more land was laid down to grass. The landowners may be said to have given up ordinary farming and turned to sheep raising.

English wool could always find a ready sale, although Spanish sheep farming had developed greatly; and the profitable trade of growing wool attracted the new capitalist class who had sprung up, so that they often invested their recently made fortunes in it, buying up many of the great estates that were scattered during the war.[192]

The increase of sheep farming was assisted by the fact that the domestic system of the manufacture of wool, which supplanted the guild system, led, owing to its rapid and successful growth, to a constant and increasing demand for wool. At the same time this development of the cloth industry helped to alleviate the evils it had itself caused by giving employment to many whom the agricultural changes wholly or partially deprived of work. 'It is important to remember, that where peasant proprietorship and small farming did maintain their ground it was largely due to the domestic industries which supplemented the profits of agriculture.'[193]

Much of the land laid down to grass was demesne land, but many of the common arable fields were enclosed and laid down. John Ross of Warwick about 1460 compares the country as he knew it with the picture presented by the Hundred Rolls in Edward I's time, showing how many villages had been depopulated; and he mentions the inconvenience to travellers in having to get down frequently to open the gates of enclosed fields.[194]

Enclosure was really a sure sign of agricultural progress; nearly all the agricultural writers from Fitzherbert onwards are agreed that enclosed land produced much more than uninclosed. Fitzherbert, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, said an acre of land rented for 6d. uninclosed was worth 8d. when enclosed. Gabriel Plattes, in the seventeenth century, said an acre enclosed was worth four in common. In fact, the history of enclosures is part of the history of the great revolution in agriculture by which the manorial system was converted into the modern system as we know it to-day of several ownership and the triumvirate of landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer. No one could have objected to the enclosure of waste; it was that of the common arable fields and of the common pasture that excited the indignation of contemporaries. They saw many of the small holders displaced and the countryside depopulated; many of the labourers were also thrown out of employment, for there was no need in enclosed fields of the swineherd and shepherd and oxherd who had tended the common flocks of the villagers in the old unfenced fields. But much of the opposition was founded on ignorance and hatred of change; England had been for ages mainly a corn-growing land, and, many thought, ought to remain so. As a matter of fact, what much of the arable land wanted was laying down to grass; it was worn out and needed a rest. The common field system was wasteful; the land, for instance, could never be properly ploughed, for the long narrow strips could not be cross-ploughed, and much of it must have suffered grievously from want of manure at a time when hardly any stock was kept in the winter to make manure. The beneficial effect of the rest is shown by the fact that at the end of the sixteenth century, when some of the land came to be broken up, the produce per acre of wheat had gone up largely.[195] Marling and liming the land, too, which had been the salvation of much of it for centuries, had gone out partly because of insecurity of tenure, partly because in the unsettled state of England men knew not if they could reap any benefit therefrom; and partly because, says Fitzherbert, men were lazier than their fathers. There can be no doubt that enclosures were often accompanied with great hardships and injustice. Dugdale, speaking of Stretton in Warwickshire,[196] says that in Henry VII's time Thomas Twyford, having begun the depopulation thereof, decaying four messuages and three cottages whereunto 160 acres of 'errable' land belonged, sold it to Henry Smith; which Henry, following that example, enclosed 640 acres of land more, whereby twelve messuages and four cottages fell to ruins and eighty persons there inhabiting, being employed about tillage and husbandry, were constrained to depart thence and live miserably. By means whereof the church grew to such ruin that it was of no other use than for the shelter of cattle. A sad picture, and true of many districts, but much of the depopulation ascribed to enclosures was due to the devastation of the Civil Wars.

In spite of these enclosures, which began to change the England of open fields into the country we know of hedgerows and winding roads, great part of the land was in a wild and uncultivated state of fen, heath, and wood, the latter sometimes growing right up to the walls of the towns.[197] An unbroken series of woods and fens stretched right across England from Lincoln to the Mersey, and northwards from the Mersey to the Solway and the Tweed; Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire were largely covered by forests, and Sherwood Forest extended over nearly the whole of Notts. Cannock Chase was covered with oaks, and in the forest of Needwood in Camden's time the neighbouring gentry eagerly pursued the cheerful sport of hunting. The great forest of Andredesweald, though much diminished, still covered a large part of Sussex, and the Chiltern district in Bucks and Oxfordshire was thick with woods which hid many a robber. The great fen in the east covered 300,000 acres of land in six counties, in spite of various efforts to reclaim the land, and was to remain in a state of marsh and shallow water till the seventeenth century.

North and west of the great fen was Hatfield Chase, 180,000 acres mostly swamp and bog, with here and there a strip of cultivated land, much of which had been tilled and neglected; a great part too of Yorkshire was swamp, heath, and forest, and of Lancashire marshes and mosses, some of which were not drained till recent times. The best corn-growing counties were those lying immediately to the north of London, stretching from Suffolk to Gloucestershire, and including the southern portions of Staffordshire and Leicestershire; Essex was a great cheese county; Hants, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, and Bedfordshire were famous for malt, and Leicestershire for peas and beans. The population of England in 1485 was probably from two to two and a half millions. At the time of Domesday it was under two millions, and from that date increased perhaps to nearly four millions at the time of the Black Death in 1348-9, which swept away from one-third to one-half of the people, and repeated wars and pestilences seem to have kept it from increasing until Tudor times. Of the whole population no fewer than eleven-twelfths were employed in agriculture.[198]