Page images
PDF
EPUB

of the soil. It is not surprising that this should be so. From the standpoint of the 20th century there are chapters in the story which can scarcely be read without indignation. The rack and the dungeon of the Tudors are to us not more inconceivable than the callous inhumanity of the criminal law in the days of the Regent. The best, and the worst, that can be said for these instruments of brutality is that they did not outrage the public opinion of the time. Agricultural workers were not singled out for special treatment. It is the general atmosphere and contemporary standards of a period that monographs on particular branches of historical inquiry are apt to ignore. In consequence they often tend to lose perspective and to become political pamphlets. None of the three books altogether escapes this danger. The picture that they paint is too uniformly gloomy to be an entirely faithful representation of the facts. Cases of harshness and oppression do not tell the whole story. Myriads of acts of fair-play and justice, of human sympathy and neighbourly friendliness, which are not recorded in history, and do not appear on the face of legal documents, must be taken into account before we can form any accurate estimate of rural conditions.

From the 15th century onwards an agricultural and economic change had been in slow but continuous progress. It was the passage from the occupation of the land by groups of occupiers in common to its occupation by individuals. Operating by the enclosure of commonfields and the commons which were their adjuncts, it gradually transformed the medieval peasant into the tenant farmer and agricultural labourer of to-day.. By 1815 the process was practically completed under the pressure of industrial expansion, the growth of new urban centres, and, during the French wars, the menace of famine. Inelastic, adapted only to a stationary population, village farms offered little employment to surplus numbers. Close, self-supporting communities, they produced scanty food beyond the immediate needs of the occupiers themselves. Large tracts of land were withdrawn from their most productive use. Meanwhile, the cry for food rose more and more loudly from new industrial centres, and, at a later stage, was swollen by the panic-stricken clamour of a nation at war. If only

free play could be given to modern methods of production, new resources and improvements had been tested by farmers which promised to supply, and did in fact supply, the national demand for bread and meat. In these considerations lies the economic justification for enclosures.

It would be beside the present purpose to weigh the national advantages against the national losses consequent on the change, or to consider whether action, taken with Parliamentary sanction and under the existing law, was in each individual case morally justified. But it must be remembered that enclosure did not necessarily mean any transfer of ownership. The immediate effect was often to increase rather than to diminish the number of owners. What it did was to change the subject-matter of the property, and to make the change compulsory. There is no novelty in the 'blessed word '-compulsion. The general principle of enclosure was to recognise the claims of all occupiers of land and commoners who could establish a permanent independent right. Thus a freeholder, or an owner of a cottage to which common rights were attached, received a compact block of land estimated to be of the same value as his bundle of scattered strips in the common fields or his .common rights of user. On the other hand, the claims of those occupiers whose title was only temporary and derivative were not admitted. Thus tenants of land or of privileged cottages received no allotment.

The importance of the point justifies one illustration. In 1767, 988 acres of common fields and commons were enclosed at Steeple Aston in Oxfordshire. The award sets out, not only the area allotted to each owner, but the area which each had previously owned in the common fields. Land was allotted to the 23 persons who established their legal claims. The following are instances. The Rector, who owned 12 yardlands of glebe in the common fields, received, in lieu, 188 acres. Sir C. Cottrell-Dormer owned 33 yardlands and 4 "oddlands" and commons thereto belonging.' He

* Quoted by W. H. R. Curtler, 'The Enclosure and Redistribution of our Land' (1920), pp. 318-19.

[graphic]

was allotted 63 acres, 1 rood, 29 perches. Lucy Buswell, in lieu of 41 yardlands and commons thereto belonging,' received 84 acres, 1 rood, 6 perches. Robert George, 'in lieu of 1 yardland and commons belonging,' received 21 acres, 3 roods, 21 poles. John Clary, in lieu of 1/8 yardland and commons belonging,' was allotted 3 acres, 1 rood, 4 poles. Eliza Davis, 'in lieu of 23 yardlands with commons belonging,' received 53 acres, 2 roods, 7 poles. Other illustrations from similar awards might be added. Perhaps the Return of the Enclosure Commissioners given in their annual Report for 1876, may be also quoted. Between the years 1845-75, 590,000 acres were enclosed. They were divided among '25,930 persons 620 lords of manors received, on an average, 44 acres each; 21,810 common-right owners received, on an average, 24 acres each; 3500 purchasers (of land sold to pay the expenses of enclosure) received, on an average, 10 acres each. Abundant evidence exists to prove that, under the Enclosure Acts, a very large area of land was distributed among a great number of small owners in compact blocks. If the owners could have been protected against themselves in the enjoyment of their properties, and if larger provision had been made for cases in which the exercise of common rights rested on no legal basis, the social and moral injury done by enclosures might have been removed or very greatly mitigated.

...

The concluding stages of the agricultural change were reached at a most difficult crisis. In many parts of the country, even without enclosures, the old rural organisation must probably have broken down under the declining fertility of the land, and the disappearance of the domestic handicrafts and local industries which were migrating to the new industrial centres of the North. In the South and West of England, the heritage of this transfer of industry was the creation of an unemployed population which forced down the wages of agricultural labour. Everywhere, manufacture and agriculture were simultaneously reorganised on those commercial lines Which facilitated increased production at reduced cost. Farming ceased to be a subsistence and became a trade. The united effect of the two reorganisations was to

Ibid. p. 261.

[graphic]

sweep away many small freeholders, tenant-farmers, and commoners, who had lived by the cultivation or the use of land, combined with the practice of domestic handi crafts. Their places were taken by the large corn-grow ing farms which met the needs and fashion of the day The organisation of the village, in which wealth and poverty, employer and employed were almost imper ceptibly graded into one another, was broken up. With the destruction of the primitive framework went the traditions of the peasant, his inherited ideals, his ancestral customs, his habitual solutions of the problems of existence. The village was not idyllic. 'Auburn never existed. But in each of these small self-supporting communities, the members lived tranquil, sequestered lives. They enjoyed some degree of independence. They knew few changes beyond those of the recurrent seasons. They rarely took any interest in the world outside their own parish. They were not forced to face the struggle of competition. They bought so little that fluctuations in prices did not disturb their minds; almost all the simple necessaries of food, drink, and clothing were produced at home. Such conditions of self-supporting isolation can never be exactly reproduced in this crowded country and bustling century.

There

In unenclosed districts there was little or no demand for hired labour on the land except at harvest. Small freeholders, small farmers, as well as the occupiers of the intermixed strips of the common fields, worked their holdings themselves with the aid of their families. The live stock was tended by the village shepherd, cowherd, and swineherd. Nor did the style of farming tend to create employment. There were no quickset hedges to trim, or plash or weed. Roots were not grown. were no drilled crops to clean. Nor, finally, did the common-field farm afford any opening to new-comers to acquire land. It is to causes like these that the extremely slow increase of the rural population up to the end of the 18th century must be attributed. In one direction only was it possible to obtain an interest in the use of land. The common was the pasture of the village farm, and as such was an essential integral adjunct to each arable holding. But rights of grazing, and of cutting fuel were also attached to certain cottages, or might be acquired by

encroachment if the trespasser was undisturbed for sixty years. Where an owner occupied one of these privileged cottages, he enjoyed common rights as an owner. Where

1

he was only a tenant, he enjoyed them as a tenant, and in consideration of the higher rent which he paid. On enclosure, the claim of the owner, not of the tenant, would be recognised. The number of these privileged cottages was often considerable. At Stanwell, for instance, where 2126 acres were distributed under an award in 1789, 'near 100' occupiers of cottages claimed common rights. Of these claims, 66 were recognised, and 40 owners were compensated by allotments of land varying from a quarter of an acre to over an acre. Twentyfour of the 66 cottages belonged to two individuals. It would, therefore, appear that, out of the 100 claimants who had enjoyed the rights, 34 were altogether disallowed, probably because, as squatters, they had been in occupation too short a time to establish a legal claim, and at least 26 lost them because they had only the derivative title of tenants.

It was here that enclosures, however sound the legal principle on which they proceeded, often inflicted real hardships. A number of persons, no doubt, were attracted to commons by the facilities which they afforded to a life of comparative idleness, or, to use Defoe's phrase, of lazy diligence. On the other hand, to many saving and industrious men commons were of inestimable value. They provided free fuel and a run for stock to those who practised domestic handicrafts, and, at certain seasons, hired themselves out as labourers on the land. To them the common was a ladder of thrift.

Even if the use they had enjoyed was admitted as the exercise of a legal right and recognised by an allotment of land, the compensation was very frequently inadequate. On the other hand, generosity to men of this type was only possible at the expense of those whose claim to the land had been established at law. To take

the case of Steeple Aston, Lucy Buswell, Eliza Davis, Robert George, John Clary, and the other 18 participants Would have complained at least as loudly as Sir C. Cottrell-Dormer, if their shares had been reduced in order to create allotments for persons who could show no legal title.

« PreviousContinue »