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keeping game for the lord’s hunting, while paddock was a small 
enclosure, often and generally within a park, for the training of 
horses, greyhounds, &c. Wherever the name paddock appears 
as an old field name I should suppose it would mark the near 
neighbourhood of an ancient house of some importance. We 
have in the Bitton survey only Greenway’s Paddock, Butterwell 
Paddock and Rusley Paddock, which I suppose to be a corruption 
of Rushy, but in the Court Rolls of the Manor in 1368 there is 
also Pat Parrok. 
Hayes is another old word for a hedge or enclosure. It forms 
the first syllable of hawthorn in its other form of hawe, and is 
well-known in Bath as a place name, East Hayes and Upper 
Hayes. In Bittan we have only Little and Great Hayes and 
Dog’s Hay, but I believe the name is much more common in 
other parts of England ; there is a whole parish called Hayes in 
Middlesex. : 
Now all these generic names that I have mentioned have one 
feature in common ; they all mark enclosures, and so they carry 
us back to the time when enclosures were the exception and not 
the rule as they are now. It is not so long ago that by far the 
greater part of England was unenclosed, and in the parish of 
Bitton I suppose that less than 200 years ago more than half of 
the parish was unenclosed, and of that a large part was open 
forest. I am not aware of a single acre in the parish now 
unenclosed. Almost during my own life-time, though not during 
my own incumbency, large tracts at Oldland Common, Longwell’s 
Green, North Common, Hanham Heath and Hanham Green, 
described as ‘‘common and waste lands,” were enclosed by the 
Act of 1819. These contained 190 acres, and at the same time 
some ‘open and commonable arable fields” called Westfield and 
Redfield, of 70 acres, were enclosed, and later still (in 1865) 260 
acres of commonable meadow were euclosed. The late Mr. 
Davidson, of Warmley, who died in 1850, told me that he had 
conversed with a man who had seen the last stag killed in 
