Ill TO SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES 45 



and the commissioners were cheated. The opposition which 

 this commission met is not likely to have been wholly 

 exceptional ; indeed we have evidence of the same kind 

 with regard to the inquisitions of Henry's time. 1 



Our difficulties do not end here. Mr. Gay assumes that 

 the movement was arrested in 1607, and in doing so puts 

 the date later than Mr. Ashley, who chooses 1530 as the 

 period when it began to slacken. 2 Yet Miss Leonard 

 points out that many of the most bitter complaints are 

 from writers after 1607, 3 notably Powell, who in his 

 Depopulation Arraigned (1636) says the evil was never 

 so monstrous, never so great, and Moore in his sermons, 

 and Taylor, who wrote as late as 1653-7. 



Miss Leonard has also brought good evidence to show 

 that the practice continued at least to the rebellion, 

 especially in the Midlands. In Leicestershire itself 10,000 ^ 

 acres were enclosed in two years, 1630-1, double that 

 given in the return of 1567-9, and five-sixths of that 

 given in the return of 1607. The counties of Northamp- 

 ton and Huntingdon experienced much the same fate, 

 while we know that in Durham the enclosures began after 

 the opening of the seventeenth century, and were then 

 extensively adopted. "We may also remind ourselves that 

 in the case of the attempted enclosure of Welcombe, in 

 Warwickshire, in 1614 or 1615, Shakespeare himself played 

 a somewhat selfish part, 4 and that in the same county a 

 serious agitation arose in the reign of James I, called that of 

 the Diggers, which spread to Bedfordshire, Leicester, 

 and Northampton. 5 Enclosure once more was one of 



1 Transactions Royal Hist. Soc. xviii, p. 224. 



2 Ashley, Introd. to English Economic Hist, i (ii). 286. 



3 Transactions Royal Hist. Soc. xix ; Slater, Enclosures, p. 201 ; 

 English Hist. Review, xxiii. 477. 



* Lee, Stratford-on-Avon, p. 295. 



5 Victoria County Hist. : Warwickshire, ii. 162. 



