V AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES 105 



usage was to establish a right. In some cases a piece of 

 common was reserved for the cottagers, in a few they 

 received a separate allotment, but so small as to be value- 

 less, except that they had something to sell. 1 With the 

 General Enclosure Act of 1845, however, a change for the 

 better was inaugurated. Much more attention was paid 

 to the interests of the public and to those of the poor, and 

 the Commissioners, in their Report of 1876, boasted that 

 by their 946 awards between 1845 and 1876, ( they not only 

 redeemed an area from common and waste equal to that of 

 a whole county, but that they had divided this acreage 

 among a far larger and more varied body of landowners 

 than that of any county in England/ 2 

 \^ Even so, enclosure facilitated consolidation. As long as 

 the common field existed, with its endless divisions and 

 irksome restrictions, there was little inducement for the 

 larger landholder to buy ; but that once gone, with its 

 commonable rights, consolidation became not only possible 

 but profitable. 3 



yln every way then, both directly and indirectly, enclo- 

 sures tended to divorce the poor man from the soil. It 

 would^ however, be a great mistake to imagine that 

 enclosure was the sole, or even the chief, cause for this 

 change which was coming over England during the 

 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, Ed. Lawrence, 

 when suggesting how a preparation for enclosure might be 

 made, shows that the same result might have been slowly 

 attained by the buying up of all the interests, 4 and, as we 

 shall subsequently show, it does not appear that enclosure | 



1 Mantoux, p. 162, and authorities quoted ; Scruton, p. 159. 



2 Board of Agriculture, Annual Report, 1903, pp. 11, 30 ; the acreage 

 was about 618,000. 



3 General Report on Enclosures, 1808, p. 32. 



' A vigilant steward should be zealous for his lord's sake, in 

 rchasing all the freeholders out as soon as possible, especially 



