132 EVIDENCES AS TO DATE OF 



II 



My own researches have unfortunately been very limited, 

 of the 15,000 odd parishes in England I have only been 

 able to analyse, or to have analysed for me, some 500, 

 distributed as follows l : 301 parishes from Oxfordshire ; 

 50 from Wiltshire ; 40 from Norfolk ; 10 from Gloucester- 

 shire ; 3 from Hants, 4 from Sussex ; 40 from Kent ; 27 

 from Hereford ; 24 from Lancashire, as well as evidence 

 from half a dozen landowners in Yorkshire, Wiltshire, and 

 a Midland county. 



From these I havfc drawn the following conclusions : 

 First, that there was a very remarkable consolidation of 

 estates and a shrinking in the number of the smaller 

 owners somewhere between the beginning of the seven- 

 teenth century and the year 1785, more especially in the 

 Midland counties. Thus, in comparing the Tudor or early 

 Stuart surveys of twenty-four Oxfordshire parishes with 

 the Land Tax assessments of 1785 given in the table below, 

 we find that, while in the earlier period there were 482 free- 

 holders or copyholders, or tenants for lives, who possessed 

 of land less than 100 acres and who therefore, in all prob- , 

 ability, for the most part cultivated it themselves and 1 

 who together held a total acreage of 13,674 acres, or an 

 average of 28 acres each, these had by 1785 shrunk to 

 212 owners and occupiers with a total acreage of 4,494 acres, 

 or an average of 21 acres each. That is to say, they had 

 diminished by more than half in number, and the acreage 

 by more than two-thirds. 



Again, out of ten Gloucestershire parishes, the respective 

 positions in the seventeenth century and in 1782 or 1785 

 were : seventeenth century, 229 owning and occupying 

 6,458 acres ; 1782-5, 80 owning and occupying 1,104 acres. 



1 Many of these were for many reasons useless and the actual 

 number which I have been able to tabulate is much less. 



