TOO ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 



not of the spirit? The Puritan of the middle period of 

 the century did not hesitate. Such things were banned, 

 and although country people continued in many places 

 their amusements on weekdays, and a social revival 

 arose after the Restoration, the spirit of Merry England 

 has never been fully restored to the villages. 



Apart from these two special events, the century 

 stands for a continual change in the general direction 

 of the reconstruction already outlined. 



( Enclosures continued. Sometimes the small farmers 

 gained by this process, sometimes they lost and were 

 reduced to poverty, their fate varying 

 Enclosures. according to whether the enclosures took 

 the form of a fair division of land, creating 

 many small holdings, or an appropriation of land by the 

 lords of the manors and big farmers, and division into 

 large farms. When they lost some wandered off, as had 

 their predecessors in the XVIth century, to parishes 

 where there were still large commons and, settling down, 

 built cottages on the waste land and increased the 

 class of squatters ; others took matters into their own 

 hands, and joining their fellows in a band of ' Levellers ' 

 or * Diggers,' destroyed the new hedges and filled 

 up the ditches, hoping thereby to bring back the land 

 to common use. Legislation and government inquiry 

 on this subject went on to the middle of the century, 

 since the government still viewed enclosures with some 

 hostility, and fines were imposed on men who had 

 enclosed. Common rights were, it appears, one of the 

 questions at issue at the time of the Civil War. Un- 

 doubtedly, some of the country people who took part 

 in the revolt against the Stuarts did so in the expectation 

 that the Parliamentary party would, when in power, 



