122 ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 



roads were very often farmed out at so much a year 

 to contractors, and the right to take the tolls was 

 sold by auction to speculators. Nevertheless turnpike 

 trusts were a step ahead of parish management, for it 

 is extremely unlikely that the parishes would ever have 

 made the hard roads of England. Without hard roads 

 there would have been no stage coaches, and far less of 

 that coming and going of people that did much to draw 

 the country together and create a feeling of national 

 unity. 



(The effect of the new control and the new agriculture 

 on the life of the village is far less satisfactory than its 



result on the cultivation of the soil. At the 

 Enclosure. beginning of the XVII Ith century the 



enclosures and the open fields were still 

 found side by side. Perhaps a quarter of England was 

 already in fenced fields, a third in open arable fields, 

 meadows, and pasture common, and the balance in wood- 

 lands, wastes, moor and fens. 1 With the two systems 

 went the different classes of cultivators, the enclosed fields 

 tending to pass more and more into the hands of the pros- 

 perous larger leasehold tenants, who depended on hired 

 labour ; the open fields being in the main farmed by 

 small farmers, most of whom were, at that time, also 

 doing well, particularly when they added to their profits 

 by weaving, spinning and other industries. Below 

 the farmers was an increasing class of labourers, many 

 of whom were squatters on the commons, where they 

 had erected their own cottages ; these men, even if they 

 depended in the main for their livelihood on wages, 

 commonly, at that time, had a little land of their own, 

 or, at least, by custom if not by law, common rights for 

 1 See Appendix, pp. 164, 165. 



