126 ENGLISH RURAL LIFE 



moreover, the grant of land was, in many cases, made 

 conditional on the new owner fencing it in a consider- 

 able expense. Unable to deal with these claims, 

 the little man had too often to sell his land for 

 what he could get, and either leave for the colonies 

 or the towns or sink into the class of labourers 

 without land and without common rights. Arthur 

 Young, writing in 1801, sums up the whole matter 

 from this point of view very fairly : " By nine- 

 teen out of twenty Inclosure Bills the poor are 

 injured, and some grossly injured. . . . Mr. Forster 

 of Norwich (a commissioner) lamented that he had 

 been accessory to the injuring of 2,000 poor people at 

 the rate of twenty families per parish. . . . The poor of 

 these parishes may say, and with truth : * Parliament 

 may be tender of property : all I know is that I 

 had a cow and an Act of Parliament has taken it 

 from me.'" 



jThe general result on village life of these numerous 

 enclosures may thus be surrjmed up. The labourers, 

 men who in the past had generally had some small 

 holdings to keep them occupied when work was scarce, 

 or at least common rights, [were impoverished ; at the 

 same time the destruction of the class of small peasant 

 farmers who in earlier days had formed the back- 

 bone of England was completed. By these means a 

 large class of labourers depending entirely on their 

 daily work for their livelihood was created. On the 

 other hand, the class of tenant farmers, the men who 

 have shown themselves more suited to carry on agri- 

 culture on the lines that have from that time prevailed, 

 was consolidated and strengthened. Ffnally, it must be 

 observed that when the work of enclosure had been 

 completed, there was no longer a ladder up which 



