The Making of the Land. 2 1 9 



vinced that their purses would suffer from the new economy, 

 and nothing but proof positive to the contrary was likely to 

 make them favour its cause. But the reader will see the 

 drawbacks to the enclosure system more clearly if we collate 

 from the pamphlets and reports of the period all we can find 

 on the subject, and arrange it under the four following heads : 

 viz., its anticipated effects (1) on the land itself, (2) on the 

 owners, (3) on the cultivators, and (4) on the labourers. First, 

 then, regarding its probable effects on the soil. The Society 

 of Farmers mentioned above, though weak in theoretical rea- 

 soning, was powerful in practical knowledge, and on more than 

 one point was able to further the cause of the common-field. 

 The enclosure agitation had become a craze ; even learned 

 experts like John Evelyn and Daniel Defoe had been carried 

 away by it, and thus induced to suggest the extravagant view 

 that all the national wastes, including His Majesty's forests 

 and open lands, would be better enclosed and cultivated. 

 Lamporte had adopted this extreme theory, and cited suc- 

 cessful precedents in confirmation of his opinion. But to 

 plough up the invaluable sheep feed of the virgin down has 

 long been recognised as little short of an agrarian outrage ; 

 and the Society of Farmers certainly scored a point when 

 their able scribe drew an imaginary picture of Salisbury 

 Plain, Newmarket, Odsey Heaths, etc., then excellent sheep 

 pasturage, becoming converted by the plough into wildernesses 

 of shifting sand. 



We next come to the landlord's views on the subject, and 

 here it will be well to recall to memory how the law re- 

 garded individual rights over such wastes. It is quite useless 

 for us to go behind the Statute of Merton, which was regarded 

 by the legal profession in much the same light as historians 

 regard the Flood. If any traditions lingered from out of this 

 prehistoric period, they were wholly in favour of a seignorial 

 as opposed to a popular monopoly of the ancient Folcland. 

 From the lawyer's point of view, therefore, the Statute of 

 Merton had merely lessened the rights of the tenant in capite 

 over the lord's waste in favour of the sicbfeudarii, and though 

 the former might (in common parlance) "improve or enclose" 



