2 26 History of the English Landed Interest. 



to pay a little increase of rent for the enclosure than meet the 

 indirect charges which landlords demanded for common rights.^ 

 They retorted that " during the winter none but fools and mad- 

 men would neglect to house their Uvestock somehow or other" ;^ 

 that in the early portion of the summer the herbage of the 

 commons was quite as useful, though not so fattening, as that 

 of the meadow land ; and that the advantage of stacking the 

 whole of his first grass crops which the commons afforded him 

 fully compensated the farmer for any indirect charge in the 

 lease which commonage rights entailed. What, they asked, 

 did it signify if in a few exceptional parishes the farmers were 

 called upon to pay a trifling charge of fourpence or sixpence 

 per beast every year at branding time ? They themselves and 

 their neighbours had unlimited rights of commonage free from 

 all manorial and parochial restrictions as to quality and quan- 

 tity of livestock, and were only controlled by their own 

 prudence as to the limits of the head of livestock kept by 

 each. The majority of English farmers like themselves en- 

 tered, they contended, upon their tenancies, or signed their 

 agreements, after they had surveyed each field, estimated its 

 rental value per acre, and compared it with the price demanded, 

 without any reference whatever to the area and quality of 

 commonage available.^ 



Turning once more, however, to the Reports of those more 

 advanced husbandmen who corresponded with the Board of 

 Agriculture, we find the preponderance of opinion weighing 

 the scale in the opposite direction. The condition of the 

 wheat market, and the opening up of fresh communication by 

 navigable canals, whereby farmers could obtain lime, marl, 

 etc., almost at their very doors, had naturally given an impetus 

 to the enclosure system. Thus, while the average number of 

 Enclosure Acts during the thirty-three years of the reign of 

 George II. was only seven per annum, it amounted to forty- 

 seven during the twenty-eight years from 1760 to 1785, and 



' Cursory Remarks on the Importance of Agriculture^ etc., 1785. 

 ^ A practice which we shall later on show to have been anything but 

 universal. 



* A Political Inquiry, efc, Holborn. 1785 



