STRONG POSITION OF OPEN-FIELD FARMERS 71 



admittance always excessive. Roger Wilbraham/ of Delamere in 

 Cheshire, about the middle of the seventeenth century, left behind 

 him instructions for his heir : " It will be expected of my heir that 

 he deale no worse with tenants than I have done. And for his 

 directions I have set down ye yearly values according to which I 

 deale and wold have him to deale with the tenants. My rule in 

 leasing is to take for a fine from ancient tenants : 8 years' value 

 for 3 hves, 5 years' value to add 2 hves to 1, 2 years' value to add 1 

 life to 2, 1 year's value to change a life, or more if there is any great 

 disparity in years betmxt the hves." When, therefore, rents were 

 raised or fines enhanced, the landlord was not always trying to dis- 

 possess his tenant. As often as not, he was claiming his proper 

 share of the tenant's " unearned increment." 



Against these weapons of the law the cultivators of the old 

 home-farms and of the assart lands were practically defenceless. 

 It is therefore natural to suppose that they were the principal 

 sufferers by the enclosing movement. In their case enclosures did 

 not of necessity involve any breach of the old or new law. 

 Even the provisions of the Tudor legislation were not infringed, 

 unless the land, thus cleared of its cultivators, was so used as to 

 throw any number of holdings together into the hands of one man, 

 to " decay " farm-buildings or houses, to convert tillage into 

 pasture, and so put do\vn ploughs, or to carry an illegal number 

 of sheep. But open-field farmers were in a stronger position. The 

 common rights, which each partner in the association enjoyed over 

 the whole cultivated area of the village-farm, could only be ex- 

 tinguished by agreement, real or enforced, among the commoners. 

 Nor was this consent the only obstacle to enclosure which the 

 system presented. The intermixture of the strips is recognised as 

 a protection against enclosure by the ablest of the sixteenth century 

 writers on the subject. In the Compendious or Briefe Examination 

 both the Doctor and the Husbandman agree as to the difficulties 

 which these two features of the open-field system threw in the way 

 of any general enclosure. The same points are insisted upon by 

 eighteenth century writers. It is not, of course, asserted that the 

 difficulties of enclosing open-field farms were insuperable. Ever 

 since the thirteenth century, village farms had been broken up, 

 both by large landowners and comparatively small freeholders. 



1 Quoted from the Wilbraham MSS. at Delamere by F. R. Twemlow in The 

 Twemlows : their Wives, and their Homes (1910), p. 17. 



