238 OPEN-FIELD FARMS AND PASTURE COMMONS 



the vicinity of all commons, wast«-lands, and forests throughout 

 the kingdom." 



4. In the Eastern and North-Eastern counties, neither Essex 

 nor Hertfordshire possessed many commons or open-field farms. 

 A description of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Epping 

 and Hainault Forests in Essex (1795) has been already quoted.^ 

 In Hertfordshire ^ (1795) the Reporter notes that the few remaining 

 open-fields had been freed from the old restraints, and were cul- 

 tivated as if they were held in separate occupation. Speaking of 

 pasture commons, he says : " Where wastes and commons are 

 most extensive, there I have perceived that cottagers are the most 

 wretched and worthless ; accustomed to rehe on a precarious and 

 a vagabond subsistence, from land in a state of Nature, when 

 that fails they recur to pilfering. . . . For cottagers of this descrip- 

 tion the game is preserved and by them destroyed." Of Cheshunt 

 Common^ (1813) it is stated that " the common was not fed by the 

 poor, but by a parcel of jobbers, who hired cottages, that they 

 might eat up the whole." 



Two-thirds of the county of Huntingdon * in 1793 lay in open- 

 fields. Proprietors rarely had more than two or three acres con- 

 tiguous. " The residue hes in acres and half acres quite disjointed, 

 and tenants under the same land-owner cross each other con- 

 tinually in performing their necessary daily labour. . . . The sheep 

 of the common fields and commons are of a very inferior sort, 

 except in some few instances, and httle if any care is taken either 

 in the breeding, feeding or preserving them ; and from the neglected 

 state of the land on which they are depastured, and the scanty 

 provision for their support in winter, and the consequent diseases 

 to which they are Hable, their wool is also of a very inferior quahty." 



On the uplands of Lincolnshire ^ (1794) there were but few open- 

 field farms. " The sheep of the common fields," says the Reporter, 

 " I do not bring into this account from the circumstances of hard- 

 ship, attending the scantiness of their food, the wetness of their 

 layer, the neglect of a proper choice in their breed, their being 

 overheated in being (where folded) dogged to their confinement, 



1 See p. 154. 



2 Walker's Hertfordshire (1795), pp. 48, 53. 

 ^ Young's Hertfordshire (1804), p. 45. 



* Stone's Huntingdonshire (1793), pp. 8, 17, 15. 

 5 Stone's Lincolnshire (1794), p. 62. 



