292 THE RURAL POPULATION, 1780-1813 



acts, a great portion of the unstinted common lands remain nearly 

 as nature left them ; appearing in the present state of civihsation and 

 science, as filthy blotches on the face of the country ; especially when 

 seen under the threatening clouds of famine which have now 

 repeatedly overspread it." ^ 



It does not appear that the necessary result of the enclosing 

 movement was to diminish the number of occupying owners. On 

 the contrary, the first efifect of an enclosure was to increase the free- 

 holders, smce rights of open arable field occupation and of pasture 

 common were often replaced by allotments of land in separate 

 ownership. After 1689, the decline in the number of owners of 

 small estates begins to be noted by contemporary writers.^ "At 

 the Revolution," says a " Suffolk Gentleman,"^ " there existed a 

 race of Men in the Country besides the Gentlemen and Husbandmen, 

 called Yeomanry, Men who cultivated their own property, consisting 

 chiefly of farms from forty to fourscore pounds a year . . . the 

 Pride of the Nation in War and Peace . . . hardy, brave, and of 

 good morals." Their alleged disappearance can only have been 

 remotely due to enclosure, if, as the " Suffolk Gentleman " says, 

 " by the influx of riches and a change of manners, they were nearly 

 annihilated in the year_1750." On the other hand, a considerable 

 body of evidence exists to show that, after the accession of George 

 III., a reaction had set in, and that small owners were not only 

 numerous, but actually increasing in numbers. Thus Marshall, 

 writing in 1790 of small freeholders both in Yorkshire (Vale of 

 Pickering) and in Leicestershire, says : " Some years back, the same 

 species of frenzy, — Terramania — showed itself here, as it did in 

 other districts. Forty years purchase was, then, not unfrequently 

 given."'* The Reports to the Board of Agriculture (1793-1815) 

 show that in many parts of the country small owners not only held 

 their ground, but once more were buying land. Thus of the north- 

 eastern counties generally, Young ^ states that " farmers have been 

 very considerable purchasers of land." Norfolk (1804) is said to 



^ The Appropriation and Inclosure of Commonable and Intermixed Lands 

 (1801). 



^ Authorities are quoted in The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, 

 by the Rev. A. H. Johnson (1909), pp. 136-8. 



^ Letter to Sir T. C. Bunbury, Bart., on the Poor Rates and the High Price of 

 Provisions (1795). 



* Rural Economy of the Midland Counties, vol. i. p. 16. 



* Young's Hertfordshire (1804), p. 18. 



