FARMING IN OLDEN TIMES. n 



These calculations, as already stated, cannot be more 

 than approximate, but they show that the extent of 

 Parliamentary inclosure accounts in no county for much 

 more than half its area, and in some counties for a very 

 small proportion. The extent of land now remaining 

 uninclosed i.e., subject to rights of commons in 

 England and Wales is not known with any degree of 

 accuracy, but it is only a small proportion of the whole 

 area of the country. It appears, therefore, that a 

 much larger area must have been inclosed prior to the 

 date about 1700 when Parliamentary sanction became 

 necessary, than since that time. It is probable that 

 greater hardships were endured and greater injustice done 

 by the earlier inclosures, but men were then less articulate 

 and their woes are farther removed from us. It is about 

 the inclosures of the end of the eighteenth century and the 

 beginning of the nineteenth centuries that the fiercest 

 controversy arose. It may be observed that the great 

 inclosure movement, which set in about the middle of the 

 eighteenth century, synchronised with the period in which 

 other influences were at work, which, taken together, 

 revolutionised English farming and, to put it shortly, 

 established modern agriculture. 



Before jumping from Tudor to Hanoverian times 

 allusion may be made to the two authors who in the 

 sixteenth century formed the vanguard of the long array 

 of agricultural writers. In the thirteenth century Walter 

 of Henley was their forerunner, but Fitzherbert's " Book 

 of Surveying " and " Book of Husbandry," both first 

 printed in I523, 1 and Tusser's " Five Hundreth Pointes 

 of Good Husbandrie " (1573) may fairly be regarded as 

 the beginning of English agricultural literature. Tusser's 

 doggerel rhymes were very popular, and form a rich 



1 There were two Fitzherberts brothers and the authorship 

 has been variously ascribed to both, but it seems now to be 

 attributed to John Fitzherbert (see " English Farming, Past and 

 Present," p. 90). 



