120 FROM JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION 



for the same reasons that they advocated enclosures. The former, 

 writing in 1650 before the drainage was complete, speaks of " that 

 great Fen of Lincolneshire, Cambridge, Hungtingdon, consisting, as 

 I am Informed, of 380,000 Acres, which is now almost recovered." 

 " Very great, therefore," he continues, " is the improvement of 

 draining of lands, and our negligence very great, that they have 

 been waste so long, and as yet so continue in divers places : for the 

 improving of a Kingdome is better than the conquering a new 

 one." Blith, writing three years later (English Improver Improved, 

 1652), speaks of the work as finished. " As to the Drayning, or 

 laying dry the Fenns," he says, " those profitable works, the Com- 

 mon-wealths glory, let not Curs Snarl, nor dogs bark thereat, the 

 unparralleld advantages of the World." But when these and 

 other writers of the period dealt with enclosures, they treated the 

 subject from a new point of view. As a matter of farming, their 

 arguments were sound. But economic gain might involve social 

 and moral loss, and the Stewart writers on agriculture tried to recon- 

 cile the two aspects of the question. In the interests of agricultural 

 progress, they are practically unanimous in their advocacy of indi- 

 vidual as opposed to common occupation of arable land. But in the 

 case of commons of pasture, they vigorously defended the claims of 

 the commoners, both tenant-farmers and cottagers. More advanced 

 members of the Republican party went beyond the recognition of 

 pasture rights, and claimed the common, not for the open-field 

 farmers to whose arable holdings it was historically attached, but 

 for the general public irrespective of claims arising from neighbour- 

 hood or from the tillage of adjacent land. On the practical assertion 

 of such claims a curious side-light is thrown by the proceedings of 

 Jerrard Winstanley in 1649. 



Winstanley and his friends sought to establish a society having 

 all things in common. With this object they settled on the common 

 lands of St. George's Hill, near Walton-on-Thames, and began to 

 plough, cultivate, and enclose the land. Lord Fairfax's soldiers 

 burned their huts, and turned them off. Winstanley, in the jargon 

 of the day, identified the struggle, in which his personal profits 

 were staked, with the prophetic Armageddon " between the Lamb 

 of Righteousness . . . and the Dragon of Unrighteousness." Need- 

 less to say, he found himself a champion of the former. He sets 

 forth his claims in a pamphlet addressed to the General as A Letter 

 to the Lord Fairfax and his Council of War : . . . Proving it an 



