126 FROM JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION 



share he had himself taken in the enclosure of Catthorp Common. 

 In his Epistle to the Reader he explains why he preferred to reply 

 to these attacks by a tract and not by a sermon : "I am very 

 sensible that if our pulpits had sounded more of the things of 

 Christ, and lesse of the things of the world, it had been better with 

 us then it is this day." Part of the tract consists of hard text- 

 fighting ; but its value lies in the facts which he quotes from his 

 own experience. 



Enclosures, in the opinion of the three writers, are not only 

 " lawfull " but " laudable. ' They injure none, but profit all. 

 Lee considers that five classes ought to be considered, landlords, 

 ministers, the poor, cottagers, and tenant-farmers. Moore omits 

 the ministers, but asserts the claims of the remaining four classes. 

 All three writers agree that a certain portion of the Commons ought 

 to be set aside for the poor, and the rest proportionately divided. 

 This, says Lee, was the principle adopted at Catthorp. If this 

 were done, there need be no depopulation. In proof Lee mentions 

 a number of parishes in Leicestershire, where the land had been 

 enclosed without any decay of population, houses, or tillage. 

 Neither would it lead to any diminution of useful employment. 

 The same number of maid-servants would be employed ; and 

 though there might be fewer lads, they would be more useful 

 citizens if set to some trade. On the industrial gain thus derived 

 from enclosures the three authors are also agreed. They in effect 

 answer the fourth question asked by Robert Child in the " Large 

 Letter " in Hartlib's Legacie with an unhesitating affirmative. At 

 the beginning of the century, Norden (1607) had drawn attention 

 to the character of the squatters who settled on the edges of wastes 

 and commons. He describes them as " people given to little or 

 no labour, living very hardly with oaten bread and sour whey and 

 goat's milk, dwelling far from any church or chapel, ... as ignorant 

 of God or of any civil course of life as the very savages among the 

 infidels, in a manner which is lamentable and fit to be reformed by 

 the lord of the manor." Fifty years later, according to the three 

 authors, commons were blots on the social life of the nation. 

 Children, says Taylor, are " brought up Lazying upon a Common 

 to attend one Cow and a few sheep," and " being nursed up in 

 idleness in their youth they become indisposed for labor, and then 

 begging is their portion or Theevery their Trade. . . . The two 

 great Nurseries of Idlenesse and Bcggery etc. are Ale-houses and 



