THE PASTURE COMMONS 157 



grasse that lyeth next to them." For open-field farmers the curse 

 in the Commination Service had a real meaning. Edward Lau- 

 rence 1 (1727) dwells on the temptations to dishonesty which the 

 unfenced lands and precarious boundaries of open-fields offered 

 to the needy, and the same point is repeatedly insisted upon by the 

 Reporters to the Board of Agriculture at the end of the eighteenth 

 century. Hence it was that open-field farmers agreed among 

 themselves as little as " wasp doth with bee." Hence also came 

 the numerous law-suits. " How many brawling contentions," says 

 Lee, " are brought before the Judges every Assizes by the in- 

 habitants of the common fields." 



Speaking generally, enclosure meant the simultaneous processes 

 of consolidating the intermixed strips of open-field farms and of 

 dividing the commons attached to them as adjuncts of the arable 

 holdings. But this was not universally the case. Sometimes the 

 arable farm had been enclosed, and only the pasture common 

 remained to be divided. Sometimes the reverse was the case ; 

 the common had gone, and only the arable land remained to be 

 enclosed. Sometimes land, previously enclosed by agreement or 

 piecemeal by individuals, was re-enclosed under a general scheme, 

 probably for purposes of redistribution. Sometimes the acreage 

 mentioned in Inclosure Acts, as tested by the awards, is exaggerated, 

 more rarely under-estimated. All these differences make accurate 

 calculations of the actual area affected by the appropriation of 

 pasture-commons and the extinction of open-field farms extremely 

 difficult, if not impossible. Now that the commons as adjuncts 

 of arable farming have greatly contracted in area, their comparative 

 disappearance is deplored on both economic and social grounds, 

 in accordance with ideas which are of recent growth. It might 

 have been possible to regulate their use to greater profit, or to pre- 

 serve them as open spaces for recreation and as the lungs of large 

 towns, or to divide them on methods which recognised more fully 

 the minor rights claimed by small commoners, and would thus 

 have benefited a larger section of the community. But so long as 

 the herbage of the commons, both in legal theory and historical 

 origin, formed an essential part of the arable farm, and was subject 

 to rights claimed against all the world by the privileged occupiers 

 of the tillage land, there were practical difficulties in the way of 

 each of these possible courses. Agriculturists scarcely looked 



1 Duty of a Steward to his Lord. 



