162 JETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHEND 



there was no other freeholder, they had been consolidated by the 

 landlord, who allowed the leases to expire, and re-let the land in 

 several occupation. Sometimes they had been enclosed piece- 

 meal by a number of separate owners ; sometimes all the partners 

 had united in appointing commissioners, or arbitrators, who dis- 

 tributed the open-field in individual ownership. By these private 

 arrangements large tracts of land had been enclosed without the 

 intervention of the law, and some of these processes continued in 

 active operation throughout the eighteenth century. But it was 

 difficult to make a voluntary agreement universally binding. 

 Modifications of the open-field system, which were introduced 

 without Parliamentary sanction, were liable to be set aside by 

 subsequent action. Instances of breaches of voluntary agreements 

 are quoted by the Reporters to the Board of Agriculture. Thus, 

 in one Buckinghamshire parish, the inhabitants, who had obtained 

 an Act of Parliament for the interchange and consolidation of 

 intermixed holdings, but not for their enclosure, ploughed up the 

 dividing balks, and grew clover. But, several years later, one 

 of the farmers asserted his legal right to the herbage of the balks 

 by turning his sheep into the clover crops which had taken their 

 place. In another parish in the same county, the inhabitants 

 agreed to exchange the dual system of one crop and a fallow for a 

 three-year course of two crops and a fallow. But, after a few years, 

 the agreement was broken by one of the farmers exercising his 

 common rights over the fallows by feeding his sheep on the growing 

 crops. Such breaches of voluntary arrangements could only be 

 prevented by obtaining the sanction of Parliament, and so binding, 

 not only dissentients, but those who were minors, possessed limited 

 interests, or were under some other legal disability to give valid 

 assent. 



In the seventeenth century, it had to some extent become the 

 practice to obtain confirmation of enclosing agreements from the 

 Court of Chancery, or, where the Crown was concerned, the Royal 

 sanction. There is some evidence that the threat of a Chancery 

 suit was used as a means of obtaining consents, and that an attempt 

 was made to represent the decision as a legal bar to claims of common 

 by those who were not parties to the suit. After the Restoration 

 a change of practice was made, which marks, perhaps, the growing 

 desire to curb the power of the Crown. The jurisdiction of the 

 Court of Chancery was at first supplemented, then ousted, by the 



