122 ENGLISH FIELD SYSTEMS 



The four general reasons advanced to explain enclosures in 

 Oxfordshire — parliamentary activity, voluntary agreement, 

 situation within a forest area or beside a river, and the existence 

 of an ancient residential estate — have accounted for nearly all 

 the townships within the county. For fifteen, however, no ex- 

 planation is at hand. Most of these are small, a circumstance 

 which in itself favored consolidation and enclosure.^ In the case 

 of the half-dozen larger ones special causes may have been at 

 work or explanatory data may have disappeared. 



So far as it is expUcable by two of the foregoing reasons, the 

 achievement of early enclosure was probably a normal develop- 

 ment. A favorable situation beside a river was itself an impetus, 

 and voluntary agreement indicates acquiescent tenants. So far, 

 however, as the desire to form a residential estate was responsible 

 for enclosure, high-handed measures on the part of the lord may 

 not have been absent. In townships where this motive came 

 into play, whether directed toward the absorption of the entire 

 area or aflfecting only a large part of it,^ investigators should seek 

 for the activity of the sixteenth-century evicting landlord — so 

 far, indeed, as this existed.' 



If we now return to those townships which in time became the 

 object of parliamentary concern and inquire what agricultural 

 progress they had made before their enclosure, we shall discover 

 that, although in some regions it was negligible, in others it was 



' Warpsgrove 334 acres and Easington 295 (both in the flat fertile valley of 

 the Thame), Stowood 593 (formerly extra-parochial, near Beckley), Kensington 

 603 (adjacent to the borough of Woodstock), VVidford 549 (adjacent to Burford 

 and now owned by a single proprietor), Ambrosden 600 (the residential part of a 

 parish which once included Blackthorn and Arncot), Prescote 551 (set off from 

 Cropready), and Nether Worton 733. The township of Studley (951 acres) has 

 been transferred from Bucks, and Little Faringdon (1161 acres) lay in Berks, when 

 its open fields were enclosed in 1788. There remain a half-dozen larger townships 

 for the enclosure of which I have no explanation, — Tetsworth (near Thame) 11 78 

 acres, Grimsbury (a rural township set off from the old parish of Banbury) 12 18, 

 Middle Aston 894, and, in the southwestern uplands, Crawley 1 1 23 (carved from 

 the old area of the borough of Witney), and Shilton 1596. 



^ The existence of a considerable residential estate is responsible for the pre- 

 ponderance of enclosures in certain townships which, since they later became the 

 objects of parhamentary award, appear in the last two groups of Appendix IV. 



' On the subject, see Gay's " Midland Revolt " and other papers (cf. above, 

 p. II, n. i). 



