The Alisuianageinent of Landed Property. 2)17 



stantly to be found on holdings yielding a mere £100 per 

 annum in rent. In Gloucestershire they are described as 

 considerabl}^ too large for the holding. But in both this and 

 the Norfolk district, the farmers refused to stack their cereals 

 on staddles, and preferred to utilise the barn in order to save 

 the trouble of thatching. 



Buildings, as a rule, were badly situated, m.ore often than 

 not in groups among the villages, and far away from the land, 

 which often stretched in a long line from one end of the lord- 

 ship to another. This we find from the reports to be the case 

 in the West and East Ridings of Yorkshire, Hertfordshire, 

 parts of Middlesex, Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, etc. Here 

 again is a case where the bad effects of the older economy 

 permeated the new. Few landlords were like Jonathan Ack- 

 ham of Wiseton, who (we learn from the Nottinghamshire 

 report), as soon as the Enclosure Act dealing with his district 

 became law, erected seven brand new homesteads on central 

 sites about his estate. Even in Derbyshire, where materials 

 were so handy that every necessary building for a holding 

 yielding £200 a year in rent, could be erected for £500, 

 we find no such wholesale improvements as this. Though 

 Northumbrian architects were still building homesteads in a 

 line rather than in a square, we read of more than one new 

 set of farm buildings in Staffordshire laid out so as to shelter 

 a compact fold-yard ; of the model farm at Sutton Court, near 

 Chiswick, where the farmyards were so constructed as to 

 shelter cattle from the weather ; and of a similar principle 

 both advocated and practised in the East Riding of Yorkshire.^ 

 In the cheesemaking districts of North Wilts, buildings, 

 especially dairies and cowhouses, were more advanced than 

 those amidst purely arable localities. No farmer seems to have 

 really believed that his corn was the better for being housed 

 in the barn ; but all thatching, besides being expensive, 

 tended, as the correspondent from the East Riding points out, 

 to deprive the land of manure. It would appear that the 

 Dutch barn was already known, for the Staffordshire reporter 



^ Some architects advocated the pol\'gon for the proper shape of farm 

 buikliugs, vide Bees'' Cyclo., sub vac. "Farm." 



