MORE ENCLOSURE 119 



common pasture, a park, and a small wood. There were 

 forty-one freeholders and many leasehold tenants, the average 

 freehold being 34 acres, the average leasehold only half an 

 acre, small holdings being the usual feature of the unenclosed 

 township. 



In the seventeenth century the price of wool ceased toi 

 operate as a cause of enclosure, but in many parts the! 

 change to pasture continued, owing to the rise in price! 

 of cattle and of wages. The same reason, too, for laying 

 down land to grass that had been so powerful in the pre- 

 ceding centuries still existed, the common arable fields 

 needed rest from continual cropping and poor manuring, 

 while good crops of corn could be grown from the virgin soil\ 

 of the newly enclosed waste. The preamble of the Durham 

 decrees clearly states this: 'the land is wasted and worn 

 with continual ploweing, and thereby made bare, barren, and 

 very unfruitfull.' l We may, therefore, take Coke's words as 

 inapplicable to many districts. In the seventeenth century 

 there were several methods of enclosing. Sometimes the lord 

 of the manor enclosed and left the land of the tenants still in 

 common ; or a tenant enclosed piece by piece ; or enclosures 

 were made by Act of Parliament, the earliest of which for 

 common fields was passed in the time of James I, a method 

 at this period very seldom used ; or there was an agreement 

 between lord and tenants often authorized by the Courts of 

 Chancery or Exchequer. 



Besides enclosure, another process was going on, the con-i 

 solidation of farms by the amalgamation of small holdings into! 

 larger ones. Farm-houses, as we see them to-day, began to 

 appear on the holdings thus consolidated, instead of being 

 grouped together in villages. A writer in 1604 says, 'we may 

 see many of their houses built alone like raven's nests, no birds 

 building neere them,' so unwonted was the sight of isolated 

 dwellings in most places at the time. 



1 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (New Series), xix. 116. 



