196 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



land little more valuable than the prairies, into well-managed 

 fruitful farms. That much of the common-field land when; 

 enclosed was laid down to grass is certainly true, and! 

 certainly inevitable if it paid best under grass. 1 No one can* 

 expect the holders of land naturally best suited for grass to 

 keep it under tillage for philanthropic purposes. A vast 

 number of the commoners too were idle thriftless beings, 

 whose rights on a few acres enabled them to live a life of 

 pilfering and poaching ; and it was a very good thing when 

 such people were induced to lead a more regular and respect- 

 able existence. The great blot on the process was that it made 

 the English labourer a landless man. Compensation was ^ 

 given him at the time of enclosure in the shape of allotments/ 

 or sums of money, but the former he was generally compelled] 

 to give up owing to the expense he had been put to at allot-l 

 ment, and the latter he often spent in the public-house. 



At this date the proprietors of large estates who wished fc^ 

 enclose by Act of Parliament, generally settled all the parti- 

 culars among themselves before calling any meeting of the 

 rest of the proprietors. The small proprietor had very little 

 say either in regulating the clauses of the Act, or in the choice 

 of commissioners. Any owner of one-fifth of the land, how- 

 ever, could negative the measure and often used his right to 

 impose unreasonable clauses. It is well known that the legal 

 expenses and fencing were very costly. The enclosure com- 

 missioners too often divided the land in an arbitrary and 

 ignorant manner, and there was no appeal from them except 

 by filing a bill in Chancery. Accounts were hardly ever shown 

 by the commissioners, and if a proprietor refused to pay the 

 sums levied they were empowered to distrain immediately, i 



1 Young, Northern Tour, iv. 340, about 1770 estimates the cultivated 

 land of England to be half pasture and half arable, and, in the absence of 

 reliable statistics, his opinion on this point is certainly the best available. 

 The conversion of a large portion of the richer land from arable to grass 

 in the eighteenth century was compensated for, according to Young, by 

 the conversion, on enclosure, of poor sandy soils and heaths or moors 

 into corn land. Hasbach, op. cit. pp. 370-1. 



