INCLOSURES IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 171 



continued agitation and repeated efforts at investigation and re- 

 pressive legislation, but we have the supporting testimony of the 

 unpublished inquisition of 1 566 for Buckinghamshire and of a 

 long series of prosecutions against inclosers under the Elizabethan 

 Tillage Act of 1563, The Buckinghamshire returns cover but 

 five of the eight hundreds of the county, and, so far as can be 

 made out from the often vague dating of the entries, deal with 

 comparatively recent offences, probably with those occurring 

 within less than ten years instead of the thirty of the more 

 important inquiries of 15 17 and 1607. Yet even with these 

 limitations it tells of 4065 i acres as affected by the inclosures 

 in 50 towns of this single county. We seem to be dealing with 

 a movement which at least from the middle of the fifteenth 

 century was gradually but steadily acquiring momentum, and 

 the figures for the period 1485-15 17 may be used as a basis 

 of reckoning, with no fear of thereby overestimating the amount 

 of inclosure. 



There is, indeed, more than a likelihood that any result so 

 obtained will err in somewhat underestimating the acreage affected 

 by the agricultural change. But for the rough approximation 

 which is all we can hope to obtain it may sufficiently serve the 

 purpose to construct a conjectural table from the known figures of 

 the 1 5 1 7 inquiry. We may assign a hypothetical figure for the 

 thirty years preceding 1485, say an acreage equal to the returns 

 from 1485 to 1499. Acting on the presumption that in the sixty 

 years from 1518 to 1577 the rate of inclosing was at least equal 

 to that of the period 1485-15 17, we may double this known 

 acreage, or, in the case of the six counties for which we have the 

 acreage for the thirty years 1 578-1607, we may take the sum of 

 the two periods. Finally, in the case of the eighteen counties re- 

 ported on in 1 5 1 7, and not in 1 607, we insert the earlier figures, 

 and obtain the following conjectural results. The purely inferred 

 totals in the table are indicated by italics. 



Hypothetical as these figures are and somewhat underestimat- 

 ing the amount of inclosure as they probably do, they neverthe- 

 less, I venture to believe, bring us appreciably nearer the actual 



