YEOMAN FARMING IN OXFORDSHIRE 199 



and a half centuries. Professor Gay's researches have done much 

 to estabHsh the fact and to determine the continuity and the 

 extent of the movement. Miss Leonard's paper adds some data 

 for the seventeenth century. The year 1760, or at least 1755, 

 marks the period at which a new method of enclosure becomes 

 popular. F^rom 1755 resort to private acts of parliament, occa- 

 sional hitherto, supplies us, as has become evident, with a full 

 series of acts and awards. Previously enclosure had gone on, as 

 a rule, by private agreement or chancery decree or had been a 

 piecemeal process unauthorized by legal formality. P'or the 

 moment we are interested in the one hundred and twenty-seven 

 Oxfordshire townships which had become enclosed in one quiet 

 way or another before 1755. . . . 



Obviously we have not data sufficient to show decisively whether 

 enclosure before 1755 caused the disappearance of the yeoman. 

 In most cases we do not know when or under what circumstances 

 the parishes were enclosed or when the small holders dropped 

 out. We have only the situation in 1785. Still conjectures can 

 be wrung even from this. If enclosure was the fundamental 

 cause of the disappearance of the yeoman, the parishes in which 

 yeomen are fewest in 1785 should be enclosed and those in 

 which they are most numerous should be open. P"rom this point 

 of view, examine the schedule. Group A exactly fulfils the logi- 

 cal demand. Its parishes have upwards of 20 per cent of yeomen 

 and are all in open field. Group B, however, with 10-20 per cent 

 of yeomen, has managed to get thirteen of its fifty-four parishes 

 enclosed. At the other end of the scale groups D and E, with 

 practically no yeomen, have fifty-four of their hundred and fifty- 

 eight parishes open. It begins to appear that the presence of 

 yeomen does not delay enclosure nor their absence guarantee it. 



Some other factor has to be considered, and the engrossing of 

 estates suggests itself. A reexamination of the groups shows 

 enclosure in far closer relation with this than with the disappearing 

 yeoman. Of the enclosed parishes in Group B, four were probably 

 never in open field, seven have three-fourths of their respective 

 areas in the hands of two or three men, and two have one-half of 

 their areas similarly engrossed. In Group C, too, seven of the ten 



