158 JETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHEND 



beyond the undrained and impoverished condition of the pastures ; 

 lawyers held that rights of common, claimed apart from the tenure 

 of arable land or ancient cottages, were in the nature of encroach- 

 ments or trespass ; economists condemned their occupation in 

 common as a wasteful and unprofitable use of the land ; social 

 reformers pointed to the attractions which commons possessed for 

 idlers, and deplored their influence on morals and industry. All 

 these classes may have been, consciously or unconsciously, self- 

 interested. There were few, certainly, who realised the full con- 

 sequences of enclosures, or appreciated the strength of the impulse 

 which the enclosing movement would give to capitalist farming, 

 and the immediate success of the agricultural change removed the 

 hesitation even of the most far-seeing. 



Custom in the course of centuries had dealt hardly with the 

 commons. Many of them were unstinted, and were consequently 

 overcharged with stock, which often belonged to jobbers and not 

 to the commoners. Even in good seasons, there was barely enough 

 grass to keep the cattle and sheep alive. In bad seasons, when 

 the weather was cold or wet, and the grass late and scanty, many 

 died from want of food. In other cases, while the main body of 

 commoners were restricted in the number of their stock, one or 

 more commoners, not always lords of adjacent manors, were 

 restrained by no limit, and not only turned out as many of their 

 own sheep and cattle as they could, but also took in those of 

 strangers. The poorer the commoner, the less was the benefit he 

 derived. If the commons were stinted, every commoner, who 

 occupied other pasture land in severalty, saved his own grass till 

 the last moment by keeping his sheep and cattle on the common, 

 and the small man, who had no other refuge for his live-stock, was 

 the sufferer. Where the commons, again, were stinted, the richer 

 men frequently turned out more than the custom allowed, and the 

 smaller commoners had lost the protection of the old Courts Baron, 

 where the offenders, before the decay of those tribunals, would have 

 been " presented." Monied men turned stock-jobbers or dealers, 

 hired land at double rents on the edge of the commons, and so 

 obtained grazing rights which they exercised by overstocking the 

 land with their own sheep and cattle or by agisting the live-stock 

 of strangers. It was thus that, in 1793, " an immense number of 

 greyhound-like sheep, pitiful half-starved-looking animals, subject 

 to rot," crowded Hounslow Heath, and that in 1804 the common 



