

VARYING DATES OF ENCLOSURES 165 



local circumstances or agricultural conditions. Disturbances on the 

 northern and western borders were unfavourable to settled agri- 

 culture, and village farms and commons never throve extensively \ 

 in the counties adjoining the borders of Scotland and Wales. In 1 

 districts which abounded in fens, marshes, moorlands or hills, the f 

 space occupied by open-fields was necessarily limited, although the I 

 inhabitants of the neighbourhood may have exercised over these \ 

 waste tracts rights of goose-pasture, of cutting fuel, turf, or reeds, \ 

 or, where possible, of grazing. But the land, when enclosed, was 

 taken in from the wild, and was, from the first, cultivated in separate 

 holdings. Other districts, which naturally were clothed with 

 extensive woodlands or forest, were enclosed piecemeal by individual 

 enterprise for individual occupation. After the end of the four- 

 teenth century, it is unlikely that any cleared land would have been 

 cultivated in common. Other districts, lastly, which were indus- 

 trially developed by the neighbourhood of large towns, or by the 

 existence of some manufacturing industry, were early enclosed, 

 either because of the demand for animal food and dairy produce, or , 

 because of the scarcity of purely agricultural labour. 



On these general principles, before the era of Parliamentary 

 enclosure, may be partially explained the comparative absence or 

 disappearance of open-fields and pasture commons in the border 

 counties, in the Wealds of Surrey, Kent, Sussex, in the forest 

 districts of Hampshire, Essex, Warwickshire, or Nottinghamshire, 

 hi the neighbourhood of London or Bristol, or in the clothing 

 districts of Devon and Somerset, of Essex, and Suffolk, or of parts 

 of Norfolk. No doubt enclosure of cultivated land by agreement ^ 

 was at this period chiefly made for grazing and dairying purposes. 

 But at the same tune a large addition was being continuously made 

 to the arable area of the country, partly by the reconversion of 

 grass-land to tillage after fertility had been restored by rest, partly 

 by the reclamation and enclosure of new land well adapted for 

 grain. " Consider," writes Blith, " the Wood-lands who before 

 Enclosure were wont to be releeved by the Fieldon with Corn of 

 all sorts, And now are grown as gallant Corn Countries as be in 

 England." 1 This addition to tillage necessarily affected the whole 

 of the old corn-growing districts, where a large acreage, more fitted 

 for pasture than for tillage, was kept under the plough by the 

 open-field system. The effect was more and more felt when in- 

 1 The English Improver, chap. xiii. 



