1 64 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



1548, 1566, and 1607. l The inquiries of 1548 and 1566 were 

 apparently not pushed very far. At any rate we now possess for 

 that of 1548 but a few meager notes from Warwickshire and 

 Cambridgeshire, 2 while the inquisition of 1566, with trifling data 

 from Leicestershire, gives only enough from Buckinghamshire to 

 indicate the steady progress of the movement for this region in 

 the mid-century. 3 But the two inquisitions of 15 17-15 19 and of 

 1607, each covering a retrospective period of some thirty years, 

 furnish a considerable amount of serviceable material. Of the 

 first of these, the larger and more important part, edited by 

 Mr. Leadam, has been published by the Royal Historical Society ; 

 the second still awaits publication. Though some part of the work 

 of these commissioners is now, through time and neglect, either 

 lost or indecipherable, there is reason to believe that the lacunae 

 are inconsiderable, at any rate cannot materially affect the general 

 conclusions that. may be drawn from the map and the statistical 

 tabulations founded upon these documents. There are preserved 

 either in abstract or in full the presentments for twenty-three 

 counties returned to Chancery by the commissioners of 151 7 

 I5i9, 4 and, though the extant returns of 1607, now in the Record 

 Office in London, give evidence from but six counties, these six 

 are in the Midlands, the center of the inclosing activity of the 

 period. The entries in these returns supply normally the names 

 of the offenders responsible for the decay of farmhouses or for 

 the inclosure and conversion to pasture of arable land, the place 



1 I do not include the commission of 1636. The Public Record Office in 

 London contains the accounts of compositions made by inclosers as a result 

 of this commission, but the returns upon which these compositions were based 

 have not yet been found. 



2 The Warwickshire entries are printed from Dugdale's MSS. in Leadam's 

 " Domesday of Inclosures," 1897, Vol. II, pp. 656, 666. The Cambridge present- 

 ments (C. II. Cooper, " Annals of Cambridge," Vol. II, p. 38), are probably to 

 be referred to this commission. 



a I have also entered upon the map the few items concerning Middlesex pre- 

 served in a jury presentment of 1 556. Hist. MSS. Com., Vol. XV, Pt. II, pp. 258 ff. 



4 Mr. Leadam has published the Lansdowne abstracts for ten counties in 

 the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. 1S92-1S94, and the original 

 Chancery returns for nine additional counties in his " Domesday of Inclosures." 

 Returns for four more counties have since come to light. See my list in Trans- 

 actions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. XIV, p. 238, n. 2. 



