i8o 



READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



reveals but around two dozen villages or hamlets which were prac- 

 tically all inclosed and emptied of their inhabitants, the full half of 

 them in Northamptonshire. But even here, the incloser's county 

 par excellence, a competent local observer remarks, in 1712, that 

 "the main body of the county is champaign (open-field), . . . the 

 inclosures lie dispersedly up and down in the county. In some 

 few places are four or five lordships lying altogether enclosed, . . . 

 yet far the greatest part of the county is still open." 1 The inqui- 

 sitions show that, in the main, the inclosures are of small hold- 

 ings, ranging on the average for the Midland counties from 30 

 to 60 acres ; and, were it not that the statute of 1490 took no 

 account of decay associated with less than 20 acres, the average 

 entry in the inquisitions would doubtless be lower. Apparently 

 a piecemeal inclosure had long been going on, which, so far as 

 size is concerned, was not very dissimilar to that which left its 

 traces on the fields of Norfolk at the close of the eighteenth 

 century. 2 The figures show that in 68.5 per cent of the 1090 

 villages reported on in 1517 the acreage affected was less than 

 100 acres, while the Midland inquiry of 1607 gives 48 per cent 

 of places with less than 100 acres. 3 



Despite the inadequacies of our statistical basis, its general 

 teaching harmonizes with that resulting from a study of the great 

 era of inclosures in the eighteenth century, and is not inconsis- 

 tent with the little precise information that can be winnowed from 

 the chaff of contemporary comment. It may be stated, to resume 

 the argument briefly, that the specific inclosure movement of the 

 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the depopulating inclosure of 

 open fields with a view to the greater profit of grass-farming, had 



1 John Morton, The Natural History of Northamptonshire, 1712, pp. 13, 15. 



2 Marshall, Rural Economy of Norfolk, 17S7, Vol. I, pp. 8, 9. " Wherever a 

 person can get four or five acres together [in the open field], he plants a white 

 thorn hedge around it" (Kent, Agricultural Survey of Norfolk, 1794, p. 22). 



