200 BOARD OF AGEICULTURE. 



Enclosure Acts by Parliament, continued through many 

 reigns, from Henry III. even down to our own time, con- 

 verted over six millions of acres of the commons to care- 

 fully enclosed fields. "Thus," says a leading writer on 

 British rural aflairs in 1816, "the commons and common 

 fields, a disgrace to English agriculture, are being wiped 

 away." 



Some of the work of fencing done by the Parliamentary 

 commissions under Enclosure Acts, even within this cen- 

 tury, is worth referring to here. 



• In "A General View of the Agriculture of Devon," pub- 

 lished in 1813, a fence is described as "permanently efficient 

 for the purpose of subdivision and boundary as well as an 

 excellent protection for stock," a statement which no one 

 will challenge who reads how it was set up : — 



" Raising a mound on a nine feet base, with a ditch three feet wide on 

 each side (making the whole base of the fence fifteen feet wide), facing 

 the mound four feet high with stones, sodded three feet higher than the 

 stone work on each side, and leaving it four feet wide on the top. 

 Then planting the top with two rows of hawthorn." 



The size of these enclosures, which seem indeed to have 

 looked to military engineering for their defences, is stated as 

 varying from six to eight acres. 



In 1844, Hon. Henry Colman, ex-commissioner of agri- 

 culture of this State, made an extended tour in Europe with 

 the purpose of agricultural observation and inquiry. In his 

 published letters, in two handsome and valuable volumes, he 

 makes some interesting notes on the features of English 

 farming presented in the fences. He found the English field 

 of all shapes, often not exceeding four or five acres. One 

 farmer in Devon cultivated one hundred acres of wheat in 

 fifty fields. In Staffordshire a sixty-five acre turnip field 

 was in eight enclosures. Ninety-one acres in the same 

 neighborhood were originally in twenty-seven different en- 

 closures. Many of these farm fences occupied a strip of 

 land four or five yards wide that the plough never touched. 



It is interesting to turn over the evidences of intense 

 fencing which cover and I must believe associated with the 

 period of strongest growth of English home characteristics. 



