I20 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



However, in 1630 Charles I went back to the poh'cy of his 

 forefathers and issued letters to certain of the Midland counties 

 ordering all enclosures of the last two years to be removed, 

 and Commissions were issued to inquire into the matter in 

 1632, 1635, and 1636,^ the chief evil feared from enclosures 

 being depopulation, and enclosers were prosecuted in the 

 Court of Star Chamber. 



The assertion that enclosures ceased during the seventeenth 

 century has been proved inaccurate by modern research, and 

 there is no doubt that they went on continuously. In 1607, 

 in the Midlands, the enclosing of land produced serious armed 

 resistance, probably because the Midland counties were then 

 the great corn-growing district of England, and the change to 

 pasture and the consolidation of farms displaced a larger popu- 

 lation there than elsewhere. Between 1628 and 1630 enclosures 

 in Leicestershire, for instance, were very numerous, no less 

 than 10,000 acres being enclosed in that time, most of which 

 was converted to pasture. The attempt of the Government to 

 check the movement, initiated by Charles I, seems to have had 

 considerable effect, but died away with the Civil War, and 

 though other attempts were made under the Commonwealth 

 they came to nothing, and from this time enclosures went on 

 unchecked by the Government,^ and were soon to have its 

 active support. Yet there was a vast amount still in common 

 field : the whole of the cultivated land of England in 1685 was 

 stated by King and Davenant to amount to not much more 

 than half the total area, and of this cultivated portion three- 

 fifths was still farmed on the old common-field system. North- 

 amptonshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, and 

 Bedfordshire were comparatively unenclosed.^ From the 

 books and maps of the day ' it is clear that many routes 



^ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (New Series), xix. 127. 

 » Ibid. 130. 



3 See article in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (New 

 Series), xix. 



