MORE ENCLOSURE lai 



which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, 

 corn-fields, hay-fields, and bean-fields then ran through nothing 

 but heath, swamp, and warren. In the drawings of an English 

 landscape made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo 



scarce a hedgerow is to be seen At Enfield, hardly 



out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of five- 

 and-twenty miles in circumference which contained only three 

 houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.'^ The enclosure of 

 these areas was to be mainly the work of the latter half of the 

 eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries. 



The amount of enclosure in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the 

 first half of the seventeenth centuries was, according to the 

 latest research, much, and perhaps very naturally, exaggerated 

 by contemporaries. Between 1 455-1 607 the enclosures in 

 twenty-four counties are said to have amounted to some 

 500,000 acres, or 276 of their total area,^ but the evidence for 

 this is by no means conclusive. However, there seems no 

 reason to doubt that the enclosure of this period was but 

 a faint beginning of that great outburst of it that marked the 

 agrarian revolution of the middle of the eighteenth century, 

 and that it was mainly confined to the Midland counties. 

 Mr. Johnson, in his recent Ford Lectures, has stated that the 

 enclosure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not 

 accompanied by very much direct eviction of freeholders or 

 bona fide copyholders of inheritance ; yet the small holder 

 suffered in many ways, e.g. by the lord disproving the heredi- 

 tary character of the copyhold, or by changing copyholds of 

 inheritance into copyholds for lives or leases for lives or years. 



' Macaulay, History of England, ch. iii. 



''■ Quarterly Journal of Economics, xvii. 587. Considering that the 

 legislature of the sixteenth century was against enclosure and depopula- 

 tion, it is hard to understand 31 Eliz., c. 7, which forbade cottages to 

 be erected unless 4 acres of land were attached thereto, in order to avoid 

 the great inconvenience caused by the ' buyldinge of great nombers and 

 multitude of cottages, which are daylie more and more increased in many 

 partes of this realme'. How was it that cottages had increased so much 

 in rural districts, which are of course alluded to, in spite of enclosure ? 



