ENCLOSURE 195 



closure very forcibly.^ The writer's opinion was that it was 

 clearly to the landowner's gain to promote enclosures, but 

 that the impropriator of tithes reaped most benefit and the 

 small freeholder least, because his expenses increased in- 

 versely to the smallness of his allotment. As to diminution 

 of employment, he reckoned that enclosed arable employed 

 about ten families per 1,000 acres, open field arable twenty 

 families, a statement opposed to the opinion of nearly all the 

 agricultural writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies. It is surely an incontestable fact that enclosed land 

 meant much better tillage, and better tillage meant more 

 labour, the excessive amount of fallow necessary under the 

 I A common-field system, from the inability to grow roots except 

 ' by special arrangement, is alone enough to prove this. The 

 same writer admitted that common pastures, wastes, &c., 

 employed only one family per 2,000 acres, but enclosed pasture 

 five families per 1,000 acres, and enclosed wastes sixteen 

 families. 



A • Country Farmer ', who wrote in 1786, states that many 

 of the small farmers displaced by enclosures sold their few 

 possessions and emigrated to America.^ The growing manu- 

 facturing towns also absorbed a considerable number. That 

 there was a considerable amount of hardship inflicted on 

 small holders and commoners is certain, but industrial progress 

 is frequently attended by the dislocation of industry and con- 

 sequent distress ; the introduction of machinery, for instance, 

 often causing great suffering to hand-workers, but eventually 

 benefiting the whole community. How many men has the 

 self-binding reaping machine thrown for a time out of work ? 

 So enclosure caused distress to many individuals, but was 

 for the good of the whole nation. The history of enclosure 

 is really the history of progress in farming ; the conversion 

 of land badly tilled in the old common fields, and of waste 



* Slater, English Peasantry and Enclosure^ p. 95. 

 ' Ibid. p. 101. 



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