174 PREFACE 



In modern times enclosure has been carried on by act of 

 parliament, and the parish has generally been the unit dealt with ; 

 but before the eighteenth century this was not usually the case. 

 There were instances of ruthless enclosure when a whole parish 

 was depopulated and the land used entirely as sheep-run ; l but 

 occasional incidents of this kind, which made a deep impression 

 on the minds of contemporaries, such as John Ross and Sir 

 Thomas More, can hardly be taken as typical. Throughout 

 England generally, enclosure was a process which went on 

 piecemeal within one parish after another, and it was a constant 

 cause of irritation from the manner in which it interfered with 

 customary rights. Sometimes a few contiguous strips in the 

 common fields might be enclosed, either by the Lord, or by a 

 tenant with his permission, to be tilled in severally ; in such a case 

 the ground was withdrawn from the area over which cattle 

 pastured in winter, and was to this extent lost to the community. 

 Besides this, the lord might encroach on the common waste by 

 applying more and more of it for use in severalty, so that the 

 opportunities of the tenants for pasturing their stock were seriously 

 interfered with. The grievance from the increase of sheep farming 

 evidently took this form in some cases where there was no evidence 

 of deliberate depopulating. Both Cottenham and Stretham afford 

 cases in point, and there is a chorus of complaint on this matter 

 during the sixteenth century. It is plain too, from such writers as 

 Fitzherbert, Hales, Tusser, and Norden, that farming in severalty 

 was generally regarded as the system by which the most was made 

 of the land. As this improvement was adopted there was a 

 tendency for the common waste to diminish not only in area but 

 in importance, so far as the lord and his more progressive tenants 

 were concerned ; the neglected waste was sometimes given over to 

 an undesirable class of squatters. 7 



1 Cunningham Growth of English Industry and Commerce, I, 404, 448, 529. 



* See my Growth of English Industry, II. 570. A bill was introduced in 1656 

 which provided for the regulation of commons and commonable grounds, but it 

 failed to pass. E. M. Leonard, Royal Hist. Soc. Trans. XIX, 130. 



