SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



rated rent was C^idyT^^ paid by forty-eight proprietors. In only about a 

 dozen of the parishes inclosed before 1807 were the tithes left; in the others 

 land was given in lieu of them, generally one-fifth or one-sixth of the arable, 

 one-ninth of the sward, and one-tenth of the woods ; and in some parishes 

 a corn-rent for the old inclosures. Small parcels of land were set apart as 

 commons in many parishes : as at Henlow, 40 acres stinted at two cows to a 

 cottage. The proportion of land newly inclosed to that which had already 

 i been inclosed varied greatly. At Eaton Socon the new inclosure amounted 

 to two-thirds of the whole parish. At Flitwick the old inclosures amounted 

 to 1,040 acres, the new to 1,090 acres. At Lidlington the old inclosures 

 amounted to 1,085 acres, the new to 1,415 acres. At Marston the new 

 inclosures amounted to 1,999 °"^ °^ ^ total of nearly 4,000 acres for the 

 whole parish. The ground of complaint among the poor was generally that 

 the allotments of land granted to them were not of so much value as their 

 previous common rights. For example : as to Campton-cum-Shefford, 

 Arthur Young says that here was a rich common of 70 acres on which many 

 cottagers kept cows. In lieu, allotments of three roods to a right were made ; 

 but ' these were thrown with the rest, and the poor, as usual in so many 

 other cases, left without either stock or land.' At Maulden, Arthur Young 

 was told by a cottager that inclosure would ruin England : it was worse than 

 ten wars. Asked what he had lost by it, the cottager replied : ' I kept four 

 cows before the parish was inclosed, and now I don't keep so much as a 

 goose : and you ask me what I lose by it ? ' The common at Maulden had 

 been very extensive, and there was so much rioting at the inclosure in 1796 

 that soldiers were sent from Coventry to quell it. At Millbrook the poor 

 complained that the allotment of peat was not an equivalent for their former 

 rights of turbary. At Sandy, where the inclosure of 1,000 acres of warren 

 had recently been made, Arthur Young found the parishioners complaining 

 heavily. Then, as now, market-gardening was a local industry. Sixty-three 

 small proprietors had been cultivating their little freeholds, and had depended 

 for their manure upon the cows which they had kept on the boggy common, 

 and on the fern which they cut for litter on the warren. The small allot- 

 ment of an acre and a half, however good the land, was found by them to be 

 no compensation for what they were deprived of Mr. Maxey, of Knotting, 

 writing in Young's Annals, vol. xlii, says that, through bad management, the 

 ' effects of enclosing the poor cold lands in this neighbourhood have proved 

 very prejudicial to the tenantry, and also to the community.' Mr. Foster, of 

 Bedford, writing about the same time, says that the effect of inclosures was 

 often in the first instance unsatisfactory, but time and experience were begin- 

 ning to remedy the initial defects. The Rev. Oliver St. John Cooper, vicar 

 of Podington and Thurleigh, an antiquary and scholar, whose writings are 

 still well known in the county, published in 1796 a Letter to the Bishop of 

 Lincoln (then the diocesan of Bedfordshire), entitled 'Reflections on the 

 Cruelty of inclosing Common Field Lands, particularly as it affects the 

 Church and the Poor.' In this letter the author enumerates the circum- 

 stances ^A(hich occasionally afi^ected the clergy^ — as alterations in the value of 

 money where the clergy receive a corn-rent, and the diminution of the rent 

 of church lands, &c. He specially quotes the case of Felmersham, where, 

 within sixteen years after the inclosure, ' all the land in the parish, except 

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