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The Enclosure of Open-Field Farms. 



[Dec, 



by both historians and politicians. It is the agricultural side. 

 From this point of view the subject of enclosures is suitable 

 for discussion in this Journal, But so universal has been the 

 reconstruction of the agricultural industry on the lines with 

 which we are now familiar, and so completely has the older 

 system disappeared from our midst, that it is necessary to begin 

 with a brief description of the open-field farms which, 250 years 

 ago, still formed half the area which was then in cultivation. 

 The picture must necessarily be a general one. Space allows 

 of nothing else. But wide modifications in the system, due to 

 customary variations or local peculiarities, are so numerous, 

 that in its broad features only is the description universally 

 true. Any examination of the origin of the system would be 

 out of place. To discuss it would be to go back into the mists 

 of antiquity, and enter on a region of acute controversy, legal, 

 historical, political and social. 



The land of a Manor in the fourteenth century was divided 

 into three unequal areas. The smallest portion was a compact 

 enclosed block, reserved for the private use of the lord, and 

 held in individual occupation. A far larger part was occupied 

 and cultivated on co-operative principles by the villagers in 

 common, as an association of co-partners, both free and unfree, 

 ander a rigid regulated system of management which was 

 binding on all the members of the association. The third part 

 was the common pasture, fringed by the waste in its natural 

 wildness. Over this pasture and waste common rights were 

 exercised by the lord of the manor in virtue of his ownership, 

 by the village partners in virtue of their arable holdings, and 

 by the occupiers of certain cottages to which rights were 

 attached. An inquiry into the farming of the lord's demesne 

 land is outside the scope of the present subject. Originally the 

 land had been thrown into the village farm. Its withdrawal 

 from the area of common cultivation was the first breach in 

 the system; but by the middle of the fourteenth century the 

 enclosure of a compact block in individual occupation for the 

 private use of the lord had become very general. Whether it- 

 was left in the village farm, or enclosed for private use, it was 

 mainly cultivated by the labour services of the open-field 

 farmers, who paid rent in the form of labour on the demesne 

 for their holdings in the village partnership. The legal and 

 social position of these tenant labourers largely depended on 

 the nature of the services which they thus rendered to their 

 lord. The highest in the social scale were those who gave 



