1921.] Agricultural Labour Early Last CE^^TURY. 587 



If we turn to England we find that the old village was dis- 

 solved in a very different manner. The agrarian revolution 

 which began with the conclusion of the IGth century and was in 

 full force between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle 

 of the nineteenth centuries destroyed the village as a society 

 of men with common rights, changing the population from men 

 with rights and property of one kind or another into landless 

 wage earners. Before that revolution, over most of rural Eng- 

 land the normal inhabitant of the English village had certain 

 common rights. In many cases he owned a strip of the common 

 fields ; in most he had the right to common pasture. At the time 

 at which this society was taken to pieces the government of 

 England was in the hands of an aristocracv which, unlike the 

 French aristocracy, lived on the land, and took an active part 

 in local government. To this class it seemed obvious that the 

 whole system of agricultural life, of which this common field 

 farming was a part, was retrograde. It believed that the agii- 

 cultural labourer would be more effective than the peasant, 

 that the possession of nghts and some degi'ee of independence 

 discouraged men and women from putting forth their best 

 energies, and that the real stimulus to industry was the pressure 

 of poverty. A writer at the time put this view very well when 

 he said that the use of common land by labourers operates upon 

 the mind as a sort of independence, and that among the advan- 

 tages that would follow the enclosing of the common " the 

 labourers will work every day in the year, their children will 

 be put out to labour early, and the subordination of the lower 

 ranks of society, which in the present time is so much wanted, 

 will be thereby considerably secured." 



Enclosures. — With these ideas in the ascendant it was not 

 likely that the rights either of the individual peasant or of the 

 village as a peasant society would be carefully protected in the 

 process of enclosure, or the process by which the individualist 

 farming was substituted for the old confused economy. In truth 

 they were almost wholly disregarded. When an enclosure was 

 carried out by Act of Parliament the procedure was by private 

 Pill. Commissioners were appointed to inquire into local rights 

 and to make the enclosure award. Only two interests were 

 formally and definitely protected in the Bill : the interest of the 

 lord of the manor, and the interest of the owner of the tithe. 

 The individual proprietor and the indi^ddual commoner had to 

 make out his case as best he could, and when he received com- 

 pensation it was often in the form of a small plot of land, un- 

 accompanied by rights of pasture on the common, which he 



