358 
The Making of the Land in England. 
of six or eight powerful horses, and proceeded to the restoration 
of their highways, by ploughing them up, casting the furrows 
towards the centre, and then harrowing them down to a fairly 
level surface for the summer traffic. They have lived to see the 
same highways first and for years mended with weak and rotten 
sand and gravel, and finally hardened and rendered water-proof 
with granite, transported 50 miles or more for that purpose. 
Progress, however, was stayed by the exercise of the remaining 
communal rights, and a further step was taken by the owners 
to allot among themselves in severalty that which hitherto they 
had enjoyed in common, and to free their cultivated lands 
from the customary right exercised by sheep-masters and the 
owners of commonable cattle and animals, as well as the other- 
wise incurable evil of a prescriptive course of cropping which 
rendered the provision of sufficient winter food an impossi- 
bility. At an enormous expense this last great step towards 
efficient tillage and grazing was carried out with the sanction 
of Parliament, and the way was clear for the erection of suitable 
homesteads, no longer huddled in the villages, but placed in the 
newly set out freeholds, and for the complete removal of the 
superfluous water by open ditches and under-drains. The 
English landowner was not slow to make use of the opportunity 
now given for laying the soil dry, and for sheltering and sub- 
dividing his cattle by enclosures fenced off by hedges or stone 
walls, and the cost value of the made land of the empire was 
speedily raised by the enormous expenditure on these works. 
There are other subsidiary and local improvements that must 
not be overlooked, such as warping, claying, marling, pumping 
from low levels, all of which operations have necessitated an 
outlay of capital, and a periodical charge for renewal, without 
which the soil would be entirely unfitted for modern husbandry. 
There is, it may be broadly asserted, but a small portion of rural 
England the present value of which is not due wholly or in 
a very large part to the costly operations to which reference 
has been made, and which have been conducted wholly at the 
charge of the successive owners of the soil. » 
In the twenty-fourth volume of the First Series of this Journal, 
Mr. Belcher has drawn a remarkably clear picture of what 
remains to be done after the forest trees of wild land have been 
removed. Speaking of Wychwood Forest, then recently grubbed 
up, he says : — 
" The land, when given into the bands of the tenants, presented anything 
but a smooth inviting appearance. Wide ditches, and long irregular high 
banks that had formed the boundaries of the difi'erent coppices ; deep pits and 
liollows, wlieie stones liad been dug for tlie use ot bygone generations; small 
straggling briars tliat had escaped the notice of the wood-grubbers ; roots of 
