Exmoor Reclamation. 
83 
The enclosure of Exmoor and the surrounding commons, the 
improvable nature of the slate-soil, and its great and easy 
adaptability to the wants of the age — beef and mutton — have 
been of unmitigated advantage to the inhabitants of the neigh- 
bourhood, high and low. 
Nothing could be poorer or more miserable than the " en- 
tourage " of these wastes previous to the enclosures. The farms 
were generally very small ; the farmers were hardly removed 
from the class of agricultural labourers, to which their brothers 
and sons often belonged. Wages were but 75. or 8s. a week, and 
employment in the winter months almost nil. 
In some parishes, a great part of the land belonged to these 
small farmers, whose little holdings were generally mortgaged, 
and often deeply. These little proprietors lived in such extreme 
poverty as to be often actually worse off than the agricultural 
labourers. 
In other parishes the farms had for centuries been let on 
leases for three lives, the annual rent being very small, the chief 
income arising from fines paid on putting a new life into the 
lease. 
The cultivation was miserable in the extreme. It consisted 
in making good the fence round one field, and cropping it with 
oats, year after year, until it would bear oats no longer ; then 
throwing it out, and treating another field in the same way. 
The best grass-field on the farm Was generally chosen as the 
next in succession for oats. Turnips were almost unknown ; 
and a man who had been seen hoeing a field of them was pro- 
nounced a madman for destroying his own produce. 
It was a lawless country. The commons extended to the sea- 
coast for many miles. The farmers were in league with the 
smugglers ; and when a cargo was announced, all the farm men 
and horses were put in requisition to land it and to convey it by 
night over the moors to the little inland towns for sale. Some 
ol the farmhouses near the sea had large secret cellars, where the 
kegs were stowed away. 
Sheep and pony stealing was rife on the moors ; and herds of 
stolen sheep and ponies were regularly driven to the chief fairs 
in the South of England. 
Wrecking was not neglected, when opportunity offered, on 
the rocky and dangerous coast between Barnstaple Bar and 
Minehead. Families are pointed out whose wealth, such as it is, 
is said to have been made by some such contraband and un- 
lawful practices. 
The neighbourhood of Withypool, where a large undivided 
common still affords secret ways of conveying stock by night, 
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