634 
president’s address. 
other places “ converting the villager from a peasant with 
a mediaeval status to an agricultural labourer entirely 
dependent upon a weekly wage,” population, as we have 
seen, increased, and the villager’s status was probably raised 
in consequence of the ability or opportunity of earning 
something additional in the actual work of inclosure, and the 
annual upkeep of the many new gates and posts, rails, 
bridges, planks, and stiles, and the mileage of fences, ditches 
and dykes to be yearly brushed and drawn or bottom-fyed, 
together with the increased money to be earned by the more 
intense cultivation of adjacent lands allotted to private 
individuals. In the present case, moreover, we are chiefly 
dealing, not with the inclosing of waste land and common 
fields and the awarding of them to separate owners, but with 
the inclosing of large tracts of Poor’s land for the benefit 
of the poor. It has been calculated that the cost of survey 
and allotment was (as a general rule) abour £i per acre, 
and the cost of enclosure quite half as much again. The 
Ruston Common Inclosure Act left the peasant with a well- 
drained and well-fenced common in perpetuity, an inclosure 
which is, even at the present day, the envy of all neighbouring 
parishes whose commons are not thus protected, and which 
are, therefore, a constant source of trouble in consequence 
of gipsy encampments thereupon. 
Printed handbills, circulated in 1832, ’45, ’53, and ’67, 
prove that the rules and regulations concerning the common 
were not only sensible and well considered, but also strictly 
enforced by the Trustees, who, to my own knowledge, have, 
for the last thirty years at least, taken much interest in the 
fair administration of their trust. 
As to the inhabitants, higher education, and the advent of 
school teachers from other counties, have, of course, tended 
towards the obliteration of local dialect, and robbed the 
rising generation of implicit belief in many articles of 
mythical creed and former day folklore — but old faiths and 
practices die hard. 
