54 MR. W. G. CLARKE OX THE COMMONS OF NORFOLK. 
well-defined lights for six months of the year over all the arable 
and pasture land and over all the waste ground or bruery. 
These rights have gradually been lost. In the 13th century 
the Statute of Merton enabled lords of manors to enclose 
large tracts of common land if a jury agreed that enough was 
left for the lord’s tenants, and in the following centuries 
many commons were imparked for the purpose of stocking 
deer. The Statute of Westminster II. caused further en- 
closures. and hardly a century passed but what the rights of 
the holders of common rights were encroached upon legally 
or otherwise, despite local rioting and even rebellion, for the 
biggest insurrection Norfolk has known, that of Kett and his 
followers, was mainly due to the enclosure of common land. 
Sir Anthony Fitzherbert in his ‘ Book of Surveying,’ (1523) 
says, “ for the most part the lords have enclosed a great part 
of their waste grounds and straitened their tenants of their 
commons therein,” and after the suppression of the monasteries 
many further common rights were extinguished. 
Notwithstanding these various enclosures it is probable 
that at the beginning of the 18th century quite half the land 
in Norfolk was commonable. Then began the Enclosure 
Acts which, as regards the commons, were most disastrous 
of all. In abolishing the economically wasteful open-field 
system of land tenure they did good, but not only were the 
public rights on most of the arable land of the county 
extinguished, but further allotments of the commonable 
wastes were made to private owners. Dr. Gilbert Slater’s 
standard work on the enclosure of common fields shows that 
in Norfolk the area thus dealt with in the 18th and 19th 
centuries was 442,986 acres or 32.3 per cent, of the total area 
of the county. And this does not include Acts passed for 
the enclosure of common land only. In 1796 the area of 
unimproved commons was put* at 80,000 acres, and of sedgy 
and swampy ground at 1500 acres ; reduced in Kelly’s Direc- 
tory (1891) to 12,869 acres of common or waste land. 
Dr. Slater has pointed outf that the preambles of Norfolk 
* Britton’s 1 Norfolk,’ p. 100. 
f 'Geographical Journal,’ January, 1907. 
