88 
NATURE NOTES. 
exercised, and to within the present decade they were practi- 
cally unquestioned. As it has a considerable bearing on the 
dispute, it must be mentioned that the Common and the Com- 
mon Fields were for generations controlled by the village vestry 
of Ham. Mr. Harland devotes a whole chapter to quotations 
from the minutes of the vestry books to prove this. These 
village archives are contained in seven volumes, and with but a 
couple of breaks extend from the year 1721 to the present date. 
The general tenor of these extracts goes to prove that the vestry 
had complete authority over the Common and the fields at 
any rate down to the year 1862, when the Local Board was 
established. The vestry, which had hitherto maintained the 
Common by funds from the Poor Rate, was now relieved of this 
duty. The Local Board never assumed proper authority over 
the Common, and thus responsibility for its proper maintenance 
was allowed, in common parlance, “to slip between two stools.” 
The loosened hold of the vestry over the Common and the 
Common Fields paved the way for the acts of repression by the 
trustees of the Dysart estate, which led up to what the author 
of this pamphlet styles “the great battle of 1891.” The 
trustees, who for the past eighteen months had been helping 
themselves to eighteen or twenty cartloads of gravel on an 
average each week from the Common, put up notice-boards 
forbidding anyone else to do the same save with their leave, 
under penalty of prosecution. They also erected notice-boards 
on the Common Fields, threatening to prosecute for trespass. 
The servants of wealthy people are generally prone to forget 
their humble rank and to copy all the vices, and none of the 
virtues, of their employers. A butler, however, named Radford, 
proved a worthy exception to this rule, for to him belonged the 
honour of starting a successful agitation against these deter- 
mined infringements of public rights. After more than one 
public meeting (the first of which he convened), unanimous in 
opposition to the high-handed action of the Dysart trustees, 
Radford, in company with several others, including the author 
of this narrative, proceeded to cut down the obnoxious notice- 
boards. A criminal prosecution at the Quarter Sessions was the 
result, but the jury returned a verdict of “ not guilty,” and the 
courageous aggressors were welcomed home in triumph. Only 
last summer the trustees were again foiled in their attempt to 
prosecute a labouring man for removing gravel from the Com- 
mon. A permanent Committee has been formed to uphold the 
rights of the villagers, and it is to be hoped that its members 
will be spared a protracted struggle if only Ham Common can 
be brought under the operation of the Metropolitan Commons 
Act. 
Archibald Clarke. 
