20 
Land & Water 
April 4, 19 1 8 
great enclosures, and instead of the country gentleman, 
an official like the intendant would have ruled the country- 
side. 
The struggle between the reasons of State and the reason 
of class interest ceased when the State was merged in a class. 
The effect is seen in comparing the enclosures of the eighteenth 
century with those of the sixteenth. In the eighteenth 
century it was assumed by the governing class that a process 
which turned the mass of the villagers from men with rights 
and property into mere wage-earners was a blessing to 
civilisation. In the sixteenth century Governments still 
kept something of the old fear of the social consequences of 
enclosure. We have Acts of Parliament prohibiting the con- 
version of arable to pasture, enacting that houses which have 
decayed must be rebuilt, and forbidding the letting of 
cottages to labourers with less than four acres of land 
attached. We have a Royal Commission for checking 
enclosures in the Midlands. A century later, Charles the 
First actually annulled enclosures, and Cromwell's influence 
in the Eastern Counties has been attributed by Professor 
Firth to his championship of the commoners in the Fens. 
There is nothing of this spirit in the proceedings of Parlia- 
ment in the eighteenth century. There it is taken for 
granted that the old common rights and common customs 
are obsolete, and an encumbrance. The word most often 
applied to them is barbarous, and it was argued that they 
were more suitable to a Tartar State than to a modern and 
civilised society. This was the view, it must be remem- 
bered, not merely of the landowners themselves, but of the 
thinkers and economists of the day. 
Force of Ideas 
If we want to know how a society will behave in any 
circumstances we must know what is in men's minds. The 
Industrial Revolution would have had quite different conse- 
quences if the age in which its decisive phases occurred had 
been under the influence of a different set of ideas. So with 
the enclosures, and the Agrarian Revolution of which they are 
the most striking feature. That revolution destroyed the 
old common life of the village and changed the population 
from men with rights and property of one kind or another 
into landless wage-earners. It had fierce critics in Cobbett, 
Sadler, and, after 1801, in Arthur Young. It was bitterly 
hated by the poor, as anybody can see from chance allusions 
in the novels of Fielding and Jane Austen, if his study of the 
period has led him no further. But the dominant view was 
that it was better for the nation that the man who worked 
in tjie fields should be a wage-earner, entirely under the 
power of the farmer, than that he should have any kind of 
independence. Of course, the old common field system 
needed reform, but it would have been possible to reform it 
in such a way as to preserve the elements of independence in 
the village population. Cobbett, Arthur Young, and the 
great Lord Suffield, who took so large a part in the attacks 
on the abuses of the prisons a century ago, presented schemes 
for this purpose. If the changes necessary for making the 
methods of agriculture more productive and scientific had 
been guided by their ideas England would have retained a 
peasant class. But those changes were carried out by men 
who beUeved with the economist, cited at the beginning of 
this article, that it was precisely because the men who tilled 
the soil of France had rights as French peasants that France 
was in danger of decay. 
It is sometimes argued that England had to choose between 
poverty culminating in famine and the loss of the peasant ; 
tliat it was only by means of removing enclosures that the 
country maintained itself during the long struggle with 
France. But to the generation of the enclosures there was 
no such reluctant and anxious dilemma. The loss of the 
peasant seemed not a loss, but a gain. We caa see the prevail- 
ing notions of the time in the debates in Parliament and in the 
Reports to the Board of Agriculture whidi was established 
in 1793, with Sir John Sinclair as President, and Arthur 
Young as Secretary. Take, for example, the extract from 
the Report on Somerset in 1795 : "The possession of a cow 
or two, with a hog and a few geese, naturally exalts the 
peasant, in his own conception, above his brethren in the 
same rank of society. It inspires some degree of confidence 
in a property, inadequate to his support. In sauntering 
after his cattle he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, 
half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly lost. 
Day labour becomes disgusting ; the aversion increases by 
indulgence ; and at length the sale of a half-fed calf or hog, 
furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness." 
The gentleman who reported in Shropshire put the case still 
more plainly. "The use of common land by labourers 
operates upon the mind as a sort of independence." He 
went on to give as some of the advantages that would follow 
the enclosing of the common, "the labourers will work every 
day in the year, their children will be put out to labour 
early, and the subordination of the lower ranks of society 
which in the present time is so much wanted will be thereby 
considerably secured." 
With these ideas in the ascendant it was not likely that the 
rights either of the individual peasant or of the village as a 
peasant society would be too jealously safeguarded in the 
process of enclosure. In point of fact, they were almost 
wholly disregarded. Where enclosure was carried out by 
Act of Parliament, procedure was by private Bill. Commis- 
sioners were appointed to inquire into local rights and to 
make the enclosure award. Only two interests were formally 
and definitely protected in the Bill : the interest of the 
Lord of the Manor and the interest of the tithe owner. The 
inclividual proprietor and the individual commoner had to 
make out his case as best he could, and the compensation he 
received took the form very often of a small plot of land, 
which was worthless when unaccompanied by rights of 
pasture on a common. But, of course, in hundreds of cases 
the small commoner could not make out a case at all. He 
was uneducated, and of the rights that were at issue he knew 
little except that as long as he could remember he had kept 
a cow, driven geese across the waste, pulled his fuel out of 
the brushwood, and cut turf from the common, and that his 
father had done all these things before him. If Parliament, 
the local commissioners, the landowners, and the lawyers 
had all been full of the idea that a population with rights of 
this kind was a better basis for building up a village society 
than a population of men without land and without rights, 
the enclosures 'would have been carried out in such a way as 
to preserve this element in village life, while enlarging the 
opportunities for production and the power of the improving 
landowner to introduce the ideas of a Coke or a Bakewell. 
But, as it happened, their heads were full of just the opposite 
idea : the idea that the nation would be happier, as well as 
richer, if the village labourer had to depend entirely on his 
earnings from day to day. 
This same belief gives the key to a momentous chapter in 
English rural history. Towards the end of the century 
there came two or three years of bad harvests and high 
prices. The labourers, deprived of all their customary 
means of livelihood, were in danger of starvation. Some of 
the magistrates of the day proposed to establish a minimum 
wage for agriculture, and a Bill with this object was intro- 
duced by Samuel Whitbread into the House of Commons. 
But the predominant opinion was hostile. Pitt opposed the 
Bill, and the magistrates all over the country adopted as an 
alternative the vicious system, generally known in history as 
the Speenhamland system. Under this system a man's 
wages were supplemented, according to a fixed scale, out of 
the rates in proportion to the number of his children. The 
system takes its name from a place, now part of Newbury, 
where the Berkshire magistrates met in May 1795, in order 
to fix wages. But when the meeting was held, the proposal 
to fix wages, made by Charles Dundas, the M.P. for Berk- 
shire, was rejected in favour of the fatal alternative. The 
degrading and depressing effects of this policy are notorious, 
and the reason for preferring to supplement wages out of the 
rates rather than compel farmers to pay adequate vages 
was the belief that the more dependent and helpless the 
position of the labourer, the better for society. Men were 
afraid of recognising any right or moral claim on the part 
of the labourer, and they wanted to keep the atmosphere of 
charity about him. 
The agrarian problem, as Mr. Arthur Acland once pointed 
out, has two aspects. Agriculture is an industry : the 
system of life that depends on it is a civilisation. The great 
English landowners who performed such signal services to 
the nation in introducing improvements, and in making 
agriculture an infinitely more productive industry, did not 
lose sight of this truth. The chief argument for the form 
that the enclosures took was the argument that the world 
needed more food, and that these methods helped to satisfy 
that need. But this was not the only argument. It was 
believed that the concentration of social power produced in 
itself a desirable civilisation, and that the view that there 
was some virtue in a community of men enjoying a certain 
economic independence was a sentimental superstition. 
Now, we are at this moment supremely interested in the 
problem that confronted our great grandfathers. We want 
to increase production, and we also have our ideas of the 
qualities that make a civilisation more or less desirable ; and 
these ideas are not theirs. It will be interesting in a later 
article to examine the effect of the ideas of that age on the 
problem as we find it to-day, for the English village has lain 
for a hundred years under the shadow of the eighteenth century. 
