Page:Landholding in England.djvu/137

 ""The natural industry of the people is such that wherever a person can get four or five acres together, he plants a whitethorn hedge around it, and sets an oak at every rod distance, which is consented to by a kind of general courtesy from one neighbour to another. ... In this way many of the common fields of East Norfolk appear to have been enclosed.""

But in many counties—Middlesex, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, the chief part of Bedfordshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, the south of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire — there were open fields up to about 1794.

Nothing was easier than to get an Act. A pamphlet published in 1786 says that to obtain an Act to enclose a common field, "two witnesses are produced to swear that the lands thereof, in their present state, are not worth occupying, though at the same time they are land of the best soil in the kingdom, and produce corn in the greatest abundance and of the best quality. And by enclosing such lands they are generally prevented from producing any corn at all, as the landowner converts twenty small farms into about four large ones, and at the same time the tenants of those large farms are tied down in their leases not to plough any of the premises so let to farm, by which means, of several hundred villages, that forty years ago contained between four or five hundred inhabitants, very few will now be found to exceed eighty, and some not half that number; nay, some contain only one poor decrepit man or woman, housed by the occupiers of lands who live in another parish, to prevent them being obliged to pay towards the support of the poor who live in the next parish" (p. 2).

An earlier pamphlet makes the result of enclosure bad