The first Enclosure Act was the Statute of Merton, passed in 1235, 20 Henry III, c. 4, which permitted lords of manors to add to their demesnes such parts of the waste pasture and woods as were beyond the needs of the tenants. There is evidence, however, that enclosure, probably of waste land, was going on before this statute, as the charter of John, by which all Devonshire except Dartmoor and Exmoor was deforested, expressly forbids the making of hedges, a proof of enclosure, in those two forests.[185] We may be sure that the needs of the tenants were by an arbitrary lord estimated at a very low figure. At the same time many proceeded in due legal form. Thomas, Lord Berkeley, about the period of the Act reduced great quantities of ground into enclosures by procuring many releases of common land from freeholders.[186] His successor, Lord Maurice, was not so observant of legality. He had a wood wherein many of his tenants and freeholders had right of pasture. He wished to make this into a park, and treated with them for that purpose; but things not going smoothly, he made the wood into a park without their leave, and then treated with his tenants, most of whom perforce fell in with his highhanded plan; those who did not 'fell after upon his sonne with suits, in their small comfort and less gaines.'[187] Sometimes the rich made the law aid their covetousness, as did Roger Mortimer the paramour of the 'She Wolf of France'. Some men had common of pasture in King's Norton Wood, Worcestershire, who, when Mortimer enclosed part of their common land with a dike, filled the dike up, for they were deprived of their inheritance. Thereupon Mortimer brought an action of trespass against them 'by means of jurors dwelling far from the said land', who were put on the panel by his steward, who was also sheriff of the county, and the commoners were convicted and cast in damages of L300, not daring to appear at the time for fear of assault, or even death.[188] Neither dared they say a word about the matter till Mortimer was dead, when it is satisfactory to learn that Edward III gave them all their money back save 20 marks. We are told that Lord Maurice Berkeley consolidated much of his demesne lands, throwing together the scattered strips and exchanging those that lay far apart from the manor houses for those that lay near; trying evidently to get the home farms into a ring fence as we should term it.[189] In this policy he was followed by his successor Thomas the Second, who during his ownership of the estate from 1281 to 1320, to the great profit of his tenants and himself, encouraged them to make exchanges, so as to make their lands lie in convenient parcels instead of scattered strips, by which he raised the rent of an acre from 4d. and 6d. to 1s. 6d.[190] There is a deed of enclosure made in the year 1250, preserved, by which the free men of North Dichton 'appropriated and divided between them and so kept for ever in fee all that place called Sywyneland,