Article XIV. “A Steward should not forget to make the best Enquiry into the Disposition of any of the Freeholders within or near any of his Lord’s Manors to sell their Lands, that he may use his best Endeavours to purchase them at as reasonable a price as may be for his lord’s Advantage and Convenience ... especially in such Manors where Improvements are to be made by inclosing Commons and Common fields.... If the Freeholders cannot _all_ be persuaded to sell yet at least an Agreement for Inclosing should be pushed forward by the Steward” (p. 9). “The Steward should not suffer any of the Lord’s lands to be let to Freehold Tenants within or near his Lord’s Manor” (p. 34). “The Steward should endeavour to lay all the small Farms, let to poor indigent People, to the great ones” ... but “It is unwise to unite farms all at once, because of the odium and increase of Poor-rates. It is much more reasonable and popular to stay till such farms fall into Hand by Death” (p. 35). And to facilitate this process, “Noblemen and Gentlemen should endeavour to convert copyhold for lives to Leasehold for lives” (p. 60). The significance of this last recommendation may be illustrated by the passage in William Marshall’s account, in “Agriculture of Gloucestershire,” published about sixty years afterwards, of the Cotswold Hills:-- “Thirty years ago this district lay almost entirely in an open state; namely in arable common field, sheep-walk, and cowdown. At present it may be said to be in a state of inclosure, though some few townships yet remain open. “The difficulties of Inclosure were not, in this case, numerous or great. The sheep-walks and cowdowns were all of them stinted by ‘yardlands’ in the arable fields: there was not, perhaps, one unstinted common on these hills. They were, formerly, many of them, or all of them, occupied by leasehold tenants for three lives renewable. A species of tenancy I have not met before. Many of these leaseholds had fallen in. The removal of those which remained, was” (_sic_: he means, of course, “removed”) “the main obstacle of inclosure.” Because the number of Acts for Enclosure gradually increases through the eighteenth century, and reaches its maximum at the opening of the nineteenth century, it has been hastily assumed by some that the process of enclosure was similarly accelerated. But it is on _a priori_ grounds at least as probable that there was no acceleration in the rate of extinction of common fields, only a gradual change in the prevailing method of procedure. Thus very few Acts of Enclosure are extant previous to 1727, the year in which Edward Lawrence recommends to Stewards and Landlords a vigorous enclosure campaign. That that campaign was being carried on at the time can be shown by two contemporary extracts from writers on opposite sides. The Rev. John Laurence of Yelvertoft, in the “New System of Agriculture,” 1726, writes:--