At Bledlow, in Northamptonshire, “it is presented that John Le Pee has unlawfully thrown up a bank” in 1275 (p. 23). In Hemingford (Huntingdon) that “William Thomas Son has planted willows in the bank unlawfully” in 1278 (p. 90), and in the same manor “Elias Carpenter has wrongfully planted trees on a boundary” (p. 92). In Weedon Beck (Northamptonshire) in 1296 “Walter Mill complains of John Brockhole and says that he has raised a wall and hedge between their tenements to his damage.” One is tempted to associate the early and complete enclosure of Kent, without Acts of Parliament, with the proverbial wealth and importance of the Kentish yeomen, and the custom of Gavelkind (_i.e._, the equal inheritance of landed property by all sons), which necessarily tended to multiply small properties. William Marshall’s description of the enclosure of the Vale of Pickering, the most fertile part of the North Riding of Yorkshire, occupying the southern slopes of the Yorkshire Wolds, shows a similar association. In “Rural Economy of Yorkshire,” published in 1788, we read:--“A century ago the marginal townships lay perhaps entirely open, and there are vestiges of common fields in the area of the vale. The West Marshes, church property, have been longer under inclosure; and the central townships were probably inclosed long before those of the margin; the soils of that part being adapted to grass; and while the surrounding country lay open, grass land was of singular value. At present the entire vale may be said to be in a state of inclosures (p. 17). “Lands are much in the hands of small owners, in general, in the occupation of yeomanry; a circumstance, this, which it would be difficult to equal in so large a district” (p. 19). He notices (p. 20) that it was the custom to divide lands among all the children, and (p. 24) that the custom of sale of tenant right existed. “In the present century, more especially in the last fifty years, enclosure has made a rapid progress.... In my own remembrance more than half the vale lay open” (p. 50). The township of Pickering itself lay open at the beginning of the century. It then had 2376 acres of common field arable, stinted pastures, and 3700 acres of common. “The common fields and common meadows have been gradually contracting by amicable changes and transfers, and are now, in a manner, wholly inclosed. The stinted pastures have, at different times, been inclosed ‘by commission,’ namely, by the unanimous reference to arbitrators.”[80]