The general movement of agricultural progress, it may safely be assumed, up to Leland’s time, was from the south-east of England northwards and westwards. The extreme south-east corner was certainly very early enclosed, as one would naturally expect, but we also find remote western districts, where one would naturally expect to find old customs linger comparatively late, precede the central districts in the abandonment of the “village community,” by many years.[84] [84] How long the enclosure of certain western counties preceded the enclosure of the east midlands, is shown by comparing the two following extracts. Of the former, Joseph Lee, in “A Plea for Regulated Inclosure,” published 1656, asks, “Are not many places in England, Essex, Hereford, Devonshire, Shropshire, Worcester, wholly enclosed?” (p. 31). Of the latter the “General Report on Enclosures,” published 152 years later, “A village of farmers and labourers surrounding a church and environed by three or four and in a few cases by five open fields, form the spectacle of Cambridge, Huntingdon, and Northampton shires, as much as on the Loire and on the plains of Moscow” (p. 25). Whether much of the enclosure which Leland saw in 1536 had been the work of the previous twenty years, it is of course impossible to say; but making any reasonable allowance for progress in hedging and ditching in the western counties where agriculture was mainly pastoral during those twenty years, and assuming that the Act of 1516 had effectually stopped enclosure in that period in the corn-growing districts, one can hardly resist coming to the conclusion that if Leland had made his journey in 1516 he would then also have found enclosure most advanced in those districts which were most enclosed in 1536. What we have, then, to ask is whether the priority of enclosure in the western counties is to be attributed entirely to the fact of their being devoted more to grass and less to tillage, or whether there was some difference in the primitive village community of the west which caused cultivated land to pass more easily into the condition of exclusive ownership and separate use. Obviously we must look for the answer to this question beyond the boundaries of England. To understand the differences between the village life of those parts of England which were once the Danelagh, Mercia and Wessex, from those which were then West Wales and Strathclyde, which may be regarded as at least semi-Celtic, we must examine the purely Celtic type of village community.