The area of Bedfordshire being 298,500 acres, a slight deduction should be made from the figures under each head. But this does not affect the two striking points about the estimate: (1) that over two-thirds of the area of the county was open, and (2) that the open and commonable land amounted to over 200,000 acres. The author proceeds: “Every parish which is commonly understood to be open consists of a certain proportion of antient inclosed land near the respective villages, but that proportion, compared with the open common field in each respective parish, does not on an average exceed one-tenth of the whole” (p. 25). He further says that Lidlington, Sundon and Potton had been recently enclosed. Each was enclosed by Act of Parliament. We can deal with the above information in two ways: (1) by translating it into terms of parishes, and (2) by dealing with it in terms of acres. In Bedfordshire very little common indeed existed apart from the open field parishes. This is proved by the fact that from 1700 to 1870 there were only three enclosures of commons, apart from arable common fields, comprising an area of 867 acres, and that the tithe maps only indicated 507 acres more of commons in parishes where there were no common fields. We may safely assume that at least 200,000 acres out of our author’s 217,200 acres of open land belonged to open field villages, and that these villages also had, in accordance with his estimate, 20,000 acres of old enclosures, the area of all the open fields parishes in 1764 was, according to the estimate, about 220,000 acres; that of the enclosed parishes about 87,200 acres. If the numbers of the parishes enclosed and open were about in the same proportion, out of the one hundred and twenty-one parishes in Bedfordshire, there should have been eighty-seven open and thirty-four enclosed. From the list of Parliamentary enclosures in the appendix, it will be seen that seventy-three parishes were enclosed by Acts passed in 1798 and later. There were also seven other parishes in which the tithe documents indicate common fields surviving up to the date of Tithe Commission, making a total of eighty parishes, which we have previously accounted for. It would follow that about seven parishes were enclosed in Bedfordshire between 1794 and 1845 without any Act. This is in accordance with what we might reasonably expect. Of the thirty-four parishes which by this argument were enclosed in 1790, seventeen had been enclosed by Acts passed between the years 1742 and 1783, leaving a remainder of seventeen parishes. There is obviously a strong probability that the majority of these were enclosed in the eighteenth century.