┌─────────────┬───────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┐ │ │ Acreage Enclosed │ │ │ ---- ├─────────────────┬─────────────────┤ Percentage of │ │ │ By 18th Century │ By 19th Century │ Total Area. │ │ │ Acts. │ Acts. │ │ ├─────────────┼─────────────────┼─────────────────┼───────────────┤ │ Warwick │ 124,828 │ 24,731 │ 25·0 │ │ Leicester │ 187,717 │ 12,660 │ 38·2 │ │ Rutland │ 37,180 │ 10,044 │ 46·5 │ │ Northampton │ 247,517 │ 85,251 │ 51·8 │ └─────────────┴─────────────────┴─────────────────┴───────────────┘ Like Bedford, they are all counties with a high proportion of enclosure by Act of Parliament; but they differ from Bedford in that their enclosure was much more preponderatingly effected in the eighteenth century. The proportion of eighteenth-century Acts is particularly high in Leicester, but the proportion of Acts earlier than 1760 is higher in Warwick than in any other county--twenty-nine out of 114. These counties comprise the district in which the greatest amount of agitation arose against enclosure in the seventeenth century, and that in which the effect of enclosure in causing depopulation through decay of tillage was most marked in the eighteenth century. [Illustration: EAST MIDLANDS SECTION 1. Map of Rutland, Northamptonshire, Huntingtonshire, Cambridgeshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and part of Essex showing land enclosed: before the General Enclosure Act of 1801. between 1802 and 1845. under General Enclosure Act of 1845. Scale 1:1,000,000 or 1 inch = 15.78 Stat. miles.] NORTHAMPTONSHIRE. Northamptonshire has 51·5 per cent. of its area covered by Acts of Parliament for the enclosure of whole parishes, a larger proportion than any other county. There have been passed in addition an important Act for extinguishing foreign rights in Rockingham Forest in 1796, an Act in 1812 for draining and enclosing Borough Fen, and creating a new parish to be called Newborough, and three other Acts for enclosing commons or wastes; the whole area affected by the five Acts being perhaps 15,000 acres. These being included, the total area which has undergone Parliamentary enclosure reaches 54 per cent. of the area of the county. James Donaldson, the Board of Agriculture reporter, says that of the 316 parishes, 227 were enclosed by 1793, and eighty-nine were then in open field; and that “half of the inclosed parishes may be denominated old inclosure.”