The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common FieldsSlater, Gilbert
History
The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields
Slater, Gilbert
Agriculture -- England; Inclosures; Peasants -- England; Village communities -- Great Britain
But particularly in Dorset, instead of describing the land as enclosed,
or “Champain,” he frequently uses such expressions as “meately well
woddid” or “good Corne and sum Grasse,” which it is difficult to
interpret in terms of enclosure. The choice of such expressions
probably implies (1) that there is not much actual enclosure by hedges,
and (2) that there are no _extensive_ arable common fields. Such
descriptions would suit land passing directly from the condition of
forest or moor into separate cultivation, but in which the cultivated
patches were not as yet enclosed with hedges; or a district in which
small arable common fields were surrounded by such later extensions of
cultivation. But leaving Dorset in doubt, it is clear from Leland’s
notes that enclosure was well begun in the south of Hampshire, while
the country to the north was all open.
In the above journey Leland skirted the central chalk district; later
he passed directly through it, going from Oxford through Abingdon,
Lambourn, Marlborough and Devizes to Trowbridge. He passed the forests
of Savernake and Blake, but all the cultivated land is described as
“champayne” (Vol. VII., Part 2, fol. 63–7).
To sum up, we find that in the south of Hampshire, the cultivated land
was early enclosed, and also probably in the south and west of Dorset,
that enclosure gradually spread from the middle of the sixteenth
century into the rest of the four counties, the movement attacking
the “champain” district on three sides, on the east from Surrey, on
the south from the early enclosed district between Winchester and
Southampton and Portsmouth, and in the west from Devon and Somerset;
the progress of enclosure appears to have been practically confined
to Dorset and Hampshire in the seventeenth century; to have had the
north-west of Wiltshire for its chief scene in the greater part of the
eighteenth century, and finally to have attacked south-east Wiltshire
and Berkshire, the former in the first quarter, the latter throughout
the first half, of the nineteenth century.
GLOUCESTER AND WORCESTER.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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