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
The dotted lines represent bulks separating adjacent strips in the
open field; the continuous lines represent hedges. It is easy to see
how the enclosures on the edge of the field were made out of two or
three strips thrown together.]
Braunton Field is noteworthy in that it shows that however the
primitive village community of West Wales may have differed from that
of Wessex, it must have had certain characteristics in common with
it, by which open arable fields of intermixed occupation were created
in the neighbourhood of villages. Braunton cannot have been from the
beginning an isolated example. The process of enclosure by the method
Marshall describes went on around and outside these ancient tilled open
fields.
Another interesting fact is revealed by the study of the twenty-five
inch Ordnance map for Braunton. Braunton Field has been much reduced
in area; one can easily see that the adjoining lands were once part
of the open field, for the hedges in the lands are so placed as to
form a continuation of the spider-web lines of the “launchers” within
the field. The average size of the enclosed fields outside the Great
Field is indeed a little greater than of the separate lands within it,
but there is an imperceptible gradation, beginning with the smallest
“lands” in the Great Field which are nearest the village, on through
those more remote, the nearer enclosed fields, and then the more remote
of them. Enclosure has been effected by simply enclosing the strips
of arable land in the open field as they are. The fact that no common
rights existed over the Field, supposing this always to have been the
case, would have made such enclosure almost a matter of indifference
to the other occupiers; and the motive, no doubt, would be the desire
to lay the strip down in pasture. The whole field is known to the
villagers as “the tillage land.”
THE WELSH BORDER.
The enclosure history of the counties along the Welsh border is
somewhat similar to that of Devonshire. It took place early, partly
in consequence of the predominance of pasture over arable, and partly
under the influence of a custom of temporarily enclosing the waste and
common pasture, similar to that in Devon and Cornwall.
The percentages of area of these counties enclosed by Acts for
enclosure of common field arable are respectively:
Per cent.
Cheshire 0·5
Hereford 3·6
Monmouth 0·4
Shropshire 0·3
Staffordshire 2·8
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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