“_Warwick._ Almost the whole of the cultivated land (1126 acres) has been enclosed within the last fifty years. It formerly, although divided, lay in long strips, or narrow _dales_, separated from each other by _ranes_, or narrow ridges of land, which are left unploughed. In this manner a great deal, and perhaps the whole, of the cultivated lands in Cumberland, was anciently disposed” (p. 92). The other observer is the poet Wordsworth. In his book on the scenery of the lake district, he quotes from West’s “Antiquities of Furness” to show that in the troubled times between the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland, holdings were let to groups of four tenants, each group dividing its tenement into four equal parts. “These divisions were not properly distinguished; the land remained mixed; each tenant had a share through all the arable and meadow land, and common of pasture over all the wastes.... The land being mixed and the several tenants united in equipping the plough, the absence of the fourth man” (who was called out for military service) “was no prejudice to the cultivation of his land, which was committed to the care of three.” In High Furness, “The Abbots of Furness enfranchised these pastoral vassals, and permitted them to enclose quillets to their houses, for which they paid encroachment rent.” Wordsworth then proceeds with the tale of enclosure: “The enclosures, formed by the tenantry, are for a long time confined to the homesteads, and the arable and meadow land of the fields is possessed in common fields; the several portions being marked out by stones, bushes, or trees; while portions, where the custom has survived, to this day are called _dales_, from the word deylen, to distribute; but while the valley was thus lying open, enclosures seem to have taken place upon the sides of the mountains; because the land there was not intermixed, and was of little comparative value; and therefore small opposition would be made to its being appropriated by those to whose habitations it was contiguous. Hence the singular appearance which the sides of many of these mountains exhibit, intersected, as they are, almost to the summit with stone walls.... There” (in the meadows and lower grounds), “where the increasing value of land, and the inconvenience suffered from intermixed plots of ground in common field, had induced each inhabitant to enclose his own, they were compelled to make fences of alders, willows, and other trees ... but these last partitions do not seem to have been general till long past the pacification of the Borders, by the union of the two crowns” (Fourth Edition, p. 23).