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
It is because the process was late in Cumberland and Westmoreland and
because it happened to interest three authors, West, Wordsworth, and
Eden, who were not agriculturists, that the record of it for these two
counties is available. All the indications suggest that Northumberland
and Durham underwent a similar evolution; and all the preceding
information with regard to the enclosure of Wales and much of the
land immediately on the Welsh border, and of West Somerset, Devon and
Cornwall, harmonises with the hypothesis that in those districts also
the process was fundamentally the same, though with local differences,
due to a very much earlier pacification.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE RESULTS OF ENCLOSURE.
The scenery of England and Wales has been transformed by the enclosure
of its lands, but the extent and results of the transformation vary.
Here you have the landscape cut into little fields with great hedges,
looking from an elevated point of view like a patchwork quilt; there
the skimpy quickest hedges only slightly emphasise the natural sweeping
lines of the hills: here you have narrow winding lanes; there broad,
straight roads with margins of grass on either side: here you have
compact villages in which almost all the habitations in the parish are
clustered together; there farmhouses and cottages so scattered that
were it not for the church, which seems to attract to its neighbourhood
the inn and the smithy, there would be no recognisable village at all.
This diversity in the effect of enclosure on the face of the country is
a symbol of the diversity of its effect upon the material, social, and
moral conditions of the local peasantry, who, like the land itself, may
be said to have undergone Enclosure.
Where, as in Devon and Cornwall, in Cumberland and Westmoreland,
the division of intermixed arable and meadow land took place early
and gradually, and in subordination to the reclamation of waste,
that reclamation itself being carried on steadily and gradually, the
result was the creation of numberless small holdings and properties. A
career was offered to the enterprising and laborious, and enterprise
and industry grew accordingly,--“Devonshire myghty and Strong,”
says Leland; and the great part taken by Devonshire in the national
struggles in the reign of Elizabeth must be partly attributed to the
reaction upon the character of the people of the conquest over the
difficulties of bringing the rocky soil, woodland or moor, into
cultivation: a conquest which made Devonshire husbandry famous for two
generations, and “Devonshiring” a well-known term for a particular
method of preparing waste land for cultivation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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