In general the results of the two different methods of enclosure in this district are practically identical. Superficially the characteristic features of the “champaign” or “champion” country remain. The population is concentrated in the villages; the sites of which appear to have been originally selected for convenience of water supply; outside the villages are the long sweeps of open fields of barley, wheat or beans, lying generally open to the roads, and to one another, and to the open down, though one notices a tendency to an increased use of wire fencing. The monotony is broken by the beautiful curves of the hill slopes, and by clumps of trees; here and there, on steeper inclines, lynches are clearly visible, and occasionally what looks like an inconsequent hedge, beginning and ending in the middle of the field--an old “mere” or “balk” on which bushes happened to grow. On the other hand, the farms run generally from 200 to over 1000 acres each; machinery is extensively used; the supply of labour, though not so superabundant as a generation or two ago, is still sufficient, the customary wage being 2_s._ per day. The men themselves struck me as being of finer physique than the agricultural labourers I have seen in any other part of the South or Midlands of England; but they appear to be as completely shut out from any rights over the land, from any enterprise of their own upon the land, or from any opportunities for rising into the farmers’ class as can well be conceived. Only one man whom I met could remember a different condition. He, a labourer of seventy-three, said that in North Moreton before the enclosure (completed in 1849) every villager who could get a cow could keep it in the open fields, and all the villagers also had rights of cutting fuel. Under the Enclosure Act some moneys were set aside to provide the poor with fuel in compensation for these rights, but latterly the amount provided had much diminished. Steventon, which lies in the centre of this district, is to some extent exceptional. The manor has always been in ecclesiastical hands, from the first time when the village was founded as a settlement from the Abbey of Bec in Normandy to the present day, when it is held by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. In the intervening period it belonged to Westminster Abbey.