In Northamptonshire we find the case of Brixworth, enclosed in 1780, a parish of 3300 acres. Before enclosure it consisted almost entirely of common fields. At the time of Eden’s writing, sixteen years later, only one-third remained arable. The expenditure on the poor in 1776, before the enclosure, was £121 6_s._, in the six years 1787 to 1792 it averaged £325 (Vol. II., p. 529). Again, with regard to local urban opinion, he notes that “the lands round Kettering are chiefly open field: they produce rich crops of corn. The people of the town seem averse to enclosures, which they think will raise the price of provisions, from these lands being all turned to pasture, when inclosed, as was the case in Leicestershire, which was a great corn country, and is now, almost entirely, converted into pasture.” Arthur Young, a little more than twenty years previously (in “Political Arithmetic,” published in 1774), while arguing in favour of enclosure on the depopulation count, makes an admission against it with regard to pauperism. “Very many of the labouring poor have become chargeable to their parishes, but this has nothing to do with depopulation; on the contrary, the constantly seeing such vast sums distributed in this way, must be an inducement to marriage among all the idle poor--and certainly has proved so.” (Pp. 75, 76.) As a general rule it may be said that where after enclosure pasturage was increased at the expense of tillage, rural depopulation resulted; where the amount of land under tillage was increased the rural population increased. Further, that enclosure in the northern and western parts of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increased the area under tillage; that the balance between the production of bread and meat for the whole country, so disturbed, was maintained by the conversion into pasture, on enclosure, of much of the “champion” corn growing land, particularly in those midland counties nearest to the northern and western ones in which the complementary change was taking place. By means of the Enclosure Acts, interpreted by the light of the above statements, we can trace these two compensating movements through the eighteenth century. The following passage in Arthur Young’s “Political Arithmetic,” published in 1774, at the time, that is, when he was an eager advocate not only of enclosure of all sorts, but also of the engrossing of farms and the raising of rents, sums up the two movements:--