We have also direct evidence of the same movements in the seventeenth century. On the one hand Walter Blyth (“The English Improver,” 1649, p. 40) has the passage:--“Consider but the Woodlands, who before Enclosure, were wont to be relieved by the Fieldon, with corne of all sorts. And now growne as gallant Corne Countries as be in England, as the Western part of Warwickshire, and the northern parts of Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Shropshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and all the countries thereabouts.” On the other hand, from the controversy between the two John Moores on the one hand, and Joseph Lee and an anonymous controversialist on the other, we can pick out certain statements of matters of fact that passed uncontradicted. This controversy arose out of the enclosure of Catthorp, a parish in the extreme south-west corner of Leicestershire, bordering on Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. Lee was the parish priest of Catthorp, and a party to the enclosure. In his “Vindication of Regulated Inclosure,” he gives a list of fifteen parishes within three miles of Catthorp which had been enclosed. He also gives a list of nineteen parishes, enclosed from twenty to fifty years, in which depopulation had not yet taken place. This second list, as John Moore remarks, “they were forced to fish up out of the counties of Leicester, Warwick, Northampton, etc.,” and it is significant that two only of the fifteen parishes enclosed near Catthorp are asserted by Lee not to have been attended by depopulation. If we go a little earlier we find in 1607 an insurrection against enclosures, followed by a searching enquiry by James I.’s government, and no doubt by renewed vigilance, for a while, in the enforcement of the Depopulation Acts. It may be regarded as axiomatic that in a corn-growing country,[51] enclosure which does not diminish tillage, does not provoke riot and insurrection. [51] Riots may occur on the enclosure of waste, where the enclosed waste gave a livelihood to a considerable specialised population, as in Hatfield Chase and the Fens. See Dr. Cunningham’s “Growth of English Industry and Commerce,” Vol. II., pp. 187, 188. While, however, enclosure which does not diminish the land under tillage does not, as a rule, cause rural depopulation, it is a rule not altogether without exception. One of the most striking passages in Cobbett’s “Rural Rides” is that written in August, 1826, in which he describes the valley of the Wiltshire Avon:--