[332] Compleat Husbandman, 1659, p, 42.

[333] Compleat Husbandman, 1659, p. 57.

[334] Ibid. p. 73.

[335] In this apparently repeating Davenant’s statement.  See McCulloch, Commercial Dictionary, 1852, p. 271.

[336] Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, v. 332.

[337] Houghton, Collections for Improvement of Husbandry, i. 294.

[338] Ibid., Collections for Husbandry and Trade (ed. 1728), iv. 336.

CHAPTER XIII

THE EVILS OF COMMON FIELDS.—­HOPS.—­IMPLEMENTS.—­MANURES.—­GREGORY KING—­CORN LAWS

From what has been said in the preceding pages, it will be gathered that a vast amount of compassion has been wasted on the enclosure of commons, for it is abundantly evident from contemporary writers that there were a large number of people dragging out a miserable existence on them, by living on the produce of a cow or two, or some sheep and a few poultry, with what game they could sometimes catch, and refusing regular work.  Dymock, Hartlib’s contemporary, questions ’whether commons do not rather make poore by causing idlenesse than maintaine them;’ and he also asks how it is that there are fewest poor where there are fewest commons.

In the common fields, too, there was continual strife and contention caused by the infinite number of trespasses that they were subject to.[339] The absence of hedges, too, in these great open fields was bad for the crops, for there was nothing to mitigate drying and scorching winds, while in the open waste and meadows the live stock must have sadly needed shelter and shade, ’losing more flesh in one hot day than they gained in three cool days.’  Worlidge, a Hampshire man, joins in the chorus of praise of enclosures, for they brought employment to the poor, and maintained treble ’the number of inhabitants’ that the open fields did; and he gives further proof of the enclosure of land in the seventeenth century, when he mentions ’the great quantities of land that have within our memories lain open, and in common of little value, yet when enclosed have proved excellent good land.’  Why then was this most obvious improvement not more generally effected?  Because there was a great impediment to it in the numerous interests and diversity of titles and claims to almost every common field and piece of waste land in England, whereby one or more envious or ignorant persons could thwart the will of the majority.[340] Another hindrance, he says, was that many roads passed over the commons and wastes, which a statute was needed to stop.