common flock was broken up.  The small farmer had no longer any common to turn his horses on.  The down on which he fed his sheep was largely curtailed, the common shepherd was abolished, and the farmer had too few sheep to enable him individually to employ a shepherd.  Therefore he had to part with his flock.  Having no cow common and very little pasture land he could not keep cows.  In such circumstances the small farmer, after a few years, succumbed and became a labourer, or emigrated, or went to the towns.

In a pamphlet called The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, 1795, the Rev. David Davies said, ’by enclosure an amazing number of people have been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of mere hirelings, who when out of work immediately come on the parish.’  It has often been said that the poor were robbed of their share in the land by the landowners; but as a matter of fact it was the expense of securing the compensation allowed them, much greater in proportion on small holdings than on large, which went into the pockets of surveyors and lawyers, that did this.  It was also often through the farmer that the labourer was deprived of his land when he had retained an acre or two after enclosure.  Wishing to make the labourer dependent on him, he persuaded the agent to let the cottages with the farm, and the agent in order to avoid collecting a number of small rents consented.  As soon as the farmer had the cottages he took the land from them and added it to his own.  The peasant’s losses engaged the serious attention of many landlords; near Tewkesbury, in 1773, the lord of the manor on enclosure, besides reserving 25 acres for the use of the poor, allowed land to each cottage sufficient to keep a horse or a cow, often added a small building, and gave stocks for raising orchards.  Even some of the idlest were thereby made industrious, poor rates sank to 4d. in the L, though the population increased, and the labourer always had for sale some poultry, or the produce of his cow, or some fruit.[570]

In 1800 the Board of Agriculture, composed almost entirely of landowners, noticing that the poor of Rutland and Lincolnshire, who had land for one or two cows and some potatoes, had not applied for poor relief, offered a gold medal for the most satisfactory account of the best means of supporting cows on poor land, in a method applicable to cottagers.[571] Young recommended that in the case of extensive wastes every cottage on enclosure should be secured sufficient land on which to keep a cow, the land to be inalienable from the cottage and the ownership vested in the parish.

Lord Winchelsea[572] urged that a good garden should always go with a cottage, and set the example himself, one which has been generally followed in England by the greater landlords with much success.  As may be imagined, these schemes or others similar to them were put into effect by the conscientious and energetic, but not by the apathetic and careless.  Further, an Act was passed in the fifty-ninth year of George III, which enabled parishes to lease or buy 20 acres of land for the employment of their poor.