In many cases, it must be allowed, the grazing of the commons was often worth very little.  Let one man, it was said in 1795, put a cow on a common in spring for nothing, and let another pay a farmer 1s. 6d. a week to keep a cow of equal value on enclosed land.  When both are driven to market at Michaelmas the extra weight of the latter will more than repay the cost of the keep, while her flow of milk meanwhile has been much superior.

The Committee on Waste Lands of 1795 attributed the great increase in the weight of cattle not only to the improved methods of breeding, but to their being fed on good enclosed lands instead of wastes and commons.[573] Even when commons were stinted they were in general overstocked, while disease was always being spread with enormous loss to the commoners.  The larger holders, too, who had common rights, often crowded out the smaller.

There were often, as we have seen, a large number of ‘squatters’ on commons who had seized and occupied land without any legal title.  As a rule, if these people had been in possession twenty-one years their title was respected; if not, no regard was very justly paid to them on enclosure, and they were deprived of what they had seized.

Eden wrote when enclosure was at its height; he was a competent and accurate observer, and this is his picture of the ’commoner’:[574] ’The advantages which cottagers and poor people derive from commons and wastes are rather apparent than real; instead of sticking regularly to labour they waste their time in picking up a few dry sticks or in grubbing on some bleak moor.  Their starved pig or two, together with a few wandering goslings, besides involving them in perpetual altercations with their neighbours, are dearly paid for in care, time, and bought food.  There are thousands and thousands of acres in the kingdom, now the sorry pastures of geese, hogs, asses, half-grown horses, and half-starved cattle, which want but to be enclosed to be as rich as any land now in tillage.’

Enclosure worked an important social revolution.  Before it the entirely landless labourer was rare:  he nearly always had some holding in the common field or a right on the common pasture.  With enclosure his holding or right had generally disappeared, and he deteriorated socially.  It was very unfortunate, too, that when enclosure was most active domestic industries, such as weaving, decayed, and deprived the labourer and his family of a badly needed addition to his scanty income.

In its physical and moral effects the system of domestic manufactures was immensely preferable to that of the crowded factory, while economically it enabled the tillers of the soil to exist on farms which could not support them by agriculture alone.