1.  Enclosing the common arable fields for grazing, generally
     in large tracts.

  2.  Enclosing the same by dividing them into smaller fields,
     generally of arable.

  3.  Enclosing the common pasture, for grazing or tillage.

  4.  Enclosing the common meadows or mowing grounds.

It is the first mainly, and to a less degree the third of these, which were so frequent a source of complaint in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for the first, besides displacing the small holder, threw out of employment a large number of people who had hitherto gained their livelihood by the various work connected with tillage, and the third deprived a large number of their common rights.

The first Enclosure Act was the Statute of Merton, passed in 1235, 20 Henry III, c. 4, which permitted lords of manors to add to their demesnes such parts of the waste pasture and woods as were beyond the needs of the tenants.  There is evidence, however, that enclosure, probably of waste land, was going on before this statute, as the charter of John, by which all Devonshire except Dartmoor and Exmoor was deforested, expressly forbids the making of hedges, a proof of enclosure, in those two forests.[185] We may be sure that the needs of the tenants were by an arbitrary lord estimated at a very low figure.  At the same time many proceeded in due legal form.  Thomas, Lord Berkeley, about the period of the Act reduced great quantities of ground into enclosures by procuring many releases of common land from freeholders.[186] His successor, Lord Maurice, was not so observant of legality.  He had a wood wherein many of his tenants and freeholders had right of pasture.  He wished to make this into a park, and treated with them for that purpose; but things not going smoothly, he made the wood into a park without their leave, and then treated with his tenants, most of whom perforce fell in with his highhanded plan; those who did not ’fell after upon his sonne with suits, in their small comfort and less gaines.’[187] Sometimes the rich made the law aid their covetousness, as did Roger Mortimer the paramour of the ’She Wolf of France’.  Some men had common of pasture in King’s Norton Wood, Worcestershire, who, when Mortimer enclosed part of their common land with a dike, filled the dike up, for they were deprived of their inheritance.  Thereupon Mortimer brought an action of trespass against them ‘by means of jurors dwelling far from the said land’, who were put on the panel by his steward, who was also sheriff of the county, and the commoners were convicted and cast in damages of L300, not daring to appear at the time for fear of assault, or even death.[188] Neither dared they say a word about the matter till Mortimer was dead, when it is satisfactory to learn that Edward III gave them all their money back save 20 marks.  We are told that Lord Maurice Berkeley consolidated much of his demesne lands, throwing together the scattered strips and