Perhaps what the eminent Surveyor said to John Cowper is not very convincing evidence. But in considering the estimate of the amount of enclosure in the “last 80 years,” _i.e._, from 1652, the first year of peace after the Civil War, to 1732, the time when John Cowper wrote, we have to bear in mind, firstly, that there was an important enclosure movement going on in the Commonwealth period; and secondly, that in 1660, with the Restoration, the country gentry came by their own again. The King’s ministers during the reigns of Charles II., James II., William III. and Anne would scarcely have dared, even if they had desired, to check any proceedings on the part of landowners, with the object of raising rents. The whole policy of Parliament was, in fact, in sympathy with this object, as may be seen from all the legislature affecting agriculture.
For the first part of this period there is further evidence of the progress of enclosure in John Houghton’s “Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade.” In repeated issues he strongly advocates Enclosure; in that for September 8, 1681, he says: “Oh that I had sufficient influence to put it” (_i.e._, a General Enclosure Act) “to the trial, if it did not succeed I’d be content not to be drunk this seven years” ... “Witness the many enclosures that have of late been made, and that people are daily on gog on making” (pp. 15, 16). It will be remembered that a General Enclosure Act for Scotland was passed in 1695.
To sum up, it is clear that the Parliamentary enclosure of a given parish indicates that the lord of the manor, or principal landlord, had not secured such a complete or preponderating influence over the parish as to enable him to effect an enclosure without an Act of Parliament.
And yet, on the other hand, it does not appear that the absence of any lord of the manor, or of any single landowner superior in wealth to the others in the parish was favourable, through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the continuance of common fields, except where many of the properties were extremely small.
We have seen that the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, in Elmstone Hardwicke, while desiring themselves to enclose the parish, discourage enclosure by the tenants on their own account, by raising the rents to a prohibitive extent. Similarly Edward Lawrence in 1727, while urging, as we have seen, the steward to procure a general enclosure of his lord’s manor, declares that it is the duty of the steward, particularly if his lord is the owner of the Great Tithe, to prevent gradual enclosure by yeomen--“He should be ever on his watch to prevent (if possible) the Freeholders inclosing any part of their land in the common fields (Article xxiv.).” “Partial enclosure should never be permitted without a general agreement to do the whole.”