It is my pleasant duty here to gratefully acknowledge my obligations to the two gentlemen above mentioned for the original impulse to study the process of the destruction and decay of English village communities; to the London School of Economics; and in particular to its first Director, Mr. W. A. S. Hewins, its present Director, Mr. H. J. Mackinder, and Mr. Hubert Hall, for assistance, encouragement, and advice; to many labourers, farmers, clergymen, and other rural residents, for information and personal kindness; to the Royal Geographical Society for defraying the cost of the production of the blocks of the illustrative maps herewith published; and to Earl Carrington, the President of the Board of Agriculture, for reading the book in proof, and recommending it to those who are willing to study rural history because they desire to improve rural conditions of life.
In writing this book I have deemed it a matter of conscience to preserve the attitude of mind of the student of history, pure and simple. I have felt, and feel, that historical investigation can only be rightly carried on when all motives except the simple desire to know the truth are excluded from the investigator’s mind. Yet the investigation undertaken having been thus far completed, and its results placed on record, I cannot refrain from attempting to read out of them some lessons for the present and the future.
My conclusions have been in large measure expressed for me by Lord Carrington’s Introduction. The policy of the legislature and of the Central Government, expressed in the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, though it claimed, and on the whole rightly claimed, that it effected an immediate and great increase in the country’s output of agricultural produce, and an improvement in the breeds of sheep and cattle, was nevertheless essentially a policy directed towards the enhancement of agricultural rents, the building up of large and compact landed estates, the establishment of capitalist farming, the uprooting of peasant proprietors and of small holdings together with the communal use of land, and the multiplication of the class of landless agricultural labourers. There is need in the twentieth century for a new agricultural policy. As I read the economic signs of the time, industrial conditions are beginning to favour a great agricultural revival in the British Isles. A wise programme of rural reform is necessary both in order that the possible agricultural prosperity may be secured, and in order that the nation may reap in full its possible fruits of physical and moral well-being for the people.