On the other hand, the farmer often rose in the social scale. With the abandonment of the handicaps and restrictions of the common-field system the efficient came more speedily to the front. It was they who had amassed capital, and capital was now needed more than ever, so they added field to field, and consolidated holdings.
The Act of 1845 did away with the necessity for private Enclosure Acts, still further reducing the expense; and since that date there have been 80,000 or 90,000 acres of common arable fields and meadows enclosed without parliamentary sanction, and 139,517 acres of the same have been enclosed with it,[576] besides many acres of commons and waste.
In the _Report of the Committee of Enclosures_ of 1844,[577] there is a curious description of the way in which common fields were sometimes allotted. There were in some open fields, lands called 'panes', containing forty or sixty different lands, and on a certain day the best man of the parish appeared to take possession of any lot he thought fit. If his right was called in question there was a fight for it, and the survivor took the first lot, and so they went on through the parish. There was also the old 'lot meadow' in which the owners drew lots for choice of portions. On some of the grazing lands the right of grazing sheep belonged to a man called a 'flockmaster', who during certain months of the year had the exclusive right of turning his sheep on all the lands of the parish.
Closely connected with the subject of enclosure is that of the partial disappearance of the small owner, both the yeoman who farmed his own little estate and the peasant proprietor. We have noticed above[578] Gregory King's statement as to the number of small freeholders in England in 1688, no less than 160,000, or with their families about one-seventh of the population of the country. This date, that of the Revolution, marks an epoch in their history, for from that time they began to diminish in proportion to the population. Their number in 1688 is a sufficient answer to the exaggerated statement of contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the depopulation caused by enclosures. Chamberlayne, in his _State of Great Britain_, published at about the same time as Gregory King's figures, says there were more freeholders in England than in any country of like extent in Europe: '£40 or £50 a year is very ordinary, £100 or £200 in some counties is not rare, sometimes in Kent and in the Weald of Sussex £500 or £600 per annum, and £3,000 or £4,000 of stock.' In the first quarter of the eighteenth century he was a prominent figure. Defoe[579] describes the number and prosperity of the Greycoats of Kent (as they were called from their homespun garments), 'whose interest is so considerable that whoever they vote for is always sure to carry it.'