It is because the process was late in Cumberland and Westmoreland and because it happened to interest three authors, West, Wordsworth, and Eden, who were not agriculturists, that the record of it for these two counties is available. All the indications suggest that Northumberland and Durham underwent a similar evolution; and all the preceding information with regard to the enclosure of Wales and much of the land immediately on the Welsh border, and of West Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, harmonises with the hypothesis that in those districts also the process was fundamentally the same, though with local differences, due to a very much earlier pacification.
The scenery of England and Wales has been transformed by the enclosure of its lands, but the extent and results of the transformation vary. Here you have the landscape cut into little fields with great hedges, looking from an elevated point of view like a patchwork quilt; there the skimpy quickest hedges only slightly emphasise the natural sweeping lines of the hills: here you have narrow winding lanes; there broad, straight roads with margins of grass on either side: here you have compact villages in which almost all the habitations in the parish are clustered together; there farmhouses and cottages so scattered that were it not for the church, which seems to attract to its neighbourhood the inn and the smithy, there would be no recognisable village at all.
This diversity in the effect of enclosure on the face of the country is a symbol of the diversity of its effect upon the material, social, and moral conditions of the local peasantry, who, like the land itself, may be said to have undergone Enclosure.
Where, as in Devon and Cornwall, in Cumberland and Westmoreland, the division of intermixed arable and meadow land took place early and gradually, and in subordination to the reclamation of waste, that reclamation itself being carried on steadily and gradually, the result was the creation of numberless small holdings and properties. A career was offered to the enterprising and laborious, and enterprise and industry grew accordingly,--“Devonshire myghty and Strong,” says Leland; and the great part taken by Devonshire in the national struggles in the reign of Elizabeth must be partly attributed to the reaction upon the character of the people of the conquest over the difficulties of bringing the rocky soil, woodland or moor, into cultivation: a conquest which made Devonshire husbandry famous for two generations, and “Devonshiring” a well-known term for a particular method of preparing waste land for cultivation.