[478] Lansd. MSS. 83, f. 68, quoted Gonner, _Common Land and Enclosure_, p. 156 n.
[479] _e.g. Nottingham Records_, vol. iv. pp. 170-171, Nov. 4, 1577: "Any burgess that hath not been prentice to pay £10 and no pardon. _Records of Leicester_, vol. iii. p. 351, Oct. 17, 1598: "He is inhibited from dwelling in your corporation unless he finds bonds for £200 that neither his wife nor children shall be burdensome to the town." _Southampton Court Leet Records_, vol. i., Part I.: "One William Dye, undertenant to John Netley, dothe lyve idelly and hathe no trade.... He hathe 4 or 5 children in places from whence he came whom he will bring shortly hither, yf he may be suffered here to remayne, whom we desyer may be examined and removed from hence according to the Statute."
[480] Some instances are given by Leonard, _Early History of English Poor Relief_, pp. 107-109.
[481] _Nottingham Records_, vol. iv. pp. 304-307.
In the second place there is a general movement from the enclosed to the open field villages. The families displaced by enclosure cannot easily enter into industry, even if they wish to do so, for the avenue to most trades is blocked both by the Corporations and by the statutory system of a seven years' apprenticeship, which maintains professional standards at the expense of an unprivileged residuum. What they do is to follow the orthodox advice given to those who have lost their customary means of livelihood. They proceed to colonise, and to colonise in such numbers that they cannot easily be kept out. They settle as squatters on the waste lands of those manors which have not been enclosed, and which, before the waste is turned into a sheep-run, offer no obstacle to immigration. That the possibility of using the manorial waste to accommodate those who had no settled abode had occurred to statesmen as one expedient for meeting the problem of the infirm and destitute, is shown by the sanction expressly given in the Poor Law of 1597[484] to the expenditure of parish funds on the erection of cottages on the waste as residences for the impotent poor. In fact, however, the mobility of labour was becoming such that it was impossible, even if it had been desirable, to reserve those unutilised territories for the maintenance of the impotent. In spite of bitter protests from the existing inhabitants, refugees from other villages swarm down upon them in such numbers that the Act requiring four acres of land to be attached to each cottage cannot be observed, and the issuing of licences for the erection of cottages on the waste for able-bodied men, who have come with their families from a distance, becomes a regular part of the business of Quarter Sessions.[485] Such a redistribution of the population solves one problem only to create others. Stern economists in the seventeenth century lament that the ease with which permission to build cottages on the waste is obtained encourages the existence of an improvident and idle class, which will neither work for wages nor make good use of the land. "In all or most towns where the fields lie open and are used in common, there is a new brood of upstart intruders as inmates, and the inhabitants of unlawful cottages erected contrary unto law.... Loyterers who will not usually be got to work unless they may have such excessive wages as they themselves desire."[486] The opponents of enclosure answer with some justice that, in effect, the open field villages are saddled with the destitution caused by enclosing landlords, who first ruin their tenants and then, like a modern Dock Company which relies on the Poor Rate to save its wage-bill, leave them to be supported by those places to which they are compelled to migrate.[487] The latter difficulty is indeed a very serious one, which not only is the occasion of numberless petitions[488] from villages who wish to be assisted by, or to avoid assisting, their neighbours, but on occasion converts even the country gentry into opponents of enclosure. "We further conceive," write the Justices of Nottingham to the Council, "that if depopulation may be reformed it will bring a great good to the whole Kingdom; for where homes are pulled down the people are forced to seek new habitations in other towns and countries, whereof those towns where they get a settling are pestered so as they are hardly able to live one by another, and it is likewise the cause of erecting new cottages upon the waste and other places who are not able to relieve themselves ...