“Leicestershire,” she says, “is a very Rich Country--Red land, good corn of all sorts and grass, _both fields and inclosures_. You see a great way upon their hills the bottoms full of Enclosures, woods, and different sorts of manureing and herbage” (p. 133).
It is evident that enclosure had considerably advanced; but it must be noted that “fields” with Celia Fiennes means common fields. It is further to be noted that her description of the enclosures creeping up the hills implies a process of gradual enclosure. Of the neighbourhood of Bosworth (in the west of Leicestershire) she says, “this is a great flatt full of good Enclosures.” The western side of Leicestershire was therefore mainly enclosed before 1700, while the north-east was all open till 1760.
But though enclosure was so far advanced in Leicestershire, “their fewell,” Celia Fiennes says, “is but cowdung or Coale.” The use of cowdung for fuel supplied to advocates of enclosure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one of their chief arguments. Either the hedges of Leicestershire were not yet able to supply enough wood for fuel, or the old custom continued although it was as unnecessary as objectionable. In either case the natural inference is that much of the enclosure of Leicestershire which Celia Fiennes observed, was then recent.[94]
[94] Arthur Young found the practice still prevalent in Northamptonshire more than seventy years later: “they collect all the cow-dung from their fields and daub it in lumps, barns, and stables, to dry for fuel” (“Eastern Tour,” Vol. I., p. 48). Edward Lawrence speaks of Yorkshire (evidently the East Riding only is meant) and Lincolnshire as the counties where the practice prevailed in 1727 (“The Duty of a Steward to his Lord,” Article 3).
This again is confirmed by Walter Blyth, who in the passage quoted above describes Leicestershire as entirely open, as well as Northampton, Rutland, and the south part of Warwick.
Further detailed information is given by the disputants Joseph Lee, John Moore, and the anonymous writers who joined in the controversy, who debated the ethics of enclosure in the Midlands in the years 1653–1657. John Moore, in his first pamphlet, asks, “Above one hundred touns inclosed in Leicestershire, how few amongst them all are not unpeopled and uncorned?” Now it is probably fair to read “above one hundred” as “about one hundred” or “nearly one hundred.” The names of some of these are supplied by Joseph Lee in his “Vindication of Regulated Enclosure,” for he gives (page 5) as examples of enclosure without depopulation the following thirteen parishes in Leicestershire: Market Bosworth, Carlton, Coten, Shenton, Cadesby (Cadeby), Bilson (Billesdon), Twicriss, Higham, Golding (Stoke Golding), Little Glen, Croft, Ashby Magna, and Stapleton, together with Stoke in Northamptonshire, Upton and Barton, which might be either in Northampton or in Warwick, and three others, Nelson, Cosford and Woscot, which I am unable to locate, except that Cosford was near Catthorp, the extreme south corner of Leicestershire; for Lee further gives a list of fifteen enclosures within three miles of Catthorp, in which Cosford and Coten are included, and also Bigging, Brownsover, Shawell, Streetfield, Over, Cottesbatch, Pultney, Sturmer, Hallfield, Sister (? Siston), Moorebarn, Cotes and Misterton (p. 8).