Note 202 — Chapter IV · AGRICULTURAL TRIBES.

The inclosures which took place, especially in the 16th century, are a fact of foremost importance in the history of English agriculture. The term “inclosure” has two different meanings. In medieval England the lands of the villeins, with those of the lord interspersed between them, lay scattered in a number of acre or half-acre strips, no two strips held by one man being contiguous. This system, dating from a time of extensive tillage, fell short of the exigencies of advanced culture, and had to be removed before any improvement in the mode of cultivation could be made. Therefore inclosures have often, especially in the reign of Elizabeth, been made with the common consent of all the landholders concerned, the result being that every tenant, instead of many scattered strips, obtained one or a few fields lying together. “But in the earlier part of the same movement, during the period which may be roughly defined as from 1450 to 1550, inclosure meant to a large extent the actual dispossession of the customary tenants by their manorial lords. This took place either in the form of the violent ousting of the sitting tenant, or of a refusal on the death of one tenant to admit the son who in earlier centuries would have been treated as his natural successor”202. It was this latter kind of inclosure that was condemned by several writers of the 16th century, for instance by Hales, who by inclosure did not mean “where a man doth enclose and hedge in his own proper grounds where no man hath commons. For such enclosure is very beneficial to the commonwealth; it is a cause of great encrease of wood; but it is meant thereby when any man hath taken away and enclosed any other men’s commons, or hath pulled down houses of husbandry and converted the lands from tillage to pasture”203.