Note 460 — Chapter II · THE REACTION OF THE AGRARIAN CHANGES ON THE PEASANTRY

It is a question how far there had ever been an open field system in some of these counties, e.g. Cornwall and Kent. There certainly were some open field villages of the ordinary pattern in Kent (see Slater, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, p. 230). But Kent from an early date develops on its own lines, and does not go through the same stages of manorialism and commutation as other counties. Much of it seems to start at the point which they reach only in the sixteenth century. Cornwall again, though in the sixteenth century there were commons where the villagers pastured their cattle together (see accounts of Landress and Porpehan, Topographer and Genealogist, vol. i.), was largely a county of scattered homesteads and very early enclosure (for the “nucleated village" and “scattered homesteads,” see Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 15–16), pointing to a different system of settlement from that of the counties where the open field system obtained. For enclosures in Devon and Somerset see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, Part II., App. B: “A consideration of the cause in question before the lords touchinge depopulation," and Carlyle’s Cromwell, Letter XXIV. “Lest we should engage our body of horse too far into that enclosed country.”