other places which show signs of having been formerly open fields. He thinks it was once the prevailing practice of Devon to CULTIVATE ITS COMMUNABLE LANDS. (The capitals are Marshall's.)
In Leicestershire, Belton, Newton, Austrey, Shuttington, Edinghall, and three or four more townships in the Bosworth quarter, were the only townships "that remain in any degree open. Half-a-century ago, the district was principally open." He says that each township appears to have been laid out originally into three arable fields with grassy "balks and ley lands," a common meadow and a common cow pasture. It is remarkable that neither Young nor Marshall seems aware of the history of those lands, which had "every appearance of having been formed from a state of common pasture," and the "better parts in a state of aration." Nor does Marshall seem to realise the significance of the "decrease of population," which he suspects, without seeming to connect it with any particular event or period.
Young, however, gives a few incidents of his tours which enable us to understand retrospectively many things which happened long before. One concerns enclosure; one the working of the poor law in rural parishes.
Mr Nicholas Styleman was a country gentleman who had been very active in the enclosure of some commons in Snettisham parish (near Sandringham). There were forty-one houses that had a right of commonage over all the open fields, after harvest. This totally prevented the growing of turnips and clover in those fields.
"This great inconvenience induced Mr Styleman to give his consent to, and promote, an Act for enclosing the commons, and preventing so great an incumbrance on the husbandry of the open fields. But in executing this idea he planned the outline of it in so candid and
There can be no good reason given that the price of corn and grass should be higher now than they were formerly, or than they are in other countries. I have said that the price of common labour does not and cannot increase: but the farmer will say that rent and taxes increase. To which I reply: if they do, they ought not : because everything that tends to raise the price of the first necessaries, must repeat its effects in all the millions of exchanges afterwards made."—S. in the Gentleman's Magazine, June 1825.
