POLITICAL HISTORY treating the bailiwick as forest, the county complaining that it was treated even as a purlieu. The general sixteenth century grievance of enclosures, other than parks, no doubt affected Surrey. Materials do not seem to exist in our county to help us to decide the vexed question of what the unpopular enclosures were. They were partly without any doubt the enclosure of waste, with the eviction of squatters and with the curtailing of the rights of commoners. Besides this, they were either the conversion of private estates from arable into pasture, or the enclosing of the common arable fields for private use. It is certain that very considerable common arable fields existed in a great part of Surrey in the eighteenth century, and were enclosed by Acts of Parliament at known dates since then, and that over another considerable part of the country, the Weald, there are no traces of common arable fields nor of any enclosures of such. 1 But there were common woods in the Weald of sufficient extent to become the care of the law. The Act of 35 Henry VIII. 17, which forbade the cutting of wood of a certain size for conversion into charcoal, exempted the woods of private owners in the Weald of Kent, Sussex and Surrey, but applied to the common woods. These common woods were no doubt encroached upon by private owners. They were a valuable property. The encroachment has now triumphed everywhere beyond the chance of successful reclamation. We seem to catch a glimpse of popular resistance when in Elizabeth's reign Lord Montague writes to Mr. More 2 begging him to redress certain disorders which have arisen from certain women ' set a-worke ' by their husbands to resist the clerk of the works, who superintended Lord Montague's iron works, in the use of ' his owne wodes.' The clerk has been ' disorderly and daungerously abusyd.' This was either at Pophole beyond Haslemere, near the Sussex and Hampshire boundaries of Surrey, or in Chiddingbold parish, where Lord Montague had iron works at Imbhams. He also claimed an iron mine at Hambledon. Perhaps the woods in question were Hambledon Hurst. The women's husbands of course considered that they were not my lord's ' owne wodes.' The same nobleman's interests were looked after in another case, when the Earl of Lincoln wrote to 'Master Moore' begging him to use his interest with the magistrates to stop a private person from enclosing the waste at East Horsley, as it would injure the writer, ' lord Mountygewe and divers tenants.' The last were lucky in having the two noblemen on their side. At any rate the grievances of the poor against the upper classes, in whatever way they were caused, were felt in Surrey enough to make the county share in the general unrest which broke out into insurrection in several English counties under Edward VI. in 1549. The Earl of Arundel wrote from Guildford on June 29 to Sir William Petre, another 1 The great region of common arable fields recently existing is along the northern slope of the chalk hills from Croydon to Guildford. They also existed in the Thames valley and at a few inter- mediate places. There are few on record south of the chalk, and none apparently on the Wealden clay.
- Loseley MSS. February 20, 1570, x. 28. 8 Ibid. January 5, 1572, viii. 67.
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