A.D. 1689 
1776. 
and small 
farmers. 
54 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM 
ndependent life. But throughout the country generally 
hey seem to have been regarded as lazy and undisciplined?, 
ind public opinion was in favour of forcing them to take to 
more regular habits? 
The remaining class, whose fate elicited most sympathy 
was that of the small holders—whether tenants or freeholders 
_ who worked the land on traditional methods, and lived on 
the produce. They were regarded as the backbone of the 
country; but their cultivation was apt to be slovenly? and 
there were difficulties in allowing it to continue side by side 
with the improvements which more adventurous men were 
making on their estates. There are many complaints from 
the earlier part of the seventeenth century of the encroach- 
ment on pasture rights, so that the small farmers could no 
longer feed their stock*; or encroachment on the common 
fields might interfere with the customary husbandry of a 
village. Sir W. Dolben’s Act in 1773, which facilitated the 
improvement of the common custom of tillage so as to render 
it less necessary to break up the common fields into severalty, 
was an attempt to epable the old race to move with the 
times® but the trend of circumstances was too strong”: and 
U « Destroying of Manors began Temp. Hen. VIII., but now common, whereby 
the mean people live lawless, nobody to govern them, they care for nobody, having 
n0 dependence on any body.” Aubrey, Introduction to Survey of North Wiltshire. 
Miscellanies 1714, p. 80. 
1 8. Taylor, Common Good, 37, Pseudonismus, Considerations, 9. See below 
p. 567 n. 1. The advocates of enclosure continued to insist that the commons 
were & source of moral evil as well as of economic loss, Reports 1844. v. Questions 
71, 774, 1811, 3091, 4203. 
8 The chief excuse for pushing on the enclosure of common fields lay in the 
prevalence of weeds; a single lazy farmer who allowed his strips to be covered 
with thistles and allowed these thistles to seed, would do an infinity of mischief 
to all his neighbours. The case of Farmer Riccart near Audley End brought 
this home forcibly to Arthur Young. Southern Counties, 386. 
4 Compare the very interesting petition from Wooton Bassett printed by 
J. Britton, Beauties of Wiltshire, mm. 89. 
5 Aubrey, Topographical Collections, 181. 
6 T. Stone a Bedfordshire surveyor, writes as if a common custom of tillage 
was prevalent in his experience; he approves of Sir W. Dolben’s Act (13 Geo. IIT. 
c. 81), but regards it as inoperative. Suggestions for rendering the Inclosure of 
common fields and waste lands a source of population and riches (1787), p. 13. In 
1801 the Act was revived with the view of enabling occupiers to take a crop of 
potatoes (41 Geo. ITI. c. 20). Slater, The English Peasantry, 87. 
7 The exceptional case of Weston Subedge, where the communal system was 
maintained till 1852, is fully described by C. R. Ashbee. Last Records of a 
(otawold Community.