[61] These causes were (_a_) the great fluctuations in prices of agricultural produce; (_b_) the custom of using poor relief as a supplement to agricultural wages. The way in which these operated is ably dealt with by Dr. Cunningham.
In the south-east of Wiltshire, then, enclosure was followed by no increase of pasture farming, but it was followed by local depopulation. Whether the depopulation was merely local, or national as well, would depend upon whether, after enclosure, the total production of food of the parish were increased or diminished. Thomas Davis tells us that in many cases it was diminished, the reason, no doubt, being that there was a lack of farmers with sufficient enterprise and control of capital to absorb the small farms, as their occupiers began to drift towards bankruptcy. That such a result as this was felt to be an impending danger is shown by his statement:--“In some late inclosures allotments of arable land to small farmers have been set out adjoining to each other, directing the same to remain in an uninclosed state with a common right of sheep-feed over the whole, and a common allotment of down land and another of water-meadows, and some inclosed pasture to each if necessary.”
In this district, consisting of open downs, stretching for miles along the summits and higher slopes of the chalk hills; intersected by winding rivers bordered by flat alluvial land of naturally rich pasture, but converted by irrigation into the famous Wiltshire water meadows, the long lower slopes of the hills, as it were, decreed by nature to be noble corn fields, cultivation had to be on a large scale; the unit of cultivation had to be a piece of land of reasonable width, stretching from the river to the summit of the downs. Hence small farms could not exist without some degree of organised mutual help. When that organisation, which in this district was furnished by the common field system, was terminated by Enclosure Acts, consolidation of farms became necessary.
Nowhere else are these conditions present in quite so fully developed a degree as in Wiltshire, which contains the central hub from which radiate the three great belts of chalk down, the South Downs, the North Downs, and the range containing the Chilterns, the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, the Gog-Magogs of Cambridgeshire, and their continuation into Norfolk. But the most essential feature of Wiltshire agriculture, viz., the combination of sheep down and arable field, may be said to be characteristic of all this country. This is the country from which in the sixteenth century came the great indignant outcry against enclosure, which in More’s “Utopia” enters into the classic literature of our country. When it is remembered that the economic motive of enclosure then was the high price of wool, that private individuals are stated to have owned flocks of ten thousand, twenty thousand, and even of twenty-four thousand sheep[62], it is easy to conceive of whole parishes being converted into great sheep runs.