[278] For the popular attitude towards enclosures see below, pp. 313?-340, and Leland (quoted Hone, _The Manor and Manorial Records_, p. 117): "The Duke of Buckingham made a fair park by the Castle of Thornbury, Gloucestershire, and took very much fair land in, very fruitful of corn, now fair lands for coursing. The inhabitants cursed the Duke for those lands so enclosed." I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage (_Topographer and Genealogist_, vol. iii): "To the Right Honble. House of Parliament now assembled, the Humble Petition of the Mayor and Free Tenants of the Borough of Wootton Basset in the Countie of Wilts, Humble sheweth to this Honourable House" [that their common has been seized and enclosed by the lord of the manor, who] "did divers times attempt to gaine the possession thereof by putting in of divers sorts of cattle, in so much that at length, when his servants did put in cowes by force into the said common, many times and present upon the putting of them in, the Lord in his mercy did send thunder and lightning from heaven, which did make the cattle of the said Francis Englefield [the lord of the Manor] to run so violent out of the said ground, that at one time one of the beasts was killed therewith; and it was so often that people that were not there in presence to see it, when it thundered would say, Sir Francis Englefield's men were putting in their cattle into the land, and so it was, and as soon as those cattle were gone forth, it would presently be very calm and fair, and the cattle of the towne would never stir, but follow their feeding as at other times, and never offer to move out of the way." For the allusion to invoking the devil, see Moore, _The Crying Sin of England_, &c. It was said that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations (Erdeswick, _Survey of Stafford_, ed. Harwood, p. 55). The same was said of enclosers (Moore, _op. cit._).
In every age there are words which are sufficiently definite to become a battle-cry, and yet which contain so many shades of meaning and are susceptible of such varying interpretations, that those who seem to differ most profoundly really differ because they are using the same word to express quite different ideas. Such a word was enclosing. For many years it was a burning question--with statesmen, with preachers, with the mass of the peasantry. But those who tell us exactly what it meant are few, and they tell us hardly more than is sufficient to show that it meant several different things in different connections. The picture of enclosure which carried Ket's followers against the walls of Norwich was that immortalised two centuries later in Goldsmith's "Deserted Village"; a vision of village cornfields turned into dreary expanses of pasture, where sheep grazed amid ruined homesteads and cattle were stalled in the mouldering churches.[279] When the scientific agriculturists of the age eulogised enclosures, they thought of a more orderly and productive cultivation arising in place of the intolerable "mingle mangle" of the open fields. The Levellers, who in the seventeenth century carried on the agitation against enclosure, had no objection to such as took place "only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor."[280] The panegyrists of enclosing like Fitzherbert and Norden denounced[281] lords who made enclosure an occasion to rack-rent and depopulate. The Justices of Nottinghamshire[282] complain to the Government that enclosure drives people into the already overburdened towns, but they are careful to explain that enclosures of less than five acres in size improve agriculture without depopulating the country. The Government itself under Elizabeth sets its face against the enclosures which produce evictions, but nevertheless expressly sanctions the exchanging of strips, which is desired chiefly in order that small enclosures may be made.[283] In this phase of the eternal quarrel between the plain man and the technical expert both the technical expert and the plain man were right, and needed only a definition to unite against the avarice and oppression which snatched a golden harvest from their confusion. It is the tragedy of a world where man must walk by sight that the discovery of the reconciling formula is always left to future generations, in which passion has cooled into curiosity, and the agonies of peoples have become the exercise of the schools. The devil who builds bridges does not span such chasms till much that is precious to mankind has vanished down them for ever.