In spite of this progress, many crops introduced years before were unknown to many farmers. Sainfoin, cabbages, potatoes, carrots, were not common crops in every part of England, though every one of them was well known in some part or other; not more than half, or at most two-thirds, of the nation cultivated clover. Many, however, of the nobility and gentry in the north had grown cabbages with amazing success, lately, 30 guineas an acre being sometimes the value of the crop.
Half the cultivated lands, in spite of the progress of enclosure for centuries, were still farmed on the old common-field system. When anything out of the common was to be done on common farms, all common work came to a standstill. 'To carry out corn stops the ploughs, perhaps at a critical season; the fallows are frequently seen overrun with weeds because it is seed time; in a word, some business is ever neglected.'[444] As for the outcry against enclosing commons and wastes, people forgot that the farmers as well as the poor had a right of common and took special care by their large number of stock to starve every animal the poor put on the common.[445]
About the same time that Young wrote these words there appeared a pamphlet written by 'A Country Gentleman' on the advantages and disadvantages of enclosing waste lands and common fields, which puts the arguments against enclosure very forcibly.[446] The writer's opinion was that it was clearly to the landowner's gain to promote enclosures, but that the impropriator of tithes reaped most benefit and the small freeholder least, because his expenses increased inversely to the smallness of his allotment. As to diminution of employment, he reckoned that enclosed arable employed about ten families per 1,000 acres, open field arable twenty families, a statement opposed to the opinion of nearly all the agricultural writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is surely an incontestable fact that enclosed land meant much better tillage, and better tillage meant more labour, the excessive amount of fallow necessary under the common-field system, from the inability to grow roots except by special arrangement, is alone enough to prove this. The same writer admitted that common pastures, wastes, &c., employed only one family per 2,000 acres, but enclosed pasture five families per 1,000 acres, and enclosed wastes sixteen families.