Commencing with the great insurrection of the peasants in 1549, there were numerous local risings throughout the sixteenthcentury, all with the same object, the destruction of the enclosures which deprived them of their lands.
In the reign of Elizabeth, the price of wool still rising, the clearances and expulsion of the cultivators in no way abated; andthe destruction of small properties has continued to our own days, by means of the "Enclosures Acts," passed successivelyfrom 1710 to 1843. These laws, which allowed the lords of the manor to enclose for their own use the common lands,wrongly regarded as their property, brought into private domain 7,660,413 acres, (14) or one-third of the cultivated area ofEngland, which in 1867 amounted to 25,451,626 acres. This immense amount of land was taken from the enjoyment of thecultivators almost without indemnity. In 1845, Lord Lincoln could assert in Parliament, without contradiction, that, innineteen cases out of twenty, the House had disregarded the rights of the peasant, not from any feeling of antagonism, butfrom sheer ignorance. The country people could not produce, before the committee which discussed the laws, any proof ofrights reposing merely on custom, nor could they pay counsel to defend them. They only learnt that they were dispossessed,when the enclosures, erected by virtue of Act of Parliament, prohibited access to the lands which they had used from timeimmemorial. The legislature ignored the existence of rights derived from the ancient mark organization. It allowed the lordof the manors eminent domain; and thought, with economists, that the common lands should be surrendered to the moreproductive efforts of individual activity. In the middle ages and in the sixteenth century the copyholders had been despoiledof their property, because their title of occupation was deposited in the records of the manor, against the usurpation ofwhich they had to defend themselves; and also because the judges all belonged to the class of their adversaries, whoemployed fraud, violence, and corruption, to attain their object.
Until the eighteenth century the legislature endeavoured to preserve small properties. The laws of Henry VII. ordained thatevery cottage should have four acres of land belonging to it. They tried to enforce this rule for a long time, but to nopurpose. In 1627, in the reign of James I, Roger Crocker was fined for building a cottage on his domain of Frontmill,without the prescribed four acres. In 1636, Charles I. nominated a commission to devise a means of enforcing the ancientprescription. Cromwell renewed the prohibition against building a house without allotting at least four acres to it. In the firsthalf of the eighteenth century complaints were made that the dwellings of the agricultural labourers had not at least one ortwo acres. (15)
