portions being only a quarter of an acre each. The largest meadow
contained 50 acres, divided among fifty-three people. In the manor,
besides the arable and meadow, there were 300 acres of common
pasture, a park, and a small wood. There were forty-one freeholders
and many leasehold tenants, the average freehold being 34 acres, the
average leasehold only half an acre, small holdings being the usual
feature of the unenclosed township.

In the seventeenth century the price of wool ceased to operate as a
cause of enclosure, but in many parts the change to pasture continued,
owing to the rise in price of cattle and of wages. The same reason,
too, for laying down land to grass that had been so powerful in the
preceding centuries still existed, the common arable fields needed
rest from continual cropping and poor manuring, while good crops of
corn could be grown from the virgin soil of the newly enclosed waste.
The preamble of the Durham decrees clearly states this: 'the land is
wasted and worn with continual ploweing, and thereby made bare,
barren, and very unfruitful.'[272] We may, therefore, take Coke's
words as inapplicable to many districts. In the seventeenth century
there were several methods of enclosing. Sometimes the lord of the
manor enclosed and left the land of the tenants still in common; or a
tenant enclosed piece by piece; or enclosures were made by Act of
Parliament, the earliest of which for common fields was passed in the
time of James I, a method at this period very seldom used; or there
was an agreement between lord and tenants often authorized by the
Courts of Chancery or Exchequer.

Besides enclosure, another process was going on, the consolidation of
farms by the amalgamation of small holdings into larger ones.
Farmhouses, as we see them to-day, began to appear on the holdings
thus consolidated, instead of being grouped together in villages. A
writer in 1604 says, 'we may see many of their houses built alone like
raven's nests, no birds building neere them' so unwonted was the sight
of isolated dwellings in most places at the time.

However, in 1630 Charles I went back to the policy of his forefathers
and issued letters to certain of the Midland counties ordering all
enclosures of the last two years to be removed, and Commissions were
issued to inquire into the matter in 1632, 1635, and 1636,[273] the
chief evil feared from enclosures being depopulation, and enclosers
were prosecuted in the Court of