Star Chamber.

The assertion that enclosures ceased during the seventeenth century
has been proved inaccurate by modern research, and there is no doubt
that they went on continuously. In 1607, in the Midlands, the
enclosing of land produced serious armed resistance, probably because
the Midland counties were then the great corn-growing district of
England, and the change to pasture and the consolidation of farms
displaced a larger population there than elsewhere. Between 1628 and
1630 enclosures in Leicestershire, for instance, were very numerous,
no less than 10,000 acres being enclosed in that time, most of which
was converted to pasture. The attempt of the Government to check the
movement, initiated by Charles I, seems to have had considerable
effect, but died away with the Civil War, and though other attempts
were made under the Commonwealth they came to nothing, and from this
time enclosures went on unchecked by the Government,[274] and were
soon to have its active support. Yet there was a vast amount still in
common field: the whole of the cultivated land of England in 1685 was
stated by King and Davenant to amount to not much more than half the
total area, and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still
farmed on the old common-field system. Northamptonshire,
Leicestershire, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire were
comparatively unenclosed.[275] From the books and maps of the day 'it
is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession
of orchards, corn-fields, hay-fields, and bean-fields then ran through
nothing but heath, swamp, and warren. In the drawings of an English
landscape made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo scarce a hedgerow
is to be seen.... At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the
capital, was a region of five-and-twenty miles in circumference which
contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.'[276]
The enclosure of these areas was to be mainly the work of the latter
half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth
centuries.

The amount of enclosure in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the first
half of the seventeenth centuries was, according to the latest
research, much, and perhaps very naturally, exaggerated by
contemporaries. Between 1455-1607 the enclosures in twenty-four
counties are said to have amounted to some 500,000 acres, or 2.76 of
their total area,[277] but the evidence for this is by no means
conclusive. Ho