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.

A 'Country Farmer', who wrote in 1786, states that many of the small
farmers displaced by enclosures sold their few possessions and
emigrated to America.[447] The growing manufacturing towns also
absorbed a considerable number. That there was a considerable amount
of hardship inflicted on small holders and commoners is certain, but
industrial progress is frequently attended by the dislocation of
industry and consequent distress; the introduction of machinery, for
instance, often causing great suffering to hand-workers, but
eventually benefiting the whole community. How many men has the
self-binding reaping machine thrown for a time out of work? So
enclosure caused distress to many individuals, but was for the good of
the whole nation. The history of enclosure is really the history of
progress in farming; the conversion of land badly tilled in the old
common fields, and of waste land little more valuable than the
prairies; into well-managed fruitful farms. That much of the
common-field land when enclosed was laid down to grass is certainly
true, and certainly inevitable if it paid best under grass.[448] No
one can expect the holders of land naturally best suited for grass to
keep it under tillage for philanthropic purposes. A vast number of the
commoners too were idle thriftless beings, whose rights on a few acres
enabled them to live a life of pilfering and poaching; and it was a
very good thing when such people were induced to lead a more regular
and respectable existence. The great blot on the process was that it
made the English labourer a landless man. Compensation was given him
at the time of enclosure in the shape of allotments or sums of money,
but the former he was generally compelled to give up owing to the
expe