In breeding
sheep regard was had to 'folding quality,' i.e. the propensity to
drop manure only after being folded at night, as much as to quality
and quantity of wool and meat. On enclosure the common flock was
broken up. The small farmer had no longer any common to turn his
horses on. The down on which he fed his sheep was largely curtailed,
the common shepherd was abolished, and the farmer had too few sheep to
enable him individually to employ a shepherd. Therefore he had to part
with his flock. Having no cow common and very little pasture land he
could not keep cows. In such circumstances the small farmer, after a
few years, succumbed and became a labourer, or emigrated, or went to
the towns.

In a pamphlet called _The Case of Labourers in Husbandry_, 1795, the
Rev. David Davies said, 'by enclosure an amazing number of people have
been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the
precarious condition of mere hirelings, who when out of work
immediately come on the parish.' It has often been said that the poor
were robbed of their share in the land by the landowners; but as a
matter of fact it was the expense of securing the compensation allowed
them, much greater in proportion on small holdings than on large,
which went into the pockets of surveyors and lawyers, that did this.
It was also often through the farmer that the labourer was deprived of
his land when he had retained an acre or two after enclosure. Wishing
to make the labourer dependent on him, he persuaded the agent to let
the cottages with the farm, and the agent in order to avoid collecting
a number of small rents consented. As soon as the farmer had the
cottages he took the land from them and added it to his own. The
peasant's losses engaged the serious attention of many landlords; near
Tewkesbury, in 1773, the lord of the manor on enclosure, besides
reserving 25 acres for the use of the poor, allowed land to each
cottage sufficient to keep a horse or a cow, often added a small
building, and gave stocks for raising orchards. Even some of the
idlest were thereby made industrious, poor rates sank to 4d. in the L,
though the population increased, and the labourer always had for sale
some poultry, or the produce of his cow, or some fruit.[570]

In 1800 the Board of Agriculture, composed almost entirely of
landowners, noticing that the poor of Rutland and Lincolnshire, who
had land for one or two cows and some potatoes, had not applied for