ivate Enclosure
Acts, still further reducing the expense; and since that date there
have been 80,000 or 90,000 acres of common arable fields and meadows
enclosed without parliamentary sanction, and 139,517 acres of the same
have been enclosed with it,[576] besides many acres of commons and
waste.

In the _Report of the Committee of Enclosures_ of 1844,[577] there is
a curious description of the way in which common fields were sometimes
allotted. There were in some open fields, lands called 'panes',
containing forty or sixty different lands, and on a certain day the
best man of the parish appeared to take possession of any lot he
thought fit. If his right was called in question there was a fight for
it, and the survivor took the first lot, and so they went on through
the parish. There was also the old 'lot meadow' in which the owners
drew lots for choice of portions. On some of the grazing lands the
right of grazing sheep belonged to a man called a 'flockmaster', who
during certain months of the year had the exclusive right of turning
his sheep on all the lands of the parish.

Closely connected with the subject of enclosure is that of the partial
disappearance of the small owner, both the yeoman who farmed his own
little estate and the peasant proprietor. We have noticed above[578]
Gregory King's statement as to the number of small freeholders in
England in 1688, no less than 160,000, or with their families about
one-seventh of the population of the country. This date, that of the
Revolution, marks an epoch in their history, for from that time they
began to diminish in proportion to the population. Their number in
1688 is a sufficient answer to the exaggerated statement of
contemporaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as to the
depopulation caused by enclosures. Chamberlayne, in his _State of
Great Britain_, published at about the same time as Gregory King's
figures, says there were more freeholders in England than in any
country of like extent in Europe: 'L40 or L50 a year is very ordinary,
L100 or L200 in some counties is not rare, sometimes in Kent and in
the Weald of Sussex L500 or L600 per annum, and L3,000 or L4,000 of
stock.' In the first quarter of the eighteenth century he was a
prominent figure. Defoe[579] describes the number and prosperity of
the Greycoats of Kent (as they were called from their homespun
garments), 'whose interest is so considerable that whoever they vote
for is always sure to