landlords, he did not take the slightest trouble
to prove his case to the many who knew nothing of the matter. It must
be remembered that the sociological side of English history was only
just beginning to be explored to any serious extent. In the _Village
Labourer_, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond point out to what an extent they had
had to depend on the Home Office papers and contemporary documents
for the mass of facts which this book and the _Town Labourer_ brought
for the first time to the knowledge of the general public. Chesterton
had worked with Hammond on the _Speaker_ for some years. Just as with
his book about Shaw so too with the background of his sociology he
could have gone round the corner and got the required information. He
knew the thing in general terms; he would not be bothered to make
that knowledge convincing to his readers. If to his genius for
expounding ideas had been added an awareness of the necessity of
marshalling and presenting facts, he must surely have convinced all
men of goodwill.

For in this matter the facts were there to marshal. It was less than
a hundred years since the last struggle of the English yeomen against
a wholesale robbery and confiscation that catastrophically altered
the whole shape of our country. And it seems to have left no trace in
the memory of the English poor. In _Northanger Abbey_, Jane Austen
describes Catherine Morland finding the traces of an imaginary crime.
But Chesterton comments that the crime she failed to discover was the
very real one that the owner of Northanger Abbey was not an Abbot.
The ordinary Englishman, however, thinks little of a crime that
consisted in robbing "a lot of lazy monks." That they had possessed
so much of the land of England merely seemed to make the act a more
desirable one: yet it was a confiscation, not so much of monks' land
as of the people's land administered by the monasteries.

What is even less realised is how much of the structure of the
mediaeval village remained after the Reformation and how widespread
was small ownership nearly to the end of the eighteenth century, when
Enclosures began estimated by the Hammonds at five million acres.
This land ceased in effect to be the common property of the poor and
became the private property of the rich. This business of the
Enclosures must be treated at some little length because it had the
same key position in Chesterton's sociological thinking as the
Marconi Case (shortly to be discuss