ed) had in his political.

In every village of England had been small freeholders, copyholders
and cottagers, all of whom had varying degrees of possession in the
common lands which were administered by a manorial court of the
village. These common lands were not mere stretches of heath and
gorse but consisted partly of arable cultivated in strips with strict
rules of rotation, partly of grazing land and partly of wood and
heath. Most people in the village had a right to a strip of arable,
to cut firing of brushwood and turf, and rushes for thatch, and to
pasture one or more cows, their pigs and their geese. A village
cowherd looked after all the animals and brought them back at night.
Cobbett in his _Cottage Economy_ (to a new edition of which
Chesterton wrote a preface) reckoned that a cottager with a
quarter-acre of garden could well keep a cow on his own cabbages plus
commonland grazing, could fatten his own pig and have to buy very
little food for his family except grain and hops for home-baking and
brewing. He puts a cottager's earnings, working part-time for a
farmer, at about 10 sh. a week. This figure would vary, but the
possession of property in stock and common rights would tide over bad
times. A man with fire and food could be quasi-independent; and
indeed some of the larger farmers, witnessing before Enclosure
Enquiry Committees, complained of this very spirit of independence as
producing idleness and "sauciness."

The case for the Enclosures was that improved agricultural methods
could not be used in the open fields: more food was grown for
increasing town populations: much waste land ploughed: livestock
immeasurably improved. Only later was the cost counted when cheap
imported food for these same towns had slain English agriculture. The
"compensation" in small plots or sums of money could not for the
smaller commoners replace what they had lost--even when they
succeeded in getting it. Claims had to be made in writing--and few
cottagers could write. How difficult too to reduce to its money value
a claim for cutting turf or pasturing pigs and geese. A commissioner,
who had administered twenty Enclosure Acts, lamented to Arthur Young
that he had been the means of ruining two thousand poor people. But
the gulf was so great between rich and poor that all that the commons
had meant to the poor was not glimpsed by the rich. Arthur Young had
thought the benefits of common "perfectly contemptible," but by 1801