he was deeply repentant and trying in vain to arrest the movement he
had helped to start.

Before enclosure, the English cottager had had milk, butter and
cheese in plenty, home-grown pork and bacon, home-brewed beer and
home-baked bread, his own vegetables (although Cobbett scorned green
rubbish for human food and advised it to be fed to cattle only), his
own eggs and poultry. After enclosure, he could get no milk, for the
farmers would not sell it; no meat, for his wages could not buy it;
and he no longer had a pig to provide the fat bacon commended by
Cobbett. Working long hours he lived on bread, potatoes and tea, and
insufficient even of these. Lord Winchelsea, one of the very few
landowners who resisted the trend of the time, mentioned in the House
of Lords the discovery of four labourers, starved to death under a
hedge, and said this was a typical occurrence.

At the beginning of the Enclosure period the Industrial Revolution
was barely in its infancy. A large part of the spinning, weaving and
other manufactures was carried on in the cottages of men who had
gardens they could dig in and cows and pigs of their own. The
invention of power machines, the discovery of coal wherewith those
machines could be worked, led to the concentration of factories in
the huge cities. But it was the drift from the villages of
dispossessed men, together with the cheap child labour provided by
Poor Law Guardians, that made possible the starvation wages and the
tyranny of the factory system. And here the tyrants were largely of a
different class. There were some landowners who also had factories,
and more who possessed coal-mines, but many of the manufacturers had
themselves come from the class of the dispossessed.

Successful manufacturers made money--a great deal of money. Many of
the men's appeals gave the figures at which the goods were sold in
contrast with their rate of wages, and the contrast is startling. So,
as the towns grew, the masters left the smoke they were creating and
bought country places and became country gentlemen, preserved their
own game and judged their own tenants. And thus disappeared yet
another section of the ancient country folk. For the large landowners
would seldom sell and the land bought by the new men was mostly the
land of small farmers and yeomen. This was the age of new country
houses with a hundred rooms and vast offices that housed an army of
servants. "Labour was cheap," the descendants of th