One usually thinks of the enclosure of a common as a procedure which takes effect immediately, in striking and memorable change; yet the event in this village seems to have made no lasting impression on people's minds. The older folk talk about things that happened "before the common was enclosed" much as they might say "before the flood," and occasionally they discuss the history of some allotment or other made under the award; but one hears little from them to suggest that the fateful ordinance seemed to them a fateful one at the time.

It may be that the stoical village temper is in part accountable for this indifference. As the arrangement was presumably made over the heads of the people, they doubtless took it in a fatalistic way as a thing that could not be helped and had better be dismissed from their thoughts. Were this all, however, I think that I should have heard more of the matter. Had sudden distress fallen upon the valley, had families been speedily and obviously ruined by the enclosure, some mention of the fact would surely have reached me. But the truth appears to be that nothing very definite or striking ensued, to be remembered. The change was hardly understood, or, at any rate, its importance was not appreciated, by the people concerned.

Perhaps, indeed, its calamitous nature was veiled at first behind some small temporary advantages which sprang from it. True, I question if the benefits experienced here were equal to those which are said to have been realized in similar circumstances elsewhere. In other parishes, where the farmers have been impoverished and the labourers out of work, the latter, at the enclosure of a common, have sometimes found welcome employment in digging out or fencing in the boundaries of the new allotments, and in breaking up the fresh ground. So the landowners say. But here, where there were few men wanting constant labour, the opportunity of work to do was hardly called for, and the making of boundaries was in many cases neglected. In that one way, therefore, not many can have derived any profit from the enclosure. On the other hand, an advantage was really felt, I think, in the opening that arose for building cottages on the newly-acquired freeholds. Quite a number of cottages seem to date from that period; and I infer that the opportunity was seized by various men who wished to provide new house-room for themselves, or for a married son or daughter. They could still go to work almost on the old lines. Perhaps the recognized price—seventy pounds, it is said to have been, for building a cottage of three rooms—would have to be exceeded a little, when timbers for floor and roof could no longer be had for the cutting out of fir-trees on the common; and yet there, after all, were the trees, inexpensive to buy; and there was the peasant tradition, still unimpaired, to encourage and commend such enterprise.

There is really little need, however, for these explanations of the people's unconcern at the disaster which had, in fact, befallen them. The passing of the common seemed unimportant at the time, not so much because a few short-lived advantages concealed its meaning as because the real disadvantages were slow to appear. At first the enclosure was rather a nominal event than an actual one. It had been made in theory; in practice it was deferred. I have just said that in many cases the boundaries were left unmarked; I may add now that to this day they have not quite all been defined, although the few spots which remain unfenced are not worthy of notice. They are to be found only in places where building is impossible; elsewhere all is now closed in. For it is the recent building boom that has at last caused the enclosure to take its full effect. Before that began, not more than ten or twelve years ago, there were abundant patches of heath still left open; and on many a spot where nowadays the well-to-do have their tennis or their afternoon tea, of old I have seen donkeys peacefully grazing. The donkeys have had to go, their room being wanted, and not many cottagers can keep a donkey now; but kept they were, and in considerable numbers, until these late years, in spite of the enclosure. But if the end could be deferred so long, one may judge how slowly the change began—slowly and inconspicuously, so that those who saw the beginning could almost ignore it. Even the cows—once as numerous as the donkeys—were not given up quite immediately, though in a few years they were all gone, I am told. But long after them, heath for thatching and firing might still be cut in waste places; fern continued until six or seven years ago to yield litter for pig-sties; and since these things still seemed to go on almost as well after the enclosure as before it, how should the people have imagined that their ancient mode of life had been cut off at the roots, and that it had really begun to die where it stood, under their undiscerning eyes?

Nevertheless, that was the effect. To the enclosure of the common more than to any other cause may be traced all the changes that have subsequently passed over the village. It was like knocking the keystone out of an arch. The keystone is not the arch; but, once it is gone, all sorts of forces, previously resisted, begin to operate towards ruin, and gradually the whole structure crumbles down. This fairly illustrates what has happened to the village, in consequence of the loss of the common. The direct results have been perhaps the least important in themselves; but indirectly the enclosure mattered, because it left the people helpless against influences which have sapped away their interests, robbed them of security and peace, rendered their knowledge and skill of small value, and seriously affected their personal pride and their character. Observe it well. The enclosure itself, I say, was not actually the cause of all this; but it was the opening, so to speak, through which all this was let in. The other causes which have been at work could hardly have operated as they have done if the village life had not been weakened by the changes directly due to the loss of the common.

They consisted—those changes—in a radical alteration of the domestic economy of the cottagers. Not suddenly, but none the less inevitably, the old thrift—the peasant thrift—which the people understood thoroughly had to be abandoned in favour of a modern thrift—commercial thrift—which they understood but vaguely. That was the essential effect of the enclosure, the central change directly caused by it; and it struck at the very heart of the peasant system.

For note what it involved. By the peasant system, as I have already explained, people derived the necessaries of life from the materials and soil of their own countryside. Now, so long as they had the common, the inhabitants of the valley were in a large degree able to conform to this system, the common being, as it were, a supplement to the cottage gardens, and furnishing means of extending the scope of the little home industries. It encouraged the poorest labourer to practise, for instance, all those time-honoured crafts which Cobbett, in his little book on Cottage Economy, had advocated as the one hope for labourers. The cow-keeping, the bread-making, the fattening of pigs and curing of bacon, were actually carried on here thirty years after Cobbett's time, besides other things not mentioned by him, such as turf-cutting on the heath and wheat-growing in the gardens. But it was the common that made all this possible. It was only by the spacious "turn-out" which it afforded that the people were enabled to keep cows and get milk and butter; it was only with the turf-firing cut on the common that they could smoke their bacon, hanging it in the wide chimneys over those old open hearths where none but such fuel could be used; and, again, it was only because they could get furze from the common to heat their bread ovens that it was worth their while to grow a little wheat at home, and have it ground into flour for making bread. With the common, however, they could, and did, achieve all this. I am not dealing in supposition. I have mentioned nothing here that I have not learnt from men who remember the system still flourishing—men who in their boyhood took part in it, and can tell how the turfs were harvested, and how the pig-litter was got home and stacked in ricks; men who, if you lead them on, will talk of the cows they themselves watched over on the heath—two from this cottage, three from that one yonder, one more from Master Hack's, another couple from Trusler's, until they have numbered a score, perhaps, and have named a dozen old village names. It all actually happened. The whole system was "in full swing" here, within living memory. But the very heart of it was the open common.

Accordingly, when the enclosure began to be a fact, when the cottager was left with nothing to depend upon save his garden alone, as a peasant he was a broken man—a peasant shut out from his countryside and cut off from his resources. True, he might still grow vegetables, and keep a pig or two, and provide himself with pork; but there was little else that he could do in the old way. It was out of the question to obtain most of his supplies by his own handiwork: they had to be procured, ready-made, from some other source. That source, I need hardly say, was a shop. So the once self-supporting cottager turned into a spender of money at the baker's, the coal-merchant's, the provision-dealer's; and, of course, needing to spend money, he needed first to get it.

The change was momentous, as events have sufficiently proved. In the matter of earning, to be sure, the difference has appeared rather in the attitude of the people than in the actual method of going about to get money. To a greater or less extent, most of them were already wage-earners, though not regularly. If a few had been wont to furnish themselves with money in true peasant fashion—that is to say, by selling their goods, their butter, or milk, or pig-meat, instead of their labour—still, the majority had wanted for their own use whatever they could produce in this way, and had been obliged to sell their labour itself, when they required money. Wage-earning, therefore, was no new thing in the village; only, the need to earn became more insistent, when so many more things than before had to be bought with the wages. Consequently, it had to be approached in a more businesslike, a more commercial, spirit. Unemployment, hitherto not much worse than a regrettable inconvenience, became a calamity. Every hour's work acquired a market value. The sense of taking part in time-honoured duties of the countryside disappeared before the idea—so very important now—of getting shillings with which to go to a shop; while even the home industries which were still practicable began to be valued in terms of money, so that a man was tempted to neglect his own gardening if he could sell his labour in somebody else's garden. Thus undermined, the peasant outlook gave way, perforce, to that of the modern labourer, and the old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this change of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the enclosure of the common which were spoken of above. If the villagers became more mercenary, it was not because the fencing in of the heaths immediately caused them to become so, but because it left them helpless to resist becoming so—left them a prey to considerations whose weight they had previously not so much felt. After all, the new order of things did but intensify the need of wage-earning; it made no difference in the procedure of it.

But in regard to spending the case was otherwise. Under the old rÉgime, although probably a small regular expenditure of money had been usual, yet in the main the peasant's expenditure was not regular, but intermittent. Getting so much food and firing by his own labour, he might go for weeks without needing more than a few shillings to make up occasional deficiencies. His purse was subject to no such constant drain as that for which the modern labourer has to provide. In short, the regular expenses were small, the occasional ones not crushing. But to-day, when the people can no longer produce for themselves, the proportion has changed. It has swung round so completely that nearly all the expenses have become regular, while those of the other sort have wellnigh disappeared. Every week money has to be found, and not only, as of old, for rent, and boots, and for some bread and flour, but also for butter or margarine, sugar, tea, bacon or foreign meat if possible, lard, jam, and—in the winter, at least—coal. Even water is an item of weekly expense; for where the company's water is laid on to a cottage, there is sixpence a week or so added to the rent. The only important thing which is still not bought regularly is clothing. The people get their clothes when they can, and when they positively must.

As a result, the former thrift of the village has been entirely subverted. For earning and spending are not the whole of economy. There is saving to be considered; and, in consequence of the turn-over of expenses from the occasional to the regular group, the cottagers have been obliged to resort to methods of saving specially adapted to the changed conditions. The point is of extreme importance. Under the old style, a man's chief savings were in the shape of commodities ready for use, or growing into use. They were, too, a genuine capital, inasmuch as they supported him while he replaced and increased them. The flitches of bacon, the little stores of flour and home-made wine, the stack of firing, the small rick of fern or grass, were his savings-bank, which, while he drew from it daily, he replenished betimes as he planted his garden, and brought home heath and turf from the common, and minded his pigs and his cow, and put by odd shillings for occasional need. Notice that putting-by of shillings. It was not the whole, it was only the completion, of the peasant's thrift. At a pinch he could even do without the money, paying for what he wanted with a sack of potatoes, or a day's work with his donkey-cart; but a little money put by was a convenience. When it was wanted, it was wanted in lump sums—ten shillings now, say, for a little pig; and then fifteen shillings or so in six weeks' time for mending the donkey-cart, and so on; and, thanks to the real savings in the shape of food and firing ready for use, the shillings, however come by, could be hoarded up.

But under the new thrift they cannot be so hoarded up; nor, fortunately, are the little lump sums so necessary as before. The real savings now, the real stores of useful capital, are no longer in the cottager's home. They are in shops. What the modern labourer chiefly requires, therefore, is not a little hoard of money lying by, but a regular supply of money, a constant stream of it, flowing in, to enable him to go to the shops regularly. In a word, he wants an income—a steady income of shillings. And since his earnings are not steady—since his income may cease any day, and continue in abeyance for weeks at a time, during which the shops will be closed against him, his chief economy is directed upon the object of insuring his weekly income. Most miserably for him, he has never been able to insure it against all reverses. Against trade depression, which throws him out of work and dries up the stream of money that should come flowing in, he has no protection. He has none if his employer should go bankrupt, or leave the neighbourhood, and dismiss him; none against the competition of machinery. Still, the labourers do as much as they can. Sickness, at least, does not find them unprepared. To cover loss of wages during sickness, they pay into a benefit society. The more careful, indeed, pay into two—the Oddfellows or the Foresters, or some such society—and a local "slate-club." I have known men out of work living on tea and bread, and not much of that, so that they may keep up their club payments, and be sure of an income if they should fall sick; and I have known men so circumstanced immediately feel the advantage if sickness should actually fall upon them.

This is the new thrift, which has replaced that of the peasant. I do not say that there is no other saving—that no little sums are hoarded up; for, in fact, I could name one or two men who, after illness protracted to the stage when sick-pay from the club is reduced, have still fought off destitution with the small savings from better times. In most cases, however, no hoarding is possible. The club takes all the spare money; and the club alone stands between the labourer and destitution. And let this be clearly understood. At first it looks as if the member of a club had money invested in his society—money there, instead of perishable goods at home. Yet, in fact, that is not the case. His payments into the club funds are no investment. They bring him no profit; they are not a useful capital that can be renewed with interest. At the Christmas "share-out" he does get back a part of the twenty-six shillings contributed to the slate-club during the year; but the two pounds a year paid to the benefit society are his no longer; they cannot be "realized"; they are gone beyond reclaiming. Though he be out of work and his family starving, he cannot touch the money; to derive any advantage from it he himself must first fall ill. That is what the modern thrift means to the labourer. It does nothing to further—on the contrary, it retards—his prosperity; but it helps him in a particular kind of adversity. It drains his personal wealth away, and leaves him destitute of his capital; it robs his wife and children of his savings; but in return it makes him one of a brotherhood which guarantees to him a minimum income for a short time, if he should be out of health.

An oldish man, who had been telling me one evening how they used to live in his boyhood, looked pensively across the valley when he had done, and so stood for a minute or two, as if trying to recover his impressions of that lost time. At last, with appearance of an effort to speak patiently, "Ah," he said, "they tells me times are better now, but I can't see it;" and it was plain enough that he thought our present times the worse. So far as this valley is concerned I incline to agree with him, although in general it is a debatable question. On the one hand, it may be that the things a labourer can buy at a shop for fifteen shillings a week are more in quantity and variety, if not better in quality, than those which his forefathers could produce by their own industry; and to that extent the advantage is with the present times. But, on the other hand, the fifteen shillings are not every week forthcoming; and whereas the old-time cottager out of work could generally find something profitable to do for himself, the modern man, having once got his garden into order, stands unprofitably idle.

Perhaps the worst is that, owing to the lowness of their wages, the people have never been able to give the new thrift a fair trial. After all, they miss the lump sums laid by against need. If their earnings would ever overtake their expenses and give a little margin, they might do better; but buying, as they are obliged to do, from hand to mouth, they buy at extravagant prices. Coal, for instance, which costs me about twenty-six shillings for a ton, costs the labourer half as much again as that, because he can only pay for a hundredweight or so at a time. So, too, the boots he can get for four or five shillings a pair are the dearest of all boots. They wear out in a couple of months or so, and another pair must be bought almost before another four or five shillings can be spared. In its smaller degree, a still more absurd difficulty handicaps the people in dealing with their own fruit-crops. To make raspberry or gooseberry jam should be, you would think, an economy delightful to the cottage women, if only as a piece of old-fashioned thrift; yet they rarely do it. If they had the necessary utensils, still the weekly money at their disposal will not run to the purchase of extra firing and sugar. It is all too little for everyday purposes, and they are glad to eke it out by selling their fruit for middle-class women to preserve, though in the end they have to buy for their own families an inferior quality of jam at a far higher price.

Wherever you follow it up, you will find the modern thrift not quite successful in the cottages. It is not elastic enough; or, rather, the people's means are not elastic enough, and will not stretch to its demands. There is well-being in it—variety of food, for instance, and comfort of clothing—as soon as both ends can be made to meet and to lap over a little; but it strains the small incomes continually to the breaking-point, so that every other consideration has to give way under it to a pitiful calculation of pence. For the sake of pence the people who keep fowls sell the eggs, and feed their children on bread and margarine; and, on the same principle, they do not even seek to produce other things which are well within their power to produce, but are too luxurious for their means. "'Twouldn't be no use for me to grow strawberries," a man explained; "my children'd have 'em." It sounded a strange reason, for to what better use could strawberries be put? But it shows how tightly the people are bound down by their commercial conditions. In order to make the Saturday's shopping easier, they must weigh the shillings and pence value of everything they possess and everything they attempt to do.

These considerations, however, though showing that present times are not good, do not prove that they are worse than past times. It may be that there was poverty in the valley before the enclosure of the common quite as severe as there is now; and, so far as concerns mere economics, that event did but change the mode of the struggle for existence, without greatly affecting its intensity. People are poor in a different way now, that is all. Hence, in its more direct results, the loss of the common has not mattered much, and it might be forgotten if those results were the only ones.

But they are not the only ones. The results have spread from the economic centre outwards until the whole life of the people has been affected, new influences coming into play which previously were but little felt. So searching, indeed, has the change been, and so revolutionary, that anything like a full account of it would be out of the question. The chapters that follow, therefore, do not pretend to deal with it at all exhaustively; at most they will but draw attention to a few of its more striking aspects.