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clearance was associated with industry, mining or quarrying. Existing settlements would also be affected with new buildings and farms, the loss of traditional tradesassociated with the previous landscape and, in some wetland areas, a diverted river, leaving streets and greens where water once flowed.
    It was believed by most innovators that these new agricultural practices would work best within enclosed fields, something which had already been done in many parts of north, west and south-east England by agreement. However, in the central belt of the country from Wiltshire, up through the south and east Midlands and on into Yorkshire, open fields still dominated the landscape and efforts to enclose them met with strong opposition. The pressure to enclose, though, became too great with the sudden upsurge in the population from the mid 18th century, so landlords and enterprising farmers looked to their friends in government to authorise enclosures. Parliamentary enclosures had first occurred in the early 17th century, but between 1750 and 1850 they dramatically increased to change the landscape of the heart of village England.

    FIG 4.3 CROWLAND, LINCS: This old three-legged bridge was left high and dry when the rivers which met beneath it were channelled around the village. During the 17th century similar drainage schemes were taking place, the most notable by the Duke of Bedford and his group of Adventure Capitalists who employed the Dutch engineer Vermuyden to build channels in the Fens and make the land suitable for farming. Unfortunately the drying soil, which was very peaty, shrank and the land level dropped below that of the rivers which were meant to be draining it. Windmills powering pumps and new channels were built to solve the problem, but this area is still unnaturally lower than sea level. Names like Bedford Channel and fields called Adventurers Lands record the culprits for posterity .
    The enclosure of a parish would usually be granted as long as those who applied owned the majority of the land, whereupon a commissioner would be appointed. His task was to divide up and allocate the land with some respect to the farmers’ previous holdings. Those with sizable claims would find a new set of fields clustered together rather than sprinkled randomly over the parish, and a new farmhouse at their centre. However, those with very small holdings could lose out altogether and end up as landless labourers. The farmers’ houses left behind in the village were often split up to provide these workers with accommodation, while they relied upon their former neighbours for employment. Their plight had been made worse because the commissioners also enclosedheaths, meadows, greens and other waste lands which peasants had used to graze their few livestock or where they gathered materials which were essential to their family’s existence. Some villages maintained or even increased their population depending on the success of the new farms; in others the drifting away of landless labourers may have played a part in their continued demise.

    FIG 4.4: A plan of a village before and after Parliamentary enclosure showing how the dispersed strips of farms A—D were reorganised into their new holdings. Farm E was too small and its lands were absorbed by the others and common land (the hill grazing, heath and green) were also lost. Note the road to the neighbouring village had to be realigned between farms C and D creating a kink which can often still be seen today along parish boundaries .
    The other areas affected by Parliamentary enclosure in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were thelarge commons and wastes, especially in the upland regions like the Peak District and the Lake District. These previously open moors and mountains were covered in a grid of dry stone walls with barns erected in the new fields but, unlike the lowlands, the farms themselves often stayed rooted in the village or hamlet. Some of the last royal forests,