This hypothesis is directly suggested by the evidence of recent survivals. The most familiar type of village community is characteristic of the Midlands; I have termed it the Mercian type. It is most easily conceived as a compound of the pure Keltic system, known in the Highlands and Ireland as Run-rig or Rundale, and the North German system traditional among the Angles, in which the two elements in equal strength are very perfectly blended together. In the South of England we find a different type, here termed the Wessex type, in which the influence of Keltic tradition is more strongly seen. The village community in Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk shows some remarkable special features, traces of which are found in adjoining counties, but which appear to be easily accounted for as the result of the later intrusion of Scandinavian traditions. Further, throughout the West of England, from Cumberland to Devon and Cornwall, we find evidence that the primitive type of village community approximated very closely to the Keltic Run-rig.

Enclosure of the common fields, meadows and pastures, of any particular village may have taken place in the following ways:--

(1) By Act of Parliament, viz., (a) by a private Act, (b) under the authority of the General Enclosure Acts of 1830 and 1836, (c) by the Enclosure Commissioners and their successors, the Board of Agriculture, under the General Enclosure Act of 1845 and its amending Acts.

(2) By common agreement of all the collective owners.

(3) By the purchase on the part of one owner of all conflicting rights.

(4) By special licence of the Tudor monarchs.

(5) By various forms of force and fraud.

Commonable waste may have been enclosed in any of the above ways, and also under the Statutes of Merton and Winchester (1235 and 1285), which give Lords of the Manor the right of enclosing commons provided proof is given that the tenants of the manor are left sufficient pasture.

Enquiry into the history of Enclosure naturally begins with an examination of the Enclosure Acts.

The first fact elicited by this examination is that there is a perfect legal similarity between Acts for enclosing commonable waste, which may be termed Acts for extending cultivation, and Acts such as that for Henlow, for enclosing all the open and common arable and other lands of a parish or parishes, which may be termed Acts for extinguishing village communities. About one-third of the Enclosure Acts belong to the former variety, about two-thirds to the latter. As from the economic and social points of view, the two classes of Enclosure Acts are as widely different as they are legally similar, no statistical summaries of the Acts can have much value until the two classes are sorted out. To do this involved a separate examination of all the Acts accessible.

Appendix A contains a statistical summary of the Acts for enclosing commonable waste passed between 1727 and 1845; Appendix B contains a list of Acts for enclosing common arable fields with or without other commonable lands passed between 1727 and 1900.