at which has gone. And it is no wonder if some of
those habits seem now stupid, ignorant, objectionable; for the fitness
has departed from them, and left them naked. They were acquired under a
different set of circumstances--a set of circumstances whose
disappearance dates from, and was caused by, the enclosure of the
common.

IX

THE NEW THRIFT

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