e 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 t