12.  “An examination into the details of an Enclosure Act will make clear the point that the system as above described [communal ownership] is the system which it was the object of the Enclosure Act to remove” (Seebohm, l.c. p. 13).  And further on, “They were generally drawn in the same form, commencing with the recital that the open and common fields lie dispersed in small pieces, intermixed with each other and inconveniently situated; that divers persons own parts of them, and are entitled to rights of common on them... and that it is desired that they may be divided and enclosed, a specific share being let out and allowed to each owner” (p. 14).  Porter’s list contained 3867 such Acts, of which the greatest numbers fall upon the decades of 1770-1780 and 1800-1820, as in France.

13.  In Switzerland we see a number of communes, ruined by wars, which have sold part of their lands, and now endeavour to buy them back.

14.  A. Buchenberger, “Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik,” in A. Wagner’s Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie, 1892, Band i. pp. 280 seq.

15.  G.L.  Gomme, “The Village Community, with special reference to its Origin and Forms of Survival in Great Britain” (Contemporary Science Series), London, 1890, pp. 141-143; also his Primitive Folkmoots (London, 1880), pp. 98 seq.

16.  “In almost all parts of the country, in the Midland and Eastern counties particularly, but also in the west—­in Wiltshire, for example—­in the south, as in Surrey, in the north, as in Yorkshire,—­there are extensive open and common fields.  Out of 316 parishes of Northamptonshire 89 are in this condition; more than 100 in Oxfordshire; about 50,000 acres in Warwickshire; in Berkshire half the county; more than half of Wiltshire; in Huntingdonshire out of a total area of 240,000 acres 130,000 were commonable meadows, commons, and fields” (Marshall, quoted in Sir Henry Maine’s Village Communities in the East and West, New York edition, 1876, pp. 88, 89).  See also Dr. G. Slater’s The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, London, 1907.

17.  Ibid. p. 88; also Fifth Lecture.

18.  In quite a number of books dealing with English country life which I have consulted I have found charming descriptions of country scenery and the like, but almost nothing about the daily life and customs of the labourers.

19.  In Switzerland the peasants in the open land also fell under the dominion of lords, and large parts of their estates were appropriated by the lords in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (cf.  A. Miaskowski, in Schmoller’s Forschungen, Bd. ii. 1879, pp. 12 seq.) But the peasant war in Switzerland did not end in such a crushing defeat of the peasants as it did in other countries, and a great deal of the communal rights and lands was retained.  The self-government of the communes is, in fact, the very foundation of the Swiss liberties. (cf.  K. Burtli, Der Ursprung der Eidgenossenschaft aus der Markgenossenschaft, Zurich, 1891.)