A LAOCOON OF THE ROCKS


The enclosure of the common fields of England by hedge or wall, whereby
the country has been changed from a land of open champaigns and large
vistas to one of parterres and cattle-pens, constitutes a revolution in
the social and economic life of the nation. Though extending over many
years and even centuries, this process of change reached its height in
the latter half of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, and
thus comes into line with the industrial revolution which was taking
place in urban England about the same time. To some, indeed, the
enclosure of the open fields may appear as the outward symbol of that
enwalling of the nation's economic freedom which transformed the artisan
from an independent craftsman to a wage-earner, and made of him a link
in the chain of our modern factory system. To those economists who
estimate the wealth of nations solely by a ledger-standard, the
enclosure of the common fields has seemed a wise procedure; but to those
who look deeper, a realisation has come that it did much to destroy the
communal life of the countryside. Be that as it may, it is beyond
question that to the ancient and honoured order of shepherds, from whose
ranks kings, seers and poets have sprung, it brought misfortune and even
ruin.

Among the shepherds of the eastern slopes of the Pennine Hills few were
better known in the early years of the nineteenth century than Peregrine
Ibbotson. A shepherd all his life, as his father and grandfather had
been before him, he nevertheless belonged to a family that had once
owned wide tracts of land in Yorkshire. But the Ibbotsons had fought on
the losing side in the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the forfeiture of their
lands had reduced them to the rank of farmers or shepherds. But the