Welsh Journals

some. The deepening of local party divisions may also have played a part, for yet more attempts at enclosure in Llanbister and Llananno foundered mainly upon the mutual mistrust between Sir Richard Green Price and his allies on one side and Lord Ormathwaite, the Hon Arthur Walsh, and their agent, the Presteigne solicitor, William Stephens, on the other.8 By the early 1 88os when the last phase of enclosure was under way, the outlook for the livestock sector had begun to darken. The Hendy Bank enclosure in Cefnllys seems to have been a mopping up measure, while in at least two of the other enclosures, at Betws Diserth and Cefn Drawen, Glascwm, the reason given for seeking enclosure was that regulation of the common was too expensive to administer, given the small number of com- moners. Since there were only eight allottees in the Llandegley Rhos award in Glascwm, regulation would not seem to have been a viable alternative here either. Again, even at this late date, enclosure was seen as perhaps the only effective means of ending the sometimes bitter disputes between commoners. Thus in the Betws Diserth application for an enclosure order it was asserted that if it were not for sheep coursing, driving the sheep of a fellow commoner from a favoured grazing area, and offences against the fishing laws, petty sessions for the locality could have been abandoned.9 However the enclosures of the 1880s were very much an afterthought for public opinion at large, prompted by the Radical wing of the Liberals, had been moving against enclosure since the later 1860s, and the realities of the agricultural depression saw champions of enclosure such as the second Lord Ormathwaite change their stance in the i 8gos. 10 THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ENCLOSURE The thirty-four parliamentary enclosures in Radnorshire dealt with about 61,000 acres, a total exceeded in Wales only by Debighshire and Mont- gomeryshire. Chapman gives the county total as 52, 359 acres, but under- estimates the acreages in the 1840 Llanyre and 1862 Llandrindod enclo- sures and relies upon the acreage stated in the act in the case of the manor of Gollon enclosure of 1846.11 The land was normally designated as com- mon lands and waste, basically rough pasture, but by no means all of it was mountain land or incapable of improvement. In 1844 Thomas Frankland Lewis explained that some of the land enclosed at Rhayader in 1828 had produced good crops of wheat.12 The acreage mentioned usually in the act and, after 1845, invariably in the order, was no more than an estimate, usually accurate, but on occasions as at Cascob 1813, the manor of Gollon 1846, Nantmel and St Harmon