Parliamentary Enclosure and Landownership Change in Buckinghamshire

S INCE the publication of A. H. Johnson's The Disappearance of the Small Landowner in I 909, a considerable literature has been produced which discusses the consequences of enclosure for landownership patterns and distributions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and which draws evidence from the contemporary land-tax returns.' A heated debate took place in the I960's about the value of these returns and in particular whether, as documents expressed in monetary terms, they could be re-interpreted in terms of acres, or more correctly, acreage equivalents.2 The argument rested with the two main protagonists still in disagreement: J. M. Martin, who favoured such an acreage equivalent, and G. E. Mingay, who had considerable doubts whether such an equivalent could be used.3 As the latter quite rightly pointed out, it was more like a property tax than a purely land tax, since it also assessed cottages, houses, other dwellingplaces and appendant buildings, as well as land, and very often failed to distinguish the two. Of all the problems in using the land tax this is perhaps the most insoluble, though it should become clear as this article proceeds that the circum-