Cylchgronau Cymru

Popular Enclosures and the One-Night House. R. U. SAYCE. To the last number of the Revue de Folklore Francais (April-June 1939) that reached this country M. G. Jeanton contributed a paper on Les maisons construites en une nuit." In doing so he raised a question of interest to social historians and one about which there seems to be little known. Many people in Montgomeryshire must be familiar with the belief that if a man built a cottage on a piece of waste land, in one night, he thereby acquired a freehold right to it; but opinions probably differ as to whether this is merely an unfounded belief or a survival of some ancient popular custom. I have collected a few notes on the subject and am publishing them in order to start a hare which I hope competent historians will hunt down. Although the custom was well known in the last century, there are now many middle-aged people who have never heard of it. A quotation from Mr. G. Slater's book on The English Peasantry and the Enclosures of the Common Fields (1907) will form a suitable introduction to the subject. The author acknowledged his indebtedness for information to Mr. John Swain, who, he said, spoke from an intimate personal knowledge. The parish of in the county of Montgomeryshire, is about five miles long by two miles broad. It consists for the most part of a hill, lying between a river and one of its tributaries. The hill rises to about 900 feet above sea-level, and contains no unenclosed land On this hill most of the cottage holdings are to be found, usually in some sheltered hollow near a spring or a running stream Previous to the Enclosure Act, passed early in the nineteenth century, the greater part of the hill was open The unenclosed portion of the hill was used as a common pasture by all the farmers whose land adjoined it, and the amount of stock each one was allowed to feed on it was roughly regulated by the size of his holding." About 120 years ago a number of the poorer peasantry began settling on the common land. There was a general understanding that if a house was raised during the night so that the builders were able to cause smoke to issue from the chimney by sunrise, they thereby established a right of possession