Agricultural History Review, Volume 39 Part 2 (1991), pp. 116–125

Parliamentary enclosures under the 1845 General Enclosure Act formed a substantial proportion of the total in South Wales. They were overwhelmingly of waste, and thus contributed to a net increase in the size of the existing holdings, in contrast to some early English enclosures. Though the number of allottees per enclosure was normally relatively small, few individuals received very large acreages, and this was reinforced by the pattern of purchases of sale allotments, with little evidence of large-scale buying by large landowners. Much of the newly-enclosed land appears to have undergone little improvement in the formal sense, but, at least in the view of contemporaries, sheep-farming became much more profitable when freed from the problems associated with common usage of the waste. 

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