Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Newton Rebellion occurred in 1607 when armed peasants gathered at Newton in Northamptonshire to tear down hedges and fill ditches to reclaim common land rights. The confrontation resulted in a pitched battle against the gentry's private forces, leading to the deaths of forty to fifty people and the hanging of the rebellion leaders.
The demographic collapse caused by the Black Death in the middle of the 14th century created a labor shortage that forced landowners to rethink their relationship with the peasantry. Surviving farm laborers could demand higher wages, leading to inflation and the eventual abandonment of some lands, which set the stage for the enclosure movement.
The open-field system organized the English countryside under a complex arrangement where land was divided into narrow strips scattered across large common fields. This system utilized a three-field rotation where barley, oats, or legumes were planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in autumn, and the third field was left fallow to be used for grazing animals.
The insatiable demand for wool during the Tudor period drove manorial lords to enclose common land to convert it from arable farming to sheep pasture. This conversion often involved evicting the villagers who had lived there for centuries to maximize the value of their estates.
The formalization of enclosure through acts of Parliament began in 1604 with the Melcombe Regis and Radipole Act. Between 1604 and 1914, more than 5,200 inclosure bills were passed, amounting to approximately one fifth of the total area of England.
The social consequences of enclosure were profound, with historians debating whether the movement destroyed the traditional peasant way of life or simply modernized agriculture to feed a growing population. Sir Thomas More famously described the movement in his 1516 work Utopia as a process where sheep ate men, highlighting the human cost of converting arable land to pasture.