Enclosure

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Over a thousand people gathered at Newton, near Kettering, on the 8th of June 1607. They pulled down hedges and filled in ditches by hand. Women and children stood among them. This was enclosure: the appropriation of waste or common land, the fencing of it, and the stripping away of the commoners' traditional rights of access and use. Across England, from the 1530s to the 1640s, historians call enclosure riots the pre-eminent form of social protest. So how did the simple act of putting up a hedge come to feel like an act of war? Why did the people who held common rights for centuries find those rights suddenly gone? And how did a process justified as improving the efficiency of agriculture end up, in the words of one Tudor critic, making sheep devour men?

• 2. Land After The Conquest

  ›

  After William I invaded and conquered England in 1066, he distributed the land among 180 barons who held it as his tenants in chief. This established a feudal system. He also promised the English people he would keep the laws of Edward the Confessor, so commoners could still exercise their ancient customary rights. The original contract bound the people who occupied the land to provide some form of service, which later evolved into a financial agreement that replaced the service.

  In the 13th century, successful lords did very well financially. The peasants, facing ever increasing costs, did not, and their landholding dwindled. Then the Black Death struck in the middle of the 14th century. Population and crop yields fell sharply, and the surviving farm workers found themselves in great demand. Landowners had to raise wages to compete for labour or let their lands go unused. Rising wages translated into inflation across the economy. The difficulty of hiring labour has been seen as causing the abandonment of land and the demise of the feudal system. Some historians argue the Black Death may only have sped up a process already under way. Agricultural land had been enclosed from as early as the 12th century, long before the great upheavals to come.

• 3. The Open-Field World

  ›

  A typical manor held two elements: the peasant tenantry and the lord's own holding, called the demesne farm. The lord's land was farmed by his direct employees or by hired labour, while tenant farmers paid rent in cash, labour, or produce. Tenants held certain rights such as pasture, pannage, or estovers. Beyond these lay waste land, often narrow strips less than a yard wide, in awkward spots like cliff edges or oddly shaped manorial borders, sometimes bare rock, officially used by no one and so farmed by landless peasants.

  The remaining land was organised into a large number of narrow strips, with each tenant possessing several scattered strips throughout the manor. Manorial courts administered the system and exercised some collective control. The arable land worked on a three-field crop rotation. Barley, oats, or legumes went into one field in spring, wheat or rye into a second in autumn. Medieval England had no artificial fertilizer, so a third field was left fallow each year for grazing animals on the old stubble. The manure restored the soil's fertility, and the following year the fields rotated.

  The rotation imposed a discipline on lord and tenants alike. Everyone could do as they liked with their own land but had to follow the rhythms of the system. After harvest the fields became common, so tenants could graze their sheep, pigs, cattle, horses, oxen, and poultry. This open-field system was probably a development of the earlier Celtic field system it replaced. Even now there are villages that still use it, one example being Laxton, Nottinghamshire.

• 4. Three Ways To Enclose

  ›

  Enclosure was the removal of common rights people held over farm lands and parish commons. It re-allocated the scattered strips into large new fields, closed off by hedges, walls, or fences, and reserved for the sole use of individual owners or their tenants. The spelling inclosure, by the way, is the one used in laws and statutes. The process could normally be accomplished in three ways: the creation of closes taken out of larger common fields by their owners, enclosure by proprietors acting together such as small farmers or squires, or enclosure by acts of Parliament.

  Formal enclosure came either through an act of Parliament or, from 1836 onwards, through a written agreement signed by all parties, usually including a map. Informal agreements left minimal or no written record beyond an occasional map. The most straightforward informal route was unity of possession. If an individual acquired all the disparate strips in an area and consolidated them into one whole piece, such as a manor, then any communal rights simply ceased, since no one remained to exercise them.

  The legal mechanics could be quietly ruthless. Copyholders had a customary tenancy that was legally enforceable, but valid only for the holder's life. An heir had no right of inheritance, though by custom he could usually have the copyhold transferred for a fee called a fine. To strip out these customary rights, landlords converted copyhold into leasehold tenancy. Leasehold removed the customary rights but offered the tenant one advantage: the land could now be inherited. After the Statute of Merton in 1235, manorial lords could reorganize strips into one contiguous block.

• 5. When Sheep Ate Men

  ›

  In Tudor England the demand for wool had a dramatic effect on the landscape. Large profits drew manorial lords to enclose common land and convert it from arable to sheep pasture, often unilaterally and sometimes illegally. The widespread eviction of people collapsed the open field system in those areas. Sir Thomas More captured the alarm in his Utopia, writing that sheep, naturally mild, may be said now to devour men and unpeople not only villages but towns, as an insatiable wretch resolves to enclose many thousand acres and turns owners and tenants out of their possessions.

  The consequences worried the Crown directly. Depopulation was financially disadvantageous to the state, and authorities feared the dispossessed would become vagabonds and thieves. Empty villages also meant a weakened workforce and a feebler military. From the time of Henry VII, Parliament passed the so-called tillage acts between 1489 and 1597, meant to stop enclosure, limit its effects, or fine those responsible. They were rarely enforced, because the people responsible for enforcement were often the very people opposed to the laws.

  Later measures bit harder. The Tillage Act 1533 restricted flocks to no more than 2,400 sheep. The Taxation Act 1549 imposed a poll tax on sheep alongside a levy on home-produced cloth, making sheep farming less profitable. In the end, though, market forces stopped the conversion. Rising corn prices in the second half of the 16th century made arable farming attractive again, so the emphasis shifted toward the efficient use of arable land.

• 6. The Norfolk Improvement

  ›

  The Norfolk four-course system was one of the most important innovations behind enclosure, greatly increasing crop and livestock yields by improving soil fertility and reducing fallow periods. Wheat grew in the first year, turnips in the second, then barley with clover and ryegrass in the third, with the clover and ryegrass grazed or cut for feed in the fourth. The turnips fed cattle and sheep through the winter. Growing dissimilar crops in sequence restored plant nutrients and reduced the build-up of pathogens and pests, while alternating deep-rooted and shallow-rooted plants improved soil structure. Turnips, for instance, can recover nutrients from deep under the soil.

  None of this was realistic under the open field system. Unrestricted access meant other villagers' livestock would simply graze on the turnips. The Norfolk system also spread labour into times when demand was not at its peak. Enclosure was therefore never merely the fencing of existing holdings. It carried a fundamental change in agricultural practice, and landowners pursued it seeking better financial returns.

• 7. Acts, Commissioners, And Roads

  ›

  The first enclosure by act of Parliament came in 1604, for Radipole in Dorset, through the Melcombe Regis and Radipole Act. The informal method continued alongside it, but by the 1750s the parliamentary system became the more usual route. The Inclosure Act 1773 enabled enclosure while removing commoners' rights of access. Compensation was usual but often took the form of a smaller, poorer plot. Between 1604 and 1914 more than 5,200 inclosure bills covered 6,800,000 acres, roughly one fifth of the total area of England, including fens, marshes, heathland, downland, and moors.

  The statutory process appointed commissioners, and it favoured the tithe owner, usually the Anglican clergy, who could appoint one commissioner per parish. The Tithe Act 1836 made it compulsory to commute tithe payments to a rent charge. Later, permanent Inclosure Commissioners could approve enclosures without submitting to Parliament. The Reverend William Homer, a commissioner, described the role in 1766 as dividing and allotting common fields according to the respective interests of proprietors without undue preference, calling it perhaps one of the greatest trusts ever reposed in one set of men. After 1899 the Board of Agriculture, later the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, inherited the commissioners' powers.

  One objective of enclosure was to improve local roads, and the road system had long been a problem. An 1852 government report called a road between Surrey and Sussex very ruinous and almost impassable. In 1749 Horace Walpole advised a friend who wanted good roads never to go into Sussex, and another writer called the Sussex road an almost insuperable evil. Commissioners gained power to build wide, straight roads for the passage of cattle, subject to inspection by local justices. In the late eighteenth century enclosure roads were at least 60 feet wide, narrowing from the 1790s to 40 feet and later to 30 feet. Built between 1750 and 1850 and linked to neighbouring parishes and the turnpikes, they were a permanent improvement to the country's roads.

• 8. Revolt And Reckoning

  ›

  Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450 made land rights a prominent demand, and by Kett's Rebellion of 1549 enclosure was a main issue, as it was in the Captain Pouch revolts of 1604 to 1607. It was during those revolts that the terms leveller and digger appeared, naming those who levelled the ditches and fences. Enclosure riots were not confined to the countryside. Urban unrest spread across England, from York in the north to Southampton in the south, Gloucester in the west to Colchester in the east, drawing in artisans such as butchers, shoemakers, weavers, glovers, barbers, tanners, and glaziers.

  In May and June 1607 the Midland Revolt broke out in villages across Leicestershire, Warwickshire, and Northamptonshire. It was led by John Reynolds, known as Captain Pouch, thought to be an itinerant pedlar or tinker from Desborough, Northamptonshire. He claimed authority from the King and the Lord of Heaven to destroy enclosures, and promised the contents of his pouch would keep protesters from harm. After his capture, the pouch was opened, and all it held was a piece of mouldy cheese. A curfew fell over Leicester, and a gibbet erected there as a warning was pulled down by the citizens.

  The rising came to a head at Newton, where the Treshams were enclosing The Brand Common, once part of Rockingham Forest. The old Roman Catholic Tresham family had long quarrelled with the Puritan Montagus of Boughton over territory. Edward Montagu, who had once opposed enclosure in Parliament, was now placed by the king in the position of defending the Treshams. The local militia refused the call-up, so the landowners used their own servants. The royal proclamation was read twice, the rioters held their ground, and the gentry charged. In the pitched battle 40 to 50 people were killed, and the ringleaders were hanged and quartered.

  Historians have argued over enclosure ever since. John and Barbara Hammond wrote that enclosure was fatal to the small farmer, the cottager, and the squatter, leaving the cottager a labourer without land. J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay countered that the Hammonds exaggerated, since enclosure meant more food, more land under cultivation, and on balance more employment. For Marxist historians like Barrington Moore Jr., enclosure was primitive accumulation, the structural condition for capitalism, which probably peaked from 1760 to 1832. By that latter date it had essentially completed the destruction of the medieval peasant community, sending surplus peasant labour into the towns to become industrial workers. The dispossessed of the Western Rising of 1630 to 1632, granted little or no compensation when the royal forests were divided, would have recognised the pattern far earlier.