A Brief History of Enclosures

Cliff Cobb

[Reprinted from Progress, January-February 2003]

Until about two centuries ago, peasants in England held rights to common land. This had an equalizing effect on English society, because almost everyone could claim some ownership rights. Common rights consisted of both parcels of land on the arable acreage or pasture of the manor farm and rights to gather wood, graze cattle, or go hunting and fishing on the "wastes" beyond the common fields. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these rights were stripped away as a result of enclosures. Peasants were thrown off their farms and forced to work in the cities for starvation wages. Acts of enclosure--the legally sanctioned privatization of common rights without compensation--caused massive deprivation.

This story has been in circulation now for about a century. Gilbert Slater's 1907 book, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, along with the 1911 book, The Village Labourer, by J.L. and Barbara Hammond created an enduring mythology about the enclosure movement. They argued that Parliamentary enclosures, from around 1750 to 1844, drove peasants off the land and into the satanic mills of the north. The enclosure myth contains both an element of truth and an element of exaggeration. (By calling the conventional story of enclosure a myth, I do not intend the pejorative meaning of a false statement. By myth, I mean a story that conveys layers of meaning, in this case about the struggle between the forces of privatization and the defense of common ownership.)

First, it is important to understand that "contrary to a widespread belief, all common land is private property" (Hoskins and Stamp, 4). Common arable fields in interspersed strips were held by individual households, a practice dating back to the eighth century. This method of land-holding developed in Saxon England as a result of a) the breakup of patriarchal families into conjugal ("nuclear") families) b) the division of property upon the death of the parents, and c) the transformation of slaves working on a master's large fields to serfs working their own smaller fields and providing services or a share of the crop. The advantage of interspersing private plots and managing access collectively, rather than fencing each separately, was that it enabled sheep to fertilize all arable fields equally by allowing them to roam freely over the fallow strips (Kerridge, 32-42).

From the beginning, rights to land were unevenly distributed. In addition to various categories of freeholders and tenants, there were also landless laborers, who held no land at all. Thus, when people were later forced off the land, either through enclosure or economic pressures, many of them had never had strong rights in the medieval system of land tenure. The "loss" of land rights for many must be traced back to the Norman or even Saxon period. Since land tenure records are still being slowly pieced together at the parish level, it is hard to say anything definitive. What can be said with some certainty, however, is that the romantic picture of relatively equal land rights in the feudal era is misleading.

In addition, the dating of enclosure by Slater and the Hammonds from 1760 onward is deceiving. The Hammonds note in passing that "the Statute of Merton, 1235, allowed [feudal lords] to make enclosures on the waste," but they do not investigate the extent to which such enclosures took place until the eighteenth century. Using compilations of various local studies, later historians have estimated that 45-50% of the agricultural land of England had been enclosed by 1500 and 70% by 1700 (Wordie, 489). Until 1520, the purpose of enclosure was primarily to convert tilled acreage into pasture because of the high price of wool (Wordie, 492). After that it was often done to capture the value of capital investments (such as drainage of wet soils) and to implement new methods of farming. Thus, enclosure was already an old story by 1500. The central drama begins in a period more than two hundred years before Slater and the Hammonds focused.

Changing the timing of the enclosure movement changes its meaning. Enclosure was not as closely associated with industrialization as the conventional story suggests. Rather than being a case of government-sanctioned land robbery, enclosure was part of a more general transition from feudal to modern tenure. That represented a shift from rights based on reciprocity to non-reciprocal ownership rights. It did not happen either quickly or self-consciously. Nor was it a simple elite conspiracy to deprive peasants of their land. As late as the 16th century, there were both royal edicts and parliamentary acts that were intended to prevent the rural depopulation that was associated with enclosure. What Slater and the Hammonds recorded was the change that took place in the gentry class--from disapproval of enclosure in the 16th century to strong approval in the 19th.

To understand the changing perceptions of enclosure or privatization of feudal tenures is no simple task. Historians are still trying to make sense of it. It is associated not merely with the growth of markets, but with the development of what Max Weber called the "spirit" of capitalism. This involved a departure from the entire medieval-romantic value system, which was based on chivalry, heroism, honor and public display, to a new value system that treated acquisitiveness, thriftiness, and careful management as a religious calling. As Albert O. Hirschman, one-time professor of political economy at Harvard, said (p. 11): "This astounding transformation of the moral and ideological scene erupts quite suddenly, and the historical and psychological reasons for it are still not wholly understood."

Whatever psychological factors may have promoted private ownership, economic factors were also at work. A price revolution took place in Tudor England. From 1500 to the 1640s, the price of grain rose 600%, while wages and the price of manufactured goods rose only 200% (Goldstone, 89). The price index of charcoal rose from 60 in 1560 to 100 in 1630 and then to 250 in 1670, due to an increase in the money supply and a reduced supply of forests. Finally, and most important, land rents rose by 600 to 1000 percent from 1540 to 1640 (Goldstone, 97).

Although a rise in land prices usually results in greater concentration of ownership, in this case it produced the opposite result. According to Lawrence Stone (1967, appendix I), the holdings of the hereditary peerage or aristocracy declined by around 50%, while enterprising families with much smaller estates (including some yeoman farmers of humble birth) bought land from them. Land values rose dramatically, but the central government did not benefit from the economic growth. Since the gentry were in charge of assessing the value of land, the land tax (the "subsidies" to the Crown for extraordinary expenses), did not rise in proportion to the increase in value (Goldstone, 98). Assessments fell from 80% of the market value of land in 1540 to 3% in 1590 (Goldstone, 98).

The new gentry were often Puritans who were distressed by the idea of waste. They wanted to put all land to use productively, at the highest yields possible. But that was not possible if there multiple voices in a village deciding how common fields would be tilled or how "wastes" would be used. Gaining control over management decisions was a major reason for enclosure during this period. In addition, the new owners did not have the same sense of personal connection to tenants that had characterized many of the older nobility. Thus, new owners raised rents and fines (a sort of capitalized rent, payable upon the expiration of a lease) and shortened leases. The overall effect was a tremendous increase in the economic power of the gentry and a lowering of wages of those who remained as either tenants or as day laborers.

After the period 1540 to 1640, these economic processes continued in England, but at a slower pace. During most of the 18th century, land sales and enclosures dropped off. The next period of dramatic change in land tenure took place during the period from 1790 to 1815. As in the previous era of privatization, rapid inflation drove land prices up and real wages down, as landlords raised rents, and many tenants lost their holdings. One-half of all enclosures between 1727 and 1845 took place during that 25-year period (Jones and Mingay, 30). In addition, a million acres was drawn into cultivation for the first time during this period.

Rather than seeing enclosure as a sudden form of expropriation of land rights, it is better understood as one element of a sustained pattern of economic pressure that was associated with agricultural improvement. In some cases, compensation was paid to displaced tenants. In others, their leases expired and were not renewed. The main form of rights that were simply terminated without compensation were foraging rights in the wastelands surrounding villages. For some people in the 19th century, the loss of hunting and fishing rights was a matter of life and death. Yet, on the whole, the enclosure of fens and marshes was responsible for an increase in total agricultural output.

Explaining enclosure as a process of change over several centuries does not diminish the hardship of displaced tenants and laborers or justify the privatization of rent collection. It merely helps us see that enclosure is more like the ongoing market processes that continues to operate everywhere in the world today, but particularly in countries where ambiguous traditions are giving way to explicit land titles. Enclosure was not a single event that happened in the 19th century. It was instead, a new mindset that understood property in a new way. Future articles will deal with the transformed understanding of property and property rights in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Bibliography

Goldstone, Jack A. 1991. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hammond, J.L. and Barbara. 1911. The Village Laborer, 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill. Available at http://www.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hammond/index.html

Hirschman, Albert O. 1977. The Passions and the Interests. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hoskins, W. G. and L. Dudley Stamp. 1963. The Common Lands of England and Wales. London: Collins.

Kerridge, Eric. 1992. The Common Fields of England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Jones, E.L. and G.E. Mingay., ed. 1967. Land, Labour, and Population in the Industrial Revolution. London: Edward Arnold.

Stone, Lawrence. 1967. The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Abridged edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

J.R. Wordie. 1983. The chronology of English enclosure 1500-1914. Economic History Review, Series 2, Vol. 36. No. 4 (November):483-505.