Ellen Rosenman, On Enclosure Acts and the ...

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Ellen Rosenman, On Enclosure Acts and the Commons

Figure 1: Detail from Peter Paul Rubens, A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning, c. 1636, illustrating a
pre-Enclosure landscape

According to the working-class politics of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Enclosure Acts (or
Inclosure Acts) stole the peoples land, impoverished small farmers, and destroyed the agrarian way of life that
had sustained families and villages for centuries[1] Historians have debated this account of their effects, but for
the politicized working classes the Enclosure Acts represented a profound trauma, an extended moment in a
narrative of dispossession that undergirded resistance to aristocratic power and urbanization. While this essay
provides some factual background, its primary aim is to explain why the Enclosure Acts took on the significance
they did within working-class politics. Assumptions about English history, especially about the imputed
relationship between the land and the people, produced a single, powerful interpretation that, if not always or
entirely accepted by professional historians today, held sway over popular opinion.

For centuries, English agriculture depended on common landland that was privately owned but to which others
enjoyed the legal right of access (the term commoner originally meant someone who had access to common
land). Waste land was also accessible to local inhabitants. It was universally understood that common and waste
land were to be used for planting crops, grazing livestock, gleaning, foraging, and sometimes hunting and fishing;
they also provided wood and turf that could be used as fuel. Though small-scale agriculture could be arduous and
unpredictable, life organized around the commons was relatively democratic, egalitarian, and self-sustaining,
especially compared to the urban life that succeeded it.[2] Every year, a locally elected council met in a public
place to distribute plots of land, schedule their multiple uses, and set the stint or fee for pasturing animals to
prevent over-grazing. Each allotment consisted of long strips of land, often separated from each other to ensure

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that no individual would receive the best parcels. This arrangement placed farmers side by side, available for
mutual aid. After the harvest, poorer families could glean the grain that remained on the ground. Then horses,
cows, and sheep grazed the field, depositing their manure as fertilizer for the next years crops. Unfarmed land
supported turkeys, pigs, and geese, which could forage in the woods. Communities also set limits on the income
level that qualified inhabitants to use common land; in one village, an income of more than 4 a year was the
ceiling, while other villages set aside pasture land for the very poor who could not afford to purchase access
(Neeson 74). Christopher P. Rodgers et al. define the ideal of commonable land as good neighborhoods in
which sustaining the resource, equitable access, and balancing conflicting demands guide decision-making
and land use (34, 35, 36).

Of course, rural communities were not the homeostatic paradises implied by this description. Wealthier farmers
often dominated the councils and could arrange the practice of stinting and the assignment of land for their
benefit. Access was not equal; land was distributed not by a modern notion of social justice but by proportionality
based on property rights and ancient custom (Rodgers et. al. 36). Nevertheless, commonable land provided a
supportive structure within the fragile economy of small-scale agriculture. When it was enclosed, the majority of
villagers, who did not own land, could not farm independently but had to hire themselves out, a less secure and
less profitable arrangement.

Although the enclosure of common land had been taking place since the time of the Tudors, advances in
agriculture in the eighteenth century made consolidation of land profitable, inciting large-scale farmers and estate
owners to claim more and more land.[3] The rapid increase of enclosure between approximately 1750 to 1850,
often effected by Parliamentary acts rather than private transactions, made it a highly visible and controversial
practice. The passage of the Inclosure (Consolidation) Act of 1801 reflected the recognition of the accelerated
pace of enclosure. While commoners were compensated for their losses, they were generally given smaller and
less arable parcels of land or allowed to remain only on the condition that they take on the prohibitive expense of
fencing their allotment. Approximately 4,000 parliamentary acts were passed in this period, leaving virtually no
common land.[4] Historians have disagreed about the impact of enclosure: early accounts saw the destruction of
common land as a devastating blow to small farmers and the poor, while the revisionist claims that followed
asserted that poverty had always plagued rural families and that, in some places, the enclosure acts alleviated it
by increasing the profitability of agriculture. More recent scholarship has tended to see these latter claims as an
over-correction, though disagreement remains. It is probably fair to say that the Enclosure Acts had a significant
though not exclusive impact on the massive shift to an industrial, urban society in which agricultural workers lost
whatever measure of economic independence they had possessed.[5]

Not only did the Enclosure Acts contribute to an economic crisis, they also redefined the land and its relationship
to the people. The image of a happy, prosperous village was an idealized vision of England itself, in which the
people were industrious, independent farmers with ties to specific plots of land going back through generations.
With the rise of large-scale agriculture and the removal of small farmers from land that had historically been theirs
to use, this image became increasingly difficult to sustain. Moreover, while commons were often consolidated into
larger agricultural units, some of the land was annexed to estates for show, creating broad vistas and carefully
designed wild areas. This repurposing turned farmland into landscape, eliminating its use value and redefining it
as an aesthetic resource that signified the wealth and taste of landowners. No longer the foundation for an
agrarian England, land became the exclusive cultural capital of the elite.[6]

According to working-class politics, this transformation of the land destroyed a symbolic connection to a national
past. Common land was not only a specific plot of earth; it was the land, the materialization of a national
essence, a metonym for England itself. Working-class politics had long claimed that the landboth the earth itself
and the symbolic national belonging it conferredbelonged to the people. A popular broadside, The Wrongs of
Man (1816), sums up this assumption, directly linking the people, the land, and the nation:

The Rights of Man art in the Land,

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While it might seem quixotic to rally around the peoples farm in a time of urbanization and industrialization, we
should remember that these processes occurred unevenly and at times unsteadily. Periodically rocked by
economic crises, industrial capitalism was not self-evidently the wave of the future. Much production still occurred
in small workshops or in homes, and agriculture remained a way of life for a significant portion of the mid-century
population, though often combined with other seasonal employment, including factory work. If the agrarian ideal
was threatened with new developments, it was not a foregone conclusion that it was to be definitively overcome
by a radically new system.[7]

Several writers played important roles in disseminating the central tenets of the agrarian ideal: that the land
belongs to the people and that its abundance can and should support them. This ideal had a long pedigree,
extending back to the Diggers of the 17th century, who opposed private property and promoted the establishment
of small rural communes, and through John Lockes idea of the state of nature, which writers often referenced
directly. Echoing the Wrongs of Man, Thomas Spence, one of the most prominent influences on the populist
agenda, considered these ideas unquestionable truths: few . . . would be foolish enough to deny . . . that the
country of any people in their native state is properly their common, in which each of them has an equal property,
with free liberty to sustain himself and family with the animals, fruits and other products thereof (5-6). Spences
identification of their common with the country succinctly expresses the peoples simultaneous claim to land
and to national belonging. Other well-known writers such as William Cobbett, publisher of the working-class paper
Political Register and author of Rural Rides, and radical thinker Thomas Paine echoed these beliefs. According to
Cobbett, the people have the right to have a living out of the land of our birth in exchange for our labour duly
and honestly performed; the right, in case we fell into distress, to have our wants sufficiently relieved out of the
produce of the land (qtd. in Thompson 761). Already a revered figure for his Rights of Man (1791), which
circulated widely in England, Thomas Paine contributed to these claims with Agrarian Justice (1797), which also
invoked the idea of the state of nature in its assertion that the earth . . . [is] the common property of the human
race (para. 11). These thinkers did not promote the same remedy to the peoples current unlanded state.
Influenced by the successful resistance to the enclosure of the commons in Newcastle, Spence argued that land
should be owned by local communities, which would function as mini-democracies providing for all inhabitants.
Cobbett was not theoretically opposed to private property held by individuals rather than communities if the
people were still able to thrive but, in the face of widespread dislocation and poverty, did not rule out land
redistribution.[8] Paine recommended establishing a fund to compensate every person for the loss of his or her
natural inheritance by creating an inheritance tax that would allocate a fixed percentage to this fund. But all
assumed that the people had a right to a portion of the wealth that inhered in the land, if not to the land itself.[9]

In the nineteenth century, Chartist newspapers and speakers kept these agrarian ideals in circulation alongside
their agenda of full male suffrage. (See Chris R. Vanden Bossches BRANCH essay, On Chartism, for an
explanation of Chartism.) One of the most outspoken and radical activists, Julian Harney, explicitly joined this
platform with the ideas of earlier agrarian writers in the title of his essay The Charter and Something More,
which reiterated the familiar claim that THE LAND BELONGS TO ALL by virtue of the peoples natural right
(351).[10]

Thus, as understood by working-class politics, the Enclosure Acts undermined crucial dimensions of national
identity. First, it destroyed the place-based sense of identity that was crucial to the construction of the people.
Villagers had a sense of identity rooted in a specific area and embedded in a web of familial and neighborly
relations that had defined that place through generations.[11] This association between identity and place is so
intuitive, so prevalent in western culture that geographer Tim Cresswell terms it a metaphysic. With wage labor
came enforced mobility as workers were compelled to travel to different villages, towns, and cities to eke out a
living. The imbrication of the people and the land underlay the trauma of the Enclosure Acts, giving rise to a
narrative of not only economic loss but dispossession in which farmers saw themselves as refugees in their own
land. Oliver Goldsmiths well-known poem The Deserted Village (1770) is driven by this sense of paradise lost,
dwelling on the profound tie to place as it surveys the landscapes, buildings, and people that have been erased by
enclosure.[12]

Added to this sense of dislocation was the loss of a specific kind of personhoodor more accurately,
manhooddefined by self-reliance, industry, and the ability to support a family. The Northern Star, the chief
newspaper of Chartism, mourned the extinction of the hardy sons of the earth who typified Englishness (THE

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LAND!). Radical politics consistently looked to an imputed past as the model for the future. This fealty to a single
version of England, understood as originating in its ancient Anglo-Saxon origin, is one of the defining features of
working-class politics.[13] National identity itself was at risk; with the betrayal of a foundational culture, the land
itself is dying:

No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,

Given this context, it is not surprising that populist politics turned to a variety of land schemes in an attempt to
restore pre-enclosure communities. In the late 1840s and 1850s, freehold land societies attempted to recreate
these communities on a micro-scale. Selling shares to individuals, they then purchased large tracts of land and
sold smaller portions to shareholders, who, theoretically, could work their portion within the larger community
marked off by the boundaries of the larger tract like members of a rural parish. Promoting land ownership as the
road to suffrage, freehold land societies also appealed explicitly to the metaphysical connotations of land,
reminding potential investors, There is an universal instinct in the soul of man to be the absolute possessor of a
piece of land (Parnell 1).

The Chartist Land Company was a large-scale, explicitly political version of freehold societies.[14] Conceived by
the Chartist leader Feargus OConnor in 1842 and formally established by the Chartist National Delegates
Meeting in April 1846, the Company, like freehold societies, purchased large tracts of land through subscriptions
and then sold smaller parcels to subscribers. It attempted to re-create village life by building cottages, hospitals,
and schools, and setting aside one hundred acres for common use. On 17 August 1846, the first estate, named
OConnorville after its founder, celebrated its inauguration with a festival that attracted almost 12,000 visitors. By
1847, the Land Company had over six hundred branches, 70,000 subscribers, and five estates. As with freehold
land societies, the vote was a strong enticement to join, but the Land Company also appealed to subscribers
through the values and history it engaged. In historian Malcolm Chases words,

land reform had always been integral to the social programme Chartists anticipated would follow the
enactment of the Charter. This . . . reflected the long pedigree of agrarian agitationfrom opposition to
enclosure, through Thomas Spence, to early 1830s interest in communal land-holdingwhich ran like a red
thread through English radicalism. (Chartism 167)[15]

Not surprisingly, the Land Company did not succeed in renovating England one garden plot at a time. To some
extent, it was undermined by its idealism: with limited knowledge of agriculture, subscribers could not magically
reincarnate the small farmers of the past and, so, struggled economically. To some extent, it was the victim of its
own success: it had not developed a structure capable of managing the claims of 70,000 subscribers. Unable to
establish itself on a legal footing, it also became vulnerable to state intervention. A Parliamentary investigation in
1848 accused the Land Company of shoddy documentation and misleading promises, beginning a process that
brought it to Chancery Court in 1851. By 1858 its holdings were dissolved, though some cottages still remain
today. (Freehold land societies survived, ironically, by joining the inexorable current of capitalism and promoting
themselves as mortgage societies for the middle classes.) Its disastrous end should not obscure the powerful hold
it had over the imagination of the working classes and the version of England it attempted to sustain.

Thus, the Enclosure Acts and the commons they appropriated were crucial to the social and political imaginary of
the working classes. Certainly, the reliance of radical politics on a static myth of national identity was a form of
nostalgia, opposed to change and based on an idealization of rural life. But opposition to the Enclosure Acts was
not only nostalgic. Although the preoccupation with rural life seems anachronistic in the face of urbanization and
industrialization, it is a reminder that agriculture was still a significant part of the nineteenth-century economy and
that industrial capitalism was not the self-evident future of England. Attending to the presence of the rural ideal in
working-class politics usefully supplements the view of urban, middle-class professionals. From the perspective of
the working classes, England appeared to be a different nation. With a strong measure of historical accuracy, this

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perception expands our understanding of mid-century England and insists that novels, journals, and parliamentary
reports focused on urbanization and industrialization reflect a class-specific version of the nation rather than
providing a transparent account of the truth.

Just as significant, valorization of the land maintained the memory of a way of life that, whatever its hardships,
offered a more supportive social structure and more economic self-determination than agricultural wage labor or
factory work. The appearance of several recent critical works that take up the idea of the commons in
contemporary lifeHardins The Tragedy of the Commons (1968), Donahues Reclaiming the Commons (2001),
and Reid and Taylors Recovering the Commons (2010)positions the debates of the nineteenth century within an
ongoing modern problematic involving private property, resource allocation, and the common good. Despite
coming to diametrically different conclusionsTragedy predicts the destruction of the commons as individuals try
to maximize their own economic interests, while Reclaiming and Recovering foresee responsible stewardship and
a more just societythese explorations suggest the ongoing relevance of this moment in nineteenth-century
history.

Ellen Rosenman, professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is currently working on a book on the
relationship between penny fiction and radical politics. She is the author of Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of
Victorian Erotic Experience (Cornell UP 2003) and the co-editor, with Claudia Klaver, of Other Mothers: Beyond
the Maternal Ideal (Ohio State UP 2008). She also edits the Victorians Institute Journal.

HOW TO CITE THIS BRANCH ENTRY (MLA format)

Rosenman, Ellen. On Enclosure Acts and the Commons. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and
Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.
Web. [Here, add your last date of access to BRANCH].

WORKS CITED

Bronstein, Jamie. Land Reform and the Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Print.

Buchardt, Jeremy. Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change in England since 1800. London: I. B. Taurus
Publishers, 2002. Print.

Bunce, Michael. The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Chambers, J. D. and G. E. Mingay. The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880. New York: Shocken Books, 1966.
Print.

Chase, Malcolm. Chartism: A New History. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007. Print.

. The Peoples Farm: English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Print.

Clark, Gregory and Anthony Clark. Common Rights to Land in England, 1475-1839. Journal of Economic
History 61:4 (2001): 1009-1036. Print.

Cosgrove, Denis E. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. London: Croom Helm, 1984. Print.

Crabbe, George. The Village. The Poetry Foundation. Web. 24 November 2012.

Cresswell, Tim. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

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Donahue, Brian. Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town. New Haven,
Yale UP, 2001. Print.

Freedgood, Elaine. Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century Britain. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Deserted Village. Poetry Foundation. Web. 24 November 2012.

Griffin, Carl. J. More-than-Human Histories and the Failure of Grand State Schemes: Sylviculture in the New
Forest, England. Cultural Geographies 17 (2010): 451 472. Web. 24 November 2012.

Hadfield, Alice Mary. The Chartist Land Company. Aylesbury: Square Edge Books, 1970. Print.

Hardin, Garrett. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science #13, Vol. 162 (1968): 1243-1248. Web. 24 November
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Harney, Julian. The Charter and Something More! Democratic Review of British and Foreign Politics, History,
and Literature. February 1850. 351. Print.

Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. London: Pelican Books, 1958. Print.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832-1098. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1983. Print.

Neeson, J. M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. Cambridge:
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Paine, Thomas. Agrarian Justice. Thomas Paine Historical Association. 15 June 2012. Web. Thomas Paine
Archives. . Web. 24 November 2012.

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Rents, Houses, and Land. London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1870. Print.

Reid, Herbert and Betsy Taylor. Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Peace, and Social Justice. Champaign: U
of Illinois P, 2010. Print.

Rodgers, Christopher P., Eleanor A. Straughton, Angus J. L. Winchester, and Margherita Pieraccini. Contested
Common Land: Environmental Governance Past and Present. London: Earthscan, 2011. Print.

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Snell, K. D. M. Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950.
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Pioneers of Land Reform: Thomas Spence, Thomas Paine, M. Beer. Honolulu: UP of the Pacific, 2001. Google
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THE LAND! THE LAND! THE LAND! Northern Star 14 November 1840. Nineteenth-Century British Library
Newspapers. Gale Group. Web. 16 June, 2012.

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Vanden Bossche, Chris R. On Chartism. BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed.
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ENDNOTES

[1] Working-class politics is a broad phrase. I use it to invoke the genealogy (or genealogies) established by E. P.
Thompson and to embrace the array of thinkers, speakers, writers, publishers, and activists who agitated for
greater social and economic rights for the working classes. The most prominent organization representing these
interests was Chartism, which promoted a six-point charter to reform suffrage; see Chris Vanden Bossches
BRANCH essay for an analysis of Chartism and its tactics. Because of my emphasis on the land, on the agrarian
tradition, and on the possibility of property redistribution, I use the term interchangeably with radical politics and
populist politics, following the example of Chase and Burchardt.

[2] This description comes from Neeson, based on historical accounts and observation in rare villages that still
practice common land use. See also Bunce 7, Buchardt 22, and Cosgrove 41-42.

[3] This claim has been disputed by Clark and Clark, who argue that most common land was enclosed by the
sixteenth century. However, their definition of common land is land that is available to all comers (1009). While
most common land was either held by an estate or accessible only to local inhabitants, it did not function only as
private property, but was understood to be available to others by right.

[4] Exceptions to this generalization are forests, which the government was not able to enclose effectively (Griffin)
and certain coastal commons (Rodgers et. al., especially 163-5).

[5] In an early work on the subject, Chambers and Mingay state that the effects of enclosure were rarely great or
immediate (104), while more recently Shaw-Taylor argues that many small farmers were employed as wage
laborers before the heyday of parliamentary enclosure (641) and that data indicating a rise in poor relief during
enclosure does not necessarily point to a specific or single cause (659). Qualifying the claim that enclosure
destroyed farmers livelihood, Burchardt nevertheless finds a moderate pessimism consensus (21) about the
acts effects among historians.

[6] See Silbey for a theoretical definition of this phenomenon: power is expressed in the monopolization of space
and the relegation of weaker groups in society to less desirable environments (ix). See also Cosgrove 199 and
Bunce 7-8 for discussions of this phenomenon in relation to the Enclosure Acts.

[7] See, for instance, Joness claim that there was no belief in the inevitability of industrial capitalism in the
1830s and 1840s (59). Even in the highly mechanized textile industry, the majority of workers were employed
outside factories in 1850 (Freedgood 2). See also Buchardt 41.

[8] See Thompson 746-61.

[9] A somewhat more complicated figure is Robert Owen, who promoted and organized several rural
communitarian experiments, but whose paternalistic approach offended many radical political figures (see
Thompson 779-806).

[10] Chase calls the phrase The Charter and Something More the banner under which Chartism redefined
itself after Parliament rejected its final petition for full male suffrage in 1848 (Chartism 336).

[11] The work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, and more recently K. D. M. Snell, reflects this sense of
English identity. See Cresswell for an analysis of the valorization of place-based identity and the related critique of

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mobility in Williams and Hoggart 35.

[12] George Crabbes The Village (1810) offers a less idealized view of the rural past, emphasizing poverty and
hardship.

[13] Though Thompson identifies a conflict between the idea of a natural rights, possessed by every person, and
a right that inhered in a specific national history, populist periodicals and speakers did not always make this
distinction, so I have felt free to conflate the two ideas here (88).

[14] For discussions of the Chartist Land Company, see Bronstein 11-15, Burchardt 39-40, Chase (Chartism: A
New History 166-68, 249-61, 327-31), and Hadfield.

[15] See also Burchardt: Only if we see the Land Plan in the context of the long-standing tradition within
radicalism does its popularity make any sense (40).

The text of this article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 3.0). For more
information, go here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. See above for "HOW TO CITE THIS
BRANCH ENTRY."

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