Enclosure
Based on Wikipedia: Enclosure
Imagine waking up one morning to discover that the forest where your family has gathered firewood for generations, the meadow where your pigs have rooted for acorns since your grandfather's time, and the stream where you've always fished—all of it now belongs to someone else. A fence has gone up. Armed men patrol the perimeter. Your way of life has been declared illegal overnight.
This wasn't a dystopian fantasy. It happened to millions of English peasants over several centuries, in a process called enclosure.
The Great Land Grab
Enclosure was, at its heart, a massive transfer of wealth. Land that had been used collectively for centuries—commons where villagers grazed their animals, forests where they gathered wood, wetlands where they hunted waterfowl—was systematically privatized and fenced off. The stated justification was always "agricultural efficiency." The practical result was that ordinary people lost their ability to feed themselves.
The word itself tells the story. To enclose meant literally to surround common land with hedges, walls, or fences, and to exclude everyone who had previously used it. What had belonged to the community became the exclusive property of a single owner.
There's a reason this process is sometimes called "the enclosure of the commons" rather than simply "enclosure." The commons weren't wastelands. They were a sophisticated system of shared resources that had sustained English village life for a thousand years.
How Medieval Farming Actually Worked
To understand what was lost, you need to understand what existed before.
Picture a typical English manor in the year 1400. The land is divided into two or three enormous open fields, each containing hundreds of narrow strips. A single farmer might own a dozen strips scattered across all the fields—a deliberate arrangement that ensured everyone got a mix of good and poor soil.
Why strips instead of consolidated plots? Because medieval farmers didn't have tractors. They plowed with teams of oxen, and oxen don't turn easily. A strip one furlong long (the distance an ox team could plow before needing rest—about 220 yards) and one rod wide (about 5.5 yards) was the practical unit of cultivation. The word "acre" originally meant the area one man could plow in a day with an ox team.
But here's the crucial detail: after the harvest, those strips stopped being private property. The fields became common grazing land. Everyone's cattle wandered freely over everyone's land, eating the stubble and fertilizing the soil. Your individual ownership mattered only during the growing season.
This system had a beautiful logic to it. One field would be planted with wheat or rye in autumn. Another would get barley, oats, or legumes in spring. The third would lie fallow—uncultivated for an entire year, used only for grazing. Then the fields would rotate. The fallow period, combined with animal manure, restored the soil's fertility. Medieval farmers understood something that industrial agriculture often forgets: the land needs rest.
The Commons Beyond the Fields
The open fields were only part of the picture. Surrounding them was a complex patchwork of common resources.
Common pasture was land where everyone could graze their animals. Common meadows provided hay for winter fodder—crucial in an era before root vegetables were grown as animal feed. These meadows were often divided into strips too, allocated by lot, so that the luck of the draw determined who got the best grass each year.
Then there were the wastes. This term is misleading to modern ears. Medieval "waste" wasn't garbage; it was land that didn't fit neatly into the agricultural system. Heathlands. Marshes. Rocky hillsides. Forest edges. These marginal lands were vital to the poorest villagers, who might own no strips at all but could still survive by grazing a few geese on the common, gathering firewood from the woods, or cutting rushes in the wetlands for floor coverings and candle wicks.
The commons even extended into the harvested fields. After the grain was cut, the poor had the right of gleaning—gathering the leftover stalks that the harvesters had missed. For the destitute, gleaning could mean the difference between eating and starving.
All of these rights had names. The right to graze pigs in the woods was called pannage. The right to gather wood was estovers. The right to cut peat for fuel was turbary. These weren't vague traditions; they were legally enforceable entitlements, often documented in manorial court records going back centuries.
The System's Flaws
Defenders of enclosure were not entirely wrong about the open-field system's inefficiencies.
Coordination was difficult. If one farmer wanted to try a new crop on his strips, he couldn't—not if it would interfere with the communal grazing schedule. Innovation required community consensus, which is slow to achieve. The scattered strips meant farmers spent significant time walking between their various parcels. Disputes over boundaries were endless.
The fallow year was also wasteful by modern standards. Leaving a third of your arable land unproductive each year is expensive when you're trying to maximize output. Agricultural reformers in the 17th and 18th centuries developed new rotation systems that eliminated fallow entirely by using legumes and turnips to restore soil fertility—but these crops couldn't be grown in open fields where livestock would eat them during the common grazing period.
The Norfolk four-course rotation was particularly revolutionary. Year one: wheat. Year two: turnips. Year three: barley, undersown with clover and ryegrass. Year four: grazing animals on the clover. The turnips fed cattle through winter, eliminating the autumn slaughter that had been standard practice. The clover fixed nitrogen in the soil. The whole system produced more grain and more meat while actually improving soil fertility. But it required enclosed fields where the farmer had complete control.
The First Wave
Enclosure began long before it became controversial.
As early as the 12th century, some landowners were consolidating their scattered strips into single blocks. After the Statute of Merton in 1235, manorial lords gained explicit legal authority to reorganize landholdings this way. In some regions—particularly the southeast, where Celtic field patterns had survived the Roman occupation—land had never been organized into open fields at all.
The Black Death of 1348-1350 accelerated everything. With perhaps a third of England's population dead, labor became desperately scarce. Wages rose. Landlords who couldn't afford the new labor costs simply abandoned marginal farmland or converted it to sheep pasture, which required far fewer workers.
Wool was the driver. English wool was Europe's finest, and the Flemish cloth industry paid premium prices. Converting arable land to sheep pasture could triple a landlord's income—but it required enclosure. Sheep can't graze alongside crops in an open-field system. They eat everything.
Tudor Turmoil
By the early 1500s, enclosure had become a political crisis.
The problem wasn't just that peasants were losing their commons. It was that they were losing their homes. When a landlord enclosed a manor for sheep grazing, he didn't need the peasant farmers anymore. Entire villages were evicted. Houses were demolished. Churches stood alone in empty fields, serving no congregation.
Contemporary observers were appalled. Sir Thomas More, in his famous work Utopia (1516), described sheep as beasts that "may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns." The humanist scholar Thomas Starkey called England "a country full of wool and empty of men."
The government tried to intervene. Henry VII began passing anti-enclosure legislation in 1489. These "tillage acts" required that lands converted to pasture be returned to arable farming and that demolished houses be rebuilt. They imposed fines on enclosers and authorized royal commissioners to investigate complaints.
But who enforced these laws? Local justices of the peace—who were typically the very landowners doing the enclosing. Unsurprisingly, enforcement was feeble. The laws remained on the books for over a century, largely ignored.
The dispossessed didn't take this quietly. Enclosure riots became what historians call "the pre-eminent form of social protest" from the 1530s through the 1640s. Crowds would tear down fences, fill in ditches, and drive their animals onto enclosed land. These weren't random acts of vandalism; they were assertions of ancient rights.
The most serious uprising came in 1549. Kett's Rebellion, named for its leader Robert Kett, saw 16,000 peasants camp outside Norwich, the second-largest city in England. They demanded, among other things, that all enclosures of common land be reversed. The rebellion was eventually crushed by mercenary forces, and Kett was hanged. But the fear it inspired contributed to a temporary slowdown in enclosure.
The Parliamentary System
By the 17th century, informal enclosure by agreement had become common. If all the landowners in a parish agreed to consolidate and fence their holdings, no one could object. The tricky word here is "all." Tenant farmers, cottagers, and common rights holders were rarely consulted, even though their livelihoods depended on the commons.
The first Parliamentary enclosure act came in 1604, for the parish of Radipole in Dorset. This established a new method: instead of needing everyone's agreement, you could petition Parliament for a private act authorizing enclosure. The act would appoint commissioners to survey the land, allocate it to various claimants, and compensate those who lost rights.
Compensation sounds fair. In practice, it wasn't.
The commissioners were appointed by the landowners promoting the enclosure—hardly neutral parties. Compensation was usually in the form of land, but the legal costs of claiming it were often higher than the land's value. Poor cottagers who had grazed a cow on the common for generations might receive a tiny plot of marginal ground, too small to support livestock, along with a bill for surveying and legal fees they couldn't pay. Many simply sold their allotments immediately—often to the same large landowners who had enclosed the commons in the first place.
The system accelerated dramatically after 1750. Between 1604 and 1914, Parliament passed over 5,200 enclosure acts, affecting nearly 6.8 million acres—roughly one-fifth of England's total land area. The peak came during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), when grain prices were high and agricultural improvement seemed patriotic.
The Inclosure Act of 1845 streamlined the process further by creating permanent commissioners who could approve enclosures without individual Parliamentary acts. Note the spelling: "inclosure" was the official legal term, though "enclosure" was used in everyday speech. Both referred to the same process.
What Was Really Lost
Defenders of enclosure pointed to genuine agricultural improvements. Enclosed farms did produce more grain per acre. New crop rotations did work better in consolidated fields. The woolens industry did need more pasture.
But something profound was also destroyed.
The commons had provided a safety net. A family that fell on hard times could still gather fuel from the woods, graze a pig on the waste, glean grain after the harvest. These weren't charity; they were rights, embedded in law and custom. Enclosure didn't just transfer land ownership; it created a new category of people who had nothing to sell but their labor.
Historians debate how many people were truly displaced. The enclosure commissioners did provide compensation, and not all of it was worthless. Some smallholders actually benefited from receiving consolidated plots instead of scattered strips. Agricultural wages rose in some areas as enclosed farms needed more hired workers.
But the psychological and social transformation was undeniable. A peasant farmer with common rights was, in a meaningful sense, independent. He might be poor, but he could feed his family from his own resources. A landless laborer, dependent on wages from an employer who could fire him at will, was something different—a member of a new class that Marx would later call the proletariat.
The poet John Clare, who grew up in a village enclosed in 1809, spent much of his life mourning what had been lost. His poem "The Mores" describes the transformation:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
Clare lived to see the open landscape of his childhood replaced by geometric hedgerows and "No Trespassing" signs. He spent his final years in a mental asylum.
The Legacy in Law and Landscape
Drive through the English Midlands today and you'll see the physical evidence everywhere. The regular rectangular fields, bounded by hedgerows or stone walls, are the direct product of Parliamentary enclosure. The older, irregular field patterns in places like Cornwall or Kent tell a different story—land that was enclosed earlier, or perhaps was never open in the first place.
The legal legacy persists too. English property law still distinguishes between common rights that "run with the land" (attached to a specific property) and those held "in gross" (by a person regardless of where they live). Courts still occasionally have to interpret medieval documents describing pannage rights or estovers.
A few places preserved their open fields as curiosities. The village of Laxton in Nottinghamshire still farms part of its land under the medieval system, complete with strips and a manorial court that meets to resolve disputes. It's now a tourist attraction—a museum of what once covered half of England.
The concept of the commons itself has become a powerful metaphor. When Garrett Hardin wrote his influential 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," he argued that shared resources are inevitably overexploited because individuals have no incentive to conserve them. But historians of actual English commons have pointed out that Hardin had his history backward. The medieval commons weren't unmanaged; they were intensively regulated by manorial courts that could punish overgrazing, impose rotation schedules, and exclude outsiders. The "tragedy" came not from sharing but from privatization—from the destruction of the communal institutions that had managed the land for centuries.
Echoes in the Modern World
The enclosure of the English commons might seem like ancient history, but the same pattern keeps repeating.
In the Global South, the privatization of communal land continues today. Indigenous peoples in Latin America, Africa, and Asia face displacement as governments grant concessions to mining companies, agribusiness, or conservation projects. The language has changed—it's now called "land reform" or "development" or "protected areas"—but the mechanism is familiar. Traditional use rights are extinguished. Fences go up. People who lived on the land for generations are removed.
Even in the digital realm, we see enclosures. The early internet was a kind of commons—information shared freely, accessible to all. Increasingly, that commons is being fenced off into proprietary platforms, paywalled content, and data harvested for private profit. When critics talk about the "enclosure of the digital commons," they're drawing on a metaphor centuries old.
Perhaps the most provocative parallel concerns the enclosure of knowledge itself. Academic research funded by taxpayers is published in journals that charge for access. Traditional agricultural knowledge—plant varieties bred by farmers over millennia—is patented by corporations. Even our own data, generated by our movements and choices, becomes the property of companies we've never heard of.
The pattern is always the same. Resources that were once shared are privatized in the name of efficiency. Those who lose access are compensated inadequately or not at all. The wealth generated flows upward. And defenders of the process insist that there is no alternative—that the old ways were inefficient, that progress demands change, that the displaced will eventually benefit from economic growth.
The English peasants who tore down fences in the 16th century probably didn't think they were fighting the first battles of a war that would last for centuries. They just wanted to graze their cows. But their struggle—against the privatization of shared resources, against the transformation of rights into commodities, against the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands—remains ours.
A Note on Sources
Much of what we know about enclosure comes from the records of the enclosure commissioners themselves—hardly neutral observers. The voices of the displaced are harder to find. Most were illiterate. Their protests were often recorded only when they were suppressed.
John Clare's poetry is one of the few contemporary accounts from the perspective of those who lost. Court records document the riots and the punishments that followed. Ballads and folk songs preserve fragments of popular sentiment. And the landscape itself is a kind of archive—the hedgerows still mark the boundaries drawn by Georgian surveyors, and the ruins of abandoned villages still dot the English countryside, visible from the air if not from the ground.
The debate over enclosure's effects continues among historians. Some emphasize the genuine agricultural improvements and the limitations of the open-field system. Others focus on the social catastrophe of displacement and the creation of a landless working class. Both perspectives capture part of the truth. Enclosure was genuinely efficient. It was also genuinely devastating. History is not obligated to offer clean moral lessons.