Parliamentary Enclosure in England

An Introduction to its Causes, Incidence and Impact, 1750-1850

Gordon E Mingay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317890324
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Enclosure transformed the old open fields and common lands of England to create the modern rural landscape. It changed forever the life of many villages, but provided food for a rapidly rising population. Its methods and consequences were controversial - many rural poor lost their access to land - and the subject is still a cause of dispute. Gordon Mingay's authoritative survey guides the reader through the complexities of the topic. He describes the processes by which land was reorganised and analyses the impact of enclosure regionally. Throughout he stresses the extent of local variation which make the subject so complex.

CHAPTER ONE

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Introduction

 

 

 

 

Towards the close of the nineteenth century there was an upsurge of public interest in matters concerning the countryside. Some of this new attention was due to economic circumstances, arising especially from the depression which affected much of English farming in the last quarter of the century. But other elements had a social origin, centring on the conditions, particularly the housing, of the farm-worker, his poor living standards, his complete dependence on his low wages, his lack of education and, generally, lack of prospects. Contemporary observers could not help but notice the fact that the agrarian structure of England was markedly different from that which dominated large parts of continental Europe. The publication of the first comprehensive statistics on English farming reinforced the observation, and curiosity was stimulated into why the ‘peasant’ or small family farmer was relatively scarce over large areas of the English countryside.

The concern with a ‘lost peasantry’ was always somewhat exaggerated, for the enquiries made in 1887 and subsequent years showed that between 15 and 16 per cent of the cultivated land of England was still occupied by its owners. A more relevant figure, however, allowing for farms that because of the depression had fallen into the hands of their large owners, and allowing also for accommodation land kept by non-farming owners, was probably not above 12 per cent. The holdings statistics for 1885 were also revealing, showing that small farms of between 5 and 50 acres numbered over 200,000, and accounted for 14 per cent of the 27,700,000 acres reported on in England and Wales.¹ Small farmers, even small owner-farmers, had evidently not ‘disappeared’, though perhaps it was true that they were fewer than in the past. In the 1880s historical knowledge was too limited for even an approximate answer to be given on this point.

Whatever the facts, political and social motives inspired a number of published works dealing with various aspects of the later nineteenth-century village. Some were concerned with the continued domination of large landowners, some with farm-workers’ conditions, and others with smallholdings – a rather vain attempt to restore a peasant class to the contemporary countryside. Best known, and most soundly based, perhaps, were Seebohm Rowntree and May Kendall’s, How the Labourer Lives (1913), together with the detailed survey of the (Liberal) Land Enquiry Committee, The Land, of the same year, and the response of the Land Agents’ Society, Facts about Land, of 1916.²

The academic strand of the controversy was primarily concerned with establishing when and how the small farmer had declined, with some historians concentrating on the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and others on the age of the parliamentary enclosures. Among the major works were Gilbert Slater’s The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (1907), Wilhelm Hasbach’s History of the Agricultural Labourer (English translation, 1908), A.H. Johnson’s The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (1909), R.H. Tawney’s The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912), and E.C.K. Gonner’s Common Land and Inclosure (1912). Some of these books, notably those by Slater and Hasbach, followed a left-wing approach to the subject emanating from Marx’s view of enclosure as the agency creating a landless industrial proletariat. The works by Johnson, Tawney and Gonner, it might be said, were more balanced interpretations of available evidence.

However, undoubtedly the most widely read and influential book was that by J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer of 1911.³ The Hammonds in their work largely ignored other contemporary studies, and continued to do so in their later editions. It was they who established the generally accepted view of parliamentary enclosure as not only the cause of the dispossession of the peasantry but also the root cause of the rural poverty and unrest of the period. Certainly they produced a highly readable study, even if their method was somewhat flawed: in particular, they noted, but then neglected, the significance of the limited area affected by parliamentary enclosure, and they failed to observe Gonner’s approach in refusing to formulate simple generalisations. He purposely abstained, as he wrote, ‘from dwelling at length on the incidents of a few cases. Such a method, while it may make things more picturesque, is misleading when the instances are few out of many thousands, and not necessarily typical.’⁴

However, such was the influence of the Hammonds’ book that for long the orthodox view of parliamentary enclosure was that it was responsible for the major social problems of the later eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century countryside. Gonner’s work, though in sobering contrast to that of the Hammonds, and also Johnson’s earlier book, made little impact on this orthodoxy, in large part because neither work was well known outside academic circles. Later attacks on the Hammonds’ position, from Sir John Glapham in the 1920s and Professor J.D. Chambers in subsequent years, also failed to weaken the Hammond orthodoxy, except in some degree at the rarefied level of the learned journals and university teaching.⁵ And it is at this level, primarily, that the controversy has continued: between those who with the benefit of more recent research continue to support a somewhat modified Hammond position, and those who, again with the advantage of greater knowledge, expand on a modified Clapham/Chambers stance.

The present writer has tried to take a middle view, holding with Sir Edward Conner that the subject is much too complicated to make simple generalisations valid. In particular, it is felt that one must dissect the rural society of the period into its component elements – large landowners, large farmers, owner-occupiers, small tenant farmers, and very small occupiers and cottagers – and consider the likely effects on each. To do this it is necessary to establish, so far as is possible, the facts of the pre-enclosure countryside, eschewing any romantic view of the life of the open fields and commons. For example, it is true that many commons did yield a variety of valuable resources for those having access to them, but a lager number of commons were of lesser value, some of little value, or none at all. And of course it has to be borne in mind that use of even the best of commons, for grazing, gathering fuel, and searching for berries and medicinal herbs, was extremely time-consuming.

Moreover, it was not only the commons which differed from parish to parish. Wide variations were found also in the size and number of the open fields and the method of their working; the soil might be a difficult one that was slow and expensive to work in terms of the rate of ploughing and the strength of the teams required; pasture might be good or poor, plentiful or scarce; and the villagers were involved in numerous disputes, for instance over the maintaining of drains, the depredations of insecurely tethered livestock, overstocking of the commons, encroachments on the uncultivated land, and the shrinkage of the open fields through piecemeal enclosure. Such wide variations in conditions reinforce Gonner’s point: generalisation is far from easy, and should not be based on a handful of examples. To give concrete expression to this variety the present writer has drawn on a substantial body of documentary material as well as on published sources, and it is hoped that this will keep the complexity of the subject to the fore of the reader’s mind.

Of course, parliamentary enclosure, affecting both property and customary rights as it did, and frequently in a major way, inevitably gave rise to friction, discontent, even violence. The disturbance of established property, and its enjoyment, has always been a source of conflict and remains so today: witness the opposition stirred up by major road improvement schemes or, most recently, the building of a Channel tunnel railway link across Kent.

In time the problems caused by parliamentary enclosure passed away, as the generations immediately affected by it receded, although it is certainly remarkable how long a folk-memory persisted, with late-nineteenth-century country people inclined to look back to a supposed golden age existing ‘before the enclosure’. What has not so far disappeared are the changes wrought by enclosure on the landscape. Contemporaries were divided on the aesthetics of these changes, some feeling that the new lines of hedges, rectangular fields and straight, wide roads were offensive to the eye (and certainly less convenient for hunting), while others shed no tears for the extinction of the great expanses of open fields and broad, unkempt commons which to them seemed eyesores.

The landscape changes were indeed very remarkable, and noticeably so even today. There are parts of Lincolnshire, for example, where one can readily recognise the work of the enclosure Commissioners and their surveyors, particularly in the neatness of the field divisions and the straight roads, wide with edges of grass strips, roads which do not bend but change direction with sharp turns of ninety degrees. Owing to the requirements of the post-enclosure farmers, the fields on similar soils assumed a high degree of similarity, as Frank Emery points out. In areas where stone was readily available, dry-stone walls replaced the quickset hedges most commonly seen in the Midlands, and as open land was replaced by cultivated fields and new substantial farmhouses and cottages appeared, the centre of a community might find itself pulled away from its former position. Some consequences were often unwelcome: near Oxford, for example, the disappearance of the commons, it was complained, inhibited riding, prevented the pursuit of natural history, and cut off the university’s students from fresh air. The former pretty, winding trackways were replaced by ‘dull and dusty’ footpaths along the newly made, formally direct roads. Apart from the many new country roads created by the Commissioners, the landscape was changed also by the incursions into woodlands necessary for obtaining the great quantities of timber required by landowners for their miles of new fences and numerous gates and gate-posts – a work which gave employment to a host of woodmen and carpenters, as well as to hedgers and ditchers, masons and roadmen.⁶

In northern England the proliferation of dry-stone walls and earthen banks subdividing newly enclosed waste lands completely altered the landscape, though where the land was too poor to bear the cost of making permanent divisions these might well be omitted. Again, in the Pennine valleys where minerals were to be found, small pieces of waste were enclosed by walls in order to provide some agricultural income for the miners and their families. Old woodland areas like Staffordshire’s Needwood Forest, Leicestershire’s Gharnwood Forest and Dorset’s Vale of Blackmoor were cleared and replaced by a pattern of geometrical fields and straight roads. The Lincolnshire wolds and the chalklands of Wiltshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Sussex also succumbed to the Commissioners’ surveyors, although some parishes were enclosed by agreement among the owners rather than by Act of Parliament. A similar picture emerged in fenland districts, in the Somerset Levels for example, and the East Anglian fens, with innumerable rectangular fields edged by new straight drains replacing the old undrained fields and commons. And just as the new farmsteads sometimes took their names from contemporary events – Trafalgar Farm, Waterloo Farm – so some of the new fields were called after the recently lost open fields and commons, or by more precise if mundane descriptions such as Twenty Acres or Fourteen Acres. The new crops introduced in the period were also commemorated by names such as Trefoil Close, Turnip Close, Potato Ground.⁷

So enclosure has left its marks, which are still evident some two centuries or more after the event. A present-day historian was once heard to remark that, as a subject for fresh discussion, enclosure was dead and buried. Nothing could be further from the truth. It continues to fascinate a younger generation of historians, as evidenced by the frequent appearance of important new research in books and articles. It is a subject, in fact, which has always aroused controversy and seems likely to continue to do so in the future. But too often, in the view of the present writer, the controversies are obscured by an unfortunate lack of balance and a failure to recognise the facts of the matter. If this book goes some way towards creating a more realistic basis for discussion, then the many years spent in bringing its material together will have been well used.

 

1. J.H. Clapham, Economic History of Modern Britain, II, Cambridge, 1932, pp. 260–1, 264.

2. Seebohm Rowntree and May Kendall, Hoiu the Labourer Lives: Study of the Rural Labour Problem, 1913; Land Enquiry Committee, The Land: the Report, of the Land Enquiry Committee, 1913; Land Agents’ Society, Facts about Land: A Reply to The Land’, the Report of the Unofficial Land Enquiry Committee, 1916.

3. J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1st edn, 1911, new edn, 1978.

4. E.C.K. Conner, Common Land and Inclosure, 1st edn, 1912, preface, p. vii.

5. Clapham, Modem Britain, I, Cambridge, 1926, ch. iv;J.D. Chambers, ‘Enclosure and Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Reviezv, 2nd ser., V, 3, 1953, pp. 319-43.

6. Frank Emery, The Oxfordshire Landscape, 1974, pp. 138, 140–3

7. Christopher- Taylor, Fields in the English Landscape, 1975, pp. 141, 143, 144, 146, 150, 152.

CHAPTER TWO

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The Anatomy of Enclosure

The meaning of enclosure

What exactly was enclosure? What did it involve? Most simply, it meant the extinction of common rights which people held over the farm lands and commons of the parish, the abolition of the scattered holdings in the open fields and a re-allocation of holdings in compact blocks, accompanied usually by the physical separation of the newly created fields and closes by the erection of fences, hedges or stone walls. Thereafter, the lands so enclosed were held ‘in severalty’, that is, they were reserved for the sole use of the individual owners or their tenants.

What were the common rights that were extinguished by enclosure? We shall consider them in more detail later on, but broadly they were old-established rights exe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Anatomy of Enclosure
• 3. The Objectives of Enclosure
• 4. The Process of Parliamentary Enclosure
• 5. The Gains of Parliamentary Enclosure
• 6. The Costs of Parliamentary Enclosure
• 7. Parliamentary Enclosure and the Cottager
• 8. Conclusion: The Continuing Debate
• Maps
• Index