The patch of ground that we call the common in my home village in Essex is a low-lying area of grassland next to the railway station. It is much used by dog walkers as well as for impromptu games of football (when these are allowed). In normal times, it is the venue for the summer fete, featuring a dog show, a bouncy castle, and cake stalls.
Were this land ever to be fenced in
and built upon, the loss for my village would be devastating. A vital piece of accessible
green space (albeit one that often floods in winter) would be gone forever. But
this open land has never been threatened with enclosure. Indeed, it only exists
because of enclosure. These few acres were carved out from the village’s pre-enclosure
meadows to form a recreation ground under the terms of an Enclosure Act of 1856.
Enclosure in this corner of Essex was
never more than a tidying-up exercise, bringing order to the tangled skein of
rights and obligations that overlay the landscape. The complexity of the
pre-enclosure landscape here means that my village was even used as a case
study in Oliver Rackham’s monumental history of the English countryside.
Recent books have depicted
enclosure as something else altogether. Guy Shrubsole in Who Owns England?
(2019) describes enclosure as ‘a land grab of criminal proportions.’ It’s a
powerful narrative, which fuels the outrage that many feel at the unequal
distribution of landownership. It is also almost entirely untrue.
The commons were never ‘owned in common’ before enclosure in the way that Shrubsole and others have assumed. After all, it was the very absence in English law of any concept of property that was owned in common that led to the invention of the National Trust in 1895.
The underlying ownership of land was
never really the issue at stake during enclosure, even if the subsequent
consolidation of landholdings was arguably its consequence. Commons were privately owned places over
which certain other people – the commoners – also possessed use rights.
Commoners were those members of the parish who had a stake in the open fields –
the right to farm strips of land, or to graze livestock. Common rights were themselves
forms of property, and enclosure, in its Parliamentary sense, was the legal
process by which the commoners were compensated for the loss of their rights
when the open fields were divided into individual plots.
For the most part, enclosure was a largely
bureaucratic exercise. Across many counties in England, enclosure either never
happened at all (because land had been held in severalty since time out of
mind) or was tolerated with barely a hint of opposition. Examples of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century enclosure protests – such as the famous anti-enclosure
riots at Otmoor in Oxfordshire in 1830 – are conspicuous by their relative rarity.
Historians have long debated why
there appears to have been so little direct opposition to enclosure, even if
resistance to it was more frequent than has sometimes been assumed. Undoubtedly the landowning class had the
weight of military and political force behind them. But the fact also remains
that enclosure was a legal event, conducted with a degree of transparency and
with the tacit if not overt approval of many of those involved.
Without question, enclosure in
lowland England was damaging for the poorest in society. Those people possessed
nothing at all, beyond the informal discretion to occasionally take firewood or
a rabbit from the common. Because these rights were purely customary, they were
not recognised as common rights during the enclosure process. Once enclosure
had taken effect, less open land was available for the landless to eke out a
living. The flight to urban centres began.
In upland parts, meanwhile, commons
served different purposes altogether. Here, great stretches of hillsides had
only ever been held for common grazing. Manorial courts resolved squabbles
between farmers over the uses and abuses of the commons, and many of these
courts survived even into the twentieth century. This did not alter the
underlying reality: that common land was privately owned property over which certain
other people shared common rights of access or use.
The myths of enclosure are
widespread. They get more powerful with every retelling. George Monbiot’s
recent report for the Labour Party, Land for the Many, insists (p61) that
‘Common land was where the majority of the population once lived and worked’. As
non-sequiturs go, it takes some beating. Commons after all tended to be those marginal parts
of a settlement where the land was of too poor a quality to be incorporated
into the open fields.
The idea that enclosure was a
criminal land grab sits uncomfortably with the fact that 5,200 acts of
Parliament were passed to make it happen. Far from being criminal, enclosure
was a thoroughly legal process, conducted in the full gaze of public scrutiny. After
an enclosure act had been passed, enclosure commissioners would be appointed to
descend on a parish and begin the process of sorting out who got what so that
lines could (literally) be drawn on the ground. This process often took several
years to resolve, which is why the enclosure award in my village (1861)
postdated the enclosure act by five years.
John Clare’s influence runs deep. His
melancholy lines remind us of the very real losses that enclosure caused,
especially for those customary users of the commons who could claim no legal
stake in the process. But Clare was a labourer not a farmer, and enclosure
ultimately was about improving the efficiency of agricultural production. Enclosure
was not the English equivalent of the Highland Clearances.
Progressive thinkers are right to
reclaim the idea of the commons as a powerful metaphor for rethinking how our present
society might be organised differently in the future. But it is worth bearing
in mind that different stories can also be told about the history of the
commons and their enclosure.
