Parliamentary Enclosure in England

Parliamentary Enclosure in England An Introduction to its Causes, Incidence and Impact 1750-1850 G.E. MINGAY ~ Longman London and New York 6 Parliamentary Enclosure in England 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 CHAPTER TWO 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 The Anatomy of Enclosure 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 evid enced 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 The meaning of enclosure obscured by an unfortunate lack of balance and a failure to recog nise the facts of the matter. If this book goes some way towards What exactly was enclosure? What did it involve? Most simply, it creating a more realistic basis for discussion, then the many years meant the extinction of common rights which people held over the spent in bringing its material together will have been well used. farm lands and commons of the parish, the abolition of the scat tered holdings in the open fields and a re-allocation of holdings in 7. Christopher Taylor, Fields in the English Landscape, 1975, pp. 141, 143, 144, 146, compact blocks, accompanied usually by the physical separation of 150, 152. the newly created fields and closes by the erection of fences, hedges or stone walls. Thereafter, the lands so enclosed were held 'in sever alty', 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 en closure? We shall consider them in more detail later on, but broadly they were old-established rights exercised by the occupiers of farm lands and cottages, and varied considerably in nature and extent from place to place. Generally, however, on arable lands of the open fields they included the important right ('common of shack') to graze livestock on the corn stubbles left after the crops had been harvested and cleared from the ground. The manure dropped by the grazing stock was a vital element in securing satisfactory yields of following crops. Equally valuable was that provided by the sys tematic folding of sheep on the land that was left fallow, or uncul tivated, between crops (left so in order to help it recover fertility and to allow for a thorough extermination of weeds). In addition to the open-field lands that were regularly cropped, there were in many unenclosed villages useful areas of meadow, perhaps enriched by a stream which flooded in winter. The meadows were highly valued for their early bite of rich grass, and not infrequently they 7 8 Parliamentary Enclosure in England The Anatomy of Enclosure 9 were newly re-allocated each year, so that each farmer had an equal and wagon wheels, among many others, with the bark sold separ chance of access to tl;ie best grazing. ately for use in the tanning trade, while coppice wood was used for The common or commons (there might be more than one in making charcoal. the parish) consisted of areas of open land set aside for grazing The arable land of the parish was frequently divided into a during the summer months when the arable or crop lands in the number of large fields. These have usually been described in his fields were shut up to keep stock from damaging the growing corn. torical accounts and in nineteenth-century General Enclosure Acts In addition to the farmers, numbers of cottagers and others might as 'open' fields, to distinguish them from enclosed ones. In reality, have the right to graze a cow or horse on the commons, find pannage as Joan Thirsk has pointed out, there were two kinds of unenclosed (acorns and beech-mast) there for pigs, cut brushwood or furze for fields. Firstly, there were fields where common rights are not defin fuel, and gather berries and herbs in season. Contemporaries also itely known to have been used, or where the farmers agreed to spoke of the 'waste', a term which included small areas of stony or renounce them. Secondly, there were the fields where common rocky ground together with more extensive stretches of heathland, rights had always existed and were still in use at the time of parlia moors and bogs, as well as barren mountains and steep hillsides. mentary enclosure. She suggested reserving the term 'open' fields Parts of the waste might be useful for some very sparse grazing, for for the first, and 'common' fields for the second, a distinction gathering wild berries and digging turves or peat for fuel, and which in terms of historical accuracy has much to recommend it. 1 perhaps for getting supplies of clay, gravel and stone for repairing However, the use of 'open' fields to describe unenclosed arable houses and maintaining the roads. fields in general is so long enshrined in the historical literature Waste lands were often quite limited in lowland parishes but that to avoid confusion it is perhaps best to retain this term, while were very extensive over much of the country in the eighteenth cen remembering that there were fields that were 'open' in a landscape tury, even beyond the limits of the northern moors, the Cumbrian sense but were not subject to common rights. fells and the Welsh mountains. In the south-west, for example, lay The number of fields varied from parish to parish, and although the wastes of Dartmoor, Exmoor and Sedgmoor, in the Midlands textbooks speak of the 'three-field system', and in fact three fields were the bleak wolds and considerable areas of poor soils taken may have been quite usual, it was not uncommon to find parishes up by the royal and other forests, while in the east stretched the with only one or two fields and others with from four to seven or forbidding Lincolnshire uplands, the still ill-drained fenlands fur more. In the so-called 'classical' open-field system of the Midlands ther south, and the Thames-side marshes. Even in approaching the the fields were often large, stretching from several hundred acres capital itself, the traveller had to brave the highwaymen who to as many as two thousand acres or more; in some areas, on the infested wastes such as Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common. other hand, they were quite small, the arable being subordinate to Some areas of hill and moor, especially in the north, were so high, a predominating demand for grazing, or limited by the restricted steep and barren as never to be worth the cost of enclosing. But availability of suitable soils. On the coast of Lincolnshire, for example, often unenclosed lowland parishes had some small patches of very the salt marshes were highly valued for their pasture, and the small poor land of such marginal value that they might not be worth arable fields there were quite a secondary consideration.2 taking in when the parish was enclosed, unless it were for their Whether the open fields formed a rigid basis for the rotation of stone or minerals. Indeed, in lowland farming districts not only crops, as was often supposed, is highly doubtful. Already by the later some wastes, but also a number of commons, remained untouched seventeenth century or early eighteenth century open-field farmers by enclosure, so that it is not quite true to say that the commons were experimenting with new crops, such as turnips and legumes.3 always disappeared along with the open fields. Lastly, the parish often had some woodlands. These were usually 1. Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, IV: 1500-1640, privately owned and cultivated on a commercial basis, the trees Cambridge, 1967, pp. ix-x. being cut at regular intervals and systematically replanted. The large 2. Joan Thirsk, English Peasant Farming: the Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor lo Recent Times, 1957, pp. 68, 152. timber went for house building and shipbuilding, or to workshops 3. See, for example, Michael Havinden, 'Agricultural Progress in Open-field making a variety of wooden articles such as furniture, posts, gates t Oxfordshire', Agricultural History Review, IX, 1961 , pp. 78-83. 10 Parliamentary Enclosure in England The Anatomy of Enclosure 11 Such crops were particularly useful to farmers where the commons to amalgamation and consolidation, sometimes on a large scale. were small and grazing was short, enabling them to keep more stock More frequently, perhaps, individual farmers agreed to exchanges, than would otherwise have been possible, and consequently helping so that over time the separate units in the fields got fewer and them to manure their cropland more thoroughly. To some extent larger, and became easier to work. However, in numbers of villages this flexibility made it possible for open-field farmers to overcome before enclosure many of the units making up a holding were still the basic weakness of their farming system - the more or less fixed very small, sometimes only a quarter of an acre, and still widely division of the village land into that reserved for arable and that scattered, and this was frequently given as a ground for bringing reserved for pasture.

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