Enclosure (sometimes inclosure) was the legal process in England of consolidating (enclosing) small landholdings into larger farms. Once enclosed, use of the land became restricted to the owner, and it ceased to be common land for communal use. In England and Wales the term is also used for the process that ended the ancient system of arable farming in open fields. Under enclosure, such land is fenced and deeded or entitled to one or more owners. The process of enclosure began to be a widespread feature of the English agricultural landscape during the 16th century.
By the 19th century, unenclosed commons had become largely restricted to rough pasture in mountainous areas and to relatively small parts of the lowlands, and also, surprisingly perhaps, within the newly forming conurbations. Throughout the period of enclosure there had been various forms of resistance, but this was an inexorable process that was "part and parcel" of the agricultural revolution in Britain and the consequent industrialization and urbanization of England and Wales, where the large scale migration of a rural population was a contributory factor to the development of the industrial revolution itself. The phrase 'part and parcel' was used as a legal term from the mid-16th century on, principally for clauses in law for parts of a landholding, but didn’t start to be used in its present figurative sense until about 1800, when vast numbers of the English population had been stripped of either their landholding or their rights regarding access to "common land".
Thomas Spence was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land. Spence was one of the leading revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814. The threatened enclosure of the common land known as Town Moor in Newcastle in 1771 appears to have been key to Spence's interest in the land question and journey towards ultra-radicalism. His scheme was not for land nationalization but for the establishment of self-contained parochial communities, in which rent paid to the parish (wherein the absolute ownership of the land was vested) should be the only tax of any kind. His ideas and thinking on the subject were shaped by a variety of economic thinkers, including his friend Charles Hall. Spence argued for:
The end of aristocracy and landlords;
All land should be publicly owned by 'democratic parishes', which should be largely self-governing;
Rents of land in parishes to be shared equally amongst parishioners, as a form of social dividend;
Universal suffrage (including female suffrage) at both parish level and through a system of deputies elected by parishes to a national senate;
A 'social guarantee' extended to provide income for those unable to work;
The 'rights of infants' [children] to be free from abuse and poverty.
The origin of the phrase "rights of man".
Spence's Plan was first published in his penny pamphlet Property in Land Every One's Right in 1775, but was later re-issued as The Real Rights of Man.
This was because Spence was probably the first Englishman to speak of 'the rights of man'. The following recollection, composed in the third person, was written by Spence while he was in prison in London in 1794 on a charge of high treason. According to Spence he was;
the first, who as far as he knows, made use of the phrase "RIGHTS OF MAN", which was on the following remarkable occasion: A man who had been a farmer, and also a miner, and who had been ill-used by his landlords, dug a cave for himself by the seaside, at Marsdon Rocks, between Shields and Sunderland, about the year 1780, and the singularity of such a habitation, exciting the curiosity of many to pay him a visit; our author was one of that number. Exulting in the idea of a human being, who had bravely emancipated himself from the iron fangs of aristocracy, to live free from impost, he wrote extempore with chaulk above the fire place of this free man, the following lines:
Ye landlords vile, whose man's peace mar, Come levy rents here if you can; Your stewards and lawyers I defy, And live with all the RIGHTS OF MANThis is in reference to the story of "Jack the Blaster" at Marsden Grotto.
Building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land
Following the Reform Act of 1832, that had introduced wide-ranging changes to the electoral system of England and Wales, and that the Manchester Guardian and the Little Circle had been campaigning for, the Chartist working class movement in England and Wales mobilized large scale support for the right to vote for men over 21 years of age. This was to be achieved through petitions signed by many millions of people accompanied by mass meetings and demonstrations.
By the 1840's the British state hit back. Several Chartist leaders, including Feargus O'Connor, George Julian Harney, and Thomas Cooper were arrested. During the late summer of 1842 hundreds were incarcerated – in the Potteries alone 116 men and women went to prison. A smaller number, but still amounting to many dozens – such as William Ellis, who was convicted on perjured evidence – were transported. However, the government's most ambitious prosecution, personally led by the Attorney General, of O'Connor and 57 others (including almost all Chartism's national executive) failed: none were convicted of the serious charges, and those found guilty of minor offences were never actually sentenced. Cooper alone of the national Chartist leadership was convicted (at a different trial), having spoken at strike meetings in the Potteries.
Despite this second set of arrests, Chartist activity continued. Beginning in 1843, O'Connor suggested that the land contained the solution to workers' problems. This idea evolved into the Chartist Co-operative Land Company, later called the National Land Company. Workers would buy shares in the company, and the company would use those funds to purchase estates that would be subdivided into 2, 3, and 4 acre (8,000, 12,400 and 16,000 m²) lots. Between 1844 and 1848, five estates were purchased, subdivided, and built on, and then settled by lucky shareholders, who were chosen by lot. Unfortunately for O'Connor, in 1848 a Select Committee was appointed by Parliament to investigate the financial viability of the scheme, and it was ordered that it be shut down. Cottages built by the Chartist Land Company are still standing and inhabited today in Oxfordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and on the outskirts of London. Rosedene, a Chartist cottage in Dodford, Worcestershire, is owned and maintained by the National Trust, and is open to visitors by appointment. From where did this idea stem?
Ellen Rosenman writes about this in an article: “On Enclosure Acts and the Commons”, that can be found on the website: BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History.
Since no one scholar could hope to provide a complete overview of an entire century of British society, I have compiled material from a host of scholars working on all facets of the British nineteenth century. Authors come from History, Art History, and English departments across the world. The site differs from wikipedia in so far as all articles have undergone peer review, copy-editing, and proofing. Each article also seeks to interpret the events being discussed. Indeed, many events are discussed by more than one scholar.
Ellen Rosenman says this of enclosures and the commons and what they meant and represented for the Chartists in their ongoing campaign for democratic change:
". . . especially compared to the urban life that succeeded it."
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 land–both the earth itself and the symbolic national belonging it conferred–belonged 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, Let the feudal Lords say all they can; A Nation is the People’s Farm . . ."
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 Bossche’s 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 people’s “natural right”
Added to this sense of dislocation was the loss of a specific kind of personhood–or more accurately, manhood–defined 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 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. 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,
But choked with sedges, works its weedy way . . .
Sunk are thy bowers, in shapeless ruin all,
(Deserted Village ll. 41-43, 47)
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, John. Land and Houses: The Investor’s Guide to the Purchase of Freehold and Leasehold Ground Rents, Houses, and Land. London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1870).
The Chartist Land Company was a large-scale, explicitly political version of freehold societies. Conceived by the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor 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 O’Connorville 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 Chase’s 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 agitation–from opposition to enclosure, through Thomas Spence, to early 1830s interest in communal land-holding–which ran like a red thread through English radicalism."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.
This was all taking place in a period of Revolution across Europe. The Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, People's Spring, Springtime of the Peoples, or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It remains the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. It was the year that the Communist Manifesto was published, a moment in history that just preceded the eruptions of protest across Europe, and summarises Marx and Engels' theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in their own words;
"the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".And it was also a moment when the Chartist movement presented the most serious challenge to a conservative and/or liberal political and commercial establishment in Britain. It was hardly surprising that Chartism re-emerged as a powerful force in 1848. On 10 April 1848, a new Chartist Convention organised a mass meeting on Kennington Common, which would form a procession to present a third petition to Parliament. The estimate of the number of attendees varies depending on the sources (O'Connor said 300,000; the government, 15,000; The Observer newspaper suggested 50,000). Historians say 150,000.
The authorities were well aware that the Chartists had no intention of staging an uprising, but were still intent on a large-scale display of force to counter the challenge. 100,000 special constables were recruited to bolster the police force. In any case, the meeting was peaceful. The military had threatened to intervene if working people made any attempt to cross the Thames, and the petition was delivered to Parliament by a small group of Chartist leaders.
The Chartists declared that their petition was signed by 6 million people, but House of Commons clerks announced that it was a lesser figure of 1.9 million.
These clerks could not have done their work in the time allocated to them; but their figure was widely reported, along with some of the pseudonyms appended to the petition such as "Punch" and "Sibthorp" (an ultra-Tory MP), and the credibility of Chartism was undermined.
The enclosure of Kennington Common
The common land in Kennington lay on the south-eastern border of the Manor, and is now covered by St. Mark’s Church and burial ground, the triangle of land between Brixton and Kennington Park Roads, and a large part of Kennington Park. The Common was bounded on the south-west by Vauxhall Creek and was marshy; Hodskinson and Middleton’s survey shows a pond near the south-east corner, and a ditch on the north-east and east sides.
Cattle belonging to the tenants of the Manor were grazed there, provided that they were clearly marked, and in 1660 it is recorded that 2d. was to be paid to the “common keeper” for every horse or mare and 1d. for every head of kine set to pasture there. The animals were probably driven to pasture form the riverside parts of the Manor along the track which became Kennington Road. Fines for making cartways across the Common are recorded frequently in the court rolls; in some cases the carts were said to be carrying bricks.
In the 18th and 19th centuries Kennington Common gained an evil reputation. Part of it, including the site of the church and burial ground and the triangle of land between Brixton and Kennington Park Roads, was used as a place of execution and known as Gallows Common. Several Jacobites were executed here after the rising of 1745, and in 1866 when the removal of Temple Bar from Fleet Street was being considered, there was a suggestion that it should be re-erected in the Park to commemorate their execution. Crowds came to the Common not only to witness executions, but also to hear itinerant preachers “arguing upon their different religions”, and to see the cricket matches so profitable to the landlord of the Horns Tavern.
In 1841 there was an unsuccessful proposal to form a park in the area between Doddington Grove and Wyndham Street a little to the east of the Common. Ten years later the Rev. Charlton Lane, minister of St. Mark's Church, perhaps alarmed by the vast Chartist gathering in 1848, led a deputation to the First Commissioner of Works and the Duchy of Cornwall requesting that the Common should be made a Park. A local committee was set up to raise £1,000 of the estimated cost of £3,650, and a Bill was promoted in Parliament, which became law in 1852.
The Kennington Common Inclosure Act vested the Common in the Commissioners of Her Majesty's Works and Public Buildings, “freed and discharged from all Rights of Common and all other Rights whatsoever”. It also gave the Commissioners power to inclose, drain and plant the Common, and to divert Brixton Road and move the toll-gate and house. Iron railings were immediately erected round the Common by Messrs. H. and M. D. Grissell, and the levelling and planting of the ground was completed by March 1854.
Iron railings used in an art project
Common Land, Rights and Ownership
Update - The biggest privatisation has been the sale of the ground beneath our feet
In her memoirs the late Margaret Thatcher wrote that privatisation must be “at the centre of any programme of reclaiming territory for freedom”. Since 1979 British prime ministers have been true to her word. Thatcher used territory in a metaphorical sense, but it was also true literally: the privatisation of land is the biggest, and least well-known, sell-off of the state’s assets. As Brett Christophers, a professor of economic geography, points out in our pages, almost 10% of land has been transferred from public into private ownership since Thatcher came to power. In his book, The New Enclosure, Prof Christophers calculates that approximately 2 million hectares of land – or 10 % of Britain – has disappeared from public hands, the bulk of which has entered corporate, as opposed to charity or community, ownership. This is a privatisation of half of the state’s estate, worth about £400bn, and dwarfs any other transfer of public wealth to private hands.
The scale of the disposals was masked because the process took place largely in silence and by stealth. Often tracking the sales was difficult because of the opacity of transactions. The diversity of public bodies in the UK offering sites – from forests to airbases to hospital grounds – made it hard to piece together. The sales often took place at knockdown prices, with the public sector barely realising a fraction of the current value. This process has been briefly illuminated by tenacious journalism, such as this week’s story exposing how nine years of swingeing central government cuts to English councils have resulted in a vast and irreversible sell-off of public assets. In many cases local authorities have begun offloading their assets – playing fields, community centres, libraries, youth clubs, swimming pools – to fund redundancies made necessary by Whitehall cuts.
The defence of privatisation is that it can increase efficiency and spur investment. Such an argument is difficult to sustain with land. When the Cabinet Office looked into whether public bodies were holding on to vacant space, officials reported that, au contraire, it was the private sector that had a problem – maintaining a vacancy rate three times as high as government. Neither has land use been invigorated by private developers. Last year the New Economics Foundation pointed out that the government’s target of building 160,000 homes by selling off public land was 12 years behind schedule and would take until 2032 to achieve. The Tudor enclosure movement was supposed to have turbo-charged the capitalism of its day. Even if this dubious claim is true, it is unlikely that today’s equivalent is having any positive effect.
Where there appears to be some historical echo is in the appropriation of wealth by a rentier class which has grown up alongside large aristocratic estates. A staggering 23 of the top 100 richest people in the country last year have property listed as a major source of their wealth. That dwarfs the other biggest sources. Then there is the corporate hoarding of land: one study lists 50 private companies that together own about a 40th of Britain. Lastly there is the growing social dislocation: the share of young families privately renting has increased from just 9% in the late 1980s to 34%. Land can bring political influence, power, wealth and pleasure. But these things ought to be widely shared, whether land is built upon or not. It ought to be there for the common good: to be run across or gazed over or protested on.
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Ownership of land matters, and it ought not to be solely for the market to decide who is included or excluded from it.
