“Good fences make good neighbours”: Enclosure in Georgian England

By Elizabeth Grant

A lawn sweeping down to a stream, expanses of undulating turf dotted with clumps of trees rising to a wooded skyline, a bridge giving focus to the scene – it is the quintessential English landscape. 

View from Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

In fact, it is a man-made park. The harmonious view reflects the ideas and style propagated by the dominant figure of eighteenth-century gardening history, Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783). It also reflects a social order dominated by landowners, because laying out the grounds in this style required exclusive ownership of vast tracts of land. And that meant enclosing.

Enclosing describes a process by which small or fragmented parcels of land are merged into homogeneous blocks, absorbing the common land that lies in-between. On the ground, that meant building fences. The common land previously accessible to all was now reserved for one deeded owner. At the political level, enclosing required an Act of Parliament. This was easy to obtain in a country where political power was tied to land ownership.

Enclosing meant building fences

Good fences make good neighbours: the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations traces the proverb cited in the heading back to the mid-seventeenth century. This was the time when enclosure, which had begun in the Tudor era, reached a significant scale. It intensified during the Georgian period, with around two thousand Enclosure Acts passed during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. From 1760 to 1800, approximately 21 million acres of land were enclosed by statute. The process accelerated still further after 1800. (Charles Quest-Ritson, The English Garden: A Social History, London 2001, pp. 13, 137)

Was England a nation of wealthy aesthetes, then, desperate to improve their view? Garden historian Charles Quest-Ritson explains: “Landscaping the grounds of an estate was … closely linked to other forms of improvement – above all, better economic use of the land. It may seem at first that there is an obvious contradiction between improving the income of the estate and turning much of it into an extensive landscaped park. But, in fact, the opposite is true.” (Quest-Ritson, p. 137)

Compact land holdings were much easier to administer and improve. Enclosing made it possible to reorganize the farms on an estate and free up space around the landowner’s house for a landscaped park. Parks were ornamental and expensive to build, a perfect status symbol. But once a park had been created, it could be highly profitable. Not only was it low in maintenance – the mowing or grazing by deer, sheep or cattle which it required actually generated income. The rents from pasture exceeded rents from agriculture by up to 50 per cent. Stock-breeding became an elegant fashion, seen as a leisurely pursuit far removed from the more energetic arable farming. The handsome copses and clumps of wood dotting the pasture produced firewood, props, poles and hurdles. Their valuable hardwoods would swell the purse of the landowner’s descendants when cut and sold seventy or ninety years hence. (Quest-Ritson, pp. 140ff.)

Enclosing made huge pastures available for profitable
sheep farming

Agricultural improvement, in turn, was slow to gain ground. Most landowners concentrated their efforts on increasing their land holdings rather than increasing the yields of the land they already had – even though they were living in a time of profound demographic change, and knew it. Thomas Malthus had published his Essay on Population in 1798, and in 1817 Lord Liverpool wrote to Sidmouth: 

“If our Commercial Situation does not improve, Emigration, or Premature Deaths, are the only Remedies. Both must occur to a considerable Extent. It would be most inhuman in such Case, to encourage the latter, by prohibiting the former.” (John Plowright, Regency England: The Age of Lord Liverpool, London 1996, p. 8).

Historian Boyd Hilton asks the pertinent question, “How on earth did agricultural output manage to rise to meet the needs of townsfolk?” And explains, 

“This was a period of agricultural expansion rather than revolution. The number of acres increased from around 10 to 15 million between 1770 and 1850, while the area under wheat rose from about 2.8. million to 3.8 million … Most of the increase took place between 1790 and 1812, when scarcity prices due to population pressure and the difficulty of importing food in wartime led the margin of cultivation to be pushed up the hillsides.” (Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783–1846, Oxford 2006, p. 8)

You will object that there are no fences to be seen in the view from Chatsworth House, nor from scores of similarly grand or less grand houses in England. That’s because they’re hidden behind the trees. But they’re there all right. While historians continue to argue about the actual value and yields of the enclosed land, most of them agree that the social consequences were dire. Local labourers had customary shared-use rights to grazing, crops, brushwood, and fuel from the common land. You could graze a couple of goats on the commons, or a flock of geese. You could drive your pigs into the woods to fatten on acorns or beech mast. You could collect firewood or cut staves to repair your house or your fences. You might even fish or make hay (Wikipedia, s. v. common land). 

To claim compensation for lost use, however, you needed to be able to claim a legal right which few possessed. And even if they did, the compensation mostly came in the form of small allotments that could never yield the benefits a large tract of common land could. (Hilton, pp. 8f.). The Honourable John Byng, later the fifth Lord Torrington, wrote in 1781: “I hate enclosures, and as a citizen I look on them as the greedy tyrannies of the wealthy few to oppress the indigent many, and an iniquitous purchase of invaluable rights” (see Quest-Ritson, p. 138).

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Elizabeth (Elsie) Grant writes romantic fiction set in the early nineteenth century. Her first novel, An Independent Heart, takes place in a country house surrounded by just the kind of park described here. It also involves an enclosure scheme, parliamentary ambitions, and the landed interest, but never fear – these only form a sketchy background against which the romance is painted in delicate hues.

Elsie grew up in Germany, Yugoslavia (as it was then), and the United States. After studying languages in Glasgow and Berlin, she went on to work as a translator and proofreader, specializing in medieval art and contemporary architecture. She is currently working on her second novel, which revolves around a bright young heiress and a one-armed sea captain and is partly set in Greece.

An Independent Heart is available at:

Bod Buchshop

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

Please visit Elsie at elsiegrant.blogspot.com

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The Fenland Riots

by Ann Swinfen
An Editor's Choice, originally published April 15, 2014.  
Editors' note: Ann passed away on August 4, 2018

My new novel Flood takes place in the seventeenth century in a very distinctive area along the east coast of England, known as the Fens. Once a remote, slightly mysterious region of marshes and hidden villages, it attracted the attention of men greedy to get their hands on land by fair means or foul, never mind the consequences for the local inhabitants. They used the notorious method of ‘enclosure’, but in the Fens they were up against a formidable people who could not easily be bullied into submitting. When I discovered their story, I knew I had to write about it.

I had always known about enclosures, of course. From roughly Tudor times to the nineteenth century in England, land was stolen by large landowners or groups of speculators by semi-legal means. This stolen land was ‘common land’, that is, land held in common by a group of people, often the free villagers of a parish who were peasant farmers or yeomen. They had ancient rights to cultivate arable land on a shared basis, to graze their flocks and herds on local meadows, and to gather firewood and feed their pigs in neighbouring woods.

The enclosers fenced off the commons, expelled the commoners – sometimes even seizing their animals – and took possession of the land for themselves. The local people rarely had any means of redress or compensation. If they went to law, almost invariably they lost their cases, at considerable financial cost, when opposed by those with influence and deep pockets. The result is that there are very few common lands left today. Port Meadow in Oxford still has common grazing for a few Freemen who can claim ancient rights granted by Alfred the Great. The New Forest has privileges for those who are eligible.

This was a massive injustice, carried out under the guise of land improvement, or in order to create large wool-producing businesses. And in some cases it may have led to more efficient farming methods, but nevertheless it resulted in poverty, starvation and dispossession for many of its victims. The Highland Clearances in Scotland had a similar effect, although in their case small tenants were cleared off land already owned by a wealthy landowner in order to produce a larger income from sheep.

The Fens of East Anglia (stretching along the east coast of England from Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk to Lincolnshire) were from ancient times an area where land, water and marsh combined to form a rich tapestry with unique problems and rewards. The natural phenomenon of the area is the annual deposit by winter rains of rich silt from higher ground inland on to the lower arable fields of the fenlands. This produced some of the richest soil in England.

Floods would cover these fields in winter, then drain away, leaving land ready for cultivation. Between these arable fields lay a network of ancient peat bogs and waterways – some natural, some man-made over the centuries by local people who understood their special environment and the behaviour of their annual floods. They lived by arable farming, raising stock, fishing and water-fowling. The peat bogs provided fuel as well as absorbing excess water, and the rushes and willows growing along the waterways furnished materials for everything from thatch to hurdles and eel-traps.

Then, in the early seventeenth century, the ‘adventurers’ came – adventurers because they invested their money in a speculative venture. They would drain this boggy land, which they mistakenly believed to be poor and unprofitable, seize control of it, and install settlers from Holland and France as rent-paying small farmers. The return on their money would be phenomenal – it was a fool-proof investment. There were plenty of Protestant refugees from Catholic persecution on the Continent who would be only too glad of a chance to start a new life on the reclaimed lands.

And what of the local people? Many held charters of ancient rights. These were ignored in the law courts. Some tried to obtain compensation, but often found themselves imprisoned or fined instead, for attempting to oppose the speculators.

Oliver Cromwell

But they were a tough people, the fenlanders. They fought for their rights, destroying the drainage ditches and pumping mills, attacking the drainage workers and settlers. The unrest spread throughout the Fens and was one of the underlying causes of the English Civil War. The war itself brought a temporary halt to the drainage, but in the lull between the two phases of the war, it began again. And whereas the first period of drainage and enclosure had been financed by the aristocracy and the king, the new speculators were the men who had risen to power under the new government, and included Oliver Cromwell himself, who, in the past, had declared that he would protect the fenlanders.

Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder

I was drawn to the period and the events in the Fens by the persistent courage of the local people in defending their land and their customary way of life. I was also fascinated by discovering that the women fought alongside their men, some of them even being accused of being witches because of their unwomanly behaviour. Yes, this was the very period when the infamous ‘witch-finder general’, Matthew Hopkins, was roaming over this same area, instigating witch-hunts and hounding hundreds of innocent men and women to their deaths. Mostly women. But some men too. Because of the imposition of strict and unforgiving Puritan rules by Cromwell’s government, clergymen who continued to practice the established ceremonies of the Anglican church – such as baptism and church weddings – were attacked and in some cases tried and executed for witchcraft.

The more I read about the Fenland Riots, as they came to be known, the more I wanted to tell the story of these persecuted people. In my novel Flood, Mercy Bennington and her family and friends provided the voices of those forgotten seventeenth century forebears of ours.

And the irony of it all? Because the engineers brought in to drain the Fens did not understand the local terrain, their works resulted in uncontrollable floods. Water which would once have been absorbed by the marshland was pumped out into new ditches which overflowed and flooded villages and homes. Not until the nineteenth century was efficient drainage carried out, and it destroyed the peat bogs which by the present day have withered and shrunk, so that in many places the rivers are now higher than the surrounding lands, a dangerous and unsustainable situation. In recent years it has come to be realised that the marshes along the sea coast of the Fens used to provide a buffer against that other source of floods – floods from the sea. As a result, some coastal farmlands are now being allowed to revert to salt marsh, to protect the land.

I wonder what Mercy Bennington would have had to say about that?

References:
Fraser, Antonia, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth Century England
Lindley, Keith, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution
Plowden, Alison, Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War

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Ann Swinfen (http://www.annswinfen.com) published three novels with Random House, but The Testament of Mariam, Flood and The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez – she published herself under the imprint Shakenoak Press. Loving the whole independent publishing process, and the control it offers to authors, she thought it unlikely she would ever return to conventional publishing. Some of her short stories which previously appeared in magazines and on BBC radio are now published on Kindle. She also reissued her backlist titles as paperbacks and Kindles. In July 2018, she published The Stonemason's Tale (Oxford Medieval Mystery 6).

FLOOD @ Amazon UK
FLOOD @ Amazon US

A Painful Transition for Some, A Benefit for Others: The Enclosure Acts

by J.A. Beard

"Not so large, I dare say, as many people suppose. I do not mean to complain, however; it is undoubtedly a comfortable one, and I hope, will in time be better. The inclosure of Norland Common, now carrying on, is a most serious drain. And then I have made a little purchase within this half year -- East Kingham Farm, you must remember the place, where old Gibson used to live. The land was so very desirable for me in every respect, so immediately adjoining my own property, that I felt it my duty to buy it. I could not have answered it to my conscience to let it fall into any other hands. A man must pay for his convenience, and it has cost me a vast deal of money."

-- John Dashwood, Sense and Sensibility, Chapter 33

Mr. Dashwood's comments don't initially seem to be all that important in the grander discussion of the nature of socio-economic disparity and economic realignment in Georgian and Regency England. His off-hand mention of "the inclosure of Norland Common", however, touches upon a rather significant series of land reforms that had major an impact on the rural lower classes in England.

Enclosure/inclosure was the process by which land was consolidated, separated from neighboring properties, and deeded to private owners. The name comes from the way these lands were marked off from others: enclosure with a wall, hedge, fence, or other obvious marker of division. Much of this process involved consolidation of irregular areas into more contiguous lands, but there were also cases of just simple conversion from common-use to private use. The combination of consolidation, demarcation of borders, and simple ownership assignment eliminated any ambiguity about who owned what and effectively eliminated most common-use land in England.

For a good chunk of English history, an open system was in place in many (but certainly not all) areas where peasants could make use of common-use land for grazing, small-scale planting, small-scale forestry, and similar subsistence activities. Although various minor cases of enclosure occurred throughout the centuries, the process really picked up speed during the Georgian era with a huge number of Enclosure Acts being passed by Parliament between the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century. While these were acts passed by the legislature, it should be noted that the process of acquiring enclosed land during most of the Georgian era involved a private citizen petitioning Parliament (until the mid-19th century at least), and so many of these Parliamentary acts were the culmination, in a sense, of private concerns and petitions rather than autonomous top-down decisions by the government. Even excluding the major Enclosure Acts, many smaller-scale private acts were passed by Parliament at the direct petition request of individuals.

It should be noted that in some cases enclosure was done to basically cut down on illegal use of private property. A man might own a swath of land, but a lack of clear borders allowed people to come in certain areas, pick berries, graze their livestock, et cetera. That being said, in other cases there were centuries-old common areas that were destroyed by enclosure.

The act of enclosure, given that it removed many economic/food-related rights from peasants in local villages and nearby areas, had wide-spread secondary effects. Once land was controlled by an owner, usage, if allowed, would require rent, which poorer families may have not been able to afford. Whereas previously they could potentially get by making limited use of common land, many now had to seek out employment. Arguably, without the Enclosure Acts, the huge number of cheap laborers necessary to help fuel the Industrial Revolution in England would not have been available.

Even if one is not particularly politically inclined, it's easy to see how these acts might be viewed with suspicion by some. A person (and many have) could make the argument that formerly self-sufficient people were forced to go seek out work, sometimes far from home (thus disrupting village life), whereas a small percentage of individuals found themselves in a stronger economic position.

The often unpleasant labor conditions of the early Industrial Revolution or the low-security life that accompanied service were arguably tolerated because of the flood of workers desperate for new means to sustain themselves. Was enclosure nothing more than people of superior means consolidating resources and land at the expense of people of lesser means? Some argue that rather strenuously.

On the other hand, the ostensible logic behind enclosure was in some cases simple protection of property rights and in other cases was about improving efficiency of the land. Some historians suggest that by pushing people out of low-level subsistence farming, enclosure may have ultimately contributed to greater social mobility potential in the long-run. General improved economic efficiency combined with the slowly eroding social resistance to things like trade and investment among gentry arguably led to a consolidation, enrichment, and investment cycle that benefited the nation as a whole. Under this argument, the workers flooding into the factories of the Industrial Revolution, in turn, expanded the economy and helped shift the poorer English away from having effectively zero chance at social mobility.

It's also undeniable that in many areas over-use and agricultural inefficiency was a legitimate motivation for enclosure. This is the so-called tragedy of the commons. In such a situation, as no one involved in the use of land/resource has true ownership, they will not take special measures to conserve it because others using the resources may not. This cycle of use and self-interest leads to the depletion of the resource. The various people who supported enclosure often based their argument on economic reasons (fencing associated with enclosure allowed high-value pasturage), agricultural efficiency, and land restoration.

Did this mean that every enclosed area was actually some horribly depleted over-farmed and over-logged deadland that needed the help of the gentry to rescue it? Doubtful. While there were areas where this was the case, it's not as if during the process of enclosure the government first did some sort of complicated land-use analysis. Mostly they were responding to petitions filed by people with enough wealth to hire lawyers to file petitions.

Many enclosed areas had been successfully maintained for centuries. Though, as noted above, in some cases enclosure was about making property borders more concrete rather than a more active attempt to expand land holdings. The nature and appropriateness (depending on one's point of view) of enclosure likely varied by case.

Regardless if you feel enclosure was some sort of land-grab by the elite or if it was a painful but necessary part of an economically maturing England that benefited everyone, it most definitely played a role in changing the nature of the English countryside and working classes.