The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields

by Gilbert Slater

In Leicestershire the complaint is naturally more loud and general. In the account of Kibworth Beauchamp we read as follows:—

“No account of the Rates in any of the divisions, previous to the enclosure of the common fields, can be obtained; but it is said that they were not one-third of what they are at present; and the people attribute the rise to the enclosures; for they say ‘That before the fields were enclosed, they were solely applied to the production of corn; that the poor had then plenty of employment in weeding, reaping, threshing, etc., and could also collect a great quantity of corn by gleaning; but that the fields being now in pasturage, the farmers have little occasion for labourers, and the poor being thereby thrown out of employment, must of course be employed by the parish.’ There is some truth in these observations: one-third or perhaps one-fourth of the number of hands which were required twenty years ago, would now be sufficient, according to the present system of agriculture, to perform all the farming work of the parish.”

He adds that if it were not for the fact that many labourers were getting employment in canal cutting, the rates would be much higher still, and “the tradesmen, small farmers, and labourers are very loud in their complaints against those whom they call monopolising farmers and graziers, an evil which, they say, increases every year.” (Vol. II., p. 383.)

In Northamptonshire we find the case of Brixworth, enclosed in 1780, a parish of 3300 acres. Before enclosure it consisted almost entirely of common fields. At the time of Eden’s writing, sixteen years later, only one-third remained arable. The expenditure on the poor in 1776, before the enclosure, was £121 6s., in the six years 1787 to 1792 it averaged £325 (Vol. II., p. 529). Again, with regard to local urban opinion, he notes that “the lands round Kettering are chiefly open field: they produce rich crops of corn. The people of the town seem averse to enclosures, which they think will raise the price of provisions, from these lands being all turned to pasture, when inclosed, as was the case in Leicestershire, which was a great corn country, and is now, almost entirely, converted into pasture.”

Arthur Young, a little more than twenty years previously (in “Political Arithmetic,” published in 1774), while arguing in favour of enclosure on the depopulation count, makes an admission against it with regard to pauperism. “Very many of the labouring poor have become chargeable to their parishes, but this has nothing to do with depopulation; on the contrary, the constantly seeing such vast sums distributed in this way, must be an inducement to marriage among all the idle poor—and certainly has proved so.” (Pp. 75, 76.)

As a general rule it may be said that where after enclosure pasturage was increased at the expense of tillage, rural depopulation resulted; where the amount of land under tillage was increased the rural population increased. Further, that enclosure in the northern and western parts of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increased the area under tillage; that the balance between the production of bread and meat for the whole country, so disturbed, was maintained by the conversion into pasture, on enclosure, of much of the “champion” corn growing land, particularly in those midland counties nearest to the northern and western ones in which the complementary change was taking place. By means of the Enclosure Acts, interpreted by the light of the above statements, we can trace these two compensating movements through the eighteenth century.

The following passage in Arthur Young’s “Political Arithmetic,” published in 1774, at the time, that is, when he was an eager advocate not only of enclosure of all sorts, but also of the engrossing of farms and the raising of rents, sums up the two movements:—

“The fact is this: in the central counties of the kingdom, particularly Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, and parts of Warwick, Huntingdonshire, and Buckinghamshire, there have been within thirty years large tracts of the open field arable under that vile course, 1. fallow, 2. wheat, 3. spring corn, inclosed and laid down to grass, being much more suited to the wetness of the soil than corn.” Here he admits local depopulation takes place, though he claims that a greater net produce is, as the result of enclosure, supplied by such districts to the rest of the kingdom. But then, he asks with regard to the opponents of such enclosure, “What will they say to the inclosures in Norfolk, Suffolk, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and all the northern counties? What say they to the sands of Norfolk, Suffolk and Nottinghamshire, which yield corn and mutton from the force of Inclosure alone? What say they to the Wolds of York and Lincoln, which from barren heaths at 1s. per acre, are by Inclosure alone rendered profitable farms? Ask Sir Cecil Wray if without Inclosure he could advance his heaths by sainfoine from 1s. to 20s. an acre:—What say they to the vast tracts in the peak of Derby which by Inclosure alone are changed from black regions of ling to fertile fields covered with cattle? What say they to the improvements of moors in the northern counties, where Inclosures alone have made these countries smile with culture which before were black as night?”

He then proceeds to ridicule the view of his opponents, that the enclosure of waste, though desirable in itself, should as far as possible be so conducted as to create small farms and small properties, a view with which in later years, and after his tour in France, he very much sympathised. Into the merits of this controversy we need not go; what we have to note here is Arthur Young’s evidence to the fact that from about 1744 to 1774 there was simultaneously proceeding a rapid enclosure of waste in Norfolk, Suffolk, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire and the northern counties, by which the acreage under tillage was vastly increased, and a compensating enclosure of arable common fields in Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire, Huntingdonshire and Buckinghamshire, involving the conversion of arable to pasture, of small farms into much larger ones, and of the peasantry into urban labourers.