The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields

by Gilbert Slater

“In many instances they have suffered considerably for four, five, or six years. From the first starting the project of an Enclosure Act to the final award, has, in numerous cases, taken two, three, four, and even five or six years; their management is deranged; not knowing where their future lands will be allotted, they save all their dung till much of it is good for little; they perform all the operations of tillage with inferior attention; perhaps the fields are cross-cropped and exhausted, and not well recovered under a course of years. Rents are greatly raised and too soon; so that if they do not absolutely lose five years they at least suffer a great check. In point of profit, comparing the old with the new system, attention must be paid to their capitals; open field land is managed (notwithstanding the inconvenience of its pieces) usually with a less capital than enclosures; and though the general profit of the latter exceeds that of the former, yet this will entirely depend on the capital being adequate. In cases where the new enclosures are laid down to grass, all this becomes of tenfold force; to stock rich grass lands demands a far greater sum than open field arable; the farmer may not possess it; this has often happened, and drove them to seek other investments, giving way to new-comers more able to undertake the new system introduced; and if profit be measured by a percentage on the capital employed, the old system might, at the old rents, exceed the profits of the new; and this is certainly the farmers’ view of the comparison. He also who had given the attention of a life to the regular routine of open field arable, without 10 acres of grass ever having been in his occupation, may find himself much at a loss in the regular purchase and sale of live stock, the profit of which depends so much on habitual skill. Add to all this the previous circumstance of laying down to grass, the business of all others of which farmers know the least, of which I have many times seen in new enclosures striking instances; and if all these points be duly considered, we shall not find much reason to be surprised at the repugnance shown by many farmers to the idea of enclosing.” (Pp. 31, 32.)

While the whole of this description of the ordeal that the farmers had to pass through is interesting, the point I desire here to emphasize is the need of a larger capital after enclosure. Those who had the requisite skill, knowledge, energy and capital survived the crisis; they were able to take up the farms which their weaker neighbours were compelled to relinquish; to send, in almost every case, a larger surplus of food from the lands of the parish to maintain the state and power of England, and to pay higher rents. In perhaps the majority of cases they raised a larger gross produce, and provided maintenance and employment for a larger population than before. In some cases even (though these were rare exceptions) the labouring population gained in material prosperity as well as in numbers. But in any case the relationship between employer and employed was notably altered.

In the open field village the entirely landless labourer was scarcely to be found. The division of holdings into numerous scattered pieces, many of which were of minute size, made it easy for a labourer to obtain what were in effect allotments in the common fields. If he had no holding, he still might have a common right; if no acknowledged common right, he might enjoy the advantage of one in a greater or less degree. From the poorest labourer to the richest farmer, there was, in the typical open field village, a gradation of rank. There was no perceptible social gap between the cottager who worked the greater part of his time for others, and for the smaller part of his time on his own holding, who is therefore properly termed a labourer, and his neighbour who reversed that distribution of time, and is therefore to be deemed a farmer. It was easy for the efficient or fortunate man to rise on such a social ladder; equally easy for the inefficient or unlucky to slip downwards.

After enclosure the comparatively few surviving farmers, enriched, elevated intellectually as well as socially by the successful struggle with a new environment, faced, across a deep social gulf, the labourers who had now only their labour to depend upon. In the early part of the nineteenth century, at any rate, it was almost impossible for a labourer to cross that gulf; on his side the farmer henceforward, instead of easily becoming a farm labourer if bankrupt, would rather try his fortune in the growing industrial towns.

Our “Country Farmer” gives us a vivid picture of one side of the social change (“Thoughts on Enclosure,” p. 21). Of the farmer after enclosure he says:

“Their entertainments are as expensive as they are elegant, for it is no uncommon thing for one of these new created farmers to spend ten or twelve pounds at one entertainment; and to wash down delicate food, must have the most expensive wines, and these the best of their kind; and to set off the entertainment in the greatest splendour, an elegant sideboard of plate is provided in the newest fashion. As to dress no one that was not personally acquainted with the opulent farmer’s daughter can distinguish her from the daughter of a Duke by her dress, both equally wishing to imitate something, but they know not what.

“View the farmer before the land was inclosed, and you will find him entertaining his friends with a part of a hog of his own feeding, and a draught of ale brewed from his own malt presented in a brown jug, or a glass, if it would bear it, which was the utmost of his extravagance: in those happy days you might view the farmer in a coat of the growth of his flock; and spun by his industrious wife and daughters, and his stockings produced from the same quarter of his industry, and his wife and daughters clad from their own hands of industry and their own flock.”

As for the other side of this social change, the labourer’s side, it seemed so serious an evil to many even of the progressive landlords and agriculturists who strongly advocated enclosure, that they busied themselves to find a remedy.

In 1897 the Board of Agriculture drew the attention of its members to a typical case. Mr. Thomas Bernard communicated an “Account of a Cottage and Garden near Tadcaster.” The cottager had held two acres of land and a common right at Poppleton for nine years, and there had lived comfortably and brought up six children. The enclosure of the parish turned him adrift, but he prevailed upon a landlord to let him have a piece of roadside waste for a garden, saying, “I will show you the fashions on it.” The landlord was so delighted afterwards with the way in which this garden was cultivated, that he offered the man to let him have it rent free. Particular attention was directed to the man’s reply:—“Now, sir, you have a pleasure in seeing my cottage and garden neat: and why should not other squires have the same pleasure in seeing the cottages and gardens nice about them? The poor would then be happy and would love them and the place where they lived; but now every nook of land is let to the great farmers; and nothing left for the poor but to go to the parish.” (“Communications to the Board,” Vol. I. p. 404.)