The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields

by Gilbert Slater

The form of enclosure which is familiar to our minds is the enclosure of land previously uncultivated; in the legal phrase, “enclosure of waste of a manor,” in the ordinary phrase, “enclosure of commons.” Enclosure in this sense has been, and is still, a matter of very vital interest to the urban population, a fact which might be brought vividly to our minds by a recital of the commons within London and its immediate neighbourhood which have been lost or preserved with difficulty. It is sufficient to refer to Epping Forest, Hadley Wood, Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common, Hayes and Keston Commons, Bostall Heath and Plumstead Common.

Far more important from a broad national point of view, is the enclosure of common fields—the enclosure, that is, of land previously cultivated according to a system which did not involve the separation of one holding from another by any tangible barrier. Enclosure of this sort, when suddenly effected, as by a Private Act of Enclosure, is rightly termed the extinction of a village community. In the following chapters it will be shown in detail from existing and recent survivals, what was the nature of the system of cultivation in open and common fields in different parts of England, up to the time of enclosure; the question when and how enclosure was brought about in different counties will be discussed; and light will be thrown upon the result of the transition from the medieval to the modern system of village life upon the material and moral condition of the villagers, the peasants, farmers or labourers, who underwent the change. In these chapters facts drawn directly from observations and inquiries in the villages themselves, from the observations of agricultural writers who speak from direct and intimate knowledge, and from the Enclosure Acts, will be left in the main to tell their own story. But a generalised statement will perhaps make that story clearer.

Here is a typical Enclosure Act of the type which encloses common fields, taken at random, and a good example of the 2565 Acts of its class enumerated in the [Appendix], by which about 3000 parishes were enclosed. It was passed in 1795 (c. 43) and begins:—“Whereas there are in the parish of Henlow, in the County of Bedford, divers Open and Common Fields, Meadows, Pastures, Waste Lands, and other Commonable Lands and Grounds, containing by estimation, Two Thousand Acres, or thereabouts.... And whereas the said Open and Common Fields, Lands, Grounds, Meadows and Pastures, lie intermixed, and are inconveniently situated, and are in their present state incapable of Improvement, and the several Proprietors thereof and Persons interested therein are desirous that the same may be divided and enclosed, and specific Shares thereof set out and allotted in Lieu and in Proportion to their several and respective Estates, Rights, and Interests therein; but such Division and Inclosure cannot be effected without the Aid and Authority of Parliament. May it therefore please your Majesty——.”

The total area of the parish of Henlow is 2450 acres, and it has a large park. It appears, therefore, that when the Act was passed practically the whole of the arable, meadow, and pasture land in the parish lay entirely open, and was commonable. The more remote and least cultivable parts of the parish were, no doubt, common pastures; on these the villagers kept flocks and herds according to some recognised rule based on the sizes of their holdings in the arable fields. A drift would lead from the common to the village, passing through the arable fields, and fenced or hedged off from them. Immediately behind the cottages, clustering together to form the village, there would be small closes for gardens or paddocks; beyond these all round the village would stretch the open, common, arable fields, in area probably considerably more than half the parish. These were probably divided into three or four approximately equal portions, and cultivated according to a three or four year course, imposed rigidly on all occupiers by a mutual agreement sanctioned by custom. The holdings would be of various sizes, from three or four acres of arable land upwards, but all small; and a holding of, say, twenty acres of arable land would consist of about thirty separate strips of land of from half an acre to an acre each, scattered over all the three or four arable fields, but approximately equally divided between each field, so that each year the occupier would have, for example, about five acres under wheat, five under barley, five under pulse, and five fallow, provided that were the customary course of husbandry. Right through the year the fallow land would be used as common pasture, and the land under crops would become commonable after the crops were carried.

Along the streams flowing into the river Ivel would be the open commonable meadows. These would be divided into a number of plots, half-acres, quarter-acres, or even smaller, marked by pegs driven in the ground, or stones; and a certain number of these plots were assigned to each holding, in proportion to the amount of arable land. During the spring, while the cattle were on the common pasture, the meadow would be let grow for hay; when the time for hay harvest came, each peasant cut his own plots, and the meadow became commonable during the rest of the summer. Some of the peasant occupiers would be small freeholders, some probably copyholders, others legally annual tenants. All would meet together on certain occasions to settle questions of common interest.

We might say, though the expression must not be too rigidly interpreted, that under the common field system the parish, township, or hamlet formed one farm, occupied and cultivated by a group of partners holding varying numbers of shares. It may well be imagined what a village cataclysm took place when an Act for the enclosure of the parish was passed, and commissioners descended upon the village, valued every property and every common right, and carved out the whole parish into rectangles, instituting the modern system of separate exclusive ownership and individual cultivation. We shall see that ordinarily the holdings on enclosure became fewer and larger, that very many of the peasants were in consequence driven from the village, or became landless, pauperised agricultural labourers. We shall see also that the traditions of the common field system where they have perished as distinct memories, have survived in the form of aspirations for agricultural reform. In fact, the great rural question for the twentieth century to determine, is whether there were not beneath the inconvenient and uneconomical methods of the common field system, a vital principle essential to true rural prosperity, which has to be re-discovered and re-established in forms suitable to the present environment.

It is not intended in this book to go into the vexed question of the origin of the common field system, or of the English village community. It will be noticed that the researches upon which this book is based do not as a rule go further back than Leland’s Itinerary in 1536 and following years. From such materials only hypotheses can be obtained, which require to be tested by all the evidence from earlier records. A hypothesis, however, has a certain value as a mental thread by which the facts can be connected and more clearly conceived.

Judging entirely from eighteenth and nineteenth century evidence, one is in the first place driven to accept most unhesitatingly the prevailing theory that the English common field system was based on co-aration. But one is tempted to very summarily dismiss the theory of Roman origin. Rather one is inclined to say that as long as a considerable portion of the villagers of the parish were accustomed to yoke their oxen or harness their horses to a common plough, the system was a living one, capable of growth and modification according to the ideas of the people who worked it. It became, as it were, fossilised and dead, incapable of other than decaying change, when each occupier cultivated his own set of strips of land by his own plough or his own spade. One is therefore inclined to suppose that the introduction of each new element in the population of a village—Saxon, Angle, Dane, and in a less degree, Norman—profoundly modified earlier customs, and that in each part of Britain a local type of village community resulted from the blending of different racial traditions.

This hypothesis is directly suggested by the evidence of recent survivals. The most familiar type of village community is characteristic of the Midlands; I have termed it the Mercian type. It is most easily conceived as a compound of the pure Keltic system, known in the Highlands and Ireland as Run-rig or Rundale, and the North German system traditional among the Angles, in which the two elements in equal strength are very perfectly blended together. In the South of England we find a different type, here termed the Wessex type, in which the influence of Keltic tradition is more strongly seen. The village community in Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk shows some remarkable special features, traces of which are found in adjoining counties, but which appear to be easily accounted for as the result of the later intrusion of Scandinavian traditions. Further, throughout the West of England, from Cumberland to Devon and Cornwall, we find evidence that the primitive type of village community approximated very closely to the Keltic Run-rig.

Enclosure of the common fields, meadows and pastures, of any particular village may have taken place in the following ways:—