Dan Snow's History Hit - The Enclosures

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

The enclosure of the commons was a centuries-long process. Gradually, through a combination of legal degrees and private acts, the land across Britain moved from a system of open field system to larger, enclosed farms. This was a transformative political, social and agricultural shift – that is still the source of much debate by historians. Joining Dan for this episode of the podcast is Dr Katrina Navickas who has studied protest and collective action, especially in relation to contested spaces and places in Britain from the 18th century through to today. They discuss how and why enclosure took place, its impact on the demographics of the countryside and how it has shaped the British landscape.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hey everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. As you will know, the best period in human history is the long 18th century. And in Britain, the long 18th century was characterised by a gigantic move to enclose land, to put hedges and fences round it and walls, and to turn land, although it's not quite as simple as this, from something that was kind of a bit of a communal asset to something that was shackled, yoked to the needs of one man or family to produce wealth, to boost yield. That is a very simplistic version of enclosure. Luckily for you, on this podcast, I've got Dr. Katrina Navakar.

She's a historian of protest, social movements, public space and landscape. She is an academic specialising in enclosure. And she will point out that this is a movement that stretches all the way from the medieval period right up to the present day. And we're still talking about the issues of enclosure now as we're all debating what we want our landscape to be, how we all should have access to it, and whether primacy should be given to the interests of agriculture, to making our food, or we can do that in buildings now, do it in a lab. And should the priority in our landscape be about our own health and wellness? The health of the natural world and as a sink for carbon.

We're going to cover it all in this episode, folks. It's a very timely look at enclosure. If you wish to hear more podcasts about the 18th century, or wish to watch programmes about the 18th century, you lucky things, go to History Hit TV. That is the world's best history channel. If you follow the link in the description of this podcast you'll get taken there straight away as if by magic and then you will be able to subscribe. I had a beer in Leeds the other day. It cost me six quid for a delicious delicious

IPA. That is considerably more than the cost of a month of subscribing to History Hit so you've got no excuse. If you're drinking beer you can afford a subscription to History Hit TV and it's a lot better for you let me tell you in the meantime though folks here's the very brilliant dr katrina navicas enjoy katrina thank you very much for coming on the podcast thanks very much i'm excited to talk about enclosure today i love enclosure i mean people say it doesn't sound very sexy, but it is the reason why this country looks the way it does. And this country looks so distinctive. People always talk about British and hedges and fields and all this. But what 500 years ago, when Henry VII was marching towards his showdown at Bosworth with Richard III, so 1500-ish. What did agricultural land in Britain look like?

Britain's always been quite regional. Yes, that's the problem. Because we've got hills and we've got lowlands. So the lowlands... Yeah, lowland, rich agricultural land, like we'd expect in the central belt of Scotland or in sort of south and east in England. Like, what did it look like?

Yeah, we had an open field system, which is where farmers would farm in common, where there would be open strips of land. So farmers would have small parts of a field. It wouldn't be divided up into hedges or hedgerows or walls necessarily. Although, as we'll see, enclosure has been going on for a longer time than that. But essentially there's an open field system where they're sharing plots of land, doing small bits of farming in different parts of the landscape. They do that because they want to have a bit more of an equitable system

where one bit of the land's a bit shadier than others, one's bits a bit more fertile. where one bit of the land's a bit shadier than others, one's bit's a bit more fertile. So the open field system allows for a bit more of a fluid method of farming than we get later in the 18th and 19th centuries. So I don't want to make your head explode, but those strips in big open fields, whole community, but were those strips regarded as private,

the property of one family or person? They're normally farmed by one family, but the concept of private property or person? They're normally formed by one family, but the concept of private property is a bit more fluid in the medieval and early modern period. So they're formed in common. So there's an idea that these are shared spaces and they're not necessarily belonging to someone. The right to form them is belonging to maybe one family or one tenant of a cottage, but property is not quite what we understand it today. And the whole field, if you like, the whole area might be, quote unquote, owned by the Earl of Essex or something, who holds it on behalf of the sovereign, and then his agent

parcels it up, strips it up into these sort of family groups. Yeah, exactly that. So we've had Lords of the Manor since William the Conqueror. 1235, the Statute of Merton gives Lords of the Manor the right to enclose places, but essentially this idea of property and property ownership is still being worked out in the medieval period. But we do have aristocratic lords of the manor who essentially own everything in England on behalf of the crown. And they can get on with their fighting and their drinking and their fornication and their courtly love,

whilst other people are tilling and ploughing and doing all that kind of stuff. That's right. Lovely. Okay. What then is enclosure? So enclosure is the removal of that common right to farm the land. It comes in various forms. So it's a bit more complicated than the usual myth that it's the aristocrats taking the land off the people. That's a complete myth. It's perhaps the one thing that I want people to get out of this podcast today is that there's no such thing as the land being taken off the people

because the people don't own the land to start off with. The lords of the manor, the aristocrats own the land. Enclosure is a process where people have those common rights, make an agreement to maybe amalgamate those strips of land to make them more efficient. Or it might be that the Lord of the Manor decides to remove the common rights of local tenants and local commoners to use that land for other farming purposes. So it's a removal of common rights rather than a change of land ownership. That's not what it is. So is this about technology? Is it about yields? Do lords of the manor start going,

hang on a second, rather than have all these people like farming in strips and you've got some of my big fields out for pasture and there's horses nibbling strips and you've got some of my big fields out for pasture and there's horses nibbling grass and I've got some turnips going over here, is this about them working out that you get more yield if you could have, I don't know, rationalised the right words or is that the process? Yeah. Throughout the Middle Ages and the early modern period,

there were different impetuses for what we now call agricultural improvement. So in the 12th, 13th, 14th century, it's about wood. So quite a few areas of forest and forest land are enclosed because the need is for wood. Then in the 14th century, the price of wool rockets up. So there's a need for more sheep farms. So more areas are enclosed in order to provide more of an industry for the wool. That again changes after the depopulation, after the plagues and harvest failures. There's a concern about villages depopulating agricultural areas. So that's another push for enclosure. And then it moves on into the 17th century when we shift back to more need for arable land, more need for wheat and oats and

barley. And that really pushes through to the 18th and 19th century with an increase in population, more food needs. So enclosure is very much about agricultural efficiency, making things easier to farm, easier to produce high quantities of whatever product you want to produce. So if you want more grain, rather than having loads of families all kind of doing things on their strips, you just go like, get out of it all of you. The physicality of enclosure, like we think of building a wall or a hedge around something, is that important? Yes. So that's the other part of enclosure is that you're physically dividing up the land, be it hedges or fences or stone walls, partly to show where the boundaries are, but also in order to make that process of farming more efficient.

Yeah. So other people's pigs can't come and just run through your nice new big load of grain, which you're growing for the increasing urban centre. So what happens when you've got, right, here's my nice field now, I've put a hedge around it, no animals going to come in, we're going to grow grain here. But what about all the people that you've, you haven't dispossessed them, but you've upset, there's discontinuity there, isn't there? There's a break with the kind of traditional farming method. What happens to those people?

They move somewhere else or they employ just workers rather than sort of leaseholders? Yeah, there is a shift towards what we call wage labour, daily rates or yearly rates of pay. So we start to see much more of an industrial system, if you like, in agriculture where you have workers and employers. That's not to say that there's a landless agricultural labourer class that's created out of enclosure. Again, that's another myth of enclosure. Quite a few of the commoners are part of this process of enclosure. They see it as financially advantageous to be part of it because presumably so i'm thinking sort of modern terms but as someone who's just gone from being a startup entrepreneur history hit to now working for

somebody else you swap some of the risk of being your own farmer presumably and you just get paid to farm the lords like i can see that that isn't necessarily the worst outcome for some people in some situations. Yeah. I mean, it is true that enclosure increases rural poverty. There's been plenty of studies of that, but it doesn't mean that suddenly everyone's kicked off the land. Commoners still have some rights over some commons. Hence the word commons.

There's commons that survive in the UK, right? Yeah. That we all know. So those are the vest's commons that survive in the UK, right? Yeah. That we all know. So those are the vestiges of what used to be the norm, right? Common ground, is that correct? Yeah, there's two types of commons. So there's commons where you can cultivate them for arable purposes, for wheat, barley,

and there's what's called waste, which I'm really interested in as a term, which generally is places that you can't cultivate the upland mountainous types of terrain, but you can graze sheep on or cattle. And those are still used. And the majority of the upland of Britain, so if you think about the Peak District or the Lake District, that's manorial waste, and that doesn't get enclosed until much later in the 18th and 19th centuries. So like near me in the New Forest, you know, you can put your pigs out to get the acorns, you can collect a bit of firewood. It's not considered valuable, so you let the commoners

kind of get what they can out of it. Yeah, places like the New Forest, they have a very strong group of commoners who are always defending their rights. So yeah, new forest commoners have got special privileges, but generally common rights are what's called profits a prondra. So the right to take things from the land. So it is grazing your animals. You might be able to take firewood or turf fuel, especially before the time when we use coal, especially before the time when we use coal firewood is the main fuel source or turf so these sorts of subsistence goods that you can take from the land are very important for people's livelihoods it contributes to their domestic economy so if you're a commoner you guard those types of rights very jealously because you need somewhere to graze your cow or you need some

firewood that you can take from the forest. Right. Okay. So I'm with you. We've got the two types of commons, but okay, good. Now let's come to the 18th century when we think of this process as just like accelerating. And is that because it's a huge population growth that is the beginnings of a kind of industrial revolution that can sustain our populations and farming's changing. Why do we associate this time with massive amounts of enclosure?

This period of wartime harvest failure, increased pressure on populations, urbanisation. I love the 18th and 19th century because they're the greatest period of change. And we're shifting from a rural population to an urban population so what you see in this period is increased demand for food increased demand for land which increases land prices and what we see is a shift from that old method of enclosure which is by agreement where just local people decide to enclose a piece of land because that will be beneficial for them, to much more of an organised system where you have to apply for an Act of Parliament to enclose a piece of land, which is a lot more of a

bureaucratic, expensive process. And what we see in the late 18th, early 19th century is that becomes the dominant means of enclosure. We see over 5,000 Acts of Parliament. All these different patches of land, mainly in the uplands, in the north and the midlands, are being enclosed through an Act of Parliament. It's estimated about 20% of the land coverage of England and Wales is enclosed between about 1760 and 1860. Huge amounts. And so now when you drive around in, say, the Midlands or the Pennines or the Landscapes of Leeds District and these places in Cumbria,

you see all these little stone walls and hedges and field boundaries. They may well be from this period. Yes, exactly. Most of Cumbria and Northumbria undergo this process during the Napoleonic Wars. There's a great need for wool, also a great need for timber. So many of these upland areas are forested again because we need timber to have more ships and more buildings. So there's great sort of need to enclose places that previously had just been let out commonly for sheep grazing. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about enclosure, which is a lot more exciting than it sounds, more coming up.

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Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. So in a way, though, is this great aristocrats, sort of lords of the manor, rich people,

realising they've always had this claim on the land, they've always sort of technically been theirs, but now they, because of new farming practices and new demand, they're sort of making real that. They're going, well, I'm actually genuinely going to put a wall up and claim this and run it and it's going to become not just my land, but I'm going to run this like a business. Yeah, exactly. There are also new theories about agricultural improvement in the late 18th century. So people like Arthur Young are writing pamphlets saying you need to have much more of an industrial style agriculture. You need to have artificial fertilisers and have much larger swathes of land to produce enough to feed the population and also to make profit. to feed the population and also to make profit. So the agriculture improvers are always concerned about the price of land and the fact that you need to push up property prices and you can do that through enclosure. It makes it more profitable. And if you're going to, you know, drain land in the fens, it's really expensive. And the landowner's like, well, I need to see

some return on this investment. We're going to create a pattern of field systems that I'm then going to exploit. I'm not doing this for the love of my community. No. And also another big driver of enclosure and something perhaps historians haven't worked on as much, but I'm interested in is enclosing for buildings. So this, again, is the era of massive urban expansion. And particularly, again, in the north in England, these industrial towns are enclosing areas around the fringes of the urban expansion. And particularly, again, in the north in England, these industrial towns are

enclosing areas around the fringes of the urban areas so that they can sell off that land for building factories, building housing. And again, that pushes up land prices. So there's all these impetuses, both in terms of agricultural improvement, but also urbanisation, industrialisation to enclose most of England and Wales in this period. Okay, so you've talked about the myths and let's try and kind of get into that again in this period. So if I'm the Duke of Newcastle and I own a load of land outside a growing industrial city, I enclose that land before flogging it to a developer, I enclose that land before flogging it to a developer, basically. What does happen to the people on that land?

Again, they've lost their right to graze animals or use common land for their own purposes. So in this period of urbanisation, it's very likely that they'll end up living in the town, taking up a factory job or a mining job and becoming urban. So Britain becomes urban in the early 19th century. Rural populations are in decline. Farms are becoming much larger. So there is a shift of population from rural to urban. But you can see why that's characterised as people being kicked off the land. Is there any truth in that? Is that an unfair characterisation? Some of these communities must just simply have seen their farmland disappear and they've been told to pack up and get out there right yeah or the farmland gets swallowed up by urban areas i think it's the idea of people being

kicked off the land is perhaps not quite a true representation of what goes on in england and wales it's more the case in scotland where you've got the Highland clearances where people are physically being evicted. But in England and Wales, it's more of a process of shifting populations. We forget that people are quite mobile in this period. They do move in search of work and in search of new types of employment. So there is obviously resistance to the removal of common rights, there is a sense of resentment, but it's much more of a gradual process of negotiation, people moving around. Also, you mentioned earlier, it does increase rural poverty. Is that just because the nature of the change from sort of leaseholder, semi-independent farming to wage labour,

you just end up in the long term, the man wins. Yes, that's right. That's why, say, the swing rights of the 1830s are so important, where agricultural labourers were set in fight of machinery and trying to make a protest against the changes in rural society where they've lost control of their own working lives and they've become day labourers, almost like zero-hour contracts in some respects.

They don't have that job security anymore. Let's talk about the swing rights, Gail. So let's talk about the political effect of enclosure. Obviously, politicians, the people in Parliament who are the rich and landed, the landed interests, love it. Land is more productive. Their margins are increasing, right? And they can flog all this wonderful, they can send it on the new canals and then railways to big cities and eventually around the world. It's a bonanza for them. What about for the people? Does it become quite uniformly unpopular or does it depend on agriculture cycles

and harvests and economic cycles and that kind of stuff? Yeah, there's waves of resistance to this process, stretching all the way back to when it starts in the 13th century. So in the earlier part, there are big rebellions, so the Tudor rebellions, there's Kett's rebellion in the 16th century. There's the Diggers in 1649 who are setting up camp, trying to oppose the idea of this new wage labour. So there are big rebellions. There's also more low-lying resistance with individual tenants and individual commoners challenging the lords of the manor in the courts and maybe also pulling up the hedges, pulling up the fences. So there's a whole range and tradition of rural protest against this process of enclosure. And the church, unfortunately, not much help to anybody because they had skin in the game. Big landowners, right? So presumably they weren't going to get much help from the pulpit. right? So presumably they weren't going to get much help from the pulpit. No, as you said, the Church of England owns quite a substantial amount of land and vicars generally tend to be on the side of the landowners, on the side of the lords of the manor. They gain from

enclosure. So when Enclosure Act is passed, the main landowners get allotted specific areas of land and the vicar quite often is one of those beneficiaries of this process. And it would have looked very modern. This was a bright, gleaming future of rational chunks of land that can be farmed rationally rather than kind of moving from one strip to another that might be a while away. You know, you can just see that it was a vision of the future. Yeah. I mean, the process is a bit more gradual than suddenly we all have this really rational farming system. But certainly in some areas of the country, it is a big change in the landscape. Another big change is to the road system. So you don't want lots of little

parish lanes and country roads going through this system. So another part of enclosure is to reorder the roads, so you have much straighter roads. And again, that causes perhaps more resistance than actual removal of common rights itself. And people are very concerned about losing rights of way, for example. But by the 18th, 19th century, we are seeing much more of a modern system of agriculture. It's not complete. It depends on which region you are. Obviously, Britain remains very regional in how it produces different types of agricultural produce, but we are moving much more to that system of large fields, straighter roads, divided by hedges or by stone walls. And yet, as you say, the rights of way, we still have this curious system in England and Wales

where there are these little pink dotted lines on ordnance survey maps and you're allowed to walk even if it's through someone's garden, if it's through someone's farms, their crops are growing, it doesn't matter. You can walk on it. Presumed that's the effect of a kind of compromise where there might have been enclosure,

but local people still, they had to make sure they could still walk on their traditional routes yes so rights of way and the idea of a footpath perhaps much more of a common right than the right to take firewood or the right to graze your cattle everyone has the right of way along a footpath. And that's why it's perhaps much more protected and the removal of those rights of way is more resisted, is because everyone has that right. And so enclosure does try and preserve rights of way through certain areas because it's been customarily used by generations and generations. And ironically, I think in England and Wales particularly, where we don't have a right to roam, footpaths, as you've said,

restrict people to where they can go. There's not a free-for-all. An enclosure literally puts that on the map in terms of where exactly you can walk and where you can't walk. Yeah, fascinating. Also, I suppose that we get this idea of ownership of lands, like a little plot of land. You know, obviously, this is kind of part of the American,

quote-unquote, American dream expansion, where they're still owning a little plot. But that's a British idea too, and presumably that's having a small holding. That comes from this period, I imagine. Yeah, it develops from about the 16th century onwards. We see more and more philosophers like John Locke writing about theories of property. There's growing ideas that property is a physical

thing that you can put on a map, have on a deed, and it belongs to you as a person. And I think from the 16th century onwards, this idea, particularly as an English idea of property ownership is the main stake in society. It's the main way in which England and Wales is distinguished, is the prominence of private property as something to be defended, something to be put into law. It's so interesting to be talking about this now because we are sitting in 2022. It feels like we've reached the absolute apogee of commercial industrial farming, completely marginal land being blasted with all sorts of modern chemicals and being able to provide yields, unimaginable yields, supporting giant global populations.

And yet, suddenly, rewilding is this idea that no one heard about 10 years ago and is now the most popular idea in British political life. Everyone's a rewilder. You can't walk around the street without someone saying, I'm rewilding this flowerpot and right to Rome. And the way we're looking at our food supply. Is this the beginning of a process of undoing the last 400 years of enclosure and everything it represents?

Rewilding is such an interesting parallel with what goes on throughout English landscape history. Again, it comes and goes in terms of how people see the environment and what the environment's for. So we have shifted somewhat, but I think we've always had a very agricultural, a very commercial landscape since the Middle Ages. It's always been highly controlled. It's always been formed. So to think of rewilding as trying to pull the clock back to something completely unformed is never reasonable in the English context, certainly, because every scrap of land, even up in the Lake District, has been managed in some way. What's interesting is that these sorts of ideas come into bear in the

later 19th century with the start of the Commons Preservation Movement. So from the 1860s onwards, we see the Commons Preservation Society being formed, a movement set up by Robert Hunter and other members who then formed the National Trust. So these bodies are starting to think about the English landscape in a different way, and they start to think about it in terms of a national landscape that needs to be preserved because of its beauty, because of its nature. And that's not something that perhaps the earlier Victorians had thought about. They were much more concerned with production and exploitation for agricultural benefits. And so these ideas of turning the clock back to having meadows and much more naturalistic, if not natural landscapes start in the late 19th century with these groups trying to stop the tide of urbanisation in Victorian Britain. And that continues through obviously in the 20th century with the setting up of national parks after the Second World War and ideas about nature reserves.

But there's always been this idea that we still need to have a landscape that people can enjoy for leisure, for recreation. And can you have that at the same time as rewilding where you're maybe reintroducing species that humans have made extinct previously? It's a difficult balance of conserving land for people to enjoy or keeping people out so that nature can recolonize it. Tell me about it. Listen, this is my most unpopular opinion, which I'm sharing with you right now. Dog walkers, big problem. Anyway, don't at me, everybody. Don't at me. Okay, so that was amazing. Thank you very much for coming on and allowing me to geek out about enclosure. This is a story that is absolutely ongoing, as important now as it's ever been as we're working,

because access, as you say, rewilding how we want this landscape to be and who's allowed to go there. Amazing. How can people get more of your work? I've got a website, historypublicspace.uk. I'm writing a new book on the history of public space and these questions around landscape and conservation. So watch this space. I hope you are very rude about dog walkers in the last chapter.

Katrina, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks, folks, for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. As I say all the time, I love doing these podcasts. They are the best thing I do professionally. I feel very lucky to have you listening to them. If you fancied giving them a rating review, obviously the best rating review possible would be ideal. It makes a big difference to us. I know it's a pain, but we'd really, really be grateful. And if you want to listen to the other podcasts in our ever-increasing stable,

don't forget we've got Susanna Lipscomb with Not Just the Tudors. That's flying high in the charts. We've got our Medieval podcast, Gone Medieval, with the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. We've got The Ancients with our very own Tristan Hughes. And we've got Warfare as well, dealing with all things military.

Please go and check those out. Where do you get your pods?