In Our Time - The Enclosures of the 18th Century

Episode Date: May 1, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the enclosure movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the early 19th century, the Northamptonshire poet John Clare took a good look at the countryside and didn’t like what he saw. He wrote: "Fence meeting fence in owners little boundsOf field and meadow, large as garden-grounds,In little parcels little minds to please,With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease."Enclosure means literally enclosing a field with a fence or a hedge to prevent others using it. This seemingly innocuous act triggered a revolution in land holding that dispossessed many, enriched a few but helped make the agricultural and industrial revolutions possible. It saw the dominance of private property as the model of ownership, as against the collective rights of previous generations. For some Enclosure underpinned the economic and agricultural development of Modern Britain. But it has also been a cause celebre for the political left ever since Karl Marx argued that enclosures created the industrialised working class and ushered in the capitalist society. What really happened during the era of 18th and 19th century enclosures? Who gained, who lost and what role did Enclosures play in the agricultural and industrial transformation of this country? With Rosemary Sweet, Director of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester; Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow; Mark Overton, Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Exeter.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the early 19th century, the Northamptonshire, so-called peasant poet John Clare, took a look at the countryside and didn't like what he saw.

He wrote, fence meeting fence in owner's little bounds, a field and meadow, large as gardens grounds. In little parcels, little minds to please, with men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease. He is referring to the effects of the 18th century enclosures, literally the fencing in of land to stop others from using it. This apparently simple act has been hugely controversial. For some, enclosure underpinned the economic and agricultural development of modern Britain.

For others, it was an act of theft, the turning of common land into private property that impoverished the many for the sake of the few. But what really happened during the era of 1830s, in early 19th century enclosures. Who gained, who lost, and what role did the enclosures play in the agricultural and industrial transformation of this country? With me to discuss the enclosures of the 18th century. I'm Mark Overton, Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Exeter, Rosemary Sweet, Director of the Centre for Urban History at Leicester University and Murray Pitig, Bradley Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow.

Rosemary Sweet, can you explain to us what enclosure actually means? Well, enclosure took place when there was a transfer from the traditional system of open field farming to a system where you had enclosed fields. So what would happen is that before enclosure you'd have a system of open fields which might be several hundred acres in size and these would be divided up into strips

which the property owners would farm. These strips might be scattered and they weren't separated by fences or hedges. They were simply strips of land within these large several hundred acres fields. would also be land which was common land which would be used for grazing. What happens through enclosure is that

these strips are consolidated so that the property owners end up with unified units of land and these are marked out through fences or hedges and you have absolute property rights over them. That before enclosure with the open field system

there was a common and right usage of this land, that the fields would be farmed communally, that you had to have consensus as to when you were going to plough or when you were going to let the animals in to the land when it had been harvested in order to manure the land. You needed consensus. But after enclosure, the land was yours and you could farm it as you wished. You didn't have to be part of a greater unit, if you like, that you could, you had greater autonomy and you had absolute property rights over it. Can we just develop the idea of the common land

because it's a phrase that comes easily and a lot of people have a bit of an idea about it, but it's worth going into more detail. What was the common land for small farmers, labourers, yeoman farmers and that sort of thing? What could they do on the common land? Well, common land wasn't land

which is open to the general public. It was land over which people in that village generally had rights. so that anybody who owned property or who indeed was a tenant of property in that village to which the common land belonged had the right to use that land. The land actually nominally belonged to the Lord of the Manor,

but the inhabitants of the village had rights of usage which might be pasturing cattle or it might be collecting turf from the ground which could be used for fuel. It might be collecting firewood. It might be collecting any kind of fruit or berries or other kind of subsidiary food. It might be for keeping geese on, but it was rights of usage.

Customary rights. Customary rights of usage, yes. And this went quite far down the class chain, didn't it? When you say property, you just had to own a little bit, a tiny little bit of land, and you could go onto this common land. And it could be a big part of your income for the people who are scraping and living. It could be a big part of the living they scraped. Indeed.

In theory, you had to be able to support a cash. in order to be able to pasture it on the common land. But the right to pasture cows was one which could extend right, as you say, extend right down the social chain. So that people with very, very small holdings of land, possibly only one or two acres, might have rights of common land. And you also had squatters who were simply established rights by usage.

They didn't actually have any property, but they simply establish customary rights. And the right to pasture a cow could actually be a very important part of the family's income. There are calculations which suggest that the profits from having a cow, if you like, from producing the milk and other byproducts, could actually amount to at least the value of half a year's annual wages.

And so this could be a crucial supplement to families' incomes and equally important would have been the right to gather forward because fuel was one of the most expensive items in a household as expenditure. And obviously you didn't have fuel, you couldn't cook, you weren't able to heat, and the standard of living would go down dramatically. Murray Piddock, so if an 18th century village were to be enclosed, now we must make it clear that by the 16th, about half the land in this country was enclosed, and a bit more was enclosed in the 17th, by 1700.

But in 18th century, something different. came in, Parliament came in, such a case. But if, if the, we'll come to that in a moment, but if the village were to be enclosed, what would happen, and who would do well from it, who would do badly from it? Well, the kind of people who would do well

from the enclosure of the land were doubly landowners. First of all, because they had greater freedom to use the land on a larger scale than ever before to develop it and to improve it, and it's no real coincidence that improvement of the land comes together, the last phase

the last major phase of enclosure. Secondly, landowners would benefit from being able to sell the land because commercial successes in the city and also wanted to buy land in increasing numbers of 17th and 18th centuries, and the price of land in real terms went up. So you've got a double whammy for, as far as the landowners were concerned. The Church of England clergy benefers, whose income depended very heavily on rental from land,

benefited enormously by 1823. The canons of Durham Cathedral were on £3,000 a year, which was between 50 and 100 times the annual salary of a village schoolmaster. So the status of the Church of England, particularly clergy in good livings, changed enormously in the 19th century. And thirdly, arguably, in terms of benefits, the landscape benefited with the draining of bogland in Scotland, with the improvement of heathland in England and with aforestation as well.

In terms of the people who lost out, well, obviously the people who lost out with people with common rights of the land, they lost out very largely, but also people who continue to have some rights in land as tenant farmers lost out because increasingly this was part of the process of the loss of common rights.

Increasingly, they were asked for rent in cash terms rather in kind terms. So you couldn't use chickens for rent anymore. It had to be cash on the net. nail. And that combined with a loss of, say, I mean, for a small tenant farmer gathering firewood could be

a ploughman's wages a week in terms of income, as, you know, Rosemary was suggesting, that that actually started to drive them towards the wall towards the end of the 18th century, so they lost out. And just to show that there were, it wasn't all bad, highwaymen lost out as well, because the enclosure

of the heaths around, the enclosures of the heaths around London meant that the hideouts and and the places where highwaymen could rove were no longer so bleak, so open, and so in common as they have been before. And so it's no coincidence. The last recorded highway robbery was in 1831 towards the very end of this period.

Was the idea of absolute rights of a property, did that get a big kick of a foe in the 18th century? Because I have an idea, and if I'm wrong, you'll knock it on head, we'll move on, that although you, the land, Lord of the Manor, owned the land, It was, customer rights meant that the people around could drift onto it, they could raise their catalogue, a collective fire, and so on and so forth. But when you fenced it in, it became your absolute property.

Is that right? Broadly speaking, that is right, yes. I mean, I think sometimes you needed an act of Parliament, sometimes you really need to enforce the rights, sometimes you need the agreement of the 1760s, the agreement of those with common rights to the land. But the trouble was, actually, in the 18th century, the increasing number of squatters

and it was sometimes hard to know who had common rights in certain places so you do get a stronger sense of absolute ownership and you also get a sense since many of the rights were customary it was difficult to prove them and so if so they weren't written down

with that we were not always no yeah and that proved to be when Parliament started to move in that proved to be a severe disadvantage it is a critical critical phase yeah it is disadvantage Mark Overton let's just talk keep talking about in closure we'll come to it

what effect would it have on a village? I mean, I like listeners, I like myself actually, to know about the appearance. So we've got a place, let us say, in Cumberland, on the Solway Plain, a very rich plane there, strip farming, large holdings and so and so forth. It's what it is in 1700. Enclosure by 1800, how has it changed? What's different about the way it looks? Well, as John Clare said, new farms, new fences,

the farms would move out of the centre of the village with an open field farm all the farms tended to be in the centre of the village because that was the optimal place to be if your land was scattered around you were in the centre of it so the farms would move out the farms tended to

farmhouses would tend to have the farms around them to be ring fence farms after enclosure after enclosure many more fields often with straight lines if a field boundary wiggles it's old if it's straight, it's probably dating from the 18th century with enclosure.

And hedges, of course, often hawthorn, because it grew very quickly and was pretty good at keeping stock out. Horthor on the bar. Yes, indeed. New roads, often as well. But many rights of way cut off. I mean, it was part of removing common rights. The rights to walk from A to B would be curtailed,

so people would have to find new ways of actually moving around a village. Would it change the structure of the village? You've talked about the farms. When you say moving out, would they literally build it somewhere else, or would they build the land around themselves? No, they'd build new farmhouses. You can see many 18th century, 19th century farmhouses sitting on their own,

a mile or so away from what was formerly a nucleated village. And what would happen to the nucleated village? Would that change at all, or would that decay? What would happen now? It wouldn't necessarily decay. It's just that the farmers would move out of it. I mean, there would still be church. pub, whatever, in the village.

What social effect did this have? I mean, the way that people related to each other to use, that's another word I like. But anyway, there you go. What happened there you go? What happened? Well, just by changing the layout and the geography of the village, you can imagine that it would change the nature of social interaction. And one feature of open field farming was that farmers did lots of things together. And certainly they had to make decisions about what to do,

when. And so running an open field village involved a lot of sitting around, talking, negotiating, arguing, working out what was the best way to do things? To do what? Just be more specific place. When do we throw the cattle onto the open to the open fields after the harvest?

When do we break open the meadows and put the animals onto them? These are sort of strategic farming decisions that were made cooperatively. So it's cooperative, not a commune. It's not a commune. No, it's not a commune. But they have to decide together to do things because the land is so into mixed, one person really can't do

his own thing. So strips, three strips suggestions should belong to Mr. O, Mr. B, and Mr. C. Exactly, exactly. And then that changed. Yes, that changed, so that farmers were essentially farming on their own, they were making their own decisions, they were deciding what to do, and they weren't bound

by the village consensus as to what they could do when. Would this have been thought at the time as a massive upheaval? Did it happen quickly, did it happen gradually over the hundred years of the 18th century, which had started before, we've already rather brief established that, it'll go on a bit into the 19th century,

but would people living through that be aware of an un-upheaval? Yeah, well, not quite overnight, but over a period of two years. Because given that you've got to keep producing food, given the land's got to be used, you've got to really do it quite suddenly. But it wasn't necessarily new or unprecedented because enclosure only affected certain parts of England. There were certain counties, such as Kent, for example,

which had never had enclosure and where this way of farming was the norm. Can I come back to you, Murray Piddick? Eclosure wasn't new, as Mark said. But what's distinctive about eclosure in the period we're talking about is the involvement of Parliament and the enclosure acts. Can you describe the relationship between Parliament's interventions here and a land ownership? Well, I think that one of the crucial things is

that land ownership is intimately connected. to parliamentary representation and sometimes it's the same peoplehood involved. And one of the features of that is that there's a spine of control in English society, you can argue, which runs right from the fact that the ownership of land

which has got a capital value is an easier way to access becoming a member, a justice of the peace, than having a significant income, which is well in excess of the income that could be produced from the capital value of that land. So land is the way. way to authority. Land is the way to authority,

which is why it's prized, people want to buy it, but it also, that means that the JP is a landed person, tends to be landed person, acts in the landed interest. And that's the crucial, that's the crucial function of control in the English society, and it's, for example, the topic

of William Goddard's colleague Caleb Williams. It is the central critique, the fact that the justice of the peace system is a landed system, and right the way up from JPs to Knights of the Shires to the Parliamental Legislation, the interests of the landowner are served by the law, by making the law and by implementing it. And Parliament is meeting more regularly and Parliament's more...

But why did Parliament decide to interfere with statute laws in this area, which had been accreted in its own way, for two or three hundred years beforehand? Why was this intervention? Do you want to talk about this, Rosam? I don't think it was a decision on the part of Parliament. It was Parliament responding to pressure from, well, people, from people presenting petitions. that it's their private acts, they're not public act, their private acts of Parliament, brought by private individuals. And so Parliament isn't, Parliament as a body,

the House of Commons, isn't making a decision that this is a policy that should happen. It's simply responding to requests for parliamentary sanction to give enclosure a kind of legal authority that it hasn't had before. And what's interesting is when Parliament starts actually to pass more and more acts, that enclosure, as we said,

has been taking place for very long time, and the first actual parliamentary act of enclosure was in the 17th century, but it's not until the 1760s that they really begin to pick up, and a lot of enclosure bills failed in the early 18th century, but what seems to change around mid-century is the chances of success become much more likely. And this, I think, is due to fact that parliamentary procedure

is becoming more efficient, so fewer bills fall by the wayside, but also because there's increasing consensus that enclosure is important for the national economy. Yes, I think the key point was that the law of parliament, statute law, trumped common law. So that you could have enclosure by agreement using common law within a particular community. But if there was disagreement or there wasn't a uniform consensus, then Parliament, by enacting a statute, would override that and impose the will of the majority of landowners on the whole community.

And this device of a private act to improve didn't just apply to enclosure. It applied to Turnpike roads, to canals, and later on to railways. It was a device of enacting quite major change across the countryside or in urban areas relatively quickly, relatively easily. Resortland Street, can I come back to you?

There's one way of enclosures has a rather bad name in the general atmosphere of things, partly because of the power of poetry. Claire, Goldsmith, and so and so forth. But for a lot of people, this was part of an enlightenment movement in farming. This was part of something that was of going to be, and was, of great benefit to the nation eventually. And there was a mania for capability, Brown, redesigning, reshaping, and so and so forth.

Can you address that a little bit? Yes, we tend to be now more familiar with the people who wrote against enclosure, as you say, because of very evocative poetry of Claire or even Goldsmith. But at the time, it was probably more literature produced, pronouncing the benefits to be gained from enclosure. There were some very effective publicists, and most notably Arthur Young, who was the great agricultural writer from the 1760s onwards,

who went around the country describing the progress of agricultural improvement. And he saw enclosure as a rational enlightenment form of improvement, that it was obviously rationalisation. It allowed the consolidation of units of land, and it allowed the implementation of what he believed to be in more advanced agricultural methods. And it seemed to him that it was a more efficient exploitation of a land, that you got rid of this common land, which just was very often effectively wasteland, which wasn't efficiently exploited.

This could be brought under more regular and efficient agricultural usage. And he very much associated it with the introduction of new crops like turnips and the introduction of a forefield rotation where you have wheat, roots, Clover. And so in his literature, he always compares the enlightened, improving agriculture of the enclosed system with the barbarism. And he uses the word barbarism to describe the unenclosed communities and the backwardness. And in the 18th century, people were very suspicious, very often of unenclosed communities because they regarded the commoners as being really potentially quite subversive

that these were people who had an independence which could be a challenge to the... A bold peasantry. Exactly. They didn't have to work for wages the whole time. Therefore, they could afford to be idle if they wanted to and they could afford to be subversive if they wanted to. And so there's... And we're talking about a time of still the Jacobite Rebellion

the 1745 invasion. It's around, isn't it? It's long-standing that. I mean, it goes back to the civil war or earlier. The people who were most... likely to take up arms against the king. It's a war tend to come from places like Fendlands, where you have a lot of communists. Murray wants to jump in, and I want him to jump in,

but I just want to nail, one second, I just want to nail the business of the improvements, because again, just let's get it right before we move on. This was an enormous advance. The rotation, forecrop rotation system, the turnips and clover there, it was a quantum, I'm not going to use that. It made a leap forward for agriculture.

It was an agricultural revolution. Can you just nail that a bit more? Yes, I think it was. Not everybody does, but I do. There were three things, really, from a practical farming point of view that enclosure did. First of all, by amalgamating strips, by having more compact blocks of land, you were able to make sort of basic improvements like draining, for example. And enclosure acts include stipulations about the land will be drained after enclosure. So you could improve the quality of the land.

The next thing you could do, really, was to use the land for the person, purpose in farming terms for which it was most appropriate. One of the main points, if you like, about open field, common field farming was that it was geared to maintain subsistence. It was geared to maintain the integration of livestock and crops. It was geared to making sure that enough food was produced for the village. I mean, food was brought in, but it was, emphasis was on subsistence. Well, when you no longer need to do that, because the economy is more commercialised, because you have better transport and you can bring in certain food, then you can switch the land over to more economically rational use.

And this happened in two areas in particular. In the Midlands, you went more or less over to wholesale grass. Inclosure happened, no more arable farming, everything down to grass, cattle farming. And this was because essentially the land was heavy, grass gave you the most profit, so that there was a major change in land use and villages would import. food. In other areas, particularly lightland areas, which had been rather

farmed in a very extensive way, sheep walks and so on, you could then introduce these new crops and new rotations that Rosemary was talking about. It's known as the Norfolk four course rotation, although the first place I've ever found it in the records is in Suffolk, but that's by the by.

It's known as... That's the people who live in Suffolk. It's known as the Norfolk... You just cheered them up no end. Well, indeed, indeed. They can be something. need to be proud of. And this was really alternating grain with clover and turnips. It's really quite a sophisticated system and it achieves a number of things that couldn't be achieved before.

With the open field farming, typically you had a year of fallow followed by a year of wheat and a year of another cereal crop. So one third of the land was fallow, which means not actually being used, not growing a productive crop. But with the Norfolk Forkhorst rotation, you could practically actually remove fallows. So it made the land much more productive. I meant you could store feed for winter, you could produce a lot more, the crop production increased massively,

and by fencing in the promiscuity of cattle could be restrained, and you could begin proper breeding. Yes, the problem. Which helped with all sorts of beasts. Murray Pitrick, you've been sitting there so patiently. Do you want to go back three stitches or just carry on? I'm quite happy to carry on, I think. to say that I...

Stitches are agricultural. Yes, yes. The phrase, economic rationality is always one which is I think double-sided. One person's rationality is very much another person's suffering

and things which are economically rational tend always to have to have by-products in human change which can be unacceptable. I mean, I think I quite agree with Mark's point in many ways, one of the additional points really to make is that when you have a cooperative farming

structure. This is one of the things that holds up, for example, the adoption of smalls plow, the affection plough in late 18th century, is that actually, you know, they all have to agree to use the, to get the thing and to use it. It slows it down no end. If you have very large farms, obviously you can have economically rational.

You can get plows with very important. Yeah, you can get, you can use byproducts, you can farm pigs, because you can feed pigs on whey, which are the byproduct of making cheese, you can do all these things which you can't do on a, on a communal farming basis. But, you know, nonetheless, the idealisation of the bold peasantry,

which is not just a feature of Goldsmiths or Clare's writing, but it's a feature of Gainsborough's painting. It's a big theme in the late 18th century is a view which is being taken because there are a lot of displaced people. There are a lot of people who are beggars as a result of being, in the end, not perhaps immediately, but in the end, driven off the land. the whole group of people who began as small farmers in the 18th century

whose descendants are agricultural labourers by the beginning of the 19th. The yeomanry was in effect displaced. The yeomanry is effectively not destroy but large to destroy. How did this work out in Scotland? Because we hear highland clearances and sort of a greater savagery

appears to be there. Is this accurate? Certainly that the highland clearances were carried out were carried out more, from 1794 were carried out a great deal more savaged and they were carried out in defiance of customer rights which until the middle of the 18th century had involved actually fighting for the landowner. So in the sense

the custom obligations, the feudal obligations were much stronger and so the sense of customary right was actually exceptionally strong as well so in the end it wasn't perhaps surprising that violence was used. When it comes to economic rationality, one of the interesting things about what happened in Scotland was that fertile ground was sometimes not used to develop

for farming but if the effort was too much was used instead for deer and by the end of the 19th century and like a tenth of Scotland's arable land was actually under deer so it was being used as hunting a state for visiting sportsmen for people coming up from England to enjoy shooting for the season and so forth so actually the land use didn't always

migrate towards farming. Sometimes it migrated towards leisure use and I think the Highland clear examples are a clear example of that. When you brought in the word English as if the English is adopting that their customer row recently has been the Bullands, but the Highland clearances were done by you could say it.

They were done by Highland landlords. Absolutely they were done by Highland. The point is that they were done within the context of a British market which had a nostalgic vision of what it was to hunt in Scotland. using perhaps traditional methods

is by spearing salmon Albert as Prince Consort was pictured spearing salmon over a Scottish barn so I'm not talking about it so I think what we're talking about here is a market that became possible because of the existence of Great Britain which was by force of population not by force of inclination

largely an English market which is the point I was getting at absolutely but in your notes which one of lots of interesting stuff was that The population of the highlands has only now recovered from what it was at the mid-late 18th century. Yes, in fact, that's at best. It's quite possible lower than it was in 1750. Can we take the population question to you, Rose?

People must have wondered what was going on because we were an agricultural country. We were still massively agriculture in 1800. I can't remember. 55% something like that. People worked on the land. You tell me, if I'm wrong, 37%. Well, you've probably got about 37% working in agricultural. 55% in 1700, that's right. Still, a lot.

Now, they're going away. Quite a lot of them are going away. Do people feel that the country is draining population, because people are going abroad and so and so forth? Well, one of the reasons why people like Goldsmith or other critics were hostile to enclosure was the fear that it was leading to depopulation of rural areas, that they thought that people were losing their livelihood from the land,

therefore would have to move away, and that they were moving to the cities. And Richard Price, in his observations on reversional payments, is making this in 1771, is making precisely this argument, that he sees London in particular growing. And what he also is pointing out is that London is growing at a faster rate than it's reproducing itself. He's looking at the bills of mortality and showing the number of deaths exceeds a number of births. So he's saying, well, where's this population coming from?

It's coming from the land. It's the product of people being driven off the land by enclosure. And so London is eating up the population, and it's corrupting the population. It's creating an effeminate, luxurious, morally corrupt population. And all these independent, bold, sturdy peasants who would have fought in the Navy or in the army are being lost and jeopardising the national interest.

Whether enclosure really drove population growth in cities is an entirely different matter. Yes, some people might have been released from the land after enclosure and they might have moved to towns. But the areas of greatest urban growth don't match up with the areas where it's most widespread enclosure during the 18th century. And what you're more likely to get is pools of unemployment in areas like the southeast, wherever was enclosure,

because there's no obvious time for people to migrate too. Whereas the biggest towns which are growing most rapidly tend to be ports or places like Birmingham and Manchester, where migration, yes, it might, enclosure might have contributed to it, but it's also internal population graved of attauntary. But enclosure is contributing very much to the feeding of the population, Mark Eoford, isn't it?

Indeed. Well, agricultural production is. I mean, there's the relationship between then enclosure and agricultural production. But yes, and really, in 1750, England was a net exporter of agriculture, of food. And that was, and by 1800, it was more. or less even. So this period of rapid population growth with the Industrial Revolution

initially was fed by home production to which new agricultural methods were obviously vital and enclosure made their contribution to that. Just on this point about population growth, I mean, as I mentioned when you change a village from arable farming to pasture farming, you need fewer

people. And it's quite clear that in some villages the population did fall or people did move. But on the other hand, it wasn't on such a scale as to call the massive urban growth that took place, which really came around through what demographers call natural increase. And the earliest population growth in cities starts around about 1700, that towns outside London are really beginning to grow quite rapidly.

And this is when the overall population of the country is more or less stagnant and when there's actually not that much enclosure taking place. They do grow, it's true. But, I mean, there is natural increase everywhere. And the fact is the natural increase to place like Herefordshire is pretty low in the terms from the early 90 to the 20th, the century. one of the reasons for that is a lot of people leave. A lot of people, and Hedford is actually quite near Burmium,

which is a useful example for you to use. So I think that we are looking, certainly in the cities that I'm aware of whether there are studies, and I'm not aware of all the cities you mentioned, there is movement from rural areas to a city, which is sometimes displacement. And not necessarily, but I mean, although there are jobs in rural areas,

a lot of the jobs that then appear, there are a lot of plowman jobs, and they are badly paid. And so in a situation where you used to be a tenant farmer and now there are some plowment jobs, but actually you can get five shillings, ten shillings more a week by moving to an urban environment 20, 30 miles away. They've been argued over since they happened,

and they've been argued over this morning. What is Karl Marx version of this, Markov, well, Karl Marx having identified and defined capitalism as something that emerged from feudism that preceded it, he had to find a mechanism whereby you got from one to the other and he looked around for some empirical process that would lead you from feudalism to capitalism and parliamentary enclosure really fitted the bill

because it killed two birds with one stone. With the end of feudalism, you didn't have people there in order to fight for you in wars because the idea of taking people off to wars with you had faded away. Yeah, he was talking about feudism in a more of an economic sense where it defined relationships. The basis was a military relationship.

It was, indeed. but in looking to how you've got the establishment of capitalism, you needed two things. You needed private property rights, and enclosure gave you private property rights, and you needed a proletariat. I think Marx found it very difficult to understand, despite wages,

why people would work in factories for 16 hours a day or whatever. It's an extremely unpleasant environment, and he writes at length about this, and the problem for him was, why did these people do this? Why did they go into these factories? and the answer was they were driven off the land by enclosure and do you think he was right

Mary Pittley I think that there is merit in the point yes I mean I think that one of the interesting I don't think he's absolutely right one of the things are interesting I think is that those is that those from a kind of from a

those historians have been influenced by Marx for example E.P. Thompson without don't adopt a strict Marxist point but in looking at the details of enclosure they do say that the point is some validity. I think frankly the point would not continue

to be debated if it had no validity at all. So I think the discussion we should be having is about how much validity it's got. How much validity does it have, Rosalie? Yes, well I think there is some. The agricultural labour workforce did become proletarianised over the course of the 18th century, but it was

happening anyway. It wasn't dependent upon enclosure. It was a trend that was happening anyway. Inclosure exacerbated it. And the trend to absolutely property rights, private property, yes, that was exacerbated or at least assisted by enclosure, but it wasn't dependent upon. I think Marx uses enclosure as a key to unlock the problem, where it was simply part of a much broader structural transformation in the economy.

So, I mean, in the 18th century, people took enclosure as a means of explaining all kinds of ills from rising poor rates to depopulation to criminality and immorality in the metropolis. Well, similarly, in the 19th and 20th centuries, historians have used enclosure to explain historical changes. And it's a very easy and seductive way of explaining change, but it's actually more complicated. Maria, Peter, I know you want to say something, but after you said what you want to say, could you ask you? Could you tell us whether enclosure's changed the notion of what land ownership meant in this country? I think that I think that enclosures had a significant effect

on the perception of the landowner as an increasingly alien, landowner in class, an increasingly alien group from the generality of the population. And I also think that it helped to create by virtue of its knock-on effects, for example, the increase in clergy's salaries in England and the aspirational quality of land owning, especially improved

land in the 18th century, helped to create the kind of counter-society which developed as the social structure of the countryside in the 90th century. A counter-society, the sense of were you in or were you out, were you a member of the gentry, who did you dine with, what kind of group you're involved in,

the kind of world that is, you know, the world of Jane Austen's novels and those which succeeded it. That kind of society actually develops, I think, on the basis of a structure which is strongly geared to the importance and value of land, which is itself a development of the final enclosures of the third of common land

that was still common in 1700 during the century that followed it. Mark? Sorry? Do you want to follow that up? I'm talking about when I mentioned Jane Austen. Sorry to disturb your arrest. You moved into territory out of it. Adam I Kent.

No, I think really, from the point of view of Marx, I mean, he was wrong. I mean, he was wrong in his empirical mechanism, that's what I would say. He was wrong in ascribing these things to enclosure. I think most historians now agree that if you like, the proletariat generated itself. And also, I have to say that enclosure

was probably not a necessary condition to provide enough food to actually feed the population. In some ways, it's very conspicuous. because of the evidence it produced, but it marks almost the end of a process that's been going on for a very long time. I mean, in terms of urbanisation, I mean, a tenth of the population lived in London

in 1700 before enclosure began. I mean, that's a vast number of people. So I think significant and as symbolic, if you like, as enclosures are, to ascribe all these consequences to them is probably going a little bit too far. Yeah, but people have done. I mean, Marx did, and as has been said,

I think Murray said this, that E.P. Thompson, the author of the making of the English working classes, described in closures as little more than an act of theft. Would you like to develop that? Yes, well, Thompson saw it as an act of class robbery, that he saw it as the destruction of one form of economy, what he called the moral economy, which was based on reciprocal obligations, customary right,

and a much stronger sense of community, where the gap between the elite and the labouring sort wasn't so wide, where you had a much stronger sense of mutual obligation, to one where it's a market economy driven by market relations, where you have what you call the patricians and the plebs, where the plebs lost out completely. They were so short by the patricians who consolidated all the rights, and so the customary rights disappeared

only the absolute rights of property as sanctioned by Parliament, as Mark said, Parliament trumps customary rights. And Thompson saw this as a transformation which pervaded agriculture, which pervaded the workplace, which pervaded the whole of British society and which a transformation which took place in the 18th century ushering in the 19th century era of full-blown.

Did he say from a moral to a political economy? Yes. Yes. What exactly did it mean by that, do you think, Murray? It means an economy which is based, moving away from a common which is based on the rest of process over a wide range of kinds of exchange to one which is based on exchange value and fundamentally a capitalist economy. But I have to say, I think Rosemary over-schematizes E.P. Thompson here.

And I think that he's much more sensitive to individual locations and individual events of enclosure. And he's very keen to distinguish those that were actually made, brought about by Act of Parliament and those which occurred through consent or through landlord, or I suppose conspiracies, too strong a word, but the agreement, should we say, of law officers with the landlord interest locally. I think that Thompson's case is fundamentally more complex and it's stronger by being more complex. This is not an easy issue which could be resolved either down the proletarian, the root of proletarian self-fashioned,

the proletariat had vented itself, or on the other hand, a simple crude Marxist's view that everybody who ended up in the industrial cities came from the rural economy were displaced by evil capitalist landowners. I don't think either of those views is really tenable. I think we need, you know,

people have to find the place on the spectrum between them. Can I end up where I almost began, resume, an idea that a lot of people have about the enclosures is the bold peasantry, and Wordsworth in his poem, Michael, and we've quoted one way and other, Gail Smith and John Clare and so forth.

How far do you think that obtains, finally? Do you think they were romanticising the plight and the position of the bold peasantry, or do you think that they were actually describing it more or less accurately? It's very difficult to know how much of the bold peasantry actually existed. As we said, certain areas of the country had already been largely enclosed. But you gave them great value earlier, didn't you? You said they received ideas.

They weren't dependent. This is what contemporaries said they did. but the extent to which contemporaries were constructing this image of what they believed an ideal of a peasantry was and the extent to which such people actually existed, it's quite hard to establish. But in certain areas we do know they existed. Northamptonshire, for example,

there is very convincing work to show that there were a lot of villages which did consist of these sturdy individuals who weren't dependent. Who also weren't entirely dependent on the benefits of others, and therefore they could take part in, they were regarded as possible treasonable, treasonous person. Exactly, and could be they weren't beholden to anybody. So this was where their independence came from. They weren't beholden.

They weren't locked into any kind of relationship with an employer or through charity or through poor relief. They were independent. And it is quite clear, too, that after enclosure, poor rates went up. More people had to be supported by the poor rates. So there is some evidence, but these people don't leave much of records as historical traces

from which we can reconstruct them. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Rosemary, Pite. and Mark Oberton, and next week we'll be talking about the ideas about the brain, the history of ideas about the brain. Thank you very much for listening.