{"id":3490039,"date":"2022-01-17T12:28:06","date_gmt":"2022-01-17T12:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3490039"},"modified":"2022-01-17T12:28:06","modified_gmt":"2022-01-17T12:28:06","slug":"against-enclosure-the-commoners-fight-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2022-01-17\/against-enclosure-the-commoners-fight-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Enclosure: The Commoners Fight Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed. note: Part 1 can be read on Resilience.org\u00a0here<\/a>, Part 2 can be found\u00a0here<\/a>, Part 3 can be found here<\/a>< and Part 4 is here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Three centuries of mass resistance to privatization and dispossession<\/p>\n

In 1542, Henry VIII gave his friend and privy councilor Sir William Herbert a gift: the buildings and lands of a dissolved monastery, Wilton Abbey near Salisbury. Herbert didn\u2019t need farmland, so he had the buildings torn down, expelled the monastery\u2019s tenants, and physically destroyed an entire village. In their place he built a large mansion, and fenced off the surrounding lands as a private park for hunting.<\/p>\n

In May 1549, officials reported that people who had long used that land as common pasture were tearing down Herbert\u2019s fences.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a great number of the commons up about Salisbury in Wiltshire, and they have plucked down Sir William Herbert\u2019s park that is about his new house, and diverse other parks and commons that be enclosed in that county, but harm they do to [nobody]. They say they will obey the King\u2019s master and my lord Protector with all the counsel, but they say they will not have their commons and their grounds to be enclosed and so taken from them.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Herbert responded by organizing an armed gang of 200 men, \u201cwho by his order attacked the commons and slaughtered them like wolves among sheep.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/p>\n

The attack on Wilton Abbey was one of many enclosure riots in the late 1540s that culminated in the mass uprising known as Kett\u2019s Rebellion,\u00a0discussed in Part Two<\/a>. There had been peasant rebellions in England in the Middle Ages, most notably in 1381, but they were rare. As Engels wrote of the German peasantry, their conditions of life militated against rebellion.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were scattered over large areas, and this made every agreement between them extremely difficult; the old habit of submission inherited by generation from generation, lack of practice In the use of arms in many regions, and the varying degree of exploitation depending on the personality of the lord, all combined to keep the peasant quiet.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Enclosure, a direct assault on the peasants\u2019 centuries-old way of life, upset the old habit of submission. Protests against enclosure were reported as early as 1480, and became frequent after 1530.<\/p>\n

\u201cHundreds of riots protesting enclosures of commons and wastes, drainage of fens and disafforestation \u2026 reverberated across the century or so between 1530 and 1640.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Elizabethan authorities used the word \u201criot\u201d for any public protest, and the label is often misleading. Most were actually disciplined community actions to prevent or reverse enclosure, often by pulling down fences or uprooting the hawthorn hedges that landlords planted to separate enclosed land.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe point in breaking hedges was to allow cattle to graze on the land, but by filling in the ditches and digging up roots those involved in enclosure protest made it difficult and costly for enclosers to re-enclose quickly. That hedges were not only dug up but also burnt and buried draws attention to both the considerable time and effort which was invested in hedge-breaking and to the symbolic or ritualistic aspects of enclosure opposition. \u2026 Other forms of direct action against enclosure included impounding or rescuing livestock, the continued gathering of previously common resources such as firewood, trespassing in parks and warrens, and even ploughing up land which had been converted to pasture or warrens.\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The forms of anti-enclosure action varied, from midnight raids to public confrontations<\/p>\n

\u201cwith the participants, often including a high proportion of women, marching to drums, singing, parading or burning effigies of their enemies, and celebrating with cakes and ale.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(I\u2019m reminded of Lenin\u2019s description of revolutions as festivals of the oppressed and exploited.) Villagers were very aware of their rights \u2014 it was joked that some farmers read Thomas de Lyttleton\u2019s\u00a0Treatise on Tenures<\/em>\u00a0while ploughing \u2014 so physical assaults on fences and hedges were often accompanied by petitions and legal action.<\/p>\n

Many accounts of what\u2019s called the enclosure movement focus on the consolidation of dispersed strips of leased land into compact farms, but most enclosure riots actually targeted the privatization of the\u00a0unallocated land<\/em>\u00a0that provided pasture, wood, peat, game and more. For cottagers who had no more than a small house and an acre or two of poor quality land, access to those resources was a matter of life and death.<\/p>\n

\u201cCommons and common rights, so far from being merely a luxury or a convenience, were really an integral and indispensable part of the system of agriculture, a lynch pin, the removal of which brought the whole structure of village society tumbling down.\u201d[6]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Coal wars<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the last decades of the 1500s, farmers in northern England faced a new threat to their livelihoods, the rapid expansion of coal mining, which many landlords found was more profitable than renting farmland. Thousands who were made landless by enclosure ultimately found work in the new mines, but the very creation of those mines required the dispossession of farmers and farmworkers. The search for coal seams left pits and waste that endangered livestock; actual mines destroyed pasture and arable land and polluted streams, making farming impossible.<\/p>\n

The prospect of mining profits produced a new kind of enclosure \u2014 expropriation of mineral rights under common land.<\/p>\n

\u201cWherever coal-mining became important, it stimulated the movement towards curtailing the rights of customary tenants and even of small freeholders, and towards the enclosure of portions of the wastes.\u201d In the landlords\u2019 view, it wasn\u2019t enough just to fence off the mining area, \u201cnot only must the tenants be prevented from digging themselves, they must be stripped of their power to refuse access to minerals under their holdings, or to demand excessive compensation.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a result, historian John Nef writes, tenant farmers \u201clived in constant fear of the discovery of coal under their land,\u201d and attempts to establish new mines were often met by sabotage and violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany were the obscure battles fought with pitchfork against pick and shovel to prevent what all tenants united in branding as a mighty abuse.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fences were torn down, pits filled in, buildings burned, and coal was carried off. In Lancashire, the enclosures surrounding one large mine were torn down sixteen times by freeholders who claimed \u201cfreedom of pasture.\u201d In Derbyshire in 1606, a landlord complained that twenty-three men \u201carmed with pitchforks, bows and arrows, guns and other weapons,\u201d had threatened to kill everyone involved if mining continued on the manor.[8]<\/sup><\/p>\n

In these and many other battles, commoners heroically fought to preserve their land and rights, but they were unable to stop the growth of a highly-profitable industry that was supported physically by the state and legally by the courts. As elsewhere, capital defeated the commons.<\/p>\n

Turning point<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the early 1500s, capitalist agriculture was new, and the landowning classes were generally critical of the minority who enclosed common land and evicted tenants. The commonwealth men whose sermons defended traditional village society and condemned enclosure were expressing, in somewhat exaggerated form, views that were widely held in the aristocracy and gentry. While anti-enclosure laws were drafted and introduced by the royal government, they were invariably approved by the House of Commons, which \u201calmost by definition, represented the prospering section of the gentry.\u201d[9]<\/sup><\/p>\n

As the century progressed, however, growing numbers of landowners sought to break free from customary and state restrictions in order to \u201cimprove\u201d their holdings. In 1601, when Sir Walter Raleigh argued that the government should \u201clet every man use his ground to that which it is most fit for, and therein use his own discretion,\u201d[10]<\/sup>\u00a0a large minority in the House of Commons agreed.<\/p>\n

As Christopher Hill writes,<\/p>\n

\u201cwe can trace the triumph of capitalism in agriculture by following the Commons\u2019 attitude towards enclosure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe famine year 1597 saw the last acts against depopulation; 1608 the first (limited) pro-enclosure act. \u2026 In 1621, in the depths of the depression, came the first general enclosure bill \u2014 opposed by some M.P.s who feared agrarian disturbances. In 1624 the statutes against enclosure were repealed. \u2026 the Long Parliament was a turning point. No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.\u201d[11]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The early Stuart kings \u2014 James I (1603-1625) and Charles I (1625-1649) \u2014 played a contradictory role, reflecting their position as feudal monarchs in an increasingly capitalist country. They revived feudal taxes and prosecuted enclosing landlords in the name of preventing depopulation, but at the same time they raised their tenants\u2019 rents and initiated large enclosure projects that dispossessed thousands of commoners.<\/p>\n

Enclosure accelerated in the first half of the 1600s \u2014 to cite just three examples, 40% of Leicestershire manors, 18% of Durham\u2019s land area, and 90% of the Welsh lowlands were enclosed in those decades.[12]<\/sup>\u00a0Even without formal enclosure, many small farmers lost their farms because they couldn\u2019t pay fast rising rents.<\/p>\n

\u201cRent rolls on estate after estate doubled, trebled, and quadrupled in a matter of decades,\u201d contributing to \u201ca massive redistribution of income in favour of the landed class.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was a golden age for landowners, but for small farmers and cottagers,<\/p>\n

\u201cthe third, fourth, and fifth decades of the seventeenth century witnessed extreme hardship in England, and were probably among the most terrible years through which the country has ever passed.[13]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fighting back<\/strong><\/p>\n

Increased enclosure was met by increased resistance. Seventeenth century enclosure riots were generally larger, more frequent, and more organized than in previous years. Most were local and lasted only a few days, but several were large enough to be considered regional uprisings \u2014<\/p>\n

\u201cthe result of social and economic grievances of such intensity that they took expression in violent outbreaks of what can only be called class hatred for the wealthy.\u201d[14]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The\u00a0Midland Revolt<\/em>\u00a0broke out in April 1607 and continued into June. The rebels described themselves as \u201cdiggers\u201d and \u201clevelers,\u201d labels later used by radicals during the civil war, and they claimed to be led by \u201cCaptain Pouch,\u201d a probably mythical figure whose magical powers would protect them.[15]<\/sup>\u00a0Martin Empson describes the revolt in his history of rural class struggle,\u00a0Kill all the Gentlemen<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cEvents in 1607 involved thousands of peasants beginning in Northamptonshire at the very start of May and spreading to Warwickshire and Leicestershire. Mass protests took place, involving 3,000 at Hilmorton in Warwickshire and 5,000 at Cotesback in Leicestershire. In a declaration produced during the revolt,\u00a0The Diggers of Warwickshire to all other Diggers<\/em>, the authors write that they would prefer to \u2018manfully die, then hereafter to be pined to death for want of that which those devouring, encroachers do serve their fat hogs and sheep withal.\u2019\u201d[16]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These were well-planned actions, not spontaneous riots. Cottagers from multiple villages met in advance to discuss where and when to assemble, arranged transportation, and provided tools, meals and places to sleep for the rebels who would spend days tearing down fences, uprooting hedges and filling in ditches. Local militias could not stop them \u2014 indeed,<\/p>\n

\u201cmany members of the militia themselves became involved in the rising, either actively or by voting with their feet and failing to attend the muster.\u201d[17]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The movement was only stopped when mounted vigilantes, hired by local landlords, attacked protestors near the town of Newton, massacring more than 50 and injuring many more. The supposed leaders of the rising were publicly hanged and quartered, and their bodies were displayed in towns throughout the region.<\/p>\n

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The\u00a0Western Rising<\/em>\u00a0was less organized, but it lasted much longer, from 1626 to 1632. Here the focus was \u201cdisafforestation\u201d \u2014 Charles I\u2019s privatization of the extensive royal forests in which thousands of farmers and cottagers had long exercised common rights. The government appointed commissions to survey the land, propose how to divide it up, and negotiate compensation for tenants. The largest portions were leased to investors, mainly the king\u2019s friends and supporters, who in turn rented enclosed parcels to large farmers.\u201d[18]<\/sup><\/p>\n

Generally speaking, the forest enclosures seem to have been fair to freeholders and copyholders who could prove that they had common rights, but not to those who had never had formal leases, or couldn\u2019t prove that they had. The formally landless were excluded from the negotiations and from the land they had worked on all their lives.<\/p>\n

For at least six years, landless workers and cottagers fought to prevent or reverse enclosures in Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, and other areas where the crown was selling off public forests.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe response of the inhabitants of each forest was to riot almost as soon as the post-disafforestation enclosure had begun. These riots were broadly similar in aim and character, directed toward the restoration of the open forest and involving destruction of the enclosing hedges, ditches, and fences and, in a few cases, pulling down houses inhabited by the agents of the enclosers, and assaults on their workmen.\u201dsup>[19]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Declaring \u201chere were we born and here we will die,\u201d as many as 3,000 men and women took part in each action against forest enclosures. Buchanan Sharp\u2019s study of court records shows that the majority of those arrested for anti-enclosure rioting identified themselves not as husbandmen (farmers) but as artisans, particularly weavers and other clothworkers, who depended on the commons to supplement their wages.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could be argued that there were two types of forest inhabitants, those with land who went to law to protect their rights, and those with little or no land who rioted to protect their interests.\u201d[20]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The longest continuing fight against enclosure took place in eastern England, in the fens. From the 1620s to the end to the century, thousands of farmers and cottagers resisted large-scale projects to drain and enclose the vast wetlands that covered over 1400 square miles in Lincolnshire and adjacent counties. Aiming to create \u201cnew land\u201d that could be sold to investors and rented to large tenant farmers, the drainage projects would dispossess thousands of peasants whose lives depended on the region\u2019s rich natural resources.<\/p>\n

The result was almost constant conflict.\u00a0 Historian James Boyce describes what happened in 1632, when constables tried to arrest opponents of draining a 10,000 acre common marsh, in the Cambridgeshire village of Soham:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe constables charged with arresting the four Soham resistance leaders so delayed entering the village that they were later charged for not putting the warrant into effect. When they finally sought to do so, an estimated 200 people poured onto the streets armed with forks, staves and stones. The next day a justice ordered 60 men to support the constables in executing the warrant but over 100 townspeople still stood defiant, warning \u2018that if any laid hands of any of them, they would kill or be killed\u2019. When one of the four was finally arrested, the constables were attacked and several people were injured. A justice arrived in Soham on 11 June with about 120 men and made a further arrest before the justice\u2019s men were again \u2018beaten off, the rest never offering to aid them\u2019. Another of the four leaders, Anne Dobbs, was eventually caught and imprisoned in Cambridge Castle but on 14 June 1633, the fight was resumed when about 70 people filled in six division ditches meant to form part of an enclosure. Twenty offenders were identified, of whom fourteen were women.\u201d[21]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Militant and often violent protests challenged every drainage project. As elsewhere in England, fenland rioters uprooted hedges, filled ditches and destroyed fences, but here they also destroyed pumping equipment, broke open dykes, and attacked drainage workers, many of whom had been brought from the Netherlands.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time of the civil war the whole fenland was in a state of open rebellion.\u201d[22]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Revolution in the revolution<\/strong><\/p>\n

For eleven years, from 1629 to 1640, Charles I tried to rule as an absolute monarch, refusing to call Parliament and unilaterally imposing taxes that were widely viewed as oppressive and illegal. When his need for more money finally forced him to call Parliament, the House of Commons refused to approve new taxes unless he agreed to restrictions on his powers. The king refused and civil war broke out in 1642, leading to Charles\u2019s defeat and execution in 1649. From then until 1660, England was a republic.<\/p>\n

Many histories of the civil was treat it as purely a conflict\u00a0within<\/em>\u00a0the ruling elite: it often seems, Brian Manning writes, \u201cas if the other 97 per cent of the population did not exist or did not matter.\u201d[23]<\/sup>\u00a0In fact, as Manning shows in\u00a0The English People and the English Revolution<\/em>, poor peasants, wage laborers and small producers were not just followers and foot soldiers \u2014 they were conscious participants whose actions influenced and often determined the course of events. The fight for the commons was an important part of the English Revolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween the assembling of the Long Parliament in\u00b71640 and the outbreak of the civil war in 1642 there was a rising tide of protest and riot in the countryside. This was directed chiefly against the enclosures of commons, wastes and fens, and the invasions of common rights by the king, members of the royal family, courtiers, bishops and great aristocrats.\u201d[24]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Between 1640 and 1644 there were anti-enclosure riots in more than half of England\u2019s counties, especially in the midlands and north:<\/p>\n

\u201cin some cases not only the fences but the houses of the gentry were attacked.\u201d[25]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The wealthiest landowners were outraged. In July 1641, the House of Lords complained that \u201cviolent breaking into Possessions and Inclosures, in riotous and tumultuous Manner, in several Parts of this Kingdom,\u201d was happening \u201cmore frequently \u2026 since this Parliament began than formerly.\u201d They ordered local authorities to ensure \u201cthat no Inclosure or Possession shall be violently, and in a tumultuous Manner, disturbed or taken away from any Man,\u201d[26]<\/sup>\u00a0but its orders had little effect. \u201cConstables not only repeatedly failed to perform their duties against neighbours engaged in the forcible recovery of their commons, but were also sometimes to be found in the ranks of the rioters themselves.\u201d[27]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

The rioters hated the landowners\u2019 government and weren\u2019t reluctant to say so. When an order against anti-enclosure riots was read in a church in Wiltshire in April 1643, for example, one parishioner stood and \u201cmost contemptuously and in dishonor of the Parliament and their authority said that he cared not for their orders and the Parliament might have kept them and wiped their arses with them.\u201d[28]<\/sup><\/p>\n

In 1645, anti-enclosure protestors in Epworth, Lincolnshire, replied to a similar order that \u2018<\/p>\n

\u201dThey did not care a Fart for the Order which was made by the Lords in Parliament and published in the Churches, and, that notwithstanding that Order, they would pull down all the rest of the Houses in the Level that were built upon those Improvements which were drained, and destroy all the Enclosures.\u201d[29]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The most intense conflicts took place in the fens. To cite just one case, in February 1643, in Axholme, Lincolnshire, commoners armed with muskets opened floodgates at high tide, drowning over six thousand acres of recently drained and enclosed land, and then closed the gates to prevent the water from flowing out at low tide. Armed guards then held the position for ten weeks, threatening to shoot anyone who attempted to let the water out.[30]<\/a><\/p>\n

Many more examples could be cited. The years 1640 to 1660 weren\u2019t just a time of revolutionary civil war, they were decades of anti-enclosure rebellion.<\/p>\n

Defeat<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two centuries later, in\u00a0The Communist Manifesto,<\/em>\u00a0Marx and Engels wrote that \u201call previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities.\u201d That was certainly true of the English Revolution \u2014 Parliament could not have overthrown the monarchy without the support of small producers, peasants and wage-workers, but the plebeians got little from the victory. As Digger leader Gerard Winstanley wrote to the \u201cpowers of England\u201d in 1649:<\/p>\n

\u201cthough thou hast promised to make this people a free people, yet thou hast so handled the matter, through thy self-seeking humour, that thou has wrapped us up more in bondage, and oppression lies heavier upon us.\u201d[31]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since the king was one of the largest and most hated enclosers, many anti-enclosure protesters expected Parliament to support their cause, but their hopes were disappointed \u2014 no surprise, since almost all MPs were substantial landowners. Both houses of Parliament repeatedly condemned anti-enclosure riots, and no anti-enclosure measures were adopted during the civil war or by the republican regime in the 1650s. The last attempt to regulate (not prevent) enclosure occurred in 1656, when a Bill to do that was rejected on first reading: the Speaker said \u201che never liked any Bill that touched upon property,\u201d and another MP called it \u201cthe most mischievous Bill that ever was offered to this House.\u201d[32]<\/sup><\/p>\n

Like the royal government it replaced, the republican government in the 1650s raised revenue by selling off royal forests and supported the drainage and enclosure of the fens. It passed laws that eliminated all remaining feudal restrictions and charges on landowners, but made no changes to the tenures of farmers and cottagers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThus landlords secured their own estates in absolute ownership, and ensured that copyholders remained evictable.\u201d[33]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In Christopher Hill\u2019s words in the seventeenth century struggle for land, \u201c<\/p>\n

the common people were defeated no less decisively than the crown.\u201d[34]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The last wave<\/strong><\/p>\n

There were sporadic anti-enclosure protests in the last years of the seventeenth century, especially in the fens, but for all practical purposes, the uprisings of 1640 to 1660 were the last of their kind. In the early 1700s, peasant resistance mostly involved illegally hunting deer or gathering wood on enclosed land, not tearing down fences. Long memories of brutal defeats, reinforced by fear of ruling class forces that were now even stronger, discouraged any return to mass action.<\/p>\n

Until the mid-1700s, the large landlords who owned most of English farmland seem to have been more interested in reaping the rewards of previous victories than in enclosing the remaining open fields and commons. About a quarter of the country\u2019s farmland was still worked in open fields in 1700, but so long as rents covered costs, with a substantial surplus, few landlords chose to make changes.<\/p>\n

When a new wave of enclosures began about 1755, spurred first by falling grain prices and then by rising prices during Napoleonic wars, the social and economic context was very different. English capitalist society, we might say, had become more \u201ccivilized.\u201d In place of the rough methods of earlier years, enclosure became a structured bureaucratic process, subject to political oversight and regulation. Enclosure required detailed surveys and plans prepared by lawyers and professional enclosure commissioners, all accepted by the owners and tenants of three-quarters of the land involved (which was often a small minority of the people affected), then written into a Bill which had to be approved by a Parliamentary committee and both houses of Parliament.<\/p>\n

Marx referred to the resulting Enclosure Acts as<\/p>\n

\u201cdecrees by which the landowners grant themselves the peoples\u2019 land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people.\u201d[35]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Most Parliamentary enclosures seem to have carefully followed the law, including fairly allocating land or compensation to leaseholders large and small, but the law did not recognize customary common rights. Just as with the cruder methods of previous centuries, Parliamentary enclosure didn\u2019t just consolidate land: it eliminated common rights and dispossessed the landless commoners who depended on them. When a 20th century historian called this \u201cperfectly proper,\u201d because the law was obeyed and property rights protected, Edward Thompson replied:<\/p>\n

\u201cEnclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers. \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was \u2018perfectly proper\u2019 in terms of capitalist property-relations involved, none the less, a rupture of the traditional integument of village custom and of right: and the social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property-definitions.\u201d[36]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There were some local riots after enclosure was approved, often in the form of stealing or burning fence posts and rails, but as J.M. Neeson has shown, most resistance took the form of \u201cstubborn non-compliance, foot-dragging and mischief,\u201d before an enclosure Bill went to London. Villagers refused to speak to surveyors or gave them inaccurate information, sent threatening letters, stole record books and field plans, and in general tried to force delays or drive up the landlords\u2019 costs. In some cases, villagers petitioned Parliament to reject the proposed bill, but that was expensive and rarely successful.[37]<\/sup><\/p>\n

Ultimately, however, the game was rigged. Sabotage might slow things down or win better terms, but landlords and large tenants who wanted to impose enclosure could always do so, and there was no right of appeal. Between 1750 and 1820 nearly 4,000 Enclosure Acts were passed, affecting roughly 6.8 million acres. Only a handful of open-field villages remained. Despite centuries of resistance, the power of capital prevailed:<\/p>\n

\u201cthe commons in England were gradually driven out of existence, the small farms engrossed, the land enclosed, and the commoners forcibly removed.\u201d[38]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Continuing enclosure<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Marx wrote, \u201cthe expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production.\u201d People who can produce all or most of their own subsistence are independent in ways that are alien to capitalism \u2014 they are under no economic compulsion to work for wages. As an advocate of enclosure wrote in 1800,<\/p>\n

\u201cwhen a labourer becomes possessed of more land than he and his family can cultivate in the evenings \u2026 the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work.\u201d[39]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This series of articles has focused on England, where the expropriation involved a centuries-long war against the commons. It was the classic case of primitive accumulation, the<\/p>\n

\u201ctwo transformations\u201d by which \u201cthe social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-laborers,\u201d[40]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

but of course this is not the whole story. In other places, capitalism\u2019s growth by dispossession occurred at different speeds and in different ways.<\/p>\n

In Scotland, for example, enclosure didn\u2019t begin until the mid-1700s, but then the drive to catch up with England ensured that it was much faster and particularly brutal. As Neil Davidson writes, the horrendous 19th century Highland Clearances that Marx so eloquently condemned in\u00a0Capital<\/em>\u00a0involved not primitive accumulation by new capitalists, but the consolidation of<\/p>\n

\u201can existing, and thoroughly rapacious, capitalist landowning class \u2026 whose disregard for human life (and, indeed, \u2018development\u2019) marked it as having long passed the stage of contributing to social progress.\u201d[41]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, of course, the growth of the British Empire, from Ireland to the Americas to India and Africa, was predicated on enclosure of colonized land and dispossession of indigenous peoples. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote, extending the \u201cblight of capitalist civilization\u201d required<\/p>\n

\u201cthe systematic destruction and annihilation of all the non-capitalist social units which obstruct its development .\u2026 Each new colonial expansion is accompanied, as a matter of course, by a relentless battle of capital against the social and economic ties of the natives, who are also forcibly robbed of their means of production and labour power.\u201d[42]<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That remains true today, when one percent of the world\u2019s population has 45% of all personal wealth and nearly three billion people own nothing at all. Every year, the rich enclose ever more of the world\u2019s riches, and their corporations destroy more of the life support systems that should be our common heritage. Enclosures continue, strengthening an ever-richer ruling class and an ever-larger global working class.<\/p>\n

In the seventeenth century, an unknown poet summarized the hypocrisy and brutality of enclosure in four brief lines:<\/p>\n

The law locks up the man or woman
\nWho steals the goose from off the common
\nBut leaves the greater villain loose
\nWho steals the common from the goose.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We should also recall the fourth verse of that poem, which urges us to move from indignation to action.<\/p>\n

The law locks up the man or woman
\nWho steals the goose from off the common
\nAnd geese will still a common lack
\nTill they go and steal it back.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0Quotations in Andy Wood,\u00a0The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge University Press, 2007), 49.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0Frederick Engels, \u201cThe Peasant War in Germany\u201d (1850) in\u00a0Marx-Engels Collected Works<\/em>, vol. 10 (International Publishers, 1978), 410.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0Roger B. Manning,\u00a0Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640<\/em>\u00a0(Clarendon Press, 1988), 3.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0Briony Mcdonagh and Stephen Daniels, \u201cEnclosure Stories: Narratives from Northamptonshire,\u201d\u00a0Cultural Geographies<\/em>\u00a019, no. 1 (January 2012), 113.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a>\u00a0Norah Carlin,\u00a0The Causes of the English Civil War<\/em>\u00a0(Blackwell, 1999), 129.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>\u00a0R. H. Tawney,\u00a0The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century<\/em>\u00a0(Lector House, 2021 [1912]), 76.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a>\u00a0John U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry<\/em>, vol. 1 (Frank Cass, 1966), 342-3, 310.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a>\u00a0John U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry<\/em>, vol. 1 (Frank Cass, 1966), 312, 316-7, 291-2. See also Andreas Malm,\u00a0Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming<\/em>\u00a0(London: Verso, 2016), 320-24.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a>\u00a0Christopher Hill,\u00a0Reformation to Industrial Revolution\u00a0<\/em>(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a>\u00a0Proceedings in the Commons, 1601: November 2\u20135.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a>\u00a0Hill,\u00a0Reformation to Industrial Revolution<\/em>, 51.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a>\u00a0Keith Wrightson,\u00a0Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain<\/em>\u00a0(Yale University Press, 2000), 162.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a>\u00a0Peter Bowden, \u201cAgricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents,\u201d in\u00a0The Agrarian History of England and Wales<\/em>, ed. Joan Thirsk, vol. IV (Cambridge University Press, 1967), 695, 690, 621.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a>\u00a0Buchanan Sharp,\u00a0In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660<\/em>\u00a0(University of California, 1980), 264.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a>\u00a0Such figures appeared frequently in rural uprisings in England: later examples included Lady Skimmington, Ned Ludd and Captain Swing.<\/p>\n

[16]<\/a>\u00a0Martin Empson, \u2018Kill All the Gentlemen\u2019: Class Struggle and Change in the English Countryside<\/em>\u00a0(Bookmarks, 2018), 165.<\/p>\n

[17]<\/a>\u00a0John E. Martin,\u00a0Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development<\/em>\u00a0(Macmillan, 1986), 173.<\/p>\n

[18]<\/a>\u00a0Sharp,\u00a0In Contempt of All Authority,<\/em>\u00a084-5.<\/p>\n

[19]<\/a>\u00a0Sharp,\u00a0In Contempt of All Authority,\u00a0<\/em>86.<\/p>\n

[20]<\/a>\u00a0Sharp,\u00a0In Contempt of All Authority,\u00a0<\/em>144.<\/p>\n

[21]<\/a>\u00a0James Boyce,\u00a0Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens<\/em>\u00a0(Icon Books, 2021), Kindle edition, loc. 840.<\/p>\n

[22]<\/a>\u00a0Brian Manning,\u00a0The English People and the English Revolution<\/em>\u00a0(Bookmarks, 1991), 194.<\/p>\n

[23]<\/a>\u00a0Brian Manning,\u00a0Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England 1640-1660<\/em>\u00a0(Pluto Press, 1996), 1.<\/p>\n

[24]<\/a>\u00a0Manning,\u00a0English People<\/em>, 195.<\/p>\n

[25]<\/a>\u00a0John S. Morrill,\u00a0The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives And Radicals In The English Civil War, 1630 1650<\/em>\u00a0(Longman, 1987) 34.<\/p>\n

[26]<\/a>\u00a0\u201cGeneral Order for Possessions, to secure them from Riots and Tumults,\u201d\u00a0House of Lords Journal<\/em>\u00a0vol. 4, July 13, 1641.<\/p>\n

[27]<\/a>\u00a0Lindley,\u00a0Fenland Riots<\/em>, 68.<\/p>\n

[28]<\/a>\u00a0Sharp,\u00a0In Contempt of All Authority<\/em>, 228.<\/p>\n

[29]<\/a>\u00a0Quoted in Lindley,\u00a0Fenland Riots<\/em>, 149.<\/p>\n

[30]<\/a>\u00a0Lindley,\u00a0Fenland Riots<\/em>, 147.<\/p>\n

[31]<\/a>\u00a0Gerard Winstanley,\u00a0The Law of Freedom, and Other Writings<\/em>, ed. Christopher Hill (Penguin Books, 1973), 82.<\/p>\n

[32]<\/a>\u00a0Christopher Hill and Edmund Dell, eds.,\u00a0The Good Old Cause<\/em>, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2012), 424.<\/p>\n

[33]<\/a>\u00a0Christopher Hill,\u00a0Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century<\/em>\u00a0(Schocken Books, 1964), 191.<\/p>\n

[34]<\/a>\u00a0Christopher Hill,\u00a0God\u2019s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution<\/em>\u00a0(Harper, 1972), 260.<\/p>\n

[35]<\/a>\u00a0Marx,\u00a0Capital Volume, 1<\/em>, 885.<\/p>\n

[36]<\/a>\u00a0E. P. Thompson,\u00a0The Making of the English Working Class<\/em>\u00a0(Penguin Books, 1991), 237-8.<\/p>\n

[37]<\/a>\u00a0The best account of resistance to enclosure in the 18th century is chapter 9 of J. M. Neeson,\u00a0Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge University Press, 1993).<\/p>\n

[38]<\/a>\u00a0John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, \u201cMarx and the Commons,\u201d\u00a0Social Research<\/em>\u00a0(Spring 2021), 5.<\/p>\n

[39]<\/a>\u00a0Commercial and Agricultural Magazine<\/em>, October 1800, quoted in E. P. Thompson,\u00a0The Making of the English Working Class<\/em>\u00a0(Penguin Books, 1991), 243.<\/p>\n

[40]<\/a>\u00a0Karl Marx,\u00a0Capital Volume, 1<\/em>, 874.<\/p>\n

[41]<\/a>\u00a0Neil Davidson, \u201cThe Scottish Path to Capitalist Agriculture 1,\u201d\u00a0Journal of Agrarian Change<\/em>\u00a0(July 2004), 229.<\/p>\n

[42]<\/a>\u00a0Rosa Luxemburg,\u00a0The Accumulation of Capital<\/em>, (Routledge, 2003), 352, 350.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

By derivative work: Division of farm land in England. Unitfreak (talk)Ploughmen_Fac_simile_of_a_Miniature_in_a_very_ancient_Anglo_Saxon_Manuscript_published_by_Shaw_with_legend_God_Spede_ye_Plough_and_send_us_Korne_enow.png: Paul Lacroix – Ploughmen_Fac_simile_of_a_Miniature_in_a_very_ancient_Anglo_Saxon_Manuscript_published_by_Shaw_with_legend_God_Spede_ye_Plough_and_send_us_Korne_enow.png, Public Domain, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=4564923<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In these and many other battles, commoners heroically fought to preserve their land and rights, but they were unable to stop the growth of a highly-profitable industry that was supported physically by the state and legally by the courts. As elsewhere, capital defeated the commons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3490047,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79717,213528],"tags":[97144,190145,105104],"class_list":["post-3490039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-economy-featured","tag-commoners","tag-critiquesofcapitalism","tag-enclosureofthecommons"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3490039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3490047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3490039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3490039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3490039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}