Wednesday, May 09, 2012

The Enclosures - The Thieving of the Land

It has only been over the course of the last few hundred years that much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Private ownership of land, and in particular absolute private ownership, is a modern idea, only a few hundred years old. The king, or the Lord of the Manor, might have owned an estate in one technical legal sense of the word, but the peasant enjoyed all sorts of so-called "use" rights which enabled him, or her, to graze stock, cut wood or peat, draw water or grow crops, on various plots of land at specified times of year. The open field system of farming, which dominated the flatter more arable central counties of England throughout the later medieval and into the modern period, is a classic common property system. The open field system was fairly equitable. Nor could most peasants could not afford a whole team of oxen, just one or two, so maintaining an ox team had to be a joint enterprise. The livestock were also fed on hay from communal meadows (the distribution of hay was sometimes decided by an annual lottery for different portions of the field) and on communal pastures. A man may have no more than an acre or two, but he gets the full extent of them laid out in long "lands" for ploughing, with no hedgerows to reduce the effective area, and to occupy him in unprofitable labour. No sort of inclosure of the same size can be conceived which would give him equivalent facilities. Moreover he has his common rights which entitle him to graze his stock all over the 'lands' and these have a value, the equivalent of which in pasture fields would cost far more than he could afford to pay. In short, the common field system, rather ingeniously, made economies of scale, including use of a whopping great plough team, potentially accessible to small scale farmers.

However, as medieval England progressed to modernity, the open field system and the communal pastures came under attack from wealthy landowners who wanted to privatize their use. The first onslaught, during the 14th to 17th centuries, came from landowners who converted arable land over to sheep. The peasantry responded with a series of ill fated revolts. In Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450 land rights were a prominent demand. By the time of Kett's rebellion of 1549 enclosure was a main issue, as it was in the Captain Pouch revolts of 1604-1607 when the terms "leveller" and "digger" appeared, referring to those who levelled the ditches and fences erected by enclosers. The actual Diggers appear to be not so much a resistance movement of peasants in the course of being squeezed off the land, but an attempt to reclaim the land by people whose historical ties may well have already been dissolved, some generations previously. Nor were the Diggers  trying to stop "inclosures"; they didn't go round tearing down fences and levelling ditches, like both earlier and later rebels. In some ways the Diggers foreshadow the smallholdings and allotments movements of the late 19th and 20th century.

The rights of commoners to take firewood, timber and game from woodlands, and to graze pigs in them, had been progressively eroded for centuries: free use of forests and abolition of game laws was one of the demands that Richard II agreed to with his fingers crossed when he confronted Wat Tyler during the 1381 Peasants Revolt. But in the early 18th century the process accelerated as wealthy landowners enclosed forests for parks and hunting lodges, dammed rivers for fishponds, and allowed their deer to trash local farmer's crops. Commoners responded by organizing  resistance, sooting their faces, both as a disguise and so as not to be spotted at night, and were known as "the blacks". Legislation in 1723 was known as the Black Act. Without doubt the most viciously repressive legislation enacted in Britain in the last 400 years, this act authorized the death penalty for more than 50 offences connected with poaching. The act stayed on the statute books for nearly a century, hundreds were hanged for the crime of feeding themselves with wild meat, and when the act was finally repealed, poachers were, instead, transported for even minor offences.

 Another area of revolt was the fenlands in south Lincolnshire, and the Isle of Axholme in the north of the county. In the early 1600s, the Stuart kings James I and Charles I, hard up for cash, embarked on a policy of draining the fenland commons to provide valuable arable land that would yield the crown a higher revenue.  A contemporary pamphlet resonates of todays anti-landgrabbing movements against bio-fuels. "The Undertakers have alwaies vilified the fens, and have misinformed many Parliament men, that all the fens is a meer quagmire, and that it is a level hurtfully surrounded and of little or no value: but those who live in the fens and are neighbours to it, know the contrary." The anonymous author goes on to list the benefits of the fens including: the "serviceable horses", the "great dayeries which afford great store of butter and cheese", the flocks of sheep, the "osier, reed and sedge", and the "many thousand cottagers which live on our fens which must otherwise go a begging." And he continues by comparing these to what the developers proposed to plant on the newly drained land: "What is coleseed and rape, they are but Dutch commodities, and but trash and trumpery and pills land, in respect of the fore-recited commodities which are the rich oare of the Commonwealth."

 The commoners' resistance to the drainage schemes was vigorous and they fought back by rioting and by levelling the dikes. Between 1760 and 1840 most of the fens were drained and enclosed by act of parliament. The project was not an instant success. As the land dried out it shrunk and lowered against the water table, and so became more vulnerable to flooding. Pumping stations had to be introduced, powered initially and unsuccessfully by windmills, then by steam engines, and now the entire area is kept dry thanks to diesel. Since drainage eventually created one of the most productive areas of arable farmland in Britain, it would be hard to argue that it was not an economic improvement; but the social and environmental consequences have been less happy. Much of the newly cultivated land lay at some distance from the villages and was taken over by large landowners; it was not unusual to find a 300 acre holding without a single labourers' cottage on it. Farmers therefore developed the gang-labour system of employment that exists to this day:

Marx describes the dispossession of the people "In England, serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the 15th century, of free peasant proprietors...The wage labourers of agriculture consisted partly of peasants, who utilised their leisure time by working on the large estates, partly of an independent special class of wage labourers, relatively and absolutely few in numbers. The latter also were practically at the same time peasant farmers, since, besides their wages, they had allotted to them arable land to the extent of 4 or more acres, together with their cottages. Besides they, with the rest of the peasants, enjoyed the usufruct of the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, furnished them with timber, fire-wood, turf, etc....What the capitalist system demanded was, on the other hand, a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labour into capital...Even in the last decade of the 17th century, the yeomanry, the class of independent peasants, were more numerous than the class of farmers. They had formed the backbone of Cromwell’s strength, and, even according to the confession of Macaulay, stood in favourable contrast to the drunken squires and to their servants, the country clergy, who had to marry their masters’ cast-off mistresses. About 1750, the yeomanry had disappeared and so had, in the last decade of the 18th century, the last trace of the common land of the agricultural labourer...Communal property — always distinct from the State property just dealt with...the forcible usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century....the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well."

Between 1760 and 1870, about 7 million acres (about one sixth the area of England) were changed, by some 4,000 acts of parliament each transferring a single piece of land out of common ownership and into the ownership of farmers and landowners. 3,511,770 acres of common land between 1801 and 1831 was stolen from them without a farthing of compensation by parliamentary devices presented to the landlords by the landlords. The "democracy" of late 18th and early 19th century English parliament proved itself to be less answerable to the needs of the common man than the dictatorships of the Tudors and Stuarts. This legalised theft of common land in the name of more efficient agricultural production made it impossible for the rural poor to survive. Millions of people had customary and legal access to lands and the basis of an independent livelihood was snatched away.  Coupled with the advance of the industrial revolution it drove them out of homes, which many families had occupied for generations, and into fast-growing towns and cities to become factory fodder

"Those who are so eager for the new inclosure,"
William Cobbett wrote, "seem to argue as if the wasteland in its present state produced nothing at all. But is this the fact? Can anyone point out a single inch of it which does not produce something and the produce of which is made use of? It goes to the feeding of sheep, of cows of all descriptions . . . and it helps to rear, in health and vigour, numerous families of the children of the labourers, which children, were it not for these wastes, must be crammed into the stinking suburbs of towns?"

There are still 396,800 hectares of common land in England and 175,000 hectares in Wales contained in around 8675 separate commons. Common land represents 3% of England's area, and 12% of Wales. A village green is any land on which a significant number of inhabitants of any area has indulged in lawful sports and pastimes, for 20 years, as of right. There is about 3650 registered greens in England and about 220 in Wales, covering about 8150 and 620 acres respectively. A right of way is a path that anyone has the legal right to use on foot, and sometimes using other modes of transport eg by  horses and a bridleway.


A bit of local history
Clapham Common is an 89 hectare (220 acre) triangular area of grassland and 3 ponds produced  from gravel pits is near the Socialist Party's Head Office.  It was historically ‘common land’ for the parishes of Battersea and Clapham and was first mentioned as far back as 1086 in the famous ‘Domesday Book’ as being part of the Manor of Clapham. The locals used it as pasture for animals and as a source of firewood and water. In 1836 some local people formed a committee and obtained leases  from the Lords of Clapham and Bttersea to improve the Common which was overgrown and unkempt. When the leases expired in 1871, local residents passed a resolution saying they wished the Common to be publicly owned.  There was much haggling over the price but in 1877 the Metropolitan Board of Works acquired the Common for £18,000.  They drained about 70 acres of swamp, filled in the ditches and developed the Common into a green space for recreation. During both World Wars the Common was transformed into allotments for food production. Close to Clapham is Wandsworth common of 73 hectares (175 acres) and contains two ponds. It dates back to the 11th century. On the common people had rights which included the cutting of wood and shrubs, the grazing of animals and the digging of gravel. by the 19th century it had been sub-divided by the railway and encroached upon by building as London was developed, with some 53 enclosures between 1794 and 1866. The larger areas enclosed were taken for building the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, the industrial school of St James, Allfarthing Piece, McKellar's Triangle, the Justices of Surrey. Attempts by local people to preserve the common against further encroachment began in earnest in 1868 when appeals were made to the metropolitan board of works to take over responsibility, following the metropolitan commons act of 1866, but this was initially unsuccessful. In 1870 a common defence committee was set up, later to become the Wandsworth Common preservation society. Action was taken in April 1870 to try and keep Plough Green,  A village green with a pond, open and in the months following fund-raising efforts and lobbying of support accelerated. Eventually Earl Spencer, Lord of the Manor, agreed to transfer most of the common to the defence committee excluding the area which later became Spencer Park. A bill went through Parliament in July 1871, the Wandsworth Common Act, and the common was then transferred to a group of conservators elected by inhabitants of Battersea and Wandsworth for a £250 annuity paid to Earl Spencer. This annuity and maintenance costs were raised by a special rate levied of the inhabitants.

Today, 6,000 landowners own some 40m of Britain's 60m acres of land, and that 70% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. By contrast, 60 million people live in houses collectively occupying 4.4m acres.- Kevin Cahill's  Who Owns Britain? Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.

The new clearances? We read eople are increasingly being forced to move from villages where their families have lived for generations as price rises turn them into exclusive “playgrounds” for the wealthy. In some countryside districts average house prices have reached 10.7 times the average income of less well-off people. Small rural communities are becoming rich people’s ghettoes which exclude people on moderate and lower incomes.

A brief history of the commons in Scotland can be read on our companion blog Socialist Courier here

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