The country around Stanford on Avon is ribbed with the bones of an ancient landscape showing through a thin green skin of the pastures that replaced the open fields, the landscape changed for ever by the Enclosure Movement. It is about fifty miles to the village of Helpston, the home of the poet John Clare, who lamented the enclosure of his village in the early 1800s. As I drive out of the village I see wide ridges in the fields, curving parallel with each other, running under and through the modern landscape, below all the enclosure hedges. This is the old open field landscape. At the centre of the lands of the village was an area of arable land where strips of land were worked in common by the villagers, growing corn and beans and peas to feed their families, and flax too to make their textiles.
The strips of the open fields became mounded up as the teams of oxen ploughed them, because they ploughed down the middle, turned at the headland, and ploughed back in the opposite direction, piling the soil against the furrow that opened the ploughing. Every furrow turned the soil towards the middle, forming the typical rounded strips. I remember my father ploughing just like that, setting up rows of hazel wands before he ploughed, to make sure the strips were parallel, straight and of an even width. The result was a field of alternate ‘cops’ and ‘reens’, where the soil was higher in the middle of each strip (a ‘cop’) and formed a wide furrow between them (a ‘ reen’). When the open fields were enclosed the ploughboys still ploughed the fields in strips because it was the most efficient way to plough, but they harrowed across the strips afterwards to even out the field. On the strip system they would inevitably have harrowed along each strip, turning on the headland and coming back the other way.
The strips, and the commons, hay meadows, wastelands and woods that surrounded them, were all of value to the peasants. The arable crops supported all the villagers and maybe the lord of the manor, cultivated sustainably before the word was needed, as is usually the way with indigenous people. There were rules to govern how the commons were grazed, and how the open fields were manured and fallowed, enforced by and with the consent of the villagers. The system may have been almost as old as agriculture, when the people of the village would have been closely related, and the system seems to have been fairly consensual and communal. The Norman conquest started bringing in changing ideas about property, since they needed to regularise the way they had stolen the entire country, and the greed of grasping peasants or overweening lords of the manor sometimes drove a growing inequality, but until the enclosures the villagers had substantial rights to use and enjoy and feed themselves from the lands of the villages.
The poet John Clare lamented the destruction of the open field village system in verse, portraying the pre-enclosure landscape in idyllic terms and the enclosure landscape as being dominated by a new breed of small-minded grasping farmers. It is therefore easy to dismiss Clare as nostalgic, especially if you tend to view history as the march of progress. But peasants turned into landless labourers by the enclosures, who also harked back to pre-enclosure days on the occasions when they dared to protest, cannot so readily be accused of nostalgia. Their grievances were based in memories of an era when they had a measure of independence and self-sufficiency based on their shared land-use rights. Much had been taken from them, and they had been left at the mercy of a few farmers in possession of lands where they and their ancestors had farmed. They had grounds for lamenting the loss of many rights, losses that are undisputed history, rights to the means to feed and clothe and warm themselves and maintain their cottages. Clare’s lament for a living landscape shared by the community, full of life, song and haunts of wildlife, is less concrete in the historical record, but it is still a record of the way in which the people were excluded from their historical birthright, and of the way that the land was transformed into something to be exploited for private individual profit rather than being a shared resource for the common good of a community.
Nowadays the value of intangible things like enjoyment of nature or being able to exercise in beautiful environments is increasingly included in new ways of accounting for our impact on the living world. Clare, far from being nostalgic in the pejorative way in which the word is often used, was using poetry to express similar losses that are not easy to quantify but are nonetheless very real. The peasants turned into landless labourers very often could not find wood to burn or food to eat. These were primary losses, but the losses Clare lamented were important too. We are still struggling to reassert the right to roam at will in the countryside that we lost when the enclosers put up their little sign boards:
These paths are stopt – the rude philistines thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
On paths to freedom & to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
& on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go
Landscape is not just the product of geomorphology. It is also a record of all the people (and animals) who have lived and struggled and brought up families and lived their lives as best they could. Men have laboured annually to maintain ditches and hedges and cultivate the fields. Peasants have ploughed the strips, walking with the ploughman’s rolling gait behind the oxen, and village women and children gleaned after the corn harvest, or minded cattle on the great commons. When I see this landscape now, with its few trees, straggly decrepit hedges and bits of wire fencing, and its chemical monocultures, I can see through this green veil not just into another countryside but another way of life and another way of existing within nature, both spiritually and practically. Places where people sang as they worked, where children played games and made grass cages for crickets, and fished for minnows with bent pins. Shepherds and gypsies sat around fires at night, singing and playing fiddles, and lovers lay among the grass. I am reminded of the way the Irish language can convey a sense of a veil between the commonplace daily world and the parallel magical otherworld, that still finds expression in the idea of the little people sharing the land with modern people, where rocks or sacred thorn trees span the boundary between the world above and below the veil.
The people who organised the enclosures were the rich and powerful, the educated gentry, but in spite of their presumed sophistication and enlightenment, few of them have left any record of their attachment to the countryside or love of nature that can equal the poems of John Clare. Their writings are prosaic, arguing in general that if they gain the lands previously worked communally, the whole nation will benefit. They argue that stealing the land rights of the peasants will be in the nation’s interest. Some hope that dispossessing the peasantry will produce a useful class of landless labourers to work cheaply on their farms or in the ‘manufactories’ they are developing. Some are concerned that the landless labouring class will provide inferior soldiers, compared with those from a sturdy peasantry, with which to build armies to control the growing Empire. Others think the peasantry are a little too sturdy – one writer compares the peasants of the East Anglian fens with ‘the Cherokee’ - and see enclosure as likely to weaken an inconveniently unruly class. The peasants aren’t good at reading and writing, much less at challenging the way the landowners use the Parliament in which they or their friends sit to legislate away the ancient rights and customs of the villagers. Few of the villagers will have ever left the parish, much less gone to London, where their rights are signed away.
The writings of John Clare, once called the peasant poet, are an almost unique record of how the enclosures were felt by those who lost out. He portrays the lives of the country people who worked this landscape, and the wild creatures with which they shared it. He describes a countryside of moorlands and commons as well as ploughland, of peewits and ravens, wild cats and martens, nightjars and glow-worms, ancient trees and ponds. This is a poignant reminder of all the wildlife that landowners have uncaringly and very often deliberately destroyed. But when Clare is concerned with the dispossession of the indigenous people, he laments a dispossession not only from their right to support themselves on the village fields as they have done from time immemorial, but also a physical and emotional exclusion from the landscape in which they have lived and loved and played as children, maybe a landscape of a beauty that is part of the emotional landscape of those who have lived within it.
From now on the enclosers have ‘No Trespassing’ notices everywhere, as they still do today. You can only go on the land if you work there, and only on sufferance. That is still true on this bit of Northamptonshire, as in most of England and Wales, except for a few hard-fought rights of way. And from now on the land is used for the private profit of the owner, and is valued by its capacity to produce income rather than food. Clare deplored ‘the enclosers refusal to acknowledge any relationship between man and nature which was not predicated on possession. To Clare, the inhumanity of the master class was nowhere more apparent than in the ‘lawless laws’ it enacted to set its coercive and possessive rights to the land over what he deemed the more just and noble rights to access which (the country people) had inherited as their birthright, earned through their work, and secured through their profound feelings of local attachment’.*
As I drove through this historic landscape those summers over 30 years ago on my way to net eels in the reservoir, I would have been glad to know that we would eventually come to agree with Clare not just emotionally or poetically, but practically, as we began develop an alternative economics that did not just take account of the farmer’s profit and loss. Thirty years on we are beginning to find ways to quantify in absolutely monetary terms the value of recreation, carbon sequestration, flood prevention, recovery of the biosphere that supports all life, or the mental health benefits of access to nature, with real calculable savings to the NHS. At last the things that Clare celebrated and mourned are being valued even by the money men, and maybe we will soon overlay the open field landscape and the enclosed landscape with a third layer, where space for nature and for people is made among farmland once again farmed in a way that supports nightjars and glow worms, and adders and lizards, and has meadows glowing with wild flowers and scarlet poppies in the corn, and young people will come out from the cities to reclaim the countryside and plant trees upon the hills.
*Clare, J, 1951, (Not, of course, the poet)
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As soon as I mention peasants some people assume that I am going to be ‘romantic’. Let me be clear. I think that the peasants before enclosure had access to land-use rights that enabled them to feed their own animals and grow their own crops, which they lost after the enclosures. I think the enclosure process benefitted those who organised it and often left the peasants as landless day labourers, unemployed particularly in winter because enclosure was often followed by a pastoral system with, for example, less winter work such as threshing available, and without their previous access to wood for fuel. I am also saying that the enclosures signalled a new attitude to land, typically regarded as private property and used as part of a cash economy where the peasant economy had been more about producing food and less about cash.
I have no way of evaluating how happy villagers were before the enclosures. A PhD thesis I have been reading about rural crime and protest in Herefordshire between 1800 and 1860, following the enclosures, suggests that the rural population was poor, hungry and cold and was often harshly dealt with when starving children stole handfuls of peas from the fields, for example, or when labourers caught rabbits or took wood to make a fire. A lot had been taken from them, and life is likely to have been worse. And we too have less access to the countryside and less of a say in how it is managed as a result of changes at this time. That my family was living in a cold and damp tied farm cottage when I first became aware of my own consciousness has not predisposed me to be romantic about it, whatever that means, but I believe that the peasants are, at the very least, likely to have felt more in control of their own destinies than did their dispossessed descendants.
Another thought-provoking article. Your depth of personal knowledge and experience is astonishing!
Thanks for another informative and enjoyable article Richard.