The Common Field Landscape, Cultural Commemoration and the Impact of Enclosure, c. 1770–1850

Abstract

One ‘traditional’ image of the English landscape is that of a ‘patchwork’ of groups of small fields, enclosed and demarcated by verdant hedgerows. As Christopher Taylor pointed out many years ago however, the word ‘traditional’ has to be used advisedly in relation to any type of English landscape, since it has largely evolved in a constant state of flux, change and contradiction.1 In much of midland and southern England at least, that patchwork landscape was largely created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the process historically known as parliamentary enclosure. As such, this ‘traditional’ landscape is 250 years old, at the very most. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain experienced a period of intense cultural, economic and industrial expansion which saw a cultural attachment to nature and the landscape begin to play a crucial role in the development of a strong sense of national identity.2 Parliamentary enclosure was a component part of this expansion, producing a new landscape of small, divided and hedgerow-lined fields that, paradoxically, became emblematic of the ‘English Countryside’ and ‘Englishness’ for later generations. The subsequent cultural dominance of this type of countryside also reveals how the enclosed landscape’s antithesis — the open or common field landscape — has been sidelined in key late twentieth-century historical studies of English agriculture and rural society.