The Enclosure and Reclamation of Waste Land in England and Wales in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the importance of the subject of waste-land reclamation, and examines the accuracy and acceptability of the available data. The paper examines critically the estimates of the Board of Agriculture Reports and the I874 Waste Land Returns among other sources, and considers the extent of Parliamentary waste-land enclosure and the rise in agricultural rent between 1806 and I878. The problems of investigating wasteland reclamation include the varying definitions of 'waste', the suspect nature of the enclosure evidence and the lack of knowledge of the magnitude of private enclosure. There are indications that there was a massive reduction in waste land of between 2-42 and 1-48 million ha from about 1780 to i88o. An attempt is made to combine the data into a single index of change. The answer to many of the questions lies in a thorough investigation of sources at the county or regional level. DURING the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, the hundred years from I780 to I880 were an age of great agricultural change. One of the most prominent and visual aspects of that century of change was Parliamentary Enclosure. There were, broadly, two kinds of enclosure. First, the enclosure of the open and predominantly arable fields that surrounded the village settlements, and secondly, the enclosure and reclamation of the commons and waste, although in many cases the distinction was not so clear-cut and both kinds of enclosure went hand in hand. The objects of enclosure were to make farming more efficient and productive. In the open fields the need was to redistribute and amalgamate the fragmented holdings into compact farms that were easier to work; to make possible a better balance between arable and pasture, and to promote better livestock husbandry. In the waste, the aim was to expand the area of land under regular cultivation. In both there were underlying aims of changing the use of the land and of converting the land to more profitable use. The enclosure of the open fields has commanded most attention and the numerous general accounts of the enclosure of the i 8o million ha of open fields need little comment. Nearly a dozen major works, most written during the period I907 to 1915 when contemporary political controversy concerning the future of agriculture led to a careful inquiry into the decline of peasant farming in England, have explored the broad economic background to the rapid agrarian changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the concomitant social and demographic changes.1 More recent work has sought to explore the regional variations in the agrarian changes of the period and thereby add to and, in some