The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.