The scenery of England and Wales has been transformed by the enclosure of its lands, but the extent and results of the transformation vary. Here you have the landscape cut into little fields with great hedges, looking from an elevated point of view like a patchwork quilt; there the skimpy quickest hedges only slightly emphasise the natural sweeping lines of the hills: here you have narrow winding lanes; there broad, straight roads with margins of grass on either side: here you have compact villages in which almost all the habitations in the parish are clustered together; there farmhouses and cottages so scattered that were it not for the church, which seems to attract to its neighbourhood the inn and the smithy, there would be no recognisable village at all.
This diversity in the effect of enclosure on the face of the country is a symbol of the diversity of its effect upon the material, social, and moral conditions of the local peasantry, who, like the land itself, may be said to have undergone Enclosure.
Where, as in Devon and Cornwall, in Cumberland and Westmoreland, the division of intermixed arable and meadow land took place early and gradually, and in subordination to the reclamation of waste, that reclamation itself being carried on steadily and gradually, the result was the creation of numberless small holdings and properties. A career was offered to the enterprising and laborious, and enterprise and industry grew accordingly,—“Devonshire myghty and Strong,” says Leland; and the great part taken by Devonshire in the national struggles in the reign of Elizabeth must be partly attributed to the reaction upon the character of the people of the conquest over the difficulties of bringing the rocky soil, woodland or moor, into cultivation: a conquest which made Devonshire husbandry famous for two generations, and “Devonshiring” a well-known term for a particular method of preparing waste land for cultivation.
Perhaps the greatest evil of Acts for the enclosure of waste in the past, was that they prevented such gradual reclamation and enclosure by peasant cultivators. At the present day the vital objection applies to enclosure of waste by any method that the area of such free open spaces is already sufficiently curtailed, that every remaining acre is becoming continually more precious, so that while public-spirited people fight for their preservation in remote places, in the neighbourhood of towns, citizens tax themselves to add to their area.
The enclosure of arable common fields, and of all the commonable lands of whole parishes within what I have called the Parliamentary Enclosure Belt, is of immeasurably greater historical importance. The ethics of such enclosure has been the subject of fierce debate for centuries; now the process is practically complete, and it is possible to apraise its results.
We have observed that with regard to the immediate results, capable of being contemporaneously verified, there is no real controversy between the disputants; it is on the inferences to be drawn as to the more ultimate results on the nation as a whole, and in the judgment pronounced upon the desirability of such results, that the dispute turned. The more candid disputants on either side admit the vital points in their opponents’ case: thus, for example, no opponent of enclosure denies that it tended to raise rents; and, on the other hand, it was the greatest advocate of enclosure who declared that “By nineteen out of twenty Enclosure Acts the poor are injured.”
The increase of rent was, of course, the motive of enclosure; and though there were exceptional cases in which the results were very disappointing to the promoters, as a rule the increase of rent was very great. Arthur Young gives the full financial details of twenty-three Acts for the enclosure of open field parishes in Lincolnshire.[108] The total rents before enclosure amounted to £15,504; on an average they were nearly doubled, the increase of rent obtained being £14,256, and the expenditure necessary to obtain this result was £48,217. Assuming that the money was borrowed at 6 per cent., there remained to the landowners a net profit of £11,363. These results were no doubt something above the average, but they were not exceptional. In Long Sutton the rent was raised from an average of 5s. per acre to between 30s. and 50s. per acre.[109]
The increase of rent was not a concern purely of the landowning class. As the advocates of enclosure continually pointed out, the rent was a pretty accurate test of the net produce of the agriculture of the parish; it was roughly proportional to the amount of food grown but not consumed on the spot, and sent away to markets to feed urban consumers at a distance. It was upon this net produce, they pointed out, that the taxable resources of the country depended. It was argued that an addition to the population of the country which was all engaged in gaining its own subsistence from the soil, added neither to the number of soldiers who could be enlisted for war without paralysing industry, nor to the power of the State to equip and support an army. On the other hand, a change by which a whole village of peasants who consumed nearly all the food they produced, was swept away and replaced by one or two highly rented farms, producing a less quantity of food, but sending much more to market, did supply the State with additional resources for the maintenance of its forces.
Private interests stimulated the appreciation of these public advantages. Money had to be borrowed to meet the heavy initial expenses of enclosure, and the banking system grew with the enclosure movement of the eighteenth century. And hence a secondary gain to the State. Increased opportunities for the remunerative investment of capital increased the supply of loanable capital, and made possible the enormous State loans by which the Napoleonic war was carried on. Lawyers, land surveyors, Parliamentary agents and others, reaped a copious harvest; and further, London in particular, and other towns in varying measure, grew in wealth by ministering to the increased “effective demands” of the enriched aristocracy.
But the opponents of enclosure were concerned with the gross rather than the net produce of land, and, as we have seen, it can be proved from the testimony of the advocates of enclosure and of impartial witnesses, that over a great part of the Midlands enclosure meant the conversion of arable to pasture, and local depopulation. The Board of Agriculture gives what may be considered an official estimate of the diminution of gross produce which would follow. An acre of common field arable might be expected to produce 2010 lbs. of bread in a three years course (that is, 670 lbs. of bread per annum), and 30 lbs. of meat per annum. The same area enclosed and converted to pasture would produce 176 lbs. of mutton, or 120 lbs. of beef. If we split the difference between the production of beef and mutton, we have on the average 148 lbs. of meat produced. There is on enclosure a gain of 113 lbs. of meat against a loss of 570 lbs. of bread; supposing the food values of equal quantities of bread and meat to be equal, there is a loss of 557 lbs. out of a total produce of 705 lbs.
And yet, through a chain of causation which can now be clearly perceived, but which at the time was not evident, though locally there might be a loss of gross produce, there was a gain throughout the kingdom. The key to the position was the operation of the Poor Laws.
Enclosure of arable fields and open field parishes in the Parliamentary Enclosure Belt in many ways greatly affected the operation of the Poor Laws.
By increasing rents it made a given poor-rate yield more. Further, the increase of rent reconciled the enclosing landowners to an increase in the poor-rate; more especially when it fell, not on them, but on their neighbours. For, as we have seen, the effect of enclosure in some parishes in a given neighbourhood was often to drive the poor into the parishes which remained unenclosed; these bore the burden, while the others reaped the profits.
As we have seen, enclosure, even when arable was not converted to pasturage, tended to ruin small owners and to eliminate small farmers, so that these had to join the ranks of agricultural labourers. The number of potential paupers was thus increased.
Destitution and recklessness among the labouring classes also increased. The common rights and small holdings of a few acres in the common fields were, at best, as we have seen, exchanged for a sum of money for which no investment offered itself, which therefore soon disappeared. With these small holdings disappeared also the hope of gradually taking more and more additional strips of land in the fields and the fear of losing the little already gained.
Early marriage was particularly encouraged by the change from the open field condition to enclosure. Before enclosure, the conditions of labour made the common field farmers who employed labourers, desire young unmarried men and women who would live in the farmhouse; such farm servants postponed marriage till they had accumulated some savings and could begin their married life with some resources—a cow, for example—over and above their labour. After enclosure, the enriched farming class preferred to pay board wages, and the young labourer with nothing to gain by waiting, with the assurance of Poor Law assistance if needed, naturally preferred to marry early.
Lastly, the disappearance of the yeoman class and of the connecting links between the largest farmers and the day labourers naturally tended to make the careful local administration of the Poor Law more difficult; it even to a great extent destroyed the motive for economical administration. The open field parish retained some of the social vitality of a self-governing community; men who had to concert together for the regulation of the fields, for the purchase of a parish bull, were more likely than the farmers of an enclosed parish to settle in concert questions of Poor Law relief in accordance with the interest of the parish as a whole.
This last point of connection between the enclosure and the Poor Law history of the country during the eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth is, however, interesting in itself, apart from the present argument. The point here laid stress upon is that whatever hardships for labourers and others resulted from the enclosure of arable fields, they did not starve, they did not eat less bread; they might be rendered miserable, but they married earlier and reared large families, somewhere or other. Poor Law relief ensured their offering an “effective demand” for bread. This effective demand compelled the increase of arable cultivation somewhere within the country; for foreign supplies were practically unavailable. The enclosure of waste for tillage and the enclosure of arable for pasture were economically inter-dependent.
The gross agricultural produce of the country as a whole was therefore increased by common field enclosure.
The effect upon urban industries was also great. The greater the local depopulation in rural districts produced by enclosure, the greater the supply of needy labourers of industrious habits and robust physique drafted to the growing industrial towns. Local depopulation was the usual result of Enclosure, as we have seen, in the Midlands and in Wiltshire, and parts of neighbouring counties. Where, as in Norfolk and parts of Lincoln and Yorkshire, local depopulation did not ensue, there was a vast increase in the agricultural produce sent to market, and in consequence, in the manufactured commodities demanded. Enclosure tended to assist urban industry therefore by an increased labour supply, an increased market, and perhaps also, an increased supply of capital.
Summing up, therefore, the economic results of the whole mass of little village revolutions under examination, we find increased population, increased production of all sorts of commodities, increased national resources for purposes of taxation and foreign war. The moral effects we find to have been increased misery and recklessness, showing itself in increased pauperism and drunkenness. An increase of the quantity of human life is attained at the expense of a degradation in its quality.