Parliamentary enclosure
node · earth · England
The conversion of open-field arable, common pasture and waste into consolidated, individually held and hedged fields, carried out in England mainly by private Acts of Parliament between roughly 1750 and 1830 and running into several thousand Acts covering a large fraction of the cultivated surface. Enclosure by agreement had gone on for centuries; what was new was the statutory instrument, which allowed a majority of landholders by value — not by head — to bind an entire parish, and the commissioners who redrew the map. Two consequences are usually claimed for it and only one is settled. That it extinguished use-rights on which cottagers depended, and that it turned a body of customary occupiers into wage labourers, is well attested in the parish records. That it produced the productivity gain which fed the industrial cities is much more contested: several quantitative studies find the yield advantage of enclosed over open-field farming smaller than the older literature assumed, which would make enclosure more a redistribution of who held the land than an increase in what the land produced.
Read in · 1
Timeline
No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.
Connections · 1
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 10 related
- Story
- The conversion of open-field arable, common pasture and waste into consolidated, individually held and hedged fields, carried out in England mainly by private Acts of Parliament between roughly 1750 and 1830 and running into several thousand Acts covering a large fraction of the cultivated surface. Enclosure by agreement had gone on for centuries; what was new was the statutory instrument, which allowed a majority of landholders by value — not by head — to bind an entire parish, and the commissioners who redrew the map. Two consequences are usually claimed for it and only one is settled. That it extinguished use-rights on which cottagers depended, and that it turned a body of customary occupiers into wage labourers, is well attested in the parish records. That it produced the productivity gain which fed the industrial cities is much more contested: several quantitative studies find the yield advantage of enclosed over open-field farming smaller than the older literature assumed, which would make enclosure more a redistribution of who held the land than an increase in what the land produced.
- Knowledge
- Parliamentary enclosure
- Nineteenth-century British urbanisation
- Connections
- Nineteenth-century British urbanisation
- The peak of parliamentary enclosure
- Parliamentary enclosure
- Manchester
- The peak of parliamentary enclosure
- Chadwick reports on the sanitary condition of the labouring population
- The census records an urban majority
- Evidence
- Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.
Observed changes · 0
No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.
Actions
/atlas?object=PHENOMENON_ENCLOSURE&experience=PHENOMENON_ENCLOSURE