Parliamentary enclosure

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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.