War Against the Commons

* Book: The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism. By Ian Angus.

URL =

Excerpt

Ian Angus:

"Getting a private enclosure act passed was only the beginning: the land still had to be divided and allocated, and landlords and capitalist farmers took property very seriously indeed. To ensure that the interests of property were respected, decisions were made by an independent commission, usually three people: one named by the landlord, one by the tithe-owner, and one by other large landholders. Patronage played a big role: commissioners were well paid, and any who hoped to be recommended for future enclosures would be careful to represent their patrons’ interests.

Usually the act specified that a certain proportion of the land would be automatically assigned to the lord of the manor and the tithe-owner, and some land had to be set aside for new roads so farmers could reach their farms without crossing others’ property. After these and other deductions, each proprietor was supposed to receive land equal to the combined value of the land and rights he owned before the act. It would be more than a year, and was often three or four years, before the commissioners’ awards were announced. Only then could the owners begin building roads, erecting fences, planting hedges, and building new farm buildings.

Parliamentary enclosure awards were rarely challenged, which suggests that most commissioners followed the law, but that did not mean the process was fair. In fact, as the Hammonds pointed out, it was never about fairness, it was about property, and the winners were those who already had the most:

Two classes were ignored . . . two classes to whom enclosure meant not a greater or less degree of wealth, but actual ruin. These were such cottagers as enjoyed their rights of common in virtue of renting cottages to which such rights were attached, and those cottagers and squatters who either had no strict legal right, or whose rights were difficult of proof. Neither of these classes was treated even outwardly and formally as having any claim to be consulted.

As well as consolidating land, enclosure eliminated common rights. After the award, “landless commoners could no longer feed pigs, geese and poultry on commons, lanes and roadsides; they could no longer gather fuel; in the fens they lost their fishing and fowling; in forest villages they could no longer hire acommon right for their cattle, unless the commons remained open.”10 In some cases, cottagers received a few acres in exchange for loss of common rights, but because they were charged a disproportionate share of the enclosure costs, including the expensive work of fencing and hedging, many had to sell their rights. And because enclosure acts also terminated existing leases, small tenants often had to abandon farming when landlords doubled or tripled rents.

Two conservative twentieth-century historians called Parliamentary enclosure “perfectly proper,” because the law was obeyed and property rights were protected. E. P. Thompson replied that they were ignoring the real issue—“a redefinition of the nature of agrarian property itself.”

In village after village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of the poor. The cottager without legal proof of rights was rarely compensated. The cottager who was able to establish his claim was left with a parcel of land inadequate for subsistence and a disproportionate share of the very high enclosure cost.

Enclosure (when all the sophistications are allowed for) was a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers. . . .

What was “perfectly proper” in terms of capitalist property-relations involved, none the less, a rupture of the traditional integument of village custom and of right: and the social violence of enclosure consisted precisely in the drastic, total imposition upon the village of capitalist property-definitions…."

(https://monthlyreview.org/press/excerpt-the-war-against-the-commons/?)