The Enclosure Acts

How Parliament Stole The Commons

The title of this article is a provocation.

“Stole” is a strong word, and historians of agriculture have spent considerable energy arguing that enclosure was more complicated than simple theft. They are right that it was complicated. But the central fact still stands: that millions of acres of land to which ordinary people had held customary rights for centuries were, over the course of roughly a hundred years, transferred into private ownership by an act of parliament in which those people had no vote and no effective voice.

The Enclosure Acts were the legal instrument by which this was accomplished. Understanding how they worked is essential for any local historian whose research touches the countryside between 1750 and 1850 — which is to say, almost all of us.

How an Enclosure Act was passed

The process began with a petition to parliament, signed by the owners of the majority of the land in a parish — measured not by number of people but by acreage. This is the first thing to understand about enclosure as a political process: the people who lost most from it had the least say in whether it happened. A handful of large landowners owning three-quarters of a parish’s land could petition for enclosure against the wishes of every smallholder and cottager in the village, and parliament would listen to the petition, not the protests.

Once parliament passed the act — usually a private act, specific to a single parish — commissioners were appointed to carry it out. Typically three commissioners, often lawyers or surveyors with no connection to the parish, they were tasked with surveying the land, adjudicating competing claims to strips and common rights, and drawing up the Enclosure Award: the legal document that redistributed the land in consolidated parcels.

The whole process, from petition to completed award, typically took several years. During that time, existing farming arrangements continued — but everyone involved knew what was coming, and the atmosphere in an enclosed parish during the period of commission was often one of considerable anxiety.

What the commissioners decided

The commissioners had considerable power. They determined which claims to common rights were legally valid and which were not. Customary rights that had been exercised for generations but never formally recorded were particularly vulnerable. A family that had grazed cattle on the common for a hundred years but had no documentary proof of that right could find itself with nothing.

Those whose claims were accepted received a consolidated allotment of land, but the allotment came with obligations. They were required to fence or hedge their new holding within a specified period, at their own expense. For a small landowner, this cost could be ruinous. Fencing an allotment of several acres required materials, labour, and capital that many simply didn’t have.

The result was a wave of distressed sales in the years following enclosure, as smallholders sold out to larger neighbours who could absorb the costs.

The commissioners also laid out new roads. The straight-edged roads that cut across the Midlands countryside at right angles to each other, quite different in character from the winding lanes of pre-enclosure England, are often enclosure roads, imposed by commissioners who valued efficiency.

Finding the records

For local historians, the most important enclosure documents are the Award and the accompanying map.

Enclosure Awards are formal legal documents, typically written on vellum in a clear hand. They list every claimant, every allotment, every road, every drain, and every condition imposed by the commissioners. They are extraordinarily detailed and, once you know how to read them, remarkably vivid: you can see exactly who received what, trace which large landowners expanded their holdings at the expense of smaller neighbours, and identify the cottagers and squatters who received nothing at all.

Enclosure maps — usually large, coloured, and drawn to a high standard — show the parish at the moment of enclosure, with new allotments outlined and numbered to correspond with the Award. They are among the most beautiful documents in any county archive.

Both documents are typically held at the county record office for the county in which the parish falls. Copies of awards were also deposited with the clerk of the peace, and some are held at The National Archives in the series MAF 1. The Enclosure Maps database at the Historical England website provides a searchable list of surviving enclosure maps across England.

The human cost in the records

The Enclosure Award tells you the legal outcome. The human cost shows up elsewhere.

Poor law records are the most direct evidence of what enclosure meant for the rural poor. The vestry minutes of an enclosed parish frequently show a spike in applications for poor relief in the decade after enclosure: families who had supplemented a marginal income with common rights now applying to the parish for support. Settlement examinations — the formal questioning of paupers about their places of origin, used to determine which parish was responsible for their relief — sometimes contain explicit references to the loss of common rights as the cause of destitution.

Local newspapers occasionally recorded the protests that surrounded enclosure; petitions, confrontations with commissioners, the pulling down of newly planted fences. These are rare, because most of the people affected had no access to the press and no means of making their grievances public in any lasting way. But they exist, and when they surface they are remarkable.

The poet John Clare, a Northamptonshire labourer’s son who watched the enclosure of his parish of Helpston in the 1810s, left a different kind of evidence: verse that mourns the lost landscape with a specificity and an anguish that no official document captures. Clare is not a local historian’s source in any conventional sense. But his work is a reminder that behind every Enclosure Award is a community of people for whom the commissioners’ neat allotments represented the end of a way of life.

The records tell us what was taken. The poetry tells us what it felt like to lose it.