Enclosure fenced commons and erased customary rights
In English land law, enclosure meant taking waste or common land into private bounds and stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access. Owners preached agricultural efficiency and rising land values; villagers answered with riots that historians rank as the leading form of protest from the 1530s to the 1640s.
After conquering England in 1066, William I divided it among some 180 barons as tenants in chief, yet promised to keep Edward the Confessor's laws, so ordinary people held on to ancient customs. A typical manor mixed the lord's demesne with tenant land scattered in narrow strips, and tenants enjoyed rights to pasture animals, turn pigs into woods or gather wood. Waste land, often slivers under a yard wide on cliff edges or awkward borders, belonged to no one and was worked by the landless.
The open fields ran in a broad band from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire across the Midlands to south central England, while parts of Essex and Kent kept small Celtic enclosed fields and much of the west was enclosed early. Villages rotated three fields: spring barley or oats, autumn wheat or rye, and a fallow field where livestock grazed stubble and manured it. After harvest the land turned common. Laxton in Nottinghamshire still farms this way.
The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century gutted the population, drove wages and prices up and left land abandoned, speeding feudalism's decline. Enclosure could happen by an owner carving out closes, by neighbours agreeing to enclose a whole parish, or by act of Parliament; from 1836 a written agreement signed by everyone would also do. If one person bought up every strip, the common rights simply lapsed for lack of anyone to use them.
Landlords argued that enclosure let them farm better, and it did enable new methods such as the Norfolk four-course rotation of wheat, turnips, barley and clover with ryegrass, which fed livestock through winter and cut fallow time. Such crops were impractical when anyone's animals could roam the open fields. The price was that strips once shared became hedged fields reserved for single owners and their tenants.
Source: Enclosure
