Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s (original) (raw)

Abstract

For English landowners in the seventeenth century, the enclosure of common-use pastures, farms, and fields made good economic sense, as land was simply worth more enclosed than unenclosed. Once a property was hedged or fenced, it commanded higher rent, facilitated the selective breeding of livestock, enabled the quality of the land to be improved by such techniques as floating meadows and draining fens, and yielded increased profits from more intensive, flexible, and efficient arable farming. 1 Enclosure and the agricultural improvements that enclosure made possible were not universally welcomed however: in the eyes of the rest of the agrarian population, enclosing landlords were seen as acting in no one's interest but their own. The main victims of enclosure were the poor subsistence farmers whose survival was tied to the scattered strips of land they cultivated on the commons. As a result of enclosure, which eliminated common property rights and access to waste ground, entire villages were depopulated. Railing against enclosing landlords in a sermon delivered at Lutterworth and published in 1653, Leicestershire minister John Moore complained that they "care not how many Beggers they make, so themselves may be Gentlemen; nor how many poor they make, so themselves may be rich. I mean the unsociable, covetous, cruel broode of those wretches, that by their Inclosure do unpeople Towns, and uncorn fields." 2 Thus attacked from the pulpit, private enclosure had to be defended on both social and spiritual grounds: the promoters of improvement sought to establish that the movement served the common good and the nation as a whole, and they tried to show that the private landowner, by improving his soil, was also improving his soul. Drawing from selected Katherine Bootle Attie is a lecturer in literature at

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References (41)

  1. Austen, "A Preface to the Reader," in The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), sigs. 3r-5r, 5r. 22 Ibid.
  2. Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 25.
  3. Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 23.
  4. Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1657), p. 129.
  5. James Grantham Turner, "Austen, Ralph (c.1612-1676)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 2:979-80.
  6. Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), pp. 36-7.
  7. Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 36.
  8. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Re- naissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 15. 30
  9. Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1657), p. 191.
  10. Virgil, The Georgics, trans. L. P. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth UK: Pen- guin Books, 1982), book 1, line 145. 32 The phrase "Garden-state," deriving from Marvell's "The Garden" (pp. 112-4, line 57), "can implicitly oppose the garden state as a scene of cultiva- tion to the political state as one of disruptive ambition, violence, and waste; and it can also posit a virtually ecological reconstruction of the political state which desirably approximates the condition of the enclosed, cultivated gar- den" (Jonathan Crewe, "The Garden State: Marvell's Poetics of Enclosure," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994], pp. 270-89, 271). Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), p. 11.
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  12. Walter Blith, "The Epistle to the Ingenuous Reader," in The English Im- prover, or a New Survey of Husbandry. Discovering to the Kingdome, that Some Land, Both Arrable and Pasture, May Be Advanced Double or Treble; Other Land to a Five or Tenfold: and Some to a Twenty Fold Improvement: Yea, Some Now Not Worth above One, or Two Shillings, "Per" Acree, Be Made Worth Thirty, or Forty, if Not More. Clearly Demonstrated from Principles of Sound Reason, Ingenuity, and Late but Most Certaine Reall Experiences (London: J. Wright, 1649), sig. a2r; EEBO STC B3194. The nationalistic England-as-Eden anal- ogy was duly extended to the New World by travel literature and mercantile propaganda; Michael Drayton's ode "To the Virginian Voyage" (1619) accord- ingly celebrates the discovery of "Earth's onely Paradise" (The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, ed. David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen [1992; London: Penguin, 2005], pp. 431-3, 432, line 24). On agricultural improvement and the botanic garden as realizations of the Edenic vision in Britain and in the colonies, see Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Brit- ain, and the 'Improvement' of the World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), especially pp. 50-9. For a study of the new world environment and recovery narratives of paradise found, see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003).
  13. Austen, epistle dedicatory to Samuel Hartlib, in A Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653), sigs. 1r-3r, 2v.
  14. Silvanus Taylor, Common-Good: or, the Improvement of Commons, Forrests, and Chases, by Inclosure. Wherein the Advantage of the Poor, the Common Plenty of All, and the Increase and Preservation of Timber, with Other Things of Common Concernment, Are Considered (London: Francis Tyton, 1652), p. 6; EEBO STC T552.
  15. J[ohn] B[eale], Herefordshire Orchards, A Pattern For all England. Written in an Epistolary Address to "Samuel Hartlib" Esq. (London: printed by Roger Daniel, 1657), pp. 2-3; EEBO STC B1558. 38 Beale, p. 2.
  16. Taylor, p. 12.
  17. Austen, epistle dedicatory to Samuel Hartlib, sig. 2v. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid.
  18. Taylor, pp. 42, 46.
  19. Adam Moore, author's epistle to the reader in Bread for the Poor, and Advancement of the English Nation, Promised by Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Grounds of England (London: R. and W. Leybourn for Nicholas Bourn, 1653), sig. B[1]v; EEBO STC M2529. Moore evokes Isaiah 51:3 (King James Version): "For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody." 45 Adam Moore, author's epistle to the reader, sig. A2r. 46 Ibid.
  20. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 2.
  21. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, pp. 1, 2.
  22. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 2.
  23. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 3.
  24. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, pp. 2, 39.
  25. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 3, 4.
  26. Fussell, p. 21.
  27. On radical ideology, property relations, and competing notions of the common good during this period, see Loewenstein, "Digger Writing and Ru- ral Dissent in the English Revolution: Representing England as a Common Treasury," in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 74-88; and Geoff Ken- nedy, Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism: Radical Political Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
  28. Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousnes Budding forth, in Restoring the Whole Creation from the Bondage of the Curse. Or a Glimpse of the New Heaven, and New Earth, wherein Dwels Righteousnes. Giving an Alarm to Silence All that Preach or Speak from Hear-Say, or Imagination (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), p. 21; EEBO STC W3049. 56 Winstanley, The New Law, p. 4. 57 On this point see also Brace, p. 20; McRae, p. 126; Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 131; and Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Lon- don: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 346.
  29. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform: Or, True Magistracy Restored. Humbly Presented to "Oliver Cromwel", General of the Common- Wealths Army in England. And to All English-Men My Brethren Whether in Church-Fellowship, or Not in Church-Fellowship, Both Sorts Walking as They Conceive According to the Order of the Gospel: and from Them to All the Nations in the World. Wherein Is Declared, What Is Kingly Government, and What Is Commonwealths Government (London: printed by J. M. for the author, 1652), p. 12; EEBO STC W3045A.
  30. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, p. 30.
  31. Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, Concerning the Whole Creation, "Man- kinde". To Be Made Known to Every Man and Woman, after Seven Dispensa- tions and Seasons of Time Are Passed Over. According to the Counsell of God, Revealed to His "Servants" (London, 1648), p. 2; EEBO STC W3047. 61 Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, p. 2.
  32. Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, pp. 3, 4.
  33. Winstanley, The New Law, pp. 24-5.
  34. Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, p. 20.
  35. Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, p. 6.
  36. Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), book 4, line 133. Subsequent references to Paradise Lost are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by book and line number.
  37. Duncan, pp. 74-5.
  38. Virgil, 1.125-8.
  39. 69 On the easy permeability of Eden's boundaries with emphases different from my own, see Kent R. Lehnhof, "Scatology and the Sacred in Milton's Paradise Lost," ELR 37, 3 (2007): 429-49, 445; and Jeffrey S. Theis, "Milton's Principles of Architecture," ELR 35, 1 (2005): 102-22, 103. 70
  40. Richard Drayton, pp. 19-20.
  41. 71 My argument that Paradise Lost stages the abandonment of the hortus conclusus in favor of the paradise within sets my approach apart from that of Joanna Picciotto, who by contrast argues for "the poem's experimentalist commitment to extending the borders of paradise to include the world beyond it" (Joanna Picciotto, "Reforming the Garden: the Experimentalist Eden and Paradise Lost," ELH 72,1 [2005]: 23-78, 40). For a masterful new study of Baconian inquiry as original sin's purge in Paradise Lost and elsewhere, see Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010).