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

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