MDMD2: Enclosures

[Dave Monroe]

"'On the other hand, Surveyors are runnin' about numerous as Bed-bugs, and 
twice as cheap, with work enough for all certainly in Durham at present, 
Enclosures all over the County, and North Yorkshire,-- eeh!'"
(M&D, Ch. 3, p. 17)

>From Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), 
Ch. 10, "Enclosures, Commons and Communities," pp. 96-107 ...

   "We have considered several instances of the melancholy of 
eighteenth-century poems of country life, and we have seen ... their 
culmination in distress.  It is worth emphasizing these predominant feelings 
of loss and pain as we move to that common outline of the history of rural 
England, in which the campaign of parliamentary enclosures is seen as the 
destroyer of a traditional and settled rural
community.
   "... the idea of the enclosures, localised to just that period in which 
the Industrial Revolution was beginning, can shift our attention from the 
real history and become an element of that very powerful myth of modern 
England in which the transition from a rural to an industrial society is 
seen as a kind of fall, the true cause and origin of our social suffering 
and disorder.... the perpetual retrospect to an 'organic' or 'natural' 
society.  But it is a main source for that last projecting illusion in the 
crisis of our own time: that it is not capitalism which is injuring us, but 
the more isolable, more evident system of urban industrialization." (p. 96)

Contra ...

   "'You think like a Bircher,' Fallopian said.  'Good guys and bad guys.  
You never get to the underlying truth.  Sure he was against industrial 
capitalism.  So are we.  Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism?  
Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror.'
   "'Industrial anything,' hazarded Metzger.
   "'There you go,' nodded Fallopian.'" (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 51)]

But continuing from Williams ...

   "There is no reason to deny the critical importance of the period of 
parliamentary enclosures, from the second quarter of the eighteenth
century to the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  By nearly four 
thousand Acts, more than six million acres of land were appropriated, mainly 
by the politically dominant landowners: about a quarter of all cultivated 
acreage.  But it is necessary to see the essential continuity of this 
appropriation, both with earlier and with later phases.  It is necessary to 
stress, for example, how much of the country had already been enclosed, 
before this change of method in the mid-eighteenth century to a 
parliamentary act.  The process had been going on since at least the 
thirteenth century, and had reached a first peak in the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries.  Indeed in history it is continuous from the long 
process of conquest and seizure: the land gained by killing, by repression, 
by political bargains.
    "Again ... enclosure can never really be isolated from the mainstream of 
... those more general changes in property relationships which were all 
flowing in the same direction: an extension of cultivated land but also a 
concentration of ownership into the hands
of a minority.
    "The parliamentary procedure for enclosure made this process at once 
more public and more recorded....  In this period the area mainly affected 
was a belt from Yorkshire to Dorset, across the midland counties, and 
extending east to Norfolk [!]....  But large tracts elsewhere were already 
effectively enclosed: ... [including] the important cultivated areas of 
Lancashire, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Northumberland and Durham [!].  The 
social importance of enclosures is not then that they introduced a wholly 
new element in the social structure, but that in getting rid of the 
surviving open-field villages and common rights, in some of the most 
populous and prosperous parts of the country, they complemented and were 
indeed often caused by the general economic pressure on small owners and 
especially small tenants...." (pp. 96-7)

"What really happened was that in the economically dynamic areas a 
capitalist social system was pushed through to a position of dominance, by a 
form of legalised seizure enacted by representatives of the beneficiary 
class." (p. 98)

Okay, this is going to be a longish one, even for me.  To be continued ...

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp