Re; 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)

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

"The links with the Industrial Revolution are again important, but not as 
the replacement of one 'order' by another.  It is true that many of the 
landless became, often with little choice, the working class of the new 
industrial towns ....  But the growth of the industrial working-class must 
be related also, and perhaps primarily, to the growth of population ...." 
(p. 97)

Cf. ...

"'How can Yese dwell thah' closely together, Day upon Day, without growing 
Murderous?'" (M&D, Ch. 3, 14)

As well as Mason's "Contract between the City and oneself" (ibid.).  But 
back to Williams  ...

   "The crisis of poverty ... was a result of this social and economic
process as a whole, and cannot be explained at the fall of one order and the 
institution of another.  The essential connections between town and country 
... reached a new, more explicit and finally critical stage....  By the late 
eighteenth century we can properly speak of an organised capitalist society, 
in which what happened to the market, anywhere, whether in industrial or 
agricultural production, worked its way through to town and country alike, 
as parts of a single crisis.
   "Within these developments, violent alterations of conditions
occurred ....
   "At a certain stage, though, enclosure came to be isolated as a main 
cause... by most acts of enclosure the poor had been injured ...." (pp. 
97-9)

   "Most records of loss come from these marginal lands: the commons and 
heaths.  But parliamentary enclosure did not operate on them.  Indeed we 
cannot understand the social consequences of enclosure unless we distinguish 
between two fundamentally different processes: the enclosure of 'wastes' ... 
and the enclosure of open arable fields ....  What was being suppressed on 
the wastes was a marginal independence, of cottagers, squatters, isolated 
settlers in mainly uncultivated land.  What was being suppressed in the 
open-field villages must have been a very different kind of community: the 
close nucleated villages of an old arable economy.... But what kind of 
social order really existed, in the old open-field village?  We must be 
careful not to confuse the techniques of production--the open-field 
strips--with society.... it is not ... so dissimilar from the ordinary 
social structure of mature rural capitalism ....  There are, in effect, 
three classes: the gentry; the small entrepreneurs; and the unpropertied 
poor.  The inequalities of condition which the village contains and supports 
are profound, and nobody, by any exercise of sentiment, can convert it into 
a 'rural democracy' or, absurdly, a commune....

http://www.montypython.net/cgi-bin/dl2/grail.cgi?colectiv.wav

http://www.montypython.net/grailmm.php#Scene 3

The social structure which will be completed after enclosure is already 
basically outlined." (pp. 101-2)

   "To what extent, then, was there ever a genuine community, in such 
villages, in spite of the economic and social inequalities?  It is very 
difficult to say ...." (p. 103)

   "But consider, directly, their social effect.  Some of them had been 
there for centuries, visible triumphs over the ruin and labour of
others.  But the extraordinary phase of extension, rebuilding and
enlarging, which occurred in the eighteenth century, represents a
spectacular increase in the rate of exploitation: a good deal of it, of 
course, the profit of trade and of colonial exploitation; much of it, 
however, the higher surplus value of a new and more efficient mode of 
production.  It is fashionable to admire these extraordinarily numerous 
houses: the extended manors, the neo-classical mansions, that lie so close 
in rural Britain.... But stand at any point and look at that land....  Think 
it through as labour and see how long and how systematic the exploitation 
and seizure must have been, to rear that many houses, on that scale....  
What these 'great' houses do is to break the scale, by an act of will 
corresponding to their real and systematic exploitation of others.... a 
visible stamping of power, of displayed wealth and command: a social 
disproportion which was meant to impress and overawe.  Much of the real 
profit of a more modern agriculture went not into productive investment but 
into that explicit social declaration: a mutually competitive but still 
uniform exposition, at every turn, of an established and commanding class 
power." (pp. 105-6)

To continue for a moment from Pynchon ...

"'Fences, Hedges, Ditches ordinary and Ha-Ha Style, all to be laid out...I 
could have stay'd home and had m'self a fine Living...?'
   "'They did mention a Background in Land-Surveying,' Mason in some 
Surprize, 'but, but that's it?  Hedges?  Ha-Has?'
   "'Well, actually the Durham Ha-Ha boom subsided a bit after Lord
Lambton fell into his, curs'd it, had it fill'd in with coal-spoil.'" (M&D, 
Ch. 3, p. 17)

Hm ... a few things to mention on this passage, but I'll farm them out to 
another post.  Back to Williams ...

   "But to turn for a moment elsewhere: to the villages that escaped
their [!] immediate presence; to the edges, the old commons still preserved 
in place-names; to the hamlets where control was remote.  It can make some 
difference, as you go about every day, to be out of sight of that explicit 
command....
    "In some places still, an effective community, of a local kind, can 
survive ... can succeed in being neighbours first and social classes only 
second.  This must never be idealised ...  But in many intervals, many 
periods of settlement, there is a kindness, a mutuality, that still manages 
to flow....  Where the pressure of a system is great and is increasing, it 
matters to find a breathing-space, a fortunate distance, from the immediate 
and visible controls.  What was drastically reduced, by enclosures, was just 
such a breathing space, a marginal day-to-day independence ....  It is right 
to mourn that loss but we must also look at it plainly.  What happened was 
not so much 'enclosure'--the method--but the more visible establishment of a 
long-developing system, which had taken, and was to take, several other 
forms.  The many miles of new fences and walls ... were the formal 
declaration of where the power now lay.  The economic system of landlord, 
tenant and labourer, which had been extending its hold since the sixteenth 
century, was now in explicit and assertive control.  Community, to survive, 
had to change its terms." (pp. 106-7)

And maybe note those last couple of pages of Mason & Dixon?  But not quite 
yet, of course ...

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