Enclosure

Enclosure is usually taught as an eighteenth-century English event with a date on it. It was a process with a beginning, a middle, and no end yet. The rest of this part stands on it, so the mechanics matter more than the mood.

The mechanics are three moves, and they repeat wherever shared land becomes a private asset: change what the land is for, take the people off it, and give it a price per acre.

The land before the fence

Before enclosure, most English land was held in common. A village had around it great ploughed fields, usually three, tilled on a rotation in which each field lay fallow one year in three, during which it was open to all holders. The fields were under common ploughing, each holder supplying oxen, two per virgate of thirty acres and eight the normal number to a plough. The original holding of lands was by tribes or clans, a collective holding with no personal proprietorship.

That is the system recorded by Donald McDonald in Agricultural Writers (1908) at pages 80 to 84, the survey this course draws its medieval English material from. Two things are worth noticing. The rotation traded one year in three for soil that never needed a purchased input, and the rules governing ploughing, oxen and grazing were made by the people doing the work. It was not romantic. It was a commons with an operating manual.

The three moves

Change what the land is for. The enclosure movement was driven by the demand for English wool. Large owners "inclosed immense tracts of common land and evict cultivating tenants and small squatters, substituting pasturage for tillage." A field that fed forty households became a pasture that fed one flock.

Take the people off it. The tenants and the small squatters were evicted, and the evictions produced rebellions, one around Jack Cade's rising about 1450, and another after the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Be exact about who was removed: not only the substantial tenants but the small squatters, the households with a hut, a pig and a patch, who appear in the record mostly as the people whose removal needed no paperwork.

Give it a price. Once a parcel holds one use inside one boundary it can be valued per acre, mortgaged and sold. That step makes the first two permanent, because the land can then change hands without the people on it changing anything.

A witness inside the mechanism

Gabriel Plattes, writing about 1640, watched the transfer at the scale of a manure heap. As McDonald reproduces him, the land is impoverished by "carrying the sheep from the commons with their full bellies into the folds, whereby the common ground is impoverished to enrich the other."

Night after night the flock grazes the common and is folded on the private ground. Fertility walks out of the shared land into the enclosed land under a rule nobody broke, which is how most enclosures are completed: not by a fence, but by a daily transfer everyone can see and nobody can call theft.

What it did to the people who worked it

The best before-picture is in the first English practical husbandry book. John Fitzherbert, in the Boke of Husbandrye of 1523, describes a yeoman who "existed on the produce of his land" and generally fed his labourers at his own board. A yeoman with land of his own was "a very independent man," living plainly and working hard with his wife and children, "little raised above common labourers except that they were freemen."

Keep the last clause. The difference between the yeoman and the labourer was not the work but the ownership of the ground, and the word the source uses for that difference is freedom. What enclosure removed was that class as the normal condition of a farming household. The commoner with a right to graze became a labourer with a wage, and a wage buys food the wage-earner no longer grows. Enclosure did not only take land. It created the wage, and with it the dependence a wage is paid inside of.

Land as a commodity, and the oldest objection

Not one of the Roman farm writers treats land as a portfolio asset. Cato, on buying a farm, lists good climate, strong soil, water, a road or a river and a market town nearby, then two tests that are still the right ones: "Choose a place which has not often changed ownership, one which is sold unwillingly," and "it is better to buy from a man who has farmed successfully and built well." He adds a ratio for judging whether a farm is being run or merely owned: "Know that with a farm, as with a man, however productive it may be, if it has the spending habit, not much will be left over."

The present enclosure

It did not stop in 1700, and it did not stop in England. Of about 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land worldwide, one per cent of farms cover seventy per cent of the land area, while forty per cent of farms are crowded onto three per cent of farmland. About 1.5 billion of the world's 8.3 billion people are landless rural workers, and most hungry people live in rural areas. After the 2008 financial crisis, financial capital turned to land en masse, which the movements call the global land grab.

Locally the process runs through the price. The USDA's Land Values 2025 Summary reports West Virginia farm real estate, land plus buildings, at $3,520 an acre, up from $2,820 in 2021. That figure could not be opened from the NASS file on this machine, so treat it as reported and check it before you bid. The direction is not in doubt: land here has been repriced as an asset, and a young household is now bidding against a portfolio. The permaculture podcast that prompted this course states the diagnosis accurately, that land is treated as an investment rather than a living system and that young people cannot afford a holding. It then prescribes individual purchase, with land framed as a retirement asset and an equity builder. The disease is named correctly and the medicine is a dose of it.

Why this is the foundation

Tenure decides who farms and how sustainably. A holder with secure long-term rights can plant perennials, terrace a slope and build soil over a decade, because the returns are theirs. A tenant on a short term is being rational when they mine the ground. You cannot design a food forest on land you might lose.

So the order of this part is not arbitrary. The certification economy sells knowledge about land the buyer cannot afford. The land access crisis is the same enclosure at household scale. The influencer economy is what a person does to earn a living from ground they cannot buy. And the stopping rule is the one thing enclosure cannot do, which is stop.