Inclosure

in popular phrase, a fenced field or plot of ground. In English law, inclosure acts are statutes of Parliament providing for the division and allotment of commons and waste lands to private, usually adjoining, owners. In the history of the sixteenth century, the term has reference to a very general fencing of large fields for sheep pasture. The fifteenth century is regarded as a period of comfort for the English peasantry. The peasantry had escaped from the enforced labor of serfdom; food was plentiful; good woolen clothing and stout leather shoes were within the reach of the common people. Landlords let their acres in small holdings. It was measurably true that "every rood maintained its man," and maintained him in the condition of simple happiness described by Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village.

An industrial change came over England, however. The very welfare of the European peasantry conferred ability to buy clothing; the market for woolens stimulated the weaving industry of Flanders; Flemish merchants visited the wool fairs and paid high prices for wool. The English landlord became correspondingly desirous to raise wool. He refused to renew the leases of the small tenants and turned them adrift that he might form large inclosures for sheep pastures. Owners of small fields were bought out and driven out. Commons were inclosed for private use. The sturdy villagers, no longer permitted to let and not needed to herd, had nothing for it but to tramp. Thousands of hamlets were depopulated. The process went on for the better part of a century--until the growth of English manufactures and the consequently increased profit of wheat raising brought about a return to agriculture. This return to farming may be said to have been accomplished by 1640.

A careless and unsatiable cormorant may compass about and inclose many thousand acres within one pale, and the husbandmen be thrust out of their own; or else by fraud, or violent oppression, or by wrongs and injuries, they be so worried that they be compelled to sell. . . . They (the landlords) throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church, to be made a sheep-house.--Sir Thomas Moore.