The second enclosure movement.
| Author | Boyle, James |
| Position | Features - Critical essay |
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine. The poor and wretched don't escape If they conspire the law to break; This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back. (Anonymous) This poem is one of the pithiest condemnations of the English enclosure movement, the process of fencing off common land and turning it into private property. In a few lines, the poem manages to criticise double standards, expose the artificial and controversial nature of property rights, and take a slap at the legitimacy of state power. And it does this all with humour, without jargon, and in rhyming couplets. Academics (including this one) should take note. Like most of the criticisms of the enclosure movement, the poem depicts a world of rapacious, state-aided 'privatisation', a conversion into private property of something that had formerly been common property or, perhaps, had been outside of the property system altogether. Sir Thomas More went further, though he used sheep rather than geese to make his point. He argued that enclosure was not merely unjust in itself, but harmful in its consequences--a cause of economic inequality, crime, and social dislocation:
But yet this is not only the necessary cause of stealing. There is another, which, as I suppose, is proper and peculiar to you Englishmen alone. What is that, quoth the Cardinal? Forsooth my lord (quoth I) your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen ... leave no ground for tillage, they enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep-house ... Therefore that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own. (More, 1992) The enclosure movement continues to draw our attention. It offers irresistible ironies about the two-edged sword of 'respect for property', and lessons about the way in which the state defines and enforces property rights to promote controversial social goals. The most strident critics of the enclosure movement argue that it imposed devastating costs on one segment of society.
Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society was being disrupted. Desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defences of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves. Though this happened only in patches, the black spots threatened to melt into a uniform catastrophe. (Polanyi, 1957; see also Thompson, 1963) Some of these costs were brutally and relentlessly 'material'--for example, the conversion of crofters and freeholders into debt-peons, seasonal wage-labourers, or simply, as More argued in Utopia, and Polanyi argues 400 years later, into beggars and thieves. But other harms are harder to classify: the loss of a form of life; the relentless power of market logic to migrate to new areas, disrupting traditional social relationships and perhaps even views of the self or the relationship of human beings to the environment.
So much for the bad side of the enclosure movement. For many economic historians, everything I have said up to now is the worst kind of sentimental bunk, romanticising a form of life that was neither comfortable nor noble, and certainly not very egalitarian. The big point about the enclosure movement is that it worked; this innovation in property systems allowed an unparalleled expansion of productive possibilities (Ernle, 1961). By transferring inefficiently managed common land into the hands of a single owner, enclosure escaped the aptly named 'tragedy of the commons'. It gave incentives for large-scale investment, allowed control over exploitation, and, in general, ensured that resources could be put to their most efficient use. Before the enclosure movement, the feudal lord would not invest in drainage systems, sheep purchases, or crop rotation that might increase yields from the common--he knew all too well that the fruits of his labour could be appropriated by others.
The strong private...
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