'A spacious horizon is an image of liberty': Artistic and literary representations of space and freedom in the English common field landscape in the face of Parliamentary Enclosure, 1810-1830

Capital & Class, Winter 2004 by Waites, Ian

This article explores artistic representations and responses to the Parliamentary Enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the literary work of John Clare and the paintings of Peter DeWint in depth. It highlights the competing cultural and political agendas of the time, the cultural meanings that common land and the rights of access to it held for common people, and the way the privatisation of common land dramatically affected their cultural lives. The article then draws some comparisons between the cultural politics of land and space from this period, and contemporary urban, spatial political movements such as Reclaim the Streets, in order to highlight its continued urgency and vitality.

Introduction: The philosophical and ideological context

In The Guardian of May 6 2004, an article by Patrick Barkham reported, 'Madonna stands her ground in test case against ramblers'. The pop star Madonna had brought a legal test case against the Countryside Agency, citing her right to privacy against the public's right to roam. Referred to in court as Mrs G. Ritchie, Madonna sought to prevent twelve areas in her 1,200-acre Ashcombe estate, which includes ancient chalk downland and a historic Quaker burial ground, from being designated as Open country' by the Countryside Agency. Jon Gambles of the Ramblers Association said 'You're talking about open country. On this particular estate there are some excellent wild land and combes. We think a lot qualify under the Countryside and Rights of Way [CROW] Act.' Barkham reported that almost eight per cent of England and Wales has been provisionally mapped by the agency as open country. Once other appeals have been heard, the agency will produce a definitive map of open countryside.

This story provides an example, if one were needed, of the contemporary social and cultural consequences of the private ownership of land and the restriction of its use. In opposition to this, cultural politics often expresses a politics of space and nature. From the Ramblers Association to various aspects of the ecological movement; from the politics of land ownership and reform in the developing world, to the more urban spatial-political movements such as Reclaim the Streets, a cultural politics of space is an urgent question. In this article, I want to explore an early version of this cultural politics of space, which occurred during the Parliamentary Enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I want to examine the ways in which the political and ideological programme to privatise areas of common land impacted upon people's cultural lives, and how certain artists and writers responded to this. The severity of these Acts is brought home when we realise that today, only eight per cent of land is being brought back into common usage and this is presented as progress! This article can be seen as something of a case study in a wider discussion of the relationship between politics and cultural space, and the politics of artistic representation.

The statement 'A spacious horizon is an image of liberty' comes from a perhaps unlikely source in the context of this essay, in that it was written by Joseph Addison, and is taken from the periodical he helped to found, The Spectator (Addison, 1712). In his book Landscape and Western Art, Malcolm Andrews elaborates on the importance of Addison's statement in relation to our understanding of the English landscape, by asserting that it 'carries force in two senses: in terms of sheer spatial geography it conveys the sense of expansive freedom to roam; it also suggests that the mind is liberated by the apparent absences of territorial boundaries inscribed on that geographical space' (Andrews, 1999: 156).

It also carries force in a third sense that Andrews does not explicitly acknowledge. Given Andrews's interpretation, Addison must have had the common field landscape in mind when making this statement, at a time when this type of landscape was the norm, particularly across lowland England. Early in the eighteenth century, the social and cultural establishment of the time clearly viewed the unenclosed, common field landscape as a largely unproblematic norm, and even as something to be celebrated aesthetically.1 This, however, was to change within Addison's lifetime, as his class and milieu began to carry out a radical reorganisation and appropriation of the common field landscape, through a legal and political process now referred to as Parliamentary Enclosure.

Increasingly throughout the eighteenth century, and as part of a more general, 'Enlightenment' sense of improvement and progress, the countryside began to be thought of more in terms of property; as an economic and agricultural resource that had to change or be 'improved' in order to properly contribute to what was seen as the necessary progress of mankind. It is this notion of 'improvement' that led eighteenth-century man to turn his eye specifically towards the ancient (and therefore, in 'enlightened' terms, outmoded) common field system, and ultimately to have designs upon it. John Locke's work in the late seventeenth century played a decisive part in determining the course of improvement and progress in eighteenth-century Britain.