'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

In his Two Treatises of Government (1690), Locke set up a general concept of liberal political theory which proved important in providing a political justification for the typically 'enlightened', practically progressive approach to Nature, and therefore for what was to come in relation to social and economic changes in agriculture during the eighteenth century.

For Locke, God had given the Earth to 'Mankind in common', but if man was to progress in this enlightened age, then what was once given in common could now be individually worked and improved. By working this land (cultivating it, and thereby taking it out of a 'natural' state), this labour then created a title or claim upon that land. Tacitly, the land became private property. As such, Locke's notion can be understood to have essentially provided a philosophical motive and vindication for enclosing and privatising the formerly communal open fields in the eighteenth century: 'It hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men' (Locke, 1993: 128). The common field landscape, therefore, fell out of favour with landowners at a time when new 'modern' forms of social and economic activity were emerging, stressing the primacy of the individual and a more pronounced individualism expressed through the acquisition of private property. In the predominantly rural society of much of England, the means to achieve this meant the enclosure or the 'privatisation' of common field agricultural land.

Locke's property theory provided the α-priorijustification for enclosure-the consequent division and appropriation of the open fields and commons by the ruling classes into discrete, private parcels of land, regardless of how the poorer commoner already 'hath mixed his Labour with' the natural 'common' state of the landscape [my italics].

Enclosure concerned itself not only with economic reorganisation or agricultural improvement: the process was also intended as a form of social control. According to the historians J. L. and Barbara Hammond, in an unenclosed, common field system 'the villagers lived their own lives and cultivated the soil on a basis of independence' (Hammond & Hammond, 1911: 147). It was this very independence that obsessively irked the establishment classes. In his book, A Six Months'Tour through the North of England, Arthur Young refers with typical outrage to a commoner who 'used to bask himself all day in the sun, holding a cow by a line to feed on the balk' (Young, 1771: 175).

He equates this to what he and many others saw as the social and moral evil inherent in the use of common land. What the commoner might understand as the social and economic independence to work as and when needed or desired, Young and his ilk saw only as the potential breeding of idleness, indolence and vice. Enclosure could effectively put a stop to this by taking away the common rights and the consequent means of independence that the common field system could afford.

One of the ways in which the enclosure process did this was to restrict movement across the newly privatised and enclosed fields, closing off the old paths, tracks and general rights of way that once crossed the open, common fields. Any sense of a 'spacious horizon' in the common field landscape, and the concurrent liberties it afforded, were aggressively curtailed. As the historian Jeanette Neeson sharply puts it, 'Enclosure had a terrible, but instructive visibility' (Neeson, 1984: 117). By the period we are concerned with here, enclosure had effectively suppressed the 'sense of expansive freedom to roam' by implementing physical, territorial and legal boundaries across the spatial geography of the common field landscape, creating the privatised countryside of limited access that we recognise today. Indeed, the issues raised by movements such as Freedom to Roam and Reclaim the Streets in the twentyfirst century still deal with the same notions of freedom and restriction of movement as those two hundred years ago.