'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

Freedom to Roam campaigns, in particular, stress how the countryside remains an exclusive commodity where there should instead exist the universal freedom to enjoy a landscape that, in cultural terms, ought to be viewed as a common inheritance. Reclaim the Streets refer to the 'privatisation of public space' such as road schemes, business 'parks' and shopping developments that can result in the disintegration of community.

The commodification of habitat is viewed as part of a social conditioning process that tacitly excludes people from their own environment, leaving little other option but to stay indoors or pay for the consumption of spatial experiences. This, as we shall see, echoes the social and cultural changes that occurred after the countryside enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This deliberate political and ideological programme was aimed at controlling an otherwise independent peasantry, to the point where the feeling of space and the expression of freedom of movement in the common fields was aggressively terminated.

Some artists and writers in the first three decades of the nineteenth century-in particular John Clare and Peter DeWint-celebrated and attempted to uphold the physical and visual nature of the common field landscape, its way of life and the social and psychological freedoms it could offer even to the lowest of classes. They responded to the loss of this space and freedom by emphasising these very qualities in their words about, and pictures of the common field landscape. In doing so, they were going against the ideological and cultural grain advocated by the pro-enclosure landowning classes. As such, they have provided us with an historical and cultural consciousness that can inform contemporary issues and debates on the freedom to roam and on social exclusion at work in the privatised countryside.

The habitat of the common field landscape

For a commoner in the unenclosed English countryside, a spacious horizon could represent more than just an image of liberty. According to J. L. and Barbara Hammond (1911), a parish that farmed its land under the common field system used 'three kinds of land ... and the three were intimately connected with each other. There were (i) the arable fields, (2) the common meadowland, and (3) the common or waste' (Hammond & Hammond, 1911: 121). All three kinds of land were held, organised, distributed and farmed 'in common' amongst the inhabitants of a parish. Theoretically, the terms Open' and 'common' both need to be defined in effectively describing the landscape we are referring to here. The term Open' related specifically to the physical and visual aspect of this landscape: it was the openness and the expanse of this landscape that was its most striking feature.

Open arable fields could be up to 2000 acres in size, and would generally lack any of the topographical features or details that we traditionally associate with the English countryside today, such as hedgerows or even trees. The contemporary onlooker frequently remarked on the emptiness of this landscape. One pro-enclosure commentator typically complained that the 'wide fields' of the unenclosed landscape 'strained and tortured the sight'.2 Such fields were also open in a social sense, in that everyone in an open-field parish had some potential access to the use of the land. Hence they were also 'common' fields, held and farmed 'in common'. In principle at least, everyone had a right to some land, to either grow crops or to use for grazing. The word 'common' also applied to the uncultivated common or waste-land in a parish, which was again held in common and organised by 'common right'.