'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

Artistic and literary representations of space and freedom in the English common field landscape, 1810-1830

A particularly striking feature of the common field landscape was the numerous rights of way that it afforded through a network of paths and tracks, sometimes created in an adhoc manner, sometimes planned, which covered the large, open and predominantly featureless fields. The open fields and their rights of way provided the infrastructure for a sense of space and freedom that seems quite alien to us today, especially across lowland arable fields, and even within the tourist areas of the northern uplands or the downland of southern Britain, where issues of access and freedom to roam remain contentious to this day.

Rights of way in the common fields can be seen in numerous depictions of the landscape: for instance, in George Lambert's Hilly Landscape with Cornfield of 1733 (Tate Gallery), and John Sell Cotman's watercolours oiMousehold Heath, Norwich of 1809-10 (Norwich Castle Museum). The importance of such paths, both as part of a network that enabled movement across the large open fields and, more particularly, in that they represented an unrestricted, communal sense of right of way across a parish, is clearly indicated in all of these depictions by the diligent manner in which these paths appeared to be kept clear. That they were kept as such-winding, for instance, through the cornfield in Lambert's painting in a very ad-hoc manner-is startling to modern eyes. The seemingly arbitrary nature of these paths is deceptive, given the stringent manner in which they were kept.

What is even more difficult to evaluate in today's terms, when looking at Cotman's heathland, is the sense of freedom these paths would have afforded to everyone within that parish and beyond. These features only serve to throw into relief the sense of loss and confinement that would have been felt after enclosure. John Clare, in his poem The Mores, deliberately puts this in blunt terms: 'these paths are stopt' (in Summerfield, 1990).

The fundamental essence of the beauty of the common fields then, lay in a sense of spaciousness and freedom that, to Clare's contemporaries, went even beyond the alreadyabundant network of paths that covered them. Joseph Gutteridge, a ribbon-weaver from Coventry, wrote of the open common fields of his youth in the 18205 as being 'a veritable paradise. I would roam over them without let or hindrance' (Gutteridge 1893: 5). Thomas Miller came from a similar literary-artisan background to Gutteridge's. His book Our Old Town, first published in 1857, recounts his memories of his early life during the first two decades of the nineteenth century in Gainsborough, a small market town in Lincolnshire. Miller was tacitly in favour of the open landscape, if his vivid and often sentimental descriptions of the surrounding open fields, commons and wastes are anything to go by. He particularly refers to the landscape of his boyhood as 'flower-covered meadows and wide green open marshes that stretched far away in every direction' (Miller 1857: 14).