'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

Indeed, Clare's attachment to his native Helpston was almost transcendental. Emmonsails Heath, for example, is the local wasteland that Clare reputedly crossed as a boy, searching for the edge of the world (Tibbie & Tibbie, 1951). Such a notion is as astonishing in its long-lost mode of emotional attachment as the Suffolk commoner's exclamation that 'everybody in the world may cut rushes on the common'. After wandering across the heath to find the edge of the world as a child, Clare as a youth covered the same expansive, seemingly infinite open fields to vainly meet a sweetheart: 'I've ran the furlongs to thy door/ And thought the way as miles' (Tibbie & Tibbie, 1951: 133). Despite the apparent monotony and emptiness of the common field landscape that

the pro-enclosure propagandists noted, the sense of space and liberty that this landscape offered became intricate and indelible when experienced across a lifetime, and therefore its loss was devastating once the 'lawless law's enclosure came' and took it away (Summerfield, 1990).

When Clare exclaims that 'nature's wide and common sky Cheers everything that lives' (Summerfield, 1990), his personal aesthetic sensibility expresses an exact antithesis to the dominant rationalism that only saw the land as 'smiling'4 once closure had restrained and privatised the wide and common sky [my italics]. This particular sensibility is echoed in the work of Clare's contemporary, the landscape painter Peter DeWint, who for many years of his life was based in Lincoln and whose work most notably concentrated on the Lincolnshire landscape. A posthumous memoir of DeWint by his wife Harriet refers to the way that

at Lincoln and the neighbourhood (he) found new beauties and new subjects, and what a common-place observer would consider flat and unmeaning was in his eyes picturesque. The long extensive distances with their ever varying effects ... the cornfields and hayfields ... afforded him unceasing delight. (DeWint, 1900: 20)

Harriet DeWint's use of the phrase 'long extensive distances' correlates with our knowledge of what the open field system looked like. It also accords with John Clare's more literary sense of space and freedom when he describes, for instance, Helpston's open fields as 'plains that stretched ... far away'. In historical terms however, we should be careful in taking the description of'long, extensive distances' to mean that Harriet DeWint was directly referring to the unenclosed, common field landscape. Just as the writers cited above celebrated this landscape after it had been lost, by the time Peter DeWint's artistic career was beginning, circa 1815, most of Lincolnshire had already been enclosed, with only a few unenclosed parishes surviving.

Despite this, many of DeWint's paintings of Lincolnshire fields do appear to be depictions of common fields, and his work expresses a constant aesthetic preference for this type of landscape. A notable example of this preference is View Across the Holmes, Lincoln, of circa 1825 (Usher Gallery, Lincoln).