In this chapter, we jump forward to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, to provide a historical account of the early enclosures of rural (and urban) commons, and resistance to this enclosure via a Peasants’ Revolt, sporadic riots and a fictional Utopia. In this chapter, the notion of utopia is explored and defined through historic example and theory. It is used to further explore the prefigurative politics of forests, and some of the history behind the experimental communities and protest camps considered in later chapters.

This chapter begins with a brief exploration of the manorial system that emerged around the time of the Norman Conquest and the changes that were wrought to this system by the population shifts caused by the Black Death. From here, the chapter explores some of the key rebellions that occurred in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, including the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the early urban enclosure riots and the radical theology that informed these uprisings. This exploration of radical theology then leads to a consideration of Thomas More's Utopia, a literary work of both fiction and socio-political satire that critiqued the times and portrayed a place (or rather ‘no place’) where enclosure was unthinkable and communal ownership of property the norm. More's utopian thought experiment then gives way, in Chapter 4, to Kett's Rebellion, the English Civil Wars, the Levellers and the True Levellers (or Diggers) – and Gerrard Winstanley's concrete utopian experiment. Through these various incidents of both theory and action, this chapter tracks the history to what has been called England's second or ‘shadow’ revolution1 – one that focused on the rejection of enclosure, claims to communal property rights, and radical economic equality in lieu of Cromwell's bourgeois republic that was eventually realised.

The Manorial System and the Black Death

As Chapter 2 depicts, early ‘Anglo-Saxon settlements were relatively small, and surrounded by wood and waste’. These settlements of ‘individual free peasant landholders’ came to symbolise a particular conception of pre-Norman English life that was subsequently held up in contrast to the strictures of the so-called ‘Norman Yoke’ – a symbolic concept that came to play a powerful role in the rebellions of later centuries. Historians, however, dispute this idealised version of English history and point out that ‘the general drift of peasant life in [the] centuries before the Norman Conquest was from freedom to servitude’.