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The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 May 2010

Donald N. McCloskey
Donald N. McCloskey
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

In 1700 much of the land of England was farmed under the ancient system of open fields. With its three great fields planted in a communally regulated rotation of crops, its common meadows and wastes, and its mixture of holdings in hundreds of strips less than acre each, this apparently inefficient system had characterized the agriculture of northern and eastern Europe for centuries. In England it had never been universal and had from an early date been subject to erosion at the edges, giving way by agreement among tenants and by compulsion from landlords to compact enclosure. Yet in 1700 a broad swath of England from the North Sea across the Midlands to the Channel exhibited the system in a more or less complete form. A century and a half later, 5,000-odd acts of Parliament and at least an equal number of voluntary agreements had swept it away, transforming numerous and vague rights of use to open fields, commons, and waste into unambiguous rights of ownership to enclosed plots, free of village direction. The enclosure movement, particularly its climax in the sixty years of intense parliamentary activity after 1760, has long been among the dozen or so central concerns of British economic and social historians, a concern warranted by the importance of the event: through the statistical haze one can discern that something on the order of half the agricultural land of England was enclosed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Type
Papers Presented at the Thirty-first Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 1972 , pp. 15 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1972

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References

The present paper is a preface to a preface: it is a condensation of a considerably longer paper, available on request, which is in turn the beginning of an extended project of research. I would value comments on it. The longer paper examines the argument here in more detail, particularly on points of logic. I have inflicted earlier versions on an embarrassingly large number of my colleagues, learning a great deal from each. I would like to thank, therefore, without implicating them in the errors that remain, the members of the seminars in economic history at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of British Columbia, Carleton University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana, Northwestern University, Stanford University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Washington.

1 One of the chief tasks of scholarship on the open fields has been to document the variety and flexibility of the system. Nothing in the argument that follows, however, depends on the oversimple characterization used here.

2 The estimate excludes Wales. An estimate of English agricultural land of roughly 24 million acres can be inferred from the contemporary estimates (including arable, meadow, pasture, and woods) quoted in Ernie, Lord (R. E. Prothero), English Farming Past and Present, 6th ed., a reprint of the 5th edition with additional introductions by Fussell, G. E. and McGregor, O. R. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 503.Google ScholarThe area enclosed by parliamentary act, 6 million acres, is the estimate of Clifford, F., A History of Private Bill Legislation, I (London, 1885), 495.Google Scholar The area enclosed by private agreement, 8 million acres, is an estimate or, more candidly, a guess by Slater, Gilbert in a review of the Hammonds' The Village Labourer in The Sociological Review, V (Jan., 1912), 63 ff.Google Scholar

3 J. L., and Hammond, Barbara, The Village Labourer, reprint of the 4th ed. (1927) (London: British Publishers Guild, 1948), I, p. 19.Google Scholar

4 Readers of Coase's, R. H. important article, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law and Economics, III (1960), 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, will recognize this as an application of his argument.

5 Vinogradoff, P., Villainage in England (Oxford, 1892), p. 254.Google Scholar

6 Maitland, F. W., Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897), p. 337.Google Scholar Compare Ernle, English Farming Past and Present, p. 25; Lipson, E., The Economic History of England, I (London: Black, 1915), p. 65 ffGoogle Scholar; and Homans, George C., English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, p. 235 ff, argues that this administrative convenience was important. He briefly recognizes the difficulty that subsequent exchanges would transform the system, but dismisses it by appeal to the continuing strength of “the communal principle with its equalizing tendency.”

8 The reasoning here is somewhat naive, leaving to one side as it does the question of how the shift from unanimity to majority will affect the strategic behavior of the villagers in casting their votes, but it is nonetheless suggestive. It depends on a binomial model of the probability of ayes and nays. If the fraction of recalcitrants is as low as 15 percent among the population of voters, under the rule of unanimity villages of ten voters will on average vote to enclose 27 percent of the time they are presented with the choice, but villages of twenty voters only 7 percent of the time. On the other hand, under the rule of a four-fifths majority the ten-voter villages will achieve enclosure 82 percent of the time, and the twenty-voter villages 93 percent of the time.

9 Ashton, T.S., An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1955), p. 41 ffGoogle Scholar, gives his argument. Chambers and Mingay are among those who disagree with Ashton. See Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution 1750–1880 (London: Batsford, 1966), p. 82 ff.Google Scholar

10 Martin, J. M., “The Cost of Parliamentary Enclosure in Warwickshire,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal, IX (1964), reprinted in Jones, E. L. (ed.), Agriculture and Economic Growth in England 1650–1815 (London: Methuen, 1967).Google Scholar

11 Tate, W. E., Nottinghamshire Parliamentary Enclosure, Vol. V of the Record Series of the Thoroton Society (Nottingham: Thoroton Society, 1935).Google Scholar Compare Martin, “The Cost of Parliamentary Enclosure,” in Jones, Agriculture, p. 135: an interval of one year during the early enclosures in Warwickshire widened to four or five by the end of the century.

12 This and other costs of delay are neglected in studies of the costs of enclosure. The incentive to overwork land soon to become another's could be quite expensive. With yields of, say, 2½ quarters of wheat an acre and a price of £2 a quarter, a loss from this source of as little as, say, one-fifth of the normal yield for one year after the enclosure would add £1 an acre to the other costs (which Martin, “The Cost of Parliamentary Enclosure,” reckons at something over £2 an acre before the inflation of the Napoleonic Wars).

13 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 218.Google Scholar

14 “Other prices” are meant here to stand as a rough proxy for the costs of enclosure. The model of investment used here is a knife-edge one, because it supposes that any excess of benefits over costs, however small, will prompt an enclosure. A more realistic model would admit that large excesses are more potent than small ones. If this emendation proves its worth in the statistical work it will imply another: since £1000 of benefit net of cost is the same amount in real terms as £2000 of benefit net of cost if the general price level has doubled between the two, the benefit itself will have to be deflated by the general price level.

15 In this form the calculation has a long history. See Arthur Young, Agricultural Survey of Lincolnshire (1799), pp. 77, 83; Slater, Gilbert, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (London: Constable, 1907); p. 262 ffGoogle Scholar; Tate, W. E., “The Cost of Parliamentary Enclosure in England (With Special Reference to the Country of Oxford),” Economic History Review, 2d ser., V (1953), 265Google Scholar; and, most recently, Mingay, G. E., English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 183.Google Scholar