Monoscapes - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 30

result, 2.75 million hectares of common land were enclosed, comprising
1.82 million hectares of open-field arable, and 0.93 million hectares of
'wastes'. To put this in perspective, there are about 18 million hectares of
agricultural land in the UK, of which just 4 million are currently under
arable farming, and about 0.5 million still under common land. 6
Historians have long documented the political and economic forces
driving these enclosures, the powerful rhetoric used to support the claims
for national progress, and the consequences for the wealthy and the poor.
At the time, agricultural writers were unanimous about the agricultural
benefits that derived from individual, as opposed to common, occupation
of land. Most ignored the social losses caused by enclosures, and magnif-
ied the economic waste of the common use of land - both arable and
'wastes'. In his famous topic English Farming, Lord Ernle records the views
of dozens of notable writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, including
Fitzherbert, Hartlib, Houghton, Lee, Moore, Norden, Taylor and Tusser,
all of whom considered enclosure 'lawful' and 'laudable', and the commons
wretched and wasteful. 7
The narrative of the time was uncompromising. Silvanous Taylor said:
'this poverty is due to God's displeasure at the idleness of the commoners'. From the
pulpit, the Reverend Joseph Lee opined that the commoners fostered
laziness, and Adam Moore said that the commons were overstocked, and
were 'pest houses of disease for cattle. Hither come the poor, the blinde, lame, tired, scabbed,
mangie, rotten, murrainous' . John Norden was equally one-sided, saying that
those who lived on wastes and commons were 'people given to little or no labour,
living very hardly with oaten brew and sour whey. . . as ignorant of any civil source of
life as the very savages among the infidels, in a manner which is lamentable and fit to be
reformed'. Despite these dominant views, it seems extraordinary that one
short piece of folklore verse should have persisted to this day, as it seems
to suggest a deeper truth: 'The law locks up the man or woman, Who steals the goose
from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose, Who steals the common from the
goose.'
Some writers did concede 'economic gain might involve social and moral loss' . 8
A few activists even defended the rights of commoners, and movements
for wider change arose, including those seeking to claim tracts of land for
the public at large. Jerrard Winstanley and friends tried to establish a new
common society in 1649 by settling on lands near Walton-on-Thames.
They interpreted the defeat of Charles I in the Civil War as implying new
rights for people to own their own land, and to use common resources.
But they were mistaken, and Lord Fairfax's soldiers burned their huts and
threw them off. Much later, William Cobbett, writing during his Rural Rides
of the 1820s, noted something important about poverty, landscape and
access to resources. Of the monoscape arable lands, he said: