The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 168

them of animal-tutors and river-mentors and stole their deep dream-
shelters. The great outdoors was fenced off and marked 'Trespassers
Will be Prosecuted.' Over the generations, as the outdoors shrank, the
indoor world enlarged in importance. 3
As Griffiths shows, enclosure, accompanied by a rapid replacement
of the commoners' polyculture with a landlord's monoculture, destroyed
much of what made the land delightful to children - the ancient trees
and unploughed dells, the ponds and rushy meadows, the woods, heath
and scrub - and banned them from what it failed to destroy. Destruc-
tion and exclusion have continued long beyond the nineteenth century.
So many fences are raised to shut us out that eventually they shut us in.
Enclosure, Griffiths notes, also terminated the long cycle of festivals
and carnivals through which people celebrated their marriage to the
land, when authority was subverted and mischief made. The places
where the festivals had been held were closed, fenced and policed.
In the early 1990s, I saw this excision performed with shocking
speed in Maasailand. I watched the warriors of the community with
which I worked perform their people's last ceremonies - last rites - as
the commons in which these had been held were privatized and wired
up. 4 This process of enclosure and closure shut the people out of their
land almost overnight, shattered their communities, dispersed their
peculiar culture and drove the young people, many of whom were
now destitute, into the cities, where their contact with the natural
world was permanently severed. I watched, in other words, the reca-
pitulation of the story of my own land, and witnessed the bewilderment,
dewilderment and grief it caused.
The commons belonged, inasmuch as they belonged to anyone, to
children. Their trees and topography provided, uncommissioned and
unbuilt, the slides and climbing frames, sandpits and ramps, seesaws
and swings, Wendy houses and hiding places which must now be con-
structed and tested and assessed and inspected, at great expense and
(being planned and tidy, fenced and supervised) one-tenth of the fun.
Their sticks and flowers and insects and frogs were all the toys that
consolidated and accelerated in England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by
parliamentary Acts of Enclosure.