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were the property of individuals such as local landlords, with nearby commoners
having quite limited rights to gather what they could from the fi elds after the
harvest; still other lands were royal hunting preserves, where commoners could
gather wood and other materials but not hunt. Second, common lands and rights
changed considerably over time, with contestation over them constant, and enclo-
sures severely curtailing or eliminating them beginning as early as the 12th century.
Third, the strength and stability of commoners' rights varied, with some being codi-
fi ed into formal law, others being well-established and regularised in local custom,
and still others being much more informal, fl uid, and contested through daily prac-
tice. The variety of combinations of land tenures and use rights was thus highly
complex and dynamic; such diversity is often glossed over in gestures towards 'the
commons' as a unitary set of rights and relationships destroyed by capitalism
(Williams, 1973).
It is certainly true, however, that attacks upon, and the eventual near-complete
elimination of, the commons played a central role in the development of capitalism.
Many commons were subject to enclosure, or privatization, in two major waves.
From the late fi fteenth through the mid-16th century in particular, many landown-
ers, motivated by rapidly rising wool prices, enclosed their own properties in order
to convert large areas into pastures for sheep, forcing off tenant farmers and entire
communities with traditional rights of residence and use in the process. In the 18th
and 19th centuries, a steady stream of parliamentary acts - thousands of them -
authorised the consolidation and enclosure of many remaining commons, trans-
forming them into private property by legal fi at and eliminating many commoners'
rights in the process. The scale of these appropriations must be appreciated: by some
accounts, the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alone trans-
formed some six million acres, including about a quarter of the cultivated land in
the country, from common to private property (Williams, 1973, p. 96). The priva-
tization of formerly common lands and the elimination of traditional use rights was
a long, contested, and frequently violent process: hedges and walls were erected and
broached; hunters and gatherers continued to take resources they felt they had rights
to even after such actions were criminalised, and sometimes paid with their lives;
and in the most extreme cases, soldiers evicted entire communities and burned their
homes behind them (Marx, 1967; Thompson, 1975; 1991; Blomley, 2007).
Marx saw such enclosures as fundamental to the development of capitalism
because they forcibly separated laborers from the land and created a legal frame-
work in which labor power and nature were redefi ned as privately owned commodi-
ties that could only be brought together again through market exchanges. He
described this as a process of 'primitive accumulation', meaning processes of accu-
mulation that logically had to precede capitalist accumulation per se and that
created the preconditions for it through extra-economic means (Marx, 1967; De
Angelis, 2004; see Glassman, 2006). On the one hand, the mass of the population
was cut off from any direct access to the land and from the possibility of legally
supporting themselves through direct production for their own benefi t, that is, pro-
ducers were separated from the means of production. 'Freed' from their feudal and
community networks of reciprocal obligation, their only option for subsistence was
now to enter the market as individuals and sell their labor power to the capitalists
who could afford to purchase both it and the means of production. At the same
time, by converting many lands and associated natural resources from commons to
private property, the enclosures dramatically increased the assets directly owned by
