A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

other people have certain traditional rights to it, too, such as using it for arable farming, mowing for hay or pasturage, grazing cattle, horses, sheep or other animals. There might also be piscary, the right to fish; turbary, the right to take sods of turf for fuel; common in the soil, the right to take sand and gravel; mast or pannage, the right to turn out pigs for a period in autumn to eat mast – acorns and other nuts; and estovers, the right to take sufficient wood for the commoner’s house or holding (usually limited to smaller trees, bushes such as gorse and fallen branches). There are a considerable number of places in Britain where commoners’ rights still exist – the Ashdown Forest and New Forest, to name but two – and these ancient rights are as fiercely defended today as they were in the Middle Ages, when common rights were of immense importance to the survival of those who held them.

      Existing commons are almost all pasture, but in earlier times arable farming and haymaking were also included in the commons system, with strips of land in the common arable fields and common hay meadows assigned annually by lot. When not in use for these purposes, such commons were also grazed. A few of them still survive, for example, common arable fields around the village of Laxton, in Nottinghamshire, and a common meadow at North Meadow, Cricklade. Under enclosure, such land is fenced – enclosed – and deeded or entitled to one or more private owners who then enjoy the possession and fruits of the land to the exclusion of all others.

      The main thrust of the Parliamentary Enclosures was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but throughout the medieval period piecemeal enclosure took place in which adjacent strips were fenced off from the common field. From as early as the twelfth century some open fields in Britain were being enclosed into individually owned fields. This was sometimes undertaken by small landowners, but more often by large landowners and lords of the manor. Significant enclosures, or emparkments, took place to establish deer parks, particularly in the early years of Norman rule, and this was ratified in 1235 under the Statute of Merton, which gave lords of the manor the right to enclose common land, providing sufficient pasture remained for the tenants: ‘setting out in what cases, and in what manner, Lords may approve part of the wastes, woods, and pastures, belonging to their Manors, against the tenants’. There was a significant rise in the enclosure of common land during the Tudor period as surplus-to-requirement arable hectares were converted to pasture for sheep. The primary areas of enclosure were in a broad band from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire diagonally across England to the south, taking in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, large areas of the Midlands, and most of south-central England.

      The woollen industry was the backbone of the economy and cloth exported to the continent was Britain’s most important manufactured output. Flemish weavers fleeing the horrors of the Hundred Years’ War with France were encouraged to emigrate to England, with many settling in Norfolk and Suffolk. Others moved to the West Country, the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales and Cumberland, where weaving began to flourish in the villages and towns. Lavenham, in Suffolk, is widely acknowledged as the best example of a medieval wool town in England, its fine timber-framed buildings and beautiful church built on the success of the wool trade. In Tudor times, Lavenham was said to be the fourteenth wealthiest town in England, despite its small size. Merchants made immense fortunes from wool and gave us the magnificent and architecturally stunning ‘wool’ churches such as St Peter and St Paul at Northleach, St Peter at Winchcombe and St Mary’s at Fairford, in the Cotswolds, Holy Trinity at Long Melford, in Suffolk, or St John’s, St Martin’s and All Saints’ churches in Stamford.

      Sheep were also seen as being essential for maintaining the soil fertility of arable ground, and periodically ploughing out sheep pasture became part of the improved rotation of cultivated land. The sheep industry was of enormous benefit to the land-owning elite, the wool merchants and the Crown, for whom it raised vast sums. It also created something of a quandary: on the one hand the economy was buoyant, on the other, enclosures led to the depopulation of villages, displacement of farm labourers and a decrease in crop production, which made England more susceptible to famine and higher prices for domestic and foreign grain. The Tudor authorities were particularly nervous about how the villagers who had lost their homes would react. They had every reason to be worried: in Leicestershire over thirty-one villages were abandoned, and this must have run to many hundreds across the country. In Tudor Britain, a man who lost his home and his livelihood automatically became a vagrant, and vagrants were regarded as criminals. Anxious minds envisaged multitudes of vagabonds and thieves roaming the countryside as a result of continued enclosures, and Parliament began passing acts to stop them. The first such legislation was in 1489 and over the next 150 years there would be a further eleven Acts of Parliament and eight Commissions of enquiry on the subject, none of which stopped land from being enclosed.

      The population in 1500 was little more than at the end of the Black Death, but it began to increase sharply. There was an urgent need for more arable land and an increase in antagonism towards graziers. Agriculture responded to the demand for food by increasing the area under the plough, reclaiming marginal upland areas again, clearing woodland for cultivations and trying to drain the fens. It was too little too late, and as social unrest grew, enclosures were seen as the cause of the problems. There were angry demands for government to remove existing enclosures and much parliamentary vacillation in the 1530s and 40s. Finally, furious peasants took matters into their own hands and started destroying the enclosures.

      The first major incident was in Norfolk with kett’s Rebellion of 1549. On 6 July, the townspeople of Wymondham started ripping down enclosures in the nearby village of Morley St Botolph before moving on to Norwich, tearing out hedges from any enclosed land along the way. Robert Kett and his brother William, themselves wealthy landowners, joined the protesters in sympathy and attracted a mob of 15,000 supporters. Kett and his rebel army attacked and captured Norwich, effectively gaining control the city and major port. From here they issued a petition of twenty-six grievances to Edward VI, who responded by sending William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton, with 1,500 men to quash the rebellion.

      This expedition was a complete failure and the rebels held Norwich until they were savagely defeated by the Earl of Warwick with an army of around 14,000, including mercenaries from Wales and the Continent. Robert Kett was hung in chains from the walls of Norwich, where his death was drawn out over several days, and his brother William from the roof of Wymondham Abbey. Ten of the other principal rebels were hung from an oak tree on Mousehold Heath, just outside Norwich, which became known as the Reformation Oak. This venerable growth can still be seen, propped, shored, and in-filled with concrete, by the roadside between Norwich and Wymondham. Despite this harsh treatment, agrarian revolts swept all over the nation, and other revolts occurred periodically throughout the century, no doubt inflamed by the Earl of Warwick persuading Parliament to ratify the Statute of Merton. This enabled landowners to enclose their land at their own discretion and was, in fact, only finally repealed in 1948.

      THE STEADY MARCH OF AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS

      There was a major decline in living standards as the population continued to grow, and this coupled with high unemployment meant a large proportion of the population survived through charity, Parish Poor Laws and scavenging for wild fruit and vegetables. There was a significant migration of desperate people seeking work in the towns, and by the end of the century, the State found itself both distrusted and ill equipped to deal with the social consequences of population growth and inadequate food.

       They hang the man, and flog the woman, That steals the goose from off the common; But let the greater villain loose, That steals the common from the goose.

      Agricultural improvers were thin on the ground during the sixteenth century, and the handful that existed stand out as voices in the wilderness, including John Fitzherbert, who wrote Master Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandrie in 1531, and the great Thomas Tusser, author of the instructional poem Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, published in 1557. At the end of the century, two people came up with