Enclosure turned England's cottagers from laborers with land into laborers without land.
For centuries, English villages operated under an open-field system in which large tracts of land were subdivided into narrow strips, each farmer's allotment scattered across the fields rather than gathered in one place. Common land, including pastures, woodlands, and waste ground, was shared by the entire community for grazing, fuel, and foraging.1
Beginning around 1450, landowners started enclosing these common fields, converting arable land to sheep pasture to profit from the booming wool trade. In the period from 1450 to 1640, enclosure accelerated as manorial lords consolidated holdings through private agreements.1
The process reached its greatest intensity between 1750 and 1860, when Parliament passed thousands of individual enclosure acts that transferred common land into private ownership.2 Commissioners appointed to oversee the redistribution were typically of the same class as the large landholders who had petitioned for enclosure in the first place.3
John and Barbara Hammond, historians of the English working class, argued that enclosure destroyed three groups above all others: the small farmer, the cottager, and the squatter. "Before enclosure the cottager was a labourer with land, after enclosure he was a labourer without land."3 Displaced farmers migrated to industrial cities in search of factory work.
Karl Polanyi identified enclosure as one of the earliest examples of the deliberate separation of people from land for the purpose of creating a labor market.4 The Commons Act of 1876 marked a shift in emphasis from enclosure to the preservation and regulation of what remained of England's common land.