> [!NOTE] How the shared ground of English life was fenced off — and what we might still do about it # The Taking of the Commons *A short history of the enclosures, and why the idea of the commons is stirring again.* --- > *"The law locks up the man or woman > Who steals the goose from off the common, > But lets the greater felon loose > Who steals the common from the goose."* > — Anonymous, 17th-century English protest rhyme --- ## A Country of Shared Ground For most of English history, the land most people lived on was **common**. This did not mean unowned. It meant held in overlapping layers of right — the lord of the manor might hold title, but commoners held detailed, legally protected rights to graze livestock, gather firewood, cut turf, glean grain after harvest, pasture pigs in autumn woodland, fish in streams. A peasant family was poor, often miserably so, but they were rarely entirely dependent on wage labour. The commons provided a floor. These rights were encoded in local custom and had the force of law. They were what made medieval rural life, with all its hardship, *survivable*. In good years they provided abundance. In bad years they prevented starvation. This older England has been almost entirely erased from the national memory. The story we are told, when we are told any story at all, is that medieval peasants were wretched serfs, and that industrial wage labour represented liberation. The truth is stranger, bleaker, and more interesting. --- ## The Enclosures The **enclosure** of the English commons was not a single event. It was a process that ran, with varying intensity, from roughly the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Over that span, something like **seven million acres** of common land — by some estimates more than half of England — was privatised, fenced, hedged, and handed to landowners. The mechanisms varied. In the early period, powerful landlords simply enclosed common land by force and defied anyone to challenge them. In the later period — the **Parliamentary Enclosures** of the late 18th and early 19th centuries — the process was formalised: private Acts of Parliament, passed by a legislature overwhelmingly composed of landowners, authorised the enclosure of specific commons, with a formal compensation process that systematically favoured the already-wealthy. The human consequences were immense. **🏚️ Mass dispossession.** Families who had lived on particular ground for generations lost the material basis of their lives. Gleaning became trespass. Firewood became theft. **🏭 Forced urbanisation.** Dispossessed rural populations streamed into the growing industrial cities, providing the cheap labour that powered the Industrial Revolution. The "dark satanic mills" required the prior destruction of the commons to fill them. **🌿 Ecological simplification.** Mixed-use common lands, which had supported complex ecosystems of grazing, woodland, and wetland, were systematically converted to monoculture pasture or arable. Much of English biodiversity loss runs back to this period. This is not fringe history. It is in [[E.P. Thompson]]'s *The Making of the English Working Class*, in [[Silvia Federici]]'s *Caliban and the Witch*, in [[J.L. & Barbara Hammond]]'s *The Village Labourer*. But it has not made it into the story most Britons tell themselves about how we got here. --- ## The Myth of "The Tragedy of the Commons" In 1968, the biologist [[Garrett Hardin]] published an essay titled *The Tragedy of the Commons*, which argued that shared resources were inevitably overexploited because each individual would rationally maximise their own use of them. The idea proved enormously influential — it was used, for decades, to justify privatisation of almost everything. It also happened to be empirically wrong. The Nobel-winning political economist [[Elinor Ostrom]] spent decades studying actual commons around the world — alpine grazing in Switzerland, fisheries in Turkey, irrigation systems in the Philippines, forests in Japan — and demonstrated, with patient data, that well-governed commons have been stable for centuries. Ostrom's *Governing the Commons* identified the specific design principles that made commons work: clear boundaries, rules adapted to local conditions, participation by users in rule-making, graduated sanctions, low-cost dispute resolution, and recognition by the surrounding state. The commons did not fail of their own internal logic. They were **taken**. That is a different story entirely. --- ## The New Enclosures It is not just a historical phenomenon. The enclosures continued into the 20th and 21st centuries, often under new names. **🧬 The privatisation of genetic material.** Plant breeders' rights, seed patents, and the legal capture of traditional crop varieties by multinational agribusiness. **💊 The privatisation of medicine.** Publicly-funded research captured by patent-holding pharmaceutical companies. **💻 The privatisation of digital commons.** Open-source projects absorbed into proprietary platforms; user-generated content monetised by the platform rather than the user. **🌐 The privatisation of knowledge.** Academic research, often publicly funded, locked behind publisher paywalls that charge libraries — and the public — for access. This is the pattern [[David Bollier]] and others describe as **the new enclosures**: the same extractive dynamic as the original, applied to new categories of shared resource. --- ## What Might Be Taken Back There is a small but real countercurrent. Much of it is quieter than the original enclosures and depends less on dramatic reversal than on patient, local work. **🌱 Community land trusts.** Land held in perpetuity for community benefit, priced against speculation. Several hundred now operate in England alone. **🌾 Community-supported agriculture.** Shared-risk, direct relationships between growers and eaters, cutting out the retail logic that commodifies food. **🏞️ Right to roam.** The slow legal campaign to restore public access to rural land, most of which in England remains privately enclosed. Scotland has the right. Most of England does not. **🗺️ Community forests and rewilding trusts.** Woodlands held in public ownership, managed for ecological recovery rather than timber yield. **🛠️ Digital commons.** Creative Commons licensing, open-source software, Wikipedia, federated social networks. These are the digital equivalents of the medieval commons — shared resource governed by collective norm, not by ownership. > [!TIP] The principle > The commons is not a utopia. It is a practical legal and social arrangement that has worked, across cultures and centuries, whenever the governing conditions are in place. Our task is not to invent it. It is to remember it. --- ## Why This Belongs on a Gardening Site The history of the English lawn, it turns out, is a specific chapter in the history of the enclosures. The aristocratic lawn became possible precisely because common land was taken, labour was made cheap, and the "estate" — with its ornamental grounds, its landscaped park, its decorative lake — became the architectural expression of a new concentration of land and wealth. The ecological lawn — the meadow, the tapestry, the wild verge — is not only a horticultural choice. It is, in a small way, a recovery of an older sensibility. That a piece of ground might be held for everything that lives on it, rather than for display. A garden cannot undo an enclosure. But a garden can refuse to extend it any further. --- ## Conclusion: The Long Memory The commons were taken slowly, and they will, if they return at all, return slowly. The work is in decades. It is in local campaigns, planning committees, community land trusts, right-to-roam coalitions, open-source licences, and the patient ecological restoration of particular pieces of ground. It is also in memory. As long as we remember that the current arrangement of ownership is not natural, not inevitable, and not particularly old, alternatives remain thinkable. That is the first thing an honest history gives us. --- ## Related Notes - [[The Commons]] — Background note - [[Enclosures]] — Background note - [[The New Enclosure]] — Brett Christophers - [[Tragedy of The Commons]] — The Hardin essay and its rebuttal - [[The Dawn of Everything]] — Graeber & Wengrow on alternatives to the standard history - [[A Distant Mirror]] — Barbara Tuchman on the 14th century - [[common people]] — Background note - [[Rethinking the Lawn]] — Where this history meets the garden --- *Part of an ongoing attempt to think more carefully about the world.*