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Enclosure and Resistance in Oxfordshire: A Tradition of Disorder? |
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These common rights were guaranteed by local custom rather than by law, and they were regulated by manorial courts which acted as the custodians of the local traditions through which entitlement to the valuable perquisites of common land were allocated.
To the elites of the period, however, the exploitation of customary right hardly counted as work at all. Common lands enjoyed a fearsome reputation for disorder and lawlessness, being renowned as places where the shiftless and the indolent could rely on natural resources to subsist even in their idleness. Little wonder that as commercial opportunities presented themselves, landowners should seek to realise the potential of their estates, often in defiance of the customary arrangements through which natural resources had been managed for centuries.
Enclosure
Enclosure saw the erection of fences, hedges and ditches around parcels of land
© Ian Britton, freefoto.com |
The process through which these common rights were extinguished is known as enclosure, the physical manifestation of which was the erection of fences, hedges and ditches around parcels of land which were now farmed commercially by individual owners who claimed absolute rights in their own property.
Lands that had once been regarded as assets of the community as a whole were turned into emptiable space and those who had once depended on them for their living usually received scant compensation for their loss. It is hardly surprising that the victims of this process should seek every opportunity to hinder and harass those landowners who, they felt, were responsible for transforming commons teeming with livestock, fish, fowl and fuel into runs for the rearing and shearing of sheep.
The tradition of resistance to enclosure is marked in numerous communities across southern England, but is especially marked in the county of Oxfordshire. Indeed, the parishes to the north-east of the city of Oxford were at the heart of covert and outright opposition to the loss of their common rights from at least the middle of the 16th to the middle of the 19th Centuries.
Words: Steve Hindle - University of Warwick
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