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Enclosure and Resistance in Oxfordshire: A Tradition of Disorder? |
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Two episodes of protest, separated by over 200 years, are particularly revealing of the impact of enclosure on the mental maps of the poor, and of the ferocity of the opposition to the most potent symbols of enclosure: the shepherd and his dog travelling from sheepcote to sheepcote across land which had once supported dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of families.
Resistance
The geographical proximity of the late 16th Century conspiracy to attack landlords who had been hedging and ditching the fields of numerous Oxfordshire parishes in order to convert them to pasture with the early 19th Century “revolution of Otmoor”, a series of popular protests against the drainage and enclosure of the lands farmed in common by seven parishes north-east of Oxford, is highly revealing of the localised tradition of disorder which might evolve in opposition to enclosure.
Common land was vital to the labourer and his family, providing pasture, food and fuel
© Mary Evans Picture Library |
The projected “rising of the people” of November 1596 was planned and co-ordinated by one Bartholomew Steere, an artisan who had once worked in the household of Lord Lieutenant Norris, who promised his co-conspirators that it would be a “merrier world” when all the hedges, and the gentlemen who had planted them, were “knocked down”.
Those involved were angry young men, deprived of the opportunity to find a niche in local society by those enclosing landlords who had eliminated most of the smallholdings on which poor husbandmen and labourers might settle and start a family. They had become especially desperate in the autumn of 1596 after a second consecutive harvest failure had driven the price of provisions beyond the reach of even the most industrious rural households.
Steere’s plot, which included a plan to seize the munitions in Norris’ household and march on London to join forces with the apprentices who had the previous year wrought havoc in the city, came to nothing, but he and three of his cohorts paid the ultimate price; two of them (including Steere) dying during interrogation in the Tower of London, and a further two being hanged, drawn and quartered on Enslow Hill within sight of the enclosures they had hoped to destroy.
Words: Steve Hindle - University of Warwick
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