Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820

Commoners is both a social history of the smallest landholders and users of commons in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English villages, and a powerful reassessment of the entire course of English rural history during that period. For much of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England all occupiers of common-field land and many cottagers shared common grazing over common fields and wastes. In forest and fen manors, and others with substantial uncultivated commons or well-defended customs, even the landless found pasture and collected fuel, food and materials. Here common right ensured the survival until parliamentary enclosure of a peasantry whose social relations were in part shaped by access to land, common agriculture and shared use-rights. Commoners describes some of these villages. It looks at entitlement to commons, the co-operative regulation of common fields and pastures, and the harvests taken from uncultivated common waste. It suggests why and where common right survived until enclosure, and it reviews the contemporary debate on the social implications of common right and the public policy issues at the heart of parliamentary enclosure. Finally, it describes a vigorous opposition to enclosure and a significant decline of small landholders when common lands were enclosed. In short, Commoners makes shared land-use a prism through which to see both the economies and the social relations of common-field villages. A work of unusual strength and imagination, Commoners challenges the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization: rather it shows that common right and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages, and that their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted on popular culture a pervasive sense of loss.