THE PEAK COUNTRY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The study of economic and social history does not always benefit from the identification of clear moments of discontinuity. Such moments are often inventions of historians, keen to find disjunctures where the sources imply only seamless continuity. None the less, such moments do occur. We have seen how the introduction of Humphrey's new technology in the 1570s forced one such transformation. A more protracted, but still visible, period of decisive change started to take form at around 1770. And just as with the moment of technological breakthrough some two centuries earlier, its implications were only to be only realized some two decades later. After 1763, enclosure acts concerning the Peak Country started to pass through parliament. Slowly at first, but with gathering force in the years of the French Wars, what survived of the Peak's commons were enclosed, and remaining common rights extinguished. In spite of long-standing piecemeal enclosure by tenants and cottagers, and the much larger post-Restoration enclosures, many commons still provided vital resources to poor inhabitants in the form of pasture, foodstuffs, fuel and building materials. But with parliamentary enclosure, the long movement towards the privatization of communal land and the commodification of collective rights was completed. As always, the local chronology of enclosure was subject to variation. But taken as a whole, the period of parliamentary enclosure spanned some two generations, and gathered in intensity over time. In legislation of the 1760s, cottages of less than twenty years were removed.