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PARLIAMENTARY ENCLOSURE, PROPERTY, POPULATION, AND THE DECLINE OF CLASSICAL REPUBLICANISM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2008

S. J. THOMPSON
S. J. THOMPSON*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge
*
Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Sir William Hardy Building, Downing Place, Cambridge CB2 3ENsjt54@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

The pamphlet debate concerning the perceived effects of parliamentary enclosure on property and population in eighteenth-century Britain has been largely neglected by intellectual historians. One consequence of this debate was to undermine the credibility of the classical republican economic vision of agrarian simplicity, due to its proponents' failure to come to terms with the enormous disjunction between ancient and modern economies. Although the enclosure of agricultural land had provoked hostility since at least the fifteenth century, after 1700 its opponents developed new arguments to take account of the legislature's increasingly prominent role in facilitating the process. In doing so, anti-enclosure writers drew on classical republican ideas, arguing that enclosure was contrary to the public interest because it eroded the independence of the yeomanry, valorized by numerous republican authorities as integral to the country's military strength. In their criticisms of modern policy, these writers praised the agrarian laws of the Roman republic, as well as the Tudor tillage acts. The agricultural ‘improvers’, on the other hand, denied the validity of these precedents on the grounds that the historical contingencies which had produced the Roman agrarian laws, or the Tudor tillage acts, were of limited relevance in a society based on the interdependence of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 621 - 642
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Mark Goldie and Leigh Shaw-Taylor for supervising the research on which this article is based. They, together with Richard Smith, Clare Jackson, and two anonymous referees provided extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft. Spelling is original throughout, and place of publication for all pre-1800 works is London, unless otherwise stated.

References

1 For some of the leading, but divergent, accounts of the republican tradition see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian moment: Florentine political thought and the Atlantic republican tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975); idem, Virtue, commerce and history (Cambridge, 1985); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before liberalism (Cambridge, 1998); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: a theory of freedom and government (Oxford, 1997).

2 The agrarian legislation which provoked the greatest discussion among commentators discussed in this article were the redistributive measures of the Spartan law-giver Lycurgus (?700–630 bc), and of Gaius Licinius Stolo, tribune of Rome from 376 to 366 bc. The law of Licinius forbade citizens from holding more than 500 jugera (about 320 acres) of the ager publicus (public land acquired by conquest). Land in excess of this legal maximum was redistributed among the poor. Another important precedent was the senate's allotment of land in seven jugera parcels to poor plebeians following the conquest of Veii (c. 396 bc).

3 Eric Nelson, The Greek tradition in republican thought (Cambridge, 2004).

4 John Chapman has found only one instance of parliamentary enclosure in Scotland following the 1707 Act of Union: Chapman, John, ‘The extent and nature of parliamentary enclosure’, Agricultural History Review, 35 (1987), pp. 25–35Google Scholar. Julian Hoppit attributes this to the passage in the Edinburgh parliament of the ‘Act anent lands lying run-rigs’ and the ‘Act concerning the dividing of the commonities’ (both 1695), which allowed eighteenth-century Scottish landowners to enclose land without recourse to the Westminster parliament: Julian Hoppit, ‘The landed interest and the national interest, 1660–1800’, in Julian Hoppit, ed., Parliament, nations and identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660–1850 (Manchester, 2003), p. 95.

5 For popular and elite responses to enclosure before 1700, see Joan Thirsk, ‘Enclosing and engrossing’, in The agrarian history of England and Wales (8 vols., Cambridge, 1967–2000), iv, pp. 213–38.

6 A major advantage of parliamentary enclosure was that it deprived small proprietors of their veto: Sheila Lambert, Bills and acts: legislative procedure in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1971), p. 133.

7 The first Tillage Act of 1489 (4 Hen. 7, c. 19) was followed by four acts under Henry VIII (6 Hen. 8, c. 5; 7 Hen. 8, c. 1; 25 Hen. 8, c. 13; 27 Hen. 8, c. 22), one under Edward VI (5 & 6 Edw. 6, c. 5), one under Mary (2 & 3 Ph. & M., c. 2), and three under Elizabeth (5 Eliz. 1, c. 2; 13 Eliz. 1, c. 13; 39 Eliz. 1, c. 2): W. E. Tate and M. E. Turner, A domesday of English enclosure acts and awards (Reading, 1978), appendix ii; Gilbert Slater, The English peasantry and the enclosure of the common fields (London, 1907), appendix D.

8 Enclosure by agreement was not uncontroversial, however, and provoked some public discussion in the seventeenth century. See Maurice Beresford, ‘Habitation versus improvement: the debate on enclosure by agreement’, in F. J. Fisher, ed., Essays in the economic and social history of Tudor and Stuart England, in honour of R. H. Tawney (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 40–69; Joan Thirsk, ‘Agricultural policy: public debate and legislation’, in The agrarian history of England and Wales, v, part 2, pp. 298–388.

9 Of 1,611 enclosure acts passed before 1793, 1,124, or 70 per cent, were enacted in the period 1755–80. During the war years, 1793–1815, a further 1,969 enclosures received parliamentary assent: Michael Turner, English parliamentary enclosure: its historical geography and economic history (Folkestone, 1980), tabs. 10 and 11, pp. 68, 71. The first parliamentary enclosure act (1 Jac. 1, c. 30), which affected the parish of Radipole, Dorset, was not primarily concerned with farming, but rather authorized the enclosure of waste land for a burial ground adjoining the site of the new parish church.

10 Ibid., pp. 72–93, 101, 108. This claim should be treated with caution because Turner systematically underestimates the proportion of common waste enclosed due to his classification system: see Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Proletarianisation, parliamentary enclosure and the household economy of the labouring poor, 1750–1850’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge, 1999), pp. 23–30.

11 The failure rate of enclosure legislation, 1760–1800, was 23 per cent (566 bills failed and 1,916 acts were passed). Hoppit calculated the failure rate of non-enclosure legislation for the same period to be 24 per cent: Hoppit, ‘The landed interest and the national interest’, tab. 5.3, p. 89. For an institutional explanation of the two peaks in enclosure legislation, which considers the effect of new standing orders introduced in 1781, see Hoppit, Julian, ‘Patterns of parliamentary legislation, 1660–1800’, Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 121–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The village labourer (London, 1911), pp. 55–8. Opposition could take other forms and counter-petitions, in particular, sometimes provided an effective means of obstructing bills: Tate, W. E., ‘Parliamentary counter-petitions during the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, English Historical Review, 59 (1944), pp. 392–403CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A detailed study of the content of these counter-petitions is beyond the scope of this article.

13 Hammond and Hammond, Village labourer, pp. 31, 79–81, 100; E. C. K. Gonner, Common land and inclosure (London, 1912), pp. 187–93, 360–99; K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 166–80; E. P. Thompson, Customs in common (London, 1991), pp. 159–63, 176–7; Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Labourers, cows, common rights and parliamentary enclosure: the evidence of contemporary comment, c. 1760–1810’, Past and Present, 171 (2001), pp. 95–126. One exception is J. M. Neeson, Commoners: common right, enclosure and social change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 15–52.

14 Paul Langford, Public life and the propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 315; cf. pp. 370–2. Langford's own treatment of parliamentary enclosure is exiguous. See also H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and property: political ideology in eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1977), the index of which contains three references to agrarian laws, and none to enclosure.

15 For a good historiographical overview see J. V. Beckett, ‘The decline of the small landowner in England and Wales, 1660–1900’, in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., Landowners, capitalists and entrepreneurs: essays for Sir John Habakkuk (Oxford, 1994), pp. 89–112.

16 [Stephen Addington], An enquiry into the reasons for and against inclosing the open fields (Coventry, 1767), pp. 8–9, 23.

17 Ibid., pp. 10, 20–2. Families ‘on the parish’ were dependent upon welfare payments distributed by parish overseers in fulfilment of the obligation placed on every parish to maintain its own poor by the old poor law.

18 Ibid., pp. 26, 33–4.

19 Ibid., pp. 28–32.

20 Ibid., p. 31.

21 This doctrine, sometimes referred to as populationism, and its decline, are discussed at greater length in James C. Riley, Population thought in the age of the demographic revolution (Durham, NC, 1985), esp. pp. 38–58, 131–45.

22 On the early success of the Observations, and subsequent editions, see D. O. Thomas, The honest mind: the thought and work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977), pp. 138–46. Although Thomas discusses Price's contribution to actuarial science in detail, he only briefly alludes to Price's analysis of the political causes of population trends (pp. 116–17, 136–7).

23 Richard Price, Observations on reversionary payments (1st edn, 1771), pp. 198–9, 202. Notwithstanding the rhetorical impact of Oliver Goldsmith's poem, The deserted village (1770), which blamed rural depopulation on the effects of luxury, I have been unable to find any allusions to it either in the various writings of Price, or in the second edition of Addington's Inquiry (1772). That did not stop John Howlett, who denied Price's depopulation claims, from remarking that ‘we have not only heard of the deserted village and the depopulated country in the fictions of poetry; but have been repeatedly assured, by an able calculator, the Reverend Dr. Price, that is a clear and indubitable fact that the number of our inhabitants has long been decreasing’: John Howlett, An examination of Dr. Price's Essay on the population of England and Wales (Maidstone, 1781), p. xi.

24 Richard Price, Observations on reversionary payments (2nd edn, 1772), pp. 359–61.

25 Richard Price, Observations on reversionary payments (3rd edn, 1773), pp. 379–84.

26 Price, Observations (3rd edn, 1773), p. 382.

27 Price, Observations (1st edn, 1771), pp. 176–7, 199–202.

28 [Addington], Enquiry, pp. 12–13. In a footnote to this paragraph Addington quotes Cicero, De officiis, iii.22: ‘if each one of us should seize upon the property of his neighbours and take from each whatever he could appropriate for his own use, the bonds of human society must inevitably be annihilated’ (translation from Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (London, 1913), p. 289).

29 Bela Kapossy, ‘Neo-roman republicanism and commercial society: the example of eighteenth-century Berne’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: a shared European heritage (2 vols., Cambridge, 2002), ii, pp. 227–47.

30 John Cowper, An essay, proving, that inclosing commons, and common-field-lands, is contrary to the interest of the nation (1732), p. 9.

31 [Thomas Andrews], An enquiry into the causes of the encrease and miseries of the poor of England (1738), p. 30 and passim.

32 An enquiry into the advantages and disadvantages resulting from bills of enclosure (1780), pp. 5–10.

33 A political enquiry into the consequences of enclosing waste lands (1785), pp. 103–4.

34 7 Hen. 8, c. 1. Cf. 4 Hen. 7, c. 19; 39 Eliz. 1, c. 2.

35 [Thomas Allen], A proposal for a free and unexpensive election of parliament men (1753), pp. 37–8.

36 Country Farmer, Cursory remarks on inclosures, shewing the pernicious and destructive consequences of inclosing common fields, &c. (1786), pp. 1–2, 6–7. This is probably a reference to the proclamation of 14 July 1526 which ordered the destruction of all enclosures erected unlawfully since the accession of Henry VII: Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor royal proclamations (3 vols., New Haven, CT, and London, 1964), i, pp. 154–6.

37 One important authority for the neo-roman account of liberty was Justinian's Digest, where ‘the concept of liberty is always defined … by contrast with the condition of slavery’: Skinner, Liberty before liberalism, p. 39; see also pp. 12–13, 50 for Price's use of neo-roman theory to defend the claims of the American colonists.

38 Price, Observations (3rd edn, 1773), pp. 393–4.

39 Ibid., pp. 390–1. Cf. Francis Bacon, The history of the reign of King Henry VII and selected works, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 65–7, 251–2.

40 39 Eliz. 1, c. 2. See J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her parliaments, 1584–1601 (London, 1957), pp. 337–47, for the controversy surrounding the bill.

41 Simon d'Ewes, The journals of all the parliaments during the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1682), p. 674.

42 Markku Peltonen, ‘Bacon's political philosophy’, in Markku Peltonen, ed., The Cambridge companion to Bacon (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 300–8.

43 Bacon, History, p. 66. Cf. ‘Bacon's, Lordaccount of monopolizing farms in Henry VII.'s reign, with a remedy’, Gentleman's Magazine, 44 (1774), pp. 62–3Google Scholar, in which an anonymous correspondent wrote ‘the remarks of the great Lord Bacon … are so very applicable to the present times, that the revival of them cannot fail of producing some good effect.’

44 James Harrington, ‘The commonwealth of Oceana’, in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The political works of James Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), esp. p. 231.

45 Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the yeoman (Oxford, 1992), pp. 303–7.

46 [John Mitchell], The present state of Great Britain and North America, with regard to agriculture, population, trade, and manufactures, impartially considered (1767), p. 122.

47 Ibid., pp. 214–15.

48 Price, Observations (2nd edn, 1772), p. 360n. Like Bacon, Süssmilch favoured an equal distribution of land for defensive purposes: James Bonar, Theories of population from Raleigh to Arthur Young (London, 1931), pp. 152–3.

49 Price, Observations (3rd edn, 1773), pp. 381–2. One of the ‘ingenious men’ that Price had in mind was the agricultural improver, Arthur Young, whose objections will be discussed below: Price, Observations (3rd edn, 1773), pp. xviii–xix.

50 Price, Observations on the importance of the American revolution (1784), pp. 68–73. See [Robert Wallace], A dissertation on the numbers of mankind in antient and modern times (Edinburgh, 1753), pp. 117–19, for the provisions of the Roman agrarian law. Wallace argued that ancient nations were more populous than modern nations due to the former's more equal division of lands.

51 Matthew Peters, Agricultura: or the good husbandman (1776), pp. 175–9, where he quotes at length Price's discussion of the Vaud from the third edition of the Observations on reversionary payments.

52 Ibid., pp. vii, x, xvi, xxv–xxvi. Cf. Pliny, Natural history, trans. H. Rackham (10 vols., London, 1938–62), v, 18.7, p. 213. In fact, it was Pliny who thought large estates had brought about the ruin of Italy, though Virgil, to whom Pliny alludes, advised readers of his Georgics (ii.412) to ‘praise thou large estates, farm a small one’ (laudato ingentia rura, exiguum colito).

53 [Allen], Proposal, p. 27. Cf. An enquiry (1780), pp. 25–6, which also recalls Isaiah 5.8 in its critique of the enclosure of small commons.

54 [Allen], Proposal, pp. 28–9.

55 Ibid., p. 30.

56 Ibid., pp. 39–41.

57 Harrington's debt to Bacon is discussed in Peltonen, Markku, ‘Politics and science: Francis Bacon and the true greatness of states’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), pp. 298–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Paul Slack, From reformation to improvement: public welfare in early modern England (Oxford, 1999), p. 80; Richard Drayton, Nature's government: science, imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the world (New Haven, CT, and London, 2000), p. 52.

59 [Arthur Young], The farmer's letters to the people of England (1767), p. 52.

60 On the prejudice of opponents of enclosure see [Young], The farmer's letters (2nd edn, 1768), p. 186; Arthur Young, Political arithmetic (1774), pp. x–xi, 122; Observations on a pamphlet entitled An enquiry into the advantages and disadvantages resulting from bills of inclosure (1781), pp. iii, 3, 54; Thomas Stone, Suggestions for rendering the inclosure of common fields and waste lands a source of population and riches (1787), pp. 1, 39–40; on ignorance see The true interest of the land-owners of Great-Britain (1734), p. 3; W. Pennington, Reflections on the various advantages resulting from draining, inclosing, and allotting of large commons and common fields (1769), p. 64.

61 The debate between Price and Young is discussed in D. V. Glass, Numbering the people: the eighteenth-century population controversy and the development of census and vital statistics in Brtiain (Farnborough, 1973), pp. 53–7, but this account largely ignores the significance of the two writers' contrasting claims regarding the consequences of parliamentary enclosure.

62 On Hume's role in this debate see Istvan Hont, ‘The “rich country–poor country” debate in Scottish classical political economy’, in Istvan Hont, Jealousy of trade: international competition and the nation-state in historical perspective (London, 2005), pp. 267–322; Donald Winch, Riches and poverty: an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 84–7.

63 Hume, ‘Of the populousness of ancient nations’, in Essays, moral, political, and literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (2 vols., London, 1875), i, p. 394. In his essay Idea of a perfect commonwealth [1752] Hume identified Harrington's agrarian law as one the chief defects of Oceana because he thought it impracticable (Hume, Essays, i, p. 481).

64 Hume, ‘Populousness’, pp. 397–8.

65 Ibid., pp. 399–402.

66 Ibid., p. 412.

67 Sir James Steuart, An inquiry into the principles of political oeconomy (2 vols., 1767), i, p. 17.

68 Ibid., i, p. 125.

69 Ibid., i, pp. 125–6.

70 Ibid. W. Pennington made essentially the same point two years later when he commented that ‘other writers’ failed ‘to distinguish properly … between a state where an Agrarian law might be established, and one supported both by the produce of it's lands, it's manufactures, and an extensive commerce’: Pennington, Reflections, p. 12.

71 Steuart, Inquiry, i, p. 132.

72 [Nathaniel Forster], An enquiry into the causes of the present high price of provisions (1767), pp. 120–1.

73 Quoted in Ibid., p. 122n; cf. David Hume The history of England, under the house of Tudor (2 vols., 1759), i, p. 65.

74 [Forster], Enquiry, p. 112.

75 Quoted in Young, Political arithmetic, pp. 155–7n.

76 Young's scorn for a smallholding system of agriculture is evident throughout his writings, but particularly acute in his account of French peasant farming: Arthur Young, Travels during the years 1787, 1788, & 1789 (2nd edn, 2 vols., 1794), i, pp. 407–17.

77 [John Arbuthnot], An inquiry into the connection between the present price of provisions, and the size of farms (1773), pp. 126–8.

78 Ibid., p. 137.

79 Ibid., p. 140. Cf. Steuart, Inquiry, i, pp. 134–6.

80 Adam Smith, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd (2 vols., Oxford, 1976), esp. ii, iv.ix.51, p. 687.

81 See True interest, p. 3, on the majority of common-field proprietors being forced, arbitrarily, ‘to work against the Nature of the Land’ by the ignorance of the few. Also [Walter Harte], Essays on husbandry (1764), pp. 15, 56–7; [Henry Homer], An essay on the nature and method of ascertaining the specifick shares of proprietors, upon the inclosure of common fields (1766), p. 7; Stone, Suggestions, pp. 25–6.

82 Young, Political arithmetic, pp. 122–3, 199.

83 Ibid., p. 201.

84 For Howlett's rejection of Price's depopulation claims, see n. 23, above.

85 John Howlett, An enquiry into the influence which enclosures have had upon the population of England (1786), pp. 9–10. See also Stone, Suggestions, p. 28, on ‘a medium’ being kept between the value of corn and cattle.

86 On the improvers' view of nature, see Drayton, Nature's government, esp. ch. 3.

87 [Homer], Essay, p. 35.

88 Young, Political arithmetic, pp. 94–5. Young confused the 1489 Tillage Act, which said nothing about cottages, with an ‘Act against erecting and maintaining of cottages’ (31 Eliz. 1, c. 7). This latter act prohibited the erection of cottages on less than four acres of ground. It was repealed by 15 Geo. 3, c. 32 (1775) on the grounds that it lessened population, a year after the publication of Political arithmetic.

89 Ibid., pp. 93–6, 331–5.

90 [Arbuthnot], Inquiry, pp. 88–9; Young, Political arithmetic, pp. 276–86.

91 Willis, Kirk, ‘The role in parliament of the economic ideas of Adam Smith, 1776–1800’, History of political economy, 11 (1979), pp. 505–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. According to Willis, ‘there are literally hundreds of citations of Arthur Young's great works’, compared with ‘slightly over forty references to Smith in the eighteenth-century debates’ (p. 510). See also n. 88, above.

92 Lord Ernle, English farming past and present (6th edn, London, 1961), pp. 302–3.

93 C. A. Bayly, Imperial meridian: the British empire and the world, 1780–1830 (London, 1989), p. 80.