SOURCE: “The Anatomy of Enclosure,” in Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence, and Impact, 1750-1850, London, 1997, pp. 7-31.

In the following essay, Mingay provides an overview of parliamentary enclosure with special emphasis on its effects on England as a whole and in its individual counties.

The Meaning of Enclosure

What exactly was enclosure? What did it involve? Most simply, it meant the extinction of common rights which people held over the farm lands and commons of the parish, the abolition of the scattered holdings in the open fields and a re-allocation of holdings in compact blocks, accompanied usually by the physical separation of the newly created fields and closes by the erection of fences, hedges or stone walls. Thereafter, the lands so enclosed were held ‘in severalty’, that is, they were reserved for the sole use of the individual owners or their tenants.

What...