But the clues are largely inferential. Land, it is believed, played a signal role in one of the great episodes of early English heroics. Boadicea—Boudicca, Victoria; her names are many—the great English warrior-queen of the Iceni who rebelled against the Roman rulers in AD 60 (and burned down most of Londinium in the process), is thought, for example, to have staged her insurrection because the imperial governors had confiscated land hitherto given to the Iceni for some unspecified reason. That the Romans had given the land* in the first place suggests to scholars today that Rome firmly believed itself to be the owner of all English land, and could distribute it, or rent it out, as it saw fit. Such assumption spawned the greater idea that Roman rule over England existed, and was absolute.

  Prior to the Romans’ four centuries of generally stabilizing presence, the idea of the ownership of early England becomes supremely vague, and assumptions about its arrangement tentative in the extreme. We know of the existence of the British Isles’ various tribes—tattooed and woad-painted Celts—but little of their attitude to land. Except it is known they ploughed, with two-oxen teams hauling the primitive ploughs and tracing patterns of furrows over the friable and stony earth of the untilled countryside. Where a plough team completed a line and turned back, left behind was an eruption of piled earth—and after a time this pile of earth became a crude fence, the demarcation, a line in the ground that divided one pattern of ploughing from another, one area of personal settlement from another, one owned field from the owned field of a neighbor.

  And such, it seems to those archaeologists and anthropologists who have contemplated the finer relict patterns of the English landscape, is how ownership began. It started with the lines of furrows left behind by the ploughs of neighbors, probably fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, thirty-five hundred years ago.

  In those ensuing years, the concept of landholding in England, which had so considerable an influence on the patterns and practices of landholdings all around the western world, took shape, developed, and evolved. Ploughed field furrows became eventually substantial stone walls and Roman villa building; Saxon kings divided their fields among their faithful thanes; Norman monarchs devised the idea of kingly ownership and the feudal granting or gifting of real estate; and from the eleventh century, laws and policies spread ripples of consolidation and control that have left millions of acres of today’s England in the exclusive ownership of a corps d’elite of (mostly) men, who with their families belong still today to a titled and untitled aristocracy that owns—or to be exact, holds estate in—so many millions of acres of modern England.

  “This dear, dear land,” complained old John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s King Richard II, “is now leased out . . . Like to a tenement or pelting farm.” Ownership of land brings with it a grave responsibility, not least when one considers the state of today’s planet. Whether the planet’s surface has been tended well, or ill, has over the centuries been to many a matter of profound and enduring concern. It was when people began building fences around it, enclosing public land for private purpose, and when others, more cruelly, began dismissing landed tenants and replacing them with livestock—both acts being seen not as social vandalism, but as means of improving the quality and the usefulness of the land—that matters first started to go awry.

  Part III

  Stewardship

  1

  The Tragedies of Improvement

  The law locks up the man or woman

  Who steals the goose from off the common;

  But lets the greater villain loose

  Who steals the common from the goose.

  —ANON., IN The Tickler Magazine (1821)

  At the start it was all down to the ploughing methods and the field patterns of two Bronze Age farmers. Many years later it came down to two ideas, two movements, two series of long-drawn-out events that were put to work on land that was by now fully known, divided, managed, inhabited, and used.

  Each in its own way was a movement intended to make the use of land more efficient and, for its owners, more profitable. The older of the two—enclosure—was a phenomenon generally backed by the state. The latter and more notorious—the more obviously cruel and generally Scottish experience known as clearance—was privately inspired. Both had profound human consequence. Both led to waves of migration: the hundreds of written enclosure acts persuaded millions to move from the countryside to live in towns, while the clearances compelled thousands to flee the wilds of Scotland and settle anew in the unrestricted emptiness of North America. More glibly, one can say that enclosures brought about the invigoration of great cities; the clearances helped to create Canada.

  The enclosure of land, the enforced removal of a portion of the surface of the Earth from the common ownership of many to that of one or more private individuals, represented a revolution in the social order, a cataclysmic change like few others before or since. It had been going on without formal sanction for years—the earliest records show land being enclosed, often against the villagers’ will, in the thirteenth century. In 1604, Radipole, a village in Dorset, was the first to have the backing of a Parliamentary Act—the first of almost five thousand specific acts for towns, villages, moorlands, and pastures all around the country that would be passed between then and the early part of the twentieth century, each under the terms of enabling acts which remain on the books and are still theoretically in force today.

  Enclosure of an even less formal nature is still more ancient—with many believing it to have been occurring in England as far back as the late Bronze Age four thousand years ago, at the time of the previously mentioned Deverel-Rimbury people, whose field patterning set in train the idea of land demarcation and its private ownership.

  The earliest lands back then were covered with primeval wildwoods, and archaeological evidence suggests that even as far back as the Stone Age these woods might have been partly felled and ravaged to provide rough grazing for captured animals—leaving behind a landscape of gorse and furze and bracken and relict stumps and fresh undergrowth. Come the Bronze Age, and its sudden semisophistication in farming methods, and the previously roughly grazed cattle were corralled into what one might term ranches, with islands of cleared meadow happily endowed with good grass and flowing water. These grassy areas were specifically reserved for arable farming—parcels of land decidedly not to be trampled upon with hooves and horns, and so enclosed from the less agriculturally congenial stump-laden pastureland.

  No concept of ownership had yet evolved—but the idea that some especially motivated individual might assume direct responsibility for, and an interest in, a specified piece of enclosed land was born at that moment. The conventional notion holds the first true enclosures were in Tudor times—Radipole in Dorset being the classic example, though technically its taking in 1604 was of course a year into the reign of the Stuarts. But this is only partly true. The process, where land is concerned, of having and holding may have been informally organized, but it had been occurring nonetheless for centuries, suggesting that the habit of taking over land for oneself has been an inherent human trait for a very long while.

  Informality had reigned for many previous centuries. Customary law, which long predated the thirteenth-century invention of precedent-based common law, and which varied from village to village in Old England, regulated—if regulated be the word, for in truth it was much less formal than that—the assignment of village land throughout the Middle Ages. And assignment was often sorely needed—for while a villager might have an acre or two of land that he could cultivate, he and his family could barely survive without also having a cow or two or a pig or three or a gathering of sheep or chickens—and yet he could not allow these animals to graze on the land that he was cultivating, in case they ate all the crops and vegetables that he was trying to grow at the same time. He would need somewhere else to graze his livestock—and also somewhere to fell and split his firewood and collect his turf—and for these purposes custom allowed him and his neighbors the right to do so on the land nearby that was used in common.

  This was the so-called wasteland, lying on the outer edge of the village, occupied by no one and thick with cattle, trees, and rough and untended grass. This was for the peasantry an accepted aspect of English village life, long established and settled according to customary law. The common man had rights to this common land, this commonly held land. And they were rights that, though varying in the detail from place to place, were both recognized and, if all around were reasonable men, legally inextinguishable.

  Except that they could be extinguished or traded by agreement with neighbors. The villagers might all agree, for example, that the common land on which they all exercised these rights might somehow be made better use of in some way—by this part being reserved for cows, that for sheep, this corner set aside for all the village pigs, or this copse left for the growing trees and that area being left as rough grassland. If, in other words, there was some sense of order to be brought about on the hitherto free-for-all common. Part of the commons could be enclosed, to use the term of art, and by mutual and commonly accepted consent.

  This is how it was accomplished, and for many hundreds of years reasonably happily so. But as history illustrates on all too many occasions, with education and sophistication comes awareness—and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a number of educated and aware men and women started to have arguments over the perceived inequities of the common land system. People started to cry foul over the readjustment and reassignment of various tracts, and radical leaders empowered by fine oratory and impelled by what seemed a prima facie injustice—men like Jack Cade in Kent, Robert Kett in Norfolk, and John “Captain Pouch” Reynolds in Northamptonshire, and groups like the Diggers in Surrey—found themselves able to assemble angry crowds who gathered to protest that this field had been unfairly distributed or that fence spoiled the common access to a particularly fertile meadow. Mobs set about destroying fences and filling in ditches and driving their sheep into forbidden pastures (or, as with the Diggers, illegally planting carrots on a hill south of London).

  Through the early part of the eighteenth century, this unease showing itself was born from more than just the simple freelance acts of enclosure that so troubled the peasantry of the day: rather there was a distinct feeling of an inchoate unease, a gathering impression that the country had become awash in newfangled ideas, part of what we now know to have been the beginning of the Enlightenment. There were new and unsettling developments in farming techniques, the introduction of machinery and of four-crop rotation methods, which we in retrospect now recognize as the Agricultural Revolution. There were hints of the coming of the Industrial Revolution too, a revolution that would soon sweep like a gale through all of English society and would massively enhance the rise and role of cities, which would lure workers in vast numbers away from the countryside.

  The unease of the times parallels to a degree the same kind of bewilderment at the rate of change in society that so clearly afflicts twenty-first-century humankind. A vague but gathering sense of anxiety was spread more by taproom gossip and from riders of the stage lines, slowly and fitfully. However, it gave the rural poor—especially once they also saw fences rising all about them—the idea that matters were taking place that were somehow not consonant with the supposed idyll of arcadian pastoral life. And so, in many scores of villages there were riots and violence and a scattering of deaths. The government responded with curfews, imprisonment, charges of treason, and not a few hangings, and a growing alarm was felt in London that the situation in the countryside might be getting out of hand.

  After much debate and argument, the government in its wisdom set about laying down rules. With the intention of making certain for everyone’s good that in the matter of enclosure, ownership become a known and formalized quantity, and there was paperwork and the drawing of maps and the making of deeds and the issuance of titles that would formalize and make somewhat more defined the whole fast-changing edifice of the private ownership of England’s solid surface.

  And thus came the first formal and officially approved enclosure of common lands, in and around the Dorset village of Radipole. For the next three hundred years it was ruled that the formal approval of Parliament was necessary for this very particular kind of land seizing. The process of winning the acquiescence of the government in London was both costly and time-consuming for whoever applied, but it followed more or less the same pattern in each case.

  It would begin with a formal request from the proprietor, as the ultimate owner of the land was known, that his land be enclosed and the rights of the commoners who customarily used it for livestock or wood or turf collecting be extinguished. A private bill asking for this would be drawn up, with the details laid out for all members to consider. Parliament would then examine the request on its face: Was the enclosure justified? Would farming become, as usually claimed, more efficient? Would the land become more productive? (With the English population now growing fast, more and more food was needed from the nation’s farmers.) And then again—who would be affected, who adversely, and how badly—and who might benefit, and would they do so in a reasonable or an unduly generous manner? And what rival claims might there be?

  Parliament would then order that a parchment document giving notice of the possibility of local enclosure be fixed to the church doors in the parish, for the next three weeks, just like the banns of marriage. Once the bill passed such muster—at a time when perhaps not all churchgoers had full command of written English—three commissioners, men of good standing and with a presumed neutrality in the matter, would be dispatched to examine the proprietor’s request and such commoners’ claims as had been thrown up, and then try to determine if indeed the enclosure served the public good or not. And once the commissioners’ report was in, so the bill would be debated, voted upon, and, if successful, translated into a formal act of Parliament—meaning that the enclosure itself, of this particular village or parish or common field, would be the settled law of the land. Challengeable still in the courts, but effectively a done deal.

  A formal printed Parliamentary Enclosure Act would be tacked to the church door to be read by all. After a decent interval, it permitted the local common land to be fenced off and turned into private property.

  And as mentioned, it was a deal done nearly five thousand times through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as bill after bill was presented in Parliament and millions of acres of once commonly used land came to be ringed by wattle and wire, and fields, meadows, and woodlands were swept into private hands. The controversies attendant on the very idea of enclosure have not subsided over the years since, and the complexities of both its initial justification and its often dire consequences continue to exercise the minds of academics and social commentators to this day. Its complexities are indeed very real, and the social historian E. P. Thompson issued a warning, less heeded than it should be, that “a novice in agricultural history caught loitering in those areas with intent would quickly be despatched.”

  So far as justification is concerned, the official reasons can be inferred from the long title of the enabling act that Parliament passed in 1773, that “inclosure” was a process designed “for the better Cultivation, Improvement, and Regulation of the Common Arable Fields, Waste and Commons of Pasture in this Kingdom.” The unstated reason, however, was suggested by an infamous paper published in Science magazine very much later, in 1968, which had a title that has since become a catchphrase: “The Tragedy of the Commons.”

  The essay’s author, an American ecologist named Garrett Hardin who was a devout anti-immigrationist and eugenicist and a believer in the dangers of overpopulation, declared that commonly used land would inevitably be badly used land, because people were greedy or careless, wouldn’t cooperate or take care of their land, would push as many of their own cattle to graze on fields that were already overgrazed, would take more than their fair share, and so on—would, in other words, ruin the bounty that God and Nature had so generously offered to them. Hardin quoted William Forster Lloyd, a Victorian divine and Oxford mathematician who in 1833 had asked:

  why are the cattle on a common so puny and stunted? Why is the common itself so careworn and cropped so differently from the adjoining enclosures? If a person puts more cattle into his own field, the amount of the subsistence which they consume is all deducted from that which was at the command of his original stock; and if, before, there was no more than a sufficiency of pasture, he reaps no benefit from the additional cattle, what is gained one way, being lost in another. But if he puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all the cattle, as well that of others as his own, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle.

  This, as Hardin described it, was the true tragedy of the commons, and the only sure way to avert it was to make the land private. “Common ownership remorselessly generates tragedy,” he wrote, and then with a final flourish, offered a paragraph memorized by all who have strong views about enclosure and common ownership:

  An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? . . . We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust—but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.