The classical republican ideal of the independent, armed citizen whose freedom and moral rectitude are guaranteed by the possession of landed property can be detected in the writings of a range of thinkers, who have lived in a diverse array of times and places. From Machiavelli's Florence to Thomas Jefferson's early American Republic, via the English Commonwealth of James Harrington, we can still hear the echoes of a political language which embodied a pre-liberal conception of liberty, and an agrarian vision of political virtue.Footnote 1
Recently, Eric Nelson has extended our understanding of republicanism by uncovering an alternative tradition of thought, which prioritized the values of happiness and justice, over and above freedom or virtue. One feature of this tradition was an acceptance of the state's responsibility to legislate against grossly unequal distributions of landed property. Nelson traces the genealogy of this tradition back to the major texts of Greek moral and political philosophy, in particular Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. In exploring the early modern manifestations of the ‘Greek tradition’, Nelson shows how republican theorists including Thomas More, James Harrington, Baron de Montesquieu, and Thomas Jefferson interpreted classical notions of justice, property, virtue, and happiness. What united these thinkers was their praise, albeit in varying degrees, for ancient Hellenic and Roman legislation on the distribution of property, the so-called ‘agrarian laws’.Footnote 2 The agrarian laws, so it seemed to these thinkers, provided the best policy solution to the problem of an unequal distribution of wealth, and its attendant evils of political corruption and civil decay.Footnote 3
This article does not presume to arbitrate between contrasting versions of republicanism, but rather seeks to show how elements from each of these strands interacted in a neglected, but important, debate on the distribution of landed property in eighteenth-century Britain. Under discussion were the merits, or otherwise, of enclosing England's remaining open-fields, commons, and wastes by parliamentary authority. Whilst it should be noted that Scottish agriculture was left virtually untouched by the eighteenth-century parliamentary enclosures, the debate can nevertheless be described as genuinely British because of the prominence of Scottish theories of commercial society in the arguments of those who sought to legitimate enclosure.Footnote 4 The republican opponents of enclosure, meanwhile, were not, for the most part, political theorists of the fame of Montesquieu or Jefferson – indeed the identity of a number of them is unknown – but they were engaged pamphleteers who shared a number of key assumptions with both the armed citizen brand of republicanism, associated above all with Machiavelli, and the more egalitarian, Greek model of republicanism delineated by Nelson.
The enclosure of agricultural land was not a new phenomenon in eighteenth-century England, and had been a cause of popular unrest from at least the fifteenth century.Footnote 5 Put simply, enclosure implied the negation of common rights. Under the medieval, open-field system of agriculture, arable land was divided into strips that were cultivated by individual farmers. Typically, farmers would hold a number of different strips that were not spatially contiguous. After harvest, the open-fields became ‘common’ and anyone in possession of common rights could graze animals on the land. Enclosure put an end to this. Physical barriers in the shape of hedges, fences, and ditches demarcated enclosed land and established exclusive property rights. After enclosure farmers were no longer subject to a communal system of husbandry and were free to change land usage. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this invariably meant enclosure was followed by the conversion of arable land to pasture, because sheep farming, the staple of the textile industry, tended to be more profitable.
Since there was limited economic incentive in enclosing isolated strips, enclosure was often accompanied by a reorganization of landholdings so as to create parcels of land that could be let for higher rental values. As a result, enclosure could lead to the elimination of small owner-occupiers, who were bought out by larger proprietors. The amalgamation of a number of smallholdings into one large farm is known as ‘engrossing’. Although enclosure and engrossing were not necessary concomitants, contemporary critics frequently conflated the two processes because of their perceived association with depopulation. Enclosure resulting in the conversion of arable to pasture reduced agricultural employment, even if it did not eliminate smallholders, since livestock farming was less labour intensive. Engrossing, even when it did not effect changes in land use, was associated with abandoned farmhouses and cottages, as economies of scale rendered open-field levels of employment obsolete.
What distinguished the hedges, fences, and ditches of the Hanoverian period was that they had been planted, constructed, and dug with the explicit authorization of parliament. Before 1700 enclosure was rarely accomplished by statutory means, since legislative fiat was unnecessary if all proprietors consented to ‘enclosure by agreement’.Footnote 6 Moreover, Tudor parliaments were generally hostile to enclosure and legislated against depopulating conversions to pasture in the so-called ‘tillage acts’, passed between 1489 and 1597.Footnote 7 Under the Stuarts, however, earlier legislation fell into disuse. Enclosures dating from this period were achieved by judicial, rather than legislative means, with landowners enrolling private agreements in the court of Chancery.Footnote 8 By contrast, the eighteenth century saw two distinct waves of legislative intervention on behalf of enclosers. The first enclosure act was passed in 1604, but it was not until after 1750 that the slow trickle of acts turned into a flood, the first surge occurring between 1755 and 1780, and the second coinciding with the outbreak of the French revolutionary wars in 1793.Footnote 9 Michael Turner has suggested that while the second wave of enclosures was mainly associated with the reclamation of commons and wastes for arable farming as a result of wartime grain shortages, the first wave was concentrated in areas of the country more suited to conversion from arable to pasture.Footnote 10 In other words, the first period of parliamentary enclosure bore a greater resemblance to the Tudor enclosures of the sixteenth century, than to the wartime enclosures of the 1790s.
Despite continuity in terms of enclosers' ends, the means were discontinuous since parliament no longer objected to land use changes. To illustrate the extent of parliament's acquiescence, it is instructive to compare the failure rate of enclosure legislation with that of non-enclosure legislation. Julian Hoppit has found that between 1760 and 1800 the failure rates for enclosure legislation and non-enclosure legislation were essentially the same.Footnote 11 Legislators do not seem to have subjected enclosure bills to any additional scrutiny in this period, notwithstanding their sixteenth-century predecessors' hostility to enclosure. Indeed, the majority of enclosure bills passed without significant comment; the Hammonds were only able to find evidence of three enclosure debates having been sufficiently controversial to merit inclusion in Debrett's Parliamentary register.Footnote 12 However, it should be noted that the infrequency of debates on enclosure bills in Debrett does not prove that there were not more; simply that they were not deemed sufficiently interesting to warrant inclusion in eighteenth-century newspapers and periodicals, not least because enclosure legislation was nearly always private and local, as opposed to public and general.
This article focuses on the half century or so after 1730, when the enclosure debate out-of-doors was at its height, and the number of enclosure acts was increasing sharply. It draws on evidence from some two dozen books and pamphlets, more than half of which were published in the third quarter of the century. Notwithstanding parliament's apparent indifference to the pamphleteers who were hostile to enclosure, opposition out-of-doors was sufficiently strong to provoke a response from writers who not only denied the premises of the anti-enclosure case, but were willing to defend parliament's actions as both legitimate and necessary. Previous discussions of the enclosure debate have concentrated predominantly on its empirical content, focusing particularly on what its participants can tell us about enclosure's impact on the agricultural poor. Such accounts have paid insufficient attention to the ideological influences and authorities which shaped this debate.Footnote 13 Meanwhile, historians of eighteenth-century ideology interested in shifting attitudes to property, such as Paul Langford, or H. T. Dickinson, have understated or even overlooked the impact of parliamentary enclosure on eighteenth-century thought. Langford, for example, has claimed that ‘historians have paid more attention to parliamentary enclosure than it strictly deserves’ yet fails to provide any specific examples of this supposedly excessive attention. Perhaps he is alluding to the research priorities of twentieth-century agrarian history, of the Hammonds et al. Footnote 14 This article, by contrast, attempts to bridge the gap between agrarian and intellectual history by explaining why and how the debate caused a primarily political model of a commonwealth of yeoman farmers to be replaced by a more overtly economic model of a society in which the progress of commerce was privileged above all other considerations.
The first two sections describe the arguments levelled against enclosure and identify the authorities on which pamphleteers drew. They reveal the extent to which opponents of enclosure developed a law-based critique of parliament's actions – hitherto overlooked – which drew on Tudor and classical legislative precedents. The third and fourth sections deal with the legitimation of enclosure by means of an attack on leading republican assumptions. The language of ‘improvement’ (the idea that land could be put to more profitable uses) underpinned the arguments put forward by supporters of enclosure. They rejected the notion that parliamentary enclosure should cease, arguing instead that the contingent historical circumstances which had produced the Roman agrarian laws, or the Tudor tillage acts, no longer applied to a society based on the interdependence of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.
I
Agrarian historians have long been interested in the status of the English yeomanry and much ink has been spilt on the subject of its decline, and the extent to which this was caused by enclosure.Footnote 15 This question is part of the larger historiographical debate on the advent of capitalist relations within English agriculture, which saw the disappearance of owner-occupiers and their replacement by tenant farmers. Many eighteenth-century writers on agriculture, it will be argued here, shared this interest in the fate of the owner-occupier, but took a more holistic view of enclosure, which considered the economic effects of enclosure within a wider moral and political framework. A major part of the case against enclosure rested on the claim that the destruction of the yeoman would lead to wider political and moral decay in the commonwealth.
Before turning to the intellectual roots of this assumption, and the policy proposals which followed from it, it is important to outline the charges against enclosure. Two of the most frequently cited critics, Stephen Addington and Richard Price, both dissenting ministers, are the clearest exponents of the opposition case. Addington, whose Enquiry into the reasons for and against inclosing the open fields appeared anonymously in 1767 (but whose authorship was revealed in the second edition of 1772), argued that enclosure was against the public interest in several key respects. First, enclosure reduced the amount of land under tillage, as well as agricultural employment, by enabling farmers to convert to pasture. Although this might increase profits for the individual farmer, it was nevertheless a social evil since the plough was ‘indispensably necessary to the very being of the community’.Footnote 16 Secondly, enclosures enriched the few at the expense of the many because the cost of obtaining enclosure acts was punitive for all but the ‘principal proprietors in a parish’. Tenants unable to afford the rent hikes associated with enclosure ‘must submit to throw their families on the parish’, while ‘small proprietors of land’ and ‘most of the labourers in every parish … are deprived of the means of support’ because of the negation of common rights.Footnote 17 Thirdly, enclosure ‘is an encouragement to the monopoly of lands’, which reduced both agricultural and non-agricultural employment due to the collapse in overall demand.Footnote 18 Finally, and most importantly, Addington blamed enclosure for thinning ‘the country villages of inhabitants’ and depopulating ‘the nation in general’. Depopulation took two forms: rural out-migration, including emigration to foreign countries, and a fall in the marriage rate ‘among the lower classes of people’ due to the difficulty of securing a dwelling and the want of employment.Footnote 19 Britain was thus doubly weakened; internally by structural unemployment, and externally by the steady loss of subjects to her colonies, and potential rivals in trade.Footnote 20 Addington was by no means unusual in the concern he expressed over depopulation, since it was treated as virtually axiomatic in the eighteenth century, at least before Malthus, that national wealth – and therefore power – was directly proportional to the ‘number of hands’.Footnote 21
For Richard Price, enclosure, and more particularly the engrossing of farms associated with it, were major causes of depopulation. His Observations on reversionary payments, which proved so popular that it went through seven editions between 1771 and 1812, was written to solve the problem of establishing life assurance schemes on a sound financial footing.Footnote 22 As part of his efforts to improve the calculation of life expectancy, Price collected mortality data for different environments. He concluded that the unhealthy conditions found in towns, ‘and the luxury which generally prevails in them’, were responsible for checking the increase of population.Footnote 23 Although Price did not refer to enclosures in the first edition, he became increasingly insistent on the harmful effects of rural out-migration in subsequent editions as a result of his comparative work on urban and rural vital rates. In the second edition, Price added a supplement in which he discussed the ‘difference between the probabilities of life in great towns and in country parishes’, using evidence assembled by the Swiss demographer, Jean-Louis Muret, for the pays de Vaud. Price cited Muret in support of his own contention that luxury was an obstacle to population growth, but also singled out another cause of depopulation identified by Muret, when he blamed the engrossing of farms for ‘erecting private benefit on public calamity’ and ‘giving up the nation to depopulation and misery’.Footnote 24 When Price published the third edition in 1773, he wrote a postscript to the supplement which strengthened his critique of engrossing and introduced for the first time a direct assault on the enclosure of open-fields and the conversion of tillage to pasture.Footnote 25
Price, who had read Addington's Enquiry by this time, saw depopulation operating in two parallel directions. First, the ‘accumulation of property’ that characterized an increasingly unequal rural society of large farms implied the creation of an agricultural proletariat, or, in Price's words, ‘a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others’, who would avoid marriage due to the costs of providing for a family in the market economy.Footnote 26 Secondly, Price's analysis of parish registers and bills of mortality revealed that great towns were not conducive to long life, and typically depended on rural incomers to maintain their size. In an extreme case like London, where Price observed a significant excess of burials over births, and estimated that up to a quarter of its inhabitants were in-migrants, its continued increase contributed to the desertion of the rest of the kingdom.Footnote 27 In other words, enclosure and engrossing mattered because they had a direct, and negative, effect on both rural and urban population growth. Economic checks to marriage in the country would ultimately be felt in towns, which were simultaneously subject to greater mortality and morbidity checks.
It is now possible to identify more explicitly the republican underpinning of the anti-enclosure case, not only in Addington and Price, but also in the writings of a number of other authors. First, there is the idea that enclosure was contrary to the public interest (res publica). While it was undoubtedly a commonplace of early modern political thought that the test of any particular policy was its conformity to the ‘common good’, it is noteworthy that when Addington applied this test to enclosure – and found it wanting – he alluded to the ruin of ‘the most flourishing and virtuous of the ancient eastern republicks’, caused by the ‘very hurtful maxim, “That which inriches individuals is an advantage to the public.”’ To avoid the same fate, he advised his readers to look to classical Greece and Rome, where ‘de amore Patriae … glowed in the bosoms of many of the ancient inhabitants’.Footnote 28 Similarly, Price's characterization of engrossing as ‘erecting private benefit on public calamity’ was contrasted with an approving reference to the agrarian law of Licinius Stolo, enacted during a period of Rome's history when plebeians were in the ascendant. In addition, this remark was made in the context of a discussion of the pays de Vaud, a constituent (and subjugated) part of the Bernese republic, which for Montesquieu, among others, was the standard-bearer of classical republican values in eighteenth-century Europe due to its agrarian simplicity, untouched, so it was thought, by maritime commerce.Footnote 29
Other opponents of enclosure, although less classically minded, insisted that enclosure subordinated the public interest to the private. For John Cowper, ‘the Good of the Whole ought constantly to be preferr'd to that of a Part’, a test which enclosure failed to meet, he argued, due to the ‘great Number of Families’ ruined by its ‘present Benefit to some particular Persons’.Footnote 30 Thomas Andrews, meanwhile, praised the principle of Britain's mixed constitution of king, lords, and commons ‘founded on Mutual Interests’ and ‘Publick Virtue’, but attacked what he regarded as the degeneration of this system, exemplified in the public debt, luxury, electoral corruption, the enclosure of wastes, and the neglect of poor children.Footnote 31 Half a century later, when parliamentary enclosure had gathered pace, two anonymous critics were sceptical of the capacity of Britain's mixed constitution to promote the public interest. One writer remarked on how the ‘involution of different interests’ made it hard for the legislature to discover the general good, and warned that public acts of the legislature could all too easily become the ‘means of much evil’. Although sympathetic to the enclosure of sandy wastes and boggy moors on the grounds that public and private interests were ‘inseparably united’ in such cases, this author warned legislators against allowing the enclosure of small commons because they were ‘prejudicial to the public’ and ‘they add nothing to the population of the country’.Footnote 32 Another writer questioned what good a mixed constitution was if the nobility, gentry, clergy, and crown that formed the legislature should be ‘actuated by individual interests, contrary to the national good’, as seemed to be manifestly the case in respect of enclosures.Footnote 33
A second republican theme articulated by critics of enclosure was their vision of an agrarian economy of independent smallholders, ready and able to bear arms in defence of the state. In part this reflected the intellectual inheritance of Tudor tillage legislation, which routinely decried the depopulation associated with enclosure, ‘whereby the power and defence’ of the country was ‘enfeebled and impaired … to the subversion of the common weal of this realm’.Footnote 34 Eighteenth-century commentators used these statutes to add weight to their critique of parliamentary enclosure because they demonstrated the degree to which parliament had strayed from the policy course set by the Tudors. Thomas Allen, after praising the wisdom of the tillage acts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, advised his readers to ensure that their elected representatives were men ‘well known to them, and who live in open field parishes’.Footnote 35 Writing in 1786, the anonymous ‘Country Farmer’ remarked it was ‘no wonder … that the British arms were so unsuccessful’ in the recent American war, since one effect of sixty years' enclosure was the loss of small farmers to the colonies. Significantly, this author proposed the restoration of the wise policy of ‘our forefathers’, who ‘ordered all the land that had not been inclosed upwards of fifty years, to be laid open again’.Footnote 36
For Richard Price, ‘the policy of former times’ embodied in Tudor statutes against depopulation revealed a clear preference for owner-occupancy. By contrast, ‘Modern policy, is, indeed, more favourable to the higher classes of people’, which would ultimately produce a kingdom consisting of ‘only gentry and beggars, or of grandees and slaves’. Price blamed what he called ‘modern policy’ for reducing independent occupiers, ‘to the state of day-labourers and hirelings’. In effect, Price was adopting a broadly ‘neo-roman’ definition of liberty in the sharp contrast that he drew between economic independence, afforded by the possession of landed property, and the day-labourer's wage slavery.Footnote 37 As for the consequences of this policy, Price warned his readers that the lower ranks' taste for tea and wheaten bread was indicative of the corrupting influence of the upper ranks. The implications for the state were disastrous since it ‘is the lower people chiefly that pay the taxes of the state, fight its battles, carry on its commerce, and maintain its splendor’.Footnote 38
Price's analysis owed much to Francis Bacon's account of Tudor policy. According to Bacon, whose History of the reign of King Henry VII is quoted at length in the third edition of the Observations, the aim of the act of 4 Hen. 7 was to reverse depopulating enclosures by maintaining ‘all houses of husbandry, with 20 acres of ground to them’ in perpetuity. Or, as Bacon put it in his essay ‘Of the true greatness of kingdoms and estates’ (also quoted by Price), the act intended to ‘breed a subject in convenient plenty and no servile condition’, who would be an owner, and not a hireling.Footnote 39 Bacon's own anti-enclosure credentials were substantial, both as a politician and writer. In 1597 he proposed a motion in the House of Commons against depopulating enclosures and for the maintenance of tillage. This gave rise to a less ambitious tillage act, which ordered the reversal of all conversions to pasture since 1558, and a ban on future conversions.Footnote 40 In 1601 Bacon successfully defended the measure against attempts to prevent its continuance, and made explicit the link between husbandry and strength in arms.Footnote 41 Outside parliament, Bacon the political philosopher adhered to a Machiavellian theory of civic greatness, which valorized the military virtue of the citizen-farmer.Footnote 42 Indeed, in his discussion of Henry VII's Tillage Act, Bacon had praised the policy precisely because it protected ‘the yeomanry, or middle people’, who constituted the ‘military power of the kingdom’.Footnote 43
Price's invocation of Bacon is noteworthy because it reveals the extent to which key republican tropes, such as the absolute polarity between liberty and slavery, or the moral and political importance of owner-occupiers, could suffuse a debate largely ignored by intellectual historians of the period. Moreover, the more radical aspects of the eighteenth-century critique of parliamentary enclosure were softened by repeated references to Tudor legislative precedents. By drawing attention to Tudor responses to enclosing landlords, eighteenth-century commentators sought to ground their opposition to agrarian change in history, but simultaneously presented a model for parliament to adopt in the future. This legislative discourse was an eighteenth-century innovation which reflected the specific polemical needs of the opponents of parliamentary enclosure. As we shall see, the other side of the republican coin helped to reinforce the claim that an unequal distribution of property was detrimental to the welfare of the commonwealth.
II
If the influence of Tudor agrarian policy on the eighteenth-century enclosure debate has gone unnoticed in the secondary literature, the same can be said of the most important classical legislative precedent which informed the debate: the agrarian law. One exception is Robert C. Allen's reinterpretation of English agricultural change. Allen's primary objective is to provide a quantitative reassessment of the productivity gains achieved by early modern yeoman farmers prior to the eighteenth-century enclosure movement, but he also offers a qualitative analysis of the republican language which informed contemporary objections to the inequality produced by the ‘landlords’ agricultural revolution'. For Allen, writers such as Thomas More, John Lilburne, and James Harrington are representative of a radical school of thought in the early modern period which denied the ‘inevitability of a trade-off between growth and equity’. Of these three, particular attention is given to Harrington, whose Oceana (1656) offered a detailed exposition of the operation of an agrarian law for an Anglophone audience.Footnote 44 Although Allen traces the reception of Roman agrarian laws among eighteenth-century radicals, including Walter Moyle, Andrew Fletcher, and Thomas Gordon, he is unable to point to any specific examples of the agrarian law being deployed in debates on the impact of enclosure on the yeoman.Footnote 45 This section offers a correction to this lacuna and suggests that writers on enclosure drew on both conventional and lesser known sources in their articulation of the classical republican agrarian model.
The intention behind all agrarian laws – the redistribution of land to prevent extremes of wealth – had obvious appeal to opponents of parliamentary enclosure who linked enclosure to land monopolization. Although none of the participants in the enclosure debate followed Harrington in setting out specific clauses of an agrarian law – or even quoted him – critics legitimated their opposition by reference to Roman history. John Mitchell, a Virginian botanist and cartographer who wrote on England's commercial relations with the colonies, argued land ought to be cultivated for corn so as to encourage population, because ‘Without that use of the lands … this nation will never be able to breed or maintain half the people it wants. The Romans themselves never stood in such need of a lex agraria, as the English.’Footnote 46 Mitchell praised the distribution of lands in the colonies and the custom of ‘dividing the lands among their children’. In Britain, by contrast, ‘the lands are engrossed by a few’. The more equal distribution of land in the colonies accounted for their rapid population growth and he warned that the colonies would soon become more populous than the mother country.Footnote 47
Richard Price received his account of the Roman agrarian laws from the German demographer, J. P. Süssmilch. In the second edition of his Observations (1772), Price reported Süssmilch's remark that if the laws of Licinius or that of Romulus were revived ‘you will soon convert a barren desart into a busy and crouded hive’.Footnote 48 This was in the context of a footnote to his discussion of engrossing in the Vaud, a discussion, moreover, which Price regarded as particularly applicable to Britain. A year later, Price's fears had increased, and although he retained the section on the Vaud, he chose to refer to the Roman agrarian laws in his postscript entitled ‘the Policy of former Times with respect to Inclosures, engrossing of Farms, and the Encouragement of Agriculture’. In this edition the ‘laws of Licinius’ merited inclusion in the main body of the text and Price forcefully restated his claim that ‘the division of property promotes population’, in opposition to ‘the doubts of some ingenious men’.Footnote 49
Nevertheless, Price's views on the practical applicability of agrarian laws are complicated by his remarks a decade later on the outcome of the American revolution. Writing in 1784, Price suggested the American cause had been greatly assisted by the relatively equal distribution of property there, not to mention the ‘independent and hardy Yeomanry, all nearly on a level – trained to arms’. Although he advised his American readers to strive to maintain equality, and even went so far as to suggest that schemes for a ‘community of goods’ and the annihilation of property proposed by Plato, Thomas More, and Robert Wallace were not ‘wholly impracticable’, Price argued that ‘a republican constitution of government’ should not be considered universally applicable. According to Price, ‘Britain … consists too much of the high and the low (of scum and dregs) to admit of it.’Footnote 50 Price's views are therefore difficult to interpret, but this later text may indicate his growing sense of disenchantment with Britain's prospects, and his frustration that so little had been done since 1773 to reverse the progressive polarization of wealth.
Price's comments on engrossing caught the attention of Matthew Peters, a member of the Dublin Society for the Encouragement of Husbandry.Footnote 51 Peters was not strictly an opponent of enclosure, but he criticized the monopolization of farms on the grounds that this practice, regardless of whether it resulted in pasture or tillage, depopulated the kingdom. He drew an unfavourable comparison between contemporary ‘gluttonous appetites after land’, and ‘the conduct of the great men in antient times, who … well knew the error of leaving much land in one man's hands’. In what was perhaps an oblique reference to parliamentary enclosures of previously cultivated land (as opposed to unimproved wastes), Peters attributed to Virgil the opinion that ‘large enclosures and great domaines held by private persons, have long been the ruin of Italy’. In addition, Peters praised the agrarian foundations of Rome's military strength, which meant that the greatest general and the lowliest soldier each ‘cultivated the seven acres’. Under the agrarian laws, Peters argued, following the analysis in Josiah Tucker's Four tracts, on political and commercial subjects (1774), Rome had been a ‘happy state’ until, that is, ‘luxury, ambition after conquest, &c. had crept in’.Footnote 52 Although Peters did not propose an agrarian law for Britain, and feared that contemporary monopolizations would prove ‘difficult to retrench’, his discussion of Roman history was clearly intended to be exemplary, rather than of purely antiquarian interest.
For Thomas Allen, parliament's failure to act against the wholesale enclosure of the open-fields risked the divine curse of desolation found in Isaiah 5.8 against those ‘who join one house to another, and bring one land so nigh to another, till ye can get no more ground’.Footnote 53 To avert this threat, Allen proposed legislative remedies which drew on both the Hebrew precedent of the Sabbatical year – which required land to be left uncultivated and debts forgiven every seventh year – and classical agrarian laws.Footnote 54 He reminded his readers that though property ‘is very dear to Englishmen’, the Spartans had been no different before Lycurgus imposed ‘an equality of estates, in order to reform the vices of the state, and to make all virtuous’.Footnote 55 Quoting at length Petrus Cunaeas's De republica Hebraeorum libri III (1617), Allen made explicit the analogy between the shared intent of Moses and Licinius Stolo, since both lawgivers wanted to regulate property so as to prevent moral degeneration among the citizenry.Footnote 56
While Robert Allen is surely right to draw our attention to the republican counter-tradition of eighteenth-century opinion which theorized a ‘yeoman alternative’ to the landlord-led enclosure movement, his account should be treated with caution because of its readiness to reproduce overly schematic genealogies of republican thought. Such genealogies, which prioritize the Harringtonian inheritance, obscure more distant republican relations. Indeed, Harrington is conspicuous by his absence in the eighteenth-century enclosure debate. Nevertheless, critics of enclosure did at least share some common ground with Harrington, apart from their interest in agrarian laws: both followed Francis Bacon in recommending the military advantages of the owner-occupier.Footnote 57 It is therefore Bacon, and not Harrington, who emerges as the leading light in the ‘yeoman alternative’. The significance of this finding cannot be explored fully here, but surely deserves to be, given the orthodox view of Bacon as the father of ‘improvement’.Footnote 58 As we shall see, the eighteenth-century improvers – for whom support for enclosure was virtually an article of faith – regarded Bacon's praise for Henry VII as deeply unsound.
In this particular debate, republican themes surfaced in the critique of parliamentary enclosure from unlikely sources, ranging from continental demography, to humanist Biblical scholarship, by-passing entirely more recognized authorities. Opponents of enclosure combined commentary on Tudor agrarian legislation with the maxims of classical politics to challenge the Hanoverian parliaments' apparent indifference to a massive reorganization of landed property. The advocates of enclosure, to whom we now turn, recognized that the historical authority of both Tudor and Roman policy were the strongest pillars of the anti-enclosure case. To defend parliament against its detractors, supporters of enclosure needed to challenge the validity of the republican critique.
III
‘I might enter into a long discussion of enclosures’, wrote the agricultural improver, Arthur Young, in 1767, ‘was it not a subject absolutely exhausted by preceding writers.’ Young was so confident that ‘the universal benefit resulting from inclosures’ was ‘fully proved’ that he felt able to dismiss those who argued against them as ‘contemptible cavillers’.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, Young did engage with the arguments of those who doubted the ‘universal benefit’ of enclosure. Over the next forty years he showed himself far from satisfied with the exhaustive treatment of the subject by previous writers.
One reason for considering the arguments of improvers, such as Young, only after the case against enclosure has been explored is that, to a greater extent than their polemical opponents, supporters of enclosure structured their arguments with the explicit intention of refuting what they regarded as the ‘prejudice’ and ‘ignorance’ of the ‘cavillers’.Footnote 60 Although agricultural improvers deployed a range of arguments in support of enclosure, I wish to focus on their efforts to question the value of an egalitarian distribution of property which, as we have seen, was so central to the republican tradition. Young and his allies did this by articulating a historicist critique of the early modern and classical agrarian models that opponents of enclosure upheld.Footnote 61
Before examining the detail of the improvers' reply, a detour into the Scottish Enlightenment account of ancient and modern politics is required. David Hume and Sir James Steuart analysed English society without any nostalgia for the independent smallholder. Both believed that the development of commercial society heralded a new kind of political economy, distinct from that of the ancients. The progress of history rendered older models of economic organization moribund. Improvers in the enclosure debate found in the writings of Hume and Steuart an alternative vision of society which denied the republican claim that inequality would bring depopulation and ruin to the state.
Hume's contribution was two-fold, attacking classical assumptions about the relationship between population and property distribution, as well as the wisdom of Tudor agrarian policies. Of the populousness of ancient nations (1752) was an unapologetic defence of modern politics, written as an intervention in the wider eighteenth-century debate on luxury, and its effects on population.Footnote 62 Hume argued that the ‘domestic œconomy of the ancients’, founded on slavery, was detrimental to population. Slaves were generally unmarried and had to be continually brought into cities from the surrounding countryside, thereby depopulating the state. Hume thought the Roman agrarian laws were a consequence of slavery and of no relevance to modern politics since ‘The laws, or, as some writers call them, the seditions of the Gracchi, were occasioned by their observing the encrease of slaves all over Italy, and the diminution of free citizens.’Footnote 63 Hume conceded that before the ‘encrease of Roman power’, when ‘each man had his little house and field to himself, conditions were more conducive to marriage and propagation.Footnote 64 Although ‘the situation in modern times’ was less favourable with respect to equality of fortune, Hume argued that this simply reflected a difference in ancient and modern policy. Ancient republics needed institutions favourable to propagation because they ‘derived their chief or only security from the numbers of their citizens’ and since they spent so much time at war with their neighbours, equality of fortune was necessary for defensive purposes.Footnote 65 The final aspect of his denial of ancient populousness was the inferiority of trade, manufactures, and industry in ancient times. For Hume, an economy governed by the exchange of agricultural and non-agricultural goods was ‘the most natural way’ of encouraging husbandry because it would raise agriculture above the level of subsistence production that had prevailed in the ancient world.Footnote 66
Although Sir James Steuart declared himself unwilling to arbitrate between ‘the elaborate performances of Mr. Hume, and Mr. Wallace’ regarding the populousness of the ancient world, his analysis of agriculture, population, and property distribution owed more to Hume than Wallace.Footnote 67 Like Hume, Steuart argued that ancient policy had favoured an equal distribution of property ‘as the best security for liberty’ and the best method ‘to increase the citizens, that is the higher classes of the state’.Footnote 68 In the modern world, however, there were at least two important differences which rendered such a policy obsolete. First, Steuart assumed that there had been, and always would be, a propertyless class in society. In ancient states ‘the multiplication of the lowest classes, that is of the slaves, never entered into the consideration of the public’. Yet in modern times, the welfare of the lowest classes, who were still propertyless, was no longer a private matter and consequently a new policy was needed. Instead of an equal distribution of lands, which would chiefly aid the increase of landlords, Steuart condoned the ‘consolidation of small estates’ on the grounds that the disappearance of middling families did little harm to the state, and because the greater levels of consumption found among the very rich would produce a trickle-down effect ‘into the pockets of the industrious poor’.Footnote 69
Secondly, and more fundamentally, Steuart rejected calls for an equal distribution of lands because such a policy failed to take account of the ‘change of our manners’, and the effect that this had had ‘upon every thing relative to our œconomy’. In particular, the gradual release of ‘free hands’ from agriculture into new trades and manufactures meant that land was no longer the only source of income, and therefore its redistribution would fail to produce equality.Footnote 70 Moreover, this body of ‘free hands’ employed in towns and cities produced manufactured goods whose desirability tended to promote the further improvement of agriculture, and hence population growth, since the land was made to produce surplus food beyond basic subsistence needs.Footnote 71
Hume and Steuart's contribution to the enclosure debate was to deny the economic value of the classical republican economy of independent smallholders. Instead, they highlighted the importance of exchange between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. This latter sector not only absorbed labour that was no longer required in agriculture, but also stimulated agriculture by creating demand for its output. Nathaniel Forster, a largely forgotten English political economist, denied depopulation was a genuine problem in ‘a country full of trade and manufactures’ and argued that it was from the non-agricultural population that the fleets and armies of the nation were recruited.Footnote 72 Quoting Hume's History of England, Forster argued that the best encouragement to population was to appeal to farmers' self-interest:
All methods of supporting populousness, except by the interest of the proprietors, are violent and ineffectual. During a century and a half after this period (the reign of Henry the seventh) there was a continual renewal of laws and edicts against depopulation; whence we may infer, that none of them were ever executed. The natural course of improvement at last provided a remedy.Footnote 73
Although Forster shared common ground with critics of engrossing, and denounced the harm which it did to the ‘hardy, free, and intrepid race of men’ who were ‘the state's most useful subjects in peace, and its best soldiers in war’, he sought to differentiate enclosure from engrossing in a way that would blunt the force of much of the anti-enclosure rhetoric.Footnote 74 Even before Price had challenged the wisdom of ‘modern policy’, Forster's invocation of Hume questioned the practicality of reviving Tudor statutes as writers such as Allen and Addington proposed. Populousness could only be encouraged indirectly, by removing obstacles to the ‘natural course of improvement’.
Arthur Young and John Arbuthnot followed Forster in challenging the relevance of Tudor policy to the eighteenth century, but did so as part of a stinging attack on Price's appropriation of Bacon. More importantly, Young and Arbuthnot did not share Forster's qualms about engrossing. Young used the same quotation from Hume's History of England, previously deployed by Forster. However, he also included Hume's description of Henry VII's policy of placing limitations on manufactures to promote husbandry as ‘absurd’, as well as Hume's comment (omitted by Forster) that ‘the law enacted against inclosures, and for keeping up of farm-houses, scarcely deserves the high praises bestowed on it by Lord Bacon’.Footnote 75 Young was unrepentant in his support for large farms, and argued for many years that yields could only be raised by increasing farm size and capital intensity.Footnote 76
Arbuthnot, who denied that large farms were responsible for increases in the price of provisions, evidently regarded Price as the leading opponent of them since he devoted twenty-six pages to rebutting Price's postscript to the third edition of the Observations on reversionary payments. Arbuthnot's case rested on the discontinuities – economic, social, and political – that distinguished the eighteenth century from earlier periods. Although Arbuthnot professed himself in agreement with Price's regret at the loss of the country's yeomen, he thought Price's apparent support for agrarian laws was mistaken. For Arbuthnot, such a policy was only suitable for a small state, ‘not depending on its manufactures and commerce’. By contrast, in a modern, commercial nation dependent on the export of surplus corn for its wealth, restricting every farmer ‘to seven jugera, or five acres’ was simply out of the question.Footnote 77 In like manner, Arbuthnot thought Price's ‘quotation from Lord Bacon’ regarding Henry VII's Tillage Act, ‘is not applicable to present times’ because of the ‘absurdity of owners holding the plough themselves, at a time when corn is, or ought to be, esteemed part of the trade and wealth of this great nation’.Footnote 78
Arbuthnot was also sceptical of the military motivation behind Price's support for Tudor policy. Although he conceded Price's point ‘that the lower people fight the battles of the nation’, Arbuthnot chose to defer to the authority of Sir James Steuart, rather than Lord Bacon, when he wrote ‘it is from the free hands, the manufacturers and artificers, that our armies are recruited, and not from the cottager and small farmer’.Footnote 79 The effect of what might be called the ‘Scottish turn’ in the improvers' defence of enclosure during the 1760s and 1770s was to shift the terms of the debate. Whereas the opponents of enclosure condemned it for moral and political reasons, such as the immiserating consequences of proletarianization, or the loss of military power, the improvers side-stepped these concerns by focusing on the economic potential of a modern system of large-scale, commercial farming, liberated from the low productivity constraints of smallholding.
IV
In addition to their legitimation of inequality, improvers defended enclosure on the grounds that it was more compatible with individual liberty than the open-field system it replaced. Supporters of enclosure were noteworthy for applying the doctrine of ‘natural liberty’ to the analysis of production and labour supply. Although this concept was to receive its fullest exposition in Adam Smith's Wealth of nations (1776), the enclosure debate provided an important, and early, forum for establishing some of the basic tenets of free market liberalism.Footnote 80 In particular, it was argued that the distribution and use of property, and the encouragement of population, should become indirect objects of state policy. Underlying this claim was a deep-seated scepticism regarding the capacity of legislators, or indeed any collective body, to discern the public interest in a matter as important as the country's subsistence. Legislators were advised instead to leave individual farmers free to pursue their private interest, since the ever-present demand for their output would guarantee its supply.
Writers such as Walter Harte, Henry Homer, and Thomas Stone argued that enclosed land was superior to the open-fields because individual proprietors were left free to put land to its ‘best’ or most natural use. The open-field system, with its requirement of universal agreement among all proprietors as to the mode of cultivation, was an impediment which obstructed the natural course of production, and prevented the improvement of the land.Footnote 81 Arthur Young wondered how depopulation could result from ‘the husbandman converting his farms [by enclosure] to that use for which the soil is most adapted’ and took up the image of restraint when he remarked that ‘a farmer ought not to be tied down to bad husbandry, whatever may become of population’.Footnote 82 Young also denied the statesman any role in promoting corn over wool, or vice versa, since when ‘every man is left to do what he pleases with his land, a general level will be observed among all common products’. Above all, the statesman should lay ‘no prohibitions, no restrictions’ on any party.Footnote 83 John Howlett, an Essex clergyman and social investigator, agreed, rejecting Addington's complaint that enclosures were the cause of rising prices.Footnote 84 If too much land were converted to pasture, Howlett argued, ‘the evil would very soon cure itself’, since ‘the farmer, confident of the vast advantage of growing corn, would sell off his sheep and oxen, break up his meadows and sow them with wheat’.Footnote 85 The open fields were condemned for the burden they placed on individuals, and, by implication, as a perversion of the natural order. Nature, for Young and his allies, was not primarily a historical, or conjectural, moment of original equality, as it was in the Hobbesian natural law tradition. It could nonetheless be a state of abundance (one feature of the state of nature emphasized by Locke) if only private property and improvement were allowed free rein.Footnote 86 Obstacles to improvement, such as the open-fields, needed to be removed so that the full bounty of nature could be enjoyed.
As for the encouragement of population growth, the same basic principle of removing artificial obstacles to the natural course of affairs applied. Henry Homer admitted that enclosures would reduce agricultural employment in the long term, but this merely caused ‘a natural Transition of the Inhabitants of Villages, where the Labour of Agriculture is lessened, into Places of Trade’.Footnote 87 In yet another attack on Richard Price, Young argued that where depopulation did occur, it was the consequence of positive laws such as Henry VII's Tillage Act which prevented poor men from erecting cottages unless they could also afford at least four acres of ground. Such a law, Young claimed, produced the very effect that it was designed to prevent.Footnote 88 Another example Young gave of positive law ‘prohibiting the natural course of things’ was the law of settlement, which ‘cut off that natural liberty of mankind of moving where he pleases’. Young argued that ‘all restrictive forcible measures in domestic policy’ were damaging, and therefore proposed the repeal of positive laws that regulated either the use of land, or the movement of labour. By doing this, the natural causes of population increase would be free to operate.Footnote 89
There were limits to the improvers' enthusiasm for the system of ‘natural liberty’. Young and Arbuthnot, for example, disagreed on liberalizing the grain trade. Whereas Arbuthnot proposed the wholesale repeal of the corn laws, to ‘let corn flow like water’ without the least restraint, confident that the price would ‘find its level’, Young stopped short at recommending the free importation of corn, notwithstanding his support for its free export.Footnote 90 This example is instructive because it serves as a warning against attributing to supporters of enclosure an intellectual unity which did not exist. What united these writers was their belief in the national economic benefits of pursuing agricultural improvement through enclosure. They were not Smithians avant la lettre, notwithstanding the importance of ‘natural liberty’ in their programme. Nor were they simply English physiocrats since they assigned a much greater prominence to the non-agricultural sector than Quesnay or Mirabeau. Rather, the particularities of the enclosure debate – not least the classical republican arguments of men like Allen, Addington, and Price – meant that improvers developed an anti-interventionist outlook, which, paradoxically, legitimated a period of sustained and massive agrarian change, led by parliamentary activism.
It is telling that Arthur Young, who was a leading advocate of parliamentary interference on behalf of enclosing landlords, appears to have made a much greater impression on MPs than Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, if citations in debates on other economic matters are any guide.Footnote 91 The classical republican assumption that the public interest could be established, and then secured, by lawmakers, was thoroughly discredited in the improving literature. In its place, improvers argued for the autonomy of landlords to decide the size, and tenants to decide the produce of farms. Price's republican model of an ‘independent and hardy’ yeomanry, ‘trained to arms’ and ‘all nearly on a level’, was rejected as a historical relic, at least in Britain. Classical republican thought, either in its Machiavellian or Greek guises, appeared ill-equipped to counter the opposing claims of those who justified parliamentary enclosure as a necessary step in the progress not simply of agriculture, but of history itself.
By the 1790s, the second wave of parliamentary enclosure was gathering momentum, and the combined pressure of poor harvests and wartime blockades put agricultural improvement at the forefront of the domestic agenda. The Board of Agriculture, established in 1793 with Young as its first secretary, began to publish county-by-county surveys as part of its campaign to promote further improvement, while a House of Commons select committee on waste lands issued a series of reports from 1795 onwards. There was no comparable output of anti-enclosure publications to accompany this second wave of activity, although further research is needed to examine how far the French Revolution and fear of Jacobinism stifled British proposals for the redistribution of property for egalitarian ends.Footnote 92 The great fear of Price, that the country was being brought to its knees by the depopulating effects of enclosure and engrossing, was exploded at the turn of the century by the results of the 1801 census. This investigation not only revealed the current population size, but also implied a continuous increase in population since 1700, based on the evidence of parish registers. Yet it was not simply the fact of Britain's populousness that undermined the case against enclosure: much of the spade work had already been completed by the zeal of improving authors in the preceding decades. If agrarian improvement had been, as C. A. Bayly has put it, the ‘dominant faith of the élite’ since the 1730s, then it was not until the close of the century that its disciples finally succeeded in cutting the cords that connected the country's civil and military prospects with the fate of the yeoman.Footnote 93
