Enclosure stories: narratives from Northamptonshire

Abstract

This paper rethinks and revises enclosure narratives, thickening the concept of enclosure by researching a particular place and period: the English Midland county of Northamptonshire in the period between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It argues that while many elements of the landscape were dramatically reshaped by enclosure, the parliamentary enclosures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were nevertheless part of a much longer process of landscape change. The paper points to the complexities within enclosure thought and experience, drawing particular attention to individuals and groups -including female landowners, ordinary villagers and animals -too often entirely written out of the 'enclosure story'.

Enclosure as Internal Colonisation: The Subaltern Commoner, Terra Nullius and the Settling of England's ‘Wastes’

“…21 A series of articles by Briony McDonagh has also usefully, in her words, engaged in 'thickening the concept of enclosure' by placing examples of enclosure into complex longue durée narratives and drawing in humans and non-human things often excluded from established enclosure stories. 22 Yet, beyond the aforementioned paper by Stephen Thompson, 23 the politics of enclosure in the very era of parliamentary enclosure (and in the age of enclosure by dispossession overseas that became known as settler colonialism) remains remarkably little studied, the study of enclosure itself in many ways 'enclosed'.…”

Licit or Illicit? Encroachments on ‘the Lord’s Waste’ in North-east Scotland, c.1400 – c.1800

“…There are certain aspects of English enclosure that resonate with north-eastern encroachments, but these are more broadly reflected in the later period after the Scottish parliament's Division of the Commonties Act that pre-empted the later 18th-and 19th-century Inclosure Acts of the British parliament. In fact, enclosure protest, as described across England from at least the 13th centuries (Dyer, 2006;McDonagh & Daniels, 2012;McDonagh, 2019), is rarely, if ever, encountered in the North-east before the 1850s. The alignment of cross-class associations of interest, discussed by McDonagh with respect to the South Cave dispute in Yorkshire during the 16th century (2013), does, however, find resonance with north-east examples where lairds and their tenants faced-off against each other in legal (and more practical) arguments.…”