Over the course of three centuries, huge swathes of Britain and the rest of Europe were enclosed and millions of people removed from the land, triggering an internal refugee crisis. It would be difficult to overstate the upheaval that characterised this period – it was a humanitarian catastrophe. For the first time in history, commoners were systematically denied access to the most basic resources necessary for survival. People were left without homes and food. We don’t need to romanticise subsistence life to recognise that enclosure produced conditions that were far worse; worse even than
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