This process was known as ‘enclosure’.12 Thousands of rural communities were destroyed during the enclosure movement; crops were ripped up and burned, whole villages razed to the ground. Commoners lost their access to land, forests, game, fodder, water, fish – all the resources necessary for life. And the Reformation added further fuel to the bonfire of dispossession: as Catholic monasteries were dismantled across Europe, their lands were snapped up by nobles and cleared of the people who lived there.
