Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

The process of enclosing the commons began in the Middle Ages in England but peaked between 1750 and 1850 with a series of parliamentary enclosure acts. These acts gave to powerful individuals land that had long been collectively farmed, grazed, and administered, erasing villages and villagers and their self-determination and prosperity. Historian of the commons Peter Linebaugh notes that in England and Wales, “between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million acres of land, about a quarter of cultivated acreage, to the politically dominant landowners. . . . It got rid of open-field villages and common rights and contributed to the late eighteenth century’s crisis of poverty.”