Tombland

Somerset turned to royal proclamations to deal with the enclosure issue, bypassing Parliament – government by proclamation was a notable feature of his rule. In June 1548 a proclamation ordered a ‘view and enquiry’ on illegal enclosures to be made, to begin with a commission to investigate enclosures in the Midlands. The proclamation recited laws against enclosures ignored since Henry VII’s reign. In each place visited, a jury of twelve was to be empanelled under a commissioner, who could make wide-ranging orders including forcing land illegally turned to pasture to be returned to tillage. The leading commissioner was John Hales, a strong-minded, fierce MP, the only serious Commonwealth-minded reformer to find an executive government role. However, Hales emphasized to commoners that they must not take it upon themselves to pull down enclosures. By concentrating on illegal enclosures Hales brought this particular issue to the fore, at the expense of other rural issues.

The practicality of the idea must be doubted – to reverse illegal enclosures going back sixty years, far beyond the lifetime of most potential witnesses, against the opposition of landlords and local officials would have been a gigantic, probably impossible, task. No arrangements were provided for enforcement, and appeals by landlords to the courts could have kept the matter tied up for decades. However, without getting further than preliminary enquiries in the Midlands, the commission adjourned, probably because Hales, as an MP, had to return to Parliament for the new session, and nothing more happened for a year. All this indicates how low a priority the matter really was for Somerset.

In May 1548, the month before Somerset’s proclamation (perhaps influencing its timing), a sizeable insurrection took place in Hertfordshire. ²

The cause was an impending commission (separate from Hales’s commissions) obtained by Sir William Cavendish to authorize enclosure of part of Northaw Great Waste, a very large area of common land. Villagers who used the land, together with outsiders, took action that in many ways prefigured what was to happen the following year, setting up a camp on Northaw Common led by substantial yeomen and local officeholders, creating an infrastructure to supply and run it, and petitioning the Protector. However when local magnate Roger Chomley offered assurances and promises of reform, the rebels dispersed. Several were subsequently prosecuted.

It is worth pausing here to consider what ‘enclosure’ meant. ³ The English village used the three-field system, where each year two fields were farmed and one left fallow. The fields themselves were divided into strips, with villagers owning several, positioned in a haphazard way. Additionally there was an expanse of village ‘common land’. This was of central importance to poor villagers especially, used for grazing their own animals as well as a source of game, wood, fish and reeds. Milk from cows and bacon from the pigs were crucial sources of nutrition.

The village was not an undifferentiated mass of peasants. There were several types of holding – copyhold, the commonest, which had replaced serfdom; tenancies at the landlord’s will, often on land occupied long ago by squatters; and freehold, where the freeholder effectively owned the land, subject to a lord’s or the King’s suzerainty.

Sizes of holdings varied greatly. Many ‘cottagers’ had only a few acres, not enough to live on, and worked part time as tradesmen or labourers. Often they relied heavily on their rights on the commons, particularly in the 1540s as inflation ate away at their earnings.

WAS ENCLOSURE A MAJOR PROBLEM?

There were two types of enclosure. The first was where tenants, by exchange or purchase, brought their strips together into a single holding, making for more efficient farming. Often such people profited and were able to expand their holdings. This was the rising class of yeoman from which it was possible, though rare and tricky, to rise to acceptance as a ‘gentleman’. ¹ Most yeomen kept their share of the common land, though some were not above undertaking illegal enclosures of the land themselves.

The second type of enclosure was quite different, and this was the target of Hales’s commissions. Here landlords, often non-resident, actively sought to expand their sheepfolds and squeeze out smaller farmers, mainly by attacking the commons. Sometimes they grazed additional sheep or cattle to crowd out other users; sometimes they simply enclosed the commons illegally. Without its commons a village could not survive, and though established rights to use the commons could be enforced in court, this was extremely difficult in practice. ²