Every Act of Parliament that enclosed a parish's open fields, commons or wastes, as the official chronological tables list them, placed on the map and in time: 3,655 private Acts and 449 local Acts. Press play and watch the hedges creep out from the Midlands, then surge again in the war years, when bread was dear.
For centuries much of lowland England was farmed in open fields: great unhedged expanses divided into strips, with each farmer's strips scattered across them, and beyond them commons and wastes where villagers grazed animals, cut turf and gathered wood. Between the 1750s and the 1830s most of what was left of that world was fenced, hedged and divided into private fields. Where the landowners of a parish could not all agree, the usual way to do it was a private Act of Parliament, which appointed commissioners to survey the parish, extinguish the common rights and allot the land.
Parliament kept a record of every one of those Acts, and legislation.gov.uk publishes the list as its Chronological Tables of Private and of Local Acts. I took every title in them that mentions inclosure (the old spelling), split each into the parishes and townships it names, and found 4,259 of the 5,375 named places on the map. The map below shows them appearing year by year. The colour of each dot is the decade of its Act.
Dots: places named in enclosure Acts and found in the Wikidata gazetteer, one per place, so an Act naming three townships has three dots; coloured by the decade of the Act (the first calendar year of its parliamentary session). Rings: places named in local Acts. Counties view: Acts per 100 km² of each historic county to the chosen year, by the first county each Act names; county shapes are rebuilt from Wikidata places and are approximate. Source: Chronological Tables of Private and of Local Acts, legislation.gov.uk, Open Government Licence v3.0; Wikidata (CC0). Hillshade tiles © Esri.
A handful of Acts touch enclosure before 1750: the very first title in the tables, from 1562, is for draining and enclosing Plumstead Marsh on the Thames in Kent, and there are 113 enclosure Acts in all before 1750. Then the numbers take off. The first wave ran through the 1760s and 1770s: 985 private Acts in twenty years, about 49.2 a year, peaking at 87 in 1777. The 1780s, during and after the American war, brought a lull, down to 11 Acts in 1784.
Enclosure Acts per year, 1700 to 1849
Private Acts (green) and local Acts (gold), by the first calendar year of each parliamentary session. Shaded: Britain at war with France, 1793 to 1815. Local Acts for 1802 and 1803 were not collected. Hover or tap a year.
The second wave came with the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, which began in 1793 and ended in 1815. Imports were disrupted, harvests failed in several years, and wheat prices soared; turning commons and open fields into enclosed farmland suddenly paid. In those 23 years Parliament passed 1,967 enclosure Acts, about 85.5 a year: 1,541 private Acts and 426 local ones. The private Acts peaked at 100 in 1801; counting both tables, the busiest year was 1811, with 125. When peace came the boom ended at once: 114 Acts in 1814, 79 in 1815, 43 in 1816.
48% of all the enclosure Acts in the tables were passed in the 23 years of war with France.
Up to the late 1790s enclosure Acts were private Acts. The Chronological Table of Local Acts begins in 1797, and from 1799 more and more enclosure Acts appear there instead: 426 of them by 1815, and in 1811 to 1814 about half (51%) of all the enclosure Acts in the two tables. So the fall in private Acts after 1801 is partly an accounting change, and the two have to be added together to see the real second wave. I keep them apart in every count. Two pages of the local table, for 1802 to 1803 and for 1841, could not be collected, so the local counts for those years are missing.
Before, during and after the wars
Share of each table's enclosure Acts passed before 1793, in the war years and after 1815. Hover a block.
Enclosure by Act was concentrated in a broad band across the middle of England. Northamptonshire had more enclosure Acts for its size than any other county: 193 private Acts, 7.5 for every 100 km². Leicestershire (6.9), Rutland (6.6), Huntingdonshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Worcestershire and Buckinghamshire follow. These are the heavy-soiled open-field counties where the old common-field system survived longest. Taken together, twelve Midland and East Midland counties cover 21% of England but account for 39% of its private enclosure Acts, about 5.2 per 100 km² against 2.7 for England as a whole.
Enclosure Acts per 100 km², by historic county
Private Acts by the first county named in each title, divided by the area of the historic county. Click a bar to see the county on the map.
At the other end are counties that were enclosed early, by private agreement between landowners or piece by piece, long before Parliament became involved, or where open fields had never covered much ground. Kent had 15 private Acts (0.37 per 100 km², 44th of 52 counties), Devon 26 (43rd) and Cornwall just 1, last of all. Essex and Sussex are low too. In Wales, enclosure by Act came late and was mostly about common hill land: 70 private and 92 Acts in all, 60% of the private ones in the war years.
Every county
Private and local Acts, density, first and last year, and the share before and during the wars. Click a heading to sort, a row to see the county on the map.
The war-years boom did not simply repeat the first wave. In 1750 to 1779 more than half (53%) of all enclosure Acts were for the twelve Midland belt counties; in 1793 to 1815 that share fell to 31%. What grew was everywhere else: Norfolk and Suffolk went from 2% of Acts to 13%, the south-west and the Welsh border counties from 12% to 22%, the home counties and Kent from 2% to 7%, and Wales from almost nothing to 3.5%. The share of Acts for places west of 2°W, roughly a line from Lancashire through Shropshire to Dorset, doubled from 13% to 27%. One thing did not grow: the north. Yorkshire, Durham and the northern counties took 26% of the first wave's Acts and 19% of the second's.
Where each wave fell
Share of each period's enclosure Acts by region (private and local, by the county named first). Hover a bar.
Historians have long described the war-years enclosures as reaching beyond the old open fields to commons, heaths and wastes, the poorer land that only high prices made worth fencing. The Act titles mostly cannot test that: almost all simply say "inclosure", and only 5% name a common, moor, heath, fen or forest. The map can show where, though. Watch East Anglia: Norfolk's light sands and heaths filled with the teal and blue dots of the 1800s and 1810s (68% of its Acts came in the war years), and Norfolk ended with 261 Acts, third only to Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.
Average the positions of each decade's Acts and you get a centre of gravity for enclosure. In the 1760s it sat near Carlton, on the edge of Nottingham, pulled north by the many Acts in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. By the 1810s it had moved about 46 km, to the country west of Leicester, near Earl Shilton, as the second wave spread south and west. By the 1830s and 1840s it lay near Rugby. It never left the East Midlands, because enclosure by Act was always an English lowland affair.
The centre of enclosure, decade by decade
Mean position of the located Acts of each decade (each Act counted once at the average of its places). Hover a point.
The first. The earliest title in the private table that mentions enclosure is the 1562 Act for Plumstead Marsh in Kent, on the Thames below London, about draining and embanking a marsh more than parcelling out a village; there are 5 Plumstead Marsh Acts in all. The classic form, "Place (County) inclosure", starts to appear in the early 1700s, with Ropley Commons in Hampshire in 1709.
The last. After the General Inclosure Act of 1845, enclosure moved to the Inclosure Commissioners, whose awards were confirmed in bulk by general Acts that these tables do not list one by one. The last private enclosure Act in the table is for Terrington in Norfolk, in 1847; the last local one, for Gedney in Lincolnshire, came in 1873.
The biggest. Most Acts name a single parish; 871 name more than one place. The longest list is the 1811 Act for 10 places in Staffordshire: Over Stonnall and Lynn, Nether Stonnall and Thornes, Shenstone, Woodend, Footherley, Little Hay, Chesterfield and Little Aston, around Lichfield.
Enclosed again. 258 places are named in enclosure Acts of two or more different years. Usually that means a parish whose open fields were enclosed first and its commons later, or a large upland parish enclosed common by common. Elsdon in Northumberland appears in Acts of 1728, 1769, 1805 and 1807; Simonburn, Chatteris and Rothbury in four Acts each. The longest gap is at Eccleshall in Staffordshire: Gratwood Heath in 1719, and an Act for the parish again in 1841, 122 years later.
Enclosed again and again
Places named in the most enclosure Acts, and the longest gaps. Each dot is an Act. Click a name to see it on the map.
Enclosure has been argued over ever since. Its defenders, then and now, point to output: enclosed land could be drained, consolidated, sown with new crops or turned to pasture without the agreement of a whole village, and studies from J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay's The Agricultural Revolution 1750 to 1880 (1966) to Michael Turner's English Parliamentary Enclosure (1980) found that farm output and rents rose where it happened. Turner estimated that Acts of Parliament enclosed about a fifth of England. Robert Allen, in Enclosure and the Yeoman (1992), argued that the productivity gains were smaller than claimed and that most of the extra income went to landowners as higher rents.
The critics point to who lost. J. L. and Barbara Hammond's The Village Labourer (1911) and, in far more detail, J. M. Neeson's Commoners (1993) showed what common rights were worth to the poor: grazing for a cow or geese, fuel, gleaning after harvest, the margin that let a labouring family get by. The commissioners allotted land to those who could prove a legal right; many cottagers who had used the commons by custom got nothing, or a plot too small to keep a cow on and too costly to fence. Both views can be true at once: more food from the same land, and a great deal of it taken from people with the least.
Data. The Chronological Table of Private and Personal Acts on legislation.gov.uk, parts 1 to 33 (12,284 rows on 33 pages), and the Chronological Table of Local Acts (185 of its 187 pages; the parts for 1802 to 1803 and for 1841 could not be collected, and only rows mentioning inclosure were kept). I rejoined titles that run over two rows, dropped the annotation rows that record later repeals and amendments, and dated every Act by the first calendar year of its session. Every title containing a word starting "inclos" or "enclos" was kept: 3,722 private and 483 local. An enclosure Act here is one whose title enacts or confirms an enclosure, including drainage and enclosure, enclosure with tithe exchange and the confirmation of an enclosure already agreed (51 private Acts). I set apart 43 Acts that only amend or explain an earlier one, 29 later Acts confirming the Inclosure Commissioners' orders, a few titles that mention enclosing only in passing, and 10 Acts for Irish counties.
What this is not. W. E. Tate's county-by-county list, published as A Domesday of English Enclosure Acts and Awards in 1978, remains the standard reference, and this study does not replace it. This is a count of Acts as the chronological tables list them, not of all enclosure. The total usually quoted for England, more than 5,000 Acts, comes from Tate's and Turner's work and also takes in public local Acts and the enclosures completed after 1845 by the Inclosure Commissioners, whose awards were confirmed by general Acts that are not itemised here. Enclosure by agreement without an Act, which covered much of England before 1750, does not appear at all. 68 private Acts that speak only of "allotment" or "dividing" and never use the word inclosure are also left out.
Places. Each title was split into the places it names ("Great and Little Cressingham" becomes two places). I matched them to a Wikidata gazetteer of about 28,035 places in England and Wales, within the county the title names, allowing for old spellings, Saint and St, "upon" and "on", and pieces of land named within a parish ("Glusburn Moor in Kildwick" becomes Kildwick). 4,259 of 5,375 named places (79%) were found, 81% for private Acts and 65% for local Acts, whose titles rarely give a county; 3,431 Acts (84%) have at least one place on the map. Wales matches less well (57%) because of spelling. A name with two candidates in one county was accepted only if another place in the same Act settled it; nothing else was guessed, and every unmatched place is listed in the data files.
Counties. An Act counts for the first county its title names (for Acts without one, the county of its first located place). Yorkshire is one county here. There is no historic county boundary file among my sources, so the county shapes and areas are rebuilt from the gazetteer: each place gets the area closest to it, and the areas are merged by historic county and clipped to the coast. They match the real historic counties closely but not exactly.