A Land of Lost Content: Visions of Enclosure in English Literature
Abstract:While the effects of industrialisation on the English working class have been widely explored, the impact of its precursor, enclosure, has been insufficiently acknowledged. This paper examines anti-enclosure descriptions of its psychosocial, cultural and material effects. It does so through a wide-ranging thematic analysis of literature (broadly defined) by More, Winstanley, Goldsmith, Clare, Flora Thompson, Bourne, and many others. Anti-enclosure critique identifies a range of outcomes including: shock, anxiety and long-lasting bitterness; proletarianisation, poverty, deepening class divisions and alienation; destruction of natural beauty and genius loci; the dying-out of meaningful work, festivity, and rural material culture; the loss of self-respect and freedom; and the deterioration of family life and women's status. In conclusion, the paper suggests some implications of this durable anti-enclosure critique for modern English culture.
It has been argued that the effects of enclosure on the English have not been sufficiently recognised, and while it is true, as Raymond Williams has suggested, that rural nostalgia lends itself to infinite regression, it is possible to explore enclosure critiques in English literature in terms of lost contentment, with the unravelling of social connections, and lost cultural content (1). The first part of this analysis focuses chronologically on anti-enclosure writing before the 18th century, while the bulk of material from the 18th century onwards requires thematic treatment. Due to space constraints this paper omits the criticism of forest enclosures in the Robin Hood stories, As You Like It, and the works of Keats, Southey, Love Peacock and Sir Walter Scott (2).
In a sermon before King Edward VI, Bishop Latimer commented, "Where forty persons had their livings, now one man and his shepherd have all," while Thomas More observed "Sheep do eat up men" (3). Thomas Starkey later repeated More's criticisms of noble greed (4). Likewise in this earlier period Robert Crowley, John Hales, Sir Francis Bacon, William Tyndale, and Tudor and Stuart governments condemned enclosure without full compensation in land, views shaped by the idea of the 'moral economy' and fear of depopulation (5). During the civil war era, when London was swelled by the rural dispossessed (6), an urban Levellers petition of 1648 to the House of Commons demanded the reversal of "all late enclosures of fens and other commons" (7), while another petition villifies "the parliament of England....who....part and share amongst themselves.....the nation's public....lands"(8). Anti-enclosure critique reflected England's legalistic popular culture: cottages on wastes and commons had only recently been made illegal, so enclosures were widely perceived as contrary to "natural justice" and "customary rights" (9) (buttressed by the notions of "common usage" and "time out of mind") (10), ideas which formed the basis of legal challenges (11), usually the first reaction (12). In an anonymous letter, fenmen expressed fury at the enclosers' plan "to take Poors right from them by Force and Fraud" (13). A 17th-century unsigned letter to the Bishop of Lincoln portrays enclosure as iniquitous because it removes "[our neighbour's] landmark"-a suggestive quotation of Deuteronomy 19:14 (14).
Most famously, Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley attacked private property in general and enclosures in particular (15) in a critique informed by his mystical theology, identifying both as the result of the Fall of Man: the most literal expression of the prelapsarianism that haunts enclosure critique (16). For Winstanley, enclosure was like the Egyptian bondage, dishonouring both Mother Earth by preventing her from feeding all her children, and the Father, "the spirit of community" (17). Likewise, the nine Diggers of Wellinborough in Northamptonshire argued: "we consider that the Earth is our Mother.....and that the common and waste Grounds belong to the poor." A 17th century Roxburghe Ballad notes the pretence that enclosures are for the common good, when they are really for private gain and "hurt a whole Countrey" (18).
In the mid 17th century, the establishment began to countenance enclosure causing local distress (19), though it was still attacked as contrary to the national interest by figures including David Davies, Thomas Bewick, Arthur Young (Secretary to the Board of Agriculture) (20), reformer Thomas Spence and numerous pamphleteers. For the commoners themselves, there was shock. In Good Neighbours Walter Rose compares the experience to "the uprooting of old trees" (21) while Flora Thompson identifies enclosure as a traumatic watershed in her hamlet's history (22) and George Bourne believes that it "knocked the keystone out of the arch" (23). Shock was followed by feelings of bitterness, betrayal and hostility (24) aroused by the violation of what John Clare called the "kindred bond" (25) between farmers and commoners (26), despite protests by smallholders, letters and petitions defending commoners' traditional rights and needs (27).
Enclosure left a lingering "memory of expropriation" (28) expressed by Cobbett (29), and in a popular verse: "The fault is great in man or woman/ Who steals a goose from off a common;/ But what can plead that man's excuse/Who steals a common from a goose?" (30) Goldsmith in The Deserted Village describes a luxurious aristocrat: "The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth/Has robb'd the neighb'ring fields of half their growth." Such feelings easily turn radical: to Goodridge, Clare's greatest anti-enclosure poem The Mores transforms enclosure "into the much greater subject of civil rights" (31). Neeson notes its sharpening of class hostility, evident in the poetry of Robert Bloomfield (32), while according to E P Thompson, access to the land was still the focus of "rural grievance" in the late nineteenth century (33), a yearning also detected by Rose (34). An epitaph in a Hampshire cemetery bleakly observes that "England made her choice long ago/ Wealth. Cities, industry/ All countrymen know" (35), while in folk music, heroic poaching songs such as The Death of Bill Brown reflect the Poaching Wars provoked by enclosure (36). (This theme was reprised much later by Roald Dahl) (37). Country memoirist Winifred Foley viewed large private estates as the "stealing of.... human birthrights" (38), and Ivor Gurney hints at rural disinheritance in The Mangel-bury and wishes "for the children of West Ham/a plot of land/Where one might play and dig" (39). Leon Rosselson's song The World Turned Upside Down celebrates the Diggers and warns the rich; in an interview with Albion he mordantly noted that the Diggers are now remembered, rather than the parson who drove them away with death threats (40). Orwell portrays enclosers as "land-grabbers.....taking the heritage of their own countrymen" (41) and Byron Rogers shows uncharacteristic animus towards families who cleared villages for sheep-farming (42). The sadism of Lord Cobham of Stowe, who promised the wives of two poachers their safe return and sent their husbands home in coffins, becomes symbolic of enclosers' cruelty for both Rogers and George Monbiot (43); to the latter, sanitisation of such stories from twee official rural history is connected and similar to the forgetting of imperial atrocities (44). Monbiot locates enclosure at the heart of a web of oppression: rack-renting, eviction, execution, imprisonment, famine, vagrancy, transportation as indentured labourers, and the brutal suppression of enclosure riots (45). Custom-based legalism persists in the poetry of John Clare, who refers to "lawless law's enclosure," while the ballad My Old Hat purports to trace common right to Roman antiquity (46). Robert Blatchford's popular 1894 socialist treatise Merrie England comments that "the law was made by the landowners themselves... [who] robbed the small landowners in a shameful and wholesale way" (47). Kipling's poem The Land portrays the gardener Hobson as the land's authentic owner, a function of his family's time-out-of-mind, intimate knowledge of it, which transcends the superficial 'legal' titles subsequently claimed by Saxons, Danes and Normans (48). Again, in "An Habitation Enforced" a couple realise that their newly-bought estate is "not our land. We've only paid for it.....it belongs to the people" (49).
Loss of continuity, the "radical sense of displacement" diagnosed by E P Thompson (50), is expressed by the transportation ballad The Green Fields of England, in which mainly urban convicts anticipate homesickness for the eponymous fields. The trauma was exacerbated by the peasant's intense feelings of belonging in the landscape: "He fitted into it as one of its native denizens, like the hedgehogs and the thrushes" (51). Clare evokes this sense of being part of the countryside's "human fauna" (52) in his empathy for creatures uprooted by enclosure: badgers, rabbits, cows (53), and most famously moles, whose tunnelling gives shape and detail to the landscape (54). Now they are trespassers, "little homeless miners," killed and hung by the gamekeeper "for traitors," an image that recurs in Kipling's story "The Tree of Justice" (55). Clare is, in E P Thompson's words, the poet of "ecological protest" angered on behalf of nature as well as "human community" (56). Neeson notes that for Clare and Bourne, belonging is "not the ownership of a few acres...but the possession of a landscape" (57).
Anxiety is a common theme. The new economy makes expenditure a continual rather than an intermittent necessity, so labourers can no longer save up nest eggs as security for their families (58). In an "anxious calculation of shillings and pence" they must focus on wage labour rather than country crafts and production, with no time to beautify their gardens, hedges, furniture or garments (59). Constant fear of destitution leads to illness, Bourne warns, echoing Crabbe who had deplored the "slow disease" brought on by anxiety and overwork in his portrait of the lonely old shepherd (60). Bourne and Crabbe suggest that for some, death is a welcome escape from suffering and anxiety (61). William Barnes' dramatic dialogue between two peasants, The Common A-Took In, captures the anxiety of one peasant who, alarmed by news that the moor is about to be enclosed, plans to sell his stock (62). The dialogue highlights the fear of being unable, without a cow, to "put a lwoaf on shelf" and thus of the workhouse (63). In Bourne's village the inhabitants have become subdued, and Goldsmith laments the disappearance of "rural mirth." Anxiety is reflected in songs of complaint, such as The Hard Times of Old England (64) and Time's Alteration (65), while Palmer detects "a strong whiff of enclosure" about To Be a Farmer's Boy, a song which describes the impoverished protagonist's extraordinary luck in finding a good farmer for whom to work: he marries the daughter, thereby inheriting the farm (66).
With enclosure came the loss of community solidarity: Neeson notes that property rights breed loyalty to both community and nation, a point supported by rural writer David Davies (67). Goldsmith mourns the erosion of pub life, "Where grey-beard mirth and smiling toil retired, /Where village statesmen talked with looks profound" (68). In contrast, Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village notes that "We have the good fortune to live in an unenclosed parish," celebrating the detailed pre-enclosure landscape, happy village children, harmonious family life—notably, paternal involvement in childcare—community sociability, festivity and sport, and the Gypsies who are an integral part of this rural scene, as they were for John Clare (69). Mitford's (no doubt idealised) village is "a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like.... bees in a hive" (70). In anti-enclosure writing the communal oak table symbolises the solidarity that has been lost: Clare regrets the time when "master son & serving man & clown/Without distinction daily sat them down" and "the poor was fed" (71). The image also appears in Bloomfield's The Farmer's Boy, William Barnes' memories of Harvest Home, Cobbett's meditations on finding an oak table at auction, and the ballad When My Old Hat was New (72), while both Clare and Bloomfield miss the shared drinking bowl, symbol of friendship and reciprocity (73). The social intimacy of open-field farming may have discouraged class indicators: according to Bourne there was little pre-enclosure distinction in terms of food, clothes, thoughts or dialect, so that labourers did not feel inferior to farmers (74). Neeson notes that cohesion was also encouraged by family bonds between the different levels of society (75), feudal alliances "with one lord against another" (76), and mutuality consisting of a sense of "risk sharing" and "common purpose," expressed in the exchange of services, small gifts of food harvested from the commons (77), communal harvesting and festivity, creating a web of mutual obligations that formed a safety net in hard times (78) but which, post-enclosure, was impoverished and restricted only to the labouring class (79). Clare's satirical poem The Parish angrily attacks social polarisation and the nascent squirearchy (80), as do the ballads The New-Fashioned Farmer and Times are Altered (81). Bourne analyses the inferiority complex of post-enclosure labourers—and the fear that their children now show in the presence of social superiors—on transitioning from a position largely outside the urban class system to the proletariat, an effect attacked by writers as diverse as Blatchford and Barnes. The loss of self-respect is captured by Clare's wistfulness: "There was a time my bit of ground/Made freeman of the slave" (82), an outlook mirrored by Barnes' bullish pre-enclosure peasant: "I got two vields, an' I don't ceäre/ What squire mid have a bigger sheäre" (83). With social degradation came the efforts of the provincial middle class to impose their own culture (84), in which they eventually succeeded: as Wolfreys has observed "I have only one culture; it is not mine" (85). As the wealth of this bourgeoisie increased, their ruralist outlook vanished so that, as Bourne explains, they came to view rural labourers, like colonial peoples, as Other (86), a remark which supports Cannadine's Ornamentalism theory and may explain the U-associations of the word 'Englishman.' The parallels are captured by Linebaugh's quote: "Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt.... but let us subdue Finchley Common," while the Raj in India invoked the Norman conquest in their attack on Indian peasants' common rights, and the latter petitioned for their rights under Magna Carta (87).
In Bourne's view, enclosure also divided labourers from one another by making them compete for waged labour, fostering suspicion, avarice, and aloofness between different families, in contrast to the hospitable reciprocity that perished with enclosure (88). There is now a dissonance in values between the village families, as they adapt in different ways and at different speeds to the change, so that they seem to come from different eras (89). One aspect of social estrangement was the loss of custom and festivity (90). In his journals, letters (91) and poetry, Clare mourns specific village feast days such as May Day (92), divination and courtship rituals, and child-like festival unselfconsciousness, lost when post-enclosure festivals became merely tolerated and no longer "intrinsic parts of the year"; for him, the years have lost "their comforting cyclical regularity" (93). Southey, Samuel Bamford and the Rev J. A. Giles also noted a "slump in festivity," and its revival, along with hospitality, was a plank of Cobbett's cottage charter (94). The ballad My Old Hat is wistful for the merriness of harvest time (95). Neeson notes the importance in pre-enclosure society of "occasions when labour was shared and rewarded" with an evening of festivity, expressed in Clare's portrait of a farmer whose year was punctuated by ceremony and community-based generosity (96). Similarly, Clare laments the disappearance of communal singing and its bonding effect, as, later, did A L Lloyd (97). Flora Thompson describes an old man's performance of The Outlandish Knight, now only "tolerated" by the audience (98).
With the loss of common fields, Bourne keenly senses a loss of meaning. The villagers are disoriented and apathetic: there is "a dull waiting" for "nothing in particular" (99). The increased leisure of the new wage-labour economy is merely meagre compensation for the monotonous, proletarian, onerous work that has replaced the varied and skilful pre-enclosure tasks steeped in local knowledge and custom, which are now dying out (100). For women, for whom commoning had held special economic significance (101), the necessity of wage work has made domestic duties bitter and meaningless drudgery, leaving no time for cottage production or leisure (102). Bourne feels that the change has not only leeched rural civilisation from the people (103) --a loss of culture through urban influence noted by Richard Jefferies in 1880 (104) —but also the meaning from the landscape. Clare captures the disorientation caused by the loss of genius loci: hills and hillocks "All leveled like a desert," trees, hedgerow briars and the mulberry bushes of his childhood uprooted (105). Barrel notes that Clare's poetry reflects enclosers' destruction of "The hostile and mysterious road system.....the minute and intricate divisions between lands.... Everything about the place....which made it precisely this place, and not that one, was forgotten" (106). In 1785, William Cowper records enclosure's eradication of the common's "wild odours" (107), smells suggested by a Cowper poem: "there the turf/Smells fresh, and rich in odoriferous herbs/And fungous fruits of earth" (108). In Ganev's view, enclosure means the loss of beauty for Clare and for the writers John Blackner and Nathaniel Bloomfield; in Bloomfield's poetry, the ruling class appropriate natural beauty by creating pleasure gardens from which they exclude labourers (109). Goodridge observes the similarity between the "barren and bare land" of Clare's enclosure elegies and Great War and modernist wasteland imagery, "the savage transformation of the villager's psychic landscape" noted by E P Thompson (110). Likewise, Goldsmith's The Deserted Village contrasts an idealistic portrait of pre-enclosure village life with post-enclosure barrenness, as does William Holloway's poem The Peasant's Fate (111). Much later, the country's night-time emptiness frightens and depresses the urban narrator of Three Men in a Boat (112).
The loss of freedom to roam was another trauma: Walter Rose notes how even forty years after enclosure, the villagers "still clung to the semi-free life when, without fear of trespass, all were able to ramble from end to end of the long parish" (113). A poem by Barnes captures the way the law of trespass undermines social relations: "the goocoo wull soon be committed to cage /Vor a trespass in zomebody's tree /.....Stranger or brother, /Men mussen come nigh woone another" (114). Likewise, Clare observes that the No Trespass sign is hung on the one remaining tree "As tho' the very birds should learn to know/When they go there they must no further go" (115), and again in The Village Minstrel, "Inclosure came & every path was stopt" by the tyrannical signs (116). The destruction of the open landscape is for Clare the loss of his childhood (117) and also the loss of liberty, a loss evoked by Nathaniel Bloomfield's elegy for Honington Green when he mourns "on the Green we were free," and by the Derbyshire ballad The Lament of Nun's Green (118). Gypsies symbolise pre-enclosure freedom: the Gypsy Queen revels "upon the green/In boundless liberty" (119). The "spiritual claustrophobia" of Clare's experience (120), which Dean describes as "an agony" (121), was so intense because enclosure effected a shift in English taste, previously oriented to large, open spaces—the "open-field sense of space" (122)—but now focussed on confined spaces as more productive and authentically 'English' (123). Bourne notes the post-enclosure fear shared by labourers and their children to wander "off the public roads," their feeling that the law of trespass was prejudiced against them, so that they increasingly withdrew to their own homes (124). Later, Orwell observes sourly that the current owners of the land keep children out of green spaces (125), and Ewan MacColl celebrates the 1932 Kinder Scout mass trespass in TheManchester Rambler. Rogers reflects on the time "when parson and squire conspired to cheat the poor of their rights to graze animals and walk freely, rights which had been theirs since Neolithic times" (126) (which is, again, the appeal to custom). Gurney bemoans "the too exact/Straight streets of modern times that....strict/And formal keep man's spirit within bounds" (127), and Chesterton celebrates The Rolling English Road's untrammelled freedom, enhanced by the wildness of inebriation. In the poetry of Thomas, Gurney and Davies, the wanderer obtains insights into England denied to others: "only the wanderer/ knows England's graces" (128).
Loss of food and material culture, "comfort's cottage" (129), is a major focus and was a motivator for the Swing riots (130). Village poet Ebenezer Elliott asks "Where art thou, festal pudding of our sires?/Gone, to feed fat the heirs of thieves and liars" (131), while Crabbe evokes "the misery of a stinted meal." Cobbett calls for "beer and bacon" (132), instead of the new potato diet (133). Neeson comments on "the stubborn memory of roast beef and milk" (134); the ballad My Old Hat longs for the milk and sheep's wool of yesteryear (135). Goldsmith mourns the disappearance of the "festive" village pub's "parlour splendours": "The white-washed wall, the nicely sanded floor,/ The varnished clock that clicked behind the door." On a tour of Derbyshire, John Byng meets an old woman who describes the loss of her rented cottage, garden, beehives, sheep, fuel for heating and geese pasture (136). In Lark Rise to Candleford, Old Sally's lifestyle is a legacy from the pre-enclosure era: her house is full of home produce, comfort and warmth, with its two-foot-thick walls, rugs, cushions and curtains, and a flower garden including coloured roses, fruit trees and beehives (137). Her solid oak furniture, pewter and willow pattern dishes, and grandfather clock contrast with the cheap and ugly imitations in the hamlet's other homes (138). Such losses are listed in the revised ballad The Roast Beef of Old England (139) and by Cobbett: the warm Sunday coat, the feather bed, the clock, the cottage garden (140). Like Thompson, Bourne notes the survival of a few old people who maintain the pre-enclosure life—keeping pigs, donkeys, cows and bees, wine-making, gathering fuel from the woods and heath, and paying in kind for services—but his village is haunted by vanished cow-stalls and hop-kilns. When My Old Hat Was New laments post-enclosure chilliness—"The winter's cold, the clothing's thin, and blankets very few" (141)— and Wordsworth's poem Goody Blake and Harry Gill describes the suffering of those no longer allowed to gather fuel on the commons (142). The poets James Templeman and Samuel Jackson Pratt decry post-enclosure poverty: villagers are "haggard" and "thin" (143).
Anti-enclosure writers note a negative effect on family life: farm servants and day labourers lost the hope of obtaining land or rights in the common, and with it the incentive to delay marriage and starting a family (144). Old Sally deplores the new tendency to have numerous children with inadequate means of supporting them (145). Combined with women and children's loss of commoning income (146), and the decline of profitable cottage crafts with industrialisation (147), this illuminates Lloyd's comment that for the labourer a family became "a set of shackles round his feet," tension enhanced by the new competition between men and women for wage labour (148). Songs of seduction and abandonment increased exponentially in this era, as did violent crime ballads, often with female victims (149). Crabbe depicts the exhausted poverty of a post-enclosure family, poverty whose endpoint is the workhouse where they are separated, and the ballad A New Song on the Times notes that post-enclosure, the rich send the poor to workhouses and gaols (150). Bourne hints that parents' anxiety over trespassing fines makes them harsh, which contrasts with the former loving leniency described by Cobbett (151). In anti-enclosure critique, not only have children lost the play-world of the village green and the freedom to roam, their home life and family relationships have also deteriorated (152).
The neuroses identified by anti-enclosure writers partially illuminate various aspects of modern English culture, including gothic pastoral, rural nostalgia and the instinct for the "Great Return" (153), in particular the Merrie England cult and its close relative Deep England, which represent a denial of enclosure. The countryside as a refuge from trauma figures in works by J L Carr, Warwick Deeping, and Michelle Magorian, as well as some Great War poetry (154). The heritage industry with its images of thatched cottages and flower gardens—iconography of an interrupted domesticity—and its country house cult, signifying continuity, ironically attests to a disinheritance, a land-shaped hole in English culture. The unreality of chocolate-box England is captured by Rogers' description of country visitors as "men walking through a film set," and Alagaiah's remark that in England the countryside is an idea rather than a place. Rural memoirs, such as Akenfield and Lark Rise to Candleford, have a popular aura at odds with their un-idyllic contents (155), and Monbiot sees Cider with Rosie as a cruel mirage, "a hearse at the head of a nation in mourning." Enclosure can also be seen in the passion for allotments, described scathingly by Monbiot as "a sop to the dispossessed" (156), echoing Cobbett (157). It suggests the background to the melancholy of Thomas, Housman, Gurney and Hardy. Where Hardy is concerned, rural decline and the mistreatment of women seem linked (158). The Mayor of Casterbridge is a displaced agricultural labourer, physically and psychologically, and his downfall takes a rural form: rough music.
The persistent connection between enclosure and lost childhood suggests trauma, both in Clare (159) and in English culture more generally: Rogers' village is "like a toy lost in a counterpane" (160) while Linebaugh finds echoes of the commons in children's novels such as "Peter Pan, Treasure Island.... and The Wind in the Willows" (161). Other examples include L. M. Boston's Green Knowe series, the Stone Book Quartet by Alan Garner, Alison Uttley's books, children's television such as Camberwick Green (162), and the child's-eye perspective of sixties psychedelic pastoral, a creation of urban working-class young people (163). English anthropomorphism is illuminated both by this regression and by Clare's empathy for displaced animals.
The disconnect between pre-enclosure England and its modern re-imaginings is highlighted by the unfamiliarity of anti-enclosure critiques, nostalgic for a time of social harmony underpinned by a greater remembered equality between social orders, genders, Gypsies and non-Gypsies. It reminds us of "rural-intellectual radicalism" as identified by Raymond Williams, and Aughey's comment that nostalgia can be radical as well as conservative (164). Anti-enclosure writers suggest that things were done differently in some villages before dispossession and displacement, that modern experience that the English and so many other peoples share in common.--Isabel Taylor
(2) Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 141; Richard Wilson,"Like the Old Robin Hood": As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots, Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 43, Issue 1 (Spring, 1992): 6.
(3) Hugh Latimer, Sermons on the Plough, quoted in Byron Rogers, The Green Lane to Nowhere: The Life of an English Village (London: Aurum Press Ltd, 2004), 103; Thomas More, Utopia, Book 1.
(4) Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset. ed. T F Mayer (Cambridge: Camden Fourth Series, Vol 37, 1989).
(5) J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18; 43, n 84.
(6) Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1972), 49 (n1). (7) "To the right honourable, the Commons of England in parliament assembled. The humble petition of divers well-affected persons inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets and places adjacent," in Andrew Sharp, ed. The English Levellers, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 131; "The young men's and the apprentices' outcry," in Sharp, 196.
(8) Sharp, 196.
(9) Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, (n 1) 55; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 106.
(10) John Maynard, The Agricultural Labourer in Worcestershire: Responses to Economic Change and Social Dislocation 1790-1841 (PhD diss., Coventry University, 2005), 34.
(11) Underdown, (n 74) 107.
(12) Michael Braddick, God's Fury, England's Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008) (n 23) 234.
(13) E P Thompson, The Essential E P Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: The New Press, 2001), 396.
(14) Quoted in Neeson, 221.
(15) J Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) 105; H N Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, ed. Christopher Hill (London: Cresset Press, 1961) 431, n 27.
(16) Gerrard Winstanley, A Declaration to the Powers of England, in Thomas N. Corns, Anne Hughes and David Loewenstein, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, Vol. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6.
(17) Winstanley, A Declaration to the Powers of England, 18.
(18) Quoted in Robin Ganev, Songs of Protest, Songs of Love: Popular Ballads in Eighteenth Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 6-7.Neeson, 18-19. (19) Neeson, 45-48, 50.
(20) Neeson, 7-8, 9, 21-22, 52.
(21) Walter Rose, Good Neighbours (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), v.
(22) Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945); reprinted Folio Society, London, 2009, 1-2.
(23) George Bourne, Change in the Village (London: Duckworth, 1912).
(28) Neeson, 330; Arthur Young imagined a labourer saying: "All I know is, I had a cow and Parliament took it from me." Quoted in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 99. (29) William Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. Ian Dyck (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), 443-444; Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 156, 168. (30) Neeson, 291; Peter Linebaugh quotes another verse in "Enclosures from the Bottom Up," Radical History Review, December 2010: 21.
(31) John Goodridge, "Pastoral and Popular Modes in Clare's 'Enclosure Elegies, Part 2," in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. John Goodridge, John Clare Society 1994.
(32) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 87. (33) Neeson, 329.
(34) Rose, v.
(35) Rogers, xii.
(36) Quoted in Ganev. 19-20; A L Lloyd, The Singing Englishman: An Introduction to Folksong (London: Workers' Music Association, 1944); Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 114.
(37) Roald Dahl, Danny, the Champion of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975).
(38) Winifred Foley, The Forest Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 363.
(39) Ivor Gurney, Everyman's Poetry, ed. George Walter (London: Phoenix, 1996), 44, 83.
(40) Isabel Taylor, "Talking About the New Jerusalem: A Potted History of English Radicalism, including an Interview with Leon Rosselson," Albion Magazine Online, Summer 2007.
(41) George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters: As I Please, 1943-45, Vol. 3, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: David R. Godine Press, 2007), 207; quoted in Kim Taplin, The English Path (Sudbury: Perry Green Press, 1999, orig published 1979, the Boydell Press).
(42) Rogers, 104, 192. (43) Rogers, 137; George Monbiot, "Why you'll never find execution or eviction on a National Trust tea towel," The Guardian, 24 February, 2009.
(44) Monbiot.
(45) Monbiot.
(46) My Old Hat, quoted in Ganev. 7.
(47) Robert Blatchford, Merrie England (Manchester: Clarion Office, 1893), 57-58, 61.
(48) Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures (London: Macmillan and Co., 1917, reprinted Echo Library, 2007), 34.
(49) Rudyard Kipling, Actions and Reactions (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909, reprinted Nuvisionpublications, 2008), 26.
(50) E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), cited in Maynard, 21.
(51) Bourne.
(52) Neeson, 179.
(53) The Badger, To the Snipe, To a Fallen Elm, in John Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2008).
(54) Goodridge.
(55) Rudyard Kipling, Rewards and Fairies (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910; new Echo Library edition, 2007), 149. In the story this image of the hanging tree is connected to the Norman Yoke: 149-150. See also the use of this image in The Little Grey Men by 'B B'.
(56) E P Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 182.
(62) Quoted in Sue Edney, "'Times be Badish Vor the Poor': William Barnes and his Dialect of Disturbance in the Dorset 'Eclogues.'" English, Volume 58, Issue 222 (Autumn 2009).
(63) Edney.
(64) Mudcat DigiTrad. (65) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 145, 163-164.
(66) Roy Palmer, Everyman's Book of English Country Songs (London: J M Dent, 1979), 43.
(69) Mary Russell Mitford, quoted in Kim Taplin, The English Path; Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village (London: The Folio Society, 1997).
(70) Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village,1.
(71) Clare, Major Works, 32, 290; Neeson, 290.
(72) Ian Dyck, introduction to Rural Rides, xv; When My Old Hat Was New, Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads, Harding B 28(56), Mudcat DigiTrad.
(73) Neeson, 33.
(74) Bourne.
(75) Neeson, 324.
(76) Neeson, 298; Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 31.
(77) Neeson, 180-181.
(78) Ibid.
(79) Neeson, 181-182. (80) Neeson, 290.
(81) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 56-61.
(82) Neeson, 297.
(83) Quoted in Edney.
(84) Bourne.
(85) Wolfreys.
(86) Bourne.
(87) Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 142-143, 153-154.
(88) Bourne.
(89) Bourne.
(90) E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 238.
(91) Letter to William Hone of April 1825, in Clare, Major Works, 486.
(92) Sarah Houghton, "'Some little thing of other days / Saved from the wreck of time'": John Clare and Festivity." John Clare Society Journal, 23 (2004): 32-33; Helen Mary Ward, Enemies of England: John Clare and the Defence of the Realm (Masters diss., Simon Fraser University, 1992), 26-27.
(93) Houghton, 34, 39-40.
(94) Houghton, 37; Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 210.
(95) My Old Hat, Mudcat Digitrad; Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 149.
(96) Neeson, 324.
(97) Ward, 23-24; The Songs of Our Land, Later Poems I1 1000, Rural Morning, Early Poems I1 612 lines 9-14; Lloyd.
(98) F Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, 58-59.
(99) Bourne.
(100) Bourne. (101) Jane Humphries, "Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of Economic History 50, no. 1 (1990): 35-41, quoted in Ganev, 4.
(102) Bourne.
(103) Bourne.
(104) Richard Jefferies, quoted in E. J. T. Collins and Joan Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. VII, 1850-1914, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23.
(105) To a Fallen Elm, Helpstone, John Clare, Major Works; Johanne Clare, John Clare and the Bounds of Circumstance (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), 38.
(106) John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 94-6.
(107) A letter of Dec 6 1785, quoted in Edward Thomas, A Literary Pilgrim in England (London: Methuen & Co., 1917).
(108) Quoted in Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village.
(109) Ganev, 13-14. Likewise, Thomas Bewick mourns the eradication of the common's "beautiful wild scenery," quoted in Williams, The Country and the City, 99.
(110) Thompson, quoted in Goodridge.
(111) Holloway, The Peasant's Fate, quoted in Ganev, 12-13.
(112) Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, J. W. Arrowsmith, 1889, Chapter VI.
(113) Rose, 5.
(114) William Barnes, The Leane, quoted in Taplin, The English Path.
(115) Clare, The Mores, Major Works.
(116) Early Poems, II, 170.
(117) Raymond Williams, quoted in Ward, 32.
(118) Ganev, 15-16.
(119) "The Gipsy Queen," quoted in Ganev, 15.
(120) Paul Dean, "John Clare: Freedom & Enclosure," The New Criterion, December, 2003.
(121) Dean.
(122) Barrell, 103. (123) Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
(124) Bourne.
(125) Orwell, As I Please, 208.
(126) Rogers, 71.
(127) Ivor Gurney, 44.
(128) Ibid.
(129) John Clare, To a Fallen Elm.
(130) Dyck, Willam Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 153, 166.
(131) Neeson, 328.
(132) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 139, 209.
(133) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 161.
(134) Neeson, 11.
(135) My Old Hat, quoted in Ganev, 7.
(136) Quoted in Maynard, 26-27.
(137) F Thompson, 62-64, 97.
(138) F Thompson, 81-82.
(139) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 131.
(140) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 31, 39, 147.
(141) When My Old Hat Was New, Mudcat.
(142) Wordsworth, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, discussed in Ganev, 18-19.
(143) Pratt, quoted in Ganev, 8; Dyck, 45. (144) Neeson, 323, 255, 258; Bourne; Bloomfield, The Farmer's Boy, quoted in Ganev, 11.
(145) Lloyd.
(146) F Thompson, Lark Rise, 65.
(147) Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 162.
(148) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 136.
(149) Lloyd; K D M Snell, quoted in Maynard 23-24.
(150) A New Song on the Times, from Roy Palmer, A Ballad History of England, quoted in Ganev, 7.
(151) Bourne; Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 25, 102, 161.
(152) Evoked by Clare in Helpstone Green and Blake in The Ecchoing Green--Goodridge.
(153) Rogers, XIII.
(154) E.g. Siegfried Sassoon; Rupert Brooke; Nowell Oxland.
(155) Rogers, 201; Kathryn Hughes, introduction to Lark Rise to Candleford, viii.
(156) Monbiot, "A Beautiful Fraud," The Guardian, 27 May 1997.
(157) Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, 187.
(158) Tess of the d'Urbervilles; The Mayor of Casterbridge.
(159) Clare, The Mores.
(160) Rogers, 2.
(161) Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, 163.
(162) Simon Gooden, "The Rural Ideal and the English Countryside," 1945-2000, Albion, Winter 2008.
(163) Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties (London: Fourth Estate, 1994). Examples include Strawberry Fields Forever, The Kinks are....The Village Green Preservation Society and Traffic's John Barleycorn.
(164) Arthur Aughey, The Politics of Englishness (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 36.
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