June 17, 2025 • 43 mins
When England privatized its commons – lands that by custom belonged to all English to work and support themselves for centuries – it began the modern era, industrialization, wage labor, industrialization, or all of those things and more.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just trucking along
doing our thing. It's called Stuffy Show. Oh.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Is this the episode on the Great seventies movie Convoy.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
No, this is the episode on the Coming Down the
Pike in the Future movie Fencing the comments.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Oh I thought it was Fencing the Convoy.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
No.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Boys, a lot of mashups happening.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, we should probably let's stop joking around. We've had
a lot of fun here, but let's get serious. We're
talking about fencing the Commons. And for anybody who heard
our episode on the Tragedy of the Commons, they're fairly related.
They're talking about the same thing. The Commons are both
the same thing, but there's radically different stuff going on here.
(01:05):
Just go listen to our Tragedy of the Commons episode.
I won't give a rundown of it. But fencing the Commons,
some people point to it is this process of separating
and extracting land from people to whom it had formerly belonged.
Everyday people literally commoners.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, or maybe not belong but at least you know,
made use of to survive.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Okay, Well, it depends on who you ask, and it
is possible, say some historians that this is where wealth
inequality came from, that this is where wage labor came from,
that this is where a lot of the really not
great features of the modern world were rooted. And when
you dig into it, you're like, wow, this is a
(01:51):
decision by a really self interested group of powerful people
to pull off a really big land grab. J All
the old England.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Boy, I love that self edit there.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Thanks, that's between you and me, Jerry and the lamp post.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That's right. Shall we get on with it? Then?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yes, I feel like that was a good setup. If
I did say so myself.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I agree, just like the old days. Not that your
setups now are no good, but.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
In the old days it would have been like, Chuck,
have you ever eaten grass off of the Commons?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah? I think in that last Commons episode actually mentioned
that the Commons was the area of our high school
in just the big middle open area inside where everyone
would hang out, because that was a common area and
that's what the Commons are in this case too. And
Lyvia did a bang up job with this one.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I think yes she did not, as we.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Say, yeah, out of the commons, and we're going to start,
as Livia suggests, with William the Conqueror, because that makes
sense in this case. The Normans when they conquered England
in ten sixty six, they said, all right, here's what
we're gonna do. All the the wealthy, noble people of
our land are going to get all the land, and
(03:06):
so let's just divide it all up. They're going to
live there on manners. And if you if you have
a manor house, you are the lord of that manor.
You're you have allegiance to the king, obviously. But on
that land of yours, besides your manor house, there's also
going to be a peasant village. There's gonna be some
some great farmland that they're going to work for you,
(03:28):
so they can give you lots of food. And then
there's also the commons, which all of the peasant people
or commoners can can share. They can divide it up
and share it and live off that stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, and this land was not the commoner's land. This
is not peasant's land. This is the medieval era. I
guess it kicked off the medieval era, and just to
be clear, this was this was the lord's land like
you were saying, but the commoners had what are called
use of fructory rights, which is basically like they don't
(04:01):
own the land, but they have like actual legal right
to use and to work that land and to take
the products of their work from that land to sustain themselves.
So this is the arrangement like that, and it worked
pretty well for several centuries, it turns.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Out, yeah, it did. You know. They divided that land
into basically straight strips and we'll get into that in
a second, for each household. And there was also the waste,
which will come into play. It sounds like a terrible
word to name basically the forest, but you know, it's
where they couldn't farm, but it was you know, it's
where the rivers were, that's where the trees were, So
(04:39):
that's where they hunted and fished and gathered peat and
wood and stuff like that. So it's still very valuable
area as far as use goes. But they called it waste.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It was just not a good, good term.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
But so with the farmland themselves, like you said, they
cut them up into strips, and just imagine like a
series of fields. One field is just grass. We'll call
that like the meadow. It's where all the sheep and
the cows are grazing. Now there's another field, and that's
where a bunch of cropland is growing. There's another field.
There's more crop land, and if you look very closely,
(05:15):
the crop land is divided up into very long, thin strips,
and each of those strips belongs to a different person
who farms that common land in both fields. And that's
how things were divided up. And you didn't have two
strips next to each other because they didn't want anybody
to get like all the good dirt. Yeah, and then
(05:37):
you would have strips in both fields because there were
different things growing in different fields, and the whole thing
rotated every few years, and a different field would become
the new meadow because the sheep and the cows would peep,
poop on it and fertilize it for next time around
when it became cropland again.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah. So it was just basic crop rotation that made
a lot of sense. They would let it rewild. They
you know, they were straight because they had these very
tough to use plows that did not turn very well,
so they just made these long, straight strips. They would
take care and share the oxen that it took to
pull these plows for everyone.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, that was a big one.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And it was you know, it was sort of like
a It wasn't like like communism or anything or socialism.
It was just like how it was. It was like, hey,
we're all going to care for this land. We're going
to rotate the crops so the land stays good for
all of us, and we're gonna all help take care
of the ox and will help each other out. And
we're not going to put up fences because the animals
(06:41):
have to graze around, and we all just have to
agree on how to do this, and they basically did.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well. That's the big one. Because you are sharing strips
with your neighbors in a single field, everybody has to
do the same farming all at the same time. It's
almost like the group of commoners working those fields were
collectively one single farmer making these decisions on when to harvest,
when to plow, when to do all that stuff. And
(07:09):
like I said, it worked pretty well. It's important because
these people are the losers in this situation, and we
usually root for the underdog. So we have to be
careful not to overidealize life in a medieval English peasant
village like it was tough. Good point, like if if
your crops failed and it turned out that your your
(07:32):
neighbors thought you worshiped some new knows, they might burn
you at the stake. Like it was. It was not
necessarily the easiest life, but it seems to be a
life that was very satisfactory to the peasants because when
it came time for them to be forced to give
it up, they did not want to give it up.
They wanted to keep living like that because the alternative
(07:52):
that they were given was not preferable to peasant village life.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, it's like, hey, go move to the same and
work in a textile mill. So they didn't necessarily also
divide this up evenly. It was, you know, it was
divided up according to like a lot of like inherited
steaks that had been around for a long long time
in the families. There were people that did not get
(08:18):
any land at all and basically were just the hired
farm hands even within the peasant village. But they did
get resources that could generally hunt and fish and things
like that. In the waste after the harvest. If they
were like you know, crops that were leftover or not
completely utilized, they a lot of times could had access
(08:41):
to those, So you know, they were getting along okay.
You know when you look at the alternative, which is
having no land at all to farm, I guess.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah. And although there was inequality, you could still work
your way up. There were people who had more land
than they necessarily needed. Yeah, so if you were land
you could sublet that land, work that land, and start
giving yourself a foothold and maybe eventually buy that strip
or those strips of field for yourself. So it seems like, yes,
there were some people who were wealthier than others, but
(09:14):
the difference in income equality and social equality is much closer,
right than it would become in the next few centuries.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, for sure. And they also, you know, thought ahead, like, hey,
you within this system, you can't just get so rich
and still be here. So they had an income cap basically,
so if you went above that, they're like, sorry, you're
you're not a commoner anymore. You can't farm this land.
And they did this in a pretty democratic way. They
had a local council that they elected that you know,
(09:44):
every year they would allocate these strips for different households
and stuff like that. They would set fees for like
you know, grazing and pasturing and stuff like that and
get their agricultural calendar and order. And yeah, that's just
how it went for a long time. And like you said,
for a couple hundred years, it wasn't it worked out
pretty well?
Speaker 2 (10:03):
It did so apparently around twelve thirty five, so people
have been farming like this for a couple hundred years.
By then, there was a statute passed, and I don't
know the ins and outs of it, but it was
called the Statute of Merton.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I wonder if the statute was named for the famously
long necked defensive back for the San Francisco forty nine ers,
Merton Hanks.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Obviously it was, but regardless of who it was named after,
the Statue of Merton said that if you were the
lord of a manor and you want to like close
off your whole, well, I guess manner. If you want
to close off some of it, you can do that
legally from now on, but you have to make sure
that there's plenty of common land left for the peasants
(10:48):
to work and live on. And I guess whoever that
was passed for was like yes, and everybody else didn't
pay much attention to it for about one hundred or
so years, and then something happened in England and Europe
in general that really altered the trajectory of history, and
that was the Black Death, when as much as half
(11:09):
half of the people in England died off from this
one plague in just a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So this it's interesting to see how things like this
in history can just change the course of history, right,
because had the Black Death not happened, obviously a lot
of people would have still been alive. But aside from that,
like this may have never gone down that way because
it was just a radical shift in the way the
(11:36):
country looked and how they had to operate moving forward.
Because obviously, when half the people go away and leave
the planet.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Is that how I'm saying this now, I think I
sniffed up the case forever.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, like it was the snap or something. There's gonna
be a labor shortage, just the nuts and bolts of
it is, there's gonna be far less people to do
that kind of work, which was kind of good for
the peasants at the time, because all of a sudden
they had some bargaining power and they said, hey, maybe
we should get paid a little more. We also don't
need as much food because there's only half the people.
And so that all of a sudden paved the way
(12:12):
for more sheep grazing because England started realizing, hey, there's
a lot more money and a lot easier money to
be made in textiles and shearing the sheep and selling
wool in the wool trade than there is this farming,
Like that's for the birds, right.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
So, because sheep are much less labor intensive, require way
fewer farmers, but more land, the people who are wealthy
started going after enclosure more and more. They started following
that statute of Merton Hanks and saying like, oh, yeah,
I want to enclose this. I'm going to enclose this
and turn it into grazing land for sheep. And people
(12:54):
were actually displaced. Some people were some entire villages were displaced.
And it was as simple is that it was, you
don't live here anymore, get out, and don't forget I'm
the lord of the manor so what are you going
to do about it? Sometimes there were armed people who
would show up and tell them to leave. It was
just as illegal and indefensible as that. But that's exactly
(13:16):
what happened. People were moved out for sheep because they
could make more money off of wool than they could
off of crops, because there weren't that many people who
needed the crops in the first place. So this huge
land grab first started because the price of wool was
pretty expensive, and that started the first what you would
call really the first wave of enclosure back in the
(13:38):
fourteenth fifteenth century.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, and you know what we mean by fencing an
enclosure is literal fencing because they had to keep those
sheep there. If not, the sheep were going to go away,
so they had to physically construct barricades to keep these
fences in. Sometimes they were literal fences. Sometimes there were
these hedges. But yeah, if you're thinking, like you know
topiari type, you know, finery of a English garden, it's
(14:06):
more like a hedge that they train to grow so
thick and then vines attached to that that it essentially
acts as a fence.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, like you just can't get through it. There's too
many brambles and blackberries and all that stuff. So, yeah,
these hedges. If you're British, you are probably pretty fond
of your hedges. They're part of British culture. But outside
of Britain, it's worth going to Britain just to see
the hedges. So the hedges have like two or three
Michelin stars, I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
That's right. The other thing we have to point out
here is that sometimes it was a little more like
how it was supposed to work officially is different than
how it went down in practice. Officially, you were supposed
to get unanimous consent of all the stakeholders of the
Commons in order to sell that often fence it up
for your sheet, but it obviously didn't always work out
(14:56):
that way. Like you said, sometimes he just took it.
Sometimes they forced them to move to a very much
less desire. They're like, here, take this land. It's not
nearly as fertile, but look I gave you something. And
sometimes yeah, it was just completely illegal.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, so some people were like, hey, this is kind
of messed up. One of the most well known voices
was Thomas Moore, who wrote his book Utopia in fifteen sixteen,
and he was pretty clearly against the sheep. He called
them the great devourers who devoured entire communities. And you know,
(15:35):
obviously it wasn't the sheep's fault. They were just doing
what they do, which is kind of a yeah, I know,
they really took the brunt of it. But it was
because of this, the raising sheep that became so profitable
that that's what was really devouring the communities. And it
got the ear of Henry the seventh. Remember he was
the guy who killed Richard the third and took over.
(15:57):
He was the first Tudor king. He said, hey, I
am hearing what you're saying. So let's kind of slow
down these enclosures because we don't want to uproot the peasantry.
We want them to keep doing what they do, because
that is England as far as anyone thinks of England.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, so that's sort of the first bucket of enclosure,
the first wave, I guess, the first tronch, the first trunch.
That's right. So maybe we should take a break and
we'll come back with a little more intense enclosure right
after this.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And things A job in job.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
All right, So, as promised, we talked about the first
wave of enclosure, and now the second wave a couple
of hundred years later comes back in a much more
intense form because the government, like the whole government of England,
said all right, this is how we're going to do
things now, because in the last couple of hundred years,
textile making has really become the thing. Although we're getting
(17:16):
most of our wool and cotton and stuff from our
various colonies all over the world, it's not like we
need all this for sheep. We think this is just
the way to go because we really need to make
our whole agricultural operation much more efficient, and it was
not efficient when people were just doing their own thing
with these little strips of land. Like one person or
(17:38):
one entity needs to kind of be in charge of
all of this so it'll be more efficient and smooth.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Right ideally, and in practice, a peasant could support himself
and his family and you know, maybe have enough leftover
to sell or something like that, but you can't really
support a growing workforce, a labor force that you're creating
basically out of whole cloth. With the industrial Revolution started
in England thanks to these wool factories, converting them into textiles.
(18:07):
You need a bunch of people for that. So you
need to figure out how to take the people off
the land and put them in the factories. And then
you have to figure out how to feed those people
from the land that you just move the people from,
and you can pay them so that they actually have
to buy the food from the land that you just
forced them off of. Yeah, you can start to see
(18:28):
what a bad deal it was. But because there was
so much money to be made, because there was such
a huge leap forward just waiting to be taken through
the Industrial Revolution, the powers that be guided steered railroaded
England and the English into the cities and the factories
in the cities.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah. And one of the biggest sort of pillars of
this new system was the Norfolk four course system. And
a guy named Lord Townsend nicknamed Turnip. I believe he
brought this over from the Netherlands. His nickname was Turnip.
And wouldn't you guess turnips are part of this four
(19:07):
course system. It involved crop rotation, in this case wheat, turnips, barley,
and clover. You might be wondering, like clover, what good
is that?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Clover?
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Was good for the grazing.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
It's good for the bees, so honey, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Good for the bees, it's good for the soil. And
it also meant that they didn't need to let those
fields go down for a season and rewild. They could
just kind of keep rotating things and you could use
those turnips to feed the livestock that are grazing on
the clover, and previous to that, they might slaughter livestock
at the end of the season in the early winter.
(19:41):
Another big change was that the seed drill came along,
which has allowed them to plant in these very long
straight rows, just you know, endless, endless straight rows, and
they planted grain. And guess who introduced that, Josh and audience, I.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Know who it is, Air and Air yep survivor.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Oh man, jeth Throw Toll baby.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Oh yeah, Jethrow Toll.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
I knew it all along. I was just teasing. So
did you know Jethro Toll was a British band?
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Oh? I did not. I just thought he was the
guy that came up with the seed drill and was
generally feeling like a dead duck.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
No. Uh, they were a British band and apparently someone
in their agent's office was a history buff and was
telling them all about Jethrow Toll and what a great
inventive person he was. So they're like, we'll just name
our band Jethro Toll, even though it'll make no sense
because it doesn't fit with our music at all. We're
gonna name our band Jethrow Toll.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I think it kind of fits, do you think so? Yeah.
When I think of seed drills, I think of flautists.
I think of Ian Anderson dancing around on one leg
like a flamingo.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Nice. Okay, I guess it makes sense now that you
put it like that.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
We talked about aqualon quite a bit on the show.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I don't know how you don't talk about aqualong like
pretty frequently. It's just there. It's worth talking about, for sure.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
I love very divisive song. I think it's great and
kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Oh yeah, some people hate it, boy, a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Yeah, I wonder why it's a weird song.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's odd. So I guess the upshot of all this
is that an industrial revolution was coincidental with an agricultural revolution,
and one fueled the other, which is pretty interesting because
this is happening at the exact same time. But even still,
the government was like, you can't just go in and
(21:34):
steal people's land. If you want to enclose your land
and consolidate it so that you can create this super
efficient agricultural land that you can make tons of money
off of selling food again to the peasants who were
just removed from that land that they used to farm,
it just gets me chuck. You have to do that
through act of parliament. You have to petition Parliament and
(21:57):
say I want to enclose this land, and not only that,
you have to have a supermajority of the local area
to agree to it. And there were two things that
helped people with this one. The same people who were
trying to enclose the land were in Parliament or at
least friends with them. And the people who provided the
supermajority to say yes, you can enclose the land were
(22:20):
their friends and neighbors and people in the same class.
So it's not like these were huge obstacles that the
people enclosing Great Britain had to overcome at the time.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Now, and if you're thinking like, oh, guys, are you
telling me, they passed like thousands and thousands of acts
of Parliament they did exactly that. They passed about four
thousand of these between seven fifty and eighteen sixty, so
just a little over one hundred years and almost eleven
thousand square miles of England beginning at the start of
the twentieth century was now enclosed. That's about a fifth
(22:52):
of the entire area of the country. If you're wondering
about the waste, we mentioned the waste. We don't want
to let the waste go to waste. They were enclosed
as well. Like it wasn't like they fenced all of
that off, but a lot of it was. And they said, hey,
I know you used to hunt and fish here, but
(23:13):
now we're going to take our ritzy hunting parties out
here and you're not going to be allowed to hunt.
Or we may just raise it and have our own gardens.
It might be like agricultural that you know, we get
some of our food from, but it will probably be
just like like you know, the English gardens that we
love to gaze upon with our riches go off.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, yeah, I have a real problem with that as well.
So people just didn't necessarily take this lying down. There
were huge, huge waves and spasms of violence throughout the
centuries from the beginning of enclosure up until the nineteenth century.
This is a really, really big deal. You can trace
it all the way back to the thirteen eighty one
(23:54):
Peasants Revolt that wasn't entirely about enclosure, but it was
a factor in it, and trace it up to the
English Civil War where the Diggers came along. The Diggers
were a radical faction of a radical group called the Levelers,
and their whole thing was enclosure is a mess, and
it's terrible and we're not going to put up with it.
(24:15):
The Diggers, i think, kind of capture what the issue
was to the peasants, and that was to them, if
you were born British, you had a birthright to British soil,
like the country belonged to you as much as it
belonged to anybody else who was born in Britain, and
your right was to work that soil and make a
living for yourself however you wanted to. And coming in
(24:38):
and enclosing this area and forcing people from that land
with a violation of the birthright of those British people,
and you know, they engaged in violence, and they would
break down enclosures and fences and hedges, but ultimately they
lost that battle or that war.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, and if you're wondering about uh, I feel like
I'm waste guy today, which I come like it keeps
just popping up. Whatever, it's my turn. And while I'm
looking at the script, here is at my line.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
This is your line. You didn't highlight your lines?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Sorry? Sorry? Yeah, as far as the waste goes, you know,
I said that a lot of them were kind of
closed off as well, so they couldn't use them. So
obviously there's going to be some like saboteur action going
on there. And these were commoners known as the Blacks,
and they would poach deer on in the waste. They
would destroy trees because trees all of it. I mean,
(25:31):
there were always a bit of a commodity, but they
became an increasing commodity because of the shipbuilding prowess, the
growing shipbuilding prowess of England at the time, and the
British Royal Navy fleet that was just growing and growing,
British seapower Great band. So they were doing this and
so the government passed the Black Act, which basically said
(25:52):
all right, if you get caught poaching a deer on
land that you hunted all your life, We're going to
kill you. And it was the death penalty, and so
hundreds of people were hanged for approaching those deer that
they had always been hunting.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, so the way of life that these people lived
was outlawed, and so to engage in that way of
life you were now a criminal. And the crimes you
committed e g. Killing a rabbit on enclosed land, maybe
even chasing after a rabbit through someone's enclosed land could
get you killed by the government. Like that's what happened
(26:26):
with that. This is how serious things got. And back
to the I'm going to take a waste one if
you don't mind.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Well, the sub waste, which is the fens.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Okay, fine, it's not the greatest waste, but it's important
because the fens were a and I think still are
in some places, a big, vast marshy area of England.
And the people who wanted to grow crops for that
agricultural revolution and make a bunch of money, we're like,
we should drain those because that'll immediately turn into a
(26:56):
really great crop land. And the people who lived on
the fence, the peasants, said, well, wh whoa, we're using
those And so this kind of battle for public opinion
broke out, and the people who were trying to make
the money off of it told everybody else like, this
is just waste land, like terrible land, not even the
other version of waste. This is just terrible land that's
(27:19):
not doing anybody any good. And the people who don't
want to leave are too lazy to come into the
cities and work, so forget them. And the peasants said, hey,
we can make way more money working the fens than
we can working for you in the cities. And it
worked for a little while the fens. They managed to
stave off the fens being drained from the seventeen hundreds
(27:42):
for most of the seventeen hundreds, and then ultimately lost out.
That's a recurring theme in this chuck. The people who
are defending their right to the land ultimately lost out,
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, for sure, you'll be glad to know. Like, just
like the first sort of wave of enclosure, when there
were some people speaking up and saying like this is
really the best idea. During the official parliamentary enclosure, some people,
some officials even stepped forward and said, hey, I don't
think this is the best thing that we're doing here.
Those guy named Arthur Young, who who actually was a
(28:16):
pro enclosure and was promoting that kind of stuff as
the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, But then as
it started to play out, he was like, wait a minute,
We've got these villages that are just drying up. We've
got these commoners that are impoverished now, and so I'm
going to whip up a report here and take it
to the board. And they said this is in eighteen
oh one, and they said, thanks, but no thanks, we're
(28:37):
not even going to take a look at that.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I think I saw somewhere that something like three hundred
and fifty English villages just vanished in that one hundred
years of the parliamentary enclosures. Yeah, I mean just gone
like gone.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah. I guess there's different ways of looking at this,
like you can't stop progress. And it's not like if
this hadn't happened, there would still be these, you know,
villages of commoners in this modern society. But it's the
way it went down was just pretty despicable.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, for sure, there was another group that were similar
to the diggers, but they were more interested in like
income equality, fair wages, kind of industrialized stuff like workers' rights,
but they were also interested in agrarian rights as well.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
The chartists they made talked about them before, right.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yes, in the Pinkerton episode, Alan Pinkerton started out as
a chartist, that's right. And they tried to actually kind
of get back to the land. They bought a bunch
of these enclosed lands and turned them back into crop land.
But I saw that they were a victim of their
success because they had like seventy thousand people joining in
to do this, and they just could not get enough
(29:48):
land fast enough, so they ended up going bankrupt.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, and you know, like you said, they're just the
way their country looked changed so radically, and it wasn't
just about the way of life. It was like that
the medieval village was a was something that the people
of England, like that's all they knew. So all of
a sudden, it's just everything is changing so fast, and
it's being foisted upon them so fast. There were you know,
(30:13):
there were poets and there were authors like writing these
books and odes about you know, the destruction of the
way of life that they had always known. So it
was sort of in the in the cultural ether.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah as well zeitgeist. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
I don't think they said zeitgeist then, did they.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Okay, so cultural ether. I didn't realize that was a
term of the peasantry, but.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
I guess I've had ether at the time either.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
So Chuck, I say we take our second break and
come back and talk more about this, like what actually
happened from.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
This, let's do it and things.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Okay, So we're back, and enclosure has become this orgy
of land grabbing and displacement. One other thing we should
have said is that Parliament kind of enforced movement to
the city, so you would have your village stolen out
from under you and turned into sheep grazing land or
crop land or something like that, and now you were homeless.
(31:36):
So legally you were considered a vagrant. Vagrancy was a crime.
You were a criminal if you didn't have a place
to live. So where you're gonna go? I need to
make some money fast. I'm gonna move to the city
and start working in the factory. So like just choice
after choice was shut down for everybody, and the effects
of this huge sweeping change in Britain just rippled across
(31:58):
the world because one thing would feed into another thing,
would feed into another thing, and then the whole thing
would cycle back again. And every time it cycled back,
it would just grow and grow and grow and grow.
And the British Empire in the nineteenth century rose based
on the agricultural revolution that fed the industrial revolution, and
(32:18):
it just exploded. It just started to grow exponentially.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, for sure. I mean you can look at anytime
something like this happens, you can kind of pick apart
little small parts or not small changes. I guess they
ended up being, you know, pretty monumental, but like just
you know, did people live longer, were they healthier, did
wages increase? Stuff like that? And wages for labor did rise,
but it was really hard work. It was pretty intense stuff.
(32:46):
It's hard to get a lot of data and nutrition
sort of statistics for that time period, but if you
look at things like you know, average heights and weights
and things like that, it seems like malnutrition maybe increased
because you know, people were working in these factories and
it was pretty dangerous wage work and they didn't have
(33:06):
like the best food available to them at the time.
You're gonna have a lot more people that have less,
so obviously they're going to turn to like the church
or maybe even the government and say, hey, you kicked
us out of our land. We're poor, we need help.
You need to help us subside. And at the time,
you know, and that's that's still, you know, a big
debate all over the world like how much should should
(33:28):
the rich help the poor? People just of regular means
help the poor, And it was a thing back then.
A lot, you know, a lot of people are saying like, hey,
it's not the government's place to step in and support
the poor. It's just not We're not going to get
involved in that.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
No, And a big one was Thomas Malthus, who wrote
the Essay on the Principle of Population. We've talked about
Malthus a lot. I think he even got his own episode,
and he's unfairly saddled with the idea of like no, no, no,
you just let the poor die. It's just a it's
just a natural check and balance to prevent over population.
And he was not advocating that. He was pointing out
(34:02):
that is a check on overpopulation, not make sure that
that happens. But he was the one, he was the
first one to really get across, like, our agricultural production
will never be able to keep up with population, and
so we have to kind of be concerned about overpopulation
at some point in time.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, for sure. So now you have a lot of
people living in cities, far fewer people living in the
rural farmland where they used to live. The population is
actually rising a lot. Between seventeen fifty and eighteen fifty
of one hundred years, it may have doubled, of course,
this is you know, after being halved with the Black Death.
It may have been you know, just sort of the
(34:41):
way things went.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, twenty more people, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
But you know, there's there was a definite increase in
efficiency of agriculture, Like no one can deny that. Like
what they set out to do, they did pretty successfully
because you had to support this larger population and free
of those workers to work in the city, so that
all worked well. If that was if that was your aim,
if you're on that side of the argument, you could
point to all those things and saying like, hey, our
(35:07):
navy strong, we've got a great urban labor force now,
and everyone's you know, everyone's happy.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right, I mean, you could say quality of life in England, Rose,
I mean the middle class, the merchant class suddenly exploded
in wealth. There are a lot of people who got
rich off of it, off of the Industrial Revolution and
all the stuff that came from it. And you can
kind of step back and look at England going from
the people making sure the people fed themselves to making
(35:37):
sure that the people of England and other places like Australia,
New Zealand, Colonial America were supplying England like itself with
the food it needed to put out these goods that
it could then sell and continue to grow in wealth.
(35:57):
That's kind of the switch that happened. And you've mentioned
the British Navy, I mean, like they the enclosed wastes
directly contributed to the rise of the British Navy because
those timbers were used for shipbuilding, and as the British
Navy grew more and more powerful, they had more and
more clout to colonize more and more places, increasingly brutally,
(36:21):
so that they could extract raw materials to feed into
the industrial machine in the cities of England.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, for sure. And this inspired the rest of the
world to go out and do likewise. As everything was
becoming more modern. It certainly inspired probably what happened in
Russia in eighteen sixty one when Alexander two said, you
know what, no more serfdom in Russia. The landlords are
going to just basically what they did in England. The
(36:50):
landlords are going to get the best farming land serfs.
You can buy that land back, but you got to
take out these big heavy loans from maybe even your
landlord or maybe the state, and you should move to
the city. We got a rising growth in industry because
of the Industrial Revolution, just like in England, and we're
going to exploit you just like we did in England.
And that led eventually in part to the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
It did, and I mean, that's like a legitimate response
to having your land stolen from you, uprising of peasants.
It's just happened to work in Russia, where it kept
getting tamped down by the government century after century. In England,
and so the government and the the wealthy interested parties
won out. But enclosure was so successful that Britain exported
(37:36):
it to its colonies and basically said we're doing the
same thing here so that you guys can become more
and more efficient and provide more and more raw materials
for export back and it just didn't happen. Just in
the colonies. Scotland very famously had its highlands cleared of
thousands of Highlanders, like they just came in, just like
they did to the peasant villages and said get out,
(37:58):
and if you don't, we've got sore and you don't
want these swords. Actually by that time they probably had
muskets and such, but that was just they just kept
doing it over and over and over again, and each
time it seems like it was a worse and worse
thing morally speaking.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, for sure, there are, believe it or not, still
some commons today. Not every single one of them was
done away with. There's just a handful though. In Laxton,
apparently in North Nottinghamshire, they have an open field system.
They have three fields that they never enclosed and they
are divided into strips just like the old days and
(38:37):
farmed by tenants of that manor. And there's also a
guild called the Oxford Freemen who owned the town meadow
of that city and they can, you know, they can
pasture their cattle there and their horse and they can
fish in the part of the Thames that runs alongside
that I guess jointly owned or cared for meadow.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah, so yeah, there are still places that survived. But
enclosure itself is done in Great Britain. It's been done
since the eighteen sixties. And the reason it came to
an end was because those the middle class, the merchant class,
who became wealthy in the cities, said hey, we want parkland,
(39:18):
We want places to be able to go and like
have picnics and stuff, and this enclosure is eating up
that land, so we need to stop enclosure. And so
they did. They created something called the Commons Preservation Society.
They gained influence in Parliament, they gained support in parliament.
There was an eighteen seventy six act called the Commons
(39:38):
Act that said you can only enclose a piece of
Great Britain if there's a public benefit of it, and
that group, the Commons Preservation Society, eventually created the National Trust, which, now, chuck,
here's the great twist of irony, protects the very same
hedges that created enclosure in the first place, and prevent
(40:01):
farmers who want to tear up those hedges from tearing
them up because they're protected by old enclosure acts. Wow,
amazing stuff. Huh yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Well, let's say about fencing the comments or enclosure, and
I think that means we've just teed up listener.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Now that's right. This is from Christina. Hey, guys, I
was very interested in the episode and paganism, as I'm
a Christian who's always had an interest in respect for paganism.
I wanted to clarify some comments you made about Easter
and its roots and paganism. Yes, it is true that
many things we have about Easter are based on the
pagan celebration of Ostara. However, we often focus on that
(40:45):
to the neglect and misattribution of the influences of Judaism
on Easter. In English and the Germanic languages, the holiday
we call Easter was taken from the name Ostara. However,
in the Roman Romance languages and many other languages, the
name for that holiday is based on the Jewish Passover,
which is when Jesus is death and resurrection is supposed
to have taken place. In Spanish it is Pascua, In
(41:09):
Italian and Catalan it is Pascua, etc. The time of
the year is also based on Jewish Passover. It's a
spring holiday, so when Christianity was moving through Western Europe,
it did coincide with Ostara. But that's not why Easter
takes place in the spring. The bunnies and eggs and
sun Sybolism are all pagan, but let's not ignore Christianity's
origins out of Judaism and its influences on the day.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Man, that's a great email. Who's that from?
Speaker 1 (41:34):
That's great? That's from Christina. She says, thanks a lot
for what you do. I listen a lot to a
lot of true crime, but I am happy that I
still have you, guys and stuff you missed in history class.
Nice our compatriots Hallian Tracy to listen to now that
my baby is learning to talk and I need to
listen to less murder and more family friendly content.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, we are pretty family friendly, aren't we.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Hey, we try to be not We do our best.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
So thanks christ And that raised something that I realized
we didn't mention when we were talking about evidence of
pagan roots still around today. Our days of the week
are almost all rooted in paganism, like Thursday. Thursday, that's
where that came from. Saturday is Saturn'sday, like all of
(42:19):
the days of our week come from pagan gods. Essentially,
isn't that neat goats head Day? Yeah? Did you say
goats head Day?
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, which became Monday.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
It's good stuff, buddy. Well, thanks again, Christina. If you
want to be like Christina and send us in the email,
especially a great one like that, you can send it
off to stuff podcast adiheartradio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just trucking along
doing our thing. It's called Stuffy Show. Oh.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Is this the episode on the Great seventies movie Convoy.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
No, this is the episode on the Coming Down the
Pike in the Future movie Fencing the comments.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Oh I thought it was Fencing the Convoy.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
No.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Boys, a lot of mashups happening.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, we should probably let's stop joking around. We've had
a lot of fun here, but let's get serious. We're
talking about fencing the Commons. And for anybody who heard
our episode on the Tragedy of the Commons, they're fairly related.
They're talking about the same thing. The Commons are both
the same thing, but there's radically different stuff going on here.
(01:05):
Just go listen to our Tragedy of the Commons episode.
I won't give a rundown of it. But fencing the Commons,
some people point to it is this process of separating
and extracting land from people to whom it had formerly belonged.
Everyday people literally commoners.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, or maybe not belong but at least you know,
made use of to survive.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
Okay, Well, it depends on who you ask, and it
is possible, say some historians that this is where wealth
inequality came from, that this is where wage labor came from,
that this is where a lot of the really not
great features of the modern world were rooted. And when
you dig into it, you're like, wow, this is a
(01:51):
decision by a really self interested group of powerful people
to pull off a really big land grab. J All
the old England.
Speaker 1 (02:02):
Boy, I love that self edit there.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Thanks, that's between you and me, Jerry and the lamp post.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That's right. Shall we get on with it? Then?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yes, I feel like that was a good setup. If
I did say so myself.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I agree, just like the old days. Not that your
setups now are no good, but.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
In the old days it would have been like, Chuck,
have you ever eaten grass off of the Commons?
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah? I think in that last Commons episode actually mentioned
that the Commons was the area of our high school
in just the big middle open area inside where everyone
would hang out, because that was a common area and
that's what the Commons are in this case too. And
Lyvia did a bang up job with this one.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
I think yes she did not, as we.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Say, yeah, out of the commons, and we're going to start,
as Livia suggests, with William the Conqueror, because that makes
sense in this case. The Normans when they conquered England
in ten sixty six, they said, all right, here's what
we're gonna do. All the the wealthy, noble people of
our land are going to get all the land, and
(03:06):
so let's just divide it all up. They're going to
live there on manners. And if you if you have
a manor house, you are the lord of that manor.
You're you have allegiance to the king, obviously. But on
that land of yours, besides your manor house, there's also
going to be a peasant village. There's gonna be some
some great farmland that they're going to work for you,
(03:28):
so they can give you lots of food. And then
there's also the commons, which all of the peasant people
or commoners can can share. They can divide it up
and share it and live off that stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Yeah, and this land was not the commoner's land. This
is not peasant's land. This is the medieval era. I
guess it kicked off the medieval era, and just to
be clear, this was this was the lord's land like
you were saying, but the commoners had what are called
use of fructory rights, which is basically like they don't
(04:01):
own the land, but they have like actual legal right
to use and to work that land and to take
the products of their work from that land to sustain themselves.
So this is the arrangement like that, and it worked
pretty well for several centuries, it turns.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Out, yeah, it did. You know. They divided that land
into basically straight strips and we'll get into that in
a second, for each household. And there was also the waste,
which will come into play. It sounds like a terrible
word to name basically the forest, but you know, it's
where they couldn't farm, but it was you know, it's
where the rivers were, that's where the trees were, So
(04:39):
that's where they hunted and fished and gathered peat and
wood and stuff like that. So it's still very valuable
area as far as use goes. But they called it waste.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
It was just not a good, good term.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
But so with the farmland themselves, like you said, they
cut them up into strips, and just imagine like a
series of fields. One field is just grass. We'll call
that like the meadow. It's where all the sheep and
the cows are grazing. Now there's another field, and that's
where a bunch of cropland is growing. There's another field.
There's more crop land, and if you look very closely,
(05:15):
the crop land is divided up into very long, thin strips,
and each of those strips belongs to a different person
who farms that common land in both fields. And that's
how things were divided up. And you didn't have two
strips next to each other because they didn't want anybody
to get like all the good dirt. Yeah, and then
(05:37):
you would have strips in both fields because there were
different things growing in different fields, and the whole thing
rotated every few years, and a different field would become
the new meadow because the sheep and the cows would peep,
poop on it and fertilize it for next time around
when it became cropland again.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah. So it was just basic crop rotation that made
a lot of sense. They would let it rewild. They
you know, they were straight because they had these very
tough to use plows that did not turn very well,
so they just made these long, straight strips. They would
take care and share the oxen that it took to
pull these plows for everyone.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
Yeah, that was a big one.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
And it was you know, it was sort of like
a It wasn't like like communism or anything or socialism.
It was just like how it was. It was like, hey,
we're all going to care for this land. We're going
to rotate the crops so the land stays good for
all of us, and we're gonna all help take care
of the ox and will help each other out. And
we're not going to put up fences because the animals
(06:41):
have to graze around, and we all just have to
agree on how to do this, and they basically did.
Speaker 2 (06:46):
Well. That's the big one. Because you are sharing strips
with your neighbors in a single field, everybody has to
do the same farming all at the same time. It's
almost like the group of commoners working those fields were
collectively one single farmer making these decisions on when to harvest,
when to plow, when to do all that stuff. And
(07:09):
like I said, it worked pretty well. It's important because
these people are the losers in this situation, and we
usually root for the underdog. So we have to be
careful not to overidealize life in a medieval English peasant
village like it was tough. Good point, like if if
your crops failed and it turned out that your your
(07:32):
neighbors thought you worshiped some new knows, they might burn
you at the stake. Like it was. It was not
necessarily the easiest life, but it seems to be a
life that was very satisfactory to the peasants because when
it came time for them to be forced to give
it up, they did not want to give it up.
They wanted to keep living like that because the alternative
(07:52):
that they were given was not preferable to peasant village life.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Yeah, it's like, hey, go move to the same and
work in a textile mill. So they didn't necessarily also
divide this up evenly. It was, you know, it was
divided up according to like a lot of like inherited
steaks that had been around for a long long time
in the families. There were people that did not get
(08:18):
any land at all and basically were just the hired
farm hands even within the peasant village. But they did
get resources that could generally hunt and fish and things
like that. In the waste after the harvest. If they
were like you know, crops that were leftover or not
completely utilized, they a lot of times could had access
(08:41):
to those, So you know, they were getting along okay.
You know when you look at the alternative, which is
having no land at all to farm, I guess.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah. And although there was inequality, you could still work
your way up. There were people who had more land
than they necessarily needed. Yeah, so if you were land
you could sublet that land, work that land, and start
giving yourself a foothold and maybe eventually buy that strip
or those strips of field for yourself. So it seems like, yes,
there were some people who were wealthier than others, but
(09:14):
the difference in income equality and social equality is much closer,
right than it would become in the next few centuries.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Yeah, for sure. And they also, you know, thought ahead, like, hey,
you within this system, you can't just get so rich
and still be here. So they had an income cap basically,
so if you went above that, they're like, sorry, you're
you're not a commoner anymore. You can't farm this land.
And they did this in a pretty democratic way. They
had a local council that they elected that you know,
(09:44):
every year they would allocate these strips for different households
and stuff like that. They would set fees for like
you know, grazing and pasturing and stuff like that and
get their agricultural calendar and order. And yeah, that's just
how it went for a long time. And like you said,
for a couple hundred years, it wasn't it worked out
pretty well?
Speaker 2 (10:03):
It did so apparently around twelve thirty five, so people
have been farming like this for a couple hundred years.
By then, there was a statute passed, and I don't
know the ins and outs of it, but it was
called the Statute of Merton.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I wonder if the statute was named for the famously
long necked defensive back for the San Francisco forty nine ers,
Merton Hanks.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Obviously it was, but regardless of who it was named after,
the Statue of Merton said that if you were the
lord of a manor and you want to like close
off your whole, well, I guess manner. If you want
to close off some of it, you can do that
legally from now on, but you have to make sure
that there's plenty of common land left for the peasants
(10:48):
to work and live on. And I guess whoever that
was passed for was like yes, and everybody else didn't
pay much attention to it for about one hundred or
so years, and then something happened in England and Europe
in general that really altered the trajectory of history, and
that was the Black Death, when as much as half
(11:09):
half of the people in England died off from this
one plague in just a couple of years.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So this it's interesting to see how things like this
in history can just change the course of history, right,
because had the Black Death not happened, obviously a lot
of people would have still been alive. But aside from that,
like this may have never gone down that way because
it was just a radical shift in the way the
(11:36):
country looked and how they had to operate moving forward.
Because obviously, when half the people go away and leave
the planet.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Is that how I'm saying this now, I think I
sniffed up the case forever.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Yeah, like it was the snap or something. There's gonna
be a labor shortage, just the nuts and bolts of
it is, there's gonna be far less people to do
that kind of work, which was kind of good for
the peasants at the time, because all of a sudden
they had some bargaining power and they said, hey, maybe
we should get paid a little more. We also don't
need as much food because there's only half the people.
And so that all of a sudden paved the way
(12:12):
for more sheep grazing because England started realizing, hey, there's
a lot more money and a lot easier money to
be made in textiles and shearing the sheep and selling
wool in the wool trade than there is this farming,
Like that's for the birds, right.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
So, because sheep are much less labor intensive, require way
fewer farmers, but more land, the people who are wealthy
started going after enclosure more and more. They started following
that statute of Merton Hanks and saying like, oh, yeah,
I want to enclose this. I'm going to enclose this
and turn it into grazing land for sheep. And people
(12:54):
were actually displaced. Some people were some entire villages were displaced.
And it was as simple is that it was, you
don't live here anymore, get out, and don't forget I'm
the lord of the manor so what are you going
to do about it? Sometimes there were armed people who
would show up and tell them to leave. It was
just as illegal and indefensible as that. But that's exactly
(13:16):
what happened. People were moved out for sheep because they
could make more money off of wool than they could
off of crops, because there weren't that many people who
needed the crops in the first place. So this huge
land grab first started because the price of wool was
pretty expensive, and that started the first what you would
call really the first wave of enclosure back in the
(13:38):
fourteenth fifteenth century.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
Yeah, and you know what we mean by fencing an
enclosure is literal fencing because they had to keep those
sheep there. If not, the sheep were going to go away,
so they had to physically construct barricades to keep these
fences in. Sometimes they were literal fences. Sometimes there were
these hedges. But yeah, if you're thinking, like you know
topiari type, you know, finery of a English garden, it's
(14:06):
more like a hedge that they train to grow so
thick and then vines attached to that that it essentially
acts as a fence.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Yeah, like you just can't get through it. There's too
many brambles and blackberries and all that stuff. So, yeah,
these hedges. If you're British, you are probably pretty fond
of your hedges. They're part of British culture. But outside
of Britain, it's worth going to Britain just to see
the hedges. So the hedges have like two or three
Michelin stars, I can't remember.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
That's right. The other thing we have to point out
here is that sometimes it was a little more like
how it was supposed to work officially is different than
how it went down in practice. Officially, you were supposed
to get unanimous consent of all the stakeholders of the
Commons in order to sell that often fence it up
for your sheet, but it obviously didn't always work out
(14:56):
that way. Like you said, sometimes he just took it.
Sometimes they forced them to move to a very much
less desire. They're like, here, take this land. It's not
nearly as fertile, but look I gave you something. And
sometimes yeah, it was just completely illegal.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Yeah, so some people were like, hey, this is kind
of messed up. One of the most well known voices
was Thomas Moore, who wrote his book Utopia in fifteen sixteen,
and he was pretty clearly against the sheep. He called
them the great devourers who devoured entire communities. And you know,
(15:35):
obviously it wasn't the sheep's fault. They were just doing
what they do, which is kind of a yeah, I know,
they really took the brunt of it. But it was
because of this, the raising sheep that became so profitable
that that's what was really devouring the communities. And it
got the ear of Henry the seventh. Remember he was
the guy who killed Richard the third and took over.
(15:57):
He was the first Tudor king. He said, hey, I
am hearing what you're saying. So let's kind of slow
down these enclosures because we don't want to uproot the peasantry.
We want them to keep doing what they do, because
that is England as far as anyone thinks of England.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Yeah, so that's sort of the first bucket of enclosure,
the first wave, I guess, the first tronch, the first trunch.
That's right. So maybe we should take a break and
we'll come back with a little more intense enclosure right
after this.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
And things A job in job.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
All right, So, as promised, we talked about the first
wave of enclosure, and now the second wave a couple
of hundred years later comes back in a much more
intense form because the government, like the whole government of England,
said all right, this is how we're going to do
things now, because in the last couple of hundred years,
textile making has really become the thing. Although we're getting
(17:16):
most of our wool and cotton and stuff from our
various colonies all over the world, it's not like we
need all this for sheep. We think this is just
the way to go because we really need to make
our whole agricultural operation much more efficient, and it was
not efficient when people were just doing their own thing
with these little strips of land. Like one person or
(17:38):
one entity needs to kind of be in charge of
all of this so it'll be more efficient and smooth.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Right ideally, and in practice, a peasant could support himself
and his family and you know, maybe have enough leftover
to sell or something like that, but you can't really
support a growing workforce, a labor force that you're creating
basically out of whole cloth. With the industrial Revolution started
in England thanks to these wool factories, converting them into textiles.
(18:07):
You need a bunch of people for that. So you
need to figure out how to take the people off
the land and put them in the factories. And then
you have to figure out how to feed those people
from the land that you just move the people from,
and you can pay them so that they actually have
to buy the food from the land that you just
forced them off of. Yeah, you can start to see
(18:28):
what a bad deal it was. But because there was
so much money to be made, because there was such
a huge leap forward just waiting to be taken through
the Industrial Revolution, the powers that be guided steered railroaded
England and the English into the cities and the factories
in the cities.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Yeah. And one of the biggest sort of pillars of
this new system was the Norfolk four course system. And
a guy named Lord Townsend nicknamed Turnip. I believe he
brought this over from the Netherlands. His nickname was Turnip.
And wouldn't you guess turnips are part of this four
(19:07):
course system. It involved crop rotation, in this case wheat, turnips, barley,
and clover. You might be wondering, like clover, what good
is that?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Clover?
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Was good for the grazing.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
It's good for the bees, so honey, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Good for the bees, it's good for the soil. And
it also meant that they didn't need to let those
fields go down for a season and rewild. They could
just kind of keep rotating things and you could use
those turnips to feed the livestock that are grazing on
the clover, and previous to that, they might slaughter livestock
at the end of the season in the early winter.
(19:41):
Another big change was that the seed drill came along,
which has allowed them to plant in these very long
straight rows, just you know, endless, endless straight rows, and
they planted grain. And guess who introduced that, Josh and audience, I.
Speaker 2 (19:58):
Know who it is, Air and Air yep survivor.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Oh man, jeth Throw Toll baby.
Speaker 2 (20:07):
Oh yeah, Jethrow Toll.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
I knew it all along. I was just teasing. So
did you know Jethro Toll was a British band?
Speaker 1 (20:16):
Oh? I did not. I just thought he was the
guy that came up with the seed drill and was
generally feeling like a dead duck.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
No. Uh, they were a British band and apparently someone
in their agent's office was a history buff and was
telling them all about Jethrow Toll and what a great
inventive person he was. So they're like, we'll just name
our band Jethro Toll, even though it'll make no sense
because it doesn't fit with our music at all. We're
gonna name our band Jethrow Toll.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I think it kind of fits, do you think so? Yeah.
When I think of seed drills, I think of flautists.
I think of Ian Anderson dancing around on one leg
like a flamingo.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Nice. Okay, I guess it makes sense now that you
put it like that.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
We talked about aqualon quite a bit on the show.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I don't know how you don't talk about aqualong like
pretty frequently. It's just there. It's worth talking about, for sure.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
I love very divisive song. I think it's great and
kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
Oh yeah, some people hate it, boy, a lot of people.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Yeah, I wonder why it's a weird song.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
It's odd. So I guess the upshot of all this
is that an industrial revolution was coincidental with an agricultural revolution,
and one fueled the other, which is pretty interesting because
this is happening at the exact same time. But even still,
the government was like, you can't just go in and
(21:34):
steal people's land. If you want to enclose your land
and consolidate it so that you can create this super
efficient agricultural land that you can make tons of money
off of selling food again to the peasants who were
just removed from that land that they used to farm,
it just gets me chuck. You have to do that
through act of parliament. You have to petition Parliament and
(21:57):
say I want to enclose this land, and not only that,
you have to have a supermajority of the local area
to agree to it. And there were two things that
helped people with this one. The same people who were
trying to enclose the land were in Parliament or at
least friends with them. And the people who provided the
supermajority to say yes, you can enclose the land were
(22:20):
their friends and neighbors and people in the same class.
So it's not like these were huge obstacles that the
people enclosing Great Britain had to overcome at the time.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
Now, and if you're thinking like, oh, guys, are you
telling me, they passed like thousands and thousands of acts
of Parliament they did exactly that. They passed about four
thousand of these between seven fifty and eighteen sixty, so
just a little over one hundred years and almost eleven
thousand square miles of England beginning at the start of
the twentieth century was now enclosed. That's about a fifth
(22:52):
of the entire area of the country. If you're wondering
about the waste, we mentioned the waste. We don't want
to let the waste go to waste. They were enclosed
as well. Like it wasn't like they fenced all of
that off, but a lot of it was. And they said, hey,
I know you used to hunt and fish here, but
(23:13):
now we're going to take our ritzy hunting parties out
here and you're not going to be allowed to hunt.
Or we may just raise it and have our own gardens.
It might be like agricultural that you know, we get
some of our food from, but it will probably be
just like like you know, the English gardens that we
love to gaze upon with our riches go off.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
Yeah, yeah, I have a real problem with that as well.
So people just didn't necessarily take this lying down. There
were huge, huge waves and spasms of violence throughout the
centuries from the beginning of enclosure up until the nineteenth century.
This is a really, really big deal. You can trace
it all the way back to the thirteen eighty one
(23:54):
Peasants Revolt that wasn't entirely about enclosure, but it was
a factor in it, and trace it up to the
English Civil War where the Diggers came along. The Diggers
were a radical faction of a radical group called the Levelers,
and their whole thing was enclosure is a mess, and
it's terrible and we're not going to put up with it.
(24:15):
The Diggers, i think, kind of capture what the issue
was to the peasants, and that was to them, if
you were born British, you had a birthright to British soil,
like the country belonged to you as much as it
belonged to anybody else who was born in Britain, and
your right was to work that soil and make a
living for yourself however you wanted to. And coming in
(24:38):
and enclosing this area and forcing people from that land
with a violation of the birthright of those British people,
and you know, they engaged in violence, and they would
break down enclosures and fences and hedges, but ultimately they
lost that battle or that war.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Yeah, and if you're wondering about uh, I feel like
I'm waste guy today, which I come like it keeps
just popping up. Whatever, it's my turn. And while I'm
looking at the script, here is at my line.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
This is your line. You didn't highlight your lines?
Speaker 1 (25:10):
Sorry? Sorry? Yeah, as far as the waste goes, you know,
I said that a lot of them were kind of
closed off as well, so they couldn't use them. So
obviously there's going to be some like saboteur action going
on there. And these were commoners known as the Blacks,
and they would poach deer on in the waste. They
would destroy trees because trees all of it. I mean,
(25:31):
there were always a bit of a commodity, but they
became an increasing commodity because of the shipbuilding prowess, the
growing shipbuilding prowess of England at the time, and the
British Royal Navy fleet that was just growing and growing,
British seapower Great band. So they were doing this and
so the government passed the Black Act, which basically said
(25:52):
all right, if you get caught poaching a deer on
land that you hunted all your life, We're going to
kill you. And it was the death penalty, and so
hundreds of people were hanged for approaching those deer that
they had always been hunting.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, so the way of life that these people lived
was outlawed, and so to engage in that way of
life you were now a criminal. And the crimes you
committed e g. Killing a rabbit on enclosed land, maybe
even chasing after a rabbit through someone's enclosed land could
get you killed by the government. Like that's what happened
(26:26):
with that. This is how serious things got. And back
to the I'm going to take a waste one if
you don't mind.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Well, the sub waste, which is the fens.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Okay, fine, it's not the greatest waste, but it's important
because the fens were a and I think still are
in some places, a big, vast marshy area of England.
And the people who wanted to grow crops for that
agricultural revolution and make a bunch of money, we're like,
we should drain those because that'll immediately turn into a
(26:56):
really great crop land. And the people who lived on
the fence, the peasants, said, well, wh whoa, we're using
those And so this kind of battle for public opinion
broke out, and the people who were trying to make
the money off of it told everybody else like, this
is just waste land, like terrible land, not even the
other version of waste. This is just terrible land that's
(27:19):
not doing anybody any good. And the people who don't
want to leave are too lazy to come into the
cities and work, so forget them. And the peasants said, hey,
we can make way more money working the fens than
we can working for you in the cities. And it
worked for a little while the fens. They managed to
stave off the fens being drained from the seventeen hundreds
(27:42):
for most of the seventeen hundreds, and then ultimately lost out.
That's a recurring theme in this chuck. The people who
are defending their right to the land ultimately lost out,
over and over and over again.
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yeah, for sure, you'll be glad to know. Like, just
like the first sort of wave of enclosure, when there
were some people speaking up and saying like this is
really the best idea. During the official parliamentary enclosure, some people,
some officials even stepped forward and said, hey, I don't
think this is the best thing that we're doing here.
Those guy named Arthur Young, who who actually was a
(28:16):
pro enclosure and was promoting that kind of stuff as
the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, But then as
it started to play out, he was like, wait a minute,
We've got these villages that are just drying up. We've
got these commoners that are impoverished now, and so I'm
going to whip up a report here and take it
to the board. And they said this is in eighteen
oh one, and they said, thanks, but no thanks, we're
(28:37):
not even going to take a look at that.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
I think I saw somewhere that something like three hundred
and fifty English villages just vanished in that one hundred
years of the parliamentary enclosures. Yeah, I mean just gone
like gone.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Yeah. I guess there's different ways of looking at this,
like you can't stop progress. And it's not like if
this hadn't happened, there would still be these, you know,
villages of commoners in this modern society. But it's the
way it went down was just pretty despicable.
Speaker 2 (29:06):
Yeah, for sure, there was another group that were similar
to the diggers, but they were more interested in like
income equality, fair wages, kind of industrialized stuff like workers' rights,
but they were also interested in agrarian rights as well.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
The chartists they made talked about them before, right.
Speaker 2 (29:27):
Yes, in the Pinkerton episode, Alan Pinkerton started out as
a chartist, that's right. And they tried to actually kind
of get back to the land. They bought a bunch
of these enclosed lands and turned them back into crop land.
But I saw that they were a victim of their
success because they had like seventy thousand people joining in
to do this, and they just could not get enough
(29:48):
land fast enough, so they ended up going bankrupt.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Yeah, and you know, like you said, they're just the
way their country looked changed so radically, and it wasn't
just about the way of life. It was like that
the medieval village was a was something that the people
of England, like that's all they knew. So all of
a sudden, it's just everything is changing so fast, and
it's being foisted upon them so fast. There were you know,
(30:13):
there were poets and there were authors like writing these
books and odes about you know, the destruction of the
way of life that they had always known. So it
was sort of in the in the cultural ether.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Yeah as well zeitgeist. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:30):
I don't think they said zeitgeist then, did they.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
Okay, so cultural ether. I didn't realize that was a
term of the peasantry, but.
Speaker 1 (30:37):
I guess I've had ether at the time either.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
So Chuck, I say we take our second break and
come back and talk more about this, like what actually
happened from.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
This, let's do it and things.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Okay, So we're back, and enclosure has become this orgy
of land grabbing and displacement. One other thing we should
have said is that Parliament kind of enforced movement to
the city, so you would have your village stolen out
from under you and turned into sheep grazing land or
crop land or something like that, and now you were homeless.
(31:36):
So legally you were considered a vagrant. Vagrancy was a crime.
You were a criminal if you didn't have a place
to live. So where you're gonna go? I need to
make some money fast. I'm gonna move to the city
and start working in the factory. So like just choice
after choice was shut down for everybody, and the effects
of this huge sweeping change in Britain just rippled across
(31:58):
the world because one thing would feed into another thing,
would feed into another thing, and then the whole thing
would cycle back again. And every time it cycled back,
it would just grow and grow and grow and grow.
And the British Empire in the nineteenth century rose based
on the agricultural revolution that fed the industrial revolution, and
(32:18):
it just exploded. It just started to grow exponentially.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Yeah, for sure. I mean you can look at anytime
something like this happens, you can kind of pick apart
little small parts or not small changes. I guess they
ended up being, you know, pretty monumental, but like just
you know, did people live longer, were they healthier, did
wages increase? Stuff like that? And wages for labor did rise,
but it was really hard work. It was pretty intense stuff.
(32:46):
It's hard to get a lot of data and nutrition
sort of statistics for that time period, but if you
look at things like you know, average heights and weights
and things like that, it seems like malnutrition maybe increased
because you know, people were working in these factories and
it was pretty dangerous wage work and they didn't have
(33:06):
like the best food available to them at the time.
You're gonna have a lot more people that have less,
so obviously they're going to turn to like the church
or maybe even the government and say, hey, you kicked
us out of our land. We're poor, we need help.
You need to help us subside. And at the time,
you know, and that's that's still, you know, a big
debate all over the world like how much should should
(33:28):
the rich help the poor? People just of regular means
help the poor, And it was a thing back then.
A lot, you know, a lot of people are saying like, hey,
it's not the government's place to step in and support
the poor. It's just not We're not going to get
involved in that.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
No, And a big one was Thomas Malthus, who wrote
the Essay on the Principle of Population. We've talked about
Malthus a lot. I think he even got his own episode,
and he's unfairly saddled with the idea of like no, no, no,
you just let the poor die. It's just a it's
just a natural check and balance to prevent over population.
And he was not advocating that. He was pointing out
(34:02):
that is a check on overpopulation, not make sure that
that happens. But he was the one, he was the
first one to really get across, like, our agricultural production
will never be able to keep up with population, and
so we have to kind of be concerned about overpopulation
at some point in time.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yeah, for sure. So now you have a lot of
people living in cities, far fewer people living in the
rural farmland where they used to live. The population is
actually rising a lot. Between seventeen fifty and eighteen fifty
of one hundred years, it may have doubled, of course,
this is you know, after being halved with the Black Death.
It may have been you know, just sort of the
(34:41):
way things went.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, twenty more people, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
But you know, there's there was a definite increase in
efficiency of agriculture, Like no one can deny that. Like
what they set out to do, they did pretty successfully
because you had to support this larger population and free
of those workers to work in the city, so that
all worked well. If that was if that was your aim,
if you're on that side of the argument, you could
point to all those things and saying like, hey, our
(35:07):
navy strong, we've got a great urban labor force now,
and everyone's you know, everyone's happy.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Right, I mean, you could say quality of life in England, Rose,
I mean the middle class, the merchant class suddenly exploded
in wealth. There are a lot of people who got
rich off of it, off of the Industrial Revolution and
all the stuff that came from it. And you can
kind of step back and look at England going from
the people making sure the people fed themselves to making
(35:37):
sure that the people of England and other places like Australia,
New Zealand, Colonial America were supplying England like itself with
the food it needed to put out these goods that
it could then sell and continue to grow in wealth.
(35:57):
That's kind of the switch that happened. And you've mentioned
the British Navy, I mean, like they the enclosed wastes
directly contributed to the rise of the British Navy because
those timbers were used for shipbuilding, and as the British
Navy grew more and more powerful, they had more and
more clout to colonize more and more places, increasingly brutally,
(36:21):
so that they could extract raw materials to feed into
the industrial machine in the cities of England.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, for sure. And this inspired the rest of the
world to go out and do likewise. As everything was
becoming more modern. It certainly inspired probably what happened in
Russia in eighteen sixty one when Alexander two said, you
know what, no more serfdom in Russia. The landlords are
going to just basically what they did in England. The
(36:50):
landlords are going to get the best farming land serfs.
You can buy that land back, but you got to
take out these big heavy loans from maybe even your
landlord or maybe the state, and you should move to
the city. We got a rising growth in industry because
of the Industrial Revolution, just like in England, and we're
going to exploit you just like we did in England.
And that led eventually in part to the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
It did, and I mean, that's like a legitimate response
to having your land stolen from you, uprising of peasants.
It's just happened to work in Russia, where it kept
getting tamped down by the government century after century. In England,
and so the government and the the wealthy interested parties
won out. But enclosure was so successful that Britain exported
(37:36):
it to its colonies and basically said we're doing the
same thing here so that you guys can become more
and more efficient and provide more and more raw materials
for export back and it just didn't happen. Just in
the colonies. Scotland very famously had its highlands cleared of
thousands of Highlanders, like they just came in, just like
they did to the peasant villages and said get out,
(37:58):
and if you don't, we've got sore and you don't
want these swords. Actually by that time they probably had
muskets and such, but that was just they just kept
doing it over and over and over again, and each
time it seems like it was a worse and worse
thing morally speaking.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Yeah, for sure, there are, believe it or not, still
some commons today. Not every single one of them was
done away with. There's just a handful though. In Laxton,
apparently in North Nottinghamshire, they have an open field system.
They have three fields that they never enclosed and they
are divided into strips just like the old days and
(38:37):
farmed by tenants of that manor. And there's also a
guild called the Oxford Freemen who owned the town meadow
of that city and they can, you know, they can
pasture their cattle there and their horse and they can
fish in the part of the Thames that runs alongside
that I guess jointly owned or cared for meadow.
Speaker 2 (38:57):
Yeah, so yeah, there are still places that survived. But
enclosure itself is done in Great Britain. It's been done
since the eighteen sixties. And the reason it came to
an end was because those the middle class, the merchant class,
who became wealthy in the cities, said hey, we want parkland,
(39:18):
We want places to be able to go and like
have picnics and stuff, and this enclosure is eating up
that land, so we need to stop enclosure. And so
they did. They created something called the Commons Preservation Society.
They gained influence in Parliament, they gained support in parliament.
There was an eighteen seventy six act called the Commons
(39:38):
Act that said you can only enclose a piece of
Great Britain if there's a public benefit of it, and
that group, the Commons Preservation Society, eventually created the National Trust, which, now, chuck,
here's the great twist of irony, protects the very same
hedges that created enclosure in the first place, and prevent
(40:01):
farmers who want to tear up those hedges from tearing
them up because they're protected by old enclosure acts. Wow,
amazing stuff. Huh yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (40:15):
I got nothing else.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Well, let's say about fencing the comments or enclosure, and
I think that means we've just teed up listener.
Speaker 1 (40:22):
Now that's right. This is from Christina. Hey, guys, I
was very interested in the episode and paganism, as I'm
a Christian who's always had an interest in respect for paganism.
I wanted to clarify some comments you made about Easter
and its roots and paganism. Yes, it is true that
many things we have about Easter are based on the
pagan celebration of Ostara. However, we often focus on that
(40:45):
to the neglect and misattribution of the influences of Judaism
on Easter. In English and the Germanic languages, the holiday
we call Easter was taken from the name Ostara. However,
in the Roman Romance languages and many other languages, the
name for that holiday is based on the Jewish Passover,
which is when Jesus is death and resurrection is supposed
to have taken place. In Spanish it is Pascua, In
(41:09):
Italian and Catalan it is Pascua, etc. The time of
the year is also based on Jewish Passover. It's a
spring holiday, so when Christianity was moving through Western Europe,
it did coincide with Ostara. But that's not why Easter
takes place in the spring. The bunnies and eggs and
sun Sybolism are all pagan, but let's not ignore Christianity's
origins out of Judaism and its influences on the day.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Man, that's a great email. Who's that from?
Speaker 1 (41:34):
That's great? That's from Christina. She says, thanks a lot
for what you do. I listen a lot to a
lot of true crime, but I am happy that I
still have you, guys and stuff you missed in history class.
Nice our compatriots Hallian Tracy to listen to now that
my baby is learning to talk and I need to
listen to less murder and more family friendly content.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, we are pretty family friendly, aren't we.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
Hey, we try to be not We do our best.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
So thanks christ And that raised something that I realized
we didn't mention when we were talking about evidence of
pagan roots still around today. Our days of the week
are almost all rooted in paganism, like Thursday. Thursday, that's
where that came from. Saturday is Saturn'sday, like all of
(42:19):
the days of our week come from pagan gods. Essentially,
isn't that neat goats head Day? Yeah? Did you say
goats head Day?
Speaker 1 (42:29):
Yeah, which became Monday.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
It's good stuff, buddy. Well, thanks again, Christina. If you
want to be like Christina and send us in the email,
especially a great one like that, you can send it
off to stuff podcast adiheartradio dot com.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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