Enclosure acts

Enclosure could be accomplished by buying the ground rights and all common rights to accomplish exclusive rights of use, which increased the value of the land . The other method was by passing laws causing or forcing enclosure, such as Parliamentary enclosure involving an Inclosure Act. The latter process of enclosure . The Act is still in force in the United Kingdom. Enclosure Acts transformed much of the rural landscape and helped to stimulate agricultural productivity.

The Black Acts were the vicious response of prime minister Walpole and his cronies to increasing resistance to the enclosure of woodlands.

The rights of commoners to take firewoo timber and game from woodlands, and to graze pigs in them, had been progressively eroded for centuries: free use of forests and abolition of .

Enclosure of land through the mutual agreement of landowners began during the 16th century. These normally specified where awards were to be deposited or enrolle either by one of the courts of record or with the local clerk of the peace. An understanding of the Enclosure Acts is necessary to place aspects of the Industrial Revolution in their proper context.

According to the working-class politics of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these acts impoverished small farmers and destroyed the agrarian way of . An Introduction to the Enclosure Acts. In some ways the legal historians may have been well advise . Background The Enclosure Acts were essentially the abolition of the open field system of agriculture which had been the way people farmed in England for centuries. The ownership of all common lan and waste lan that farmers and Lords ha was taken from them. Private Acts of Parliament were enacted after failure to settle land disputes amicably between the landowner and tenants.

The earlier agreements can be found amongst the equity Court of Chancery . An Act for the better Cultivation, Improvement, and Regulation of the Common Arable Fields, Wastes, and Commons of Pasture in this Kingdom.

The technological improvements of the Industrial Revolution had created enormous job opportunities in the industrial towns. Melvyn Bragg examines the enclosure movement that fenced in the British countryside. In the rapacious quest for land . The Nottingham enclosure was unlike any other.

There had been other Inclosure Acts for the town, such as for the Derby Road area and the General Cemetery, where land with common rights was sold by the Lord of the Manor, (in this case the Mayor and Burgesses), but the changing of use of most of the . It was sanctioned by act of parliament, occasioned by private and local petitions and bills for the enclosure of the whole or parts of villages, parishes, townships, and hamlets.

Their primary purpose was to register the change from the ancient farming methods of open fields, common meadows and pasture, to the modern system of landownership, tenure . The income made from this land would then be administered to the poor. For reasons of consistency the word enclosure has been used throughout this introduction. Protecting from nuisances town and village greens and allotments for exercise and recreation.

A variant of this economic argument relates enclosure to interest rates and rates of inflation.

The argument is that high rates of inflation would have encouraged.