Enclosure or inclosure is an English term which indicates the action to enclose a field. This Anglicisme passed in French where it indicates the piece of ground encloses Haie S, of Mur S or barriers. This term refers to a movement born in Great Britain with the beginnings of the industrial revolution.

The realization of a enclosure passes by the following stages:

  • the appropriation by the owners of spaces beforehand reserved for the collective use
  • substitutions of the old system opened by fields enclosed by hedges
  • establishment of vast domains, rented with farmers equipped with financial means

The enclosure is generally accompanied by the use of novel methods, new cultures, new farming rotations.

The enclosure was often presented like the means making it possible to pass from a not very productive agriculture to a powerful agriculture of capitalist type. It most generally fits in a situation of economic development. The social consequences of enclosure were very décriées by English authors such as Saint Thomas More. The most important consequence was to remove the possibilities of Pacage and glane to farm small multiples or inhabitants who benefitted from open spaces. To ensure their subsistence, they left the fields for the city. It is one of the reasons which explain why in Great Britain the population urbanized earlier than in France and than agriculture more quickly intensified there.

Enclosure acts , the English laws between 1760 and 1840 which gradually imposed the fence of the fields in Great Britain, of which the principal one:

* the General Enclosure Act (1801)
parliamentary enclosure
enclosure by agreement
enclosure part with part

See too

Related article

  • Movement of the enclosures

References

  • Utopia , Thomas More
  • Common Land and Inclosure , E.C.K. Gonner, 2nd ED. 1912, republished in 1966

External bonds

  • http://students.imsa.edu/~lsport05/laura_fa/enclosure%20acts.htm, summary of the phenomenon of enclosure (in English)
  • a similar phenomenon is held acuellement in India

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