19th Century Enclosure Movement

The “enclosure movement” in the 19th century encouraged a large demographic migration of people from the English countryside to city centers, speeding up urbanization.

Enclosure is the process of converting land from public ownership to private ownership through capital acquisition. Enclosure is typically a problem in countries backed by an agrarian economy because wealthy land-owners increasingly minimize the amount of arable land others can use; as a result, enclosure tends to produce a sizable class of landless farmers without capital or labor. Enclosure in England only became possible when land organization changed from a system from feudalism to capitalism. Under feudalism, land lords agreed to maintain “open space” on their manors for others to use. This historical plan of a medieval manor by William Shpererd shows the common land in green (1926, http://www.emersonkent.com/images/english_manor.jpg). Common land allowed landless laborers to still earn an income, but enclosure threatened their economic prospects by privatizing land.

The Agricultural Revolution encouraged property-holders to maximize their harvest yields, so landowners began to use their “common land” to experiment with new technology and farming techniques. Landscapes at the time, like Turner’s Crossing the Brook (1815, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-crossing-the-brook-n00497) and Contstable’s Wivenhoe Park (1816, http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/highlights/highlight1147.html) glorify the bounty of the English countryside, but the opportunity to achieve such was only limited to those who held property rights over the land. Heeding the demands of the land-owning gentry, Parliament began to pass a series of “Inclosure Acts” in the 19th century to reorganize common land and profit from increased land sales. These pieces of legislation were specific to territorial regions, so enclosure happened gradually over a long period of time. For example, the 1796 Inclosure Act only authorized the privatization of common land in Sherrington, Buckingham (1796, http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/shhs/encmap.htm). Thus, there was no way for landless farmers to prepare in advance because they did not know when the land-owning proprietors in their parish or county would appeal to Parliament for enclosure.

Enclosed land reduced labor opportunities in the countryside, forcing those without property to move into the cities for work. This occurred at a time of mass industrialization, combining together to produce an era of rapid urbanization. The development of city centers can best be seen by analyzing the growth of London in the 19th century. In the beginning of the century, the city was mainly confined to the banks of the Thames River (1814, http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~genmaps/genfiles/COU_files/ENG/LON/luffman_lon_1814.htm). By the mid-century, after Parliament issued numerous Inclosure Acts, the city grew to include boroughs on both sides of the Thames and well into counties that bordered previous urban areas (1862, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1862_Reynolds_Pocket_Map_of_London,_England_-_Geographicus_-_London-reynolds-1862.jpg). This meant that city planning was focused in new areas to accommodate the population influx, while infrastructure in the old areas was left unattended. One of these areas would be Whitechapel, London: the site of Jack the Ripper’s canonical murders.

d402709f-8805-48a2-9ea9-66740f689a4cimage12