On this day in 1845, Parliament handed over vast stretches of common land with barely a backward glance. The Inclosure Act set up a new breed of official, the enclosure commissioner, who no longer needed Parliament’s blessing for every land grab. One rubber stamp did the job from then on.
The scale of it is the part that stuns you. Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, over five thousand enclosure acts carved up more than six million acres of land that ordinary people had shared and relied on for generations. Anyone who dug their heels in often met soldiers rather than sympathy.
This was not some tidy bit of paperwork. It built the working class from the ground up, by leaving huge numbers of people with nothing to their name but their own two hands and the labour they could sell. Capitalism needed workers, and enclosure is largely how it got them.
And now, for a change of scenery entirely: here is a view north-west from Boltby Scar.
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