Enclosure

Enclosure was the process by which open fields, commons, and waste land were consolidated into individually owned, fenced holdings. It transformed the physical and legal landscape of English manors over a period of roughly four centuries, from the fifteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. The process extinguished communal rights, redistributed land, and accelerated the decline of the manorial system.

Early enclosure by agreement

Before the eighteenth century, enclosure happened piecemeal. Lords and tenants enclosed land by private agreement, purchase, or exchange. This process was unregulated and left few formal records. In some parishes, enclosure began as early as the fifteenth century when lords converted arable strips to sheep pasture. The Tudor enclosure commissions of 1517 and 1548 investigated complaints that depopulation had followed enclosure, but the Crown lacked the means to reverse the process at scale.

Early enclosure was most common in the Midlands, where the open-field system was strongest. In Hampshire and Sussex, where woodland, downland, and coastal marshes meant that much land had never been farmed in open strips, the pattern was more uneven. Some hundreds saw little formal enclosure because the land had been held in severalty for centuries.

Parliamentary enclosure

From about 1750 to 1850, enclosure was carried out by individual Acts of Parliament. Each Act appointed commissioners to survey the parish, determine existing rights, and allot the land among claimants. Between 1750 and 1815, Parliament passed over 4,000 Enclosure Acts, affecting approximately 6.8 million acres. The General Enclosure Act of 1801 standardised the procedure. The Enclosure Consolidation Act of 1845 further simplified the process and established the Enclosure Commissioners as a permanent body.

Parliamentary enclosure required the consent of the owners of at least three-quarters (by value) of the land in the parish. In practice, the lord of the manor and the major landowners drove the process. Smaller tenants and cottagers with common rights received allotments, but the cost of fencing and the legal expenses of the Act itself often forced them to sell. The result was a concentration of landownership.

Effect on manorial structure

Enclosure affected the manor in several ways. The lord's rights over the waste and common were extinguished and replaced with a specific allotment, usually the largest in the parish. Tenants' common rights (grazing, turbary, estovers) were commuted into individual plots of land or, in some cases, cash compensation. The manorial court lost its role in regulating the commons, which had been one of its principal functions. Copyhold tenures, which bound tenants to the manorial system, persisted in law until 1926 but lost their practical significance as the land they governed was reorganised.

The relationship was reciprocal. The decline of the manor made enclosure easier, and enclosure further weakened the manor. By the mid-nineteenth century, the manorial court in most parishes was either defunct or reduced to a formality.

Enclosure records as a source

Parliamentary enclosure produced two documents of value for manorial research: the enclosure award and the enclosure map. The award names every person with a legal interest in the land, states the nature of their right, and records what allotment they received. The map shows the entire parish before and after enclosure, plotting field boundaries, roads, and allotments. Together, they provide a snapshot of landownership at a specific date.

Enclosure awards survive for most enclosed parishes and are held at county record offices. For Hampshire, the Hampshire Record Office holds the awards for the Portsdown and Fareham parishes. These records fill a gap between the earlier manorial surveys and the tithe maps of the 1840s, documenting who held what land at the moment the old open-field system was formally dissolved.