enclosure of the commons A history of land ownership would be incomplete without reference to mid- eighteenth-century England, when a radical transformation of the organisation of land
the common border Our speculative fiction begins in 1764 with the passing of an Act of Enclosure. Let us imagine that this bill approved the measuring, mapping and subsequent division of the lands within a typical township, the White Ladies Aston parish in Worcestershire, for example. A survey team took stock of the open and common fields, common meadows, common grounds, heaths and wastelands surrounding the village. They would also survey the existing buildings, paths and carriageways. The team brought their field books and chain. At sixty-six feet long, the chain subdivided into four rods or one hundred links. It was closely associated with agricultural practice, as ten square chains neatly equals an acre. The chain was the standard unit of measure used not only to survey England but also to map and organise land in the colonies, especially in North America. We will imagine that the survey team made an error. In their work, they used an Irish chain, a variant of the English chain that measured eighty-four feet long. Without realising the discrepancy in dimensions, the surveyors mapped the entire parish. Individuals subsequently claimed title to the newly divided common land, dispossessing many and forcing the landless from where they had lived. The new landowners set about marking their properties by planting perimeter hedgerows, using the enclosure map as a guide to determine the edges of their land. Oddly, the boundaries of their properties never seemed to match what was mapped.
However, it is not the goal of this essay to recount the history of enclosure and the disappearance of the commons. For this, one could turn to Raymond Williams’s 1973 The Country and the City , Ann Bermingham’s 1986 Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740 – 1860 , or more recently to Jeanette M. Neeson’s 1993 Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 . Rather, this design essay presents a work of speculative fiction. Whereas design fields commonly use a method of working where a critical position on the past is used to conceive of possible futures, the images here establish an alternative history, where contemporary critiques of the past are contextualised within that past. In contrast to proposing how to improve our future, designing an alternative history prompts an imagining of our present had we acted differently in the past. Thus, design can be a tool to help us understand the failings of the present.
had a significant social and economic impact. This time was marked by the
enclosure of common land, where land that had previously been open for communal uses, such as grazing, gathering provisions, or cultivation, was physically enclosed by fences or hedges. Powerful landholders took ownership of these newly divided lands, which drove independent cultivators and part-time labourers to growing industrial towns where they sought employment and eventually comprised a new working class. Thus, enclosure, being a form of legalised seizure of land, formed the foundation of a developing agrarian capitalism. To this day, our contemporary capitalist economy remains bound to the premise that land can be possessed, and that ownership of land is an indicator of social status. The enclosure of the commons signalled the elimination of land with indeterminate use, and any remaining public lands were assigned specific purposes. Even parks today are rule-bound and dedicated to leisure and recreation. One cannot, for example, pasture a goat in a public park, nor grow vegetables without prior approval in a sanctioned ‘community garden’. So, when we step off a sidewalk, we step onto land that is likely owned by a separate entity and certainly with some other use, even if just dedicated to being unused, as in the case of the residential lawn.
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 16
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