Introduction

We have chosen this topic because more and more people feel isolated, lonely and without the things they need to live such as housing, food, warmth and connection. Meanwhile, resources such as health care, libraries and village halls, which have been free and collective are being privatised and charged for. In this topic we aim to understand why the commons were enclosed and how this set us on a path of private and individual resources. We will also explore what resistance to enclosure has looked like and how it can offer solutions for today. 

Many know the first verse of this anonymously penned poem; ‘The law locks up the man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ But leaves the greater villain loose/ Who steals the common from the goose.’ In a few simple lines it describes the process known as ‘the enclosures’ where the landed gentry across these islands removed the long held rights of their tenants to hunt, graze livestock, gather firewood and materials for housing, from land near their village known as ‘commons’. It also describes the way that the law, mostly written and enforced by the same social class, was structured. Many of the commons cases went to court where the ‘encroachment’ of the aristocracy on these rights was viewed as legal, whereas people taking food from land they had previously had access to were ‘poachers’. 

This, Silvia Federici has argued in ‘Witches, Witch-Hunting and Women’ was because people could not be fully exploited as labourers, while they had strong relationships to ‘the natural world, other people and their own bodies’. The commons gave tenants, and sub tenants (cottars) access to much of what they needed to live and an expectation that they should have access to what they needed to live. It also created a strong web of relationships based on shared needs. 

The power this gave people against the ruling class was witnessed again in Jamaica in the 1830s and described in Andrea Levy’s novel ‘The Long Song’. Formerly Enslaved people refused to work because they had built their own houses, grown their own food, tended their own sick and preserved their own culture.  They understood that they were the majority of the population, exclusively possessed the skills required for life and that they quite simply had no need for their former masters. In order to force formerly Enslaved people into waged labour, Plantation owners first charged them rent for the land they had tended and houses they had built and then burned what people refused to pay for. 

Though the English history of Diggers and Levellers is better known, the enclosure of common land and resources in Scotland was and is contested. At the Common Ridings of the Scottish Borders songs declare ‘Aye defend your rights and commons’ and people mark the boundaries of the common land each year. Within Gàidhlig communities common grazing and peat cutting are still practiced and knowledge of Sheilings is handed down through language and culture. Traveller communities still gather and hold fairs on common lands, exercising in the face of state repression, their ancestral rights. And a mostly hidden history of poaching, squatting and occupation reminds us of the far lesser known final verse of ‘The Goose and the Common’. ‘The law locks up the man or woman/ Who steals the goose from off the common/ And geese will still a common lack/ Until they go and steal it back’. 

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