Enclosure

Walking on the mountain today, where old walls and fences divide the open moorland (top right, dark with gorse and heather scrub) from the rough pastures sprinkled thick with sheep and lambs, my thoughts turned to a novel I've just read (and would highly recommend). The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds focusses on the microcosmic community of High Beach mental hospital in which the poet John Clare was a patient from 1837-41.

Clare was born in 1793, the son of a farm labourer in Northamptonshire, and grew up in rural poverty, working in the fields from an early age, running wild with gypsies and sampling a variety of manual jobs before his untutored attempts at poetry began to attract attention. He was taken up by the London literati who dubbed him the peasant poet and saw him as a kind of idiot savant. Caught between the world of the intelligentsia and the largely illiterate country folk to whom he, his family, wife and children belonged, Clare became depressed and deluded to the point of requiring custodial care. Although he escaped from High Beach and made an epic trek home, he was soon admitted to the county lunatic asylum where he ended his days, still writing, over 20 years later.

John Clare's poems remain some of the finest ever written about nature and the countryside. He often used the dialect of his home county (although much of that was rendered into standard English by his publisher), and his intimate familiarity with the animals, the plants and the seasons shines out of his work. This was a man who loved the land with a passion and wanted to roam freely across it. He was deeply grieved and disturbed by the Enclosure Acts that allowed common land, hitherto available to all, to be appropriated by rich landowners for private agricultural use. Where the peasants had once be free to graze their animals or grow crops on wide tracts of open land, now hedges, walls and fences sprang up and transformed the face of the countryside, chopped and divided the landscape. Clare saw this, correctly, as an assault of the liberty of the labouring class and deprivation of their rights. (In a more personal way it may also have symbolised his own feelings of constraint and entrapment within an invidious class system.)

In the remoter regions of Britain's Celtic fringe, the native populace was routinely thrown off the land to make way for grazing stock owned by wealthy incomers. It happened in Wales, Scotland and Ireland throughout the 19th century; many starved while others left the land or the country for good. It was only in 2005, after 100 years of campaigning, that the public were given back the right to roam freely over mountain, moor, heath, downland and registered common land without having to stick to paths.

Here is John Clare's poem, Enclosure.

There once were lanes in nature's freedom dropt,
There once were paths that every valley wound-
Enclosure came, and every path was stopt;
Each tyrant fixed his sign where paths were found,
To hint a trespass now who crossed the ground:
Justice is made to speak as they command;
The high road now must be each stinted bound:
Enclosure, thou'rt curse upon the land,
And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence planned.
O England, boasted land of liberty,
With strangers still thou mayst thy title own,
But thy poor slaves the alteration see,
With many a loss to them the truth is known:
Like emigrating bird thy freedom's flown,
While mongrel clowns, low as their rooting plough,
Disdain thy laws to put in force their own;
And every village owns its tyrants now,
And parish-slaves must live as parish-kings allow.
Ye fields, ye scenes so dear to Lubin's eye,
Ye meadow-blooms, ye pasture-flowers, farewell!
Ye banished trees, ye make me deeply sigh-
Enclosure came, and all your glories fell:
E'en the old oak that crowned your rifled dell,
Whose age had made it sacred to the view,
Not long was left his children's fate to tell.
Where ignorance and wealth their course pursue,
Each tree must tumble down - old Lea-close Oak, adieu!
Lubin beheld it all, and deeply pained
Along the paled road would muse and sigh,
The only path that freedom's rights maintained;
The naked scenes drew pity from his eye,
Tears dropt to memory of delights gone by
The haunts of freedom, cowherd's wattled bower,
And shepherds' huts, and trees that towered high
And spreading thorns that turned a summer shower,
All captives lost, and fast to sad oppression's power.