Unforeseen Consequences

My little rainy-day book about the English landscape was written in 1954, when Elizabeth II was just 2 years queen and Winston Spencer-Churchill was Prime Minister. Charles III was 5 years old

At school, we all learned about 'The Enclosures' and the demise of communal open fields. I only learned from the book that there was resistance to enforced private enclosure by no less than Thomas Wolsey - he who fixed up Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn, and had little time for landed gentry. In a village near here, he forced a landowner to reverse enclosure that had been carried out before he bought the estate and rebuild the tenant farms that had been demolished

The landlord - a man named Spencer - sent several petitions to parliament, protesting the injustice and irrationality of the decree. The enclosed land was more profitable, enabling him to repair and refurnish the church; it supported a good livelihood for almost as many people as there had previously been impoverished tenants; the enclosure coppice hedges yielded timber, of which there was a dire need in the heavily populated area; the cost and loss of income would ruin him

Reasonable arguments; the case for and against enclosure in microcosm. Perhaps the last one was a bit disingenuous. When he was nevertheless forced to return the land to tenanted tillage, he still had enough funds to buy grazing land across the county boundary in Northamptonshire, and move his sucessful cattle enterprise there. He settled in the village of Althorpe and became the founder of two noble families: the Earls Spencer (who eventually produced Lady Diana) and the Spencer-Churchills, who did their bit the last time Europe had to deal with fascists

When we built our kitchen, we inadvertently created a little grassy enclave, surrounded by walls, sheltered and quiet, somewhat separated from the rest of the garden. An enclosure, if you will. A fair place to hunt worms on a foul day