Enclosure Acts

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Last updated: 2026-08-24

This article is part of the Intermediate course on Libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics -> The Industrial Revolution

The enclosures (or Enclosure Acts) were the historical process by which lands that had previously been used in a communal or semi-communal way in England were privatized and consolidated. It is one of the most important institutional changes that preceded and accompanied the Industrial Revolution.

The previous system: the open fields

During the Middle Ages and well into the 18th century, a large part of English agriculture operated under the open-field system:

The arable land of a village was divided into large unfenced fields.
Those fields were subdivided into narrow strips that were assigned to different peasants.
After the harvest, the fields were opened to communal grazing.
In addition there were the commons (communal lands): pastures, woods, and wasteland where the neighbors had traditional rights to graze animals, gather firewood, hunt, etc.

It was a fairly rigid system, with crop rotations decided collectively and with many limitations on innovation.

What the enclosures did

Enclosure consisted in:

Consolidating each owner’s scattered strips into compact blocks of land.
Enclosing those plots with hedges, fences, or walls.
Extinguishing communal rights over those lands.
Converting the land into exclusive private property, which the owner could use, sell, or rent as he wished.

There were two great phases:

Informal or agreed enclosures (from the Late Middle Ages to the 17th century). Many were made in order to devote land to sheep grazing (because of the boom in wool).
Parliamentary Enclosures (mainly between 1750 and 1830). Parliament passed specific acts to enclose the lands of a particular parish. Between 1604 and 1914 more than 5,200 bills of this type were introduced, affecting some 6.8 million acres. The most intense peak was between 1760 and 1820.

Why were they done?

The owners (especially the great landowners) sought:

Greater efficiency and productivity.
The ability to apply new agricultural techniques (more advanced crop rotation, improvement of livestock breeds, drainage, fertilization, etc.).
To respond to population growth and to the demand for food and raw materials.

Recent economic studies confirm that, on average, parliamentary enclosures significantly increased agricultural yields (some estimates speak of around 45% in certain cases).

Positive (productive) effects:

It was a key engine of the Agricultural Revolution.
It made it possible to produce more food with relatively less labor.
It released workers who later migrated to the industrial cities.

Many small peasants, cottagers (people who had a cottage with a small garden), and people who depended on communal rights lost access to important resources.
Some received a compensatory plot, but often it was too small or the costs of enclosing it forced them to sell it.
It contributed to the formation of a landless rural proletariat, which ended up feeding migration toward the factories.

By eliminating access to the common lands, small peasants and tenants lost their economic subsistence base. Remaining independently in the countryside became unsustainable for many.

This mass of workers, stripped of their traditional means of life, was forced to migrate massively to the cities in search of employment. This phenomenon constituted precisely the cheap and available labor that fed the growth of factories, mines, and workshops in the industrial towns, giving rise to accelerated urbanization.

Critique of the Enclosure Acts

The “Common Lands”

The commons suffer from “The Tragedy of the Commons” (overuse, lack of investment, low productivity).

The privatization and consolidation of plots allowed agricultural innovations (crop rotation, breed improvement, incipient mechanization), increased yields, and released labor and capital for industry.

Later studies (and the historical literature that counters the Fabian/Marxist narrative) confirm productivity gains and the fact that industrialization did not depend fundamentally on a “massive displacement” of peasants by the parliamentary enclosures.

The process was not purely voluntary

Many parliamentary enclosures were imposed by a majority of owners (often ¾ of the value of the land) and could harm small commoners with traditional rights.

A radical Austrian (of the Murray Rothbard type) would criticize the state coercion in those cases and would prefer unanimous agreements or titles based on use/homesteading.

Rothbard would have said that the laws did not arise from a free market in land or from peaceful appropriation, but from parliamentary decrees designed to benefit the landed aristocracy, harming small peasants with legitimate customary rights.

However, the general result —more defined and transferable property rights— is valued positively against feudal or semi-feudal stagnation.

Against the Marxist thesis of “primitive accumulation”

Industrial capitalism was not built on the systematic theft of common lands as a necessary condition.

The Agricultural Revolution (of which the enclosures were a part) and then the Industrial Revolution raised the standard of living in the long run; workers migrated to the factories because they offered better prospects than the rural alternative.

In short

The Austrian School of Economics and classical libertarianism would defend the movement as an advance toward a more productive market economy, although they would not sanctify every coercive parliamentary act. They would prefer the spontaneous or contractual evolution of property rights.

The analysis does not end here; it continues with the analysis of this law and the Combination Acts on the following pages.