The Enclosures in England: An Economic Reconstruction

Economic historians have told a simple story for generations: rising wool prices drove England's enclosure movement, as landlords enclosed common lands to cash in on the textile boom. Harriett Bradley Fitt demolishes this comfortable myth. Drawing on contemporary evidence, she argues that the real driver was not profit but exhaustion. Centuries of common-field farming had stripped the soil of its fertility, and the lands simply could not sustain intensive cultivation any longer. Enclosure was not greed in action but desperation in disguise, a shift to grazing systems that required less of depleted earth. This is revisionist history at its finest: a careful, methodical dismantling of received wisdom that reshapes how we understand a transformative moment in English economic development.