ABSTRACT
Intensified commercial use was reflected in structural changes in land occupation. The open patterns of communal farming were gradually displaced. Enclosure of the open fields symbolised this development, and when all the evidence is considered, it is clear that this took place on a more substantial scale in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than recent historians have allowed. Furthermore, the effect was greater then because the disruption of communal systems and beliefs was most marked, and enclosure drew the opposition of the political and ecclesiastical authorities. After 1650, the public condemnation ceased, and enclosure became normative, encouraged by the triumph of absolute property at the centre of the state. The significance of the early period is underlined when we note that the essence of the change was not enclosure itself, but the consolidation of individual units out of the common fields. The essential process of consolidation had often already occurred before the later enclosures. Early industrial activity could also appropriate the commons for commercial use. These developments explain why the majority of rural workers had lost their position as smallholders and become wage labourers on commercial farms by the later seventeenth century.
