ABSTRACT
Until the advance, a generation ago, in the study of the demographic aspect of the Industrial Revolution, the function of enclosure in regard to labour supply was regarded as crucial. Its special importance in recruiting the industrial labour force was developed in a series of important studies as the result of which it came to be generally regarded as a basic postulate of the new large-scale economy. Economic historians are generally agreed that the fever of technical improvement in the early phases of the Industrial Revolution was partly occasioned by labour shortage even though enclosure was reported to be emptying the villages and bringing desolation to the countryside. Later historians have been inclined to look for the reason in the institutional factors of enclosures and poor law, which, they tell us, reduced the dispossessed peasantry to hopelessness and despair and removed the last remaining restraints upon ‘unbridled impulse’.
