ABSTRACT
How did the conceptual origins of modern property law, the theoretical model of people and things, apply in the real world? The answer to this question lies principally in the enclosure of the English commons. The customs or laws of the commons were locally specific and responsive to geographic capacities and limits defined by forests, fens, marshes, wetlands and heaths. These specificities were regarded as irrelevant to the development of an abstract law of private property. The material origins of the modern laws of property were thus the physical processes of transforming very particular local geographic and ecological relations into uniformly productive fields and pastures across the nation through enclosure.
