ABSTRACT
The third chapter tracks an important historical moment – early modern rural enclosure in England - when the contemporary hegemonic territorialization of property emerged. As an interaction device, territory helped reconstitute changing property relations, producing new social gradients premised on differential access and use of land. These practices placed an increased importance upon a territorial exclusivity that centred on individual rights, most particularly the right of exclusion. As such, the legal and practical defence of territory became of more pressing importance. As land becomes more sharply territorialized, commoners become deterritorialized. Legal doctrine – notably the very concept of ‘property’ itself’ – changed, as did imaginative and practical changes in ‘space’, particularly the practice of land surveying. The often contradictory role of materiality in remaking territory, particularly the enclosure hedge, will be explored here.
