ABSTRACT

But times are alter’d; trade’s unfeeling train Usurp the land and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scatter’d hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770) When Goldsmith was writing his celebrated poem – only four years before his early death in 1774 – the pace of economic life was quickening. Trade was expanding, population growing, towns swelling, and industry spreading and adopting novel forms of production. And agriculture, too, was gradually changing in its organisation and technology. The enclosure of open fields and commons was a part of that change, and was often enough a preliminary to it. However, Goldsmith’s poem appeared very early in the history of parliamentary enclosure, when the full flood of new Acts, over ninety a year in the early 1800s, was still a generation away. Wrote Goldsmith: Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, When wealth accumulates, and men decay: Princes and lords may flourish or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, the country’s pride, When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.