Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're just trucking along
Speaker 2: doing our thing. It's called Stuffy Show. Oh.
Speaker 1: Is this the episode on the Great seventies movie Convoy.
Speaker 2: No, this is the episode on the Coming Down the
Speaker 2: Pike in the Future movie Fencing the comments.
Speaker 1: Oh I thought it was Fencing the Convoy.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: Boys, a lot of mashups happening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should probably let's stop joking around. We've had
Speaker 2: a lot of fun here, but let's get serious. We're
Speaker 2: talking about fencing the Commons. And for anybody who heard
Speaker 2: our episode on the Tragedy of the Commons, they're fairly related.
Speaker 2: They're talking about the same thing. The Commons are both
Speaker 2: the same thing, but there's radically different stuff going on here.
Speaker 2: Just go listen to our Tragedy of the Commons episode.
Speaker 2: I won't give a rundown of it. But fencing the Commons,
Speaker 2: some people point to it is this process of separating
Speaker 2: and extracting land from people to whom it had formerly belonged.
Speaker 2: Everyday people literally commoners.
Speaker 1: Yeah, or maybe not belong but at least you know,
Speaker 1: made use of to survive.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, it depends on who you ask, and it
Speaker 2: is possible, say some historians that this is where wealth
Speaker 2: inequality came from, that this is where wage labor came from,
Speaker 2: that this is where a lot of the really not
Speaker 2: great features of the modern world were rooted. And when
Speaker 2: you dig into it, you're like, wow, this is a
Speaker 2: decision by a really self interested group of powerful people
Speaker 2: to pull off a really big land grab. J All
Speaker 2: the old England.
Speaker 1: Boy, I love that self edit there.
Speaker 2: Thanks, that's between you and me, Jerry and the lamp post.
Speaker 1: That's right. Shall we get on with it? Then?
Speaker 2: Yes, I feel like that was a good setup. If
Speaker 2: I did say so myself.
Speaker 1: I agree, just like the old days. Not that your
Speaker 1: setups now are no good, but.
Speaker 2: In the old days it would have been like, Chuck,
Speaker 2: have you ever eaten grass off of the Commons?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I think in that last Commons episode actually mentioned
Speaker 1: that the Commons was the area of our high school
Speaker 1: in just the big middle open area inside where everyone
Speaker 1: would hang out, because that was a common area and
Speaker 1: that's what the Commons are in this case too. And
Speaker 1: Lyvia did a bang up job with this one.
Speaker 2: I think yes she did not, as we.
Speaker 1: Say, yeah, out of the commons, and we're going to start,
Speaker 1: as Livia suggests, with William the Conqueror, because that makes
Speaker 1: sense in this case. The Normans when they conquered England
Speaker 1: in ten sixty six, they said, all right, here's what
Speaker 1: we're gonna do. All the the wealthy, noble people of
Speaker 1: our land are going to get all the land, and
Speaker 1: so let's just divide it all up. They're going to
Speaker 1: live there on manners. And if you if you have
Speaker 1: a manor house, you are the lord of that manor.
Speaker 1: You're you have allegiance to the king, obviously. But on
Speaker 1: that land of yours, besides your manor house, there's also
Speaker 1: going to be a peasant village. There's gonna be some
Speaker 1: some great farmland that they're going to work for you,
Speaker 1: so they can give you lots of food. And then
Speaker 1: there's also the commons, which all of the peasant people
Speaker 1: or commoners can can share. They can divide it up
Speaker 1: and share it and live off that stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this land was not the commoner's land. This
Speaker 2: is not peasant's land. This is the medieval era. I
Speaker 2: guess it kicked off the medieval era, and just to
Speaker 2: be clear, this was this was the lord's land like
Speaker 2: you were saying, but the commoners had what are called
Speaker 2: use of fructory rights, which is basically like they don't
Speaker 2: own the land, but they have like actual legal right
Speaker 2: to use and to work that land and to take
Speaker 2: the products of their work from that land to sustain themselves.
Speaker 2: So this is the arrangement like that, and it worked
Speaker 2: pretty well for several centuries, it turns.
Speaker 1: Out, yeah, it did. You know. They divided that land
Speaker 1: into basically straight strips and we'll get into that in
Speaker 1: a second, for each household. And there was also the waste,
Speaker 1: which will come into play. It sounds like a terrible
Speaker 1: word to name basically the forest, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: where they couldn't farm, but it was you know, it's
Speaker 1: where the rivers were, that's where the trees were, So
Speaker 1: that's where they hunted and fished and gathered peat and
Speaker 1: wood and stuff like that. So it's still very valuable
Speaker 1: area as far as use goes. But they called it waste.
Speaker 2: It was just not a good, good term.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agreed.
Speaker 2: But so with the farmland themselves, like you said, they
Speaker 2: cut them up into strips, and just imagine like a
Speaker 2: series of fields. One field is just grass. We'll call
Speaker 2: that like the meadow. It's where all the sheep and
Speaker 2: the cows are grazing. Now there's another field, and that's
Speaker 2: where a bunch of cropland is growing. There's another field.
Speaker 2: There's more crop land, and if you look very closely,
Speaker 2: the crop land is divided up into very long, thin strips,
Speaker 2: and each of those strips belongs to a different person
Speaker 2: who farms that common land in both fields. And that's
Speaker 2: how things were divided up. And you didn't have two
Speaker 2: strips next to each other because they didn't want anybody
Speaker 2: to get like all the good dirt. Yeah, and then
Speaker 2: you would have strips in both fields because there were
Speaker 2: different things growing in different fields, and the whole thing
Speaker 2: rotated every few years, and a different field would become
Speaker 2: the new meadow because the sheep and the cows would peep,
Speaker 2: poop on it and fertilize it for next time around
Speaker 2: when it became cropland again.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So it was just basic crop rotation that made
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. They would let it rewild. They
Speaker 1: you know, they were straight because they had these very
Speaker 1: tough to use plows that did not turn very well,
Speaker 1: so they just made these long, straight strips. They would
Speaker 1: take care and share the oxen that it took to
Speaker 1: pull these plows for everyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a big one.
Speaker 1: And it was you know, it was sort of like
Speaker 1: a It wasn't like like communism or anything or socialism.
Speaker 1: It was just like how it was. It was like, hey,
Speaker 1: we're all going to care for this land. We're going
Speaker 1: to rotate the crops so the land stays good for
Speaker 1: all of us, and we're gonna all help take care
Speaker 1: of the ox and will help each other out. And
Speaker 1: we're not going to put up fences because the animals
Speaker 1: have to graze around, and we all just have to
Speaker 1: agree on how to do this, and they basically did.
Speaker 2: Well. That's the big one. Because you are sharing strips
Speaker 2: with your neighbors in a single field, everybody has to
Speaker 2: do the same farming all at the same time. It's
Speaker 2: almost like the group of commoners working those fields were
Speaker 2: collectively one single farmer making these decisions on when to harvest,
Speaker 2: when to plow, when to do all that stuff. And
Speaker 2: like I said, it worked pretty well. It's important because
Speaker 2: these people are the losers in this situation, and we
Speaker 2: usually root for the underdog. So we have to be
Speaker 2: careful not to overidealize life in a medieval English peasant
Speaker 2: village like it was tough. Good point, like if if
Speaker 2: your crops failed and it turned out that your your
Speaker 2: neighbors thought you worshiped some new knows, they might burn
Speaker 2: you at the stake. Like it was. It was not
Speaker 2: necessarily the easiest life, but it seems to be a
Speaker 2: life that was very satisfactory to the peasants because when
Speaker 2: it came time for them to be forced to give
Speaker 2: it up, they did not want to give it up.
Speaker 2: They wanted to keep living like that because the alternative
Speaker 2: that they were given was not preferable to peasant village life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like, hey, go move to the same and
Speaker 1: work in a textile mill. So they didn't necessarily also
Speaker 1: divide this up evenly. It was, you know, it was
Speaker 1: divided up according to like a lot of like inherited
Speaker 1: steaks that had been around for a long long time
Speaker 1: in the families. There were people that did not get
Speaker 1: any land at all and basically were just the hired
Speaker 1: farm hands even within the peasant village. But they did
Speaker 1: get resources that could generally hunt and fish and things
Speaker 1: like that. In the waste after the harvest. If they
Speaker 1: were like you know, crops that were leftover or not
Speaker 1: completely utilized, they a lot of times could had access
Speaker 1: to those, So you know, they were getting along okay.
Speaker 1: You know when you look at the alternative, which is
Speaker 1: having no land at all to farm, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And although there was inequality, you could still work
Speaker 2: your way up. There were people who had more land
Speaker 2: than they necessarily needed. Yeah, so if you were land
Speaker 2: you could sublet that land, work that land, and start
Speaker 2: giving yourself a foothold and maybe eventually buy that strip
Speaker 2: or those strips of field for yourself. So it seems like, yes,
Speaker 2: there were some people who were wealthier than others, but
Speaker 2: the difference in income equality and social equality is much closer,
Speaker 2: right than it would become in the next few centuries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And they also, you know, thought ahead, like, hey,
Speaker 1: you within this system, you can't just get so rich
Speaker 1: and still be here. So they had an income cap basically,
Speaker 1: so if you went above that, they're like, sorry, you're
Speaker 1: you're not a commoner anymore. You can't farm this land.
Speaker 1: And they did this in a pretty democratic way. They
Speaker 1: had a local council that they elected that you know,
Speaker 1: every year they would allocate these strips for different households
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. They would set fees for like
Speaker 1: you know, grazing and pasturing and stuff like that and
Speaker 1: get their agricultural calendar and order. And yeah, that's just
Speaker 1: how it went for a long time. And like you said,
Speaker 1: for a couple hundred years, it wasn't it worked out
Speaker 1: pretty well?
Speaker 2: It did so apparently around twelve thirty five, so people
Speaker 2: have been farming like this for a couple hundred years.
Speaker 2: By then, there was a statute passed, and I don't
Speaker 2: know the ins and outs of it, but it was
Speaker 2: called the Statute of Merton.
Speaker 1: I wonder if the statute was named for the famously
Speaker 1: long necked defensive back for the San Francisco forty nine ers,
Speaker 1: Merton Hanks.
Speaker 2: Obviously it was, but regardless of who it was named after,
Speaker 2: the Statue of Merton said that if you were the
Speaker 2: lord of a manor and you want to like close
Speaker 2: off your whole, well, I guess manner. If you want
Speaker 2: to close off some of it, you can do that
Speaker 2: legally from now on, but you have to make sure
Speaker 2: that there's plenty of common land left for the peasants
Speaker 2: to work and live on. And I guess whoever that
Speaker 2: was passed for was like yes, and everybody else didn't
Speaker 2: pay much attention to it for about one hundred or
Speaker 2: so years, and then something happened in England and Europe
Speaker 2: in general that really altered the trajectory of history, and
Speaker 2: that was the Black Death, when as much as half
Speaker 2: half of the people in England died off from this
Speaker 2: one plague in just a couple of years.
Speaker 1: So this it's interesting to see how things like this
Speaker 1: in history can just change the course of history, right,
Speaker 1: because had the Black Death not happened, obviously a lot
Speaker 1: of people would have still been alive. But aside from that,
Speaker 1: like this may have never gone down that way because
Speaker 1: it was just a radical shift in the way the
Speaker 1: country looked and how they had to operate moving forward.
Speaker 1: Because obviously, when half the people go away and leave
Speaker 1: the planet.
Speaker 2: Is that how I'm saying this now, I think I
Speaker 2: sniffed up the case forever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like it was the snap or something. There's gonna
Speaker 1: be a labor shortage, just the nuts and bolts of
Speaker 1: it is, there's gonna be far less people to do
Speaker 1: that kind of work, which was kind of good for
Speaker 1: the peasants at the time, because all of a sudden
Speaker 1: they had some bargaining power and they said, hey, maybe
Speaker 1: we should get paid a little more. We also don't
Speaker 1: need as much food because there's only half the people.
Speaker 1: And so that all of a sudden paved the way
Speaker 1: for more sheep grazing because England started realizing, hey, there's
Speaker 1: a lot more money and a lot easier money to
Speaker 1: be made in textiles and shearing the sheep and selling
Speaker 1: wool in the wool trade than there is this farming,
Speaker 1: Like that's for the birds, right.
Speaker 2: So, because sheep are much less labor intensive, require way
Speaker 2: fewer farmers, but more land, the people who are wealthy
Speaker 2: started going after enclosure more and more. They started following
Speaker 2: that statute of Merton Hanks and saying like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I want to enclose this. I'm going to enclose this
Speaker 2: and turn it into grazing land for sheep. And people
Speaker 2: were actually displaced. Some people were some entire villages were displaced.
Speaker 2: And it was as simple is that it was, you
Speaker 2: don't live here anymore, get out, and don't forget I'm
Speaker 2: the lord of the manor so what are you going
Speaker 2: to do about it? Sometimes there were armed people who
Speaker 2: would show up and tell them to leave. It was
Speaker 2: just as illegal and indefensible as that. But that's exactly
Speaker 2: what happened. People were moved out for sheep because they
Speaker 2: could make more money off of wool than they could
Speaker 2: off of crops, because there weren't that many people who
Speaker 2: needed the crops in the first place. So this huge
Speaker 2: land grab first started because the price of wool was
Speaker 2: pretty expensive, and that started the first what you would
Speaker 2: call really the first wave of enclosure back in the
Speaker 2: fourteenth fifteenth century.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know what we mean by fencing an
Speaker 1: enclosure is literal fencing because they had to keep those
Speaker 1: sheep there. If not, the sheep were going to go away,
Speaker 1: so they had to physically construct barricades to keep these
Speaker 1: fences in. Sometimes they were literal fences. Sometimes there were
Speaker 1: these hedges. But yeah, if you're thinking, like you know
Speaker 1: topiari type, you know, finery of a English garden, it's
Speaker 1: more like a hedge that they train to grow so
Speaker 1: thick and then vines attached to that that it essentially
Speaker 1: acts as a fence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you just can't get through it. There's too
Speaker 2: many brambles and blackberries and all that stuff. So, yeah,
Speaker 2: these hedges. If you're British, you are probably pretty fond
Speaker 2: of your hedges. They're part of British culture. But outside
Speaker 2: of Britain, it's worth going to Britain just to see
Speaker 2: the hedges. So the hedges have like two or three
Speaker 2: Michelin stars, I can't remember.
Speaker 1: That's right. The other thing we have to point out
Speaker 1: here is that sometimes it was a little more like
Speaker 1: how it was supposed to work officially is different than
Speaker 1: how it went down in practice. Officially, you were supposed
Speaker 1: to get unanimous consent of all the stakeholders of the
Speaker 1: Commons in order to sell that often fence it up
Speaker 1: for your sheet, but it obviously didn't always work out
Speaker 1: that way. Like you said, sometimes he just took it.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they forced them to move to a very much
Speaker 1: less desire. They're like, here, take this land. It's not
Speaker 1: nearly as fertile, but look I gave you something. And
Speaker 1: sometimes yeah, it was just completely illegal.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so some people were like, hey, this is kind
Speaker 2: of messed up. One of the most well known voices
Speaker 2: was Thomas Moore, who wrote his book Utopia in fifteen sixteen,
Speaker 2: and he was pretty clearly against the sheep. He called
Speaker 2: them the great devourers who devoured entire communities. And you know,
Speaker 2: obviously it wasn't the sheep's fault. They were just doing
Speaker 2: what they do, which is kind of a yeah, I know,
Speaker 2: they really took the brunt of it. But it was
Speaker 2: because of this, the raising sheep that became so profitable
Speaker 2: that that's what was really devouring the communities. And it
Speaker 2: got the ear of Henry the seventh. Remember he was
Speaker 2: the guy who killed Richard the third and took over.
Speaker 2: He was the first Tudor king. He said, hey, I
Speaker 2: am hearing what you're saying. So let's kind of slow
Speaker 2: down these enclosures because we don't want to uproot the peasantry.
Speaker 2: We want them to keep doing what they do, because
Speaker 2: that is England as far as anyone thinks of England.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's sort of the first bucket of enclosure,
Speaker 1: the first wave, I guess, the first tronch, the first trunch.
Speaker 1: That's right. So maybe we should take a break and
Speaker 1: we'll come back with a little more intense enclosure right
Speaker 1: after this.
Speaker 2: And things A job in job.
Speaker 1: All right, So, as promised, we talked about the first
Speaker 1: wave of enclosure, and now the second wave a couple
Speaker 1: of hundred years later comes back in a much more
Speaker 1: intense form because the government, like the whole government of England,
Speaker 1: said all right, this is how we're going to do
Speaker 1: things now, because in the last couple of hundred years,
Speaker 1: textile making has really become the thing. Although we're getting
Speaker 1: most of our wool and cotton and stuff from our
Speaker 1: various colonies all over the world, it's not like we
Speaker 1: need all this for sheep. We think this is just
Speaker 1: the way to go because we really need to make
Speaker 1: our whole agricultural operation much more efficient, and it was
Speaker 1: not efficient when people were just doing their own thing
Speaker 1: with these little strips of land. Like one person or
Speaker 1: one entity needs to kind of be in charge of
Speaker 1: all of this so it'll be more efficient and smooth.
Speaker 2: Right ideally, and in practice, a peasant could support himself
Speaker 2: and his family and you know, maybe have enough leftover
Speaker 2: to sell or something like that, but you can't really
Speaker 2: support a growing workforce, a labor force that you're creating
Speaker 2: basically out of whole cloth. With the industrial Revolution started
Speaker 2: in England thanks to these wool factories, converting them into textiles.
Speaker 2: You need a bunch of people for that. So you
Speaker 2: need to figure out how to take the people off
Speaker 2: the land and put them in the factories. And then
Speaker 2: you have to figure out how to feed those people
Speaker 2: from the land that you just move the people from,
Speaker 2: and you can pay them so that they actually have
Speaker 2: to buy the food from the land that you just
Speaker 2: forced them off of. Yeah, you can start to see
Speaker 2: what a bad deal it was. But because there was
Speaker 2: so much money to be made, because there was such
Speaker 2: a huge leap forward just waiting to be taken through
Speaker 2: the Industrial Revolution, the powers that be guided steered railroaded
Speaker 2: England and the English into the cities and the factories
Speaker 2: in the cities.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And one of the biggest sort of pillars of
Speaker 1: this new system was the Norfolk four course system. And
Speaker 1: a guy named Lord Townsend nicknamed Turnip. I believe he
Speaker 1: brought this over from the Netherlands. His nickname was Turnip.
Speaker 1: And wouldn't you guess turnips are part of this four
Speaker 1: course system. It involved crop rotation, in this case wheat, turnips, barley,
Speaker 1: and clover. You might be wondering, like clover, what good
Speaker 1: is that?
Speaker 2: Clover?
Speaker 1: Was good for the grazing.
Speaker 2: It's good for the bees, so honey, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: Good for the bees, it's good for the soil. And
Speaker 1: it also meant that they didn't need to let those
Speaker 1: fields go down for a season and rewild. They could
Speaker 1: just kind of keep rotating things and you could use
Speaker 1: those turnips to feed the livestock that are grazing on
Speaker 1: the clover, and previous to that, they might slaughter livestock
Speaker 1: at the end of the season in the early winter.
Speaker 1: Another big change was that the seed drill came along,
Speaker 1: which has allowed them to plant in these very long
Speaker 1: straight rows, just you know, endless, endless straight rows, and
Speaker 1: they planted grain. And guess who introduced that, Josh and audience, I.
Speaker 2: Know who it is, Air and Air yep survivor.
Speaker 1: Oh man, jeth Throw Toll baby.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Jethrow Toll.
Speaker 1: That's right.
Speaker 2: I knew it all along. I was just teasing. So
Speaker 2: did you know Jethro Toll was a British band?
Speaker 1: Oh? I did not. I just thought he was the
Speaker 1: guy that came up with the seed drill and was
Speaker 1: generally feeling like a dead duck.
Speaker 2: No. Uh, they were a British band and apparently someone
Speaker 2: in their agent's office was a history buff and was
Speaker 2: telling them all about Jethrow Toll and what a great
Speaker 2: inventive person he was. So they're like, we'll just name
Speaker 2: our band Jethro Toll, even though it'll make no sense
Speaker 2: because it doesn't fit with our music at all. We're
Speaker 2: gonna name our band Jethrow Toll.
Speaker 1: I think it kind of fits, do you think so? Yeah.
Speaker 1: When I think of seed drills, I think of flautists.
Speaker 1: I think of Ian Anderson dancing around on one leg
Speaker 1: like a flamingo.
Speaker 2: Nice. Okay, I guess it makes sense now that you
Speaker 2: put it like that.
Speaker 1: We talked about aqualon quite a bit on the show.
Speaker 2: I don't know how you don't talk about aqualong like
Speaker 2: pretty frequently. It's just there. It's worth talking about, for sure.
Speaker 1: I love very divisive song. I think it's great and
Speaker 1: kind of fun.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, some people hate it, boy, a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder why it's a weird song.
Speaker 2: It's odd. So I guess the upshot of all this
Speaker 2: is that an industrial revolution was coincidental with an agricultural revolution,
Speaker 2: and one fueled the other, which is pretty interesting because
Speaker 2: this is happening at the exact same time. But even still,
Speaker 2: the government was like, you can't just go in and
Speaker 2: steal people's land. If you want to enclose your land
Speaker 2: and consolidate it so that you can create this super
Speaker 2: efficient agricultural land that you can make tons of money
Speaker 2: off of selling food again to the peasants who were
Speaker 2: just removed from that land that they used to farm,
Speaker 2: it just gets me chuck. You have to do that
Speaker 2: through act of parliament. You have to petition Parliament and
Speaker 2: say I want to enclose this land, and not only that,
Speaker 2: you have to have a supermajority of the local area
Speaker 2: to agree to it. And there were two things that
Speaker 2: helped people with this one. The same people who were
Speaker 2: trying to enclose the land were in Parliament or at
Speaker 2: least friends with them. And the people who provided the
Speaker 2: supermajority to say yes, you can enclose the land were
Speaker 2: their friends and neighbors and people in the same class.
Speaker 2: So it's not like these were huge obstacles that the
Speaker 2: people enclosing Great Britain had to overcome at the time.
Speaker 1: Now, and if you're thinking like, oh, guys, are you
Speaker 1: telling me, they passed like thousands and thousands of acts
Speaker 1: of Parliament they did exactly that. They passed about four
Speaker 1: thousand of these between seven fifty and eighteen sixty, so
Speaker 1: just a little over one hundred years and almost eleven
Speaker 1: thousand square miles of England beginning at the start of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century was now enclosed. That's about a fifth
Speaker 1: of the entire area of the country. If you're wondering
Speaker 1: about the waste, we mentioned the waste. We don't want
Speaker 1: to let the waste go to waste. They were enclosed
Speaker 1: as well. Like it wasn't like they fenced all of
Speaker 1: that off, but a lot of it was. And they said, hey,
Speaker 1: I know you used to hunt and fish here, but
Speaker 1: now we're going to take our ritzy hunting parties out
Speaker 1: here and you're not going to be allowed to hunt.
Speaker 1: Or we may just raise it and have our own gardens.
Speaker 1: It might be like agricultural that you know, we get
Speaker 1: some of our food from, but it will probably be
Speaker 1: just like like you know, the English gardens that we
Speaker 1: love to gaze upon with our riches go off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I have a real problem with that as well.
Speaker 2: So people just didn't necessarily take this lying down. There
Speaker 2: were huge, huge waves and spasms of violence throughout the
Speaker 2: centuries from the beginning of enclosure up until the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: This is a really, really big deal. You can trace
Speaker 2: it all the way back to the thirteen eighty one
Speaker 2: Peasants Revolt that wasn't entirely about enclosure, but it was
Speaker 2: a factor in it, and trace it up to the
Speaker 2: English Civil War where the Diggers came along. The Diggers
Speaker 2: were a radical faction of a radical group called the Levelers,
Speaker 2: and their whole thing was enclosure is a mess, and
Speaker 2: it's terrible and we're not going to put up with it.
Speaker 2: The Diggers, i think, kind of capture what the issue
Speaker 2: was to the peasants, and that was to them, if
Speaker 2: you were born British, you had a birthright to British soil,
Speaker 2: like the country belonged to you as much as it
Speaker 2: belonged to anybody else who was born in Britain, and
Speaker 2: your right was to work that soil and make a
Speaker 2: living for yourself however you wanted to. And coming in
Speaker 2: and enclosing this area and forcing people from that land
Speaker 2: with a violation of the birthright of those British people,
Speaker 2: and you know, they engaged in violence, and they would
Speaker 2: break down enclosures and fences and hedges, but ultimately they
Speaker 2: lost that battle or that war.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you're wondering about uh, I feel like
Speaker 1: I'm waste guy today, which I come like it keeps
Speaker 1: just popping up. Whatever, it's my turn. And while I'm
Speaker 1: looking at the script, here is at my line.
Speaker 2: This is your line. You didn't highlight your lines?
Speaker 1: Sorry? Sorry? Yeah, as far as the waste goes, you know,
Speaker 1: I said that a lot of them were kind of
Speaker 1: closed off as well, so they couldn't use them. So
Speaker 1: obviously there's going to be some like saboteur action going
Speaker 1: on there. And these were commoners known as the Blacks,
Speaker 1: and they would poach deer on in the waste. They
Speaker 1: would destroy trees because trees all of it. I mean,
Speaker 1: there were always a bit of a commodity, but they
Speaker 1: became an increasing commodity because of the shipbuilding prowess, the
Speaker 1: growing shipbuilding prowess of England at the time, and the
Speaker 1: British Royal Navy fleet that was just growing and growing,
Speaker 1: British seapower Great band. So they were doing this and
Speaker 1: so the government passed the Black Act, which basically said
Speaker 1: all right, if you get caught poaching a deer on
Speaker 1: land that you hunted all your life, We're going to
Speaker 1: kill you. And it was the death penalty, and so
Speaker 1: hundreds of people were hanged for approaching those deer that
Speaker 1: they had always been hunting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the way of life that these people lived
Speaker 2: was outlawed, and so to engage in that way of
Speaker 2: life you were now a criminal. And the crimes you
Speaker 2: committed e g. Killing a rabbit on enclosed land, maybe
Speaker 2: even chasing after a rabbit through someone's enclosed land could
Speaker 2: get you killed by the government. Like that's what happened
Speaker 2: with that. This is how serious things got. And back
Speaker 2: to the I'm going to take a waste one if
Speaker 2: you don't mind.
Speaker 1: Well, the sub waste, which is the fens.
Speaker 2: Okay, fine, it's not the greatest waste, but it's important
Speaker 2: because the fens were a and I think still are
Speaker 2: in some places, a big, vast marshy area of England.
Speaker 2: And the people who wanted to grow crops for that
Speaker 2: agricultural revolution and make a bunch of money, we're like,
Speaker 2: we should drain those because that'll immediately turn into a
Speaker 2: really great crop land. And the people who lived on
Speaker 2: the fence, the peasants, said, well, wh whoa, we're using
Speaker 2: those And so this kind of battle for public opinion
Speaker 2: broke out, and the people who were trying to make
Speaker 2: the money off of it told everybody else like, this
Speaker 2: is just waste land, like terrible land, not even the
Speaker 2: other version of waste. This is just terrible land that's
Speaker 2: not doing anybody any good. And the people who don't
Speaker 2: want to leave are too lazy to come into the
Speaker 2: cities and work, so forget them. And the peasants said, hey,
Speaker 2: we can make way more money working the fens than
Speaker 2: we can working for you in the cities. And it
Speaker 2: worked for a little while the fens. They managed to
Speaker 2: stave off the fens being drained from the seventeen hundreds
Speaker 2: for most of the seventeen hundreds, and then ultimately lost out.
Speaker 2: That's a recurring theme in this chuck. The people who
Speaker 2: are defending their right to the land ultimately lost out,
Speaker 2: over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, you'll be glad to know. Like, just
Speaker 1: like the first sort of wave of enclosure, when there
Speaker 1: were some people speaking up and saying like this is
Speaker 1: really the best idea. During the official parliamentary enclosure, some people,
Speaker 1: some officials even stepped forward and said, hey, I don't
Speaker 1: think this is the best thing that we're doing here.
Speaker 1: Those guy named Arthur Young, who who actually was a
Speaker 1: pro enclosure and was promoting that kind of stuff as
Speaker 1: the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, But then as
Speaker 1: it started to play out, he was like, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: We've got these villages that are just drying up. We've
Speaker 1: got these commoners that are impoverished now, and so I'm
Speaker 1: going to whip up a report here and take it
Speaker 1: to the board. And they said this is in eighteen
Speaker 1: oh one, and they said, thanks, but no thanks, we're
Speaker 1: not even going to take a look at that.
Speaker 2: I think I saw somewhere that something like three hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty English villages just vanished in that one hundred
Speaker 2: years of the parliamentary enclosures. Yeah, I mean just gone
Speaker 2: like gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I guess there's different ways of looking at this,
Speaker 1: like you can't stop progress. And it's not like if
Speaker 1: this hadn't happened, there would still be these, you know,
Speaker 1: villages of commoners in this modern society. But it's the
Speaker 1: way it went down was just pretty despicable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, there was another group that were similar
Speaker 2: to the diggers, but they were more interested in like
Speaker 2: income equality, fair wages, kind of industrialized stuff like workers' rights,
Speaker 2: but they were also interested in agrarian rights as well.
Speaker 1: The chartists they made talked about them before, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, in the Pinkerton episode, Alan Pinkerton started out as
Speaker 2: a chartist, that's right. And they tried to actually kind
Speaker 2: of get back to the land. They bought a bunch
Speaker 2: of these enclosed lands and turned them back into crop land.
Speaker 2: But I saw that they were a victim of their
Speaker 2: success because they had like seventy thousand people joining in
Speaker 2: to do this, and they just could not get enough
Speaker 2: land fast enough, so they ended up going bankrupt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, like you said, they're just the
Speaker 1: way their country looked changed so radically, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: just about the way of life. It was like that
Speaker 1: the medieval village was a was something that the people
Speaker 1: of England, like that's all they knew. So all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, it's just everything is changing so fast, and
Speaker 1: it's being foisted upon them so fast. There were you know,
Speaker 1: there were poets and there were authors like writing these
Speaker 1: books and odes about you know, the destruction of the
Speaker 1: way of life that they had always known. So it
Speaker 1: was sort of in the in the cultural ether.
Speaker 2: Yeah as well zeitgeist. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't think they said zeitgeist then, did they.
Speaker 2: Okay, so cultural ether. I didn't realize that was a
Speaker 2: term of the peasantry, but.
Speaker 1: I guess I've had ether at the time either.
Speaker 2: So Chuck, I say we take our second break and
Speaker 2: come back and talk more about this, like what actually
Speaker 2: happened from.
Speaker 1: This, let's do it and things.
Speaker 2: Okay, So we're back, and enclosure has become this orgy
Speaker 2: of land grabbing and displacement. One other thing we should
Speaker 2: have said is that Parliament kind of enforced movement to
Speaker 2: the city, so you would have your village stolen out
Speaker 2: from under you and turned into sheep grazing land or
Speaker 2: crop land or something like that, and now you were homeless.
Speaker 2: So legally you were considered a vagrant. Vagrancy was a crime.
Speaker 2: You were a criminal if you didn't have a place
Speaker 2: to live. So where you're gonna go? I need to
Speaker 2: make some money fast. I'm gonna move to the city
Speaker 2: and start working in the factory. So like just choice
Speaker 2: after choice was shut down for everybody, and the effects
Speaker 2: of this huge sweeping change in Britain just rippled across
Speaker 2: the world because one thing would feed into another thing,
Speaker 2: would feed into another thing, and then the whole thing
Speaker 2: would cycle back again. And every time it cycled back,
Speaker 2: it would just grow and grow and grow and grow.
Speaker 2: And the British Empire in the nineteenth century rose based
Speaker 2: on the agricultural revolution that fed the industrial revolution, and
Speaker 2: it just exploded. It just started to grow exponentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. I mean you can look at anytime
Speaker 1: something like this happens, you can kind of pick apart
Speaker 1: little small parts or not small changes. I guess they
Speaker 1: ended up being, you know, pretty monumental, but like just
Speaker 1: you know, did people live longer, were they healthier, did
Speaker 1: wages increase? Stuff like that? And wages for labor did rise,
Speaker 1: but it was really hard work. It was pretty intense stuff.
Speaker 1: It's hard to get a lot of data and nutrition
Speaker 1: sort of statistics for that time period, but if you
Speaker 1: look at things like you know, average heights and weights
Speaker 1: and things like that, it seems like malnutrition maybe increased
Speaker 1: because you know, people were working in these factories and
Speaker 1: it was pretty dangerous wage work and they didn't have
Speaker 1: like the best food available to them at the time.
Speaker 1: You're gonna have a lot more people that have less,
Speaker 1: so obviously they're going to turn to like the church
Speaker 1: or maybe even the government and say, hey, you kicked
Speaker 1: us out of our land. We're poor, we need help.
Speaker 1: You need to help us subside. And at the time,
Speaker 1: you know, and that's that's still, you know, a big
Speaker 1: debate all over the world like how much should should
Speaker 1: the rich help the poor? People just of regular means
Speaker 1: help the poor, And it was a thing back then.
Speaker 1: A lot, you know, a lot of people are saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: it's not the government's place to step in and support
Speaker 1: the poor. It's just not We're not going to get
Speaker 1: involved in that.
Speaker 2: No, And a big one was Thomas Malthus, who wrote
Speaker 2: the Essay on the Principle of Population. We've talked about
Speaker 2: Malthus a lot. I think he even got his own episode,
Speaker 2: and he's unfairly saddled with the idea of like no, no, no,
Speaker 2: you just let the poor die. It's just a it's
Speaker 2: just a natural check and balance to prevent over population.
Speaker 2: And he was not advocating that. He was pointing out
Speaker 2: that is a check on overpopulation, not make sure that
Speaker 2: that happens. But he was the one, he was the
Speaker 2: first one to really get across, like, our agricultural production
Speaker 2: will never be able to keep up with population, and
Speaker 2: so we have to kind of be concerned about overpopulation
Speaker 2: at some point in time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. So now you have a lot of
Speaker 1: people living in cities, far fewer people living in the
Speaker 1: rural farmland where they used to live. The population is
Speaker 1: actually rising a lot. Between seventeen fifty and eighteen fifty
Speaker 1: of one hundred years, it may have doubled, of course,
Speaker 1: this is you know, after being halved with the Black Death.
Speaker 1: It may have been you know, just sort of the
Speaker 1: way things went.
Speaker 2: Yeah, twenty more people, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But you know, there's there was a definite increase in
Speaker 1: efficiency of agriculture, Like no one can deny that. Like
Speaker 1: what they set out to do, they did pretty successfully
Speaker 1: because you had to support this larger population and free
Speaker 1: of those workers to work in the city, so that
Speaker 1: all worked well. If that was if that was your aim,
Speaker 1: if you're on that side of the argument, you could
Speaker 1: point to all those things and saying like, hey, our
Speaker 1: navy strong, we've got a great urban labor force now,
Speaker 1: and everyone's you know, everyone's happy.
Speaker 2: Right, I mean, you could say quality of life in England, Rose,
Speaker 2: I mean the middle class, the merchant class suddenly exploded
Speaker 2: in wealth. There are a lot of people who got
Speaker 2: rich off of it, off of the Industrial Revolution and
Speaker 2: all the stuff that came from it. And you can
Speaker 2: kind of step back and look at England going from
Speaker 2: the people making sure the people fed themselves to making
Speaker 2: sure that the people of England and other places like Australia,
Speaker 2: New Zealand, Colonial America were supplying England like itself with
Speaker 2: the food it needed to put out these goods that
Speaker 2: it could then sell and continue to grow in wealth.
Speaker 2: That's kind of the switch that happened. And you've mentioned
Speaker 2: the British Navy, I mean, like they the enclosed wastes
Speaker 2: directly contributed to the rise of the British Navy because
Speaker 2: those timbers were used for shipbuilding, and as the British
Speaker 2: Navy grew more and more powerful, they had more and
Speaker 2: more clout to colonize more and more places, increasingly brutally,
Speaker 2: so that they could extract raw materials to feed into
Speaker 2: the industrial machine in the cities of England.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. And this inspired the rest of the
Speaker 1: world to go out and do likewise. As everything was
Speaker 1: becoming more modern. It certainly inspired probably what happened in
Speaker 1: Russia in eighteen sixty one when Alexander two said, you
Speaker 1: know what, no more serfdom in Russia. The landlords are
Speaker 1: going to just basically what they did in England. The
Speaker 1: landlords are going to get the best farming land serfs.
Speaker 1: You can buy that land back, but you got to
Speaker 1: take out these big heavy loans from maybe even your
Speaker 1: landlord or maybe the state, and you should move to
Speaker 1: the city. We got a rising growth in industry because
Speaker 1: of the Industrial Revolution, just like in England, and we're
Speaker 1: going to exploit you just like we did in England.
Speaker 1: And that led eventually in part to the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 2: It did, and I mean, that's like a legitimate response
Speaker 2: to having your land stolen from you, uprising of peasants.
Speaker 2: It's just happened to work in Russia, where it kept
Speaker 2: getting tamped down by the government century after century. In England,
Speaker 2: and so the government and the the wealthy interested parties
Speaker 2: won out. But enclosure was so successful that Britain exported
Speaker 2: it to its colonies and basically said we're doing the
Speaker 2: same thing here so that you guys can become more
Speaker 2: and more efficient and provide more and more raw materials
Speaker 2: for export back and it just didn't happen. Just in
Speaker 2: the colonies. Scotland very famously had its highlands cleared of
Speaker 2: thousands of Highlanders, like they just came in, just like
Speaker 2: they did to the peasant villages and said get out,
Speaker 2: and if you don't, we've got sore and you don't
Speaker 2: want these swords. Actually by that time they probably had
Speaker 2: muskets and such, but that was just they just kept
Speaker 2: doing it over and over and over again, and each
Speaker 2: time it seems like it was a worse and worse
Speaker 2: thing morally speaking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, there are, believe it or not, still
Speaker 1: some commons today. Not every single one of them was
Speaker 1: done away with. There's just a handful though. In Laxton,
Speaker 1: apparently in North Nottinghamshire, they have an open field system.
Speaker 1: They have three fields that they never enclosed and they
Speaker 1: are divided into strips just like the old days and
Speaker 1: farmed by tenants of that manor. And there's also a
Speaker 1: guild called the Oxford Freemen who owned the town meadow
Speaker 1: of that city and they can, you know, they can
Speaker 1: pasture their cattle there and their horse and they can
Speaker 1: fish in the part of the Thames that runs alongside
Speaker 1: that I guess jointly owned or cared for meadow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, there are still places that survived. But
Speaker 2: enclosure itself is done in Great Britain. It's been done
Speaker 2: since the eighteen sixties. And the reason it came to
Speaker 2: an end was because those the middle class, the merchant class,
Speaker 2: who became wealthy in the cities, said hey, we want parkland,
Speaker 2: We want places to be able to go and like
Speaker 2: have picnics and stuff, and this enclosure is eating up
Speaker 2: that land, so we need to stop enclosure. And so
Speaker 2: they did. They created something called the Commons Preservation Society.
Speaker 2: They gained influence in Parliament, they gained support in parliament.
Speaker 2: There was an eighteen seventy six act called the Commons
Speaker 2: Act that said you can only enclose a piece of
Speaker 2: Great Britain if there's a public benefit of it, and
Speaker 2: that group, the Commons Preservation Society, eventually created the National Trust, which, now, chuck,
Speaker 2: here's the great twist of irony, protects the very same
Speaker 2: hedges that created enclosure in the first place, and prevent
Speaker 2: farmers who want to tear up those hedges from tearing
Speaker 2: them up because they're protected by old enclosure acts. Wow,
Speaker 2: amazing stuff. Huh yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1: I got nothing else.
Speaker 2: Well, let's say about fencing the comments or enclosure, and
Speaker 2: I think that means we've just teed up listener.
Speaker 1: Now that's right. This is from Christina. Hey, guys, I
Speaker 1: was very interested in the episode and paganism, as I'm
Speaker 1: a Christian who's always had an interest in respect for paganism.
Speaker 1: I wanted to clarify some comments you made about Easter
Speaker 1: and its roots and paganism. Yes, it is true that
Speaker 1: many things we have about Easter are based on the
Speaker 1: pagan celebration of Ostara. However, we often focus on that
Speaker 1: to the neglect and misattribution of the influences of Judaism
Speaker 1: on Easter. In English and the Germanic languages, the holiday
Speaker 1: we call Easter was taken from the name Ostara. However,
Speaker 1: in the Roman Romance languages and many other languages, the
Speaker 1: name for that holiday is based on the Jewish Passover,
Speaker 1: which is when Jesus is death and resurrection is supposed
Speaker 1: to have taken place. In Spanish it is Pascua, In
Speaker 1: Italian and Catalan it is Pascua, etc. The time of
Speaker 1: the year is also based on Jewish Passover. It's a
Speaker 1: spring holiday, so when Christianity was moving through Western Europe,
Speaker 1: it did coincide with Ostara. But that's not why Easter
Speaker 1: takes place in the spring. The bunnies and eggs and
Speaker 1: sun Sybolism are all pagan, but let's not ignore Christianity's
Speaker 1: origins out of Judaism and its influences on the day.
Speaker 2: Man, that's a great email. Who's that from?
Speaker 1: That's great? That's from Christina. She says, thanks a lot
Speaker 1: for what you do. I listen a lot to a
Speaker 1: lot of true crime, but I am happy that I
Speaker 1: still have you, guys and stuff you missed in history class.
Speaker 1: Nice our compatriots Hallian Tracy to listen to now that
Speaker 1: my baby is learning to talk and I need to
Speaker 1: listen to less murder and more family friendly content.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are pretty family friendly, aren't we.
Speaker 1: Hey, we try to be not We do our best.
Speaker 2: So thanks christ And that raised something that I realized
Speaker 2: we didn't mention when we were talking about evidence of
Speaker 2: pagan roots still around today. Our days of the week
Speaker 2: are almost all rooted in paganism, like Thursday. Thursday, that's
Speaker 2: where that came from. Saturday is Saturn'sday, like all of
Speaker 2: the days of our week come from pagan gods. Essentially,
Speaker 2: isn't that neat goats head Day? Yeah? Did you say
Speaker 2: goats head Day?
Speaker 1: Yeah, which became Monday.
Speaker 2: It's good stuff, buddy. Well, thanks again, Christina. If you
Speaker 2: want to be like Christina and send us in the email,
Speaker 2: especially a great one like that, you can send it
Speaker 2: off to stuff podcast adiheartradio dot com.
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