- Inclosure Act
The Inclosure Acts were a series of
United Kingdom Acts of Parliament which enclosed open fields andcommon land in the country. This meant that the rights that people once held to graze animals on these areas were denied. Note that although the modern spelling of the word is normally "enclosure", the Acts, other formal documents and some place names use the old spelling "inclosure". Both spellings are normally PronEng|ɪnˈcloʊʒɚ.Inclosure Acts for small areas had been passed sporadically since the
12th century but the vast majority of them were passed between1750 and1860 . Much larger areas were also enclosed during this time and in1801 the Inclosure (Consolidation) Act was passed to tidy up previous acts. In1845 another General Inclosure Act allowed for the appointment of Inclosure Commissioners who could enclose land without submitting a request to Parliament.Under this process there were over 5,000 individual Inclosure Acts and 21% of land in
England was enclosed, amounting to nearly 7 millionacres (28,000 km²).Marxist interpretation
The Inclosure Acts encouraged many English country-dwellers to move to
urban area s where they might typically become employed inwage labour jobs, thus becoming, in the terms ofMarxist economics, theproletariat . In Marxist interpretation, the Inclosure Acts can be seen as a process of bringing land and people into the sphere of capitalist social relations through political force; in Marxist terminology this process is an example ofprimitive accumulation of capital .Fact|date=June 2008ee also
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Common land
*Enclosure Further reading
* [http://www.ukat.org.uk/thesaurus/term.php?i=18335 Thesaurus of Acts]
* [http://www.surreycc.gov.uk/sccwebsite/sccwspages.nsf/LookupWebPagesByTITLE_RTF/Parliamentary+enclosure?opendocument Parlimentary Enclosure - Surrey County Council]
* [http://www.catalogue.nationalarchives.gov.uk/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=345&CATLN=2&Highlight=&FullDetails=True Archive details and description]
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