Capitalist Enclosure: Stealing The Ground From Beneath Your Feet

The Peaceful Revolutionary || There’s an old anonymous verse, which survives in various forms and variations, that explains more about how property and ownership work than most economics textbooks:

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose. The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own But leaves the lords and ladies fine Who take things that are yours and mine.

Interest in this poem has been renewed recently by its appearance in Sunrise on the Reaping (2025), part of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games series, in which the character Lenore Dove sets it to music as she sings about her corrupt and greedy government.

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What the rhymes describe isn’t metaphor. It’s a fairly literal account of what happened to most of England, and in time most of the world, over the course of about a thousand years. The commons, the land that fed and housed ordinary people, that they used in common, by right, were taken. Not always through conquest in the obvious sense, but often through paperwork and parliament. Through the slow, patient application of legal force against people who had no lawyers, no votes, and no say in any of it. It is one of the largest acts of robbery in human history, yet it is rarely called theft.

At its height the commons were a system of shared land management, built on custom and mutual obligation, that fed most of the rural population of England for centuries. Villagers held rights to graze animals, gather wood, fish streams, cut peat, glean the fields after harvest, that were as real and as understood as any property right, even when they were never written down. The land wasn’t owned in the modern sense. It was used, collectively, according to rules the community had made and enforced for itself.

By the mid-1400s, around half of England’s agricultural land was still managed this way. By 1876, less than two per cent of the population owned almost all of it. That didn’t happen by accident. It was done to people. It took the better part of a thousand years, and it was so successful in part because it took place slowly enough that each generation lost only a portion of what the previous one had taken for granted, and protested when they could, and were defeated, and the fences stayed up.

1066 and onwards

You can trace the beginning back to the Norman Conquest. When William the Conqueror invaded in 1066, one of his first acts was to divide up the country and parcel it out among the nobles who’d come with him. The Domesday Book of 1086 was an inventory, an accounting of who now owned what, drawn up so the new Norman ruling class could tax and control it. The Anglo-Saxon system of land tenure, which had its own hierarchies but also its own customs of common right, was overlaid with a feudal one imported from across the Channel.

The commons survived under this new order, but only just. They survived because they had to: a manor couldn’t function if the peasants who worked it starved, and the peasants couldn’t survive without grazing rights, woodland rights, fishing rights. The lord owned the land in a legal sense, but the commoners had real, enforceable rights of use within it. The history of enclosure is the history of the peasant’s rights being slowly, deliberately erased while the lord’s entitlement being promoted to the status of an eternal natural law.

The first serious push against the commons came in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and it was driven by a simple sum. Sheep were more profitable than people. The wool trade was expanding. Cloth prices were rising. Landowners worked out that converting arable common land into enclosed sheep pasture produced far greater returns than letting peasants farm it. A field full of sheep needed almost no labour and made the lord rich. A field full of common-right holders made the lord almost nothing, while obliging him to honour their customary entitlements.

So the fences went up. Common land was absorbed into private estates. Peasant families who had worked the same strips for generations found themselves with nowhere to go. Whole villages emptied, not because anyone chose to leave, but because the land that had fed them was now grazing someone else’s livestock.

Even at the time, people knew what they were watching. In 1516, Thomas More wrote in Utopia that the sheep, formerly ‘so meek and gentle, and so small eaters,’ had become ‘so great devourers, and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves.’ Henry VII banned further enclosure of arable land in 1489. Henry VIII and Edward VI later tried again. None of the legislation worked, because the people passing the laws were mostly the same people doing the enclosing, and the people losing everything had no political power at all.

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When people did fight back, in Jack Cade’s rebellion in 1450, Evil May Day in 1517, Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, the Captain Pouch risings of 1604 to 1607, they were put down by force. The fences stayed up. The hangings were public.

The parliamentary enclosures

If the first wave of enclosure was patchy and sometimes illegal, the second wave, running roughly from 1750 to 1850, had Parliament’s full authority behind it, the full force of law behind that, and moved at a speed that gave communities no time to organise a response.

The mechanism for this theft was the Enclosure Act. A private bill, introduced by local landowners, authorising the fencing and redistribution of common land in a specific parish. Each act required a separate bill. Most passed with almost no scrutiny, because the people sitting in Parliament were, without exception, substantial property owners, and many of them were the very people standing to gain from the enclosure. The rural poor had no vote and no representation. They couldn’t challenge an act in court even if they had the money to hire lawyers, which they didn’t. Once the commissioners arrived to draw the new boundaries, the matter was settled.

Somewhere between four and five thousand Enclosure Acts were passed. They appropriated around 6.8 million acres, close to a fifth of England, from common use, and handed it to private owners. Millions of people lost access to land their families had worked for generations. The villages looked the same. The fields looked the same. The people who had lived from them no longer had any right to be there.

By 1876, a government survey found that four thousand people owned half the rural land in England and Wales. Less than one per cent of the population owned more than ninety-eight per cent of it.

This isn’t ancient history. The great-great-grandparents of people alive now lost their commons to Parliament. Half of England is, today, owned by 25,000 people. The rest of us spend the working part of our lives paying off the debt on a small patch of land that’s barely enough to fit a house on, if the bank will give us a mortgage at all, which for an increasing number of people, it won’t. This is rarely called theft either.

What was actually taken

The textbook account of enclosure, when it acknowledges enclosure at all, tends to present it as unfortunate but necessary. The price of agricultural improvement. The price of increased productivity. The price of the capital accumulation that eventually produced the industrial revolution and the modern economy.

This isn’t exactly wrong. Agricultural productivity rose, capital accumulated, and the industrial revolution followed. What this framing leaves out is who paid for all of it, what that payment looked like on the ground, and who suffered because of it.

What was taken when the commons were enclosed wasn’t just land. It was a whole system of survival, the means by which ordinary people fed themselves, housed themselves, kept warm, and got through bad years without depending on anyone else. Common grazing meant a family could keep a cow or a few sheep without owning pasture. Common woodland meant fuel without paying for it. Common fishing meant protein when the harvest failed. Common gleaning meant that even the poorest household had some grain at the end of summer. Take all of that away, and what you have is a population that cannot survive without wages. That isn’t a side effect of enclosure. That’s the point.

The creation of a class of people with nothing to sell but their labour wasn’t an accident of economic development, it was necessary for the existence of industrial capitalism. The factories needed workers desperate enough to take whatever was on offer. Enclosure produced the desperation. Marx called it primitive accumulation, Kropotkin called it ‘the plundering of the commons’. The commons was the first wealth, a wealth everyone once shared, and that everything else is built on. It was stolen.

The poet John Clare, who watched his own Northamptonshire commons disappear in the 1820s, wrote about it with the directness of someone watching a crime in progress. In ‘The Mores’, he describes the fences going up across land that had been open for centuries:

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene Nor fence of ownership crept in between … Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds Of field and meadow large as garden grounds In little parcels little minds to please With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease … Each little tyrant with his little sign Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine

A few lines later, he names what’s happened plainly. ‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave.’ He feared the working people of England were being enslaved. He was right.

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The same story, everywhere

Enclosure didn’t stop at England’s borders. It travelled with the British Empire, and with every other European colonial project, across the entire world. The logic was the same wherever it landed. Communal land systems, in Bengal or Jamaica, in Aotearoa or Nigeria, in Mexico or Australia, were declared primitive, inefficient, or simply nonexistent. The legal fiction of terra nullius, empty land, let colonial governments treat any land not organised on European private property lines as legally unoccupied, never mind the communities who’d managed it for centuries. They then handed it to settlers, to companies, or to the colonial state.

In Bengal, the Permanent Settlement of 1793 converted a complicated web of communal and conditional tenure into English-style individual freehold overnight. The result was a rentier class with no obligation to improve the land and every incentive to extract from it, and a peasant class with no security and no rights. The famines that followed weren’t natural disasters. They were the result of the introduction of the colonial and capitalist concepts of property.

In Mexico, the ejido system, communal village land rooted in pre-Columbian practice and partially protected under Spanish colonial law, was steadily picked apart by the hacienda class after independence. Emiliano Zapata’s movement in 1910 was, openly, a war to take it back. Tierra y Libertad. Land and Freedom. The 1917 constitution gave his demands real recognition, and protected ejido land as communal and inalienable. That protection lasted until 1992, when, as a condition of NAFTA, the Mexican government amended the constitution to allow ejido land to be sold off. On 1 January 1994, the day NAFTA came into force, the Zapatistas rose within Chiapas. They knew what was being done to them, and they knew exactly what to call it, because it had been done to their grandparents and their great-grandparents under different names.

In Australia, the legal fiction that the continent was uninhabited wasn’t formally overturned until 1992. Two centuries of dispossession later, one of the largest acts of enclosure in human history was carried out with judicial blessing. This too was rarely called theft.

Enclosure hasn’t stopped

It would be convenient if enclosure were a historical episode, something that happened to other people in a crueller age. It isn’t. It continues in our present day, using the same logic, the same mechanism, and often the same result, adapted for the present.

Water privatisation takes a resource communities managed in common for centuries (rivers, aquifers, irrigation systems) and turns it into a commodity. Water in England and Wales was privatised in 1989. Shareholders have since extracted billions in dividends while the pipes leaked and the rivers filled with sewage. The water itself didn’t change, the question of who it belonged to did.

Intellectual property is enclosure applied to knowledge. A folk song that was common, freely sung, freely varied, freely passed on, becomes property the moment somebody registers a copyright. Disney built its empire on Brothers Grimm folk tales it didn’t pay for, and then lobbied successfully to extend its own copyrights so that nobody else could do to Mickey Mouse what it had done to Snow White. Traditional plant knowledge developed over generations by indigenous communities becomes property the moment a pharmaceutical company patents the compound. The knowledge existed before the patent. The patent doesn’t create the knowledge. It just excludes everyone else from using it.

Digital enclosure has turned the architecture of the internet, built substantially on publicly funded research, on open standards, on the volunteer labour of millions, into the private property of a handful of corporations. Google didn’t invent search. It enclosed it. Facebook didn’t invent social connection. It enclosed it. The commons of freely shared information has been fenced off, and we’ve been handed back some of it in exchange for our attention, our data, and a constant low-grade anxiety.

Land grabbing, documented over the past two decades by GRAIN and the Oakland Institute, has seen something like sixty to eighty million hectares of land, mostly in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, bought up by foreign investors and corporations since the 2008 food price crisis. Smallholder communities have been displaced from land they have managed for generations. The mechanism isn’t an Act of Parliament any more, it’s investment contracts and bilateral trade agreements. The result is the same. Once common land becoming privately held. Communities becoming dispossessed.

None of this is called theft. It is called development, modernisation, unlocking value, public-private partnership, and asset realisation. There are a hundred euphemisms and not one of them is the right word. The right word is theft.

What enclosure does to people

Think about what it actually means to have nowhere left to go. You can’t feed yourself without earning money. You can’t earn money without an employer. You can’t refuse the employer’s terms, because refusing means your family goes hungry. There is no patch of ground you can retreat to, no woodland where you can gather fuel, no stream where you can fish. Every route to survival runs through someone else’s gate, and they get to set the toll.

This isn’t a natural condition. It was manufactured, deliberately, over several centuries, by stripping away every alternative. When somebody tells you that capitalism is the natural order of things, what they mean is that the alternatives have been destroyed thoroughly enough that you can’t see them any more.

The progression is from commoner to peasant to proletarian to precariat. The person who once had rights in common land becomes a tenant farmer dependent on a landlord. The tenant farmer’s grandchild becomes a factory worker dependent on a wage. The factory worker’s grandchild becomes a gig worker with no contract, no security, no safety net, and an app on their phone that punishes them for taking a toilet break. Each step is a further enclosure: of time, of autonomy, of the ability to say no.

The same logic keeps spreading into things that don’t even look like land. Pollution is an enclosure of the air: it takes what was common (breathable atmosphere, belonging to nobody) and uses it as a dump, at no cost to the polluter. Surveillance is an enclosure of attention and private life. Algorithmic management is an enclosure of the working day. Homelessness is the end point of all of it: a person with no claim on any ground at all, not even enough to sleep on without a property owner’s permission.

The vocabulary expands to match. Wage theft, asset stripping, price gouging, profiteering, extractivism, artificial scarcity, manufactured demand, and the invisible hand. Every one of them is a description, in different clothes, of the same basic move: taking what is collective, calling it private, and getting away with it. It is rarely called robbery.

Resistance

The commons have never been given up without a fight, and the fight has never really stopped. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Jack Cade’s rising in 1450. Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, when twenty thousand people occupied Norwich for six weeks under a man who was, by trade, a tanner. The Captain Swing risings of the 1830s, who broke threshing machines because the machines were taking what little work the enclosures had left. These were direct responses to specific acts of dispossession, by people who understood exactly what was being taken and who was taking it. They were put down, brutally, every time. But they were not forgotten, and the communities they came from did not just accept what had happened.

Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers went further than complaining. In April 1649, they occupied common land on St George’s Hill in Surrey and simply started farming it, declaring that the earth was ‘a common treasury for all’. The Army, the same New Model Army that had just executed a king in the name of the people, drove them off and burned their houses. But Winstanley’s argument outlived him by several centuries, and it has not run out of force.

There are the women of Rossendale Valley who tore down enclosure fences in the seventeenth century. The villagers of Mynydd Bach in Wales who pulled down an encloser’s buildings, over and over again, until he gave up and left in 1815. The Highland crofters who fought the Clearances with whatever they had. The free software programmers who used open licenses specifically to make their work impossible to enclose. The community land trusts that take housing permanently off the property market. The Right to Roam campaigners trespassing on Dartmoor. The squatter movements of every European city. The mutual aid networks that operated outside the market entirely through Covid, when the state could not be relied on, and people, as they always have, made arrangements with each other.

Resistance sometimes looks like an allotment, a credit union, or a housing co-operative, or a community energy scheme, or a tool library, or a free shop, or a squat. The thread that runs through every one of them is the same refusal: this is ours, not yours to sell.

What the commons prove

The same logic has been running through Anglo-American politics for nearly half a century. Thatcher’s privatisation programme, continued by every government since, has sold off 5 million acres of publicly held land and assets: the Forestry Commission estates, common land held in trust, council housing, the utilities, British Rail. Reagan proposed the sale of 35 million acres of federal public land before an unlikely coalition of ranchers, environmentalists, and congressional opposition shut it down.

What Reagan failed to steal, Trump is now getting away with taking: in September 2025, the Bureau of Land Management rescinded its Public Lands Rule, which had treated conservation as a legitimate use of the 245 million acres under its management. Ninety-two per cent of public comments on the rule had been in favour of keeping it. It was rescinded anyway. The same year, the BLM opened 13.1 million additional acres to coal leasing, offered 80 million acres of offshore waters for drilling, and was mandated by Congress to hold quarterly oil and gas lease sales through 2040. The language of efficiency covered the transfer of public wealth into private hands, as it always has.

The argument for all of this is that private ownership improves things and collective ownership wastes them. The available evidence does not support it. In the UK, the Royal Mail, sold off in 2013 at a price that undervalued it by around a billion pounds, is now foreign-owned, delivers a worse service, and was guilty of wrongly prosecuting hundreds of subpostmasters. Private finance contracts, sold as a way to build hospitals and schools without public borrowing, have left the National Health Service and local councils paying 70% more than direct public financing would have. More than thirty private energy suppliers have collapsed since 2021, with the costs picked up by the taxpayer, while three million people live in fuel poverty. The argument only holds if ‘improvement’ means profit for the owner, rather than the thing functioning for the people who depend on it.

The commons, where they still exist, function well. The Maine lobster fishery, governed by informal community rules, hasn’t been fished to collapse. The open-source ecosystem, built on shared work and free distribution, runs most of the internet. Elinor Ostrom spent decades studying commons that had been functioning without collapse for centuries, including irrigation systems in the Philippines, alpine pastures in Switzerland, fisheries in Turkey. She found again and again that the reason they worked was not luck, it was that the communities running them had the autonomy to make their own rules and the standing to enforce them. The evidence that people can manage shared resources without owners is, at this point, overwhelming. It just happens to be inconvenient for the people with the most to gain from the other story.

What enclosure stole was not just land. It was the living evidence that another way of organising things was not only possible but had existed, sustainably, for most of human history. Every commons that still functions is evidence that it perseveres. Every new commons created, every housing trust, every open licence, every cooperative, every act of collective management, every refusal to put a fence around something, is more evidence that it can and does work still. They keep enclosing. We keep commoning. The geese, in time, will want their common back, and will take it forcefully if necessary.

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Bibliography

Peter Kropotkin — The Conquest of Bread (1892)

Leah Gordon, Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards — Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance (2025)

Ian Angus — The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism (2023)

Nick Hayes — The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us (2020)

Guy Shrubsole — Who Owns England? How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back (2019)

Brett Christophers — The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (2018)

Peter Linebaugh — Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance (2014)

Andro Linklater — Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (2013)

Andy Wightman — The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got It (2010)

J.M. Neeson — Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (1993)

Marion Shoard — This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside (1987)

Christopher Hill — The World Turned Upside Down (1972)

J.L. and Barbara Hammond — The Village Labourer, 1760–1832 (1911)

Gilbert Slater — The English peasantry and the enclosure of common fields (1907)

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