Common Ground (16 page)

I have all but given up looking when a careless sidestep sinks my boot through the leaf cover and into boggy, smelly soil. A tiny stream trickles downhill. Up close it pulses with the living current of deeper earth, gurgling, whispering. Tracing it back through wild garlic and the shiny spurts of bluebell leaves reveals a shallow dip that has something in its middle, a sandy grey-green shape, something large and lost in the undergrowth. An old capstone. It's been pushed aside, intentionally dislodged, and now slumps lazily in the mud, skew-whiff. My eyes move to the outline of the carved initials and a date on its top, but I know what they say even before I read them.

It's a fact that never fails to jolt my brain: the idea of private ownership of land as we know it today is only a few hundred years old.
A few hundred years.
It says something about the world we live in that even to absorb that information requires a moment of reflection. Just conceiving of it necessitates a mental dismantling of everything that modern existence is predicated upon. Look from an aero-plane window over Britain's patchwork of farms, fields and woods today and what you'll see is an almost entirely privatised place, three-quarters of which is owned by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population. Swathes of it are even propped up by the taxpayer in the form of grants and subsidies. Yet, in contrast, as Simon Fairlie – editor of
The Land
– states: ‘Most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.' Ours is a deeply entrenched culture of exclusive land possession, of privilege and poverty, begun with the Norman land grabs and legitimised by a 500-year system that spread from these shores and would go on to change the physical and psychological landscape of the world.
Enclosure
.

In the minds of medieval peasants, the idea that a single man or woman might one day have absolute and exclusive rights over an area of ground would have seemed incomprehensible. Although The Crown or a Lord of the Manor ostensibly ‘held' much of the land, it was worthless without peasants working it, producing crops and paying duty as tenants. In return, they had rights in common over ground, allowing them to sustain their families, which in time became codified, passing down from generation to generation as customary and legal rights of access. They became traditions and outlived the feudal system, their persistence down to the effectiveness of the open-field system. This was a kind of cooperative arrangement between neighbours and families that formed the bedrock of rural communities and villages. England's clay soils were heavy going and dragging a large wooden plough through them to create ridges and furrows might take as many as four pairs of oxen plodding ahead of a ploughman. Few peasants could afford to buy – or had enough land to support – more than one or two beasts, meaning ploughing was always a joint enterprise. It was ‘open-field' because hedges would have impaired the manoeuvrability required from the plough; instead, cleared land was divided into fields, furlongs and strips. It was a rigid structure that didn't allow for innovation, but out of necessity peasants synchronised with each other and the earth around them, sharing their oxen, tools and crop plans across their strips, adhering to rotation systems for wheat, rye, barley, vegetables and oats that grew flecked with the confetti of wild poppies and cornflowers. Fallow fields were set aside and used to feed livestock, ensuring good manure cover for crops the next year. Beyond the plough strips was common land, the vital shared space of meadow, wood and pasture that provided all the other essential resources peasants needed for survival: access to grazing pastures for a cow, hay meadows, wild foods, bedding and acorns for pigs, wood for fuel and withies for thatching.

It was a humble existence, one that would later get distorted by distance and stoke visions of a pastoral Eden distinctly romanticised by the muck-free pen and paintbrush. In reality, peasants were engaged in a brutal, primitive struggle with nature and destined to live hard, hungry, filthy and unforgiving existences at times. They were vulnerable to crop failure and pestilence, to illness, disease and the vagaries of climate and weather. Death was everywhere, the stalking shadow at the ploughman's heels, lurking in the nick of the blade, but these were people who belonged to the land and wouldn't have been hardened against its beauty. Wildlife abounded with no pesticides or gamekeepers to interfere: kestrels hovered over the crops, sweat-stung eyes saw flashes of skylarks, corncrakes and kites; hares, harvest mice, stoats and weasels sprung from their scythes. They would have felt the subtleties of the wind on their skin, they knew the smell of slow, thick autumns and saw enormous red-sun spring dawns and winter sunsets. It's there in the folk songs and the festivals. They knew of equinoxes and solstices and rejoiced in those heady high points in the wheel of the year. They felt a sense of belonging difficult for our removed minds to comprehend or understand. You can be sure of that.

Everything changed with enclosure. In the late medieval years, under the watch of the Tudors, the open-field began to come under attack from wealthy landowners who increasingly evicted tenants to make way for sheep ranges that could provide the wool required for a new and emerging textile industry. Initially, sheep had been seen as a sensible solution to controlling empty and untended land, for which a landowner might receive a fine, but the proliferation of flocks supplying wool to a booming trade opened up a new concept – earth as a profit-making space. Wealth could be won from soil. The rabbit was out of the hat. Pursuing considerable financial interests, the swelling landowning class received support from like-minded reformers and statutes that legitimised claims of ownership. Despite protestations from the Church and denunciations like the oft-quoted words of Thomas More in
Utopia –
‘Your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow down the very men them selfes. They consume, destroye, and devoure whole fields, howses and cities' – rural depopulation and poverty followed on a wide scale. Desperate, the rural poor hit the roads. Communities collapsed and entire villages vanished, fuelling a succession of ill-fated peasant riots and rebellions throughout the 1500s. By the middle of the seventeenth century, half of all agricultural land in England had been claimed and subdivided with catastrophic consequences. Many thousands were dispossessed and the peasantry reduced to selling labour to a rising class of tenant farmers who, requiring far fewer men to manage sheep, no longer needed their work.

If this was the wound, the deathblow fell with the parliamentary ‘Inclosure Acts', which reached a peak in the years between 1760 and 1870. Up to that point, enclosures had primarily turned land into sheep pasture, but with the clearances of Scotland for wool, and land grabs in India and the Southern US states for cotton, the advocates of enclosure changed their tune. They methodically redrew the landscape. Reforming open fields, pastures and the ‘waste' land into hedged and fenced compact units for arable production, they left only greatly reduced patches like village greens or small commons, turning yet more people off the land. Industrialised England's cities and towns swelled with factories and mills that needed a large and cheap labour force. For the millions of rootless and landless, two paths led away from the fenced-up commons. One was to endure the drudgery and humiliation of becoming a roaming agricultural labourer hired on pitiful and unsustainable wages, dispossessed of rights, slowly being starved by the land you'd been hefted to for generations. The other lay over the smoke-wreathed horizon, through the black hole of the factory gate.

Parliament was a committee of representatives largely drawn from this landowning class, rather than a democratic body engaged with people's rights and it was, unsurprisingly, complicit. As were the ranks of newly wealthy merchants, tenant farmers and neo-elite that rallied to demonise the ‘laziness' and slovenly nature of commoners disinclined to work beyond supporting themselves and their families. The word bandied about in the reams of pamphlets and reports produced at the time was ‘improvement'. It was also maintained that enclosure was essential to Britain's increasing industrial might and expansive colonial ambitions and, in many senses, it was. This was efficiency over sufficiency, agribusiness over allotmenting. Yet its opponents knew the landscape that lay over the hill – the further engorged coffers of the haves, the have-nots driven into urban slums.

Moving my hands back and forth over its weatherworn surface, I trace the details chiselled into the capstone.
JW 1778.
Faded and mute, they can offer no further explanations, no eyewitness insight to the stories here. Little is known either of John Watson, the man who purchased Bilton Hall in 1742, beyond the fact that it was he and his descendants who surgically enhanced the building through its Golden Age, remodelling and improving its ancient skeleton, adding the grandeur expected in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society: ornate staircases and stone fireplaces, new attics and wine cellars, mock-Tudor brickwork, chandeliers, panelling, façades and bay windows. The capstone tells us that it was Watson's grandson, also John Watson, who was in possession of the hall at the time the lands surrounding Bilton Park's borders went through its own Parliament-sanctioned processes of remodelling and ‘improvement'. They are his initials that my fingers run over.

Centuries had passed since Knaresborough Forest had fallen off the priority list of a monarchy more concerned with fighting for survival than the thrill of the chase. Local yeoman farmers had long been granted rights as copyholders and turned the land they cleared of trees over to the open-field and commons system, subletting these privileges to the peasant class. This had been, in turn, further divvied up into strips. Such early incursions of the forest were subject to ‘fines', but the fines resolved into regular rents and received the approval of The Crown. Foresters branched out into other industries to supplement their income – flax growing, linen milling, lead and stone quarrying. A form of poor-quality coal, lignite, was being mined in pits in the woods along the banks of the Nidd. Limestone was hewed out and burned to create the slaked lime that could be spread over the fields as fertiliser. Predominantly, though, hands worked ploughs. A map drawn up by the boundary commissioners whose job was to survey and enclose Knaresborough Forest notes the whole of Bilton as tenanted farmland.

We're told that in the grand scheme of things Harrogate got off lightly and, for some, it did. In 1770, the owner of the forest, George III via his title Duchy of Lancaster, petitioned for and was granted the right to demark and fence up the strips and commons, and to auction them off to the highest bidders. After local protests, however, a concession to the town's fledgling mineral spa industry was made. A 200-acre horseshoe of grassland in and around the vicinity of its various iron and sulphur springs was set aside, ensuring the town's hospitality trade could flourish. On paper, ‘The Stray', as it is still known, appears a victory of sorts for the commoner. Local stone quarries remained open for a period too; these were rights of access of a fashion. But the devil, as always, is in the detail. Only freeholders or copyholders had legal claim; only those at the top of the pyramids of tenancy received the compensation of land equivalent to their former plough strips. Even then rents increased and enclosure was expensive, incurring legal, surveying, hedging and fencing costs that forced many into selling regardless. Smallholders had legal rights and were likewise entitled to compensation, but the amount of land they were allocated was often so small that, without a commons, it proved useless and also had to be sold. Hardest hit, though, were the cottagers without rights of ownership, but who had survived through informal access to the commons. These people appeared on no records, had no voice to defend them and received nothing when their means of survival was taken.

From the western perimeters of his private park, John Watson must have watched as Bilton was surveyed, divided and sold. He must have seen as cottagers and smallholders were fenced off the fields and families exiled into the overcrowded cities of Leeds and Bradford to become fodder for the industrial age. Some will surely have adapted to the cycles of loom and cog, thrived even; others would have faced the familiar fate of the dispossessed across the world: identity crisis, alcoholism, poverty, death. The capstone doesn't record how Watson felt or – and here's a thought – if the sulphur spring beneath was even on his land. Perhaps fearing the boundary commissioners might claim it, and with no one to contest him, he stamped his mark. Or with visions of a lucrative future spa near his hall, maybe he was seized with entrepreneurial zeal and bought the wood in the land sales that followed. Whatever his motive, he staked a claim and, in the process, froze a moment. Here marks a new departure in our changing relationship with land. For the dispossessed, surviving the shock of subsisting in the city must have required the blanking out of that which they'd lost. Solace can be sought through moving on, through a conscious forgetting; over time land became something other, opposite, for the urban masses. It was the past. We pledged body and soul to new rhythms of production and consumption, slouched over machines, counting down the clock.

The weather turns. A wet wind cuffs me about the ears and stirs the trees. Rain runs off the leaves in its slow
tick-tack
rhythm. I walk eastwards away from the spring and back towards the edge-land, following the Nidd upstream. The journey should be a relatively short one, about a mile as the crow flies, but in the interest of keeping hidden from the row of farms and 1970s bungalows that run along the raised ground to the south-west, I cut through a mess of wire-divided fields, up banks, through hedges and gullies and fenced-off patches of wood. Some places exude such a strong sense of their history that it's impossible not to think about what went before. Every landscape is freighted with stories and their clues, like stray letters or sentences lifted from a novel. And here the story of enclosure runs on ragged and retold through the twenty-first century. Swathes of rectangular grass, flat and uninteresting, are edged with overgrown hawthorns that seethe with rabbits. Stray pairs of shaggy, somnolent horses bow their heads. Soaking-wet trailers and pre-fab cabins bulge on the verge of collapse next to piles of cut logs and the heaped black doughnuts of old tractor tyres. ‘Land for Sale' signs stick up from field corners underwritten with improbably archaic agents' names. An off-season caravan park sits closed, waiting for the Easter holidays. And all around is the orange twine of the electric fence ticking away like a metronome, repelling nothing from nothing.