ENCLOSURE

Parliamentary enclosure delivered a scale of shock to the landscape.

Enclosure redistributed into designated units, consolidating small landholdings into larger farms.

This included the conversion of commons, wasteland and open fields to formally enclosed units of land, the conversion of some arable land to pasture and the partition of large areas of communally farmed land into small fields farmed by individuals.

Commons were places of the poor. Inevitably they were often considered by those in authority as synonymous with people on the margins of mainstream society- known by various names in antiquity. Many of the transient, seasonal or semi-permanent inhabitants of English commons were firmly described in pejorative terms by modern parlance - they are squatters , peddlars, hawkers, tinkers, runaways, Scots, Irish, Egyptians (Gypsies), itinerants, and ultimately, the catch-all term, vagrants.

Commons were increasingly viewed as economically inefficient and hotbeds of lawlessness and immorality, ‘edgy’ places on the edges of parishes, where clandestine or illegal activities took place. In Bampton the commons were used for a myriad of other purposes, including residential and recreational.