• DOI:10.1086/242327
• Corpus ID: 144167728

English Parliamentary Enclosure

@article{Blum1981EnglishPE,
  title={English Parliamentary Enclosure},
  author={Jerome Blum},
  journal={The Journal of Modern History},
  year={1981},
  volume={53},
  pages={477 - 504}
}

• J. Blum
• Published 1 September 1981
• History
• The Journal of Modern History

The debate about what really happened during the so-called era of parliamentary enclosure, from about 1760 to 1840, has been a constant of English agricultural history. It is a subject that refuses to die.l The primary explanation both for the continued historiographical discussion and for the differences of opinion lies in the scantiness of quantitative data for that era. The statistical desert makes it impossible to make incontestable quantitative statements about parliamentary enclosures.2 The same statistical sparseness, however does allow, indeed encourages sweeping generalizations based on very limited datawhat has been called the technique of truth by inferred quantity. This involves the frequent resort to such unquantifiable terms as i'generally,? "usuallyS iimost,8' or if the author is cautious, 'iprobably." The historiography of enclosure divides into two distinct periods. In the last decades of the nineteenth and the first years of the present century public concern about the future of agriculture and about the condition of the small farmer and the agricultural aborer directed scholarly attention to the developments that had led to the existing unsatisfactory situation.3 Works of high quality appeared, among them studies by Slater, Curtler, Gonner, Ernle, Johnson, Hasbach Gray, and Levy4 but one book made an especially longlasting impression upon the minds of the public and the scholarly world alike. The book, of course, was The Village Labourer 1760-1832 by J. L. and