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Enclosure (also inclosure) is the process of conversion of common land to private ownership. Historically, enclosure is primarily associated with the privatization of land in England from the 12th to 19th centuries.There were two main help processes of enclosure in England. One was the division of large open fields into privately controlled plots of land, usually hedged and known at the time as "severals". This land was already owned, but under a concept of ownership that gave the owners rights to the crops, but also meant that other people might have rights to partial use of that land. For example, villagers might have the right to graze their animals on the stubble in the open fields after the harvest was taken, or in a hay meadow after the haying. This land was private, but subject to certain public rights, usually known as "common rights". Before enclosure, a farmer might own or rent several strips in an open field. Medieval manors usually had two to three large open fields, so that crops could be rotated. In the process of enclosure, the large fields were divided and communal access restricted. Most open-field manors in England were enclosed in this manner, with the notable exception of Laxton, Nottinghamshire.The second process of enclosure was the division and privatization of common fens and marshes, moors and other "wastes" (in the original sense of "uninhabited places"). These enclosures turned common land into owned land, whereas field enclosures only segregated land that was already owned.The history of enclosure in England is different from region to region. Not all areas of England had open-field farming in the medieval period. Parts of south-east England, notably parts of Essex and Kent retained a pre-Roman system of farming in small enclosed fields. In much of west and north-west England, fields were similarly either never open, or early enclosed. The primary area of open field management was in the lowland areas of England in a broad swath from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire diagonally across England to the south, taking in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, large areas of the Midlands, and most of south central England. These areas were most affected by the first type of enclosure, particularly in the more densely settled areas where grazing was scarce and farmers relied on open field grazing after the harvest and on the fallow to support their animals.The second form of enclosure affected those areas, such as the north, the far southwest and unique regions such as the East Anglian Fens, where grazing had been plentiful on otherwise marginal lands, such as marshes and moors. Access to these common resources was an essential part of the economic life in these strongly pastoral regions. In the Fens, large riots broke out in the seventeenth century, when attempts to drain the peat and silt marshes were combined with proposals to partially enclose them.From as early as the 12th century, some open fields in Britain were being enclosed into individually owned fields. In Great Britain, the process sped up during the 15th and 16th centuries as sheep farming grew more profitable. In the 16th and early 17th centuries, the practice of enclosure was denounced by the Church and the government, particularly depopulating enclosure, and legislation was drawn up against it. But elite opinion began to turn towards support for enclosure, and rate of enclosure increased in the seventeenth century. This led to a series of government acts addressing individual regions, which were given a common framework in the Inclosure Consolidation Act of 1801.
