Making and Breaking Property: Negotiating Enclosure and Common Rights in Sixteenth-Century England

Abstract

This paper explores the making – and breaking – of property in early sixteenth-century England, examining the range of strategies available to those engaged in negotiating and resisting enclosure, common rights and land-use change. It interrogates the relationship between litigation and direct action, paying particular attention to those self-help strategies other than hedge-breaking – itself already the subject of considerable scholarly interest – by which enclosure and agricultural change could be promoted or resisted. The paper focuses on strategies such as animal and human trespasses, animal rescues and mass ploughings, highlighting the importance of occupation and trespass as ways of resisting the extension of private property rights, even whilst possession was also property’s ultimate aim. In doing so, the paper explores enclosure and land use change as an ongoing process and a contested practice through which local communities and individuals played a key role in the making of modern property relations.