Colin Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England: Revolutions in Architectural Taste, London, University of London College Press, 1994. 230 pp, 78 plates. 30 hardback, £12.95 paperback, ISBN 1-85728-315-5 HB and 1-85728-316-3 PB.

Abstract

The common pastures were well governed, the value of common right was well maintained.' (p. 157) Wastes provided 'fuel, food and materials' (p. 158) not of marginal value but central to the maintenance of the system itself. She points out that 'Common right could double a family income' (p. 177). Furthermore, it underpinned a much larger system of small exchanges and cash-free trading of the kind Mick Reed has described as still extant in nineteenth-century Sussex. A detailed study is presented of the enclosure of two Northamptonshire villages: West Haddon and Burton Latimer. A pattern of covert opposition and overt resistance is recovered which cannot be minimised and she establishes that resistance to enclosure was more widespread than we have previously been led to believe. 'Unlawful opposition', Neeson writes, 'either delayed and disrupted enclosure or it mitigated its terms and punished its supporters' (p. 277). She deduces from the experience of West Haddon and Burton Latimer that both land and rights were lost to landed, land-poor and landless commoners alike. Throughout Northamptonshire, she concludes from land tax returns, small holding fell as a consequence of parliamentary enclosure. Commoning families were not labourers although many of them were reduced to a dependence on wage labour as a consequence of enclosure. Their world can no longer be dismissed as a picturesque irrelevance which stood in the way of prosperous 'high farming'. Jeanette Neeson's Commoners is a tour de force and is possibly the most important study of rural England after 1700 since Keith Snell's Annals of the Labouring Poor. John Clare lamented that 'All sighed when lawless laws enclosure came'. We are now able to see, from Jeanette Neeson's work, that this was not a lament for a world already lost but for one being consciously and completely destroyed, before his eyes, throughout the decades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.