In the post below, on the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare, I spoke of the traumatic effect on the inhabitants of rural England of the accelerated privatisation of the Common Land of the country. John Clare himself never got over this, and some of his most moving poems were written in response. This process of Enclosure gathered pace in the eighteenth century, and later, in the Victorian Age, the novelist Thomas Hardy would depict and lament the situation of the rapid disintegration of rural communities and their ancient customs, which came about when country folk were thrown off the land. In Hardy's novels, it is common to see people walking the country roads in search of seasonal employment and habitation. Yet this process began much earlier...
Here is an extract from The Servile State, written in 1912 by the poet, historian and man of letters Hilaire Belloc. Most historians I think would agree with his account of Henry VIII's selling off of Church land at the time of the Reformation. It is impossible for us to comprehend the profound effects this would have had on hundreds of thousands of people's lives. The aftershocks were still being felt a few decades later in Shakespeare's time. We must not forget that our poets, novelists and playwrights have always been working within difficult, if not well-nigh impossible economic conditions for the vast majority of the people.
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