First private parliamentary enclosure act

Historical Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Domains

Real Estate and Land Law

Dates

Date of occurrence 1710-02-25-1710-03-17

Places

United Kingdom (Location)

The first ever private bill to enclose common land was brought to the House of Lords on 25 February 1710 and passed on 17th March. It concerned Ropley Commons, near Farnham, in the bishopric of Winchester, Hampshire. It was protested in the House of Commons on 23rd March 1710 on behalf of the freeholders, copyholders and leaseholders, and an appeal lodged against it on 3 February 1711. The Act, however, stood. This act was the first of the many thousands of such acts which would be brought across the next two centuries, converting common land into the private holdings of wealthy landowners, a process which signalled the conversion of the countryside into private property, and the slow abolition of customary rights which had been …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

173 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "First private parliamentary enclosure act". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 January 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=7220, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

First private parliamentary enclosure act

Domains

Dates

Places

Save this article

Leave Feedback