Reply to comment 'What is the pic on 'Council size, why 9 councillor's'' posting

Reply to comment, what is the pic on ‘Council size, why 9 councillors’ posting.

Written for the Blog by a Preston resident

Interesting question, I believe it to be taken from the ‘Enclosures Act 1776’, or similar, obviously a copy of some kind. I do not intend to go into an explanation of the ‘Enclosures Act’ because there has been a few since the 18^th centaury and the full answer would be a book, I don’t have the time, unfortunately.

Briefly the enclosures movement started in the 15^th centaury when people had skinny strips of land dotted about the place and the enclosures act is the start of peoples land being brought together in one place and farm houses starting to appear.

Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized, that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.

The original ‘Enclosure Act’ occurred in Great Britain in the 18th century. It caused all the skinny plots of land to be joined together, since a lot of wealthy men owned over 3/4 of the land the vote was won by only a couple of wealthy people instead of the many peasants against the vote. The land was joined and then people were given their share of land based on the amount of land that they owned before the act. They were also given a small parcel of land to help them but often the land was useless. The land owners had to fence their land in order to live on it. Most couldn’t afford this so they had to sell and move into urban areas. This gave 'muscle’ to start the industrial revolution.

In other words, the landed aristocracy forced all the poor labourers off  the "village commons" that now became "enclosed" as their own property, because they were the ones that actually owned the majority of the land, and the social classes were highly stratified at this time in Great Britain. This was done using new technology and advanced cropping systems that would replace many labourers. These jobless poor would end up as constituting the working class, or "proletariat" in the Industrial Revolution that would follow shortly.

There’s lots of literature on the subject and very interesting reading it is, can I suggest you get yourself a book without causing offence? You could do a lot worse.

The pic actually came about when we were fighting a development in Preston and researching the original medieval village of Preston, we managed to obtain aerial photo’s of the site, absolutely fascinating!

The pic at the top of this posting is an aerial view of the site of the development we fought, successfully I might add. The medieval village is located at the bottom right of pic, you can just make out some ridge and furrows, the X if you can see it marks an Anthrax burial site from the 1950's.

Thanks for reading and thanks for your comment, good luck with your reading if you decide to.