enclosure of the commons

between 1760 and 1870, about 7 million acres (about one sixth the area of England) were changed, by some 4,000 acts of parliament, from common land to enclosed land.

– What the battle for Freeman's Wood says about the future of our common land |…

Commons.

In England, over the course of a few centuries, lands that were held and cared for by communities in common were expropriated, fenced in and enclosed as private property to be owned by a small elite. This process of transforming shared interdependent ecologies into separate, scarce and privately owned ‘things’ was encoded into property law and violently exported across the world in a continuous and unceasing process of colonisation.

– Seeding the Wild