The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [67]
Indeed it is, but the fact that it was definitively recorded in 1862 is due solely to the fact that this was part of the documentation of an enclosure order, in this case for the ‘remaining wastes’ of Framfield Manor. Proof that we should be allowed to walk the path today is therefore based on what historian and writer W. G. Hoskins called ‘the legalised theft’ of the enclosures.
Although the process dates back to medieval times, the ongoing enclosure of huge tracts of British land accelerated dramatically through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the venerable environmentalist Marion Shoard, in her classic book This Land Is Our Land, there were in England during those two centuries 5,400 individual enclosures under 4,200 private Acts and various general Enclosure Acts, which resulted in the privatisation of more than seven million acres of land. This is, as she puts it, ‘more than the total area of the following ten contemporary English counties: Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk’.
For the finest, most righteous howl of anger at this land grab that changed our relationship with the land for ever, it is best to spend some time in the company of John Clare (1793–1864). The greatest nature poet England has ever produced, his prodigious talent combined with the era of Enclosure Acts, leaving us with thousands of perfectly crafted observations from the frontline of breakneck rural change.
To Clare, the enclosures brought:
Fence meeting fence in owner’s little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden-grounds.
In little parcels little minds to please,
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease.
The right time, the right talent, but also very much the right place. John Clare was born and raised in the village of Helpston, one of thirty or so parishes that make up the Soke of Peterborough, a curious cul-de-sac of history. Historically, the Soke was a semi-detached enclave at the northern end of Northamptonshire, so that Clare was known from the very beginning of his poetic career as the ‘Northamptonshire Peasant Poet’, a label that quickly became yet another stifling enclosure to him. When the creation of the first county councils was being debated in Parliament in 1888, the Marquis of Exeter, lord of the manor of one of the Soke’s great houses, Burghley, bored his fellow lords rigid with lengthy demands that his little fiefdom be granted its own county status. It is said that members of the House of Lords nodded this odd arrangement through just to shut Exeter up. This lasted until 1965, when the Soke of Peterborough was amalgamated with Huntingdonshire to the immediate south. Just nine years later, Ted Heath’s great local authority shake-up resulted in the absorption of the entire authority into neighbouring Cambridgeshire, and there it remains today. Nominally, at least: people there still identify far more readily with Northamptonshire, if anywhere.
To have stayed stock still, yet see four different counties drift by within a century fits this quite beguilingly odd part of eastern England. It feels apart and beyond, yet deeply rooted into its fertile soil, while straddling the border where the limestone belt dissolves into the ethereal weirdness of the Fens. Despite being foursquare Middle England, it is an area on the cusp, somewhere in which it is monumentally easy to get lost and disoriented, and entirely the right place to have produced rural England’s most heartfelt, heartbreaking battle-cry.
Most of his early poems, those that made him a near overnight sensation in Georgian literary society, were passionate evocations of his native landscape, in its diverse moods and detail. Like many young boys before and since, Clare had combed his own back yard with reckless glee, in the company of friends and alone, always watching, always noticing. His poetic account