Agricultural Sustainability and Open-Field Farming in England 251contemporary contrary pressures to raise arable output during the wartime con-
flict. Enclosures on the heavy clays of the midland counties continued to feed the
desire for more animal products, perhaps not to the same degree as prevailed in
earlier decades, but nonetheless the trend was not reversed. Instead, during the war
the grain crises for a country now under siege were relieved by enclosure of a dif-
ferent sort. There was the enclosure of the lighter soils, of the sort that occurred on
the East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds, which could benefit in a different way
from farming in severalty – not for conversion to pasture but for intensification of
the arable (Turner, 1984, pp16–23). There was also a reclamation of otherwise ill-
used land, the commons and upland sheep walks, moors and mosses, all com-
monly called at the time ‘wasteland’. There may not have been a plough-up
campaign to rival the ones witnessed in 1916–1918 or 1939–1944, but there was
certainly a good deal of Parliamentary rhetoric along such lines. In 1803 Sir John
Sinclair, a Scottish MP and President of the Board of Agriculture, called for an
attack on the commons and wastes, and not just the highland ones. ‘Let us not be
satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us sub-
due Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath, let us compel Epping
Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement’ (Turner, 1984, p23). This was inter-
vention by default, but clearly the message suggested that the ecological balance
might need to be compromised for the wider equitable crisis, not in this case of the
community, but of government and the nation state itself. Sir John and the cham-
pions of enclosure could not be sure of the long-term impact of enclosing land that
was otherwise used for traditional moorland or commons economy. It may not
have compared with the ecological damage imparted by the wartime plough-up of
sheep walks in the 20th century, but whether they recognized it or not, contempor-
aries threatened ecological sustainability by their short-term actions. They can
have had few ideas as to the potential long-term damage they were in danger of
imposing by enclosing commons and waste and then ploughing them for grain,
but in the French wars, as in the 20th-century world wars, sustainability was com-
promised for reasons of national security.
Contemporary estimates suggest that the wheat acreage could have grown
from something less than 2 million acres (0.8 million hectares) in the 1790s, to
about 2.4 million acres (0.97 million ha) in 1801, and to 3.2 million acres (1.3
million ha) in 1808 (Turner, 1981, pp299–301). We cannot rely too heavily on
these figures as they were based on little more than informed guesses, but they
point towards a rapid complement to the trend towards grass, which had not been
stemmed by the growth of population and grain prices from the 1760s. Further-
more, with spiralling prices as an incentive the old principles of equity were easily
abandoned. Almost invariably enclosure began by extinguishing common rights, a
gesture which symbolized the move away from the communal and towards the
individual. The local communal administration with its policy of upholding com-
mon rights, by-laws, stints and other restrictions was swept away on this tide of
individuality. Once lines of engagement had been drawn to divide the property
and adjudicate on property rights, it meant the end of the communal care. At