248 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
to intervene, but also the more often their powers were questioned and sometimes
ignored. In consequence the local court system collapsed or was forced to accede
to local pressures, often because farmers were searching for ways to respond to
everyday market forces. The courts were simply not equipped to counter the
demand for economic individuality, which could often be achieved only through
the formal and legal procedure of enclosure. Barnes has shown how the erosion of
power exercised by local courts unfolded in the Nottinghamshire village of Orston
(Barnes, 1997).
The Final Breakdown
We have stressed the capacity of open-field communities to react to pressures,
whether of an ecological, economic or equitable nature, by adjusting farming and
yet retaining sustainability. Yet in the longer term the open-field system collapsed.
As a system it was, in modern terminology, unsustainable. It was possible to adjust
the ecological balance, to lay down areas of arable to grass, to enclose areas of
remote arable for permanent pasture, or to alter the stints on the commons, but
the degree to which the system was completely flexible and therefore inviolable is
open to question. The local ecology may have been firmly established but the sys-
tem of managing it could not resist external economic considerations, particularly
in the form of agricultural commercialization in the face of changing demand.
Ultimately something more fundamental was needed, and this was to be enclosure
and the parcellation of land into individual properties. At the same time it meant
the extinction of common rights. At Wendover in Buckinghamshire in 1777 an act
was secured to exchange land in the open fields to create a degree of consolidation
of otherwise intermixed land ownership. This was not a full enclosure but rather a
consolidation, but it did require the break-up of boundaries and access points
between ownership strips and therefore the loss of scattered sheep pastures, since
those boundary and access lands were usually grassed over. One of the local courts
agreed to let clover and turnips be sown in place of the lost pasture. This arrange-
ment proceeded smoothly for 12 years until one of the farmers turned a flock of
sheep onto the clover in May before the agreed time for depasturing. The crop was
lost, equity was challenged, and the parishioners proceeded to a formal enclosure
through a parliamentary act (James and Malcolm, 1794, p29). This and countless
examples like it, and also the variations of it that we have intimated, existed in the
17th and 18th centuries and are real-life examples of Hardin’s theoretical ‘tragedy
of the commons’ in which individual and collective utility are sometimes at odds
with each other (Hardin, 1968, p1240).
In its purest form the open-field system was non-specialized and non-intensive.
It was developed in a context of relative community self-sufficiency (which under-
pinned ecological, economic and equitable considerations). In saying this we rec-
ognize that the village was never entirely self-sufficient because taxes and rents left