विस्तारः (द्रष्टुं नोद्यम्)
Common land is owned collectively by a number of persons or by one person with others holding certain traditional rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, collect firewood, or cut turf for fuel. A person who has a right in or over common land jointly with others is called a commoner.
Most of the medieval common land of England was lost due to enclosure. In English social and economic history, enclosure was the process that ended traditional rights on common land formerly held in the open field system. Once enclosed, these land uses were restricted to the owner, and the land ceased to be for the use of commoners.
… Following enclosure, crop yields and livestock output increased while at the same time productivity increased enough to create a surplus of labor. The increased labor supply is considered one of the factors facilitating the Industrial Revolution.
When the poet John Clare was admitted into an insane asylum in 1837, it was commonly understood that the cause could partly be put down to the effects of the Enclosures Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries. Introduced by Parliament in order to increase productivity but also to limit the number of commoners who had access to land, the Acts radically changed the psychological and as well as physical landscape of Britain.
Land that was previously accessible to commoners was closed off, leaving a drastically reduced set of options available for people to graze their animals, fish and hunt, cultivate the land and escape their squalid living conditions. Perhaps most damaging of all, the Acts resulted in psychological scarring on a huge scale, constraining the human spirit and shutting down access to other worlds.
Before the Acts came in to force, John Clare could often be found drinking and singing with local gypsies under a tree near his home in Helpston, East Anglia. Escaping the limited set of expectations set by his peers (mainly wealthy poets in London), his family and in all likelihood himself, the tree and its surroundings represented a space where he was free to express himself in any way he wished. He refers to this tree in his poems as the ‘Langley Bush’.