The Fencing Of The Commons

Summary

Podcast Title: Stuff You Should Know
Host/Author: iHeartPodcasts
Episode: The Fencing Of The Commons
Release Date: June 17, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "The Fencing Of The Commons," hosts Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant delve into the historical phenomenon of enclosure in England, exploring its origins, implications, and lasting impacts on society and the world. Building upon their previous discussion on the Tragedy of the Commons, they unravel how fencing the commons transformed English society and fueled the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions.

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Historical Origins of the Commons

William the Conqueror and Land Division

The discussion begins with William the Conqueror in 1066, who, after conquering England, initiated the division of land among the wealthy nobles. This marked the beginning of the medieval era, where land was segmented into manors, peasant villages, farmland, and the commons.

Josh Clark [03:04]: "These were collectively one single farmer making these decisions on when to harvest, when to plow, when to do all that stuff."

Medieval Commons and Usufructory Rights

The commons were areas where commoners had usufructory rights—the legal right to use and benefit from the land without owning it. This system allowed shared usage, fostering a cooperative approach to farming and resource management.

Chuck Bryant [03:39]: "Because that was a common area. And that's what the commons are in this case too."

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Statute of Merton and the Black Death

Statute of Merton

Around 1350, the Statute of Merton was enacted, allowing lords to enclose parts of their land legally, provided sufficient commons remained for commoners. Initially, this statute had minimal impact.

Impact of the Black Death

However, the Black Death in the mid-14th century drastically altered England's trajectory. With half the population decimated, the labor shortage empowered peasants to demand better wages and conditions, prompting a shift from farming to more profitable ventures like sheep grazing for the wool trade.

Chuck Bryant [12:18]: "Because had the Black Death not happened, obviously a lot of people would have still been alive."

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The Enclosure Movement

First Wave of Enclosure

Post-Black Death, the profitability of wool led to the first wave of enclosures in the 14th and 15th centuries. Landowners converted common land into private property for sheep grazing, often forcibly displacing peasants.

Chuck Bryant [13:27]: "Saying, like, oh, yeah, I want to enclose this. I'm going to enclose this and turn it into grazing land for sheep."

Resistance and Legislation

Enclosures were enforced through literally fencing the land, using hedges or barriers to contain livestock. Peasants resisted these changes violently, with notable uprisings like the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and groups like the Diggers during the English Civil War challenging the loss of communal lands.

Josh Clark [16:09]: "I know they really took the brunt of it."

Second Wave of Enclosure

A second, more intense wave of enclosure occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries, driven by the needs of the Industrial Revolution. The transformation aimed to increase agricultural efficiency to support a growing urban workforce.

Josh Clark [20:21]: "Because that was your aim, if you're on that side of the argument, you could point to all those things and saying, like, hey, our navy's strong."

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Societal and Economic Impacts

Agricultural Efficiency and Industrialization

Enclosure facilitated the shift from small-scale farming to large, consolidated agricultural estates. This not only boosted agricultural productivity but also freed up labor for the burgeoning factories in urban centers, accelerating the Industrial Revolution.

Josh Clark [40:19]: "Our agricultural production will never be able to keep up with population."

Urbanization and Social Change

The displacement of peasants led to significant urban migration, swelling the populations of cities like London. While this supported industrial growth, it also resulted in poor living conditions, malnutrition, and labor exploitation for many workers.

Chuck Bryant [39:40]: "It's a bad deal. But because there was so much money to be made."

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Global Repercussions and Exporting Enclosure

Colonial Expansion

Britain exported the enclosure model to its colonies, imposing similar land grabs and displacements elsewhere. This not only disrupted local communities but also fueled the extraction of raw materials, further strengthening the British Empire.

Chuck Bryant [44:15]: "There are still some comments today, not every single One of them was done away with."

Influence on Other Nations

Enclosure influenced land reforms in other countries, such as Russia's abolition of serfdom in 1861, setting the stage for future revolutions by highlighting the tensions between landowners and the working class.

Josh Clark [43:11]: "They were being foisted upon them so fast."

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End of the Enclosure Era

Commons Preservation Society and Legal Reforms

By the late 19th century, opposition to enclosure led to the formation of the Commons Preservation Society. Legislative changes, including the Commons Act of 1876, restricted the ability to enclose land solely for private gain unless a public benefit was demonstrated.

Chuck Bryant [25:57]: "They passed about 4,000 of these between 1750 and 1860."

Formation of the National Trust

The efforts culminated in the establishment of the National Trust, which paradoxically protected many of the very hedges and lands that had facilitated enclosure, ensuring their preservation for public enjoyment and historical significance.

Josh Clark [46:11]: "Protects the very same hedges that created enclosure in the first place."

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Conclusion

"The Fencing Of The Commons" offers a comprehensive exploration of the enclosure movement, highlighting its role in shaping modern Britain and its global implications. Josh and Chuck effectively illustrate how economic motivations, legislative actions, and social resistance intertwined to transform communal land use, drive industrialization, and alter societal structures—effects that resonate to this day.

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Notable Quotes

• Josh Clark [03:04]: "These were collectively one single farmer making these decisions on when to harvest, when to plow, when to do all that stuff."

• Chuck Bryant [13:27]: "Saying, like, oh, yeah, I want to enclose this. I'm going to enclose this and turn it into grazing land for sheep."

• Josh Clark [16:09]: "I know they really took the brunt of it."

• Josh Clark [40:19]: "Our agricultural production will never be able to keep up with population."

• Josh Clark [46:11]: "Protects the very same hedges that created enclosure in the first place."

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Key Takeaways

• Enclosure was a pivotal movement that transitioned shared communal lands in England to private ownership, reshaping the agricultural landscape.

• The Black Death significantly influenced enclosure by creating a labor shortage that empowered peasants but favored profitable ventures like sheep farming.

• Resistance to enclosure, though ultimately unsuccessful, highlighted the social tensions and laid the groundwork for future labor movements.

• The Industrial Revolution was both a cause and effect of enclosure, as increased agricultural efficiency necessitated a labor force for burgeoning industries.

• Legislative reforms and organizations like the Commons Preservation Society eventually curtailed enclosure, leading to the preservation of communal lands for public use.

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Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

FDIC host Nora McInerney returns for season three of the Head Start, Embracing the Journey, a podcast from Ruby Studio and AbbVie. Each episode, Nora shares intimate conversations with real people living with chronic migraine as they try to find the doctor that is right for them, navigate their treatment journey, and be present in the moment in spite of it all. Join in the conversation for season three and create more space for empathy and understanding for this invisible chronic disease. Listen to the Head Start Embracing the journey on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too, and we're just trucking along, doing our thing. It's called Stuff youf Should Know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, is this the episode on the great 70s movie Convoy?

[Josh Clark]

No, this is the episode on the Coming down the pike in the Future movie, Fencing the Comets.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I thought it was Fencing the Convoy.

[Josh Clark]

No.

[Chuck Bryant]

A lot of mashups happening.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we should probably. Let's stop joking around. We've had a lot of fun here, but let's get serious. We're talking about fencing the commons. And for anybody who heard our episode on the Tragedy of the commons, they're fairly related. They're talking about the same thing. The commons are both the same thing, but there's radically different stuff going on here. Just go listen to our Tragedy of the Commons episode. I won't give a rundown of it, but fencing the commons, some people point to is this process of separating and extracting land from people to whom it had formerly belonged to everyday people, literally commoners.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Or maybe not belong, but at least, you know, made use of to survive.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, well, it depends on who you ask.

[Chuck Bryant]

Good point.

[Josh Clark]

It is possible, say some historians, that this is where wealth inequality came from, that this is where wage labor came from, that this is where a lot of the really not great features of the modern world were rooted. And when you dig into it, you're like, wow, this is a decision by a really Self interested group of powerful people to pull off a really big land grab in jolly old England.

[Chuck Bryant]

Boy, I love that self edit there.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks. That's between you, me, Jerry and the lamp post.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Shall we get on with it then?

[Josh Clark]

Yes. I feel like that was a good setup, if I do say so myself.

[Chuck Bryant]

I agree. Just like the old days. Not that your setups now are no.

[Josh Clark]

Good, but in the old days it would have been like. Chuck, have you ever eaten grass off of a commons?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I think in that last commons episode actually mentioned that the commons was the area of our high school in just the big middle open area inside where everyone would hang out. Because that was a common area. And that's what the commons are in this case too. And Libya did a big bang up job with this one, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, she did knock. Knocked it out of the park as we say.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, out of the commons. And we're going to start, as Livia suggests, with William the Conqueror, because that makes sense in this case, the Normans, when they conquered England in 1066, they said, all right, here's what we're going to do. All the wealthy noble people of our land are going to get all the land. And so let's just divide it all up. They're gonna live there on manors. And if you have a manor house, you are the lord of that manor. You have allegiance to the king, obviously. But on that land of yours, besides your manor house, there's also gonna be a peasant village. There's gonna be some great farmland that they're gonna work for you so they can give you lots of food. And then there's also the commons, which all of the peasant people or commoners can, can share. They can divide it up and, and share it and live off that stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And this land was not the commoner's land. This was not peasants land. This is the medieval era. I guess it kicked off the medieval era. And just to be clear, this was. This was that lord's land, like you were saying. But the commoners had what are called usufructory rights, which is basically like they don't own the land, but they have like actual legal right to use and to work that land and to take the products of their work from that land to sustain themselves. So this is the arrangement like the. And it worked pretty well for several centuries, it turns out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it did. You know, they divided that land into basically straight strips. And we'll get into that in a second for each household. And there was also the Waste, which will come into play. It sounds like a terrible word to name, basically, the forest, but, you know, it's where they couldn't farm. But it was, you know, it's where the rivers were, that's where the trees were. So that's where they hunted and fished and gathered peat and wood and stuff like that. So it's still a very valuable area as far as use goes. But they called it waste.

[Josh Clark]

It was just not a good term.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, agreed.

[Josh Clark]

But so with the farmland themselves, like you said, they cut them up into strips and just imagine like a series of fields. One field is just grass. We'll call that like the meadow. It's where all the sheep and the cows are grazing. Now there's another field and that's where a bunch of cropland is growing. There's another field, there's more cropland. And if you look very closely, those. The cropland is divided up into very long, thin strips. And each of those strips belongs to a different person who farms that common land in both fields. And that's how things were divided up. And you didn't have two strips next to each other because they didn't want anybody to get, like all the good dirt.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And then you would have strips in both fields because there were different things growing in different fields. And the whole thing rotated every few years. And then a different field would become the new meadow because the sheep and the cows would poop on it and fertilize it for next time around when it became cropland again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So it was. It was just basic crop rotation. It made a lot of sense. They would let it rewild. They, you know, they were straight because they had these very tough to use plows that did not turn very well. So they just made these long, straight strips. They would take care and share the oxen that it took to pull these plows for everyone.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that was a big one.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it was, you know, it was sort of like a. It wasn't like communism or anything or socialism. It was just like how it was. It was like, hey, we're all going to care for this land. We're going to rotate the crops so the land stays good for all of us. And we're going to all help take care of the ox and we'll help each other out. And we're not going to put up fences because the animals have to graze around. And we all just have to agree on how to do this. And they basically did.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's the big one, because you are sharing strips with your neighbors in a single field, everybody has to do the same farming all at the same time. It's almost like the group of commoners working those fields were collectively one single farmer making these decisions on when to harvest, when to plow, when to do all that stuff. And like I said, it worked pretty well. It's important because these people are the losers in this situation, and we usually root for the underdog. So we have to be careful not to over idealize life in a medieval English peasant village. Like, it was tough. Like, if the. If your crops failed and it turned out that your. Your neighbors thought you. You worship Sanunos, they might burn you at the stake like it was. It was not necessarily the easiest life, but it seems to be a life that was very satisfactory to the peasants because when it came time for them to be forced to give it up, they did not want to give it up. They wanted to keep living like that because the alternative that they were given was not preferable to peasant village life.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's like, hey, go move to the city and work in a textile mill.

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

So they didn't necessarily also divide this up evenly. It was, you know, it was divided up according to, like, a lot of, like, inherited stakes that had been around for a long, long time. In the families, there were people that did not get any land at all and basically were just the hired farmhands, even within the peasant village.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they did get resources. They could generally hunt and fish and things like that in the waste after the harvest. If they were like, you know, crops that were left over or not completely utilized, they a lot of times could. Had access to those. So, you know, they were. They were getting along okay. You know, when you look at the alternative, which is having no land at all to farm, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And although there was inequality, you could still work your way up. There were people who had more land than they necessarily needed. So if you were landless, you could sublet that land, work that land and start giving yourself a foothold, maybe eventually buy that strip or those strips of field for yourself. So it seems like, yes, there were some people who were wealthier than others, but the difference in income equality and social equality is much closer than it would become in the next few centuries.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And they also, you know, thought ahead, like, hey, you. Within this system, you can't just get so rich and still be here. So they had, like, an income cap, basically. So if you went above that, they're like, sorry, you're. You're not a Commoner anymore. You can't farm this land. And they did this in a pretty democratic way. They had a local council that they elected that, you know, every year they would allocate these strips for different households and stuff like that. They would set fees for, like, you know, grazing and pasturing and stuff like that and get their agricultural calendar in order. And yeah, that's just how it went for a long time. And like you said, for a couple hundred years, it wasn't. It worked out pretty well.

[Josh Clark]

It did. So apparently around 12:35. So people have been farming like this for a couple hundred years. By then there was a statute passed. And I'm not. I don't know the ins and outs of it, but it was called the Statute of Merton.

[Chuck Bryant]

I wonder if the statute was named for the famously long necked defensive back for the San Francisco 49ers, Merton Hanks.

[Josh Clark]

Obviously it was. But regardless of who it was named after, the Statute of Merton said that if you were the lord of a manor and you want to like, close off your whole, well, I guess, manor, if you want to close off some of it, you can do that legally from now on, but you have to make sure that there's plenty of common land left for the peasants to work and live on. And I guess whoever that was passed for was like, yes, and everybody else didn't pay much attention to it for about 100 or so years. And then something happened in England and Europe in general that really altered the trajectory of history, and that was the Black Death, when as much as half. Half of the people in England died off from this one plague in just a couple years.

[Chuck Bryant]

So this, it's interesting to see how things like this in history can just change the course of history.

[Josh Clark]

Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Because had the Black Death not happened, obviously a lot of people would have still been alive. But aside from that, this may have never gone down that way because it was just a radical shift in the way the country looked and how they had to operate moving forward. Because obviously when half the people go away and leave the planet. Is that how I'm saying this now?

[Josh Clark]

They got sniffed off the case forever.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, like it was the snap or something. There's gonna be a labor shortage. Just the nuts and bolts of it is there's gonna be far less people to do that kind of work, which was kind of good for the peasants at the time because all of a sudden they had some bargaining power and they said, hey, maybe we should get paid a little more. We also don't need as much food. Cause there's only half the people. And so that all of a sudden paved the way for more sheep grazing because England started realizing, hey, there's a lot more money and a lot easier money to be made in textiles and shearing these sheep and selling wool in the wool trade than there is this farming. Like, that's for the birds.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So because sheep are much less labor intensive, require way fewer farmers, but more land, the people who are wealthy started going after enclosure more and more. They started following that statute of Merton Hanks.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And saying, like, oh, yeah, I want to enclose this. I'm going to enclose this and turn it into grazing land for sheep.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And people were actually displaced. Some people were. Some entire villages were displaced. And it was as simple as that. It was, you don't live here anymore. Get out. And don't forget, I'm the lord of the manor. So what are you going to do about it? Sometimes there were armed people who would show up and tell them to leave. It was just as illegal and indefensible as that. But that's exactly what happened. People were moved out for sheep because they could make more money off of wool than they could off of crops, because there weren't that many people who needed the crops in the first place. So this huge land grab first started because the price of wool was pretty expensive. And that. That started the first, what you would call really the first wave of enclosure back in the 14th, 15th century.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And you know what we mean by fencing an enclosure is literal fencing because they had to keep those sheep there. If not, the sheep are going to go away. So they had to physically construct barricades to keep these fences in. Sometimes they were literal fences, sometimes there were these hedges. But if you're thinking like, you know, topiary type, you know, finery of a English garden, it's more like a hedge that they train to grow so thick and then vines attach to that that it essentially acts as a fence.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like, you just can't get through it. There's too many brambles and blackberries and all that stuff. So, yeah, these hedges, if you're British, you are probably pretty fond of your hedges. They're part of British culture, but outside of Britain, it's worth going to Britain just to see the hedges. So the hedges have like two or three Michelin stars. I can't remember.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. The other thing we have to point out here is that sometimes it was a little more like how it was supposed to work officially is different than how it went down in practice. Officially, you were supposed to get unanimous consent of all the stakeholders of the commons in order to sell that off and fence it up for your sheep. But it obviously didn't always work out that way. Like you said, sometimes they just took it, sometimes they forced them to move to a very much less desire. They're like, here, take this land. It's not nearly as fertile, but look, I gave you something. And sometimes, yeah, it was just completely illegal.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And so some people were like, hey, this is kind of messed up. One of the most well known voices was Thomas More, who wrote his book Utopia in 1516. And he was pretty clearly against the sheep. He called them the great devourers who devoured entire communities. And you know, obviously it wasn't the sheep's fault. They were just doing what they do, which is kind of felt bad for.

[Chuck Bryant]

The sheep in that point.

[Josh Clark]

I know they really took the brunt of it. But it was because of the raising sheep that became so profitable that that's what was really devouring the communities. And it got the ear of Henry vii. Remember, he was the guy who killed Richard III and took over. He was the first Tudor king. He said, hey, I am hearing what you're saying. So let's kind of slow down these enclosures because we don't want to uproot the peasantry. We want them to keep doing what they do because that is England as far as anyone thinks of England.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. So that's sort of the first bucket of enclosure. The first wave, I guess.

[Josh Clark]

The first tranche.

[Chuck Bryant]

The first tranche, that's right. So maybe we should take a break and we'll come back with a little more intense enclosure right after this. Learning things with Jack and Jack. Learning all my days. Stop. You should know.

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[Chuck Bryant]

50 years after Jaws scared an entire.

[Dexter Thomas]

Generation out of the water, I looked.

[Josh Clark]

Down, there was this great big head, these big white teeth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Radiolab is pulling you back in. There's just like so much fear building of what's gonna come out of that blue. Listen to Swimming with Shadows, a Radiolab week of sharks.

[Josh Clark]

Anything you dig down on is fascinating. These creatures.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wherever you get podcasts.

[Michael Kasson]

Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google, I'm talking anywhere.

[Dexter Thomas]

Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.

[Michael Kasson]

That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes.

[Dexter Thomas]

So in this one case, two of the search results that I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, just a picture of Michael Jordan.

[Michael Kasson]

But cops are still using it to make arrests.

[Dexter Thomas]

Police, they are trusting this software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works.

[Michael Kasson]

This is not Minority Report. This is happening right. Right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Killswitch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so as promised, we talked about the first wave of enclosure, and now the second wave, a couple of hundred years later, comes back in a much more intense form. Because the government, the whole government of England, said, all right, this is how we're going to do things now. Because in the last couple of hundred years, textile making has really become the thing. Although we're getting most of our wool and cotton and stuff from our various colonies all over the world. It's not like we need all this for sheep. We think this is just the way to go, because we really need to make our whole agricultural operation much more efficient. And it was not efficient when people were just doing their own thing with these little strips of land, like one person or one Entity needs to kind of be in charge of all of this, so it'll be more efficient and smooth.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Ideally. And in practice, a peasant could support himself and his family and, you know, maybe have enough leftover to sell or something like that. But you can't really support a growing workforce, a labor force that you're creating basically out of whole cloth. With the Industrial revolution, which started in England thanks to these wool factories, converting them into textiles, you need a bunch of people for that. So you need to figure out how to take the people off the land and put them in the factories. And then you have to figure out how to feed those people from the land that you just moved the people from, and you can pay them so that they actually have to buy the food from the land that the. You just forced them off of.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You can start to see, like, what a bad deal it was. But because there was so much money to be made, because there was such a huge leap forward just waiting to be taken through the Industrial Revolution, the powers that be guided steered railroaded England and the English into the cities and the factories in the cities.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And one of the biggest sort of pillars of this new system was the Norfolk four course system. And a guy named Lord Townsend, nicknamed Turnip, I believe he brought this over from the Netherlands. His nickname was Turnip. And wouldn't you guess turnips are part of this four course system. It involved crop rotation, in this case, wheat, turnips, barley, and clover. You might be wondering, like clover, what good is that? Clover was good for the grazing.

[Josh Clark]

It's good for the bees, too. So, honey.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's good for the bees. It's good for the soil. And it also meant that they didn't need to let those fields go down for a season and rewild. They could just kind of keep rotating things. And you could use those turnips to feed the livestock that are grazing on the clover. And previous to that, they might slaughter livestock at the end of the season in the early winter. Another big change was that the seed drill came along, which has allowed them to plant in these very long, straight rows, just, you know, endless, endless straight rows. And they planted grain. And guess who introduced that. Josh and audience.

[Josh Clark]

I know who it is. Yep. Survivor.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, man. Jethro Tull, baby.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. Jethro Tull.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

I knew it all along. I was just teasing. So did you know Jethro Tull was a British band?

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I did not. I just thought he was the guy that came up with the seed Drill and was generally feeling like a dead duck.

[Josh Clark]

No, they were a British band and apparently someone in their agent's office was a history buff and was telling them all about Jethro Tull and what a great, inventive person he was. So they're like, we'll just name our band Jethro Tully.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Even though it'll make no sense because it doesn't fit with our music at all. We're going to name our band Jethro Tull.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I think it kind of fits.

[Josh Clark]

Do you think so?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. When I think of seed drills, I think of flautists. I think of Ian Anderson dancing around on one leg like a flamingo.

[Josh Clark]

Nice. Okay, I guess it makes sense now that you put it like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

We've talked about Aqua Lung quite a bit on the show.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know how you don't talk about Aqualung, like, pretty frequently. It's. It's just there, it's worth talking about for. Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love very Divisive song. I think it's great and kind of fun.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah. Some people hate it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Boy, a lot of people. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

I wonder why.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's a weird song.

[Josh Clark]

It's odd. So I guess the upshot of all this is that an industrial revolution was coincidental with an agricultural revolution, and one fueled the other, which is pretty interesting because this is happening at the exact same time. But even still, the government was like, you can't just go in and steal people's land. If you want to enclose your land and consolidate it so that you can create this super efficient agricultural land that you can make tons of money off of selling food again to the peasants who were just removed from that land that they used to farm. It just gets me, Chuck. You have to do that through act of Parliament. You have to petition Parliament and say, I want to enclose this land. And not only that, you have to have a super majority of the local area to agree to it. And there were two things that helped people with this one. The same people who were trying to enclose the land were in parliament or at least friends with them. And the people who. Who provided the super majority to say, yes, you can enclose the land were their friends and neighbors and people in the same class. So it's not like these were huge obstacles that the people enclosing Great Britain had to overcome at the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

No. And if you're thinking like, well, guys, are you telling me they passed like thousands and thousands of acts of Parliament? They did exactly that they passed about 4,000 of these between 750 and 1860. So just a little over 100 years and almost 11,000 square miles of England, beginning at the start of the 20th century, was now enclosed. That's about a fifth of the entire area of the country. If you're wondering about the waste, we mentioned the waste. We don't want to let the waste go to waste. They were enclosed as well. It wasn't like they fenced all of that off, but a lot of it was. And they said, hey, I know you used to hunt and fish here, but now we're gonna take our ritzy hunting parties out here and you're not going to be allowed to hunt. Or we may just raise it and have our own gardens. It might be, like, agricultural that we get some of our food from, but it'll probably be just like the English gardens that we love to gaze upon with our riches to show off.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah, I have a real problem with that as well. So people just didn't necessarily take this lying down. There were huge, huge waves and spasms of violence throughout the centuries, from the beginning of enclosure up until the 19th century. This is a really, really big deal. You can trace it all the way back to the 1381 peasants revolt. That wasn't entirely about enclosure, but it was a factor in it. And trace it up to the English Civil War where the Diggers came along. The Diggers were a radical faction of a radical group called the Levelers. And. And their whole thing was, enclosure is a mess and it's terrible and we're not going to put up with it. The Diggers, I think, kind of capture what the issue was to the peasants and that was to them. If you were born British, you had a birthright to British soil. Like the country belonged to you as much as it belonged to anybody else who was born in Britain. And your right was to work that soil and make a living for yourself however you want it to. And coming in and enclosing this area and forcing people from that land was a violation of the birthright of those British people. And, you know, they engaged in violence and they would break down enclosures and fences and hedges, but ultimately they. They lost that battle or that war.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And if you're wondering about. I feel like I'm waste guy today, which I kind of like. It keeps just popping up whenever it's my turn. Well, I'm looking at the script here. Is it my line?

[Josh Clark]

It's your line. You didn't highlight your lines.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sorry, sorry, yeah. As far as the waste goes, you know, I said that a lot of them were kind of closed off as well, so they couldn't use them. So obviously there's going to be some, like, saboteur action going on there.

[Josh Clark]

Saboteur action.

[Chuck Bryant]

These were commoners known as the blacks, and they would poach deer in the waste, they would destroy trees, because trees, I mean, they were always a bit of a commodity, but they became an increasing commodity because of the shipbuilding prowess, the growing shipbuilding prowess of England at the time, and the British Royal Navy fleet that was just growing and growing British sea power. Great band. So they were doing this, and so the government passed the Black act, which basically said, all right, if you get caught poaching a deer on land that you've hunted all your life, we're going to kill you. And it was the death penalty. And so hundreds of people were hanged for poaching those deer that they had always been hunting.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So the, the, the, the way of life that these people lived was outlawed. And so to engage in that way of life, you were now a criminal. And the crimes you committed, eg, killing a rabbit on enclosed land, maybe even chasing after a rabbit through someone's enclosed land, could get you killed by the government. Like, that's what happened with that. This is how serious things got. And back to the. I'm going to take a waste one, if you don't mind.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, the sub waste, which is the Fens.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, fine, it's not the greatest waste, but it's important because the Fens were a. And I think still are in some places, a big, vast marshy area of England. And the people who wanted to grow crops for the agricultural revolution and make a bunch of money were like, we should drain those because that'll immediately turn into a really great cropland. And the people who lived on the Fens, the peasants said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're using those. And so this, this kind of battle for public opinion broke out. And the people who were trying to make the money off of it told everybody else, like, this is just waste land. Like terrible land. Not even the other version of waste. This is just terrible land that's not doing anybody any good. And the people who don't want to leave are too lazy to come into the cities and work, so forget them. The peasants said, hey, we can make way more money working the Fens than we can working for you in the cities. And it worked for a little while. The Fens, they managed to stave off the Fens being drained from the 1700s, most of the 1700s, and then ultimately lost out. That's a recurring theme in this, Chuck. The people who were defending their right to the land ultimately lost out. Over and over and over again.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. You'll be glad to know, like, just like the first sort of wave of enclosure, when there were some people speaking up and saying, like, is this really the best idea? During the official parliamentary enclosure, some officials even stepped forward and said, hey, I don't think this is the best thing that we're doing here. There was a guy named Arthur Young who actually was pro enclosure and was promoting that kind of stuff as the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture. But then as it started to play out, he was like, wait a minute, we've got these villages that are just drying up, We've got these commoners that are impoverished now. And so I'm going to whip up a report here and take it to the board. And they said, this is an 1801. And they said, thanks, but no thanks. We're not even going to take a look at that.

[Josh Clark]

I think I saw somewhere that something like three hundred and fifty English villages just vanished in that hundred years of the parliamentary enclosures. Yeah, I mean, just gone, like gone.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I guess there's different ways of looking at this. Like, you can't stop progress. And it's not like if this hadn't happened, there would still be these, you know, villages of commoners in this modern society. But it's the way it went down was just pretty despicable.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, for sure. There was another group that were similar to the Diggers, but they were more interested in like, income equality, fair wages, kind of industrialized stuff, like workers rights. But they were also interested in agrarian rights as well.

[Chuck Bryant]

The Chartists, we talked about them before, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yes. In the Pinkerton episode. Alan Pinkerton started out as a Chartist.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And. And they tried to actually kind of get back to the land. They bought a bunch of these enclosed lands and turned them back into cropland. But I saw that they were a victim of their success because they had like 70,000 people joining in to do this and they just could not get enough land fast enough, so they ended up going bankrupt.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And, you know, like you said, they're. They're just. The way their country looked changed so radically, and it wasn't just about the way of life. It was like that the medieval village was something that the people of England, like, that's all they knew. So all of a sudden it's just everything is changing so fast and it's being foisted upon them so fast. There were poets and there were authors, like writing these books and odes about the destruction of the way of life that they had always known. So it was sort of in the, in the cultural ether. Yeah, ether as well.

[Josh Clark]

Zeitgeist.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I don't think they said zeitgeist then, did they?

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so cultural aether. I didn't realize that was a term of the peasantry, but I get it.

[Chuck Bryant]

They may not have had ether at the time either.

[Josh Clark]

So, Chuck, I say we take our second break and come back and talk some more about this. Like what actually happened from this.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's do it. Learning things with Chuck and Chuck churning all the things stuck.

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[Chuck Bryant]

50 years after jaws scared an entire.

[Dexter Thomas]

Generation out of the water, I looked.

[Josh Clark]

Down, there was this great big head, these big white teeth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Radiolab is pulling you back in. There's just like so much fear building of what's going to come out of that blue. Listen to Swimming with Shadows, a Radiolab week of sharks.

[Josh Clark]

Anything you dig down on is fascinating. These creatures.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wherever you get podcasts.

[Michael Kasson]

Are there any pictures of you online? I'm not just talking about Google, I'm talking anywhere.

[Dexter Thomas]

Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.

[Michael Kasson]

That database is now being used by police departments all across the country to match criminal suspect photos. And sometimes it makes mistakes.

[Dexter Thomas]

So in this one case, two of their Search results that I think were in the top 10 of the search results were Michael Jordan, just a picture of Michael Jordan.

[Michael Kasson]

But cops are still using it to make arrests.

[Dexter Thomas]

Police, they are trusting this software to lead them to the right suspect. But you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it works.

[Michael Kasson]

This is not Minority Report. This is happening right now. People are getting arrested and doing actual time in jail after being picked out by a computer. I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, where every Wednesday we explain the right now of living in the future. You can turn off the computer, but do not let the computer turn you off. Listen to Kill switch in the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so we're back. And enclosure has become this orgy of land grabbing and displacement. One other thing we, we should have said is that Parliament kind of enforced movement to the city, so you would have your village stolen out from under you and turned into sheep grazing land or cropland or something like that. And now you were homeless, so legally you were considered a vagrant. Vagrancy was a crime. You were a criminal if you didn't have a place to live. So where are you going to go? I need to make some money fast. I'm going to move to the city and start working in the factory. So, like, just choice after choice was shut down for everybody. And the effects of this huge, sweeping change in Britain just rippled across the world because one thing would feed into another thing would feed into another thing, and then the whole thing would cycle back again. And every time it cycled back, it would just grow and grow and grow and grow. And the British empire in the 19th century rose based on the agricultural revolution that fed the Industrial Revolution. And it just exploded. It just started to grow exponentially.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, you can look at anytime something like this happens, you can kind of pick apart little small parts or not small changes. I guess they ended up being pretty monumental. But, like, just, you know, did people live longer, were they healthier, did wages increase? Stuff like that? And wages for labor did rise, but it was really hard work. It was pretty intense stuff. It's hard to get a lot of data and nutrition sort of statistics for that time period. But if you look at things like, you know, average heights and weights and things like that, it seems like malnutrition maybe increased because people were working in these factories, and it was pretty dangerous wage work. And they didn't have the best food available to Them at the time, you're gonna have a lot more people that have less. So obviously they're gonna turn to the church or maybe even the government and say, hey, you kicked us out of our land. We're poor. We need help. You need to help us subside. And at the time, and that's still a big debate all over the world, like, how much should the rich help the poor or people just of regular means help the poor? And it was a thing back then. A lot of people are saying, like, hey, it's not the government's place to step in and support the poor. It's just not. We're not going to get involved in that.

[Josh Clark]

No. And a big one was Thomas Malthus, who wrote the essay on the principle of population. We've talked about Malthus a lot. I think he even got his own episode. And he's unfairly saddled with the idea of like, no, no, no, you just let the poor die. It's just a. It's just a natural check and balance to prevent overpopulation. And he was not advocating that. He was pointing out that is a check on overpopulation, not make sure that that happens. But he was the one, he was the first one to really get across, like, our agricultural production will never be able to keep up with population. And so we have to kind of be concerned about overpopulation at some point in time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. So now you have a lot of people living in cities, far fewer people living in the rural farmland where they used to live. The population is actually rising a lot between 1750 and 1850, over 100 years, it may have doubled. Of course, this is, you know, after being halved with the Black Death, it may have been, you know, just sort of the way things went.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, 20 more people.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, exactly. But, you know, there was a definite increase in efficiency of agriculture. Like, no one can deny that. Like, what they set out to do, they did pretty successfully because you had to support this larger population and free up those workers to work in the city. So that all worked well, if that was your aim, if you're on that side of the argument, you could point to all those things and saying, like, hey, our navy's strong. We got a great urban labor force now, and everyone's, you know, everyone's happy.

[Josh Clark]

Right. I mean, you could say quality of life in England rose. I mean, the. The middle class, the merchant class suddenly exploded in wealth. There are a lot of people who got rich off of it, off of the Industrial Revolution and all the stuff that came from it. And you can kind of step back and look at England going from the people, making sure the people fed themselves to making sure that the people of England and other places like Australia, New Zealand, colonial America were supplying England, like itself, with the food it needed to put out these goods that it could then sell and continue to grow in wealth. That's kind of the switch that happened. And you mentioned the British Navy. I mean, like they, the. The enclosed wastes directly contributed to the rise of the British navy because those timbers were used for shipbuilding. And as the British navy grew more and more powerful, they had more and more clout to colonize more and more places increasingly brutally so that they could extract raw materials to feed into the industrial machine in the cities of England.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. And this inspired the rest of the world to go out and do likewise as everything was becoming more modern. It certainly inspired probably what happened in Russia in 1861 when Alexander too said, you know what? No more serfdom in Russia. The landlords are gonna just basically what they did in England. The landlords are gonna get the best farming land serfs. You can buy that land back, but you gotta take out these big heavy loans from maybe even your landlord or maybe the state and you should move to the city. We got rising growth in industry because it's the industrial revolution, just like in England, and we're going to exploit you just like we did in England. And that led eventually to, in part to the Russian revolution.

[Josh Clark]

It did. And I mean, that's like a legitimate response to having your land stolen from you. Uprising of peasants. It's just, it happened to work in Russia where it kept getting tamped down by the government century after century in England. And so the government and the wealthy interested parties won out. But enclosure was so successful that Britain exported it to its colonies and basically said, we're doing the same thing here so that you guys can become more and more efficient and provide more and more raw materials for export back. And it just didn't happen just in the colonies. Scotland very famously had its highlands cleared of thousands of highlanders. Like, they just came in just like they did to the peasant villages and said, get out. And if you don't, we've got swords, and you don't want these swords. Actually, by that time they probably had muskets and such, but they just kept doing it over and over and over again. And each time it seems like it was a worse and worse thing, morally speaking.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, for sure. There are, believe it or not, still some comments today, not every single One of them was done away with. There's just a handful, though, in Laxton, apparently, in north Nottinghamshire. They have an open field system. They have three fields that they never enclosed and they are divided into strips, just like the old days, and farmed by tenants of that manor. And there's also a guild called the Oxford Freemen who own the town meadow of that city, and they can pasture their cattle there and their horse, and they can fish in the part of the Thames that runs alongside that, I guess, jointly owned or cared for meadow.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So, yeah, there are still places that survive. But enclosure itself is done in Great Britain. It's been done since the 1860s. And the reason it came to an end was because those, the middle class, the merchant class who became wealthy in the cities said, hey, we want parkland, we want places to be able to go and, like, have picnics and stuff. And this enclosure is eating up that land, so we need to stop enclosure. And so they did. They created something called the Commons Preservation Society. They gained influence in Parliament, they gained support in Parliament. There was an 1876 act called the Commons act that said, you can only enclose a piece of Great Britain if there's a public benefit of it. And that group, the Commons Preservation Society, eventually created the National Trust, which now, Chuck, here's the great twist of irony, protects the very same hedges that created enclosure in the first place and prevent farmers who want to tear up those hedges from tearing them up because they're protected by old enclosure acts.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

Amazing stuff, huh?

[Nora McInerney]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

You got anything else?

[Chuck Bryant]

I got nothing else.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's it about fencing the commons or enclosure, and I think that means we've just teed up listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. This is from Christina. Hey, guys. I was very interested in the episode on paganism, as I'm a Christian who's always had an interest and respect for paganism. I wanted to clarify some comments you made about Easter and its roots in paganism. Yes, it is true, many things we have about Easter are based on the pagan celebration of Ostara. However, we often focus on that to the neglect and misattribution of the influences of Judaism on Easter in English. In the Germanic languages, the holiday we call Easter was taken from the name Ostara. However, in the Romance languages and many other languages, the name for that holiday is based on the Jewish Passover, which is when Jesus, death and resurrection is supposed to have taken place.

[Josh Clark]

Place.

[Chuck Bryant]

In Spanish it is Pascua. In Italian, in Catalan it is Pascua, etc. The time of the year is also based on Jewish Passover. It's a spring holiday. So when Christianity was moving through Western Europe, it did coincide with Ostara. But that's not why Easter takes place in the spring. The bunnies and eggs in sun symbolism are all pagan. But let's not ignore Christianity's origins out of Judaism and its influences on the day.

[Josh Clark]

Man, that's a great email. Who is that from?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's great. That's from Christina. She says thanks a lot for what you do. I listen a lot to a lot of true crime, but I am happy that I still have you guys and stuff you missed in history class.

[Josh Clark]

Nice.

[Chuck Bryant]

Our compatriots Holly and Tracy to listen to now that my baby is learning to talk and I need to listen to less murder and more family friendly content.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, we are pretty family friendly, aren't we?

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, we try to be not. We do our best.

[Josh Clark]

So thanks, Christina. And that raised something that I realized we didn't mention when we were talking about evidence of pagan roots. Still around today, our days of the week are almost all rooted in paganism. Like Thursday, Thor's Day. That's where that came from. Saturday is Saturn's day. Like all of the days of our week come from pagan gods, essentially. Isn't that neat?

[Chuck Bryant]

Goat's Head Day.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Did you say Goat's Head Day?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, which became Monday.

[Josh Clark]

That's good stuff, buddy. Well, thanks again, Christina. If you want to be like Christina and send us an email, especially a great one like that, you can send it off to stuffpodcastheartradio.com.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Michael Kasson]

Are there any pictures of you online? Then you could already be in a massive police database without even knowing it.

[Dexter Thomas]

Clearview scrapes together images from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from Venmo accounts.

[Michael Kasson]

I'm Dexter Thomas, host of Kill Switch, a podcast about how living in the future is affecting us right now.

[Dexter Thomas]

Police, they are trusting the software with this magical ability to lead them to the right suspect.

[Michael Kasson]

In this episode, we dive into how cops are using AI and facial recognition and sometimes getting it wrong and putting innocent people behind bars.

[Dexter Thomas]

So if your accuser is this algorithm, but you're not even being told that it was used, let alone given any of the details about how it was.

[Michael Kasson]

Works, Listen to Kill Switch on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm Michael Kasson, founder and CEO of.

[Josh Clark]

3C Ventures and your guide on Good Company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Angeli.

[Chuck Bryant]

Su, CEO of Tubi.

[Josh Clark]

We dive into the competitive world of streaming.

[Chuck Bryant]

What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core. There's so many stories out there, and if you can find a way to.

[Nora McInerney]

To curate and help the right person discover the right content.

[Chuck Bryant]

The term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen.

[Josh Clark]

Listen to Good company on the iHeartRadio.

[Chuck Bryant]

App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Clark]

I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip hop.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's Black Music Month, and we need the Talk is to tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone. Breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shapes the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important and that's.

[Michael Kasson]

What stands out, is that our music changes people's lives for the better.

[Chuck Bryant]

Let's talk about the music that moves us to hear this and more on how music and culture collide. Listen to we need the Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an iHeart podcast.