Event Type: Branch

Takes Place: 10th November 2025

Time: 7.30

Venue: Gloucestershire Heritage Hub, Clarence Row, Alvin Street, Gloucester GL1 3DW and and via Zoom online

Description: The enclosure story is well known. Between 1500 and 1850, the open fields and pastures, and commons and wastes that made England’s landscape were enclosed, common rights eliminated, and the poor cottager and peasant once reliant on the common now turned into a wage labourer. In this, enclosure’s protagonists were also the already landed and wealthy, and the process inexorable, and poor commoners’ passive and powerless. But there is a different story to be a told. This is a story about margins, about what happened both on the edge of manorial wastes and on the edge of society. About the ways in which the poor were often active as enclosers themselves through acts of encroachment, typically on the edges of remnant commons and other ‘wastes’ (verges, greens, forests). If none of this is to challenge the big picture of the processes (and impacts) of enclosure, it does reveal a neglected and forgotten aspect of how that once held in common became private property. As the talk will show, through acts of encroachment and squatting, not only were new plebeian communities forged, but at the very time that agrarian capitalism was turning peasants and small farmers into Marx’s proletariat, on the margins the poor found ways to eke out an existence.

How to book: To register for Zoom - https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/historical-association-gloucestershire-branch/t-vvlpjda Member password - HAGL26

Price: Free for members and students, £4 for guests

Tel: 01242 574889

Email: histassocglos@gmail.com

Website: https://www.haglos.co.uk

Organiser: Andrea Robertson

Lecturer: Professor Carl Griffin, University of Sussex

Comments: Tea, coffee and biscuits available before the talk

Region: West Midlands

Branch: Gloucestershire