Cider and enclosure

Enclosure covers at least two distinct things. The first is the piecemeal, often agreed consolidation of strips and the hedging of fields, proceeding from the later Middle Ages onwards and largely complete in much of the west and south-west by the seventeenth century. The second is parliamentary enclosure, concentrated between roughly 1750 and 1850, which extinguished common rights over open fields, commons and wastes by statute.

The distinction matters for orchards because the two processes had different geographies. Parliamentary enclosure fell most heavily on the midland open-field counties. Herefordshire, Devon and much of Somerset were already landscapes of small hedged fields, and their orchards had grown up inside that pattern.

Where the argument about enclosure and orchards does apply directly is to commons, wastes and roadside strips, and to the cottage holdings that depended on them.

A cottager with a garden, a right to graze a pig or a cow and a few fruit trees had a small independent subsistence. Enclosure that extinguished common rights without compensating the cottager removed the grazing that made a few trees viable and, over time, the household that tended them. The nineteenth-century decline of cottage orchards is real and is connected to this.

Access is the other loss. Trees planted on commons, in lanes and on manorial waste were in practice available to people who owned no land, and the drink and fruit they produced did not appear in any account. Enclosure converted that into private property. The people affected left few records, which is one reason this part of the history is thin.

The consolidation of holdings also worked against very small orchards. A field of standard trees suits a farm that can spare the ground and the labour; a labourer’s quarter-acre plot does not survive a reorganisation designed around larger units.

Enclosure also encouraged planting. A field held in severalty, hedged and secure from common grazing, is a field in which it is rational to plant trees that will not bear for a decade. Improvement writers from the seventeenth century onwards made exactly this argument, urging landowners to plant orchards on newly enclosed ground.

The great extension of orchard acreage in the cider counties in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries happened in enclosed landscapes and could not have happened in an open-field one. Grazing beneath standard trees, the characteristic West Country arrangement, likewise requires a fenced field.

So the same process that removed one kind of orchard created the conditions for another, larger kind. The net effect on tree numbers is not something the sources allow anyone to calculate.

Enclosure is often invoked in cider writing as a straightforward act of dispossession that stripped the countryside of its orchards. That reading fits the general history of rural poverty better than it fits the orchard evidence, and it flattens a regionally uneven process into a morality tale.

The defensible statement is this. Enclosure redistributed who could plant, own and take fruit; it damaged the cottage orchard and the commons tree; it assisted the farm orchard and the estate orchard; and its effects in the cider counties were muted relative to the midlands because those counties had been enclosed earlier and differently.

The catastrophic loss of British orchards, when it came, was a twentieth-century event driven by grant schemes, market change and the arithmetic of standard trees. That is a separate history and should not be projected backwards.