A Commonwealth of Thieves Read Online Free PDF Page A

special conditions which had driven many rural poor to the cities and towards crime. The English countryside was undergoing a revolutionary process known as enclosure. Villages had previously been organised according to a system of scattered strips of open land variously owned by peasants and landlord, and shared common ground. This had been the way since feudal times. Under a series of Enclosure Acts passed by the Parliament at Westminster, villages were reorganised by enclosure commissioners according to new agricultural efficiencies, so that the ground of the chief landlord, of prosperous farmers, and of various small-holders was consolidated and fenced. In reality, enclosure drove small farmers and agricultural workers off land their families had worked for centuries. Many smallholders not only found the expense of fencing with barriers of hawthorn and blackthorn beyond them, but discovered that the “common land” traditionally shared by the community, on which they and more marginal peasants had depended to run their livestock, was now fenced off too. The ancient right of the peasant to hunt and scavenge for game and produce from the landlord's ground also vanished as the crime of poaching came into being. And this process was occurring at a time when the cloth produced in cottages was required less and less, as great loom factories were established. Traditional village, church, and family controls on the way men and women behaved broke down as families became itinerant and set off for cities.
    Oliver Goldsmith's famed lament for the uprooting of rustic populations, the poem
The Deserted Village,
was written in 1770 when great numbers of people were seeking parish poor relief because of enclosure, and the dispossessed pooled in big towns. In these times, says a historian, “Everyone below the plateau of skilled craftsmen was undernourished.” And the rural poor became poorer still. Some became the scarecrow people of the countryside, but many more were forced towards the cities, creating a dangerous under-class, who saw crime as a better option than working an eighty-hour week as a servant, or toiling for the unregulated and dangerous gods of machine-based capital.
    The precise extent to which the great Georgian dislocation produced Phillip's bunch of convicts is still a matter of debate, but Goldsmith himself, until his death in 1774, had no doubt that enclosure had become the great despoiler of rural virtue in the British. Addressing his rhetorical address to a fictional deserted British village, he declared:
    … a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroy'd can never be supplied.
A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life requir'd, but gave no more:
His best companions innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
    Times had changed for the worse, thought Goldsmith. Now, he said:
    … The man of wealth and pride
Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds.
Space for his horses, equipage and hounds;
The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth
Has robb'd the neighb'ring fields of half their growth.
    As a case in point for Goldsmith's thesis one might look at an adolescent convict like Sarah Bellamy, who came from an impoverished rural family frequently on parish relief in Belbroughton in Worcestershire. They were the sort of people who might once have been cottagers but, since enclosure, lived in housing “occupied by paupers of the said parish.” At the age of nine, Sarah began work for one of the parish overseers, and from the age of fifteen she was employed by Benjamin Haden, a weaver. At that age she was charged with stealing from Mr. Haden one linen purse, value tuppence, as well as 15 pounds 15 shillings in coin and promissory notes. Whether she would have committed the crime if she had still been a cottager's