Jordan’s Enclosure and Sheep-Farming Policy

Jordan’s Enclosure and Sheep-Farming Policy is the plan to fence the estate’s fields, commons, and woods and convert them to sheep pasture. Presented as a promise of prosperity and easier work, it overturns a village economy organized around shared harvest labor, customary access, and provisions for local households. Its decisive consequence is not simply a change in what the land produces: the villagers themselves are excluded from the future being planned for it.

The Existing Economy and Its Customs

The policy confronts a community whose food and work depend on the land’s seasonal yield. When barley is ready, harvest labor is shared across the village: children clear weeds, stronger workers cut the crop, women bind sheaves, and older men build stooks. The work is collective because the population has dwindled too far for anyone useful to stay away, and because a poor harvest threatens the community’s stores. The account of the harvest makes clear that the land is not an abstract holding but the basis of daily survival and reciprocal labor.

The distribution of the crop reflects that shared economy. Sheaves are bound according to the principle of ten for the commons and one for gleaning; villagers may gather what remains after the harvest, and their customs extend to common grazing and the use of other local resources. At the annual beating of the bounds, people review what they have and what they hope to use, while boundary stones teach children where the community belongs. The walk also recalls practical obligations and disputes: households may seek additional grazing for pigs or geese, and villagers negotiate the siting of compost heaps and the upkeep of shared land. These practices make access a matter of custom, need, and local negotiation, not solely a decision made by the estate owner.

The Plan and Its Promise

Edmund Jordan prepares the ground for the policy by measuring the fallow field and counting the village’s people. The tally reaches fifty-eight. To the villagers, the measurements connect land assessment with a threat to their homes: they know that outside their local system, flour, meat, and cheese are weighed for sale rather than divided into household portions. Philip Earle’s surveying therefore appears not as neutral observation but as work that may make the estate legible for sale and reorganization.

At a harvest feast, Charles Kent presents sheep farming as a way out of the risks of crop cultivation. Rain, wind, mildew, cattle disease, and birds can ruin a harvest; wool, he argues, is less vulnerable to the seasons. His imagined future has villagers shepherding instead of plowing, shearing instead of reaping, and weaving yarn into cloth at home. He describes looms replacing oxen and the finished cloth reaching people elsewhere, including nobles. The proposal’s appeal lies in its apparent security and leisure, but its promise depends on replacing the village’s existing agricultural life with a different form of production. The narration recognizes this concealed reversal: the sheaf is giving way to sheep.

The Gleaning Day ceremonies make that change visible before the policy is fully announced. Charles Kent confirms that gleaners may keep the barley they find for their own kitchens rather than contribute it to the common store. He then describes the order in which livestock will enter the field: cattle, geese, and finally hogs. His omission of the plow, ordinarily mentioned after the hogs, unsettles the villagers. Since the barley field is meant to be plowed for winter wheat, the silence suggests that this may be their last harvest. The customary sequence of gleaning, grazing, and plowing becomes an early measure of what the new plan will discontinue.

Enclosure and Implementation

Edmund Jordan makes the policy explicit as a program of enclosure and commercial expansion. He proposes fencing and quickthorning all the land, including the commons and what he calls the wasted woods, and turning it into sheep country. He contrasts the village’s condition of Enough with a future of More, invoking profit, progress, and enterprise. His language presents the transformation as improvement, but his account of the villagers’ departure reveals who will not share in it: he says the land has returned to its owner and that he can begin again from a clean slate.

The practical preparations follow the announcement. A steward rides away to arrange the purchase of sheep, not to summon soldiers. Hired workers are expected in the coming months; they will lodge in empty cottages while trees are cut, hedges struck, and drystone walls and winter folds built. Shepherds are expected later in the autumn. These projected works give enclosure a physical form: boundaries will be remade, woodland cleared, and pasture infrastructure constructed in place of the village’s accustomed uses.

Edmund Jordan also offers Walter Thirsk a place within this transition. Thirsk is to remain behind as the new owner’s ears and eyes, oversee the land until the sheep arrive, and later receive wages. The arrangement assigns him a role in administering a landscape emptied of its former community. At the same time, Edmund Jordan agrees to release the three detained women only when they reach a marketplace three days away, and bars the Rogers, Gosse, and Carr families from his estate. Charles Kent agrees to accompany the prisoners to ensure that the promise is kept. Enclosure thus proceeds alongside the villagers’ removal, not as a neutral reallocation of fields among people who remain.

Consequences and Significance

The policy displaces an interlocking system of land use. The planned fences and walls would restrict access to the commons; sheep pasture would take the place of crops and customary grazing; and the villagers’ rights to glean and share the harvest would no longer organize the estate. The loss is material, because households depend on grain, livestock, and shared access, but also social: seasonal labor, boundary walks, and negotiated customs bind the community to particular places and to one another.

The contrast between the policy’s sales-oriented measures and the village’s practical knowledge sharpens its significance. On the bounds walk, Philip Earle records views, plants, and specimens, while Walter Thirsk knows the same terrain through its uses: where peat can recover, which reeds can thatch roofs, what wood can fuel fires, and which walls need repair. A measured landscape can be prepared for new ownership and production; the lived landscape contains obligations and resources that the plan does not preserve. The sheep scheme therefore changes both the land’s use and the terms by which that land is understood.

The policy’s promise of a richer, easier future remains inseparable from exclusion. The villagers’ work is recast as an outdated subsistence, while the proposed prosperity belongs to an estate reorganized for sheep and wool. By the time Edmund Jordan speaks of starting from scratch, the planned fences, hired hands, and shepherds already point toward a future without the people whose customs shaped the place. The transformation is called progress, but for the village it means the end of its established economy and its removal from the land.