Over several centuries, and intensively through parliamentary acts after about 1750, England's open common fields and waste lands were consolidated into privately owned, hedged enclosures. The process raised agricultural productivity but displaced smallholders and cottagers who had relied on common rights. Many of the dispossessed migrated toward growing industrial towns in search of wage labour. Roughly a fifth of England's land area was enclosed by parliamentary act.
Enclosure supplied much of the labour force for industrial cities and helped establish the private, exclusive ownership of land that underpins modern urban property and development.
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