Making and Breaking Property: Negotiating Enclosure and Common

This paper explores the making – and breaking – of property in early six-teenth-century England, examining the range of strategies available to those engaged in negotiating and resisting enclosure, common rights and land-use change. The sixteenth century was a crucial moment in the history of prop-erty, a time when modern notions of private property as individually owned and spatially exclusive first began to solidify in the legal, administrative and popular imaginations.1 It was also a period of considerable social, economic and environmental change, as common rights were extinguished and open fields enclosed for sheep pasture or other private land uses. While enclosure for sheep pasture – and the local and regional anti-enclosure protests which accompanied it – seems to have been particularly prevalent in the Midland counties of England, processes of land-use change were evident to a greater or lesser extent throughout the central zone of England and beyond.2 The impacts of enclosure and land-use change on the landscapes and communities of Tudor England have been a mainstay of social and eco