@cloudgoose

1 year ago

I absolutely LOVE this series. Ruth and the boys are great guides, and I feel like I learnt so much the first time I watched this series. Watching a second time, my biggest criticism is how mildly the narration puts things like enclosure. When they describe the fields as being “open,” they’re not clearly expressing the idea that the fields were owned by lords or entities like the monasteries, but they were essentially public — families had their own sections of land that they could farm for subsistence, of which the monastery or landowner would take a payment in the form of a portion of that harvest. However, because the land was openly available for use by all members of the community, they could also forage and hunt on it, key to survival in this era. When enclosure began, that land that had previously been available for use by the entire community was divided up into smaller sections that were owned by wealthy individuals who no longer allowed others to use it as subsistence farmland or hunting/gathering grounds. Where before, the majority of your time might be spent farming and gathering your own food directly, enclosure meant the only way you could eat was by earning wages to buy food someone else had grown. The new landowners also prosecuted people who hunted or foraged on their land, making what was an essential element of survival illegal. It was a forced beginning of capitalism, and it was a huge cultural upheaval.

271 |