Author: A T Brown

Abstract:

Enclosure riots in England have been understood through their importance to early modern social history, representing a conflict over rights and access to resources. Driven by Tudor demographic growth, these disputes demarcate changing social relations in the sixteenth century. Yet, as this article shows, enclosure riots could reflect a much longer heritage of disputation, including centuries-old boundary disputes. An enclosure riot involving the monks of Lytham Priory and neighbouring tenants in the 1530s had its origins over three centuries before, in the original grant of land to the monks, and raised its head in every century until the suppression of the priory. Through these conflicts, we can understand the construction and inculcation of popular and institutional memory across this period, as both their neighbouring tenants and the monks of Lytham sought to justify their occupation of the commons. Above all, this case-study highlights the importance of the interpretative framework that we use as historians: if read forwards, the conflict of the 1530s takes on all the features of the archetypal early modern enclosure riot, presaging the struggle for the commons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but if read backwards, it becomes the culmination of centuries of medieval boundary disputes before the eventual suppression of the priory. This article demonstrates both the artificial nature of temporal boundaries in the study of history and how the access rights of tenants could align with the jurisdictional claims of lords against an outside seigneurial authority, producing conflict but not necessarily class conflict.

Published on The English Historical Review, Volume 140, Issue 606, October 2025, Pages 943–975, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceaf003 (open access)

Published: 20 February 2025