Public good or private gain? The politics of ‘inclosure’ in the New Forest during the long eighteenth century

Abstract

This thesis examines the politics of inclosure in the New Forest during the long eighteenth century and offers new perspectives on the physical and cultural transformation of its ancient landscape, from royal deer forest into a state tree forest. The study is situated within the branches of political, social, and environmental historiography and examines human impacts on the landscape of the New Forest, the political events and ideas that preceded those impacts, and the protagonists who advanced them. The thesis offers an original contribution to knowledge in the historiography of the New Forest by exploring the connection between the tenets of improvement and rational thought, the rise in political dominance of a landed elite, and the narrative of a timber scarcity that was believed to be affecting the Royal Navy’s ability to build, maintain and repair its fleet of wooden warships. Together these factors would subject the open landscape of the New Forest to the scrutiny of members of establishment institutions, such as The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the Houses of Parliament, and the Royal Navy; and to the use of scientific or rational methods proposed for its ‘improvement’, which were characterised by the large-scale use of inclosures.

The thesis explores how the belief in the efficacy of inclosure was not just intellectual but ideological. While the intensification of Britain’s forests bore some resemblance to the strategies adopted for agricultural improvement, particularly in the adoption of ‘scientific’ methods, the importance of timber to national and economic security meant that its production would ultimately become a political objective. Much of the historiographical argument regarding enclosure, and the Agricultural Revolution of which it was an important symbol,
focuses on the social and economic spheres of the open field system, which consisted of strips of land within different fields, crop rotation and common grazing. As a royal forest, the New Forest had never been configured in this way but was based on ancient rights exercised over its commons and open wastes. While enclosures generally happened piece-meal and were seen in a local and not a national context, recent environmental historiography has asserted that the development of state-run forests were synonymous with the advent of bureaucratic and rational techniques forming the foundations of the British government’s modernisation, as demonstrated in existing scholarship looking at state formation and understanding of landscape.

This thesis explores the proposals to enclose the New Forest in this broader political context and looks at how, under the control of a narrow collection of landed interests, using enlightened, rational methods to justify their policies, the New Forest would become subject to the tenets of private ownership while remaining a state-controlled property.

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