Guide: Parliamentary-walls and the Northern Enclosures

The Parliamentary-wall

The Enclosure Acts of the late 17th and early 18th centuries introduced the term “parliamentary wall”, and I thought it interesting to look at how this phrase carried forth into modern literature.

Milestone text	Exact wording	Relevance
Enclosure award schedules (c. 1760-1840)	“A good and sufficient stone wall 5 ft 3 in high and 2 ft 4 in broad at the base…”	The Acts never coined a special name; they merely prescribed height, breadth and stone type.
W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955)	“…mile after mile of the long straight walls and hedges laid out by the Parliamentary enclosure commissioners.”	Hoskins links the walls to enclosure, but still does not create a fixed term.
David Garner, “Dry-stone walling on the Mendips” Proc. Somerset Arch. Soc. 127 (1984)	“The later Parliamentary walls were built to tighter specifications and in straighter lines.”	First specialist paper to treat the phrase as a wall-type. (learning.mendiphillsaonb.org.uk)
County‐level landscape guides (e.g. Durham 2009)	“Later parliamentary enclosure walls are typically built from regular thinly-bedded quarry stone … 2 ft 4 in at the base, 5 ft 3 in high.” (durhamlandscape.info)	Standard dimensions are now codified for conservation practice.
Ian Whyte, “The Parliamentary Enclosure of Upland Commons” in Cultural Severance and the Environment (2013)	Caption to fig. 23.5: “Well-built parliamentary enclosure wall with three lines of through-stones…” (SpringerLink)	Academic synthesis: fixes the phrase in upland landscape history.
Pendle Hill Landscape Action Plan (2017)	“These parliamentary walls are the longest, straightest walls you see, often running up the side of the hill …” (forestofbowland.com)	Shows the term now embedded in public‐facing heritage documents.

Key points in that evolution

18th–19th c. reality: enclosure commissioners ordered walls to uniform metrics; the walls themselves are historic but not yet named “parliamentary”.

Mid-20th c. scholarship: Hoskins popularises the idea that the straight, regimented field boundaries are the visual signature of the Acts.

1980s–2000s field studies: walling historians (Garner, CHERT Surveys) begin to speak of “Parliamentary walls” as a typological class, contrasting them with earlier “intake” or “clearance” walls.

Current conservation usage: county guidelines and AONB reports treat “Parliamentary wall” as standard jargon for straight, survey-set dry-stone walls erected under an Enclosure Award, usually 1.3–1.6 m high, with two through-courses and a neat copestone.

Typical identifying features (drawn from field manuals)

Straight, ruler-like alignment across moor or fell, often ignoring micro-relief.

Regular thin-bedded quarry stone rather than random field-cleared boulders.

Specification walls: about 0.7 m wide at base, tapering to 0.4 m; two courses of through-stones; single or saddle coping (Durham spec sheet). (durhamlandscape.info)

Sometimes accompanied by an “occupation road” set out in the same Award.

Earliest printed occurrences

The phrase “parliamentary wall” itself is hard to trace before the 1980s—award clerks simply spoke of “stone walls” and early historians (e.g. J. R. Ward 1954) used “enclosure walls”. Garner’s 1984 article is the first to treat it as a fixed compound; by the 1990s the term appears in county HERs and by 2010 it is routine in management plans and academic monographs (Whyte 2013; Rotherham 2013) (Ethernet University).

Why the phrase matters now

Dating guide: in upland northern and western England, a long, straight dry-stone wall marching up-slope almost always signals an 18th–19th-century Act.

Conservation trigger: repair grants and SSSI guidance often distinguish “Parliamentary walls” from earlier vernacular boundaries because their tidy appearance is vulnerable to partial collapse or modern rebuilding in a different style.

Social history: the walls are the physical trace of enclosure’s legal and social revolution—the line that privatised former stints and commons.

What the Enclosure Acts were

Between the mid-18th and late-19th centuries the British Parliament passed almost 5,000 local “Inclosure Acts.” Each Act authorised a team of appointed commissioners to survey one specific township or parish, divide its open-field strips, common pastures, and “wastes” into new, privately owned parcels, and lay out straight roads and boundary walls or hedges. The commissioners issued a legal award map and schedule that became the new title deeds.

Earlier enclosures (14th-17th c.) had been done piecemeal by manor court agreement or lordly edict, but the Parliamentary Acts provided a uniform, litigable procedure and—critically—over-rode any local dissent once the Bill was passed.

Why enclosure was pursued—shared justifications at the time

Stated aim	Problem with the old system	How enclosure claimed to solve it
Increase food production	Open-field strips and communal grazing made it hard to try crop rotations, drainage, or new grasses; grazing animals wandered and over-browsed.	A landowner who held a compact, hedged farm could invest in four-course rotations (turnips, clover), selective breeding, liming and manuring—all said to raise yields 50–100 %.
End common-field disputes	Rights to stint (graze) or cut turf were vague; trespass cases clogged manor courts.	Single-owner parcels and straight “parliamentary walls” abolished overlapping rights and the need for constant adjudication.
Encourage investment & drainage	No tenant would sink capital into drainage channels or marl-pits on land he might lose next year through open-field reallocations.	Freehold or long leases on enclosed land secured returns on drainage, fencing, and new buildings.
Support a growing population & army	Britain’s population doubled 1700-1800; wars with France demanded grain self-sufficiency.	Larger, more efficient farms were expected to feed cities and keep bread prices stable.

Less-voiced but real motivations

Landlord profits: rising grain prices after 1750 made enclosure attractive; rents on newly enclosed Wolds or Midland arable sometimes doubled within a decade.

Rational tax base: compact holdings were easier to rate for the Poor Law and land tax than scattered strips and commons.

Control of labour: concentrated holdings reduced the number of small independent graziers, creating a wage-dependent workforce for both agriculture and emerging industries.

Were the Acts “needed”? (Historians’ verdict)

Agronomic necessity: modern scholarship shows that many innovations (turnips, clover, Norfolk rotation) could happen inside common-field frameworks given cooperative governance; yet enclosure accelerated their universal adoption.

Legal clarity: in areas with tangled manorial rights (upland commons, forest wastes) Parliamentary authority did supply a clear, once-for-all settlement.

Social cost: enclosure delivered efficiency for owners but often at the expense of cottagers who lost grazing and fuel rights; pauperism initially rose in several districts. Whether that price was “necessary” remains debated.

The Enclosure Acts were local laws that converted shared medieval landscapes into modern, hedged and walled farms. Reformers hailed them as essential for higher yields and legal order; critics then and now point out that they chiefly served landowners, dismantled village commons, and set the stage for the rural depopulation that fed Britain’s industrial cities.

What happened to Swaledale’s people when the commons were “walled in”?

When Parliament authorised the division of Swaledale’s stinted pastures (the main awards came in 1814 – 1825 for Grinton-Reeth and 1824 – 1843 for Muker/Gunnerside) the dale acquired the ruler-straight dry-stone “parliamentary walls” we still see today. But the physical neatness masked a radical social shift.

Land ownership and control

Before enclosure most dale households—yeomen, copy-holding miners, and cottagers—held tiny rights to graze a handful of beasts on the township commons; these were protected by the custom of “stints”.

After the award the surveyors allotted the lion’s share of former common to a few dozen larger farmers and to outside investors (notably lead-mine partnerships who wanted moorland for water-capture reservoirs). Cottagers and tenant miners received token plots—often steep, rushy ground that was impossible to wall without spending more than the land was worth. (eprints.lancs.ac.uk)

Within a generation many smallholders had sold their allotments or slipped into pure wage labour, consolidating fields into today’s 10- to 30-hectare livestock units.

Population movement

Parochial censuses show a brief spike during the 1820s–1840s as men were hired to wall and drain the new allotments, followed by steady decline once lead prices slumped and small graziers lost common grazing: Muker township fell from c. 1250 people in 1851 to 720 in 1901. Many families followed the ore-smelters to Teesside or took mill work in Darlington and Leeds. (Academia)

Every-day impact on livelihood

What changed	Practical effect on ordinary families
Loss of free turf & bracken	Cottagers now had to buy peat-cutting rights or coal for fuel; bracken for bedding became a rented commodity.
hay-meadow obligation	Each new in-bye parcel had to be fenced, limed and mown: hired labour or cash rent replaced communal “meadow days”.
Higher rents & rates	Landlords passed enclosure survey costs onto tenants; Swaledale vestry minutes record a 40 % rise in poor-rate calls in the 1830s.

Resistance and negotiation

Unlike some lowland counties, Swaledale saw no enclosure riots; but township minutes note repeated petitions asking commissioners to set back head-dykes so that poorer graziers could still reach summer turbary plots. A few concessions were granted—narrow “occupation lanes” that today appear as un-walled green tracks threading to the moor.

What the landscape still tells us

The dense lattice of field barns and hay-meadows between Muker and Thwaite is the fossil of the allotment grid laid down by the 1824 award—each barn stands in the very centre of its original two “ing” strips.

Parliamentary walls run arrow-straight over blind summits (e.g., Birkdale Common) where practical farmers would once have followed slope contours; that rigidity is the surveyor’s signature. (Parliament News)

Deserted miner-cottages on the new allotments (e.g., Bracken Rigg) mark the failure of small allotments to sustain dual mining–farming households after ore prices collapsed in the 1870s.

Documentation Notes

Parish vestry books, enclosure maps, the 1841 tithe returns, and estate rentals—makes Swaledale one of the better-recorded Dales for studying how parliamentary paperwork translated into everyday winners, losers, and a field pattern that still frames the view from every fell-side today. (Lumen Learning, eprints.lancs.ac.uk)