Enclosure - progress & dispossession

• 'An organisation to all of our advantages' - ch 3 


  • manipulating villagers - 'organisation' is a tool of exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few
  • will benefit those in power while exploiting the lower class
  • criticises how capitalism masks self-serving actions under the guise of communal benefit
• 'His mapping has reduced us to a web of lines. There is no life in them' - ch 3 


  • future is now in lines
  • end of pastoral time and beginning of capitalist time
  • critique of enclosure which strips the villagers of their individuality & humanity - traditional way of life is being disrupted as they are being alienated from ties to the land
• ‘We’ve never woken up before Gleaning Day without a pretty sovereign to rule the stub’ - ch 4 


  • interruption of cycle in harvest - pastoral time already disrupted by Mrs Beldam arriving at party
• 'We’re written down only as The Jordan estate or The Property of Edmund Jordan, gentleman. 'He is deceased.'' - ch 4 


  • Thirsk learns in confidence that Kent is no longer the legal owner of the land
• 'What of the corpse?' 'There were graver, grander things to talk about' - Jordan - ch 6 


  • Jordan has no care of the older man's body
  • only interest is business & making money - individual issues do not count or matter - profit over human life
  • criticism of how capitalism dehumanises people - profit over human life - individuals reduced to mere obstacles in economic pursuits
  • capitalism erasing personal suffering & historical ties
  • those in power disregard the powerless - corpse rendered invisible in face of capitalist progression
• 'You're pasture now' - ch 6 


  • loss of identity tied to communal farming - reduced to a singular function
  • repurposed for profit - humans cogs in machine of capitalist system - objectified into units of production
  • erasure of tradition
• ‘And I will have a bell cast for the very top of it to summon everyone to prayer. And hurry everyone to work’ - ch 6 


  • shift in way they see time
  • shift from pastoral time, day dictated by natural rhythms of sun rise & sunset, to capitalist time where external forces impose structure & control over daily life
  • hurried to work enforcing discipline & efficiency - shift to linear, regulated system dictated by authoritative signals
  • growing loss of autonomy - increasing grip of capitalist order over rural life
• 'We wake to learn that Willowjack is dead' - ch 7

  • signals increasing violence
  • whether through violence or displacement, everything familiar in the village is being erased or repurposed
  • exposes fragility of villagers' world & irreversible transformation
  • though murder done by mrs Bledam in defiance against their unjust punishment - reflection of villagers' complicity in the cruel system they have allowed to flourish - they are responsible for breaking down of village
• Jordan commands search of village in ch 7

  clear Kent is no longer in charge
• 'I fear his harvesting. I think he means to shear us all, then turn us into mutton' Kent - ch 10 


  • Kent now looking at idea of Jordan as a brutal master & is becoming terrified of what may happen to village
  • Kents power falling & Jordan rising
• 'Profit, Progress, Enterprise' - ch 12 


  • Jordan bringing in 'hired hands' to turn village into profit-driven settlement - reduces people to tools for labour - views Thirsk as 'just the hand he's looking for' - dehumanises - contrast to how Kent calls villagers 'souls', viewing them as whole people
  • utterly uncreative, impersonal & industrial
• 'Ours has been a village of Enough, but he proposes it will be a settlement of More' - ch 12 


  • shift from a traditional village based on communal living & shared survival, to a planned, owned settlement driven by profit & control
  • unlike village's past, rooted in cooperation, Jordan's vision is focused on exploitation & efficiency
  • The 'More' he promises is not shared by all but concentrated in the hands of a single leader who directs & profits
  • marks transition from subsistence farming & collective survival to a capitalist system where people work for wages & landowner extracts financial gain
• 'It’s simply quiet and undisturbed, attending to itself, an Eden with no Adam and no Eve' - ch 17


  • deep sense of loss & disconnection
  • eden reference suggests a time when land existed in natural balance, now corrupted by human greed & ambition that have destroyed social harmony
  • human intervention, through enclosure & capitalist motives, has shattered the traditional social equilibrium - what was once communal & shared has been divided & replace with isolation & exclusion
  • an entire way of life, rooted in community, continuity & coexistence with nature has been lost
  • capitalist triumphs at expense of human freedom