WI: No Land Enclosures?

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Land enclosures by the English and Scottish Aristocracy during the late 17th and entire 18th century decimated traditional agrarian modes of production.

By fencing off common areas for grazing, hunting, etc. your typical low class farmer could no longer supplement the income/diet gained from farming with goods gathered from public land. The result was thousands of impoverished farmers being forced into the major cities for factory work.

But what if this wasn't the case? What if, by Royal decree or Parliamentary stipulation, the land enclosures were halted?

What butterflies would this create?
 
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Well, the English wool industry largely doesn't exist. Possibly more stability in the food supply as there are more more small farms probably with higher crop variety. Much of what we consider traditional British countryside doesn't exist.

And land owners aren't happy. The switch to grazing was in large part because it was more profitable. I could see this forcing more wool production to the Americas where land was so cheap. Overall though the cost of wool cloth is going to go up.
 
Possibly more stability in the food supply as there are more more small farms probably with higher crop variety

Smaller farms that don't produce much of a surplus are very vulnerable to swings in the productivity of the land from year to year and can produce famines more easily than larger farms that produce surplus that can be traded in a more advanced economy. There's a reason why, even in dirt-cheap landed America, farms usually didn't approach the tiny, postage stamp five to ten acres a subsistence farming peasant in early modern Europe might consider adequate. It's just not something you want to do if you can avoid it.

It's also something the state loves, because bigger surpluses mean that more can be taxed away without endangering the farmer's subsistence (the make-or-break point in a lot of historical tax revolts). That makes it hard to see an English/British state turning against enclosure in the 17th and 18th century, especially earlier on when the land taxes made up a huge chunk of Royal revenues.

You're probably looking at something like a durable Leveller victory in Commonwealth political struggles that takes a more and more Digger approach to the Land Question as the decades drag on. A Restoration, of course, being out of the question.
 
Wasn't Charles I hostile to enclosures?

I read that somewhere when I first started to read English history. I just did a quick internet search to see if my memory was playing tricks on me, and apparently there is some evidence that he tried to re-publicized the enclosures. And of course additional enclosures had to be created by acts of Parliament.
 
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