John Clare and Anarchism: Commons, Enclosure, and the Critique of Domination

Table of Contents

John Clare watched the fields he knew get fenced, measured, and taken. He was not writing political theory. He was writing as someone who had walked the commons, worked them, and then seen them closed. The Enclosure Acts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not just change land law. They reorganised power. What had been shared or at least open to customary use became private property under the control of those who could claim and enforce title. Clare’s poetry is one of the clearest records we have of what that felt like from below.

Read through an anarchist lens that starts from hierarchical systems, his work becomes even sharper. Enclosure was not only an economic process. It was the installation of a new set of elite and subordinate positions. Landowners and their agents accumulated power (legal, monetary, political, epistemic). Commoners were pushed into the subordinate seat. Multiple modes of domination went to work at once: defining the rules, naming what counted as proper use, controlling mobility, extracting value, and producing a new story in which the old ways were called waste and the new fences were called improvement.

The Commons as a Different Relation

Before enclosure, the commons were not a free-for-all. They were a set of customary relations. People had rights of pasture, gathering, gleaning, and access that were local, known, and defended by memory rather than by title deeds. Clare grew up inside that world. When he writes about it, he is not idealising a pure past. He is remembering a way of living with land that did not require one side to sit permanently in the elite seat.

In “The Mores” he looks back:

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centurys wreathed springs blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In unchecked shadows of green brown and grey

The language is of openness and continuity. No one has yet claimed the right to draw a hard line and say “this is mine, keep out.” The land is not treated as a passive object waiting for an owner. That matters. In hierarchical terms, the commons kept certain forms of power from concentrating too completely in a single elite position.

Enclosure as the Installation of Hierarchy

When the fences went up, the relation changed. Clare records it without sentimentality. In the same poem he continues:

Now this sweet vision of my boyish hours
Free as spring clouds and wild as summer flowers
Is faded all—a hope that blossomed free
And hath been once as it no more shall be
Enclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labours rights and left the poor a slave

Enclosure here is not a neutral administrative act. It tramples. It turns customary rights into something that can be erased. The poor are left in a new subordinate position. The mode of defining rules and being defined by rules is suddenly very visible. The elite authors a new normative framework (private property backed by law). Everyone else has to live inside it.

Clare also sees the mode of naming at work. What had been common is now called waste. What had been open is now called improved once it is fenced. The elite produces the categories and the subordinate is forced to inhabit them. In “Remembrances” he writes of the old places:

By Langley Bush I roam but the bush hath left its hill
On cowper green I stray tis a desert strange and chill
And spreading lea close oak ere decay had penned its will
To the axe of the spoiler and self interest fell a prey
And crossberry way and old round oaks narrow lane
With its hollow trees like pulpits I shall never see again

The names remain in his memory, but the places have been altered or destroyed by “self interest.” Naming and being named, presence and absence: the old landmarks are pushed toward absence while the new order claims the right to decide what counts as real and valuable.

Controlling Mobility and Accumulating Rights

One of the clearest modes in Clare’s enclosure poems is the control of mobility. The commons had allowed movement. Paths, tracks, and open ground let people pass. Enclosure blocked those paths. In “The Mores” he notes:

These paths are stopt—the rude philistines thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’

The little sign is a small object with large effects. It converts open movement into conditional, monitored, or blocked movement. The elite secures mobility for itself and its interests. The subordinate finds the old routes closed. Rights accumulate upward; duties and exclusions accumulate downward.

This is not only about walking. It is about who gets to decide how the land is used and who is treated as a trespasser on what was once shared.

Epistemic Authority and the Story of Improvement

Enclosure was justified by a powerful story: the old commons were inefficient, wasteful, and in need of rational improvement. That story is an exercise of epistemic authority. Those who spoke for “improvement” claimed the position of knowing subject. Local knowledge, customary practice, and the lived experience of commoners were treated as ignorance or obstacle. Clare refuses that claim. He keeps insisting that the old ways had their own order and their own value.

In “The Lament of Swordy Well” the land itself is given voice and speaks of what has been done to it:

Im Swordy Well a piece of land
Thats fell upon the town
Who worked me till I couldnt stand
And crush me and keep me down

Later the voice continues:

The bees which on the thyme once fed
Now find no resting place
And every tree that once had shade
Is vanished from the place

By letting the land speak, Clare disrupts the usual hierarchy of voice. The subordinate (the land, the old common) takes the position of speaking subject. The improvers who claimed to know best are shown as agents of destruction. This is a direct challenge to the mode of speaking and being spoken about.

Exploitation, Discipline, and the Making of the Poor

Enclosure did not only fence land. It helped produce a more dependent labouring population. When people lost access to common pasture, fuel, and gleaning, they had less ability to subsist outside wage relations. Clare saw the link. In “The Mores” the poor are left “a slave.” The word is strong, but the direction of the thought is clear. Loss of the commons tightened the grip of those who controlled employment and resources.

The mode of exploiting and being exploited intensifies. So does disciplining and being disciplined. The new landscape of fences and private fields required new forms of surveillance and punishment for those who continued to act as if the old rights still existed. Clare’s poetry registers the pressure without turning it into abstract theory.

Peripheral Subordinates and the Wider Damage

Enclosure did not only affect human commoners. Clare is attentive to what the user’s framework calls peripheral subordinates: the beings and relations pushed outside the central binary of landowner and labourer. Trees are felled. Birds lose nesting places. Paths disappear. The old ecological texture of the open field and common is simplified into private plots. In “To a Fallen Elm” he addresses the tree directly:

Old Elm that murmured in our chimney top
The sweetest anthem autumn ever made
And into mellow whispering calms would drop
When showers fell on thy many coloured shade
And when dark tempests mimic thunder made
While darkness gave thy deepening foliage night
I saw thee then in all thy glory laid

The tree is not scenery. It is a presence that has been destroyed by the same logic that enclosed the fields. Clare keeps the wider field of damage in view.

Autonomy, Memory, and the Refusal of the New Frame

Clare’s response is not a call for a new central authority. It is a stubborn attachment to the old relations and a refusal to accept the new meanings imposed by enclosure. Memory itself becomes a form of resistance. By continuing to name the old places and describe what they were, he refuses to inhabit fully the interpretation produced by the improvers.

This is close to the anarchist insistence on questioning legitimacy and on keeping alive forms of knowledge and relation that hierarchical systems try to erase. Clare does not offer a programme for reclaiming the commons. What he does is record, with great precision, what was lost when one set of relations was replaced by another that concentrated power more tightly in elite hands.

Where Clare and This Anarchism Meet

Both treat the concentration of power over the means of life as a central problem. Land is a survival node and a flourishing node. When access to it is monopolised, dependency deepens and subordination becomes harder to escape.

Both are alert to multiple modes of domination working together: defining rules, controlling mobility, naming, producing meaning, exploiting, and silencing local knowledge.

Both refuse the story that the new order is simply progress. Clare keeps showing the violence and the loss. An anarchism focused on hierarchy does the same when it asks who benefits, who is subordinated, and what forms of power have been accumulated.

And both value forms of life that do not require a permanent ruling position. The commons, in Clare’s memory, were imperfect, but they did not rest on the same sharp division between those who command the land and those who must ask permission to exist on it.

Limits of the Comparison

Clare is a poet of place and loss, not a theorist of organisation. He does not outline how to build federated structures or how to displace dependencies in a systematic way. His strength is diagnostic and affective. He makes the experience of dispossession impossible to ignore. The practical work of creating freer relations to land and resources remains a task for the present.

His focus is also intensely local. That locality is a source of power in the writing, but it means the wider interplay of hierarchies (colonial, racial, gendered) is less developed in his work than in a full anarchist analysis.

Why Clare Still Matters

John Clare shows what it looks like when a hierarchical system rewrites the rules of access to the means of life and then calls the result improvement. He tracks the modes of domination as they settle onto a landscape and into people’s daily movements. He keeps the memory of a different relation alive. For anyone trying to understand how power concentrates, how consent is manufactured around “progress,” and how subordination is made to feel inevitable, his poetry remains a necessary record.

Reading suggestion: Read “The Mores,” “Remembrances,” and “The Lament of Swordy Well” side by side. Ask of each: which forms of power are being accumulated, which modes of domination are most visible, and what older relations is Clare trying to keep in view?

Possible Discussion Questions

1. In “The Mores,” how does Clare present the change from open common to enclosed land as a change in social relations rather than just a change in scenery?
2. Which modes of domination are most clearly at work in the stopping of paths and the appearance of “no road here” signs?
3. How does “The Lament of Swordy Well” challenge the usual hierarchy of who gets to speak and who is only spoken about?
4. In what ways does the story of “improvement” function as an exercise of epistemic authority over local knowledge?
5. What does Clare’s attachment to the old names and places offer to an anarchist attempt to question the legitimacy of new property relations?

How does John Clare’s poetry relate to an anarchist critique of hierarchy?

Clare records the enclosure of common land as the installation of new elite and subordinate positions. Landowners accumulated legal and economic power; commoners lost customary access. His poems track multiple modes of domination (defining rules, controlling mobility, naming, silencing local knowledge) that accompanied the process.

What does Clare show about the commons?

He presents the commons as a landscape of customary access and open movement rather than as empty waste. The old relations did not concentrate the power to exclude in the same sharp way that private enclosure did.

Which modes of domination appear most clearly in Clare’s enclosure poems?

Defining rules and being defined by rules, controlling mobility, naming and being named, producing meaning (the story of improvement), exploiting, and the silencing of local knowledge are all strongly present.

How does Clare treat the idea of “improvement”?

He treats it as a story told by those who benefited from enclosure. The language of improvement claimed epistemic authority while erasing the value of the older commoning relations and the damage done to both people and places.

Is John Clare an anarchist?

He did not use the term or develop a political programme. What he did was produce one of the most precise poetic records of how the enclosure of common land redistributed power, restricted autonomy, and imposed new forms of subordination. That record remains valuable for any anarchism concerned with hierarchy, the commons, and the critique of domination.