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

Table of Contents Cite This Article × Cite This Article Choose a citation style and copy the reference. MLA 9 APA 7 Chicago Copy Citation 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). Commone…