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Allotments before 1870 in England According to the English allotment historian Jeremy Burchardt, the provision of allotments prior to 1873 in England was a response to events that were disrupting the order of landed society.1 Two major factors had an impact on the origins of the allotment movement: radical agrarianism and the practice of enclosures. Radical Agrarianism and Land Reform In the decade following the French Revolution, the demand for universal adult male suffrage as the main avenue to political agency challenged the aristocratic control of landownership that, within the British system, secured political power. A number of radical social thinkers connected landownership with advocacy for political representation. Among these thinkers, Thomas Spence incorporated within his social radicalism the biblical concept of the jubilee (Leviticus 25), whereby land is redistributed every fifty years to ensure an equitable share for all members of the community. Subsequent influential reformists include Robert Owen, whose community experiments on both sides of the Atlantic (from New Lanark to New Harmony) led him to advocate for an agrarian society where industry would remain subservient to land exploitation . Feargus O’Connor proposed the Chartist Land Plan, which would establish a fund from a subscription among working-class members to acquire land that would be redistributed as small holdings to subscribers. Also, the political journalist William Cobbett articulated for the urban working class an agrarian ideal that was, according to him, compromised by aristocratic land control.2 Despite the failure of the Chartist Land Plan and O’Connor’s land acquisition and redistribution scheme in 1847, a continued commitment to agrarian ideas and to Spencean, Owenite, and Chartist ideals would gradually achieve land reforms by implementation of three types of activities on a smaller scale.3 First, freehold land societies were created to provide their members with land in order to build a house, often with a garden or small holding.4 The 1832 Representation of the People Act, commonly referred to as the Reform Act (2 & 3 2 Allotments in England The Working Man’s Green Space 22 Will. 4, c. 45), also enabled those purchasing land through freehold land societies to acquire the right to vote, thereby eroding aristocratic landholding privileges. Freehold land societies became more focused on financial profit, turning into building societies catering to the lower middle class and the upper echelons of the working class. Second, the Land and Labour League was formed in 1869 by socialists and former Chartists in the context of the 1860s trade depression and the political activity preceding the Second Reform Act (1867, Representation of the People Act, 30 & 31 Vict., c. 102). The league’s program included land nationalization and provision of small holdings, but it failed due to poor organization and an upward trend in the economy. And third, a parallel middle-class movement of the 1850s–60s, related to the anticorn agitation of the 1840s, sought to reform the tax structure and undermine the aristocracy by purchasing freeholds and their attached votes, shifting voting power to the middle class. After repeal of the Corn Laws (1849), some AntiCorn Law League supporters, along with others influenced by John Stuart Mill, joined the Land Tenure Reform Association, founded by Mill to voice calls for land-law reform. Land reform thus encompassed a complex set of movements and allegiances that pitted the landed aristocracy and its rural concerns against reformers advocating for the lower classes and for the middle class, with its rising urban- and industry-based financial power. Enclosures Enclosure of common land, sanctioned by Parliament, had deprived the working class of access to and use of the “waste” lands that had provided a means of modest subsistence for centuries, and it had increased the resources of the landowning class. The topic of enclosure of the commons has a long history. As of 1235 the Statute of Merton (specifically chapter 4) included clauses that provided legal sanction for enclosing common land. “Commons” or “common waste” refers to land that was not exploited for agriculture as fields or meadows . Although it could provide shelter and a means of subsistence to local residents , such land did have an owner. The right of use or “common” was available to local commoners, but not to the general public.5 Restriction of land access for the poor occurred in rural and urban areas, but it is primarily the exclusion from agrarian use that is connected to the development of allotments. Jeremy Burchardt attributes a more aggressive assertion of property rights at the expense of...

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