An econometric examination of the English parliamentary enclosure movement

EXPLORATIONS

IN ECONOMIC

HISTORY

15,221-228

(1978)

An Econometric Examination Parliamentary Enclosure

of the English Movement

PETER D. LINNEMAN* The University of Chicago

INTRODUCTION Many students of economic history have attempted to analyze the causes and consequences of the English enclosure movement. Unfortunately, due to a scarcity of appropriate data, these analysts have generally been unable to test their hypotheses. This paper reports the results of applying econometric analysis to the period of Parliamentary enclosure for a sample of English villages. DATA’ The data used in this paper consists of 79 English villages which were enclosed from 1761 to 1851, i.e., during the period of Parliamentary enclosure.2 These villages are located in the 24 English counties in which the open field system was most prominent. No villages from either Wales or Scotland are included in the sample. A random sample of 276 English villages was obtained from Roger Schofield which reported the village’s: (1) number of marriages between 1754 and 1779; (2) percentage of males who could sign their name on the marriage register; (3) percentage of females who could sign their name on the marriage register; and, (4) status as a market town in 1700 as defined in John Adams’, Index villuris (1700). A search was made through the various published county handlists of enclosure to match these villages with their dates of enclosure. This search yielded enclosure dates *I acknowledge the advice and assistance of Donald McCloskey, Joseph Reid, three anonymous referees and members of the Agricultural Economics and Economic History Workshops at the University of Chicago. A special thanks is due to Roger Schofield for his assistance in putting together the data used in this paper. My wife, Kathleen, was also most helpful in developing the data set. All errors are, of course, my own. Send reprint requests to the author, University of Chicago, S-32 Haskell Hall, Chicago, IL 60637. ’ This data set is available upon request from the author. * Unfortunately the available data required that the analysis be limited to enclosures during this period. Hence the results obtained for this sample are perhaps subject to sample selectivity bias. 221

0014-4983/78/0152-0221$02.0010 Copytip Q 1978 by Academic Press, Inc. All rightsof reproductionin my form reserved.

222

PETER

D. LINNEMAN

for 97 of the 276 villages.3 These “surviving” 97 villages were then matched with the 1801 Abstract of Answers and Returns to obtain information on the village’s population; percent mainly employed in agriculture; and, percent mainly employed in trades. The information set for this set of villages also includes several pieces of climatological information for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (the earliest long period for which published data was available) using the Climatological Atlas of the British Isles. These climatological variables are defined in the Appendix. The final piece of information contained in the data set is a set of regional dummy variables. These regional dummies take the value of one if the village is in the relevant set of counties and zero otherwise: Southeastern: Sussex, Hampshire, and Berkshire; South Midland: Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire; Eastern: Norfolk and Suffolk; Southwestern: Wiltshire, Dorset, and Somerset; West Midland: Glouchestershire, Herfordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire; North Midland: Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire; and Yorkshire is the base region.

and

In all, full data is available for 79 villages enclosed between 1760 and 1851. Attempts to incorporate information on: (1) shipping costs from the village to London and several other sites; (2) agricultural factor and product prices in the village; (3) the soil composition in the village; (4) the probability of flooding of village fields, (5) the concentration of ownership of village’s fields, and (6) the village’s access to an enclosed village, were all deemed (given the author’s resources) to be prohibitively expensive. EMPIRICAL

RESULTS

The main hypothesis of interest in this research is whether more educated villages enclosed relatively early.4 The reasoning behind this hypoths There are four apparent reasons why no enclosure dates were found for the remaining 179 villages. First, there were no published enclosure handlist for many counties. A second reason is that some of the villages either disappeared or changed their name. Third, the village may never have had an open field system and hence no enclosure was ever necessary. The final reason is that the enclosure records prior to Parlimentary enclosures are extremely scarce (at least in published sources). Hence even though the village may have enclosed, no enclosure date could be discovered as it occurred prior to the dates recorded in the handlists. In fact, in the cases of only four villages (of the original 276) were the matched enclosure dates prior to 1761. * See Schultz (1975) and Welch (1970) for a more complete statement of this hypothesis.

PARLIAMENTARY

ENCLOSURE

MOVEMENT

223

esis is that more educated people adapted more quickly to the various technological advances which provided the incentives for enclosure. The village education level was proxied by the percentage of males who could sign their name on the marriage register, LIT.5 The use of literacy as a measure of education in this context is not meant to suggest that the primary source of information dissemination (with respect to enclosure) was written (although an extensive pamphlet literature did exist). Rather, the notion is that a person who had invested in obtaining these skills will in all likelihood also invest relatively more in obtaining other relevant skills, i.e., he will be an enlightened man. Further, the fact that not all village members voted in enclosure proceedings (or had equal vote weights) does not mitigate against this proxy. This is because even if all well educated people could not vote they would be able to advise their less educated (but voting) villagers with respect to the advantages of enclosure (much as Congress is advised by nonvoting economists!). Also it is likely that the distribution of education within villages was relatively stable with the main difference across villages being variation of the mean education achievement. In both instances the village literacy rate will capture the hypothesized effect. The other variables included in the enclosure regressions (imperfectly) attempt to hold constant the various determinants of the costs and benefits of enclosure. Specifically the four measures of weather variance are attempts to measure the benefits of the open field system due to risk diversification and are expected to be negatively related with the rate of adjustment to enclosure (see, e.g., McCloskey, 1975). Village population is included to capture the costs of obtaining the required voting concensus on enclosure and possible scope economies, while the regional dummies are a crude attempt to hold constant region specific advantages such as access to markets and soil type. As is always the case in applied economics, the analysis is potentially plagued by omitted variables to the extent that the omitted variables are correlated with the included variables. Given the current state of the data one can do nothing more about this potential source of bias other than encourage tests of the robustness of the results. ‘In order to make the empirical results easier to interpret with respect to the hypothesis that educated villages adjusted more quickly to the enclosure system the dependent variable was defined as an index reflecting the village’s speed of adjustment. Specifically the dependent variable was found to perform best when it was defined as the natural log of A = (Date of enclosure - 1760)-l where in this data A has a maximum

5 Schofield (1968, 1973) has argued that for this time period this literacy rate is, in fact, the best indicator of village educational achievement.

224

PETER D. LINNEMAN TABLE

1

Summary Statistics Variable

MSTE%ll

A ENC TOWN N GALE RANG RNSD DNS LIT SEC SMC EC swc WMC NMC

.05936 1798.6 .07594 304.43 .3924 I 1.5316 2.1772 1.0380 .53241 0.7595 .21519 .I1392 .OLXt61 .I6456 .22785

TOWN LIT TOWN N GALE RANG RNSD DNS

.17

N .29 .59

GALE -.Ol 39 -.09

RANG -.12 -39 .oo -64

RNSD .16 - .05 -.08 -.49 .35

SD .12582 20.289 .26492 361.58 36404 1.0772 1.2197 .7a665 .13238 2.6492 .41095 .31772 .2S418 .37078 .41944

DNS

SEC

ML

EC

SWC

.05 .20 .I1 .05 -.I8 .Ol

-.13 a9 .05 -.I5 .Ol .06 -.29

-.09 -.16 .03 -.32 .M .16 -.32

-A6 34 -36 .21 -.19 -.41 -.29

-.08 -.09 -.I1 39 -.05 .05 -.I7

WMC .03 .08 -.Ol -.13 .04 .40 .06

NMC .24 - .05 .06 .@I -.09 -.03 .43

value of 1, minimum value of .OOl, and a mean value of .059.g The summary statistics for the other variables are provided in Table 1. Table 2 reports the results for two alternative specifications (the independent variables are defined in the Appendix) of the rate of adjustment index function. The most notable result is that the effect of literacy on enclosure adjustment is positive, as was hypothesized. Further the estimated coefficient is quite robust between specifications and is nearly twice as large as its standard error for both specifications. Using the specification shown in column one, at the mean, the estimated literacy effect implies that a 5 percentage point increase in village literacy leads to a .005 increase in the adjustment to enclosure or, equivalently, a 3.4 years earlier date of enclosure. Thus, the evidence seems consistent with the hypothesis that more educated entrepreneurs were able to assimilate the changes in market information relatively quickly and hence found enclosure profitable at relatively early dates. Concentrating on the results of column one, we also see that the Census defined regional dummies add little explanatory power to our regress It is easily shown that for this specification that the change in the date of enclosure with respect to the linear independent variables is -b(E - 1760) where b is the estimated regression coefficient and E is the date of enclosure.

PARLIAMENTARY

ENCLOSURE TABLE

Rate of Enclosure

225

MOVEMENT

2

Adjustment

Equations

In A (1)

In A

LIT

1.77 (1.9)

1.72 (1.9)

N

.007 (7.8) -.44

(2)

.29 x lo-’ (0.1)

x 10” (0.7)

TOWN

-.54 (1.3) .35

-.54 (1.4) .u

GALE

(1.8)

(3.2)

RANG

.21 (1.7)

.21

(2.1)

RNSD

.24 (2.4)

.12 (1.5)

.39 DNS

(2.2)

.41 (3.4)

-.29 (0.4) -.21 (0.4) EC

.15 (0.3)

swc

-.25 (0.5)

WMC

(1.2)

NMC

-.21 (0.5)

-.61

-5.61

(7.2)

Constant

.4051

RZ

3.11

F a Absolute

t values

-5.44 (12.4) .3479 5.412

in parenthesis.

sion with the exception that the West Midland counties on average adjusted more slowly than all other regions of England. The results also indicate that larger villages tended to adjust more quickly to enclosure but that this effect reverses at very large village sizes. Specifically, up to a village size of 794 males the effect on adjust-

226

PETER

D. LINNEMAN

ment to enclosure is positive, i.e., the effect is positive for around 75% of our sample. At the mean, the effect of a 10 male increase in village size is a 2.7 year earlier enclosure. This positive result is consistent with Mansfield’s (1963) contention that larger enterprises find it more profitable to adopt new techniques for reasons associated with the scope of operation as well as because the relative risk associated with the introduction of a new technique is smaller for larger enterprises. On the other hand, the diminishing positive effect on enclosure adjustment (eventually even reversing the sign) is consistent with the costs of achieving the necessary concensus for the Parliamentary enclosure increasing with village size due to increasing the probability of encountering “hold-outs.” The results for our sample indicate that the profitability of enclosure was smaller for market towns as they adjusted relatively slowly to enclosure. This is consistent with the hypothesis that market towns had a comparative advantage in nonagricultural matters (this is why they were market towns) and hence had relatively little interest in the various agricultural improvements which made enclosure attractive. Finally, the regression results suggest, contrary to the McCloskey (1975) hypothesis, that villages which expected to experience relatively large variations in weather adjusted relatively rapidly to enclosure. Further, in all four cases the estimates are quite precise (1.7 is the smallest r value). This suggests that the profitability of enclosure was relatively high in such villages, which in turn led them to enclose at relatively early dates. Hopefully future research will be able to specify the source of this increased profitability of enclosure. In conclusion, it is worth noting that the explanatory power of the regression (R2 = .4) is quite high for a cross-section. Further, theoretically consistent explanations can be provided for the results. This data set, although not perfect, represents a potential starting point for subjecting the various models of enclosure to rigorous testing. As the data set is expanded (both in terms of villages and variables), students of enclosure should be able to develop testable hypotheses. This development will represent a dramatic step forward in understanding enclosure and it is the author’s hope that he has taken the initial (though small) step in this learning process. APPENDIX

The regional dummy variables are defined as follows: Southeaslern counties (SEC): Sussex, Hampshire, and Berkshire; South Midland counties (SMC): Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Cambridgeshire; Eastern counties (EC): Norfolk and Suffolk; Southwestern counties (SWC): Wiltshire, Dorset, and Somerset; West Midland counties (W&K’): Glou-

PARLIAMENTARY

ENCLOSURE

227

MOVEMENT

cestershire, Herefordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire; North Midland counties (NAC): Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Derbyshire; Yorkshire is the base region. The climatological risk variables are defined as:

L 0 if the wind from 1 if >2 2 if >5

GALE = (number of gale days)

annual average number of days when speed was at least 39 miles per hour 1918 to 1937 was 12 days. days but 15 days. days.

RANG = (annual monthly temperature range)

0 if warmest average monthly temperature minus coldest averages monthly temperature from 1901 to 1930 was 112°F. 1 if ~12°F but 513°F. 2 if >13”F but 114°F. L 3 if >14”F.

RNSD = (annual deviation in rainfall)

0 if the average annual deviation in rainfall from 1881 to 1916 is 512 inches. 1 if >I2 inches but 113 inches. 2 if ~13 inches but 514 inches. 3 if >14 inches but 515 inches. ~ 4 if ~15 inches. if the annual average number of days with no bright sunlight from 1913 to 1932 is 170

DNL = (days without bright sunlight)

if >70 days but 580 days.

Other climatological variable definitions (not used here) are available upon request. Other variables definitions are: LIT = percentage of males who signed their name on the marriage register; TOWN = 1 if market town, 0 otherwise; N = (male population); iV2 = (male population)2; A = (date of enclosure - 1760)-l = rate of enclosure adjustment. REFERENCES ofthe Answers and Returns (1801), Great Britain Census Office, Vol. 1-2. Great Britain Meteorological Office (1952), Climatologicnl Atlas of the British Isles, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. Griliches, Z. (1957), “Hybrid Corn: An Exploration in the Economics of Technical Change,”

Abstract

Econometrica,

25, 4.

Huffman, Wallace (1974), “Decision Making: The Role of Education,” of Agricultural Economics, 56, February.

American

Journal

PETER D. LINNEMAN

228

McCloskey,

Donald N. (1975). “The Economics of Enclosure: A Market Analysis,” in Issues in European Agrarian History, Eric Jones and William Parker (Eds.). (a) McCloskey, Donald N. (1975). “The Persistence of English Common Fields,” in Economic Issues in European Agrarian History, Eric Jones and William Parker (Eds.). (b) Mansfield, Edwin (1%3), “Size of Firm, Market Structure, and Innovation,” J.P.E., 71, 6, December. Rosen, Sherwin (1972), “Learning by Experience as Joint Production,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, August. Schofield, Roger (1973), “Dimensions of Illiteracy, 1750- 1850, Explorations in Economic Economic

History.

Schofield, Roger (1%8), “The Measurement of Literacy in Pre-industrial England,” in Literacy in Traditional Societies, J. Goody (Ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schultz, Theodore W. (1975), “The Value of the Ability to Deal with Disequilibria,” Journal of Economic Literature, 13(3), September. Welch, Finis (1970), “Education in Production,” Journal of Political Economy, 78, 1, January/February.