Sir – I was interested in the idiosyncratic logic of your columnist Maggie Hartford when she claims in your Oxfordshire Limited Edition April 2014 supplement that the landowners enclosed the commons because they “wanted its inhabitants weaned off the ‘dependency culture’ encouraged by their common-law rights....”


Might I suggest that it was those very rights which had sustained the commoners economically, socially and culturally for centuries. And it was the loss of the commons that resulted in the destitution that followed. When European societies such as Denmark and Sweden began to modernise their agriculture, it was not by amassing ownership in a few elite landowners’ hands, as in Britain.


Instead, those societies guaranteed independent, small farmers continued ownership of the land and provided them with education, as well as technical, scientific and other support.


A visitor to New Zealand, in 1867, commented on the striking appearance of the working class immigrants in the colony: independent-minded, healthy, well-fed, decently-clothed and with upright gait.

They compared so positively, she thought, with, “the half-starved, depressed appearance, and too often cringing servility of the mass of our English population”.


It was largely the loss of the commons, and ensuing landlessness, which brought about that degree of deference among the dispossessed English farm labourers.


I’m afraid that one per cent history — consuming preoccupation with the doings of the small minority, the allegedly “great and good” — can blind us to rather obvious actualities.
Warwick Armstrong, Oxford