Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s

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SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 51, Number 1,Winter 2011, pp. 135-157 (Article)

P bl h d b Th J hn H p n n v r t PrDOI: 10.1353/sel.2011.0003

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Katherine Bootle Attie 135SEL 51, 1 (Winter 2011): 135–157ISSN 0039-3657

135

Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s

KATHERINE BOOTLE ATTIE

For English landowners in the seventeenth century, the en-closure of common-use pastures, farms, and fields made good economic sense, as land was simply worth more enclosed than unenclosed. Once a property was hedged or fenced, it commanded higher rent, facilitated the selective breeding of livestock, enabled the quality of the land to be improved by such techniques as float-ing meadows and draining fens, and yielded increased profits from more intensive, flexible, and efficient arable farming.1 Enclosure and the agricultural improvements that enclosure made possible were not universally welcomed however: in the eyes of the rest of the agrarian population, enclosing landlords were seen as acting in no one’s interest but their own. The main victims of enclosure were the poor subsistence farmers whose survival was tied to the scattered strips of land they cultivated on the commons. As a result of enclosure, which eliminated common property rights and access to waste ground, entire villages were depopulated. Railing against enclosing landlords in a sermon delivered at Lut-terworth and published in 1653, Leicestershire minister John Moore complained that they “care not how many Beggers they make, so themselves may be Gentlemen; nor how many poor they make, so themselves may be rich. I mean the unsociable, covetous, cruel broode of those wretches, that by their Inclosure do unpeople Towns, and uncorn fields.”2 Thus attacked from the pulpit, pri-vate enclosure had to be defended on both social and spiritual grounds: the promoters of improvement sought to establish that the movement served the common good and the nation as a whole, and they tried to show that the private landowner, by improv-ing his soil, was also improving his soul. Drawing from selected

Katherine Bootle Attie is a lecturer in literature at American University in Washington, D.C.

136 Enclosure Polemics

husbandry tracts of the 1650s, this essay identifies a distinctive rhetorical strategy designed to persuade readers of the virtues of agricultural improvement in general and enclosure in particular: the representation of enclosed waste grounds and commons as idealized gardens.

In the case of one such publication, Ralph Austen’s influen-tial and popular A Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653), this rhetorical strategy is given pictorial form in the title page emblem.3 Beneath the clasped hands of Profits and Pleasures is a walled, square garden with imposing gates in which formal rows of fruit trees surround an embroidered central parterre. Although the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen strolling along its dividing paths suggest aristocratic leisure rather than georgic labor, their idle enjoyment of the fruit garden is balanced by the foregrounded gardener with his hoe and by the gardening tools adorning the outer corners of the frame. The garden square is encircled by the following words from Song of Solomon 4:12–3: “A Garden inclosed is my sister my Spouse: Thy Plants are an Orchard of Pomegranats, with pleasant fruits.” Since ornamental gardening is normally considered “one of the arts of peace”—or, as Andrew Marvell’s speaker puts it in “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” most likely written in 1650, “the inglorious arts of peace”—it is common to think of the enclosed garden as an idyllic sanctuary or retreat from the political domain, a world apart from the trials of public life, war especially.4 It is only when Oliver Cromwell emerges “from his private gardens” (pp. 114–7, 115, line 29) that he assumes his destined place at the head of the Parliamentary forces. Exploring the reverse trajectory in “Upon Appleton House,” Marvell depicts Commander in Chief Thomas Fairfax, who retired from his post in opposition to the Scottish invasion, retreating to his private gardens at Nun Appleton, where “[h]is warlike studies” (pp. 117–37, 125, line 284) now apply to nothing more significant than his orderly ranks of flowers play-fully laid out “[i]n the just figure of a fort” (p. 125, line 286). In both poems, as in Marvell’s “The Garden,” the boundaries of the hortus conclusus are defined in part by what they supposedly exclude: the political landscape. And yet during the seventeenth century, the archetypal garden was often politicized in various ways, as “Eden became a war-scarred battleground” fought over by monarchists and republicans.5 While Robert Filmer traced the divine origin of royal prerogative back to Adam’s patriarchal authority in paradise, antimonarchical sects such as the Level-lers traced the divine origin of individual rights and natural law back to Adam’s perfect liberty in paradise.6

Katherine Bootle Attie 137

The sociopolitical usefulness and adaptability of the first garden—or for that matter of any garden serving as a type of the Edenic archetype—was not lost on the agricultural reformers. Eden, Gethsemane, and the Bible’s many horticultural metaphors attest to the garden’s status as a spiritually privileged space; in their writings, enclosure advocates use that privilege to their best advantage. Austen’s Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653) was highly val-ued by contemporaries for its practical advice on arboriculture. Emphasizing the previously neglected techniques of grafting, propagation, and pruning, it offered “the most systematic and detailed treatment of this subject yet published in England.”7 But the Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653) should not be divorced from its devotional counterpart, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), which was published as part of the treatise and which clearly dem-onstrates Austen’s commitment to promoting simultaneously the material and spiritual profits of good husbandry. The title of the devotional section also suggests the importance of the improver’s rhetorical equation of orchards and gardens, a strategy designed to change the public perception of the profitable enclosure from a space of selfish ambition into one of paradisal recovery.

Enclosure advocates were not the only ones who used the garden’s biblical roots and mythic sanctity as means to political ends. One of the period’s fiercest opponents of enclosure, radi-cal Puritan Gerrard Winstanley, also relies on the image of the idealized garden, but he redesigns and resituates it as a para-dise within. In this regard, his prose anticipates Paradise Lost. While scholars of seventeenth-century political thought have put Winstanley and Milton together before, no one to my knowledge has focused on how they both represent the cultivation of the garden within as the preferable alternative to literal enclosure.8 My purpose in this essay is to explain how the garden topos was thus appropriated by polemicists on both sides of the enclosure debate, and how the image of the garden itself was dramatically modified as a result. In the close readings to follow, I focus on a selection of pro-enclosure writings that, by associating enclosures with gardens, emphasize the moral and spiritual significance of agricultural improvement along with its economic and political benefits. I then turn to Winstanley and Milton, both of whom separate allegorical, mystical gardens from actual, earthly ones; in so doing, they surprisingly make garden imagery part of an anti-enclosure stance designed to privilege the paradise within over any imaginable earthly garden. By adapting the garden topos to encompass the violence of civil war, the fervent effort of agrarian improvement, and the zealous work of spiritual self-cultivation,


English writers at midcentury create their own georgic vision of paradise.

While England’s enclosure controversy was of course not new in the 1650s, it gathered considerable steam during this decade of cultivation born of conflict. The Civil War had destroyed farms, fields, orchards, and gardens, yet the overburdened farming community was expected to have food supplies available at a moment’s notice for the itinerant soldiers and their horses. Inflict-ing financial losses on landowners of both parties, the war made agricultural improvement an issue of higher national priority than ever before. Food supplies were insufficient for the growing population, the ranks of the poor were swelling, and a series of bad harvests from 1646 to 1651 added to the sense of urgency.9 These factors, along with the lifting of censorship under the Com-monwealth, give a sense of why the publication of husbandry tracts burgeoned at midcentury. Despite their differences of opinion about such technical matters as planting, fertilizing, and grafting, the improvers consistently employ the same rhetorical strategy: they revise Adam’s curse of agricultural labor into an opportunity to recover in England at least part of what mankind lost in the Garden of Eden.

West Midlands clergyman John Beale voices the prevailing sentiment when he envisions England reaching a state of paradisal productivity through a perfect marriage between the gifts of nature and the arts of husbandry. When each county plants wisely with respect to its own particular soil and climate, and when every tree and shrub across the land is thus made to yield something use-ful, “[t]hen will all Passengers confesse and admire [England], as a Land of Blessings, in which the Original Curse is Reversed, To whom God hath given the wisdom to Dresse the wildernes into a Paradyse.”10 Beale’s rhetoric is typical of the early modern period in that change and ingenuity are represented in terms of rever-sal, restoration, and recovery. A revolution is made to seem less frightening and destabilizing (in theory at least) when it is taken to mean a conservative return to origins, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, or a cyclical movement back to an uncorrupted past. This rationale worked particularly well for those who advocated a revolution in husbandry as a means of restoring the lost terrestrial paradise in England. Adam’s ubiquitous presence in the discourse of improvement was also intended to overcome the entrenched upper-class prejudice against work and to replace it with a differ-ent ethos: that of the honorable “gentleman farmer” who remains an active presence on his property, imagines his land as a garden,


and cultivates it as Adam, in keeping with God’s commandment, cultivated his.11 In the expanded 1657 edition of The Spirituall Use of an Orchard, Austen accordingly asserts that gardening must be an employment “fit for the best men,” as it was “the worke of the first man, even in his perfect state, and that appointed by God himselfe, as befitting such a condition … Men may honour God, greatly profit themselves, the Church, and Commonwealth by their studies and labors in a Garden of Fruit-trees.”12

For the Englishman’s redemptive reconnection with the first garden and the first gardener to take place, however, the idea of the garden itself had to be rhetorically dissociated from the vestiges of royal power and feudal oppression—those selfishly cultivated spaces belonging to the monastic cloister, the Italian villa, the French château, and the Stuart palace. Commonwealth writers sought to cleanse enclosure of the rank corruption invoked in “The Mower Against Gardens” by Marvell’s peevish mower in his indictment of “Luxurious Man” (pp. 107–8, 107, line 1):

He first enclosed within the garden’s squareA dead and standing pool of air: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .’Tis all enforced; the fountain and the grot;While the sweet fields do lie forgot.

(pp. 107–8, lines 5–32)

Playfully ironic though this poem may be, it still calls to mind the licentiousness and vice allegedly represented by the royal pleasure garden offensive to Puritan sensibilities. For the horticultural writer bent on spiritual reform, such suggestions of wasteful extravagance had to be rooted out of the garden and replaced by something chaste and useful to society.

In A Commentary, Literal or Historical, and Mystical or Spiritual on the Whole Book of Canticles (1652), Separatist minister Natha-nael Homes accordingly defines “Garden” in a strikingly plain and practical way: “Garden in our English imports a place taken and separated from the open field; and guarded, viz. with a fence about it … signifying to defend. And the word enclosed in the general notion imports the same thing.”13 This definition highlights not form but function, not a standard of aesthetics but the purpose of separating and guarding. In Homes’s reading, garden and or-chard (“Hortyard”) become synonymous as the two spaces literally merge into one: “our common practise is to make our Hortyard to joyn to our Garden, with little or no fence between. Yea, in our


heroick and stately gardens we use to have fruit-trees under their walls round about; as also to plant trees of rare qualities, and choice berries, blossoms, and branches at all the corners of every quarter. So that Garden and Hortyard imply the same thing, as to separation and guarding, out of favour.”14 Granted, Homes is not writing about the politics of the enclosure movement per se; the term “enclosed” appears in his work because he is exploring the etymological implications of the Canticlean master trope, “the true Church is the Spiritual Hortyard, Garden, and Paradise of God.”15 Nevertheless, his exegesis clearly equates enclosed land with spiritual privilege and divine election in a way that proved ideologically and rhetorically essential to seventeenth-century enclosure advocates. As garden, orchard, and paradise become virtually interchangeable terms whose only requirement is the pure and simple fact of enclosure, the socially elite and morally corrupt space of the ornamental pleasure garden is effectively lev-eled. In its original Persian sense, the word “paradise” meant an enclosed royal park, but in promoting private enclosure as being for the common good, seventeenth-century reformers adapted the notion of paradise to a new republican ideal.16 No longer conceived as a display of the king’s power, wealth, and aesthetic preferences, the ideal garden is rhetorically remade into a georgic space where flowers yield to fruits, where pleasures become profits, and where private wealth improves the Commonwealth.

Austen’s readership evidently appreciated the sustained at-tention he gave to horticultural theology, as Charles Webster’s account suggests: “The first edition of A Treatise of Fruit Trees with the Spiritual Use of An Orchard (1653) devoted 97 pages to the former and 41 pages to the latter subject, whereas in the second edition (1657) both sections were expanded, to 140 and 208 pages respectively. Thus despite the effectiveness and popularity of the practical part, the theological section came to preponderate.”17 We can infer from this that many Protestants viewed horticultural improvement not simply as analogous to but as a necessary com-ponent of spiritual growth. In Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653 and 1657), Austen accordingly represents the improvement of the garden within as a blessed consequence of improving private land. Reveling in how man’s cultivation of an enclosure has a metaphysically perfect complement in God’s cultivation of man, he matches each natural principle of effective horticulture with a biblical truth via Baconian similitude, thereby establishing a point-by-point correspondence between the actual experience of the earthly husbandman and the mystical teachings of “God the


Great Husbandman of his Vineyard the Church.”18 Represent-ing horticultural improvement as the duty and responsibility of the faithful, Austen advises that “every private Christian (in his spheare and compasse) is bound to improve his Talent for most advantage of the Kingdome of Christ”—for the Christian husband-man, that “spheare and compasse” is precisely his own enclosed garden of fruit trees, and he serves God as well as country by improving that garden.19

Moving gracefully between literal and metaphorical senses, Austen applies the same rhetoric of improvement across the gar-den of fruit trees, the garden of the soul, and the garden of the church. The language of engrafting is especially important for him in this regard. In Marvell’s “The Mower against Gardens,” grafting is one of the most notorious ways for “[l]uxurious Man to bring his vice in use” (p. 107, line 1). Indeed, the innovative horticulturalist who “dealt between the bark and tree” (p. 107, line 21) is figured as a pander, soliciting “[f]orbidden mixtures” (p. 107, line 22) that produce bastard offspring:

No plant now knew the stock from which it came;He grafts upon the wild the tame:That the uncertain and adult’rate fruitMight put the palate in dispute.

(p. 107, lines 23–6)

Giving grafting a moral makeover, Austen describes it in terms suggestive not of prostitution or adultery but of marriage: “The Graft and Stock of the Fruit-tree, are so joyned together, as that they are the one within the other, and so made one intire body … This Similitude shadowes out unto us. That Beleevers by ingrafting into Christ, doe live in him, & he in them, and are thereby made one with him.”20 Austen even describes The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653) as itself the product of grafting his observations and practical experiences concerning fruit trees onto Christian theology and scripture; from the “many Naturall Fruit-trees” he himself has planted “for the good of the Common wealth,” he has “taken some Spirituall Cyences, or Grafts,” which he now spreads abroad in this work published “for the good of the Church of God.”21 He promises that if men will accept these principles of divine husbandry, “and be willing to engraft them in their owne Gardens, (their hearts and minds) by the Husbandmans watring of them by his Spirit, they will grow, and blossome, and beare much good fruit, here and for ever.”22 If Christians want to have


the best of both worlds, then, they should practice the art of grafting in both the literal and metaphorical senses. They should absorb the arboricultural advice in Austen’s treatise along with his religious analogies, for then they are assured of gaining material and spiritual profits simultaneously, of reaping rewards in this life and in the next.

As the garden is defined and privileged by its apartness from the wilderness outside it, so is the Christian defined and privileged by his apartness from the tumultuous, ungodly society around him. Like Homes in his commentary upon the Canticles, Austen presents this separateness as a sign of divine favor, love, and protection: “Such as walke closely with god, live in another spheare, in a higher Orb, then the common world, though they live with them: And notwithstanding there be Commotions, and stirs, and turning of the world upside downe, yet in the spirits of these, all is calme, and quiet, their hearts are fixed and unmoved … trusting in the Lord.”23 Despite this favored apartness however, all is not necessarily calm and quiet in the garden within, which is perforce a georgic garden—a site of constant, relentless labor because trial and temptation are unavoidable aspects of the godly life. Within each Christian, Austen avers, “there are two Natures the one contrary to the other, the Spirit, and the flesh, the new man, and the old man, the Divine Nature, and Corrupt Nature: these two Natures abide in us, and act in us, soe long as we live … and they strive one against the other.”24 This perpetual state of inner conflict also plays out within the community of faith. Following the standard interpretation of Song of Solomon—“The Church of God is called a Garden, a garden compassed, and fenced”—Austen might seem to be depicting the church as a peaceful, inviting en-clave in the midst of a hostile wilderness.25 But such a depiction does not accurately reflect religious life during this period, since the ecclesiastical enclosure was in fact fraught with conflict.

As a “radical puritan, rejoicing in the overthrow of the Anglican establishment,” Austen expertly nurtures the analogies between his practical gardening experience and his revolutionary religious views.26 He adapts the motif of the divine gardener to accommodate the bitter disagreements and controversies that raged within and among different congregations: just as the husbandman in fall and winter aggressively prunes, digs, and transplants his trees, making “the Garden lye rough, & unhandsomely” so that it may flourish all the more beautifully in spring and summer, so too does God seasonally effect “overturnings, and great alterations … both in Church and State.”27 Austen’s horticultural and georgic theol-


ogy helped reinforce the conviction that the Good Old Cause was indeed God’s cause. Amid the battles of mid-seventeenth-century England, many believed that the mystical husbandman himself had brought about this ecclesiastical and political winter of “Com-motions, troubles, and confusions” in order to prepare the ground for a millenarian spring of “settlement, peace, and glory.”28 At the same time, Austen uses the husbandry analogy to minimize the significance of disagreements over forms of Christian worship. “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholics and Protestants, Anglicans and sectarians endlessly debate whether priests ought to wear vestments, whether communicants should kneel when they receive communion, whether infant baptism is acceptable, whether prescribed prayers have merit.”29 Austen’s attitude to-ward such differences seems strikingly permissive; just as “[t]he husbandman does not much stand upon the outward forme of his Orchards and Gardens … he accompts it not necessary that they be all Uniforme; but so the inward forme be good,” so too may the churches of Christ “have divers formes, and waies of outward administrations, and every Church is to be left to its owne liberty therein.”30 Through the church-as-garden trope, Austen makes religious tolerance and ecclesiastical self-governance into natural aspects of the Christian life.

Besides promoting agricultural improvement in terms of Edenic recovery and spiritual cultivation, the English husbandry tracts of this period have something else in common: they follow in Virgil’s footsteps by promoting agrarian life in proudly nation-alistic terms. But the nationalism of the improvers is cultivated through what I take to be a uniquely English rhetorical innovation in which the strenuous experience of practical farming becomes dialectically associated with the peaceful abstraction of the en-closed garden.31 During the 1650s, the image of England as a fortified “Garden-state” became a prominent rhetorical means of promoting agricultural innovation and improvement explicitly in terms of what Anthony Low calls “the georgic activity of nation building.”32 Politicizing the idea of the garden came naturally to writers of this decade in part because the idea of England as a garden—“this other Eden, demi-Paradise”—was already familiar literary territory.33 However, in the husbandry tracts, England’s garden status is figured not as a given but as a goal whose achieve-ment depends upon inspiring affluent landowners to embrace ingenuity, take an active interest in their property, and put the poor to work in enclosing land and improving cultivation. In The English Improver (1649), Walter Blith reckons that “[w]ere Inge-


nuitie [in husbandry] the Fashion of the Times, This Kingdom would be the Paradice of the World.”34 Also equating the profits of husbandry with the pleasures of gardening, Austen opines that while some already think of England as “a very Garden of delights,” how much more delightful “would it be, did it abound with goodly Fruit-trees, and other Profits, where now are barren Wasts: Might it not then be called another Canaan, flowing with Milke and hony, of which it is recorded, that there were Fruit-trees in abundance.”35 In his treatise, Silvanus Taylor links commons to the cursed fields in which fallen Adam toiled, but which the English could now restore to blessed fruitfulness if they would only work for it: “What’s the matter with us in England, that we labor not to remove the curse, and reduce those large briary and thorny Commons (who offer themselves) if not into a Paradise, yet into pleasant Gardens, fruitful Orchards, goodly fields of Corn, feeding pastures for all sorts of Cattel, stately Woods, and pleasing Groves? All which, with reasonable labor, would be obtained.”36 Even if Taylor seems here to move away from the rhetoric of Eng-land as the new Eden, his vision of agricultural abundance and variety is no less paradisal: he is striving to shape the image of England as a distinctly georgic paradise.

In Herefordshire Orchards, A Pattern For all England (1657), Beale makes a similar effort to promote the Commonwealth’s re-gional diversity in idyllic terms. He asserts that Herefordshire is rightfully called “the Orchard of England” in part because of what hardworking landowners have consistently managed to achieve there: “From the greatest persons to the poorest cottager, all habi-tations are encompassed with Orchards and Gardens,” a boast that conveys this county’s collective defeat of idleness, its espousal of universal prosperity, and its enabling of an independent, self-sustaining poor.37 But in saying that Herefordshire should be a pattern for all England, Beale is not saying that the entire country could or should look exactly like Herefordshire topographically speaking; he is saying that every gentleman in every county should follow the Herefordshire model by carefully “setting forward such kind of husbandry, as best agrees with the nature of the soyl where he inhabiteth.”38 For the Commonwealth to reach its full potential as a georgic paradise, regional differences should be marked and distinguished as should private property. The husbandry tracts thus seek to establish that private interest and the public good are not antithetical but equivalent; Taylor’s succinct statement of purpose—“to shew how each [sort of common] may be improved to each particular mans interest, and so to the Commonwealth in


general”—applies just as well to the work of Blith, Austen, Beale, and other writers in the Hartlib circle.39 This agrarian capitalist ideal plays on the dual meaning of country as both land and na-tion: what improves the countryside improves the country; what is good for an English farm, field, orchard, or garden as private property is good for England as political body.

The self-reliant, industrious individuals who profit by enclo-sure, then, are the foundation of a self-reliant nation. Challenging the perception that gardening belongs merely to the inglorious arts of peace, Austen makes good husbandry seem not only patriotic but also heroic for fostering this national self-reliance, which is an inexhaustible source of strength when the country is threatened: “The more obstructions we have from Forraine parts, the more need we have to labour diligently for all necessary, and usefull things, within our own Nation, that we may be able to subsist without the help of others: so that this work of Planting Fruit-trees, for improvement of Lands, is fit to be carried on as well, (if not much rather) in these times of Warre, as in times of Peace.”40 Bolstering not only England’s self-sufficiency but also its trade relations with friendly nations, the paradisal variety and abundance produced by the different kinds of enclosure across the land would provide a wide range of materials for export: “all sorts of Corne, Fruits of Trees, Timber, Fuell, Hempe, Flaxe, and many other Profits, might be multiplied … and the overplus to transport to other parts, for the enriching & strengthning of this Nation, still more and more; in stead of sending out our Monies and Commodities for supplies from them.”41 As profits and pleasures go hand in hand in Austen’s discourse, so then do economic power and military power; once able to support itself and to supply its allies with necessities, England will “be a terror to all those that contend with us.”42 Taylor emphasizes the defensive purpose of enclosures for woods in particular, which preserve timber “for a constant and certain supply of the Navy … it’s good and sure work to have our supplies within our selves, and if the enemies should once find that we were defective in Timber for shipping, it would be a greater incouragement to them.”43 It is thus by enclos-ing commons that England’s army of husbandmen, beating their ploughshares into swords and their pruning hooks into spears, are best able to tend and defend the national garden.

Like Austen and Taylor, Adam Moore in Bread for the Poor (1653) ennobles the humble husbandman as the source of Eng-land’s pride and power; the fences in which he works and brings forth fruit are also the best defenses against moral, economic, and


military weakness. Opening his case for enclosure by invoking the gardens of scripture, Moore appeals “[t]o all Inhabitants, Tenants and Occupiers of Lands bordering on Wastes and common grounds … And to the poorer sort especially” with a biblical dichotomy: “why should you love a desert more then a garden? or prefer the comfortlesse Wildernesse of Arabia, to the pleasant fruitfull fields of Canaan? and what are Commons and Enclosures with us but the very like?”44 Developing the connection between the profits of enclosure and the pleasures of the garden, he invokes the privi-lege, propriety, and sanctity of the hortus conclusus, epitomized by the Canticlean trope of the female body as an enclosed garden. Applying the metaphor’s implications of sexual property to enclo-sure polemics, he compares sharing lands to sharing wives while invoking the secondary meaning of “Common” as base and vulgar: those who would keep their land open and available to communal use, he suggests, are “so cuckolded by Forreigners and strangers, and your Common used before your face … while you make it a common prostitute to every lust.”45 Thus having provoked in the husbandman the righteous indignation of the husband, Moore establishes the superiority of enclosure as a point of manly pride and honor: “were it not better therefore and more secure to take her home to your chamber, and keep her with a guard where she cannot be abused? which you may do by distinguishing each ones part properly to himself.”46

While Moore employs the usual image of England as an en-closed garden of delights that lesser nations look “over her walls to behold,” he politicizes this peaceful image through the rhetoric of English imperialism.47 He initially defines the Englishman’s duties amid his “Eden-like blessing” and “garden-like condition” via the standard citation of Genesis 2:15: “as Adam in Eden, so are we by that all-Creator placed in this Garden, To keep it and dresse it.”48 But Moore expands the modest Adamic virtue of diligent, self-sustaining horticulture into something more epic. Nourishing those at home and friends abroad, Englishmen in the past tended “our Garden” so well that “as the Imperiall Lady of Europe’s bounds, she ruled the Nations with an high hand; and not the proudest suitor enamoured of her beauty, nor the cruel-lest foe envying her fortunes, could ever execute the least attempt on her worth.”49 In Moore’s strategically shifting symbology, the fertile garden of delights becomes a chaste garden of domination, the hortus conclusus an impregnable fortress, Eden an empire. With such power comes responsibility; to leave “by our neglect the family famished,” he suggests, is to render the empire weak and vulnerable.50


Yet it is also through the improvements wrought by enclosure that the impenetrable, virginal Garden of England paradoxically warms and opens into “the Nurcery of Plenty as well as of Delights” and “an happy mother overjoyed in the glory of her issue.”51 It is evidently out of patriotism—“in zeal to my Countrey”—that Moore presents the principles of enclosure and good husbandry “to the judicious view of our Imperiall Gardiner, and his Monarchicall Fam-ily.”52 It is tempting to interpret “Imperiall Gardiner” as an oblique reference to Cromwell, who is arguably figured as the imperial gardener in Marvell’s Horatian ode—“his highest plot / To plant the bergamot” (p. 115, lines 31–2), bergamot being the pear of kings and therefore prefiguring (with a likely pun on “plot”) his sovereign aspirations in replanting the national garden. But then it would be hard to explain Moore’s use of “Monarchicall Family,” jarringly out of tune with the rhetoric of republican leadership. I propose we read “our Imperiall Gardiner” instead as a flattering appeal to every private farmer in England who stands to profit by enclosure. When a yeoman rose to the rank of gentleman farmer, “he became a little sovereign on his own estate, the representative of the central government and the dispenser of justice in the coun-tryside.”53 The well-run estate, then, becomes both microcosm and model of the well-run state. In the role of patriarchal ruler, the English husbandman first fulfills the noble responsibility of feeding his own family. He then feeds the members of his extended “Family”: the nation, its colonies, and its allies. Husbandry is he-roic precisely because it safeguards English imperial rule. Peace does not ensure plenty; plenty ensures peace.

Despite the efforts of the improvers to present enclosure as a nationalist movement that created employment opportunities and increased food supplies, the Diggers and the Levellers still held the moral high ground, so to speak, in their claim that enclosure destroyed agrarian communal life and hurt the peasants by taking away their access to the land.54 Winstanley is rightly perceived as radical not least because he called for the total elimination of private property. But from another perspective, he was making the conservative argument in the enclosure debate: in defending the common-use rights of the poor, he was defending the status quo, the system of customary rights that had been in place for centuries. Reflecting his opposition to enclosure, his horticultural imagery pointedly represents the earth as God’s completely bound-less territory: “the whole Creation is his garden wherein he walks and delights himself.”55 Unlike the advocates of improvement, who extol Adam as the first gardener, Winstanley condemns him


as the first enclosing landlord, who “by his unrighteousnesse makes [the earth] a land of barrennesse: For this first Adam is such a selfish power, that he seeks to compasse all the creatures of the earth into his own covetous hands, to make himself a Lord, and all other his slaves.”56 In Winstanley’s revisionist reading of Genesis, private property is not a consequence but a cause of the Fall.57 Mankind reenacts the defining moment of original sin in “this cheating device of buying and selling,” particularly in the buying and selling of land, a violation of God’s law that breeds tyranny and war and therefore belongs “among the rubbish of Kingly power.”58 Winstanley represents the republic, by contrast, as an ancient field of plenty that must be dug out from beneath the wasteland of the kingdom; when the peasants unite to up-root tyranny and plant equality, “then will thy Commonwealths Government arise from under the clods, under which as yet it is buryed, and covered with deformity,” and the Land of Canaan will be exhumed in England.59

While some of his contemporaries speculate about the geo-graphic location of Eden or celebrate it as a literal enclosure with Adam as the first improver, Winstanley emphasizes the Garden of Eden’s purely allegorical status. For him the real point of the Genesis story is that “Adam himself, or that living flesh, Man-kinde, is a Garden which God hath made for his own delight, to dwell, and walk in, wherein he had planted varietie of Hearbs, and pleasant Plants, as love, joy, peace, humility, knowledge, obedience, delight, and purity of life.”60 At the same time, he implicitly undermines the pro-enclosure argument by equating the designs of the improvers with Adam’s fatal attraction to the forbidden fruit, his “spirit of self love” and desire to be God’s equal, which “would spring up as a weed … in the midst of this Created, living Garden.”61 Echoing the charges that ecclesiasti-cal authorities leveled against scientific change and innovation, Winstanley implicitly associates the improvement agenda with Adam’s failure to forsake “his own invention” and trust in God—with his “secret tickling delight … to be a more knowing man then God made him.”62 He applies anti-enclosure rhetoric to the nature of Christian life as he exhorts the reader to “mind what power rules in you, whether it be a particular, confining, selfish power, which is the Devil … Or whether it be a universall spreading power, that delights in the liberty of the whole Creation, which is Christ in you.”63 From Winstanley’s perspective, even the garden within remains unenclosed; just as the earth should be no one’s personal property but a common treasury, the individual believer


should reject self-possession in favor of opening his soul freely to Christ. Hedging oneself about with selfish pride and enclosing a plot of land against common use amount to the same violation of God’s “universall spreading power.” He has “husbanded the ground” of man; we are his horticultural work in progress.64 By attempting to cultivate ourselves instead of allowing ourselves to be cultivated by him, we manifest the aspiring vanity of original sin, whereby “that Garden of pleasant plants, Adam, is become a stinking dunghill of weeds.”65

Private property also bears the indelible mark of original sin in Paradise Lost (1667). Milton’s Eden is vulnerable and bound to be trespassed upon precisely because it is a private “enclosure green.”66 In his social conception of the state of innocence, Milton agreed with St. Thomas Aquinas that goods were held in common and shared without strife.67 In The Georgics, Virgil’s description of the Golden Age pointedly emphasizes the absence of enclosure:

Before Jove’s reign no tenants mastered holdings, Even to mark the land with private bounds Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth Herself, unbidden, yielded all more fully.68

By contrast, Milton’s Eden is marked with private bounds, bounds that inevitably fail to provide adequate protection and that thus invoke the social and economic problems of enclosure and of unequal ownership more generally. Mocking the security of the earthly paradise, Satan “[a]t one slight bound high over leaped all bound / Of hill or highest wall” (4.181–2), penetrating the enclosure

As when a prowling wolf,Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve In hurdled cotes amid the field secure, Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold.

(4.183–7)

Because the savage wilderness always finds a way in, the order and security of private land are exposed as illusions, the tran-quility of the pastoral idyll disrupted. The passage then makes a jarring shift from an agrarian to a bourgeois simile, by which Milton underscores the particular selfishness of urban middle-class property owners:


Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors, Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault, In at the window climbs, or o’er the tiles;So clomb this first grand thief into God’s fold.

(4.188–92)

A rich burgher’s ostensibly secure townhouse seems an incongru-ous analogy for the verdant earthly paradise, yet that incongruity is precisely the point. Rather than inviting us to sympathize with the victims of invasion, Milton’s similes encourage us to recognize the ease, even the naturalness, with which boundaries are trans-gressed and the enclosed are victimized.69 Compared to “this first grand thief,” the burgher is petty and insignificant; imagining him hoarding his cash, smugly self-satisfied behind locked doors, we almost feel he deserves it. Whether in enclosed pasture, bolted house, or walled paradise, exclusion invites intrusion. The only way to ensure peaceful coexistence would seem to be not stronger enclosures but none at all.

Milton also suggests wild nature’s inevitable encroachment upon the terrestrial paradise when Eve, not without reason, points out the futility of “their sweet gardening labour” (4.328). The more she and Adam alone try to keep the entire garden manicured, the more it seems to mock their efforts:

the work under our labour grows,Luxurious by restraint; what we by dayLop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,One night or two with wanton growth deridesTending to wild.

(9.208–12)

With time, this garden is thus becoming less and less distinct from the unenclosed wilderness surrounding it, a situation that seems to point to abandoning the idea of the terrestrial paradise and focusing instead on tending the paradise within. Accordingly privileging the inner garden, the Son intercedes on fallen man’s behalf by presenting to the Father

Fruits of more pleasing savour from thy seedSown with contrition in his heart, than thoseWhich his own hand manuring all the trees


Of Paradise could have produced, ere fallenFrom innocence.

(11.26–30)

In this touching passage, the paradise regained transcends the spatial and material limitations of the paradise lost; hence it is more perfect—a garden whose tillage and fertilization are purified by virtue of being purely metaphorical. Yet the Son’s metaphors give the garden of Adam’s penitent soul all the sensory appeal of a real garden. In Milton’s monist universe of food and sex-enjoying angels, this is not too surprising. At the same time, an entirely orthodox doctrine, that of Christ as fully man and fully God, un-derlies the miraculous paradox of the Son taking the Father on a five-senses tour of the spiritual garden, inviting him to “[s]ee” (11.22) and “savour” (11.26) the first fruits of “thy implanted grace in man” (11.23), to “hear his sighs though mute” (11.31), to touch by engrafting “all his works on me” (11.34), and to receive “[t]he smell of peace toward mankind” (11.38). The fruits of the spirit, tended with faith and devotion, ultimately prove more pleasing and satisfying to the Divine Husbandman than anything yielded by actual husbandry.

By the 1650s, the dream of literally recovering paradise in England or anywhere else was beginning to sound increasingly unrealistic and naive. During the seventeenth century, travel-ing merchants and New World explorers discovered a staggering variety of new plants. While imperial expansion vastly enriched the science of botany, as Richard Drayton observes, “it also un-dermined the utopian optimisms which had once supported the Renaissance ideal of the hortus conclusus … The gradual fading, after 1650, of the hope that all Eden’s herbs might return to one chamber” essentially amounted to “a second loss of Eden.”70 In its own way, Paradise Lost reflects and reinforces this second loss of Eden by exposing the unnaturalness, even the impossibility, of a perfect botanical garden. As a locus amænus of encyclopedic completeness, Milton’s Eden supposedly encompasses “[i]n nar-row room nature’s whole wealth” (4.207). But this image simul-taneously calls attention to its own problematic imbalance. Since nature’s whole wealth obviously cannot be contained for long “[i]n narrow room,” Milton seems to be suggesting that it ought to be more freely and widely distributed. Indeed, when Michael says, “surmise not then / [God’s] presence to these narrow bounds confined /Of Paradise or Eden” (11.340–2), he essentially vali-dates Eve’s earlier complaint about being stuck living “[i]n narrow


circuit straitened by a foe” (9.323), which makes Eden sound less like a garden than a garrison. After the Fall and our first parents’ eviction, Michael renders obsolete the notion of paradise as any particular locality; he shows Adam a vision of the Garden of Eden dislodged and destroyed by the Flood

To teach thee that God attributes to place No sanctity, if none be thither brought By men who there frequent, or therein dwell.

(11.836–8)

Michael’s description of the Second Coming makes enclosure sound even more pointless and obsolete, since “this world’s dis-solution” (12.459) will mean the collapse of boundaries far greater than walls, hedges, and fences. With the removal of the separation between the terrestrial and celestial spheres, between the past and the future, between the living and the dead, “then the earth / Shall all be paradise, far happier place / Than this of Eden, and far hap-pier days” (12.463–5). In the meantime, however, there is another way to trump Eden: if Adam cultivates the fruits of the spirit, “then wilt thou not be loath / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far” (12.585–7). And with that, Milton makes the inner garden the only one worth improving.71

NOTES

I would like to thank SEL’s anonymous reader for valuable suggestions that contributed to the development of this article.

1 This overview of enclosure and its socioeconomic implications is in-debted mainly to Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996) and Joan Thirsk, Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice, 1500–1750, vol. 3 of Chapters from the Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1750, 5 vols., gen. ed. Thirsk (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). See also John Chartres and David Hey, eds., English Rural Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); C. G. A. Clay, Eco-nomic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 1:67–101; and J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1977).

2 John Moore, The Crying Sin of England, of Not Caring for the Poor. Wherein Inclosure, “viz.” Such as Doth Unpeople Townes, and Uncorn Fields, Is Arraigned, Convicted, and Condemned by the Word of God (London: Antony Williamson, 1653), p. 7; EEBO STC M2558. Here, and in all other cited early modern texts, the substitution of “j” for “i” and the use of the long “s” have been silently amended.


3 RA[lph] Austen, title page to A Treatise of Fruit=Trees, Shewing the Manner of Grafting, Setting, Pruning, and Ordering of Them in All Respects: According to Divers New and Easy Rules of Experience; Gathered in

ey Theory

and Practise of ey Art of Planting Fruit-Trees, with the Alimentall and Physicall

Use of Fruits. Togeather with the Spirituall Use of an Orchard: Heldforth in Divers Similitudes betweene Naturall & Spirituall Fruit-trees: According to Scripture and Experiece (Oxford: Tho[mas] Robinson, 1653); EEBO STC A4238. Because I will also be citing a 1657 edition, this work will hereafter be referred to as A Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653), in order to differentiate it. As indicated in the full title, this work includes The Spirituall Use of an Orchard; or Garden of Fruit-Trees. Held Forth in Diverse Similitudes between Naturall and Spirituall Fruit-Trees, in Their Natures, and Ordering, According to Scripture and Experience, hereafter referred to as The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653). Subsequent references to A Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653) and The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653) are to this edition. Finally, standard pagination is not available for all sections of A Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653) and The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653). Where possible, the standard page number has been given, but where it is not available, the signature block identification has been given instead.

4 Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England, rev. edn. (1979; rprt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 197; Andrew Marvell, “An Hora-tian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” in George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets, ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 114–7, 115, line 10. All citations of Marvell’s poems are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text at first mention of each poem by inclusive page numbers, page number, and line number, and subsequently by page number and line number.

5 Joseph E. Duncan, Milton’s Earthly Paradise: A Historical Study of Eden (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1972), p. 166.

6 Duncan, pp. 172–4.7 Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform,

1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), p. 478.8 See, for example, David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton

and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 1–14, 50, 56–7, 63–5, 75, 77, 80–4, 87–90; John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 149–50; Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries, rev. edn. (1984; Chicago: Bookmarks, 1994), pp. 304–6, 319; and Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 10, 158, 162, 164, 167, 169, 173.

9 Thirsk, pp. 128, 274. On the agricultural and economic crisis of 1650, see also Laura Brace, The Politics of Property: Labour, Freedom, and Belonging (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 16–7. On England’s rapid popula-tion growth and price inflation as key factors in motivating the improvement agenda, see Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 12–3; and Clay, 1:67–101.

10 John Beale, “The True Interest of the Common-Wealth of England. Soliciting a Public Care for the Plantation & Preservation of Orchards,


Groves, Woodes, Hedges, Fences, & Mounds. For the Increase of Fruite, Fu-ell & Timber with Helpefull Directions for the Increase of All Kind of Foods, Namely Corne, Catell, and Foule. First Undertaken by Arthur Standish, and Further Explicated and Advanced by Severall True-Hearted Commonwealthe-men in the Way of Their Epistolary Addresses to Samuel Hartlib the Elder Esqr.” (Hartlib Papers LI, Sheffield Univ. Library, 19 March 1658/9), qtd. in Webster, p. 482.

11 G. E. Fussell, The English Countryman: His Life and Work, A.D. 1500–1900 (London: Andrew Melrose, 1955), pp. 18–9.

12 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard, or Garden of Fruit-Trees. Set Forth in Divers Similitudes betweene Naturall and Spirituall Fruit-Trees, in Their Natures, and Ordering, According to Scripture and Experience, in A Treatise of Fruit=Trees: Shewing the Manner of Grafting, Setting, Pruning, and Ordering of Them in All Respects: According to Divers New and Easy Rules of Experience; Gathered in

ey Space of Twenty Yeares. Whereby the Value of Lands

May Be Much Improved, in a Short Time, by Small Cost, and Little Labour. Also Discovering Some Dangerous Errors, Both in

ey Theory and Practice of

ey Art of

Planting Fruit: Trees, with the Alimentall and Physicall Use of Fruits. Togeather with the Spirituall Use of an Orchard: Heldforth in Divers Similitudes betweene “Naturall” and “Spirituall” Fruit:Trees: According to Scripture and Experiece (Oxford: Tho[mas] Robinson, 1657), p. 148; EEBO STC A4326. This work will hereafter be referred to as The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1657) in order to differentiate it from the 1653 edition.

13 Nathanael Homes, A Commentary, Literal or Historical, and Mystical or Spiritual, on the Whole Book of Canticles, in The Works of Dr. Nathanael Homes (London: printed for the author, 1652), p. 309; EEBO STC H2559.

14 Homes, p. 309.15 Homes, p. 314.16 OED, 2d edn., s.v. “paradise, n.”17 Webster, p. 508.18 Austen, epistle dedicatory to Dr. Langley, in The Spirituall Use of an

Orchard (1653), sigs. 2r–2v, 2v; EEBO STC A4238. The figure of the mysti-cal husbandman is embodied in the New Testament when Mary Magdalene mistakes the risen Christ for the gardener (John 20:15). Allegorically speak-ing, however, she makes no mistake, as suggested in a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes in 1631: “Christ rising was indeed a Gardiner … He it is … shall garden our bodies, too: turne all our graves into garden-plots” (Lancelot An-drews, XCVI. Sermons, 2d. edn. [London: Richard Badger, 1631), pp. 538–9; EEBO STC 607.

19 Austen, epistle dedicatory to Dr. Langley, sig. 2v.20 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 38. Likewise rep-

resenting grafting as marriage, Shakespeare aligns horticultural and social improvement in The Winter’s Tale:

You see, sweet maid, we marryA gentler scion to the wildest stock,And make conceive a bark of baser kindBy bud of nobler race. (2:1612–55, IV.iv.92–5)


in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al., 2 vols., 2d edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

21 Austen, “A Preface to the Reader,” in The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), sigs. 3r–5r, 5r.

22 Ibid.23 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 25.24 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 23.25 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1657), p. 129.26 James Grantham Turner, “Austen, Ralph (c.1612–1676),” in Oxford

Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 2:979–80.

27 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), pp. 36–7.28 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1653), p. 36.29 Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Re-

naissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 15.30 Austen, The Spirituall Use of an Orchard (1657), p. 191.31 Virgil, The Georgics, trans. L. P. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth UK: Pen-

guin Books, 1982), book 1, line 145.32 The phrase “Garden-state,” deriving from Marvell’s “The Garden” (pp.

112–4, line 57), “can implicitly oppose the garden state as a scene of cultiva-tion to the political state as one of disruptive ambition, violence, and waste; and it can also posit a virtually ecological reconstruction of the political state which desirably approximates the condition of the enclosed, cultivated gar-den” (Jonathan Crewe, “The Garden State: Marvell’s Poetics of Enclosure,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994], pp. 270–89, 271). Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), p. 11.

33 Shakespeare, The Tragedy of King Richard the Second, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 1:847–83, II.1.42.

34 Walter Blith, “The Epistle to the Ingenuous Reader,” in The English Im-prover, or a New Survey of Husbandry. Discovering to the Kingdome, that Some Land, Both Arrable and Pasture, May Be Advanced Double or Treble; Other Land to a Five or Tenfold: and Some to a Twenty Fold Improvement: Yea, Some Now Not Worth above One, or Two Shillings, “Per” Acree, Be Made Worth Thirty, or Forty, if Not More. Clearly Demonstrated from Principles of Sound Reason, Ingenuity, and Late but Most Certaine Reall Experiences (London: J. Wright, 1649), sig. a2r; EEBO STC B3194. The nationalistic England-as-Eden anal-ogy was duly extended to the New World by travel literature and mercantile propaganda; Michael Drayton’s ode “To the Virginian Voyage” (1619) accord-ingly celebrates the discovery of “Earth’s onely Paradise” (The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, ed. David Norbrook and H. R. Woudhuysen [1992; London: Penguin, 2005], pp. 431–3, 432, line 24). On agricultural improvement and the botanic garden as realizations of the Edenic vision in Britain and in the colonies, see Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Brit-ain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000), especially pp. 50–9. For a study of the new world environment and recovery narratives of paradise found, see Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003).


35 Austen, epistle dedicatory to Samuel Hartlib, in A Treatise of Fruit=Trees (1653), sigs. 1r–3r, 2v.

36 Silvanus Taylor, Common-Good: or, the Improvement of Commons, Forrests, and Chases, by Inclosure. Wherein the Advantage of the Poor, the Common Plenty of All, and the Increase and Preservation of Timber, with Other Things of Common Concernment, Are Considered (London: Francis Tyton, 1652), p. 6; EEBO STC T552.

37 J[ohn] B[eale], Herefordshire Orchards, A Pattern For all England. Written in an Epistolary Address to “Samuel Hartlib” Esq. (London: printed by Roger Daniel, 1657), pp. 2–3; EEBO STC B1558.

38 Beale, p. 2. 39 Taylor, p. 12.40 Austen, epistle dedicatory to Samuel Hartlib, sig. 2v.41 Ibid.42 Ibid.43 Taylor, pp. 42, 46.44 Adam Moore, author’s epistle to the reader in Bread for the Poor, and

Advancement of the English Nation, Promised by Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Grounds of England (London: R. and W. Leybourn for Nicholas Bourn, 1653), sig. B[1]v; EEBO STC M2529. Moore evokes Isaiah 51:3 (King James Version): “For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody.”

45 Adam Moore, author’s epistle to the reader, sig. A2r.46 Ibid.47 Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 2.48 Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, pp. 1, 2.49 Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 2.50 Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 3.51 Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, pp. 2, 39.52 Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, p. 3, 4.53 Fussell, p. 21.54 On radical ideology, property relations, and competing notions of the

common good during this period, see Loewenstein, “Digger Writing and Ru-ral Dissent in the English Revolution: Representing England as a Common Treasury,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 74–88; and Geoff Ken-nedy, Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism: Radical Political Thought in Seventeenth Century England (Lanham MD: Lexington Books, 2008).

55 Gerrard Winstanley, The New Law of Righteousnes Budding forth, in Restoring the Whole Creation from the Bondage of the Curse. Or a Glimpse of the New Heaven, and New Earth, wherein Dwels Righteousnes. Giving an Alarm to Silence All that Preach or Speak from Hear-Say, or Imagination (London: Giles Calvert, 1649), p. 21; EEBO STC W3049.

56 Winstanley, The New Law, p. 4.57 On this point see also Brace, p. 20; McRae, p. 126; Hill, The World

Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York:


Viking Press, 1972), p. 131; and Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Lon-don: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 346.

58 Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform: Or, True Magistracy Restored. Humbly Presented to “Oliver Cromwel”, General of the Common-Wealths Army in England. And to All English-Men My Brethren Whether in Church-Fellowship, or Not in Church-Fellowship, Both Sorts Walking as They Conceive According to the Order of the Gospel: and from Them to All the Nations in the World. Wherein Is Declared, What Is Kingly Government, and What Is Commonwealths Government (London: printed by J. M. for the author, 1652), p. 12; EEBO STC W3045A.

59 Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, p. 30.60 Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, Concerning the Whole Creation, “Man-

kinde”. To Be Made Known to Every Man and Woman, after Seven Dispensa-tions and Seasons of Time Are Passed Over. According to the Counsell of God, Revealed to His “Servants” (London, 1648), p. 2; EEBO STC W3047.

61 Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, p. 2.62 Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, pp. 3, 4.63 Winstanley, The New Law, pp. 24–5.64 Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, p. 20.65 Winstanley, The Mysterie of God, p. 6.66 Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman,

1971), book 4, line 133. Subsequent references to Paradise Lost are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by book and line number.

67 Duncan, pp. 74–5.68 Virgil, 1.125–8.69 On the easy permeability of Eden’s boundaries with emphases different

from my own, see Kent R. Lehnhof, “Scatology and the Sacred in Milton’s Paradise Lost,” ELR 37, 3 (2007): 429–49, 445; and Jeffrey S. Theis, “Milton’s Principles of Architecture,” ELR 35, 1 (2005): 102–22, 103.

70 Richard Drayton, pp. 19–20.71 My argument that Paradise Lost stages the abandonment of the hortus

conclusus in favor of the paradise within sets my approach apart from that of Joanna Picciotto, who by contrast argues for “the poem’s experimentalist commitment to extending the borders of paradise to include the world beyond it” (Joanna Picciotto, “Reforming the Garden: the Experimentalist Eden and Paradise Lost,” ELH 72,1 [2005]: 23–78, 40). For a masterful new study of Baconian inquiry as original sin’s purge in Paradise Lost and elsewhere, see Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2010).

Enclosure Polemics and the Garden in the 1650s

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