William Wordsworth and enclosure: 1793-1803

Chapter Two: William Wordsworth and enclosure, 1793-1803

Perhaps, as he wandered alone across Salisbury Plainone night in the summer of 1793 William Wordsworth may have recalled the plot of The Old Manor House, and managed to summon up a rueful smile at the partial and unsatisfactory way in which life imitated art. Here he was, re-enacting part of Orlando Somerive's journey across the newly-enclosed landscapes of England, but he would not discover his lost love nestling safely in a bower in the New Forest, and there was no hidden piece ofpaper which would prove his right to land and consequence. Indeed, after the accident to the carriage he had been travelling in, and since his friend Calvert had taken the horse, he was on foot, which made him rather more like Orlando when he first arrived back in England, and found that everything he had known and lovedhad changed or vanished.1

Wordsworth had long been an admirer of Smith, subscribing to the fifth edition of her Elegiac Sonnets in 1789, and taking the trouble to introduce himself to her in 1791, when he was waiting in Brighton for the boatthat was to take him to France.2 His admiration was life-long and it is entirely plausible that by July 1793 he might already have read The Old Manor House, though it had only been published around the March of the same year

1 For the details of the carriage accident, see Dorothy Wordsworth toJane Pollard, 30 August 1793, Letters 1.108-9.2 'I was detained at Brighthelmstone from Tuesday till Saturday Evening, which time must have past in manner extremely disagreeable, if I had not bethought me of introducing myself to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, she received me in the politest manner, and shewed me every possible civility' (William Wordsworth to Richard Wordsworth, 19 December 1791, Letters 1.68). For the subscription see the explanatory notes to this passage.

(Fletcher 140).3 Though there are a number of points of similarity between The Old Manor House and the early Salisbury Plain poems – the journey to America and involvement in American wars, illness during a sea-voyage, the figure of the old broken down soldier – my discussion of ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ and ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ will instead concentrate on a text we are certain Wordsworth read. I will however, begin by justifying my decision to follow a biographical approach in my treatment of Wordsworth similar to that I pursued with Smith. Though of necessity my discussion is not straightforwardly chronological, I group the texts together roughly in order of first composition. Such a system of organization would undoubtedly not have met with Wordsworth's approval, since when writing about a collection of his poetry he expressed the opinion that, 'order of time is the very worst that could be followed; except where determined by the course of public events; or if the subject be purely personal – in the case of Juvenile Poems, or those of advanced Age' (William Wordsworth to Henry Crabbe Robinson, 27 April 1826, Letters 4.444). To some extent though, Wordsworth's poems about enclosure are personal. The subject was, for family reasons, a peculiarly sensitive one and although using chronological progression can be extremely difficult with a poet who continually revised his work, it allows us to chart Wordsworth's changing and sometimescontradictory attitudes towards enclosure.

I begin by highlighting the extent to which the early influence of their father's acquisitive attitude towards land continued to affect both William and Dorothy3 See Grasmere Journal 134, William Wordsworth to Alexander Dyce, 10 May 1830 (Letters 5.260) and William Wordsworth to Alaric Watts, 10 January 1836 (Letters 6.149), where he calls her 'my old friend Charlotte Smith'.

into adulthood, outlining the painful associations that enclosure and enclosers possessed for the Wordsworth siblings. I then move to discuss ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ in the context of the contemporary Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff and as a more-or-less straightforwardly Godwinian text, while acknowledging thepersonal elements in the poem. These elements are made both more explicit and more central in the reworking of ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’, entitled ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, and I offer a reading of this poem, begun at Racedown, with several other poems of the Racedown period, suggesting that the intense doubt and mental anguish which Wordsworth experienced during this time can be seen as essentially reified in texts which present two incompatible views of enclosure and veer unevenly between them. 4 I move on to argue that the presence of sheep in a number of these poems serves as a shorthand for enclosure, particularly enclosure leading to large-scale sheep farming, as was frequently the case in the north of England and in Scotland and sketch in theagricultural background to Wordsworth’s 1803 Scottish tour , analysing ‘Neidpath Castle’ as a poem which offersa carefully contradictory view of enclosure. Finally, I suggest that in ‘Stepping Westward’ Wordsworth seeks to evade the domestic implications of enclosure altogether, glancing instead towards America and towards enclosure's rhetorical twin, colonization. A coda reflects on the contrast between Wordsworth's fraught encounter with the enclosure debate during his twenties and his later, politically expedient references to enclosure during the 1818 elections.

There is some very minor discussion of enclosure in 4 See William Wordsworth to Francis Wrangham, 20 November 1795 ; 'since I came to Racedown I have made alterations and additions so material as that it may be looked on almost as another work' (Letters1.159).

recent Wordsworth criticism. Gary Harrison briefly mentions enclosure, the poor laws, and the loss of the old rural order (27-29) and notes that ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ 'plainly tells' the story of the resultsof enclosure (94), something Benis also registers (68). Harrison also suggests that there are similarities between the story of the female vagrant's early distresses and the experience of the Hawkins family in Godwin's novel Caleb Williams (98), a plot strand which, as I suggest below, in Chapter Four, is framed in terms which evoke enclosure (see below Error: Reference source not found). Mark Schoenfield refers to enclosure severaltimes in passing, noticing that hedges can be used as markers of enclosure (106) and that the behaviour of Goody Blake is in fact 'unconscious political resistance'(107). Most of his references to enclosure, however, appear in footnotes. Michael Wiley follows John Barrell's paradigm, drawn from the example of Helpston, in Northamptonshire, in which the pre-enclosure landscapeis figured as circular, the post-enclosure one as linear (Idea 49), an approach well-adapted to the specific experience of John Clare, but which does not appear to memore generally helpful. Additionally, Wiley claims that Wordsworth 'configures the loss [i.e. the switch to enclosure] as the disappearance of pastoral-idyllic spaceand time', eliding the other side of Wordsworth's essentially divided response to the enclosures. I go much further than these critics, none of whom attribute much importance to The Borderers, or ‘Stepping Westward’ or observe how dominant a leitmotif enclosure is in Wordsworth's work during this period. However, my readingof Wordsworth is not a new departure. I am influenced byWu's uncovering of Oedipal traces in Wordsworth's poetry,by his account of the poet's troubled relationship with his father, and by David Bromwich’s suggestion that Wordsworth at times sees himself as ‘a criminal seeking expiation’ (1). I also build on Wiley's claim that

Wordsworth displaces his revolutionary energies to nature, showing how the issue of enclosure becomes an arena for the working out both of revolutionary ideas andof personal trauma.

In 1795 Dorothy and William, after years of separation, moved together to Racedown Lodge, on the edgeof the tiny hamlet of Birdsmoorgate, not far from Chard. It was, for both brother and sister, the first time sincethey had been orphaned that they felt they could call a house their own. Yet despite their long absence from each other, the two thought and wrote in similar ways, ways which reveal how much influence the experiences of their early years still exercised over them. Racedown Lodge lay, as the name suggests, on the downs. Dorothy described the situation of the house in a letter of November 1795;

we have many very pleasant walks about us and what is a great advantage, the roads are of a sandy kind and are almost always dry. We can see the sea 150 or 200 yards from the door, andat a little distance have a very extensive viewterminated by the sea seen through different openings of the unequal hills. We have not the warmth and luxuriance of Devonshire though there is no want either of wood or cultivation,but the trees appear to suffer from the sea blasts. We have hills which seen from a distance almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their wild state covered with furze and broom. These delight me the mostas they remind me of our native wilds. (Letter to Mrs. John Marshall, November 30 1795, Letters 1.161)

It is a landscape very similar to this, it may be recalled, which provides the backdrop to Charlotte Smith's 1793 poem The Emigrants, and Smith uses the same juxtaposition of waste, cultivation, and vulnerable coastline to construct an argument in favour of enclosure, justifying the extension of agriculture, properly managed, as the only possible bulwark against revolution or invasion (see Chapter One). Much of Dorsetshire had been enclosed early, during the Tudor period. Of what had remained unenclosed, some was left undisturbed well in to the nineteenth century, and the rest was divided up in a fairly desultory fashion throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, none of it in the vicinity of Racedown at the time the Wordsworths lived there.5 Yet the countryside around Racedown, as traced out by Dorothy, is characterized bothby divisions, and by what seems to her a curious lack of them. On the one hand there is, she explains, 'a little brook which runs at the distance of one field from us' and 'divides us from Devonshire', on the other, she records that 'in some of our walks we go through orchardswithout any other enclosure or security than as a common field'.

Dorothy also noted the extreme poverty of the area; 'the peasants are miserably poor; their cottages are shapeless structures (I may almost say) of wood and clay -- indeed they are not at all beyond what might be expected in savage life'. William, too, asserted that the 'country people' around Racedown were 'wretchedly poor; ignorant and overwhelmed with every vice that usually attends ignorance in that class, viz -- lying andpicking and stealing &c &c' (Letter to William Matthews,

5 Though Wuchser suggests that the gathering of fuel had been more restricted since the early 1790s (97).

24 October 1795, Letters 154). Dorothy and William were the children of a man who, among other roles, had been a steward or land agent to Sir James Lowther, later Earl ofLonsdale.6 James Lowther was, according to Johnston, the 'most powerful, feared, and hated aristocrat' in the area, and was popularly known as 'Jimmy Grasp-All' (19). Johnston suggests that though John Wordsworth collected rents his role was more that of a 'political business agent, or nonstop campaign manager' (22-3). John Wordsworth, however, was also a land-owner in his own right, one who, as Johnston points out, owned a 'seventy-acre farm at Stockbridge', crofts, barns, and 'gates' on the High Moor which 'controlled livestock's access to pasture' (25), and we know that he took part inevictions (Dann, 80-1). The passages above are the reactions one might expect from the offspring of a land agent and budding landowner, coloured by early contact with eyes that looked appraisingly at properties, and a mind alert to tenants who might need to be weeded out when leases next came up for renewal, or the landlord evinced a desire to see them gone. It is perhaps hardly surprising that, living at Racedown, seeing division and distinction everywhere – between the sea and the land, between cultivation and 'wild' waste or down, between Devonshire and Dorsetshire, imagined and real – William'sthoughts should also have come to rest on boundaries, on borders, and, on the shaping of space. These thoughts, though, were perhaps never that far from his mind.

In addition to having a father who was an enthusiastic proponent of the new agricultural order, Wordsworth's childhood was played out in scenes of heavy enclosure. There was even a northern dialect word, 'intack' or 'intake', which denoted a particular type of 6 The connection between the families went back to John's father, Richard Wordsworth, who was steward and law agent to the third Viscount Lonsdale (Dann 80).

local enclosure in Cumberland and Westmoreland, ground 'taken in' – or taken over – from mountain or moor.7 The Wordsworth siblings seem to have employed the word throughout their lives, indicating that they remained alert to the shaping of the countryside. Dorothy was particularly fond of it. In her Grasmere Journal, she mentions 'walk[ing] into John Fisher's Intake with Ellen'(132), and in a letter of 1808 she writes of 'Miles Holmes's Intack' as a geographical marker.8 In a letter of1819, she writes of a guest involved in a 'dispute with the people of Grasmere respecting the inclosure of an Intake' (Dorothy Wordsworth to Joanna Hutchinson, September 5 1819, Letters 3.555). William uses the word in‘An Evening Walk’ – 'when horses in the wall-girt intake stood' (line 65) – and later in life, as we shall see, hementions it in relation to freehold tenure and the rightsattending such tenure. Such intacks or intakes however represented only part of the local enclosure story.

Though Cockermouth, where Wordsworth was born, was not enclosed till 1832 (Kain et al. 315) there was enclosureactivity in Cumberland and Westmoreland from the Tudor period far into the nineteenth century and enclosure mapsfrom various periods cover almost exactly one third of the area of Cumberland, and a quarter of Westmoreland. The rate of enclosure in Cumberland in the 1760s is, according to Kain et al., 'markedly above average', and the

7 1. A local word signifying a mountain-enclosure, or piece of groundtaken in from a moorland. 2. (Chiefly north. dial.) 'A piece of land taken in from a moorland, common, etc.; an inclosure'.8 Dorothy is describing the route presumed to have been taken by a local couple who became lost in the snow; 'They left Langdale between5 and 6 o'clock in the evening and made their way right up the Fells,intending to drop down just above their own cottage, in Easedale -- (Blenkrigg Gill under Miles Holmes's Intack). They came to the highest ridge of the hill that can be seen from Langdale in good time, for they were seen there by some people in Langdale: but alas! they never reached home (Dorothy Wordsworth to William Wordsworth, March 23rd 1808, Letters v.2 200)

'relatively extensive' parliamentary enclosures in Westmoreland during the 1770s are also a significant departure from national norms (59, 127). In the first thirty years of Wordsworth's life enclosure activity in the area increased still further. Enclosures happened all across the two counties, but they were concentrated in two places, both of which had meaning for the Wordsworth family. The larger area of concentration wascentred on Penrith, where, as Johnston points out, Wordsworth spent 'nearly half of his first eight years inhis maternal grandparents' rooms above their linen shop',the place where his mother had been born and brought up (32). In 1775 both Culgaith, 3 miles from Penrith, and the parishes of Great and Little Stainton, Newbiggin and Great Blencow, which lay about five miles to the south-west of Penrith, were enclosed. Temple Sowerby, five miles to the east, had been enclosed in 1774, and Brougham Moor and Sandwath, which now lie within the boundaries of the town, followed suit in 1776. In 1779 Kings Meaburn, five miles to the south east of Penrith, also fell to the enclosers. Two years later the parish of Bolton, seven miles from Penrith, was enclosed. Therewas less enclosure during the 1780s, though Egremont, tenmiles to the south of Cockermouth, was enclosed in 1783. In the 1790s, enclosure around Penrith started up again. Johnby, three miles north-west of Penrith was first, in 1795, while Greystoke, two miles west of the town, followed in 1796.

The other centre of enclosure lay around Brampton and Appleby. This was the heart of Lowther land, not five miles from where James Lowther himself had been bornat Maulds Meaburn (Phillips xiv).9 Brampton was enclosed in 1772 and Great Ormside, a mile to the south of

9 For Lowther's birth-place see his entry in The Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography.

Brampton, the following year. In 1773 it was the turn ofSandford, a couple of miles to the south east, and in 1774 of Appleby itself. The enclosers are quiet again until 1791, when Bleatarn was enclosed. In 1800 Upper and Nether Denton would also be swallowed up (Kain et al.). James Lowther must have been involved in some of these enclosures, and given the acquisitiveness which is indicated by his nick-name of 'Jimmy Grasp-All', it seemsprobable that he would have encouraged them, if he was not the prime mover behind them. He was, we know, a member of the Board of Agriculture, which suggests that he was interested in enclosure and improvement (List of the members 6). The subject of enclosure was approached with great care by Lowther's eventual heir, which may be some indication of how Jimmy Grasp-All's behaviour was viewed by locals (see William Wordsworth to Lord Lonsdale, January 21 1825, Letters 4.305). Both Dann andJohnston (28 ff.) record the incident, two years before William Wordsworth was born, which did more than any other to blacken Lowther's name. It involved what was generally held to be the legal theft of land.

In the 1768 election, Lowther was opposed by the third Duke of Portland. The year before there had been some disagreement between the two over a fishery and during the investigation, as Dann explains, it was discovered that the Duke of Portland was in possession ofa piece of land – Inglewood Forest and the soccage of Carlisle – which had not in fact been included in the original grant to the family. Effectively he was squatting, though the length of time that the family had done so ought to have afforded him protection under the Quieting Act. Lowther, never loath to obtain any advantage, promptly acquired a grant of the Crown interest in the land. Crown property was not covered by the Quieting Act, meaning that Lowther could legally take

possession of the land in question, which he proceeded todo. This was not of course an enclosure, but in essence it was not so very different.10 Portland had made use of land which was not legally his property, as his father had done, and his father before him, and Lowther had taken it from him by means of a piece of paper. When theelection came round, each side accused the other of skulduggery, and when the matter eventually reached the House of Commons it was decided that the Sheriff of Cumberland had returned Lowther contrary to the wishes ofthe majority of the electors, and Portland's candidate was declared the winner. Lowther, partly in response to the passing of a bill which proposed to close the loophole in the Quieting Act which he had exploited, and partly, it would seem, as an act of revenge, promptly ejected around four hundred tenants from Inglewood Forest. The message was perfectly clear, and is expressed in a condemnatory verse on Lowther appearing inthe immensely popular Rolliad;

E'en by the elements his pow'r confess'd, Of mines and boroughs Lonsdale stands possess'd: And one sad servitude alike denotes The slave that labours and the slave that votes.

(164)

The man who carried out many, if not most, of these ejectments for Lowther was, Dann argues, John Wordsworth. It must have made him unpopular in the

10 Inglewood Forest was in fact enclosed in 1819 (Kain et al. 346).

county.11 But John Wordsworth was to prove the victim of Lowther's greed as well as its tool. He had lent the sumof almost £5000 to his employer without any reliable security, money he had gained from his investment in landand his involvement in enclosure. After their father's death the Wordsworth siblings and their guardians spent years trying to recover it, but Lowther always refused topay. The debt was only finally settled by Lowther's heirin 1803 (Johnston 782). James Lowther sentenced the orphaned Wordsworths to nearly two decades of penurious uncertainty, and his behaviour may explain some of the energy with which Wordsworth's enclosure poetry is imbued.12 Lowther's involvement in enclosure and similarlyacquisitive activities was part and parcel with the greedy avariciousness of a man who would deny orphaned children money which belonged to them and force people out of their homes for voting against him. What was lessclear was the amount of blame that attached to John Wordsworth. As Wu reminds us, John Wordsworth had died ofan illness contracted 'after spending a night without shelter when he became lost returning home' (1). In thisrespect William could easily conflate his father with Lowther's other victims. He clearly dwelled on the wrongs Lowther had done his family. In 1793, after himself spending the night alone and without shelter, William wrote a poem in which one great act of persecution sees three generations of a family slowly butsurely destroyed – ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’. The figure of a female vagrant, who has lost both husband and

11 Decades later William Wordsworth demonstrates a fair depth of knowledge about the enclosure of Inglewood Forest, though he makes nocomment on his father’s earlier involvement with the area. ‘Here survives one of those pleasant rural features, a village green. It was purchased by the Inhabitants when the Enclosure of Inglewood forest took place, and I was delighted to see the Children, Boys and Girls, playing upon it. (William Wordsworth to Isabella Fenwick, 3 November 1840, Letters 7.135).12 See Wu for some suggestion of the unpleasantness that was sometimesinvolved in being dependent relatives (8 ff. and 78).

children also appears in ‘An Evening Walk’ of 1793 (lines241 ff.) and is borrowed from Richard Langhorne's The Country Justice.13 What is different about her presentation in the early Salisbury Plain poems is the detail of the persecution suffered by her father, which sparks off her family's descent into penury. This initial act of injustice begins a cascade of misfortune through the generations, just as James Lowther's greed had robbed John Wordsworth's estate, beggared his children, and now prevented William from providing for his own baby daughter by Annette Vallon. The parallel isreadily apparent. But John Wordsworth had also been a willing servant of Lowther. He had aided him in his oppression of the voters of Inglewood Forest, had forced them out of their homes, been the medium through which Lowther's tyranny was expressed. ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ was composed alongside the Lyrical Ballads version of ‘The Female Vagrant’ in which enclosure is more clearly identified as the root cause ofthe family’s misfortune, and its inclusion of a scene in which a father attacks his own child perhaps serves as some sort of expiation for the criticism which Wordsworthhad heaped on the character of the encloser elsewhere.

In the introduction I referred to Salisbury Plain asthe archetypal site of enclosure. Its status as enclosedland remained close to the forefront of public consciousness well in to the eighteen-teens and twenties

13 Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, Perhaps that parent mourned her soldier slain; But o'er her babe, her eye dissolv'd in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, Gave the sad presage of his future years, The child of misery, baptiz'd in tears! (The Country Justice, 1.18)

and it is as enclosed land that it features in Southey's Letters from England and Austen's Northanger Abbey. The story of the genesis of ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ is well known. It was written in response to an incident which befell the poet in the summer of 1793. Together with a friend, William Calvert, he was travelling across the plain, on a touring holiday, when their carriage developed problems. They agreed to part company, with thefriend taking the horse to ride on into Wales, and Wordsworth choosing to go on foot on across the plain. Inlater life Wordsworth claimed that he had slept on the sacrifice stone at Stonehenge.14 Little can be divined ofhis real experience other than the bald outline mentionedabove but soon afterwards he produced the first of a series of poems about Salisbury Plain, ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’.15

Biographia Literaria, first published in 1817, contains a passage in which Coleridge waxes enthusiastic over the poem, which Wordsworth recited to him soon afterit was composed, and laments the fact that it had not appeared in print. He wrote that ‘A Night’ united, 'deepfeeling with profound thought', that it demonstrated;

[a] fine balance of truth in observing with theimaginative faculty in modifying the objects

14 'I fall in exactly with your train of thinking and feeling in your Moonlight, and Silchester, and Dorchester Amphitheatre. Stonehenge has given you at your advanced years just such a feeling as he gave mewhen in my 23rd year, I passed a couple of days rambling about Salisbury Plain, the solitude and solemnities of which prompted me towrite a Poem of some length in the Spenserian Stanza. I have it stillin Mss and parts may be perhaps be thought worth publishing after my death among the 'juvenilia'. Overcome with heat and fatigue I took mySiesta among the Pillars of Stonehenge; but was not visited by the Muse in my Slumbers.' (William Wordsworth to John Kenyon, Summer 1838, Letters 6.616).15 In a letter written the next year Wordsworth describes the poem as having been 'written last summer' (Letter to William Mathews 23 May 1794, Letters 1.120)

observed; and above all [an] original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world around forms, incidents, and situations, of which, forthe common view, custom had bedimmed all the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew drops. (1.82-85)

The poem has its phantasmagorical, Coleridgean moments – the 'stormy fire' in the 'troubled west' (line 37), 'a voice as from a tomb' that cries a warning in 'hollow accents' (line 81), the story of the horse pawing at the ground where a murdered body is buried (lines 147 ff.), and Stonehenge itself, like an 'antique castle spreading wide' (line 78) a haunted, terrible place (lines 82 ff.). It is also very much a literary poem, a poem to appeal to a poet, drawing on Spenser and Shakespeare. The 'dead house of the plain' (line 126), site of potential moral rebirth, is taken from Book One of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and the metre is Spenserian stanzas, a verse form which Wordsworth was later to describe as 'almost insurmountably difficult' (William Wordsworth to Catherine Grace Godwin, Spring 1829, Letters 5.58). 16 The meeting in a dilapidated building in the middle of exposed countryside, meanwhile, recalls Lear. But early on Wordsworth signals that his concerns are more up to date. Coleridge is not in fact quite

16 Eftsoones unto an holy Hospitall, That was fore by the way, she did him bring, In which seven Bead-men that had vowed all Their life to service of high heavens king Did spend their dayes in doing godly thing: Their gates to all were open evermore, That by the wearie way were traveiling, And one sate wayting ever them before, To call in-commers by, that needy were and pore.

(Book One, Canto 10, stanza 36)

right; the poem evokes 'forms' and 'situations' which arenew, raw and recent, not ones 'bedimmed' by familiarity.

The poem begins with a preamble or proem on the lot of the 'savage' (line 3), suggesting that despite the harsh conditions under which he ekes out his subsistence,he is happier than those in more advanced societies whosemisfortune is thrown into relief by the luxury which others enjoy. Without 'Affluence' (line 24) there can be no sense of 'Penury' (line 27). A society based on property is, according to the poet, a zero sum equation where what is to the advantage of some must necessarily be to the disadvantage of others and where 'many thousands weep | Beset with foes more fierce than e'er assail | The savage without home in winter's keenest gale' (lines 34-36). These first stanzas may have reminded Wordsworth's contemporaries of Godwin’s views onthe ills which might be avoided by holding property in common; ‘a people among whom equality reigned, would possess everything they wanted, where they possessed the means of subsistence. Why should they pursue additional wealth or territory? These would lose their value the moment they became the property of all. No man can cultivate more than a certain portion of land' (2.66). Johnston suggests they are a paraphrase of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (350) but they also bear a distinct similarity to the beginning of a sermon by Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff. Originally preached ‘before the Stewards of the Westminster Dispensary' in April 1785, Watson’s sermon ‘on the wisdomand goodness of God in having made both rich and poor’ had been published earlier in 1793, with an appendix arguing its increased relevance in the context of the French revolution and unrest in England, it being now more important than ever that the populace should accept that ‘equality of men .... does not exist in equality of

property’ (1.481).17 In it, Watson evades the question of how the concept of property arose (‘it would be foreign to the purpose of this meeting to enter into a disquisition concerning the origin of property’) and, in contrast to Wordsworth, suggests that property exists everywhere; ‘it is a state of things which has taken place in every age and country of which we have any account: even the savage inhabitants of the uncultivated parts of the world, who derive their support from the casual success of the chace, have their separate districts for hunting; and an infringement of that species of property is one of the chief causes of their barbarous hostilities’ (1.448-9). It is, he goes on to claim, property which introduces social disparities – ‘a division of mankind into two classes, one possessing more, the other possessing less, or nothing at all’ (1.449) – and the burden of his sermon is to explain why these disparities are just and good. In order to do so he falls back on Locke and the labour theory of property:

God gave the earth to be a means of support to the whole human race; and we have all of us a right to be maintained by what it produces: buthe never meaned that the idle should live upon the labour of the industrious, or that the flagitious should eat the bread of the righteous: he hath therefore permitted a state of property to be every where introduced; that the industrious might enjoy the rewards of their diligence and that those who would not work, might feel the punishment of their laziness. (1.450)

17 It was published under the title A sermon preached before the Stewards of the Westminster dispensary at their anniversary meeting, in Charlotte-Street chapel, April 1785.

We know for a fact that Wordsworth was familiar withWatson’s sermon, since he wrote, though refrained from publishing, a Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff which responded to it. The Letter, though short, attacks Llandaff’s argument on a variety of fronts, one being enclosure.18 Wordsworth proposes abolishing primogeniture'and indeed all that monopolising system of legislation whose baleful influence is shewn in the depopulation of the country and in the necessity which reduces the sad relicks to owe their very existence to the ostentatious bounty of their oppressors' (1.43) – surely a reference to enclosure, to the abolishing of commoning, and to a resulting increase in poor rates. He also employs a slightly perplexing metaphor, in which 'the open field ofa republic' is opposed to 'the shade of a monarchy' (35).The open field is obvious enough, and may be a nod towards More’s Utopia, in which land is farmed collectively, but the reference to ‘shade’ is less transparent.19 It may, however, be aimed directly at the bishop. Watson was a Westmorland man, born in Heversham,and in 1788 he bought an estate at Windermere. There, heexplained, he occupied himself, ‘principally in building farm-houses, blasting rocks, enclosing wastes, in making bad land good, in planting larches’ (qtd. in the Dictionary of National Biography). In 1793 he became one of the first members of the newly founded board of agriculture and his Miscellaneous tracts on religious, political, and agricultural subjects includes a ‘Responseto the General View of the Agriculture of the County of Westmoreland’, and an essay ‘On Planting and Waste Lands’. In the latter of these he describes some of the

18 Wordsworth and Paine both use the somewhat unusual word ‘agrarian’,the latter in the title of his 1796/7 Agrarian Justice. They may bothbe taking the word from Godwin, who writes of ‘agrarian laws’ in the Political Justice (see 2.418, for example) but it seems more probablethat all three writers are drawing on Harrington.19 Godwin also cites More's Utopia in the Political Justice (2.339, footnote).

improvements which he had made near his Windermere estate; the purchase, on its enclosure, of ‘the land called Wansfell, on which I made a plantation of 48,000 larches near Ambleside’ and for which he had ‘received a gold medal, in 1789, from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts & c.’ (2.396-7). Perhaps, writing in response to Llandaff’s efforts at justifying and even eulogizing the inequality of property, Wordsworth could not resist a fling at Watson’s own enclosure activity.

‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ offers a flat contradiction of Watson’s bland vision of an ordered, fair, just country in which ‘the provision which is made for the poor … is so liberal, as, in the opinion of some,to discourage industry’ (1.483). Wordsworth presents a picture of a world destroyed, in pieces. There are abandoned buildings scattered on the plain, a sign-post that points nowhere (line 109), lone and lonely figures.20

It is not merely that society does not function – there is no society. The landscape resists overview, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral vanishing, and the traveller beingcautioned against looking in a particular direction lest he gaze on horrors. This is ‘Sarum's plain’ (line 38, line 549), a construction which contains within it the kernel of the poem's larger themes; it is land which belongs to the corrupt and grasping established order. Salisbury was the location, notoriously, of a rotten borough – Old Sarum – as well as a vast enclosure, and inthe poem it is also the place where the theft of propertyand power from the people is made manifest. As the traveller moves further away from Salisbury, a tiny figure silhouetted against a louring sky 'red with stormyfire' (line 37), the environment becomes increasingly 20 It should perhaps be noted that Arthur Young refers to a common, 'with roads pointing nine ways at once, but no direction post' (qtd. in Barrell Idea 88).

unfamiliar and unnatural. It is, paradoxically, the increase in arable exploitation of the plain that makes it inhuman, as the very evidence of human productivity istransformed into or revealed as something alien; boundless 'wastes of corn' (line 44) and 'huge piles of corn stack' (line 48) that in the landscape of nightmare become strangely akin not only to the 'brow sublime' (line 80), the 'mountain-pile' (line 82) of the henge with its threatened 'great flame' (line 94) and 'giganticbones' (line 97) but to the 'huge plain' (line 62) itself. They fit. The phrase 'wastes of corn' (line 44)is, I suggest, key in setting up this sense of paradox. Wordsworth plays on the two meanings of the word 'waste':the corn will feed the hungry multitudes, provide them with a Biblical staple and yet, despite the fruitfulness of the new agriculture, the change from legal 'waste' – poor scrubland common to all – to productive crops has created a waste of another kind, an unoccupied space, an unpeopled desert, a profusion which destroys its own purpose.

‘A Night’ effects a deliberate separation from the pastoral. When the traveller glances around at the plain he sees a bleak, unproductive, empty space:

No shade was there, no meads of pleasant green, No brook to wet his lips or soothe his ear, Huge piles of corn-stack here andthere were seen But thence no smoke upwreathed his sight to cheer; And see the homeward shepherd dim appear Far off – He stops his feeble voice to strain; No sound replies but winds that whistling near

Sweep the thin grass and passing, wildly plain; Or desert lark that pours on high a wasted strain.(lines 46-54)

The shade, the meads, and the brook are pastoral topoi; the horizon of the pastoral world is traditionally the homely cottage with its thin evening plume of smoke; the pastoral voice is generally static, reclining in the shade of a tree, not moving. The pastoral, in fact, is metapoetically disappearing into the distance and the void – 'the homeward shepherd' appears 'dim' and 'far-off' – the pastoral reed is replaced by the sounds of thewind whistling and keening aimlessly through the sparse scrubby grass and the traveller's 'feeble' voice is, likethat of the 'desert lark', wasted on the air, the sound of one hand clapping because there is no-one to hear it. The words 'plain' (line 53) and 'wasted' (line 54) recallthe previous stanza, directing the reader back to 'Sarum's plain' (line 38) and the 'wastes of corn' (line 44). It is enclosure that makes the pastoral mode impossible; the 'plain' is the site of grief, of plaining, and the 'wastes of corn' are a wasteful use of land that was once more productive waste, offering no support or comfort to the poor.21 The one man who seems tobe employed on the plain is as impecunious as either of the wanderers, 'his hungry meal too scant for dog that meal to share' (line 171). The plain, in its current enclosed state, makes all thought of charity impossible. Where was once 'a lonely Spital', built by 'kind' and 'pious hands' (lines 122-3) offering protection and

21 Wordsworth returns to this play on 'waste' and 'wastage' later in the poem, asking, 'How many at Oppression's portal places | Receive the scanty dole she cannot waste, | And bless, as she has taught, herhand benign?' (lines 436-438).

shelter, there remains only 'walls' (line 126) and tales of murder (lines 145-153). Neither the traveller nor the female vagrant ever seems to think that they might glean among the corn, though there is nothing in the text to indicate that it is inedibly unripe and the Bible insiststhat the corners of the field should be left for the widow and the stranger.

Stranger though she is, the tale told by the female vagrant elides regional difference. Now a wanderer on 'Sarum's plain', she was once 'the prime of Keswick's plain' (line 206), and her story centres on the tragedy of enclosure. Both Gary Harrison (94) and Toby Benis (68)suggest that the ‘oppression’ (line 257) which falls on the female vagrant’s father remains vague and ill-definedin ‘A Night’, but I doubt whether Wordsworth's contemporaries would have read into it anything other than enclosure.22 The woman’s childhood home is clearly a pre-enclosure idyll, with a garden sufficiently large to be 'stored with peas and mint and thyme' (line 236). The'hen's rich nest with long grass overgrown' (line 240) and the 'hazel copse with teeming clusters brown' (line 242) index traditional uses of the common land; the family chickens nest on the scrubby waste, where there are also natural resources, nuts and fruit which can be picked to supplement the family's diet. She is an 22 The woman’s father seems to have supported himself primarily by fishing (lines 228-9, line 234) before he was forced from his home. The disagreement between James Lowther and the Duke of Portland, it may be recalled, began with a dispute over a fishery and ended with evictions effected by Wordsworth’s father, a story which may perhaps appear here in compressed form:

His little range of water was denied; Even to the bed where his old body lay His all was seized; and weeping side by side Turned out on the cold winds, alone we wandered wide.

(lines 258-261)

industrious cottage worker who keeps her spinning wheel, symbolic of productive rural womanhood, 'humming' busily (line 247). Given the echoes between the boundaries of the plain – the spire of the cathedral, the hill over which the couple vanish – and those of this lost home – 'the steeple-tower' 'peering above the trees' which they see 'from the last hill-top' (lines 263-265) – it would appear that we are intended to read the vast emptiness ofSalisbury Plain as reflecting what has happened to the female vagrant's home. Geographically separate areas aremade alike; all enclosure is productive of this emptiness.

At the end of the poem comes what looks like a return to pastoral, when the traveller and the female vagrant look down from a hill onto a 'pleasant scene', complete with a 'winding brook | Babbling through groves and lawns and meads of green', a 'smoking cottage', a 'linnet' trilling 'amorous' and thus implicitly productive and regenerative 'lays', and, as definite confirmation, the genre markers of 'scattered herds' anda 'merry milkmaid' (lines 407-413). This is no true return, though. There is, after all, only one cottage (line 410) and only one milkmaid (lines 414). The ownersof the cottage must be the owners of the herd, people whohave worked hard and been rewarded with an increase of property, people of whom Watson would have approved. This scene is in fact almost a parody of pro-enclosure propaganda, revealing it as being as unreal as the pastoral. As in Smith's The Old Manor House, the ostensible return to pastoral order is not convincing, and is not intended to be so, but where Smith was resigned to change, Wordsworth ends ‘A Night on SalisburyPlain’ with an exhortation to the 'Heroes of Truth' to 'pursue your march, uptear | Th'Oppressor's dungeon from its deepest base' (lines 541-2). Such radical optimism

is absent from the revision of the poem, ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’.

I propose to read ‘Adventures’ alongside the poem ‘The Female Vagrant’ from the Lyrical Ballads.23 The manuscript copy of ‘Adventures’ (MS 2, in Gill's edition)does not in fact include the female vagrant's story but Wordsworth must have worked on MS 2 and the Lyrical Ballads version of ‘The Female Vagrant’ at roughly the same time. Together, the two present a gloomier, grimmerpicture, one in which Wordsworth seems both more angry about enclosure and what it represents, and, conversely, less wholly convinced of the truth of Godwin's views on property. The poem begins with two acts of human kindnessbeing done to the old soldier, but from there the tone darkens, and the poem ends with a hanging. The plain is again located as the site of unproductive enclosure with the word 'waste' (line 45) being pointedly juxtaposed to 'dreary corn-fields stretch'd as without bound' (line 53), and the dismissal of the pastoral is expressed in analmost identical stanza (lines 55-63). Then the history of the sailor is sketched in with quick, brutal strokes –the press-gang, war and the refusal to grant him his share of the spoils of war, robbery and murder – and two stanzas later the poet brings us up against a gibbet, 'a human body that in irons swang' (line 115). In ‘The Female Vagrant’, by contrast, the woman's story is expanded. One of the major additions is a passage which makes it impossible to ignore that enclosure is the primecause of evil which drives her and her father from their home:

There rose a mansion proud our woods among,

23 Note that Gill interpolates ‘The Female Vagrant’ into his reading text of ‘Adventures’, and that, for ease of reference, I follow his lineation throughout.

And cottage after cottage owned its sway, No joy to see a neighbouring horse, or stray Through pastures not his own, the master took; My father dared his greedy wish gainsay; He loved his old hereditary nook And ill could I the thought of such sad partingbrook.

(lines 300-306)

When she recovers at last from the illness to which she succumbs after the loss of her husband and children, she finds shelter and companionship with a group of gipsies;

The lanes I sought, and as the sun retired, Came, where beneath the trees a faggot blazed; The wild brood saw me weep, my fate enquired, And gave me food, and rest, more welcome, more desired.

(lines 501-4)

These people are, as Wordsworth has the woman insist, in a ventriloquization of Godwin's theories, 'the rude earth's tenants' (line 506) who maintain that 'all

belonged to all' (line 509). Avoiding agricultural labour, they have avoided likewise being affected by the tide of agricultural change, 'no plough their sinews strained; on grating road | No wain they drove, and yet, the yellow sheaf | In every vale for their delight was stowed : | For them, in nature's meads, the milky udder flowed' (lines 510- 513). John Williams suggests that theappearance of the gipsies is a return to pastoral picturesque (24) and there is certainly a prelapsarian element to this section of the poem. For the female vagrant life with the gipsies at first seems to offer a recapitulation of her own pre-enclosure, commoning youth but she balks at their easy acceptance of what she considers theft – 'ill it suited me ... | ... midnight theft to hatch' (lines 523-4). Leaving them, she lives 'upon the mercy of the fields' and 'often' uses them for her 'bed' (line 546). She also reproaches herself for her forays into theft, and despite the necessity under which she operated, considers it an 'abuse' of her 'innerself' (line 547), the one experience from amongst all herhorrific store which 'afflicts [her] peace with keenest ruth' (line 546). This insistence on guilt is shared by the ‘Adventures’, which includes a scene in which a father has beaten his small son nearly senseless as punishment for a small act of disobedience (lines 613 ff.), and ends with a scene of general depravity in which'dissolute men' position their 'festive booths' underneath the sailor's hanging body, 'idle thousands' throng, and 'fathers' bring 'women and children' to view the fair and with it the corpse in the gibbet (lines 821-4). The imagined figure of a 'kindred' criminal hardly stands out at all against this background of shared sinfulness (lines 825-8).

I suggested above that Wordsworth may have included the scene of violence between father and son as a form of

apology or expiation for the criticism of enclosure in which he had engaged. Enclosure and its ills had been a major theme in ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’, in ‘The Female Vagrant’, and in a number of other poems in the Lyrical Ballads, and by engaging in critical writing about an activity in which his father had been involved he was effectively challenging his father's moral authority. If we are to believe Book 12 of the Prelude, William had, while still so young that he could barely sit a horse, gone, with a servant, on some journey into the Cumbrian hills:

I remember well, That once, while yet my inexperienced hand Could scarcely hold a bridle, with proud hopes I mounted, and we journied towards the hills: An ancient Servant of my Father's house Was with me, my encourager and Guide: We had not travelled long, ere some mischance Disjoined me from my Comrade; and, through fear Dismounting, down the rough and stony Moor I led my horse, and, stumbling on, at length Came to a bottom, where in former times A Murderer had been hung in iron chains.

(lines 225-236)

The journey must in all likelihood have been made at the instigation of his father and the most probable explanation for a child becoming separated from an adult surely lies in the child’s momentary inattention or deliberate disobedience. If this scene or something similar to it, really did take place then it seems plausible that there may have existed in Wordsworth’s mind a connection between 'Moorland waste' (a phrase he

uses at line 258 and which is perhaps suggestive given that John Wordsworth bought up the right to manage accessto the High Moor), being disobedient to the wishes of hisfather and the gibbet. In ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’the figures of the sailor, his victim, the criminal whosebody he sees hanging in the gibbet, the father, and the son form a confused sequence in which victimhood and aggression are melded together, and one character seems temporarily to take on the lineaments of another.

It is probable that Wordsworth completed at least some of the revisions to ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’ while he was living at Racedown.24 Racedown, I suggested above, was a site which encouraged thoughts of enclosure and land usage. It also, if the majority of Wordsworth’sbiographers are to be believed, formed the backdrop to a period of depression and disillusionment during which Wordsworth experienced what, in Book 11 of the Prelude, he was to describe as, 'the crisis of that long disease |… the soul's last and lowest ebb' (lines 306-7).25 He was,'depressed', 'bewildered' (line 321), 'bedimmed and changed' (line 342), 'endlessly perplexed | With impulse,motive, right and wrong, the ground | Of obligation' until he 'yielded up moral questions in despair' (lines 298-305). There are obvious causes. William's experienceof Revolutionary France, the Terror and its aftermath, his fear for his former lover Annette, and for their child, the tyrannical measures which the Pitt government had introduced, anxiety for his own safety in the face ofthem, these together might be sufficient to bring him to a depth of uncertainty where he could be sure of nothing. But we know from Dorothy’s description of

24 ‘... since I came to Racedown I have made alterations and additionsso material as that it may be looked on almost as another work’ (Letter to Francis Wrangham, 20th November 1795, cited in The Salisbury Plain Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Gill 7)25 See for example Roe 161 ff.

Racedown that the area was reminiscent of the scenes of her Cumbrian childhood, and it is also undeniable that much of the poetry which William produced there or which was inspired by his time there is preoccupied with questions of land ownership, of rural change, and of enclosure. Intriguingly, Wordsworth writes in the same passage of attempting a retreat to the realms of 'abstract science', a place 'where the disturbances of space and time -- | Whether in the matter's various properties | Inherent, or from human will and power | Derived – find no admission' (lines 328-333). 'Disturbances of space' effected by 'human will and power' could plausibly be glossed as a reference to enclosure, particularly Cumbrian, Lowther-led enclosure. If enclosure was indeed one of the things he was trying to forget about, then he appears to have been unsuccessful. In later life Wordsworth continued to thinkof the place in terms of boundaries made and overstepped.In the 1840s, dictating a letter to Mary, in reply to some enquiries of Sara Coleridge, he recalled the arrivalof Coleridge at Racedown:

Your father he says, ‘came afterwards to see usat Racedown, where I was then living with my Sister. We have both a distinct remembrance of his arrival -- he did not keep to the high road, but leapt over a gate and bounded down the pathless field, by which he cut off an angle. We both retain the liveliest possible image of his appearance at that moment. My poorSister has just been speaking of it to me with much feeling and tenderness.’ (Mary Wordsworth and William Wordsworth to Sara Coleridge, November 7 1845, Letters 7.719-720)

If I am correct in my idea that enclosure was a complex and uncomfortable issue for the Wordsworth siblings, a

personal one reflecting on their idea of the kind of man their father had been, and the possible moral taint attaching to the money owed them by Lowther, then Racedown, with its borders, its obvious contrast between cultivation and waste, and its impoverished locals, mightvery well have forced the issue to the forefront of Wordsworth’s mind.

Godwin, to whose ideas Wordsworth repeatedly returnsin his Racedown poetry, was, it may be recalled, very much in favour of the notion that land ought to belong – indeed did belong – collectively to the people, and that the prevailing system of property ownership possessed no real validity whatsoever.26 A number of critics from EmileLegouis and Ernest de Selincourt onwards have argued thatthe most extensive work of the Racedown period, the versedrama The Borderers, can be read as an arraignment of Godwin’s ideas. One critic who does not is Bromwich; ‘I believe … that he was still attached to those principles when he began the play … [and] … it seems clear that he was still partly attached to the same principles when he finished the play’ (44). Indeed, Wordsworth seems to havecontinued to place a good deal of reliance on Godwin during this period, intellectually, at least. Godwin recommends that all ideas should be debated, as the sole route to truth and progress:

indeed, if there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind. ... all that is requisite inthese discussions is unlimited speculation, and

26 ‘To whom does any article of property, suppose a loaf of bread, justly belong? To him who most wants it, or to whom the possession ofit will be most beneficial. Here are six men famished with hunger, and the loaf is, absolutely considered, capable of satisfying the cravings of them all … the laws of different countries dispose of property in a thousand different ways, but there can be but one way which is most conformable to reason’ (Political Justice, 2.325-6).

a sufficient variety of systems and opinions ... when we are once persuaded that nothing is too sacred to be brought to the touchstone of examination, science will advancewith rapid strides. (1.53)

In the Prelude Wordsworth describes how he attempted to do this, 'dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds, | Like culprits to the bar' (11 lines 294-5). I suggest that this is exactly what he is attempting in TheBorderers, a trial of sorts in which Godwin's ideas are opposed to those of John Wordsworth. It would be a natural progression. I have already shown how ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ contains a Godwinian criticism of Watson, a Cumbrian encloser, and tentatively sketched outthe ambivalent tendencies of ‘Adventures on Salisbury Plain’, where stringent criticism of Cumbrian enclosure (on ‘Keswick’s plain’, recall) jostles uneasily against the poet’s overwhelming feeling of guilt, and I preface my examination of The Borderers with a discussion of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, which I suggest is structured about a similar 'trial' between warring systems of property. According to Butler and Green, the poem was composed not at Racedown but at Alfoxden, in 1798 (59). The action is however explicitly located in 'Dorsetshire' (line 29) rather than Devon, the county in which Alfoxden is to be found, and the narrative voice appears to belong to someone residing in Dorsetshire – 'our streams' (line 40) – so I feel justified in considering it essentially a Racedown text.

‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ centres on a moment of frozen stillness, the figures of the two title charactersstatic against an icy winter backdrop, an image so vivid as to be the poetic equivalent of kabuki or a tableau

vivant. We see the aged Goody Blake kneeling on her scattered bundle of sticks, one arm held by Harry who looms menacingly over her, the other arm raised to heaven. Schoenfield suggests that ‘Goody Blake and HarryGill’ is structured around those sticks, a trial 'betweentwo theories of property: the Burkean classical liberal theory to which Harry Gill consciously clings; and a moreabstract, naturalized theory, the roots of which are at once in Godwinian utilitarianism and in the mediaeval (and possibly mythic) common law that provided for commonproperty' (103). Godwin often glances towards the language of the enclosure debate, as he does early in thefirst volume of his Political Justice, protesting againstfurther rises in, 'the inequality of property', a phrase which appears to be a reference to the increasing rate atwhich common and waste lands were being enclosed. Cut off from the resources of commoning; 'vast numbers … are deprived of almost every accommodation that can render life tolerable or secure. The utmost industry scarcely suffices for their support' (1.32). Godwin does not entertain for one moment the idea that enclosure might benefit the poor by increasing harvests or creating work. For him enclosure appears as another weapon in thearmoury of class warfare; 'the rich are ... perpetually reducing oppression into a system, and depriving the poorof that little commonage of nature as it were, which might otherwise have remained to them' (1.35-6). Of more specific application to the poem is a passage from the second volume of the Political Justice, to the effectthat, 'our animal wants have long since been defined, andare stated to consist of food, clothing and shelter. If justice have any meaning, nothing can be more iniquitous,than for one man to possess superfluities, where there isa human being in existence that is not adequately supplied with these' (2.326).

Burney criticized the poem because he deemed Goody Blake's actions an unjustifiable infringement of propertyrights no matter how pitiable her situation;

The hardest heart must be softened into pity for the poor old woman; - and yet, if all the poor are to help themselves, and supply their wants from the possessions of their neighbours,what imaginary wants and real anarchy would it not create? Goody Blake should have been relieved out of the two millions annually allowed by the state to the poor of this country, not by the plunder of an individual. (Monthly Review 29, 206-7)

Burney, like Watson, of whose sermon this passage is distinctly reminiscent, glosses over the fact that the custom of people in the countryside helping themselves tonatural resources, to wood, to pasture, to turf, had beennot merely tolerated by the establishment but early incorporated into a quasi-legal framework by being given an Anglo-Norman nomenclature, so that words like 'piscary', 'turbary', 'estovers', and so on, appear in manorial records from the early mediaeval period (Jessel 165). Wood, in particular, was the subject of a bewildering variety of rights and quasi-rights, includingplough-bote, wood-bote, and the right to a certain amountof wood on the marriage of an eldest child. Moreover, there was a widely-held belief that any wood which was lying on the ground, and any which could be knocked or pulled off the tree was free to be taken for fuel (194). This is referred to in the seventh stanza of the poem; 'joy for her when e'er in winter | The winds at night hadmade a rout, | And scattered many a lusty splinter, | Andmany a rotten bough about' (lines 49-52).

Significantly, Goody Blake will only presume to 'pull' wood from the 'hedge of Harry Gill' (line 64). This hedge is 'old' (line 60) and, Wordsworth is careful to inform us, borders a field which contains 'a rick of barley' and 'stubble-land'. Harry, we know, is 'a drover', a man who drives cattle for a living, suggestingthat the barley field is not his, and that the hedge runsbetween his pasture and neighbouring arable land. Goody Blake does not try any of the other three sides of the barley field – she concentrates on just the one. It seems entirely plausible that the hedge used to mark the division between farmland and the pasturage which could be used by all the villagers. The use of the word 'pull', rather than 'break' indicates that Goody Blake isobeying the commoning traditions which did not permit substantial damage to trees or hedges, again supporting the assumption that the hedge is the sole remnant of the scrubby woods and shrubs which once grew on the manorial waste, a resource which Goody Blake had once been permitted to use. Goody Blake is 'old and poor', 'ill-fed' and 'thinly-clad' (lines 21-22), a virtuous old countrywoman who still operates on the assumptions and traditions which have prevailed during the greater part of her life.

Harry's anxiety, though, is presumably motivated by the concern that if Goody Blake takes too much snapwood, his animals may escape into the neighbouring barley field, and that he will be liable for any damage they might do. The hedge cannot continue to be both border and resource, and thus it serves as a locus for the irreconcilability of the new and old systems of land usage. Men like Harry are necessary for the economic prosperity of the country; though, as Schoenfield points out, Harry is not fully integrated into the local economy(103), he is implicated in the wider economy both as a

drover and as a consumer of excess goods – 'of waistcoats' the poet tells us, 'Harry has no lack, | goodduffle grey and flannel fine; | he has a blanket on his back | and coats enough to smother nine' (lines 5-8). Itis true that Goody Blake makes very little money from herspinning, but without excessive consumers like Harry Gill, it is probable she might make nothing at all. The poem is inspired by a medical case described by Erasmus Darwin in his Zoonomia, where a young, healthy man, cursed by an old woman that he would always be cold, seemed to internalise the belief and did not feel warm even when he sat beside a fire with layer upon layer of clothing on.27 The commoning references, though, are the poet's own. Wordsworth encourages us to diagnose Harry's constant shivering as a psychosomatic expression of classguilt; a guilt which should, he suggests, be more productively channelled to encourage the 'farmers' addressed in the last stanza to devise a more effective system of support than the poor rates for those left behind by the tide of economic and agricultural change. But though the poem directs the reader to find Harry guilty, it may also indicate that he is a victim of the imperatives of property ownership, compelled to wait in 27 ‘I received good information of the truth of the following case, which was published a few years ago in the newspapers. A young farmerin Warwick-shire, finding his hedges broke, and the sticks carried away during a frosty season, determined to watch for the thief. He lay many cold hours under a hay-stack, and at length an old woman, like a witch in a play, approached, and began to pull up the hedge; he waited till she had tied up her bottle of sticks, and was carryingthem of, that he might convict her of the theft, and then springing from his concealment, he seized his prey with violent threats. After some altercation, in which her load was left upon the ground, she kneeled upon her bottle of sticks, and raising her arms to Heaven beneath the bright moon then at the full, spoke to the farmer alreadyshivering with cold, “Heaven grant, that thou never mayest know againthe blessing to be warm.” He complained of cold all the next day, andwore an upper coat, an in a few days another, and in a fortnight tookto his bed, always saying nothing made him warm, he covered himself with very many blankets, and had a sieve over his face, as he lay; and from this one insane idea he kept his bed above twenty years for fear of the cold air, till at length he died’ (2.359).

the cold for Goody Blake, and compelled to rebuke her forher actions. A similar debate can be seen in The Borderers, where Wordsworth again confronts the question of property through the medium of a debate about land andland usage. Here, though, the debate focuses on the meaning which ought to be attached to the central empty heathland.

One text which can be fairly securely identified as a potential source for The Borderers is William Gilpin's Observations, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty … onseveral parts of Great Britain; particularly the High-lands of Scotland, which was published in 1789. In March1796, not long before he embarked on the composition of The Borderers, Wordsworth wrote for some of his books to be sent to him at Racedown; 'I hope you have preserved the catalogue of my books left at Montagu's. You would oblige me much by calling there; and desiring Jones to procure a box sufficient to contain them. See that they are nailed up in it. Gilpin's tour into Scotland, and hisnorthern tour, each 2 vol., ought to be amongst the number' (Letter to William Matthews, March 21 1796, Letters 1.170). Harrington Smith remarks that Gilpin's description of the northern counties repeatedly focuses on 'desolate', 'barren' spaces. Gilpin undertook his northern tour in 1772, when many of the enclosures with which Wordsworth had grown up had not yet begun and, as might be expected, it is the uncultivated space of waste and common which interests him. Recording his impression of the countryside around Grasmere, Gilpin writes that, 'with regard to the adorning of such a landscape with figures, nothing could suit it better than a group of banditti. Of all the scenes I ever saw, this was the most adapted to the perpetration of some dreadful deed' (922). At Penrith, his mind turns again on 'the ravages of banditti, with whom the country was always at that

time infested' (925). It is due to Gilpin's influence, Harrington Smith suggests, that 'the country of the Borderers … is made to present an aspect of wildness and terror not met with elsewhere in Wordsworth's work' (922). What Harrington Smith does not discuss is the possible influence of the other book Wordsworth mentions by name, Gilpin's 'tour into Scotland'. Included at the end of the first volume of the book is almost the entirety of Burns's ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ (1.215-221).28 The poem begins with a picture of pre-enclosure small-scale subsistence farming;

November chill blaws loud with angry sugh'; The short'ning winter-day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black'ning trains of craws to their repose: The toil-worn Cotter frae his labor goes, (This night his weekly moil is at an end,) Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o'er the moor, his course doeshameward bend.

The 'elder bairns' are 'at service out, amang the farmersroun' | Some ca' the pleugh, some herd' – evidently the locality supports a number of small-scale farmsteads. Elsewhere in what Wordsworth calls ‘the tour into Scotland’, Gilpin relates meeting with a party of 28 For the complete poem see Poems and Songs, edited by Kinsley, 1.145-152.

emigrants, moving on in the next paragraph to describe entering into 'a wild country, which nature had barely produced; but had done little to adorn. Neither had art ever deigned to visit it, except in the shape of a soldier working on a military road. Even the cottage smoking among a few trees, which almost every heath presents, was not here to be found' (1.169-171).

Gilpin connects both the landscapes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, and those of the Highlands of Scotland,with emptiness but with different kinds of emptiness. Cumberland and Westmoreland have a 'tumultuous' desolation, making them a perfect backdrop for 'banditti', while the emptiness of the Highlands is presented as unproblematic. Wordsworth knew better. Inthe Cumberland-set ‘Michael’, written after the return toGrasmere, the 'Dell' is empty, 'an utter solitude' (line 13) devoid of any sign of human presence save the 'straggling heap of unhewn stones' (line 17). Those who 'journey thither find themselves alone | With a few sheep, with rocks and stones, and kites | That overhead are sailing in the sky' (lines 10-12). One might wonder why, given there are still sheep grazing in the dell, 'the Cottage which was named The Evening Star | Is gone' (lines 485-6) and why Michael's half-completed sheep-foldhas been allowed to fall into ruin; I suggest that these details are a reference to the revolution in sheep-farming which began in the last quarter of the eighteenthcentury and which I shall discuss more thoroughly below. Since on Michael's death the cottage passes to his wife, and is afterwards 'sold ... into a Stranger's hand' (line484), it seems to have been a freehold or long leasehold estate, one which was, implicitly, bought up by a large-scale improving landowner, like Lowther, for in recent years, 'the ploughshare has been through the ground | On which it stood; great changes have been wrought | In all

the neighbourhood' (lines 486-488). All that remains is sheep, and emptiness. The desolation and emptiness of ‘Michael’ is the desolation produced not by groups of rival 'banditti', but by enclosure. Wordsworth had oftenwritten other enclosures as empty spaces; here, in The Borderers, he seems to ponder whether he was right to do so.

Gipin's assertion that the landscapes of Cumbria and Westmoreland formed the ideal backdrop for 'banditti'may well have been inspired by knowledge of the history of the area, which was, in the Middle Ages, home to gangsof reivers who made frequent raids across the border. Inhis own borderers, Wordsworth draws a picture of the worst excesses to which Godwinianism might persuade people. Hayden suggests that the characters in the play 'are chiefly outlaws, foraging against the wealth and property of the rich' (4) but in fact there are many minor characters who go peacefully about their lawful business and the only 'rich' person mentioned is Lord Clifford, whom the borderers do not appear to have robbed. The borderers keep their spoils for themselves. Mortimer and Rivers are not embraced as generous Robin-Hoods by the host of the inn or by the villagers. There is no evidence that they give to the poor and Herbert's description of Mortimer as a 'base freebooter' and a 'traitor' (I.i.175, 178) is never explicitly challenged, even by Matilda. It was fear of exactly this kind of behaviour that drove people like Watson and Burney to react so vociferously against Godwin's ideas. Simultaneously, though, Wordsworth traces similar behaviour in the men who usurped Herbert's estate. At the centre of the play, on the heath which represents a history of border land tenure in palimpsest, lies land, the question of who owns it, who ought to own it, and howit should be used.

Rivers tries to jolt Mortimer from his indecision and drive him to decisive and murderous action, painting a picture of how, unless Mortimer kills Herbert, the old man will not only continue to be loved by his daughter but, 'with unquestioned title | He shall be seated in hisBarony' (II.iii.208-9). He will, Rivers insinuates, enjoy property that he has absolutely no right to. Later in the scene some of the other borderers appear and report that, 'Henry has at last | Dissolved the Baron's League, and sent abroad | His sheriffs with fit force to reinstate | The genuine owners of such Lands and Baronies| As in these long commotions have been seized' (II.iii.330-334). In Act III, having moved closer to the centre of the heath, and still convinced that Herbert is an imposter, Mortimer suddenly turns to him and begins totalk, in the language of eighteenth century improvement, about farming;

A pretty prospect this, a master-piece Of nature – finished with most curious skill: My antient, have you ever practiced farming? Pray tell me what this land is worth by the acre?(III.iii.17-19)

It is unclear what answer he expects or requires but Mortimer appears to suspect that Herbert may be faking his blindness, and that if he were in truth the landownerhe claims to be, he would look at land acquistively, withan eye to enclosure and profitable cultivation. But Wordsworth shows that even lords can love their land, andnot merely look on it as a source of income as Herbert recalls once more the moment when he was turned away from

his home, relating his reactions in loving topographical detail in one of the most beautiful and tranquil passagesin the play:

From my own threshold I looked up to heaven, Anddid not want glimmerings of quiet hope; So from the court I passed and down the brook, Led by its murmur, to the ancient oak I came, and when I felt its cooling shade I sat me down [.]

(III.iii.96-101)

Despite his blindness, Herbert can still navigate his land because it is his own and he knows it. It has, however, been taken from him. Love and knowledge, need even, are no proof of ownership. Thus land tenure is madedangerously unstable, shifting between different owners; land, which should appear solid, immoveable, is revealed as potentially almost infinitely changeable, subject to 'commotions' and 'seizure'.

In an essay in Romanticism's Debateable Lands Stafford evokes ideas of a 'frontier zone' literature, concluding with a coda on J.M.W. Turner's visit to the Welsh Marches: 'it is notable that his series of landscape sketches are full of Border images; bridges, castles, storms and indistinct figures … it is as if old hostilities have marked the land so deeply that those whocome centuries later are still compelled, and repelled, by ancient conflicts' (25). The Borderers has a storm,

and a ruined castle, and it is marked by repetition, but as it describes its central empty heathland, its frontierzone, it simultaneously sketches out a more prosperous world around the edges. There is a ruined castle, and a whole one; an empty monastic house, and one which is active; a lonely cottage balanced by a bustling inn. Harrington Smith notes the poem's 'Gothicism' (922), precisely those elements which coincide with Stafford's 'Border images', but he does not note that outside the space of the heath there is a fully functioning society populated with a variety of generally friendly figures. Herbert records that when he first arrived in Ross, a wanderer with his daughter, 'a stranger' was 'moved' to take Matilda into her home while 'the good abbot of SaintCuthbert's | Supplied my helplessness with food and raiment, | And … gave me that little cottage | Where now I dwell' (Early Version, I.i.165-170). A friendly peasant directs the old man and his daughter to an inn (I.i.181ff.), where the host offers Matilda a groom to accompany her to the convent; the inn soon fills with villagers celebrating a wedding, but it is, the host informs Herbert, never empty since it stands on a pilgrimtrail (I.ii). Mortimer, maddened by guilt after exposing the frail and elderly Herbert on the moor, is observed bytwo woodsmen, who offer to help Rivers catch him and return him to safe-keeping (V.i). Even the mad 'maid whofell a prey to Lord Clifford' survives on the food brought to her hut by the local peasants (I.iii). The only character who has no shelter and nothing to eat is the female beggar, but she is strongly associated with the heath (I.iii.100; V.iii.146 ff.) and her tales of being refused charity are undermined when we learn that she has been bribed by Rivers to approach Mortimer.

All this evidence of a healthy, functioning society is, in my reading, significant. It surely offers a

speaking contrast to the space of the heath, a commentaryon it, but a commentary whose meaning is dependent on themeaning which attaches to the heath. The space of the heath represents both the pre- and post-enclosure landscapes simultaneously and can be read two ways. It either represents the old system of commoning and subsistence farming in which large portions of the countryside were left uncultivated and unproductive, or it represents the post-enclosure landscape, the tracts ofcorn fields which in ‘A Night on Salisbury Plain’ Wordsworth had described as an unpopulated 'waste'. One scene in the transcriptions from the various manuscript drafts of the poem suggests that at one point Wordsworth envisaged the heath as a popular commoning resource, usedfor pasture by locals. The 'Cottager' (later Robert) describes finding the dying Herbert;

The search of a stray heifer yesternight, While yet the moon was up had led me far Into the wildest part of this wild h[e]ath, When, hearing as I thought a sudden voiceI stopped and listened, not without such fear Upon me as the time and place might breed I looked, but neither could I hear or see Aught living, only silent as the ground Three horses of the mountains The cotters shaggy ponies pastured near, and geese from far sent forth a dreary cry [.]

(The Borderers 427)

The word 'cotters' (i.e. cottars) is rare and may gesturetowards mediaeval villeinage, since it was frequently used to translate the term 'cotarius', which appears in the Domesday Book denoting a villein who occupies a 'cot'to which a small portion of land is attached. In the late eighteenth century the predominant use of the word was to denote the Scottish peasants who, until recent agricultural change, had continued to subsist under a similar form of land tenure. The word appears in Burns's‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ and ‘Twa Dogs’, spelt as Wordsworth spells it here.

In the late version of the play, Wordsworth changed many of the references to 'heath' to read 'waste', but this does not necessarily offer a solution as to how to interpret the space. Some references are removed entirely, perhaps indicating that in old age Wordsworth wished to direct his readers away from the 'heath' of Lear. On the other hand some references in the early Borderers to 'heath' are altered to read 'moor' in the Late Version and moor – or one moor in particular – may have been connected in Wordsworth's mind with a rapacious, expansionist attitude to land, and a desire torestrict commoning.29 One of John Wordsworth's major investments, after all, was in the gates which controlledpasturing access to the High Moor, something that Lowtheralso invested in. There is another minor but suggestive shift between the Early and Late Versions; the dwelling-place where Matilda finds shelter, and where Robert, the poor man who finds Herbert dying, also lives, is described in the Early Version as a 'cottage' (III.v.173,29 For examples of where the references to ‘heath’ have been removed or altered, see also Late Version line 1209, line 1968, line 2013, line 2205, line 2294.

IV.i.29). By the Late Version it has become a 'Hut' (line 1647, line 1676). Cottages had been officially sanctioned dwellings, described by law. An act of parliament had been passed under Elizabeth I specifying that every cottage should have 4 acres of land attached to it, enough to make its inhabitants very much less reliant on commoning resources (Perry 10). In 1775 this act was repealed, partly due to demographic pressure, andpartly in order to make enclosure and large-scale cultivation easier. By turning the 'cottage' into a 'hut', Wordsworth both makes the position of Robert and his wife Margaret far less secure and connects them more firmly to the space of the common and waste where, we recall, the building of ramshackle dwellings was often tolerated. Without any legal right to land – or any provable right to common – the couple and their house could easily be swept away by the tides of agricultural change.

This is precisely what Wordsworth shows in another poem of the Racedown period, ‘The Ruined Cottage’. The narrator of the poem, having 'toiled' across 'a bare wideCommon' (MS. D, line 19), empty save for 'a group of trees | which midway in that level stood alone' finds that they have grown up around 'a ruined house, four naked walls | That stared upon each other' (lines 27-32). Here, again, are signs of depopulation. For the narrator the common is not a resource in constant use, but the backdrop to a 'tranquil ruin' (line 218), a placeto stop and hear a sad story in the 'slant and mellow radiance' of 'the sun declining'. There is only sadness in the poem, no anger. The image of the ruined cottage might even be part of a pro-enclosure argument, indicating that the uncontrolled, uncultivated spaces of common and waste threaten to overwhelm the garden, symbolof order and productivity, were it not for the fact that

the destruction of the garden, and the cottage, is connected to sheep. Having left Margaret tearful but determined, 'busy with her garden tools' (line 283), the pedlar recalls returning to find the garden overgrown with 'unprofitable bindweed', the rose 'bent down to earth', and the herb border 'straggled out into the paths' (lines 314-320). He notices also that the door tothe cottage is marked, 'with dull red stains discoloured and stuck o'er | With tufts and hairs of wool, as if the sheep | That feed upon the commons thither came | Familiarly and found a couching place' (lines 332-5). This is towards the end of summer, near harvest time, since the wheat is 'yellow' (line 299). When the pedlar returns again at the end of winter, 'ere on its sunny bank the primrose flower | Had chronicled the earliest day of spring' (lines 395-6), he finds Margaret's garden not merely overgrown and neglected, but destroyed, trodden down by the sheep;

The earth was hard, With weedsdefaced and knots of withered grass; No ridges there appeared of clear black mould, No winter greenness: of her herbs and flowers It seemed the better part were gnawed away Or trampled on the earth; a chain of straw Which had been twisted round the tender stem Of a young apple-tree lay at its root;

The bark was nibbled round by truant sheep.

(lines 414-422)

According to what Wordsworth told Isabella Fenwick in hisold age, the poem was 'indebted to observations made in Dorsetshire & afterwards at Alfoxden in Somersetshire' (qtd. in Butler 3). It is, however, set in the North, in border country, as is apparent from an earlier draft of the poem in which the speaker and the pedlar have met before, in the 'Cumbrian hills', when the pedlar was gazing on 'the house in which his earliest days were passed' (MS.B lines 48-50), and in which the pedlar 'repeat[s] the songs of Burns' (line 72). The breed of sheep native to the mountains of North England, and to Scotland, was known as short sheep. Their wool was thick, rough and wiry, offering a degree of protection against the harsh climate but still they were not sufficiently hardy to be put out to common on the uplandsduring the winter months. Instead, as John Naismith explains in his Observations on the different breeds of sheep, it was customary to keep them in a fold, and to feed them on hay and turnips;

The farmers bestow as great pains as circumstances will admit in making winter provision for the sheep ... Some reserve their stock of winter food till the stocks are in real straits: Others think it a wiser course tobegin to feed betimes; and, as soon as the winter sets in, lay down a few turnips, in somedry well-sheltered place … and continue as longas the turnips last. (7)

According to the pedlar, then, it appears that the sheep

have been wreaking havoc in Margaret's garden all winter when they should have been safely folded on less exposed ground.

There were, however, new and hardier breeds of sheep. Cheviot sheep, for example, came from the CheviotHills, and were a recent creation, bred from a base of the native animals crossed with rams from Lincoln, from Ryeland, and from Spain (Prebble 32). They fattened muchmore readily than the short sheep, even on the poor pasture in exposed areas, and produced more and better quality wool (Naismith 3-4). It was only with the rise of the Cheviots, and other improved breeds, which promised infinitely better returns than the native varieties, that it began to make economic sense for landowners in the north of England, and in Scotland, to turn to large-scale sheep breeding – and to enclosure.

More than a flavour of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ creeps into The Borderers. The Margaret of The Borderers shares a name with the central figure in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, and has also been left alone for a long time by her husband, though his absence was due to wrongful imprisonment. No sheep appear in the play, but they are mentioned more than once. When Matilda and Margaret are sitting together in the cottage, they are frightened by the boisterous voices of 'wassellers' returning home 'from a wake'. These 'wassellers' appear to be either shepherds or sheep farmers, since the scrap of speech which is overheard centres on sheep – 'in good faith, | We'll have a counting of our flocks tomorrow: | The wolf keeps festival these stormy nights' (IV.iii.5-7). From aconversation between Matilda and a Pilgrim who knew her as a child, we learn that in the early days of his vagrancy Herbert was led by a 'guide, a Shepherd's boy'

(II.ii.14-15), a fact which is repeated by Herbert himself when he describes his experience after being denied his property – 'a little boy, | A Shepherd's lad …| … said with tears that he would be our guide' (III.iii.106-109) – and mentioned again by Mortimer afterhe has abandoned him, 'a shepherd's lad came | And was his guide – if once – why not again? | And in this desert?' (III.iii.124-5). Sheep also surface in metaphor. Persuading Mortimer of Herbert's guilt, Riversposits that the old man's blindness and ill-health shouldbe no defence, since, 'his tender cries | And helpless innocence – do they protect | The infant lamb?' (II.iii.391-393). Mortimer has used ovine metaphor earlier in the scene; 'we look | but at the surfaces of things, we hear | Of towns in flames, fields ravaged, young and old | Driven out in flocks to want and nakedness' (II.iii.338-340). The juxtaposition of 'flocks' with 'want', and with expulsion, is suggestive in the context of enclosure, but it might also have recalled to anyone who had followed the progress of the new agriculture closely the only incident of really large-scale resistance to enclosure in Britain during theNapoleonic wars, which had occurred in the summer of 1792, in Scotland.

As Eric Richards explains, 'the old native Highland sheep were of no use to capitalist sheep farmers', but the new breeds were. They came across the land, 'in a series of waves mainly from the south ... first the Blackface and then, from the 1790s, the great surge of Cheviots' (Debating 49). Their advance across Scotland was astonishingly rapid. Richards calls the rise in sheep numbers 'staggering', pointing to the example of Argyll where the number of sheep had increased to 278,000by 1800, from virtually nothing in 1760 (50). In 1793, the entire parish of Uig in Lewis was advertised as a

sheep farm (53). Prebble, the great emotive historian of the Highland Clearances, describes the march of the sheepin terms of invasion, detailing how they crossed from east Lothian 'over the Highland Line. In 1790 they were across the Cromarty Forth into Ross, and two years later they reached Caithness in the far north' (33). In truth the sheep did advance rather like an army, sweeping the people from the land. The Reverend James Hall, a traveller in Scotland in the very first years of the nineteenth century recorded with amazement that 'some of these sheepwalks are from twelve to twenty miles long, and nearly as broad' (2.443). The people who had previously occupied the land were relegated to urban slums or seaside crofting. Many elected to emigrate. Asboth Prebble and Richards remark, it is astonishing, given the scale and speed of the change, that civil unrest did not erupt across the country. The one major incident that did occur took place in Galloway, in EasterRoss.

A violent dispute had erupted over cattle illegally impounded by the man who had recently taken over the large tract of land, still studded with the tiny huddled settlements of turf huts, which was destined to be turnedover to the sheep. When they congregated at a large family wedding a few days afterwards, a number of locals became increasingly fired up. The next day, a Sunday, there were notices in the local churches encouraging everyone to gather together, and there followed what was,according to Richards, 'the largest drive the Highlands had known' (41), as they marched across the countryside, herding the sheep before them. They wanted the land back. The authorities, terrified by rumours that a delivery of dynamite was on its way to the area, called in the army, and the sheep rebellion collapsed. It was, as Richards writes, 'the greatest threat to order in the

Highlands since the Jacobite Rebellion' (122), and it might have proved a threat to national security had not the courts responded with unusual leniency. The poet JohnLettice, who chanced to pass through Inverness when the case was brought to trial and observed the first day or so of it, explained the situation in his Letters on a tour through various parts of Scotland in the year 1792; ’several cottage farmers … with many others, whom they had excited, assembled together in an armed body, and seized upon, and drove away the sheep of certain proprietors from the counties of Ross and Sutherland, with the intention of forcing them out of these counties’(365). Though he thought their behaviour ‘indefensible’,he nevertheless reserved the bulk of his opprobrium for the landowners, who, he thought, had behaved far worse;

it is not, indeed, credible, till proved by fact, that anything in human shape should be sosordid and so savage, that, to become worth a few pounds more … he would reduce a being of his own species, happy but to earn a bare subsistence by the sweat of his brow, to such apiteous state of helplessness and despair. (366)

The Edinburgh Evening Courant was, Richards points out, even more sympathetic to the sheep rebels, describing them as 'exasperated at being turned out of their farms, by the present prevalent custom of the landlords letting out their grounds for extensive sheep walks, and rendereddesperate by poverty' (4 August 1792) and insinuating itsexpectation that 'the civil power, it is believed, will, as it ought ... be very lenient in the punishment of these unfortunate people' (Edinburgh Evening Courant 10 October 1792). The rebels, accordingly, were given the gentlest sentences possible for sedition, public interestquietened, and the sheep continued their stealthy march,

though, as Richards remarks, 'thefts of sheep became a chronic irritant' (Debating 138).30

In this context, the essay on the character of Rivers which is usually prefaced to the play becomes highly suggestive. In it, Wordsworth suggests that, 'thecharacter we are now contemplating will have a strong tendency to vice. His energies are most impressively manifest in works of devastation. He is the Orlando of Ariosto, the Cardenio of Cervantes, who lays waste the groves that should shelter him' (lines 42-44). Both Cardenio and Orlando attack shepherds, which initially suggests that the destructive and morally bankrupt Riversshould be identified with the men who had driven the sheep out of Galloway in 1792. Osborn, however, directs us at this point more particularly to a passage from Don Quixote:

Very well, quoth Sancho; but pray, Sir, what is it you mean to do in this Fag-end of the World?Have I not already told thee, answer'd Don Quixote, that I intend to copy Amadis in his Madness, Despair, and Fury? At the same time I will imitate the unhappy Orlando Furioso's Extravagance, when he ran mad, after he had found the unhappy Tokens of the fair Angelica's dishonourable Commerce with Medor at the Fountain: at which time in his frantic Despair,he tore up Trees by the Roots, troubled the Waters of the clear Fountains, slew the Shepherds, destroy'd their Flocks, fir'd their Huts, demolish'd Houses, drove their Horses before him, and committed a hundred thousand other Extravagancies worthy to be recorded in

30 The leniency of the courts contrasts to the treatment meted out by Braxfield in the Scottish sedition trials of 1793-4. See Barrell’s record of the cases in Imagining the King’s Death.

the eternal register of Fame (I,259-260)

Here, the imagery of 'fir'd … Huts' and 'demolish'd Houses' evokes the material destruction which so often accompanied the removal of Scottish rural populations, though the other images are reminiscent of the great 1792sheep drive.

Wordsworth refuses to indicate whether the villain of the piece is to be understood as encloser or rebel, Llandaff or Godwin. The emptiness of the heath is the double-edged symbol at the centre of the enclosure debateand Wordsworth, uncertain what he thought or ought to think, takes care to maintain its bivalency. After his recovery his poetry continues to exhibit the same doubleness about land. The version of the Lyrical Balladspublished in 1798 showcases anti-enclosure pieces such as‘The Female Vagrant’ and ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, which as I argued above seems to offer some slight justification of Harry's behaviour as an encloser, but italso includes ‘Lines written above Tintern Abbey’, a poemwhich opens with an untroubled word-picture of 'plots of cottage-ground' (line 11), 'hedge-rows' that are 'hardly hedge-rows, little lines | Of sportive wood run wild' (lines 16-17) and 'pastoral farms' (line 17). It is a tranquil rural scene, in which the possibility of 'vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods' (line 21) is entertained only for a moment before being replaced by the more pleasing image of a 'hermit' (line 22). In an analysis somewhat undermined by Rzepka, Levinson argues that Wordsworth wilfully excludes local heavy industry from his view (4-57). Neither critic remarks that the poem seems also to be wilfully blind to the rural themes which occupy Wordsworth so much elsewhere in the volume, introducing details such as 'hedges' and 'plots of

cottage-ground' which carried great charge in the enclosure debate and then drifting pastorally onwards. The second, extended version of the Lyrical Ballads of 1800 ends with ‘Michael’, another anti-enclosure poem, while two poems of 1802, ‘Resolution and Independence’ (elsewhere called ‘The Leech-Gatherer’) and ‘Beggars’ offer disparate views on vagrancy, the first praising theold man who maintains his self-respect by exploiting the resources of the common land – roaming 'from moor to moor' (line 110) – the second, in what sounds almost likean echo of Watson, dismissing the beggar woman's tale of misfortune and maintaining stoutly that, 'on English Land| Such woes I knew could never be' (lines 15-16).31 The phrase 'on English land' is, I suggest, telling, another indication that, as I suggested above in my reading of The Borderers, Wordsworth may have been aware that the pace of rural change in Scotland was faster than in England, the separation from the old ways more sudden andmore violent. At any rate, in the following year, 1803, he was to see the Scottish situation for himself.

Despite the revisionism of Michael Fry who, in 2005 denied the Clearances outright, asserting that 'in the Highlands of 1800 there was not a single county, not a single island, not a single parish, not a single estate, that was cleared' (159), few historians seriouslydoubt that this was effectively what occurred. The term ‘Clearance’ is a Victorian coinage (Richards Debating 7),but it describes accurately what was happening to the landscape. Traditionally there was a strict hierarchy of land tenure, from the landowner or laird who allotted portions of land to chief tenants, who then leased it to subtenants, who in turn leased it to cottars. In the Highlands the chief tenants were generally close relatives of the laird, but despite the relative

31 The dates of composition are drawn from Curtis.

loosening of kinfolk ties in the south, the Lowlands had retained its cottar class. Smout describes the ‘typical unit of settlement’ this system produced. The subtenantstended to collect together in, ‘a hamlet, known as a farmtoun in the Lowlands and a baile in the Highlands, a cluster of turf and stone dwellings that might be arranged contiguously … or scattered separately as impermanent huts’ (73). Prebble suggests that usually, 'six or eight men might hold a farm in common’ (21). Farming was arranged on an infield-outfield basis, the infield, the better land closer to the houses, being farmed in runrig or rundale – small individual strips divided between the inhabitants by lottery – and the poorer land of the outfield being turned over to grazing,with everyone’s animals mingling together. There might also be a piece of land known as a commonty. These were,according to Devine, ‘uninhabited lands varying in size from a few acres to several thousand’ which ‘provided a source of building materials and fuel for neighbouring settlements … could be used for rough grazing and supplied a reserve of arable land … the rights to use them went with the lands adjacent to them’ (51). From the description it appears that the commonty fulfilled a role not dissimilar to the manorial waste, offering resources not merely to the subtenants but to the cottars, the class below them.

With the rise of the new breeds of sheep, this sort of subsistence farming became absurd. Sheep offered a far better return than arable farming on all but the bestland. The changes brought in by the administrators of theForfeited Estates Commission, who managed the land which had been attainted after the ’45, had as Prebble puts it,‘shown what could be done by larger farms, higher rents and the abolition of runrig' (23). The landowners now went further still, not merely reorganizing land into

larger, more productive farms, but often abandoning arable farms altogether, and turning vast swathes of countryside over to sheep.32 Scottish philosophers, lawyers, and farmers had been wrestling with the land problem from the first years of the eighteenth century. Francis Hutcheson, professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1729, followed Locke, emphasizing that man could not live on the bounty of nature, but had to turn to farming; ‘the common interest of all requires that all should be obliged by their own necessities to some sort of industry; now no man would employ his labours unless he were assured of having the fruits of them at his own disposal’ (qtd. in Stein 153). Kames – the Scottish Blackstone – produced a tract entitled The Gentleman farmer, being an attempt to improve agriculture by subjecting it to the test of rational principles. Stein explains how, in his Historical Law Tracts, Kames, ‘traces the progress of theidea of property from barbarian times, when it is inseparable from possession and therefore liable to be dissolved by the slightest accident, until, as society advances, the relation between the subject appropriated and its owner becomes indissoluble except by consent of the owner’ (159). Adam Smith, meanwhile, lamented that;

in Scotland more than one-fifth, perhaps more than one-third part of the whole lands of the country, are at present supposed to be under

32 See, for example, the entries for the parishes of Lochgoil-head and Kilmorich in Argyll, in volume 8 of The Statistical Account of Scotland, which are described as, 'ill adapted for tillage; there is very little land capable of being ploughed ... the great decrease in the population of the country is owing to the introduction of sheep. since the farms have been chiefly stocked with sheep, one man often rents as much land as 10, 12, or 14 tenants formerly possessed ... the system by which land returns the most valuable produce, and in great abundance, seems to be the most beneficial for the country at large'.

strict entail. Great tracts of uncultivated land were, in this manner, not only engrossed by particular families, but the possibility of their being divided again was as much as possible precluded for ever. It seldom happens, however, that a great proprietor is a great improver. In the disorderly times which gave birth to those barbarous institutions ... he had no leisure to attend to the cultivation and improvement of land. When the establishment of law and order afforded him this leisure, he often wanted the inclination, and almost always the requisite abilities. (2.85-6)

In the event, Smith was proved wrong. As Richards asserts, 'many ... highland estates had instituted reorganisation and extracted rent increases before sheep farming was introduced after about 1780' (11). The introduction of sheep from the south speeded up the process, but huge numbers of people were already on the move, both within Scotland, and from outside it.

Eric Richards explains that the census statistics from the period, when correctly interpreted, admit of no doubt whatsoever that the clearances, the enclosures, thereshaping of the land, increased rather than diminished the demand for agricultural labour in absolute terms (Highland Clearances 73). There was also employment to be had in the nascent industries of the Lowlands, or in the planned fishing villages which improving landlords built on the coast to move their evicted subtenants and cottars to (see Smout). The problem was demography. The population had increased so much that even allowing for new labour requirements, there were simply too many

people (Devine 35 ff.). The obvious answer was emigration, but this was a disturbing thought. At a timewhen a nation’s strength was reckoned on population, and when invasion seemed a very real possibility, the sight of thousands of Scottish emigrants leaving for America was a daunting one to many, including Dorothy Wordsworth;‘when we were travelling in Scotland an invasion was hourly looked for, and one could not but think with some regret of the times when from the now depopulated Highlands forty or fifty thousand men might have been poured down for the defence of the country’ (Recollections of a Tour 356). By the end of the 1790s, concern at depopulation was such that the Caledonian Canal was devised to provide work and prevent emigration.

However incorrect it may have been, the perception was that enclosure was leading to the depopulation of theHighlands. For the Wordsworth siblings, Scotland was a land characterized by emptiness. Everything they could read on the subject would have supported such views, fromThe Statistical Account of Scotland, published throughout the 1790s, to Boswell, and Burns. Boswell, in his 1785 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, relates several of Johnson’s remarks on the changes taking place in Scottishagriculture, to the effect that, 'a rapacious Chief wouldmake a wilderness of his estate' by forcing rents up so high (245) and that ‘the lairds, instead of improving their country, diminished their people’ (372). Viewing the list of contents of the letters, the subject of emigration appears time and time again. The poetry of Robert Burns, whose father and grandfather had farmed in Ayrshire and Kincardieshire, is filled with dykes – ditches – which, in Scotland, were used to denote the divisions of property after enclosure (Devine 51).33

33 See Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect pp.11, 13, 57, 77, 197.

Against this background it is not surprising to findthat the poetry which grew out of Wordsworth's Scottish tour returns again and again to the language of enclosure. It is also not surprising that that poetry should be marked by the same doubleness or bivalence we have noted before. In ‘Rob Roy's Grave’, the first poem in Poems Written During a Tour in Scotland, Wordsworth first suggests that 'Rents and Factors, rights of chace, | Sheriffs, and Lairds and their domains,' would, 'all have seem'd but paltry things' (lines 69-71) to the Scottish hero, and then states that 'all the oppress'd, who wanted strength, | Had Robin's to command' (lines 111-2). He ends by imagining a 'thoughtful herdsmen' wandering 'alone' and sighing that Rob Roy is no more, one among many 'far and near ... that attest the same' sentiment (lines 113-8). The most obvious oppression in Scotland lies in the enclosures and the removal of populations for sheep; it lies precisely in 'rents' and 'factors', 'lairds and their domains'. The poem seems toknit together two entirely different and almost contradictory threads of thought. In the next poem in the collection, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, the narrative voice seems unaware of the implications of there being only one 'solitary Highland lass' (line 2) in the landscape. When the poem proceeds to offer two ideas of what the 'lass' might be singing, 'old unhappy, far-off things, | And battles long ago' or the 'familiar matter of today ... | ... natural sorrow, loss, or pain' (lines 19-23) it begins to look disingenuous.

In the seventh poem of the collection, ‘Sonnet (Composed at --- Castle)’, by contrast, Wordsworth embarks on what at first looks like an attack on the mercenary approach to land employed by major Scottish landowners, but which by the end has turned into an apology for it. The dashes stand for Neidpath, as

William revealed in a letter (William Wordsworth to Sir George Beaumont, October 14 1803, Letters 1.410). Neidpath Castle belonged to the fourth Duke of Queensberry. Already well-off, having succeeded his father as Earl of March and his mother as Earl of Ruglen,the Duke's succession to the Queensberry estates had lefthim fabulously wealthy, and his estates gave him great parliamentary influence in Peeblesshire and Dumfriesshire, making him rather like a Scottish equivalent of Lowther. He spent little time in Scotland,preferring to live in London, and seemed to regard his Scottish estates as a resource to be exploited. When hewanted to raise the money for a dowry for his supposed daughter, who was engaged to marry the Earl of Yarmouth, the Duke elected to strip the woodlands around his estates at Drumlanrig Castle and Neidpath Castle in Peebleshire (now Tweedsdale).34

Wordsworth dismisses Queensbury as 'degenerate', 'unworthy', his motive identified as 'mere despite of heart' or 'love of havoc'. The poem is only sonnet length, so I include it here in full:

Degenerate Douglas! O the unworthy lord! Whom mere despite of heart could so far please And love of havoc(for with such disease Fame taxes him) that he could send forth word To level with the dust a noble horde A brotherhood of venerable trees,

34 See entry for William Douglas, fourth duke of Queensberry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7937

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7937

Leaving an ancient dome, and towers like these, Beggar'd and outraged!—Many hearts deplored The fate of those old trees; and oft with pain The traveller at this day will stop and gaze On wrongs, which Nature scarcely seems to heed: For shelter'd places, bosoms, nooks, and bays, And the pure mountains, and the gentle Tweed, And the green silentpastures, yet remain.

The sonnet may be written in response to or imitation of a pseudo-Burnsian poem entitled ‘Verses on the Destruction of the Woods near Drumlanrig’ which was for atime considered genuine. Currie, editor of the authoritative edition of Burns, explains that the poem was written as a jeu d'esprit by Henry Mackenzie and read at Royal Society. It then appeared in the Scots Magazine inJuly 1803, prompting Mackenzie to write to Currie, Burns's earliest editor, warning him of the poem's true provenance (see Kinglsey 2.926). It is possible from thetiming, however, that Wordsworth might have thought the verses to be by Burns. In the collection the sonnet precedes the ‘Address to the Sons of Burns’, an indication that Wordsworth might not have been aware of Mackenzie's confession.

Even if the ‘Verses’ is parody, it is parody with a strong anti-enclosure theme, and the identity of the vandal who has wrought the destruction is left in no doubt by the concluding lines: '"Man! cruel man!" the

genius sighed – | As through the cliffs he sank him down – |'The worm that gnaw'd my bonie trees, | That reptile wears a ducal crown"'. The ‘Verses’ laments the 'rural cot' which once stood protected among the trees, and which is now unoccupied, exposed to the harsh east wind. The poem concentrates on the damage to the woods themselves, refusing to acknowledge the idea of ownershipsuggested by a 'castle'. Much of it is couched in the voice of the genius loci. Wordsworth, by contrast, is concerned that the 'ancient dome and towers like these' have been 'beggared'. He appears preoccupied with – as the title suggests – the idea of castle and 'property'. The anger with which the poem begins seems to dissipate entirely. The trees may be gone but what remains is 'shelter'd', 'pure', 'gentle', 'green' and 'silent' – heedless Nature. The poem divides into two, bisected by the dash in the middle of the seventh line; the first half is filled with 'havoc', 'dust', beggary and outrage,the second with the bland tranquillity of nature. Nothing, really, has changed, not disastrously, not beyond hope of recovery. Though 'many hearts deplored | The fate of these old trees' that, it is implied, lies inthe past. The river is still there, the mountains are still there, and though the 'green silent pastures' of the final line might be read as a reminder of sheep, and of the emptiness which they created, the view is still pleasing to the eye.

Indeed, in the Scottish context, enclosure succeededin making the countryside more picturesque, removing the signs of cultivation which in general were thought incompatible with it (see both Gilpin and Young, passim). It was also enclosure which opened up the Scottish landscape to seekers after picturesque beauty. At the end of the Sonnet, the only presence in the otherwise empty landscape is the undifferentiated 'traveller', one

of the increasing number of tourists attracted to Scotland where, though travel remained, as Grenier explains, 'far from easy', even the Highlands were becoming 'more accessible than ever before … thanks to the network of roads and bridges' (32). Some of this infrastructure had been built as part of a concerted state attempt to exert control after the '45, but increasingly it was laid out as part of the reshaping of estates, motivated by a desire to access the marketplacesof the new agricultural economy. Wordsworth could travelin relative ease because of enclosure, and it was enclosure which had shaped many of the picturesque sceneshe stopped to look on. So strong did this connection become in Wordsworth's mind that when, in ‘Stepping Westward’, he came to write about an experience of landscape which he had found particularly affecting, he kept the nearby cultivation firmly out of view.

"What you are stepping westward?" -- "Yea." -- 'Twould be a wildish destiny, If we, who thus together roam In a strange Land, and farfrom home, Were in this place the guests of Chance: Yetwho would stop, or fear toadvance, Though home or shelter he had none, With such a Sky to lead him on?

The dewy ground was dark and cold; Behind, all

gloomy to behold; And stepping westward seem'd to be A kind of heavenly destiny; I liked the greeting; 'twas a sound Of something without placeor bound; And seem'd to give me spiritual right To travel through that region bright. The voice was soft, and she who spake Was walking by her native Lake: The salutation had to me The very sound of courtesy: It's power was felt; and while my eye Was fixed upon the glowing sky, The echo of the voice enwrought A human sweetness with thethought Of travelling through the world that lay Before mein my endless way.

The action of the poem takes place, we have been told in the proem, in 'one of the loneliest parts of that solitary region', Loch Ketterine (now more commonly knownas Loch Katrine), near the Trossachs, an area of the

Highlands through which Wordsworth would have passed on the tour he, his sister Dorothy, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge undertook during the August and September of 1803 (Gill 214-6). The Trossachs, meaning 'the rough or bristly country', is properly the name given to the narrow gorge between Loch Katrine and Loch Achray, but inthe poem the scene, far from rough, appears dreamlike.

Dorothy describes the encounter in less misty terms in her Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803;

our path having led us close to the shore of the calm lake, we met two neatly dressed women,without hats, who had probably been taking their Sunday evening's walk. One of them said to us, in a friendly, soft tone of voice, 'What, are you stepping westward?' I cannot describe how affecting this simple expression was in that remote place, with the western sky in front, yet glowing with the departed sun. (1. 367)

Elsewhere in the Recollections Dorothy laments the precipitous decline in the population of the Highlands, and if she does not seem necessarily to connect it to the'sheep farm[s]', 'corn fields' and plantations of trees for timber which she repeatedly sees on their tour, the connection was well-established and did not need to be outlined. The well-dressed native women stand in stark contrast to the impoverished local family with whom William and Dorothy share the ferry onwards from Loch Ketterine; enclosure had enriched some, but agricultural change was a zero sum game, and what some gained had beenlost by others. Dorothy muses on 'the difference in our condition to that poor woman who, with her husband, had

been driven from her home by want of work, and was now going a long journey to seek it elsewhere' (369), a reference either to one of the planned villages, to the burgeoning urban centres, or to a longer journey across the Atlantic.

Dorothy includes William's poem in this section of the Recollections, and her contextualisation of the encounter, her siting of it in the real, forms a commentary which complicates the poem's presentation of the Trossachs as a deserted 'solitary' location. Glen Finglas, in the next valley over from Loch Katrine, was one of the favourite royal hunting forests of the Stewartkings; James II even built a hunting lodge there. The Woodland Trust, which now owns Glen Finglas, is anxious to preserve the glen as an example of wood pasture, whichis defined on its website as, 'a landscape of scattered trees in a grassland or heathland setting ... a habitat fashioned by generations of rural people grazing livestock and maintaining trees on the same site'.35 The area, then, was clearly the site of fairly continuous habitation. The writer of an anonymous 1800 pamphlet singing the wonders of the Trossachs scenery recommends that 'whoever wishes to see the whole Trossachs' should ascend a particular hill, from which 'the whole extent ofthe lake … with woods, and villages, and corn fields, along its banks' can be admired (A sketch of the most remarkable scenery 22).

One might wonder quite why, given that there was clearly a fairly sizeable local population, Dorothy and William express such surprise at encountering these women. The land around Loch Katrine had been owned for

35 http://www.snh.org.uk/publications/on-line/heritagemanagement/woodpasture/livinglandscape.asp

http://www.snh.org.uk/publications/on-line/heritagemanagement/woodpasture/livinglandscape.asp

http://www.snh.org.uk/publications/on-line/heritagemanagement/woodpasture/livinglandscape.asp

generations by the Drummonds, who were active in the Jacobite cause. After the '45 the Perth estates were attainted but Stobhall, and that part of the Stobhall estate which includes Loch Katrine, were deemed to belongto the dowager Duchess of Perth and she lived there untilshe died in the 1780s. Lady Perth, in addition to building the little bothies for walkers mentioned in Dorothy's Recollections, turned the land over to sheep-farming, being one of the first wave of Scottish landowners to do so. Thus the 'emptiness' of the Wordsworthian landscape might be read as an assignment ofblame; the Trossachs may be a less sparsely inhabited landscape than the siblings insinuate, but its emptiness is made symbolic of the acres which had been depopulated in the relentless march of the sheep.

But the poem instructs us not to look at the countryside or the fraught questions of property on whichWordsworth had expended so much thought, energy, and ink.Instead it fixes the reader's eye, like that of the speaker, 'upon the glowing sky' (line 22), drawing it to what is 'heavenly' (line 12), a 'region bright' (line 16). The changed landscapes are left in shadow, 'gloomy to behold', the 'dewy ground ... dark and cold' (lines 9-10). McKusick suggests that the poem is a dreamy utopianone, pointing to the presence of Helvyn's 1652 Cosmographie in Wordsworth's library, and its dedication to 'Poets, which turn their Faces towards the Fortunate Islands … the which are situated in the West' (122). Wordsworth may well be looking west towards the FortunateIsles, but he is also looking towards America, a continent characterised by its wildness, its lack of cultivation. In that direction lay a place where cultivation and increase of property did not have to encompass depriving others. The rhetorics of enclosure and colonization had much in common, as we shall see in

the next chapter. Perhaps for Wordsworth the prospect ofthe west offered an escape from the debate that had occupied his mind for so long. In America the Scottish emigrants driven from their own country could create their own farms and forget their loss in the realisation of how pleasant it was to tame land and further progress while making money. In America enclosure could be entirely divorced from any sense of right and wrong, and property could indeed be gained according to Locke's theories. In America, it seemed, land was simple.

‘Stepping Westward’ does not represent Wordsworth's last word on enclosure, but in later life, after the debthad finally been repaid by Lowther's heir, and after he had become involved in politics for him, he seems to havefound it less problematic. In his A Guide Through the District of the Lakes, Wordsworth writes lovingly of the old system of land tenure, and, in an admiring footnote, records the efforts of the villagers of Stavely to preserve their customary rights when James I attempted tocancel their tenancies and engross the land solely to hisown use (3.264-5). In the second of his Two Addresses tothe Freeholders of Westmorland, of 1818, he writes bombastically about one enclosure scheme, 'the malevolentand senseless abuse heaped upon the Clergy, in the matterof Tythes, through the medium of papers circulated by the Agricultural Board' and the threat of 'utter subversion to the ancient frame of society' (2.169). Thevery next year, though, we find him helping an acquaintance to obtain an enclosure; ‘Edward Park, brother of the said William, is also very steady, he has a small customary parcel in Great Langdale and wishes to purchase the Intack, but nothing more free, to enable him to Vote at the next Election. -- Pray let me know, at your earliest convenience, what will be the expense of these two enfranchisements’ (William Wordsworth to Robert

Lumb, February 27 1819, Letters 3 525). There is no passion here, only politics and pragmatism. It is, I suggest, no coincidence that as his own life came to resemble that of his father, Wordsworth grew calmer aboutenclosure. He was still happy to argue the matter either way, for a political speech or a nostalgic passage in a travel guide but in the end one must live in the world, and his world was the enclosed landscape of the Lakes.

William Wordsworth and enclosure: 1793-1803

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