“The Wall,” John Berger writes, “is the front line of what, long ago, was called the Class War.” Walls, fences, hedges, and ditches were all used to mark the boundaries of enclosed land, so that sheep could be kept there, or some other profit could be pursued. The nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.įrom my backward-facing seat, I saw a long stone wall on the crest of a cliff. That land already belonged to the landed, in the old sense of ownership, but it had always been used by the landless, who belonged to the land. There in those hedges, I was looking for a living record of enclosure, the centuries-long process by which land once collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed. I was trying to locate the origins of private property, a preposterous pursuit. I searched their dark creases and their uneven hedges for something I didn’t know how to see, something I wasn’t even certain was visible. On the train to Laxton I was facing backward, heading south from Scotland, with the fields of England rushing away from me.
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