Enclosure is the definition of a boundary. Historically enclosure has referred to the bounding of land by marking or fencing so as to include some usage and to exclude access and other usage. The typical and most obvious form of enclosure for a rural society is the enclosure of a pasture or field. The piling of cleared rock from plowed fields to form edge rows or the laying of rails to contain livestock are simple enclosures. Normally such enclosures served limited agricultural rather than social or political aims; they kept the cows and pigs in or out, and had a simple functionality compatible with accepted usage and did not prohibit or even intend to specify access by neighbors.
Formal, or statutory, enclosure has a specific social, economic, and most importantly, political history which does not express its intent in agrarian function but in matters of control of access, hence of power, station, and privilege. Such enclosures were represented in an early form in the anti-poaching laws regulating access to game and trees, and enclosure was defined in the marking and patrolling of royal boundaries. (The Magna Carta testifies to the violation of a common tradition rather than establishes it.) Later as non-royal landed interests emerged and ownership passed from indeterminate or common to private and from small landholder to large, statutory provision enabled and sanctioned, with severe penalty, the bounding of large tracts of land with the provision of tenant removal and denial of access. By the end of the Eighteenth Century in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, such statutory enclosures had rendered homeless many tens of thousands of people, thus fueling a continuing migration abroad, the removal of yet other tens of thousands to the new factory towns and cities, and producing a new socio-economic order the frictions and fractures of which are not yet spent in Great Britain or America.
Formal enclosure accompanied the rise of industry and the process of modernization of technology, law, and economy and was an instrument of the breakup of the old order. The effects of enclosure would lead to the displacing and transformation of traditional rural populations and to the transformation of the rural idea itself. In one sense, enclosure spelled the end of the common world that was the basis of land usage before the Nineteenth Century in Europe and which lasted until the Twentieth Century in parts of the United States such as the rural South. While there had always been some degree of enclosure with respect to royal or aristocratic lands since the days of classical antiquity, pastoral and rustic folk of Europe had nonetheless enjoyed traditional right of passage and access to large tracts of land and forest for purposes of migration, grazing, and farming. While access to some land might be denied, even on pain of death, some tracts of land remained common in usage if not in ownership.
Formal enclosure ended both usage and, in some cases, traditional ownership of most common land. In some cases, ownership--as for instance in the territorial legalization of the United States--passed into the hands of government; in other cases, ownership was consolidated in the hands of a new economic class with powerful vested interests in the means of production from the resource base to the manufacturing and distribution of products. Enclosure amounted to the de-commonization of traditional rural lands and the products or privileges--forage, fish, game, timber, and passage--represented by those lands. Land that formerly belonged to "nobody" or to "all" now belonged to "someone", usually someone quite specific whose identity was known less by sight than by extended will effected through intermediaries who enforced the boundaries of space and access defining the enclosure. These intermediaries some times had statutory authority as reeves or, as more commonly became the case in the Nineteenth Century, as managers and overseers--who might in any case enforce boundary lines and access by physical force. Adjudication of enclosure boundaries would become a major and normal part of legal process, and in due course, enclosure legislation would be model for varieties of private property statutes which effect boundary definition at smaller scale.
Formal enclosure involved the definition of spatial boundaries and access through such boundaries, but also came to define the boundaries of privilege and behavior as well as spatial access. Based upon physical enclosures, "enclosure thinking" attempts to define and regulate access to forms of usage as well as to the land itself. Enclosure in this extended sense involves fundamental attitudes about self and society and typically approaches these tokens on the basis of a 'closed' rather than 'open' mentality which defines the social space of the self in terms of permissions--that is, recognized and empowered authorizations for behavior which do not reside or inhere in the volition of the individual. Enclosure represents a fundamental shift of vision and power in the society in which it occurs; it is a shift away from social forms that are, in virtue of their access and shared nature, considered to be open or free toward social forms which by restriction of access are closed and not free. In an open and free society, whether democratically enabled or not (and not all open and free societies in this sense are also just), social forms which include land access and usage among many other forms, are measured by tradition and covenants instead of by contract, law, policy or regulation. In essence, enclosure replaces land covenants with land contracts and laws. Extended closure replaces the covenantal relationship as the basis of social forms with increasingly specified contractual and regulated relationships.
Covenantal relationships are characterized by an inherited sense of obligation and responsibility that is mediated through primary or secondary relationships in the society; these relationships are typically face to face or involve persons who are known face to face, are few in number, and involve negotiation of need or greviance on the basis of understood rather than stated obligations and responsibilities. Formal and extended enclosure, along with the other legal, political, social, and economic arrangements of modern society, tend to replace covenantal relationships with contractual or formally stated relationships. In many areas of human life, such contractual relationships represent significant improvements and protections of individual rights in relation to the abstract entities of modern industrial society. Such contractual relationships, however, most often represent a dimunition or disappearance of covenantal relationships that prevailed in rural or traditional societies. The loss of these covenantal relationships brought with it some new freedoms but also the loss of many personal elements in the ordering of life, in the redress of wrongs or misunderstandings, and in the satisfaction of needs.
For most of a century, the community of Sewanee has been an open and covenantal community. This does not mean that it has been a town-meeting democracy nor that its social forms have been free of injustice--quite the contrary: it is not nor has it ever been a town-meeting democracy (this is precluded by its ownership, its internal functional structure, by its economic stratification, and by its history) and its social forms have been marked by egregious injustice, particularly in its racial attitudes. It has been, nonetheless, a community of the rural or traditional sort governed by convenantal relationships and characterized largely (not exclusively) by open rather than "enclosed" access to its places and privileges. This older way might be illustrated in some specific forms of land usage and privilege that once prevailed here. In the past, the covenantal nature of the social forms of Sewanee governing access to the Domain permitted subsistence hunting over much of the Domain in an area defined neither by permission nor by boundary but instead by common sense, custom, and by the inherent considerations of hunting itself. The forest of the Domain was an area where, while logging was regulated, trash trees were available for firewood and where the trees on one's residential land could be cut or used as the need demanded. Also, many householders grew gardens that not only supplied personal domestic need but also supplied a generous flow of charitable or semi-commercial vegetables to the non-gardening elements of the community. (This way of life contrasts sharply with the transformation of social forms represented in a lease committee which presumed, at one point in the recent past, to regulate gardens by permit and permission.) At the same time, much of the Domain including the Reserve was a virtual village common allowing the grazing of livestock; in fact, much of the early fencing in Sewanee--such as the fence that once fronted the Quadrangle--was simple agricultural fencing to keep livestock out of certain areas (we might call it "exclosure" fencing) rather than to define the privileges of certain owners or to deny the general right of access in the population at large.
Through much of the last fifty years Sewanee has seen the common reduced, and long-standing covenantal relationships replaced by varieties of formal and extended enclosure and by the increasing prevalence of regulation, policy, and contract as the basis of the social forms governing relationships. This transformation has affected virtually every social form in Sewanee including the life of the community, the relation between the community and the University, the individual lives of residents and lease holders, and the internal affairs of the University itself. Much of this transfomation has been, whether or not it has been inevitable, nonetheless desirable and beneficial in its effect. For instance, the eventual enclosure of the Reserve as a commons so as to exclude completely the grazing or keeping of poultry and livestock has been beneficial and agreeable while at the same time reflecting the, perhaps lamentable, transfomation of Sewanee along with the rest of the South away from traditional life forms associated with rural occupations. The provision of general sewerage to the residential population, while still not universal, is generally complete if also accomplished at the cost of some intensive contractual negotiation that at times was coercive. It is not our part here to lament modernization nor to counter-rationally argue that such improvements were not needed, could have been done without, or were not needed. Such is manifestly not the case.
One may still observe, however, that such a transformation has taken place, that it is a shift away from an earlier order of life, and that in certain areas of our experience has not necessarily been good for the overall quality of life in this place. Dogs have never, at their worst, represented the civil or sanitary problem represented by hogs. Felling of trees on lease holds as now regulated by meticulous--if not precise--rule has never been the aesthetic problem for the community that the University's own tree management practices have represented. Only the most bureaucratic minds or the most misanthropic could have seen in the keeping of gardens a threat to public order needing to be regulated by committee and policy. And the disappearance from our experience or their passage entirely to within the enclosure of policy and regulation of older social forms such as hunting, camping in the woods, free traverse of the Domain, access to the dump, entry to football games, use of firecrackers, the baning of sledding, the licensing of fishing, or the building of storage sheds are not, of themselves, improvements in our common weal or wealth. Some restrictions, even prohibitions, were necessary--only the most jaded could have thought that the social abuse of alcohol could or should proceed unchecked and unregulated; but some of these restrictions diminished our freedom, made Sewanee a sullenly cooperative place, some took joy out of our childrens' eyes, and some encumbered life unnecessarily with regulations that more often served to validate the existence of a committee than to enhance the quality of life.
Much of the communal stress of Sewanee can be traced to or associated with this transformation of life from covenantal to contractual that has taken place here over the last quarter-century. We have been living through what might be called the "eclipse of the covenants" or the "enclosure of Sewanee"; it is a process that will not be forestalled. No area of personal or corporate life in this place will remain untransformed. And as we pass from understood obligations and responsibilities to contracts and stipulations whether in the personnel handbooks of the University or in the cryptic rumninations of the community council, our common life is diminished. There is passing from among us that sense--so long secured by the Sewanee tradition--of a common life, of things shared, of personal relationships of long duration that escaped social and racial barriers, of a fabric of community that wove allegiance and cooperation more finely than a lease form, of an acquaintance with land and neighbor through work on common borders of yard, brush, forest, and road, of a knowledge of need and dependency that could never be uncovered by a program nor discovered by a novice, of a bounty of resource that never needed to be asked for nor summoned to be available to all.
Who, who ever in times before, would have offered hospitality in time of crisis, and then later billed for it? Who ever in times before needed to have dogs certified by registration and not recognized by sight to all? Whoever would have said to children not to walk on the east side of University avenue so as to not disturb professors dozing in their offices? Who ever in times before would have treated students like pigs and fenced them off the grass? Who ever in Sewanee would have passed another on the street or the quad and not waved or spoke--or resented it or seen it as obligation or burden? Who ever would have objected to having an ambulance or fire department?
Much has changed here; much needed to change. We cannot lament the provision of water lines and hydrants--or the taxes needed to pay for them. We cannot lament the security of life--nor the police needed to protect it. We cannot lament the stability of the University--nor the budgeting necessary to achieve it. All these changes and more have made our lives better in ways not imagined even twenty-five years ago. And more changes will follow. But in all our changing, if we forget our covenantal origin, if we forget those social forms of trust, fidelity, honesty, character, wisdom, tolerance, neighborliness, compassion, friendship, and openness that could also sustain anger and enmity within the diversity of lived community, then surely we will be for all our improvements an impoverished people.