Enclosure

A feeling that this is the 18th or even 17th century is reinforced strongly by the landscape. The Giottoesque hillocks crowned with woodland, the Arno winding through the valley, poplars on either side, the Pratomagno and the Alpe della Luna (depending which way you look) far away lining the horizon. And the farm land still in strips and isolated sectors as a result of inheritance practices and subsistence farming.

So enclosure becomes a live issue, oh how my economic history teacher would have revelled in it all. It's the whole hog, as well: enclosure to repel borders and their rights, common lot; enclosure to change the use of the land; enclosure to consolidate the landholding; enclosure of all kinds and every wave except for parliamentary enclosure as, I trust, the government hasn't horned in on the act yet.

What was needed was a swap of interlocking fields so that the neighbours could divert a road from beneath their windows and we could enclose an arrow of woodland pointing at the house, and the far end of a stream so that it could be used to water a piece of cultivated ground. Both properties would then be surrounded by their own land with no rights of way across either, and water secured to its rightful destination on its owners' crops.

Interests never before thought of sprang, armed to the teeth - in the case of the hunters quite literally - out of the ground we trod on. Mushroom hunters, wood gatherers (of bits that had fallen from the trees, not cut wood) walkers, riders, wolves (well, their environmental representatives in sheep's clothing), assorted insects and toads, anti-fencers, and the tax man with a vast overestimate of the gain from 21st century adjustments undertaken by 1600s neighours' descendants.

At the end of next week we go to the notary to sign and swear. Monies will change hands, calculated by arcane procedures and determined by Google Earth. We have fought our way up and down precipitous gorges and through impenetrable undergrowth to sink markers and stakes. I suspect promises and less virtual sweeteners have been distributed widely.

There remain the water meadows by the river, beyond another land owner and his dreams. In the times of mezzadria and autarky, these were the wheatfields. Perhaps we will wait on oil and commodity prices before opening the bidding on those. But my economic history teacher simply had no idea what enclosures, from the earliest times to the present day, were all about.