The Church of England and the enclosure of England's Open Fields—a Northamptonshire case study

Abstract

This article explores the tithe system in eighteenth-century Northamptonshire. At enclosure, many clergy exchanged their right to take tithe for a portion of the newly enclosed land in the parish. The article argues that while the clergy made financial gains from this, more important was the removal of a recurrent source of dissension with parishioners. As such the article tempers the dominant narrative that emphasizes only the material enrichment of the clergy at enclosure, and sees the social and cultural gulf this opened up between the clergy and their parishioners as a potent source of rural anticlericalism.