Tom Williamson. “Enclosure and the English Hedgerow.” Pp. 263-271 in The Cambridge Cultural History: The Romantic Age in Britain. B. Ford, ed. University of Cambridge Press, 1992.

What was new in the eighteeenth and nineteenth centuries was not so much the hedge itself, but the speed with which new hedgerows were appearing in the landscape. Before the late eighteenth century' enclosure had been a gradual or episodic process, and one which had had comparatively little impact on areas of commonland. Parliamentary Enclosure dealt with the vast residue of unenclosed land - perhaps 25 per cent of the total land area of England - with remarkable rapidity. Although enclosure by Parliamentary Act continued from the early eighteenth century until the end of the
nineteenth, the overwhelming majority of Acts were' in fact, passed within two fairly short periods. The first phase of enclosure, in the 1760s and l770s' was mainly concerned with the open fields on the heavy clay soils of the Midlands. These enclosures seem to have been associated with an expansion of the area of land under Pasture.