Though Austen’s novels generally ignore the plight of the poor, Austen lived at a time when many families who had been surviving with few resources were driven from the land by the “Enclosure Law” of 1801. Though not addressing the Enclosure Law directly, Austen occasionally includes events and “background information” that may have been affected.
Fencing off farmland, especially pastures, had been controversial for centuries, largely because most estates had large “common areas” where folks with, say, only a handful of livestock, could graze their animals there alongside that of the wealthy owners. Like the American West before barbed wire came on the scene, animals were branded or otherwise marked, then they were free to roam the common areas until it was time to calve, lamb, butcher, or shear. Then the owners would take their animals back to their property as necessary.
In the middle ages, the estates owned basically everything, even the villages that grew up to house the blacksmiths, clothiers, coopers, wheelwrights, and others who settled there to provide goods and services, first to the estate owners, and later to each other. Even in Emma’s day, it’s entirely possible that Fords, the fasionable fabric shop where all classes seemed to rub shoulders, was standing on land owned by Mr. Woodhouse and paying him rent.
The positive side of this sort of autocratic communism was that the pasture land, the berries in the hedges, the water in the rivers, and even the hay in the fields was essentially communal property. So if you could afford a sheep or calf or two, no one – not even the estate owner – minded if you marked them as yours, then turned them loose in the common pastures to graze.
When it came time to harvest hay, everyone would participate, and everyone who participated had the right to take home a share to keep their livestock alive during the winter months. (That’s alluded to in Mansfield Park, when Mary Crawford complains about having trouble getting her harp delivered during hay-harvesting week – every cart was too busy laying back provisions for the animals’ winter to waste time delivering something as frivolous and as unrelated to rural economy as a harp.)
But for centuries, land owners had been trying to fence off the best parts of their land, and “commoners” had been resisting, sometimes reclaiming “common land” for the community, sometimes being withstood.
The question was more-or-less settled in 1801 when Parliament passed the General Enclosure Act, giving landowners permission to significantly reduce the size of the common area and to fence off the rest. Unfortunately it deprived many people who were “squeaking by” anyway the ability to benefit from owning a few sheep or cattle. It also meant that small farmers who were reasonably profitable otherwise saw their ability to earn income reduced. Within a few years, many gave up and sold their land to the larger estates.
The larger estates, of course, profited at first. Having complete control over all but a small tithe of their lands freed them up to try new methods that made them more profitable. Note Knightley and his chief tenant Robert Martin frequently discussing their plans – something that wouldn’t have been necessary in the “old days,” when large and small farms alike simply did everything the way they did the year before (and the year before).
Unfortunately the new abundance of crops had a down-side – the value of those crops dropped precipitously, which meant that laborer’s wages dropped as well, and there were new stresses on the remaining rural working poor.
Emma, of course, almost considers even the existence of farmers a sort of necessary evil. But as Sheryl Bodnar Craig, an English professor at Central Missouri State University, points out, Knightley recognizes that his own prosperity depends on profitably-run farms. And in Emma’s day, fences are part of the equation, both solution and problem. Craig also mentions a possible connection between the Enclosure Law and the chicken-thieves as well as the “Gypsies.” The “Gypsy” connection is possible. Romani were beginning to settle down in some regions, but the Romani who were still nomadic tended to set up camp in non-agricultural common areas such as riverbanks and fen. Unfortunately, landowners were fencing those off as well, crowding Romani camps into the right-of-ways. Or were they Travellers, so called “Irish Gypsies,” who encountered the same obstacles? Or even displaced rural families camping out as they traveled looking for work? Austen isn’t specific.
Revisiting Mansfield Park, there’s a scene that is very specifically related to fences. It’s almost never included in the adaptations but is a harbinger of things to come. On a visit to Rushworth’s estate, a “walking tour” is interrupted by a locked gate into an adjoining field. There’s really no reason to have a locked gate between two fields on a 700-acre farm, but there it is. Rushworth, who was too dim to have considered bringing the keys along, returns some distance to the house to retrieve the key. In the meantime, the rather oily Henry Crawford determines to enter the field anyway. Maria Bertram, Rushworth’s betrothed, goes along, squeezing past the gate, despite Fanny’s warning against falling into the “ha-ha.”
What, pray tell, is a “ha-ha”? When the ridiculously wealthy wanted to fence off their fields but maintain the appearance of one huge expanse, they created an illusion, installing the fences in wide ditches, so deep that they couldn’t be seen from most vantage points. The cattle couldn’t wander from one pasture to another, but from the second-story porticos on their hilltop mansions, the fields look like one unbroken vista. And that’s what mattered to folks who wanted a nice view, while safeguarding their property from others whose economies they had destroyed when the fences went up.
A generation earlier, neither the fence, nor the ha-ha nor the lock on the gate might have existed. But Austen uses the locked gate to imply that Maria is feeling trapped by her engagement. Maria refers to a famous passage of a Laurence Sterne novel. In that book, contemplating the risk of prison, the protagonist encounters a caged starling and imagines it is saying “I can’t get out! I can’t get out!”
Maria says: ” . . that iron gate, that ha-ha, gives me a feeling of restraint and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,’ as the starling said.”
By slipping past the gate with Crawford, to spend unaccounted minutes with him out of sight of the rest of the party, Maria is also presaging her willingness to disregard upper-class Regency mores about unchaperoned dalliances, not to mention outright flirtations. (To my knowledge, the scene is shown in only one adaptation – Episode 2 of the 1883 BBC miniseries, starting around 36 minutes in. Sadly, the ha-ha is not shown.)
Like the “enclosures” that robbed the working poor of any chance of agricultural pursuits and eventually hurt even the great farms they were supposed to benefit, Rushworth’s locked gate eventually had a negative effect on the Rushworth household that no one could have forseen when it was placed there in the first place.