Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), pp. 49–73

The enclosure of lands from the waste was virtually continuous in the former Principality of Wales over the period 1540 to 1900, but two key periods were the later sixteenth century and the years 1790–1830. This article explores the processes involved and the reasons why the ownership and use of the waste was often contested, based on a case study of the hundred of Nantconwy in south-east Caernarfonshire. Patterns of land ownership dating from the thirteenth-century English conquest are found to have had a significant influence. The Acts of Union between England and Wales of 1536 and 1542, which replaced the Welsh ‘tribal system’ of land tenure and inheritance with English common law, left the status of large areas of waste ill-defined. Subsequent attempts by the Crown to assert its rights as manorial lord were strongly resisted, and most enclosure took place without legal sanction, while the absence of manor courts or other means of regulating ownership and use of the wastes led to frequent disputes. This study sheds new light on the regulation and use of the Welsh commons and wastes, when and where encroachment occurred, changing attitudes towards enclosure, and how various actors – the Crown, landowners, farmers, and the poor – fared in the contest for their ownership and use. 

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