Enclosure and consolidation altered the organisation, function and purposes of land from one in which several members of a community had rights of use to a new condition in which single occupants had complete control. Jerome Blum, in his analysis of the decline of the old rural order in Europe, has characterised it as ‘the single most important departure from the traditional agriculture, heralding as it did the switch from communalism with its collective controls to individualism with its private rights of property and its individual freedom of action’. Consolidated holdings were not new in Europe before the seventeenth century. Proprietors sometimes enclosed lands for their own use, while in mountainous and forested regions peasants had long lived in consolidated holdings and they were common also in the maritime provinces of the continent. Enclosures in England were far advanced in the south east and in pockets of the south west and north in the early modern period, mainly, though not exclusively, due to the impact of an expanding market for wool. However, in the eighteenth century the forces making for consolidation accelerated rapidly. Two influences in combination operated throughout western Europe. First, an ideological attack on communalism was mounted by agronomists and political economists. Second, a massive increase in the markets for foods and raw materials as a result of the rise in population and the expansion in towns, cities and industry created both pressures and incentives for improvements in agricultural productivity.

It is clear that these stimuli, to a greater or lesser extent, were touching virtually all countries in western Europe.