The drunken librarian who wont shut up.

So someone described the internet. I had a drunken librarian experience today.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century in England, suffrage was very limited, and property holdings were one criteria for the right to vote. The landed aristocracy had control of the upper house and a prevailing influence in the lower. They passed laws they thought to be in their own interest.

Laws of enclosure allowed them to expel tenant farmers from their lands and bring more efficiency to agriculture, making the land owners wealthier. The tenant farmers were forced to move to the cities where they lived in slums and provided cannon fodder for then British army of the empire, and eventually the work force for the factories as the industrial revolution progressed (which gave rise to the commercial class that eventually surpassed the land-rich aristocracy in wealth and influence)

Later they passed the corn laws which put high import tarrifs on grain imports, insuring high profits for them and higher costs for everyone else. Opposition to the corn laws and to limited suffrage were the causes of the reform movements in the first half of the nineteenth century.

So that's what I was reading about when I googled enclosure laws and got a reference to this article which is an essay in support of home schooling. Kind of interesting and featuring quotes from Intimations of Immortality and Tintern Abbey. I was seduced by a drunken librarian.