John Clare and the Legal Production of English Rural Landscapes

This article explores the legal and literary implications of landscape production as a constitutional theory of land in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. It will point to enclosure as a way of ending commonage and establishing new entitlements to private property. This way of legally creating landscapes stood in stark contrast to spatial production rooted in social stratification, incorporeal hereditaments, and natural-human interactions. The article revisits both processes of landscape production through John Clare’s poems. There, he criticized the changes brought about by enclosure, which disrupted the centuries-old legal and ecological relationships between English communities and their territories.