There have been all manner of land disputes over the course of human history, but one type of conflict that seems to surface time and again is a situation in which nonowners are suddenly barred from land that they have always had free access to.Just think of the English enclosures (roughly 1450 to 1860), in which manorial landowners fenced in lands that were legally theirs but which before had been governed by the rules of the open-field system, in which peasants all planted on individual slivers of a field in the springtime but grazed their cattle over the whole field in common after harvesttime. The enclosures barred peasants from using lands that they didn’t own but that they had always been able to use freely in this way. This of course created tension and displaced the population. The
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