Tristan Roberts (tristan@tristanroberts.org) is a former state representative, a small-scale farmer, and a writer who explores the intersections of rural life, policy, and human dignity from Quill Nook Farm in Halifax. This piece is a response to multiple responses to his original Viewpoint in the Aug. 20 issue, "The long, uphill battle against the working class."
HALIFAX-I'm grateful to Steev Lynn and other letter writers for adding nuance to my portrayal of Enclosure's impact.
Lynn is right that pre-Enclosure serfs weren't free peasants but were bound to feudal lords. Nonetheless, the commons constituted a physical, landed right to subsistence that has vanished today. When Lynn sees Enclosure's "logical" progression after feudalism, I ask: Logical for whom?
Lynn appeals to the selfishness theory of private land ownership: "The weakness of non-ownership of land is that it discourages long-term management and improvement strategies, such as planting orchards, digging irrigation canals, improving soil fertility."
This idea is so powerful that many accept it as common sense - many of us were taught the "tragedy of the commons" in grade school. Economist Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize–winning work proved this false. Indigenous systems worldwide - Spanish ejidos, Native American tribal lands, Swiss alpine commons - demonstrate alternatives to privatization that served capitalist interests.
But look around Vermont today. How many landowners are planting orchards, digging canals, or improving soil fertility? As a farmer, I chose this year to plant crops like codonopsis and astragalus, requiring multi-year growth - not a sound business proposition under U.S. "cheap food" policy. Yet growing demonized medicinals like artemisia and valerian, I realize it's not us who don't make sense when we do what's right for our bodies and nature. It's the "logic" of the ruling class.
Our economic framework encourages soil extraction, not investment. We're parceling farmland for bigger houses with taller fences. Any sensible farmer invests in annual yields. America loses topsoil at alarming rates; plants lawns, not orchards; and runs short on water.
* * *
How does such obviously self-serving logic persist? Survivorship bias creates perfect self-deception. Our Legislature and Congress consist of people far older, wealthier, and less working-class than the general population - the exact demographic for whom the current system has demonstrably worked. They benefited from inherited wealth, navigated affordable student loans, bought homes before prices exploded, and accumulated wealth during decades of asset appreciation.
Survivorship bias is insidious because unexamined faith remains blind to everyone it crushed. They don't hear from teachers who left Vermont because they couldn't afford housing, small business owners bankrupted by health care costs, or young families who moved away.
When I served on the House Corrections Committee in the Legislature, I couldn't get us to hold a listening session in what I assumed was the most obvious location for a committee with our oversight responsibility - inside the women's correctional facility a mere 40 minutes from the State House.
Survivors mistake personal resilience for systemic fairness, their luck for merit, their advantages for universal opportunity. It's not malice - it's predictable blindness of those who mistake surviving a rigged game for winning a fair one.
* * *
Back to Lynn's critique: "The Enclosure movement may have been implemented harshly and punitively, but it was a logical response to the end of the feudal system."
I ask again - logical to whom? Let's consider who sat at the decision-making tables from the 1500s to 1900s. In this critical period, the modern state formed and took charge of everything from contraception to burial. Democratic capitalist theory was written and portrayed as inevitable. Regular people became cannon fodder.
Where Lynn sees inevitability, I see results of a centuries-long war by ruling classes on women. The European witch hunts weren't village superstition but, as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English documented, "a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population." Hundreds of thousands were executed - 85% women. In Germany's Bishopric of Trier in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each.
Why target women healers and midwives? They maintained awareness and awe for nature's power. They gave away powerful healing for free. They put allegiance to families and communities over the state. They protested when sacred groves and herbal gardens were sacrificed for industrial efficiency. They joined the widespread riots against Enclosure - until they were silenced.
The elimination of women's wisdom undoubtedly weakened resistance to the 5,200 individual acts of Parliament that, between 1604 and 1914, enclosed 10,811 square miles of land - an area larger than Vermont (9,616 square miles). Even supporters of these acts began reconsidering as they witnessed the devastating impact on the poor.
"The fact is, that by nineteen enclosure bills in twenty they are injured, in some greatly injured," admitted Arthur Young, an influential advocate for agricultural improvement who developed serious misgivings later in life. Young eventually became a champion for reallotting portions of enclosed land to the poor so they could raise potatoes and keep a milk cow.
Present-day mythology continues this erasure. We've sexualized and despised wise women and men. The Greek sirens were simply birds with women's heads who had knowledge of everything - medieval theologians turned them into prostitutes. We've emasculated wise men - Dumbledore and Gandalf are asexual. When we can't imagine powerful wisdom as embodied and sexual - as fully human - no wonder we accept treatment as disembodied economic units.
Commons letter writers correctly identify immediate homelessness causes: wage stagnation, housing costs, dismantled services. But when multinationals set wages and global capital determines housing, expecting Vermont towns to solve systematic poverty is like asking them to stop climate change by recycling.
The commons weren't just land - they were a way of being together that prioritized collective survival over individual accumulation. Who we bring to the table matters, including those no longer with us - the herbalists, the midwives, the keepers of sacred groves whose wisdom was burned away.
By grieving these losses, remembering their knowledge, and bringing everyone to today's table, we can do far better. Who's with me?
Thanks again for the dialogue, and to The Commons for holding the space.
This Voices Response was submitted to The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at voices@commonsnews.org.