The Origins of the Great Gleaning Case of 1788

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LAW 343 Dispossession Enclosure

Notes

During the eighteenth and early nine- teenth centuries, the laboring poor in many parts of England not only endured irregular employment and inadequate wages, but also suffered a series of attacks on their customary rights.

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lawyers had become converted to the notions of absolute property ownership and that (whenever the least doubt could be found) the law abhorred the messy complexities of use right.”

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farmers were rarely able to mobilize formal legal sanctions against the gleaners.

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tenants managed to resist repeated attempts by manorial lords to erode their use rights and impose arbitrary fines upon them.’

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intimate link between these legal cases and three of the most important social processes that have been highlighted by social historians of this period —the proletarianization of the rural poor, the closure of the parish, and the enclosure of the land.

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Manning, it emerged, had lost on a technicality. He had failed to assert plainly that he was a resident of Timworth at the time of the alleged trespass.

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probably strengthened the gleaners’ position rather than weakening it—provided that they stayed within their own parish.

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The 1788 case was not simply the result of an individual squabble. It was designed to establish a particular legal precedent that would assist local farmers

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The genesis of the Timworth gleaning cases coincided with a particularly unpredictable and difficult harvest period.

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fundamental change in the nature of Indian land tenure by ignoring the complex and largely unwritten customary laws of many Indian agricultural communities

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A rearrangement of leases in 1800 gave John Worlledge by far the largest farm on the Culford estate. By the 1820s, John Worlledge, Esq., was renting 1126 acres in Ingham and Timworth and in the 1844 directory “John Worlledge esq” of Ingham is described as a “banker.”

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Thus the Timworth gleaning cases arose during a period when the other customary rights of the parish’s laboring families were also under serious threat.

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the Houghton’s property was of particular strategic importance to Cornwallis at this point.

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To the Suffolk poor in general, the 1788 judgment may not have been particularly important. In many places, they continued to assert their traditional right to glean and resorted to collective action if it was threatened.

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