Definition
The act of converting land previously subject to common rights — rights of common, commonable rights, or other rights that limited exclusive cultivation — into privately enclosed land, free from those shared claims. Also used, more concretely, to describe the physical fence, hedge, or barrier that marks the separation of one's estate from adjacent or common land.
Two senses operate in the legal sources:
1. The legal process of inclosure: The extinguishment of common rights over open fields, waste lands, and similar ground, historically accomplished in England through private act of Parliament or by agreement among landholders, resulting in individual parcels being allotted and fenced off from shared use.
2. The physical inclosure: An artificial enclosure — a fence, hedge, ditch, or similar barrier — surrounding a parcel of land. In this sense the term functions as a physical description relevant to property boundaries, trespass, and construction of wills or deeds that reference an existing fence or barrier.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An alternative spelling of enclosure — the act of enclosing, or something enclosed; the separation of land from common ground by a fence; a space fenced in.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of inclosing; the state of being inclosed, shut up, or encompassed; the separation of land from common ground by a fence. Also, the thing inclosed or placed within something, or the barrier itself.
The common meaning and the legal meaning share vocabulary but not weight. In ordinary usage, inclosure is simply a synonym for enclosure — interchangeable and unremarkable. In legal historical sources, particularly English law, inclosure carries the specific freight of property transformation: the extinction of communal rights over land and the reallocation of that land to private ownership. A researcher treating the legal term as merely descriptive of a physical fence will miss its deeper significance as a mechanism of agrarian legal change.
Common Confusion
INCLOSURE / ENCLOSURE: These are variant spellings of the same word, and the distinction is orthographic rather than legal. Older English legal sources — statutes, parliamentary acts, treatises — consistently use the spelling INCLOSURE. Modern usage, including American legal writing, has largely standardized on ENCLOSURE. Researchers searching historical English sources must use the older spelling or risk missing relevant materials. The two terms have no substantive legal difference; the variation is solely historical convention.
INCLOSURE / CLOSE: A close is any piece of land enclosed and held privately — it describes the parcel itself. Inclosure describes the act or process by which common land is converted to private use and fenced off. Sources sometimes use the terms near each other, but they are not synonymous. Black's 2nd edition directs readers to "See CLOSE" in its inclosure entry, signaling the connection without collapsing the distinction.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in English agrarian or property law history will encounter INCLOSURE primarily in connection with the Inclosure Acts — English parliamentary legislation spanning roughly the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries that systematically converted open-field systems and common waste lands into privately held, fenced parcels. The body of that legislation uses the INCLOSURE spelling throughout, and a search for ENCLOSURE in older English statutory indexes may not retrieve all relevant results.
In American legal sources, the term appears in a narrower, more concrete register: disputes about physical fences and barriers, construction of wills directing executors to "inclose" specific ground, and trespass or boundary cases where the existence or extent of a physical inclosure is at issue. The large-scale agrarian transformation meaning of the English sources is largely absent from American caselaw, which mostly concerns individual property boundaries.
Corpus researchers should also watch for the doctrinal connection to commonable rights and rights of common. An inclosure extinguishes those rights, so inclosure proceedings in English records will often be paired with records of common rights, waste land rights, and allotment. Understanding what inclosure extinguishes requires understanding what rights preceded it.
The maxim appearing immediately after the Black's 2nd definition — inclusio unius est exclusio alterius — is a separate rule of construction and is not part of the inclosure definition, but the proximity in the dictionary entry has occasionally caused confusion in older indexing.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries agree on the core definition: inclosure is the act of freeing land from rights of common and other rights obstructing cultivation, and also refers to the physical fence marking an estate. Black's 1st and 2nd editions are nearly identical on this point. Bouvier adds the more precise formulation — "the extinction of common rights in fields and waste lands" — drawing on Stephens' Commentaries, and gives the additional concrete sense of the physical separation accomplished by fence or hedge.
All three sources reflect the English law orientation of the term. None of the historical dictionaries addresses the American statutory context in depth, and none discusses the Inclosure Acts by name, though Bouvier's citation to a will-construction case involving an executor directed to "inclose with an iron fence" illustrates how the physical sense of the term operated in American court practice.
What the historical dictionaries miss: the social and economic dimensions of inclosure as a legal phenomenon — the displacement of customary rights holders, the parliamentary machinery of private inclosure bills, the role of inclosure commissioners — are entirely absent. These are essential context for historians working in English agrarian or legal history and must be supplied from other sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The large-scale common-law meaning of inclosure — the extinguishment of commonable rights through parliamentary process — is essentially English and has no direct American equivalent. In American jurisdictions, the term functions primarily to describe physical enclosures of land in the context of deeds, wills, trespass, and boundary disputes. Researchers should not assume that American courts using the word inclosure are engaging with the English agrarian law tradition.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Enclosure Movement
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Common Rights
Law Mind Encyclopedia — Real Property