Some time ago I gave a talk on Song and History at our local History Society
I carried out a great deal of research on the Enclosure and seizures of land in Ireland
If this is no interest - please ignore it
Jim Carroll

The seizure of what was originally common land began in England in the 14th century and became widespread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Wealthy and powerful landowners annexed huge tracts of commonage as part of their own estates, planted hedgerows and built fences around them to prevent access by members of the public.
Common land was used by working people as an essential source of food to feed their families. It was the practice, for instance, of factory workers, landless labourers or tradesmen and artisans involved in cottage industries to use common land to graze a cow or a sheep or raise poultry, even to have a small market garden. Commons were also places where a rabbit, a pheasant or even a small deer could be got to supplement the family diet.
With the closing off of the land this vital source of sustenance disappeared overnight.
The effect on rural life was devastating: it caused poverty, homelessness, and rural depopulation, and resulted in revolts in 1536, 1569, and 1607. A further wave of enclosures occurred between about 1760 and 1820.   Numerous government measures to prevent depopulation were introduced between 1489 and 1640, including the first Enclosure Act (1603), but were sabotaged by local magistrates who were usually influential landowners.
A new wave of enclosures by Acts of Parliament from 1760 to 1820 reduced the yeoman class of small landowning farmers to agricultural labourers, or forced them to leave the land altogether.   The Enclosure Acts applied to 4.5 million acres or a quarter of England. Some 17 million acres were enclosed without any parliamentary act.
It was probably the last bout of enclosures in the first half of the 19th century that inspired, not a song, but this anonymous rhyme:

The Goose And The Common.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own,
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so, but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

While the enclosures did not produce a spate of songs relating directly to the events, a side effect of the appropriation of common land provided one of the largest and most poignant bodies of songs in the English repertoire, the poaching songs. Deprived of the right to legally catch game on the old commons, the poor resorted to taking it illegally.   Many of them continued, as they had always done, to go out at night setting traps to snare rabbits and pheasants. The landowners retaliated by employing keepers to protect what they considered their inalienable right to their newly-acquired property. They also resorted to setting mantraps, large, viciously toothed spring-loaded devices capable of breaking a man’s leg and inflicting deep wounds. The response of the poachers was to go out armed and in larger numbers. This escalation led to a period of English rural history known as “The Poaching Wars”.   It worked like this. Men who had previously gone out poaching singly resorted to teaming up with others to offer resistance to the gamekeepers employed by the landowner. The landowner would, in his turn, employ more keepers and so ad infnitum. One song from the eastern county of Lincolnshire, entitled “The Rufford Park Poachers” tells of a pitched battle between forty poachers and a similar number of keepers.
On being apprehended the poachers would be tried by local landowners who would, as was to be expected, show little mercy. First offenders would usually be heavily fined, but the most common punishment for a repeating offender was transportation to the penal settlements in Australia, often for periods up to fourteen years.
The songs created on this subject cover the whole gamut of attitudes and emotions: despair, anger, defiance, repentance even a boisterous humour, but to my mind among the best of them is the one popularly found in East Anglia.   Entitled simply “Van Dieman’s Land”, it deals with an event taking place in Warwickshire on Squire Dunhill’s (sometimes Donniell’s or Daniel’s) Estate. In my opinion it is a perfect example of a narrative English traditional song, and what makes it so good is its matter-of-fact presentation of the events. It tells how four young men go poaching, are taken by the keepers, tried at Warwick Assizes, and sentenced to be transported for fourteen years. They are placed on board ship, endure a three month voyage, land in Australia, are taken ashore yoked together like livestock, auctioned to the highest bidder and finally settle down to their fate.   
Whether the events described can be pinned down to one particular occurrence is debatable, but they are so typical of what was happening all over rural England that the song passed into numerous versions with different names and locations.