Ah but it wasn't just, or even mainly, useless, waterlogged land that was seized, was it? If only! Good land was usurped that could yield a profit without too much work once the newly-tenanted workers had been subdued and controlled. The upshot of your wonderful "agricultural revolution" was the conversion of thousands of small holdings into much bigger, "efficient" ones which did away with crop rotation and made way for big machinery and which had the horrible consequence of depopulating the countryside, a phenomenon from which it has never recovered. Thatcher may even have seen that as her model for closing down industries and wrecking communities. Even worse, the twentieth century saw the inexorable rise of the use of chemical inputs and hedgerow removal to make way for even more industrialisation of farmland. If your grass looks a bit yellow, don't worry too much about the soil: just whack on a bit more cheap artificial nitrogen, won by one of the most polluting industrial processes ever invented. And if it moves, competes with your crop or causes a rot, there will be a "-cide" to deal with it and you needn't worry too much about outdated and inconvenient methods such as rotation! Just ignore nature's lessons in diversity and "specialise!" No need to worry about quality too much either - those "-cides" will have made your crops LOOK perfect even though they now lack nutrient value and have the texture of wet cotton wool! Some revolution. Huge tracts of UK farmland now grow grain crops that can be used only for animal fodder (poor buggers) or for biofuels, and the rivers and drains just carry on silting up as whst used to be soil in good heart washes into them by the millions of tons every year. Oh yes, we've made such "progress" since those powerful "landed gentry" started to run things!

BobL, there is no moral or rational right for someone to arbitrarily put a fence round common land and say that from now on this is mine. There is the moral and rational IMPERATIVE to allow everyone a fair share of land which he or she can have unconditional stewardship of. It's rational because if you have your fair share, and no more, you will have to work it as hard as you can, drain it, improve the soil, whatever it takes,to make a decent living. If you improve land or build a house on it you have the "ownership" of your improvements and yiure entitled to profit from thstbifvyiu pass the stewardship of the land on. If I buy an empty shop in Bude for fifty grand and, by my enterprise and hard work, turn it into a thriving and profitable business then sell it for half a million, I'm selling the goodwill and the products of my labour. I haven't increased the intrinsic value of the bricks and mortar very much except via a bit of decoration. Tests how it should be