Analogously, the inhabited spaces of his childhood disappeared during the very period when he was becoming a man. In 1809, Parliament passed an Enclosure Act for Helpston and the surrounding parishes. Under the old "open field" system that had endured for centuries in this part of England — endured for much longer than in many other counties, such as Warwickshire, where questions of enclosure troubled Shakespeare — there had been a sense of the villagers sharing the ownership of the land and participating in the time-honoured rhythms and rituals of the rural year, its patterns of work and holiday or holy day. With enclosure, what Clare called "the fence of ownership" closed down the landscape and imposed a strictly economic ethic on the relationship between the villagers and the land. The "commons" — meaning both the common heathland and the "commoners" (the labouring people, as opposed to the rentier class of proprietors) — were under threat. Many of Clare's greatest poems are elegies for the commons, protests against the enclosure:

Moors losing from the sight, far, smooth and blea,
Where swept the plover in its pleasure free,
Are vanished now with commons wild and gay
As poets' visions of life's early day.
Mulberry bushes where the boy would run
To fill his hands with fruit are grubbed and gone,
And hedgerow briars — flower lovers overjoyed
Came and got flower pots — these are all destroyed,
And sky-bound moors in mangled garb are left
Like mighty giants of their limbs bereft.
Fence now meets fence in owners' little bounds
Of field and meadow, large as garden grounds,
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned, ill at ease . . .
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows, where man claims, earth glows no more divine.
On paths, to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice "no road here"
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As though the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go.
Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade good-bye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh,
And birds and trees and flowers without a name
All sighed when lawless law's enclosure came.

In lines such as these, from a poem called "The Moors", the emotional development of the poet is precisely elided with the changes in the land and the effect of those changes on his community. In curtailing the right to roam, the new landowners simultaneously blocked off the route to freedom and the path of access to happy childhood memory. Furthermore, the community for which Clare speaks is an extended one, embracing birds and flowers as well as fellow human labourers. Clare regarded the unnecessary enclosure of the land as an impediment to humankind's capacity to dwell harmoniously upon the earth. Jean-Jacques Rousseau compared "the state of nature" to two things: childhood and a relationship to the land that is anterior to the proprietorial. In Clare's world, these two states were simultaneously foreclosed by enclosure. Poetry was the only place of freedom that remained to him.