 For landowners, this was the point. They understood that the demise of the commons and the desperation and dislocation of the peasantry would yield a more pliable labor force, and they had the power to make laws towards this end. Between 1760 and 1870, so just over a century at the tail end of the enclosing process, Parliament usurped ownership of approximately 7 million acres of once common land, basically one-sixth the area of England.