Three acres and a cow explained

Three acres and a cow was a slogan used by British land reform campaigners of the 1880s, and revived by the distributists of the 1920s. It refers to an ideal land holding for every citizen.

The phrase was invented by Eli Hamshire in letters written to Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Collings during the early 1880s.^[1] Hamshire did, in fact, own 3lk=inNaNlk=in. Collings used the phrase as a slogan for his 1885 land reform campaign, and it became used as part of the political struggle against rural poverty.^[2] He became derisively known as "Three Acres and a Cow Collings."Chamberlain used the slogan for his own "Radical Programme": he urged the purchase by local authorities of land to provide garden and field allotments for all labourers who might desire them, to be let at fair rents in plots of up to 1acres of arable land and up to 4acres of pasture.^[3]

In What's Wrong With the World, G. K. Chesterton used the phrase to summarise his own distributist opinions.^[4]

See also

• "Forty acres and a mule", referring to a promised reallocation of land to formerly-enslaved peoples following the American Civil War.

References

1. http://www.chesterton.org/discover-chesterton/frequently-asked-questions/three-acres/ American Chesterton Society, "Origin of 3 Acres and a Cow"
2. A. W. Ashby, "Jesse Collings," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 12, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 668-669.
3. Dennis Hardy, Utopian England: Community Experiments 1900-1945. London: Routledge, 2000.
4. G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World.