Three acres and a cow

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

The phrase was coined by Eli Hamshire in letters written to Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Collings in the early 1880s.^[1] Hamshire did, in fact, own 3 acres (1.2 ha). Collings used the phrase as a slogan for his 1885 land reform campaign, and it became the battle cry of the fight 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 1-acre (4,000 m²) of arable and up to 4 acres (16,000 m²) of pasture.^[3]

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

See also

• "40 acres and a mule", referring to what was granted to emancipated slaves at the time of the American Civil War

References

1. ^ American Chesterton Society
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.