The main source materials for this analysis were the logs or journals kept by David Bruce and John Inglis. The first step in the analysis was to compile a spreadsheet of all vessels intercepted and all information provided in the logs about those vessels. That preliminary master list prompted the following questions:

1. What types of vessels were they?

2. What cargoes were they carrying?

3. What vessel types brought what cargoes, from whence to where?

4. Which vessels received more intensive treatment than boarding and rummaging, and why?

In this analysis, I found it useful to estimate unknown vessel types and cargoes by using percentage allocations of them based on the known types and cargoes. To avoid compounding any errors, however, I chose not to base subsequent analyses on previously-derived estimates. For example, I did not base the analysis of cargoes on previously-generated estimates of vessel types, but on the known information.

Vessels

A few types of vessels dominated British American trade, and, by this period, they were denoted primarily by the type of their sailing rigs. In decreasing order of size, with significant overlap between each, these were the ship, the snow, the brig, the schooner, and the sloop.

It was simple enough to sort the list by vessel type. The complicating factor was that, all too often, neither Bruce nor Inglis recorded it. It was not uncommon for the log to read ‘boarded some vessels in the boat,’ or something similar, no other details being given. Not only does such an entry omit details of type; it omits even a number. Taking into account the verbiage of the logs as a whole, and other supporting details they provided, I assigned an arbitrary value of three to ‘some vessels’ and a value of five to ‘several vessels.’ Those were the two consistent phrases used in these indefinite references. I believe these figures to be conservative, and thus I believe the total estimated number of vessels intercepted – 935 – to be conservative, but modestly so.

The modern compass is divided into 360 degrees. Typically, we only use the cardinal and inter-cardinal points: in the first case, North, East, South, and West; in the second, Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest. Most of us are accustomed to thinking of ninety-degree angles, and of expressing opposites as ‘180 degrees’ apart, but the compass plays little role in many modern lives, beyond the knowledge that the sun rises roughly in the east and sets in the west. Mariners, however, think of everything in terms of direction – the wind, the current, the position of the sun or a star, their own course, and where the land is – or might be. Spatial orientation is key to a conception of order out of chaos on board ship.

Mariners in Sultana's time used the thirty-two-point compass, illustrated below (see Figure 32). One point translates to 11.25 degrees, but that is not how they thought of it. The demands, and limitations, of practical navigation under sail did not require the precision offered by the 360-degree compass. This older compass might at first seem challenging to comprehend, but the notation is actually straightforward.

The eight ‘half winds’ bisect the four inter-cardinal points. The key to remembering them is that the first direction is modified by the second (as with the ‘quarter winds’ – see below). So, ‘ENE’ (East-Northeast), halfway between Northeast and East, is ‘Northeast of East.’ ‘SSW’ – South-Southwest – is halfway between South and Southwest – ‘Southwest of South.’

The ‘quarter winds,’ the finest divisions in the thirty-two-point compass, bisect the ‘half winds.’ As with the ‘half winds,’ the first direction given in a ‘quarter wind’ is the primary direction, and the second direction is an adjustment to that. So, for example, ‘NEbE’ (Northeast by East) may be thought of as ‘Northeast adjusted to the East,’ or, ‘a little bit East of Northeast.’ ‘SWbS’ means ‘Southwest by South,’ and that means ‘a little bit South of Southwest.’ Quarter winds are identified by the ‘by’ between the two directions, usually written as either ‘b’ or ‘x.’

The compass used by David Bruce and John Inglis in Sultana's logs is actually a further division of this compass into 128 points, but the thirty-two-point compass is more than adequate for understanding anything presented in this book, or likely to be encountered in other maritime histories of the period.

John clare’s hymn to the loss of his beloved heathlands of Northamptonshire, published in 1821, anticipated a fundamental change in perceptions of common land which took place across the nineteenth century. Clare was voicing nostalgia for a countryside rapidly being lost. His appreciation of land clothed ‘in the rude rags of nature’ was to become central to the value placed on commons by modern society. From the 1860s, common land came to be valued for recreation, public access and natural beauty, and later for its ecological character. No longer were commons a reservoir of untamed land waiting to be reclaimed and improved; now those which survived became a precious remnant to be conserved for the benefit of the nation at large. Paradoxically, however, that wider interest led to further loss of common land, as it came to be seen as an appropriate location for public buildings and, at times of crisis in the twentieth century, as a resource which could be drawn upon in the service of national defence. The new perceptions were part of a deep change in conceptions of land. If a wider public interest were accepted, it followed that limits would be placed on the freedom of action of those with property rights. How the common land which had survived the era of enclosure was used – indeed, how it shouldbe used – became matters of public debate. Ye are dear as this heart in my bosom to me.

The shift of discourse from ‘reclamation’ to ‘conservation’ is conventionally placed in the 1860s, with the foundation of the Commons Preservation Society in 1865, but its roots can be traced back to the earlier decades of the century. It sprang from two very different sources – landscape aesthetics and public health. The idea that the public at large had a valid interest in natural beauty was being expressed in relation to the Lake District by the first years of the nineteenth century. After visiting the Lakes in 1802, Richard Warner declared that places deemed to be beautiful were ‘the common property of the people’, and Wordsworth later famously described the Lake District

Common land is only ‘half-wild’ – hardly anywhere in Britain is ecology untouched by mankind. Typical landscapes of common land, such as moorlands and heaths, are the product of interactions between natural and human forces; they are potentially unstable and subject to change in response to variations in either. This chapter offers an overview of how the face of common land has changed since the mid-nineteenth century, looking at the relationship between evolving patterns of use and the ecological character of those commons which survived the age of enclosure. Key factors include changes in grazing pressure, the cessation of some traditional uses, notably the gathering of fuel, and, increasingly, the role of government agencies in steering management practices for conservation ends. In broad terms, economic and technological change across the twentieth century led to a divergence between actively used upland commons and abandoned lowland commons. Upland commons generally experienced an intensification of use, whether increased grazing pressure or active management as grouse moors, whereas grazing and fuel gathering ceased on many, but not all, lowland commons. Meanwhile, common land near towns tended to be brought into the service of modern urban populations, and ‘municipalised’ into recreational parkland. These three distinct trajectories of change since the 1860s are examined in turn.

One theme which recurs is the increasing role played by the state in pursuing conservation objectives, resulting in the active manipulation of the ecology of common land, both upland and lowland, from the later twentieth century. Central to this has been the language of ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’ condition used to judge the ecological state of Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). Since 57 per cent of common land in England is in SSSIs, the impact of such thinking has been significant. Owners and occupiers of SSSIs are required to seek consent from state conservation bodies (now Natural England, Natural Resources Wales and NatureScot) for activities which might damage the ecology (such as peat-digging), and consent can be refused. Financial incentives have been introduced in the form of management agreements fostering the aims of nature conservation. Even where common land is not notified as SSSI, a succession of agri-environment agreements since the 1990s, whereby state funding is used to direct land use (often by paying farmers to reduce stocking levels), has had a major impact on the exercise of common rights.

Shared use lay at the heart of common land and required mutual understandings between users and an agreed framework to structure the exploitation of resources. The law relating to commons developed from a bedrock of custom and tradition, which had deep roots and common characteristics but was essentially local in its particularities. No single set of legal concepts has underpinned all commons in Britain. Common land, as it is generally conceived, was in origin an English construct without a direct equivalent in the different legal traditions of Scotland or medieval Wales.

In teasing out the complexities of custom and law, this chapter begins by considering evidence for the organisation of common land in the pre-feudal societies of early medieval Britain. The bulk of the chapter then outlines the legal framework of property rights over common land since the medieval period – who owned common land, the nature of common rights and how these were determined – identifying recurrent themes but also considering patterns of rights and use which diverged from the legal norms. A final section examines the manifestations of legal frameworks on the ground, in territorial boundaries separating the common land belonging to one community from that of its neighbours.

PRE-FEUDAL COMMONS: EXTENSIVE LORDSHIP

Taking a very long chronological view, it can be postulated that settlements existed at an early date as islands in an ocean of unappropriated waste, the resources of which could be drawn upon freely. Population growth and expanding numbers of settlements would place increasing demands on the resources of untamed land, prompting claims to exclusive use by individual settlements or groups. Boundaries would evolve through custom and practice, defining the limits of a group’s rights. By the early medieval period, patterns of customary use had already drawn wastes into the institutional structures of society, converting wilderness into common land ‘belonging to’ communities.

Folk memories of the process were recalled on the expansive wetlands of eastern England in the thirteenth century. Fen land in the Pinchbeck area of Lincolnshire had been ‘common to all of the countryside (patria) desiring to use it’ until the ‘first habitation of Holland’, when it was divided between vills. Further south, around Sawtry, competing claims were backed by stories about the division of the fens in the time of Thurkil the Dane or in the time of Cnut. Some fens remained undivided, shared by adjacent communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Herefordshire CL 14 (Bringsty Common) and CL 15 (Bromyard Downs).

These two commons, lying little more than a mile apart on the sandstone hills of north-east Herefordshire, illustrate many of the themes in the history of common land in lowland England. Despite their proximity to each other, their characters differ. Bringsty Common (Figure 55) covers 229 acres (93 ha) of broken land, straddling the boundary between Whitbourne and Linton parishes. It is a landscape of rolling hillsides and hidden dells, partly wooded; some parts are clogged by bracken and bramble, others are open grassy slopes. Bromyard Downs (Figure 56), covering 282 acres (114 ha), is a curving sweep of hillside to the east of the medieval borough and market town of Bromyard, rising to the crest of the ridge at c.200m above sea level, which forms the parish boundary. The common contains more open land than Bringsty, with large areas of grassland and some patches of surviving heathland, as well as bracken and scrub. Their contrasting ecologies were apparent by the seventeenth century, when the road from London to Aberystwyth (the modern A44) passed through ‘Furrs & Fern’ on Bringsty Common, while the Downs were referred to as ‘Bromiard heath’, perhaps suggesting that the heathland was formerly more extensive.

In the era of medieval colonisation, Bringsty and the neighbouring smaller common at Badley Wood (56 acres; 23 ha) were surviving woodlands on rising ground on the western edge of Whitbourne parish. By the sixteenth century both were common grazings, all the tenants of the manor having common of pasture in them ‘without number’ (sance nombre), implying that the rule of levancy and couchancy applied. The woods continued to provide pannage for pigs in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century and in 1562 the manor court had sought to protect woodland by amercing those who felled trees and removed wood without licence from Bringsty, Badley Wood and Bromyard Downs.

Co. Durham CL 8.

Cockfield fell comprises 557 acres (225 ha) of open pasture on the eastern flanks of the north Pennines at around 250m above sea level. Heavily scarred by industry, it remains an actively grazed stinted pasture, managed by field reeves under the terms of the Inclosure Act 1845. The common is remarkable for its palimpsest of relict features, not only a rich legacy of industrial archaeology but also at least three banked and ditched enclosures, probably of Romano-British date. A striking aerial photograph, taken in low light in November 1971, revealed the full complexity of the multi-period landscape of the fell. Its publication by Brian Roberts in 1975 ultimately resulted in the bulk of the common being scheduled as an ancient monument, said to be the largest scheduled monument in England.

The common consists of a stretch of grassland with patches of bracken and gorse, sloping north from the village of Cockfield down to the River Gaunless which forms the parish boundary. It is underlain by Carboniferous coal measures, capped by glacial till, but much of the surface is disturbed ground, the grassed-over legacy of the fell’s industrial past. Industrial remains are numerous and various (Figures 47 and 48). Coal-mining, recorded from the fourteenth century, has left the common pock-marked by collapsed shafts and subsidence, ranging from shallow bell-pits, where a seam outcropped at the western end of the common, to the heads of the deeper shafts of nineteenth-century collieries. Several sandstone quarries had been opened by the 1850s, while the most dominant landscape feature, the long, deep quarry trench (now largely filled in) following the igneous intrusion of ‘whinstone’ and its associated spoil heaps, dates from the later nineteenth century. Other sites of extractive industry on the common included a coke oven and brickworks, one recorded in 1811, a second by 1857. Associated with the industrial exploitation of the fell are the remains of the Bishop Auckland, Haggerleases & Barnard Castle branch of the North-Eastern Railway, opened in 1863, with a station on the common, a series of tramways, and rows of cottages at the railway station and beside one of the tramways at Fell Houses.