Commons were peopled places, frequented by individuals and groups as they drove and tended livestock, cut gorse and bracken or dug turf and peat, depending on the season. Some laboured alone: a boy tending his grandfather’s cattle on Ashdown Forest in the early nineteenth century later commented, ‘Terribly lonely work it was’. However, encounters on common land were part of the fabric of society in medieval and early modern times, as the lives of those labouring there intersected with others passing through. A witness in a dispute over commons in Wensleydale (Yorks. N.R.) in 1579 recalled bargaining for butter and cheese with local womenfolk who were milking their cows and ewes as he crossed the common. Another remembered chatting (sitting ‘one hour together’) with commoners digging peat, when he was fetching his father’s cattle home. In the heathland environments of southern and eastern England, the windmills which stood on high points on many commons would, likewise, have been places for exchange of news and gossip, as the grain carts came and went. Voices and laughter were as much part of the soundscape of common land as the wind and the cries of birds. On a small Bedfordshire common one May evening in 1653, a lady encountered ‘a great many young wenches’, tending sheep and cows, who were sitting in the shade ‘singing of ballads’. Commons were part of the daily lives of young people and children, where work, play, merriment and courtship intertwined.

Commons thus played a part in medieval and early modern life in ways which extended far beyond the uses sanctioned by formal property rights: by no means all those who spent time on common land were exercising common rights. This chapter turns to explore one aspect of this: the use of commons as places for communal gatherings, large and small. Four reasons for going out onto common land to assemble with others stand out: to discharge obligations to those in authority, to trade, to engage in sport and to protest. From folk moots in the early medieval centuries, to cattle fairs and horse races in the later medieval and early modern periods, and evangelical preaching and political rallies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, men, women and children were drawn to gather on common land, especially, but by no means exclusively, on commons close to towns.

Common land – whether mountain, moorland, heathland or marsh – holds an enduring fascination for many people. Both its untamed ecological character and the existence of shared interests set it apart in a world dominated by private property. It touches a deep place in the collective historical memory, especially in England, where, in popular imagination, commons were ‘stolen’ from the poor during the enclosure movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet the nature of common land is often poorly understood, recurrent misconceptions being that commons belonged to no one or, conversely, to everyone and that they are untouched, ‘natural’ landscapes. In reality, commons have a rich history as public-private space; they are not ‘natural’ environments but the product of interaction between humanity and nature over many centuries.

This book aims to survey the history of common land in all three nations of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the present day, casting the net wide in order to explore the intersections between how commons have been viewed and valued across the centuries, how they have been used, and how the landscapes and vegetation of common land have changed. The bulk of the book (Part I) provides an overview, based largely on published literature, while eight case studies of individual commons (Part II) present detailed local histories drawing on archival research.

A mention of common land conjures up a range of images in twenty-first-century Britain. To a hill shepherd, it means whistling his dog onto the back of his quad and heading off to the open grazings of moor or mountain to find their flock. To many in the English countryside it means walks through scrubby woodland, bracken and gorse, criss-crossed by footpaths. To a young couple in London, loading their sleeping baby into a pushchair, to get some fresh air on paths winding past ponds echoing to the calls of ducks, as the traffic rumbles and planes roar overhead. What binds these snapshots together is that, though the environments differ, they share two features. Each is a tract of uncultivated country and a haunt of wildlife; the land is not fully tamed. They are also shared spaces: the shepherd’s ewes share the hill with other flocks; the walkers on the heath meet volunteers repairing paths for the local wildlife trust; the young couple join joggers, dog-walkers and other families on the urban common.

According to modern legal definitions, common land covers more than 2.7 million acres (1.1 million ha) of Britain. In England, 986,000 acres (399,040 ha) or 3 per cent of the land area is registered common land (a figure which includes 62,900 acres (25,470 ha) of commons in the New Forest, the Forest of Dean and Epping Forest, which were excluded from the Commons Registration Act 1965). The bulk of common land in England lies in the uplands, as it does in Wales, where registered commons amount to 428,387 acres (173,366 ha) or 8.4 per cent of the land area. In Scotland 1.46 million acres (591,900 ha) of common grazings in the north-west Highlands, Western Isles and Shetland are registered under the Crofting Acts, amounting to 7.4 per cent of the country.

At the macro-scale, the distribution of common land can thus be said to be environmentally determined. The largest stretches of common land are found in the uplands, from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, through the Pennines, the North York Moors and Lake District fells, to Snowdonia, the Brecon Beacons and the moorlands of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor (Figure 3). Over half of the area of common land in England lies in the two northern counties of Cumbria (31 per cent of the total) and North Yorkshire (21 per cent) and, when Devon (12 per cent) and Co. Durham (8 per cent) are added, over 70 per cent of all England’s common land is found in just those four counties. In lowland England, commons are numerous. Some wetlands and heaths cover large areas but many lowland commons are very small – half of all registered commons in England contain less than one hectare. Lowland common land is most frequent in the southern counties and East Anglia and across the Welsh Marches; few commons survive in the ‘Central Province’, the heartland of former open-field farming.

Assessing the extent of common land in a historical context poses several difficulties, not least because it was a shifting acreage which shrank over time as a result of enclosure. The chronological starting point for this book is the early medieval period, during which the framework of the rural landscape (its villages and territories, manorial and administrative boundaries) was laid down.

Cumberland CL 59.

The fell common at Nether Wasdale, a scattered hill farming community on marginal land on the western edge of the Lake District, provides an example of an upland grazing common which continued to be managed by a manor court until the 1930s. Nether Wasdale Common (Figures 44 and 45), covering 4,994 acres (2,021 ha) and accounting for 58 per cent of the land surface of the civil parish, consists of rough, mountainous ground carrying acidic soils on the volcanic rocks of the central Lake District. It rises steeply from the northern shore of Wast Water, stretching back into the higher fells to the summit of Haycock (797m) on the watershed with Ennerdale. The common includes the remote Stockdale valley, drained by the upper reaches of the River Bleng. Its resources were those typical of commons on the Lake District fells: grazing (summer pasture for cattle; year-round grazing for heafed Herdwick sheep); bracken, cut under the common right of estovers (which remained important until the twentieth century); and peat for fuel.

Nether Wasdale was part of the private forest of Copeland, belonging to the medieval barony of Egremont. When the forest was partitioned between heiresses in 1338, Nether Wasdale became part of the ‘Middleward’, along with the township of Kinniside and the wastes of Stockdale Moor, a seigniorial agistment ground lying between them, over which both townships possessed grazing rights. Nether Wasdale Common was bounded on the east by the ‘deer fence’ of Bowderdale, a section of the fells retained as private pasture by the lords of the barony, which had been enclosed by the 1540s.1 Nether Wasdale descended as part of the Percy estates in western Cumberland to the Wyndham family, later Lords Leconfield and Egremont. In 1979 the common, along with the estate’s other Lake District commons, passed to the National Trust in lieu of death duties.

In 1578 the forty-three holdings in Nether Wasdale each had appurtenant rights to ‘sufficient common quo; on the fell. Three individuals living outside the manor, in neighbouring lowland communities, also had grazing rights, termed ‘greslands’, each of which gave the right to graze a fixed number of livestock (four, five or six beasts) on the common. Like the agistment ground of Stockdale Moor, these rights in gross gave lowland farms access to summer grazing on the fells.

The bulk of this book has focused on the multiple meanings assigned to common land in Britain and how these have played out in the landscape across the centuries. Evolving conceptions of rights in land lie at the heart of the cultural context, shaping the shifting attitudes to commons. In drawing together this historical survey, this chapter begins by sketching out a history of common land, using these changing perceptions as a lens through which to view the story of commons in Britain. It takes a broad view, as a full picture of common land reaches beyond the shared use of agrarian resources, to embrace the wider place of commons in so many aspects of life.

Alan Everitt’s memorable phrase, that common land is ‘half-wild country’,1 has run as a thread throughout this book and gets to the heart of the ambiguities which lay behind perceptions of common land. Commons are neither one thing nor the other, neither fully wild, nor fully tamed landscapes; neither no man’s land nor fully private property; neither exclusively agrarian resource, nor unfettered public space. They were full of paradoxes and, thus, difficult to pigeonhole. ‘Half-wildness’ implies an inherent tension between tameness and wildness and also a restlessness: the multiple interests in common land and the different meanings and values assigned to it by different players have resulted in a fluid balance between the processes of taming and wilding across the centuries.

Multiple interests and shifting values are a theme which is prominent in much of the literature on commons. Contested rights surface repeatedly in tensions over who should be able to use common land and for what purposes. Uncertain boundaries and disputed ownership of common land recur, especially across the medieval period; the limit of common rights, both in terms of who could exercise them and how much resource could be taken, was a perennial issue across the early modern centuries; tensions between customary users of commons and those with formal property rights re-surface across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and the balance between private and public interests continues to be contested in the twenty-first century.

Those tensions spring from a paradox which lies at the heart of common land in Britain, namely that both English and Scots law define this communally-used land in terms of private property rights.

Ibsley common (932 ACRES; 377 ha) and Rockford Common (c.460 acres; c.185 ha) were part of the arc of common land abutting the historic northern and western boundaries of the New Forest, brought within the limits of the modern forest by the New Forest Act 1964. The two commons lay open to the forest wastes in Linwood bailiwick, so that their histories can only be understood in relation to the history of the forest. The manors of Rockford (in Ellingham parish) and Ibsley descended together from the sixteenth century and were bought by the family of Lord Normanton in 1825, becoming part of the Somerley estate. The National Trust acquired the majority of both commons in 1999.

Most of the commons consist of dry heath on a plateau at around 60–70m above sea level. Their western edges, abutting the enclosed land in Ibsley and Ellingham, lie where the ground falls away to the Avon valley. The commons are bisected by Dockens Water and its wet valley mire, with most of Ibsley Common lying to the north and Rockford Common to the south (though the manorial and parish boundary cuts across the terrain, ignoring the valley). The underlying geology is Eocene sands and clays, capped on the plateau by river terrace gravels, on which leached podzol soils carry a cover of heather, with areas of bracken and gorse. Rockford Common has a more wooded character than Ibsley, with scattered clumps of pine, patches of birch scrub and some oak, many of the trees probably having colonised from adjacent woodland in the forest.

Writing in 1905, Heywood Sumner noted how, although the forest landscape seemed to include the heather-clad plateau of Ibsley and Rockford commons, the forest’s legal limits followed a line across the open heath coinciding approximately with the eastern limits of Ibsley and Ellingham parishes (Figure 60), defined by ‘low grey posts, furred with lichen, & hidden with ling’. Until 1964, that invisible boundary across the heath separated manorial from forest wastes, the common rights regimes differing on either side. As Sumner put it, his rights as a freeholder in Ibsley allowed him to turn beasts onto Ibsley Common without payment, to dig sand, gravel and soil on the common and to take from it as much turf, gorse, bracken or heather as required for his own use;

Lincolnshire CL 2 (Epworth Turbary) and CL 8 (Belton Low Closes Turbary).

The turbary grounds allocated to village communities when wetlands surrounding the Isle of Axholme in the Humberhead Levels were enclosed in 1803 are examples of the perpetuation of shared use of common land as a result of Parliamentary enclosure. Two of the plots set aside then to supply domestic fuel for local people remain registered as common land.

Before enclosure and drainage, the open-field villages along the ridge of higher land on the Isle of Axholme were surrounded by wet carr lands, particularly on the western side stretching towards the River Torne. These spacious commons, cut by natural creeks and drainage dykes, provided pasture for large numbers of livestock, the grazing enriched by silt from regular winter flooding. The commons also yielded the assortment of fen resources typical of wetland areas: turf and peat for fuel, clay, hay (in parts), fish and wildfowl. Hemp and flax cultivation was widespread on the Isle and the commons also offered scope for digging pits and ponds in which to ‘ret’ or steep the plants in order to extract the fibre. The commons were thus so integral to the economy of the villages on the Isle that the resistance of villagers to the loss of large blocks of their commons to the ‘Participants’ in Vermuyden’s drainage scheme of the 1620s is not surprising. Serious rioting occurred from 1628 to 1634 and again during the Civil War when sluices were destroyed to flood the newly-reclaimed land and to prevent Royalist troops from reaching the staunchly Parliamentarian Isle.3 The resources of the commons also attracted migrants: it was said in 1675 that the area’s liberal turf-cutting rights drew ‘multitudes of the poorer sort’ from adjacent counties to settle there.4 Despite Vermuyden’s activities, around 12,000 acres (4,850 ha) of wetland waste, known collectively as ‘The Isle Commons’, survived until they were enclosed and drained under an act of 1795.

The Isle of Axholme Enclosure Act specified that the commissioners were to divide the wastes between the four parishes of Epworth, Haxey, Belton and Owston and to allocate to each parish one or more allotments of up to 100 acres (40 ha) ‘for a Turbary …

Crofting Register Common Grazing numbers: Clachtoll (CG 232); Stoer and Balchladich (CG 118); Clashmore and Raffin (CG 186); Culkein (CG 87); Achnacarnan (CG 103); Clashnessie (CG 235); Culkein Drumbeg (CG 90); Drumbeg (CG 89); Nedd (CG 150).

This group of nine contiguous common grazings belonging to crofting townships along the coast north of Lochinver, in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, was part of the Dukes of Sutherland’s vast estates from 1757 until 1913. Most of the grazings consist of an ice-scoured plateau at around 100–150m above sea level, containing rocky knolls and wet depressions with countless lochans, typical of the ‘cnockan and lochan’ landscapes underlain by Lewisian gneiss (Figure 42). The Stoer peninsula, on the ancient Torridon sandstone, is gentler and smoother, but more exposed, ground. Surveying the Assynt estate in 1774, John Home sketched pithy pen portraits of the pastures. Those belonging to Clachtoll were ‘Rugged rocky Hills interspersed with patches of Moss mostly coverd with Heath including Braes, Dens and hollow Slacks yielding grassy pasture with meadow Grass along the Burns’.

Home’s survey enables the boundaries of the modern common grazings to be compared with those of their eighteenth-century precursors (Figure 43). In 1774 the land was parcelled out between eleven farms, most in shared tenancies and containing multiple households (twenty in the most populous farm, Clashnessie). At Stoer, where there were fourteen families, the rent was divided between eleven of the tenants, for example. Each farm was centred on small areas of ploughland around the settlements near the coast and there were smaller cultivated patches at shieling sites scattered across the farms’ territories. The bulk of each farm consisted of the open grazings – ‘Hills, Moss and rocky Muirish Pasture’ in Home’s shorthand description – shared by the tenants of the farm. This, and patches of natural woodland also used as grazing ground, accounted for the overwhelming majority (on average 84 per cent) of each farm’s territory.

From the late eighteenth century, the conversion of inland farms into large-scale sheep ranches and the consequent removal of sub-tenants from them, led to migration to the coastal townships where livings could be supplemented by fishing. By the 1840s the townships of northern Assynt were congested and the estate factors sought to ease pressure by sponsoring emigration and reorganising the townships into crofts.

Much of the literature on the history of common land has focused on its demise through enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dwelling on the causes and consequences of its loss – the drivers behind enclosure, the process and its impact. In England, common rights were extinguished over more than 6.8 million acres (2.75 million ha) of land, 21 per cent of the total land surface, as a result of Parliamentary enclosure (largely in the century between c.1760 and c.1860), converting almost all open fields and much manorial waste into private property no longer used communally. The same process took place in Wales and, within a different legal framework, the period saw the loss of most common grazings across large parts of Scotland. The impact of enclosure – on the landscape, the agrarian economy and the livelihoods of the rural poor – has been the subject of much literature, a dominant theme being the negative impact on the poor, as customary uses of common land were swept away. This chapter takes a rather different approach, focusing not only on the loss of common land but also on how some commons came to be reconfigured as a result of enclosure. Paradoxically, improvement and Parliamentary enclosure did not always result in complete ‘privatisation’, as the process perpetuated communal use of some areas of common land under redefined regimes.

From the seventeenth century, ‘improvement’ came to dominate agricultural discourse, becoming an all-pervading imperative which had dramatic consequences for commons. Improvement represented a shift of paradigm, changing perceptions of the value of common land and culminating in its widespread loss. Commons were viewed as ‘wasted’ land, crying out to be ‘reclaimed’ and improved, as part of a wider change in attitudes to land, when profit and securing private property rights became dominant motives.

The idea of improvement can be traced back to the sixteenth century. At its heart lay a desire to increase income from land, one aspect of which involved changes in land use, including reclamation of marsh, enclosure of open fields, and changed management of woods and meadows. In his Boke of Surveyeng and Improume[n]tes(1523), Fitzherbert saw enclosure of common pastures, as well as arable land and meadows, as a prerequisite to increasing the value of a township.

Wimbledon common was pivotal in the battles over metropolitan commons in the 1860s, its transformation from manorial waste to a playground, ‘the pearl of London’s open spaces’, forming a central strand in its history. The debates over the future of the common played a prominent part in the revolution in attitudes to common land in the mid-nineteenth century – and in the 1970s the imaginary litter-recycling ‘Wombles of Wimbledon Common’ immortalised, through story and song, the place of common land in modern urban life. With the nearby open space of Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common and the adjacent Putney Heath form one of the largest of London’s green lungs, surrounded by the urban areas of Putney, Wimbledon, Kingston and Richmond.

Wimbledon Common and Putney Heath comprise 1,140 acres (460 ha) of woodland and open ground. They form a fairly level plateau of river gravels at c.52m above sea level, capping the London Clay, which outcrops on the western slopes of the common, where the land drops to the valley of the Beverley Brook. Together, the commons represent the bulk of the manorial waste of the manor of Wimbledon and also include a small area which was part of the waste of the manor of Battersea and Wandsworth; the Earls Spencer were lords of both manors from the eighteenth century.

Records of the manor court make it possible to reconstruct the use and regulation of the common from 1462 to the mid-seventeenth century. From the earliest records, there is evidence of pressure on the common – from those without common rights overburdening the common with livestock; from unringed pigs churning up the soil; from those taking fuel illicitly or excessively. The common’s fuel resources, in particular, not only firewood but also gorse (‘furze’) and bushes, were in high demand. In the decade after 1500 men were presented for cutting more fuel (namely ‘firses et bushes’) on the common ‘than seems necessary or fitting’; their number included a brewer, who took ‘furze, thorns and bushes’ in excess to burn in his brewhouse. Regulations aimed at reducing demand for fuel were imposed in the 1520s, when bakers, brewers and undertenants (‘undersettes’) were forbidden from taking wood or furze from the common.

The potentially conflicting interests of different users required effective regulatory systems to ensure that the exploitation of communal resources ran smoothly. Pressures on commons changed over time as demand for resources fluctuated in the face of population growth or decline, and economic and technological change. Consequently, patterns of use depended on local circumstances and could vary over the space of a few miles and over comparatively short periods of time. Regulating commons therefore needed to be tailored to local circumstance.

In the medieval and early modern periods, most common land was regulated through the institutions of the manor or estate to which it belonged, the rules they formulated creating a body of customary law, particular to the locality. Across Britain, the regulatory institutions were local seigniorial courts: the manor court (especially the court leet) in England and Wales; the barony court in Scotland; the ‘swainmote’ court in forest areas. Called by the lord and presided over by his steward, the court generally required the attendance of all tenants, from whom was drawn a jury who determined cases and formulated rules. Its principal role was to uphold the lord’s rights and privileges and also to foster harmonious relations within the local community.

Regulations made and policed by a court sought to achieve those two ends and were specific to the estate in question. In some places (especially in the Midland and northern counties of England), the rules and the sanctions which applied when they were broken were drawn together into ‘pain lists’ laying out the suites of byelaws which, together with more formal articles of enquiry, formed a checklist of matters to be looked into by the court (Figure 11). Comparatively few such written statements of byelaws survive, so many courts’ deliberations presumably continued to be structured around oral memory of local custom. Taken together, pain lists, articles of enquiry and the decisions of the courts themselves can be used to reconstruct how regulations evolved across the years, particularly in the two centuries 1550–1750, from which most records survive. Even commons which fell outside manorial regulation were governed by comparable suites of byelaws.

To quote another of Alan Everitt’s memorable phrases, commons were places of ‘homely things and humble people’. An association between common land and the poorest members of the community had become well established by the seventeenth century, to the extent that commons and poverty were seen as going hand-in-hand. In 1651, Samuel Hartlib, the champion of enclosure, asked rhetorically why ‘there are fewest poore where there are fewest Commons’. Commons, he said, engendered idleness, training up the poor ‘for the Gallowes or beggary’, rather than for useful service. To those in authority, common land was synonymous with people on the margins of mainstream society – not only the parish poor but also squatters living on the commons and itinerant groups. Commons were often viewed as hotbeds of lawlessness and immorality, ‘edgy’ places on the edges of parishes, where clandestine or illegal activities took place.

In the debates over enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the relationship between commons and the poor loomed large on both sides of the argument. Both agreed that access to the resources of common land was a key feature of the lives of the poor. To advocates of enclosure, such dependence bred idleness and poverty, so the commons should be enclosed; to opponents, it was wrong that enclosure should deprive the poor of the support they obtained from common land. Enclosure could thus be seen as an attack on the livelihood of the poor, a view succinctly expressed in the much-quoted anonymous ditty from the period, which critiqued enclosure in class terms:

Striking at the heart of the issue, by exposing ‘the artificial and controversial nature of property rights’, its choice of the cottager’s humble goose as the victim of enclosure confirms the conflation of common land with the interests of the poor in the eyes of contemporaries.

The historical consensus on the effects of enclosure on the poor veered between extremes across the twentieth century. The view proposed by the Hammonds in The Village Labourerin 1911 saw enclosure as ‘fatal’ to small farmers, cottagers and squatters, as the resources of common land were more valuable to them than any small allotments they might receive on enclosure.