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.

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 …