Common Land in Britain: A History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day

Angus Winchester's engaging and wide-ranging study of common land is of real interest both to rural historians and those in a wider society who since 1850 have sought to reconfigure the ancient right that allowed village communities to share what was usually marginal land on parish fringes and transform it into a universal right to freely access agriculturally unproductive areas of the countryside. The first two-thirds of the book take several perspectives, discussing the scale and definition, legal position, management, economic exploitation, communal use, and settlement patterns on common land, predominantly in the medieval and early modern periods, before analyzing the process of change through the enclosure movement and the conceptual shift after 1850 to preserve and extend open spaces for everyone's recreational use in a majority urban society. The final third provides eight case studies of how specific commons evolved and survived in England, Scotland, and Wales, with a refreshing concentration on the North and West of Britain, where the greatest acreage of common waste and pasture lies.The great strength of the book is how it brings together a wealth of material on a disparate topic whose very nature is local and particular, to categorize and generalize across the whole isle of Britain using many well-chosen illustrations. It sets out the basic notions underlying common land and the legal differences between England, Wales, and Scotland. These are not easy concepts to modern minds fed misguided notions of absolute freehold possession. Access to common land rests on limited use rights, based on custom but enshrined in the common law. It existed over much greater areas than the common waste of rugged upland areas, forest, and fenland that form the focus of this book. In lowland Britain it was less often the village green than land on the edges of manors and between villages and hamlets. Winchester rightly ignores the common rights of open field arable systems and water meadows before the nineteenth century, since they would complicate already complex issues. This leaves the ways in which common waste was integrated with other agricultural resources tantalizingly outside his remit.In general, the book is stronger on the medieval and modern periods. The period in between is less fully discussed, partly reflecting that common land and rights rarely entered the written records of courts and government unless they were the subject of conflict. Much of the best archival evidence comes from court cases where predominantly local matters were resolved between a finite and often well-defined group of local people. Therein lies a paradox. The modern idea of common land for recreational use is about land set aside for everyone to use, not just local people with common rights. It is part of a wider set of personal rights under common law—the right to access private land provided you do not do damage (trespass), the rights of using defined footpaths and bridleways across private land (frequently circumscribed and covertly contested by landowners), and in some places the right to pitch a tent overnight (recently upheld by the English courts against the landowner's attempt to suppress on Dartmoor). The collision between local common rights (the NIMBY factor) and wider access (in this case to Birmingham day-trippers and off-road bikers) is evoked in the case study of Bringsty Common and Bromyard Downs in Herefordshire.The original concepts of common land survive today under pressure from environmental initiatives to reduce overstocking. These are making traditional hill farming economically unviable on what was always marginal, low-value land. Those who uphold common rights today are a mixture of farmers wanting to extract value from extensive grazing and rural dwellers set on maintaining (and even reviving) older notions of shared land use that stand outside the market. The elephant in the room throughout this book is that common rights were bought and sold over the centuries, frequently undermining the viability of the whole cooperative system. The eight intriguing case studies in the final third of the book illustrate the different ways that surviving commons have developed over long periods. Conserving the "half-wild" world of commons further alters landscapes that are constantly in flux. Those who protect surviving common land today cannot revive a long-lost rural landscape; they merely try to conserve sensitively elements reflecting continuities in the terrain.