The Common Lands of England and Wales

By W. G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp

All common lands and village greens are listed county by county, along with an analysis of their legal and natural state. This edition is produced from an original copy by William Collins.

The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.

In this book Dr Hoskins deals with the history of commons, and related legal aspects; Dr Stamp with the nature conservation. The list of commons and village greens are based on hitherto unpublished returns made by local authorities to the Royal Commission - covering the staggering total of one and a half million acres.

Reviews:

“A book for whatever part of England and Wales one knows and likes, a book which enables the reader to see and feel the country of now and the past in a new way.”
The Observer

“Dr Hoskins opens with a survey to which that overworked adjective masterly may without exaggeration be applied.”
The Times

“A unique volume: never before has there been gathered together in such pleasant accessible form all this is authoritatively known about the common lands. The authors and publisher are to be warmly congratulated on a work which will be essential for students of social history, and also valuable to all who like to escape from the cities and the crowds to enjoy natural beauty. Excellent illustrations, tables and maps.”
Church Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Dec 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9780007403639

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COPYRIGHT

William Collins

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2018

First published 1963

© W. G. Hoskins and L. Dudley Stamp, 1963

The authors assert their moral rights to be identified as the authors of this work

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Source ISBN 9780007342228

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2018 ISBN: 9780007403639

Version: 2018-11-23

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Plates in Colour

Plates in Black-and-White

List of Figures

Editors’ Preface

Authors’ Preface

Part One by W. G. Hoskins

1COMMON LAND AND ITS ORIGIN

THE MEANING OF COMMON LAND

THE ORIGINS OF COMMON LAND

2COMMON LAND IN DOMESDAY BOOK

SOUTH-WESTERN COMMONS

MIDLAND AND EAST ANGLIAN COMMONS

THE CASE OF OTMOOR

3THE AGE OF EXPANSION, 1100–1350

VILLAGE GREENS

THE OPEN COUNTRYSIDE

NEW TOWNS ON THE COMMONS

4COMMON LAND AND THE PEASANT ECONOMY

THE PEASANT ECONOMY

OTHER COMMON RIGHTS

THE PRESSURE ON THE COMMONS

5THE ATTACK ON THE COMMONS

THE STATE OF THE COMMONS ABOUT

THE CASE OF OTMOOR AGAIN

THE CASE FOR THE COMMONS

THE IMPACT OF THE TOWNS

6SOME LONDON COMMONS

BLACKHEATH

CLAPHAM, WANDSWORTH AND STREATHAM COMMONS

WIMBLEDON COMMON

HAMPSTEAD HEATH

EPPING FOREST

7THE PROTECTION OF THE COMMONS

THE STATE INTERVENES

THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND AFTER

Part Two by L. Dudley Stamp

8THE COMMON LANDS CENSUS OF 1873-4

9THE PRESENT EXTENT OF COMMON LAND

10THE COMMONS OF THE LOWLAND HEART OF ENGLAND

11EAST ANGLIA

12LONDON AND THE HOME COUNTIES

13EPPING FOREST

14THE HAMPSHIRE BASIN AND SOUTHERN CHALKLANDS

15THE NEW FOREST

16THE COTSWOLD COMMONS

17EXMOOR, THE QUANTOCKS AND EAST DEVON

18THE DARTMOOR COMMONS

19THE CORNISH COMMONS

20THE LAKE DISTRICT

21THE PENNINE COMMONS

22THE NORTH YORK MOORS

23THE FOREST OF DEAN AND ST. BRIAVELS

24THE WELSH BORDERLAND

25THE WELSH COMMONS

Picture Section

Appendix: THE COMMONS OF ENGLAND COUNTY LISTS

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading

About the Publisher

EDITORS

James Fisher, M.A.

John Gilmour, M.A., V.M.H.

Sir Julian Huxley, M.A., D.SC, F.R.S.

L. Dudley Stamp, G.B.E., D.LIT., D.SC.

PHOTOGRAPHIC EDITOR

Eric Hosking, F.R.P.S.

The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wild life of Britain by recapturing the inquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The Editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native fauna and flora, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research.

PLATES IN COLOUR

PLATES IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

LIST OF FIGURES

1Intercommoning Vills in the Lincolnshire Fens

2Hatherleigh, Devon, and the great pasture of Domesday Book

3Povington, Dorset: the heath and the arable in 1086

4The Distribution of Village Greens, 1961

5Marsh Baldon, Oxfordshire, and its green, about 1730

6Laxton, Nottinghamshire; West Field and Westwood Common in 1635

7The Distribution of Heathland and Moorland in England and Wales

8The Distribution of Common Land in England and Wales, 1957

9The Regions of England and Wales used in the description of common land distribution

10The Strays of the City of York

11The Commons of the City of Cambridge

12Map of Soham Parish, Cambridgeshire

13Barrington Green, Cambridgeshire

14The Commons of Huntingdon and Godmanchester

15Commons within a fifty-mile radius of the Centre of Birmingham

16The Oxford Meads

17The Regions of East Anglia

18The Heathlands of East Anglia

19The Commons of London

20Meopham Green, Kent

21The Bagshot Commons of Surrey

22The Regions of the Weald

23Epping Forest

24The New Forest

25The Cotswold Commons

26Exmoor Commons

27Commons of East Devon

28Dartmoor

29Bodmin Moor

30Lizard Peninsula: Geology

31Lizard Peninsula: Moorland and Commons

32Rough Grazing in the Lake District

33Diagrammatic Map of the Regions of the Pennines

34Rough Grazing in the Pennines

35Commons of the Pennines

36Map of the North York Moors

37The Forest of Dean

38The Malvern Hills

39Rough Grazing in Wales

40Commons in Wales, 1873 and 1957

41The Commons of the Prescellies, Pembrokeshire

EDITORS’ PREFACE

The Editors take particular pleasure in presenting this volume in the New Naturalist series because they believe it is a book to which the word unique may be justly applied for several reasons.

It is surely an anomaly that in a crowded country such as England and Wales with 46,000,000 people living on 37,000,000 acres there should still be four per cent of the surface—as much as occupied by the dwellings of urban man—held in common and governed by a miscellaneous collection of laws dating back in many cases for centuries. Pressure on land has become such that we can no longer afford to neglect this national heritage. What in the past was often waste left to lie idle because of its low agricultural value has become to-day a precious reservoir of wild life, but continued neglect can ruin its value in that regard as much as in any other.

Despite the obvious need, successive governments for long hesitated to set up a Royal Commission on Common Land, fearing unpredictable political consequences with such easily raised but ill-informed cries as hands off the commons. After its appointment had been definitely mooted for at least two decades, it was set up in 1955 under the chairmanship of an experienced lawyer, Sir Ivor Jennings. A fundamental part in the work of the Commission and the writing of the Report fell to its able secretary, Mr. George L. Wilde, and the two authors of the present volume wish to express their great indebtedness to Mr. Wilde for helping them in the interpretation of the vast mass of material collected by the Commission.

As the expert historian and geographer respectively on the Commission, Dr. Hoskins and Dr. Stamp each wrote a lengthy appendix to the Report from their respective angles: now they present for the general reader an account uninhibited by the insistent need for circumspection inherent in membership of a Royal Commission.

It is one thing to write in general terms about commons, quite another to gather together what is actually known about them. For the first time ever the Royal Commission called for details from the counties. It has been left to the authors to summarize these county returns one by one and to attempt, however unsuccessfully, to give a list of known or suspected commons. They have gone further and, again for the first time, have attempted a list of village greens—an associated heritage so essentially part of the rural scene.

We believe that this book will inform the public at a time when far-reaching legislation is pending and will stimulate local interest everywhere—if only to tell the authors where they are wrong.

THE EDITORS

AUTHORS’ PREFACE

There are still one and a half million acres of common land in England and Wales, which give us some of our most distinctive scenery, flora, fauna, and above all perhaps bird life. Regions such as the New Forest, the Forest of Dean, Dartmoor, the Brecon Beacons, and many other well-known holiday districts, to this day consist largely of common land. Yet there is no book which deals with this unique aspect of the English and Welsh landscape as such, and there exist many popular misconceptions about the meaning of common land and of the rights of the public over it.

Though common pastures were one of the most fundamental necessities of the old peasant economy which once prevailed all over Britain, without which the whole economy would have broken down very quickly, one rarely finds any reference to Commons and Common Rights in the index of even the most erudite social and economic histories. Too often commons have been regarded, even by the most learned authors, as virtually synonymous with uncultivated wilderness and waste, of little or no economic value. Nothing could be further from the truth historically.

We have written this book after serving for three years on the Royal Commission on Common Land (1955–8), because we felt that such a comprehensive study in non-official language was badly needed. One of us is an historian, the other a geographer. It is important to emphasize that any views that may be expressed in our respective chapters are our views as individual writers, and not as members of the Royal Commission whose Report has yet to be considered by Parliament.

Part I of the book traces the history of common lands in England and Wales from their shadowy beginnings as prehistoric grazing-grounds down to the present day, showing how vital they were in the old agrarian economy by which the vast majority of people once lived, how they reached their present form and status, and how the law relating to these lands has reached its present complexity. It also serves to dispose, it is hoped, of certain myths about the nature of common land, such as the belief that it is public property and that the public have unlimited rights of access to what they regard as their own.

Part II deals with the present distribution and nature of common lands in England and Wales, region by region, with particular reference to the larger and more important commons but not forgetting the humble village greens. It should perhaps be explained at this point that because of the accident of history Scotland has no common land as we understand it in England and Wales, and it is therefore not considered at all in this volume.

The concept, if not the definition, of common land is clear enough, but the subject has often been confused in the minds of ordinary readers by the indefensible use of common fields for what are better called simply open fields. After harvest the open fields were customarily thrown open to the animals of the villages for grazing upon the stubble until the time (usually about Candlemas) for the new crop to go in. Hence the open fields were sometimes known as commonable lands because rights of common pasture could be exercised over them for certain limited periods. They were also known widely as Lammas lands, because they were usually thrown open for common grazing round about Lammas Day (August 1st).¹ In this book we are not concerned at all with these open arable fields and the limited common grazing they permitted, but only with common lands in the fuller sense of the term, grazing land over which common rights were, or could be, exercised all the year round. We have, however, taken note of those Lammas lands where stock were excluded for certain periods to permit recovery of the grazing.

We have also provided a detailed appendix, county by county, listing every common in England and giving its location, type, acreage, and such additional comment as may be necessary. This information, based largely on official sources and supplemented by personal inquiries by one of us (L.D.S.), is given in good faith; but it is not to be regarded as indicating any official opinion, least of all any legal opinion, about the status of any particular piece of land. The Royal Commission found in the course of its labours that it was often very difficult, sometimes impossible, to determine the precise status of reputed commons; and local authorities, in making their returns to the Commission, were often in the same difficulty. All we can say is that to the best of our knowledge the lands listed in the Appendix are common lands.

We have not included the counties of Wales in the Appendix since there, as explained in Chapter 25, the evidence is so fragmentary and often contradictory that it seems better to await the results of the studies now in hand by Professor Alun Roberts, mentioned in Chapter 7.

This is the first time that such detailed information has ever been made available to the general public in a handy form, and we hope that it will prove to be of particular value to those who seek to enjoy the amenities and beauties of our English and Welsh commons, whether it be the cheerful social cricket match on a Sussex village green or walking in blessed solitude on the empty uplands of the Black Mountains or the Brecon Beacons in deepest Wales.

Many of the maps and diagrams which illustrate the text have involved much careful preparation and we are greatly indebted to Mrs. E. Wilson and Mrs. M. E. Sinclair for their patience and skill in carrying out this work. For Fig. 14 we also had the help of Miss Vince of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food as well as of the local authorities.

W. G. H.

L. D. S.

31 December 1961

PART ONE

by W. G. Hoskins

CHAPTER 1

COMMON LAND AND ITS ORIGIN

THE MEANING OF COMMON LAND

Few people in this overcrowded country have not some favourite heath or common or moor to which they retire when they need solitude, or unpolluted fresh air, the glimpse of wild life like the raven and the buzzard, or the sound of water falling over stones. It may be the wild uplands of the Pennines or of Radnor Forest in mid-Wales, the undulating lowland beauty of the New Forest at any season of the year, or, not least, the open heaths of Wimbledon and Hampstead where even the grey, jaded Londoner obtains the illusion of peace and relative quiet for an hour or two. From these open spaces, in the hills or in the lowland south of England, the urban millions of England and Wales return to their dusty, noisy cities refreshed in body and spirit. If they live in cities such as Newcastle and Southampton, they may find their solitary peace within their own city boundaries, for several English towns retain their common lands to this day.

The survival of so much common and open land in one of the most densely inhabited and urbanized countries in the world is a remarkable thing. Even now, in the second half of the twentieth century, we have rather more than one and a half million acres of this land, most of it surviving more or less untouched. Much of it is still hardly changed from Anglo-Saxon times, and gives us some of our most beautiful and distinctive scenery, and some of our most treasured colonies of wild life and natural vegetation.

Of this great area, about 1,055,000 acres lie in England, and a further 450,000 acres in Wales. In the Welsh county of Brecon nearly thirty per cent of the surface consists of common land. In England, one acre in every four in Westmorland is common land, and in the North Riding of Yorkshire one acre in every six. To put the matter in another way, the seven northern counties of England (counting the North and West Ridings separately) contain two-thirds of all the common land in England, here mostly upland commons—the high moors and fells. On the other hand, nearly half the lowland commons of England, a very distinct type, lie within fifty miles of London. The three south-western counties of Cornwall, Devon and Somerset contain thirteen per cent of all the common land in England, again mostly upland commons such as those associated with Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor, Exmoor, and the Quantocks and Mendips. Over all these commons, upland and lowland, the people of England and Wales are allowed, by custom if not by right, to wander more or less freely, subject only to certain local restrictions in the interests of forestry or of water-undertakings.

Contrary to a widespread belief, however, all common land is private property. It belongs to someone, whether an individual or a corporation, and has done so from time immemorial. The owner of the common land is the lord of the manor within which the common lies, or his legal descendant and representative today. The common lands of England and Wales are therefore not public property, despite their name, nor have they ever been during the past thousand years. But they are peculiar in the sense that a considerable number of ordinary people, if one may use such a term nowadays, have legal rights over the surface of such lands, which they exercise together or in common. Of the various common rights, that most generally known and understood is the right of common pasture: the right to graze one’s animals over the herbage. Other important rights are the right to gather wood for fuel (estovers), the right to dig turf for fuel or roofing (turbary), the right to fish in common waters (piscary), and the right to cut bracken for fuel or cattle-bedding. More locally there may be rights of air and exercise.

Not all the inhabitants of a parish or village possessing common land necessarily had rights over the common. Sometimes these rights were restricted to a defined class within the local community; and no changes could be effected in the management or use of the common without the consent of the whole body of commoners. This has been a powerful safeguard in preserving our commons from hasty and ill-considered change, under some temporary and passing pressure. We probably owe some of our most unaltered commons to a few awkward old men here and there, who refused to agree to what seemed a desirable change in the eyes of the majority. Even so, many commons have suffered from much illegal encroachment, change, and downright theft at one time or another in the past; others have become derelict through the obstruction of a minority—perhaps of one—to co-operative management.

Though so little has been written about them, the commons of England and Wales have played a notable part in English history. Many a bloody battle has been fought upon the lowland heaths and moors, rather than among the growing crops. One of the earliest battles of which we have any record in Old English history was fought in the year 632 at Heathfield (now Hatfield Chase) in south Yorkshire, a wild, moory tract of country near the junction of the Trent and the Humber, where the British king Cadwallon defeated the Northumbrian king Edwin. In the year 825 Egbert of Wessex defeated Beornwulf in one of the most decisive battles of Old English history at Ellundun, on the chalk downs just to the south of Swindon; and a few years later (in 838) Egbert defeated a combined force of Cornish and Danes at Hingston Down in Cornwall, the high open moor, much of it still common land, just across the Tamar.

In the Wars of the Roses some of the most bloody battles were fought on the commons, notably Blore Heath in Shropshire (1459), and Barnet (1471), actually fought on Gladsmore Heath (now Hadley Green), just to the north of the town of Barnet. In the Civil War, Marston Moor (1644) among other great battles was fought on a common. And finally, the last battle to be fought on English soil—Sedgemoor in Somerset (1685).

In peaceful ways also, the commons have played a notable part in the development of English life. During the period between about 1100 and 1350 they provided the necessary land on which a score of new towns were built, towns such as Petersfield in Hampshire, Woodstock in Oxfordshire, Poole in Dorset, and Wymondham in Norfolk. In much later times, the new spa towns of Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells grew up on common land in the second half of the seventeenth century. We shall consider this aspect of the history of commons in a later chapter.

THE ORIGINS OF COMMON LAND

The origin of common land is a most obscure problem in English history: yet it is not an academic problem, for it has its living repercussions down to the present day. How does it come about that great tracts of land belonging to private persons or corporations should be subject to, even (one might say) burdened with, rights over their surface which may be exercised by tens of thousands of people regardless of the wishes or financial interests of the owner? For because this land is subject to common rights, including the right of free access for all commoners, the owner is prevented by law from erecting upon it any building whatsoever, even the most modest fence, and is obliged to leave the land open. To the existence of these ancient rights, it must be repeated, we owe the preservation of some of our most distinctive scenery and wild life.

How did these ancient rights originate? Some writers have thought that they were granted at a distant date as a kind of compensation for other property rights lost in some other way. Thus writers on the New Forest have said that the commoners’ rights in the Forest were specifically granted by William I, when he enlarged the Forest in the year 1079, as a form of compensation to the peasantry and others who had lost something by being brought within the severities of forest law. But one cannot imagine feudal landlords, least of all the powerful and ruthless William the Conqueror, being so tender to the losses of the medieval peasantry. If common rights exist in the Forest, as they have certainly existed since at least the eleventh century, then it is because they existed before the first Forest was ever made by some Anglo-Saxon king, that they had already been exercised from time immemorial, and that even an all-powerful Norman king was obliged to recognize them when he enlarged his Forest if he did not wish to have on his hands a quite unnecessary rebellion. That this was almost certainly so is brought out in evidence from ancient Kent and elsewhere. Common rights were not something specifically granted by a generous landlord, but were the residue of rights that were once much more extensive, rights that are in all probability older than the modern conception of private property. They probably antedate the idea of private property in land, and are therefore of vast antiquity.

The example of Dartmoor, of which more than 29,000 acres still remain subject to common rights (see Chapter 18), will make this matter clear. Men have lived upon Dartmoor since the Early Bronze Age (say from 1800 B.C.), but even before that they were using it as upland grazing during the summer months. No traces of neolithic dwellings have been found there, but other evidences (flints and so forth) show that neolithic man was in the habit of using the summer grazings. At this early date there was no question of private property in land. All who could conveniently reach the moor must have used its ample herbage and hunted its wild animals, and so it was all through the two thousand years—some seventy human generations—that separated the first Bronze Age farmers from those of Romano-British times.

From the time of the earliest written records of the Moor (in the early thirteenth century) it was the established and agreed custom that the Moor was common grazing for all the inhabitants of Devon, with the exception of the inhabitants of the boroughs of Totnes and Barnstaple. This curious exclusion helps to give us a date for the antiquity of this customary grazing and other common rights. Both Totnes and Barnstaple emerge as boroughs about the middle years of the tenth century. Their exclusion from the Moor is strong presumptive evidence that the common rights over the Moor were even older than this, that they had in fact been agreed when the county of Devon took its separate identity about the middle of the eighth century. Hitherto, the moors of the south-west must have been regarded as free for all, certainly for all the people who occupied the ancient Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia, which included the whole of modern Cornwall and Devon, and all Somerset west of the Parrett. With the establishment of counties as we know them, under the Anglo-Saxon dispensation, and the break-up of the old British kingdom, we find the rights of customary grazing, and doubtless other common rights, being limited to the inhabitants of a particular county. Hence, when Totnes and Barnstaple make their appearance about the year 950 their burgesses are regarded as newcomers who have no rights in the established economy of summer grazing. This limitation of common rights to the inhabitants of one county is the earliest form of limitation that we can trace for certain. It is a matter of inference, but it is clear enough. Before that limitation there was probably only the perfectly natural limitation of such grazing to the inhabitants of the different British kingdoms.

In this connection the very name Somerset may well be significant. It first occurs in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 845, when the men of Somerset (Sumorsaetan) together with the men of Dorset fought against the Danes. The name means the summer dwellers, clearly indicating a people who originally occupied the lowland moors and marshes of central Somerset for the purposes of summer grazing only, and later established themselves permanently on the islands that rose above the general level. These central levels, long since drained, must once have been the recognized common grazing of the summer dwellers.

Andred’s weald once extended for over a hundred miles from eastern Kent into Hampshire, no doubt with many an open glade of dry heathland. Again we find that by the time the earliest records begin this woodland, or the eastern part of it, was almost certainly common to the whole of Kent. In Nottinghamshire we find the same process at work in the extensive region now known as Sherwood Forest, which once covered a much greater area. This is first recorded as Scirwuda as far back as 958, meaning the shire wood, suggesting that here again we have a tract of woodland, with all its clearings and open glades, that was then common to the whole county of Nottinghamshire.

The so-called New Forest—new in the eleventh century—was a vast tract of undulating country, partly supporting fine oak and beech woods but also containing many large expanses of sandy heathland (Fig. 24). Like Dartmoor it was occupied to some extent by Bronze Age farmers, later by those of the Iron Age, and perhaps the Romano-British, who enjoyed unlimited grazing and supplies of fuel. In later centuries it was recognized as the common grazing ground of the Jutes, who had reached Hampshire by the fifth and sixth centuries, for its earliest known name, we are told, was Ytene, a genitive plural meaning of the Jutes.

At some date before the Norman Conquest, perhaps in the tenth century, it became a royal forest. That is a tract of land, not necessarily all densely wooded, set aside for royal hunting and subject to the special severities of forest law. Such hunting-preserves did not require continuous woodland. Indeed, they were best where there was much open heath among the woods, and this the New Forest supplied abundantly. Whatever the exact date at which this vast Hampshire common was appropriated in this way, it seems certain that it was a forest at the time when Canute issued his Laws at Winchester in the year 1016. Such a setting-up of a royal forest did not involve any expropriation of private property, but merely imposed a special code of laws upon the existing landscape, an onerous and sometimes infuriating code, but not one that involved the destruction of fields and farms, villages and their churches, which the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers attributed bitterly to William I. William enlarged the original Saxon forest in the year 1079, and possibly stiffened the existing laws or their enforcement. In the case of the New Forest, and its Saxon predecessor, much of the area already belonged to the king in any event, and much of it was infertile, sandy soil which could never have supported a flourishing population.

But what is significant of the ancient status of the Forest as common land is the careful reservation by both the Saxon and Norman kings of the existing rights of commoners over the surface. Without these common rights, and the right of common pasturage especially, the peasant farming economy would have been wrecked, and that might well have meant a large-scale rebellion. This is true of other royal forests like Ashdown (in Sussex) and Dartmoor (Devon). It is clear in all these cases and others that common rights antedate the creation of royal forests. The special case of the Forest of Dean is discussed in Chapter 23.

In Hampshire also the village-name Sherfield may well mean "the feld (open country) belonging to the shire and Shirley, just north of Southampton, where there was much common land well into historic times, means the leah or clearing belonging to the shire", presumably again a large common pasture available to all who dwelt in the county. Up in Oxfordshire, the ancient forest of Wychwood (referred to in 840 as Huiccewudu) was almost certainly the common woodland of the Hwicce, the only surviving memorial of the people who occupied what is now Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and the western half of Warwickshire, in the earliest decades of the Old English settlement.

The common use of woodland, of open glades, of lowland moors and summer-dried marshes, is thus attested all over southern England from a very early date, certainly from the seventh century onwards. In Wales and Northern England it is only the paucity of early records, and the unlimited extent of upland moors and mountain grazings, that prevent us from producing equally specific evidence about these regions. What was so abundant needed no mention in early records. It was taken for granted, and there was more than enough for all. This relative abundance persisted well into historic times, and indeed does to the present day. Thus long after the lowland commons of southern England had been forced to introduce stinting in some form or other (i.e. limiting the number of cattle and sheep that could be put on to the common) the upland commons of the north and of Wales continued unrestricted.

A passage in the laws of King Ine, issued between 688 and 694, suggests an open-field system of agriculture with its common meadows and common pastures in Wessex. Such a system was also established in eastern Yorkshire and throughout the east Midlands well before the Danish invasion of the ninth century. The open-field system of farming was predominantly arable, though pastoral farming became relatively more important as one went westwards and northwards into the Highland Zone. In addition to the two large open fields, cultivated in common, there were meadows held in common and also rough pastures grazed in common. In Kent these common pastures were mostly in the great woods of the centre and the marshes of the coastal fringe.

In the more densely populated Lowland Zone, above all in southeastern England, the increasing reclamation of the waste for arable cultivation led to further limitations on the vast original areas of common woods and pastures. It was no longer feasible for all the inhabitants of the county of Kent, for example, to roam at large throughout fifty miles of common wood with their pigs and their cattle. By the eighth century we find particular clearings, known as denns, appropriated to individual villages on the borders of the great wood and even further afield. Such villages possessed not only common pasture rights but also rights to take wood for fuel, building, and hedging, and pannage for swine. Gradually, then, we see the original unlimited summer pastures such as Andredsweald being appropriated first to a whole county and then to particular villages.

This process of limitation went on faster in some parts of England than in others. Thus Domesday Book for Suffolk records that in the hundred of Colneis there is a certain pasture common to all the men of the hundred. Here we have an example of intercommoning by all the ten villages of the hundred. Colneis hundred occupied the block of land between the estuaries of the Orwell and the Deben, and a glance at the Ordnance map shows large tracts of heathland even today. This great Saxon common is now represented by various heaths: from west to east we have the heaths of Nacton, Bucklesham, and Levington, now divided between these parishes. But in 1086 it was still an individual heath, common to all the hundred.

Common lands not only existed in the primeval woodlands of Anglo-Saxon England, and on the high moors of the west and north, but also in the marshes and fens that fringed the English coasts. The fens and marshes that border the Wash, in Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, supply the best-documented examples of this type of common. Here the practice of intercommoning between villages developed into a complicated system (see Fig. 1). Much of these great level wastes dried out during the summer months, and were grazed over by groups of villages adjacent to them; and besides this natural drying-out a great deal of large-scale reclamation was carried out by means of dykes from the tenth century onwards. This was very much a communal effort by the men of several vills, and it was natural therefore that when the marsh or fen had been successfully reclaimed they should use the grazing communally. In these districts it is clear that intercommoning by several villages is older than the manorial organization, which was superimposed at a later date. It goes back to the days of the Old English vill.¹

Fig. 1. Intercommoning vills in the Lincolnshire Fens

Intercommoning by several vills in one large pasture seems to have been the general rule in the country bordering the Wash down to the twelfth or thirteenth century, and indeed persisted until much later in some localities. But in other parts of England, above all in the more densely settled areas of the south-east, we begin to find common rights limited to a particular region as early as the eighth century (such as the marshes subject to Wye in Kent).¹

Many towns also had their common lands in late Saxon times, the use of which was limited to the burgesses of those towns from the beginning. The best known example of this is perhaps Port Meadow on the western side of Oxford, still an open common of some 350 acres. Domesday Book records that "all the burgesses have in common pasture without the wall, which pays 6s. 8d." This pasture was originally about five hundred acres in extent, but some 150 acres were given away in the