English open-field commons
The arrangement most people are unknowingly picturing when they say "the tragedy of the commons" — and it was not destroyed by overgrazing. It was dismantled by about five thousand acts of Parliament.
- Place
- The English Midlands, GB
- Founded
- 900–1200
- Ended
- 1604–1914
- Duration
- c. 1014 years
What is held
Arable strips in unfenced fields, and rights over the waste: pasture for a stinted number of animals, turbary (peat), estovers (wood), pannage (mast for pigs), and gleaning after harvest.
Who is in
Common right attached to a holding — a specific tenement or set of strips — not to a person. Cottagers with little or no land held rights by custom that were real in practice and that enclosure commissioners frequently declined to recognise, because they were not written down.
Who decides
The manorial court and its jury of tenants, with the officers it appointed: the hayward, the pinder, the field reeve. The lord presided; the jury of neighbours found the facts.
How the rules are made
The court's bylaws, made by the jury of tenants themselves. Stints — how many animals each holding could put on the common — were set and revised there, year by year, by the people whose animals they were.
How cheating is caught
The hayward walked the fields and impounded strays; the pinder kept the pound. Overstocking was checkable because the stint was a number, attached to a holding, that the neighbours knew.
The sanction ladder
- Presentment at the manorial court by a jury of neighbours
- An amercement — a fine set by the court
- Distraint — animals impounded until the fine is paid
- Forfeiture of the right itself
4 rungs, in order of escalation, for English open-field commons.
What happens in a bad year
The stint was cut, and the dates the fields opened to common grazing after harvest were moved. Both were annual decisions of the court rather than standing rules, which is what made them adjustable.
Notes on the account
This is where the mythology comes from, and explaining its destruction is how you explain why almost nobody can name a commons that worked.
Hardin’s 1968 essay described a pasture open to all, with no rules and no talking, in which each herdsman rationally adds animals until the pasture is ruined. The English open fields were not that. They were stinted: the number of animals each holding could turn out was fixed, recorded, adjusted annually, and enforced by a court of the commoners’ own neighbours. The scenario in the essay is not a description of this system failing. It is a description of this system’s absence.
What ended it was enclosure — the consolidation of strips and the extinction of common right, by private agreement and then, from the eighteenth century, by statute. Roughly five thousand acts of Parliament did the bulk of it. The process had winners and it raised agricultural output; it also removed, from people who could not document them, rights that had fed them.
What is not settled in this draft
Nearly all of it is argued over by historians, and the disagreements are the point rather than a nuisance. How much common right cottagers actually held, how much enclosure cost them, and whether the productivity gains required enclosure at all are all live. HC-007 is asked to flag anywhere this draft has flattened a real dispute into a settled sentence.
Sources
- Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 — J. M. Neeson, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
- Customs in Common — E. P. Thompson, Merlin Press, 1991.
- The Tragedy of the Commons — Garrett Hardin, Science 162, 1968. Cited as the origin of the story this page contradicts, not as evidence for it.