Of Commoners and Kings
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Of Commoners and Kings Graham Bathe
12.1 Introduction This chapter examines the relationship between Royal Forests and commons, exploring the protection afforded to commoners, and examining long-term landscape change associated with commoning. It draws on evidence relating to commons in Southern England, focusing on Savernake Forest in Wiltshire.
12.2 English Commons Since the Norman Conquest English commons are areas where certain people hold rights to take specified produce from land belonging to somebody else. These rights may include de-pasturing animals, taking sticks, small-wood, fern and heather, cutting peat for fuel, turning out pigs, catching fish and certain wild animals, or extracting minerals. Hence, by definition, commons cannot be owned by those with rights, the commoners, setting England apart from many European countries. This arrangement has persisted since at least 1066, when William the Conqueror seized the throne and expropriated all land, establishing himself as feudal overlord. The King ultimately owned every parcel of land. Productive land was distributed amongst Norman lords and held in exchange for military or other services. Within the manorial system, these became the Lords of the Manor. Whilst all land was seized, including commons, this did not prevent on-going commoning. Propertied Englishmen were replaced by a Norman elite, but there is little evidence of the eviction of commoners G. Bathe (&) Director, Foundation for Common Land, Byeley in Densome, Woodgreen, Fordingbridge SP6 2QU Hampshire, UK e-mail: [email protected]
I. D. Rotherham (ed.), Cultural Severance and the Environment, Environmental History 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6159-9_12, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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or working populace. However, the universality of the Norman system ensured that commoners could never own their commons. They simply had rights on land held by the Lord of the Manor from the King.
12.3 Common Land Before 1066 In early English history the ownership of commons may have been more closely vested in the communities they served, under the purview of a local chief, although the extent of commons prior to the Conquest is difficult to establish. There are allusions to shared pastures within land charters of the eighth to the eleventh centuries. The Laws of Wessex (which predate the kingdom of England) cite penalties for destroying enclosures which could relate to commons, whilst the Domesday Book of 1086 describes large, apparently communal pastures. Like most cultures throughout history, local communities derived their needs from a complex and fluctuating mixture of shared and exclusive resources, involving pastoral, hunted and harvested products. Societies established rules governing the extraction of goods, defining what was legitimate, and generating the notion of defendable ‘rights’. Custom and practice was not so much the basis of law, but was the law. In due course a legal system based on precedent generated Common Law, and statutes were enacted through Parli
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