166
COMMONS
treatment and simplification of tariffs, and has become a most common, now ascribed by the law to the lord being a valuable provision alike for persons, trade, and navigation ; remnant of his ownership of all the lands of the vill. (See (6) that commercial treaties are now entered into by all States ; Manor.) and that they are necessary under modern conditions of commercial At whatever date the over-lord first appeared, and intercourse between nations. (c. M. K.*) whatever may have been the personal relations of the Com lYlOns.—Early History.—Commons are a relic villagers to him from time to time after his appearance, of the system on which the lands of England were for there can be hardly any doubt that the village lands, the most part cultivated during the Middle Ages. The whether arable, meadow, or waste, were substantially country was divided into vills, or townships — often, the property of the villagers for the purposes of use though not necessarily, or always, coterminous with and enjoyment. They resorted freely to the common the parish. In each stood a cluster of houses, a for such purposes as were incident to their system of village, in which dwelt the men of the township, and agriculture, and regulated its use amongst themselves. around the village lay the arable fields and other lands, The idea that the common was the “ lord’s waste,” and which they worked as one common farm. Save for a few that he had the power to do, what he liked with it, small inclosures near the village—for gardens, orchards, or subject to specific and limited qualifying rights in others, paddocks for young stock—the whole township was free was, there is little doubt, the creation of the Norman from permanent fencing. The arable lands lay in large lawyers. tracts, divided into compartments or fields, usually three One of the earliest assertions of the lord’s proprietary in number, to receive in constant rotation the triennial interest in waste lands is contained in the Statute of succession of wheat (or rye), spring crops (such as barley, Merton, a statute which, it is well to notice, statutes oats, beans, or peas), and fallow. Low-lying lands were was passed in one of the first assemblies of the of Merton used as meadows, and there were sometimes pastures fed ac- Barons of England, before the Commons of the and Westcording to fixed rules. The poorest land of the township Realm were summoned to Parliament. This ™ c was left waste—to supply feed for the cattle of the com- statute, which became lawm the year lido, promunity, fuel, wood for repairs, and any other commodity of vided “ that the great men of England (which had enfeoffed a renewable or practically inexhaustible character.1 This knights and their freeholders of small tenements in their waste land is the common of our own days. great manors) ” might “ make their profit of their lands, It would seem likely that at one time there was wastes, woods, and pastures,” if they left sufficient pasture no division, as between individual inhabitants or house- for the service of the tenements they had granted. Some holders, of any of the lands of the township, but only of fifty years later, another statute, that of Westminster the the products. But so far back as accurate information Second, supplemented the Statute of Merton by enabling the extends the arable land is found to be parcelled out, each lord of the soil to inclose common lands, not only against his householder owning strips in each field. These strips own tenants, but against “neighbours” claiming pasture are always long and narrow, and lie in sets parallel with there. These two pieces of legislation undoubtedly mark one another. The plough for cultivating the fields was the growth of the doctrine which converted the over-lord’s maintained at the common expense of the village, and territorial sway into property of the modern kind, and a the draught oxen were furnished by the householders. corresponding loosening of the hold of the rural townships From the time when the crop was carried till the next on the wastes of their neighbourhood. To what extent the sowing, the field lay open to the cattle of the whole vill, two Acts were used, it is very difficult to say. We know, which also had the free run of the fallow field throughout from later controversies, that they made no very great the year. But when two of the three fields were under change in the system on which the country was cultivated, crops, and the meadows laid up for hay, it is obvious that a system to which, as we have seen, commons were the cattle of the township required some other resort essential. In some counties, indeed, inclosures had, by for pasturage. This was supplied by the waste or the Tudor period, made greater progress than in others. common. Upon it the householder turned out the oxen Tusser, in his eulogium on inclosed farming, cites Suffolk and horses which he contributed to the plough, and the and Essex as inclosed counties by way of contrast to cows and sheep, which were useful in manuring the Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, and Leicestershire, where the common fields,—in the words of an old law case : “ horses open or “ champion ” (champain) system prevailed. The and oxen to plough the land, and cows and sheep to Statutes of Merton and Westminster may have had compester it.” Thus the use of the common by each something to do with the progress of inclosed farming; householder was naturally measured by the stock which but it is probable that their chief operation lay in he kept for the service of the common fields; and furnishing the lord of the manor with a farm on the new when, at a later period, questions arose as to the ex- system, side by side with the common fields, or with a tent of the rights on the common, the necessary practice deer park. furnished the rule, that the commoner could turn out The first event which really endangered the village as many head of cattle as he could keep by means of system was the coming of the Black Death. This scourge the lands which were parcelled out to him,—the rule is said to have swept away half the population The disappearance, by no ^beeafbIack of levancy and couchancy, which has come down to the of the country. present day. means uncommon, of a whole family gave the In the earliest post-Conquest times the vill or town- over-lord of the vill the opportunity of appropriating, by ship is found to be associated with an over-lord. There way of escheat, the holding of the household in the common has been much controversy on the question, fields. The land-holding population of the townships and Status of whether the vill originally owned its lands free the persons interested in the commons were thus sensibly township. £rom any control, and was subsequently reduced diminished. During the Wars of the Roses the small cultivator is to a state of subjection and to a large extent deprived of its ownership, or whether its whole history has been one thought to have again made headway. But his diminished of gradual emancipation, the ownership of the waste, or numbers, and the larger interest which the lords had acquired in the lands of each vill, no doubt facilitated 1 There is an entry on the Court Eolls of the Manor of Wimbledon the determined attack on the common-field system which of the division amongst the inhabitants of the vill of the crab-apples marked the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. growing on the common.
