Thread by @DrSueOosthuizen

THREAD. This is the story of what I discovered when I became interested a few years ago in how rights of common work. I wanted to understand the practicalities behind how prehistoric, RomanoBritish, & early medieval communities organised & managed landscapes - eg for grazing.

2. Modern transhumance - the long-distance seasonal movement of flocks & herds from settlements to and from the summer pastures is still practised across many parts of the world today (eg lesvalleesdesaintbeat.com/transhumance/) ...

3. This is such an ancient tradition... eg Prof Mike Parker-Pearson has suggested that Neolithic communities from a radius of about 50 miles converged each spring c4000-2000BC with their animals on Hambledon Hill in Dorset, taking them home again in the autumn..

4. Just as Bronze Age farmers in Cornwall took their stock to Bodmin Moor c2000-800BC as @peterherring10 and his colleagues have shown..

5. And these patterns of movement to exploit natural resources persisted into the post-Roman centuries in some cases into the modern period - like this example of the Cumbrian Commoners cumbriacommoners.org.uk/moratorium-agr…

6. So how did that work? A man who took his stock to distant pastures needed to know that they would be secure over the journey, be allowed to graze when they arrived, that they would be protected against damage & theft, be able to return home safely ...

7. ... that the quality of the pastures would be predictably good from one year to the next, and that he and his children and grandchildren would be able to repeat the journey over the years and generations to come. How was that managed?
(en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuma…)

8. Some have argued that this security was achieved by ‘relationships of trust’ - informal agreement between the parties concerned. The problem with this is, though, that ...

9. (1) that’s an awful lot of friendly agreements to make and maintain; (2) each lasts only for the person’s lifetime (being optimistic); (3) people can always change their minds; & (4) it wd take just one cussed individual to disrupt the whole process by refusing to participate.

10. That’s why rights of common are rights of property, defensible in law. They offer legal protection by the community at large for safety on the journey, and compensation for eg damage or theft.. so here’s how they work - in the context of other forms of property right

11. So here’s some pasture held under private property rights - the farmer controls access to his grassland and in this way is able to manage the stock and the land to ensure both the former’s health and the latter’s long-term productivity & sustainability.

12. And here’s the example of public rights of access to pasture - here, because everyone can bring their cattle, it’s much more difficult to limit over-grazing and so there’s a high risk that the pasture will become too damaged to be sustainable in the long term.

13. Here is the 1st of 2 examples of rights of common. Common rights are limited to a defined number of individuals - they’re not public rights, but a form of private rights held and managed collectively by the commoners. In this case they are hefting - .

13a (‘cos this is a side note) Hefted commons are as open & undivided as others. The animals that graze on them remain in their home herd, each occupying a specific area of the common as their own - so, yes, they’re territorial. See blogs.reading.ac.uk/sense-of-place…

14. And here’s the other kind of communing - still restricted to a limited number of commoners, but in this case each puts his animals into a common herd which ranges across the whole common. So what are the implications?

15. For a start, each commoner is expected to participate in making decisions on how the common is managed, & each has an equal right to be heard. If 1 person had that power, the rights of others cd be infringed/lost - so commons are collectively governed (cumbriacommoners.org.uk/information-co…

16. Decision making is by consensus - otherwise someone cd disrupt the management of the common by saying that *he* never agreed. Hence the expectation on participation in decision-making: you can’t say you’re not bound by the decision ‘cos you weren’t there went it was taken ..

17. There’s transparency in decision-making because everyone participates in it, & decisions are recorded in oral traditions of custom & practice ..

17a. Many modern commons are administered by parish/city councils for lack of commoners. In many smaller places they don’t bother with minutes because the parish councillors just remember from year to year what they decided last year. Their memories act as a check in each other’s

17b. Bylaws governing commons were often not written down till the 17thC or later as the commoners knew that the person who writes the minutes controls what they record (as anyone with experience will know) - it was safer to rely on their collective memories of custom & practice

18. So what I found out was that commons were collectively governed & managed by limited groups of commoners under a system of legal rights. That meant that commons were bounded by eg banks, ditches, hedges - how else wd commoners know the physical limits of their rights?

19. Furthermore commons had the potential to persist in perpetuity - because the lifetime of the institution wasn’t governed by the lifetime of any individual right-holders. Archaeology indicates that pastures on eg Bodmin, Dartmoor & the Cheviots have been commons for millennia

19a. See eg among many others academia.edu/8643416/READIN…, also

20. So when archaeologists suggest land has been collectively exploited by the common herds of prehistoric, RomanoBritish, early medieval or medieval communities, it’s possible to suggest how that happened in practice. As the Wolvercote commoners say: since time immemorial.

21. And if you’d like to know more about the predictable structure for governing & managing commons see Elinor Östrom’s wonderful (though, alas, not riveting) book for which she won the Nobel Prize for economics...

22. And finally, please don’t mention(to me at least) Hardin’s famous paper on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. It was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how commons work. It was comprehensively defenestrated in digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewconten…

22. I hope you think this is a bit interesting - rather niche, I know 🤗. It adds so much to commons as one walks/travels thru them. They give the appearance of not much happening when in fact they have so much to tell us about collectivity & history in the British landscape. END