The W G Hoskins Lecture 2011

‘Custom and Common Rights: the management of common land in England and Wales since the Middle Ages’ presented by Dr Angus Winchester.

The twenty-second Hoskins lecture

The Annual Hoskins lecture was opened by chairman Frank Galbraith who welcomed the eminent guest speaker, Dr Angus Winchester of the University of Lancaster, who addressed the subject of ‘Custom and Common Rights: the management of common land in England and Wales since the Middle Ages’.

Dr. Winchester began by referring to Hoskins’ co-authorship of the report ‘The Common Lands of England and Wales’ (1963), a report instigated by Royal Commission in the 1950s. Historians interested in the management of resources in a communal society have shown that the sharing of communal resources can and does work. However, literature, social and local history give many examples of tension over the regular management of private and common land. The value of common land to local communities, and especially to the poorest in rural society, in the resources available from commons, consisting of food, fuel and raw materials, was lost through the conversion to private ownership in 18th and 19th-century enclosure. Between 1760 and 1860 20% of land was held as common. Today 1.3 million acres survive but almost all is marginal, semi-natural vegetation with the majority situated in the north and south-west of England and in Wales with very little in Middle England. W.G. Hoskins, writing with Dudley Stamp, saw common land as ‘a window on to a timeless landscape’. This view has been challenged, notably by The Contested Common Land Project, set up by the University of Newcastle.

The uses and purposes of common land today are threefold – grazing for farmers’ stock; exercise and recreation for the public; environmental conservation and ecological sustainability. The themes of the project concerned the interplay of local custom and the law of property rights. There are two considerations:-
1) Not all waste land is held in common, for example, in Eskdale, the top of Scafell is lord’s freehold as a legacy of the medieval Forest of Copeland, being set aside as the lord’s deer frith in the sixteenth century.
2) There may be a legal framework which vested ownership in a lord but also allowed for community rights such as common pasture, turbary and stoves (rights to wood and vegetation).

In the Early Modern period, reality shows a spectrum of custom interfacing with law and many usages were asserted by practice, which could be formal property rights, manipulated with custom and framed in law, or informal usage never legally recognised. 17th-century manor court documents record a setting out of mutual obligations over the sharing of resources, boundaries for livestock grazing and other uses and seasonal limitations for the exercise of rights such as the movement of livestock. Byelaws were enacted to limit conflict and husband resources for sustainable management. In northern England and Wales, particularly, pasturing rights were controlled by an invisible web of boundaries, unmarked on the ground, but set down in detail in manorial legislation. In the 19th century sheepwalks in Radnorshire were, to all intents and purposes, treated as private property. In the Lake District and the Pennines, extensive enclosure had taken place by 1700 resulting in the conversion of communal land to private ownership, particularly in the reservation of grouse moors.

1965 saw the Registration of Commons which demonstrated the variety in the types of common land and their usage. As an example, coastal marshes in Norfolk, held by informal custom, were registered with formal rights. In one case, the rights claimed by custom to take shellfish and seaweed were awarded to individuals from old established families to prevent their exploitation by incomers.

The conclusion of the study found that customary usage is remarkably persistent and has been incorporated into law. Hoskins’ observation romanticises the past and ignores the long history of change and adaptation in the landscape, in which local custom has played a defining role in the use of common land.

Following the lecture, Friends gathered at the Centre for tea. This year the regular second-hand bookstall was well-patronised and sales raised £272 on the day. Thanks to sterling work by members of the committee, a great amount of old stock had been disposed of and Friends had rallied round to provide a plentiful supply of interesting and attractive volumes.

From an original report by Anne Pegg