C is for commons
The bits of the country that belong to us all and connect us to our past.
Common (noun): A common land or estate; the undivided land belonging to the members of a local community as a whole. Often, the patch of unenclosed or waste land which remains to represent that.
IWANT TO LIVE like common people” sang Jarvis Cocker back in 1995. Then, as now, calling someone a ‘commoner’ was the height of snobbery. But long before Britpop’s sly retort to class tourism, being a commoner could mean something different.
250 years ago (and for centuries before then) common people enjoyed rights over common land. Today we think of commons as the scruffy, edge-of-town recs frequented by joggers, dog walkers and Wombles. We see their outlines shaded open access peach on Ordnance Survey maps and their archaic names spanning tracts of unenclosed moorland. They are living relics of a time when the countryside looked very different.
To get a sense of how a common looked centuries ago (in lowland Britain, at least), you’re best off heading for a place like Woolbeding Common in deepest Sussex. Melding with Pound Common, this 450-acre blanket of brackeny heathland draped over the greensand ridge is a window back in time. Fittingly, commons are not uncommon around this seldom-trod parcel of the South Downs National Park, with many remaining unfenced and open to walkers.
Heaths like Woolbeding Common were created when prehistoric farmers cleared ancient forests for cattle pasture, resulting in the characteristic hotchpotch of scrub and thicket we see today. This man-made habitat is now managed by the National Trust and is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
A path slinks away from the car park and viewpoint on Older Hill, snaking through the rowdy swell of heather, gorse and silver birch. It’s part of the Serpent Trail – a circuitous, 64-mile path stitching together the western Weald’s scattered pockets of sandy heathland. The New Lipchis Way (another long-distance trail linking Liphook and Chichester) takes a diverging path, hugging Woolbeding Common’s medieval boundary wall. Overrun by tree roots, this drystone puzzle of mossy greensand marks the original extent of the common and the limit of open access land today.
Fences, hedgerows and walls were few and far between in 15th century Britain. Fields could span several hundred acres. A typical medieval manor (the land holdings and village, not just the big house) was divided up by an open-field system of stripfarmed ploughland, pasture and woodland. Open fields like these survive around Laxton in Nottinghamshire.
The parish common tended to be a scrap of unfertile or unimproved land, where the squire’s tenants shared established rights. They didn’t own it (the landlord held the deeds), but commoners were normally entitled to graze livestock, collect fuel (turbary) and quarry stone from the common. Each commoner could graze a set number of cows, sheep, pigs and geese, and where there was a stream or pond, commoners could collect water and take fish ( piscary). Commoning wasn’t just a means of scraping a living, its surpluses also paid an impoverished tenant’s rent. Valuable gorse stumps collected from Woolbeding were used to fire bread ovens.
Woolbeding and Pound Commons lie half-a-mile north of Woolbeding itself, which is clustered around a medieval church in the fertile Rother
Strips of arable land subject to crop rotation, periodically left fallow for grazing.
Each commoner could graze a set number of cows, sheep, pigs and geese, and where there was a stream… collect water fish.” and take
Valley, near the market town of Midhurst. Pound Common’s name derives from the parish’s livestock pound. Pounds (or pinfolds) were small enclosures where animals which strayed from common pasture were impounded until a fine was paid for their release. Only the name endures here today, but highwalled pounds built in stone survive elsewhere.
Across the old, unfenced road fringing Woolbeding Common, the New Lipchis Way weaves between clearing and tree cover. A rutted track loops around Woolhouse Farm and tails a spring-fed brook into Oakham Common; a shady sliver of woodland wedged into a narrow valley.
Oakham’s trees provided its commoners with firewood and building materials (estovers). Coppicing ensured a sustainable supply. Elsewhere in Britain, marshes and fens provided thatch for roofing, while grass commons were mown for hay. Lowland commons range from road verges to the rambling heaths and wood pasture of Sussex and Surrey, but these are pokey affairs compared to Britain’s upland commons.
There are 1,166,781 hectares of common land registered in Britain today and much of it covers barren moors and mountainsides. The largest single area is Dartmoor, where sheep, cattle and ponies still wander at will, just as in parts of Exmoor, the Yorkshire Dales and vast chunks of Wales. Commons litter the OS map of the northeastern Lake District, where thousands of woolly grass-munchers have free rein of the open fells. Before it was broken up by hedgerows and walls, the same was true in large areas of lowland Britain.
Rising wool prices in the late Middle Ages incentivised landowners to adopt more profitable means of sheep farming, dividing open fields and communal pastures into smaller enclosures. Despite resistance, riots and even outright revolt in the midlands, enclosure continued to encroach on common land over the next few centuries. Access paths once tramped by generations of commoners were sealed off. Villages changed forever.
In Sussex, most open fields were enclosed informally by agreement between landowner and tenants, but just over the border at Waltham Chase in Hampshire, disenfranchised commoners were fighting back. In the early 18th century, vigilante gangs known as ‘the Blacks’ (due to their sootblackened faces) resisted the enclosure of woodland with night-time poaching raids. The government response was brutal. Anyone caught committing offences under the ‘Black Act’ could be sentenced to death.
As Britain’s agrarian revolution rolled on, landlords sought to improve every inch of land they owned and parliament began authorising the enclosure of commons. Between 1760 and 1870, around 4000 Inclosure Acts turned 7 million acres from common land into enclosures. The landless poor were displaced from their homes.
Change was felt hardest in the midlands, where Northamptonshire’s ‘peasant poet’
John Clare grieved for the loss of common land around his home village of Helpston.
‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave of labour’s rights… fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds,’ lamented Clare in The Mores. For him, enclosure wasn’t just about losing rights, it meant losing a connection with nature. At the time he was writing, a rural exodus was underway in Britain, as the population gravitated to industrial towns and cities. Motivated by rapid urban expansion in the 19th century, a new wave of activists set out to save commons for recreation.
The Commons Preservation Society (the forerunner of today’s Open Spaces Society) was founded in 1865; its members included Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill, who went on to set up the National Trust. They campaigned for a series of Commons Acts, initially to protect commons around London from development. Their efforts eventually led to the Commons Registration Act 1965, which protected over 9000 individual commons in England and Wales. Today, around half of all registered lowland commons lie within 50 miles of London, and Woolbeding is one of them.
A sunken track burrows out of Oakham Common and meets the Serpent Trail further on. It sidesteps spongier parts of Stedham Marsh and rises through Woolbeding’s parched heath. From the trig point on Older Hill, a mass of broccoli-like treetops extends towards the chalk crest of the South Downs.
The National Trust inherited Woolbeding and Pound Commons in 1958 and today 14 properties retain rights over the land. Woolbeding’s present commoners don’t use their rights, so for the last 20 years, National Trust rangers have managed the commons by grazing traditional breeds.
A herd of Belted Galloway cattle munch on coarse vegetation and trample the ground. Previously, Gloucester Old Spot and Saddleback pigs were drafted in to snuffle out the sprawling network of bracken roots. With help from volunteers to clear the rampant bracken, conservation grazing restores the mosaic of habitats which attracts heath-loving birds like the Dartford warbler, woodlark and nightjar. Smooth snakes, adders and common lizards are among the reptilian residents.
Woolbeding’s ‘Belties’ aren’t allowed to roam the common – they ‘target graze’ movable enclosures – but walkers can. Since the hard-fought Countryside and Rights of Way Act was passed at the turn of the millennium, Woolbeding and thousands of other commons became open access land, where anyone can walk where they like.
Commons like Woolbeding are more than just relics of a bygone age. They are living history and their story is far from over. In urban areas there are calls for new commons – community green spaces everyone can enjoy. In 21st-century Britain, walkers embracing their right to roam should proudly count themselves among today’s common people.