Over time literally countless numbers of commons in different forms have existed. It is therefore hard to describe what a commons is. The new interest in the last years and the new forms of commons possible with the internet (Creative Commons) have not made it easier.
For this reason I will explain what a commons is with the example of the old English commons – after all, that is where the name comes from. The English commons are also a well documented case of what happened to the commons over time. From this background everyone should be able to understand other commons and see the problems.
The olden days – 1000 years ago
While commons can refer to a lot of things and practices, their name goes back to the common ground – a certain are that was used by everyone in e.g. a village.
It is important to stress that we talk about areas where a lot of people had rights to, even if the land belonged to no one or someone else (like a noble). There were basically two types of those grounds.
pic CC-by-sa, Wikimedia/Lienhard Schulz
The first one was a place in or near the center of the village, often with a pond. The village green (village green is a legal term in the UK) was used for grazing and watering livestock, but also as a place where festivities happened. Those areas can be found everywhere in the world.
Today lots of those village greens have become parks inside a city that has swallowed up the villages.
The second type of common ground mostly consisted of either a grassland used for feeding livestock or a wood.
In case of the woods, there were several additional usages a commoner had a right to. Generally those were:
- Common of Pasture: Cattle, donkeys, geese or chickens, there were all allowed to use the (often grassy) woods.
- Common of Mast: Pigs everywhere! Pigs could be masted in the acorn season in the woods, making them fat and preventing the acorns from poisoning the other animals that were not so resistant.
- Right of Turbary: You may cut turf for fuel. Because turf is susceptible to damage, there are always rules where and how.
- Right of Fuelwood: Generally in the form of “you can pick up any wood that has fallen as long as you can carry it”.
Other rights could apply, depending on situation. The rights e.g. for the fuelwood were bound to the house (the wood has to be burned in the house), not to a person or the common ground. You were allowed to take what you need, but not more.
For a more detailed description look at this archived website about Hampshire New Forest
Enclosure of the Commons
From time to time common land would be enclosured, meaning a private owner would build a fence around the land and use it exclusively. But while early enclosures (or inclosures) were mutually agreed, the process sped up around 1500.
Now the enclosures were often done unilaterally by a lord or similar powerful land owner, to increase the available sheep grazing areas. The resulting over-production in wool is well known from Adam Smith’s example that countries should produce what they can produce best and then trade. It ultimately resulted in the first steps of the industrial revolution, since the wool needed to be processed and spinning machines were invented to replace the armies of old spinning wheels.
(Did you know that the word “spinster” for an “old maid” comes from those wheels? It was often the only work a single woman could do to earn money. Well, except the other one.)
But the enclosures often had devastating results for the former commoners. Whole villages had to be given up (whose former peasant farmers, in turn, provided ample cheap labor for the new wool factories).
The enclosures were a sort of class robbery (Thompson, E. P. (1991). The Making of the English Working Class.) and resulted in series of revolts lasting more then a century, that often ended very bloody.
The insistence of the commoners on their ancient rights might have played an important role in the forming of the ideas of the Enlightenment age and the various political events and documents, like the US Declaration of Independence, associated with those ideas. It also transformed England (and as a result the rest of the world) into a new economical era.
Marx argued in Capital that enclosure played a constitutive role in the revolutionary transformation of feudalism into capitalism, both by transforming land from a means of subsistence into a means to realize profit on commodity markets (primarily wool in the English case), and by creating the conditions for the modern labour market by transforming small peasant proprietors and serfs into agricultural wage-labourers, whose opportunities to exit the market declined as the common lands were enclosed. - quote on Wikipedia page to enclosures
The anger and helplessness of the commoner can be seen in this anonymous poem:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose. - WP quote link
Modern Outlook
In recent years Commons have been brought back into the eye of the public (e.g. in the Uk with the Commons Act 2006 and the interest of science.
Ozone layer damage, climate change, pollution, globalization and new respects for indigenous living concepts and sustainability have increased the demand for solutions to problems that affect us all and can only be solved if we all are somewhere in it.
Groundbreaking work was done by Nobel Economics Price winner Elinor Ostrom.
The internet has created many commons or commons-like structures.
We might see a (partial) revival of this ancient type of stakeholder economy in contrast to the shareholder economy, which is on route of destroying the earth.
Suggested additional read: The Commons – A Historical Concept of Property Rights By Hartmut Zückert, in: The Wealth of the Commons
This article is part of a series about commons that I had in mind for a longer time and now have given up trying to get it into a structures series. There are just too many connections, and every time I tried to get a “starting article” there was at least one thing I had to explain first.
Instead I will post “spotlight” articles and only post references some times. Feel free to ask questions and I will try to answer them as best as I can ;)
