The Initiation

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Buck, did not meet its doom due to individual excessive exploitation caused by the paradox of collective action, (and thereby creating the “tragedy”) but ceased to remain a functional

“social institution” after the industrial revolution and the huge social change it incurred.⁵⁷ The communal commons held on to function at large, before industrialization, because community councils, consisting of all the stakeholders who possess right to use the commons, were established to govern the collective use of both cropping, grazing, and other communal activities. The four observations of Thirsk apply here fully. Being in a pre-industrialized society with pre-modern bureaucracies in the Weberian sense, the common field system, governed by “shared norms and rules” of a community council with no modern sovereign state entity at the middle, survived many centuries. In this sense, the commons was considered a success by Buck.⁵⁸

Below, I will go into a little deeper into the historical context of this communal socio-economic institution by reviewing its initiation, its daily working, and final collapse.

2.2.1 The Initiation

The rise of the British commonfields is still being debated.⁵⁹ While the reasons of initiation of the institution or how the system took on its physical looks are varied, several historical facts are clear. After the Norman Conquest of the England in 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, or William the Conqueror, granted titles and knighthoods to a few thousands, and with it, the honors to lands. These lands, as documented in the earliest census—the Domesday Book—in 1086,⁶⁰ were pretty much matching to mostly all arable lands know today. This implies that the peoples working these lands before the Conquest knew pretty

57 Buck, 1985, pp. 58-60.

58 Buck, 1985, p. 60.

59 Campbell, “Commonfield Origins”, 112-113, 118-129; Hopcroft, Regions, 28-41; Baker and Butlin,

“Conclusion” 627-656.

60 The Domesday Book is a “far-reaching census” ordered by William the Conquer in 1086 aimed at recording lands, resources, tenures and people in England at the time. The results were later compiled into a volume known as the “Domesday Book”. In short, it was the best snapshot a historian could wish for at the time. See Amt (2001): 74.

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much what they were doing. Some documents even imply that the commonfield system could be traced up to the eighth century. However, due to the fact that time is harsh on these historical evidences, what we know today is still limited. Here, I try to put some of it back together for us to have a better glance and understanding.

As mentioned afore, Gray made three contributions to this field. Two of them concern our discussion here: the identification of plurality in the English field systems and the proposition of two main factors as cause of the variations between systems—ethnic settlement as primary, and the physical environment as secondary.⁶¹

Hopcorft, in her book, supported Gray’s ethnic explanation. Arguing in light of a

“path dependency” explanation and considering high transactions costs once a whole socio-economic system would incur if changed halfway, ⁶²Hopcroft proposes a possible interpretation: evidence suggests that “wherever certain Germanic groups settled in large numbers, communal open fields systems later emerged. This suggests that they imported into those regions the cultural precursors of the communal system.”⁶³ This is not to say that the systems were brought in “full-fledged”, but evolved according to the new environment through time. Having done extensive research in England, the Netherlands, France, German lands, and Sweden, Hopcroft postulates:

“It is quite possible that they may have taken a particular regular form in parts of northern Europe, We may surmise that both familial and community organizations were strong in the face of severities of winter in the inland areas of northwestern Europe. In turn, strong village communities may have worked to maintain the regular nature of and division and inheritance rules, assuming that they operated on democratic or both democratic and hierarchical principles. We then can imagine that groups maintained these customs when they

61 Baker, “An Evaluation”, 87; Baker and Butlin, “Conclusion”, 624-625; Campbell, “Commonfield Origins”, 112.

62 Hopcroft, Regions, 35-36, 38-41, 46-51.

63 Hopcroft, Regions, 40.

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migrated to other regions and that these customs later facilitated the emergence of communal open field systems across the plains of Europe.”⁶⁴

C. S. Orwin and C. S. Orwin detested against Gray’s plurality argument, and believed that “wherever you find evidence of open-field farming and at whatever date, it is sufficient to assume that you have got the three-field system at one stage or another”⁶⁵. They assumed that practical cooperation and collaboration was a sensible method of insuring survival in primitive conditions when the pioneer farmers arrived in the newly settled lands.⁶⁶ Due to the fact that “the animals, men, and the equipment needed for to make an effective plough-team were beyond the resources of individual peasants”,⁶⁷ pioneer families had to cooperate. In short, the Orwins believed that the open fields system was a result due to necessity of survival and limited resources, and the physical look took as such since the beginning.

However, Thirsk, coining the four core elements of the midland/champion model, sees the contrary. She notes that the system may not have taken such a look from the start, but a natural development of many factors; not all characters existed at the same time:

“The oldest element in the system is in all probability the right of common grazing over pasture and waste. It is the residue of more extensive rights which were enjoyed from time immemorial, which the Anglo-Saxon and later Norman kings and manorial lords curtailed, but could not altogether deny. By the sixteenth century we are familiar with commons that were enjoyed by one township alone.^”68

Thirsk believed that the common rights and regulations, along with the subdivided fields, came from the impetus of population growth: it created the need to regularize land

64 Hopcroft, Regions, 40-41.

65 Orwin and Orwin, Open Fields, 127.

66 Baker and Butlin, “Conclusion”, 625.

67 Ibid., 626.

68 Thirsk, “Common Fields”, 4. It should be reasonable to conjuncture here, that when Hardin wrote his influential article, the “commons” he had in mind when writing was approximated to this model—the most widespread understanding of the common field system.

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holdings and layout, to ensure even access to water, and to protect the crops from beasts;

communal rotation was introduced to rationalize the disposition of fallow lands, and communal grazing rights were established on the fallow strips.⁶⁹ The partition and subdivision of landholding into many parcels and strips, seen by Thirsk, was the result of partition among heirs from inheritance through generations, and the pressure of increased population as afore mentioned. All this proceeded in gradual stages in time. Summarized later by Bruce Campbell, Thirsk views the classical midland model representing “the ultimate stage in a long process of evolution, other English fields systems reflecting the effects of local and regional peculiarities of environment, settlement history, population density, and agrarian economy, upon the evolutionary process.”⁷⁰

However, Campbell disagrees with Thirsk’s theory of commonfield evolvement. First, Campbell believes that under increasing population, large changes like redrawing layouts of land and communal rotation would cause huge risks of low or no yields at all for farmer families. In a context of communal regulations and village consensus with an increasing number of affected parties, changes, such as proposed by Thirsk, would have been faced with immense resistance and would not have likely come from the organized peasant societies. Hence, a higher authority (such as the Parliament acting upon enclosure) would be needed to carry out such a reconstruction of socio-economic arrangements.⁷¹ Additionally, if pressure from population increased, technical innovations to agricultural methods would have been more responsive to increased demands than the rearrangements of land usage. However, just as shown above, a regular commonfield system would also be slow in adopting or experimenting new agriculture technologies due to the communal consensus character.⁷²

69 Campbell, “Commonfield Origins”,115, 118.

70 Exerted from Campbell, “Commonfield Origins”, 112.

71 Campbell, “Commonfield Origins” 119-120.

72 Campbell, “Commonfield Origins” 120-122.

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A third point would be that “[i]nnovations such as substitution for fodder crops for bare fallows, flexible rotations, and the stall-feeding of livestock, would have been incompatible with a fully regularized commonfield system.” Moreover, the increase of production from technology change would exempt the need for restructuring land use.⁷³ Forth, Campbell found that the regular commonfield system generally did not exist in areas with too dense or too scarce a population due to the reason of population pressure on the economy. If the population was too sparse, there was no need for rationalization of land holding and layout; a more consolidated and enclosed land use would be reasonable with a more extensive form of agriculture. On the contrary, if too many people, the resistance of change make restructuring impossible.⁷⁴

Whatever the reason for the initiation of the commonfield system, either ethnic or for survival, the system remained and stuck on. How it took shape was another myth, either from natural development to respond from population pressures or from order of a higher authority, but are now irrelevant to our main quest for answers. This communal style of living sunk in.

In the next section, I discuss how the commonfield system runs daily as a long lasting socio-economic institution.