Common ground
(Mainly) South London commons and common land
Common land is not land owned by everyone: it is privately owned land, by the lord of the manor, historically, and now often a local authority, the National Trust, or a private individual, over which specific people, ‘commoners’, hold enduring rights to graze animals, cut wood or peat, or forage.
The practice of using land in common is older than private ownership itself; in England it has roots in Anglo-Saxon custom but took its lasting legal shape under the medieval manorial system, first written into law in the Statute of Merton of 1235.
From Tudor times, and especially through the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of it was fenced, hedged and absorbed into private farms; today just over 1.3 million acres remain , just a few per cent of the land of England and Wales. What survived did so partly by accident, on land too poor or too fragmented in ownership to be worth enclosing, and partly by law: the Commons Registration Act 1965 required every remaining common to be registered or forfeit its status, a protection later reinforced by the Commons Act 2006, while the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 opened much of it to public access.
What’s left is less a working commons than a protected fragment, valued now for wildlife and landscape as much as grazing. One of the few surviving traces of land that was held, rather than owned.
