an old way of saying a right or something which was necessary. To build a dwelling from the manor’s forests (house-bote), cut enough hay to feed livestock from the manor’s fields (hay-bote), gather firewood (fire-bote), and cultivate a garden (plow-bote), were all necessities in the premodern agricultural world. Along with this bundle of rights, peasants on the manor often claimed the right of “pasture [and] turbary”—to pasture livestock and cut peat for fuel and fertilizer (Crump et al. 1867). Traditional CPRs in premodern agricultural economies were those necessary for shelter, food, fire, and forage.
Manure and the commons went together. Agricultural communities in England and France utilized folding and intercommoning, techniques that maximized pasture and manure distribution in an informal crop rotation method that replenished the soil. Peasants daily mingled their livestock on one pasture in order to feed them and allow their own fields to rest. In the evening, they herded their animals back to their individual fields, transporting in the process nutrient-rich manure to refresh the soil. This system was called vaine pâture in the provinces of Northern France, where farmers also utilized open-field farming, assolement, sharing a large field, marking their boundaries much like community gardens of today, and working their individual plots (Le Goff 1981). Some Breton farmers arranged their individual holdings around a village with small fields radiating outward from it, called bocage. While in England some manors shared an adjacent commons and allowed their livestock to mingle and graze in each other’s fields.
Towns formalized their commons through official surveys and maps, and in the case of Soham in England, villagers shared a common of approximately one hundred acres acknowledged and taxed in kind by the Crown. Crump writes that “common of pasture is the great right to which the most importance has ever been attached, and there is every reason to suppose that common is derived from communitate, as signifying the community or number of people who used common pasture [called ‘vicinage’]” (Crump et al. 1867; Moore-Colyer 1998; Donahue 2004; Cary 1788; Shannon 2012). Farmers in some locations such as Brittany, regarded turf as a commons. They cut it from shared wastes called lands, and then hauled it back to plough into their fields. Their repeated cutting of turf made the landscape look “barren and wretched” according to English agricultural reformer Arthur Young, who complained that their fields “consist[ed] of three-fourths or seven-eighths of turf, pared off from every hole and corner from commons and bad fields.” Nearer the seacoast, farmers extracted and used seaweed to fertilize their fields, a common practice in England and New England as well. (In 1661, a series of surveys of the environs of Beauvais (Picardy, Northern France) revealed the use of common fields, especially in Coudrey-Saint-Germer, where the commons accounted for 12 percent of all land in the parish; Goubert 1960; Le Goff 1981.)
This broad array of resource claims indicates that commoners carried a significant amount of authority to arrange their local extractions as they saw fit. The basis of that authority lay in their local knowledge, in their skills, and in their physical occupation and possession of the ground. Actual cultivators knew how to make the land productive, what James C. Scott calls “metis” (Scott 1998). These skills were a powerful asset, because they gave commoners leverage to force elites to uphold agreements about resource use. Elites used laws as the ex post facto mechanism to legitimize usurpation, but it does not follow that they could also easily annul the a priori norms, beliefs, usages, and practices of commoners. Laws such as Magna Carta (1215) and the Forest Charter (1217), known as the “Charters of Liberties,” as well as later elaborations such as the Statutes of Merton (1235), codified the commons but also tried to limit certain customary rights. According to E.P. Thompson, evidence of commons-customs exists at the “interface between law and agrarian practice” (Simpson 1986; Thompson 1991). The long historical trail of rebellions sparked by infringements of these rights, particularly against enclosure of the commons, demonstrated that people inherited and passed down these customary beliefs across generations (Maddison 2010; Clark and Page 2019).
The customs of the commons applied also to those who lived outside the manor or the village, and who claimed the right to extract from an “outer commons,” resources not explicitly claimed, or claimed by multiple different groups (Greer 2012). Long-standing custom dictated that farmers leave behind some ears of corn, wheat, or vegetables for the support of the poor. Gleaners took advantage of the corners of square fields left after circular plowing. The landless cottager might picket his milk cow, goat, oxen, or horse on the grassy verges of roads. He might let his geese or chickens forage freely, might extract fish, rushes, and eels from accessible stretches of streams and rivers. Rabbits and other wild game roamed across boundaries and into undefined areas of ownership. A community might deem a section of forest a commons to feed all community-members’ pigs (pannage). Or they might take “lops and tops”—fallen or pruned wood—from the forest. In some cases, rare resources such as sand, stone, and salt were also deemed common resources (Charter of the Forest 1225; Thompson 1991).
That the commons mapped seamlessly onto colonial North America testifies to the built-in borders with which Europeans envisioned empire. Allan Greer explains how the “inner” and “outer” commons transferred to New France and New England, and demonstrates how the grazing commons became the means of colonial expansion and the dispossession of Indigenous People. Colonizers took over indigenous settlements depopulated by disease, or built new ones, using traditional methods of agriculture and husbandry, including intercommoning. Settlers benefited from forest hunting and gathering, and they allowed their herds to freely roam outside settlements in order to take advantage of forage (Greer 2012). Colonials reversed the tradition that said that owners of livestock were responsible for any damage their animals did when getting loose, placing the onus on cultivators to fence their fields to protect them from roaming cattle, pigs, and sheep. The outer commons became a zone of conflict, where colonizers allowed their animals to overrun other colonial settlements, as well as indigenous corn, squash, and bean fields. Indigenous People retaliated by killing livestock, but disputes became the means of establishing dominion (V.D. Anderson 2004). A hybrid version of this obtains still in the western states of the United States which reflects the conflict and relative power of two forms of animal husbandry. Cattle ranchers impose on others the necessity of fencing their cattle off from adjacent property, or “commons” such as federal lands, but also impose on sheep ranchers the responsibility of fencing in herds of sheep.
In this version of the outer commons, animals became not just the means of expanding empires, but the carriers of imperial vision. As Greer says, colonizers claimed land through claiming livestock, even when they may not have been able to prove the animal was theirs. These land claims on the hoof demonstrate both the colonizer’s willful blindness towards indigenous homes and agricultural practices, as well as how their visionary claims imagined indigenous lands as their future commonwealth (Greer 2012; Preston 2012).
This zone of conflict, what Greer calls the “colonial commons,” was agriculture’s contribution to the creation of borders. Conflicts over livestock and resource-use inscribed a line that both colonizers and Indigenous Peoples could recognize, though that line signified something different for both parties. These borders always existed in European commons, but with colonization they took on new meanings. Groups in the borderland understood the line between inner and outer commons as the line between “us” and “them.” Colonizers enclosed their inner commons as a kind of embryonic national space, where their people and their customs presided. Racial and cultural identities, as opposed to localities, became new social markers regulating taking and sharing. Whereas before in Europe, both inner and outer commons had been relatively homogenous in terms of culture and race, now the outer commons was a place of potentially radical heterogeneity. In this abstract plain of commons claim-making, both inner and outer commons were in the minds of the colonists the colonial commons (Cronon 1983; Rusert 2015).
Colonial groups continued to mark the boundaries of their inner commons through both privatized and collective resource-use practices (Greer 2012). Most, but not all, habitants in New France lived along the St. Lawrence or one of its tributaries on a long-lot: a long, narrow strip of land, with one end on the water and the other end abutting up against a common. They used this “backyard” common for pasture, manure, and gathering,
