raspail001

Common rights in medieval England were not vague and customary feelings of entitlement to shared space. They were legal rights. Specific, named, enforceable in court, and recorded in documents that have survived in county archives for six hundred years. They had Latin names because the law that recognised them spoke Latin, and the Latin names were used by lawyers in cases that went all the way to the King's Bench, because when someone tried to take your common rights from you, the matter was serious enough to fight. Pannage: the right to graze pigs in the common woodland, typically in autumn when the acorns fell. A peasant family with pannage rights could run a pig through the forest from Michaelmas to Martinmas, the six-week window when the acorns were on the ground and the pig would do on its own what no other feeding regime could match in efficiency. At the end of it, the pig was slaughtered. The family had meat and fat for the winter. Estovers: the right to take wood from common land for fuel and building. Connected to the pig in ways that become apparent when you understand that pigs need shelter, that shelter needs timber, and that a peasant without access to common woodland could build neither. Turbary: the right to cut peat for fuel. Without it, you couldn't render the fat. Without rendered fat, the meat storage problem became acute. Agistment: the right to graze livestock on common pasture. The cow. The sheep. The geese. The animals that provided the milk, the wool, the eggs: the daily protein that made the feast-day meat an addition rather than the only protein the family would see. These rights were not given to the peasant by a generous lord. They were ancient, established by use and custom extending back beyond written record, recognised by common law as property rights that could not simply be removed. They were removed anyway. The Enclosure Acts between 1750 and 1850 converted six million acres of common land to private ownership through a mechanism so elegant in its institutional violence that you can only admire it: Acts of Parliament, proposed by the landlords who would benefit, approved by the Parliament the same landlords largely controlled, with compensation procedures so inadequate and so expensive to access that the people losing their rights rarely managed to use them. The pannage rights went with the woodland. The agistment rights went with the common pasture. The pig went with the pannage. The cow went with the agistment. What replaced them, for the people who lost everything, was wages. Wages paid by the landlords who had just enclosed their common land. Wages that were not enough to buy the meat that the common rights had previously provided for free. They called it agricultural improvement. They meant it made them richer. The peasant called it something else, in words that didn't survive in the legal record because the people who wrote the legal record were not taking notes on what the peasant called it.