A village built around shared land
In much of medieval Europe, a village was not just a cluster of houses. It was a working arrangement for sharing land. Households farmed their own holdings, but those holdings depended on resources used in common: pasture for animals, meadow for hay, woodland for fuel and timber, and sometimes the arable fields themselves after harvest.
Practice varied a great deal. The best-known pattern, often associated with parts of England and northern and central Europe, is a village surrounded by large open fields. Elsewhere, such as in parts of the Mediterranean, in upland regions or in areas of scattered farms, land use looked quite different. This article describes the general principles and then notes where they changed.
What “common land” meant
Common land did not mean land owned by everyone. In most cases, a lord owned the ground, or held it from a higher lord, while villagers held rights of common, meaning customary permission to use it in particular ways. Typical rights included:
- Pasture: grazing cattle, sheep, pigs or geese on waste land, heath or the village green.
- Turbary: cutting turf or peat for fuel, where it existed.
- Estovers: taking firewood or small timber for repairs.
- Pannage: letting pigs feed on acorns and beechnuts in woods, usually in fall.
- Gleaning: gathering leftover grain after the harvest, a right that often mattered most to the poorest households.
These rights were usually attached to a holding rather than a person. A household with a certain landholding could use the common in a certain way, and a household without a holding might have little or no formal claim, although local custom sometimes allowed exceptions.
Open fields and shared grazing
Where open fields were used, each household typically held several strips scattered across the village’s large arable fields. This mixed good and poor soil among families and made it necessary to coordinate work. The link between open field farming and common rights is simple: the fields had no hedges between strips, so the village had to agree on when to plow, sow and harvest.
After the harvest, the stubble was commonly opened to the village’s animals. In a fallow year, the whole field might serve as pasture. Animals grazing on the stubble and fallow spread manure over the soil, which was an important benefit in an age without commercial fertilizer. Because of this, individual owners could not simply fence a strip and graze it alone without upsetting the system.
Meadow was valuable because hay fed animals through the winter. It was often divided into portions held by individual households for the hay crop and then opened to common grazing after the hay was cut. Rules about the dates for mowing and for opening the meadow were typical.
Keeping the commons from being overused
A shared pasture can be overgrazed if everyone puts on as many animals as they like. Medieval villages often addressed this with rules. Historians generally agree that many communities limited use, though how strictly this was enforced is hard to measure and differed from place to place.
Common methods included:
- A stint or limit on the number of animals a household could graze, often linked to the size of its holding.
- Rules against bringing in animals from outside the village, or against hiring out grazing rights to others.
- Village herdsmen who looked after the animals of many households together.
- Set dates for opening and closing fields and meadows.
These rules were usually made and enforced through the manor court, which also recorded the manorial system’s wider customs, or through village by-laws agreed among tenants. Fines for breaking them, such as letting animals stray into a growing crop, appear frequently in surviving court records, which suggests that disputes were common even where rules existed. Lords had their own interests too, since their animals also used the commons and their own demesne land might lie among the village’s fields.
Who gained, who lost
Common rights mattered most to people with the least. A cottager with a very small plot might own a cow or a few geese only because the common allowed free grazing. Gleaning could add grain to a poor household’s winter supplies. Wood from the common helped with fuel. Access to these resources was part of what made small holdings viable, and losing them could push a household toward dependence on wages.
Lords and larger tenants sometimes saw things differently. Where the wool trade was profitable, there was an incentive to put more sheep on the common or to enclose land for private pasture. Enclosure was already happening in some places during the later Middle Ages, though it became a much bigger issue in later centuries. Disputes over whether a lord could take land from the waste or the common occupied manor courts, and in some areas the question was settled by written agreements. The rights of the peasants were backed by custom, but custom was not always easy to defend against a determined lord.
Forests and special restrictions
Not all woodland and waste was open to villagers. Royal and noble forests were governed by special laws, mainly to protect game for hunting. Villagers living nearby might have limited rights to graze animals or collect wood, but taking deer or cutting timber without permission could bring heavy penalties. This was a different situation from ordinary village commons, though the two sometimes overlapped, and it was a source of resentment in some regions.
Why it mattered
Shared land helped to tie village life together. Decisions about planting, grazing and harvesting required cooperation, and cooperation required shared authority, whether through the manor court, village elders or customary habit. It also made villages sensitive to outside changes, such as population growth, new lords or a changing market for wool. The commons were not a perfect system, and they were not equally fair to everyone. They did, however, give many ordinary households a margin of security that private holdings alone often could not.