commons

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commons, an area of waste land over which members of specified communities enjoyed customary rights such as estover (collection of wood or other necessaries), pasture, and turbary (see bogs). These rights of public commons were usually of medieval origin, and unlike similar rights of private commons, which might be granted by a landlord to his tenant for a determinable period over part of his estate, could not be extinguished by the proprietor of the land. By 1800, public commons remained as a significant feature of the agrarian landscape in those parts of eastern Ireland which had been heavily manorialized by the Anglo‐Normans. Most public commons had originally been granted to a particular manor or borough, and remained in their titular ownership if not their discretionary control. Others were owned by the crown or were shared by the residents of contiguous districts or the owners of estates there. By the early 19th century, the surviving commons appeared increasingly anachronistic in an age of farm improvement, and were subject to some 40 parliamentary acts of enclosure between 1800 and 1840. By this time public commons were in any case being increasingly overrun by squatters, as population pressure increased. Many of these squatters were eventually, through undisturbed possession, to gain freehold rights of land ownership.

Lindsay Proudfoot

com·mons / ˈkämənz/ • pl. n. 1. a dining hall in a residential school or college. 2. [treated as sing.] land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community. ∎  a public park of a town or city. 3. (the Commons) short for House of Commons. ∎  hist. the common people regarded as a part of a political system, esp. in Britain. 4. archaic provisions shared in common; rations.

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