Abstract
Just like the story of Aladdin’s lamp, there has been a long history of commoners being double-crossed and commons being tricked away from their local communities. This often had severe impacts on self-sufficient peasant farmers who depended upon common land and rights of common for their livelihoods, as the following case-study of Otmoor shows. These rights of common, especially those without stint, were a unique historical golden thread to a time ‘out of the memory of man.
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Notes
- 1.
Coalition Government ‘Building the Big Society’ May 2010.
- 2.
Coalition Government ‘The Coalition: our programme for government’ Cabinet Office May 2010.
- 3.
Dunkin History of Oxfordshire (The history and Antiquities of the Hundreds of Bullingdon and Ploughley) 1823.
- 4.
Jackson Oxford Journal 11 September 1830.
- 5.
Dunkin ibid.
- 6.
Dunkin ibid.
- 7.
Oxford University and City Herald 25 September 1830.
- 8.
House of Commons Journal 17 February 1815.
- 9.
Hammond and Hammond The village labourer 1760−1832 Longmans 1912.
- 10.
Jackson Oxford Journal 5 March 1831.
- 11.
Oxford University and City Herald 11 September 1831.
- 12.
Eversley, Lord, Commons, Forests and Footpaths, Cassell 1910.
- 13.
Eversley ibid. The Commons Preservation Society was a redoubtable group of social reformers, philanthropists, lawyers and liberal thinkers including WH Smith, Sir Charles Dilke, James Bryce, John Stuart Mill, the Duke of Westminster, Octavia Hill, Robert Hunter (later to be knighted) and John George Shaw-Lefevre (later to become Lord Eversley).
- 14.
Eversley ibid.
- 15.
Eversley ibid. It ended happily for Epping Forest after the Queen had put her seal to the Epping Forest Act. ‘The Forest was thrown open to the public by Queen Victoria in person, at High Beech, in the presence of a great assemblage of people on May 6th 1862. Restitution was thus in a sense made by the Sovereign, of land which in very ancient times had probably been taken from the folkland for the purpose of a Royal Forest, and the Forest was dedicated for ever to the use and enjoyment of the public’.
- 16.
Hunter ‘A Suggestion for the Better Preservation of Open Spaces’ Annual Congress of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Birmingham September 1884 (Reprinted by the Commons Preservation Society 1884).
- 17.
Hunter ibid. It was this paper that attracted the attention of Octavia Hill who was trying to acquire for the nation the garden at Sayes Court in Deptford, the London garden created by the diarist John Evelyn in the seventeenth century. In the ensuing correspondence between them Hill suggested that a ‘Commons and Gardens Trust’ should be formed…over which Hunter prophetically wrote in pencil the alternative title ‘National Trust?’ It was another 10 years before the National Trust actually came into existence and by then the owner of Sayes Court had sold up.
- 18.
Hunter ibid.
- 19.
Hunter ibid.
- 20.
Hunter ibid.
- 21.
Hardin in Science 162 1968 pp. 1243−1248.
- 22.
Ostrom et al. ‘Rules, Games and Common-Pool Resources’, 1994 University of Michigan Press.
- 23.
Natural England Natural England Position on Access, May 2009; Natural England Position on Inspiring People to Value and Conserve the Natural Environment, October 2009 www.naturalengland.org.uk.
- 24.
DEFRA ‘The Strategy for England’s trees, woods and forests’ June 2007.
- 25.
Hall et al. ‘Apples, Berkshire, Cider’ Two Rivers Press 1996.
- 26.
Mackay ‘Apples and Pears: Stairways to an Urban Paradise?’ Urban Nature Vol 4 No 1 1998.
- 27.
National Trust ‘Our Strategy for the Next Decade’ 2010.
- 28.
Hunter ibid ‘So long as sufficient land was kept to support beasts to turn onto the common, the property could be worked for a profit by the Company in the same way as by any private person. Farms and other properties might be let, and portions of them might be sold, with suitable covenants as to the exercise of Common rights. Thus an income could be derived, while at the same time a body of active Commoners would be by degrees created’.
- 29.
Eversley ibid.
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Mackay, D. (2013). New Commons for Old: Inspiring New Cultural Traditions. In: Rotherham, I. (eds) Cultural Severance and the Environment. Environmental History, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6159-9_28
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